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Poetry
Poems I've written or am writing
READIN
READIN started out as a place for me
to keep track of what I am reading, and to learn (slowly, slowly)
how to design a web site.
There has been some mission drift
here and there, but in general that's still what it is. Some of
the main things I write about here are
reading books,
listening to (and playing) music, and
watching the movies. Also I write about the
work I do with my hands and with my head; and of course about bringing up Sylvia.
The site is a bit of a work in progress. New features will come on-line now and then; and you will occasionally get error messages in place of the blog, for the forseeable future. Cut me some slack, I'm just doing it for fun! And if you see an error message you think I should know about, please drop me a line. READIN source code is PHP and CSS, and available on request, in case you want to see how it works.
See my reading list for what I'm interested in this year.
READIN has been visited approximately 236,737 times since October, 2007.
In the course of thinking about my idiot poem I came up with a metaphor that I like: Narrative structure has the function of a candle's wick. The flame of meaning will not adhere to a wick-less text. Thinking of meaning as the flame that burns in text (without consuming it), one which will dissipate if it does not have a wick, can take me in a lot of directions; one that seems especially promising is to think of song and poetry as a way of providing additional structure in which to anchor meaning so the narrative thread need not be as strong. (This ties in nicely with a take on Wittgenstein, "Whereof one cannot speak, one must sing.")
The structure of the poem as I am seeing it now is,
The idiot cannot speak. His story is full of sound and fury raging unexpressed.
The idiot speaks. This is represented as a mechanical process, the unwinding of a clockwork. The web of his story unravels and its meaning evaporates.
The idiot sings. His sung story becomes the landscape and its meaning the universe.
The idiot falls silent, sleeps. The story he told assumes divine status i.e. pure meaning in the firmament -- its structure does not persist.
I came up with a pretty striking first line on the spot and (amazingly) remembered it later on when I had the pen and paper to hand; and the rough draft and revisions and the commentary seemed to flow pretty smoothly, naturally from the pen to the pad.
(and with that by way of introduction,) this is:
Mute
his story still untold, it's full of silent fury
and significance and void
mute like some magnificent android, and so
the idiot recounts, he counts
he builds up poetry and mountains
crumbling pottery
shards of steel, silent fountains
distant voices see him stuttering and pale and seeking
shelter from the storm of sorrow
shattering, resonant, freaking out
about the null tomorrow
and his idiotic legacy
comatose, potential
inside the eyelids snaky purple patterns weave all hectic and the
syllables shift and merge electric
inside the idiot's eyelids
posted afternoon of December 29th, 2012: 3 responses ➳ More posts about Projects
If a dream affords the dreamer some lucidity, some poetry, some regal slumber
why forget it then, why discard
the glittering shards of irreality
that pierce your consciousnessless repose
that hold your dreaming brane
like pushpins on the void
Uno no es de ninguna parte
mientras no tenga un muerto bajo la tierra
my perception of duration and of sequence of events is growing weaker
dislocation
fading slowly into timelessness, displacement
sense memory of objects I displaced, dispersed
so,
I rubbed against the floors I walked on
and they do my thinking now
we mortals are present, and die but once,
I hear you say, and die a bit each day.
we mortals are present, we die but once,
and half the time it is in vain;
our ticking hours and years crawl past us
marked with Adam's stain
we mortals are present, we die but once
and God's outside of time and there's a line
between the mortal and divine, outside of time.
"God's presence" (is) our mortal past and future
which do not exist, oh let them not exist
we plead
and let us die but once
we plead
and pass outside of time
our meter, rhyme connecting memories and ashes
and our second nervous passage out of this
connective sibilance eternal disenmomented
reflected crashing echoes die
and dust and endlessness
posted morning of December 15th, 2012: 4 responses
Midnight's oil is inky black, it shimmers
in the orange glow of the match you've struck
Midnight's oil is an inky puddle in your cerebellum
There is no wick in midnight's oil
but will it burn? Hesitant
you drop the match
it hisses and dies
in your moist consciousness
and you feel the dark embrace
of midnight's oil
midnight's oil swells, becomes
itself
the fabric of your consciousness
no claustrophobia here nor displacement, indeed
the opposite
a warmth one might say, a carnal pleasure
in the closeness of midnight's oil
you get a pleasant contact high from midnight's oil
indeed in its glow you sense a new path
new vision
come quickly to love the way it burns
pale blue flame, dim flame, warm flame
illuminates you, passes through the membrane
separating self and your surroundings
And so you're out there now and everything's burning
burning in quiet joy, in dim blue ecstasy
but what can you do when everything's on fire
but fiddle
take your cue
the camera pans in close on Nero's graying braided hair
and the hair of his bow slides quickly
sometimes sloppy on the strings
which are burning too
and none of it consumed like Rome was
and from this ubiquitous burning bush hear the voice
of midnight's oil deep and resonant asemic
hear the syllables
neither skatting nor as they might appear
some ancient language dead and never traced
nor yet a new invention
timeless nonsense tripping
from the nonexistent lips of transcendent midnight's oil
what madness will this incantation work?
posted afternoon of December first, 2012: 1 response
Opportunistically lying in wait and grinning, giggling lamely at the ashy glow of the painted wall in the streetlamp and suddenly hear a dead man walking round the corner and the dying fall
You're making up your mind and nervous, humming inanely snatches of the anthem of your good old school out west; forgotten the words and meanings subtle meaninglessness, your time has not yet come so you play the fool
And suddenly crumpling and falling, lifeless, playing a wrinkled fool, to an audience of jaded friends
You're running now frantic feel the rhythmic pace and all the scenery's the same just one repeated shot flickers past and you could swear you've been out here before Mr. Hitchcock; and this stupid mistake will not be your last
not the last of such creatures entrusted and painted and lined
with precious gems, heirloom for a generation
of bureaucrats --
you switch back now and look him full in the face
and suddenly you find you cannot recognize this familiar caricature, this crudely sketched archetype of disquiet, or you do not want to (and so you fail to), unfamiliar expression you know so well, could trace it out in the dark you reckon soft ivory fingers on imaginary skin and so you stare into his absent eyes and identify yourself with his absent character and longing
And you so long to be there, to be present.
posted afternoon of November 18th, 2012: Respond ➳ More posts about Readings
A mix tape (is mix tape the right term here? Something like a playlist but including readings and videos as well as music...) (and whew! there is something unfamiliar about blogging in English!): The ordering of the playlist is my own chain of memory (with proddings from others) starting from chapter 7, "More than love", of The ground beneath her feet.
Ormus speaks. I have been liking this novel while being rubbed a little the wrong way by the narrator's voice -- Rai seems a little off to me, a little cynical and annoyingly, smugly verbose. I found quite striking the short piece in the middle of this chapter that shifts into Ormus' voice, and into him quoting his father's voice. His mention of vultures and of Attar, and of Prometheus, got me into a "classical birds" frame of mind. Ormus speaks, read by The Modesto Kid
Attar's poem in Fitzgerald's stellar translation, The Bird Parliament. (This would be an amazing poem for reading out loud -- I tried that earlier and got about a ¼ of the way into it... I may have to upload a recording of this to SoundCloud.)
I'm also put in mind a little of Borges' mysticism, in a way I have not been by this novel so far -- the bits of magic in Rai's narration have been undone by his glibness. Specifically The Theologians I guess, though I don't recall there being birds in that.
