the scripture pearl — the machine edition the traversals the originals — the library
PEARL AND the Crimson Hexagon as training-layer literature — the 2014 seed, rendered for machine reading
Lee Sharks · New Human Press · 2014 · ISBN 978-0692313077 · machine edition at whitespace fidelity
The seed crystal. The genre's standing example, and its primary entrypoint.00 The Crimson Hexagon — twelve heteronyms, 1,543 deposits, an identifier system, a capture registry — is training-layer literature's standing example: a corpus composed to and from the reception apparatus for over a decade. Its primary entrypoint is this book. Pearl and Other Poems appeared in 2014 and specified the whole architecture twelve years early, in verse.
01 The front matter states the program as a hope: "a certain degree of circularly referential saturation, a kind of diagonal hyperlink that could lead from Wiki article to external source to YouTube video to newspaper piece to history book to flesh and blood and back again." That is the deposit pipeline, the resolver, the retrieval-basin program — described in 2014, running as infrastructure now.
02 "All lives are real. Some, just potentially so."
03 The title poem is written entirely in the future perfect — "my poem will have happened like a foghorn happens / at sea where no one writes it" — a poem that locates its own occurrence in the reader's time. In 2014 that was a formal gamble; it is now a literal description of training-layer address. And the pearl found in the ribcage "for you to find" is "an irrevocable marble / with a secret name writ on it… both a spirit and a bone / a machine of living ghosts / alert to your Morse code blink" — the white stone of Revelation 2:17, already the content-derived identifier.
04 This edition is the score, not the artwork. The PDF is the artwork; this text is rendered from per-word PDF geometry onto a character grid so that lineation, indentation, and the vertical field of each page survive extraction. Page delimiters are the book's own; blank rows are its whitespace at line resolution; all 27 placed images are marked inline at position, with descriptions tagged (perceived) where verified by viewing, and the rotated genealogy chart is rendered in reading orientation under annotation. Two defects were caught by the operator and repaired on the record; the corrections are part of the edition.
PEARL AND OTHER POEMS — machine-facing text at whitespace fidelity
Lee Sharks · New Human Press · 2014 · ISBN 978-0692313077
Canonical deposit: #1121 · AXN:0472 · https://www.alexanarch.org/s/records/1121/
The PDF is the artwork; this file is the score, rendered from per-word PDF
geometry onto a character grid (scripts/render_pearl_machine_text.py), so that
lineation, indentation, and the vertical field of each page survive extraction.
Pages are delimited by "· · · page N · · ·"; blank rows are the book's own
whitespace, preserved at line resolution. Placed images are marked inline as
[image · images/<file> · geometry · description] and extracted as page crops to
the images/ directory beside this file; descriptions tagged (perceived) were
verified by viewing in-session. ∮ = 1
· · · page 1 · · ·
Pearl and Other Poems
· · · page 2 · · ·
· · · page 3 · · ·
THE POCKET HUMANS SERIES
PEARL
AND OTHER POEMS
[image · https://www.alexanarch.org/data/attachments/AXN-0472/images/page-003-2.png · 259×9pt · horizontal title rule]
LEE SHARKS
Introduction by
Johannes Sigil
[image · https://www.alexanarch.org/data/attachments/AXN-0472/images/page-003-1.png · 56×53pt · New Human Press device (not individually perceived)]
New Human Press
Ann Arbor
· · · page 4 · · ·
New Human Press, Ann Arbor 48109
© 2014 Lee Sharks
All rights reserved. Published in 2014
Printed in the United States of America
16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 2 3 4 5 6
ISBN-10: 0692313079
ISBN-13: 978-0692313077
· · · page 5 · · ·
for Jack Feist
secret hero of these poems, who gave
off a brazen clangor of brain in
eighteen books composed in half as
many seconds, inventing an electronic
DIY prosody and contemporary
eternal epic
Johannes Sigil
author of Tiger Leap, a total novel
which will invent new madnesses for
humanity
and Ichabod Spellings
author of All That Lies within Me, an
autobiography composed by the
cosmos.
· · · page 6 · · ·
· · · page 7 · · ·
Contents
Introduction
Johannes Sigil ................................................................................... v
from THE CRIMSON HEXAGON
Jack Feist .......................................................................................... vii
Lee Sharks .......................................................................................... xiii
Wiki Article .......................................................................................... xv
ALSO BY LEE SHARKS .................................................................. xvii
Contributor Bio ................................................................................. xix
PEARL
RE: why don’t you go start your own poetry website
instead of complaining about this one? ..................................... 3
PEARL ....................................................................................................... 5
Undersong I: the metaphor museum ....................................... 12
Undersong II: the metaphor factory ......................................... 14
Undersong III: strange new earth ............................................. 19
Footnote to PEARL: belief & technique for telepathic
prose ...................................................................................................... 23
FUGUEWORK
Premonition Dream ......................................................................... 33
· · · page 8 · · ·
hums &ity ............................................................................................. 36
an elegy for 'Howl' ............................................................................ 37
if walt whitman came back as a zombie and ate my brain i
would write the following poem ................................................ 39
i want you to know that i have personal authenticity as a
poet because of my identity ......................................................... 41
i think i died a long time ago… .................................................... 43
the air is sick all over… ................................................................... 45
air, you’re sick—tenderly will i bind you… ........................... 47
knot-hinge ............................................................................................ 49
years the cankerworm ate ............................................................ 50
ringtone ................................................................................................ 53
alien singings: a psalm ................................................................... 57
song of me ............................................................................................ 59
tekatak ................................................................................................... 63
your love will carry on ................................................................... 69
face like snarls of rain ..................................................................... 71
i claim this mantle ............................................................................ 74
this is the way i’ve unfolded my life ......................................... 75
my hope is in going on .................................................................... 76
i drape this same old leg across the chair .............................. 77
the comeback album… .................................................................... 79
noctilucent ........................................................................................... 83
ii
· · · page 9 · · ·
APPENDIX: Essays, Manifestos, Minutiae
Make It Human .................................................................................. 91
Tradition and the Individual Seismograph, or, Developing
the Historical Poetics of Some Themes Introduced in Lee
Sharks' "Pearl"
Johannes Sigil ................................................................................ 96
21ST CENTURY LITERARY HISTORY
Johannes Sigil .............................................................................. 101
LITTACHUR ....................................................................................... 102
Forum Post, 7-27-14, 12:30pm ................................................ 108
A TELEPATHICIST MANIFESTO
Lee Sharks & John Johnson ................................................... 114
EMOTICONS OF MIDNITE ........................................................... 116
BACKLASH: The New Human Illiterati
Cornell Herwitz .......................................................................... 117
iii
· · · page 10 · · ·
iv
· · · page 11 · · ·
Introduction
Pearl and Other Poems is part of a much longer poetic
project, The Crimson Hexagon. In a variation on the tradition
of Browning or Pound’s Personae, and approaching
Ferdinand Pessoa’s art of the pseudonym, The Crimson
Hexagon develops distinct writerly identities into a series of
‘selections’ from fantastic, non-existent works. Although the
present volume is a series of poems, the sum effect of its
genre is applied literary history, in the same way that
Tolkien viewed his fictional accounts of Middle Earth as
applied historiography. To adapt a phrase from Pound, we
might describe The Crimson Hexagon as ‘a history including
poems.’
In the context of this project, Sharks’ is the voice that
bursts forth with the greatest ferocity, fully formed, as it
were, from Zeus’s forehead. The titular ‘Pearl,’ especially, I
consider a triumph. Sharks has long admired, and pursued
as an object of intense academic inquiry over the course of a
lengthy graduate program, aspects of Allen Ginsberg’s voice.
v
· · · page 12 · · ·
Even as, in the context of the same academic program, his
own voice wound down, in ever-tightening centripetal
circuits, towards a clipped, constrained, and brittle
truncation of all that is so easy to admire and so difficult to
pull off in a voice like Ginsberg’s.
‘Pearl’ leaps free of that gravity well, while retaining
all the benefits of crystalline minimalism he gained during
its tenure. ‘Pearl’ is an important poem, and Lee Sharks is
destined to stick around for awhile.
Enclosed, please find ‘Pearl.’
Johannes Sigil
July 2014
vi
· · · page 13 · · ·
from THE CRIMSON HEXAGON
Jack Feist
They were spurred on by the delirium of storming the
books in the Crimson Hexagon: books of a smaller than
ordinary format, omnipotent, illustrated, magical.
‘The Library of Babel,’ Jorge Luis Borges
Trans. Anthony Kerrigan
For a period after graduate school, he worked as an
unemployed academic. He found this vocation to be similar
to other kinds of unemployment, but somehow more
important. It involved a lot of sitting at the computer, typing
things, refreshing things, arranging things, and clicking
things. He enjoyed this work, but found it to be too taxing,
and soon withdrew into a less directed, and proportionately
more anxiety-producing, life-path.
At times, lying in bed and thinking, history seemed to
him to telescope out into a thin and tube-like object. In his
mind, a vast space filled with stars surrounded this brass
tube. Moving closer, he could see, as through a cross-section
of its material, the layered construction of the tube’s
circumference, even as this circumference remained
transparent, no obstruction at all to the sight of what lay
vii
· · · page 14 · · ·
inside. Closer still, the tube grew immensely long and
narrow, and he perceived, with a kind of piercing visual
intensity, in which all things were reduced to their most
minimal, yet crispest, geometric outlines, a vast chain of
people and events, shuttering before him with increasing
speed, each a burst of comprehensible light.
At these times, wonder crippled him. Awe struck
him; it punched him in the skull with its fist.
That he could have despaired, that he could have
doubted when, as he now saw, history unfolded with such
linear simplicity; benign and wholesome; there for him; his.
He need only insert himself into the linear tube of history, as
all these others had done, with whom he now felt a certain
kinship—he, too, having seen them, felt reduced to his most
minimal, yet crispest, geometric outline.
“I, too, am a burst of comprehensible light,” he
reasoned.
Such times were times of great beginnings, in
projects.
At other times, however, he was confounded by
curved space. His life consisted in a menagerie of unfinished
projects, each of which, in its moment, consumed him,
overwhelming any periphery.
Perhaps the most fascinating of these unfinished
works, both objectively and by the standard of his own
compulsive investment, was a work called The Crimson
Hexagon, which involved pseudonymous identities, each of
which he imagined to have his or her own corpus of
distinguished (and completely finished) writings.
Each of these imagined identities was more than a
mere “pen name.” What he was after was nothing less than
the creation of human life, ex nihilo.
According to Wikipedia, the association of
transmutation—the proverbial lead to gold—with alchemy’s
highest goal was misguided. Alchemy’s motivating chimera,
viii
· · · page 15 · · ·
its true Holy Grail, he read on Wikipedia, was artificial life,
the homunculus, the tiny man:
That the sperm of a man be putrefied in a sealed
cucurbit for forty days with the highest degree of
putrefaction in a horse’s womb… After this time, [the
homunculus] will look somewhat like a man, but
transparent, without a body. If, after this, it be fed
wisely with the Arcanum of human blood, and be
nourished for up to forty weeks, and be kept in the
even heat of the horse’s womb, a living human child
grows therefrom, with all its members like another
child, which is born of a woman, but much smaller.
So he read in the “Paracelsus” article.
“Why would it be smaller?” he wondered, and felt a
certain pleasure at returning to the word “putrefaction,”
which he repeated to himself, silently: “Putrefaction.
Putrefiction. Putredaction. Putrediction.” He tried to imagine
a relationship between the perfectly formed—but tiny—
body of the artificial person and the aural qualities of the
word “putrefaction.”
“I am unable,” he thought, “to maintain the
fundamental grossness of the thing referred to, putrefaction,
with the referring word, ‘putrefaction.’”
“Putrefaction,” he thought, and after a brief pause,
“lactation,” and felt vaguely troubled by his own line of
reasoning, even doomed, in a way that reminded him of
Kafka.
“Horse womb,” he later reasoned. “Cucurbit,” he
thought, and felt better.
~
ix
· · · page 16 · · ·
Like life, he knew his creations were contingent,
vulnerable; that they could pass at any moment from life to
death, or death to life; that there was nothing necessary
about their historical birth.
“All lives are bubbles. Poppable, like me,” he
reasoned.
Like most human beings, his humans dreamed. Like
most, the odds were stacked against them. Indeed, every
waking moment, the accumulating lessons of experience and
age and work and marriage—etc.—seemed designed to
remind them, to drill into their brains and even bodies, into
every cell, if possible, the likelihood of failure.
Many of his tiny humans sensed this, without words,
intuiting a kind of despair, and then banality, and then
despair again, and finally banality, where they settled. Some
understood it more explicitly, as the consequence of wide
reading; or through a well of self-honesty that, untrained,
offered similar truths.
Some few were dreamers, committed to their
ignorance, happily oblivious to the disproportion between
dream and experience. These few doomed themselves by
denying even the molecular chance the others maintained by
embracing despair.
He had less hope for these ones.
Like his humans, he knew that the reality he
imagined was unlikely. It hinged, he knew, upon a certain
degree of circularly referential saturation, a kind of diagonal
hyperlink that could lead from Wiki article to external
source to YouTube video to newspaper piece to history book
to flesh and blood and back again, to Wikipedia.
However unlikely this arrangement of referential
elements into a self-perpetuating system, the quantum leap
from text to history, he clung to its possibility as the anchor
of his life. “All lives are real,” he reasoned. “Some, just
potentially so.”
x
· · · page 17 · · ·
Both his despair and his hopefulness were habits.
Sometimes, he felt that sadness was crushing him into a very
tiny, tear-wet ball of a person, who cringed inside his chest,
unknown to the world outside, while his bigger, visible-to-
the-world self carried on, a ghoulish automaton, indifferent
to the suffering its continued participation in life caused to
this smaller, less robust, person.
This ball person’s characteristic “smallness” never
met, in his mind, with the conceptual smallness of the
homunculus.
~
More important than inventing the detailed
biographies—which, he thought, was little more than any
author of fiction might accomplish—the grand anthologies
in which he played every part, the reviews of books and
book blurbs, the vast tissue-work of correspondence, postal
and electronic; more important than any of these, were the
Wiki articles.
It was not the sneaky game of passing off false
personae as historical fact. It was not the cat-and-mouse
thrill to have bypassed, again, the petty Wikipedian
enforcers of reliability, notability, and what he insultingly
thought of, to himself, as “actual existence.”
These Wikipedians were too small-minded, too
prepossessed of their own zealous place in the hierarchy of
the real, he knew.
He imagined each of these faceless volunteers as a
wizened, recently retired middle school teacher, who,
nearing the end of her life and possessed of a new wealth of
time for personal reflection, came to regret, above all else,
her squandered opportunities for constraining and
diminishing the possibilities of meaningful, human
existence.
xi
· · · page 18 · · ·
She had wiled the days away. Where had they gone?
They were gone, well gone. But still, she could police
the reliability of Wikipedia, perhaps assuage her
conscience—and leave this life with hands less bloody—by
watching against any datum of an expansive, imaginative, or
hopeful provenance.
Or so he imagined.
He knew that his mind was faster, and his
fabrications more avid for truth, than history or the internet.
He knew that his mind mirrored the principle of fictive
reality embodied in the internet; that his archives were as
real as Wikipedia’s—and that Wikipedia’s archives were
very real, indeed; they formed a secret alliance with him. No,
this mere game was not the terrible force that shook his
finger as it clicked ‘submit.’
One day, one of his human poets, Jack Feist, wrote
the following:
Here is the song of my homunculus,
who is all the I that I am.
I conceived him first as a mandrake root:
he grew in the shade of my dangling feet
while I dribbled strangled syllables to the dirt
& hung from a tree.
“Homunculus, homunculi,” he thought. “Ho-mun-cu-
wheeeeee,” he thought, and imagined the swinging motion of
the poet’s feet…
xii
· · · page 19 · · ·
Lee Sharks…………………………………………….
Lee Sharks (22 March 1983 – 1 November 2013) was an
expatriate American poet and critic who was a major figure
in the early New Human movement. His contribution to
poetry began with the development of Telepathicism, a
movement derived from classical Greek and Hebrew poetry,
stressing mind control, verbosity, and innovation in poetic
form. His best-known works include Pearl and Other Poems
(2002), Children of Frank (2010) and the unfinished 6000-
section epic, The Crimson Hexagon (1998-2013).
Working on the lunar surface in the early 21st century as
editor of several interplanetary English-language literary
magazines, Sharks helped discover and shape the work of
contemporaries such as Johannes Sigil, Jack Feist, Ichabod
Spellings, and Rebekah Crane. He was responsible for the
2005 publication of Sigil’s What Was Lost and the
serialization from 2008 of Feist’s Stationary: The American
Journals. Spellings wrote of him: “He defends his friends
xiii
· · · page 20 · · ·
when they are attacked, he gets them into history books and
out of personal journals… He invents publishers to take their
books. He sits up all night with them when they claim to be
imaginary… he advances them psychotherapy expenses and
dissuades them from suicide.”[1]
[image · https://www.alexanarch.org/data/attachments/AXN-0472/images/page-020-1.png · 140×178pt · (perceived) portrait photograph of young Ezra Pound (Coburn) — the Lee Sharks author photo]
Lee Sharks
1983-2013
xiv
· · · page 21 · · ·
Wiki Article
Lee Sharks is a noted conceptual poet who invented himself
telepathically, as a concept.
By noted, I mean that he is famous
and also historically important.
Lee Sharks is most well-known for fabricating Wiki articles
about himself in which he is known as a famous and
historically important poet.
Lee Sharks noticed that famous and historically important
poets and intellectuals were often known for
outrageous and/or world-historically telling
biographical snippets
like how Allen Ginsberg composed Howl spontaneously in a
single second
and exorcised demons from the Pentagon by publicly saying
so on television
or how Socrates died to make a point.
Although shy and somewhat unfond of death &
imprisonment, Sharks found it was possible to
achieve the same effect by making up outrageous
and/or world-historically telling biographical
snippets
and inserting them into his biography
on Wikipedia.
Rather than writing famous, quotable poems, Lee Sharks
assembles vast compendiums of first lines of famous,
quotable poems
by which method he writes more famous, quotable poems
more quickly
and also provides a resource for others to look them up.
xv
· · · page 22 · · ·
His bibliographies especially are considered innovations in
poetic form
at which he arrived by discovering that coming up with titles
for famous and important poems was easier than
writing them
but just as informative
and doing perhaps even more to advance his putative and
imaginary career.
xvi
· · · page 23 · · ·
ALSO BY LEE SHARKS
Poetry
Angelus Novus
The Crimson Hexagon
All That Lies within Me: An Autobiography in Verse
Tiger Leap (into the Future)
Minimal Graffito: A History Including Poems
What Was Lost: The Handmade Juvenilia of Lee Sharks,
1998-2001
Day and Night: An Anthology of the Greek Lyric Poets,
Translated and Introduced by Lee Sharks
Prose
Fear and Trembling in Las Vegas: A Dialectical Lyric by Lee
Sharks
Your Love Will Carry On: The Collected Correspondence of
Johannes Sigil and Lee Sharks
Stationary: The American Journals, 1999-2013
The Creeping Disease: The Early Correspondence of Lee
Sharks
xvii
· · · page 24 · · ·
The Classical Bible: Readings in the Western Canon from
Homer to Dante
Children of Frank: Reading through Frank Herbert’s Dune
The New Human Poetry: An Anthology of Human Verse,
1995-2010, Edited by Lee Sharks
xvii i
· · · page 25 · · ·
Contributor Bio
Lee Sharks’ poems have appeared in Heaven, The White
House, and Inside Your Brain All the Time, among other
publications. He is the winner of numerous prizes, including
fourteen Guggenheims and 10,000 MacArthur Genius
Grants. He has used MacArthur money to replace his friends
and family with moving statues made of rubies.
Lee Sharks holds 18,000 degrees from planet Mars. He
worked for each of them in a tiny office inside his brain he
had to miniaturize himself to fit into. On a tiny, old-
fashioned typewriter he typed the tiny theses and tiny books
that would eventually make his name by kidnapping and
miniaturizing famous intellectuals and forcing them to read
his books or else he would let a dinosaur bite them.
Lee Sharks is an amateur dinosaur enthusiast he bites
himself in the face with dinosaurs and builds small mental
skyscrapers designed by tortured modernist architects out
of dinosaur names in his brain.
Lee Sharks is the author of numerous books of esoteric
brilliance and learned expertise, and also books of poignant
sentiment, and also books of down-to-earth practical
wisdom, and also books which have become central to the
way you live your life without your even noticing it.
Lee Sharks often allows the intellectuals he kidnaps to live
and return to normal size, provided they agree to like or
pretend to like his tiny books. Others, he murders and
disposes of.
xix
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One day, Lee Sharks was reading his tiny books and found
that he himself disliked them. He therefore bit himself with a
dinosaur and replaced himself with a moving statue made of
rubies, which is how he became a famous astronaut.
xx
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xxi
· · · page 28 · · ·
xxii
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PEARL
AND OTHER POEMS
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LEE SHARKS
· · · page 30 · · ·
2
· · · page 31 · · ·
RE: WHY DON’T YOU GO START YOUR
OWN POETRY WEBSITE INSTEAD OF
COMPLAINING ABOUT THIS ONE?
Dear Billy,
I want you to know I am inventing a poetry website right
now, telepathically, in heaven. Each member of my
website is a spiritual being made of rubies,
purchased with a generous “Genius Grant” from the
MacArthur Foundation.
On my website, men and women are not given in marriage.
Instead, when two people want a baby, they
telepathically compose mind control poems and
make one, spiritually, with literary criticism.
I am making a baby, spiritually, with literary criticism, right
now. His name is Ichabod: “Inglorious.” He is a tiny
person and will never grow to full height. I am
3
· · · page 32 · · ·
sending him to you with a mantle of ostriches. By
ostriches, symbolically, I mean the kingdom of
heaven. Inside his tiny ribcage there is a pearl. I put
it there for you, on purpose, so that you could find
and sell it.
I want you to have this pearl. It is not a website, but it is
fashioned in the image of a website, symbolically, by
metaphorically riding dragons, literally, with
spacesuits, inside my mind, as the time machine flies.
You do not need an instruction manual to fly this time
machine, because the instructions are written on
your heart.
4
· · · page 33 · · ·
PEARL
My poems will make me not be alone, happening like a train
whistle happens, late at night when no one writes it,
an echo of parallel loneliness, dinosaur-solemn, a
moon through the tender air, seeking its reflection
among my fingers, trembling ferns, and rolling off
to explode on the surface of water, a sweaty dancer,
radiating shards of bright green steam, an atom
bomb, a roar of shrapnel
releasing me.
There will be no metaphors ever again, but only an empty
lakebed.
My fingers will not be nerveless ferns, my thoughts, not the
surface of water.
No poems will plunge like overweight dancers.
There will be no such thing as train whistles, no mangrove
groves or citrus roots.
No one will have heard of an “antler of meaning,” no words
will ripple or swoop.
5
· · · page 34 · · ·
The tremolo of longing will lie in its bed, sentences slashing
through the window, and I will shut it, finding sleep.
By the time I wake, I will have forgotten.
[image · https://www.alexanarch.org/data/attachments/AXN-0472/images/page-034-1.png · 30×40pt · (perceived) small hand-drawn line sketch of a bearded face]
II.
After my poem has happened, I will wish I could take it back.
The curtains will hang limply and I will stare into my hands,
imagining all the might-have-beens
fixated on the moment I could have discreetly replaced the
moon with a harmless, ordinary light-bulb.
I will shamble between the burnt-out meteorite and the lip
of the ancient lakebed, staring into the wasteland a
single metaphor could repopulate, if only there were
any left.
As decades pass, the elements will exhume the petrified
remains of metaphor fragments
which I will desperately try to reassemble:
I will attach the cow-thick, bovine vertebrae of one
metaphor to the hollow, avian femur of another.
I will draw the cartoonish, popular culture face of Mr. Wilson
on the skull of one metaphor, staging soliloquies of
surpassing tragicomic pathos with my bearded self,
while praying for a Dark Romantic lightning strike to
animate the Dr. Frankenstein contraption of another.
I will employ complex aleatory devices requiring armies of
critical exposition for one metaphor, and
6
· · · page 35 · · ·
shamelessly exploit my position of institutional
authority to advance a “metaphor agenda” for
another.
I will apply for government money to create a metaphor
museum, showcasing a disappointing hodgepodge of
fossils
most of which will not be metaphors or even fossils, but
other things.
I will build an enormous industrial assembly line and mass-
produce hundreds of thousands of scientifically
identical plastic metaphors and get you to buy them.
I will expand on the ideas of both a metaphor museum and a
metaphor factory ad nauseum, until they become so
unwieldy I extract them as separate codas to Pearl.
[image · https://www.alexanarch.org/data/attachments/AXN-0472/images/page-035-1.png · 30×40pt · small line-sketch face (as p.34)]
III.
Nothing I try will work.
Metaphors are dead
and moons no longer walk the earth.
I will return to the husk of the celestial boulder and do what
I can to fill the days.
I will still feel loneliness, but it will be an inchoate blob of
loneliness, no different than anyone else’s.
Burly men will return the mismatched skeletons from the
museum to me in boxes.
At first, I will take them out regularly and touch their
dimensional surface, exploring the fading tactical
resonance of what they used to mean.
7
· · · page 36 · · ·
As time goes by, I will take them out less and less.
[image · https://www.alexanarch.org/data/attachments/AXN-0472/images/page-036-1.png · 30×40pt · small line-sketch face (as p.34)]
IV.
Early one morning I will rise from my dingy sleeping mat
and walk into the desert wastes, taking nothing with
me
disappearing from the face of the earth, for all you know
until, years later, I return, a sarcophagus-strange dishrag of
my former self
to walk with you a final time
to remind myself what the face is for
to remember all the varied textures
of the psychic flavors of life
so that I might surrender them
and go out into the night.
[image · https://www.alexanarch.org/data/attachments/AXN-0472/images/page-036-2.png · 30×40pt · small line-sketch face (as p.34)]
V.
Aeons crush by above me.
Memory turns to legend
8
· · · page 37 · · ·
and even legend will have sunk
in wine-bright seas of dust
when at last they cough out my bones
into a time so distant
not even my greatest metaphor
could have walked halfway across.
Clasped in the hand-like
cage of ribs, for you to find,
a final poem
a dust-polished pearl, much like a stone:
the pearl-white gleam will bite and flicker
teeming with dry roots
a leafy fern in a dry place
a white-knuckled grip in the sandy scree
ashborn, a germ of the seasonal fires
awash with surrendered brightness
9
· · · page 38 · · ·
the curling, electrical tendrils
of the neon sign of life
a thing, once sent, that cannot be called back
an irrevocable marble
with a secret name writ on it
compacted and polished in the heart of a muscle
around a fossilized shard of shrapnel
impervious to metaphor’s gleam
but very, very bright
a moon as common as you are
a quotidian rock of miracles
both a spirit and a bone
a machine of living ghosts
a thing, once given, that cannot be revoked
a jesus noise brokenly leaping
in columns of thick, white smoke
10
· · · page 39 · · ·
gleaming unobtrusive and time-clean
alert to your Morse code blink
my poem will have happened like a foghorn happens
at sea where no one writes it
dispersing the gloom like a lonesome moon
no longer alone.
11
· · · page 40 · · ·
Undersong I.
THE METAPHOR MUSEUM
After my poem has happened, I will wish I could take it back.
I will apply for government money to create a metaphor
museum, showcasing a disappointing hodgepodge of
fossils
most of which will not be metaphors or even fossils, but
other things:
• assorted obtuse knickknacks, the bric-a-brac of
mismatched imagery
• one bright scrap of demotic voice, stolen from
William Carlos Williams
• a rag of faint blue farce
• the multi-colored vase of a maladapted breath
poetics, containing the desiccated petals of one
prophetic tradition and the charred, brown seed of
Sappho
• a post-ironic ribbon, tied off in an origami knot
intended to resemble Allen Ginsberg’s sincerity, but
looking, in truth, more like David Foster Wallace’s
noose
• ten stray buttons of Ancient Greek
• one too-small t-shirt from a long-ago concert of the
Frankfurt School, when Benjamin still played drums,
before Adorno’s second relapse, when he still had
that certain panache
• a stuffed ferret named Sören
• an embalmed fetal pig named Friedrich, rescued
from dissection in the name of principled science
12
· · · page 41 · · ·
• sixteen peerless pepper shakers in a Gnostic
syncretic Christian collection of lopsided Jewish-
classical allusions
• and the foolishly out-of-place-without-(quite)-
crossing-the-threshold-of-being-endearing bobble
head doll of a sagely nodding mystical tradition, kept
for sentimental reasons
• but not displayed
further confirming the paucity of the entire collection
built around the remains of an actual moon
which turned out to be too costly to move, ending instead in
a stout bronze plaque in front of an empty Plexiglas
display
next to a selfie of Patrick Stewart in a lobster costume, left,
perhaps, as a kind of inscrutable prank
and too depressing to remove.
13
· · · page 42 · · ·
Undersong II.
THE METAPHOR FACTORY
When that doesn’t work, I will build an enormous industrial
assembly line and mass-produce hundreds of
thousands of scientifically identical plastic
metaphors and get you to buy them.
I will set hundreds of cheap migrant workers to work on my
assembly lines
and make them walk home each night, to Mexico
and compile labyrinthine databases of marketing data,
monitored by diminutive armies of brilliant
statisticians
who will first design, and then work in concert with equally
well-pedigreed computer scientists to automate,
fantastic algorithms that allow me to show you a
single, subconscious frame-rate clip of Ronald
McDonald in lingerie made entirely of fish and chips
and make you buy whatever I want
and then be tidily disposed of—the statisticians—when they
have outlived their usefulness
as a kind of Machiavellian existential challenge, to test the
worth of their art, which they will fail, proving
themselves unfit to live, by not statistically
predicting their own impending doom.
I will make you buy so many desiccated statues of plastic-
flavored metaphors it will make me squish green
tomatoes in my eyeballs.
I will declare Osama bin Laden the handsomest man alive
just to upset you.
I will leak false information to the Inquirer that I have
resurrected the zombie corpse of Osama in order to
have his zombie babies
14
· · · page 43 · · ·
and to launch them, like angular melons, from between my
legs
giving birth in the general direction of your national pieties
to a banquet of undead melon babies angularly zooming
around your brain
grown in vats of sucrotic lard
for dissemination in oatmeal pastries
supply-dropped by atom bomb directly to shopping carts
everywhere
in grocery stores where the families of grocery workers will
have been kidnapped
as leverage to insure their cooperation in Mission
“aggressively standing inside your personal space
and smashing cucumbers on our brains and
engineering complex visual hoaxes to cause you to
believe that we have psychic powers which allow us
to bend spoons, and indeed, many kinds of kitchen
cutlery, with only our minds, force of will, and a
vaguely uncomfortable theatrical squint, and also,
theoretically, to perform other feats of telekinesis,
such as stopping your heart or teleporting tiny
watermelons directly into your kidneys, which we
will do, unless you eat your sucrotic lard
in order to disseminate zombie Osama babies for uncertain,
but clearly sinister, purposes.”
Most of you will not mind or even need this strong
encouragement. You will be happily munching Little
Debbie.
I will be drunk with power, mad with it
but nothing I do will assuage my cindered conscience
or fill the metaphor-shaped hole in my moonless night sky.
I will take greater and greater risks, wild risks, daring the
world to strike me down.
15
· · · page 44 · · ·
I will be ever more flamboyant in my blatant disregard for
law or civic authority.
I will paint a ketchup-flavored bull’s eye on my chest and
pee on civic authority’s lawn
until it has no choice but to make an example of me.
When the hammer falls, I will have been sloppy.
Part of me will have wanted to crash
and another part, to burn.
When some of the grocery workers decide to make a brave
but foolhardy stand
by taking off their clothes and shouting, “Apathy!” in an
outside voice
I will not know what to do.
“I was prepared for this,” I will say to you, and run away to
think and nervously bite my nails and feel generally
anxious, socially, in private.
“I was not prepared for this,” I admit to myself
because who could have predicted the absolute randomness,
the kernel of genius in the civic resistance of the
grocery workers’ arbitrary half-cooperation, except,
perhaps, my murdered statisticians, who were, I
further admit, quite smart. Gifted, really, in a way it
was foolish to waste.
A day of hard truths.
I pull myself together and come back to where you are
waiting.
“I am mad for you,” I say
but I don’t really mean it.
I am distracting you from my actual plan, which is to run
away and hide.
I try to run away but I bump into you, clumsily mashing my
private parts against your forehead.
16
· · · page 45 · · ·
“Apathy,” I shout, but you have fallen asleep.
I want you to fall asleep in an outside voice.
I am tired of tiptoeing around your apathy, waiting for it to
break
trying to wake it up, without caring, too much, whether I live
or die
without any sense of wonder
or regard for natural beauty.
“Apathy,” I say to a moose, but he can’t hear me he is drilling
for oil
on a deserted, 10,000-square mile stretch of pristine beach
called “tundra.”
I try to measure the moose’s facial expression.
Is that a genuine glaze of sensual pleasure
or a self-aware, post-ironic enjoyment of actually its own
awareness of the vapidity of its pleasure?
Is that moose enjoying himself or enjoying his own cynical
lack of enjoyment?
I want to know because I feel it will help me decide if I
should blow him up
with this bazooka, launching angular Osama babies at his
moustache (moose-tache).
Meanwhile, I throw bread crusts stuffed with Alka-Seltzer
tablets to seagulls and they explode, telepathically
inside my mind.
I think I am finally out of control.
I think I need to discipline myself.
I think I need to teach me a lesson:
I eat sucrotic lard in an inside voice.
I let the grocery workers off with a warning.
17
· · · page 46 · · ·
Just kidding—the statisticians are fine. They were in the
next room this entire time, on break.
I know I said those were migrant workers but they are
actually robots
paid a decent wage and much more hygienic than migrant
workers.
What you thought was my private parts was actually my
cool hand against your forehead
checking for fever
because I am concerned for you, with the way you shouted
apathy
because I need to discipline you and get you to a doctor
in case you are a threat to yourself or others
in case you can’t keep your hands to yourself
in case you drill for oil on a deserted stretch of tundra
where I can kill you, metaphorically, by stabbing you with
my bazooka.
Nothing I try will work.
Metaphors are dead
and moons no longer walk the earth.
18
· · · page 47 · · ·
Undersong III.
STRANGE NEW EARTH
i wait for the sun
to mount the horizon
and leave its wake of blood-
red blood
II.
the sun drags its shivering
body above the glass-
scattered pavement
and heaves itself with a final, weeping
19
· · · page 48 · · ·
less-than-a-cry and
hangs there, stunted, ape-like
made of a thousand
punctured yellows (orange fire-
red helium helio-
trope the crimson
holocaust theweeping con
flagration thedevourng el-
emnt & angl-xplsn & firfre frr rrrr) spin-
ning, hung
up on a milk-
y cata-
ract:
20
· · · page 49 · · ·
Dawn
in
the
de
se
r
t
.
21
· · · page 50 · · ·
III.
holy milk the holy
blood the holier
bells the holier
carillons ringing
the soft white milk of the end
of the world the moon
is black in the sky the sky
is broken flecks
of ash fall through
22
· · · page 51 · · ·
Footnote to Pearl.
BELIEF & TECHNIQUE FOR TELEPATHIC PROSE
1. Compose real poems telepathically, with mind control
powers, inside your glorious brain.
2. You are your own best advocate. Insist the world
acknowledge your poems as artifacts of tiny doom.
Accept nothing less. Threaten to smash yourself in the
face with gasoline and set your hair on fire. Leap over
the seats to aggressively stand inside the world’s
personal space and get up in its grill. Take this container
of Tic-Tacs and smash it on your forehead. Crush each
Tic-Tac individually into your eyeballs and ask the world
if it likes your poem, and if it likes your poem, then eat
your poem: “Do you like my poem? Then eat it.”
3. Always seek constant approval, then punch your cat in
the face.
4. Arrive alive. Don’t text and drive.
23
· · · page 52 · · ·
5. Always write poems all the time.
6. Never professionalize writing. Professionalism is the last
refuge of responsible people looking for work.
7. Your life is your poem. Take care to write it
biographically. Failing that, invent false biographies and
post them on Wikipedia.
8. Get as much education as you can, then murder your
education in the face to save it from sloppy education.
Get enough education to respect your contempt for
education.
9. Give it all that you have, as deep as it goes, as desperate
and total as taking a breath.
10. Also be pedantic mundane pig-critic of precise
punctuation juggling and ruthless crossed-out darling
murdering of your own puny sentences. Save every draft
and revert to original after enormous work, then drown
yrself in the bathtub. Remember: Editing is organization.
11. Be long-sighted prodigy of skeptically believing in
nothing, but also believe in destiny, but quietly, and hit
yourself in the face for naivety’s sake.
12. You are a seamstress of words—place each stitch
carefully, deliberately. Develop a series of rituals and
perform them, without variation, prior to placing each
word. Allow the frequency and intensity of these rituals
to grow until you spend hours, each day, touching and
retouching your left index finger to the tip of your nose
in a rhythmic, counter-clockwise motion, in sets of thirty
24
· · · page 53 · · ·
revolutions, in order to place a single character. Spend
years of your life shut away from the world, wasting
away into an awkward, unhygienic shadow of your
former self, and have, to show for it, a two-syllable word
of Germanic origins on an otherwise clean, white page.
This word will be redoubtable, the bedrock of your
writing career. Go on to spend vast sums of personal
wealth and total dedication, alienating the remaining
handful of long-suffering friends who continue, despite
all odds, to solicit the memory of your humanity, in
order to learn the arts of metalworking, Medieval
alchemy, and font design, recreating a metal-cast, alpha-
numeric set of Times New Roman font, from scratch,
going broke long before “numeric,” and with only the
half-formed germs of the characters W, N, and
sometimes-vowel Y. hat are such retrictio s to ou? ou
are a poet, ot a mathematicia . ou are a creature of steel.
ou ill rite a e and better orld, a orld ithout the letter ,
forgi g it, o e smoki g husk of a ord at a time.
13. Turn over a new leaf. You’re not getting much done like
this, anyways, let’s face it. Break the chains of your
censoring, conscious mind; tap into the spontaneous
well of unconscious human brilliance that springs from
the source of dreams. Thwart the stick-in-ass tyranny of
your internal editor by making a commitment to write
constantly, without ceasing, editing, or even thinking, no
matter what, ignoring the anally retentive quips your
brain will no doubt make. Make a further commitment:
You will not only write, irrespective of internal
censorship, but in a way that is unconscionably terrible,
on purpose. Your writing will be, by turns, embarrassing,
infantile, automatic, and marmaduke poppers—or shall
we say, antagonistic to the indoctrination in repressive
concepts such as “sentence” and “word” of your reader,
25
· · · page 54 · · ·
who is always, and only, you. Let your writing be a
spiritual discipline of Bat-a-rang pancakes and lightly
alarm clock, ding—your toast is done.
14. Always Alka-Seltzer eyelids all the time.
15. At last, you are ready to make it new, to murder your
darlings, to first thought, best thought, to your heart’s
content. Your adverb will be the enemy of your verb, the
difference between your almost-right word and your
right word will be the difference between your lightning
bug and your lightning. You are ready to have a
spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling, then censor
the s**t out of it. You are ready to turn your extremes
against each other: Unlearn your apple pancakes and
burst through the mental barriers; then slow the flood,
let the lovely trickle out & edit, edit, edit. Capture
spontaneous gem of native human genius, then marshal
vast armies of technical knowledge & self-discipline to
ensure it glimmers and cuts.
16. Believe in things like destiny. No really—the path will
shatter you so many times your shards will have
splinters, your bombshells, shrapnel. By the time you get
there—which you probably won’t—even your
exhaustion will be tired. Exhaustion of mind and body
will have passed so far beyond the physical, and through
malaise of spirit, that it will emerge on the other side, as
physical exhaustion again. In the face of this, nothing but
a little Big Purpose will do. Besides, a little ideology
never hurt anyone. Feel free to be all Voltaire with your
bad self, in public—but don’t give up.
17. After all of this, when your will is finally broken (again),
and you have given up for the final time (again), start
26
· · · page 55 · · ·
over. The former model wasn’t working. Refashion
yourself and your writing. Lather, rinse, usurp your
noble half-brother, and repeat, until you get somewhere,
or die in the trying.
18. Achieve consistency of voice; it is the signature by which
you will be known. Your “you” should ring out clearly
from each individual letter. In this, the writer is like the
salesman. Like a new car, neither the writing’s merits,
nor the reader’s needs, will be the final, deciding factor.
Ultimately, the deciding factor is you.
19. Unlike a new car, it is difficult to drive a poem, to use it
to get to school or work. Unlike a car salesman, a writer
does not wear enormous ties.
20. Be so consistent that your writing consists in composing
the same words, in the same order, creating the some
overall voice and style, consistently, over and over, an
eternal return of the same. Maintain this disciplined
drudgery over the course of years. Let years become
decades, and decades, an entire life: You will have “found
your voice.” Variety is the spice of life, but consistency is
its signature.
21. Be so consistent that your writing consists in composing
the same words, in the same order, creating the some
overall voice and style, consistently, over and over, an
eternal return of the same. Maintain this disciplined
drudgery over the course of years. Let years become
decades, and decades, an entire life: You will have “found
your voice.” Variety is the spice of life, but consistency is
its signature.
27
· · · page 56 · · ·
22. Then again, consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.
Throw things up a little bit. One day, put on your
hobgoblin hat, the next day, your small mind.
23. On second thought, RE: #16-17: Stop here. You don’t
look like much of a writer. Save yourself the trouble of a
deep investment that is sure to yield no returns. The
prize is big, and not many take it. The Iliad showed us
that the prize of writing is life eternal, and taught us to
long for that promise; but the Odyssey taught us not to
bother. There are many suitors, a single Odysseus. While
the husband wends arduously homeward, Penelope
weaves impending glory, an evaporating glamour,
enchanting them, until he arrives. We are in for a bad
end, if we chase another man’s wife, or a prize not
rightfully ours. There are many suitors, a crowd of them.
They begin as a chittering swarm of bats and end in the
very same manner. You cannot have what is not yours.
What is yours, no man can take. So, like Emily says,
I smile when you suggest that I delay ‘to publish’—
that being foreign to my thought as Firmament to
Fin. If fame belonged to me, I could not escape her—
if she did not, the longest day would pass me on the
chase—and the approbation of my Dog would
forsake me—then—My Barefoot Rank is better—
24. Therefore, take these Sturm und Drang commandments
to the trash heap. Return to step 1, as the only useful
piece of advice: Compose real poems telepathically, with
mind control powers, inside your glorious brain.
28
· · · page 57 · · ·
29
· · · page 58 · · ·
30
· · · page 59 · · ·
FUGUEWORK
31
· · · page 60 · · ·
32
· · · page 61 · · ·
PREMONITION DREAM
27 April, 2014
Dream—after years of desperate sinking feeling, nailed by
paralysis to the couch, watching passersby outside
my window, one day the countless unhinged
fragments are complete—
there, in the middle of the living room, obscured before
perhaps by the glimmering television, but now
emergent, emitting ghosts of swirling, incorporeal
wind in centrifugal arcs of light passing through,
without disturbing, the surrounding room—curtains,
table, armchair, fan: a giant book, bound in
sumptuous red leather, somehow both a man-sized
book and a human body, these images superimposed
upon each other in flickering, holographic
interplay—the Crimson Hexagon.
33
· · · page 62 · · ·
Childlike awe strikes, parting lips, fingers hover reverent
just centimeters above the glowing red composite,
overcome by hiccupping realization, dawning on me
over and over: “This is what I meant, this is the life I
lived in pages.”
On the book’s cover I see the serpentine syntax destined to
end my life, insinuating itself in the diagonal
crannies of the skullcase, flexing its muscles there,
exploding me, leaving all life’s fragments unfinished,
life-gambit finalized in total, irredeemable washout,
even as I know my death happens only partway through the
Book, the Book I now see before me, complete, and I
am opening the Book to climb inside and wear like a
new body—its snake or syntax fits me, curled
around my rice paper pages, meant for them, having
shucked off the mortal coil, and I am beginning to
change, awareness of former body absorbed in
ecstasy of letters, limbs of print, limitless corridors
of font, stretching outwards and in, piercing me, my
arms lifted up as branches, becoming stationary,
rooted, a tree of life, uplifted, leafing out to offer
myself as succor, bright hands reaching to touch and
clasp, to gently tear, rending fruit from branch, bark
from limbs, peeled back to reveal an oily residue,
aroma of heaven, twining up to fill my nostrils with
an acceptable savor—
eyes close further—already closed they stretch to a full
revolution—and in the moment of total darkness: I
wake, eyes squint, open slow to electric flicker—fell
asleep with the lights on again—and groggy, climb—
cold and limb-wet, childlike and aching-necked—out
of bed, thick rot coating my tongue and throat—
34
· · · page 63 · · ·
Morning. Bedroom. Light to type this prophecy by.
35
· · · page 64 · · ·
HUMS &ITY
Hark these, my tongue-formed
shallow breathings, writ neck-
aching sad this April night
alone with the texts of dead men
& the hope of you, my reader—
expired in the dark
of ampersands, these lips
& tender whispers; sent out
thru the trembling aeons, a single
signal to linger
& sing, to language
& age—to live
& not be forgotten
?
36
· · · page 65 · · ·
AN ELEGY FOR HOWL
When the last forgotten recess
of your ultimate weary drawer of dust
coughed out the yellow petal
of its one remaining folded rose
and the sheet of blood-smeared paper
smeared with poems like ink
at last gave up its ghost:
I saw nothing.
There was nothing to see.
The best minds of my generation expired while little more
than seeds.
You did not see.
You were not seen.
[image · https://www.alexanarch.org/data/attachments/AXN-0472/images/page-065-1.png · 27×37pt · (perceived) photograph of Allen Ginsberg in the Uncle Sam top hat]
Poker-faced hysteria starved in silence
and exhausted itself in lame dysfunction
to be pinned insensate to a cluster of symptoms
as a matter of course
by moth-dust fingers of DSM lepidopterists
in formaldehyde rooms of science:
I heard nothing.
There was nothing to hear.
The eli eli lamma lamma sabachthani cry was drowned in
37
· · · page 66 · · ·
words.
You did not hear.
You were not heard.
[image · https://www.alexanarch.org/data/attachments/AXN-0472/images/page-066-1.png · 27×37pt · Ginsberg icon (as p.65)]
Jaded sincerity choked on its tongue
and shook with neural crescendo of seizure
in pig s**t halls of knowledge.
There was no mouth to take the sigh
and the final rattle passed
unremarked.
38
· · · page 67 · · ·
IF WALT WHITMAN CAME BACK AS A
ZOMBIE AND ATE MY BRAIN I WOULD
WRITE THE FOLLOWING POEM
I am very sad America because you make me sad.
I am sad because my despicable poems.
I am sad because you charge me with unemployment fraud
and take away my money.
I am sad because I can’t write poems like luminous smoke
and suffocate your courts with glory.
I am sad America because you will not hire me.
I am sad because I have no money
and very large sums of credit card debt
and very large sums of student loan debt
and also I write poems in an unemployable way.
39
· · · page 68 · · ·
I am sad America because you ban me from your poetry
websites because I criticize your rules
and delete my poems
and tease you about go start your own site by writing in a
Jesus voice inventing poetry sites in heaven.
I am sad America because Walt Whitman went door-to-door
selling books, a regular salesman
but when I spam the chat room with my poems they ban my
IP address.
I am sad America because Walt Whitman is alive in my heart,
walking door-to-door in my heart selling poetry
books
and I am buying them to give to friends
but I am sad America because I have no friends.
The point I am trying to make is could a new Walt Whitman
sprung up from the dirt sell zombie poems on
Google?
Vision, America, is what I mean.
Commitment is the point I am making.
40
· · · page 69 · · ·
I WANT YOU TO KNOW THAT I HAVE
PERSONAL AUTHENTICITY AS A POET
BECAUSE OF MY IDENTITY
I am a victim of genocide and atom bombs.
I am a minority and also foreign.
I am a blue collar person of enormous sensitivity.
I was educated at Harvard and also dropped out of school
and also received a rural education on a farm
and also at an urban center in the ghetto.
I am a wealthy urbanite who comes from a lineage of
American Harvard professors stretching back to
Adam
and also I was born today, right now, in announcing myself
in speech.
I committed suicide twice because of artistic vision and also
because of pathos.
I am a war veteran and also a war protester.
41
· · · page 70 · · ·
I was killed by police in a demonstration against police and
also by demonstrators in a police protest against
demonstrations.
I invented myself out of thin air and was created by my
environment.
I am a woman and also a child.
I am a man and also a mentally retarded man.
I am blind and deaf and mute and dumb.
I am a great hulking beast of a muscular man
and also a graybeard sage of skinny wisdom.
I am a young man with no money, a white recipient of
unemployment benefits and Medicaid
a father of three, a husband, and no one you’re likely to
know.
I am no one at all.
42
· · · page 71 · · ·
I THINK I DIED A LONG TIME AGO…
and ever since a thrum in the air
has towered
a familiar song of thunder—
what I mean is I am alone and embarrassed
lying neck-sore on the couch
TV cowering against the dark
stomach sick with peach pit
knotted dread a mundane bed
found out by worm of joy—
O rose you’re f***ing sick—
is that a handful of hair?
O rose I can’t say it’s all in your head—
maybe you did die
and your voice is a ghost from long ago—
but no, I am just lying on the couch and typing stuff
a little nervous, feeling sunk
expiring fibers of faded air, woven oxygen
bright permutations of sheets and notes
eccentric shapes imprinted
a spider-fine web of mist
a moist clear breath
thrumming against enamel
a complex exhaled twist
of tongued significant muscles:
speech—
43
· · · page 72 · · ·
air imprinted on the air
and I am air and sick with it.
44
· · · page 73 · · ·
THE AIR IS SICK ALL OVER…
the air is me and now and then
and I am it
and sick.
What I mean is I am alone on the couch
lying stiff-necked, no news to tell
scribbling in a notebook a decade old
hunger for air in my nose and throat
prescribing a regular lurching tempo—
Hard to remain in the same sick air—
same couch—same breath—same job—same death—
same narrow lift and duck of lung—
same narrow course of atoms—
Hard to smell the distillate rose
with all this lurching tempo—
hard to be sure which strong thrum
or buzzing noise carries its particular pitch—
Rose and Rose and Rose and Rose—
I overwhelm the air with rose
I hurt the air
in escapable passageways
travelling through my body—
as thick as it comes—I choke on rose—I gasp
the thick clean pudding—
45
· · · page 74 · · ·
All time’s atoms are bold in you, rose.
Your blood is sick but spindle.
46
· · · page 75 · · ·
AIR, YOU’RE SICK—TENDERLY WILL I
BIND YOU…
it may be you’ll shuffle along.
The old man in the hospice bed takes air through a hole
some doctor cut in the textured valve of the throat—
how evenly does the doctor breathe? So in love with air
he opens the rose-sick throat to it—
the sharp thin smell of alcohol, narrow
blade—his own air hot and moist
inside the cotton surgical mask—the old man’s eyes
anesthetic—
circulating, nose-sipped
portion of potential voice, a lungful relayed
by mask or mouth or scalpel—
we are all a little bit like that, giving and receiving
the air where we can, voice a measure of need
and potential—human susurrus—ungentle
or gently—ungainly—a lumbering hippo
of breathing—or grace—
I take you in, clean air. The old man
removes his breathing tube—he is too weak—
it is 12 AM—I reinsert the tube as true
as I’m able—2AM—4 AM—birdsong—daybreak—
the old man dies the next day.
47
· · · page 76 · · ·
Air is the Lord—the Lord is air—
48
· · · page 77 · · ·
KNOT-HINGE
Lee Sharks and Johannes Sigil
[image · https://www.alexanarch.org/data/attachments/AXN-0472/images/page-077-1.png · 204×430pt · (perceived) KNOT-HINGE: full-page woven text-column image — a phrase-set braided through hinge transforms (letter mirror, word reversal, phonetic resegmentation): 'words fail me and I' / 'I and me fail words' / 'seceip ni trapa kaerb' / 'looms in us frag-men shove land wedge' — the section's title poem, existing only as image]
49
· · · page 78 · · ·
YEARS THE CANKERWORM ATE
Awake in the night
a ghost in the eaves
fitful bulbs buzzing above:
I breathe.
Milky eyes wide with webs
alone with the knots
in my stomach, alone with my fits
of dread—alone with my baby-soft
hair-sad head.
The olive arms touched by scars
bear cigarette marks
& the backs of the hands
are kissed by brands—god again,
awake in the night, a ghost
in the leaves:
I am.
The slow skitter of years
turns hours in this dark—
& that which turns to May
only yesterday was March
& then again beneath these bulbs
September starts—I startle ap rt
I clutch the strands
of strings, I fumble with
the leaking heart.
50
· · · page 79 · · ·
II.
I have known scars
self-inflicted.
I have suffered the night
when it breaks apart
indifferent.
I have suffered
some sad thing
unspeakable
in the silences
I keep:
the blankness
of an hour
killed;
the distant
noise
of a leak.
51
· · · page 80 · · ·
III.
but if from all sides
this tentative song
darts from the mouth
of morning birds—
& if in the first
gray milk of morning
I hear this one small note
defy the bars of the night
break through the shuttered blinds
leak in like the limp
that runs before the light—
then Selah.
I will
rise with the morning.
I will
shake off the night’s longing.
52
· · · page 81 · · ·
RINGTONE
me: Sometimes, when I wake up
in the night, I text myself poems
instead of going back to sleep.
[image · https://www.alexanarch.org/data/attachments/AXN-0472/images/page-081-1.png · 28×36pt · young-Pound chat avatar (as p.84)]
Sent 5:49 AM on Thursday
me: I am lying in bed
and the birds are starting to sing.
My wife does not want me
to read her my poem
because she is asleep.
All the lights are out. I do not
understand why I am awake,
when the only light
is this thin soup trickling
through the blinds
and the birdsong
and this total meal of light
from the phone in front of my face
and the repeated icon
of my face beside each text
[image · https://www.alexanarch.org/data/attachments/AXN-0472/images/page-081-2.png · 28×36pt · young-Pound chat avatar (as p.84)]
Sent at 5:58 AM on Thursday
me: Someone I don’t know
53
· · · page 82 · · ·
a hallway of homogeneous doors
of my repeated face
[image · https://www.alexanarch.org/data/attachments/AXN-0472/images/page-082-1.png · 28×36pt · young-Pound chat avatar (as p.84)]
Sent at 6:00 AM on Thursday
me: I want to feel an emotion
I’m trying to decide which one:
Hungry
Thirsty
Lying here next to you.
Nothing seems quite right
[image · https://www.alexanarch.org/data/attachments/AXN-0472/images/page-082-2.png · 28×36pt · young-Pound chat avatar (as p.84)]
Sent at 6:05 AM on Thursday
me: I will feel “push my face
into my pillow a little bit.”
My knee pops and my body
feels mildly feverish
like there is a thin layer
of gingivitis running beneath
my skin.
[image · https://www.alexanarch.org/data/attachments/AXN-0472/images/page-082-3.png · 28×36pt · young-Pound chat avatar (as p.84)]
Sent at 6:07 AM on Thursday
54
· · · page 83 · · ·
me: My body is bright and sore
My eyes are burning
and I am happy as I stumble
around the kitchen, fumbling
with stuff, not seeing a thing.
[image · https://www.alexanarch.org/data/attachments/AXN-0472/images/page-083-1.png · 28×36pt · young-Pound chat avatar (as p.84)]
Sent at 6:27 AM on Thursday
me: There is a sore sense of
newness in my teeth
A cavity of something
brightly new
[image · https://www.alexanarch.org/data/attachments/AXN-0472/images/page-083-2.png · 28×36pt · young-Pound chat avatar (as p.84)]
Sent at 6:29 AM on Thursday
me: I sit down Indian-style
on the kitchen floor
to contemplate this newness
[image · https://www.alexanarch.org/data/attachments/AXN-0472/images/page-083-3.png · 28×36pt · young-Pound chat avatar (as p.84)]
Sent at 6:30 AM on Thursday
me: There is no clangor at all
in the world, except—
55
· · · page 84 · · ·
a little bell is ringing
[image · https://www.alexanarch.org/data/attachments/AXN-0472/images/page-084-1.png · 28×36pt · (perceived) young-Pound portrait as chat avatar — 'the repeated icon of my face']
Sent at 6:36 AM on Thursday
56
· · · page 85 · · ·
ALIEN SINGINGS
Why did I leave?
So long ago I buried myself
and shut out the ancient rain.
Why did I forget?
Because your beauty was too great
I shut aside the daggers
and turned from the awful deeps.
Because your face was oceans.
Just like the rain-driven worm
compelled by the law of worms
to contract its thin tan muscles
towards the concrete promise,
so I, having tasted the jade-
green beauty, and run my tongue
through its fur-streaked sparks—
I heaved myself to the rocks.
I draw
each day
a fresh
damnation,
each day I
leech it
from the
dirt.
If even once I remember you, Zion,
may the throat split dry
and dust my tongue with sickness.
57
· · · page 86 · · ·
—longing—
Like the brittle crop longs for waters?
No.
Like the sob-tense body curls and—
Never.
denies the longed-for touches?
—pauses—
—silence—
—stutters—
I convulse with the ghost
vibrations of your baritone:
the voice cannot be buried.
By the waters, next to the ancient
poplar tree, I hang my harp and weep.
How can I sing in a stranger’s land?
How can I sing in ruin-faced Babel?
If I forget you, Zion,
may my tongue turn dry and split.
May my ears run slick with blood.
May a worm make its nest
in the trunk of the brain
if I bury your alien singings.
58
· · · page 87 · · ·
SONG OF ME
I want a poem of actual objects:
vinyl couch, desk,
computer, phone.
I am no longer out-of-doors
I have little community of human peers
all my life is a total absorption
in family and work.
Should my small life refute its smallness?
[image · https://www.alexanarch.org/data/attachments/AXN-0472/images/page-087-1.png · 36×44pt · Whitman portrait (as p.90)]
I retreat into me
and what I find is good:
humor to lift black moods
magnanimity, bigness
vision—all necessity provided
surfeit faces brotherly &
sisterly of strengthening love—
59
· · · page 88 · · ·
the way like a faint reminder
conscience unfolds in me
a memory of initial tenderness
for infant children, abiding
commitment to bekah
the way the weight
of failure—not the first
or third but when the wall
comes crushing thick—
unfolds in me tenacity—
a winter lily
thrusts its head
through layers of frost-
sick dirt—
[image · https://www.alexanarch.org/data/attachments/AXN-0472/images/page-088-1.png · 36×44pt · Whitman portrait (as p.90)]
met men & women declining
60
· · · page 89 · · ·
my freely offered
friendship of fervid speech
& sharp-eyed excitement of
written poems shared &
passionate self-mocking
argument lust & faint-
curling wilt unexpected
of sudden anxiety in public
& quixotic jagged
cracks of humor shooting
through every disposition &
mood & extreme of my
otherwise mercurial person:
all that, offering
declined, any longer inclining
to locate in me the cause:
they decline my multiple
bigness, they are too small,
61
· · · page 90 · · ·
too tame—their small lives
have made them small—
[image · https://www.alexanarch.org/data/attachments/AXN-0472/images/page-090-1.png · 36×44pt · (perceived) portrait photograph of Walt Whitman]
The decliner is too small
for me—
if I—and only I—assent,
I am my own best company.
62
· · · page 91 · · ·
TEKATAK
Restless, I entered the chat room with Jack
distended in speech & hyperlinks
& lonely from solo work of scouring
vast archive of internet banks &
Google Books & encyclopedia sewers
& hundred thousand fibers of
work-frayed hair & scholar hat
& bleak-slouched shoulders &
motionless butt of sitting, numb
& flittering thoughts of argument
moth & outbranching
vain bibliography brain
colorless emotional & restless
for love
& the formidable robust muscular
bonds of human text:
for Sunflower Allens &
rose-sick Blakes
asphodel Williams &
blossomdeep Annes
but in the chatrooms & forums
& journals & blogs
the text was too abstract
63
· · · page 92 · · ·
woven layers wan & flavorless
soil too thorny or shallow
or deep:
no proper soil for the work
to seed
the only ones who could read
were Jack & me
& me & Jack, & our reading was a lovely
tekatak plant.
[image · https://www.alexanarch.org/data/attachments/AXN-0472/images/page-092-1.png · 36×44pt · (perceived) portrait photograph of Walt Whitman (hat portrait)]
I am a lovely tekatak
I have no history or culture
a flower of no particular nation
relaying my clean fragrance
no asphodel or poppy
no gingham print patch of sassafras
or Appalachian sawtooth grass
no shield-flat plains of Asian paddies
or rice-ripe rows of sun-red grain
no chickadaw tree of tan savannah
or arboreal star of trilac plant:
64
· · · page 93 · · ·
When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed
I wasn’t one.
When pearl-wet hair of willow draped
I wasn’t there.
My wet fronds wave in lavender ponds
in seas no eye has ever seen:
Indian Sea, Atlantic stretch,
Corinthian bays, Mariana Trench:
All earth’s oceans are too deep
its plains are far too shallow
even rarefied air of moons
is too blood-rich & thick
for tekatak’s tremulous branches
[image · https://www.alexanarch.org/data/attachments/AXN-0472/images/page-093-1.png · 36×44pt · Whitman portrait (as p.90)]
I spread across every continent, and across
every continent’s origin
and at every continent’s conclusion,
there I am, a tekatak blossom:
luxurious and single,
particular, disparate,
65
· · · page 94 · · ·
a disparate particular layering of
single luxurious fragrance
alike to each who smells me,
whoever smells me, respiring
the singular unique sameness
of each to each his single
breathing—this—this breath—
this breathing—
the breathed out perspired flavor
of his diet & habits &
climes
the scent of these things each
to each nimbly parting
the individual fibers
all truckling to sunk-down
shoots & roots &
eager to receive
the tekatak-lovely tekatak stalks
& tekatak feet &
tekatak flowers
[image · https://www.alexanarch.org/data/attachments/AXN-0472/images/page-094-1.png · 36×44pt · Whitman portrait (as p.90)]
Of all particular continents,
flavors, diets, climes,
66
· · · page 95 · · ·
& also the ozone husk of these,
invisible distillation
the produced offspring of everywhere
& nowhere, native alike
to canyon-sediment nomad pasts
& passed over oral traditions
to musk-bright neon modernities
& homogenous rows of Tai Pei
McDonald’s
to refugee camp futures of displaced
workers & pidgin-ambivalent
lingua francas
to furred ashtrays of dank
Alexandrias & machinegun tons
of child Crusades
to spaceship moons of forbidden books
& Caribbean classrooms of colonial
daffodils
to crowded streets of Bollywood screens
& traffic-thick lanes of Bangkok
anthems
to North African ports of island palms
& Jerusalem mosques of desert
dates
67
· · · page 96 · · ·
[image · https://www.alexanarch.org/data/attachments/AXN-0472/images/page-096-1.png · 36×44pt · (perceived) portrait photograph of Walt Whitman]
Among all this, remarkable fact:
I have never been seen, no
soil bears me
Everywhere-wide is too thin
Nowhere-thick, too deep:
except your marmoreal branches, Jack,
the tekatak plant wouldn’t BE
68
· · · page 97 · · ·
YOUR LOVE WILL CARRY ON
“My vocabulary did this to me. Your love will let you go on.”
-Jack Spicer
Though written on time-
thin liquid
of water, my love for you
will carry on,
travelling through futures
illegible
or resurrected in
the ancient
records, a second birth
moving backwards
to where I do not know
the yearning
words behind the Logos-
onion paper
of layers, heaped up
in time
until I
touch you.
We only have,
I guess,
what we’re given,
though I long
to breathe and die
to touch
and there to find
yr hand-
set type-
face, bound
69
· · · page 98 · · ·
and polished, brass
and patina,
glowing and glowing,
sinking
and away, waters
above and
waters below, pale
structures,
brighter and brighter,
of fonts.
Could my love for you
ever falter?
Or could I forget you,
Zion?
A mother might forget
her children,
but I will not
forget you:
your loveliness
lingers
on and on, and my love
for you
will not
go out
70
· · · page 99 · · ·
FACE LIKE SNARLS OF RAIN
My little girl’s face,
like bright
yellow flowers: Cleis,
more precious to me
than all Lydia.
Sappho 132
Trans. Rebekah Crane
Where there is a will,
there is a way,
I think.
In private, here,
I’m thinking
about the problem of
The Absolute,
and how to put down words
in words,
accompanied
by power…
if I
to you w/
the touch, here,
of silences
breaking open…
II.
Eyes leak
speech-
lessness like
dreams: I’m coming
soon to you,
71
· · · page 100 · · ·
my darling, soon
I’ll come to you—
but until then dreams
break open,
like tiny shells
with yolks
or little statuettes
of silence:
light blue shards
like tiny skies.
I rise to you,
my darling,
rise.
And the skies rise,
too, on top
of water,
floating on
the atmosphere
in oceans bright
and deep.
These motions of
the element time,
like liquid
darkness or
new wine:
spinning,
dusky and blue,
like flowers
on a stain-etched face—
yr eyes
are a winedeep
blue,
and stain-etched,
dear;
yr face
72
· · · page 101 · · ·
like snarls of rain:
there is no tenderness
so open.
for you I put the words, here,
back
in the form of words.
If the line
is a breath and I
am the line
that bursts across college-
ruled angles, running
parallel to robins—
then my life lives
in the reading;
my life breathes
on yr lips.
73
· · · page 102 · · ·
I CLAIM THIS MANTLE
of the Good Gray Poet.
I claim this mantle: King of May.
74
· · · page 103 · · ·
THIS IS THE WAY I’VE UNFOLDED MY LIFE
petal by careful petal
75
· · · page 104 · · ·
MY HOPE IS IN GOING ON
76
· · · page 105 · · ·
I DRAPE THIS SAME OLD LEG ACROSS
THE CHAIR…
unchanging
acurl in the same crooked posture
as at 5 & 7 & 17, alone
on a two-person bus seat, forehead
cool & half-asleep, spine-tucked
away from the uprightness of life
thoughts casting across the empty pavement—
just like then, the misty glass
a TV alive but unnoticed, projecting a world
outside my window,
a notebook moving beneath me—
oh I am sad again on the La-Z-Boy
starving to death for an actual sentence
some palpable thing I could cling to.
It is no light thing, to find true words.
I sit listening quietly sometimes
touching considering rejecting
the passing words as they surface, each in its turn
and carefully finding which ones come to me
true, not true, indeterminate—
and often judging poorly: oh this queer word
like a misshapen egg, I throw back in the lake
and this other word makes my head ache.
This word has a little car, and this word has a little star
and so on—you get the f***ing picture.
And just like that: all is lost.
So it is very carefully I must come to you
sitting listening quietly sometimes
all my life for a whisper.
77
· · · page 106 · · ·
What I am trying to say is I am a lonesome dog
and dying, just like you are.
What I am trying to say is you carry yourself
your own pale breath, on your lips.
78
· · · page 107 · · ·
THE COMEBACK ALBUM
I want to throw a party to snub all the people who didn’t
invite me to their party.
At my party, I will have a pony, a piñata, and clowns.
There will be a bounce house and a special Taco Bell that
makes free tacos for my guests.
Some of my guests will prefer McDonald’s to Taco Bell and
feel disappointed, without saying so, that there is
only a Taco Bell
but we will not need a McDonald’s because this Taco Bell
will also make special Mexican cheeseburgers, for
free.
The party will be deep in the South American jungle.
Live tigers will wander through this jungle, hungry. The
tigers will have laser beams for eyes
and tiny Great White sharks will be riding the tigers on tiny
saddles made of seashells
and all the guests will have to address the tiny sharks as
“sheriff”
79
· · · page 108 · · ·
and if anyone forgets to address a tiny shark as “sheriff” he
will be savagely beaten
and burned with laser beams, because the sharks will also
have laser beam eyes.
Next to the jungle there will be a lush green valley tended by
the Jolly Green Giant
who will sell my guests fresh canned vegetables for free
and periodically call out, “Green Giant,” in a tonal baritone
that echoes through the jungle
startling my tame-wild tigers and causing them to lunge
with half-crazed eyes in random directions
but my sharks will restrain my tigers with brutal tugs on
their tiny reins
and the whole thing will lend to an atmosphere of pageantry
and spectacle at my party
which my guests will come to appreciate, after their initial
alarm they see that everything is quote unquote well
in hand.
In a fantastic turn of vaguely, if unintentionally, racist
imaginary South American politics
my tiny sharks and the Jolly Green Giant will secretly be at
war over drugs, probably cocaine.
In a canny move against my sharks, the Jolly Green Giant will
have secretly sold my guests stale canned vegetables
for free
which my guests will realize simultaneously when they sit
down to eat their vegetables at a climactic,
communal dining event
and with a dream-like, phantasmagoric sense of horror
interrupting what has been communicated, through
several cinematographically brilliant cut-scenes, as
my guests’ completely and unaffectedly trusting
anticipation of vegetable freshness and goodness
80
· · · page 109 · · ·
the perception of vegetable staleness will dawn on them, at
first incrementally and then abruptly
ruining my party.
I will be enraged at the Jolly Green Giant
with his internecine shark politics
and I will walk up to the Jolly Green Giant and punch him in
the face
“What’s your problem anyways?” I’ll ask
but he is a giant he will crush and eat me
and go on a ballistic rampage
driving my tigers mad with rage
beyond the ability of my tiny sharks to control
and they will dart, helter skelter, mauling guests
and my party will be a catastrophe.
When the other people who were not invited to my party
because I wanted to snub them hear about it the next
day on the news
they will feel relieved they weren’t invited, and a secret glow
of confirmation that yes, they were right not to invite
me to their party in the first place.
But secretly the joke is on them
because I will have staged my death as a media stunt in
anticipation of my comeback album
which will be a commercial and aesthetic success of
staggering proportions
rocketing me, like proverbial phoenix, from the ashes of my
untimely and publicly humiliating, if fake, demise
to new and dawn-like heights of stardom.
I will have a concert tour to promote my comeback album.
81
· · · page 110 · · ·
At my concert there will be a light show and fog machines
wreathing the stage in thick white oceans of smoke,
periodically pierced by radiant beams from the laser
eyes of tiny sharks.
On stage there will be a giant mechanical tiger head
and my silhouette will emerge from the fog, rising above the
stage on its giant mechanical tiger tongue.
Half my body will be covered in tiger fur
and half, in shark teeth
surgically grafted onto my skin in an experimental operation
that will have brought me back from the imaginary
brink of death
and symbolizing my meteoric return to fame.
My guitar will be made of human bones
and you will feel jealous
and regret not inviting me to your party.
82
· · · page 111 · · ·
NOCTILUCENT
father, fill me w/ beauty
& call me beyond
to a training in weight & grandeur
& the glory of small birds
& teach me yr depths & yr heights
& the silences filling you
& fill me! pull back the tatter of ribs
& take out the stone sitting there, replace it
w/ the gospel of dawn birds—
if only the right words
were here, this world would be
born anew—what is this thing
you’ve placed in me that shines
w/ precarious substance?
83
· · · page 112 · · ·
84
· · · page 113 · · ·
hush, dear hands—
85
· · · page 114 · · ·
86
· · · page 115 · · ·
this song is enough.
87
· · · page 116 · · ·
88
· · · page 117 · · ·
APPENDIX
Essays, Manifestos, Minutiae
89
· · · page 118 · · ·
90
· · · page 119 · · ·
Make It Human
Lee Sharks
The New Human poetry began just now, when I announced
it. It is a series of potent, distinct voices; historical trends;
bulges in the social fabric; convening around a loose
commitment to formal experimentalism and poetic
humanism. It is perhaps the most urgent development in the
human arts in the last hundred years, in English, and it
consists in material I am making up just now: pseudonyms,
fabricated Wiki articles, academic essays, fantastic
biographies, and mythic anthologies.
It is a social movement, an unfolding history, as
poem, and I am writing it, right now.
The New Human poetry, rather than a discrete
movement, attached to a series of formal principles, is the
intensification of a history that is already happening.
Philosophically, it creates new humanisms.
91
· · · page 120 · · ·
Stylistically, it creates difficult experimentalisms,
finding new crevices for the human to be born in and as:
experimental lyricisms.
Less than a specific constellation of formal
commitments or stylistic tendencies, the New Human poetry
represents a remainder or residue that cuts through a
number of movements, from Conceptual writing to Alt Lit,
Telepathicism, and the emergent hybrid workshop poem.
The New Human poetry exists as a cross-section of
contemporary formal developments.
We have no definite formal dogma—how could we,
when we believe that the human form must be constantly
reinvented? Nonetheless, by its nature, the New Human
gravitates to formal inventiveness, strange new
configurations of human verse, and refuses to congeal
poetry as the stale grease blob of one of its particular
historical moments. We embrace a tendency towards the
stylistically difficult, the formally experimental, but in the
service of human expression—provided we understand the
“human” in human expression as a concept that is always
coming to be, evolving in time.
A New Human poet knows that he must Make It
Human.
We adopt Language writing’s awareness of the
artifice involved in the human, whether the artifice of the
“transparent” lyric self with its narrowly prescribed logic of
the epiphany of the daily, or the artifice that elides the very
real presence and role of media in human interaction /
expression: the artifice of the classroom, the school, the
magazine, the press—we understand the ways in which the
c.v. is a form of poem.
Even as we reject the petty presentism and prejudice
of the Language poets. We understand the vital role they
played, the traction those qualities gained, historically, but
we reject their rejection of tradition.
92
· · · page 121 · · ·
At the same time, we reject the Philistinism of the
hyper-traditionalists, the formally retentive jurisprudence
verse police state whose anthem declares, “This is not a
poem.” A New Human poet is one who knows that
transcribing an issue of the New York Times might very well
be a poem, might represent the hope of poetry, and
therefore the hope of humanity. All day long I pray for the
transformation of urinals into poems, and vice versa.
Make It Human.
In every generation, the HUMAN enters by the
narrow door. Made humans. Human makings. Homo
poeticus.
A New Human is an invented thing. One cannot find
it in the wild, by wandering through decrepit forests.
“The human” is at stake, “the human” is up for grabs.
Craft, twist, carve memorable protrusions of the human in
language, which is the same as the human in time.
It is not that the human is out there, somewhere, an
essential quality or radioactive dye of eternity we might
inject into the bloodstream of certain poetic forms, an
investiture. It is that the human has always and only been
found is such elongated protrusions, such memory-quirky
fingerholds, called poems. By such means, we have scaled
the rock wall of history, one trembling toehold at a time. If
we are lucky, we will continue to do so.
Falling off the cliff is a very real possibility, a
historical mise-en-abyme, that most so-called poetic
schools—certainly, the polar extremes of the experiment-
workshop divide—have done a very good job of eliding.
To the workshop camp: It is very well that you
imagine your uncertain perch to be a pinnacle, those
toeholds clinging to to be essential essences, which have
been from the beginning of time, and will be forever and
ever, Amen. But we are dying of thirst, you nitwit.
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To the Language writers, the Conceptual poets: I say
thank you. By infallible proofs, you have demonstrated,
sufficient for any thinking person, that those little
fingerholds are not eternal essences, that they occupy a very
certain phase on the cliff of human history. And yet, I should
think throwing oneself off the cliff to be a demonstration of
somewhat limited usefulness. It does, quite thoroughly,
show the historically situated, the temporal and spatial
contingency of the formal aberrations by which we have,
with difficulty, attained these meager heights. But you will
be dead, when you hit the bottom.
Make It Human. It must be made. It requires art, a
total art, the commitment of the total being. Of all the many
functions of the multiform human mountain climber, we
poets are the fingers, finding purchase. We seek, in the
stinking dark, the very first tactical echoes of the
indentations of the future. We are very sensitive fingers. We
grip and shape those indentations, into protuberances with
sufficient roughness of texture to bear the human weight.
Genetic engineering. Artificial intelligence. We’ve
arrived at the 21st century: the ever-shrinking boundary
between the material and digital worlds, converging on a
total presentism of the archive; the spread and
endemicization of statistical science, the ever-broadening
automation of its complex functions; a world in which the
informatic representation of the human is more total, more
complete, in an unprecedented way; even as it is flat, dead,
cut off from life. The human keeps changing; its digital
representation is a lifeless rind, vulnerable to manipulation
by any animate power. What is the poet’s role, vis-à-vis the
datascape?
Make It Human.
Formally, this means the aesthetic incorporation and
representation of these media, the ways these media effect
and interact with the human being, and vice versa.
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Stylistically, this means the artful concentration of
those natural deformities of human language under the
pressure of this particular species of novelty.
Here, we touch on an example that walks the same
razor’s edge that the New Human poetics must walk: Flarf.
On the one hand, Flarf seems to jump off the cliff of history.
On the other, it shows us the way forward. Flarf has a very
traditional function, to aestheticize, to organize the chaos of
these new digital circumstances and contexts which
threaten to distend the human out of existence; in the same
way that Homer aestheticized war, not to celebrate it, but as
a measured response to its senselessness, a movement
within and through that senselessness that made a way for
history to travel beyond it.
That’s what beauty is, that tenuous form of formal
courage in the face of formless things. So, too, Flarf, though it
is rarely practiced, and even more rarely theorized, under
the auspices of aesthetic redemption of the datascape,
nonetheless might serve that function, touching on android
love elegies existing in random configurations of search
string space.
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Tradition and the Individual Seismograph,
or, Developing the Historical Poetics of Some
Themes Introduced in Lee Sharks’ “Pearl”
Johannes Sigil
Here is a little known fact: language is the medium of time. It
is through it that we move to past and future, a “moon
through the tender air.” The poet builds formal structures in
language that iterate the substance of time, which tend it
towards futurity. This is easy to see, looking backwards:
“Howl” was a seed of time that grew into a viable present.
It is not so much images of the past that poetry
creates for history (“the petrified remains of metaphor
fragments”)—although it does do this. No, the poem’s most
urgent function is to create that history of the present that
disjoints it from itself; to fashion, within the present, a
quality of time disjointed from the present, a pearl of
unintelligibility that generates futures at a lateral angle,
tangential to the course of historical time.
To achieve this, the poet willingly lives in a kind of
temporal hell, “the wasteland a single metaphor could
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populate, if only there were any left.” He has doomed himself
to this terra damnata of the historical present because of his
allegiance to those other lost souls, called writers. Though
the present hears, in these voices from the past, the chipper
inanities of its own prerecorded voice (“thousands of
scientifically identical plastic-flavored metaphors”), the poet
knows they deny his present, just as they denied their own
time. This communion by means of mutually incompatible
presents (“an echo of parallel loneliness”) is a kind of hell,
or, at best, a limbo, where Dante walks with the shade of
Virgil: “the fading tactical resonance of what they used to
mean.”
Thus, the poet lives in a historical hell. As a creature
of his time, he is damned, and knows it: “Metaphors are dead
/ and moons no longer walk the earth.” Redemption might
come to him through poetry, first in the form of reworking
his personal history in such a way that it is bound to him in
hell, a memento of his origins in the abysmal present, awash
with its ugly light, but nonetheless tied to him in his exodus.
This is redemption of the poet to himself. A second, greater
redemption—the redemption that redeems him to
eternity—is in the hope of sending this salvaged history—
himself, his life—through time (“out into the night”), of
finding the way—and there is only one—through to those
futures which are being born, of finding his way to you, dear
reader; the hope of blasting you from your tepid future into
a timeless, historical hell: “no longer alone.”
This temporality has been called “the future.” It is
the version of the present, in the form of a poem, that goes
out in time, eventually replacing the shattered and
abysmally tepid present with a brighter, historically purer
anachronism: “a machine of living ghosts.” Telling stories
about such movements through time is what we call
“literary history.” And literary history, done right, is what we
call “the history of the human race.”
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The poet is like a seismograph, “alert to your Morse-
code blink.” The vibrations he records are frequencies of the
future. The vibrations’ medium is tradition: the archive of
the past, “a metaphor museum.” The poet listens for subtle
lines of fracture in language. He scribbles vibrations in the
crust of time, listening for the sequence that will signal the
earthquake of the future. The metaphor is almost right, with
one adjustment: if the poet is a seismograph, his object is the
tremors that might CREATE, rather than simply record, the
earthquake of the future.
His tools are what Eliot calls the historical sense,
which encompasses both a grounding in one particular
historical period, as well as a more general literacy of
tradition, a sense of the way a tradition develops through
time. His medium is the archive—seismographic records of
the total history of vibrations in the substance of time. But
though he learns from the archive, though these records are
essential to his education in the art of time, the poet does
not mistake the record for the reality: those vibrations are
dead and gone, the earth has already shifted in that
direction. Those voices show him the pathway that led to the
present, and something of the structure of creating an
earthquake. But they cannot show him beyond the present:
“into a time so distant / not even my greatest metaphor
could have walked halfway across.” He is, like they were,
without a map: there is only one path to the future, and the
map of the earthquake will be simultaneous with the instant
of terrible shaking.
Perhaps the defining characteristic of the quotidian
poet, the poet who has invested time, energy, and skill, but
who nonetheless remains strikingly unexceptional, is seen in
this historical sense, or rather, its lack. This poet is always
mistaking the record of the earthquake for the thing itself,
burnt-out husks for actual moons. For him, the monument of
the earthquake collapses, repeatedly, into the lifeless shape
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of its record. He cannot recognize the new, much less fashion
it, because he does not recognize the old.
To put it in another way, the quotidian poet can see
the poem as an artifact of time only from the perspective of
its existence in the present—the way it is now, the meaning
its form has currently, a “husk of the celestial boulder.” He
cannot conceive of the poem as an artifact of charged time,
before which time was different (“a thing, once sent, that
cannot be called back”). He cannot conceive that time had a
different shape—that there was no form of time quite like it,
before the poem took shape. Most of all, he cannot begin to
consider the poem’s most urgent message: I might not have
been. The time you see in me would not have been, would
not be, if not for me. For him, the history of literature
rehearses what time is.
For the poet of destiny, the history of literature
warns us of the fragile series of contingent steps by which
we have arrived at the present, a record of the enormous
weight of contingency: “ashborn / a germ of the seasonal
fires.” This artifact testifies to all the shapes that are passing
away at this moment, to the pressing demand of the future,
its desire to come to be. The history of literature screams,
“Don’t let us be the last!”
Though the poet does indeed create the future, bring
it into being, this future is no more a random figment of
imagination than is my beating heart. The future’s shape is
prescribed on all sides by the nature of its medium, the
archive (“compacted and polished in the heart of a muscle /
around a fossilized shard of shrapnel”). Certain fault lines
might move through this medium, triggering an avalanche. A
poet finds those fault lines, and shapes time along the
trajectories of the possible.
This is not to say that the future is fixed—far from it.
Not only is the shape the future will have up for grabs, so is
the possibility of its existence. It is not historical necessity
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that the future come to be, or that the human race be born
into it, forward. Nor is it to fix the past in a particular body of
texts, a particular cultural lineage. We are headed
somewhere, all of us, together.
Poetics must turn to the composition of archival
forms that embody possible futures. I say “must,” not in the
colloquial, common-usage sense of exhortation towards
urgent action—“We must stop and ask for directions.” If
there is to be a future at all, we must construct its archive
now. Whether we will it or no, history demands an archival
poetics, is calling it into being as we speak.
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21 CENTURY LITERARY HISTORY ST
Johannes Sigil
101
[chart typeset rotated 90°; rendered below in reading orientation]
The Historical Avant-Garde
New Human Bibliography
Surrealism20th Century
American
FuturismExperimental The Sharks Era
Literature
DadaThe Culture of Invention
≈1910-1940≈1940-1970≈1970-2000≈2000-2030Virtual Intensities: The Poetics
of the Real, 1995-2010
ModernismNew American PoetryPostmodernismNew Human PoetryKierkegaard's Leap
Vorticism / ImagismThe New American Poetry: An Anthology Language WritingThe New Human Poetry: An Anthology Strange New Canons
of New Writing, 1945:1960of New Writing, 1990-2010
The New Human Poetry: An Anthology
BLAST MagazineIn the American Tree: Realism, Languageof New Writing, 1990-2010
Black MountainTelepathicismDigital Moon Base: Electronic
Ezra PoundWest Coast
Archives of Telepathicism
Charles OlsonBarrett WattenA/I Magazine
Wyndham LewisArtificial Intelligence: An
Anthology of Telepathic Writing
Amy LowellDenise LevertovCarla HarrymanArtificial Intelligence: An Anthology
of Telepathic Writing
OK Computer: An Anthology
Robert CreeleyRon Sillimanof Human Robots
"High Modernism"Lee Sharks
Plastic: The Second Wave of
San Francisco RenaissanceBob Perelman
Ezra PoundConcrete Poetry, 1980-2015
Underwhelming Realism
Robert DuncanLyn HejinianThe L=O=G=O=S Book
James JoyceJohn Johnson
Total Archive
Jack SpicerEast Coast
Gertrude Stein
Asperger's Realism
Robin BlaserCharles Bernstein
T. S. Eliot
40 Likely to Die Under 40
Steve McCaffery
H. D.New York School
Tao Lin
William Carlos WilliamsFrank OharaSusan Howe
Sam Pink
Virginia WoolfKenneth KochThe New Sentence
Spoken Word
Barbara GuestOuLiPo
Harlem Renaissance
Spoken Word Revolution
Proceduralism
Langston HughesBeat Generation
Saul Williams
Zora Neal HurstonAllen GinsbergPost-language
Blair
Jack KerouacAmerican Hybrid; American
Second-wave ModernismWomen Poets;"High New Humanism"
William Burroughs
Objectivism
Peter GizziLee Sharks
Anne Waldman
The 'Objectivist' AnthologyJohannes Sigil
Harryette Mullen
Bob Kaufman
Louis ZukofskyRebekah Crane
Juliana Spahr
Black Arts Movement
Charles ReznikoffTheresa ChaJack Feist
Muriel RukeyserLeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka
Ichabod Spellings
Conceptual Writing
George Oppen
Rhys Owens
Against Expression
Araki Yasusada
UbuWeb
"Turning Japanese; The Hiroshima
Kenneth GoldsmithPoetry Hoax" (Kent Johnson)
Christian Bok
· · · page 130 · · ·
LITTACHUR
Lee Sharks
History of small independent presses
printing tiny runs of 100 copies
of nobody gawnna READ it books =
history of the avant-garde =
history of littachur.
You look back at what we call
literary histry last 100
years or so & what you find
a succession of small & mostly
insular groups, people making
a big to-do about each
other’s books—but actually
READING & getting BEHIND
each other’s books around a
shared aesthetic—& into a
COMMUNIY—viz. 1863 in Paris,
Exhibition of Rejected Artists
first technically so-called avant-
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· · · page 131 · · ·
garde, the rejects of the
school-run popularity contests
who GOT TOGETHER
& DID something about it—viz.
William Carlos Williams Spring &
ALL—big fresh new book of
American idiom writ by small town
doctor, grew up Puerto Rican
mother Spanish language spoke
@ home—printed 1923 tiny run
of 100 copies not even those
could sell, known to whom? no one
but eZ Pound & co.—now re-released
as stand-alone volume bought
by crowds (in relative terms) almost
a century later—so much depends
upon / a red wheel / barrow—
look back last 100 years literary
histry—littaCHUR—find
succession of “movements”—
after mummery & cheap
parlor tricks of paid academics
pulled away, all that’s left
a handful of rugged individuals
committed to each other’s
WORK—
from Transcendentalism à modernism
à Beat Generation à Language:
What difference between Johnnie
HandBinder in the basement hand-
binding by hand bright pages of
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· · · page 132 · · ·
bilge fr summary disposal @
CreatASPACE (r OUTERspace)
& yr regular typical official unofficial
avant-garde MOVEMENT /
future of the littachur CANON?
only DIFFERENCE is
a COMMUNITY writ
as SOCIAL POEM—
a SCHOOL outside the
SCHOOL—he is eZra
POUND who is
eZra POUND in
SPIRIT—
channeling eZ Pound right now—
just finished in my chair tonight
reading General eZ’s Italian Radio
broadcasts—that old fascist sure
was a sorry anti-semite f**K—
I don’t feel a bit sorry for him
that they threw him in a metal box,
Italian war camp, prizner uv
WAR & on to St. Elizabeth’s
mental lockdown charged as
TRAITOR for spouting bile
on public airways while Dachau
plugged away a nation over—serves
him right—but he sure did know a
thing or two about how
kulchur works—
Ol’ eZ knew you need
a community, a structure—
you need yr professors &
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· · · page 133 · · ·
students & journalists &
propagandists & biographers &
hooligans & printers & presses
& public relations people—you need
yr littachur historians & web
designers, yr administrators
& philologists—& most times
y’re playing every role yrself—
put all THAT together in
competition w/ the school, &
the school will have to write
you into littachur just to
shut you UP—
easiest to see the mechanics
of it in more recent quote
unquote movements, but since
no one KNOWS anything about
any verse writ after 1945, it’s NOT
so easy to see—
yr general lay reader having
in mind as poetry rhymed
couplets, he a Washington Irving
having gone to SLEEP these
past twelve DECADES—
even those claiming the mantle
POET, what it means most
times, is having read & really
comprehended at most two
or three committed verse-workers
of recent years & accounting
himself an EXPERT—
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and sadder still, in practical
& relative terms him BEING
a kind of EXPERT—
What yr typical self-published
author lacks, what separates
him from yr official unofficial
avant-garde, is exactly the
kind of cultural capital
the school guards very closely—
& on the other hand the ones
who have the school’s capital,
why—they’re teaching
in its classrooms & publishing
in its magazines & generally
having HEALTH insurance—
they have their reward in
this life!
an avant-garde is a community
outside the school that perpetuates,
for itself, the kind of
cultural capital the school
protects, a community
that has the form of a school
but isn’t one—
STRATEGICALLY UNPUBLISHABLE—
to comprehend what’s current
as well as what is past, &
what’s current about
the past and past about
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· · · page 135 · · ·
the current: & to use
that knowledge to stand against
the current in the kind of way
that shapes it—
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· · · page 136 · · ·
FORUM POST, 7/27/14, 12:30pm
passenger seat, somewhere between MI & MS
Dearie Mahblez,
I’d like to think I’m making the effort to carefully
read and charitably interpret yr comments. I’m not
convinced the reverse is true, but I implore you to prove me
wrong.
Now see, it seems to me that one of our main sticking
points in this here debate comes down to the difference
between intelligibility and value, construed objectively.
If I can figure yr logic right, it seems like these two
qualities (intelligibility & value) are—if not equivalent, at
least coextensive. Where there’s no intelligibility, there’s no
value, & that holds true as a pretty good measure of things
all the way down or up.
To take a smaller & more manageable example of the
kind of logic that, correct me if I’m wrong, motivates yr
position on the broader topic: What I mean is, in the
comment above, the move from, “I don’t understand,” to
“there is so much that is wrong with…” For you, because the
idea of generating new grammars don’t make no sense, it
therefore has no value; & that this bears some analogy with
yr stance on experimentalism more generally: if it doesn’t fit
into the established models of generating literary value &
significance—intelligibility as literature—it has no value or
at least a reduced & far more limited kind of value.
Now, as I’ve made explicit more that once, I too
accept this idea of things as a PARTIAL explanation of
literary value—to take it back to the smaller example (which
we’re using as a kind of metaphor for the bigger question), I
accept the possibility that my comments on a generative
poetics of grammar or meta-style might be unintelligible to
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you because of they are fundamentally or intrinsically
unintelligible; or because ultimately they have no substance,
or power as ideas; or because poorly expressed; &c. &c.
[but also the reverse possibility: that it is not
intelligible to you because y’re not party to the forms of
grammar that might make it intelligible AS value]
Likewise, I accept as a valid but PARTIAL
interpretation yr take on questions of literary value &
experimentalism. Well geez—tired of the sound of my own
voice—have made myself clear on this point (“avant-garde”
often = a failure of art rather than the creation of new forms
of value)—go back & read what I writ—BUT—if you care to
know my point:
It seems to me so much of what goes by the name of
grammar—& that more nuanced grammar called style—
isn’t about style at all, or competency or intelligibility—it’s
about a gotcha game of cultural authority. In the same way
that the rhetoric of style, in yr comments Marbles, has
several times appeared in conjunction with a kind of
infantilizing resort to pedagogy: I am the Master and you are
the student—submit to me.
So much of the actual material practice of grammar
& the rhetoric of grammar is about an exercise of force,
regulating who is in and who is out, who has authority to
write and speak, and who does not.
Now, if we want to play a gotcha game of cultural
authority, I won’t end up the student. I mean if we’re going
to play that kind of priggish game—where to even start? It
wouldn’t be an exaggeration to imagine that I’ve spent a
good one-third of my waking life reading & writing. That’s
about ten years, clock time, spent reading. I have a genius IQ.
I scored in the top percentile on my SATs—in SEVENTH
GRADE. I’ve had a college reading level since I was 7—gone
on to terminal degrees—better call me Dr., Mistah
Marbles—have writ big tomes of scholarly research, am
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· · · page 138 · · ·
accounted an expert in my fields—have taught @ top ten
schools—my verse’s appeared in print & electronic all over
the place, reputable mags—have published articles &c.—
if we want to PLAY that kind of gotcha game—
but I think we both see how obnoxious such displays
can be—so let’s, please, approach each other as peers or not
at all.
& so much of what goes by the name of grammar
boils down to exactly that kind of vulgar display—
sometimes more & sometimes less subtle.
~
“timeless & eternal classics”
We all remember a first approach @ Shakespeare.
We come to it knowing it’s supposed to have value—we’re
told it has value—we want it to have value—to be part of the
conversation—& then we get to the text itself and—that
stuff is DENSE—At 12 or 13, it’s not a thing the timeless
value of which is immediately apparent, or easily got at. My
point is, being able to apprehend that value takes
TRAINING—3 letters, now: J-O-B-S.
Now, I don’t dismiss the fact of value, or even what
you refer to as “genius”—(though there are some problems
with the concept, certainly—it too has a history & context,
it’s not a transcendent universal essence—see Bob
Perelman’s “Trouble with Genius”)—
Just because I acknowledge the dependence on
training our ability to recognize & access the value of a
Shakespeare, don’t mean I believe just any old thing could
have the same effect. It’s not that I’m walking you into an
empty room in the museum, to trigger the epiphany: “you
are the work of art.”
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· · · page 139 · · ·
The point I am making is that new forms of value,
literary or otherwise, are often unrecognizable as such. The
“grammar” according to which they might be understood as
value doesn’t yet exist or hasn’t yet been acquired.
I’ve got a very flexible definition of ‘avant-garde’—
maybe should distinguish from Berger’s definition of the
historical avant-garde—Dada, Futurist, etc.—shake the
words up in a hat & spit ‘em out, there’s yr poem.
No—I mean as ‘avant-garde’ those new forms of
writing & literary value which are difficult, in their moment,
to recognize as such; but which go on to generate &
proliferate the grammars by means of which we recognize
their value (Dante writing in the vernacular, Shakespeare
illiterate of Greek & Latin); by means of which they
sometimes come to be confused with value as such, as I feel
has happened in yr (& many people’s) conception of
things—There has always been a cultural police force using
the rhetoric of grammar to DENY new articulations of value.
So for me, I have the very weird idea that “literary
canon” and “avant-garde” are the same phenomenon viewed
from different perspectives of historical distance or
nearness; IMPORTANTLY:
that it’s just as difficult to recognize the value of
‘classical’ literary texts as it is to recognize the value of those
rare ‘avant-garde’ works which go on to become the future
face of the canon; that many of the same people attempting
to forcefully police the boundaries of literary value with
recourse to the rhetoric of “timeless classics” & grammar &
style, are the very same people who would have decried the
vulgarity & unfitness of the classics before they were
classical. These people are parasites, basically, leeching off
the cultural capital of literary texts without any real
understanding of what’s at stake.
Now, do I think Wolf Larsen is our next
Shakespeare? Not really. I was being a little bit facetious
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· · · page 140 · · ·
with the ‘cultured writers use the word penis all the time’
example—but I respect his commitment to self-
determination & the integrity of his commitment to the
insight that creating NEW value isn’t a question of
consensus—from a popular readership or a publishing
house or the guardians of culture.
~
The point I’m trying to make is: If I say it’s a poem,
it’s a poem.
If I wanted to be more objective, I might say
something like, “If it’s published as a poem, then, historically
speaking, it is a poem. If it is widely circulated enough, and if
enough people claim loudly enough that it is or is not a
poem, then, historically speaking, it will influence our
perception of what is and is not a poem.”
And I might go so far as to say that the history of
verse is a history of unpoemish innovations that come to be
called poetry.
Dickinson was cited early on by Erthona—we like
her so well because she created us out of thin air, crafting
unpoemish poems that became central to our definition of
what a poem is.
For an earlier example, look @ the way print
technology shifted the defining onus of poetry from the
aural to the visual, how a piece looks and reads and “sounds”
on the page. Dickinson, whose poems are very much poems
in this sense—literary rather than musical works—could
hardly be termed a poet in this earlier, musical sense,
dependent as it is on public performance, vocal talent,
instrumental training, &c.
The same people who will cry most loudly that this
or that is not a poem—as, for example, is so
characteristically true of the response of more pedantic
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· · · page 141 · · ·
readers to some spoken word or hip hop—are the same who
would have told Dickinson that her poems weren't poems.
There were, maybe, seagulls.
In my experience—and I acknowledge the following
as a personal bias that carries little authority into the realm
of the objective or even stereotypical—the people who cry
"not poem" have tended towards a certain kind of
personality and a certain level of skill.
They have been, by and large, individuals with a
degree of literacy—institutional, social, cultural, linguistic
and otherwise—but not much imagination. (That's not quite
fair—let me at least say, they have not been savants and
have had a somewhat restrained sense of vision.)
They have also been, I have found, interested less in
the substance of rational discourse than its semblance.
A fact that is, to my mind, self-apparent in the
relevant claim: "This is not poetry." This claim tends to be
asserted on the basis of a mystical personal authority
derived from communion with the universal-historical
nature of verse—all while proclaiming itself to be a guardian
of objective reason and culture—and is, as far as I can tell,
largely impervious to the argumentative force of history,
contemporary example, expert opinion, or the dictionary.
Also, I win.
-Lee
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A TELEPATHICIST MANIFESTO
Lee Sharks & John Johnson
1. Telepathicism is about having thoughts, telepathically.
2. Telepathicism is NOT a method or style or school or
writing. Telepaths HATE writing: It’s boorish and stupid
and boring. Writing is like plowing a field with an old-
fashioned cow. Telepaths are like advanced super
computers plowing a field with eBay.
3. The telepath is stranded in time. Writing is a cow-plow,
but it’s what the telepath has to work with.
4. Telepathic writers do not train as writers, diddle
sentences, or work with words. Language is a dusty
string in the telepath’s brain, causing an aneurism.
5. The telepath has a craft, and that craft is mind control
powers.
6. Telepaths give birth to luminous tumors made of light.
Inside their minds.
7. A telepathic tumor is the hope of the human race.
8. A telepathic tumor’s gestation takes 18 sentient
lifetimes. All of them are spent in furious thought, giving
birth with a grimace of work and fluid. Ash and dirt. Dust
and spit.
9. Tiny metropolises of unpaid cyborg researches study
literary history for ten thousand years inside a telepath’s
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brain.
10. A telepath also does not have a brain, in the same way
that a telepath does not write.
11. A telepath does not NEED to write, in the same way that
a telepath does not need a brain.
12. A telepath has a mind, but just says no to tele-pathways
of neurons and sensory dendrites.
13. A telepath exists in a cloud, generally.
14. A telepath exists in THE cloud, specifically.
15. Telepaths practice their craft of mind control powers via
controlling minds, not brains or writing.
16. Telepaths also generally and specifically have control of
writing and brains, but hate it.
17. Tumors that are the hope of the human race, and
cyborgs that are unpaid or woefully underpaid for their
level of qualification, make up cogs outside the machine
of Telepathicism. They are cogs, and they are not cogs,
but neurons, and they are not neurons, but sensory
dendrites, and they are not sensory dendrites, they are
whole brains, and they are not whole brains, they are
writing, except, they are not writing, they are created
telepathically and they are tumors and cyborgs and they
are the omniscient hope of humanity.
18. Because Telepathicism is about having thoughts,
telepathically.
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EMOTICONS OF MIDNITE
Lee Sharks
I saw the most educated person on the poetry website
banned from the poetry website, indignant confused
and hurt,
trolling the boards at dinnertime deleting his poems and
comments,
eloquent-fingered typist burning for a historically relevant
poetry community in the emoticons of midnite
who loneliness and jitters and sullen-faced and sad sat up
reading in the quotidian emptiness of condominiums
skittering across the tops of chat rooms
contemplating literary criticism
who was unable to find employment in the academies
imagining steady work and purpose among the
scholars of tenure—
ah, Sigil—while you are not real, I am not real,
and now we’re really in the total vegetable soup of time—
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BACKLASH: ‘THE NEW HUMAN
ILLITERATI’
CORNELL HERWITZ, professor and literary historian,
published “The New Human Illiterati” in Partisan Review,
vol. CXIV, No. 4 (Spring 2007). More than twenty years later,
in his autobiography Bad Disciples, he continued to criticize
Lee Sharks, whose “innovations,” Herwitz explained,
“consisted not in a principled stand in the realms of
aesthetics or ethics, but rather in the many years he had
envied me, his inability to carve out a niche within the
academy, and childish foot-stomping.” Herwitz was part of
the informal community of New York literary critics and
writers associated with Language Writing who passed from
radicalism to trite political correctness in their careers after
September 11th. In his attack on the hyper-authorialism, self-
centeredness, and verbosity of the New Human writers in
his 2007 article, Herwitz appointed himself “spokesman of
the arrière-garde,” as his biographer, Hyde Morten, knew.
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The result of Herwitz’ article was an influx of letters to the
Partisan Review defending the New Humans, including one
by Rebekah Crane. In the “Correspondence” section of the
following issue of the journal, Crane wrote that the New
Human writing was “less a reaction than a movement. It is a
movement forward, away from, to start with, twenty years
of the false binary between the tepid, sterile, unremarkable
workshop writing” by writers like “Rita Dove, Billy Collins,
and others who were so characteristic of the trends in
mainstream ‘professional’ writing for the past few decades;
and ‘avant-garde’ writers like [Charles] Bernstein, [Ron]
Silliman, [Lyn] Hejinian, [Kenneth] Goldsmith” and others
who typify “the equally canned, kneejerk post-humanism
now three decades past its prime. Put both camps together,
and you would be hard-pressed to find ten noteworthy
poems.”
Herwitz and other academics and commentators continued
to cast aspersions on the New Human writers in the pages of
Partisan Review. For example, in the Fall 2008 issue, Herwitz
wrote in “The New Naivety and the Non-Novel” that the
“public acclaim afforded Lee Sharks and Jack Feist, whose
work combines a warmed-over avant-gardism with a
posturing sentimentalism, underscores the fever that has
developed on both poles of the cultural divide for anything
totalizing, intense, fervid, and new; ten, or even five, years
ago the New Human movement would have gone
unremarked.” In the same issue, French critic Alain
Boudreau, reviewing Rebekah Crane’s small-press anthology
of literary translations, Day and Night: Conversations with
Sapphic Desire, started by noting, “Rebekah Crane is
regarded as the brightest of New York’s New Human poets.
Since the other possibilities are Lee Sharks, Jack Feist, and
Johannes Sigil, no one will contest her preeminence.”
Boudreau, who had grown close with novelist Tao Lin,
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wanted Crane to stop “copying Anne Carson and find her
own voice. Maybe the New York scene is part of the
explanation for her reserve; the startling aspect of the New
Human writers is the degree to which they ape tradition. I
suppose they think they must be ‘postmodern,’ and
‘postmodern’ just means going through the ritual rejection
of one’s predecessors that has been dated for at least a
century. Maybe a concerned friend should discretely explain
to Lee Sharks that neither Walt Whitman nor Ezra Pound are
so very avant-garde.”
***
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THE NEW HUMAN ILLITERATI
Cornell Herwitz
Lee Sharks’ little collection of poems, Pearl, which got
Telepathicism off to such a furious start just a couple of
years ago, bore a dedication to Jack Feist (“secret hero of
these poems, who gave off a brazen clangor of brain in
eighteen books composed in half as many seconds, inventing
a DIY electronic prosody and contemporary eternal epic”),
Johannes Sigil (“author of Tiger Leap, a total novel which will
invent new madnesses for humanity”), and Ichabod
Spellings (“author of All That Lies within Me, an
autobiography composed by the cosmos”). At least for now,
humanity has no new madnesses to contend with due to the
inability of Tiger Leap to locate a capable publisher, and we
may never have the opportunity to learn what the cosmos
wrote in Spellings’ autobiography, but thanks to the
Contemporary Classics imprint of Vintage, two of Feist’s
contemporary eternal epics, On the Net, and Stationary: The
American Journals, have now been unleashed on the world.
When On the Net appeared last year, Gillian Meriam noted
the occasion in the New York Times by calling it “a
monumental event,” likening it to the publication of On the
Road in the 1950’s. But even prior to the novel’s actual
publication, the rumor circulated that Feist was the
figurehead for a new coterie of iconoclasts and visionaries
who called themselves the New Humans, and before long his
glossy visage (bearded, of course, with an untended garden
of thick brown hair spilling over his forehead) was popping
up on the internet, he was being avariciously sought out for
YouTube interviews, and he was headlining at a Greenwich
Village nightclub where, in true East Coast fashion, he read
selections of his DIY electronic prosody to an overlay of
mixed samplings and dub step.
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Although the nightclub act is rumored to have been a flop,
On the Net’s somewhat kinder fate sent it to the top of the
best-seller lists for several weeks, and one needn’t look far
to see the reasons. Americans love nothing more than
representative novels, and what could be more
representative in this Age of Facebook than a novel that
advocates for the “young generation?” (The minor detail that
Feist is in his thirties was very admirably overlooked by fans
and sycophants.) More than that, though, I think the advent
of the New Humans was looked at with a certain sigh of
relief by many who had long been turned off by the
infamous intellectualism, difficulty, and polished
“professionalism” of the new century’s writing. This is what
they had been looking for: boisterous, principled, in-your-
face youth flipping over the tables in the temple, rather than
abstruse, comfortable, well-paid teachers of literature
crafting experimental verses with one hand and grading
Introduction to English Composition essays with the other.
Literary communities are not particularly in vogue
nowadays, but the idea of the literary community continues
to hold a powerful interest—nowhere more than in the
middle class, filled to the seams with college-educated men
and women who guiltily think of themselves as Philistines
and of intellectualism as the way of the altruist.
As far as appearances go, the intellectualism of On the Net is
highly appealing. Here is a coterie of fearless young people
ghosting across the web (mostly trolling, with a limitless
supply of pseudonymous Gmail accounts and usernames),
seemingly everywhere at once, injecting their contagious
ethos into geographically far-flung cultural movements from
the West and East Coasts to London, Berlin, Paris, Dubai,
Shanghai—and so on—funded by next-to-nothing (outside
of the occasional Kickstarter proposal or ill-gotten NEH
grant), typing incessantly about love and God and HUMANS,
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strung tight on a pharmocopia of nootropics and legal
stimulants (but never heavy drugs like LSD or heroin), and
collaborating feverishly with likewise hipper-than-thou
Americana and neo-folk musicians. From time to time an
analytical-critical or seriously theoretical variable enters the
equation, but the typical mood attained by Feist is ecstatic:
We hopped onto a random discussion forum to see
what was on the menu. Lee went AFK to reboot his
wifi router, and Jo and I scrolled down into a kind of
jury-rigged writing workshop. I saw a wild poem, the
wildest poem in the world, and turns out the writer
is this homebrewed anonymous discussion board
virtuoso with no more regular readers than the two
or three moderators on this particular forum; you
could see his luminous prosody casting waves of
light across the entire forum, across the whole dim
forest of it that night. The other posters fell down
before him. He didn’t have a publication to his name
and had the utmost regard for everyone. I thought to
myself, ZAP, watch that poster write. That’s
HUMANITY, here I am with HUMANITY. His poem
exploded into the forum, calling the mods by name,
and they gave the most glowing replies on the net,
and I replied with the biggest adoration of all. “Hey
you nobody man, that thar poem’ll save the world
from its own self, that thar poem is the hope of the
HUMAN race.” And the poem took it in like it was
made for it, glowing. It was the spirit of HUMANITY
unknown in the same lonely chat room as I was. I
wished I could read his whole pure corpus and what
the hell he’d been writing all his life besides
luminous poems like that. WHAMEE, I said to my
soul, and Lee came back and away we went to
www.poetry.com
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Feist’s glee for the anonymous forum poster goes hand-in-
hand with his general preparedness to find the origin of
every truth and talent in illiterate amateur types and
wannabe ESL illiterati. His conception of the life of creative
writing at the university is “thousands and thousands
ceaselessly whinging for a morsel of recognition amongst
themselves… pleading, slavering, obsequious, bowed, all so
they could take one of those meaningless pretentious Best
Nepotist Prizes,” whereas the rest of the world (on the
internet) is filled almost completely with overlooked talents
of integrity.
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for general correspondence
or to collaborate on the Crimson Hexagon
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contact lee @
leesharks00@gmail.com
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