Musette

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 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 9 poem: A private kabuki of strange stories (cutup)

I do take a lot of delight from the way words fall together. What lasts? Who knows? Perhaps some of the pleasure will linger in the reading. Today's words are from pages 756-757 of the desktop encyclopedia, Hoffman to Holderlin. Hokusai provided a serendipitous echo of March's pieces....

 

A private kabuki of strange stories

Straight lines and white squares roll over, tongues lolling. Decline requires life-size and miniature excesses in sequential sets, a ballad of personal failings, the psychopathic hero. The struggle is exterior, a circular dance of reputation, blotchy experience, masquerades, abstraction. To Hokusai, this failing structure was the domain of the hypothetical, a private kabuki of strange stories. His Thirty-Six Views of Invasions, Meatpackers, and Fever was lost, but a number of erratic surimono prints turned to political theater. The whole constructed fantasy succumbed irretrievably to “conversation pieces,” rash parody, progressive paralysis—comic sets in pirated editions. Wild flights of thought evolved. Enlightenment, the superfamily of depth, moves reluctantly, no wake or hiss, no effective prevention or treatment.  The bluff fails.  Survivors become chronically the fool. Yet a shepherd covered with mud and smoke anticipates the conflict between the ideal world and outlying life. Struggle becomes hereditary. Coma follows, perspective lost in the domain of shotmaking, missiles, paint-dripping quarantine. Art fought this. But mythology worked. The daughter married the rising sun. It cannot rise.

Photo by kumon, via Flickr.

April 7 poem: Once, then later (cutup)

 

Lots of writing, but little posting, so early April will unfurl in a string of posts today. I seem to have questions of origin on my mind, and more than a few pieces go to that theme. Today's words came from pages 1066-1067 of the Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Encyclopedia, Middlebury College to Mikan.

 

Once, then later

The earliest human waveforms were steel skeletons sheathed in biblical interpretation, rhythmic prosody used for money, asynchronous serial transmission. Adam never laughed. “Cracking” was the province of professionals, a dazzling game of chess. Semicircular prayer was widespread. Four dwarfs born in the Central period developed a bawdy nightclub act to transmit the scattered sparks of visual disturbance. Used bears, planes of extravagant onyx, basketball for drama, in an alteration of composed and improvised writings. “Less is more” was adapted from the first divine wind, and echo it before the ascension to heaven, the central void of the universe, a major premise that employs less unison, more improvisation. Or zithers. An administrative question: Was hell the metamorphic host of an “aura”? Was facade simply an imprecise term for permanent exile? The ornately decorated dialects of bagpipes, viols, oboe date to magma injected into an operational ceiling, usually with no formal training.   Four groups (incl. many women), sometimes called “gnats,” or “the mighty handful,” migrated to the dome of the heavens. Dictum: enlighten by analogy. That is, from literacy to music, the starting and stopping points in time, collaborating with passages, dizziness, art. One or two beats behind, a protein and an acid molecule separated. Bloodsucking patterns bear some resemblance to the raga. The gods mobilized after heavy losses. The steel-and-glass world is only mentioned once.

Photo by Nigel Howe, 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.

April 5 poem: Cosmic comedy

At times it seems that there are a million myths wanting to be discovered somewhere. Today's reside in pages 372-373 of the desktop encyclopedia, Columbus to commedia dell'arte.

 

Cosmic comedy

Read as a narrative, comets typically tell a diffuse story: dust and gravity assigned to classes, coiled in sprays of bell-like clans, local groups that lack the lineage of bees or farmers. In the brittle atmosphere, a small, irregular language hidden in walls is subject to buckling. Spontaneous abnormalities scatter sunlight, encourage scandalous matter. Heat (or bridge hands) can alter axial loads, social standards, roads and canals. Home is pushed to the underworld, raw, hazy. Balance comes gradually. Logical analysis empties order into decorative bags used to treat wounds. The solar wind patterns telephone signals into permutations of nervous activity: lavish growth, guerrilla tactics, conformity. Dust particles combine with illicit love and other volatile compounds, objects chosen from a finite set by men or animals.  Books and their long glowing tails cause short losses of human foibles in thousands of years or not at all. War, crime and comedy have the same meaning arranged together in their gaseous envelopes. Each melts just in time, a cloud (coma) around the core. 

Comet photo by Michael Karrer, via Flickr.