reading about parody, at the moment, and seeing the state of things in the world,, decided to move onto parodying futurist militarism, justifying fascistic poetry with the military. here is my last poem in the self eliding mode i was working on
shadowing
verge cusp line begin crossed
war, have break, have double
corpse nod as if a brother. I,
contrite candour, amaze, mar.
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.
Personally, I feel the shift in diction on the last word effects an exaggerated and unnatural immediacy that combines with the similar enactment of ‘fat’ to erase the collage’s sense of wholeness and thereby – depending on the strength of the collage – the narrator too.
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.
I plan on keeping the blog but not updating this notes sections (and I am not looking to publish much for now).
Maybe the relaxing tonal play of ‘The Waste Land’ actually is the point of writing it, and it’s just that the awesome machinery behind it, of impersonal allusion and absent authority, is necessary not to sustain that but make it ambiguous in another sense: am I safe from harm – right now?
I’ll make a short note on this collection of Khaïr-Eddine, translated by Jake Syersak. I initially found the translation disappointing, which may have been due to the line-break (though the last poem is mostly prose and it is ambiguous for me), as I found looking at the French – I cannot read French at all – much more exciting until I heard it out loud, when I get a taste of seriousness to Syersak. My favourite line with its translation (ending the first stanza of the last, longest, poem):
su sang qui tue end moi les très vieux suicidaire.
with the blood that slays that age-old suicidal inside of me.
p97
I feel that both poets are shaking here, and I do not feel the translator’s verve is an imposition.
A common thread through my poetry has been making music that is a distorted non-thing: at first to return to the reign of the senses; then as something I delay about the world; then as writing that does not belong.