Archive for December, 2017|Monthly archive page
For the Record: “Reading Dudek’s The Caged Tiger”
One of the ironic aspects of the digitization of cultural artefacts and the blissfully ignorant acceptance if not celebration of this process is, apart from those documents excluded from the process in the first place, the inevitable decay of links and websites and the consequent disappearance of the works they hosted. Such was the case with the poem below.
When Louis Dudek’s penultimate volume of poetry The Caged Tiger was published, I read it with some irritation and sought a way to express it other than in a review. The compositional answer was to write poems that intervened in the original, engaging in a kind of dialogue; the relation of the new poem to the original is underlined in [28], below. The words in bold are Dudek’s; the numbers in [] are the page numbers of his original book.
The novelty or singularity of this formal maneuver to contemporaneous and subsequent compositional practice I leave to the determination of the learning of the reader; the poem was written the year of the publication of Dudek’s volume, 1997.
Reading Dudek’s The Caged Tiger
[10]
The transcendental then is merely the unknown
—No: how what’s known is—
inside out: no silhouette
no eidos no idea:
The transcendental’s how you know
you’re facing the mirror
…
Aside from yourself
the world
things
How it all happened
to come
together
‘s beyond you
…
Neither this nor any mystery’s gnawed
The mystic’s “the tight-lipped”
Tongue’s quiver locked up
[3]
Art is a dead god’s tongue
whose words
we still like the sound of
“the music of the spheres”
night’s white noise
the whole spectrum
of electromagnetic radiation
visible and audible
only to the radio-telescopes’
timpani tipped to listen
idle humming
“I-am-I”’s sound poem
[8]
Time’s transcendental
A watch
[15]
As one of those
in downy feathers
mouth open
happened on
spring mornings
[39]
in the cage too tight to lie in
a small pot nobody empties
wire mesh hardly a reach up
nights icy rain
days the sun throbs
the face in the cool mud
[28]
The bass beat faster than a raver’s heart at daybreak
shudders the whole body in the spot and strobelit dark
College boys and girls in their personal fashion statements
each writhe alone in cigarette smoke fog and pheremones
[99]
The old are removed
to their graves
and the young come up
to fill their places
i.e., as a “[f]ine bod”y
closed in a dipping casket
Old Heracleitus
renewed every sun
Zsolt Sőrés: Everything that interests me has its essence in sound
If you’ve read the poem “Get Real” I’ve shared here and wondered just who Ahad Master is, you can read an interview with him, here!
“…where lives the virtue of poetry…”
Yesterday, Canada’s Chris Banks baldly posed the question to his Facebook friends “What is authentic poetry?”. I (mis)remembered, after my own initial contributions to winding or snarling the ensuing thread, I had written a poem that addressed at least “the virtue of all authentic thinking” (and I’m hardly the first to imagine or suggest that poetry can be a kind of thinking). I post that poem, below.
It was written at the same time as the poem that opens Ladonian Magnitudes, “topos tropos typos’ (a confession”, itself composed before even my first trade edition, Grand Gnostic Central. It’s title is a quotation from Charles Olson. Whether it is possessed of any qualities that might be construed as “authentic” I leave to the judgement of the reader. For my part, I cite again, as I did first in yesterday’s thread, Novalis, from his Fragments and Studies 1799-1800, #671: “Schwer schon ist zu entscheiden, doch einzig mögliche Entscheidung, ob etwas Poesie sei oder nicht”: It’s already difficult to decide, but it’s the only decision possible, whether something is poetry or not.
“Unreal, that is, to the real itself”
where lives the virtue of poetry
and all thinking free
of the tyranny of the real
in perceiving the real
flow, elementally
fluid, hence watery
form forms
breath
seen in Winter
as slippery
hard and cold
as ice to the head
cracked
as the sea, unfathomable
God as Melville says
pondering
from the masthead
a shriek above
the water
a shriek
above the water
the same