Musette

August 3 poem: Cycle

I'd wondered how I'd make use of the cut-ups from April. Now, as I return to them, I see some possibilities, some shapes rising. The piece below (it traces the life of a woman) is a new form of the cut-up I called "Romance," which exists here.

The process interests me, as does the puzzle of ever matching an image to rather abstract work. I was lucky to find the image above in the Flickr stream of Bill Gracey.

 

Cycle

i. pedestal
Every woman knows the elegant isolation
of orchid and hummingbird—erotic, but detectable
 only by absence, or not even by that.

ii. test
Cut, she transfers soul matter,
luminous (a code for sacrifice), pollinated by exile
or enemies, love tied with wire or twine.

iii. age
The danger of spoilage is counterpoint,
blood and sand, elaborately blown,
massed in brilliant clouds.

iv. faith, of sorts
Belief returns, and seasons: rainwind, love,
hangover—the spirit out on bail, re-interpreted,
 loose network of shortcomings, never lovelier.

 

 

 

May 6 poem: Our waveform story (cutup)

 

This one sat on my screen for a while for no special reason besides other distractions. It was written quite some time ago, and I'm finding things to enjoy as I look at it now. I see there a description, of sorts, of my way of composing. Its words are drawn from pages 236-237 of the desktop encyclopedia, brocade to Brookings Institution.

 

Our waveform story

Verse alone began to suppress the wave nature of sprit, a lost part of speech. It was easier to face complications in free-flight exhibits, colored bracts—toxic ornamentals. Matter-waves moderate the ordinary, its duality drooping in the downy cheatgrass below. Creation, thin or fleshy, desires a new truthfulness, fleshy, more readily made into netting. Custom may lead to a figured injury, or ornamental complications. On one side: the spell of the low-lying ideal. Below that: flat satin emulsions of proof. Contrasting sepals and petals of the sonnet bell sleepwalkers, cast bluish shadows of a courtly ideal. Their metal changes valence when struck, poems wrought into spoonlike forms with pipe-fittings and copper turbine blades. In their deep salt beds, pure desires forage, weave convolution into dream. The mythological does not occur free in nature. Yet it buds.

 

Image by Oberazzi, via Flickr.

May 1 poem: Our task (cut-up)

My work life began to intrude on the writing of April, so much so that while I worked on pieces, I didn't post them. So I'm reaching back to my cut-ups project and, looking at it from this distance, enjoying it. The words here are from the desktop encyclopedia, pages 580-581, fin whale to Fisher (as in chess player Bobby).

I was at the L.A. Times Festival of Books on the USC campus yesterday for poems by Chase Twichell and some unexpectedly fascinating work by Daniel Tiffany, a USC prof, who read from Dandelion Clock and other books. Most interesting were those Dandelion Clock pieces which begin with lines from Old English and spin out sound- or sense-related paths from there. No doubt it was that listening that brought me back to my own experiments. Also heard Patti Smith and Dave Eggers talk about the passion that is art, whatever one's art may be. The two of them are generous souls, so inspiring, so spacious.

 

Our task

Devotees may wait years for the beauty of open craters or the sparks of luminous beetles. Those who lack faith have other means of escape: Rockets of colored salt, a rubber carriage, exclusive molecular structures. A godlessness large enough to spread thinly over the 13 level  realms  will be allowed to exit the next without injury, or enter the private network of innocence without ordeal. Purification tends to cause a severe sting, conspicuous circular scars. Do not recoil from salvation marked with orange or yellow. Common fields and ash may lie outside human control, awaiting the pollen and nectar of mating, elongated sandspit as nest, wild magenta scrub as body. The air flashes, clearing forests, seed and fire synthesizing each other. Leaves fall. Time will burn our private egress, our dormant fireseed. Watch for light-producing signals, for warmth. Eat.

 

Photo, of fireworks seen aslant, by Peter Harding via Flickr.

April 14 poem: Realm of bruising, realm of prayer (cutup)

More shepherds, fins, spirals. More prayer. Today's text was drawn from pages 424-425 of the desktop encyclopeida,current to cuttlefish.

 

Realm of bruising, realm of prayer

Revolving, with little direction from the rider, prayer flies in suspended facets, a form  that repeats and repeats and thus encloses without ending. The precise value can be thought of as music, a circle of infinite radius, or wheel born in crystal and timber, a path of custard apples. In the 25^th dynasty, a shepherd perfects the curvature, a bright arc of defiant movement. Mortality spirals like a fin, falls in ornamental folds, layering myth and taboo with its warm, moist sand.  Calculation strikes at common lures—small, cusped arches of the necessary. A pretty face. Change derives from effort to cut (isolate) the principle from its containing shell, from infatuation, from this notion of best fit. The realm of bruising ellipses the territory of the curtained bed, the procedures and techniques that allow union. Segments of light, linked end to end, can reach the roots of the herd. Spirals, suspended and spanning the yellow glass of moon, may not reenter a shepherd or saint. More exact, the three lobes of mortality limit precise value to tracery. In the end: a cup, a bird, a table, a pattern within an idea, our ornamented leaves. These are the only miracles.

 

Lovely image by rbaez, Ricardo Baez-Duarte, via Flickr.

April 13 poem: Sparks off the blade (cutup)

Today's field of words (pages 1522-1523 in the desktop encyclopedia, spark plug to speed skating) yielded the title—and the interesting theme of how things (species, lines of thought) diverge and converge. Or at least what's what happened on my trains of thought.

 

Sparks off the blade

A single evolutionary line splits into two: light and magic, chess and resonance. The insulator separating them must temper wit with morality, transform mass frequencies into sight-impaired truth. Or release an agile climber. The blade of abrupt subdivision is reflected in the body against a moving background of commanding, requesting, warning. The same factors mate and produce viable offspring, creating a spark, allowing for such effects as speculation or virtue. Human abilities have sharply serrated dimensions, fictional tricks to enliven the desired signal. Groups may continue to struggle, mechanically tapering individual differences and articulation to dark lines or radiant breathing. Standardized meaning is destroyed, absorbed or emitted, and one’s true body (a house igniting, a wild boy) must withstand low-level synthesis visible as light. Gradual changes combine the separate, atoms and molecules so close together that words and sentences appear simultaneously. Work begins (see “pattern recognition”). Synthesis, some fictional, is exhaled as clues or depth. Colorless substances heavily streaked with song and heat struggle through a common film of warning.  In the aroma and taste of peppermint, clues continue. Beginnings stud “spectacles.” Temples remain.

 

Photo by g_kat26 via Flickr.

 

April 12 poem: Any random variable (cutup)

This piece ranges (in its material of origin, that is) from nondirective psychotherapy to North. That's pages 1162-1163 in the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Encyclopedia. I am amused by the ski-jumping soprano and the commando units of verse.... (Aleatory, by the way, means "random," but with a lovely new collection of letters.)

 

Any random variable

A sapling. A king. The ritualistic gibberish of mathematicians and shipbuilding. Such words sound purposeful, hence parallel or culturally related. Yet any random variable works to release fragmenting language, rational or allegorical. The shaman’s appetite for sympathetic stimulation served as a great barrier to the idea of a single correct passage. Nicknamed “The Great White Shark,” the mythological guardian (imposing, exceptionally displeased) held many titles—whale hunter, airborne commando, ski jumping soprano. A fragile resistance encourages him. His father was imprisoned by unwritten nonsense, taken prisoner by hyperbolic geometry and forced to abandon the possibility of deviation, its furniture of dispersed data sets. The classic bell curve of career money winners, reigns, meaningless revolts threatened him. He “would rather be right” than discover an alternative parallel, postulate a new North Sea. He focused on religious ceremony, its whimsical marriage of the comic and the ornamental at the nerve endings of a relativity puzzle. A voice as opposed to a projected reputation for money laundering or tendencies toward recklessness. Now any given course is hyperbolic. The goal is to disburse commando units of verse. Axioms and stalled words derived from them (nymphaeum, vassalage, neurotransmitter) go unwritten. The goal is pilgrimage, rebellion. Pick a number. Program the aleatory.

 

The image (so striking, no?) is by Universallyspeaking, via Flickr.

April 11 poem: A brilliant door revealed (cutup)

Ah, ease at last. Some of these experiments can be a bit tortured. And some are so pleasurable. This was one of the latter. The words come from pgs 652-653 of the desktop encyclopedia, Ghibellines to Gibson (as in Gibson girl). And the image is from the endlessly wonderful Hubble.

 

A brilliant door revealed

Jesus and The Prophet play tennis, the old man and his grandson as star giants, hundreds of thousands of times brighter than the sun. They have long hair, acumen, Michelangelo masses. The Virgin and Saint John won mixed doubles. She has prolific feminine beauty, he a poetic technique. Their long arms swing (with reduced radii and brightness) through history, connected with equilibrium and mystical joy. The notion that the spirit is separate from the world of the living coincided with a nebulous sense of mathematical rigor. But close contact with thermodynamic theory revealed that wherever there is a prophet-dreamer, a brilliant door is revealed—a way of life imminent. Much detailed knowledge dances from branch to branch, hastened by songs and contact. God as big tree and sculptor or wearer, a prolific manufacturer of sheer, inaccessible nature, widely imitated. Probably not an agent of monopoly control or existential tragedy. She of strong emotion, born as a saturniid moth? Dress her in bronze, attach her fruits to sand and foam in radiating death-life-revelation.

 

The image is from the Flickr stream of the NASA Goddard Space Center, and their April 22, 2010 caption info explains, in part: "This brand new Hubble photo is of a small portion of one of the largest seen star-birth regions in the galaxy, the Carina Nebula. Towers of cool hydrogen laced with dust rise from the wall of the nebula.... The image captures the top of a three-light-year-tall pillar of gas and dust that is being eaten away by the brilliant light from nearby bright stars."

April 10 poem: 55 asymmetrical species of truth (cutup)

Considering that the words of the day, from pages 278-279 of the desktop encyclopedia, were pulled from entries that ranged from Chandra Gupta II to cantata, you'd think we'd be talking about something besides truth and poetry. But we do have the Three Blind Mice and sculpted human heads....

 

55 asymmetrical species of truth (cutup)

The cult of Three Blind Mice came under Castillian influence. The art of canopic jars declined in favor of the art and influence of “double envelopment”—re-creations of diatribes and manifestos. The new dominant character (hymn) intermittently surrendered to detached intellectualism or ornamental ritual. An industry began to grow. The flowering of crowds and power became more elaborate, expanding various slender alliances, cutting entire contentions directly from the ground, the viscera of retrograde order, mirror inversion, beatification. Tombs and popes, spirally arranged, passed westward in canoes. Sculpted human heads, transferred to the “devil’s” sterile container  prevailed over evil and chaos. Or intellectualism. The fasting dead molded pithy  miracles, considering questions of need, unstaged acts, successive variations. The phenomenon was comparably rare, but certain neurons developed a reputation for arising directly from still-water homeostasis. To the interlocking seams of ocean surf and shrapnel, add 55 asymmetrical species of truth—slender, crystallized, flexible-jointed—that prey on devout nougats of charity. The poet reforms ritual sacrifice by assassinating rules and proof, recitative and aria. The faithful, serene, tend the unknown, its honey on the tongue.

 The photo is by cambiodefractal via Flickr.

April 8 poem: The margin recedes (cutup)

Today, time's spiraling into some other ending. The words are from pages 1246 and 1247 of the desktop encyclopedia: performance art to permittivity. Science and mathematics are full of exquisite language, I am finding. I wonder if those who use it ever day enjoy its richness....

 

The margin recedes (cutup)

Time is a machine to blend head and roots. A vessel to hold scent. A table arranged to reflect the delicate mathematical formulation of submerged purpose. Romans made nearly all orthodox art forms by blending of comic lineages and bequeathed psycho absorption—mirrors reflecting change, established lines breaking into small, pearl-like bodies evolved from properties, language, raw materials. Structure was understood to control rarer elements: fragrant aggregate, the soft tissue of gemstone and water-tube boilers. In the outermost shells, spiral or constant, simple harmonic motion is repeated in posthumous degradation and bouncing, swinging optics. The glass membrane cracks with concentric prisms to change the direction of permafrost light. No force has been improved since jazz, the ultimate source of extinction and counterfeiting. Nearly all opera is more or less language weathered to soil and poison. Related deposits of elements, their paddle wheel shells the favorite food of monologists, provide continuous bone remodeling staged as an open framework for developing prototype environments. As in gardens, or less sprawling systems: manuscripts, atoms of the same magnetic permeability, a guitar string vibrating precious olivine tissues. Even waste is artful. The margin recedes, substance eroding.

Photo by foilman (Henry Burrows) via Flickr.

April 6 poem: Mythology of my people (cutup)

Today's installment of the unfolding mythology of my universe comes from pages 132-133, baldachin to Ball (as in Lucille Ball). In between came Balenciaga and baleen whales. I do recommend the history that's summed up there. Baldwin II Porphyrogenitus and the Norse god Balder definitely deserve fans.

 

Mythology of my people

In adhering to the religion of fashion, ancestor cults of the third Latin emperor, Porphyogenitus (“born to the purple”) lived alternately in plastic rainwear, relics, roofing shingles. They could be harmed by nothing but mistletoe, were impervious to male pattern baldness, studied drama, sold both male and female mythologies. Their sumptuous lord president worked as a model. Balenciaga visited the underworld in the late 19^th century to ask for small crustaceans and allegories, and his style shows the influence of Adriatic ancestor cults and the Dance of Death. He became king, playing minor roles in films, became a preacher in Harlem. His belief in spirits disintegrated when aggressive bald eagles amused themselves by throwing intarsia at him. The beautiful son of Odin, homosexual, provoking continual breakups, hoped to disturb nobility, broke up parts of the imperial palace for firewood. The suborder disintegrated, and heightened states of passion. Whales refused to weep, prophesying sudden rainfall. Corset stays matted together to form a sieve.

 

There was so much royalty in play that I looked for an image of a crown. This one is by Michael Scott, scottphotographics.com, via Flickr.