I’ve read the Pisan Cantos, with a guide. Looking at it again, seems like the cadence can be read as prototypical of a mechanical, uninteresting, poetry. It’s only when I ask what it is expressing that the line drops those demands, and it seems to be expressing despair (not a novel claim), perhaps despair at failed culture.
The title of this blog is grotesque catalysts, and I originally had wanted to use ‘grotesque’ as a catalyst, rather than compose gargoyles.
You can read my verses (and I can write in most, not the sestina, forms easily) with feet, and, while a metrical analysis changes their music (originally a taboo non-thing) significantly, it may help them pick something up. So e.g. here perhaps (the need to fit it into standard feet really changes the stress): iamb dactyl / trochee iamb / iamb iamb trochee / anapest / anapaest iamb iamb / iamb iamb trochee
Yap
They glance back at stunned
small plant, embraced
midstreet with no tending
just “thank you”,
fingers still in plastic wrap,
her set to permission.
If you want, pay attention to the interplay of those two tunes, quantitative or continuous, and I hope that you, the reader, then find the figuration truly energetic. With a wider palette…
Trying to trivialise my naive theorising a little more I got the following conclusion:
a rough texture in a smooth open tone. e.g.
Yap
They glance back at stunned
small plant, embraced
midstreet with no tending
just “thank you”,
fingers still in plastic wrap,
her set to permission.
One good thing with that is you can do it imitating others. So: who do I imitate?
I was sent some books by – the lovely – Tim Allen, and I may post some notes on a few. I started with Peasant Tower, which was published in 2021 in Disengagement Books.
46 pages each composed of 6 couplets of roughly 10 syllables and no punctuation.
It’s surrealist and, when you can locate its utterances, set in an urban environment. Peanuts, peasants, and buses, transport in general, keeps repeating, and it ends in unemphatic triumph:
When I read this without care for meaning, which seems viable as cadence feels meaningless (despite a penchant for alliteration) I get the sense of surrealism losing all but the oppressiveness of urbanity. There is a consistency of seriousness – or perhaps to its humour – throughout.
Each line reads like a hurried note, potentially combining with the next into a single thought or event. Each couplet forms a broken connection with the next, perhaps a failed commentary, the single thought being or expressed as exactly that. Each page for me formed the most obviously surreal unit, making the poem (book) as a whole, in which a referential meaning is impossible: even as words repeat they don’t construct a meaningful combination of ideas. I was going to illustrate that with two surrealist couplets from page 11 I had nearly copied out due to its repetition of ‘please’ in one line. But no such page exists.
I’d recommend this book with the caveat that surrealism is concerned with the higher or outer layer of meaning, unifying personality, thought and expression, rather than the muse.
I was looking at / thinking about Prynne’s recent poetry chapbooks again. Especially, how they overlap with early collections like ‘Brass’. Perhaps the former is more concerned with “kitsch” and closure (broadly thought to mean expressing – even saying – nothing about the world). These more recent poems seem to find a footing based more – but similarly – in language as self sufficient. I’m not at all sure that makes sense, but for me the circular collapse of meaning in these recent poems are more sentential, less at the level of the poem as organic whole. First sentence from Brass, then to the first comma in the chapbook Passing Grass Parnassus
Gratefully they evade the halflight
rising for me, on the frost abyss.
So be it bell bee lift medick black reliquary
fumitory cloven zigzag agree proud bee scout
provoked teasel,
I cannot tell you much about the sentence structure here, but it is certainly more unusual, and — here is the point I’m making — in a pressingly similar way to the play of structure (tonal or otherwise) in the prior poem as a whole. I tried rearranging some (I hope radical) improvisations of my own, based on grammar, and got
Ignite
Hush for a slept capital Eos eyes crust with semen blink at night beautiful her image: tired hands supplication for instants reverse perfect as DIY toward Revel. Turps fresh for scour with quick hope to wash closed handles door of soap.
A new technique for me, anyway. I think in effect I’m rearranging the words for tonal consistency (what I know of it) and, hopefully, it works out as something relevant to undermine my language manifesto (grotesque meaning or otherwise).
All Justice
All justice is unearnt
(placate rd she said:
his up hands).
One half inch from
day tastes of water.
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.