Me and My Pharaoh . . .
[facsimile]
He awoke,
fully charged. You
can
bring water to a horse but you can’t
make it ride. All poetry is conceptual
but some is more
conceptual
than
others.
Ambient difficulty leads to poetic
license. Poetry has
no purpose
&
that is not
its
pur-
pose.
You have to get over
be-
in-
g over. April is
the cruelest month for poetry. And May
is not much better, is
it?
Why write in prose what you could write as easily
as
poetry?
The poem is a crutch that allows us to think with
and throu-
g-
h it.
Every poem must have 13 distinct frames, devices, motifs, styles, forms, or
concepts.
Poetry emasculates prose.
The body: can’t live with it, can’t live without
i-
t.
I want to be understood,
just not by you.
Last week’s weather is worth a pound of salt, just
like the lot of wives or the snowy pillars of Danton.
There’s not a crowd in the sky. Familiarity breeds
content. Yesterday’s
weather is as
beyond reach as tomorrow’s
dreams. The
move away from close
reading often got drowned in the
bathwater, even if we could never find the baby. I wouldn’t join a poetic
tradition that would recognize me as
a
member. The wheel needs
to be reinvented because we’re still
stuck.
I am for almost new art (gently used forms) — easier on the pocketbook and on
the b-
rain (undergarments not accepted). The only true
innovation is God’s. Others
pay cash.
This is a lie and that’s the truth.
Better truth in the shade than a lie in the sun.
The taste of madeleine ain’t
what it used to be.
(taint what it used to be)
...
all alone and feeling
...
Operators are on duty. Call now.
As dry as a bubble, as expectant as the dead
of night. Without product placement, poetry
as we know it
cannot sur-
vive.
Poetry should not be in the service of art any more than religion, ideology,
or morality. Poetry should be in the service of nothing — and not even
that.
If you can identify someone as gnostic they are probably
not
gnostic enough,
for my money.
I believe in my disbelief, have faith in my reason.
The sacred in a poem is nowhere seen and everywhere
felt. There’s
more to transgression than
ritual, but not enough
more. There is more
to liturgy than doctrine,
once in a blue
m-
oo-
n.
I left my purpose in my other pants.
You’re not the only paddle in the ocean, shadow in the dark, line in
the poem, lobster in the trap, pot on the stove, wheel on the truck,
letter on the keypad, scythe in the field, lever on the controls, cloud
in the sky, fruit in the tree, rat in the lab.
Reality is usually a poor copy of the imitation. The original
is an echo of what is yet to be.
Time is neither linear nor circular; it is excremental.
Beauty is the memory of the loss of time.
Memory
is
the
reflection
of
the
loss
of
beauty.
American poetry suffers from its lack of
uncreativity. I have no faith in faith, or hope
for hope, no belief in belief, no doubt of doubt.
They say God is in the details. That’s
because the Devil has the rest
covered.
God is weak and imaginary — a flickering possibility. The dogma of an
omniscient and omnipotent God maligns hope and denies the sacred, as
it turns its back on the world.
God has no doctrine, no morality, no responsibility. To sin against
God is to use that name to justify any action or prohibition, whether
murder or martyrdom.
I’ve got authenticity, you’ve got dogma ... proclaimeth the Lord.
Saying one more time:
It’s true but I don’t believe it
I believe it but it’s not so.
“My logic is all in the melting pot.”
[wittgenstein]
Better an old cow than a dead
horse. Alzheimer’s:
What’s that again? So it turns out I’m
not a bull in a china shop but china in a
bulls’
shop. Sometimes a penis is just a s-
y-
m-
b-
ol.
In their gloom, the Jews go and come
Talking of Bergen-Belsen.
(I saw time but it didn’t return my gaze.)
My heart is like a water bucket that returns from the river
seven times full eighth
empty.
Zeno and Heraklitus are my father’s milk.
I think with the poem not thr-
ou-
g-
h
it. Turns
of phrase / my stock in
trade. Negative
capability: sure.
But also
positive
incapacity. I always
hear echoes and reverses
when I am listening to language. It’s
the field of my consciousness.
When we stop making — manufacturing,
imposing — sense then we have a chance
to find it.
A professional poet throws nothing out except the eggshells and the coffee grounds.
I think the idea is to be unoriginal but in as original a way a-
s possible.
Poets are the Pershings
of the imaginary: piercing
themselves as they perish
in spite of native ground.
I wish I was still in my pajamas.
The unironized life is not worth living.
When people tell that joke, three Jews
four opinions, what they don’t say is that two of them,
the schmucks, have the same opinion, while the third ...
Ouzo something to me and it ain’t pretty.
Absinthe makes the heart gro-
w
foreigner.
“Throughout this prospectus, ‘object’ refers to the digitized file.”
Yesterday is a stone’s throw from tomorrow
& each new year a vast canvas of impossibility.
Kalip in North Folk, you’re on the air.
Stand clear of the clo-
sing
doors.
•
Too much is still
not enough.
•
Blameless as a sheep at slaughter, am I
Guileless as the toll of tidal tug
There are no absolutes except this.
It was a veritable bow across the shot.
“Sacred means saturated with being.”
[berssenbrugge]
So does scared. So does scarred.
Source: Poetry (April 2014)