Author: Luke

The letter from Prynne, which I received 8 years ago now, was prompted by the question of what is order. Looking back and thinking about some recent poems by Sheppard in ‘litter’, I would think that it is exactly what the poet needed to know, to write the poem, and it’s exactly an expansion of that – into science etc. – which Prynne added to the art, which is by necessity an authentic expression of the poet, thereby vitalising language. This is the shadowy order or aura to collections like the white stones. I’m currently studying at the OU, writing about the science of natural beauty, but have no poems to add.

I was thinking about Prynne again. When I first looked at this collection, in ‘Poems’, I must have linked the repetition of ‘heart’ in the first poem to the ear, because I came away from it thinking of the collection’s poems as structured like the underground prison of the Labyrinth (look out a minotaur!). On the surface, it reads like a plea that he might escape his lover in some way, and I am curious if that’s a tone or meaning that a reader who has mastered false ambages that make a deeper structure will also order the poem with. Anyway here’s a poem

let’s trap

thirst conspire to tongue
(juniper flip aghast dash catapult)
tic
roof against no
dress-

ing

Cagey
Now I write above love,
wholehearted letters of
shapes held for us both
letters spill like mouths

Hope
The old song on pigeons,
oh look, dancing gives
time to say it done, hope.

What is the music of poetry? I guess visual or audible patterns in how we read. The examples of distorted music I have used here are based in different layers (a letter and a sound) to that rubbing or working against each other, and I guess I’d want my poems to exist due to incoherence between those layers, itself mirroring a loss of artistic truth, etc..

Though that seems consistent with the rest of the blog, I don’t know what the point of the latter is; maybe it shows that poetry – as distorted music – if it can exist – is undergoing a crisis of meaning, due to language.

I was watching this video of a Meyerhold production, The Inspector General, which is generally considered the prime synthesis of theatrical grotesque, and it very much reminded me of the music of my poems, and I would think so in quite an obvious way.

https://www.fulcrum.org/concern/file_sets/1g05fb61q

I then wanted to write a short poem, and I found myself looking down on the page, as I wrote, and this enabled me to – finally – have the confidence etc. necessary to use fragmentation. It’s not my best work, but it does seem to be collage, and moreover, the last edit I hope shifted everything into harmonic distortion (‘fat’)

Rolls

My stomach fat

aghast, I clutch

drink a glass straight

skirt drawn tight.

So the music to e.g. the poetic inversion of ‘glass’ is unaffected by the visual appeal of that, making it somewhat meaningless, and I probably feel that the shift in diction on the last word effects an exaggerated and unnatural immediacy that combines with a parallel enactment of ‘fat’ to erase the collage’s sense of wholeness and thereby – depending on the strength of the collage – the narrator too. Of course, the judgment that it does anything I want is intuitive and analysis of this sort is meant as justification of that.

So I’ve been playing with a synth, cancelling a waveform (adding an inverted mix of it) after adding harmonics to it (with hard clipping). It does what you would expect: makes the fundamental more inaudible (blank?) while adding a bunch of sine waves, plus artefacts (I guess). Dunno what to make of anything. So I can sort of create an intuitive sense of that, insofar as I can convince myself I am writing to that kind of effect, and the result, as lyric music, is oddly something, maybe nomadic, rather than anti lyric.

Three new poems in the next edition. I had to withdraw some others, from my pamphlet, due to their rules about always publishing before anyone else.

That might be that, given I don’t have a second collection, as my writing is more or less settled/grounded now.

Harmonic distortion, which is one way I am thinking of what I write (a cadence that might not be unusual but is unnatural for its diction, in writing that does not belong, its music as a sort of grotesque non-thing) may allow the listener to hear the melody even when there in fact is no pitch, music has ceased to exist, by mastery of technique.

Let’s suppose then a poem is that interplay between meaninglessness and distorted music:

poem=music/noise^2 

So without noise the poem is undefined, which could be one way of thinking of the front page: its claim that poetry without noise is not art, has no poetic.

In this poem, by Zukofsky, newness exists in an absence of music adding meaning.

What are these songs
straining at sense—
you the consequence?

Anew 10

‘straining’ seems musically unclear, perhaps because of the visual and semantic meaning of the ‘s’ being met by my eyes before my ears due to a potential pun and its audible music (the surprised yet slow tone of the poem make the variation in sibilance somewhat redundant compared to the tight and elegant pattern of ‘s’) being less memorable (all of which is underlined by the closing rhyme and brevity of the poem), so that the torque of the line-break is visible.

In this poem by me, there is an appearance of something similar. I think the cadence of the third line makes it seem thicker, more viscous – interacting with the immiscible meaning of ‘love’ – so that music suggests it itself is a separate layer.

Horizon
— pull out his eyes

Magistrate, judge
the line (not tender milk
but feet) emulsion, love
+ guilt.

not automatist:

the author is trashy AF, but the poems are equal parts amusing and sincere; that probably makes them avant garde!

is the past still IRL?

I am much more pleased with it than my earlier poems

Taking the top of your head off | IT (internationaltimes.it)

1/, tests by Luke Emmett (Litter Press) | Tears in the Fence

Luke Emmett’s collection of poems from Leafe Press | Rupert Mallin

https://ellipticalmovements.wordpress.com/2024/10/23/recent-reading-october-2024-a-review/

and reception has been good from everyone.