From "thirsty poems"

storm ants

I wish to god we could rip it up and, after dispensing
sensibly with the bits, start over. we can’t
there can be no consolation; winds angling in
like the ruin of bombers, the redolent smells of lunching
an endless summer as long as it’s deep lawn. what
it was that your letting me in on your
other secret life, eventually, would make up for its previous
absence from our life together, a psychological faith
in confession. forget it, that’s too big a breach to plug. life
darling, yes, life, y’know, what we live? derr and
love dearest, sweetie darling, love, that thing we do
doesn’t any of this ring any bells with you? how
about companionship, all that being together stuff,
a shivery, shared, experience at the opening to the tin
mine. you are. dusk, settling like a table, when glow bugs, bats call.

it’s just that we are storm ants
feckless aimless things blown
in on the paunch of trouble

uncertainly winged abdominally
strong but strictly
end of season stuff

here to swarm and to matter
gone to ground tomorrow blind
as worms, slaves and whores. ants

Comments

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...

What we learnt from Cambridge Analytica, Really!

Just over half a year after the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, the ongoing investigations into the criminal and nondemocratic role that illegal data-harvesting and targeted political ads have had on the election of Trump, and of course Brexit rumble on. At the same time there is clear disagreement as to what degree companies like Cambridge Analytica in cahoots with the far right and the Russians really skewed recent elections. It is now clear that what they did was on the edges of legality, but does that mean to say it was wrong? And if CA did not elect Trump, then what is the real political significance of data-based campaigning? Prof. Watkin, as ever, thinks we may have fresh insights into the debate.

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...

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