Ambiguity!

We are verbs

We are abusers

The atmospheric light, the natal blue,

burrows in the film of our skin

and gestates (disdain)

If there's anything // I am

it is ours- // and have been not

we hold concourse // (forever): potentiality

with history, // opens her fist

with future, // and I am the heartline:

with honeycombs of shadows // the terminus cloaked in inception

[nested][compacted]

I drink, and in my greed

do not distinguish, between

water and wine:

Hearts of artichokes, pigs' hearts

taste the same in the brine.

Trick of the light,

trick of the eardrum:

I kill

to sound and seem

like killing.

I confuse

only to feel the slippery thighs

wet with confusion.

Bullet, bayonet,

I give you your existence:

both mater and genitrix,

Author.

I sailed a ship, once,

beached on the peak of a wave:

the sea-monsters sunned themselves

[blowholes, the slap of fins

the isolations of eyes]all around:

(I couldn't) understand.

This is a piece that can be read in a couple different ways, both linear and non-linear. The second verse can be read as two parallel verses, but the program I use is very basic and it won't render side-by-side bodies of text, so I used caesura marks to try and denote it.

A little structure, a little myth

the wine, left of itself

is the heart's blood-

a hammer softly tapping

making in the fluid (fire)

what winks out the eye of the glass

*

your body is a vase

and I am the silent lily

a cup (like a grave)

in the snow; the imagination

you've seen so often

where it ought to be

that you know longer see

or know

*

I am the mooncow,

the two-headed, the cloven-hoofed,

calved of the sky:

eating from the trough

of old, degenerate night

and drinking the lies of the stars;

we (none of us)

have been;

we (never) were.

------------------------------

Good evening readers,

I just finished this little triad which explores the relationship of beauty/myth and its existence in the world, and conversely in the observer, a little piece of what I've been grappling with lately. I won't really go into the structure I kind of hoped to achieve with it; I haven't stood away from it long enough to really delineate its components in the reality of the poem apart from how I conceived it in my mind.

I've been thinking a lot lately about that famous Donne line "I am a little world made cunningly/Of elements and an angelic sprite." Now, I've always taken that to mean that the poem is a microcosm, a little world apart from the larger; a space which you enter and which you must accept the basic rules and premises of in order to gain access. I think that this view may be held by many literary critics and readers. However, the second line "Of elements and an angelic sprite" deserves a second thought; it of course means that a poem, like a myth, is composed of interchangeable pieces, held in sequence by a structure (as Levi-Strauss would say, an armature), an animating spirit. On the psychological level, the 'elements' are various mental objects and symbols, and the 'angelic sprite' is the arrangement by the ego into a more-or-less logical progression. On the level of construction, the 'elements' are pieces of myth, signs (whether derived or innate) that are grouped under a common genealogy and arranged according to a selective principle that is consciously chosen and may or may not mirror the author. Now, the question that follows is whether the elements and the structure are, as I said, derived or innate. I obviously didn't create the notions of wine/bottle, flower/vase, mooncow/sky (or face/face, hoof/hoof, and is/is-not; further subdividing), but in some form, perhaps a vague and nebulous form, but a form nonetheless, these concepts are inherent in me as part of my endowment as a human being. So I think that we can safely answer that they have their origins in the innate, but borrow from the world of experience (derived from somewhere) in order to find their shape and express themselves. But this is aside. Whether I stole these ideas from other texts (as I am admittedly apt to do) or whether I conceived them in the vacuum of my mind, they are external to the poem itself. Whether they refer to some specific reality, some specific mental object, or signify only other myths, other signs, in an endless progression, they are a referent to something. I conclude from this that it is not fortuitous to view the poem as a closed plane, but rather only as a signpost, a point on the infinite grid(or globe; I rather like the globe idea better) of possible things and possible thoughts. To use Buddhist terminology, the poem should be the finger and not the moon. I think that a study of the classic canon will bear this out. For example: I would rank the greatest piece of drama as Hamlet, the greatest novel as the Brothers Karamazov. In these certain ambiguities are very conspicuous: the question of Ophelia's suicide, and the question of the murder of Fyodor respectively. We can argue ourselves hoarse, but there are only clues, and no conclusive proof in the text, either of Ophelia's madness or intent, or as to which brother is the murderer; I believe that this blurring of the final outcome and it's consequent onus on the reader to fabricate some part of the story is the precise reason for why these books lead into the infinite and thus into the beautiful, the sublime. Well we know that every generation has a different reading of Shakespeare, a different insight into Dostoevsky; but these works seem to persist because they are colored mirrors, allowing you to strain out the muddle and din of humanity and isolate the human spirit, see a bit of yourself as you really are. We all hate poetry that's didactic and moral; in fact, we only tolerate morality in art when it's discursive, when it frames the question, the dichotomy of life (life/death, I/other, poem/reality), and if it asserts a solution at all, recognizes implicitly that its own solution is tenuous (the fable is a glaring exception to this, but I believe that can be entertained as well in these terms, and is for another day besides). The primary function of poetry is thus, not description, but wonderment; not the entrance into its own world, or the world of its author, but the limitless world of thought and myth itself.

Just my thoughts;

Thank you, and goodnight.

Synthesis

This one needs a title and not a sequence-tag. But I hate titles; I never want to sum my work into a neat phrase, nor create a further juxtaposition with something outside, appended later onto the text. So um...

Unsequenced Poem

Insider's joke-

putting cigarettes out in Guernica

cubist oil crinkling

like cellophane in the secret pocket.

*

I wear spectacles like cameras

X-Ray vision, or rather

quanta flitting about.

Uncovered truth:

There is no canvas under the paint.

*

I sign my name

in big, ignorant block:

Picasso.

While others searched, amongst the bodies,

I was taking notes.

I had never seen such ravens.

New work written in the hospital

Unsequenced poem

clear-headed, clear eyes;

you fly through mazy disentanglements

the saliva spans, like bars,

the place of the jaws

pulling apart.

the baleen of the uterus open:

pitcher/bell/category

of all enclosures; mark

of disparate Cains: you, small wings,

fly in.

crack the acorn, dear,

he bleeds honey;

in a mat of reeds and slivers

he sings himself to sleep.

when shall he pass through?

horn curl, like hair, framing:

the ridge of her clavicle,

the wings of her breasts,

the teeth of her ribs

and her tongue-heart.

in the center, centrality:

periphery gnashing his teeth,

castigating absence.

cut your many holes

through the many rings of the wall!

here is the place to end.

I rather like this one, it's got a nice balanced sequence and some lilting prosody; and the metaphor is quite decent even though it's necessarily abstract. The five sections are complementary, not quite to be viewed as separate poems; however, they are all split viewpoints of the same view, building not a progression or resolution as is normal, but rather adding to the picture different aspects and shadings. It attempts to make the solid silhouette, the block, into a fully dimensional entity, occupying space.

What is describes is somewhat beyond me to convey in prose without gross understatement. Besides, this is the age of the reader; what is intended by you is infinitely more subtle and meaningful than my intention in the composition.

Unsequenced poem

This is rather recent. It's already in audio form on the player, but I thought I'd supply it as text because I rather like it, with all its dissonance, and I thought maybe I'd get some criticism. Enjoy.

Unsequenced Poem

The shape of your surface

is skin and clotted ink.

Caller of bones,

Declaimer of genealogies,

Architect of sutures

to dam the insidious blood

galloping from mouth and eyes;

your speech is an act,

but you named me my name for nothing.

I've displayed it on poems, on possesions,

superscribed it

on long nude arches of women,

set it, paranthetically,

between fingers of stone.

Altar-place, dwelling-place

meat and sleep of the fires,

the atonal hush of

the sacrifice; the melody

and clamor of the pyre;

all these in identity,

old knower, covered in maps.

Nomenclature of the senseless,

orator of the sense,

your voice overwhelms you,

overflows you.

I am your erasure;

I am the signifier, decaying

into the signified.

You've broken the pieces to fit you,

you've broken your eyes to fit,

big eyes with sensuous tears.

Your taxonomies, your tongues

only say the quiet,

only photograph the night.

Poetry of the Art

This poem is what netted me that painting you see to your right; the girl in the mirror with her variously posed reflections. I wrote it about the poem; the painter (who has since become a good friend of mine) liked it, and gave me the painting. He has since painted me, as well, for God knows whatever reason.

Book 5: XXVIII
(For John Stafford, on his painting “Dressing Room”)

The crossroads, Janus
form in the plane of your smile;
He scatters

who does not gather there.
The strawmen meet inside you
trading the slow stares of those

who, long abed, have arisen,
cut the cobwebs from their faces
and departed,

walking, infirm,
on the cold long road to the North.
The sun hangs her garlands,

blue veins of pearl,
recognizing, in the first glimpses of day,
her little ones beginning.

The confusion of the other!
Bewildered, unsettled, insane;
seeing oneself plain

with no glass to intervene.
No shadow to cast, no ribbon
to untie: brilliant and lucid

the sway of the painted faces
as they brush aside the light,
the pieces of the jigsaw

that stubbornly refuse
to be lost. They meet, in the crush
of hay and rags,

leaves in the tempest, bones in the sea,
reunited; touching arms, faces, clothes:
they let the canvas fall from their bodies

standing, nude bundles of lines:
no longer seen or seeing; journeying
away, away, away.

Another from the Manuscript

Book 5: XXXI

inkpots and thin paper,

gruel of rice and tea,

my many lesions open.

jasmine and lemon,

Gaia twisting her teats,

generate-

themselves of themselves,

stain on the page.

we prick our thumbs,

my mother and I,

mingling Adam with Eve.

she licks the dust off my ribs.

in the lush

mazes of her breath,

walls of creatures part-

they leave her scent behind them.

lingering, lingering.

Short poem from the manuscript

Argot Book 2: III

an insight

an awareness

a flash in an empty pan

and I glisten

as the moonlight moves

my hiding-place

revealed

a sliver of face

exposed

how must I look

sunken and drawn?

Haiku & accompanying

Unnumbered Haiku

stone green, cut of stones

all scuffs and welts and lesions

all faces of the face

-

I wonder if I like Haikus so well because of their ambiguity? There are certainly at least a couple ways to interpret the preceding, as I see it, and it begs the question of the nature of intention and whether my understanding of the poem is right. Or, in full view of the issue, which of my understandings is right, for I certainly conceive, in retrospect, several objects (not physical objects necessarily) this could be referring to; though I certainly only intended one. But that's all aside.

What I really like about the Haiku, I think, is not ambiguity; that can be achieved in any form of writing fairly easily, and it's only a challenge not to take it too far. Rather, the very clearly defined locus of the piece, that turning-point between the second and third lines captives me. It's the fourth inaudible line, sandwiched between lines, that I like. This is almost like peripeteia in miniature; an entire reversal of fortunes occurs between the the latter two lines; the last card is shown in the third line, the dots are connected, so it must be completely unexpected, and yet still provide the key to the structure of the poem. It must be apposite as well as opposite, at is were. So you have this thing that works secretly, behind the scenes, to provide the only action that can take place in the Haiku. I love it, and I think I love it because it's hidden and loose and infinite, but becomes very defined and almost unthought-of in the final reading.

The only thing that seems to consistently annoy me with the Haiku is that I always want the sequel. Haiku historically was only supposed to begin the Renga cycle; someone else comes along and composes a 7-7 line, another person adds a 5-7-5, and so on in a circle, until the desired length is achieved or the end becomes self-evident. But it becomes fairly moot if you just do it by yourself; if I want to construct a long poem of ambiguous self-contained stanzas I'll just do it without the syllable restrictions. No, I need something else, and this is the important part. Anybody out in internet land, if you like my style and think you've got something to balance it, e-mail me at kyle.j@mail.com to do some Renga. I need a partner, and I'd love to check out your work.

New work

Unsequenced Poem

the oily slap of the lake

on artifacts-

skulls and concrete blocks

the jut of a rusting phallus

burgeoning out of the rock

all half overwhelmed, all

talking, very quietly; rivets shivering

in the torsion of the instances

of crest, trough, deny.

She came there, water-walker,

exorciser, talker to spirits and stones;

pinching eyelids, knotting tongues,

ensuring that the victims

can only weep back into their throats.

Their slow genocide wraps

their cord around its finger, marking off

unnumbered ticks. She sits on them,

faerie's ring,

wings and crowns and croziers

strewn among the stones.

Podcast notification

Short post-

I've got the podcaster up and running to the right; I'll be adding files to it in alternation with poems of text to go in the main body of my posting. My intention is to publish around a poem a day on here; I, unfortunately, am that prolific. It reminds me of a quote by Tarn to the effect of, "Writing poems every day? How enormous is my oeuvre supposed to be?" Have a listen, tell me what you think.

Armantrout, Authorship, and the world of the Postmod

"This 'most lyrical of the Language poets' has long worried that her adherence to a 'lyric' model as an 'experimental' poet has her falling between stools: too weird for the mainstream; not weird enough for her more avant-garde colleagues." - Rob Stanton, of Rae Armantrout

I think that this statement, said in the midst of a glowing review of Rae Armantrout's book "Versed", the most recent Pulitzer Prize for Poetry winner, is really emblematic of the state of poetry as a whole. When you read criticism of these heavy-hitters in the Language poet scene, guys like Ron Silliman, Bob Perelman, Barrett Watten; hiding in amongst the density and obscurity of the text are little postmod buzzwords: "deconstruction," "synchronic/diachronic," and of course the much loved and lamented "death of the author." You don't even have to delve into their own works on the topic of aesthetics and form to get this much. It's all there, all around.

The idea central to all of this, of course, is the destruction of the lyric/confessional model that grew out of Auden and Eliot into Plath, Lowell, Hughes, and Merrill. It's deeply rooted in poststructuralist/postmod philosophy, in the tradition of Barthes, De Man, and Derrida, and basically seeks to rupture our notions of subject/object and the relationship between the signifier and signified. It asks, well, what the fuck is a sentence exactly? and then proceeds to answer: "Whatever/the hell the hell the hell/reassembling/reconstituting/I/feel like it is." Of course, all these are important points, and poetry sometimes must be the first line of philosophy. Especially if speech is viewed as a restrictive, controlling tool; then, of course, you destroy the construct from the bottom-up with speech acts that in no way fit the pattern we unconsciously want to generate. There is something to be said for this, the so-called "desedimentation" and reassembling of poetic tools; since much art in bygone years, and much schlock art today, follows these closely prescribed grammars of unfolding; which is why my father always knows how a movie is going to end halfway through. With that said, however, I am mostly indebted to postmod-influenced art in two ways: a) it challenged the notion of what exactly "is" poetry, and left me free to do whatever strikes my expansive fancy, and b) it undertook this huge program of destruction of language and form thirty years ago precisely so that I wouldn't have to do it today.

Now, it's interesting, that one of their famous theses back in the heyday (to go along with I HATE SPEECH) was the "Death of the Author." It was called the great revelation of the 20th century, just as Neitzsche's "Death of God" was of the 19th. This spawned a whole plethora of collectivist ideology; where these guys write as if anyone could have written it. By this I mean they are the gradual change from Husserl and phenomenology (that the basic unit of everything is YOU and what YOU experience) through structuralism to the postmod world where we are all somewhat interchangeable parts molded and shaped by culture. It isn't you playing with that Barbie doll, it's everyone; it isn't you writing about elms and chokecherries, it's everyone. I guess you could draw a parallel to the cinema world trying to do away with the notion of the "auteur," the other, the director, and seeing film as a product of an ant colony of people from the gaffer to the producer. Well, I'm sorry, I didn't go see Shutter Island because of the sound check guy, or even because of Leonardo or Ben Kingsley, I went and saw it because I like Scorcese. And I humor myself that I can tell the stylistic flourishes that is in all Scorcese's work from Mean Streets on up; his imprint, as it were. What is obviously hilarious about all this dwells in the fact that, as Language poetry has become the entrenched school in academia, Rae Armantrout, who has become widely recognized as probably the best original Language poet (and not just in terms of her awards), is also the most lyrical, confessional, and author-ly. Her work is heavy on juxtaposition, of course, but we feel as readers that it's juxtaposition without the conceit of establishing nothing. It is the juxtaposition of what is going on in her senses and her internal world, and as we read, we constantly grope through the layers of incidence and symbol to find the grand structure and meaning (even if it be an ambiguous, questioning meaning) that we are sure is always there.

I want to reprint a poem from Versed for you here, the poem "Locality," to demonstrate my little rant, but it is of course copyrighted and I'm not going to infringe on the meager money one of my personal favorite living poets can scrape from her intellectual property. Oh, I'd also like to say that this is not finished, world of postmodernism; I have just reached a limit for manageable and easily-digested information. I will tilt my lance at your windmills again!

The state of affairs

Unsequenced Poem

You caused these burnings.

My hands shrink and crack

like a cat creeping into the fire,

a silhouette kindling copper fire

in the fingers of the paw.

And you knew,

Old God of kerosene,

of ether,

that the scarlet worm,

flame of devastation,

had slunk into your garden, strewn with embers;

fruits, knowledges,

afloat like paper lanterns.

He came, as I came,

bearing roots of feathers,

embryos of scales,

and the coal, still warm and lit,

which we kept, deep in the chest,

on the cold nights.

And as we built our Enoch,

we dug for that spark:

tongs between our ribs, extracting

slowly, slowly,

the germ of our beacon,

to be set on high for our children,

not yet come.

Who sees it, and does not wonder,

has drank deep of the chemistry

of inhibition. He has cast

aspersions on his birthright

of paper and straw;

he has sold himself for water.

Post numero uno.

Hello world; and hopefully you have a happy day full of applause for the newest venture into the overcrowded Blogosphere and the even more brazenly full and exclusive world of poetry. This is to be my font of opinions, and you are to be my captive audience; you are expected to ovate, boo, or scream as conditions warrant; while I regale you with my modest genius and epic failures, be they in essay form or verse form, formal or unnecessarily strange.

As I don't quite have a topic for this first of many entries, I feel that I should explain the background of the name I've chosen to represent myself to you, faithful audience. I currently have a pile of around a hundred and twenty separate instances of poetry laying on a table next to my computer desk. I have just finished organizing and cataloging them into a single cohesive work, however, at some point during the sequencing, a poem *gasp* fell out of its rightful place and onto the floor. As I haven't really had the time and inclination yet to put it back in its neat little order, it lays on top of the stack. As I was searching for a nom-de-web, my eyes fell upon it, and voila! My late night Dada urge gripped me and I chose a random little string of morphemes from the poem that seemed to represent something or other; what, I'm not exactly sure, but I'll let the academics agonize over it later.

So, here, for my first post, I will reprint for you this little poem that you might glean whatever small understanding it offers and get acquainted with my work. Enjoy.


Book 3: XV

Pale youth,
apropos of nothing,

the sky is ocher for you,
can you not see her drip?

thighs of orchids and cream,
hanging, a mistletoe,

the cusp into destiny.
She does not wait for pilots, for astronauts,

but for the children, blue and breathless
who choke upon her pigment.

She sends her cirrus valentines
to these. Her stalactites,

ghouls of vapor, palpitations
of air, are tubes

that drink your grief.
O saints and suicides,

guiding her arms into place,
can you hear the spirits

knocking at the horizon?
We will come in.

You already see,
painted in your rhyme book,

our faces, approximations
Noh masks and gongs

twirling, sounding, drowning out
like an engine's rotary blades.

Our anatomies
are the machinery of the stage.

Every night, our snowfall
quenches the summer that blushes our cheeks.

Open the stoppered end,
let us fly into your passageways

let us rest on the cloth
of your breath. Bend us into

bows and hoops, arrows and escutcheons,
that we may sleep, and war; and sleep again.


Finish, and Goodnight.