From "thirsty poems"

illicit substances, mostly liquids

moth balls, naphtha, semen
milk and sesame oil

stuff that issues from the husk of strange fruit
binding, blunting, strings into madagascar
it has pulp, your lips are its stains
it has pith and there must be passion
in it somewhere

grappa, chalky deposit, cheese
milk, sesame oil and olive oil

in the past there is still spittle, a tongue from which
you, drinking down straws in finland
gingham has exhausted into
stripes fading into white
water must be it—

sap, bone marrow, lsd
milk, sesame and olive oil, balsamic vinegar

stumbling in and into the “barn” of memory; pulses in a sack. light, and polish. we get free of dust. shivering. shaking. no rattle snake sighs. whatever there is it is and it is spilling. all over us and sticking. we find it on our foreheads. it finds us and our lips do. lentils, beans and split peas. you think we are dry in the sea. I feel you wet in the warm. dry slipping from us. sand.

plastic, glass, soil
milk, vinaigrette. this papery pulp is...

Comments

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...

What we learnt from Cambridge Analytica, Really!

Just over half a year after the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, the ongoing investigations into the criminal and nondemocratic role that illegal data-harvesting and targeted political ads have had on the election of Trump, and of course Brexit rumble on. At the same time there is clear disagreement as to what degree companies like Cambridge Analytica in cahoots with the far right and the Russians really skewed recent elections. It is now clear that what they did was on the edges of legality, but does that mean to say it was wrong? And if CA did not elect Trump, then what is the real political significance of data-based campaigning? Prof. Watkin, as ever, thinks we may have fresh insights into the debate.

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...

william watkin's blog (since 2003)

Search This Blog