Radio Free Verse

endless shades of greighe of
mircstreets magnesium-pierced:
crack! and neon and
phosphor and lumenlines
of automobiles:
food, and
go, and
hope

and above, all, cnewling:

“I know, I know,” (the Moon)
“I know, I know.”

So Walt Whitman walks into a bar, orders a body electric, and downs it in one gulp. ‘Bartender!’ he says. ‘Make me a live oak with moss!’ So the bartender pours a shot of calamus bitters, two fingers of Lou’siana bourbon, &…

Shit. I’m telling this wrong.

That’s how I’d translate ‘negro streets’ into Old English, tho there are problems even there. (Would an Anglo-Saxon reader read ‘affricanstrata’ differently?) Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ presents a great number of problems for the would-be New English translator: Words like ‘jazz’ & ‘heroin’ (’junk’, actually) have no obvious translation in Old English, while others like ‘Moloch’ & ‘Mohammedanism’ probably had equivalents in spoken Old English, but I’ve yet to find them in writing. More difficult is the constant juxtaposition—sort of a wonderfully post-Imagist thing that very much relies on divisions of the understood world that are foreign to the context in which Old English existed. The difficulty of ‘hydrogen jukebox’ isn’t simply that H₂ wasn’t recognised as a discrete element until more than seven centuries after Hastings & that jukeboxes didn’t exist for another century & a half after that: The problem is that it’s difficult to imagine how to reproduce the effect created by that particular contrast. You’ve got the realm of the menacingly scientific (three years after the detonation of the first H-bomb), & the realm of the playfully hep; you’ve aseptic, authoritarian Greek, & you’ve the ever-changing realm of slang—youth, racial minority, sin—via underdog Gullah/Wolof juke/jook/dzug & underdog Anglo-Saxon box.

Carol Cutrere: Juking? Oh! Well, that’s when you get in a car, which is preferably open in any kind of weather. And then you drink a little bit and you drive a little bit, and then you stop and you dance a little bit with a jukebox. And then you drink a little bit more and you drive a little bit more, you stop and you dance a little bit more to another juke box! And then you stop dancing and you just drink and you drive. And then, you stop driving. —The Fugitive Kind (1959)

Why would one even do this, tho?

Why, for very good reasons.

I haven’t written much in quite a while. I wrote a poem—one I like—in October. Before that, it had been months. Most of the poetry I’m reading, now, isn’t in English: I’ve begun La Chanson de Roland in Old French, & have recently picked up El poema de mio Cid in Old Spanish, again. In English, I’ve been reading Leviathan for the past month as part of some strange Marxist reading program I’ve set myself. & no poetry, save what I chance on.

I set out in March to learn Old English, because I wanted to understand the connection of language & poetic form. My learning has been slow. Just under my everyday consciousness, I’m not letting myself write freely until I understand those things I set out to learn. It’s killing me.

So I guess I’d better get learnin’ that Old English quicker!

I’ve been reading Walden:

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

The máss of mén léad líves of quíet dèsperátion.

That’s essentially an alexandrine (iambic hexametre—duh-DUH duh-DUH duh-DUH duh-DUH duh-DUH duh-DUH), with a spondee in the third foot (DUH-DUH) & an amphibrach (duh-DUH-duh) in the sixth. The alexandrine is the French heoric line, but I get the feeling that its hexametric nature lent to it a classical sort of authority (despite the fact that classical hexameter was not iambic). There is alliteration between the first & second, & then within the third feet. This serves to make the first half of the line feel heavier, allowing ‘…of quiet desperation.’ to float away into a whisper. You get a heavy mass, & then audibly quieter quiet desperation. The prosody of the line supports its meanings very well.

One of these days, I need to write about Emmerson & language theory in ‘Nature’.

A while ago, Yiŋ & I went to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for our sort-of-weekly English excursion. An art museum has to be pretty darned bad for me not to enjoy it, so I always have a good time at the SFMoMA, but as much as I’m intrigued by the various special exhibits they’ve got, I’m always most interested in the permanent collection—especially the Diego Rivera pieces.

That Saturday, tho, I found myself extremely dissatisfied. This manifested itself most strongly when looking at the piece ‘Untitled or Not Yet’ by Eva Hesse (to the left). The piece works largely thru tactile suggestion: The plastic looks somehow both liquid & organic. While it remains plastic, it reminds one of semen, of fish, of what is soft & saline. The visual suggests other senses, but the trouble with museums is that you can’t touch Hesse’s piece: Over time, repeat human contact would cause the degradation & eventual destruction of the piece, & the mission of museums is to preserve.

Continue Reading »

normative insanity
informative manatee

Thinking about Sentences, the other day, while in the Tenderloin. I have certain mentally diagnosed or diagnosable friends, but they’re free—or almost so—of certain madnesses that are widely accepted. Then, the phrase ‘normative insanity’. But after that, just the sound of the words, & something Sentencious came up, but I think not as pastoral: it forces motion & repetition, rather than rest.

Or maybe I’m mad.

Or maybe I’m just wrong.

I’ve been struggling with Robert Grenier’s Sentences since a while ago. It’s taken so long largely because I’ve been involved in oddling other tasks & hoo-has. Continue Reading »

I want to clarify on my second-to-most-recent post: I don’t believe that all poetry needs to be liberatory, any more than I believe that a surgeon should consider how her home culinary practices bring her closer to excising the world’s tumours. I do believe that all poetry should avoid oppression, & should, if possible, be free. First, do no harm. & don’t zap yourself with a cancer gun.