Archive for the ‘Ladonian Magnitudes’ Tag
Solace for staycationers
Filed under: poems | Tags: Ladonian Magnitudes, poems, poetry, poetry recordings, travel
Leave a comment A lot of folks aren’t able to travel as has been their wont these days. One new acquaintance and partner had been planning a short tour of Germany and Italy last summer, a plan put off until at least next summer.
To help them suffer their enforced staycation, I offer this poem from Ladonian Magnitudes, “European Decadence in medias res” to remind them of what they are missing and offer some solace. A recording of the poem follows.
European Decadence in medias res
They’re cutting the gelato in Sirmione
with pure azure lakewater.
In Siena City Hall two old pigeons hunched
on the bitch-wolf’s back trickle lime down
to her teats suckled by the twins.
In the Old City they serve una vera grappa
senese I’ve always passed over at the S.A.Q..
In Otterndorf the Matjes Dutch sushi
raw herring is swimming in salmonella.
In Charles de Gaulle Theseus a clochard
begs our last cents. “If we miss our connection
I’ll strangle somebody!” I said when we finally
found our flight home and remembered I’d said it
arriving. Air France dejeneur croissant et eau de source.
Condensation as Recomposition
Filed under: poems | Tags: Ladonian Magnitudes, Max Richter, Peter Gregson, poems, poetics, poetry, procedural poetry, recompositions
Comments (3) Like many these days, I’ve been passing the time enjoying various televisual entertainments, most notably very carefully rationing out my viewing of Paolo Sorrentino‘s The Young Pope and The New Pope. Among these series’ many pleasures is the soundtrack, which introduced me to the British cellist and composer Peter Gregson.
Gregson, along with Max Richter, have both written what they term “recompositions”, Gregson recomposing Bach’s cello suites and Richter Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Gregson’s and Richter’s reworkings are not without precedent: it’s an old compositional trick to take a phrase or theme from another composer’s music as an element for a new work of one’s own. These recompositions are, however, admittedly more radical and thorough reworkings of the original material.
In my own way, I’ve been writing recompositions for a long while. 
One form, inspired by Pound’s found dictum that “dichten = condesare” (roughly, to write poetry is to condense), I termed “condensations”. The simplest compositional procedure, a manner of erasure avant le lettre, was to reduce a given text according to a rule.
The example I share below compresses H.D.’s book Sea Garden into a single poem, rendering each of the volume’s poems as a couplet made of the poem’s first and last line. I retained H.D.’s original capitalization and punctuation as a tacit way of indicating my recomposition was in a no way a unified, straight-ahead lyric poem. The results of this poetic compositional procedure strike me now as being very aesthetically similar to Gregson’s and Richter’s musical recompositions, which is why I share the poem “Sea Garden” from Ladonian Magnitudes, below.
Sea Garden
after H.D.
Rose, harsh rose,
hardened in a leaf?
Are your rocks shelter for ships—
from the splendour of your ragged coast.
The light beats upon me.
among the crevices of the rocks.
What do I care
in the larch-cones and the underbrush.
Your stature is modelled
for their breadth.
Reed,
To cover you with froth.
Whiter
Discords.
Instead of pearls—a wrought clasp—
no bracelet—accept this.
The light passes
and leaf-shadow are lost.
I have had enough.
Wind-tortured place.
Amber husk
as your bright leaf?
The sea called—
The gods wanted you back.
Come, blunt your spear with us,
And drop exhausted at our feet.
You are clear
of your path.
The white violet
frost, a star edges with its fire.
Great, bright portal,
still further on another cliff.
I saw the first pear
I bring you as an offering.
They say there is no hope—
and cherish and shelter us.
Bear me to Dictaeus
and frail-headed poppies.
The night has cut
to perish on the branch.
It is strange that I should want
as the horsemen passed.
You crash over the trees,
a green stone.
Weed, moss-weed,
stained among the salt weeds.
The hard sand breaks,
Shore-grass.
Silver dust
in their purple hearts.
Can we believe—by an effort
their beauty, your life.
OULIPO now and then
Filed under: poems | Tags: Christian Bök, Ernst Robert Curtius, Eunoia, Joseph Conte, Ladonian Magnitudes, OULIPO, poetics, poetry, postmodern poetry
Leave a comment 
“Oulipo turns 60, but given how much we hear about it these days, it feels more like 150″ says George Murray at Bookninja. To some of us, it seems much older.
For my part, I learned about the OULIPO and composition by means of a generative device in the early nineties, thanks to Joseph Conte’s goldmine of a study, Infinite Design: The Forms of Postmodern Poetry. Not that long after (or so it seems this morning), Christian Bök’s Eunoia appeared to equal acclaim and, well, annoyance (a book, for those who don’t know, is composed by means of a generative device, after the OULIPO).
For me, the controversy was tiresome, having read Conte’s work and, more importantly, Ernst Robert Curtius’s classic oeuvre, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, which details ancient and medieval modes of composition which quickly dispel any illusions the OULIPO and its epigones are avant garde. (Though I do know that matter is more complex than I allow for here).
I expressed my impatience with the whole matter, boiling Curtius’ excurses into the following poem from Ladonian Magnitudes, one among several that got up the nose of that book’s most notorious reviewer. The poem is four quatrains and a concluding line, despite WordPress’ formatting constraints…
Liposuction & Related Procedures in Antiquity
Lasus Pindar’s master made a poem sans σ and a millennium later
Nestor of Laranda in Lycia wrote an Iliad each book less a letter Tryphrodorus Aegyptus did the Odyssey
So from Baroque Spain via Peter Rega
From Fabius Planciades Fulgentius’ De aetatibus mundi et hominis λειπoγραμματoς
Hucbald’s Charles the Bald eclogue beginning every word with C one-hundred and forty six lines
Late Roman grammarians’ παρόμoιoν
O Tite, tute, Tati, tibi tanta, tyranne, tulisti a scolia for a Caracalla’s Banquet
where as Aelius Spartianus has it from his brother Geta every dish alliterated
The so-called “figure poems” τεχνoπαίγνια in the Greek Anthology
Porfyrius Optatianus rendered in Constantine’s Latin
Alcuin, Raban Maur, Sixteenth Century Hellenism followed
Pre-Alexandrian Persian lines in trees and parasols
Eusonius follows Plato’s for the Sophists logodaedalia in his Technopaegnion
Each line of one poem starting and finishing with one syllable and the last word’s the next’s first
Catalogues of single syllable limbs, gods, foods, questions “yes” or “no”
A myth crib every line turning on one syllable
Grammatomastix’s monosyllables amputated prefixes lifted from Ennius and Virgil
The “versos de cabo roto” Urganda chants before “…a certain village in La Mancha…”
Corpus Sample: Materializations I: “Elenium”
Filed under: poems | Tags: collage, Jake the Dog, Ladonian Magnitudes, parataxis, poems, poetics, poetry, Ty Hochban, videopoems
Comments (1) 
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”
Filed under: poems | Tags: identity, individuality, Ladonian Magnitudes, poems, poetics, poetry, the Death of the Subject
Leave a comment 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.
Ye good old days
Filed under: poems | Tags: Ladonian Magnitudes, poetry, Zsolt Sőrés
Leave a comment A friend brought to mind today his meeting a now-mutual friend, musician Zsolt Sőrés. I 
had the luck to collaborate with Sőrés and his co-musician Zsolt Kovacs in Budapest, an aspect of which is memorialized in the first part of the poem I share below, from Ladonian Magnitudes. (As usual, the formatting here messes up the lineation: the original is written in tercets).
Pisces
“If our child is born in February or March it will be a Fish.”
Laszlo told us Tibor’d invited us to either his place or The Fish Restaurant
& Laszlo consistent with our unanimous consensus told him The Fish Restaurant
which miffed him a little but then why offer us the choice?—“You don’t do that!”
Besides he has a Stammtisch there
there’s always a table for him
“Of course, sir, just this way!”
So that day Kovács is supposed to arrive around five to record “Trabant” on DAT in his Trabant
because Tuesday after a solid three quarters of a litre of Tokaj, some beers before, innumerable Unicums, and even a little hash? then two big double vodkas
after the rehearsal for Wednesday night I spouted Marinneti glossolalia driving back to Laszlo’s in Kovàcs’s Trabant no one could stop me
So we went to the Tokaj bar Laszlo and I where they ladled half a deci of sweet and half a deci of dry into a glass for each of us drunk down in one go for the effect of a double martini
Then back up to Laszlo’s for a little more hash, no beer! vodka palinka Unicum whiskey two generic Gravol
Kovács an hour and a half late so I’m lying on the front balcony when the Two Zsolts arrive
Petra tells me she and Laszlo looked at each other knowingly as I swayed pale out the door
I remember raving the way I did the night before and arriving at The Fish Restaurant by surprise before seven
Sitting with Tibor and Laszlo who looked at each other and in Hungarian agreed I couldn’t eat with them
Ordering me a mineral water and putting me out on the balcony
Where I got up telling Petra I just need some air
And wander out into Buda’s streets looking for a bench
I remember Petra coming up and seeing how I was sitting tilting back and forth on a little wall over the Duna
The taxi arriving and Petra and Laszlo helping me up supporting me on each arm the taxi driver saying “Later.”
“Get up before they call the police!”
“Should I get an ambulance?”—“No, no, he’s just had too much to drink.”
And Kovács coming in his Trabant, me reeling beside him
Rolling down the window on the way and puking a great orange arc
Kovács tells me it was as if as he made the U-turn in front of The Fish Restaurant
everything I’d drunk sloshed out
One waiter pointed “Look! He’s doing it again!”
From Bremervörde we drove north to Otterndorf at the Elbe’s mouth
In the sun Matjes with raw onion on a bun and a plate of crispy gold Pommes with a big dab of mayonnaise
On the picnic table outside the strand café landside of the dike
Seaside a briny brown tide covered the sand and washed up cold over and drained through honeycombed red bricks enforcing the shore we walked on
Two black-suited windsurfers rode out fast crazy as the two boys splashing in the swimming pond just left of lunch
The sky painterly with grey-rain and sun-bleached clouds framing low sea daisy yellow mist and high blue
The Gasthaus we aimed at for an early supper closed so we drove in to Otterndorf
Brick houses cool sienna tomato rusted in early dusk
Even cobbled clean streets narrow as in Hamburg or Holland
A sample of Italian absinth and a flask of Grobmuter’s Apfelsaft in a gift shop just around the corner from the Ratskellar—“Danke, Mutti!” (Danke, Renate, for the absinthe spoon!)
A Norwegian acquavit before a litre of German beer and three rich Matjes filets Hausfrauen Art with a creamy apple onion celery relish and Bratkartoffeln punctuated by a bitter
A soft chocolate-dipped Eis eaten up quickly melting out the bottom of the cone
The way back musculature uncomfortable on bone-rack, aching joints, and threatening cramps
In bed sweat wet uncontrollable shivers chatter teeth and fingertips tingle numb
Every joint sore unable to lie still three seconds
Eyes rolling in a reeling lolling head
Delirious poetic prayers to Apollo in the name of his son Asclepius to shake from a leafy laurel branch drops blessed by Morpheus to cool my head and just let me sleep
Finally making myself puke three times about three in the morning
“…where lives the virtue of poetry…”
Filed under: poems | Tags: Charles Olson, Chris Banks, Grand Gnostic Central, Ladonian Magnitudes, Novalis, poetry, poetry criticism
Comments (2) 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
“Apart Twelve Weeks, Together in Three” / «Séparés douze semaines, ensemble dans trois»
Filed under: poems | Tags: Ladonian Magnitudes, poesie, poetry
Leave a comment “Apart Twelve Weeks, Together in Three” / «Séparés douze semaines, ensemble dans trois»
Antoine Malette does me a great favour, translating a poem from Ladonian Magnitudes into French, and even sounding it out. Un grand merci!
Three poems in German translation
Filed under: poems | Tags: Bryan Sentes, Grand Gnostic Central, Karawa.net, Ladonian Magnitudes, poetry
Leave a comment Three poems in German translation
Karawa.net has kindly published three poems from Grand Gnostic Central in careful, meticulous German translation by Petra Sentes, with the English-language originals.
Poem for Humpday
Filed under: poems | Tags: Argo Books, Ladonian Magnitudes, poetry
Leave a comment 
Need a poetic boost to get you on through to the other side of the week? Argo Books in Montreal thinks so, too, so they were kind enough to post a poem from Ladonian Magnitudes on their website!
Poeta Doctus 