Editing poetry online

This is another edit from the raw text done during NaPoWriMo last month. This is from April 11.

an old man’s pee waters the universe

No more than 6 feet in front of my car, a cat stalks a bird and an old man begins to pee. This moment spirals out from the small white fruit crook-necked with gravity, the invisible splashes, the tiny rainbow that exists, the sudden kiss between miniscule pear-bottomed spherelettes and the day's light bolting from sun to soil. This is the unseen road back to the sky through the roots, xylem'ed and phloem'ed, the old man's pee achieves a larger pendulousity, less than a bird's peck of water, millions of them making up a branch leaved against the unsmooth sky. In later days, or perhaps the slow dampening of night, there will be a turbulence and a moving, slants the heavens back down to earth. All in an old man's pee and of course the chickadee who saw it all, the cat, who intent, remains unimpressed by our joint ecology.

blogging on poetry

I’ve added a blog feed to my site, which will get going on June 1. I had such a productive time doing NaPoWriMo and I really enjoy facilitating the workshops I do (Poetry Wars, for example), that I thought I’d take it online. Maybe it’ll make me work harder, past the annoyance of constant pain.

editing online

Version 2 of April 5th’s raw text:

Note: I actually really like prose poems, but sometimes prose can be more effective when broken into lines. The extra space on the page, the openness of the form of lineated text suggests other possibilities, or at least other worlds that might impinge upon us, often without our consent. It's what I like best about poetry.

Prose occupies a page. It says, I am the ruler of this world. As much as I love reading essays and such, this attitude of language sucks. I sure didn't want that for this piece, so it became lines whilst retaining much of the prose like qualilty. A compromise, such as the one creative types make every day with the more inarticulate and dangerous of our unconscious lives.

Writing is a dangerous occupation

I don't really want to write today. I feel silent. As if the undulating lake inside of me has succumbed to a wordless sleep.

This quiet shore.

The still silver, the brushed, neat sky reclining by its side.

A mouse, sensitive ears, the inner hairs quiver at the smallest of sighs she might hear my breathing if attentive, or facing my way.

Each little break of light a flash or spark , or the sound of a vowel sighed by some bard far in the dreaming distance

and I suspect the dark of surfacing, then the water's skin settles, the light and sound uncurl back into their own generalized version of death.

How long I can watch, so still and controlled I don't know. Sooner or later I'll need to move, and a joint will crack, or I'll sneeze and the lake will erupt with thundered words and ferocious letters, like whales breaching next to the smallest of rubber rafts

but for now there is waiting and the silence

Day 30 - a white-out poem

NaPoWriMo_2015

sleeping mountain blankets or the thin sheets of summer, a feather unmoored of tiny wing descends the rocky brow unaware but felt, that slow twitch of somnambulant skin erupts with a twisting sigh rush of air squeezed in the rustling majesty of a woman turning over in bed the feather lifts off again, readdresses the day attempts contact one more time

NaPoWriMo_2015

From April 28

on the enduring power of story

When you build a window to the world you'll be using a teaspoon against brick. Suck it up. You have to start from where you are. That first scar on the brick, that grey instead of russet sand, that's not the outside world. Difference alone doesn't mean the stories have been beaten back.

You are no knight cutting with one bladed roar through the thorns around your sleeping beauty.

The pile of raw sand growing at your feet – this is the truth, no this, no that – will grow one broken certainty at a time. There is no eternity. No certain surety either.

What'll probably happen: there will be a faint whisper of moving air, so tiny, feeble in the miniscule crevices of broken brick, a world breath so tiny and awkward that you won't realize it happened until a bigger wind makes it through. You won't be able to help it.

You'll look for the break, the way out to something you're sure is there but have never seen. You'll convince yourself that there was a glimmer in that story or another of the blue sky that must reside beyond the wall. But if you keep scraping, pedal back from one certainty after another, breathe, scrape, pay attention

the air around your straining body, the subtle shift of the tiny hairs along your cheek bones,

sooner or later there will be a perceptible something wholly other.

NaPoWriMo_2015

It’s almost over. Goodness that went fast.

Here’s the bit of raw text from April 27.

horned owl that lands on your fence, at eye level pins you spiked on ecstasy, there you are flopping around on the roiling beauty of the infinitesimal sea of the moment;

those eyes pull you along, breathless, universally enveloping, gasping now the iron lung of perceived eternity the riptide pulling the moment along the shore until your life feels like it will swim forever in this intimation of coming home

it's bullshit of course

not the eyes, they're real enough but the story we make of it not the feeling, that awe and sense of stretching out, but to equate them with the dullard of eternity, what a waste of spiking hormones, the neuronal rush of speed perceiving with a willing owl

think of it what you could do if you could attend with that momentary gift of doubled perception to the owl, the yellow eye, the space shaped on one side by human limbs and other by wings with all that extra time, those extra beats of smell and vertiginous sense, what inter-species agreements could engineer in the wilderness of shared reality

NoPoWriMo_2015

More pain today following a bad nightmare, so the poem is dark. sorry.

the birth of Mary Tailfeather

Even the youngest of girls have babies, or it seems that way, this old woman, hung in the cabin doorway, the blood and twisted sheets flung to the wooden floor.

Your grandmother fed whiskey to all her children. Your mother used, so you were born already high, and you now in this bed, this steel

framed pain, this midwife, this crowning I can't tell if the hungry ghosts passing though are broken histories, or just babies born with nowhere to go.

feeling mean today and

it shows in one of the raw text bits I put up on my site today for NaPoWriMo_2015 

Like the poet with her purple heavings, her book, through a vanity press, surely she can't know how much of the audience cringes, not even when the featured poet clambours to have some prose writer or story writer or musician, or even the pee break come after the horrors of Mother Earth's heaving bosom, does that poet get it, even with all that, the sly boasts: well I found publishing easy.

Editing online. An experiment in contemporary poetry.

What I’m doing is taking some of the NaPoWriMo_2015 text and putting newer versions up above the original text and adding commentary about why I’ve made some of the changes.

I wish there was more of this online. I love to see how other poets come to grips with the work that is making this kind of art.

NaPoWriMo_2015

This is one of the bits from April 9. Like this. Will keep working on it.

a dead cat sloped against the pitted concrete barrier in the middle of a fast moving highway

flash past, black or the darkening of death

in the air's eddy half a car length a final twist feathers flesh-stuck to the road's margin

components of this concrete come from far away, more than 200 kilometers how the crow flies

the metal in that car from China maybe the oil to make the plastic bumper Algerian

crows and cats on the other hand tend toward territoriality, not a lot of cross over, of trade

treed rows past the far south-bound lanes seeds harvested in the Park lots, tree farms for beautification amongst other things

who knows about the dead cat, nothing for sure, but probably born and nursed in the industrial park from where the last run started, half way 'cross to the trees

the crow dead before the cat began the run? the closest roost is at the river, less than 5 kilometers as the road runs

NaPoWriMOO_2015

This raw text was from April 2.

14:46. Entry from the Book of (un)Truths

Absurdity # 1 The eye only perceives visible light.

You speak in tautologies : Linguistic investigation is a circular occupation.

Isn't it fun that the sun has never in all the history of the world set upon any shore, no matter how gilded.

No brave warrior at the end of battle has offered the gods solace under a dying sun.

Hummingbirds can see the glow that burns a naked man running aslant toward the sea. He cannot see it. Not even when it is too late to stop.

Are x-rays visible once they have been transformed into the shadows of the wounded's shattered arms?

The ones not named in any historical roll, not on any descendent's lips, no pictures, nor memorials, no bones, not even the failed battle plan in which limits were finally met. No eye remains to grant reality.

No classes offered on this topic. It awaits a bright graduate student to investigate this all but invisible history.

Here I am at the diner. A man facing me from another table spoons melted ice cream into his toothless mouth. He no longer speaks. He sees me but his eyes slide away like the sweet drips from his mouth.

Later, a variation of the 3-point turn, he finally unfolds himself from his booth, holds his pants with two small scarred fists so they won't fall further around his slippers. A feather is stuck to the cuff of his shirt.

He heads for home across the street. He looks both ways. He can see all that is for him still visible.

The world is all that is the case.

NaPoWriMo_2015_April 11

Here’s another bit of raw text from the month so far. This, with some work, might well become a poem.

No more than 6 feet in front of my car, an old man begins to pee. This moment spirals. Out from the small white fruit crook-necked with gravity, the invisible splashes, the tiny rainbow that exists in the sudden kiss between miniscule pear-bottomed spherelettes and the day's light bolting from sun to soil. There is the unseen road. Back to the sky through the roots, xylem'ed and phloem'ed, the old man's pee achieves a larger pendulousity, less than a bird's peck of water, millions of them making up a hanging branch leaved against the unsmooth sky. And then in the later days, or perhaps the slow dampening of night, there will be a turbulence and the moving, the air that slants the heavens back down to earth. All in an old man's pee and of course the chickadee who saw it all and the cat who has been silently stalking unimpressed by our joint ecology.  

NaPoWriMo_2015_April 20

Here’s the posted raw text from April 20. Good editing possibilities here.

2AM on a dark road border running with no lights. The girl ready in the distance, an hour yet but she waits wrapped in a blanket in the wintered dark, him drunk and sleeping hours yet before he wakes

and in that hour a policeman dreamed some troubled portent of robbery, diamonds gone out gripped in the black bag some youth taking what wasn't granted

past the moon sparked river the road taking a glancing blow as the river elbowed its way east into the road's domain a bar let out its last drunks to waiting cars, with children asleep under piles of wool and homeward in that hour they would arrow

in silence, of those in the night that remain unaware, sleep in the comedy of starlight it's past-time blinking, aeons of burning just now making pale the dark road curving towards this one's saving and the deeper dark under needled boughs not yet bent under snow's weight

the low-down and underclasses of no account in law and civil discourse, property still in fact if not in willing admission the gravel the river of humanity distresses, what of it that a few broken stones get scooped from the bank in the dark, I mean like

high past in the mountains to the west, one that 2 years now in the dark he was gone with me the blue grip of his upper arms now just a night-time shadow in his bruised dreaming that boy now asleep under the quilted smell of lilacs

true, his tyrannosaur still lurking plastic jaws agape on the shelf behind the few books he had with him when he climbed below these blankets waiting in my car's back seat, but now he sleeps away the trial of his living and it's hours yet before the boy awakes

What's in the dark run to disturb the Novembered slumber of a democratic peace?

NaPoWriMo_2015

Been free-writing every day so far. Posting the raw text up on my site. What a good thing. Now all I have to do, once May 1 hits, is continue. Heh. Shouldn’t be so scary to think that, but it is.

Un-Sight/Un-Sound (delirium X.) by M. gnOme Press. 2014.

Referential reading (as opposed to the kind when I read a recipe or genre fiction - for information or simple delight) requires, for me, an admission of weakness.

A Smattering of Personal Weaknesses: I have this point of view and not that one; I have a facility with certain domains of knowledge and not with others; I have, in today's parlance, a low EQ - I respect numbers far more than people; I need communication; I have a desire to understand.

M's book addresses aspects of human life outside this description of my comfort zone. How to approach it?

A deviation: when a reader disparages another's work with the accusation of "inaccessible" what it often means is that the reader is unwilling to do the work necessary to understand the Other.

There are at least two solutions to this difficulty. One is to refuse to move outside what is known. Rationalization follows.

"...the dogs devour the tears shed as of skin sanguine in lapse of momentary lack of resolve cast..."

As a reader, I must begin where I already am. Un-Sight/Un-Sound (delirium X.) does not live at the same coordinates as I do. Therefore, I must move towards its place on the human map.

Another aside: I wouldn't describe my sense of delirium X as one of inaccessibility. Half way up a sheer cliff face is inaccessible to me without a helicopter or some other mechanical aid. If I have the “aid” then the cliff is accessible - even if it is scary (don't like heights much). Text comes, perforce, with its own 'copter. Historical knowledge. The internet. The ability to reason, make connections, think. What this says to me: the accusation of inaccessibility roots in fear.

"...echoing from out of gouge / what gouge unto / light what else of the other / measure beyond..."

Let's go back to my low EQ. M's book, when opened randomly, strikes me as a wail. Each dipping spot - another growl or wail or whinge. So much pain/rage/despair/angst/etc./etc. I don't even know all the feeling-terms to cover the complicated world of M's textual delirium.

"...brace what trace lacking still what lapse desire in effect birthing from the grave that giveth never..."

On opening the book for the first time, I knew immediately I'd have to form some sort of intellectual solid ground to cope with it. I found a starting place on the back cover.

Un-Sight/ Un Sound (delirium X.) is a pose-poetic work in three sequences: "delirium X," "Meat Sequence (after Francis Bacon)," and "Ghost-Limb Tongue." In the first, quotations from various authors (Bataille, Beckett, Luca, Popa et al.) are used as springboards for surreal imagistic fragmentation. The second section, inspired by Deleuze's Francis Bacon, deals with the subject of flesh/meat and explores the concept of the human object divulged of identity / place, stripped of ego, and viewed from an externus. The third section addresses the conflict between sense and the real and concludes with a collection of aphorisms written with regard to words becoming a bankrupt form of expression in the conflict between language and the Post-Human world...

OK. Now I'm getting it. Here's where I can begin. Non-sense via the sensical. The powerhouse dissonance between poetry and prose. I'm even emitting an occasional chortle (I mean “meat Sequence” after Bacon - snigger). If you can't get the feelings directly, then use reason as an interpreter. (Another moment of dissonance resulting in something coherent and productive.)

An example.

The text:

“In the first, quotations from various authors (Bataille, Beckett, Luca, Popa et al.) are used as springboards for surreal imagistic fragmentation.”

Take the 4th offering in delirium X - the quote is from Georges Bataille.

I'm hungry for blood

hungry for bloody earth

hungry for fish hungry for rage

hungry for filth hungry for cold

This comes from The Oresteia - specifically from a piece called "Discord". Discord is 4 pages long but only runs to 27 lines. The title is on its own page. The next page has 3 lines - "Ten hundred houses fall / a hundred then a thousand dead / at the window of the nude". Then you need to turn the page and - "Belly open / head removed / reflection of elongated clouds / image of the immense sky". Another mostly blank page with a few centred lines and then the final one, with the relative dense presentation of 14 lines from which M has taken the quote to begin his own text. What Bataille is speaking of "The areole of my death / freedom / unspeakable / hopelessness of my death".

How M responds:

"...fag-end of death"

"...eclipse of violent meat foreign spasm clotted blood clot"

"...dense as shit the light-break stun of absolute"

There are 23 of these elliptical points in M's response to the opening quote.

What I understand because of this: It's a conversation. Without obvious (at least to me) sense or reason, but a conversation nonetheless. It's a conversation between speakers of a language built of passion and despair. Whatever its syntax, the rules will be built out of the limbic. This has me interested. What kind of language is this?

If you didn't know, The Oresteia is a trilogy of plays by Aeschylus that treats upon the movement from a revenge driven social ethic to one based on law. It is a tragedy; people die horribly. It is about curses on houses.

So, my mind goes - if this is an updated transition, we in our world are moving from the rule of law to what? A kind of anarchy brought about by the rise of the absurd?

If I'm correct about this then the conversation must be in the realm of the absurd. And, based on textual evidence, it certainly appears to be. So. Not inaccessible. In fact, didn't take all that much for me to form a bridge to the text and find it perfectly coherent within its own philosophical frame.

Aside: J'ai un nom is completely inaccessible if you refuse to recognize it is not an English sentence. Absurd if you are doing so for some reason or other, just stupid if don't recognize the possibility that it might be another language.

No more examples.

I'll continue to read – which is a different process in M's realm than it would be if I were reading Wordsworth. What I'll do (which is not to say what you should do) is open the book and commit bibliomancy.

Methodology: I'll hold the book closed in my left hand. I'll form some absurd (not to say silly) question. Absurd like “What does the steel table want for breakfast?” Then I'll take 5 shallow breaths and open the text, randomly point to a verbal phrase. I will not assume this is the answer.

Once I've done that - now in the appropriate mental frame - I'll do what I do well. I'll find the philosophical and historical traces that “delirium X” point to and follow them to some kind of understanding.

Over time, I'll continue until I can feel the cognitive map I'm building is complete. Once that is done, I'll have read the book.

Do you have to approach M's book my way? No. You might hate philosophy for one thing.

Can you still get there? Sure. It might even be easy for you. You might already live in the same map-zone as M.

Will it be worth the work if you don't? I can't answer that for you. For me it is.

writing prompt

Spell goes bad. He becomes an elephant.