Wasted numbers ondrown, wist

Quiet, eist liom, entrail tracks elong
ate the sacred number smarts with tracked
torpidities Where within withall

Classified in unthinking absolutions
Marked laceration trains

Chugged trump-bottle blasted glass
blown backhammer seminal slowings
Inundate inhale extricated from artisanic
dervish turns

Saratoga Springs

Water whimpers up under rock bed breaks.
Breaks work wet withers, horseback browns.
Browned with Eskimo sun, sympathetic shrivel.
Shriveled raisin skins stammer out their last steam-breaths.
Breaths worked wetly, wasting under didactic corona.
In the creeping iris twists an eyeworm, slow fistula forming in its crawled path.

Prompts Once More

1. Write a poem that "tackles contemporary mass culture head on."

2. Write a conceptual poem.

3. Write a poem that is "emotionally dead and monotonous, but in a good way."

4. Write a poem that moves by a process of transformation (rather than say narrative).

5. Write a poem meant for performance.

Courtesy Johanness Gorannson

Happy Easter

Happy Everyone. God Bless.

Journal

As a project for my poetry writing class we were asked to create a journal (a publication space for poems and (potentially) other creative output). The result of my efforts can be found here. I liked it so much I may end up doing it again from time to time. Anyway, happy easter to every creature.

clipped, fickle, this thick thistle chill

Journal

So, I have to do a journal for my poetry writing class. It'll be a collection of various poems (6 of my own and 5 of other people's I think) and I think I'm going to use my poetic harshness program to give the whole thing unity. The idea, I think, will be to have the poem-graphs (aesthetograms) as entryways into the poems. The table of contents will be untitled, instead it will have texture graphs of the title (or perhaps the least granular texture graph of the entire poem). You sort of pick the poem you want to see based on the look of it, I think that'd be fun. This idea of aesthetographic conceptualization of written word could influence the thought in all sorts of ways. For instance, I could try to fill a given issue of the journal with poems of certain average values, or try to replicate a landscape, or do multi-leveled comparisons between poems. I don't even know what I mean by all that, but it sounds cool. Anyway, the basic idea is that you could use different aesthetographic machines (of which the harshness program is just one) to shape the poems in a journal and draw interest to certain aspects of them. What's more, you could literally draw those aspects.

A poetic constellation might be interesting. I just thought of this so forgive the rough segue. Basically, you graph each word of a poem on two axis, harshness for one (because i've already developed a system for calculating phonetic harshness (albeit a crude one)) and, i don't know, length of words. Then you could sort of plot the path which a given poem wanders. This is a poor example because it wont supply a plot which moves by small increments (which would make the constellations interesting), but then again it might be an interesting exercise to attempt to produce small incremental jumps in a poem according to this constellation graphing.

Categorized Aesthetic

So in light of my recent exploration of technical tools for evaluating the soundscapes of poetry I've decided to begin an ongoing discussion in a topic I'm calling categorized aesthetics. Basically, the area of inquiry is methodologies by which someone can mechanically determine (to a certain degree) some aspect of the aesthetics of a piece. I'm particularly interested in generating a graphical representation of these determinations. The harshness program is an (extremely elementary) example of a aesthetograph. My hope is that I'll be able to produce a series of similar programs (in type), each charting a different aspect of aestheticism. I think the next thing I'm going to try to do is measure alliteration. Similarly simple programs might evaluate consonant or vowel density (related to the harshness problem). One can imagine a graph which is an overlay of the outputs of several such aesthetographic machines. This would not only be visually interesting (as a representation of sound in a visual manner) but also potentially useful in criticism by enabling someone to extract readily by intuitive visual means the sound structure of a given poem. In order to do the proper amount of layering I'm going to have to learn a little about generating graphs with java, but I think it'd be a worthwhile endeavor and probably produce extraordinarily interesting results.

Elderberry Blues

Walked back down tripped found and gone

Left back browned drowned doubt and drawn

Fortune favors, lost labours, minimizes the doubt and crazes

I don't quite

understand

the leftover slight of hand

Grasp back smart rack left long down and round

I'm tracked worn black crafted blasted down

Grippers gators, entrance errors, going round and facing faster

I can't simple

drift-dimple

where the sun shades sand

Fistulations and all those other inconveniences

Left lane:

Warbled rivers range and dopplerize. Caveat: willow winds attest to marbling in the intellectual sphere.

Right lane:

Fortunate allusions restructure, mitigate, untertwine. Whinge and fissure, prolonged embolic breaths.

Whetted on the back of my cracked hand

Ta

Argued and illuminated. Thinkgressions marked on slim soil. narrow land. an arrowed hand
lists under its feathered burden.

Bron

Dark sounds surveillance symbols lingering in fallow fields of leather. Sordid corvee, conscription
on the order of

Orm

Ore abounds and whispers sounds of grey galvanization. Thumped, thudded, a ruse of little tendency. Whetted on the back of my cracked hand.

I have no idea why I just wrote this

owing to the long arbitration process we have not yet been able to comment on
your outstanding patent. Please forgive the inopportune interruptions to your review,
they are the result of a great deal of litigation surrounding the processing of work
which does not quickly move through the arbitration process. Ta bron orm.

Not Quite

gallow wings fletch themselves with
mourning foliage

I am not crying

gallow wings unfurl under lowing

Soft Poem

Elderberry boogie

soot trees sway under
soot trees sway and twist under
soot trees under way sway and twist
tree soot sunders yaws and twists
orbital entrails overcome me

Collection

Here are the poems I've written in january and february, minus the crap. It's still not finished, but it's much more finished. Comments would be welcome (including stuff like "you should delete that poem, it sucks" or "you should change the order in which these poems are presented" or "fuck yourself and die"). Check. Thankee. G'night. (PS. editing this is what I've been doing instead of posting lately.)

Babylon Round

Earnest labels elaborate

build in treble tongues

eclipse the rebel twinnings

error gongs

Fallen liquors adumbrate

clear a cuckold lung

fishup on arid dammings

follow songs

Guarded liners fascinate

drip down ladder rungs

gallop with wastrel rimmings

golem wrongs

Cordially We Request Your Assistance

Mark the place in the

new markup language

Mark the place where

we under cut the linguiscape

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

inflicted

wounds that only this language knows

the final gap of

Harsh lines this elegant machine spins

hard sparks and with brute mechanic

marks a path through future flurries and

on

Smooth swan shapes, the curvature of

clouded desire and drake dreams slip

soft structures shifting smoothly

snow brushed

Here we think of something less manageable, the acreage of desire.

What trappings must we then consider? Let us calmly evaluate,

deriving establishments and eroneous echoes. Find me

unflattered. Follow down the sychophantic trips of tongue.

The textsured effluence undermines us. Watching weaves irrigate

the unfounded desires of flesh and simply evaluated leave the

underquotient finality.

Flippant toggles hold together the arguments of cloth and cold,

worship briskly at fingertips, film of water and skated simplicity.

Disengage the outlaw similes that water down.

Disengage the long shore pipes of plastic preference.

Disengage the meaning of these emblematic instruction sets.

Disengage the meaning of these emblematic instruction sets.

Lab trumpets formulate

this response. Know with stiff certainty the marsh-water proclamation of driftwood calculus, waiting only

coordinate-systems away.

Imperfect mapping contorts along beetle brows gesturing at

shift-sand continuities and limits approaching

anything but evening rain and

tide swept shins

Strangistortivating

under unbalanced

Buddhas

Fallow Cities Lay in Florid Decadence

Where ellipses waved in the long grass

glass shimmers under ordinances evoked

by impassioned cannon

smooth worked arguments, sanded away

under epoxy undulations thoroughly

shifting this cold and ungrammatical construction

departed orientals make flippant breaks

subtle languishments forward backtraces

establish close rapports and nod in

copulation

Feral Shinfish Awkwardly Engaged

Arguably we finish our statements with some prejudice.

This is understandable, being a biproduct of our excellence, the

shinfish markings which muddle and force an awkward exchange.

Engaged with fixed pixelations and corralled embolisms furtive

cuts elapse the damming encrusted with arborial efforts and

exoskeleton similes.

Folded Plates

fin-mouts iasc about undertows toes and

fsck the clean file founds the market mounds

where

aah, slip back breaks these folded plates

these ceramic shells for shells for shells for games

under which of when put me by

castle break, hassle, jostle, snake the last make

margins, make fold fins that iasc about the

task set for this idiot machine

clean, yourself

clean this 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

Found on a Red Checked Table Cloth Last Wednesday

Father,

The elbows of the ground are bending now.

The slipstream earth bowls down. Berry red

boils down, the firebed.

I am not crying. Shifted salt is merely finding

salt lines in my suede shoes. Topographical

etchings mark my rise and fall.

Loosely the marks of map burn away, under

my lens-light. Sharp glass cuts the fission air.

Fire flirts under the political oracle, smoke.

Somewhere oceans are receding, peeling

under this new mountains pretentions. Peak

tops jut, cut. Scalpels mark red lines in some

fecund cadaver. Its hundred thousand maggot

children crest like sea foam round the flecked

face of the knife.

I have seen you for the first time, as she bleeds

out around my hunch-form.

(ashamed of its death gaze)

Musk murmurs catalepsy until dusk clouds grow pinions

and take heavy flight

Lap. Bask. - Dogs filing under burdened skies and trying

on each others slys

Baffelapse, eyes wide forward dead crow rooster anosmic

Basilisk, shy under pertinent styes

How we learned to dance like this

Metronome blocks talk. They talk about

where they were when you were where

they are.

Swinging back and forth through their

rhythmic temporal necessities

Burrow animals, moles and badgers

brush dark dust in your rolling slouch

slump in time with

august bodies, may rollings, simple

textures

slump shuffle the awkward eclipse of

circling limbs and

shuntgrins

april climbs the live

wires

slipped through mole-holes

through power lines

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

Lipsong Tonguetrip

I'm a troubadour lip

midship -

fast last past mast broken

cast this row unraking slaking deep

thirst

Shipped drip

cast the whip on dolphin backs

the waves crack for me

Updraft birds cackle smartly

Updraft birds impede and slip

Updraft birds embrace the shipstream

stiff upper

grip this lipsong tonguetrip

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 west ways

where there underclass crass mice

slice 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

fine pin thin things all

come together muddle fuddle

slip the tongue the quantum bubble

pops to waveform foam

soma stone this undertone

this copper drone

cancels doubt

ribbed rout. Persian rugs,

political drugs exclaim

inhalant sympathies that fail to

moan the octave

under tone, undertow

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

q0yqw8q

Etched with sharp shards,

flint knife grates in hasty furrows

marks its place and tracks tracks

that twist and scrape the secret simple name

Glass flows slowly - time tugs, contorts

and lengthens, lowers the watchword

the crisp ice of fallen frost forms in webs

catches on lingering letter's ledges

Finally faded, the thick bottom bulge of

many centuries sitting shows a single twisted

syllable, writhed to aphasia

LIFT

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 clippings tripping

car alarms

Primary Key

There found they him

his Rory was a

wistful wash the

long twists of his

hair undone the

carmichael cost

almost nothing, just

a promise

His absent art showed

conspicuously round

undecorated walls

I do not remember or forget.

Knowledge knocked, etched,

edged round doors

and managed itself away

of him, Rory, I unknow

I will reserve judgement for the time being.

Slowly I am falling back to sleep,

And in a few moments will be finally

underwater guitar, where you could play

yourself perfect surfing weather, or another

tsunami, depending on how much

you liked Nirvana.

One day I would smile at you and consider

carefully the absenteeism implicit in congregational

homogeneity, and you would probably be baffled.

Thinking this sort of thing seems to distract.

Perhaps another sortie into punctuation, spelling, capitalization

Another guitar thing would be to find the perfect equation

for deriving, from chord mutings punctuation. I would use

this technique to programmatically derive the exact musical

texture of the Declaration of Independence.

I suspect that this tool would discourage conventional musicians

who were likewise attempting to derive its precise and unamibiguous

texture

But I would not mind the sitar; it has tones we have not

properly accounted for.

If played under water it might conjure a mystic cycle of sea urchins

or spike your drink

or call my brother late at night

and ask him whether he's ever had sex

Spearmint Tongues

Block-water

at strange pressures

purses, steams cold

they too

Saint Mary burbling in slight waters

Spoken

Whistle wisps uncurl and film the sudden cool

I keep shark leather underskin

Argument lisps and listens with submerged splashing

Unmade the wash

Drank the filament

And permitted the light to consume my undertongue

Shifts of collar light marked the fin shapes and curled my tucked

probiscus beneath glow worm gills

I have but one last ell

of eloquence left

Dunn Irrigables Flow Swiftly to Me

Tripped on lines

the fast thinking thuds

and stumbles over its

overwheeling feet

and falls to simple

slushing stuttered stop

stagnant

still pond gathers

its soiled serpents

its failing flies

its dark clouds and muck-moss

land fills slowly

those gaps which cannot run

to clean sea

and cluttered

word ways

dam shifted stanzas

today

On the lips of a sweet skimway there stands

He is human enough, measuring with tongue

the length and breadth of some rational planet

Reading the land as the earth grows thin,

near the edge, by heaven and hell this thin

soil, not much stratified, disturbed

Salivary shapes murk the thin isotopes

of his teeth, enamel geography,

from the crushed bicuspid they extract

a place of paleolithic origin

where you are from, human

(thin) enough

Thoroughly Waiting in Absense

Thunderous epigraphs allowing

what was wondered for so long as

which

Follow low the dervish spins the

arrow row in fence hedge grow

Creeping reel simply evening

Awkwardly embrace, kiss,

fall back down again

Mandarin grins rim our courtyard

where the shadows postulate upon

our true natures, discuss our relation

to the cloth-thick night

Disjointed sounds, I listen to your lips

Disjointed sounds, I listen to your lips

I. Under meager skies wistwood sm-igeons mock and twist and tongue and beak engrace engorge a fragile race of undertonnage smiles.

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

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

IV. Deviant scuttlefish misalign, thwart cosmopolitan principalities of flying fish from their airborn eruptions, consumptions.

V. Gull food. Quiphemeral memorial. Solipsis.

On Technical Evaluations of Poetry

I wrote a program the other week that analyzes the harshness of language in poems. It's really simple, but it produced (among other things) the graph behind Babylon round at the link in the last post. It's sweet, it makes poems look cool, and it got me thinking more consciously about the language I'm using in my work.