Month: December 2021

Due to the poems’ non-music (A), under analysis (B) sensuous content seems grotesque (D) and opposed to language and new poetry (C). I hope via the anonymity of my voice to prompt the reader into noticing their appetite, their own role in their projections upon their senses. In order to make this interesting, I shape the poem (its meaning) around a resignation in the face of our appetitive desires. If you do so for long enough, the poem seems to become mock heroic. Odd

Contra Auberach’s grotesque revolution, nothing changes, but perhaps we become more conscious of decadence…

I have read that poem too_many times. At first I just found it calming / reassuring, and a little later I decided it was shaped around sexual jealousy. I figured that – perhaps in all poetry – form calms shape. I get few of the allusions, enough to worry about song-birds and rats. But, going through the prologue of The Canterbury Tales, I was struck by how tonally close the first line of Eliot’s poem is, to its prose paraphrase. This could be by circumstance. But could one rewrite The Waste Land in the 21st century by writing with the music of various poems or parts of poems, contemporary or historical, but shifting the tone to that of those poems’ prose paraphrase?

A relatively simple trick…

Long collection: 42 series of, I guess you could call them, aphorisms, amounting to 400 pages. It’s unfinished. Can’t decide if it’s about Susan Sontag’s orgasm (whose essay on camp I didn’t read), or the Iraq war (you don’t need a “sieve” – or a “halo” – to make marmalade, though I enjoyed the hurried tone for its close). The penultimate “trances” to the first series should illustrate what gets the poet – Wayne Koestenbaum – to exit his mental states:

necking in

semi public, I again

praised my phallus or

what passes as my

phallus and he said “anus”

as if I didn’t have a headache

———-

disastrous plunge into

abyss, but what

is abyss and why do I

call it mother?

---

This collection seems authentic and post modern. Obviously, it’s not just about sex, neither each “trance” nor how they sing together: so definitely “camp”. I suppose that they consist of their smartness, which is either faux-unique or faux-repetitive. I’d consider it less “sprawl” than addictive.

Every insight adds up, to something, I suppose his father, which lacks closeness. I would like to compare it with O’Hara’s poetry: the latter feels more focused, even-though this collection may not pale next to it.