Saturday, February 14, 2004

Michael, Dadoodoflow, offered a comment after my poem "A photograph, six poems remembered & tagging", and this is the result (so far): a poem that weaves into the verse versions. In other words the verse--the turning--as actual conjunctions. Nothing too new: many poets offer us choices. Below, choices in form allowing the poem to actually function differently; reading as doing ethics & poetics. Let's see what happens. I wrote this and then revised the poem as I went. So, it's fresh. The next step will be to add parentheses.

(A photograph & six poems remembered & tagging)

Our leaves of grass can never surpass platonic tradition alone.
          You! Empty signifiers, cocks and cock suckers,
                        defining taste rather than tasting,
                        stroking a long rigid dialect
                        meaning for imagination,
                        consuming,
                        giving rather than
                        learning to give;

or

                    Empty signifiers, cocks and cock suckers,
                        defining taste rather than tasting,
                        stroking a long rigid dialect
                        meaning for imagination,
                        giving rather than
                        learning to give,
                        consuming,

and

          you will fade arbitrarily so out-

          standing perpetually.

         A spectacle.
         A thing that subtracts.

and

Maya Deren, at land, extravagant

or

Allen Ginsberg half-naked, snapping cymbals, singing mantras, fondling heads
and lettuce          pushing some thing on us          and his generation          dead now.

or

A photo of A and PO on my desk submits not wholly to my critique—
          smoke and            black and white              horned rimmed glasses—

or

a sinister nostalgia for a time I never spent but can afford.

and

If modernity is a movement between presence and absence,
then a post time is a whip for cynical earnestness.
She moves, our Gertrude, for an academic Hamlet,
something to hold false images towards—

          to mirror our erections.

or

Think for one instant only and only all time
about those towers we built and our forests undone.
          A wilting-shriveled remonstrance
          from an ideal corner of thought.
          Maybe modernity’s false appeal to thought—
          a grotesque cogito out-reaching,
          “I think therefore I can undo,”
          should be read “not be” or “never am.”

and

I ran outside in my boxers
painted: I was not here!

and

In Lombardia a Milanese
spraid on a Rinascente wall: STO MALE!

or

In our contemporary being eksists a word,
between you and me endures an attendance,
          the housewife
          the tree between
          the poet in the car
          the voyeur
          the snowman         
          the moment to be,
          the day to come,
          the proper cliché,
          the faked orgasm.

or

a fancied image not the thing itself
some B between
my A, your C.

and

aren’t we a fortunate joke? a punch line tossed out
with reflective acuity
at just the right moment
into an empty room.

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