Skip to main content

From "Lines out of Space"


a word in your shell is like

we entered freely into the nautilus
shell which is diminishing
for some of them the sea’s suspiration
was until that point as yet unheard
that point of our diminishing
from the shell there was no escaping

from the monolith gleaned the megalith
which I admit are no more than words to me
words with meanings not like the ones
the proper poets opt to use there
was or is no choice but to pace the crouching spiral
and adopt a stance which the others might pursue

for the confusion of the labyrinth
comes not from a mazey complexity of
options turns deadends and blank walls
it is rather a perpetual scaling down of the world
both familiar and upsetting is the park of dolls
and miniatures will disturb those who recuperate slowly

little by littler by littler still
we exited the nautilus from the
tiny horn which announced us to the
single grain of beach which they had
left to us and the monolith gleamed while the
megalith didn’t and the water’s urged words
got smaller and smaller and smaller

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...

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...

Frank O'Hara, Collected Poems pp.1-100 Annotated

Frank O’Hara, Collected Poems (Berkeley, Cal.: University of California Press, 1995) Pages 1-100 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 “How Roses get Black”, 3 • the poem seems to contain at least two anti-heroes, the violent “you”, bent on destruction of ornamentation against the modernity of the radiator, burning symbolist roses who also has some biblical precedence with reference to the burning bushes. Then the “I” who is the narrator and thus able to transform the “you” from Moses to John the Baptist by asking for the leonine head of the “you”. This “I” owns and creates the “you”, defining his heroism in the act of destruction which refers of course to the “you’s” act of destroying the roses in the first three stanzas. The line “Heros alone destroy, as I destroy” is straight out of “In Mem...” • what is of issue here is the d...