Skip to main content

From Thirsty Poems (last work)


in there

codex:
in there is the rustle, the rustle is the bait, the vortice.
on leaves, what’s left of storm, weeps on veins.
open up the vista, let billowing go bellowing.
creatures, I am obsessed with obscene, impossible, creatures.
in there is all we have left to work on
with, where my intention monkey-shined with the happening.

dalmated polkadots dance archipelagos on the parquet


1.
in there is the rustle, the rustle is the bait, the vortice.
from the twitching bough, extrapolate my twitching heart.
where the hind’s hindquarters draw you in.
berry factories burn off the fuel that they can cobble together.
are you intrigued yet, are you, are you intrigued?
in there there is another chance to spree, to see.

emasculated transvestites prance amiably in civvies

2.
on leaves, what’s left of storm, weeps on veins.
you heave! you retch! you tight! you ululate!
not too much to go on for the weather detective.
nice to see the system throbs as much as it misses a beat.
come by, stop by, drop in and see me, see:
in there must also accept the courtship of what’s out there.

crewing key-hands jig in full in jerseys

3.
open up the vista, let billowing go bellowing.
the claustropheme tells us more about the internal exiles.
it’s a happiness of sheets to the wind in starch.
hoping the thorn will end, the root give way, the clearing!
I went too far to the west, too near to the east,
in there sported a plume that swished against the enclosure.

hardened helicopters jitterbugged jealous territories

4.
creatures, I am obsessed with obscene, impossible, creatures.
how can we talk of outer space when we know not our inner space?
in the colony the distended abdomens must be groomed, kept cleaner.
the vaulting is the cavorting mixed up with an arachnid.
I am the piteous mask pressed up against the gorse bars
in here there are so many options its all left out to go stale.

left handed lepers plier into a pile and cry

excess:
in there is the rustle, what’s left of the storm, billowing, impossible creatures.
how can we talk of outer space when we know not our inner space?
it’s a happiness of sheets to the wind in starch.
nice to see the system throbs as much as it misses a beat.
from the twitching bough, hindquarters draw fuel that they can cobble together.
in there is all we have left to work on
in there is another chance to spree, to see
in there must also accept the courtship of what’s out here
in there sported a plume that swished against the enclosure
in here there are so many possibilities:

polkadot, transvestites, key-hands, helicopters, lepers.
the dance, the prance, the jig, the jitterbug, a ballet.

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

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

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