Nature rapta: a dialogue between two not so great postmodernists

Never let it be said I won't let the not so great postmoderns speak for themselves here. I'll agree to any terms of the debate between two opposing views of landscape provided it appear as a poem first. Provided it just look like a poetry of landscape. As far as I've been able to determine, they are talking about the same thing. It is with these two always hard to tell the poetry from the postmodern primers (something that's even lately grown outdated).

Again, the topic is Nature taken after their own temperament & understanding, and converted into some damn fine verses. To be perfectly objective, it seems only Marjorie's actually tried defining it for us.

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Frank says,

"I am the patriline who shoves pieces of eight & cobwebs back into my Tree Who'd dare co-author

 PDFs ('stead of stags in the woods) without me!

or lively & irreverent discussion but never daring, of course, to take a single unsolicited poem (none
of yr sacred woods) without me! E.g., at the base of the escarpment clinging to me

like the chip in my teeth is the smell of a rotten Ode which I hereby signify (in an open letter!) as meaning no more than the layers of my beard & all disassembled errata

for I propose to take the Self as (1) the mole's sinuous isochrony with the weed, identifiable by his
white male radical flows and available, for a Council grant, to any enquiring nibbling scholar, or

(2) the lachrymal weight of dried hearts wrung from bill and bp or (3) the lair of the unseen fox
with his keen rust-tipped finger

and especially the Olson nose for crumbling tufa Ah! sacerdotal passivity and friction
of smell itself (of beard, fawn, et al.!) that has ever led to poetry since 1965  Respectfully (?) yours,

To which Marjorie replies,

  "Ach! Nature's here a too mole-constrained, a too leaf-indiced space for me of jay intensity & grass frisson, estrus dissymmetry and  aggressivity: the ol' gridwork of male sod

and staid unthinking manure of poppa bears, replenishing diverted streams with their spit; the ant-

segregation and canopy-thinking style of binary bees, and

an optimal swale-obdurateness such as sink between emerging ribs  I, Marj, mean rather to be a matriline of rooks or mice, tracing out nebulae

in the night sandy terrain. Make your own micro-lairs like me! With a filmy layer of paisley shawl

round my arm, I try with charms or the rains to be sand-fractious

I the so-called creek mistress (1) won't live like Frank where there's the culpably and serially marshy, or

(2) harp much on the newness treated by sexology or sermons re:  lives of the soil, or

(3) even speak in ways that have to aestheticize hives of a field-mice system for nothing's more

antithetical to a wetland with bug than what I'll term  the imperious 'zed' Self (the unexamined zed of Self!)

Nothing worse!"

ENVOI (by Marjorie)

And where the sled's suspended on spring coils

in the red barn (with gloves and heels

still in the seat!) is a place in process only,

& never a landscape

'Visual poetry"

The cold, coming out with the
  sages, snail-
  stiff as me,
easy to scan behind the wheel,

is grey but scared—
  a deathly oblong (in heraldic terms),
  ol' smoky
who looks a bit lost, too

And the ice, liking to run
  on wooden legs
gives the storefronts along the way
  the

  punctual
  stony
  look
of all the mixed exotic fruit (inside)

ever to be spared the green
  of moss
  (of course)
The signs look swollen, too

Ed Baker's STONE GIRL E-PIC: and a note on Forewords to any future stone girl poetics

I'm happy to announce the publication (by Leafe Press) of Ed Baker's STONE GIRL  E-PIC work, a compendium of poetry & art presented in 5 Volumes for which I was very pleased to write the Foreword.

I've commented on the visual poetry (particularly the style & artistic influences) of Ed Baker here and here. It's actually from my blog posts that most of the Foreword material comes. Trying to keep tenor and conceptual unfolding strictly in conformity with both the temperament and spare, minimalist artistry of this remarkable man, I've arranged it as an informal discussion about Vispo to which many bloggers have contributed in the past (my opinion being only one, of course). I've studiously avoided long-winded academic orations on theory & genealogy of art forms.

Ed's work is an impassioned testimony to the significance of tradition, poetry community and, above all, love of muse (Chin Fay Ling) and poet (Cid Corman). I see Fay & Cid in every one of the E-PIC's 515 pages. It was a real privilege for me to appear, albeit very briefly, in that glorious company.

Egyptian youth speak out: the al-Tahrir Square Protesters' Declaration

"Our movement is Egyptian – Our movement is legitimate – Our movement is ongoing"

It's not often my post will take an overtly political turn (aside from my own swipes at the sad state of cultural affairs in my own country) but I've just discovered at Pierre Joris's Nomadics ( via Jadaliyya ) the al-Tahrir Square Protesters' Declaration by Egyptian youth. Despite the violence and political posturing there already it's to the young that the nation will have to turn eventually for just solutions. The document, given in full here, is the chronicle of a national movement that transcends ideological & religious fixities.

It's always the privileged old guard, buttressed by armies and radical clerics with their insane orthodoxies, who can't read the times as openly & generously as the young. In a spirit of national solidarity we haven't seen since the days of Lech Wałęsa the Egyptian (as have also lately the Gaza) protesters have created a declaration whose purpose is to show, through the most clear-sighted language, the affront that the violence and oppression of their elders are to their hopes for a post-political future. The Declaration speaks to the world fromTahrir (Liberation) Square, clearly revealing the same ol' two-headed  monster of dictatorship and state-sponsored censorship.

But it's also more than a reasoned tactics, designed to make brutal military rule & rulers scatter like varmints in the light: it's a  poetry of the caged heart as it's never been written and chanted. A poetry of the couplet-slogan, in fact, that gives the notion of a performance poetry its truest revolutionary face. Perhaps this is what Artaud meant by "theatre of cruelty".
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Declaration: Egyptian Youth Protesting in Midan al-Tahrir


First Main Point: The Promises of the President and the Events of February 2

We have been protesting since January 25 and conducting a sit-in in Tahrir (Liberation) Square. We strongly condemn the brutal attack that was undertaken by the mercenaries of the national party against us at the center of our sit-in on Wednesday February 2 under the pretenses of a demonstration in support of President Mubarak and this aggression continues on Thursday February 3. We are saddened by the participation of some of Egypt’s youth with the government thugs and criminals whom the National Party is used to employing in elections. The regime unleashed them against us after the regime and its media spread many lies about our goals, which are in support of a change in the political regime, to guarantee to us and to all citizens, freedom, dignity of life and social justice – goals also shared by these young people. Thus, we would like to clarify the following:

First, we are a group of young people from Egypt – Muslims and Christians; the overwhelming majority of us do not belong to political parties nor have we been involved in political activities before. Our movement includes old people and children, peasants, laborers and professionals, students and workers and pensioners. Our movement cannot be characterized as driven or moved by a minority given the millions who responded to the call for bringing down the regime. They joined this call last Tuesday in Cairo and in the governorates, in an event in which not one single incident of violence was witnessed nor any attack on property or harassment of anyone by anyone.

Second, our movement is accused of being funded from outside, with support provided by the United States. It is also said that the movement has been instigated by Hamas, and that it is under the leadership and organization of the president of the National Society for Change, Mohammed Elbaradei. Finally, and not finally, it is said that the movement is directed by the Muslim Brotherhood. The listing of these multiple accusations in this way in and of itself shows how false they are. The protestors are all Egyptians. Their goals are patriotic, clear and specific. The protestors have neither foreign weapons nor equipment as the instigators claim. The broad response of the people to the movement reveals that the movement’s goals are the same goals of the Egyptian masses in general, and not the goals of particular faction or foreign entity.

Third, the regime and its media cast false blame upon us for the tensions and instability that you have seen in the streets of Egypt in the previous days and, thus, blame the young people who are demonstrating for the damages inflected upon our interests, the interests of our nation, and the security of us all. It is not the peaceful protestors who let the criminals out of prison to create a situation of thievery and looting in the streets of Egypt. It is not the protestors who imposed a curfew that starts at 3:00PM, stopping work at banks, bakeries and fuel stations. When the protestors organized their demonstrations of millions they came out in the best form, it was well organized, and the demonstrations ended peacefully. The protestors are not the ones who killed 300 people, some of them with live bullets. Nor did they injure more than a thousand people in the previous days.

Fourth, President Mubarak came out on Tuesday to announce that he would not run in the next presidential elections, and that he would amend articles in the constitution, and begin dialogue with the opposition. The official media attacked us when we refused his “concessions” and we decided to continue our movement. Our demand that Mubarak must leave immediately is not personal. It is based upon clear reasons including:

Promising not to run is not a new thing, Mubarak promised when he became a president in 1981 that he would not serve as president for more than two terms, but he stayed in power for more than 30 years. The speech did not put forth any guarantees that his son Gamal will not run for office. Gamal is still a member of the ruling party and can nominate himself in an election that does not proceed under judicial supervision since the speech did not mention amending article 88 of the constitution. Furthermore, the speech deemed our movement a conspiracy waged by forces that work against the interest of the country, as if agreeing to the demands of the people is a dishonor and disgrace. As for starting a dialogue with the opposition – how many dialogues did the regime claim it would start with the opposition in previous years, that ended with Mubarak’s State proceeding in the path of the narrow interests of the entities that control the state.

The events that happened on Wednesday validate our position. While the president was offering promises in his speech, the leaders of his regime were arranging with thugs to plot the brutal attack in Tahrir Square using machetes, knife, and fire bombs. They were accompanied by members of the ruling party who used fire arms against peaceful demonstrators who were surrounded in Tahrir Square. This attack resulted in the death of at least seven people and wounded hundreds of people, some of them with serious injuries, with the aim of ending our national popular movement and keeping the status quo.

Our movement is Egyptian – Our movement is legitimate – Our movement is ongoing

Young people from a sit-in in Tahrir Square

A short reflection on poetry performance inspired by a recent John Latta post

I've always thought (and thank god the likes of John Latta seem to think so too) that contemporary poetry's gotten too brazen for its own good, unaware that talent will out wherever it is, and that all the self-exhibitionism in the world won't cover up talentless work. He's used a theatre analogy to good effect. Having "resorted to using face powder and dressing rooms and displaying itself on the stage", poetry's become what I think is an empty "theatre of cruelty": never to be taken in the uniquely Artaudian sense of theater as significant place of grotesque & violent passions where a living art form is so relevant it bites the spectator in the butt. It's rather a case here of the cruelty of unbridled production without any real thought for artistic sense or propriety or, more importantly, protest. I'd like to continue this poetry as theatre analogy a bit more.

The noise & fragmentariness, especially of the more self-aggrandizing poetry performance today, might be taken as poetry theatre but, as I've said, with none of the restorative powers of social commentary or, at the very least, a mastery of materials. Think of Bök's Cyborg Opera, on the one hand, as performance that (again, in Latta's words) merely "gushes", a conceptual poet's pastime, drawing more attention to performer than art, and Penn Kemp's "Poem for Peace In Two Voices", on the other, as one that "sucks up and absorbs", drawing artistic verve from the ground & the essential dark of wind, rain & animal processes:

One's imitative, a second-rate Schwitters impersonation while Penn's is the product of a lifelong devotion to sound poetry & artistic activism in general that traces its ancestry to The Four Horsemen. Latta's distinction is particularly instructive in the case of two contemporary Canadian poetry performers. And I just happen to be enough of a traditionalist, with a penchant still for rating work, to say that a well-directed analogy easily separates the real thing from all the dross swirling round it.

A gem of a quote from John Latta

Sometimes the quality of writing to be found in poetry blogs is so exceptional both author and writing deserve special mention. Here's a gem I recently discovered at John Latta's Isola di Rifiuti.

I can't honestly say I've seen a better characterization of the spirit of our poetical times than this: this is T.S. Eliot stuff! And I can't say anyone is likely to find poetry commentary as erudite and creative as Latta's. Jerome Rothenberg does come a close second (in case I'm accused of favouring the traditionalists). I've begun to read Latta for insight and enjoyment: intelligence of commentary based on wide reading as well as his own uniquely stylish prose. All significant writers possess both.
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                                                                     2


Contemporary trends assume that art is like a fountain, when really it is like a sponge.
   They have decided that art ought to gush, but it ought, rather, to suck up and absorb.
   They assert that art can be divided into categories according to means of representation, when actually it is composed of organs of perception.
   Art must always remain among the spectators and see things more clearly, more truthfully, more perceptively than the others, but in our day it has resorted to using face powder and dressing rooms and displaying itself on the stage. It is as if there were two forms of art and one of them, knowing that it holds the other in reserve, allows itself the luxury of perversion, which is tantamount to suicide. It makes a display of itself when it ought to get lost in the top gallery, in anonymity, and be unaware that it cannot help being discovered, that while shrinking in the corner it is afflicted with a glowing translucence, the phosphorescence that goes with certain diseases.

"Towards a blog poetics": cont'd

The January 13 to 28 blognoscenti posts generated the following sentences, ready to be added to our "Towards a blog poetics" text (see below).

January 13: The first true finished or rather author-made language that the reader rather than the author consciously (or unconsciously) determines through choice of contents is, of course, what emerges.

14:  Learning about the days formed out of  classical shapes (a poetics ready to remix & rush ahead!) is a new knowledge of poetry where what's left out is still something of value.

15: An excellent place, my heart, a god and demon that carries out my Poetry.

16: The book, giving away free poetry, may have the attributes of a single poem.

17: To some translations mean a celebration and mourning, the Soul found in collections & adopted by artists as an introductory defense of the uneasiness of art that reflects upon the paradoxes of masters.

18: Only a film by the poet will be apt to find the once-fruitful visual presentation decorative and sensual.

19:  Instead of dying out here's a beautiful little haiku  & book presented (two sides of the same coin); Pound's masterful Cantos, helping people understand the great poets, copresented with a constraining taxonomy.

20:  In all seriousness, an indecorously veiled poetics, filed under poetry specimen, is a sort of spruced up anthology appearing from around the web.

21:  Look, I write today a series of  grand poems on the premature death of the anthology.

22: The title of a poem will be a lyric gift encountered often.

23: This is a recurring refrain, the divine breath that solicits any and all types of poetry.

24: The characteristics of 'visual poetry' convey multiple meanings and (say it) blank faces: a complete range of poetry.

25:  Paradise Lost, a science-fiction piece, in another Pulitzer prize-winning book of poems, is any New-Poetry.

26:  The ancient theatre in a single poem, all this waiting for inspiration, catches us sometimes going to a ransacked seventeenth century."

27: After a brief break I think of literary conversations, works, poets, & schools, compelling videopoems or new trends or Mayakovsky and Mathematical Poetry.

28:  Having just fallen in the forests and least equipped to search for large understandings, I marked, as is my custom, four of the stars of many talented poets.

I will always capitalize 'Sentence' to mark its significance as a product of blognoscenti sources.
Again, I'm aiming for a standard 10-page long 'Intoduction', with about 12-13 Sentences per page (or an 'Introduction' of roughly 130 Sentences or so). After this I will post individual blognoscenti citations by numbered entries and not by date (as I've been doing): numbered entries appear in parentheses after each day on which a Sentence is generated. Sentences can be easily verified (and fact-checked, as it were) by counting them in sequence and tracing them to their original sources (whatever the date) in the blognoscenti sources site.

Every dated entry is given an individual numerical count corresponding to the number of times I've generated a Sentence to that point; for example, the 4th sentence (in paragraph 1 of 'Introduction' to primary text) corresponds to the 05 January 2011, (4) citation, reading on the 5th of January, 2011, the 4th day of my blognoscenti exercise, I generated the following Sentence for my blog poetics text:

"If the traditional poem is a mirror inserted between a straightforward world and itself, then it is an ill wind; the contemporary poem, however, is in the mirror, a silver book of danger and music."

As I've said, in future updates citations will be given by individual (parenthesized) entry only.

In this way I am not restricted to a strict chronological timetable so much as led by a judicious estimation of the number of actual times Sentences ought to be generated in order to keep my primary document going. If I should stop for a few days or slacken the pace a bit, the text resumes at exactly the point where it was left off without any messiness surrounding dates.Both purists and readers with an archival bent should be happy. Since I regard each blognoscenti source as a bibliographical entry, I acknowledge author and textual source, & regard them both as materials to be used in my growing exposition on blog poetics, hoping to avoid any 'intellectual property' or copyright issues.

At some future point (when at least the Introduction has been satisfactorily completed) I can see myself converting my blog text into a PDF file or something or perhaps even a "Blogger" Blog2Print book as advertised here.

It is to be remembered the text as is comprises of only citations-generated Sentences, still awaiting a certain degree of final authorial judgement & control. Determinations as to format, meaning and direction will be determined by a kind of intuitive reading of the materials that've already accumulated through blognoscenti sources. Recommendations and suggestions for improvement are always welcome.

With the addition of Sentences extending from the 13th to 28th of January the primary Towards a blog poetics text ('Introduction') appears below:

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A butterfly, nude and flower, traditional signatures of the poet's language, do more than say: they live, walk, hear & have being (like fires of war).The modern poem, however (if ever there was a candidate for Ionian tragedy!), is a meditation on language—a retrievable and complex one. A refuge from the disturbing visuals of Birth, Death, Time & Self: a type of "sublimely dull" beekeeping, or a parting of the clouds, since the world is read during the moment and then inventoried into rare books. If the traditional poem is a mirror inserted between a straightforward world and itself, then it is an ill wind; the contemporary poem, however, is in the mirror, a silver book of danger and music.

We alone can be grateful that genre, subject and individual poems are just a means of presentation, as if we're first witnessing the successful artist, poet and writer from several inconceivable points of view.The poet's arable couplet, minimalist and at bottom a mash-up, can still be entertaining. Perhaps the best known poem there is (or isn't) is, yes, a confession & if it'd wanted to try to get it right could follow the whole poem closely as an "End of the World" or the "Goddammit" type & continue to do so. Free to clear the tone or style of the intelligibles, you can go to the fields & birds, like a deadbeat poet. Like faces on a canvas, stories and words that mean too many things & don't emanate from the village hearth, lie dead, even in early spring. More a contest for the best minds than a poem, a peep show of perpetual sequences and good only for fools, the experimental may be the most gorgeous jellyfish I've seen.

How often does the act of getting something down, and poetry in general, like an elf clutching at a book in a bookstore, depend on the Judge's ruling—Gad!—, even setting rules to muddle things a bit? What emerges, of course, is the first true finished or rather author-made language that the reader rather than the author consciously (or unconsciously) determines through choice of contents. Learning about the days formed out of classical shapes (a poetics ready to remix & rush ahead!) is a new knowledge of poetry where what's left out is still something of value.An excellent place, my heart, a god or demon that carries out my Poetry.The book, giving away free poetry, may have the attributes of a single poem.To some translations mean a celebration and mourning, the Soul found in collections & adopted by artists as an introductory defense of the uneasiness of art that reflects upon the paradoxes of masters.

Only a film by the poet will be apt to find the once-fruitful visual presentation decorative and sensual. Instead of dying out here's a beautiful little haiku & book presented (two sides of the same coin); Pound's masterful Cantos, helping people understand the great poets, copresented with a constraining taxonomy. In all seriousness, an indecorously veiled poetics, filed under poetry specimen, is a sort of spruced up anthology appearing from around the web. Look, I write today a series of  grand poems on the premature death of the anthology.The title of a poem will be a lyric gift encountered often.This is a recurring refrain, the divine breath that solicits any and all types of poetry. The characteristics of 'visual poetry' convey multiple meanings and (say it) blank faces: a complete range of poetry.

Paradise Lost, a science-fiction piece, in another Pulitzer prize-winning book of poems, is any New-Poetry.The ancient theatre in a single poem, all this waiting for inspiration, catches us sometimes going to a ransacked seventeenth century." After a brief break I think of literary conversations, works, poets, & schools, compelling videopoems or new trends or Mayakovsky and Mathematical Poetry.Having just fallen in the forests, the least equipped to search for large understandings, I marked, as is my custom, four of the stars of many talented poets.