the ends not near

from "The Book of A Thousand Eyes" by Lyn Hejinian

To achieve reality (where objects thrive on people's passions), enormous effort
and continuous social interactions are required, and I can't get started
without you. Not here—over there's a better place to begin a funny story.
History with its dead all shot through with regularities in the woods
and following what looks like a cow-path
is part of a creature's sexual magic. Its recorded words
now are just a small memento meant to trigger memories
which will give us energy when the right time comes.
Every afternoon high in a tree
the forest vagabond naps while time hangs
like a swarm of midges, trembling on. It might be female
but it has a phallus's tendency to jump up. How lonely it is
to think that I can only think what I think even while he is thinking—our
          thinking
just our respective working body's hum. And while the warlords of Mycenae
          were storming
Troy the foundations of their own societies were crumbling, too.

nothing(seme)

Mirtha Dermisache - Book - 1970.

nothing(s) (exterior gestures / interior gestures)

“Nothing leads nowhere,
The centuries also live underground, says the Master of Ho.”
– Henri Michaux, ‘Labyrinth’, Épreueves, Exorcismes, 1944.

Josef Albers, Drawings (1958)

Totality

Click for Walter Gropius on form, industrialization and totality. (mp3 link)

from "They Will Sew the Blue Sail" by Henri Michaux

Against alveoli

against glue

against glue one another

against the soft one another

Cactus!

Flames of blackness

impetuous

dagger mothers

battle roots shooting through the plain


Race that rolls

crawling that boils

unity that swarms

lump that dances


One defenestrated flies off

one torn apart from bottom to top

one torn apart throughout

one torn apart never again retied


Man buttressed

man bounding

man rushing down

man for the lightning operation

for the tempest operation

for the assegai operation

for the harpoon operation

for the shark operation

for the shatter operation


Man not according to the flesh

but by the void and evil and intestinal torches

and gusts and nervous discharges

and reversals

and returns

and rage

and quartering

and tangling

and taking off in sparks


Man not by the abdomen and gluteal plates or vertebrae

but by his currents, his feebleness which straightens up under shock, his starts

man according to the moon and burning powder and the kermess in himself of the

movement of others

and the squall and the rising wind and the never orderly chaos

Man all flags flapping, clapping in the wind whispering from his pulsions

man who thrashes a parrot

who has no articulations

who breeds nothing

goat-man

crested man

spined

abridged

tufted man, galvanizing his rags,

man with secret props, spreading far from his degrading life


Desire barking in the dark is the multiform form of this being

Impulses scissored

forked

impulses radiating

impulses around the whole compass dial


...... 
Full text here: http://www.theywillsewthebluesail.com/poem15-TWSTBS-hmichaux.html

"Of the Divine as Absence and Single Letter" by Idra Novey

If our view were not a Holiday Inn

but a fringe of trees, I could say G here

is our greenly hidden.

                                          If we lived

amid Joe-Pye weed and high grass

instead of spackle and peeling plaster

I could say perhaps

                                  I’m listening to G now

but mean the owl, a wind playing the silo,

a sticking sorrow,

                               any sound but the snore

of our latest visitor on the futon. Dear G,

please make him turn, make me kinder.

I’m not far from unfathoming it all.

Source: Poetry (November 2012).

Winter Evening Landscape

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"For William McN. who studied with Ezra Pound" by John Cage

in ten Minutes

                                           Come back: you will

               have taught me chiNese

                                        (sAtie).

                             shall I retUrn the favor?

                                           Give you

                                        otHer lessons

                                          (Ting!)?

                                           Or would you prefer

                                      sileNce?

"The Snow is Deep on the Ground" by Kenneth Patchen

The snow is deep on the ground.   

Always the light falls

Softly down on the hair of my belovèd.

This is a good world.

The war has failed.

God shall not forget us.

Who made the snow waits where love is.

Only a few go mad.

The sky moves in its whiteness

Like the withered hand of an old king.   

God shall not forget us.

Who made the sky knows of our love.

The snow is beautiful on the ground.   

And always the lights of heaven glow   

Softly down on the hair of my belovèd.

glass face

Mies van der Rohe by Frank Scherschel for LIFE magazine.

William Clift, Reflection, Old St. Louis County Courthouse, St. Louis, Missouri, 1976.

"Poems About Trees" by K. Silem Mohammad

I have written a couple of poems about trees
poems about trees and snakes and lakes and birds
poems about nature and life in New England
I write crappy poems and eat babies
if you like poems about trees you’re in for a treat

when I get nervous I get hyper and bump into people
I read to them what MapQuest gave me
round during then in the mom seeker panties
to help me narrow down the slut thing word jobs
rawr I’m too stupid to be able to make my point clear

if you for critique you eventually works at what a
chromosome disorder speech theory itch be responsible
congratulations, really nice birth control
is the most important challenge to vintage porn food stamps
and then I thought only God etc. (i.e. chemicals about progesterone)

the woods are full of police

90% Khalil Gibran, 10% carved wooden men

that can see souls at night

but I, warlike, considering gray cream for attire

enjoying impossible “nudes on ice,” more death

(((it gets even better after this, and that Nada Gordon piece

about unicorns and Hitler has an air of sublimity about it)))

Joel Sternfeld, Ken Robson's Christmas Tree.

+

from "Continuing Against Closure" by Lyn Hejinian

Differences then, are essential. They are what we all have in common, namely that we never have everything in common with anyone else. But differences have a strange ontological status. They are basic but not, strictly speaking, elemental They exist in and as the details of what is — as features of substantives, rather than as substantives themselves. They are, indeed, instances of insubstantiality, because they mark points of mutability. They keep things susceptible to events, they allow them to participate in what happens. Differences are evidence of incompleteness.


Of course completeness has a strong appeal. It can provide emotional satisfaction, and even, as in the case of a job well done, material satisfaction. It can be exhilarating to finish a work of art, for example. It can be a relief, having cleaned up after a strained family dinner party, to stand in the relative silence of one’s restored idiosyncratic order and say: “that’s done!” — these are not words of regret.


And, though there is little evidence of completion and closure to be found in the actual state of things, and though the notion may seem a fiction to an empiricist, still, these fictions can exert cosmic fascination; as theology, even as ideology, they can be compelling. And, though I have termed closure a fiction, the desire for closure can exert real (though in my opinion often disastrous) influence. One sees this for example in relation to contemporary notions of justice.


We may speak of infinite mercy, but justice exists to keep situations finite. And when it is criminal justice that is under discussion, it is taken as a given that the people involved, especially the “victims,” have “right to closure,” and that that right is incontrovertible, proper, “inalienable.”

That the bringing about of closure is often impossible to distinguish from an act of vengeance (as in the carrying out of capital punishment) is, apparently, of no consequence. Which makes a certain sense — closure, by definition, establishes the condition of “no consequence.”


But this means that, if one is committed to consequences (to history, to social responsibility, to the ongoing liveliness of living), one has to be wary, to say the very least, of closure.


If closure is problematic ethically it is untenable semantically, since nothing can restrain meaning, nothing can contain all the implications, ramifications, nuances, and connotations that cascade and proliferate from any and every point in any and every instance of what is or is thought to be. And nothing can arrest the ever-changing terrain of ubiquitous contexts perpetually affecting these.


This alone must keep one in a condition that is the very contrary of closed. One must, to begin with, be conscious.


What has come to be of increasing interest to me over the past few years is not so much consciousness itself but the sites of consciousness. And by sites of consciousness I do not mean heads or brains but places in the world, spaces in which an awakening of consciousness occurs, the spaces in which a self discovers itself as an object among others (and thus, by the way, achieves subjectivity). My notion of these sites of consciousness, these zones of encounter, derives much from Hannah Arendt’s elaboration of what she termed “the space of appearance,” where human and world come into being for and with each other. Arendt’s “space of appearance” bears great similarity, as she points out, to the Greek notion of polis.


Full text here:  http://www.jacketmagazine.com/14/hejinian.html

windows 8

"Celestial Music" by Louise Glück

I have a friend who still believes in heaven.
Not a stupid person, yet with all she knows, she literally talks to God.
She thinks someone listens in heaven.
On earth she's unusually competent.
Brave too, able to face unpleasantness.

We found a caterpillar dying in the dirt, greedy ants crawling over it.
I'm always moved by disaster, always eager to oppose vitality
But timid also, quick to shut my eyes.
Whereas my friend was able to watch, to let events play out
According to nature. For my sake she intervened
Brushing a few ants off the torn thing, and set it down
Across the road.

My friend says I shut my eyes to God, that nothing else explains
My aversion to reality. She says I'm like the child who
Buries her head in the pillow
So as not to see, the child who tells herself
That light causes sadness-
My friend is like the mother. Patient, urging me
To wake up an adult like herself, a courageous person-

In my dreams, my friend reproaches me. We're walking
On the same road, except it's winter now;
She's telling me that when you love the world you hear celestial music:
Look up, she says. When I look up, nothing.
Only clouds, snow, a white business in the trees
Like brides leaping to a great height-
Then I'm afraid for her; I see her
Caught in a net deliberately cast over the earth-

In reality, we sit by the side of the road, watching the sun set;
From time to time, the silence pierced by a birdcall.
It's this moment we're trying to explain, the fact
That we're at ease with death, with solitude.
My friend draws a circle in the dirt; inside, the caterpillar doesn't move.
She's always trying to make something whole, something beautiful, an image
Capable of life apart from her.
We're very quiet. It's peaceful sitting here, not speaking, The composition
Fixed, the road turning suddenly dark, the air
Going cool, here and there the rocks shining and glittering-
It's this stillness we both love.
The love of form is a love of endings. 

from "Of Grammatology" by Jacques Derrida

You have, I suppose, dreamt of finding a single word for designating difference and articulation. I have perhaps located it by chance in Robert['s Dictionary] if I play on the word, or rather indicate its double meaning. This word is brisure [joint, break] “ — broken, cracked part. Cf. breach, crack, fracture, fault, split, fragment, [bréche, cassure, fracture, faille, fente, fragment.] — Hinged articulation of two parts of wood- or metal-work. The hinge, the brisure [folding-joint] of a shutter. Cf. joint.” — Roger Laporte (letter)

Origin of the experience of space and time, this writing of difference, this fabric of the trace, permits the difference between space and time to be articulated, to appear as such, in the unity of an experience (of a “same” lived out of a “same” body proper [corps propre]). This articulation therefore permits a graphic (“visual” or “tactile,” “spatial”) chain to be adapted, on occasion in a linear fashion, to a spoken (“phonic,” “temporal”) chain. It is from the primary possibility of this articulation that one must begin. Difference is articulation.

link: http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/derrida.htm

from "Manifest" by Jessica Smith

1.2   The poem is a set of topological figures or features. 
          1.2.1   Words are subject to disintegration, death, and other natural events that individuals of all types face. 
          1.2.2   The words on the page represent the page at a certain geological moment. 
                    1.2.2.1   This moment implies a history. 
                    1.2.2.2   This moment entails a future. 
                    1.2.2.3   The reader sees merely a moment captured. 
          1.2.3   The "level of the page" is the only level. 
                    1.2.3.1   The vertical "reader to page" and "author to page" and "author to reader" 
                                 relationships are eradicated. 
                    1.2.3.2   The horizontal journey through the page, as a hiker on a trail, 
                                 is the only way to search for meaning. 
                             1.2.3.2.1   As such meanings will be different for each traveler. 
                             1.2.3.2.2   As such meaning is made through memory. 
                                             Connections are delayed, soundings are delayed, meaning
                                             is delayed. Meaning is put together. 
                             1.2.3.2.3   As such meaning is a compound impression of a physically traversed 
                                             space (the eye moves physically through the space as the mind 
                                             encounters fragmented signifiers). 
                             1.2.3.2.4   Each poem is a microcosm. 
2.   The page is a slice of geological time. It has a past and a future. It has physical features. 
          2.1   It could have been otherwise. 
3.   The poem and the page become topological at the same time; as the reader traverses their space, he or she perceives a shifting, coming-into-being topology. 

From "Sleepers Awake" by Kenneth Patchen

ember, I

From "Vermin: A Notebook" by John Kinsella

A pacifist, which is what I am, can be the strongest resister, and pacifism the most defiant form of resistance. Same with language usage: I mix the old and the new to engage with a debate about protection, preservation, conservation, and respect of the “natural” world. I am aware of the problems these words carry in terms of implying complicity, because I am a poet rather than a speech writer. For me, because of this, poems can stop bulldozers. Not because they just say “stop bulldozer,” but because the intricacies of language challenge, distract, and entangle the bulldozer. I am using a semantics not of analogy, but of opposition. My words are intended to halt the damage—to see what shouldn’t be seen, to declare and challenge it.

*     *     *

I have not yet written the poems that go hand in hand with these actions, though I have seen them in my mind’s eye, because they happen as I interact and respond physically and emotionally to the world around me, and also they appear between the lines in my notebook, attaching themselves to broader ideas and counterpointing received systems of thought. Really, though, the activist moment that becomes a poem is often away from the incident or the moment of witnessing. It becomes a moment where the figurative merges with a politics of response, forming what we might term the “para-figurative”—not didactic, but still informed by a genuine political-ethical idea / l. Last night, for example.

*     *     *

Once again, around 9:00 PM, a strange and confusing noise arose outside. I went out to investigate. As all in the house described it, it was like a mob of injured birds calling out. I thought of the corellas—maybe some had survived and were on the block calling in pain. Flashlight in hand, I raced up the hill; then suddenly the noise intensified and I heard a rush, and the sound of feet.

Moments later, the sound came from a different paddock. I walked over and the noise became a mixture of growls, squawks, and screams. I shone the torch in the direction of the sound and two pairs of eyes caught the light. One on top of the other.

It was foxes mating. Foxes who’d been missed by the hunt. I turned the light off and left them to it. If ever there was a sound of pleasure and pain rolled into one . . .

The poetic analogy is obvious and irresistible. And that’s where the poet activist has to be careful—what I can take from this moment is no more or less than what I can take from the events that preceded it over the weekend. Foxes and corellas are both considered vermin. The corellas increase in number because of clearing and monoculture. Foxes were introduced in the nineteenth century as sport. Entertainment by way of killing them is sold as environmental, and yet the pleasure is all in the hands of the shooters and those who incite them. In this equation is the entire politics of what I write—in resisting through poetry the industry of pleasure and control that comes from hunting and exploitation of the environment, I am also, I believe, writing the survival and liberty of animals (including humans!).

Entire essay here:  http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/238296