Category: Uncategorized

i suppose that if the fragment is smoother than the whole then the poem is defective as a mode of collage, that it loses its texture and musicality, and it ends up like LLM: frictionless micro fascisms.

Edited poem that gemini threw out in response to something

Leo

after Appolinaire

crorn by wing

and eyes – agate chips

turned dark in in skies

reflecting – agate blue

or eflectinging or shadowed canyon floors

desert heat on music and bone

an

his sculpted wildiness

Cagey

— after Argerich

Now I write on/above love,

wholehearted letters to

shapes held for both of us;

the letters spill like mouths

her; her hair is caught;

we have time to untangle

it, but neither has sd. Her

eyes keep trim, so I cup

one while another cums.

Darn has little time to work,

so little over them, eyes close

to the thimble, to little pick.

My poems move jauntily;

quiet, I sit with them.

Quiet

Clove crisp of thought day

miracle of control to storm,

calming scent, almost light

liturgy, that relief, being with

both, and knowing I suffice drops,

so we are each more intimate

than the same;

dawn breaks on to waves.

when i write it mostly opportunistic. here, i tried to spin the ‘world’ into harmonic distortion with the v in ‘versions’: and that is clearly what happens for some readers, even if it’s just me

2823189

Frost lining in two plastic cups,

what’s going on’s history, scenic

potential to a fall into the world,

an underneath this paving stone:

versions that I love.

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.