Skip to main content

From "Lines out of Space"


Is is worth



it now that I said it it
seems so much more realer
somehow is this the apparition
trembling in the moisture
gathered on the yellowing bluff


on trains many things happen but no more than anywhere else
movement-containment-they-are-isolating
put something in a box any old crap it becomes my gift to you
a man is holding his nose in such a way or seen without due care and atten-
that I think his hand is his nose for a moment


I am not a talker a day decoder
will I tell the others about the nose, about elvis here and michael jacksons over
there is it worth it it is an unlikely thing a
precious but unlikely thing a mirage of light dispersing in
the shattered clouds resting on the lee


with each comment on it you add on to it
I watch a tourist chase a map in a small capricious wind
in reaching for the glass I knock it further from my hand
death isn’t in the detail but the accumulation of detail is
the way one talks with death
or

A GHOSTLY MIST OBLITERATES ALL WITH ITS BILLION PARTICULATE SMEAR

Comments

Anonymous said…
I like bits of this, it's casual, and i like that...has the epic feel of pound, but not as erudite(which is good, in a way)...

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

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

John Ashbery, The Tennis Court Oath

John Ashbery, The Tennis Court Oath (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1962) 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) General Notes: Shoptaw · Shoptaw includes an Ash. quote which explains away the nature of this poem as a description of leaving the Atocha Station: “It strikes me that the dislocated, incoherent fragments of images which make up the movement of the poem are probably like the experience you get from a train pulling out of a station of no particular significance. The dirt, the noises, the sliding away seem to be a movement in the poem. The poem was probably trying to express that, not for itself but as an epitome of something experienced; I think that is what my poems are about” (cf. A. Poulin Jr., “John Ashbery,” The Michigan Quarterly Review 20.3 (1981)). · yet he notes it is not the collage of automatism and Dada, n