“Stand
up tall
like a flowerpot.”
“Stand
up tall
like a flowerpot.”
“Stand
up tall
like a flowerpot.”
Inexplicable
bits are
underlined in the
copy
of The
Activist I just
picked
up at
the Prison Project
table
at the
farmers’ market. Personally
I’m
tired of
pretending I don’t
see
the bridge.
“Please go home
and
feed your
pets and children.”
Palpate
the shoulder
blades with the
breath.
Let all
that oxygen swirl.
“Stand
up tall,
like a [two
word?]
flower pot.”
or two?] like
a
flower pot.”
Kris asks what
my
responsibility is.
To stand up
straight
and say
Personally I’m tired
of
pretending I
don’t see the
bridge.
Big ink
blob on 94,
and
traced over
and. From now
on
use knives
only as mirrors.
“Look,
I want
to say …” or,
just,
“Look.” I
won’t say the
best
time is
at dawn. Two
poems:
We have these big brains
And excrete the same pathogens
Here in the shadows
It’s raining porcelain frogs
“Camera
reveals light
of the real
room.”
You are
In. There. … I’m
beginning
to believe
in the I
again
because why
not? It’s as
real
as everything
else is. Hope-
pipes,
love-pipes,
fright-pipes, thought-
pipes,
loss-pipes,
hate-pipes. Pipes
of
coarseness, pipes
of sanity. Pipes
of
confession. Pipes
of purity, pipes of
sanctity,
pipes of
flight. Riding-pipes,
rubbing-
pipes, sliding
pipes, wiping-pipes,
confronting-
pipes, adoring-
pipes. Potential fracture
of
the pipes.
Corridor of grey
mucus.
A number
of other points
served
as premises:
- a poem is not an isolated autonomous rarified aesthetic object
- a person (the poet) has no irreducible, ahistorical, unmediated,
singular, kernel identity
- language is a preeminently social medium
- the structures of language are social structures in which meanings and
intentions are already in place
- institutional stupidity and entrenched hypocrisy are monstrous and
should be attacked
- racism, sexism and classism are repulsive
- prose is not necessarily not poetry
- theory and practice are not antithetical
- it is not surrealism to compare apples to oranges
- intelligence is romantic
An
instance of
a sign: I might
see
a flock
of crows flying
in
some particular
direction. The dessert
course
arrives: it
is sweetened air.
If
They like
you, you say,
the
sign will
become a Messages
[sic]
Take off the red shoes
Sit down in the green chair
Quote a whole poem “After the Persian”*
… from
“Altar Pieces”:
A Dead Hand
from
behind a
beam / / the coffin
tilted /
on a
rock / / a bird,
no
bigger / than
a mouse / / moves
down
the floor.
Cows at their
business
bow a
hundred heads, ah
I
speak of
why our skin
is
our largest
organ
When I
speak
of skin
I speak of
a
slow day
in the forces
that
are compelling
all of us
to
be brushing
up against one
another.
A succession
of moves, severely
old
music in
skeletal form contending
with
underestimated maelstroms,
*Your sweetness and generosity
Both capture and astonish me
I am too drunk now
ever to let go
[Note: Sources: Shin Yu Pai, “Vinyasa Instruction for R.Y. Yoga”, at Makura no Soshi, 3 Jan 09; Renee Gladman, The Activist (the big blob bit and the traced and are in my copy, too, as are a few other tracings and underlines …); Kris is Kris Hemensley, with whom I’ve been discussing, via the comments section at Alan Baker’s Litterbug, Israel’s invasion of Gaza; Belle Gironda, as quoted by Katie Yates, “On Belle Gironda”, in On: Contemporary Practice (eds. Michael Cross, Thom Donovan & Kyle Schlesinger); Tom Beckett, “A Witness Rhythm”, “Statues of Limitation”, in Unprotected Texts: Selected Poems 1978-2006; Reed Bye, “Welcome Back”, in Join the Planets: New and Selected Poems; Roy Fisher, The Ship’s Orchestra, in The Long and Short of It: Poems 1955-2005; Lyn Hejinian, “Barbarism”, in The Language of Inquiry; James Koller, Messages (If … messages is a very loose paraphrase); Laura Moriarty, Ultravioleta; Simon Pettet, “Take off the red shoes”, “After the Persian”, in Selected Poems; Jerome Rothenberg, “Altar Pieces”, “The Road to Holland”, in Seedings & Other Poems; Juliana Spahr, “Poem Written from November 30, 2002 to March 27, 2003”, in The Connection of Everyone With Lungs; Marjorie Welish, “Empire Illumined”, in The Annotated “Here” and Selected Poems]
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