Friday, March 12, 2010

Here is a work-in-progress

To be is to metaphor, I believe

(Inspired by a list of words, selected at random, from George Oppen's “Of Being Numerous”)



in nothing. Irony shows us ancestry built the vehicle tomorrow. A child can preface this, but morality has dropped. What is this, seated caves? Less. Poor unknown: me, he. What, in a moment, incredibly rasps into unlikely plant grass poetry: artists sail poems. The single source of memoriam, the artist, the theater of william. These literatures are foxholes. Then the artist, what? In memoriam of all materials: all the poems yield excitement from their sources within artists. Incomplete occurrences between speech, never power never exalted, speak on numerous apprenticeships. e.g. “The monument smiled at the pedestrian by night.” Solution? Structure; branches. Comes glass, constructs preface, admits acknowledgements on the matter dear oppen dear niedecker dear matter. A child can outlast language and all its sea. Poems are almost primitive and I doubt the miraculous can be. The sea is dark, the cabins and their planets soar about us, we; animalia. A girl might say the symbol means sign, the light might show there are numerous subways, only few white women. The savvy, plain infantry bulks in halls, ready to undertake the night in relief of a solution, a reconstruction of idiom. As the ladies at parties would sorrow in their discrete notes and pillow books, true artists wool their tongues but in a good boy fashion, all that which they know. However, enlightened by longitude the crowd thus pounds on starlit, killing definition; and I? undoing. It is a neoclassic scene paved by one argument: The infantry stormed the hull, and beauty was felt by all.

4 comments:

  1. i am in awe of this. i have read it multiple times and don't have anything intelligible, anything constructive, to say... just questions that i'm not even sure i want the answer to. i love reading it aloud.

    i'll attempt to do what humans do and make meaning of it, though it may be an ironic move on my part considering what i believe this poem is exploring... the imagery and word choice (especially moments like "these literatures are foxholes", "glass, constructs preface".. "a reconstruction of idiom","the crowd thus pounds on starlit, killing definition"& the last line) give me the impression that the work is about the demolition/reconstruction & destruction of meaning by language, and this violence upon language is what makes poetry beautiful...

    i'll have to add George Oppen's work to my list of things to read

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  2. This is quite overwhelming. It seems like sometimes words are used with an understanding that they don't mean anything in the sentence? Or even that they render the sentence meaningless. But then, the whole thing is talking about that meaninglessness, so they don't render the sentences meaningless.... Because they're just exemplifying what they're talking about.

    Confusing. 8-|

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  3. Patrycja,

    I think you're right on with the decipherment.

    Yeah, Oppen's kinda the big "Objectivist" poet so I figured what could be more concrete than borrowing from the vocab of a writer who purposely steered away from the superfluous overuse of metaphor. This obviously failed, as it ended up with plenty of highly-suggestive phrases, as you noted. But I was pretty happy with the result (because I had no idea what I was doing at the time) and I'm glad you were at least amused. The only thing is perhaps making the big block of text into segments/numbered/stanza whathaveyou etc.

    Andrew,


    I feel your pain. Such is often the burden of extracting ideas from a source text and appropriating them for one's own intent. Something's bound to be lost in the transaction. But to be honest, I don't feel that I owe much more to the poem other than some aesthetically-based editing. Gleeful abstraction is really the aim here, perhaps alla NYS poetry.


    Thanks for the feedback!

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  4. you are quite welcome. oh those gleefully abstract NYS poets. gotta love em. i kind of like this in one big block of text! but if you change up the format id like to see your revision

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