Zeitgeist Spam

After Hiroshi Sugimoto (For Omo Bob, And For Sam)

After Jordania Goldberg

Autopoiesis LII (Sonnets, Set 2, No. 24)

I have gone back tout court to magma

Neo-capitalism has won

Airplanes are crushed and then unfurled like newly hatched butterflies

Each chestnut tree will extinguish itself

Candelabra after candelabra

Ships are cut in half to stand on shore as skeletal monuments

Allowing the free passage of the tide

The honey is fragrant on the table

And there is thunder in the valley

Much anxiety between the one and the other

The four caged canaries

Sound like four forests

Confused by the barbed wire the depleted uranium and the pop pop pop of the mines

A lot of money is being spent with no real idea of what we are supposed to be celebrating

And from the wounds of the bacon the fat is dripping

It keeps us inside

It makes the TV pictures snowy in spite of the HD

My grandfather

The Emperor

Was

As you know

Mad

The year is as dark and long as a bed

Language is sticky

It never dries out

The coin I’ve got is good

But I can’t see a corpse whose tongue I could put it under

20:50 refers to the viscosity of standard engine oil

The sky is lighted by the glow

From the dump

The street        the pond        the hospital

The existential safety commissioners just google and bluff

[Note: Sources: Pier Paolo Pasolini, “A Desperate Vitality” (tr. Pasquale Verdicchio), in Rothenberg/Joris; back cover of Simon Morrisey, Richard Wilson. From here to the end I use McClatchy, except as noted. Claire Malroux, “Octet Before Winter” (tr. Marilyn Hacker); Andrea Zanzotto, “Distance” (trs. Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann); Patrizia Cavalli, “Ah, yes, to your misfortune” (tr. Judith Baumel); Rutger Kopland, “Natzweiler” (tr. James Brockway); Lynne Cooke, “Richard Wilson interview with Lynne Cooke”, as quoted in Simon Morrisey, Richard Wilson; Eddie van Vliet, “Party” (tr. John van Tiel); Tomas Tranströmer, “After a Death” (tr. Robert Bly); Paavo Haavikko, “The Short Year” (tr. Herbert Lomas); Pentti Saarikoski, “Potato Thief” and “Invitation to the Dance” (tr. Herbert Lomas); Giles Goodland, “Notes Towards a History of the Cento”; Simon Morrisey, Richard Wilson; Nijole Miliauskaite, “Temporary City” (tr. Jonas Zdanys); Wikipedia, “Human Extinction”; Alan Baker, email to JBR, 29 August 2007]

Ana Mendieta's Hands

[Note: Source: front cover photo of Ana Mendieta: Earth Body, Sculpture and Performance 1972-1985 (Untitled (Body Tracks), 1974, Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection)]

Autopoiesis LI (Sonnets, Set 2, No. 23) (The Home > Explore > Galleries > Americas > Mexico > “There Is No Document Of Culture That Is Not At The Same Time A Document Of Barbarism” Including This One Poem > For Ernesto Priego)

Case 1

Merely flesh in common

Of the bones shared in common

Shivering in the fiery brambles

Case 2

The light enters and spills

(It clings to the mud of marbles like a perfume)

“The wind carries away the words”

Case 3

Petrified star

With its stone face aloof and the

Edge of the fiery sword

Case 4

“And the horsemen

“At the sight of the waters descended”

Their whispering spread out over the water / like an “o”

Case 5

Shiny metals / like an “o”

And the feathered god’s

Gap-toothed grinning turquoise mask

Case 6

“In this gram of silence”

“This promise of exile”

“The dejection that hides in the thresholds of the rain”

Case 7

“This promise of exile”

This labyrinth

This oh if only / this if / if only

Case 8

The poet must return to close the open book

The poet must come back from the dark to fill up the whiteness with blood

Each angel is visible / What a dark embrace

Case 9

Ash heaps

Hail stones or droughts shall return in cycles

Jackrabbits gnaw on the bones of the unburied dead

Case 10

The clay that sets fire to the rib

A fire for the emptiness

A dog thrown at the feet of the heart that sleeps there since

Case 11

More than a hundred million centimeters

Plus the stones

Plus the trees / plus the silence that froze / the heart of the shipwrecked

[Note: Sources: nothing from Rothenberg/Joris this time. Everything’s from The River Is Wide / El rió es ancho: Twenty Mexican Poets (ed. and tr. Marlon L Fick), except as noted. Rubén Bonifaz Nuño, “The beginning of the soul …”; Coral Bracho, “The Dark and Tepid Mosque”; Héctor Carreto, “The Black Broach”; Alí Chumacero, “The Wanderer’s Response”; Elsa Cross, “Poem Under the Willow”; Jorge Ruiz Esparza, “Heart of Darkness”; a reference to a mask in the British Museum “believed to represent Quetzalcoatl or the Rain God Tlaloc” ; Jorge Esquinca, “Flocks”; Gloria Gervitz, “Pythia”; Francisco Hernández, “The Finest Portrait of Rilke” and “Twelve Lines in the Shadow of My Father”; Elva Macías, “Lost City”; Myriam Moscona, “The Tree of Names”, “They are For the Emptiness” and “Like the defeated soldier …”; Oscar Oliva, “At the Wheel of a Car, by the Pan-American Highway from Tuxtla to Mexico City”; Jaime Sabines, “Metaphors for a Blind Girl”]

Autopoiesis L (Sonnets, Set 2, No. 22)

R writes

I will not die of sickness

Or old age

Of anguish or of tiredness

I will die of

And E writes

Many words but I mostly remember

The dot dot dots

And R

(Another R) writes

The curious thing about language is that it holds and makes visible

What

What never happened?

Ah

You have already forgotten

He rejoiced

(That was W)

And F writes

I assume a posture of pathos

Although

Although

And Y

“After these things had come to pass”

“Always”

And L

The core of the strange roselight

Out of the brilliant angular silver

And U

I eat the lamp I blow out the ghost

M writes

Don’t worry

Love

I have seen with my own two eyes

On a frosty night beside the

Volga

A destitute Marxist sleeping under the Kaiser’s sword

And

A writes something called

“A Desire Moving Through the Maps of the Material”

Which has the lines

The reference here is to something

Other than ‘the divine blessings’

Then there's B’s

For death is a strange world

It fascinates small children

(And yes

I am still a child)

Go into the room and be reimbursed

Writes P

Budding like a lotus from

Atop a box of gears

Y writes

Every rainstorm now dislodges

A rock or two

V writes a poem in 5 parts

Before the first and last howl

J doesn't write

Because he doesn’t need to

[Note: Sources: Rothenberg/Joris except as noted. Rosario Castellanos, “Two Poems” (tr. Magda Bogin); Ernesto Cardenal, “In Xóchitl in Cuicatl” (tr. Carlos and Monique Altschul); Robin Blaser, as quoted in the Rothenberg/Joris commentary; Emmett Williams, “The Red Chair”; Frederike Mayröcker (tr. Anselm Hollo); Yehuda Amichai, “National Thoughts” (tr. Stephen Mitchell); Denise Levertov, “Age of Terror”; Unsi al-Hajj, “The Charlatan” (tr. Pierre Joris); Muhammad al-Maghut, “Executioner of Flowers” (trs. May Jayyusi and Naomi Shihab Nye); Adonis, “A Desire Moving Through the Maps of the Material” (trs. Allen Hibbard and Osama Isber); Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, “The River and Death” (trs. Pierre Joris and Hedi Jaouad); Patrick Durgin “Go Into the Room …” and “The Litmus Redact”, in Imitation Poems; Yusuf al-Khal, “The Wayfarers” (trs. Sargon Boulus and Samuel Hazo); Vasko Popa, “Burning Shewolf” (tr. Charles Simic)]

Autopoiesis XLIX

The big toe

The most human part of the human body

Mystic of almost nothing

Like the hidden pictorial element

Of a drinking cat

That refers to temporality

In an otherwise very symmetrically organized picture

Speaks

All my life I have seen only troubled times

Extreme divisions in society

And immense destruction

I have taken part in these troubles

In coram publico

There are no exempt positions

The going-on is poesié ininterrompue

Ininterrompable

Immanence without expectations

Wherever I walk with transparent optimism

Over abysses

It is there that I demonstrate

What it means to be contemporary

I have only a dollar

Plastic flip-flops and a hovel

No substance

No “nature” …

Being a function both of the contingent laws of language

And of the always singular history of objects of desire

The subject is a function of the mouth

(Lévinas and his “face of the other”!)

The mouth is the beginning

In the most characteristic cases

It is the most living part

The most terrifying for neighboring animals

[Note: Sources: Georges Bataille, “Big Toe” and “Mouth” in Encyclopaedia Acephalica (various translators; eds. Robert Lebel and Isabelle Waldberg); part of title of an article by Françoise Choay, cited in “Editorial Notes: The Meaning of Decay in Art” (tr. John Shepley), in Guy Debord and the Situationist International (ed. Tom McDonough); Stephen Schmidt-Wulffen, “Stephen Shore’s Uncommon Places”, note 19, in Stephen Shore, Uncommon Places; Guy Debord, Panegyric (tr. James Brook); Nathaniel Tarn, “On Refining a Model of Poetic Production”, in The Embattled Lyric; Niklas Luhmann, Die Wissenschaft der Gesellschaft, as quoted by Eva M Knodt, Foreword to Niklas Luhmann, Social Systems (tr. John Bednarz Jr with Dirk Baecker); Peter Sloterdijk, Thinker on Stage: Nietzsche’s Materialism (tr. Jamie Owen Daniel); Linh Dinh, “Prelude”, in Jam Alerts; Alain Badiou, Ethics (tr. Peter Hallward)]

Autopoiesis XLVIII (For Ginger And Horacio)

Something else I am getting up to do

That I forget in an instant

Yet something

Curiously more important now

Than facing the blank of the wall

Defined by mourning but also by hope and encounters

All of those things that never happened and yet

Are here

Present

Happening now making our life more intense

More beautiful

MORE

We are also all the things we are not

All the time

And

We are also NOT all the things we are not

All the time

All of those things that never happened never happened

Making our life more intense

More beautiful

MORE

Making it EVERYTHING

To the point of pure ecstatic sorrow

Or if not ecstatic sorrow

Sorrowful ecstasy

I sang in a round of “Hey ho, nobody home / No drink, no wine, no something something something / Yet I will be merry”

Everything is miraculous

A state of perpetual instability

Purified by grief

[Note: Sources: some of the blogs and websites I always read; Andrena Zawinski, “Curiosity Piece”, ars poetica, 12 Aug 07; Ernesto Priego, “Sailor’s Lament”, Never Neutral, 9 Aug 07; comments (by Horacio and JBR) relating to Ginger Stickney, “Repeat a Little”, Green Tea Ginger, 11 August 2007 (slightly modified); Ivy Alvarez, untitled, Ivy Is Here, 11 Aug 07; Omo Bob, “Dead and Damned”, Omo Studios, 11 Aug 07. No ideas but in things? OK. No ideas]

Autopoiesis XLVII (Sonnets, Set 2, No. 21)

… As if

A moon rose

Of black light

Is a moon rose a flower

I nor

You know what they want

They have had

Have they had

Their tongues cut out

Near water

I crept from a womb of machines

Rose Red smeared tar on my forehead

And curls

They

(A different they)

Had

Strangled her snow white sister

The children may be right in shouting

That I look ridiculous because mildewed

They know what justice is

Though desire for it does not haunt them

… Question after question

Answer without raising your pen who leaves (dumb) images question-shaped

Slobbering down to the ding an sich

The effigy

Rattling with sacks full of mandatories

There are nights I sat up and begged like a beaked dog

Kneeling in the temple before the great peacock

Of not-saying

This is less true now I have my medicine

I ask the woman without legs

Who sits in the plaza

To pray for you

You penniless lovers

Because at every gesture you make

A bird is born from your fingers

I read

“Yesterday was Wednesday all morning

By afternoon it changed

And became almost Monday”

And I believe

Though it’s 9:17 a.m. right now

And the newspaper tells me it’s Friday

For the first time I understand that

Lamplight is a sort of snow

And so I stare

Intently

At the shapes the snow is hiding from me

… As if …

… As if …

… And yet …

… And yet …

But if there are three kinds of light

There are three kinds of shadows

Three kinds of sentences

We go from one shadow/sentence to the next

Without realizing the number of miles covered

By the fire that speaks our language

[Note: Sources: Rothenberg/Joris, except as noted. Robert Creeley, “Anger”; Paul Blackburn, “At the Well”; Ingeborg Bachmann, “Curriculum Vitae” (tr. Jerome Rothenberg); Hugo Claus, “The Tollund Man” (tr. Theo Hermans); Pierre Alechinsky, “Ad Miró” (tr. Michael Fineberg); Lucebert, “9000 Jackals Swimming to Boston” (tr. Peter Nijmeijer); Gerrit Kouwenaar, “Elba” (tr. Peter Nijmeijer); Christian Dotremont, “Some Lapland Views” (tr. Pierre Joris). From here to the end I use McClatchy. Except as noted. Sophia de Mello Breyner, “The Small Square” (tr. Ruth Fainlight); Eugenio de Andrade, “Penniless Lovers” (tr. Alexis Levitin); Angel Gonzalez, “Yesterday” (tr. Steven Ford Brown and Gutierrez Revuelta); JBR’s faithless fucking with a bit and Alan Baker’s faithful translation of another bit of Yves Bonnefoy's “The Only Rose”, in Yves Bonnefoy, The Beginning and End of the Snow (tr. Alan Baker), soon to be published by Leafe Press/Bamboo Books (Bonnefoy was the next poet in McClatchy; I decided to use AB’s translation instead of the ones found in McClatchy); the three kinds of light and the shadows echo lines in Philippe Jaccottet, “I Rise With an Effort” (tr. Derek Mahon); Edmond Jabès, “The Book of the Absent, Third Part, 5”, in The Book of Questions (tr. Rosmarie Waldrop); Jacques Dupin, “Mineral Kingdom” (tr. Paul Auster)]

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