a paltry flower

“36 caskets
are waiting
for Jerome, Jerome, Jerome.
Now his parents
are watching
them lower,
Jerome, Jerome
Now they’re all
singing ‘who the fuck is’
to Jerome, Jerome, Jerome,
now the clover
has all,
grown over
Jerome, JEROME, JEROME”
- The Unsettlers

Dreadlocks is the first man I’ve ever known to die.

R.I.P.

Your majesty

Sitting beside a large sunlight window pane in the second floor of the library, I spent a large portion of my afternoon indulging my love of cultural anachronisms.  Held in my right hand, ring finger marking the reference notes, Mishima’s Sword by Christopher Ross is creased open about 50 pages in, my goatee being stroked – indicating intrigue to observers – by my left.  The book is filled with all kinds of fascinating details about a Japan Oscar Wilde claimed to be fiction, some good Zen stories, and an author/protagonist that bounces between good-humoured and a host of parasitic complexes that unintentionally out him as a condescending member of his high school D&D club that met during lunches in the far hallway near the pool. 

A slim young woman sat down across from me with an exquisite sense of what drapings best proclaim her veil of mystique.  On top her head, a brown wide-brimed fedora that fit her the length and width of her face, casting shadows across her cheekbones in a way that evoked Audrey Hepburn.  Her blue blouse was down to her thighs, tightened around the waste, with a vine print that rose over each shoulder in a colour that matched her hat.  She wore grey tights that escaped beneath her shin-high brown leather boots.

Occasionally my gaze would leave the page to catch a glimpse of this rare and beautiful creature, then back to the font describing samurai, chivalry and the inevitable results of grace when received by testosterone and nihilism.  I decide to ask her for a pen.  ”I might have one.”  She says, alarmed but smiling, and fumbles through her large, brown bag, pulling out a thin, silver pen.  She clicks the top with her tiny, delicate hand, and I accept it with my own.

I found a small white piece of paper in my pocket, blank but for the penciled number 895.635.  On the top portion, I wrote the sentence: “At the end of his life Takuan wrote down the Chinese character ‘dream,’ dropped the writing brush and died.”‘  Then I folded the paper in half, and ripped along the fold.  On the bottom part, I wrote the sentence: “Thanks!  P.S. Your style is impeccable” in a thin blue wire of deliberate, cursive script.  

Folding the paper around the pen, I lifted majestically from my chair like a heron carved on a Japanese woodblock, leaving the pen on the table behind me, disappearing through the bookshelves toward an obstinately vast sky.  

Returning moments later, a magpie, to retrieve the Dollarama bag I left beside my chair, filled with ball-point pens and chewing gum.

Martin Tarback’s Memorial (1967 – 2009)

“In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” – Andy Warhol

I don’t much like Andy Warhol, and I don’t think he was right either.  Today in Kitchener a rose-head procession of at least 200 people shut down King Street between Victoria and Frederick in honour of a man without a home.

People from all walks of life: social workers, police officers, local characters – silver and tarnished – gathered at St. John’s Kitchen for a ceremony in honour of the most distinguishable person in the the downtown core.  King of King Street, the scary bear of the bank, gentle wraith and pivotal myth, Martin Tarback was the most destitute figure in the city, with dirty waist-lengthed dreadlocks and several pairs of clothes too big for him in all seasons, his image was a half-light ghost and his presence haunting.  He appeared a big sick dog with sad blue eyes.

A nurse that worked with him during his last months in the hospital, battling cancer, explained how, unable to speak, he wrote out what he wanted for his memorial service.  He wanted cheese cubes, and non-alcoholic beer to be there, as well as a couple of songs.  Nothing religious.  

When he was a young man he rented a room in a dilapidated mansion on Margaret Ave.  They’ve condemned it and it was torn down years ago.  Back then, another renter, Ernst Ritzman, knew him as a compassionate, intelligent guy, with real musical talent and ideas about philosophy, art, and religion.  Mr. Ritzman, and certainly everyone who knew him, watched him go from strength and wisdom into schizophrenia, alcoholism and homelessness.  

Somehow Martin acquired a violin, and was teaching himself how to play it.  Somebody stole it from him while he slept in Victoria Park.  Similar story to what happened to his acoustic guitar.  No matter what anybody said for the rest of the service, the thought seared my brain: Somebody stole his violin.

Somebody stole his violin.

Many talked.  Everyone, in one way or another, has been affected by how far through the cracks Martin had fallen.  I remember giving him some change and a cigarette in front of the TD Bank down on King, and being chastised by the security guard for it.  ”I heard he has money!” she hissed, “You can’t let them live off of you.  He’s got a family, he needs to get a job and pull himself up by the bootstraps.”  I went off on her.  Poverty, addiction, and mental illness are never cases of 1+1 – people need to understand that. 

Even if he had money, how many people could sell him peace of mind?  The security guard’s comments were scared, but not of him, but for us all, through him.  HIs alleged wealth couldn’t bribe his nightmares; so hard to reconcile with the myth it can, that we are all income brackets away from eternal love absolution happiness.

A theme driven home throughout the service was that, if anybody was teaching us that lesson, it was Dreadlocks.  His gentle isolation was the face Kitchener responded to.  He was used for police sensitivity training, many of the social outreach programs grew with him in mind, a network of concerned individuals that got involved with him were moved to go beyond themselves to make sure help was being made available for everyone in need.  Just listening to stories about him, I felt my small-self crucified by his suffering, and the need to go lightly and be compassionate to all things.  Such was his shadow.

After the speaking, they handed us each a red rose, and we poured down King Street, a big human river, posting photographs of Martin’s face on pillars, and walls, leaving roses with them.

The police stopped traffic to pay respects, and we walked down the middle of the road.  

People gathered in windows as we passed, some taking pictures of the celebration.

At the end of the march we gathered at the Speaker’s Corner and paid our final respects, to the sounds of Blackbird by The Beatles.  There’s something absolutely incredible, awe inspiring, and profound about looking over a crowd of people gathering, teary eyed, silent, to pay respects to a man that, for the over 20 years wandered the streets battling a host of mental and social demons.  It really gives me hope for a progressive awareness of mental health issues in the public consciousness, and better social outreach.  So where I disagree with Warhol, is that Martin may never be world famous, he’s left a lasting impression the people of this community that likely won’t ever fade.

 

My pictures do no justice to the size of the crowd.

After I left to head home, I stopped in and left my rose in the bank, where I remember him best.  I was harassed by the security guard for taking pictures.

Fly
Oh I can’t explain
What a simple minded
Man would say
Or what he might just find
If he flew away

And I want to fly but
I just can’t seem to find a way
Could you help me please
Cause I’m tryin’

Well maybe she’s just a
Dream in my head

Maybe she’s just a girl
That I met

Maybe she’s just the kind
Of a girl
Giving love to the rest of the world

Maybe I’m just a foll in the rain
Hopeless enough to see what you say

Or maybe I’ll just fly through the sky
Never a dreamer or wonderin’ why

Oh wouldn’t you love it
Simple minded man

- Martin Tarback
-Good Work News, Issue 30,
October 1992
 

Rota Fortuna collage

Click to see larger

Composed entirely of 1970’s National Geographic magazines.

skid city dialogues pt. 2

I went walking downtown to get the specifics on my event itinerary this week.  I was looking for this:

and this…

But then something caught my eye.  A yellow poster with a cop on it, with a gigantic bold caption “BEWARE.”  I’ve not known the Kitchener police to tape signs to posts, so my first reaction was to guess – likely correctly – that it was a warning sent from a future, fugitive rogue, Strych9’s roommate.

Shivering from the fear, I encountered, walking home, several of these armed gang members shaking down some of the local resistance faction.  Fortunately, they ignored me because I am a dignified individual, but for how long?  How long can I be free in a world where the blue & whites could attack me at random?  How long can I remain dignified in fear?

Almost as an answer, I discovered another message, probably from them on a nearby pole.

This city is coming to life around me.  What horrible, horrible end can come of it all?  I dare not think it.

Imagination and the Void by Patrick Laude

For the record, Smalls, it’s totally kosher to reproduce text from another website/blog so long as you provide a link in return. Some of the best pieces I’ve read online have been printed in their entirety on another website than it’s Mother.

This, on the other hand, likely isn’t kosher. This article, IMAGINATION AND THE VOID by Patrick Laude, originally appeared in Parabola Magazine, Spring 2009, Vol. 34, No. 1, a magazine that is still on the shelves of most magazine stores, that I took the effort to type up, only because I feel it contributes to the current discussion on poetry/Poetry, although it relates to all imaginal and creative facets. It’s rather long (about 2600 words) but it’s damn good reading, and fleshes out my last post a little more.

WARNING: The following essay contains openly spiritual language, as well as the “G” word.  People likely to be offended by the graphic nature of these concepts consider yourself advised to continue at your own discretion.

THE AMBIGUOUS POWER OF IMAGES has never been as pervasive as it is today through the world of media and virtual reality. Images shape ideas and tendencies, determine action, invade daily consciousness, and sometimes rule over opinion. They can hypnotize and control; they can feed all sorts of delusions and foster imbalance. In short, images fill up the vacuum left by the spiritual disarray of our contemporary world. So saturated is modern life with myriads of images of all kinds that we don’t take notice to most of them anymore. One must wonder what may remain of the power of creative imagination when such a passive, hardly conscious relationship with images has settled in and become second nature.

Notwithstanding, modern man still values imagination as a rare, mysterious, and awesome faculty. Our schools encourage children to explore, display, enrich their imagination, although what we mean by it is far from clear, so blurry and capricious have become the criteria that validate its worth and function. When we try to specify what imagination entails, the most likely associations involve subjectivity, individuality, and freedom from boundaries. Imagination is a private, idiosyncratic realm that makes one enjoy the oft-complacent delights of being special. As a comforting haven of fantasy, it protects us from the harshness of an objective world of drab realism and cold, inhuman structures. It seemingly frees one’s mind and heart from the strictures of an industrialized world of tedious, mechanical, senseless activity. From all of this we may infer that imagination is akin to a world of unreality to which we turn to find solace from a reality that alienates us and robs us of meaning and happiness. The imaginary is not the real: its very raison d’être is to be a sort of parallel reality to which we may escape.

In a world in which reality is defined by action and outer realizations, imagination is also prized for its prospective, unconventional, creative power of exploration and discovery. To the impediments of memory, akin to the hindering weight of the past, modern man espouses the seemingly unlimited power of projection of an imagination that defies the contraints of reality as it is known. Modern science and technology thrive on this sense of unhampered liberty to question, inquire, and fathom. This is, in a sense, the very pride that modern mankind boasts as its uncontested superiority over ages of allegedly conformist compliance with unexamined beliefs and unscrutinized customs. There is no modernity without unconstrained imagination, imagination to think, to do, and to be.

CRITICS OF MODERNITY HAVE SUGGESTED that such highly subjective, individualized, and metaphysically unrestricted understanding of imagination may ultimately confine us to alienation and Prometheism. The artificiality of many of its productions reinforces mankind’s chronic separation from its environment, short of integration with a qualitative universe of meaning. It erects walls of isolation among humans by means of mesmerizing power of technological creations and projections. Television and the internet are substitutes for bonds of friendship and communication. Furthermore, the unbound, directionless, and idiosyncratic imagination of our times is suspected of opening a chasm between humanity and the divine: it is likely that the myriads of imaginary dreams of virtual reality produce a world in which God has become implausible and seemingly unneeded. Imagination, pushed to the limits of its demiurgic élan, ends up evoking a ghostly, and ghastly, counter-reality: it is indeed the imagination of the sorcerer’s apprentice. At the end of the road this counter-reality overuns and cancels out what is counters. The virtual becomes more real than the actual; it dispels ontological boundaries and realizes the old prophecies of a world totally enmeshed in the alluring net of Maya, or swept up in the whirlwind of exponential “surreality.”

To attend to this crisis of modern imagination, a few questions are in order. Should imagination be confined to the realms of the subjective, the individual, and the phantasmatic, and has it always been akin to them? Is imagination free from laws, and independent from any objective grounding? Is the contemporary disconnection between imagination and “things as they are” and “things as we know them” the fundamental rule, or rather the circumstantial exception?

TRADITIONAL WORLDS have been unanimous in their metaphysical and spiritual embrace of imagination. The world of images has been universally conceived as an inspiring and pacifying treasury of wisdom: not only a horizon of dream but a space of knowledge. Pre-modern mankind was quite aware that visual representations provide a more direct access to reality than concepts and discourses. It highly prized the power of imagination as a privilege to relate to the beyond. This is why words referring to seeing and “imagining” often denoted, or connoted, a sense of knowledge. Thus, a “theory” amounts to none other, etymologically, than a “vision” of reality. Rites and symbols bear witness to this benefit of directness and integrality with which the discursive process of reason can never catch up. Myths, parables, icons, visionary dream,s sacred ideograms, all bear witness to the instantaneity of the manifestation of the sacred in and through images. Even the most iconoclastic of traditions, namely Judiasm and Islam, have not been able to dispense with the human need for visual imagery, if only through their inspiring cultivation of the illumination and calligraphy of the word of God.

Such pervasiveness of the imagination of forms in the world of religions may surprise: is not the end of the spiritual journey most often envisaged as a transcendence of all imaginary and discursive forms? Certainly so, but this transcending motion cannot bypass images themselves since it takes as its starting point the world of forms in which we live and “imagine,” and since images ultimately point to that “unimaginable” that is both their root and their end. Sacred imagination proceeds from the divine source of tradition that it prolongs and unforlds, thereby providing us with its iconic power of allusion to the intimation of the unseen. It offers us a way to gaze upon the Divine Mystery that we cannot grasp and that our reason can only infer without ascertaining it with full existential certainty. God escapes our imagination in His essence, but He mercifully manifests the beauty of His manifold qualities in the world of sacred imagination.

AS A SCHOLARLY “PROPHET” OF IMAGINATION, Henry Corbin emphasized, in the wake of Swedenborg and Shi’it and Sufi theosophy, that the world of imagination is an objective and universal domain, not a purely private bubble of fiction. The necessary distinction between the latter and the former demanded that he coin a new word, i.e., the “imaginal,” to prevent his readers from confusing spiritual imagination for the individual inventions that we fancy. Imagination is indeed a “world, the mundus imaginalis, a world more real than our daily dream. In it and through it the higher realm of spiritual realities becomes proportionate to our terrestrial faculties of perception: the imaginal unfolds a bridge between the celestial and the terrestrial. In other words, the “imaginal world” is the intermediary realm that joins the spiritual spheres with physical realities. As for the “imaginary” domain that we vaunt and value, it is nothing more, at best, than the residual manifestation of the imaginal realm. Thus, contemporary forms of arts, such as moving pictures, can become the vehicles of the imaginal archetypes of the myths of old, and many “imaginative” works of literature are half unconscious channels of truly imaginal realities, half phantasmatic fabrications of an old artist engrossed with his own genial figments. Literary and cinematic works may flaunt imaginal realities in contexts that often trivialize their modes of manifestation, but they cannot but be the vehicle, albiet in a passive and unconscious way, of their ultimate meaning.

Imagination has not only its ontological province, but it also possesses its own laws. In his ANTHROPOLOGICAL STRUCTURES OF IMAGINATION, Gilbert Durand drew an extensive repertory of the ways in which imagination has manifested and functioned through myths and symbols, through religions and arts, through ages and lands. He has shown that mankind has been remarkably one in its understanding and use of imagination as a faculty that makes us feel at home in the world of forms in which we live. Genuine and sound imagination is neither severed from the cosmos, nor from the gods, nor from the One. It obeys, for example, the fundamental laws of cosmic alternation epitomized by the sequence of days and nights. There is, therefore, a diurnal and nocturnal regime of imagination: the first proviudes images of separation, differentiation and opposition, as the day that projects diversity and contast, yang, whereas the second proposes visions of reconciliation, fusion and union, like the night that envelops and disposes to sleep, yin.

Imagination lies at the juncture of death and life, absence and presence. It has been hailed as a victory over death and putrefaction. Is not the image a surrogate for the living reality that has elapsed or vanished? Paintings, photographs, are images proposed to memory: we willingly evoke the presence of those we love by means of the magic of representation, or we restore, throuh it, a symbolic life to those who have passed away. In Rome, the imago was a mortuary mask of the dead that patrician families carried in a funerary procession. It was then placed on the alter of ancestors, like a permanent reminder of death in life and life in death. The image is a presence in absence, but it is also an absence in presence. It is never a full adequation, nor an utter distance. Imagination lies in this ambivalent realm that is neither real nor unreal. As the symbol–which etymologically refers to a token only one half or one side of which is presented as a sign of recognition–it always presents us with a reality the true face of which is to be found beyond.

From etymology to entomology, our exploration of the connotations of the imago teaches us that this term may also refer to the final stage in the development of an insect. This not only alludes to the idea that the true “image” may be taken to be the goal of the end result of the creative process, it also points to a sense of perfection, as well as to an intuition of a being’s essence. The image is more than a representation, it is the ultimate form of being, and imagination captures nature at a stage, or on a level, that is more real than what we flatly call reality.

IMAGINATION FILLS A GAP, but it does so in two very different ways. As Corbin reminds us, it can be, positively, like a bridge, or a pathway, between the world of visible, physical forms, and the realm of suprasensory, archetypal, spiritual realities that cannot, as such, be perceived by our senses, nor enter the world of forms. This is the intermediary world of similitude in difference and difference in similitude. Similitude is the key to interpretation, the science of deciphering messages from the beyond; but such a translation is not one-sided and quasi-automatic like that of a sign-post or an allegory, meaning this is that and that’s it. Difference introduces a wealth of levels and correspondences that makes the symbol ever more than what it appears to be. Imagination is the faculty that gives access to this full domain of meaning. On the side of creation, it crystalizes, as it were, spiritual intuitions and realities into formal, symbolic realities. On the side of interpretation it “frees” meanings from their formal shell and connects them to living sources of Reality. It does not create symbols out of nothing, it simply perceives, or unveils, their objective reality as merciful and fruitful intermediaries between the spiritual and the physical. This imaginal domain is not vain, phantasmatic imagination at all: it is an objective domain to which visionaries, shamans, and mystics have had access, a symbolic book which we can read in order to reach intimations of the Beyond as “through a glass” not “darkly, but rather through the many “colors” of divine theophanies.

By contrast with the substantive and sustentive nature of spiritual and symbolic imagination, the trivial market of our “imaginary” life amounts to no more than a “filler” in the most pejorative sense of the word. This is imagination as “filler of the void,” to use Simone Weil’s phrase: “It is continually at work filling up the fissures through which grace may pass.” There are the fissures that result from our relativity, from the fact that we are neither self-sufficient nor self-fulfilled. The “void” that is to be filled is the incompleteness of our terrestrial being, of our individual experience. It is from or through the “void” resulting from our relativity that the “fullness” of the Real can be unveiled. In need of Reality, our incomplete, fragmentary being should open itself to the completeness, the absoluteness of the Divine, which is the only fully satisfactory response to it. But such an opening implies a “dark night” that our soul does not want to bear with patience, or in waiting, to use again one of Weil’s powerful spiritual metaphors: hence the compensations of illusory imagination. Wandering imagination, sterile imagination, serves our delusions of metaphysical “immunity,” in the hope of forgetting the void that is growing within us, and threatens to make walking dead of ourselves.

EVEN THOUGH the contemporary concepts of the “imaginary” and imagination fall short of the full reality of the imaginal domain and the plenary spiritual function of images, they cannot but testify to the latter as their distant or inverted reflections. Reality is one, and there is no absolute “error” in being. First, the subjective bias of our current concept of imagination does not only stem from an ignorance of the ontological objectivity of the imaginal, it also remains, positively, as a faint mirror image of divine Self-knowledge. This is suggestively taught by the hadith: “I was a hidden treasure and I desired to be known, so I created the world in order to be known.”

Imagination is an objectification of the divine Subject through which God knows Himself in the mode of multiplicity and contrast. Imagination is the exteriorized “content” of the Divine Subject in the way of a wealth of creative meanings “passed into” imaginal forms. The world springs forth out of God’s imagination, and human imagination can, and must, unfold into an analogous creative process. Human art mimics divine art. In parallel, the individualistic bent that characterizes modern imagination, despite its flowing from an inordinate cultivation of arbitrary idiosyncrasies, can also be understood and as an obscured and indirect sense that imagination does indeed relate each and every soul to the whole of being, and to the Principle of the whole. Ibn Arabi’s concept of the “God of belief” as a personal imaginal reality, that William Chittick also defined as “self-disclosure of the Real (that) ties a knot in the fabric of existence,” is of necessity limited and colored by the size and hues of the individual recipient. There is no way for the limited to be connected with the Unlimited but through representations or limitations that are as many imaginal apprehensions of the Real. These limitations are not exclusive of liberty, and our modern equation of imagination with freedom is not unfounded, although not fully understood in its foundations.

Imagination is liberation because it reflects God’s utter freedom to create. It is the projecting and creation power of His infinity. Reflecting this divine freedom on the human level, only the sage and the saint have enough imagination to become other than themselves, and one with all selves.

RE: Fitzgerald’s untitled response to my last untitled post

Personally I don’t find “Style is the answer to everything” to be an entirely satisfactory answer to what poetry is for, yet, at least. I had to resist a lot of tangents in my post to stay on point. Really, the goal of poetry is whatever the poet wants to achieve. You can act like Philip Sidney and Edumund Spenser (both sycophantic cunt-lickers of the bald-headed rotted-toothed Queen Elizabeth I), who want to “pleasure but teach” their readers, as if poetry was a blow-job from the Pastor. You can act like Leigh Hunt or Mallarme (decadence, a privileging of style). You can act like Byron, Ed Dorn, Milton, Homer (the question the epic tries to answer, I think, How Shall We Live?). You can act like Shakespeare or Neil Gaiman (entertain the masses, intelligently). You can act like Ezra Pound (you know, I’m not qualified to peg down what he was doing), you can act like Wordsworthless or Ginsberg (LOOK AT ME I”M SO IMPORTANT I CAN CHANGE THE WORLD I”M A ROCKSTAR [actually, no, you can't, this is the only option that is totally senseless]), Pablo Neruda (on getting laid), Garcia Lorca (the surreal), Amiri Baraka, Shelley, or Mayakovsky (politics!) or many more and anything in between.

In a way these are stylistic choices. It’s not about using words as fashion, but what you fashion out of the words. It’s about aesthetic values, not just how you choose to present something, but what you choose to present. What have you made?

I don’t think we, poets, are hoodwinking anyone unless we’re setting out to cheat them of their time and money by feeding them what they want to hear and already knew.

And the idea that poets are a dying breed might be an exaggerated one. Who do you think read poetry before the printing press? In Renaissance England poetry passed through only the rich, elite, and highly educated via manuscript. When print culture really kicked off around 1800 in England, poets were selling big time, Byron was basically a celebrity, but there was still the same debate going on about whether poetry accomplished anything or not, and anyone who wasn’t as delusional as Shelley or W.W. came to this conclusion: not a whole lot. Poets are not, have never been, and never will be relevant to society. Oracles and prophets are not poets — they are either a) oracles and prophets or b) mentally ill. Poetry is always popular in society, but not always by that name. Usually it goes by the name of “lyrics.” Written poetry is the product of a prosperous civilization that values materials and isolated cultural experience. When a civilization has money and refinement, poetry comes in books. When a civilization is broke/primitive and war-torn, poetry comes from a mouth, possibly with a guitar/lyre/tambourine/shamanistic chants. When a civilization has so much money and refinement that people don’t read any more, poetry will start to come from a microphone.

Now, this leads me to your division of the “bee’s knees of expression,” a poetry that can “do more” into Concrete Poetry and Slam poetry. There’s not really such a thing as slam poetry — only spoken word that conforms to certain rules about form, and has a few common (but not essential) stylistic tropes. So we’ve got Concrete Poetry, which is just a further degeneration of exclusively written words that hasn’t been interesting since bpNichol (I didn’t know anyone did Concrete Poetry except as a lame aside anymore), and Spoken Word.

Spoken word, I think, is not just a branch from our written poetry. It’s recent history may be as such, but in practice, it’s closer to staged theatre and musical lyrics. It’s staged entertainment/art, with varying degrees of intellectual depth. It does not do more than written poetry, nor was it meant to. It does differently. Today’s spoken word is done because it’s live and its practitioners like to do it live, because it catches audiences faster and audiences that are bigger than published work, and it’s mostly DIY (and this is especially important in cities like Montreal, which has a lot of cultural capital but no cultural infrastructure in English, meaning there’s a lot of poets, and not many publishing houses).

What’s important here is, it’s a lot more popular than written poetry (especially the slam derivative) with non-poets. Unfortunately, spoken word attracts the ROCKSTAR types who think they’re going to change the world, so it can get a bad rap, but that’s the fault of those poets, not the form.

Is it important? Is it relevant to life? No. No. No. If you want to be important and relevant to life, go become a politician, judge, or CEO (political economy, folks).

I don’t think poetry is necessary at all. I don’t think “silence” is or should be the goal of poetry. If we really wanted silence we would be mute. I figure if human civilization can figure out how to walk on the moon because we really wanted to, we could have figured out how to shut up if we really wanted to.

When I say a poem is like a cigarette, to be enjoyed, I don’t necessarily mean I want to languish in Hunt’s flowery verse. I want something new, I want something challenging, I want something done –with– style.

“Style. Style is the answer to everything. A fresh way to approach a dull or dangerous thing. To do a dull thing with style is preferable to doing a dangerous thing without style. To do a dangerous thing with style is what I call art.”

Note that it reads “Style is the answer to everything,” not “Style is everything.” Even if we have style, to make art, we still have to do a dangerous thing.

Untitled (3 poets walk into a…)

Poet:

c.1300, from O.Fr. poete (12c.), from L. poeta ”poet, author,” from Gk. poetes ”maker, author, poet,” from poein ”to make or compose,” from PIE *kwoiwo- ”making,” from base *qwei- ”to make” (cf. Skt. cinoti ”heaping up, piling up,” O.C.S. cinu ”act, deed, order”). Replaced O.E. scop (which survives in scoff). Used in 14c., as in classical langs., for all sorts of writers or composers of works of literature.

I embolden myself to say that every one of us got to this game to say we know where it’s at.  Poetry is a banker’s stamp on cash-containing mail.  Insignia legit.  Poetry was the first step to say I know.

Know what?

You…
You believed …
You believed in movements none could see.

I loathe mere word-smiths.  The frail-wristed loose-jaws so confident in their own sensitive proclivities, producing endless formulaic stanzas with the mere inkling that something is there:

the way
we left the cup on the table
when we left the store in a hurry

Something is there, star-child, but what?  What is it you fools?!  

Dogen penned the word “Dokan.”  It means literally “way circle,” but embodies the idea that the practice toward enlightenment is enlightenment.  In an article found in Cytosine’s post “Enlightenment and YOU,” Todd Murphy suggests that the desire to seek enlightenment may indicate that enlightenment is possible for that individual, since only a certain neurological preset would be preoccupied with such things.

Unlike Dogan’s way-ring, I suggest that one undertakes poetry as a tool of expressing what they know and that they know, but that the very act of expression doesn’t indicate knowledge.  Self-discovery, however you choose to term it, is harder than Young Jeezy’s most inspiring words for a young thug, and it’s counterpart, delusion, is much easier to attain.  Unless it’s real, style is a fakeout; unless there’s meaning, wordplay is for tools.   

From where I’m sitting, good poetry, street poetry, is inseparable from self-development and spiritual growth.  You can’t say that though, not in a poem. Every mystical spoken word artist choking on the hairball of their own metaphysics has at least the vaguest inclination this is so, but they lack the genuine article, their words nec adequatio rei et intellectus.

This trap recurs eternally, as I earlier noted, we got into this game to show that we know.  The populace of artists and poets is filled with megalomaniacs, narcissi and other self-conscious flowers bent on attracting bees and botanists.  This is all fine and good, but let us avoid casting their shadow on poetry and art as a whole.

A blooming narcissi

By my mangled morning definition, as they are written what is to separate poetry from psychology?  Poetry is a resonant thing of essence.  Surely, both just sets of words that interpret the inner-life of persons, the relationships observed between things that charter how we are and what we feel.  One, however, must make frequent reference back to the observed subject (people), where the other is free to dwell far out there.  In a past life, I would have dared say, with the stars.

Why the stars?  Why always the goddamned stars?  Because they were those magic things intangible, so far away, beacons of a cosmic order looking over us, showing us that high is the way, but all eyes are upon the ground.  Since the stars have become impressive life-giving balls of gas, but have been severed from the order of things in our day-to-day life.  The quest is no longer way out there, but way inward, though “(direction) is a relative concept.  It has no intrinsic value.”

To pull things back to the page, when did language become little more than just a game we play to keep us occupied?  Words, wording, syntax, grammar, structure… these things are our relative reality, babe.  How we stress and work our linguistic circuitry is going to have a direct impact on how we perceive the relationships between things.  Granted, whatever words we use will not (I think) modify the structure of cold, hard reality; of what we directly take in, and the factors that move us to express it, but may affect what we choose to acknowledge, analyze and direct our attention to.  The metaphorical and literal language that we develop from youth is what will structure our ideals, and may provide an inhibiting or liberating foundation to build our lives on.  

Religion, for all of its idealized silence, has written a fucking lot of poetry. This, I believe, is because the path is long and the signs are in many languages, so those who have succeeded in reading what was said on their route left little Rosetta Stones for the rest of us, or maybe just Sphinx-like riddles as judgment.  Back at our religious/psychological/philosophical poetic vein, we see it as something more, as challenging engagements in the shadowy interior.  Blind-fighting lessons.  Coleman Barks taught us that Rumi’s words weren’t sacrosanct, and his poetry remained intact.

What I am stressing, perhaps, is that poetry is not an isolated thing unto itself, and cannot be treated as such.  It isn’t just how words look on paper, nor how “deep” they seem to other people, but the resonant essence of truth retained when held above a lighter.  Leonard Cohen said: “Poetry is the evidence of life.  If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.”  Despite that, I cannot see it as a proverbial cigarette, but more of an ash garden.  The challenge is, afterall, to bloom while the world is burning.

Yikes

Taken from: http://www.feministpeacenetwork.org/2009/03/24/1-shot-2-kills-t-shirt-showing-pregnant-woman-with-bullseye-on-her-belly-popular-with-israeli-soldiers/

Please visit to view the entire article.  Apparently the site is down for some people, so I have pasted it over and given credit.  If this is a problem please let me know–I just want to get the word out about this, and since I’ve had many people say they can’t view the link I figure this may help in the short term.

March 24th, 2009

“In a blog post last week, I wrote that  sexual assault in the U.S. military was effectively an intractable problem because rape and sexual assault have always been de-facto weapons of war.  This isn’t just true in our military of course, in recent times the conflicts in the Democratic Republic of Congo and in the Balkans provide gruesome examples that this is so.

It is in that context that the recent report of violently misogynist and genocidal t-shirts being commissioned by Israeli soldiers, horrendous as it is, is hardly surprising.  According to Haaretz,

Dead babies, mothers weeping on their children’s graves, a gun aimed at a child and bombed-out mosques – these are a few examples of the images Israel Defense Forces soldiers design these days to print on shirts they order to mark the end of training, or of field duty. The slogans accompanying the drawings are not exactly anemic either: A T-shirt for infantry snipers bears the inscription “Better use Durex,” next to a picture of a dead Palestinian baby, with his weeping mother and a teddy bear beside him. A sharpshooter’s T-shirt from the Givati Brigade’s Shaked battalion shows a pregnant Palestinian woman with a bull’s-eye superimposed on her belly, with the slogan, in English, “1 shot, 2 kills.” A “graduation” shirt for those who have completed another snipers course depicts a Palestinian baby, who grows into a combative boy and then an armed adult, with the inscription, “No matter how it begins, we’ll put an end to it.”

There are also plenty of shirts with blatant sexual messages. For example, the Lavi battalion produced a shirt featuring a drawing of a soldier next to a young woman with bruises, and the slogan, “Bet you got raped!” A few of the images underscore actions whose existence the army officially denies – such as “confirming the kill” (shooting a bullet into an enemy victim’s head from close range, to ensure he is dead), or harming religious sites, or female or child non-combatants.

The slogan “Let every Arab mother know that her son’s fate is in my hands!” had previously been banned for use on another infantry unit’s shirt. A Givati soldier said this week, however, that at the end of last year, his platoon printed up dozens of shirts, fleece jackets and pants bearing this slogan.

“It has a drawing depicting a soldier as the Angel of Death, next to a gun and an Arab town,” he explains. “The text was very powerful. The funniest part was that when our soldier came to get the shirts, the man who printed them was an Arab, and the soldier felt so bad that he told the girl at the counter to bring them to him.”

Funny?  Not perhaps the word most of us would choose. And while the article specifically quotes the IDF as condemning the t-shirts and promising to take action to discourage them, as one soldier who was interviewed makes clear, the t-shirts are being approved by officers, not just enlisted personnel:

Does the design go to the commanders for approval?

The Givati soldier: “Usually the shirts undergo a selection process by some officer, but in this case, they were approved at the level of platoon sergeant.

And what do the t-shirts mean to the soldiers:

G., a soldier in an elite unit who has done a snipers course, explained that, “it’s a type of bonding process, and also it’s well known that anyone who is a sniper is messed up in the head. Our shirts have a lot of double entendres, for example: ‘Bad people with good aims.’ Every group that finishes a course puts out stuff like that.”

Of the shirt depicting a bull’s-eye on a pregnant woman, he said: “There are people who think it’s not right, and I think so as well, but it doesn’t really mean anything. I mean it’s not like someone is gonna go and shoot a pregnant woman.”

Oh really?

Israeli troops at a checkpoint shot and wounded a pregnant Palestinian woman in labor and killed her husband today as the couple tried to reach a hospital – a day after another pregnant woman was shot in an almost identical case at the same West Bank roadblock, Palestinians said.

Sociologist Dr. Orna Sasson-Levy, of Bar-Ilan University, author of “Identities in Uniform: Masculinities and Femininities in the Israeli Military, puts it this way,

There is a perception that the Palestinian is not a person, a human being entitled to basic rights, and therefore anything may be done to him.”

Could the printing of clothing be viewed also as a means of venting aggression?

Sasson-Levy: “No. I think it strengthens and stimulates aggression and legitimizes it. What disturbs me is that a shirt is something that has permanence. The soldiers later wear it in civilian life; their girlfriends wear it afterward. It is not a statement, but rather something physical that remains, that is out there in the world. Beyond that, I think the link made between sexist views and nationalist views, as in the ‘Screw Haniyeh’ shirt, is interesting. National chauvinism and gender chauvinism combine and strengthen one another. It establishes a masculinity shaped by violent aggression toward women and Arabs; a masculinity that considers it legitimate to speak in a crude and violent manner toward women and Arabs.”

“I think the link made between sexist views and nationalist views, as in the ‘Screw Haniyeh’ shirt, is interesting. National chauvinism and gender chauvinism combine and strengthen one another. It establishes a masculinity shaped by violent aggression toward women and Arabs; a masculinity that considers it legitimate to speak in a crude and violent manner toward women and Arabs.””

I guess it proves hatred is hatred is hatred, or something like that, and they’re easy to combine.  Or it just proves combative positions have an alarming amount of power and pressure to turn someone into…whatever this is.

Untitled – (post started as a comment on strych9’s last untitled post)

First, fascinating poem. Wonder who the author is? The autonomous line thing is very cool.

Second, on the natives/wurdzwurt comparison: hilarious. More natural… more gagging… higher risk of pesticide poisoning…

Third, portree: I always make passes at the point of view that “poetry something STYLE something something the end”, but find the struggle difficult. Not that I’m a Chris Banksian, circle-jerk-platinum-membership-owning, having taught English in a country my parents couldn’t tell apart from “Jap-land” and then got scared of the locals but blamed my return after two months on a homestuck lover -ing, I had a crush on Gwendolyn McEwan in uni -ing, poetry is about treating the world like it’s your 16 year-old virgin step-sister (personal contexts are entered Here) -ing scenester, it’s just that, goddammitall, I’m really high and it hurts me whenever I’m reminded that all we’re doing is hoodwinking the few people who read poetry who aren’t poets (we out# THEM, making this a trade that’s eating itself in only the most incestuous and Fraudian of ways) by acting all secure and “it’s cool that we’re a dying breed something but back in the FIFTIES something something”.

So you start casting around for what will become the bee’s knees of expression, something that can do more, and down one path we have CONCRETEPOETRY and it’s tumorous multimedia Bruce Campbell-jaw-having offspring, while down the other deplorable alley we have… BAM poetry… er… shampoetry… umm… slam poetry. That’s it: “SINCE ALL WE’RE DOING IS STYLE, LET’s DO IT LOUDLIKE:!”

So, all we’re doing is style. Ties in with something somebody told me once. Something about how the brickabrack of “subject”, “meaning”, “message” is only slightly more impermanent than the STYLE of the thing. Marie Antoinette dies but her bodices and hair-tumors pulse onward into the collective of the unconscious RAM and conscious ROM of huManity’s /b/ folder (humanity’s WHAT folder?)

So what’s the point of stylizing what’s already THERE? That’s the question that’s been itching like a caffeine buzz under the scalp. We’re, what?, encoding arbitrarily linked nuggets of info, streamlining and kilning into stasis what is essentially the fecal matter of the mind into pottery for easy transportation? So I guess it’s basic communication, only doin it rite by being self-conscious about it. I suppose it’s only natural that the monkeys in the fabled typewriter room would start fashioning the shit they throw at each other into more aerodynamically sound mudclumps.

That’s an attractive way of looking at it: replace the term self-conscious with the term MINDFUL (not really a stretch…) and the whole thing becomes a giant tea-ceremony or practiced mantra or some kind of intricate hippy joint-rolling ritual or zenish meditation. So the point is no longer the fragile MEANING of a thing (whatever THAT has come to MEAN in this post-post-modern environment) but is instead a distillation, an expression as close to the silence underneath the cursive flourish as is possible without an eraser or delete key or a lack of pen or vocal chord or guitar or cigarette.

I suppose it (poesy) is necessary because not everyone is ready for complete silence. A life at an end without poetry(art) would be like accepting Jesus without having been martyred, betrayed or caught with the blood alcohol level of an entire Sicillian mountain-village first at some point DURING that life.

I am, surprisingly, comforted by this still-confused and penumbral notion of expression.