Semtext (Plastic) 4 by Litteraria Pragensia

SEMTEXT PLASTIC 4

The world is not obliged to be sentimental. Defeats should be acknowledged; but one should not conclude from this that there should be no more struggles • Brecht Lucia Borgia

Brian Henry

For the Duration One must admit that everything in the purpose of an object … is a matter of convention—Antonin Artaud

Not unforeseen in situations, but in things—the inopportune evasion that cannot be returned to: for the moment nothing is settled, a consequence (to give examples … but that would entail too much), some devotion that is still to be concluded: patience as a crowd sleeping , to balance by command on the edge of an inconclusive idea—(also the silence, which is unconscionable, declining to arraign itself, even to your taunting and openmouthed surrogate)—to go on not looking and not looking, scared by occurrences they were unable to account for—(it is merely to steal what it may have been possible to reprove, or redeem …)—those disillusioning motifs, with their bodies, asymmetrical justly to have been revealed, are like the daily bread consumed already past its best— but having construed themselves differently they make no point of it

Fetched in the Storm

cooking is chemistry

In lieu of retraction or retreat, she pushes further into the interior addled by dusk.

anything green is political, he said, like those asparagus spears, for example, or the patterned wallpaper. fridges filled the room. don’t arm the hearth, he shouted.

The wet means little cracks beneath, means a bare line of vision before. His distance grows, she hopes, with speed, to a less. This is how a story comes around— to scores already tallied, moments forgotten hastily, as quick or quicker than they’d happened. Whose story?

Train Problem If there’s a train headed east, going 85 miles per hour, and it leaves the station at 12:15 PM, Eastern Standard Time, and it encounters one stop light, 95 miles from its starting point, and it stops for approximately 5 minutes, and at the stop, in the dining car, the woman picks up her bags, tilts her cap a little southwest, and heads for the door of the caboose, facing west northwest, and the man, he puts down his coffee and his spoon and looks her in the eyes for the first time in approximately 3 months and 2 days and says, “Wait. Where are you going? I need you”, and she heads out anyway, traveling 2 miles per hour by foot, bound no direction in particular, at approximately what time will the train lurch forward in its eastern orbit, and exactly how will it ever go on?

[exit genetically modified texts] marginalised readers (always), what do you have to say? stone falls, naturally of course, as does water. incoherently now check under the bed. are the old photos still there? stand straight & ram the ear. the extra ball made things that much more difficult. it was yellow.

is not a thing to ask but to think about. Penetrating, she moves discernibly through the covering, metal’s gleam in front of her, the sound of cutting absent.

Rod Mengham

The Snake on the Road by the Canning Bridge

In front of her, just past where she can see, a man cannot but trip over the roots

near the quick smash repair shop forgets my name. Here at the brink

he thinks are reaching for him, his body gathering abrasions rapidly but with small pain.

the P.O. Box cannot hold

Each trip slows him, she does not trip and therefore gains, she does not trip

Sandra Miller

D.J. Huppatz

and sees him sliding down a bank, she runs because she knows the river there —its depths no depths at all— because she prefers shooting down, coming down upon. He clutches at roots as he slides, at sticks, and stops at the river’s edge to think a way across: he chooses to wade and swim as quick across as his body allows, will dive if she comes upon him shooting. She comes upon him singing.

Louis Armand

Incarnedine “it is therefore the imagination that makes the reflection of the emotions possible”—or someone calls in the middle of the night & asks about the war & public opinion, though sooner or later everything becomes habit—the short-wave hissing in several languages at once “autochthonous selves”—a clockface slumping in the heat impossible to tell what time of year it is—looking down at the page with printed words & partially impaired vision (the shadow of an aeroplane flying low over water)—something which could be a symbol, not of endurance but of congruence in flux—events currently taking place in x: he tries to think his eyes wide open, to say in this sense reflection & extension are one & the same, as slow-moving silhouettes in a calibrated range of ... distance by time: to see the approach in exact detail—citing turbulence, agitation, intruding upon the calculated “loss of faith” & other derogations—it had to be spoken of though in words re-learnt & reforgotten—by presentiment, conscience separating the idea [of power?] from its actual exercise in the world—which means: to go on for as long as you can endure it immunology, among other preventatives (“the principals of nature being the detour of human observation”)—a too-general anaesthesia, lessening the flow, slowed down, almost to a stop “for all intents & purposes”—or jamb the body deep into a hole (to repel ghosts) & speak of it only in the past tense

all the missing letters it takes three generations to undo the lock as well as urge the adhesive bud to its daily issue. The blade gets shorter and the earth wears out but never eliminate the streams you came by. Pick out the bits of human self that shall live by Dingo Flour alone: my life, my child, my work, my friends my game of snap. They are lies of the confessor the postman will tell you you are a strange one. O, stout defender of your own best bet hurry, Our Lady of the Kiosks, this is the third time of asking.

Andrew Zawacki

Vespers Architecture it’s not, not even in winter. Nor is it a draft of a river to be put away for a lover to polish up later after the nails have been paid. Nor is it the finished thing even if it has the look of a finished thing. In winter but it is not winter, it’s almost a year ago. Water that’s moving cannot be called a trigger but almost a need. Our bodies are not architecture, they’re moving, they have been put away by October. A draft of an almost finished river is not a crowblue cloud at the end of winter, but after accounts have been paid, years later, a whisper is polished up to have the look of architecture. October has the look of a crow in a river. It’s a year ago, our bodies are four-fifths water. Your body is polished up to have the look of moving water. Clouds are four-fifths of winter, but whatever is almost crowblue or moving cannot be called architecture or put away for our bodies to polish up later. I did not say nails had been put away, or paid for with our bodies’ whispered accounts. I did not say fever or finished, or after; I did not call winter a need. I never said I had been nailed to a river even if you had the look of what’s already left.

Marjorie Perloff

Differential Poetics “If literature is defined as the exploration and exercise of tolerable linguistic deviance,” write Jed Rasula and Steve McCaffery in the introduction to their new anthology Imagining Language (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1998), “the institutional custodianship of literature serves mainly to protect the literary work from language, shielding it from the disruptive force of linguistic slippage” (x). Such slippage has increasingly become a poetic norm, creating a poetry that serves as a new conduit for communication. My second example of what Joyce referred to as the verbovisivocal or “vocable scriptsigns” is a recent collaboration between two Australians, the poet John Kinsella and the sound artist/ photographer Ron Sims, called Kangaroo Virus (South Freemantle: Folio/Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1998). Kangaroo Virus exists in electronic form, it has a performance score on a CD that accompanies the book, and it is a documentary, informational poem (made up of short free-verse lyrics by Kinsella, each of which has an accompanying photograph by Sims) that relies heavily on empirical observation. Here is the opening of Kinsella’s introduction: I’d not long been back from Cambridge, England, when my partner and I decided to spend a day with my brother in Dryandra Forest near his home in Williams [in Southern Australia]. We visited Congelin dam not far off the YorkWilliams road. My brother had been there a week earlier and found a number of dead kangaroos through the bush. On arriving, we immediately found a corpse floating in the dam like the rotting hulk of a whale. The dam was built to service the railway that used to cut its way through the forest late last century. Gnarled and petrified corpses in grotesque fetal-like positions were to be found through the bush. My brother recounted how in recent months kangaroos, not only in this district but throughout the wheatbelt, had been struck down by a mysterious ‘virus’ that left them blind. He’d seen them hopping into fences and ploughing into tractors, dead in their dozens along the roads. Farmers had been shooting them in the fields, rangers had been shooting them in the bush. We talked about the release of the calici rabbit virus, how it had ‘escaped’ before ‘release’ from Kangaroo Island off South Australia. (KV 9).

“Greatly disturbed,” Kinsella starts writing his Kangaroo Virus Poem and enlists the sound-artist / photographer Ron Sims into working on the project. “Without scientific methods at hand,” he reports, “we decided to approach it through art words, sound, and images. Science and art have much in common. As a poet, I explore the data of language for codes and truths. I develop hypotheses and search for answers. Of course, much never progresses beyond the state of exploration but it is the search that counts” (KV 9). Kinsella’s romantic ecology is, in any case, interestingly qualified by Sims’s realism. In his own introduction, Sims writes: Poetry abstracts and fractures the ‘real’ world, and then reassembles our understandings into a new ‘reality’ that of the poet. . . . The photographic image has quite a different strength. Unlike any other visual art form, the photograph portrays ‘truth’ we believe the image! No matter how distorted, whether in colour or monochrome, essentially the photograph is a split second of actuality, captured.

For Kangaroo Virus my very happy dilemma has been to find a tenable bond between the ‘expressionistic’ poetry and the ‘representational’ quality of the photography. It seemed pointless that the one should merely mirror the other at the narrative or subjective level. So I began to consider the intrinsic value of the photograph image: the line, texture, density, form. I felt that if there should be a bond with the poetry then it was here, in the common ‘musicality’, not the ‘meaning’ of the two art forms. (KV 10). The two artists worked separately so that “illustration,” if it occurred at all, became what Sims calls an “organic accident, not an artistic contrivance” (KV 11). Kinsella’s poems, after two longer lyrics, “Death of a Roo Dog” and “The Visitation,” are free-verse quatrains like the following: They might call it ‘rail country’ as the tell-tale signs are there immediately - the skin deeply scraped, the bones grey and strewn about. (KV 20)

Read against Sims’s photograph on the facing page (figure 7), with its dead grey tree trunks, some still standing, bone-like, silhouetted against the sky, the “tell-tale signs” are indeed “there.” Or consider the following: The eye is black too and from the core like an exotic ache that’d be noticed only by tourists: the vacuum elemental, or cabalistic. (KV 26)

The “eye” is indeed frightening, but perhaps not as frightening as the well-meaning tourists themselves, who are unwittingly the source of the terrible virus.

Kinsella is much more traditionally “poetic” here than in his previous, more experimental works. Metaphor, for example, is a pervasive device, as in “The twisted eye of wire / works as a lyre in the small/ shifts of air scratching / close to the surface” (KV 34), accompanied by a photograph in which the wire loop on the tree trunk creates a gorgeous abstract design, or as in “The crypt of the forest / cracked like sodden rag / dryboned and calqued / cavities replete, idling” (KV 58), which accompanies a photograph of a kangaroo skull covered by debris a picture so horrible, the eye turns away in pain. Kinsella’s matter-of-fact observations culminate in the quatrain: Imprint: like they’ve seen it before, these old-timers, cast in plaster, referencing the direction of a roo, even so, the forest thinner, shrinking. (KV 62)

And here the photograph of footprints in the slag (Kinsella’s or Sims’s, not a kangaroo’s) is horribly bleak. To conclude the book, Sims provides a series of observations on the process of photographing this terrible landscape (“Steam trains once ran through here. The rail mounds, sidings, bridge are left-overs of that time and I am quite comfortable filming the evidence. It is integral to the condition of this area and to our story” [KV 67]), and Kinsella has a long poem called “Narrative” that recapitulates the horror of “new viroids / sprouting from the paddock’s surface, / memory prompted by shifting fences,” and blames the eco-tourists who invade the former wilderness for their contribution to its destruction (KV 70). The concluding note is a shade moralistic, but Kinsella’ didacticism is offset by both visual images and the soundtext, which is nothing short of extraordinary. The thirty-minute CD is by no means a straightforward reading of the poems. Rather, Kinsella and Sims read antiphonally, circling round and round the same words and phrases beginning with the word “static.” For the first few minutes we hear violent noises: a train hooting through the countryside, dogs barking, machinery crashing, the galloping of kangaroos. Throughout the sequence, there is wailing and gnashing, a fence opening with a squeak, sheep baaing, and an occasional bird cry. The choral phrase throughout is the opening of “The Visitation”: Old timers reckon they’ve seen it before but others have their doubts. . . .

Sims will chant these lines from a distance and then Kinsella, in the foreground, repeats them. Then after more frightening and violent noise, Kinsella recites, very matter-of-factly, the opening of “Death of a Roo Dog”: “One of the dogs chased a boomer / right down from the forest’s edge.” The words from the first two poems cycle in and out, interspersed with sounds of water dripping, dogs lapping water, a buzzsaw, and occasional metapoetic conversation between Kinsella and Sims, figuring out where to place the camera and what to say next. In the course of the sound piece, Kinsella reads almost all the quatrains, some of them twice, as in the case of “The living, cased in lichen / holds up the movement” (CV 40). Then after the sound of a herd in the distance, Kinsella repeats lines from “Death of a Roo Dog,” especially “Before I could grab the mad dog’s collar / it launched itself straight in after / a roo that I’d swear stood higher / than me by a head” (KV 12). We hear sheep, the perennial train shooting into the night, then silence punctuated by a faint sound of bees buzzing and bird sound. Silence. What I find so interesting in this sound poem is that it is not simply a repeat of the linear text but an artwork in its own right. The choral speaking, chanting, litanylike structure, the total human silence for long stretches, the amazing array of forest, animal, and weather sounds frightening in their clamor: all these have the effect of putting the listener squarely into the scene. As someone who (dare I confess it?) is not fond of animals, has no pets, pays little attention to problems of animal preservation and even less in the eco-problems of the Australian Southwest, I nevertheless find Kangaroo Virus wholly captivating. Reading the poems, studying the photographs, listening to the soundtrack, and surfing the internet site, I find myself keenly interested in the fate of the kangaroo. Perhaps this is just another way of saying that the new differential poetry by “differential” I mean a variorum poetry text, no single version of which has priority—is as instructive as it is compelling. Like Kenneth Goldsmith’s Fidget (Toronto: Coach House Press, 1999), which alternates verbal, visual, aural, and kinesthetic images of motor activity and the reaction of mind to body, Kangaroo Virus gives us alternate ways of tackling a given problem. The works in question are not so much intermedia (e.g., word + image or word set to music or recited on film) as produced differentially in alternate media, as if to say that knowledge is now available through different channels and by different means. Such work allows for an unusual degree of reader / listener / viewer participation: it is the reader, after all, who must decide whether to access the 20:00 chapter of Fidget, in which case s/he cannot “read” the other twelve chapters, or whether to “read” linearly by moving from page to page of the written text. In either case, the “reader’s” experience frustrates a conven-

tional experience of reading the book. The same holds true for Kangaroo Virus. In his epilogue “Process,” Ron Sims remarks: “Steam trains once ran through here The rail mounds, sidings, bridge are left-overs of that time, and I am quite comfortable filming the evidence. It is integral to the condition of this area and to our story.” But then he adds, “The sounds, of course, are gone with the trains but I will keep them in mind for the audio production” (KV 67). As Jasper Johns might say, “Do something to it. Do something else to it” (Writings, Sketchbook Notes, Interviews [New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1996]: 54). Or again, if one medium doesn’t work, try another. “Quiddity,” as we read near the end of Kinsella’s final poem in the series, “is the word.”

did i forget to bridge the mention restless for no stir’s as gelid as sky disarmed of its air or such rampancies as marblish stratus no offense in your left, it’s got to go somewhere out the wayback, on a wayfront, wayside’s not the place for it’s too much in view stones as eyes, here’s the uneasy in describe for i rappel down its slatesides in slow burn eaten by the consume in your left, your gone

John Kinsella

Susan M. Schultz

August 20, 1999

poeta anonymous for Tama Janowitz

Directing their syght toward the zodiak— small pack of riders filibustering, scat and Filofax in the spoon play of colleges and sectarianism— not a correct way, but lush in the party sense, the bird sings monastic and a mayor prevaricates, tythe-blossom litters rivers, finger-food tempts visitors. In the art halls they consider retrogradant games: twister, paintball, testicular orbicular surveillance, boys’ stuff laboured to sublime hysteria; it goes against good sense: hooray! behold afar, subway aerosol, tags like scriptures, buildings like myghtty tre(s), of nobille heyghtes, their levis lost, the sap oozing frome the rynde: take no prisoners, there’s plenty of stars stuck up there, loud between the towers. from Variations on John Skelton’s The Book of The Laurel

The room in which I sit at the table’s head and am amazed. There is no we here, there is only I and it is under attack. There is only an eye and it cannot see out, cyclops in a cave. There are only yous and mes, no us to be the putty. The soul of the artist as a young man; my high school teacher laughed. I was horrified. It was dirt and broken glass and there were snakes. Had nightmares in Kafka’s penal colony, all those blades. But he laughed when he read it to friends gathered around a table in Prague. There is time to create new colonies, even if the words remain the same, caught between sidewalk cracks. What is forged in my soul’s smithy is what they call in French “un happening.” Occurrence is tune, and tune is the muzak’s muzak of the restaurant where pork is gluten and fish tofu. There are ways to alter englishes, to re-tune the engine of our speech. Let’s table the discussion. from Memory Cards

Justin Quinn

Peter Minter

Cleaning Flakes from Grass

For Ian Milner

Declaring past concrete & masonry ridge bound, light perceived first green tessellated banksia brushed forward against blue wind & chipped

today the state exams. hour after hour i tested knowledge . . . no, say rather, power.

Evening morning passes grass’s contamination white lead flakes slow curl around stone, blades’ debris & coincidental cell drifting Lines I improve, boundaries erode discontinuous nature & the Sun’s Modern Glare, just as pigment ratio supplies chlorophyll for Malevich’s Taking in The Rye Or gloss correa’s flower & vibration as pollen, war’s vanguard brief to crest an edge of blank elements of reference, the bright Pacific’s serious technologies timing spray below Each flake, or strip of paint picked by the eye & equal as a handful to centuries of earth, mock canvas split blue by fine contrails radiating north Overhead to America.

Ethan Paquin

Two hypotheses on our love when faced with empty cupboards whether conium is poisonous depends on the flighty nasale trepidated as a schematrix who has foregone the medial and reckoned even bigger pursuits: counting wicker in corner stores, counting whiskers at yellow noon, counting holes in the seraphic looks which pine depthly from arc’d lady-stares * (did i ever describe to you the left in the diffidence between your here and my there and all belatedness) when you squirm enjoyment makes its own niche like felled waterlog’d newsprint likened without prejudice to many smiles

say rather, the necessary information. how marlowe died. and who was william shakespeare. a protocol for each interrogation. “debriefing” for each tired interrogator. the leaves all rushed back into character as i went out. and then a sudden downpour. the cold war is an adequate distraction from land and sky, from their essential torpor. up on the hill hradèany caput mortuum— its palaces and spires, its prison-tower. the pentecostal fire of marx and engels which once enflamed the just and raised the poor become so many million pilot lights and briefly palach, his own funeral pyre. because the words are sealed until the last we go our ways and end for instance here.

Octavio Armand

diamond of wood neither day is day nor night is night light and names halfway through time time is born motherwell says my generation had no faith in the deceit of lines in his german cage reads kafka’s german i must be crazy his german seems clear which ear? a metamorphosis of language for the metamorphosis of samsa gregorian chant in this ear gregorian samsa gregor samsara tune and tale music histrionics nix? nix we are in cagecoslovakia we are and are not chin over shoulder said german mateo alemán in his spanish spanish how do you spell kageka? cafka? locked in his name cage writhes like samsa

locked in his name cage is samsa samsara you me no one above all no one prague is a capital but czechoslovakia is not a country i forget who said that but it’s true in el rocco westphalen spoke of his life in other words of the past to be lived as he spoke he had only eyes there was no gaze or vice versa there was a gaze the eyes were left in his face as if by chance i listened like the empty seashell listens waves more and more distant or like a child peering into a shell broken torn perfect turn neither day is day nor night is night blanca has a translator named snow in el rocco life spoke of westphalen as it spoke there was only voice there were no words or vice versa there were words voice mouth air belonging to someone barely remembered the count of villamediana relinquishes diamonds rather than break his stride everything is movement gregor samsara gregorian samsa neither diamond is day nor stride is night the diamond is movement i turn time broken the broken shell spills its halves night and day light names on the tip of the tongue dore realised i was talking about painting my words were painting in one of cornell’s boxes she told me there is no room for rumination it’s true if he thought cornell thought with his eyes with touch thought as object he did not think it he boxed it how would one box villamediana’s stride? in a diamond of wood the box bounds movement is a stone perfectly cut cage: jaula cornell: caja outside in the distance: villamediana blood flows through here like the swiftest mirror from country to city from city to home from home to room from one cage it escapes forever to another smaller cage neither day is day nor night is night blood flows halfway through time in these lines time is born it would make a beautiful seashell translated from the Spanish by Carol Maier