those

continuing after

who are funny and stupid

revolving wheel waiting

any clever intention will

do

who are revolving apparently waiting

stupid you are

only an idea as if it mattered

what’s the use

waiting funny there are 3

types crossing

every boundary

who are only clever resolving

to repeat

an infatuation or an infantile

neurosis

repeats

you who are a multiple of 3

waiting funny and stupid

boots stuck in mud

a traumatic tragedy at the age

of 3

stupid boundaries crossing apparently

waiting to break through

or cross over

as if it mattered

circulate dreams realized after

your boots

stupid and neurotic joke infantile laughter

press seams and demarcate

ask who are willing

to

tennessee williams

Expressionism and all other unconventional techniques in drama have only one valid aim, and that is a closer approach to truth. When a play employs unconventional techniques, it is not, or certainly shouldn't be, trying to escape its responsibility of dealing with reality, or interpreting experience, but is actually or should be attempting to find a closer approach, a more penetrating and vivid expression of things as they are. The straight realistic play with its genuine frigidaire and authentic ice cubes, its characters that speak exactly as its audience speaks...has the same virtue of a photographic likeness. Everyone should know nowadays the unimportance of the photographic in art: that truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation, through changing into other forms than those which were merely present in appearance.

These remarks... have to do with a conception of a new, plastic theater which must take the place of the exhausted theater of realistic conventions if the theater is to resume vitality as a part of our culture.

Tennessee Williams, 1945

tuesday, or

infinitesimal fraction of silence shivers a long drawn space of forgetting, holding this imagined instant seen in a car spinning tires in snow the light in my eyes dust over every flat surface. fraction of a piece of infinity goes on splintering. held quick like mist, each drop of ink a lyric, spaces that dissolve in favor of unmoving time, this broken distance only a shadow of wonder, what might have held fast upon impact.

from HERmione

…I want to sit here sensing this moment that is dawn and morning. A moment and an infinitesimal fraction of a moment and dawn slides into morning like starlight into water. There is a quivering, a slightest infinitesimal shivering. The thing that was is not. (212)

impossible

“In the whole of what’s possible, you’re not missing anything.”
--Laura Wetherington


when the impossible becomes one
and the same vibration
show me
I am this body, turned and judging
missing only the possibility of
symptoms, listing ways in which
a breath, a cough, dust in the air
figures perceptibly like fragile
velcro scratching against yarn
this knitted deafness

I am (this body) under
the pressure of breaking through holes
of mist, part of a parcel
of forgotten worry
strangers meet at the intersection of 3
states, cross each border
and reconsider
symptoms can lead to other than death

when the possible becomes inclined
to ask
a philosophy of circular thinking
redundant emotional clutter
intervenes
smoke figures loosely in this analogy
see lightning, wait for
more undeniable clues
and ignore, like a sore throat
what lies behind eyes of
inclination
circling around the obvious
musical interlude
on repeat

cool Poetry Blog

Lemon Hound

in february

listless antecedent reaching heights
of fancy a gaze splayed through dirty
glass elements of sun disperse gather
dust a silent
ring

i imagined it a voice telling me something in rubble
rumble a bubble of nonsense syllables like a singular
om uttered by 100 voices simultaneously
off key

i heard a voice still repeating polite
affirmations
not unnoticed until cleverly
dismissed
accidentally nonsensical or paralyzed

loss of individual words
word sounds
making sounds like words
fails

i resort to thinking in overtones
heavy breathing
particles linger just away
from

from Slow Love by Dominique Browning

Slow Love

How Words Fail

from:

How Words Fail by Cathy Park Hong

Blevins says that the poetic “sentence” is a unit for “talk” and that “talk” is the essence of the poet’s authentic being. I, however, cannot shake the belief that English is “an artificial, stiffish thing” and was grateful to discover Stein and a whole lineage of poets, in particular the Language poets, such as Lyn Hejinian and Ron Silliman, who pretty much thought the same. Their poetry emphasizes the materiality of language rather than language as transparent conduit for soulmaking. They asserted that the “I” in the poem is really a fabrication of the self rather than a direct mirror of the author’s psyche. As Hejinian once wrote, “One is not oneself, one is several, incomplete, and subject to dispersal.” From these ideas, the Language poets stylistically formed their own versions of what poet Ron Silliman dubbed the “new sentence”: poetic lines that are syntactically fractured, purposefully atonal, averse to the first person.

Ultimately, though, I was more drawn to poets who severed syntax out of a sense of cultural or political displacement rather than for the sake of experimentation. History and circumstance alienated these poets from their own language, placed them in the margins of their cultures, where they were witness to language’s limits in articulating a cohesive voice. Through deliberate inarticulation, they managed to strain out a charged music from syntactic chaff, a music borne out of negation. The poet I have most in mind is Paul Celan.

Celan’s relationship with the German language was tortured and ambivalent. Son of Jewish parents, he lived in Romania and grew up speaking German and Yiddish, Hebrew, Romanian, and Russian. When the German forces conquered Romania, they deported Celan’s parents to the concentration camps. Because his German mother tongue was also the language of his parents’ murderers, Celan wrestled with it in his poetry, a tension evident in the fissures, elisions, and neologisms of his poems. From these ruptures, Celan sutured a composition that radiates a haunting and terrifying music. To wit:

No one kneads us again out of earth and clay,
no one incants our dust.
No one.

Blessed art thou, No one.
In thy sight would
we bloom.
In thy
spite.

A Nothing
We were, are now, and ever
shall be, blooming:
the Nothing-, the
No-One’s-Rose.

With
Our pistil soul-bright
Our stamen heaven-waste,
Our corolla red
From the purpleword we sang
Over, O over
The thorn.

read the rest: How Words Fail

from The content of Form

by Hayden White


What I have sought to suggest is that this value attached to narrativity in the representation of real events arises out of a desire to have real events display the coherence, integrity, fullness, and closure of an image of life that is and can only be imaginary. The notion that sequences of real events possess the formal attributes of the stories we tell about imaginary events could only have its origin in whishes, daydreams, reveries. Does the world really present itself to perception in the form of well-made stories, with central subjects, proper beginnings, middles, and ends, and a coherence that permits us to see “the end” in every beginning? Or does it present itself more in the forms that the annals and chronicle suggest, either as mere sequence without beginning or end or a sequences of beginnings that only terminate and never conclude? And does the world, even the social world, ever really come to us as already narrativized, already “speaking itself” from beyond the horizon of our capacity to make scientific sense of it? Or is the fiction of such a world, capable of speaking itself and of displaying itself as a form of a story, necessary for the establishment of that moral authority without which the notion of a specifically social reality would be unthinkable?...Could we ever narrativize without moralizing? (24-25)