A Washcloth Wetter Than Calculus

Language is a machine that runs on curiosity, a spider with eight testicles creating a web of bulbs and iron. What will these words do next? Shots pour out of a rifle. A parenthesis falls dead.

Money! Sure wish I had some.

I like money because it is ugly and incoherent, like poetry. Olives are more purely thermodynamic, but even they sometimes grip the sunlight like cheesecloth and stuff it with reverie and shape.

There are differences between the tablespoon and teaspoon, but how many people pay attention to that? Maybe during a special occasion, when the cutlery is laid out on the table in patterns of geological certainty. Structure is always solemn. It is a sanctuary for chaos.

How do you come into contact with words? With me, it is never simple. I sneak up on them. I try to catch a few. Then I begin to tame them and feed them and teach them tricks. Eventually, they get the drift of whatever it is I am trying to say, and they say it, though it comes out a little different than I had imagined. Thought travels by ear and utterance, but between those two entities is space, and space is full of tricks. Ask any astronaut. 23 heads and 500 gallons of water are required to say amperage. But what does amperage mean? I mean, compared to watt, or ohm, or copper, or note.

Infinity smells like iodine. Growth requires a little dying sometimes. It is dirt, after all, that initially introduces us to mysteries of life and death. Things compose and decompose. Rope or clarinets, makes little difference. This is why the word addendum has always sounded to me like a piece of anatomy. Miscellaneous paragraphs all bellowing like cows.

When language breaks it is evacuated by helicopter. But everything else just floats. The sky is inscribed with perversities of mist. 4:00 o’clock arrives soaked in opals. 8:00 o’clock arrives soaked in opinion. Both are linked by the glitter of silver, the lips of a hectic attention painted on the idea of anonymity. When a washcloth is used, it all brightens, brightens into a darkness so black it is radiant, resplendent with murk.

The philodendron is a mass of ramification. Yet the velocity is naked, like month of November, in which the leaves fall, and the frost comes, and colonnades of ice and rhetoric. The rhetoric of snow, which is delicate, and soft, and blows over the highway in swirls of nuance, entities without name.

Critical Mass

The universe is expanding. Evidence keeps turning up. Nirvana, for instance, and escalators and music. Oysters filtering seawater. A pile of rags in a Minnesota garage. Nebulous, purposeless space hung from the sad necessity of time. The weighty bones of the Irish elk as it moves through a forest converting itself into the purest energy of all which is heat. The rest is mere hydrogen, and fur and eyes.

Near the window, its dials bursting with silver, a radio gurgles the biography of pink. The astronomy of lips rattle the camellias of a rogue sentence writhing in its syntax like the pantomime of a screwdriver. We are in the realm of the empirical wondering how it all happened. This place. This world. This teaspoon. This border between the visible and the invisible postmarked with crickets.

If memory is the benediction of experience, then barnacles are the barometer of exchange.

Beauty exists abundantly in all matter but is particularly noticeable in squid.

Personalities are the candy of ingratitude. When they are flung about at high velocities they tend to release a curious behavior called dance. This cupidity for space scolds the honorable bed of matter and personalizes the naked glitter of a scorched anxiety. The entire question of existence rests on a feeling of mathematical beauty. On the imagery of the city. The towns. The ports and wharfs and tambourines and docks. Over here, quantum numbers and airy abstractions heave and bubble on a blackboard, and over there an old seaman’s knife shines in a store window like an X-ray of eternity. Which is dust, which is waves? Which is real, which is dream?

Each thought is phantom of another. Another thought, another tender moment slobbering jukebox ghosts on a queasy paradigm.

How could stars fuse so much iron and still shine? There are many symmetries in music but only one colossal trombone ejecting its music into the outer atmosphere. Only one hairline bigger than chewing. Saddle that odor and ride, ride boy, ride. Ride to the end and tell us what is there. Does it shine? Does it speak? Is it confused like a salad or native like a bone? Does it glisten with mitigation or deepen in music like a flowing, forlorn tone?

Apparatus

This is my apparatus, and this is the hod that I carry. It is heavy with fable and light with calculus. It is bearing a load of thought. It is the hod of the head. It is noble with ampersands and stroked like an intricate mitten. When waves oppose the mechanical nakedness turns jade, ink becomes a jaguar and fire is folded into a sock. Ideas thicken into applause and newspapers blaze with the heat of information.

It’s a fact. When something is absent it becomes a gland. It grows furious and explodes into cause and effect. Vascular sap. The clutter of a manufacturing plant. The light diffused through dirty windows reveals a dent in the Tuesday machine.

Name each type of snow in the above paragraph.

The bed is a firmament for the machinery of sleep, which is lamé in the gaslight and a flock of words in rhododendron. Have you ever noticed the way a cloud of gravel becomes an afternoon? That is how I would describe the way sleep leaks from an analysis of fiber. Anonymity has a miscreant side. A misdemeanor engorged with forks riding in a jalopy like the terrible cook of a cattle drive.

Poetry resembles echoes, yet it is a thing like a box, an escalator digesting a jackknife.

Have you ever sliced your hand through a wisp of incense and watched the smoke break into a cloud of random curls? That is how I would describe a shattered handshake.

This is my apparatus, and this is the hod that I carry. It churns with a furious serenity, smudges of anarchism marinated in a pot of abhorrence.

This is my apparatus and this is a riddle useless as a peep show.

This is a display of meat in a grocery store.

This is a helicopter exalting its hardware in an image of scorn.

Have you ever noticed the way a boat retains the image of a lunge even when it is still?

It is precisely that. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.

That when something is still it is also moving. That when something is moving it is also still. And this is what I call an apparatus.

An anaconda slowly unwinding from a branch.

Arc

It takes time to develop a thought, an abstraction dragged across the page like a Louisiana delta. Life is full of strange and hidden currents, a moth flickering through a neighbor’s garden, a horse rippling with muscle, a scooter parked like a scarab next to a drugstore. If thoughts are waves then smudges haunt the glue of return. A slap against the oblique creates a more immediate awareness of someone eating a snack in the hospital cafeteria. Upstairs, there are people dying, people healing, and people answering the telephone. How lavish are your feelings? My feelings go all over the place. I can’t keep track of them. Sometimes I just want to take the jack and smash it against the wheel. Nudes get cold. Obedience is inexplicable. Electrons do not mince words. Sometimes it takes a shirt churning with embroidery to reveal the beck of a beak and the tangle of blackberries. A freshly tarred road in the middle of summer ameliorates the jolts to the shocks and the body. The eyes grow tired as the twilight wrestles the sky to the ground and drags it into the night. Night is a noble ultimatum. Nothing comes from nothing and the stars make this all too apparent. It is a mystery, like the beautiful anarchy of a waterfall, or the fizz of enzymes in a laboratory jar. A greenish-black gargoyle sits on his haunches grinding away like gouache in a blue kazoo. Yet what does this image serve? I have whittled it out of air. Therefore it is vain, and useless, because we’re not in school anymore, and attentiveness has become a habit. But a good habit. Because inattention destroys the world. I am trying to reach for a little objectivity here, and yet I continually fail. Even the taxi looks like an allegory. I can’t stop interpreting things. Surely we’re moving forward into some marvelous condition where death comes easy and life is as simple and beautiful as the rain dimpling the surface of the sea. Each wave is a narration arranged queasily on the page of a book over which leans a crabby bookstore owner, angry at Amazon. What can we do to change these things? Change them into what? Change them into duvetyn. Change them into milk and filigree. A treatise in the form of a dialogue. A frequency in the form of a monologue. The sun pushing its light through a cloud. A museum of strange emotions. A distillation of shadows folded and placed in the wallet like money. Like old dollars. Miscreant enfoldments crackling with opacity and ink. Consider the screwdriver. It is a step toward the riddle of steam. It will never be solved. But the apricots are delicious, the blisters are soothed by the balm of fiction, and the highway rises over the hill in a gentle arc of speculation hugged by the mist.

Brought To A Boil: An Essay On Experimental Poetry                                                All poetry is experimental poetry.                                                           -- Wallace Stevens                       Turning words into art is unnatural. It begins with a contrary attitude. It says, I am unhappy with the way things are and desire to make things different. Rather than represent the world, I will make something wildly and savagely new. I will defy logic. I will invest in new perceptions. I will combine and recombine and fabricate and juggle until something that I have never experienced is experienced. The process is alchemical. The process is violent. It goes to the heart of creativity. It disrupts and shatters. It is splendid with provocation. It is an aggression against banality. It is sharp and loud like a janitor scraping frost from a window. The hectic bounce of steam on a street after a truck roars by. The anarchy of waterfalls, the comedy of the face, dangerous feelings vented from a cage of skin. Language is inherently hedonistic. It cries for experimentation. Remember: language is a social medium, it’s public as an airport, universal as air, but occupies a realm of cognition not unlike hallucination. It is a brutally delicate mechanism whose sprockets and chains are mere perceptions of sound, intricacies of meaning and syntax with less reality than Mercutio’s Queen Mab, or Prospero’s cloud-capped towers. It is not equipped with the tangibility of clay, the viscosity of paint, the immediacy of steel, or the simple conductivity of wire. Tongues, teeth and lungs bring it to life, ink and pixels preserve it, but apart from these neighborly appurtenances, language is fundamentally a mode of representation, a system of signs commonly accepted as referring to certain concepts. It has no actual correspondence with the external world. Which is one of its beauties. There are no limits to what it can do. It can be meticulously assembled or totally spontaneous. Its pleasure stems from infinite variation. There are no fixed associations, no unequivocal references that cannot be modified, reconstructed, mutated, altered or transformed. Language is eternally naked, anomalous as bones. It ribs, rails, goofs and grabs. It is a funhouse mirror. It tells us that something is there which is not actually there. Or may be there. Or could be there. Or should or should not be there. It thrives on predication, proposals of air in clouds and leaves. It is everything that is impossible made possible. It is water tied in a knot. It is a Brazil of giant metaphors, the fragrance of thought, the opium of solitude, pollen eloping with tropical winds. It is daylight twisted into Wednesday. The rhetoric of cells creating fish and crocodiles. Moscow turned inside out. It is a symptom of the artist’s mind manifesting itself as a faucet in Tierra Del Fuego. The noise of embroidery. The silence between notes. Black light. The disturbing amiability of zero. Experimentation in words is different from experimentations in science.  Experimentations in science lead to a sharpened empiricism, a principled pragmatism, an objective view of things that opens and shuts with the peremptory impartiality of elevator doors sliding open or closed. The honey of cause and effect. Experimentation in words leads to the mustard of cacophony, unbridled granite, ecstasies in anvils, legends and dragons boiling out of fugitive metaphors. Abstractions of thread. Mallarmé doing wheelies on a Harley-Davidson. Six nude somersaults and a buffalo in a tulip refinery. You cannot quite predict what words are going to do. That is the whole idea. That is exactly the kind of situation you want to be in: entering into a play with the language in which control is excused and revolutions begin. Revolution in both senses of the word: orbital motion about a point and a sudden or momentous change in a situation. If I tell someone that I am going to sit down and write a poem they will form a very specific idea of what it is I am proposing to do. He is going to make a construction of words which will contain certain images and effects of sound designed to move the emotions or persuade or startle or impress. But if I tell someone I am going to perform some experiments on the language they will have a much less certain idea of what I am intending to do. Is he going to pour language into beakers and precipitate zeugmas? Is he going to create macabre mutations, long scintillating sentences scuttling along like syllabic millipedes? Inflate vowels with noble gases? Grow polymers out of morphemes? Discover a cure for dieresis? There are two ways to go at writing a poem: one is to learn everything there is to know about it and cultivate a mastery, a management of words that will shine out in brilliant effects of imagery and sound but nothing else, just this virtue, this learned ability. The other method is not entirely antithetical to the first. There will be evident a fascination with language, a deepened understanding of its mysterious and vagaries, but far less certainty about how to marshal that understanding. There will be little lyrical effect and far more ugliness. Ecstasies rather than varnish. There is a misconception that those who choose to experiment do so out of a childish need to avoid rules. This is absurd. It is the reverse. This assumption is an alibi for those who lack the nerve to experiment. They simply want to polish whatever is familiar within their sphere. The truth is experimentation requires a heightened appreciation of rules. The Oulipians, for instance, have made a great discovery in the paradoxically liberating energy of constraint. The real difficulty is in doing anything new. The twentieth century was full of experimentation, full of movements and schools and manifestos and clashing philosophies. Futurism, Dada, Surrealism, Vorticism, Fluxus, Imagism, Objectivism, Black Mountain College, The Beats, The New Formalists, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing and so on. What has happened to realism? Still possible, still quite popular. Still proffered and published in glossy venues such as The New Yorker, Playboy, and The Atlantic. But one cannot help but feel something faulty at its core, as if some malady had affected its spine and caused it to go about hunched and slow, careful with cutlery, hesitant and nervous around crowds and food in foreign countries. The ideal here is a strange one: the wish to make the words disappear so that we have the illusion of looking out at the world through a pane of clear glass. The problem is, the glass is cracked and flawed and the window has been painted stuck. Even on balmy days we can’t get that window open again. Maybe it’s time to examine the glass, take a deeper look at the medium with which we’re dealing. Brecht stated that language, as a finite generality, could not deal with objects, spectacles, and events that would surprise it to the point of stupefying it. Events such as Auschwitz and Buchenwald, Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib cannot tolerate a description of literary character. Roland Barthes furthers this perception as an impotence to produce a realistic literature today and proclaims that it is no longer possible to rewrite Balzac, or Zola, or Proust. “Realism is always timid,” he observes, “and there is too much surprise in a world which mass media and the generalization of politics have made so profuse that it is no longer possible to figure it protectively: the world, as a literary object, escapes; knowledge deserts literature, which can no longer be either Mimesis or Mathesis but merely Semiosis, the adventure of what is impossible to language, in a word: Text (it is wrong to say that the notion of  ‘text’ repeats the notion of ‘literature’: literature represents a finite world, the text figures the infinite of language: without knowledge, without rationale, without intelligence)” (Barthes 119). What a marvelous thought: “the adventure of what is impossible to language.” This is the essence of experimentation. Language is radically arbitrary. We are now accustomed to think in terms of language as a body of rules. Meaning is an agreement, not a law of nature. There is no correspondence between a word and the thing to which it refers. This is imaginary. The word ‘apple’ is not an actual apple. And therein lies a paradise of experimentation. What does it mean to experiment? How does experiment relate to theory? What role do metaphors play in experimentation? How does the language of experimentation vary from one anthology to another? My preferred definition is by Gerrit Kouwenaar, a member of the COBRA group, who said: “In contrast to the traditional poets, the experimental poet does not impose his will on the word, but instead allows himself to be guided by the word… The poet… does not depict something that he had stored up ahead of time, but experiences something he had not known before” (Rothenberg 234). As an aesthetic experience, there is nothing like it. Taking a drug, particularly a hallucinogen, for the first time comes somewhat close to the mark. Skydiving, scuba diving, rock climbing, surfing, snowboarding and bungee jumping are other ways to get one’s adrenalin running and greatly heighten one’s sense of being alive. It’s probably a good way at getting a poem started. But ultimately, there comes that moment where it’s just you and a sheet of paper. What happens there is entirely up to you.                                                                                     Works Cited   Barthes, Roland. Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. Trans. Richard Howard. Hill and   Wang: New York, 1977.   Rothenberg, Jerome and Pierre Joris, eds. Poems For The Millennium, Volume Two.                 U of California P: Berkeley, 1998.