Skip to main content

PJ Harvey, White Chalk


Grow grow grow

wet toes aligned at the edge of a void
as clams
like limpets
at the rocktide's lapline

jump and make something
project out into what was not the void
until you happened and
like a waveretreat
cleaved that into empty

sfunny
the hallway didn't seem so empty until we inherited this hideous armoire
an impassable thouroughfare become itself a placeless place
my kids are stranded in the lounge
we cringe and scrape the stairway's foot
stamped once in anger
now planted
then blooming

Legends:
MAKING IS NOT ALL IT'S MADE OUT TO BE
ANYONE CAN EXPLODE
THINGS HAPPEN, TRY STOPPING THEM
bravery comes in the lingering copse of the faithful

not to break nor fashion but
hold on there on that upturned hull
skyborne rescue is not for the likes of us

rather we stubborn we clutch
to a boat's expanding shell
while the swell below becomes continuum

no, it isn't in the throw
nor in the wreck as such
but how the swell
begins to build
to gather rise and fill
beneath our rafting doggedness
to rise, to fill and then
to grow,
grow and grow.

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

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus

Deleuze's Difference and Repetition is the source for some concepts relating to mechnisation in the later, more famous "Anti-Oedipus". Here are my schematic notes pertaining to the development of my idea of poetry machines. Deleuze, Phillipe and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane. London: Athlone Press, 1990. The Desiring Machines: 1: Desiring-Production It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to have ever said the id. Everywhere it is machines—real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections. An organ-machine is plugged into and energy-source-machine: the one produces a flow that the other interrupts. The breast is a machines that produces milk, and the mouth a m...
Post a Comment
Read more