Friday, April 09, 2004
Today I'm working on a draft, inspired, I guess, by the work of Susan Mitchell, who I love because of her luxurious use of language.
cast off, cast off, a trust, a twist of
fate, of flam, of faulty
premises, primers, premiums, a
syllogistic lapse of
trust, twisted, off cast, off cast.
What I knew and When I knew it:
like a fetish, a find, a realization
fraught with knowledge
that you, you, YOU,
could do such a thing, could obsess, OBSESS
in an manner so fetish-like.
cast off, cast off, a trust, a twist of
fate, of flam, of faulty
premises, primers, premiums, a
syllogistic lapse of
trust, twisted, off cast, off cast.
What I knew and When I knew it:
like a fetish, a find, a realization
fraught with knowledge
that you, you, YOU,
could do such a thing, could obsess, OBSESS
in an manner so fetish-like.
Wednesday, April 07, 2004
Today, a new work. Not really a poem. More some thoughts on writing and language. Perhaps the beginnings of a poem if it weren't so damned theoretical!
A Few Notes towards a Topological Rhetoric
Being a meditation after reading the Dialogues of Giles Deleuze and Claire Parnet,
and re-membering my classes with Stephen Barber.
If one were to map the trajectory of human discourse
across a plane defined by axes of desire and expression,
what sort of figures might appear?
Consider first, the axis of desire, the content of our speech, our writing:
its negative side, that which repulses; and the positive,
that which one loves.
Intersecting that liminal relationship between revulsion and attraction
is the axis of expression, the regime of semiotic signs.
Its positive end being that which is fully expressed,
and at the opposite end, the hidden, the unsaid.
The intersection of said axes forming a Deleuzian plane of immanence,
A plane divided into four quadrants.
In the upper right we might find the curves of poetry,
the gentle and poignant expressions of desire,
those classical lines inspired by beauty so grand
it demands the concept of the muse.
And in the upper left, images of revulsion
like the photos of the Spanish civil war
Virginia Woolf presents in Three Guineas,
or the photos of the holocaust which appeared
at the end of our father's war.
What might appear below these quadrants,
in the regime of the inexpressible?
The bottom left must be the land of horrors so great,
they must at all costs be repressed.
This is the land of aphasia,
the region which moved Burroughs to declare
that language is a virus, which aims to destroy us all.
But the bottom right--oh so bottom,
and oh so right!
Here the Deleuzian reaches its grandeur in a place
where the expression of the personal simultaneously reaches its highest point,
and its lowest,
the mirror point where the name becomes so individual
that it loses its individuality, the place where Woolf said one might reach a state of
oh "becoming imperceptible."
And if we could make such a map,
could we use it to find those lines,
and to ride those curving lines of flight away from the discursive planes
with their lines of rigidly segmented speech and writing,
fixed genres, overcoded behaviors?
Lines of flight which lead away from
the land of "sad affect"
to a land of loving silence?
A Few Notes towards a Topological Rhetoric
Being a meditation after reading the Dialogues of Giles Deleuze and Claire Parnet,
and re-membering my classes with Stephen Barber.
If one were to map the trajectory of human discourse
across a plane defined by axes of desire and expression,
what sort of figures might appear?
Consider first, the axis of desire, the content of our speech, our writing:
its negative side, that which repulses; and the positive,
that which one loves.
Intersecting that liminal relationship between revulsion and attraction
is the axis of expression, the regime of semiotic signs.
Its positive end being that which is fully expressed,
and at the opposite end, the hidden, the unsaid.
The intersection of said axes forming a Deleuzian plane of immanence,
A plane divided into four quadrants.
In the upper right we might find the curves of poetry,
the gentle and poignant expressions of desire,
those classical lines inspired by beauty so grand
it demands the concept of the muse.
And in the upper left, images of revulsion
like the photos of the Spanish civil war
Virginia Woolf presents in Three Guineas,
or the photos of the holocaust which appeared
at the end of our father's war.
What might appear below these quadrants,
in the regime of the inexpressible?
The bottom left must be the land of horrors so great,
they must at all costs be repressed.
This is the land of aphasia,
the region which moved Burroughs to declare
that language is a virus, which aims to destroy us all.
But the bottom right--oh so bottom,
and oh so right!
Here the Deleuzian reaches its grandeur in a place
where the expression of the personal simultaneously reaches its highest point,
and its lowest,
the mirror point where the name becomes so individual
that it loses its individuality, the place where Woolf said one might reach a state of
oh "becoming imperceptible."
And if we could make such a map,
could we use it to find those lines,
and to ride those curving lines of flight away from the discursive planes
with their lines of rigidly segmented speech and writing,
fixed genres, overcoded behaviors?
Lines of flight which lead away from
the land of "sad affect"
to a land of loving silence?
Tuesday, April 06, 2004
Last night's poetry reading by John Yau has inspired me to quit procrastinating, and start working on my poetry daily.
I've begun with a new poem, which arises out of an old poem. I had long been fascinated with this famous Gramsci quote. In fact, years ago, I wrote a villanelle based upon it. A lousy villanelle, but it still evoked comments when I would recite it aloud in the nuclear control room of the submarine. Despite the fact that it was a bad poem, the repetitions of the villanelle form gave it a musicality that my fellow sailors found interesting.
So inspired by Yau's work, writing across some famous quotations, I have recast the poem in a better form.
Interregnum
“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum, there arises a great variety of morbid symptoms.”
-Antonio Gramsci, Prison Diaries
The crisis consists of symptoms
The crisis consists of the facts
Dying to be born of the interregnum
The old is dying precisely, dying to be born, precisely
There arises a crisis, a variety of morbid symptoms
Born to be dying
Cannot the crisis, the fact that the symptoms consist
Of the crisis dying to be born old
Precisely in dying arises variety
A great variety of morbid facts
There consists of dying
There consists of the new
There consists of the facts
Morbidly born arising.
I've begun with a new poem, which arises out of an old poem. I had long been fascinated with this famous Gramsci quote. In fact, years ago, I wrote a villanelle based upon it. A lousy villanelle, but it still evoked comments when I would recite it aloud in the nuclear control room of the submarine. Despite the fact that it was a bad poem, the repetitions of the villanelle form gave it a musicality that my fellow sailors found interesting.
So inspired by Yau's work, writing across some famous quotations, I have recast the poem in a better form.
Interregnum
“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum, there arises a great variety of morbid symptoms.”
-Antonio Gramsci, Prison Diaries
The crisis consists of symptoms
The crisis consists of the facts
Dying to be born of the interregnum
The old is dying precisely, dying to be born, precisely
There arises a crisis, a variety of morbid symptoms
Born to be dying
Cannot the crisis, the fact that the symptoms consist
Of the crisis dying to be born old
Precisely in dying arises variety
A great variety of morbid facts
There consists of dying
There consists of the new
There consists of the facts
Morbidly born arising.
