Skip to main content

From "Thirsty Poems"


aphorisms

before modesty the wind must fill up the hessian sail;
seed cast carelessly will further stretch the beach;
of man I say this, of woman I say that;
the future is an eraser, the past a stable gun;

looking about me now I see that
I have none of my good friends left and
nor do I miss them neither.

light is as heavy as the blossom it samples;
let society eat up its own waste, but let it eat;
of woman I assert thus, of women I assert this;
disembodied hands paddle my fatty tissue;

out on the gas light leaf street
again, the too long lesson over
and what am I to do with it?

be not so sceptical about the heather’s prosperity;
be not so soon too judge the crooked contestant;
let lie sleeping eating run do don’t do, do;
of children I have next to nothing to say;

it’s just that I feel let down veins
grow across my shoes; sea horses’ alchemy
stings in the wind, but who’s to know this?
the distance of the pancreas from the humours;
the pink fences slipping back behind the eminence; chuckling
sockets that are as free as the spinnaker streams;
the surprise party I throw myself; ridiculous hats!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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 an...

Postmodern Poetry (2)

Postmodern Poetry, A Definition Postmodern poetry is an international phenomena of aesthetic multiplicities as is typical of many postmodern cultural products. It also operates self-consciously, even foundationally, within a philosophical and/or ideological context where categorisation and closed definition are rejected in favour of investigation and free play. A definition, therefore, can only ever be of a general nature and it must always be accepted that such a definition is closer to a strategy or better, as it is poetry of which we speak, a pattern into which the rangy, tireless energy of the poetry has settled for an unspecified but limited period of time. I could, at this point, pass the buck entirely and suggest that postmodern poetry exceeds definition but this would not be true for it operates within an environment still constituted by modernist values of summation and fixity for which definitions are essential. If I do not impose a definition some other agency will perha...

Frank O'Hara, Collected Poems pp.201-300 Annotated

Frank O’Hara, Collected Poems (Berkeley, Cal.: University of California Press, 1995) Pages 201-300 Close Readings and annotations of every poem in the collection September 1997 in preparation for In the Process of Poetry: The New York School and the Avant-Garde (Bucknell UP, 2001) Frank O’Hara “In the Movies”, 206-209 · interesting that this poem has not been picked up by the critics for it is an easy point to indicate the importance of films in O'Hara’s aesthetic indicating the dissolves, cuts and montage effects he has been credited with and whilst I do not like to appropriate analogous terms in this fashion the montage of O'Hara is easily distinguishable form the collage of Ashbery in that here it is the movement from image to image in an attempt at seamlessness, a basic synaesthesia of subject in the now of consciousness. · in addition to the basic aesthetic implications of this use of films there are also certain other issues that he raises here but does not rea...