confession: I am a tapeworm of wishes

I wish I could be Robert Musil. Vomit out parties and opposing philosophical structures, let myself go with sentences and boring characters, let the boring characters boringly court each other under the eyes of boring spectators yet pull it off (if only Thomas Mann could like me! another one I envy and must read with equal sense of torture, the magic mountain is waiting on a large stack of books). If I were Robert Musil I’d have been: to the military and an engineer and met Franz Kafka. Surely that would help me in a place like now where I’m standing with interconnections – pietas of the Revolution, museums in Brussels, Desnos in Auschwitz, the Pope (don’t even know which one) hung up at the butcher’s - but apart from them, only a few badly mastered tenses. Where do connections and references end, when do the characters stop leaping into the swimming pool or retrieving nectarines from the fruitbowl in a way satisfactory enough for me to stop eating tortilla chips, yes when will I write my longest sentence, somewhere between Proust and Joyce, when will someone get back with the nut chocolate, when will I leap into Robert Musil and become his own private tapeworm? 

cummings foreword

 ee cummings, foreword to is 5

On the assumption that my technique is either complicated or original or both, the publishers have politely requested me to write an introduction to this book.

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 burlesk, viz., 'Would you hit a woman with a child?-No, I'd hit her with a brick.' Like the burlesk comedian, I am abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement.

If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little-somebody who is obsessed by Making. Like all obsessions, the Making obsession has disadvantages; for instance, my only interest in making money would be to make it. Fortunately, however, I should prefer to make almost anything else, including locomotives and roses. It is with roses and locomotives (not to mention acrobats Spring electricity Coney Island the 4th of July the eyes of mice and Niagara Falls) that my 'poems' are competing.

They are also competing with each other, with elephants, and with El Greco.

Ineluctable preoccupation with The Verb gives a poet one priceless advantage: whereas nonmakers must content themselves with the merely undeniable fact that two times two is four, he rejoices in a purely irresistible truth (to be found, in abbreviated costume, upon the title page of the present volume).

so you want to be a writer

video

I started a poem.

 
 the:

deserted carousels, intestines
of video, wide ribboned eyes waiting for
an unravelling,
the spinning
hoo
     la hoo
              ps round&round
the garden like faded teddies memory attempted
to recreate

re
  creation
             al
               playground
to spin the image out&out


I broke this video with a blunt knife.

It bled on the sofa and now it's red.

Collect the drugged eyes of movies
 be
    for
         e they
                 we
                      ave
                           their pictures.

We don't come for the pictures.
Life for memory and ornament,
round&round death cutting straight on its motor-
bike:

 I finished a poem.

picture phase continues

Salvador Dali's Credo