Archive for the ‘poems’ Category
September 13 Synchronicity
For me, September 11 is often shadowed (if not overshadowed) by the Dawson College shooting of 2006, which (as a teacher there) I witnessed, from a fortunate, safe distance.
Today, however, reflecting on the work, I opened Ladonian Magnitudes by chance to the poem “Epistle to Zsolti”, a versified missive to my friend, Hungarian sound artist Zsolt Sőrés. The letter, as much as it overtly expresses a desire to correspond and communicate with a distant friend, as a poem, has other motivations, one of which was remarked by the “Gefin” in the poem (Hungarian-language poet Kemenes Géfin László, a close friend at the time), namely, the death of another friend, writer Daniel Philip Brack (DPB), September 13.
In acknowledgement of this manifold synchronicity, and in warm memory of DPB and the other friends in the poem, and the attachment that motivated it in the first place, I share it here.
Epistle to Zsolti
been on a Tom Waits
immersion course
for weeks now
buying him all up
latest and lastest
new or used
listening to just one new song
a day
carefully
these days Foreign Affairs 1977
like Blue Velvet’s soundtrack
reminiscent of Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch
even a couple of “One-eyed Jack’s” in the lyrics:
our cinematic interests
our show’s DAT I’m so eager to hear
because of a heightened self-consciousness about Performance
teaching again now two weeks
Primal Shamanic poetry and poetics
that is “magical”, “sacralizing”, “holy-ing” “aestheticizing”, “estranging” language-act
& “The Truth is Out Where?! Exploring the Unexplained”
eager to get you a draft of our interview (!)
write up a short article on why my favourite books today are Hungarian,
namely yours and Gefin’s
Poems for Jolanta urged me
around high noon today
to likewise edit the literary remains of dear departed DPB
Yes! He in the Budapest Suites
hopfrogging with me a parodic waltz
through that night empty streetcar subway hub under intersection of those big utcas
loud and lively red eyed Bacchic old electric blue shark skin suit skinny black tie 50s grey hat
who one Friday
September 13
overdosed OD’d
in San Francisco LA
right out of rehab
he who made
our furious correspondence
into spontaneous pseudonymous
“heteronyms” like Pessoa’s?
Kierkegaardian personae?
serial surreal literary works
whose literary remains
but for one
now lost?
novel on old 5-inch floppy
now my care
hardly able to pick them up
for grief
for guilt
the years since
so really should get together with Cronenbergian croney and computer design wiz and get to it
Did I ever send you photos of the Trabante?
Hold-ups began on our return in July
when installing Flashcard reader jammed access to my Office Suite
& December saw the whole house of cards come crashing down
Just when the Raelians announced they’d cloned a human being
& BBC Radio 4 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung feuillton Times Higher Education Supplement all wanted my opinion
now I’m waiting for the cheques and checking my expectations that something poetic might come out of it
Sleeping, eating,
& now working
are all I’ve been able to do since December 3
But now apparently energetic enough to send out some feelers
which seems appropriate for someone who aspires to be
the antennae of the race
Corpus Sample: Materializations II: “Gloze”
Last week’s “materialization” sought to concretize the language by collaging snippets of decontextualized conversation. This week’s tightens the knot, making “the language speak” about the language itself.
The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein is remembered for remarking that “meaning is use.” Taking this maxim literally, I collaged together examples of every use of the word ‘gloze’ drawn from the examples supplied by the Oxford English dictionary under the word’s entry. The word is thereby lexically if not semantically “emptied out” in a cubist fashion, putting Wittgenstein’s contention to an ironic test. The poem is further self-reflexive, because the word means to glare or inspect closely; therefore, the title can be taken to be the imperative tense, instructing the reader to gloze, gloss (another meaning), or otherwise attend to the word itself. The word has the added bonus, aside from its polysemy, of being a pun on the plural of the substantive ‘glow’ and the third person singular conjugation of the verb ‘to glow’ among other things. Attentive readers will also note the poem is a chance fourteen lines….
Though this compositional procedure held promise, I exploited it only two more times, to write the poem “Gnarled Box” (along with “Gloze” included in Grand Gnostic Central) and a longer, much more complex, intertextual work that develops a passage from Lautreamont’s Poesies fittingly entitled “Poesies”.
‘Gloze’ is also the name of the first, self-published chapbook, that served as my calling card in Germany during my first European tour in 1996. And, like “Elenium” it inspired a videopoem by Ty “Jake the Dog” Hochban, viewable after the poem.
Gloze
No more men maye glosen withouten text
Than bylde materles. With fals talkyng
Many gloses are made. With Retorike,
Ne glosed eloquence, some to opteyn
Favour will flatter and glose, with new Glozes
Tainte the Text, and vnto you a fayned
Tale will gloze. Give a good glose from thy strain’d
Goggle eye, peep from the watry Humour,
And glow upon any word you may gloze,
The parasite glozes with sweet speeches,
With the tongue of flattery glozing deeds,
Known only to those who have glozed over
An illusory glozing of light dismally
Glimmering, glosing with the glory of day.
Corpus Sample: Materializations I: “Elenium”
Ironically, at a time when text is at its most material (as something to be cut and pasted, or mindlessly composed or translated by software) it is at the same time most invisible, the sign a mere window onto its meaning, disposable as a paper coffee cup once the latté is finished. Poets have, understandably, especially in recent decades, worked against this trend.
“Elenium” (aside from the elusiveness of its title) slows down the too-ready consumption of the language by complicating its logic. The poem collages overheard bits of conversation without any indication of which words belong to which speakers or even how many speakers there are. However old (and it is very old) this device is, it caused no little consternation to the most vociferous of the reviewers of Ladonian Magnitudes (see the “Product Description” at the book’s page at Amazon.ca) from which this poem is taken.
Happily, the poem inspired a video interpretation (by Ty “Jake the Dog” Hochban), viewable after the poem itself.
Elenium
The isle is full of voices
a tiny little yellow oval pill
Judy Garland ravaged by her phantoms
it’ll all be alright
they’re all pretty full—one’s puffed up
hashish, port, and In Memoriam
we must have some music, some more to drink
and then we are ready for “Shades of Callimachus…”
late night calls for coke are disturbing and boring
I always bring him something from Holland
what have we done yet? —I can see
the flower in the bud—and she is a bud!
let’s remember hysteria was thought to be a migrating uterus
you having sex would never look good
a colony mongrel hand-me-down genes
yet eyes are the guides of love still
that must have given you a twitch or two
with the Xanax I don’t feel like I need a cigarette
though you wouldn’t say you have beaten out your exile
Corpus Sample: “A Visitor from Jerry-Land”
Last week I shared a poem a little more complex and elusive than what I’m wont to compose of late. Whatever difficulty it presented was more logical than anything.
However, a more persistent concern with no less complex consequences for that linguistic art whose medium is essentially public has been a struggle with how to maintain individuality in the face of all the forces that would liquidate it. During my undergraduate studies, “the Death of the Subject” was a hot topic. Today, the Subject is, again, dissolved in various identities, whether gender, race, class, or something other, or, even more gravely, as mere data, profiling a pattern of consumption.
In this poem, from Ladonian Magnitudes, that most public of things, language and text, is folded around the singularity of intertextuality and personal allusion to create a space for individual thought and, paradoxically, dialogue and expression. “A Visitor from Jerry-Land” answers an unpublished poem by the dedicatee (though included as an appendix to Ladonian Magnitudes). To further complicate things, its field of reference is unapologetically personal. Nevertheless, in this nearly hermetic space, it remains possible to engage urgent poetical, ethical, political, and existential matters at the site where they all in fact come into play, the individual person.
A Visitor from Jerry-Land
to Daniel O’Leary
“The makar must a wanderer be”
The chance
97% in my favour,
as even the hooligans
who stoned blind
Homer knew,
is the nether lands’
weather is variable
as the garden’s flowers’ colours’
pleasures under its lights.
Sloth, sallow, must swallow
its name’s root’s in Sanskrit
He-Who-Causes-To-Fail
Ferret out and squirrel away
what you can quoth
Master Ant smugly
even before his widescreen TV
where the Albanians’ Lada
is shot to shit and first one
on the scene’s no medic but
a cameraman focussed
on the slumped driver
his passenger’s shock-eyed begging.
The gravy, this meat’s juices
heat-pressed by kinetic attention.
We drove here in a Peugeot,
right away downed two Stoli shots,
and now, hours later, one makes
it up as he cooks supper while
the other scribbles his version
at the dining table. The sheer volume
of spirits swallowed and inspiring here
prevent the endless end of ill-fare.—
Look: the light waxes every morning
and night argues its obfuscations so
we might see its numbers plain.
In this light
an 18th century volume
of Juvenal with French crib
beside the new reading-chair upstairs
aside the modern English
concurs.
Corpus Sample: “After a Legend of the Prior of Urfort”
My stylistic trend of recent years has been asymptoting to a “poetry degree zero”, a language stripped of overt figuration or texture, relying, instead, on metonymy, allusion, and, what in classical rhetoric might be termed, arrangement. But recently I’ve been hankering for a more complex poetry, not unlike some of that included in my first trade edition Grand Gnostic Central and other poems (1998).
One poem there that embodies what I have in mind is a slightly cheeky retelling of a story about the medieval German mystic, Meister Eckhart, awhile the Prior of Erfort. Eckhart is referred to only paraphrastically, and the spelling of Erfort is modified, as well, for, well, poetic reasons. Whether the poem achieves the sophistication of thought and expression it aspires to I leave, of course, to the reader.
Too, thematically, it touches on the concerns addressed in my last Corpus Sample, since, one way humankind has traditionally attempted to tame the chaos of the wild ride of being alive is to impose a mythic pattern or order, as we’re told the Prior of Urfort seems to, here.
After a Legend of the Prior of Urfort
No soul
Has effect
But by the body held
What you know
What two no one can hold
Weave in a scuffle
These
The plottings
The subtle wishes
Sung by one
An inbred family
On a mountain top
These in one
Divine
He said
Avant le deluge…Rising up against that sinking feeling
A bitter example of how vested interests (William Burroughs named them “the Nova Mob”) pervert reason, choke compassion, and stymie sane responses to global warming played itself out at this year’s Pacific Island Forum. Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, refused to endorse the Tuvalu Declaration proposed by the Smaller Island States group, “which acknowledges a climate change crisis, encourages countries to revise the emissions reductions targets and calls for a rapid phase out of coal use.”
“I am accountable to the Australian people, that’s who I’m accountable for,” Mr Morrison said.

Tuilaepa Sailelethe
Not a year ago, Tuilaepa Sailelethe prime minister of Samoa, delivered a speech in Sydney, Australia, 30 August 2018, wherein he said that “Any leader … who believes that there is no climate change I think he ought to be taken to mental confinement, he is utter[ly] stupid and I say the same thing for any leader here who says there is no climate change.”
By serendipity (if not synchronicity), the year the world was supposed to end (2012), I composed a chance, fourteen-line poem in harmony with Sailelethe’s sentiments. I’m not sure it’s much of a poem per se, unless a linguistic expression that fuses topical pertinence, heart, and complex irony is enough.
“BE IT RESOLVED…”
BE IT RESOLVED that
whereas public officials
who deny the reality
of Anthropogenic Climate Change
and hinder efforts to mitigate
its destructive effects present
a clear and present danger
to themselves and others,
said public officials should be
removed from office forthwith
and placed under a physician’s care
until such time as their suicidal
and/or homicidal and/or ecocidal
tendencies cease to present.
Corpus Sample: Grappling with the Heraclitean Tao: “At Red River’s Edge” and “Tonight, the world is simple and plain…”
Sometimes, whether sincerely or out of hubris, one comes to believe they’ve got a grip on things, and so it seemed, more or less, to me. But, recently, reading Baudrillard’s Symbolic Exchange and Death and an overview of the late Mark Fisher’s life and work, reflecting how, when I was around ten years old, the world was being maneuvered into its (apparent) Neoliberal (dis)order (a view of things probably already belated) and beginning a perceptible acceleration into what has come to be called the Anthropocene, I feel, now, there is nowhere to stand, nowhere at a standstill, that vertigo and fear just under the heart that starts at a sudden drop.
Of course, unknowingly, I’d grappled with these matters before. “At Red River’s Εdge”, the first poem of my first book (Grand Gnostic Central) attempts to resolve, with all the virtues and vices of a youthful work, this nigh metaphysical flow of things (or, as I thought of it at the time, “dissemination”), while the last poem of the book (“Tonight, the world is simple and plain…”), it appears to me now, approaches the same concern, but from a different angle.
At Red River’s Edge
I shed scales and
blood the slow water
at the river’s edge, the fish
gutted on some warming rock.
A wondering after
origins and wellsprings
rises with my standing
and squinting into the glare
of light broken upstream
at my vision’s limit.
What source spills
up this river?—
numberless puddles brimming
over as rain falls
to fill them, clear
water writhing
over slick dark rock
too hard to carve
a lasting path in,
waves of rainwater
draining in rippling sheets
off flat rock walling
a gleaming highway,
or running in rivulets
charging a careening stream
from a sudden height
in an opening spray of sparks
that scatter against one
mountain’s steep
lower rises. Upward,
glaciers moan and turn
themselves to fluid under
their own weight
for the sake of motion.
Lighter ice and snow
drop, overheavy
overhang, giving
the glitter of crystals
to the lift of winds
and the long swerve of descent
to dew on darting speargrass
leaves or on the grains
of the smallest antmounds
mining the glint
of sand mixed in the topmost soil
of swelling foothills.
Clouds shadow the climb
of rock, condensing
and losing themselves
in the strain
to come to nothing
but clearest light.
Everywhere, countless sources urge
one flow that fills
perfectly any particular
gap in every ground
in its scrambling run
to that ease of gravity
proper to the sea. This river
one route before me
and beyond me on
either side, never ebbing,
only ever changing course
to another. I follow
some black bark carried free
on flashing rises of the current,
sometimes edging a shore, sometimes stilled
in the turning of
a darker random
swirl, but always
spiraling out again
to give with the slow measure
of the ocean’s deepest founding swells
or float on the light
lift of waves
and the chance of the wind
into some child’s quick
excitement in the seadrift.
“Tonight, the world is simple and plain….”
Tonight, the world is simple and plain.
The earth is round and the sky two domes
Enclosing us, excluding nothing.
The stars are all arranged in such a way
As to suggest an endless emptiness
Or heavens full of foreign deities.
And choosing to choose neither we lose
Ourselves, desiring only an end
To this plane enclosed around itself
That keeps us coming to ourselves again.
Corpus Sample: “Hamburger Smalltalk”
While I was trying to imagine a set list for my last reading, I had thought to perform poems that, though written in the early 90s, spoke to today’s world situation. One of these would surely have been the following poem, “Hamburger Smalltalk”, composed in 1991 and later collected in Grand Gnostic Central and other poems.
One of the stops during my first visit to Europe was Hamburg, Germany, where we stayed a few days with a couple, friends of my partner at the time. One was widely travelled and had lived some time in Africa. During a very pleasant, evening walk, with our respective partners and the dog, he related the anecdote the poem retells. Accordingly, the poem is spoken in his voice, complete with Germanisms of syntax and expression.
Hamburger Smalltalk
You’ve seen a picture of a cheetah
on a gazelle: its teeth in its neck
bent back, its leg
around the gazelle’s hind leg
to break its back.
Cheetahs are a serious nuisance
for farmers in southwest Africa. Lions
and other cats kill what they need
and leave something
for the jackals and vultures.
A cheetah goes into blood-frenzies—
if you have a herd of sheep
in the morning you’ll find forty
torn apart and maybe seven lambs
carried off.
The farmers know their herds
they watch and know which cows are ready
to calve and if a calf goes missing
they mark the mother
and send her next to the abattoir.
Now you’ll see five cows gang up
on a cheetah to protect the calves
and drive it off.
(He shook his head and chuckled)
The white tribe of Africa.
Doom porn: What would Martin Luther do?
Again, as happens, acquaintances I believe should know better, being educated, intelligent, and reflective, let the doomporn clickbait get the better of their sincere, best intentions and share distressing articles, such as this one about a report by two (2) Australians this spring positing that there is a “‘High Likelihood of Human Civilization Coming to an End’ Starting in 2050”.
Nearly, already, three decades back, a similar despair, coupled with Hopkins’ “God’s Grandeur” I had by heart and the offhand remark by a friend visiting the lush, extinct volcano near his birthplace, inspired a poem in answer (the second of seven Budapest Suites in Grand Gnostic Central).
Budapest Suites II
for Laszlo Gefin
“There is a god here!”
In wild strawberry entangling thistle,
In maple saplings, a shroud on loam,
In chestnut and cherry blossoms over tree-line,
In goldenrod and grass, every green stalk, bowed with seed.
And there is a god who
Quarries slate for imperial highways,
Mines iron-ore out of greed,
Who would have Mount Ság again
Ash and rock.
And there is a god
In the seared, scarred, spent, still,
For lichen, poppies and song
Here rise from the bared
And broken rock to the air!
Just last year, some widely-publicized remarks by Mayer Hillman (“We’re doomed!”) inspired a number of responses, an early version of one I posted here the last time a friend disseminated some other bleak pessimism…
I’m hardly a Bjorn Lomborg playing down the gravity of the situation and the urgent, concerted, radical action it calls for, including the need for no less focussed, lively and creative reflection and critique to articulate a post-anthropocentric, if not post-humanist, biocentric ecosophy. But nor am I a latter-day Jeremiah confusing his insight into the woes and flaws of the present with visions of imminent, righteous catastrophe. (It’s high time I address at greater length this newly-arisen apocalyptic tone in cultural criticism…).
To wit, and not for the last time, I’m sure, I share here two unpublished (…because editors [eye-roll emoji][facepalm emoji]…) sections of the sequence “Made in Germany”, composed in 2012.
Waiting on a train to what was
the East, the summer of the year
the New Age believed the World
would end, wildfires smoke
from Colorado to Croatia,
floodwaters deeper than memory
drown southern Russia and Thailand,
tornadoes plough the Midwest,
hurricanes blow past records
on the Eastern Seaboard.
∞
http:// arctic-news.blogspot.de/p/global-extinction-within-one-human.html?spref=fb (21.07.2012)
Asked what he would do were the world to end
next day, Luther replied, “Plant an apple tree.”
“Mile End est mort…”
For the more than three decades I’ve lived in Montreal, I’ve lived in the quarter known generally as The Plateau and more specifically and recently (to my ears, anyway) Mile End, most notably at “Grand Gnostic Central” on the corner of Rachel and St. Urbain (scenes from the cinematic version of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz were filmed just up the block), a couple of locations on Hutchison and Parc Avenue south of Bernard, and, since 1996 (for the time being) on the corner of St Joseph and Parc in what our landlady calls her Chateau du Parc.

Credit: Mary Shelley
Montreal, like any number of cities on earth, is suffering a process of gentrification. In my area, it’s been underway for years, but it’s picked up since a number of software companies (Ubisoft and Softimage) have moved in. When it all began, I reflected that more affordable if less “desirable” neighborhoods attract those who can afford to live in them, which will often include creatives, writers, painters, artists, and so forth. Their creative energies, by a cruel dialectic, make the neighborhood more beautiful, pleasant and lively, attracting more residents and businesses, beginning a process of, well, gentrification. The creatives and others who made the place attractive in the first place are forced to move out, to some other quarter, sometimes in some other city, where the process can begin all over again.
A poem in Ladonian Magnitudes, “The Intersection” remarks this process. I share it below as a manner of memorial.
The Intersection
where l’Esplanade
meets Villeneuve
that spring dusk
the air’s first
breathable classic
sunlit redbrick
the unique quaint
three-storey walkups
characteristic of
the quarter’s charm
are almost all
so made up
like new the one
run down white tshirt
underarm stain yellow
building with muddy
white frames peeling
around cracked panes
stands out like
never among
those other fronts
kept up for years
without a thought
of what they’d go for