Cosmopoetica Commonplace Book

from “The Enormous Room”

chris — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 04:42:25 +0000

There are certain things in which one is unable to believe for the simple reason that he never ceases to feel them. Things of this sort– things which are always inside of us and in fact are us and which consequently will not be pushed off or away where we can begin thinking about them– are no longer things;they,and the us which they are,equals A Verb;an IS.

ShareThis

from “Is 5″

chris — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 04:41:38 +0000

At least my theory of technique,if I have one,is very far from original;nor is it complicated. I can express it in fifteen words,by quoting The Eternal Question And Immortal Answer of bulesk,viz. “Would you hit a woman with a child?– No,I’d hit her with a brick.” Like the burlesk comedian,I am anormally fond of that precision which creates movement.

ShareThis

from “Nonlecture Four: i & you & is”

chris — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 04:40:59 +0000

Writing, I feel, is an art; and artists, I feel, are human beings. As a human being stands, so a human being is: not that some human beings aren’t acrobats, while others– but why anticipate Him and Santa Claus?

ShareThis

“Rediscovering Bruce Smith”

chris — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 04:35:19 +0000

In Slip, his first book about the rise and fall of the petite bourgeoisie,
the parents are disguised as one another– father as woman, but enraged,
mother as man but unpaid, a hostage to who she is and who she tries to be.
The son’s the little darling but lives in irony. Does he love the man
or the woman or the X? Life is beautiful, duplicitous, a sex detective mystery
like the ones mother read. Chandler and Cain. Father cuts the books up
with scissors, shreds them to protect his son from the fatale. Like the boy
in the book, he grew elliptical. Who’d want to look beneath the drag of skirts
to find that pleasure is a hair shirt? Born of the dream and disillusionment
of noir, the retailed wrecks and splendors of nowhere,
he lived ravished by color, like Dorothy in Oz. Color
like an imprinted name– Smith or Rodriguez– whispered in the dark
to him something vast and swarming and munificent, some clamoring
for red and gold and vermilion like a sunset, the suffering of nations stilled
for a minute. He tried, as in his next book, Snarl, to hide the body or evolve
from his nervous system (like a fish) a mind with God and Nature and Mankind
in it, when all there was was a shadow and a sax and the voice of a melancholiac
singing a love song freighted with shame. Like one of his heroes he is lame,
Northern, can’t dance. Sensitive. A Jew nearsighted and poor and passing.
He stews in Philadelphia, enters the University of the Dark, develops a dysphasia,
develops eyes like sea creatures in the Pacific trenches, survives a heart-attack,
a few, sleeps on benches, speaks in tongues or hums, writes his bildungsroman
(which goes up in flames when a match his father strikes ignites the manuscript).
But still he’s happy being in the dark with things slowed down or exploded, the tick
of the projector, the private dreams made public, faces the size of houses, the politics
of heartbreak, the astrology of money, guys and dolls, paleface and redskin, funny
stuff, weepers, horror porn, sleepers, all the rare huge mystery taboos,
all the ripped and rearranged blues become the book he is most remembered for:
Fugue, more music than story, more vamp and pan and zoom
than empire, history, and doom, in which a man in prison
sings to himself translations of the language of the news he receives
in the altered frequencies of memory: pink, then more pink, then the necessary
felony of self, then the minstelsry, and a feeling that he had been inside
of other people, like a virus or a song, and so survived.

ShareThis

“The World as Meditation”

chris — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 03:20:11 +0000

It is Ulysses that approaches from the east,
The interminable adventurer? The trees are mended.
That winter is washed away. Someone is moving

On the horizon and lifting himself up above it.
A form of fire approaches the cretonnes of Penelope,
Whose mere savage presence awakens the world in which she dwells.

She has composed, so long, a self with which to welcome him,
Companion to his self for her, which she imagined,
Two in a deep-founded sheltering, friend and dear friend.

The trees had been mended, as an essential exercise
In an inhuman meditation, larger than her own.
No winds like dogs watched over her at night.

She wanted nothing he could not bring her by coming alone.
She wanted no fetchings. His arms would be her necklace
And her belt, the final fortune of their desire.

But was it Ulysses? Or was it only the warmth of the sun
On her pillow? The thought kept beating in her like her heart.
The two kept beating together. It was only day.

It was Ulysses and it was not. Yet they had met,
Friend and dear friend and a planet’s encouragement.
The barbarous strength within her would never fail.

She would talk a little to herself as she combed her hair,
Repeating his name with its patient syllables,
Never forgetting him that kept coming constantly so near.

ShareThis

“The Trucker”

chris — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 20:04:04 +0000

Elevators, like great oaks
rise into the evening, and when they descend
you hardly know yourself.
All night
the fair, shadowed cab light
shone on the trucker’s face. If only
he had learned to think like that!

Some extremes, but much benign lack of interest,
for which the heart gradually opens.
… patiently working, bringing cattle

from Denver, sorghum, oats,
butter, wheat and pigs from the Midwest,
steel bars, the body

with its different nightly smells …
He wanted to walk the length of Kansas.
The years had not even been difficult,

but like the stars
he watched from the speeding cab,
spaced unevenly …
so many particular events.

ShareThis

“The Secret of Poetry”

chris — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 20:03:04 +0000

When I was lonely, I thought of death.
When I thought of death I was lonely.

I suppose this error will continue.
I shall enter each gray morning

Delighted by frost, which is death,
& the trees that stand alone in mist.

When I met my wife I was lonely.
Our child in her body is lonely.

I suppose this error will go on & on.
Morning I kiss my wife’s cold lips,

Nights her body, dripping with mist.
This is the error that fascinates.

I suppose you are secretly lonely,
Thinking of death, thinking of love.

I’d like, please, to leave on your sill
Just one cold flower, whose beauty

Would leave you inconsolable all day.
The secret of poetry is cruelty.

ShareThis

“Homage to Robert Bresson”

chris — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 19:13:10 +0000

Homage to Robert Bresson

Spaces await their people.
An alabaster row of public urinals.
An empty theater. A table,
Chairs, an oak door, heavily grained,
Brass knob turning & who
Shall enter, already lost forever

In their lives? Now
Will a soul reveal its human face,
Secret luminous flesh,
& because the soul is speechless
There will be little talk,
Better revealed in this single plate

Set like a day-moon or
Lidless eye before its chair.
Who sits shall eat, because
It is important to stay alive, to
Bear the soul’s countenance
Down into the streets, their traffic,

Its endless movement. Here
A young priest, shaken, prays to give
False solace to the dying;
A girl, too young, casually prepares
To drown. Why are these
Forsaken, too long in anguish?

Why does the tree bear leaves,
The water bear downward into the earth?
This is the law, the rest
A commentary. She take off her clothes,
Folding them. He enters
A room. Though nothing can be done,

They are not resigned.

ShareThis

“Strugnell’s Sonnets (VI)”

chris — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 02:46:12 +0000

Let me not to the marriage of true swine
Admit impediments. With his big car
He’s won your heart, and you have punctured mine.
I have no spare; henceforth I’ll bear the scar.
Since women are not worth the booze you buy them
I dedicate myself to Higher Things.
If men deride and sneer, I shall defy them
And soar above Tulse Hill on poet’s wings –
A brother to the thrush in Brockwell Park,
Whose song, though sometimes drowned by rock guitars,
Outlives their din. One day I’ll make my mark,
Although I’m not from Ulster or from Mars,
And when I’m published in some classy mag
You’ll rue the day you scarpered in his Jag.

ShareThis

Humpty Dumpty the Poet

chris — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 02:43:46 +0000

“As to poetry, you know,” said Humpty Dumpty, stretching out one of his great hands, “I can repeat poetry as well as other folk, if it comes to that–”

“Oh, it needn’t come to that!” Alice hastily said…

ShareThis