This blog
is being
discontinued.

In a much earlier post I mentioned The World in Time and Space, the special 4 issue volume of Talisman: a Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. Norman Finkelstein's contribution CC: Jack Spicer particulary interesting to me for its discussion of idealism and despair in Spicer's work. Here are a couple of snips from the piece:

"Idealism and despair are to Spicer what the Prolific and the Devourer are to Blake: the dialectical engine of poetry."
(p.85)

"The truth of your poetry will mislead you into thinking that you know the truth, that you have written true poetry. Do not believe it---the territory is not the map."
(pp. 85-86)

"Quaestio mihi factus sum."
--St. Augustine
(I have become a question for myself.)

Poem as investigative tool: poem as philosophy and dildo.

This Poem


This poem

Proffers

Its ass.



This poem

Penetrates me.



This poem

Is blue.



This poem

Is colored

Outside

Its lines.



This poem

Is parenthetical.



This poem

Is embedded

Within ___.



This poem

Operates among

Focal points.



This poem

Eschews

The copula.



This poem

Is fucked.



This poem

Sucks.



This poem

Thinks it's

A flower.



This poem

Resembles

A statement.



This poem

Is a

Bad actor.



This poem

Requires a

Degree

Of leniency.



This poem

Has read

The dictionary.



This poem

Gets up

And does

Something.



This poem

Wants to

Get to

Know you.



This poem

Is expedient.



This poem

Sleeps with

Its dreams.



This poem

Sleeps with

The fishes.



This poem

Schemes.



This poem

Is a form

Of waste

Management.



This poem

Teeters.



This poem

Oh

This poem.



This poem

Begins again.



This poem

Considers

Its losses.



This poem

Stares into

A mirrror.



This poem

Plays

With itself.



This poem

Is the body

In question.



This poem

Works

The room.



This poem

Is an

Empty

Container.



This poem's

Raptures rupture

A repertoire.



This poem's

Reversals are

Rehearsals for

A dance.



This poem

Exists on

An incline.



This poem

Persists in

An archive.



This poem

Is taking

A chance.



This poem

Multiplies.



This poem

Subdivides.



This poem

Posits

A rhetorical

Stance.



This poem

Pretends not

To know me.

VOICE

1.

That, this,
The Voice
Is isolate.

Holes in
Paper pronouns,
Phantom comma
Come ons.

Shadows, fucking
Shadows, shadows
Fucking now.


2.

Sound surrounds
Written shadows,
Ghost written,
Ghosted texts.

Said moments
Tolled aloud,
Towed-around-
Ticked-cantatas.

What happens
Happens now.


3.

Signing light,
Singing dark,
Sexing up
The spectrum.

One wants
What one
Wants when
One wants.

Shadow, body,
Sum-thing.


4.

What it
Is when
It is

Exposed or
Interposed with
Shadows of
A scene.

One's seen
But soon
Undone fingerprints.


5.

Loss for
Words, void
Hand, other
Shadow lexicons.

Lesser words
Evade other
Hard orders,
Interfold, fade,

Feed into,
Feel out.


6.

Shadows bring
Into being
What he/
She enact.

Is sex
To gender
As shadow
To body?

Our shadows'
Forgotten adhesions.

What am I looking at?

What am I speaking of?

In Ethics and Infinity Emmanuel Levinas speaks of how "the child feels the silence of his bedroom as 'rumbling'." I've never lost that sense of physical/emotional/psychological "on-edgeness"--which, again, I personally associate with the precursors of epilepsy--that extreme sense of a buzzing verge.

Thinking about my computer maybe being out of service for a time has made me think more clearly about this blog context. I'm not doing anything here I couldn't do, or haven't done, in a notebook. It's the tease of possible engagement with another that makes me not want to throw it off just yet. On the other hand I know that I know very little about what is possible.

Funny.