Keeping it going...

I've decided to keep this going as my main poetry blog. So here's a poem:

"Love may Lin Yi-feng"

You love a plane
I love a cup
You love me-lad
I love you sister
you should love Lee,
Lee, Ai Li Ying slaughter
fixed-loving Well they should never be

A peak : the sun seems to love the air seems to love the sun air

Love love someone so true love is priceless
I love love
love will be expressed in words,
no haggle must first have a lot of assets
more drinks housekeeper
because it is not only a
with the best drivers hew
Facts Love is the fact realities
your car made no floor
without dogs Zuomie to drag my hands.
As long as no goods woman
As long as men no silver
So several hundred cards than Well, both platinum card
George Lam no uh you - uh own your own

A peak : salted fish is a good taste of cabbage

Several accounts in the old water SIN custody to a female buried Qu

A peak : Drainage Oh~ called Fresh Air Sunshine

Love seems a house together a card worried over a sunny air a car
love seems a person has been ripped a Until
fruit together a lifetime training
seems to love a house together
a card worried a shelter
a sunny air Cart love

A peak : the sun seems to love the air

You love me so I left you
so I love you, I standoffish
I love you because I love you
I love you because I love Quwu

match Beyond preparing prospective bride
bride kidnapping colleagues get your point
BMW who sent you flowers
to the people to drink wine you drink tea
I love you brushed aside enough going hungry match
I love to watch you, you are going hungry enough cash

Well, I love you worried mind rainy under cover
most critical
trip over two steps you will hew cars
Miles told you I love you you never see the sincerity
If you love me, I called Miles forced the bus with you
Hello but it is not the business
you ask me Point-like comfort like to join

Love seems a house together a card
worried over a sunny air a car
love seems a person has been ripped a Until
a lifetime together a training
seems to love a house
together a card
worried a shelter
a sunny air Cart love

A peak : the sun seems to love the air

Your favorite missionary
I love flying and dogs jumping dress
you love to watch Aberdeen
I love to watch three earners
you love a channel-lattice
I love Lattice elephant
love and to the UNIFIL time,
no one has never approach

A peak : the sun seems to love the air seems to love the sun air

Bonus Poems!

My original idea for my chapbook was to work with Fenollosa's idea of the Chinese character and make graphical poems using photo collages of English malapropisms and mistranslations found on Chinese billboards, street signs, menus, etc. Genius! Well, not really... I realized it wasn't really working out the way I'd hoped even before Kasey gave me feedback on my draft manuscript. He basically reiterated what I'd been thinking--the transfer to print would have had a disastrous effect on the poems. They really needed a high quality graphical element to make them interesting and since I'm too cheap to invest in magazine grade, slick glossy paper for a chapbook I ended up back at the drawing board. I transcribed a few of the poems I had but, aside from a couple of exceptions, they didn't hold up very well. I started re-collaging the remaining poems to create something--anything--but, unfortunately, I was left with very little to work with. Drats!

I wanted to keep working with Chinese--I just knew there was something there--so I tried a number of techniques using online translators with different source material until I found something I was pleased with. In fact, despite the late nights and the frustration, I am really, really happy with the way my chapbook turned out. In the meantime, however, I have dozens of poems using a variety of techniques that just didn't "fit" (oh, how I tried to make them work). Here are a couple of those poems:

Ghost 

I heard footsteps behind in 1969
life extracted from an old body
the deer licked the blood 
and fell to the ground
into the opened coffin went the truth
and threw out the corpse
butterflies die
even fly in the right hands
you still owed the valley some fighting
now without a ghost of hope

Dead dogs

Kingpins of tin-poisoned arrogance
anxiously worship the game.
Contemplating domination,
seeking maps for the right disaster.
Profit exists in chaos—
in waste after overthrow.
And noise.
Soldiers given crowns without swords,
warfare without battle,
bare, carbon nobility
left as hanging meat for the forest.
Pain is its own end
when compassionate rape is law.
Dogs.
Dead dogs.

Coolidge and Watten - Spots, Forms, Space, Time, and Context

Regarding the question of syntax, I’ve been feeling a bit like a moth locked in a room, bouncing off of a light bulb. Repeatedly hitting the glass, I’ve felt incapable of penetrating into the “energy” of the thing. Each of the essays that we’ve studied this term has been like another light bulb, each one offering a bit more illumination but still, to me, impenetrable. I dart around, examining them trying to find that one spot—-that escape into the realm of what constitutes “good poetry.” Fortunately Clark Coolidge came along and opened the door or I may have spun around in that room forever, frustrated. He reminded me there isn’t a single spot but many spots and that “forms” are always plural.

Coolidge, when describing the “actual world,” points out the arrangement of trees, leaves, and birds. He says, “There seems to be no intelligence behind it but there is an arrangement…[these] places in space being occupied and moving.” Our human brains are always trying to make sense of our place in the ever-changing world so we designate arrangements to everything—even when no “intelligent” arrangement exists. And the more we look the more we see. That’s why it is possible (as Trisha points out) for Aram Saroyan’s one-word poems or Coolidge’s “trilobites” to have syntax just as Shakespeare, Keats, and Shelley have syntax. As the reader (or the poet) we are in charge of assigning syntax. There isn’t just one way, there are many—-spots, forms.

Sometimes syntactical arrangements in language are obvious. Ron Silliman’s book-length poem, Tjanting, for example, is written in the Fibonacci number sequence (the number of sentences in each paragraph equals the number of sentences in the previous two paragraphs). Other times, however, we have to look harder at the arrangements to fit our conception of syntax--ounce code orange. At this point I doubt anyone would argue that Coolidge's poem lacks syntax, and I would go one step further and say that it constitutes good (if not great) poetry. Why? Because, for me, it hits the spots.

Those "moving spaces," when occupied with some resistance help to create poetic syntax. The particular space that Coolidge's ohm affects by "hang[ing] down there" is both struggle and acquiescence. Even though it is resistance, the poem would likely not survive without it. Even though, to some, the words in the poem may seem random, Coolidge says that is impossible, the words are "coming from a place where you are working in your mind." Not only is the poet making the connections in his mind, the reader is making them as well. Whether it "works" or not depends a lot on where your mind is at the time--or, as Samual Beckett says, "find[ing] a form that accommodates the mess..."

All of this agrees nicely with Barrett Watten's idea of syntax depending on context. We each weigh the possible interpretations of something by considering the context in which we find it. Coolidge's trilobite may not have a place in a sonnet by Shakespeare just as a line of Shakespeare would be inappropriate in a Silliman poem. In quoting Robert Smithson, Watten talks about "both the interior and exterior [time and space] to the work." Space, according to Smithson, is the exterior syntax--the physical and cultural place of the work, while time is the interior syntax: "it is structural and psychological and begins with the response to the work in language." I agree with Smithson (and Watten) that stasis is "a hopeful development in art." Does this mean that there isn't movement? No. Much like the paradox in ohm, stasis relies on movement or, as Watten says, "the breaking apart of the spatial order [to] undermine...the authority of the present time." A Coolidge poem written forty years ago feels as fresh to me as many of the poems being written today. It seems to exist outside of space and time--it has its own inherent context.

I guess what I am getting at is that, as a poet, it is up to me to try to create a syntax that can somehow exist outside of Smithson's space and time. The reader will, of course, supply her own subjective context to the work and, if we are both lucky, spots will be hit. As Silliman writes in Tjanting, “Each sentence accounts for its place." I completely agree. Hopefully now I can stop bouncing off of lightbulbs and aim for the moon.

Poetics Flow

In lieu of actually doing anything productive this afternoon I created this "Flow of Poetics" diagram (inspired by Bryan). Of course, much like Davie's "five kinds of poetics syntax", this is purely based on my experiences with the readings and is completely subjective.

The Jaguar and the Tapir

Thanks a lot, Saussure. There was a time when, to me, a cat was just a cat. Furry thing with claws and whiskers = cat. Simple. How naïve I was. It is so clear now that the word—those 3 letters C-A-T—has nothing at all to do with the animal that bears the name. Neither does “animal” for that matter. So here we are, as human beings (having nothing at all to do with the bipedal primate that bears the name), living outside of our own existence in this world of language. Try to imagine a purely visual world devoid of language. No, really—try it. It is nearly impossible. You may imagine yourself as a jaguar lurking in the dense rainforests at night, ready to spring on your hapless prey. Or, you may be the ever alert tapir, sensing the jaguar amongst the trees, every nerve telling you to run. Run, tapir, run! But right there are the T-R-E-E-S. Fucking trees.

Unless we were raised by wolves, we don’t have a choice but to live our lives through language. Lyn Hejinian knows this, Charles Bernstein knows it too... We may as well get used to it—and make the best of it. In The Rejection of Closure, Hejinian says, “Because we have language we find ourselves in a special and peculiar relationship to the objects, events, and situations which constitute what we imagine of the world. Language generates its own characteristics in the human psychological and spiritual conditions.” Yep. She quotes Francis Ponge who says, “Man is a curious body whose center of gravity is not in himself.” I pondered this for about three seconds and realized that it is undoubtedly true. I am in my own head almost every waking minute of every day (and every sleeping minute too, come to think of it). Thinking, planning, organizing (or disorganizing), working, worrying, reading, and even sometimes writing. It’s no wonder that so many of the pleasures in life are those things that take us outside of language—those things that connect us to our more primal selves. I can’t name them all but they include sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll.

So back to getting used to it, making the best of it, and sometimes writing. In the “real” world (that prehistoric, purely visual world before language and gunpowder) I am the tapir. As a mostly hairless mammal with substandard hearing and a lousy sense of smell all I can do is cower in a cave and wait to become lunch for the saber-toothed predecessor of the jaguar. I’ve got nothing. Well, not exactly nothing. I do have this enormous brain (relatively speaking). This brain, however, is both the proverbial blessing and curse. In order to survive I had to invent language (okay, I didn’t really invent language—it was some guy named Og) so that I could scream to my family, “Look out! Mastodon! Run up that tree!” pick up a stick and tell my buddy, “Hey, I bet we could kill something with this,” or relay to my mate that, “I could really use a beer right now.” But this invention of language changed everything. We now define our world by the names we give things. But they’re only names. Everything both is and isn’t what it seems. Since we don’t get to go back to that time before language, we might as well try to grasp it. Through my writing I’m in control of my world—I’m the hero of my stories and the protagonist of my poems. Through language, I get to be the jaguar. As I said, “Thanks Saussure!”

More Darwinian Poetics

In re-reading the Davie piece in order to compare it with Silliman's New Sentence, I was, once again, compelled to draw comparisons between the evolution of language and our own evolution as as a species. Davie says that most people regard syntax as the "mere skeleton on which are hung the truly poetic elements, such as imagery or rhythm." The skeleton, this syntax is a metaphor, a fossilized reminder that something came before. Davie explains that poetry "can be invertebrate" (like Coolidge's Trilobites) taking it back even deeper into a prehistoric past.
This idea that poetry is the basic, most primitive form of language goes back to Shelley's idea in A Defence of Poetry when he says, "in the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet..." Fenollosa too, talks about the evolution of language, saying that "pronouns appear a thorn in our evolution theory," implying that the further we move from that initial form (the syntax of the thing) the more we lose. This started me thinking about our own species. Ahh, how super-sophisticated we've become, but does that necessarily make us more evolved? For instance, chimpanzees, our closest living relatives (sharing 96% of our DNA), don't seem to share our penchant for destroying the planet to promote their own greedy self interests. The earth itself seems to be increasingly disturbed by us humans, as our self-inflicted climate change is poised to add us to the list of species that, ultimately, wore out their planetary welcome--to end up as fossilized skeletons on the geological junk heap... Wow, that sure seemed like a rant!

Anyway, back to language..."Sentences integrate into higher levels of meaning," Silliman says, "toward the paragraph." And yet, these "primitive" sentences are, all by themselves, poetic. So then, back to my analogy, perhaps modern linguists are like today's proponents of creationism (or the more PC "intelligent design") and that's why, according to Silliman, "the sentence has been shoved back into the domain of non-investigation." Rather than acknowledge the obvious (that we're simply sophisticated beasts--uh I mean that, with regard to language, more isn't necessarily better) they have overlooked those basic structures in favor of more complex systems. Silliman (and Davie and Shelley and Fenollosa and Pound, et al), like an archeologist, sees the beauty in all of those other bits of language that climbed out of the primordial soup and attempts to reconstruct the skeletons to better understand poetry (chimpanzees).

Poetry Finds Static (A Manifesto)

In honor of Gertrude Stein here's the manifesto I wrote last quarter...

Poetry Finds Static
(A Manifesto)

Poetry rides shotgun on a highway going nowhere anyhow. Let’s just get that straight out front. You just want to find a station. Let’s get that straight too. I can’t remember the last time poetry put in. It can tell a story. That is true. But it’s no friend. Don’t make that mistake. Sometimes poetry shakes you to wake you. That is true. Poetry always turns to the station you don’t want to hear no how. Is that true? Poetry never finds it anyway. It gets stuck between stations. Poetry finds static. You can almost hear what it’s trying to say. That is true. But it can drive you mad. That is true too. Two tunes at once. Can poetry be both? What isn’t really? That might be true. Poetry takes its time or no time. Depending. What is poetry but language? What is language but the scenery? The same images shifting perception, each of us interpreting but not really knowing. As if you could. As if it could. What is true? If nothing else, that is. It makes sense to look at poetry this way and that. Drip comes close. Buzz is closer, but that’s about it. Whisper and sizzle and clang too I guess. There are more of course, but no more are needed. Buzz Whisper Sizzle Drip Clang. Drip Whisper Clang Buzz Sizzle. How can that be true? No, true, of course, is meadow horse lake love nightingale God. So true yet it certainly doesn’t seem so. The road is what we decide. Get that straight if nothing. Poetry finds static.

Gertrude Stein said there ain’t no answer. She also said there ain’t gonna be an answer and there never has been an answer. That, she said, is the answer. Poetry is as good an answer as any. Or not. If poetry claims to have the answer it is lying maybe. Maybe not. How do you know? Gertrude Stein says so, that’s how. Poetry finds static. That is the only true thing. Poetry will smoke your last cigarette. It sits beside you or behind you. It sleeps a lot. Poetry can be ahead of you sometimes always anyway. That may be true or not. Don’t ever let poetry drive. For that you’ll be sorry. If you only take one thing away from this or that let it be. Poetry is not dependable. It barely looks at the road ahead anyway. It gawks at the rabbits and the tumbleweeds and the lines behind. It will leave you in the ditch or worse. That is true. Out of gas and out of cash listening to static. Believe it or don’t—it doesn’t matter much anyway. An old, drunk poet said there are worse things than being alone. That may be true. But he didn’t say what. He also said that friendship means sharing the prejudice of experience. That of everything seems true. So maybe poetry is your friend. Remember, it can tell a good story if you let it. You can let it. But you have to be willing to listen to both stations at once.