Skip to main content

From Moths (1999)



Part One: Ip
Many of these lyrics were published by Shearsman in modified versions for which many thanks to the editor

dog worrying

as to why doesn’t worry come down amongst us
between in animal or a better geometric form
from now we’ve time to give over to it and
later we may may not which is the bargain we
birds are perfect happy to perch is
up on me my head one shoulder too
a dog and a baby jesus and in the back yard
pale grey yellowing sub urban light making
the rashness of soil beneath the caution of grass
a baby a dog a muzzle sail cloth &
we-making
we two all like laundry all safely all gathered in
and squirrels are contented with what
I have gone and done it so far this project

-----
this is a poem about a coffee machine

vent pipe panel refuse—their
these are relations not always straining by muslin
rain still pushes for it
like dust surrounds a settlement waiting (that’s all a desert is)
steam like an apology
pipe though I still blame
panel you where is the anger
gone refuse to take it I like this
mid to late to winter colour it
is quite a cold actually
some how holds back of grips
may some thing has us snagged

-----
window watching watches windows

many things which get seen from windows
noted down don’t they? painted over by an agent
palm trees skirting this
russet browns and beetles black up
a white arrow below the finch quiver
winding watchow watchding winches I
like it could be one word but just won’t I
shadowing of a primary colour warn
ings in tri angles and in circles
a bear or no perhaps a palette stalking you
in process say it is not the frame shape but the
where or better where you place it better leave it
then when can we choose this? will you help?
later it was earlier but we are modern and can cope

-----
chiasmus

hold stroke my hands sun
dream wind detonate my head blow
gaze moon watch over my eyes halved
mine sea wash away my basin
yours words let me smell your speak
hold hands stroke my hands

it has all which once was over here with me where
I could get at it gone over there where it can get away
agreed it should be worse than it is yet
denying it is bad but couldn’t it be worse however
there is as well sadness as well suffering and sorrow these
no longer is so sublime but that I don’t know them
behold or look a sibilant wishing ‘cross the water

-----
incandescent proposal

the sun is a ring which marries
the taps of timorousness spread out
held up against the blue cubicle (of desire)
like translucent crayfish below as
like the taut surface of the shallow as
hate over shallow lake there is a hotel of aspects
is the cut predicted by the lunch?
you pull at your you once there put
your hand in mine clutch again or
we let off steam sheepishly calling them
our rented boats against a certain future tense
a blue cubicle (of desire) of which in we
they must look through or snap out of this
lots is glimmering underneath these words
hurt breaking from us like to a forest across a clearing past a modern building as potential
it which is a hotel it is an over-swallowed lake
you once put your hand you now should
put up your hand and pull your hand ought
away from it from me your hand
in mine could we once were in your watched
water now we in your hand we are
then is in the forest why early may
the tri angles of our as hotel be hind
leg us now platinum forge a shape
of things to come we could know nothing
each cray fish snap the predicate to cut ups
we eating a dinner given to you in any case

Comments

Post a Comment

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more