postcard # 4

August Poetry Postcard Fest

i signed up for this neat thing, better explained here

here are my first three. all the postcards are works of art from canadian artists

three reverse poems

published on www.ditchpoetry.com

finale-a sonnet for the end of our world

tales from the end of our world

reynold throws stones at the floor-to-ceiling windows of his penthouse apartment. water sluices from a functional sculpture, tumbling over paddle wheels, splashing on black rocks painted with the words “joy,” “gratitude,” and “sky.” a stunted bonsai lies on its side in the corner beside a lacklustre rubber tree plant. sometimes reynold hits. glass shatters, disturbs the sound of water, the gentle background music, the still leaves of the dusty plants.

denise likes to eat french pastry from larks, the latest trend in high fashion eating. you fill you cheeks with soft yellow cream and chocolate profiteroles, pause and spit. the thin and stylishly dressed waiter to your right holds a bucket and wipes your mouth when you’re done. you feels as if you’ve indulged in gustatory excess, yet when you leave you are empty. strangely empty.

zoe rides a harley hog across california’s coastal highway number one and listens to the grateful dead. she wonders about her mother, ashes and bone finally cold in an urn on her mantle in the family home where zoe dreamed of escape. she’s given her mother everything she wanted: non stop big screen colour television and the security that nothing will ever change.

bridget’s eye is still bruised from the old lady’s fists. she wouldn’t have sex with him, the man her mother sold her to. she discovers a gray army blanket and an old box of crackers. for the first time in weeks, bridget sleeps. in the morning her body is so frozen with cold she can’t feel her toes, her fingers. there’s a hole in the roof of the shed where she’s run to. winter light melts the ice. she opens her mouth and gulps.

david composes text on a typewriter, blots empty spaces with gray smudges caused by eyes that refuse to remain dry. he takes a sip of his morning martini and watches the words blur out of sense. a long list slides slowly down the refrigerator door, its overwhelming and impossible to complete obligations too heavy to be held by magnetic force. david shoots out six typewriter keys and saves the last bullet. t h e e n d

cassiopea makes the best pizzas in the city. the teenage boy watches the curves of her body bounce as she twirls another circle of dough in the air and laughs like she means it. his mother kicks him under the table and tells him to chew his food and stop gaping. his father folds the pages of the business section until the creases are so sharp they cut. while his mother goes to the ladies room and his father pays the bill, he steps through the kitchen and out the back door, a still warm ball of dough cradled in the palm of his hand.

the end of our world-a poem cycle

big bang theory: countries broken
views of earth from space
as viewed from earth from space from earth
close up where planets splinter
genealogy over atom
stratified centre of quake
birth monsoons
tsunami




before burn
wax effigy packs for apocalypse
carries child raggedly unstitched
plays radio
severs surgeon hand
speeds train
throws bird over cliff
plummets diver
swallows an open mouth
begs an answer




saving the world
wanted—
fuel efficient
fish that flies
and leaves no ecological footprint
afterwards you can eat it
without ingesting mercury or depleting
scarce ocean resources
is powered by hot air
converts noxious bleats into energy
you if ever travelled by fish
know about economies of scale


turntables rewind empathetic breath
until tuesday the stars
rescind hills folded over egg
whites of rivers, eye lids
shutter before after
yolk rises in the east
sets elsewhere
eel or jelly crust unbaked
stuck to the bottom of
bellows suck and fan
the blastfire
finale


the prince counts hands in the valley
while his wife searches for shoulders
in the kitchen
and the butcher needs meat to chop
gristle for the chattering teeth
chew 32 times a feast of galaxy
burn wholes in celeste’s brand
new night table cloth
the dog ticks frenzies from his collar
hind leg thumps to the renaissance
beat of under
again a question breaks the window

rob's assignment on sound poetry

for this week's workshop class, rob asked us to go to the website PENNsound and listen to bpNichol and Steve McCaffery and write something in response. my response is below and the poem cycle i wrote is the entry after this one.

Sound Thoughts

Steve McCaffery - love his language, it goes all over the place. with his work i like to read and hear it. silly at times, such as “what as poetic”:
“the rain in spain falls mainly on mark twain” “an avant garde a kierkegaard”
just so full of rhythm and implausibility, fantastic. absurd “poetica, helvetica, ars poetica.” “when i grow up i want to be a version of a virgin of a brain surgeon” all kinds of unlike ideas put together. “a walnut covered walrus” what happens when you let your mind run free in association with sound? [on a side note, i enjoy also his idea of poetic research being different from other kinds of research in that it is a reaction or response or inspiration rather than necessarily a comment on it, pataphysics, beyond the metaphysical and a parody of science...all fun! love his seven pages missing volume one.]

in bpNichol’s sound poetry, single syllables are emphasized, his word associations are based on sound rather than concept, there’s often strong & sing song rhythms to his poems and he also plays with pitch. some of his poems are like tongue twisters.

also Bill Bissett’s Lullaby from Motherlove-love the language of an unknown or invented language; see how sounds alone can create an atmosphere; this is soft, repetitive like a lullaby.

the addition of sound effects is so much fun; shows you there really are no limits; folks like antonin artaud and william s. burroughs played with all of this years ago, yet it’s still treated as something new. they played with sounds alone, added effects, slowed down and lengthened discrete sounds, distorting them. to me it’s like going deep inside language to really consider it and analyse it in depth, slowing down each individual sound like an isolated moment. this to me is what poems are...the isolation of a unique moment and its articulation on paper or in the air. today folks like max middle and jw curry here in ottawa, a. rawlings in toronto and others all over the world are creating sound poetry. it’s as exciting to me as visual poetry and every other media being used.

i dig the idea of removing and or playing with expected patterns of meaning. seems to me that changing languages is one way of doing so. i fell in love with words for their sounds more than their meaning. i have always spoken my poems out loud and the poems of others. as a child i would repeat and still do, little phrases and words, such as “the theory of plate tectonics” my favourite phrase and “lugubrious.” I love what these sounds do to my tongue, how they fill my mouth, how they resonate in my brain: “the murmuring of innumerable bees”-Tennyson.

in one of the music classes i can still remember from grade school the teacher has us listen to peter and the wolf and tell her what we were hearing without knowing the story. i was fascinated by the way music and sound alone could convey mood and tone, could tell the story without words.

i have always played with language, inventing my own as a child. this exploration of sound has brought me back to that playfulness and the idea of invented languages.

in this poem cycle, “8 planets speaking in tongues,” i’ve chosen vocabulary from existing languages and also added my own invented words. i haven’t chosen the words for their meaning, but rather for their sound. the sounds are meant to have onomatopoeic associations with specific atmospheres...let me know if they do...

8 planets speaking in tongues

to be published by my self-publishing imprint Angel House Press and to be launched at the ottawa small press fair along with two other chapbooks on june 16, 2007

away by train

what if there’s nothing more beautiful
than this about to be

what if i can never look in your eyes without the dominos of all our histories
downing the centuries of every thing discovered not as important as this

you and i at castles moated between us no fire greater than the inner dragon wind
travels the taut wire sings our bones

walls of roman ruins and tarnished armour carved statues of ghosts and rusted red wine staining silver chalices i’m eager to touch the legend of you if that’s all i will ever

some have found prophesies written in the sacrificed petals of flowers torn apart
fingernail scars on the moon fanatic latched onto

in this life understand what’s meant and what’s not to be
you’ll allow spark to lightning but never to ground

your histories i dare not
fall into

fingers fumble through electric compositions and fret
board under your hands i’ve imagined how they’d find me
a pattern beneath all the eras
eros eros rose sees seas seize
scar of lightning written over bones
is all i need

it’s windy the clouds i can taste the coming storm

you the ocean nothing more
one glance reveals infinity

believe unbreakable

hand wedged between soap
bubbles and narrow water glass
body within a morning’s yellowgreen
the simple act of washing over re
washing daily in the early hours

constant hymn of swallows in prayer overhead
folds into routine unnoticed
always present
an act of forgiveness
your blood receives

before feet press down onto solid
the day begins with this

two untitled poems

(1) friday's poem

on these nights

better go hungry

know exactly what misses

you leave the water on the table in its empty glass

wait and listen sound of

you could talk the constant the surround the hum

wonder does anyone?

feel it there a pulse that drives

yesterday there was lightning thunder

response yes exactly

only the cold air can understand

only the spring green tree blur can understand

to clarify a hot air balloon made of tissue paper set on fire

there is no voice for this

tune guitar the in-between

the waves will tell

so the whisper it’s taken so long to find it the secret so this is

leave lose in paper shuffle yet in pulp scrape over you can still discern

the travel of what’s left unsaid

(2) monday's poem

snow thinks of you
sky merges land
the quiet ly
falling fall
day where nothing matters
but white
whets appetite for


the cold is
silence that never before existed
the morning an answer

secret

please distract me

its true your words go directly

and i shouldnt

but do

want

if this the only conduit

i accept

speak general

careful unspecific dont for granted take

vicarious thru your words not meant for me

not meant

i close and your eyes simultaneous

ly river ly stars ly flow from to inadvertant ly

touch your something language with my body

syllable i could devour each

will subsist on nothing but word scent

on wind

notes from my response to hannah weiner's poems

hannah weiner’s little books/indians came along when i’ve been feeling frozen by the cold beauty of the perfect. writing like hannah’s seems closer to the bone, more real to me than the writing of someone like don mckay lately. a good friend suggested it’s all about timing and what we need at a particular moment. at this moment i am not inspired by beauty but by messes, holes and ambiguities. i don’t want a writer to fill in all the blanks for me, i want her to leave the space open, so i can breathe.

hannah addresses herself directly, makes colossal typos and spelling errors, changes apostrophes to esses, fucks around with subject verb agreement and linearity. nothing is sacred. within all that is a painful honesty. she makes up words, she references other writers, like ron padgett. she sticks in clichés, she messes with the order of ideas, and even splits words apart.

she began writing poems in her mid 30s, no reason why she waited until then, just twenty years went by. she went to the new york school and was bored to tears by the poetry of writers like kenneth koch. her most well known book was the clairvoyant journal. she saw words on people, on things, giant 8 foot words. in an interview with charles bernstein for penn sound, she said:

capital words give instructions
italics make comments
ordinary type – me just trying to get thru the day

more stuff from the interview and other sources:
are you ever embarrassed about the triviality of thought – cb?
i don’t have time to be embarrassed

i bought a typewriter; i had 3 choices ordinary words, italics and capital letters, that settled it

how can you not be avant garde if you’re the only person in the world who sees words.

cb says that “One of Hannah’s most enduring achievements as a writer was her unflinching, indeed often hilarious, inclusion of what, from a literary point of view, is often denigrated as trivial, awkward, embarrassing, silly, and, indeed, too minutely personal, even for the advocates of the personal in writing.” jacket 12
http://jacketmagazine.com/12/wein-bern.html


it’s not easy to go thru her writing. at times she loses me with all the stretching and playing around but i don’t mind that. it’s good to be lost and i know i can go thru her stuff again and notice different bits.

at the same time i’ve been going thru steven ross smith’s book flutterlongue-the book of games. not only does he play around with sound, but he also messes with form and linearity. in some interview i listened to on line, steve mccaffery said that when you take away cues for literal meaning, it forces your reader to look for other patterns of meaning, such as sound. i’m excited about this idea. i think it also extends to form. when you take away linear patterns, how does that affect how readers read your poems? folks like weiner and ross smith are opening up poetry for me, making me want to throw some sand out of the sandbox too.

[click on pic to enlarge poem]

space junk circus act

he a high wire artist who loves
distance between trapeze
and audience
you someone who holds fistfuls
of air

he glides all business
like across enthusiasm you as
net

here is tennis between ceiling
and floor
your words ricochet relay
bounce off silence

vertical’s a virtuous border
with enough gap
to keep him safe
not from falling
but from falling in

thru
one way
telescope he is the man
in moon
where he escapes gravity
and the unavoidable drop

you remember a juggler
incapable of throwing fire
without burning

she sells fruit and memories

brown eyes gold flecked reflected
seed
devoured inflection
possibility of taste
hands tender lift apple from basket
the old man who no longer hungers
wants a bite
squeezes ripe in palm
sweet plum scent of longing
clings like remembrance

ode to late night conversations

winter has emptied the pub
a snowplow scrapes away what remains

another scheme creative dream unfolds
i think of a song in italian
che so bello da morire
you’re so beautiful i might die
between hands i hold the need
to touch his fingers

i take his words lovingly inside
plate scraping substitutes
for a full meal
when the meal is done

this morning i wake late
the sound of his voice in my dreams
i am so hungry

notes from juliana spahr's response and a poem

in our last workshop, rob mclennan had us go to http://www.ubu.com/ubu/ (a great site for post avant stuff) and choose a collection to read and respond to by means of a poem. i chose juliana spahr's response (i've read and felt affected by spahr's writing already):

in her poems, spahr describes a series of scenarios where someone's truth is questioned: the torture of military prisoners, the self stalking of a woman with disassociative personality disorder, the abduction of people by aliens.

in her introduction, she discusses the difficulties of representing what's real and what's not through patterns, through art, through history. my poem was triggered by her use of abstract language, her method of including everyone by not being specific in naming, her occasional use of very complicated sentence structure, her simple language and the following excerpts:

"some co-opt this language and paint a series of meticulous and beautifully colored (sic)
monumental images of people imprisoned alone and at the edge of a
tedious despair."

"some [refigure [refuse] respond] call out for an end "

"rewritten the goal of the artist is to present reality in a true and concrete manner"

"another [generic human figure] says passionately we express ourselves in a lan-
guage of regulations. Symbols and numbers best convey our ideas."

"a voice stutters in the background of our waking mind"

"in the narrative she finds herself floating up and out of the bed"

"i can't say this happened to me and expect to be treated in the same way again"

"you keep shaking the secrecy tree
hopefully something drops out"

"as we try to look with eyes better than what we've had before"

"when terrible things happen they must be witnessed"

"how much of self can be removed and the self remain?"

and all of this VIII from page 79

"an attempt to speak to the human moment will occur
in these moments someone touches someone
someone claims to love someone
someone moves closer to someone in prelude to a proposition
someone waits outside for someone to come by
someone becomes unable to live his/her life and succumbs

this is information that might be left out of witness
yet it has a bearing that is all the more strong
it speaks to the safety of immunity that does not exist
to the various kinds of immunity that do exist
such as an emotional immunity to the world
a quarantine of engagement
a feeling of safety

which do you believe?"

untitled poem by me (amanda)

these pages are intentionally left blank

any attempt to find meaning

here is fruitless

abstract does not equal concrete does not produce sound does

not translate

into utterances decoded by ear

there is no evidence to suggest that saying no does not eliminate occurrence

or re o cur rence

to engage in hypothetics is incorrect

muscle memory is a myth

to obey / respect conspires against

solve this problem

where x is father

and y is mother

and z is child

x + y = z

x + z =

there is no answer

solve for why