from SOME OF ITS PARTS a
A Poem By Luke McMullan
Dawn, Vision
Speechless and confronting. My
sight, unowned and held
with that fabric, dimensional pin-hook
in the wall, up against,
pressing its upholstered back,
and back, and my sight
pressing into the focal hook
the ploy of apprehension unheld
by strained, inaudible screech.
(What) can a tongue see
or twist in the endless
photon storm?
O starlight receding.
O dark, leathern quilt.
O pin-hooks.
Two Poems by Tray Drumhann
A Poem By Sophie Seita
Fragonard
A l’origine des parfums se trouve –
The art of seduction.
Grass, eh? La capital mondiale!
Grass grows slowly Here
The tanneries work On the hour. Timely
Scented the leather. Region so charming.
Yes, yes, yes, pretty. Mmhhh...ah/oh.
Reconvene at coach half one. Good
Gift shop round the Restaurant ‘usine’
Évoque la poésie. No?
Now. Create an almost [petit drumroll]
Almost infinite number.
Age-old know-how. [emphasis on age]
More so. Hello, Marguerite.
My favourite. And of. Orange.
Of, an, and. Avec. Blossom.
Who? Also a master glove maker.
Sniff this.
A l’origine des parfums se trouve –
The art of seduction.
Grass, eh? La capital mondiale!
Grass grows slowly Here
The tanneries work On the hour. Timely
Scented the leather. Region so charming.
Yes, yes, yes, pretty. Mmhhh...ah/oh.
Reconvene at coach half one. Good
Gift shop round the Restaurant ‘usine’
Évoque la poésie. No?
Now. Create an almost [petit drumroll]
Almost infinite number.
Age-old know-how. [emphasis on age]
More so. Hello, Marguerite.
My favourite. And of. Orange.
Of, an, and. Avec. Blossom.
Who? Also a master glove maker.
Sniff this.
Tout cela est matématique: Ian Seed’s Shifting Registers
Reviewed by Virginia Konchan
Rainer Maria Rilke and Anna Akhmatova are among the 20th century poets for whom the human face symbolizes the integrity of the person: the evisceration of same as equated with death.
From Rilke’s prose poem “Faces”: “Other people changes faces incredibly fast, put on one after another, and wear them out. At first, they think they have an unlimited supply; but when they are barely forty years old they come to their last one. There is, to be sure, something tragic about this. They are not accustomed to taking care of faces; their last one is worn through in a week, has holes in it, is in many places as thin as paper, and then, little by little, the lining shows through, the non-face, and they walk around with that on.”
From Akhmatova’s “Instead of a Preface”: “One day somebody in the crowd identified me. Standing behind me was a woman, with lips blue from cold, who had, of course, never heard me called by name before. Now she started out of the torpor common to us all and asked me in a whisper (everyone whispered there): “ ‘Can you describe this?’ “And I said: ‘I can.’ “Then something like a smile passed fleetingly over what had once been her face.”
For 21st century poet Ian Seed, the face is as rich with signification—perhaps more so for its Heraclitian tendency toward perpetual flux and maskings—as any other element of the human body. Many post-lyric poets, influenced as they are by continental theory’s critique of the subject, which conceives of the self as a linguistic and ideological construction, spend little time mourning Horace’s “disjecta membra poetae” (the scattered members of the poet): even fewer poets spend any time at all on the signification of the dissemblance—and reassembly—of that fragment of the human form that still lays claim to outmoded concepts of uniqueness and presence: the face. From “Mining the Seams”: “The fusion of the face/ with its shadow is total in verisimilitude/ beyond the real . . . Ecce homo: the color/ of his eyes, the shape of his nose/ are never the same. For something more lasting,/ insert glass eyes into broken skin.” The language of this and other lines—largely composed of quatrains and couplets—in Seed’s second full-length collection is indeed visceral, but not for the purposes of engendering shock or discomfort in the reader. Rather, to show just how terrifying the deconstruction of Nietzsche’s “human, all too human” can, would, is, and may forever be. The language in parts that haunts and, occasionally, damns: “Our eyes are holes/ our noses blotches/ which lead to a gaping mouth . . . You’ve got to have a good/frost to make everything die.” This focus echoes the words of Ronald Bogue on Francis Bacon: “the face is the most heavily coded zone of the body and hence the point at which the effects of diastolic forces are most pronounced.”
Rarely are two distinct tropes woven so seamlessly in one collection than the two outstanding tropes in Shifting Registers: the (re) assembly of the face (and the shift from chaos to composition on the level of the human figure and the cosmos itself) and pure (versus applied) mathematics, or what the speaker refers to as “segments of the act . . . [and] the matrix/ from which it is removed.”
This discourse stakes place at the level of the line, unraveled forms and unraveled narratives echoing movements in scientific circles during the last century—the concept of the event horizon in general relativity (a boundary in spacetime beyond which events cannot affect an outside observer) being paramount to this collection. From “Theory” “ . . . we must be cautious with/ parables and patterns. Best/ pierce the order of/ symmetry, the sentence truest/ when readily lost.”
The ever-receding event horizon permeates Shifting Registers, in poems resplendent with mediations on inhabiting a post-human world: “ . . . you wander towards the happy end/ where it will happen,/ whatever it is/ in the emptiness of what was there”; “Referring/ to the act euphemistically,/ how can Miranda do colouring/ real and true through the flipbook/ of ‘alternative realities’ . . . ”
The felt pathos of Seed’s second collection is in its classical recourse not to redemptive figures, whether messianic or not, or to any version of futurity, but, rather, to the “beauty of geometry”: the promises of formalism, yes, but also of pure (Platonic) forms. “ . . . you can fall/ fast and cheap through the unknowns/ of algorithms precisely because you don’t think/ much of maths.”
The disfigured face and the beloved face, for Seed, are one: as are algebraic forms, Romantic concerns (truth, beauty) and Enlightenment dreams of reason restored to the world. It is difficult to imagine a poet of our times bent so painstakingly over a mirror that does nothing but refract, hoping, by the sheer power of patience and concentration, to see a face—however splintered— emerge: as difficult as loving the passage from form to decomposition, then back to form again. Quiet moments in this powerful collection suggest that this dream and this dreamer (accompanied by centuries of compounded desire) are to be realized not, as the speaker fears, in the future, or never, but soon—or, perhaps, now. “The new song is in the leaves/ the young queen on her coin.”
Shifting Registers is published by Shearsman (2010)
The art of writing books is about to be discovered
Check out this in-depth blog post by Ken Edwards, justly celebrating RSE's publication this year of four significant works of experimental narrative.
The books in question are John Gilmore's Head of a Man, Richard Makin's Dwelling, Leopold Haas' The Raft and Johan de Wit's Gero Nimo.
The only one I've read, at least in its final form, is Head of a Man, an enthrallingly still suspension-drama in the white space of a Nepalese youth hostel (ish). Gilmore has also written about jazz, and that's something I keep remembering as I take in the structures of this text. Whatever, he uses brackets wonderfully. Here's page 82:
MP
The books in question are John Gilmore's Head of a Man, Richard Makin's Dwelling, Leopold Haas' The Raft and Johan de Wit's Gero Nimo.
The only one I've read, at least in its final form, is Head of a Man, an enthrallingly still suspension-drama in the white space of a Nepalese youth hostel (ish). Gilmore has also written about jazz, and that's something I keep remembering as I take in the structures of this text. Whatever, he uses brackets wonderfully. Here's page 82:
☐
Line speaks. Line effaces. Line breaks.
☐
We met in the passageway. I stood limp, trailing. I stepped aside. In caved chest, a density of breathing. Lead cooled. Nothing moves.
☐
My body's aching. Held too long. Not the muscle tensed, but the joint contorted.(Monet's stroke.) (Deepened reds.)
☐
Still the distance across the room, still the floorboards wiped clean, the long lines of pale wood converging in the distance before her.
MP
a link
I just heard about a new book by Jessica Smith, and I’m delighted. Is it really five years since Organic Furniture Cellar? (Intercapillary Space review here.)
Articulating Space: Short Essays on Poetry is from Argotist and it’s a free download. Ignore the unassuming title. JS’s writing is constantly lucid, fascinated, precisely crafted, full of risks and plunges, and scarily open to criticism. Obscurantism and defensiveness are conspicuously absent. And these are big subjects:
There are powerful reasons to escape linearity: our language is saturated with our worldview, and for political lives to change—for capitalism to subside as the default economic strategy, for gender and racial egalitarianism to emerge, for “logical,” sentential theories of justice based on a “two-way street” or “equal exchange” (an eye for an eye) to submit to a higher and more abstract system of forgiveness—our language must escape the grid-like logic that allows social “stratification,” ideas of “equality,” and political and economic “equity.” Even communism, at least as it has so far been practiced in the world, refers back to these social ideas of lines (vectors pointing upwards to the rich from the “base” nether regions of the poor and oppressed; the Hegelian dialectic as a mathematical description of social evolution). I would suggest that a higher order of humanity exists (not to sound too Nietzschean) where the lines that currently permeate our language and our politics might be erased, without a trace, where a more abstract view of social, economic, and political systems allows a plethora of different things to exist at once, replacing the current way of thinking that constantly attempts to set both sides of any social situation equal to zero. Social order and language need not be reducible to mathematical logic.
(From “Ruptured Lines As Minor Uprisings”)
We can access Gertrude Stein reading her poetry via an .mpg file, switch on the radio to hear an NPR report, and listen to a rerun of The Simpsons on television all at once, then turn all of those sounds off and occupy a specific aural Time that exists only with reference to a multiplicity of Time fragments. A Native American theory of Time makes this idea of Time in the Electric Age more digestible: a certain tribe imagined that Time is a whirling, edgeless chaos, without linearity (pastpresentfuture), origin, shape (curve, line, circle), or end. To find oneself in Time, to lasso oneself to a sort of Time-platform where one could momentarily tame its chaos into a livable linearity, one had to build posts to touch periodically. Like a child “saving” himself in a game of tag by hitting “home base” or a journeyman “locating” himself with signposts along his way, the Native American needed to build and touch Time-posts (real, tangible posts, like signposts) to locate himself on a platform of Time in which he could exist. Similarly, Time in the Electric Age requires the subject to dip in and out of a chaos and locate oneself via duration messages in a chaotic Time that disallows categorization into a strict linear progression. This Time is not a formless form, as Bernstein attempts to describe in “State of the Art,” but an edgeless edifice.
(from “Not a Formless Form but an Edgeless Edifice”)
I’m only beginning to read it properly, but I’ve dipped enough to know that these 64 pages cover a lot of ground. There is also Shelley brought into communion with Derridean apocalypse, EBB, Christina Rossetti, Cecilia Vicuña, Zukofsky, Cage, Steve McCaffery; everything becomes absorbing...
MP
Articulating Space: Short Essays on Poetry is from Argotist and it’s a free download. Ignore the unassuming title. JS’s writing is constantly lucid, fascinated, precisely crafted, full of risks and plunges, and scarily open to criticism. Obscurantism and defensiveness are conspicuously absent. And these are big subjects:
There are powerful reasons to escape linearity: our language is saturated with our worldview, and for political lives to change—for capitalism to subside as the default economic strategy, for gender and racial egalitarianism to emerge, for “logical,” sentential theories of justice based on a “two-way street” or “equal exchange” (an eye for an eye) to submit to a higher and more abstract system of forgiveness—our language must escape the grid-like logic that allows social “stratification,” ideas of “equality,” and political and economic “equity.” Even communism, at least as it has so far been practiced in the world, refers back to these social ideas of lines (vectors pointing upwards to the rich from the “base” nether regions of the poor and oppressed; the Hegelian dialectic as a mathematical description of social evolution). I would suggest that a higher order of humanity exists (not to sound too Nietzschean) where the lines that currently permeate our language and our politics might be erased, without a trace, where a more abstract view of social, economic, and political systems allows a plethora of different things to exist at once, replacing the current way of thinking that constantly attempts to set both sides of any social situation equal to zero. Social order and language need not be reducible to mathematical logic.
(From “Ruptured Lines As Minor Uprisings”)
We can access Gertrude Stein reading her poetry via an .mpg file, switch on the radio to hear an NPR report, and listen to a rerun of The Simpsons on television all at once, then turn all of those sounds off and occupy a specific aural Time that exists only with reference to a multiplicity of Time fragments. A Native American theory of Time makes this idea of Time in the Electric Age more digestible: a certain tribe imagined that Time is a whirling, edgeless chaos, without linearity (pastpresentfuture), origin, shape (curve, line, circle), or end. To find oneself in Time, to lasso oneself to a sort of Time-platform where one could momentarily tame its chaos into a livable linearity, one had to build posts to touch periodically. Like a child “saving” himself in a game of tag by hitting “home base” or a journeyman “locating” himself with signposts along his way, the Native American needed to build and touch Time-posts (real, tangible posts, like signposts) to locate himself on a platform of Time in which he could exist. Similarly, Time in the Electric Age requires the subject to dip in and out of a chaos and locate oneself via duration messages in a chaotic Time that disallows categorization into a strict linear progression. This Time is not a formless form, as Bernstein attempts to describe in “State of the Art,” but an edgeless edifice.
(from “Not a Formless Form but an Edgeless Edifice”)
I’m only beginning to read it properly, but I’ve dipped enough to know that these 64 pages cover a lot of ground. There is also Shelley brought into communion with Derridean apocalypse, EBB, Christina Rossetti, Cecilia Vicuña, Zukofsky, Cage, Steve McCaffery; everything becomes absorbing...
MP