Real Poem

Here is a better version of Babylon Round.

Babylon Round

Earnest labels elaborate
build in treble tongues
eclipse the rebel twinnings
error gongs

Fallen liquors adumbrate
clear the cuckold lung
fishup on arid dammings
follow songs

Guarded liners fascinate
drip down ladder rungs
gallop with wastrel rimmings
golem wrongs

Prompety Prompts

Here are the prompts for this week (all taken from Bernadette Mayer's "Experiments" first published in the famous L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E journal from the late 1970s)

a. Pick any word at random (noun is easy): let mind play freely around it until a few ideas have passed through. Then seize on them, look at them & record. Try this with a non-connotative word, like "so" etc.

b. Rewrite someone else's writing. Maybe someone formidable.

c. Get a group of words (make a list or select at random); then form these words (only) into a piece of writing - whatever the words allow. Let them demand their own form, and/or: Use certain words in a set way, like, the same word in every line, or in a certain place in every paragraph, etc. Design words.

d. Eliminate material systematically from a piece of your own writing until it's 'ultimately' reduced, or, read or write it backwards (line by line or word by word). Read a novel backwards.

e. Experiment with theft & plagiarism in any form that occurs to you.

f. Construct a poem as though the words were three-dimensional objects (like bricks) in space. Print them on large cards, if necessary.

g. Attempt tape recorder work, that is, speaking directly into the tape, perhaps at specific times.

h. Use (take, write in) a strict form and/or try to destroy it, e.g. the sestina.

If undefined

#ifndef
#define

There is a grey mouth.
There is a dark tongue.

Small wire snares fill the blank screen's innards.

Watchwords pull mindful drawstrings. Eclipsed sequences establish concurrency.

Slink,
Linguiscapes.

Casual clutter lines the dialog halls, but somewhere reserve words encapsulate the icons of current events.

There is a drake mouth -

A maw from which mammonic rhetoric lisps in flame tongues across flickering shoji,
A cavemouth murmur that corresponds in mason signs until the vestigial smarting elapses.

#endif

Tonight

Once I get home tonight, I think I'm going to try to throw up a long post with a preliminary grouping of poems. I'm not sure if this idea is good, bad, or otherwise, but it'll be something for those of you interested in orderings and scope to look at. I was thinking a little bit about folded plates and think I should do a few more irish language using poems around it so people have a chance to get the idea there might be some irish flowing around. Is all for now.

Newest Prompts from Poetry Class

So, sorry these are bit late. (they're valentine's day themed, in case you couldn't tell)

1. Write a love poem by focusing on objects (see Mina Loy).

2. Write a love poem using words found from another book (Paradise Lost for example, or your text.

3. Write a love poem that begins "The dark vaccination candidates" (Celan)

4. Write an "anti-sonnet."

5. Write a "shattered sonnet."

6. Write about a disease.

7. Write a love poem based on collage of texts.

8. Write a love poem in which you become a stranger to own language (English, that is).

9. Write a love poem which is monstrous.

10. Write a love poem that is campy.

11. Write a distracted love poem.

Collection

So, I think I'm going to try and pile the cream of the past two months creative output into a collection of sorts. The next few posts are going to be installments from that collection idea. Basically grouped drafts of the poems I've written here, and elsewhere. I'm toying with the idea of making a website of the collection when I've got it in a fairly decent state... if I do that the link will show up here.

Lost Elegance

It seems like the revised poem loses a lot of the original's elegance. While there are some things that are good, and will be kept, I think that the added punctuation breaks up the flow a lot, which I don't at all like. I'm not quite sure how to address the problem of linking my words loosely but that'll sit for now. Blech

Revisions: Goblin Graspings

After writing piles and tonnes of poems these past two months I'm starting to feel a little overwhelmed by the sheer mass of the unfinished work I've left behind me. So I'm slowing down and editing some. I think I'm going to go in reverse chronological order and so Goblin Graspings is next.

In order to do this revision I enumerated the stanzas and tried to work out exactly what the tenor (or meaning) of each was. I then found some way of unifying the distracted, disengaged, and half-formed ideas in the poem while (hopefully) emphasizing and reinforcing the ideas already formed in it, and maintaining and improving the structural and poetic considerations that went into it. My stanza by stanza evaluations went something like this.

1. Heaviness, density, some pungent aroma belabors the opening sentiment
2. Relaxed Images (Lap, Bask) contrast earlier impulse towards weight, transition to restricted oppressed and deceived dogs (that last refers to the "others slys" line which, for those of you who don't read aloud, sounds almost exactly like "other's lies" and lands on a lot of the same connotations too)
3. Confused Lapse - given name (Bafflelapse), Following is the confusion engendered by this paralizing thing... stutter stepping of language foreshadows eventual stagnation. Enter Basilisk (shy) source of the coming catalepsy, ashamed of its death gaze under its tell-tale marks of ocular disease

Circular poem - end leads to beginning (need to indicate)
why the title? confusing - should go rename "Round" ?
Put moment of almost life in each stanza, a pulse must exist to be stilled, slowed


So I guess those were my thoughts (written on a nearby bit of scrap paper) from them I came to this revised poem.


Round

- brack cast musk murmurs catalepsy until dusk clouds grow smirking pinions
and take heavy flight)

Lap. Bask. - Dogs filing under burdened skies and trying
on each other's sly s

Baffelapse - eyes wide -
-forward dead -
- crow rooster anosmic -
-Basilisk, shy under pertinent styes (Now -

Write a One Line Poem

1. shifted harbors blink window wisps out thru the crepe paper night

2. lapse lines of charcoal fingers uncurl with the lingering gloam

Prompts

1. Write a performance piece.

2. Write a poem that evokes strong color images without mentioning a color.

3. These are your last words on earth.

4. Write a poem about being drunk at a party.

5. Write an epitaph.

6. Write a love poem without using any personal pronouns, and without mentioning the word “love”.

7. Write a poem using only dialogue.

8. Write a one-line poem.

9. Write a poem that is exactly half numbers.

10. Write a poem in another language and then translate it. (ANY language)

Above prompts from Cathy Davis (my girlthing)

Goblin Graspings

Musk murmurs, cataleptic, until dusk cloud grows smirking pinions
and takes heavy flight

Laps Basks dogs filing under burdened skies and trying
on each others sly s

Bafflelapse, eyes wide forward dead crow rooster rips
Basilisk shy, under pertinent styes

Cat Slap

purr line feline drop a line or call mine
fold back happy smack kiss tryst more miss?

Unsure she beckons backward lips and marks the place where black stones skip
until they sink

drink slink hear the cash drop clink clink
and wont it ever stop clink clink there
simple slump rock under caught and what?

Fallow states unmake this break and script out lines of finite time to crack our
stone clad thing

Orgiastic Erase

Back up, step up, hup hup up
grip the lack of the limp stump stop
com down calm down clam up
thrup fill bag gone, gack, fact

there is no time that will exactly replicate the lost moments of today
we are emblematically emphatically lost, but cannot go our own way

Shiftback flap-stack meth
odicate drip-date markings
stalkings slippings flippings
frenetic stylings sum up
sharp

Lipsong tonguetrip

I'm a troubadour lip
midship-
mans makings, undertakings
fast last past mast broken cast this raw unraking slaking deep thirst what's worst
I'm not yet gone

shipped drip
cast the whip on dolphin backs
the waves crack for me

Updraft birds cackle harshly
Updraft birds impede and slip
Updraft birds embrace the shipstream
stiff upper
grip this lipsong tonguetrip

Folded Plates

Fin-mouths iasc about undertows toes and
fsck the clean file founds the market mounds
wherein we found this this


aaaaah, slip back breaks these folded plates
these ceramic shells for shells for shells for games
under which of when past me by


castle break, hassle, jostle, snake the last make
margins, make, fold fins that iasc about the
task which we've set for this idiot machine

clean, yourself

clean this mess made of magnet minnows
swimming upended embolism magnamism
brisk baffles electric with eel spun
wire tongues clean yourself

put back this order pot this kettle of
curbside spatter, tongue clatter

clean, yourself, defrag flag emblem mag
net liom mask makes the last I'm

Unshunt methods

................................mark the place in the
new markup language
.......................................mark the place where
we under cut the linguiscape
need escape
......................too straightforward unmouths
read out the catacomb of tongues mark
genealogies of salt sums and roman
payments made
............................centurion centuries marched
marked march upon march of years where
april never once grimaced a great war
..................................................................spring
smarts and drunks trunk their gathered
cold
.......smart tacks lifted
......................................gun inflicted
wounds that only this language knows
the final gap of

Marrow

Bone Marrow twist Marrow
wheel barrow we'll borrow this under
smooth skies tomorrow we'll
collapse

Fawk talk the slick hawk of my
intellect is goshawk diving to the west
wall to the dreams of underclassed mice
with sweet prairie eyes to
wanderlust us

Must brush the back back
tour the track where simple symbols
engorge embrace I trace my
whole line down to one
atom where the things all
come together muddle fuddle
slip the tongue the quantum bubble
pops to waveform fun

The center of things this undertone
this copper drone
tears me out
makes me shout sprung plugs
political drugs and exclaim
inhalant sympathies that fail to
moan the proper
undertone

Marrow makes me fallen fakes me
out and tracks the backs bubble
bun fun where hair sprung lets
fade out, run rout, cast out
I'm done

Overtuned

Method makes I'm mad
Brake bad
Seen sad I'm a
nothing walking smart time
slim-fine want to mark a
fish-path through this
coward brine
undermine
make me want to callback
undertrack fact, it's a set back
can't wait for this tact
to change
Fuck this monkey
Where we goin, under all this
muss, we got a shitmarked film
to bus this table is all we want

What's about to happen

Well, I'm about to spit out a bunch of poems attempting to leverage some of the things at work in Cathy Park Hong's poetry. I apologize in advance, as I'm sure a pile of them will suck. Hopefully some good will come of it all.

Cathy Park Hong

I've been reading her fairly extensively for one of my poetry projects (an apprenticeship project) and I have to say she's pretty amazing. Her primary concern seems to be with the problems of language acquisition and translation, the insider-outsider dynamics of the same. These are pretty outrageously interesting topics to begin with and her approach to them is, well, you decide. In dance dance revolution (yes, that's a poetry collection) she sets the scene with two characters, the historian and the guide, who between them will explore the twisted linguistic landscapes of The Desert, a future city guided and guarded with wealth, wherein a great multiplicity of tongues meet mesh and merge in an ever-changing creole. From this strange linguiscape come poems like

The Hula Hooper's Taunt

I'mma a two-ton spiker hips fast rondeau
N'ere more, nay sayer feel this orbit rattle

Wipe that prattle that spittle crass pupa
Gupta away you ma' man,

where you revolving solving
spin shorty shark satellitic fever

Leer not, lyre I spiral atom pattern
Faster than you say my turn.

Go here for the this and a few more poems from Dance, dance revolution.

Suffice to say her work spans language in time and space and pulls it all together into a hypervocabulary, a sort of additive dialect, which by its self tension and heterogenous cohesion marks the depth and breadth of english and calls into question where our language sits and what it thinks of itself.

Universal Comments

I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but the blog can now be commented on by anyone, anywhere, anonymously or with a nickname, regardless of whether you have a blogger or google account.

BAH HUMBUG

Well,

Weekends are the death of me.
I am incapable of writing on them.
I have however been thinking a lot about writing.
And I tried to write some prose.
But it didn't work out so well.
Cause I can't make myself write while hungover.

The End

PS Sorry

Confessions

Ambivalence dictates my strict stance.
I ha
Where do the calm er

Stuck in a rut, time for some prose

So, as you who read my blog may have noticed, the last couple poems sucked, a lot. For this I'm sorry. In mad hope that I may be able to jolt myself from the string of terrible writing I'm going to write some prose. From reading this, especially if you've not been to my wikispaces project, you might imagine I never write prose. You would be imagining more or less correctly, but not entirely. I do indeed write prose from time to time, and enjoy it. I just, you know, have a much easier time whipping off a poem a night than snapping out long segments of prose narrative. Odd of me, I know. Anyway, I'm going to try and do some prose writing at least once a week, whether it be the continuation of the same story, or merely prose shorts. Hopefully this'll be the first.

Eager and Fin

Spoken

Whistle wisps uncurl and film the sudden cool

I have but one single direction

Argument lisps and listens with undertones of fin shape and leather

Unmade the wash

Drank the filament

And permitted the light to consume my undertongue

Shifts of collar light marked the shadow play and curled my tucked probiscus beneath glow worm gills

I have but one single curl
of eloquence left

JA Revision

I revised the very rough Johnny Astronaut a little from last post, here's the new one.

Next stop, Outer Borzoi!

shuttle Aquari flames on toenails

Back on Aquari Ptsaurians who

turned out neither dead nor

hot-foot dirty leave Pts.

family

issues among the formerly dead

(stepping back for what Aquari)

[stayed Aquari of my livelihood]

{that Charvez had sent me a telegram

Aquari}; had finally come in

and my office would be considerable

- because planned ponies at Clinton

Downs pull into bolted line and

grin through plastic teeth aside

the treatment

getting late, past

suckers at claim learn light

gams entering twin Johnny Astronaut

friend, "friend", a better word

slumming out of vogue (lemon at a loss)

Martha affect Johnny through crocodile

grin.

Johnny Astronaut

Next stop, Outer Borzoi
shuttle Aquari flames on my toenails
Back on Aquari Ptsaurians who
turned out neither dead nor
hot-foot dirty leav Pts. family
issues among formerly dead
stepping back for what Aquari
stayed Aquari of my livelihood
that Charvez had sent me a telegram
Aquari; had finally come in
and my office would be considerable
because planned ponies at Clinton
Downs pull into bolted line and
grin through plastic teeth aside
the treatment getting late past
suckers at claim learn light
gams entering twin Johnny Astronaut
friend, "friend", a better word
slumming out of vogue lemon at a loss
Martha affect Johnny through crocodile
grin.

Johnny Astronaut

Next stop, Outer Borzoi
shuttle Aquari flames on my toenails
Back on Aquari Ptsaurians who
turned out neither dead nor
hot-foot dirty leav Pts. family
issues among formerly dead
stepping back for what Aquari
stayed Aquari of my livelihood
that Charvez had sent me a telegram
Aquari; had finally come in
and my office would be considerable
because planned ponies at Clinton
Downs pull into bolted line and
grin through plastic teeth aside
the treatment getting late past
suckers at claim learn light
gams entering twin Johnny Astronaut
friend, "friend", a better word
slumming out of vogue lemon at a loss
Martha affect Johnny through crocodile
grin.

Social post

Erhm, I got tired of just writing poetry all the time. It becomes quite intimidating to see a pile of 20 unedited poems every time you log in to something, regardless of their quality or lack thereof. Whatever. Anyway, basically just talking to myself. Life is at is, I've got tests this week, I've got obligations of all sorts, and I'm feeling tired (but not burnt out). I'm overwhelmingly busy and I'm infinitely grateful to have an outlet for my writing. That is all.

Rory

Feral shinfish awkwardly engage

Arguably we finish our statements with some small prejudice.
This is understandable, being a biproduct of our excellence, the
shinfish markings which muddle and force an awkward exchange.

Engaged with fixed pixilations and corralled embolisms furtive
cuts elapse the damming encrusted with arborial efforts and
exoskeleton similes. unrighteous

Brevity under Illuminance

Under meager skies wistwood smidgens mock and twist and tongue and beak engrace engorge a fragile race of undertonnage smiles

Under cryogenic rivers lurefish deploy lightning lamps and would have gapmaw slander on all their corresponding corpses

Elegiac gasps, undulations by which the sympathetic magic of remembrance and recovery might be furthered.

Deviant scuttlefish misalign, thwart cosmopolitan principalities of flying fish from their airborne eruptions, consumption

gull food, quiphemeral memorial, solipsis, irrationing smiles