Skip to main content

From "thirsty poems"

the annals of robinson crusoe—experiments in form

1: arrival
the weed gets dislodged from the deep;
so lonesome I could weep.

the furry fruits sprout well beyond your reach;
and how I fear the beach.

from the head land razor reefs are all too plain;
I dream of mittle europa, and spain.

2: remembrance
in my father’s house are many wonders
I can taxonomise them still
fabrics culled from the tropics
machinery made at home
porcelains from china
idols of asia minor
religious emblems scraped in rome
curious american hydroscopics
and of course grotesque hookahs from brazil.
evidence of adventurers, traders and their unfair plunders,
how I miss it so.

3: adjustment
I love my goat
who gives me love unconditional
I long for the boat

I hate cats, cats
they perform excess inexcusable
and collude with rats

at first they charmed me seemed
so free and full of such
shenanigans but they give to take away and
I have to keep these rabbits in that hutch
to keep them from being molested as
that oft discovered corpse attested to.

4: maladjustment, psychosis
over the years I see the importance of
leaf migration has allayed my fears and
perturberance of belief in an eventual salvation.
the way they blow across the island face
so exigent and also somehow motivated the flow of
matter into space my hope resurgent invigorated.

yet, in the darkness when tornadoes rape the mangroves
and the leaves become as spectres at my perimeter
fence they are my intimidator the best forgotten stark
ness that hectors my joy like desperadoes who as
thieves descend and occupy the pass in filthy droves.

-----
Note: this was first published in Aabye's Baby

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

John Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror

John Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
(Manchester: Carcanet, 1977)
First Published (New York: Viking, 1975)

Close Readings and annotations of every poem in the collection March-April 1997 in preparation for In the Process of Poetry: The New York School and the Avant-Garde (Bucknell UP, 2001)


Introduction:

· Shoptaw notes that this return to poetry is dominated by images of waiting, that narrative (especially fairy-tale) returns, as do the musically based titles, there are no prose poems and no fixed forms such as sonnets of pantoums, most are free verse paragraphs, also bring forward a new American speech, more direct and inclusive.



“As One Put Drunk into a Packet-Boat”, 1-2

· Shoptaw notes this was the original title for the collection, marking a self-consciously Romantic return to poetry, recording the thoughts of “I” from afternoon to night, just outside a childhood country home. Has a pastoral crisis narrative in that a summer storm gathers but passes leaving the poet relieved i…
Post a Comment
Read more

John Ashbery, Some Trees

John Ashbery, Some Trees
(New York: Corinth Books, 1970)
Originally published (New York: 1956)

Close Readings and annotations of every poem in the collection March-April 1997 in preparation for In the Process of Poetry: The New York School and the Avant-Garde (Bucknell UP, 2001) currently in the process of complete update (2013)


"Two Scenes," 9

This is a poem about duality so in this sense the title actually refers to what the poem is ‘about’. John Shoptaw notes, for example, the phonic mirroring of the poem which he sees as an element later phased out as is the “linear introversion” to be found here. Thus we have the following phonic recurrences: “we see us as we”; “Destiny...destiny”; “News...noise”; “...hair/Air”; “-y” and rhymes of section 2; and “...old man/...paint cans”.


This simple but subtle semiotic device is then developed structurally as well, as the title hints. So ‘scene’ 2 reflects back internally onto ‘scene’ 1. “Machinery” recalls the train as does the canal; g…
Post a Comment
Read more

Deleuze, Difference and Repetition

For a long time I have felt that poetics has not taken into consideration a great deal written about issues pertaining to difference and repetition to be found in contemporary philosophy. As poetry's whole energy and dynamic is based on a fundamental relation to differential versus repeated units of sense (sense both in terms of meaning and the sensible), any work on difference and repetition would be welcome. That some of the greatest thinkers of the age, notably Deleuze and Derrida, have made both issues core to their whole philosophical systems is so remarkable that poetics is impoverished if it does not fully acknowledge this.

Not that I am one to talk. Although I am aware of the centrality of Deleuze's work to postmodern poetry, I have as yet not been able to really address this but in Poetry Machines I began that work at least. In preparation for the few hundred words I wrote there, here are the 10,000 words I annotated in preparation.



Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and …
Post a Comment
Read more