Post-Consumer: some reflections on bottled water

'Post-Consumer' (or the bilingual 'post-consommation') appears on my water bottle as part of a description of the recycled plastic from which it's made. Printed on a green ribbon-like strip above the familiar "100% recycled" logo, next to the garish "President's Choice" brand name. It obviously means the bottle itself will live on after its user as a recyclable consumer artifact, in which case the 'Recycled Plastic' part of the complete 'Post-Consumer Recycled Plastic' phrase makes it seem a little redundant or, more interestingly, turns 'Post-Consumer' into a kind of devouring abstraction, leaving in its wake nothing but bits of recyclable plastic. Nonetheless the title tries to maintain a salubrious green-friendly sense of both bottle and water. But does it?

Post-Consumer. I'm wondering if something more than just water and name doesn't, after all, threaten to destroy what it wants to preserve: if 'Post-Consumer' isn't just a term for a bottle-producing process but a sort of tag for a consumer culture trying to invoke a stern metaphysics of 'materiality' or, in a more interesting post-environmentalist sense, purposely complicate the notion of the health-conscious Self itself. Strike the water drinker right out of the picture completely! I wonder if what I've just consumed doesn't threaten the very saving waters (read metaphorically) on which the recycling idea rests because I've taken in an ideal configured to make water a consumable whose pure state is becoming harder and harder to come by. And recyclable plastic its purest form of expression.

I'm beginning to think that Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson is right: that Nature, like the Unconscious or Self itself, is being swallowed whole but not just by a late capitalist logic: the abusrdity of drinking from a recyclable ideal can only be possible in a stupid language posturing (buttressed by capitalist production) that's having a similar deleterious effect on a lot of contemporary politics, poetry and media in general. Also interesting in this regard are Žižek‘s views on the end-of-the-biosphere discourses that seem to have been assimilated to eco-friendly capitalist uses. It's language that's been gutted & gilded.

Post-Consumer. If there was ever a fitting analogue for an age of deep cultural inanity. Is it the bottle itself, as recycled artifact, or the recycle process that is primary? Just what comes after the consumer anyways? Water as thing or the act of drinking raised to a purer exploitable function? Is the bottle used for drinking or is it code simply, with or without contents, for a water fetishization that's premised on some clearly irrational 'posthuman' fears of our own. It's as if the 'post-consumer' title is a redundant signifier for the hope that plastic bottles can never provide enough of what's inside it. That the water we essentially are & come from can never be drunk often enough. Legitimate fears of self-extinction used as a surplus value to be branded and endlessly repeated.

Post-Consumer Recycled Plastic. Stupid abstraction work typical of the age of late-capitalist production (and consumption). Of stupid producers and consumers in general.

A pwoermd a day

                                                           caugth (posted June 25, 2010)

An artful way to escape consonantal hardness is to sing a word's silent 'h', which renders the speech apparatus quite literally 'caught' (like a moral dilemma) somewhere between reality and a softening intention. A transposition of two final letters, and a kind of release ensues at the same time. As if the poet has reached the limits of programmable language, wanting to create where there's only a page of stony obdurateness in front of him. 'Caught' is simply too hard to face without amelioration (somehow). Perhaps the squeamish, by introducing speech's always silent 'h' partner & making life's tough endings more bearable, have one over the hard-nosed, for once. But what's the intention, really? Is intentionality the issue at all? And does the substitution of an 'h' not violate any sense of respectable meaning-making? At what point is it right to mess with the hard facts of the real world that evolve linguistically by millennia of usage only? It's, to me, quite akin to the elder's resentment of the propensity of the young to revel in permissible grey areas, forgetting that the young like to stand you on your head for fun. Lustful Mennonites before the beard!

As if the old dictum that language can only mean what's empirically given extends also to what's also potentially or gratuitously permissible. Anything given to speech this freely can't be all that bad, Huth seems to say. It's also interesting to ask what creative fiat led him to do it anyways: what phantom eidolon guides his hand. A Bronze Age versifier, who easily dispensed with a linguist-moralist's tricks,was perhaps the last to experience the thrill of 'h' seduction. But then the survival of the species depended on it. The artist's disdain for convolution.

Used in a sentence: Caugth is a safer bet than a Kantian 'ought'.

Pro cathedral

A little thistly, prickly, & wet the grounds of the poor,
  chancel past doors, child inside
Thurifer I was is still rather sacred-like to me,
  the prints my sandals leave invisible
as ever

Or st. francis dropt down from the many, thumbs
  in tassel, visible through beard,
 saying "brrrr brrrrr heaven's reclaimable,
  in 50 years,  rascally hearts!"—
Still in tassels

A chancel where beads in a drawer, cards, fake twines
  seep into me still
(if you're attuned enough!), stacks of offertory hymns
  that've turned to bone, & a
mission box—

these I can see, outside, since the Pro still tries to sigh,
  sadly, unmistakably to me
and as it does it's not the clutch it was once, written
  in bronze now, on a plaque
(pulpit-like as hell):

saying it's all gothic bastarda, pew wood, & intentions
  Shaly breath;
and from lawns over there a chintzy crèche (the sheep
  still licking his feet!) of the convents—
the veiny calves

And I haven't found anything, as I walk the summer asphalt,
  no talking sparrow, not a mist
to make me soul-good 'cause the middle-aged don't see
  ghosts
Under a golden umbrella

sneaky tourists like me, in too much traceless grass, look
   Stoles & mitts gone, too
absent now as the dripping spear, and no laburnum
  either, or potted irises
to tidy virgins

In sum: a plaster moulding hangs bent ( christ, knew it well!)
  over shiny brows
and cross-beam,  the granitic frown that's still inside
  this fake child,
Virgin-tidy

A pwoermd a day

Visual & minimalist poet Geof Huth has recently started posting almost a pwoermd a day on his blog dbqp: visualizing poetics, poetry sometimes alternating with insightful commentary on the present state of Vispo poetics. Pwoermds are "one word poems, visual plays, portmanteaus, abbreviations and cuts of regular words." (cited in introduction to Huth's recently published collection of 750 pwoermds entitled ntst ). They're just too good to pass up. I think I'd like to give to some of them a bit of commentary, short or long, off the cuff, studied or perhaps as the result of sheer inspiration. But not everyday: just as the  mood takes me. Let's begin with poisong ( posted Saturday, June 19, 2010)

                                                                   Poisong

Poisong looks like a morbidity itself, suggesting "poison" if read too rapidly.If, in other words, it's taken too visually and aurally. Like a too high dosage of an unknown herbal remedy. Perhaps the result of looking for danger in exotic-looking things though the fear of contamination, even at first glance, may be a bit unreasonable. There's just too much music in the word! What is more likely is that it's a healthy confluence (saved in its mellifluous consonant and vowel combination alone) of ancient island staple (poi as food): the opposite of "poison", and of dance (poi as performance art), activity associated with health and vitality. Now combinative properties (of 'poi' and 'song' ) rather than jangling and sounding morbid on the tongue can actually swing delicately from the dancer's hands and serve as principles of dance, poetry and life.

But yet there's still something lurking in the pwoermd that suggests the toxicity (or perhaps the dark underside) of tropical exuberance.

Used in a sentence: "To lose the slow but pelting poisong of summer rain—tragedy!"

Wasp, shade-grown

Up to now the exemplary Tree
  outshone the wasp—
                 yet there he is

Hiding ( a term from love!) is how
  to grow wings:
look!  the daisy's loose petal

    like the arena
in a calf's cotton ear he flies in,
  caked in yellow:

it's where he listens for words,
  being shade-grown
Look! those are flea-balls not talc

  you silly stinger!
And the anger in your hairy brow
 comes from you—

              the calf is silent

Wasp as amiable fascist

First the eye grope, then
  the eighth-of-a sec
lag of pure wasp speed

(my bare arm o morte!)

 The loner comes, while the
  infinitesimal's a slit,
and tumbles in, cross-wise

(oh, poor long withdrawing
  head)—

 he sings his blades, the way
  larva its own filth
at the end of day, in rain
  or hair

Wasp bite

Show this judge of the sylphs,
  heavy with me,
the way back to his nudes—
  out!

Hard here to thud between upper,
  lower lip,
poor thing, run down 7th Louth,
  out of the East

The sticky-winged from oily
  fields,
who like to clamp down hard,
  will die

dragging on my wheel, or sawn
  in half-
shrills, just off the 7th Louth.
  Out!