I stopped liking them and got embarrassed, so I pulled them… but here you go once more. I think there are parts that aren’t bad. Anyway take ‘em for what they are, and I’d be interested in any comments they spur.
When we overlook the obstacles of
the screens that shield our view,
they will replace our view.
We will see in a mirror
in a state of pure translation.
The screens are only so big,
but they do not fit in our head.
Instead they fit in our hand,
and our head fits in them.
So we carry our head in our hand
across Charon’s river, o’erland
to the place where the echoes live.
We are waving to ourselves.
Have you ever seen your palm?
Can you hold its gaze?
A smile is a contortion of
the muscles in the upper
jaw, the tergal eye skeleture,
often the brow, and at times
the lips in order to hide
or reveal the teeth.
Also, here’s the original format of the last poem:
The whole of western history has been based on a linear timescale.
That is about to change.
It wasn’t always that way!
It was much different.
I remember!
Time went around in circles.
It dizzied me!
I was often sick, and injured by falls.
Lucky when I could stand!
And woe if you reached where you were going.
You were back from where you came!
But soon
Very soon indeed!
time will no longer go back and forth
Back and Forth!
but up and down
Up and Down!
won’t that be fun
Standing on our heads!
and bleeding up!
rather than into the past.
I know that feeling (of needing to take down something that you’ve just posted), but I’m glad you decided to put them back. In fact, it might help me get up the courage to post two poems I’ve been thinking about sharing that I’ve been afraid to unveil. Here are the comments I wrote to your initial post, for whatever they’re worth:
Body would be absolutely perfect if you took out the line “for in truth I must admit that he is unforgivable.” I think it’s extraneous, and the poem is immaculate without it.
Poetry is Pottery leaves me with a few questions. “In order to love them better”? In order for who to love whom better? “Uncivilized sexual deviants” is an interesting choice… I want to hear more about this (in the poem, not commentary). I feel like this wants to be a poem about myth and history and clay and earth and circles and cycles and bodies and sex (and love), but it’s floating away in abstraction. Or maybe it doesn’t really want to be about those things; maybe that’s just what I want. At any rate, I think it needs more specifics. The first three lines are great, and I don’t mean to say that the rest isn’t, but the rest almost feels like a separate poem, and I think the reader could use more direction in putting the parts together.
I really like The Future. It makes me think of an Ursula K. LeGuin story I read recently, Newton’s Sleep, which is in her book A Fisherman of the Inland Sea. You should read it if you get a chance.
Time, I love. The last stanza is delightful, and the second stanza is great just as it is. The first stanza gets a little repetitive, but I love what it does visually – the long line and the short, the way the whole poem spins around a central axis – I would think about cutting “I remember.” On second glance, though, there’s a bit of tension between “the whole of western history” and “it wasn’t always that way.” At first, I took “it” to be the whole of western history, which confused me, but now I see that “it” is time. I wonder if that needs to be clearer in the poem, or maybe it’s okay (or even a good thing?) that it’s confusing at first. I think there’s something significant about the fact that I started at the bottom and worked my way up as I tried to collect my thoughts on this poem. It’s very bottom heavy, it’s disorienting, it’s backwards and crooked and lumpy – and I think those are all great things for this poem to be!
A Blue Flame makes me think of Nam June Paik and also this Discovery Channel special called 2057, which makes a completely reasonable prediction of what our technology will look like in 50 years (not that I really know what’s reasonable, but it convinced me)… Your poem makes me think of 2057’s portrayal of wearable computers, one version of which would project a translucent screen in front of one’s eyes from what looks much like a pair of glasses, so that a person could walk around all day with a screen between herself and the world. Our heads inside a screen. Oh, and the iphone! Were you thinking of the iphone at all as you wrote this? Back to the poem, I think the reference to the skeleton is particularly relevant and well-placed, and something about the word “teeth” sticks with me more than anything. Screens and teeth – it’s sort of surprising, yet at the same time, mundane. Screens, smile, teeth – The progression makes me feel like I’m trapped inside of a fading, flickering light bulb.
It’s also very interesting how you’ve arranged the poems on the page. Almost everything aligned to the left, with Body sticking out from the pack. I think this accentuates what you’re getting at in Body in a good way. Also, at first I was a bit put off by the thin white text on the black background, but after reading through the poems, I think it’s a great choice. They’re lost in space. The black creates a sense of depth around them, a sense that you can reach your hand right through them and grab onto a star and that at any moment they might collapse into nothingness. Which is, of course, what happened. I came back to the screen to post my comments, and they were no where to be found.
Thanks for your comments. You’ve been very kind to my poems, and I very much appreciate the response. And in turn, your comments have evoked a bit of a response in me, so I’ll try to verbalize that - I just want to talk about my thought process behind a few of the lines you pointed out.
In all of the poems, except for Body, I was on this kick about the future. For some reason, when I’m writing poetry I can’t seem to get over the idea of poetry as prophecy. I suppose that poetry is the balancing act of pulling something from the moment and recording it for the future. Prophecy is the similar act of pulling something from the future and recording it for the moment. But to what extent do these overlap? I suppose it’s cyclical. On the other hand, I want to believe that poetry and prophecy should be separate. And that a true act of poetry has no thought of the future - that it is pure construction of the moment, in the moment, for the moment. Let the future be left to the dead. I think that’s what aggravates me about most of my poetry, there is a dead element in them, an element of expectation, of waiting. This is very hard to explain because waiting can be beautiful when in the moment. I mean longing, a passionate longing, away-ness rather than hope.
This is of course very confusing and I’m on a divergent train of thought now so I’ll try to get into something more specific. Though I do think that last line is actually an interesting prism through which to read Body (whether it is an expression of away-ness or hope).
OK - well speaking of Body, I wanted to respond to your comment about the line with “…unforgiveable.” I think you’re right that it should be taken out. I don’t like the repetition, which I actually put in there in editing. But I also want to keep that sense of the line. I wanted to make the distinction that it is not due to some personal shortcoming of mine that I cannot forgive him. It would be like forgiving a raisin for being wrinkly. Which perhaps should be the line?
“I wish to forgive him but I cannot.
Who blames a raisin for her wrinkles?”
Maybe that’s dumb. But its important to me to make that distinction, which doesn’t exist without some sort of second line there - does it? Actually, on second reading, I like that sense of being unforgiveable. Not in the sense that something is so heinous that it would be morally unconscionable to forgive it, but in the sense that whatever it is is inert, is simply matter, does not operate on the laws of language and the play of moralities.
I’m gonna write another short comment about the blue flame one, but I gotta get off my computer for a few minutes.
Hey I really liked these, whether or not you’re embarrassed about them. I like how you sometimes start saying something and then seem to change your mind. Like in that one about love, that ends with ‘One is love.’ You seemed to be going somewhere else in the stanza before that but then, in a way that strikes me as japanese and zennish, you say fuck that, ‘one is love,’ and this is good enough. And actually I like that phrase a lot. Because I think there is this very mystical but very present ‘One’ for everybody, maybe it’s the superego, and it is definitely love. It’s our relation to that One which makes us different… I suppose you can have a narcissistic relation or a too-altruistic relation or many others, and they’ve probably been litanized by Freud and Kristeva already, and it’s nice not to have to read those giants to figure it out, it’s nice to read a poem that just says ‘One is love’ and to not have to read any more and to just be able to say ah yes, one is love, that is true, I agree.
I like that stuff about monitors, about heads going in them, and that bit about living in hospitals and no one else in other countries speaking our language or existing, I forget which, I liked that too. You manage to conjure some quite memorable mental situations… I suppose I agree with Inga that there are times when you float towards abstraction, when you’re talking about abstract things rather than the things you started off talking about, and those abstract things can begin to ring too devoidedly; that’s usually my problem in writing too. I also like the shape of Time, I like that long first line and I really liked the exclamation points Up and Down! and the other one before that, I like to watch excitement taking place. I like that your poems show you-thinking rather than you-thought. And it isn’t “I’m thinking and all I can do is think and all any of us can do is think and there is no certain thought and there is no truth and yet there is and we’re never going to reach it and god it’s such a long dreadful thinking endless blithe dearth of emptiness and christ we’re all so desolate and grey,” it isn’t that it all, it’s just you thinking and sometimes you’re sure and then you’re sure you’re not sure and then you’re assuredly unassured, and ultimately some poems like this will be better than others, it just comes from how lucid the moments are, how strictly you hold to the mood or how strictly the mood holds to you, and it’s ok for some of them to suck and some to come so close to perfection but to have to be slightly novitiate instead… all of that’s the best so far as I’m concerned, so long as it isn’t “I’m thinking and you’re thinking and all we can all do is think and god it’s such a sorrowful lacking universe and here I am thinkedly thinking,” so long as it is that without being that, that is, so long as it presents thinking without representing thinking, so long as it is thinking without being thinking about thinking, so long as it is the very passion of thought rather than the berry reflection of passion.
I stopped liking them and got embarrassed, so I pulled them… but here you go once more. I think there are parts that aren’t bad. Anyway take ‘em for what they are, and I’d be interested in any comments they spur.
December 17th, 2007 | #
When we overlook the obstacles of
the screens that shield our view,
they will replace our view.
We will see in a mirror
in a state of pure translation.
The screens are only so big,
but they do not fit in our head.
Instead they fit in our hand,
and our head fits in them.
So we carry our head in our hand
across Charon’s river, o’erland
to the place where the echoes live.
We are waving to ourselves.
Have you ever seen your palm?
Can you hold its gaze?
A smile is a contortion of
the muscles in the upper
jaw, the tergal eye skeleture,
often the brow, and at times
the lips in order to hide
or reveal the teeth.
It is often not quite
less than what it is.
A blue flame.
December 17th, 2007 | #
Also, here’s the original format of the last poem:
The whole of western history has been based on a linear timescale.
That is about to change.
It wasn’t always that way!
It was much different.
I remember!
Time went around in circles.
It dizzied me!
I was often sick, and injured by falls.
Lucky when I could stand!
And woe if you reached where you were going.
You were back from where you came!
But soon
Very soon indeed!
time will no longer go back and forth
Back and Forth!
but up and down
Up and Down!
won’t that be fun
Standing on our heads!
and bleeding up!
rather than into the past.
December 17th, 2007 | #
I know that feeling (of needing to take down something that you’ve just posted), but I’m glad you decided to put them back. In fact, it might help me get up the courage to post two poems I’ve been thinking about sharing that I’ve been afraid to unveil. Here are the comments I wrote to your initial post, for whatever they’re worth:
Body would be absolutely perfect if you took out the line “for in truth I must admit that he is unforgivable.” I think it’s extraneous, and the poem is immaculate without it.
Poetry is Pottery leaves me with a few questions. “In order to love them better”? In order for who to love whom better? “Uncivilized sexual deviants” is an interesting choice… I want to hear more about this (in the poem, not commentary). I feel like this wants to be a poem about myth and history and clay and earth and circles and cycles and bodies and sex (and love), but it’s floating away in abstraction. Or maybe it doesn’t really want to be about those things; maybe that’s just what I want. At any rate, I think it needs more specifics. The first three lines are great, and I don’t mean to say that the rest isn’t, but the rest almost feels like a separate poem, and I think the reader could use more direction in putting the parts together.
I really like The Future. It makes me think of an Ursula K. LeGuin story I read recently, Newton’s Sleep, which is in her book A Fisherman of the Inland Sea. You should read it if you get a chance.
Time, I love. The last stanza is delightful, and the second stanza is great just as it is. The first stanza gets a little repetitive, but I love what it does visually – the long line and the short, the way the whole poem spins around a central axis – I would think about cutting “I remember.” On second glance, though, there’s a bit of tension between “the whole of western history” and “it wasn’t always that way.” At first, I took “it” to be the whole of western history, which confused me, but now I see that “it” is time. I wonder if that needs to be clearer in the poem, or maybe it’s okay (or even a good thing?) that it’s confusing at first. I think there’s something significant about the fact that I started at the bottom and worked my way up as I tried to collect my thoughts on this poem. It’s very bottom heavy, it’s disorienting, it’s backwards and crooked and lumpy – and I think those are all great things for this poem to be!
A Blue Flame makes me think of Nam June Paik and also this Discovery Channel special called 2057, which makes a completely reasonable prediction of what our technology will look like in 50 years (not that I really know what’s reasonable, but it convinced me)… Your poem makes me think of 2057’s portrayal of wearable computers, one version of which would project a translucent screen in front of one’s eyes from what looks much like a pair of glasses, so that a person could walk around all day with a screen between herself and the world. Our heads inside a screen. Oh, and the iphone! Were you thinking of the iphone at all as you wrote this? Back to the poem, I think the reference to the skeleton is particularly relevant and well-placed, and something about the word “teeth” sticks with me more than anything. Screens and teeth – it’s sort of surprising, yet at the same time, mundane. Screens, smile, teeth – The progression makes me feel like I’m trapped inside of a fading, flickering light bulb.
It’s also very interesting how you’ve arranged the poems on the page. Almost everything aligned to the left, with Body sticking out from the pack. I think this accentuates what you’re getting at in Body in a good way. Also, at first I was a bit put off by the thin white text on the black background, but after reading through the poems, I think it’s a great choice. They’re lost in space. The black creates a sense of depth around them, a sense that you can reach your hand right through them and grab onto a star and that at any moment they might collapse into nothingness. Which is, of course, what happened. I came back to the screen to post my comments, and they were no where to be found.
December 17th, 2007 | #
Thanks for your comments. You’ve been very kind to my poems, and I very much appreciate the response. And in turn, your comments have evoked a bit of a response in me, so I’ll try to verbalize that - I just want to talk about my thought process behind a few of the lines you pointed out.
In all of the poems, except for Body, I was on this kick about the future. For some reason, when I’m writing poetry I can’t seem to get over the idea of poetry as prophecy. I suppose that poetry is the balancing act of pulling something from the moment and recording it for the future. Prophecy is the similar act of pulling something from the future and recording it for the moment. But to what extent do these overlap? I suppose it’s cyclical. On the other hand, I want to believe that poetry and prophecy should be separate. And that a true act of poetry has no thought of the future - that it is pure construction of the moment, in the moment, for the moment. Let the future be left to the dead. I think that’s what aggravates me about most of my poetry, there is a dead element in them, an element of expectation, of waiting. This is very hard to explain because waiting can be beautiful when in the moment. I mean longing, a passionate longing, away-ness rather than hope.
This is of course very confusing and I’m on a divergent train of thought now so I’ll try to get into something more specific. Though I do think that last line is actually an interesting prism through which to read Body (whether it is an expression of away-ness or hope).
OK - well speaking of Body, I wanted to respond to your comment about the line with “…unforgiveable.” I think you’re right that it should be taken out. I don’t like the repetition, which I actually put in there in editing. But I also want to keep that sense of the line. I wanted to make the distinction that it is not due to some personal shortcoming of mine that I cannot forgive him. It would be like forgiving a raisin for being wrinkly. Which perhaps should be the line?
“I wish to forgive him but I cannot.
Who blames a raisin for her wrinkles?”
Maybe that’s dumb. But its important to me to make that distinction, which doesn’t exist without some sort of second line there - does it? Actually, on second reading, I like that sense of being unforgiveable. Not in the sense that something is so heinous that it would be morally unconscionable to forgive it, but in the sense that whatever it is is inert, is simply matter, does not operate on the laws of language and the play of moralities.
I’m gonna write another short comment about the blue flame one, but I gotta get off my computer for a few minutes.
December 17th, 2007 | #
Hey I really liked these, whether or not you’re embarrassed about them. I like how you sometimes start saying something and then seem to change your mind. Like in that one about love, that ends with ‘One is love.’ You seemed to be going somewhere else in the stanza before that but then, in a way that strikes me as japanese and zennish, you say fuck that, ‘one is love,’ and this is good enough. And actually I like that phrase a lot. Because I think there is this very mystical but very present ‘One’ for everybody, maybe it’s the superego, and it is definitely love. It’s our relation to that One which makes us different… I suppose you can have a narcissistic relation or a too-altruistic relation or many others, and they’ve probably been litanized by Freud and Kristeva already, and it’s nice not to have to read those giants to figure it out, it’s nice to read a poem that just says ‘One is love’ and to not have to read any more and to just be able to say ah yes, one is love, that is true, I agree.
I like that stuff about monitors, about heads going in them, and that bit about living in hospitals and no one else in other countries speaking our language or existing, I forget which, I liked that too. You manage to conjure some quite memorable mental situations… I suppose I agree with Inga that there are times when you float towards abstraction, when you’re talking about abstract things rather than the things you started off talking about, and those abstract things can begin to ring too devoidedly; that’s usually my problem in writing too. I also like the shape of Time, I like that long first line and I really liked the exclamation points Up and Down! and the other one before that, I like to watch excitement taking place. I like that your poems show you-thinking rather than you-thought. And it isn’t “I’m thinking and all I can do is think and all any of us can do is think and there is no certain thought and there is no truth and yet there is and we’re never going to reach it and god it’s such a long dreadful thinking endless blithe dearth of emptiness and christ we’re all so desolate and grey,” it isn’t that it all, it’s just you thinking and sometimes you’re sure and then you’re sure you’re not sure and then you’re assuredly unassured, and ultimately some poems like this will be better than others, it just comes from how lucid the moments are, how strictly you hold to the mood or how strictly the mood holds to you, and it’s ok for some of them to suck and some to come so close to perfection but to have to be slightly novitiate instead… all of that’s the best so far as I’m concerned, so long as it isn’t “I’m thinking and you’re thinking and all we can all do is think and god it’s such a sorrowful lacking universe and here I am thinkedly thinking,” so long as it is that without being that, that is, so long as it presents thinking without representing thinking, so long as it is thinking without being thinking about thinking, so long as it is the very passion of thought rather than the berry reflection of passion.
December 24th, 2007 | #