American Poetry Read online

  Poetry, like drugs, should not be difficult, it should be easy. Poetry should not be interesting, it should hold out the potential to be very insipid. Boring is the least of what most people have always realized, evidenced by the large numbers of Americans who have never read a poem. Poetry should not be morally uplifting, it should inspire a deep sense of relax. Poetry need not say anything important or humanly meaningful, it should merely evoke a mood. That mood resembles the sound of a sunset. Jack Spicer understood that all unsaid words are painful to listen to. They are better to look at. That is why Jack Spicer is a beautiful poet.

  I compose and you compose. The little and the like. The most refreshing language would be written by an exercise bike or a fancy treadmill filled with electronic devices that measure one’s alpha waves, pulse, heartbeat, respiration rate, CO2 output, etc. It would be a machine that had not been given a ten-minute course in Zen or Salsa dancing but had its own multitrack recorder. The multimedia loudspeaker intones, the internet site and the homepage repeats. “I return to psychedelia.” The great poems of the late ’90s and the early 21st century will be written not to the jaded forms of serial or twelve-tone productions, not the remnants of Stockhausen and Webern, but the music of electronica and circuitry and electrical processing that first came of age in the ’70s. Tricky is the King. The Orb is a Prince. Hendrix’s single-hand feedback is reincarnated as the flat ambiance of Stereolab. All poetry is the sound of an optical illusion on a mirror ball. What is the most beautiful sound in the world? The sound of an image dying, the sound of a television commercial one ignores like a reflection like a highway divider, the sound of fucking on a couch while MTV plays on the TV set. The poem aspires to a trans-historical, trans-ethnic revival. It admits of a kind of enlightened multicultural ambiance.

  The other day I went to the Rose Bowl in Pasadena to look for some George Nelson coconut chairs, with two girls who had just graduated from college and had come to L.A. to make movies, and they were telling me about how ecstasy is great because it makes falling in love completely irrelevant because you are in a state where you don’t need to fall in love. For this reason it’s better to take ecstasy with someone else. That is basically what poetry is like. The best poem doesn’t try to make anything beautiful or watery or dark or light. It is Saturday night around 7 P.M. California time. I see a strange yellow and red cloud that resembles one of those diagrammatic drawings for the rotary engine that were introduced in the ’70s by Mazda. The cloud moves quickly upward and downward like a jellyfish whose body resembles the effects of a massive plunger. Three days later I read about a NORAD experiment involving a Minuteman with a dummy nuclear warhead. It was launched off the California coast that Saturday night. It was destroyed by a heat-seeking missile that was launched from the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands forty minutes later.

  I understand the question to mean something about sounds, rather than language. The revival of the ’60s and ’70s in the ’90s is the most fitting example of a kind of contemporary revision of the Arts and Crafts movement, which culminated in Colonial Revival products, especially with regard to things such as quilts and other decorative arts. How late we come to our realizations and our own monotonies. How often we switch ourselves off and realize that poetry no longer needs to be avant-garde, and less formal in its orientation. I can remember the lives of various schools. It can review home arts like quilt making, needle work, gardening, collecting of ephemera, etc. Repetition is crucial to all these endeavors. Poetry should aspire to the condition of continuous relaxation but without effort. It should be filled with typos. One studies and re-studies the ape and biological determinism as if it were a form of the Holocaust or a victim of the Hiroshima blast. This is the kind of history that most appeals to us. The least important thing one can say about craft is that it suggests an evolutionary downdraft toward greater levels of domesticity, homelife and infinite credit. It approaches the state of the ultimate home furnishings catalogue and unlimited personal spending. Poetry cannot survive in a homeless state. The poetry of exile is a dead end, the poetry of world weariness is an overwaxed palm leaf yanked from some Caribe Isle, as numerous poets have demonstrated. But, of course, it is bad manners to pronounce this at a dinner party populated by publishing people or Nobel Prize laureates and their hosts or in a poem, that the ideal poem is an extension of home entertaining, that its verbs are intertwined with the life of good manners and candlesticks. Not every decent poem is willing to please, but many are. All poems are healed by corruptions of the feelings.

  What does it mean to stop reading a poem? It means that one is tired. Lynne Cox, the great American long-distance swimmer has a body comprised of 35 percent body fat (compared to most women who have 18–25 percent body fat), and it is that layer of fat that functions like a natural wet suit. People who have seen her swim say she appears to float or melt through the water; that it somehow becomes her element or she it. Rumor has it that East German swimmers inject gas into their colons to induce similar properties; her plump, large undulating mermaid-like hips have fiercely propelled her obliviously through all manner of things in her twenty-five years as a long-distance swimmer: oil slicks, jellyfish that swell the eyes and lips, sewage, dead dogs, walruses and sharks. Yet she swims without any shark cages, no layer of grease or wetsuits—only a swimsuit. It is her layer of fat that is most remarkable about her; it turns her into something, a human porpoise, and allows her to maintain an even internal body temperature despite external temperatures that would kill most humans after thirty minutes or induce severe hallucinations. When she began her swim across the Diomeded—which separates Alaska from Siberia—she had to step carefully into the Arctic Sea. Had she dived in head first, the water would have stopped her heart almost instantaneously. I believe all these things are merely simulations by our brain of what will happen next, outward manifestations of the things that are just going on in our heads, and these situations are almost always hypothetical ones that we model rapidly and instantaneously and without thinking about it at all. There is nothing here but the writing and least of all the residue that is not in the writing and can never be there if reading is to be done at a later moment, say in history, or later in the day before one calls up a friend and goes to see My Own Private Idaho at the local bargain cinema for $2. Thus a form of dittoing or mimeographing the forms of the earth results in a worthwhile purgation of the things we cannot stand, a means of increasing the levels of aural pollution or interference. All beautiful objects ought to be replaced by residues of the sort that are created by the interference of beauty in the abstract. All great things of beauty should be abstracted to their least common denominators. No thing shall be separated any other thing. No love for anyone shall be love for any one. No words shall be used to trace out some other thing. As Robert Smithson recognized, poems are the strata of their own composition, they are never still but move like a series of roving sundials or mirrors across a Yucatan landscape, a series of roving tombstones where the sky is buried in the earth. A poem is just a machine made of words. It merely reflects and then reflects on what happens to get in its way. I was reading the obit for James Velez, the young man who was “tormented by a baffling illness” and who died last Wednesday at the age of twenty-five from infections of his blood and spine. No one knew why James Velez thought a million bugs crawled across his skin. To bring himself comfort he scratched himself so vigorously that he broke his skin and created heavy scars across his body mutilating himself even though he possessed intelligence enough to recognize what he was doing. He spent most of his life in institutions where he received electric shock therapy but in 1994 a small social service agency, Job Path, allowed him to have his own apartment. In January of 1999 he remarked: “The happiest thing is to have a place that’s mine.” Nothing shall be hated decorated excoriated repudiated or remembered. Everything shall be copied and then recopied verbatim. I light a cigarette. I turn on the television while the stereo is on. I listen to the sound of a car an
d the music of DJ shadow. The end of summer is the end of the things I do not remember. There is no longer time for protestations in language. Poetry should not be performed, it should merely be listened to. The time for conscious experimentation and ego, which is its logical extension, should be replaced by unconscious repetition and listening. All poems should be rewritten over and over again and exist in as many versions as possible. No poem should ever

  Delight Instruct

  Marjorie Welish

  1.

  With expectations prepared to be inventing

  the text of that half-open book, that book there, we are selectively it.

  It? An index sewn

  to abstract nouns.

  Of interesting silk appropriated, prepared to be firmament

  on a two-inch string

  The blue sea on a two-inch string

  The blue sea on a two-inch string only proves the rule.

  Index intercepting text

  a text throughout index, whenever an index in abstract

  an index in concrete

  correlates to text not to tile … title.

  Of nouns tethered to spine.

  Of difference throughout index measuring the text in attendance.

  2.

  The reader leapt through the index

  To save time

  the reader leapt through the scrim.

  This is a test, a breakthrough for readers in reading rooms.

  They have leapt through many Kraft paper screens

  have broke through colloquially—a hiatus!

  3.

  The index accommodated curvature

  through proper names.

  Commence to count the lines assigned to Freud’s rival: therein lies

  subjectivity whistling.

  Commence to read the index of this book, of that, to compare

  lines assigned to Freud’s rival, and so to ascertain

  oasis therein.

  Sum and substance whistling through the walls.

  A field near a far farmhouse assigned to Freud’s rival

  has come to inflame the index

  and take the initiative:

  who is whistling?

  A hiatus in the hunt, a field near a farmhouse

  inflecting the index assigned to Freud’s rival

  perspectives:

  whistling is its own infield.

  4.

  Consisting primarily of an itemized list

  hand-in-hand with immobility studding the top.

  Hand-in-hand immobility

  Hand-in-hand immobility in and of

  Hand-in-hand immobility in and of synchrony, primarily.

  Yes. Immediacy.

  Much gratified by neurons firing (yours).

  Much gratified by neurons firing. Yours sincerely, …

  Such are the diverging extremes,

  the diverging of “Yours sincerely,” from “(yours)” in the above.

  5.

  Yes, as abiding content and spirit in the following feast: “Hi! No!”

  Displaying what he knows since, with “Hi! No! Hi! No!” arising from this project,

  non-negatively. Next is a discussion,

  mostly living, and with largely lurid details: “PpulrpNleK” and sound poetry

  “Poetry is a mental event—Thwack!” “Next!” The new rhetoric

  looks at the arts. “Hi! No! Thwack! I acquit!”

  Mostly living and with largely lurid details is “Hi! No!” in the affirmative

  greeting from the infant’s displaying what he, the umpire, does—the requisite

  rhetoric for abiding content and spirit. “Hi! No! A mental event—thwack! Next. New!”

  The new rhetoric in the clutch of the waltz, the waltz instructed by the march,

  struck, and sound poetry. “Poetry is a mental event—Thwack!” That, his promise

  acting under duress and remaining Symphony #6 throughout, struck the aptness.

  “Out! Yes! Hi! No!” like a promise stuck

  in diaspora greeting the infant. With largely lurid details and “Next!”

  mostly living a mental event aggravated with imperatives

  that is his format, the infant greets the adult. “PpurlpNleK”

  in graphic description has captivated the waltz,

  with a taste not unlike sandpaper across woodblocks.

  6.

  index text registers thesis this unconfessed register magisterial belief

  index indent indebted to reading relative incurrence

  To submit the officiating text to a test of its unconfessed register, first read the index.

  In a first reading through its index, the charismatic text is tested.

  To ascertain authoritative texts informing this

  belief by informing that indent (incurrence),

  slip into theoretical studies of the thesis hidden in the index;

  the index confesses to scarifications unconfessed in the body of the text

  Our reading the index to reveal the simultaneity prior to the text

  will make descent into priority—agriculture, cattle raising—

  for the index values only increase manifest underlying first glance at the magisterial title;

  expectations are not lost upon the title: the title boasts, is delighted and indecent.

  The index punctures the equanimity of the text at long last:

  the testing of the text, the torment issuing from

  nominative belief informing that indent (incurrence)

  enumerating names, and through the definite spatial plan of the deceased

  we postulate authoritative texts, possess the paradigm, the false door.

  7.

  Like a window not immediately obvious.

  Sense, the inexpressive mention.

  For which footfall?

  He is hard on narrative.

  8.

  If Flaubert is innumerable, or, else, if “Flaubert” is numerous

  and if “Flaubert” along with “Forster” is more numerous than “Freud,” then

  erasure becoming a must is an elemental gauntlet proper to nouns.

  Without the nouns, without nouns equaling ideas, an index of nothing but “Flaubert”

  is notable, with he more numerous in name than “Freud” in this case, so literature or literary

  crescendo can be said, is said to be designated

  of a code. If “Fielding,” “Flaubert” and “Forster” eagerly await the literary

  matter probabilistic, with its ups and downs, then gathering etiquette

  to themselves are these proper names in particularity

  only, saving ancient space. In a box

  of abandoned enterprise without universals, a name weighs

  some number: what does it mean in daylight, the volume so deleted

  of topics,

  it saves space by remaining empty: this is a test or a deck of despotism

  or a token. Enumeration gives vehement weight to celebrity. Count the mentions,

  the various attempts at mention, the revenge of more minerals

  written there. “Thenceforward it proliferated.” Oval in section, the signature frequenting the index.

  Frequency of something is an index to vehement weight: the rhetoric yclept cliff

  cliff entitled there on the various attempts to exile and index to the back of everything

  alphabetically, distributively. The index distributes its sources, specifically, gathering etiquette

  gathering affiliation, the fringe of which you read as theory of the literary index becoming a must,

  an ought, in mathematizing creases from a number that appears to refer to a page.

  “… Cezanne who spent who spent afternoons. …”: that, an author’s implicit criteria

  through who goes furthest in mention against the glass to accrue subentries (F’s rival, etc.). If names retire,

  name the criteria once frequenting the index. A kind of fore
nsics of situations is under way.

  Roseate, Points of Gold

  Laynie Browne

  1.

  She turns, light reflecting her eyes constructed of light

  a liquid hand

  (of) blossoms

  The scent red, bower of red—May

  As she drinks this (color, blossom)

  replenished notion of Spring.

  Where this ring will have completed another

  in the unimaginable distance—

  Given the color (gold)

  (now gold) of the fields from which the distance was

  gathered.

  2.

  From fields of now, which gathered gold,

  That which has been misplaced, or intrudes upon an

  afternoon—

  Magenta hue of bud—fallen—a crown of red she associates

  with a name

  Suspecting this will disrupt the carefully pleated intuition of

  the manner in which to cross a room made of

  reciprocity.

  (a room at once a field)

  Touched lightly, the surface ripple recants.

  Such buoyancy, opposite gravity, could not have been guessed

  of the fields (the distance gold gathered)

  Though hardly could she call this tremor persistent, while

  when sitting quietly no color nor motion intrudes

  upon the inner vestibules.

  There have been days painted of such—

  A bird made of wood outlined in a tree of identical shade

  while the background, lily-pensive.

  When the portrait flew away she doubted the color, the grain

  of the bird

  and the stillness of the lily as wings traversed its hue.