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

Credo by Jack Kerouac

 Yes, more Kerouac.

Credo by Jack Kerouac

Remember above all things, Kid, that to write is not difficult, not painful, that it comes out of you with ease, that you can whip up a little tale in no time, that when you are sincere about it, that when you want to impress a truth, it is not difficult, not painful, but easy, graceful, full of smooth power, as if you were a writing machine with a store of literature that is boundless, enormous, endless, and rich. For it is true; this is so. Do not forget it in your gloomier moments. Make your stuff warm, drive it home American-wise, don't mind critics, don't mind the stuffy academic theses of scholars, they don't know what they're taking about, they're way of the track, they're cold; you're warm, you're red hot, you can write all day, you know what you know, like Halper; you remember that, Kid, and when you feel as if you cannot write, as if it is no use, as if life is no good, read this over and realize that you can do a lot of good in this world by turning out truths like these, by spreading warmth, by trying to preach living for life's sake, not the intellectual way, but the warm way, the way of love, the way which says: Brothers, I greet you with open arms, I accept your frailties, I offer you my frailties, let us gather and run the gamut of rich human existence. Remember, Kid, the ease, the grace, the glory, the greatness of your art; remember it, never forget. Remember passion. Do not forget, do not forsake, do not forget. It is there, the order and the purpose; there is chaos, but not in you, not way down deep in your heart, no chaos, only ease, grace, beauty, love, greatness.....Kid, you can whip up a little tale, a little truth, you can mop up the floor with a little tale in no time; it is a cinch, you are the flow of smooth thrumming power, you are a writer, and you can turn out some mean stuff, and you will turn out tons of it, because it is you, and do not forget it, Kid, do not forget it; please, please Kid, do not forget yourself; save that, save that, preserve yourself; turn out those mean little old tales by the dozens, it is easy, it is grace, do it American-wise, drive it home, sell truth, for it needs to be sold. Remember, Kid, what I say to you tonight; never forget it, read this over in your gloomier moments and never, never forget.....never, never, never forget.....please, please, Kid please…

The Foxhole Manifesto

Belief & Technique For Modern Prose-- List of Essentials

JACK KEROUAC   BELIEF & TECHNIQUE FOR MODERN PROSE
LIST OF ESSENTIALS

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In Praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. Youre a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

                                                                                                As ever,
                                                                                                        Jack

Antipodal Dwelling by Aimé Césaire

Crucible in which is born the world hair humus of the first earth

hair first worry stone

when the rain shall be the thread with which bit by bit the world undoes itself

when the sun shall be a spider in which to lose ourselves one by one

when the sea shall be an octopus to spit our hopes at us in our faces

when the moon shall uncoil and will unroll for us its long serpent body

when the volcano shall shake its wrinkled pachyderm body

when the wind shall no longer blow because we have forgotten to strike the wind stones

when the stones shall cease to speak for having preached too much in the desert

(entangling my veins an entire forest down to its lowest branches

entangling my veins completely the water and the regime of faithful fires

entangling that from the bottom shall dash waterlilies in my face and my blood

of redemption and my shoulders slipping better than any knots

entangling

a drop of water in the precious alembic of water tables that shall go to the window and
cry out in Esperanto that the weather is fine poorly heard by the volutes scored by our bitterest spit)

a drop of fire in the throat without risk of wind

firefly and water I shall assemble myself in little drops of water of fire too beautiful for any other architect

dwelling made of water glimpsed upon waking

dwelling made of rumpled perfumes

dwelling made of spangled sleep

dwelling made of swelled chests stretched out of benumbed lizards

strength lines me up on the shadowless meridian

pythons crews of catastrophes unnatural brothers of my longitude

roads raise themselves to the height of green-eyed female gnomes intersected with

prayers taking aim at us on the footbridge of the malfunctioning compass sky

dwelling made of a laying-on of palms of hands

dwelling made of red cheetah eyes

dwelling made of a rain of shells of sand

the revolver shots give me a halo too vast this time for my head which arrives via portage in spare parts

In a Grove by Philip Lamantia

Ulysses on water

What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier returning to the range, admire?

Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator’s projection: its umplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8,000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: Its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including billions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents: gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs, and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe) numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90% of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon.

– from Ulysses, Chapter 17

born.

Clearing out my desktop, I found a short poem and remembered I haven't been posting here enough.
Translations from Polish:
o boże boli= oh god it hurts
kwiatuszki= flowers in a sweet way, something like "little flowers"
tuśki= the way I'd say kwiatuszki when I was small :P

There are also references to a Polish poem about the soldiers of Westerplatte, and though the translation is really bad, at least you'll understand this poem better.

Oh god explaining is as long as the poem itself. Anyway, here it is:
___________

born out of o boże boli and sunlight whipping up the air.
born here and not there.
behind the walls they sing the song of the soldiers
of westerplatte.
but it is not summer, and there are no flowers;
only the memory of how I'd say kwiatuszki, tuśki, and throw them
above my head,
giving birth to a completely new gesture.
but sometimes I doubt there was any birth, ever.
soil is eternal, ever-present, bitter and smiling.

bbc (again!): man drowns rescuing two children

man drowns rescuing two children

How the sea's lullaby rocks the rubber ring,
and every wave speaks the universal language
of tide, of force, of the feminine:
shhhh for she and seducing the moon.
But children are no moon. They are bodies
in a ring, the ring is rubber, is a ring because of its hole.

He also has a hole in him now.
Death could be a hole in which there is no air.
Dying could be slow elimination,
like water disappearing from the beach,
like the moon smiling at his lover
and kissing her goodnight.

bbc: thousands take part in 10km run

I haven't done my whole bbc thing for ages, though I was so excited about it. My excuse is travel, but I laze around so much (watching eurovision, for example) that it's not a real reason at all. Anyway, I'm in a good poetry mood today, so I'll share my good mood and bad poetry with everyone else <3

thousands take part in 10km run

the run of the sole
the run of the soul
the run of the lung that ties you to your breath
until it's lost in a plethora of air
the run of a shoe pointing east
because heading east is shoe factories not money
only when you head too far
you bump into the statue of liberty which is a
stone symbolising standing

this is why i'm on the run, you're on it, and the road

the philosophy obsession.

 BBC day 2 and I'm reading philosophy.


no breakthrough in greek talks


oh plato poor plato banging his elbows against the table spilling the soup
nobody wants to discuss this there there
what of the utopian country on which the philosopher is throned
now he asks as he bangs and there is euro falling from the sky
how strong the soul can be

but you know money is more than an idea
beneath the toga
it throbs

new stuff new stuff

NaPo came and went. I didn't care too much; now I have more of a challenge facing me. My friend from youngwritersonline.net and I decided to write a poem or so a day inspired by headlines from the almighty BBC. Here is yesterday in poetry:

mexico police find bodies in bags

A list of art (definition: asphalt, on other wavelengths- headlines):

49 bodies 49 nouns
110 miles (180 kilometers) 110 verbs (180 irregular)
04:00 local time 12:00 time of the muse
18 people in 2 abandoned vehicles 18 words in 2 stanzas
35 corpses in Veracruz 35 rhymes in a masterpiece
26 corpses in Guadalajara 26 similes in Poemcity
47,000 people killed in 6 years 47,000 commas vanquished by 6 poets
1 me reading 1 me writing

nepal's mystery language on the verge of extinction

To fall out of a language like a myap at night.
Even the frogs have their hymns after darkness steps in.
Silence is guiltiest of all. Bells remind of sin.
A woman is trying to break the chair she is sitting on
to get rid of the voice, and the voice follows the creak
of wood, a full sentence like a stomach overflowing with plums.
Your language expresses your guilt
while a confessional takes it, hand-washes and hangs
on a metaphysical line until it's bleached.

What if the moon spoke to you, child of the myap?
What if you are the moon, dying, as the chair creaks?

rise and fall of underwater volcano revealed

there are uprisings and there are falls
there are rainbow lollies melting in sun
heat always makes the headlines
the pacific also feels like fame

the mountains of underworld
have special cores for reciting poetry
that advertise once in a while
but art is drying up
and hades is snoring

his sheets violent waves
sweeping us off the mattress of the world

Bilingual/Bilingüe- Rhina P. Espaillat

My father liked them separate, one there,

one here (allá y aquí), as if aware

that words might cut in two his daughter’s heart

(el corazón) and lock the alien part

to what he was—his memory, his name

(su nombre)—with a key he could not claim.

“English outside this door, Spanish inside,”

he said, “y basta.” But who can divide

the world, the word (mundo y palabra) from

any child? I knew how to be dumb

and stubborn (testaruda); late, in bed,

I hoarded secret syllables I read

until my tongue (mi lengua) learned to run

where his stumbled. And still the heart was one.

I like to think he knew that, even when,

proud (orgulloso) of his daughter’s pen,

he stood outside mis versos, half in fear

of words he loved but wanted not to hear.

Across a Great Wilderness without You - Keetje Kuipers

The deer come out in the evening.

God bless them for not judging me,

I'm drunk. I stand on the porch in my bathrobe

and make strange noises at them—
                                                  language,

if language can be a kind of crying.

The tin cans scattered in the meadow glow,

each bullet hole suffused with moon,

like the platinum thread beyond them

where the river runs the length of the valley.

That's where the fish are.

                                   Tomorrow

I'll scoop them from the pockets of graveled

stone beneath the bank, their bodies

desperately alive when I hold them in my hands,

the way prayers become more hopeless

when uttered aloud.

                            The phone's disconnected.

Just as well, I've got nothing to tell you:

I won't go inside where the bats dip and swarm

over my bed. It's the sound of them

shouldering against each other that terrifies me,

as if it might hurt to brush across another being's

living flesh.

                But I carry a gun now. I've cut down

a tree. You wouldn't recognize me in town—

my hands lost in my pockets, two disabused tools

I've retired from their life of touching you.