Skip to main content

From "Lines in Space"


trowel - render - hazchem - wrecking, bar


trowel - render - hazchem - wrecking bar
ducting - bolster - spatula - vent
and agency
agency - enthusiasm - transcedence, then - negation

WELCOME TO THE UNITED KINGDOM
gather your writing materials together and advance
piazza - loggia - calle - portico
the square sloping elegantly in a place they called siena the
leaning towers of subjective experience of note # 3056,
bologna, the red do you remember, subject pinion term “darling”?
the roman palace in humid nights of split (in moonlight, athwart the buffed paving)
versus
the venetian arsenale in relcutant hvar (where we first…)
how we travel vs. how they do did

You arrive alone in dover at 3 am what next? You have the name of someone in the city can they help you? We cannot help you. They can? Good. Europe is a big place that has such wanderers in it. During
these close nights of imminence then I got to thinking of all those blissed-out beatnik losers and crazy-eyed ayes-theetes like roussel like trocchi going mad for what?

ART AND DEEP EXPERIENCES
how to live a good life how to live a great life how to live just a life
as he said, capitalism is mainly about having fun and
let those other suckers pick up the bill, then commenced harsh laughter
white teeth flash, same of nation
and I think it’s just as well that I am not intense or too talented
then again, nephew, they got to see the angels feel immemorial dislocation of ecstatic glossolalia
the rhythm the rhythm the
hé-llo my name is william and I am from stoke-on-trent impoverished ugly sarcastic mythless there are no fucking angels in stoke upon the trent it has been an instant since my last confession here it is I’m an abstinence addict

were they right? // am I wrong? I
am certainly wrong will lang-
piciously and ex- // uage fix aus-
//quisitely crafted
me? // plumber builder plasterer electrician
know feel touch transform // pass
she left afraid but hopeful
mournfully up the steep cliff path ==== WAIT
went a single figure
//in the darker hours,
before the dawn // sweet is the night

//heading for
//the window
//our capital or

Note:
This" - "indicates a visual separation that is a long gap in the paper text version. Blogger won't reproduce this so am using " - " instead.
I experiment a lot in this collection with columns which cannot be reproduced so have used "//" to indicate a column break

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

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 reli