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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. I’d hope this learning process in some sense makes the music alone grotesque.

I looked at Charles Bernstein’s recent LLM collection, enjoyed it, and I have been half thinking about the future of the art, in those terms. LLM is a statistical process, and I don’t think that sort of roughness is how poetry works, let alone how poets write it (however wrong we are).

If you look at The Waste Land and think what sets it apart as the greatest poem in the English language, that all – any way to approach that question, be that historical context or talent – rests on the logic of language. Just to get on with the metaphor: the true and false aspect of logical reasoning/syntax are similar to technique and ultimately disappears (if only for a time while we all catch up). Deliberately indeterminate.

And I reckon that vague statistical reasoning is the exact opposite not only of how poets learn to write poetry but also what it means (however it is curated or presented).

I was thinking of how seldom I am conscious of depth, when writing; usually, it is just surface, style, syntax, structure and shape, I explicitly think of expressively (and remember I shape to express the energy of speech that does not belong on the page), but there are many opportunities to generate both figuration and diction that draw from writing. Take them! In the following test, words 1 (Bunting), 4, 6 (similar sort of poorness) and 8 (a figure – I was thinking of beauty regimes as a butterfly – vaguely thinking of Olson, then aligning its tongue with ‘lashes). I need to read more!

Curved

For low abrupt flight
petal purchase, proboscis
tong.

I was trying a few different things on some of my little verses. Seems as if it is impossible to meaningfully shape these poems to express my own energy: then, it is as if absolutely arbitrary where to “chop up” the poem. Expression is a useful word, and difficult to get around, at least without random processes and kitsch. It makes sense, from what I understand about expressive processes in art in general, that expressing ones own energies is abstract enough to be meaningless (given one expresses affect, in general). Nevertheless, it’s the energy of the poem that should stand out, I feel.

1. Shaping for energy seems to make diction so.
2. Shaping to express the energy of the poem seems to make cadence so.

That seems fairly self explanatory, if not “correct”, but it raises the question which to learn with, or from, first. I would suppose (2), with the goal of reaching (1), at which point expression might fall to the necessity of the world’s fragments (which is a fine enough means to restate my blog’s continued babble).

I have his collected poems, and I flick through it now and again, trying really just to stem my bafflement.

To utter the speech that belongs there

‘Blue Sonata’

making a poem fit to the occasion of its writing, literary and kitsch (Greenberg’s faked sensations): “To be lost among the thirteen million pillars of grass… And I am lost without you.” (‘They Dream Only of America’). Ashbery’s post modern use of high and low art is satisfying: it is not clear whom he is lost without, even-though each part of that short poem is perhaps disorientated, along with the allusions of the former line.

I’d suppose that the speech of my own poems belongs elsewhere, ideally to ideologically undo high and low orders.

I think that Ashbery’s poetry is great when America is kitsch (and his poetry folds that into the occasion), which might explain how he can even exist alongside LANGUAGE (poetics).

I was enjoying a lot about this collection, and I was going to remark that I was puzzled by the use of Blake and that perhaps Fisher was trying to link physics to Blake’s poems and heterodox religious views (even the music of Brixton to Blake’s art), but I got to here and the pun with ‘lead’ (gasoline) and then that all collapsed.

How they purchase will depend on their choice of food
Huge profits from ‘Landspeed’
Started with anecdote lead on conservative angst
Destruction of flora in a circle unexplained.
Splintered beauty
A kid hops the walkway,
says two elves can beat a wolf, and repeats it
Behind the front, a row of trees and flowers.

The italic quote is from Investors Chronicle (the book, ‘Gravity’, helpfully lists quotations), and while I still enjoy the use of syntactically coherent collage, I am very puzzled by how much it has lost me. Perhaps it’s something to do with neo-modernism’s relation to exclusion via parody, but that’s a random guess. But then I return to it, and though some of the materials seem forced, e.g. Pound quotations, there is an utmost tenderness to the language, so yes.