feminist complainings that i may not agree with in the morning

what is so exciting about engagements?

everyone says "congratulations! i'm so happy for you!"
even if they have no reason to be happy about it.

everyone says "you two are so good for each other!"
even if they are far from compatible.

everyone says "oh, you will have a great life together!"
even though chances are that "life" will only last 5 or 10 years.

everyone says "you've finally found your place in life"

because we all know that every woman's place is to be tethered to a man.

what a cause for celebration ...

when my words are not enough

music speaks to the deepest part of my soul.
it brings truth.
it says what i cannot find the
words to say.
i have listened to one
song countless times in the last week.
it speaks me.
it is my heart.


selections:

carry me ohio
sun kil moon


sorry that i could never love you back
i could never care enough in these last days

heal his soul

lingering in, what about the sweetness we knew?
what about what's good, what's true from those days?

can't count to all the lovers i've burned through
so why do i still burn for you? i can't say.

sorry that i could never love you back
i could never care enough in these last days

heal his soul

craving dreams a million miles ago
and the star that i just don't see anymore

words long gone, lost on journeys we walked on
lost are voices heard along the way

sorry for never going by your door
never feeling love like that anymore

heal his soul

life in death in love in life in love in death in life.

would you die for me
? i mean really
agony
and blood
not the idealized
hallmark-card
'i love you so much
i would die for you'
please.
it's about
more
gore and pain and
not the sure-
i-would-honey
-you-know-i'll-
follow-you-into-
the-dark
it's
going into the dark
before me and making it
light
erasing
everything that is not
how it should
be
be
crying tears of glass
wearing a crown of
thorns
staring into my
eyes
making me cry
and breathe
gasp
like a baby just born
it may be hard but
it is
necessary
this dying
to live
would you live for me
? after death
i wonder

CRY

Cry. Cry your eyes out for all the starving children you can't save. Cry a river for the Chinese and Indian rice farmers you can't console. Blubber and shudder and let out a long sigh for all of those Arab babies you paid to have blown to bits. Claw at your face and pound your fist onto the nearest surface for the deformed South American children ravaged by the effects of illegal pesticides used indiscriminately to destroy coca fields. Now what have you done? You have cried. Does it make you feel better? Does it change anything? Does it make someone else's struggle your own? When you go about your day, doing the same mundane things that you do every single day, think about where your money goes. Where does your coffee come from? Is that really basmati rice or was it grown in Texas? Could you have walked to the store just now? Was it necessary to burn gas? Isn't there a war for oil somewhere? Do your research. Learn the difference between free trade and fair-trade. Cry. Bawl. Blubber. Shudder. Scream. And then WAKE UP!!!

- Anonymous author in Adbusters magazine

http://www.adbusters.org/

gibberish?

i speak a different
and difficult impossible?
language, i guess.

i thought it easily decipherable, but
there is a language barrier -
perhaps a language berlin wall (except
still standing) - perhaps a
language coral reef [and coral
reefs are in fact quite large] - perhaps
a language olympic pole vault -
in any case, it has so far proven
insurmountable.

i am sometimes discouraged
about this:
every language has a
translator, even twi
has a translator, my
language cannot be more
complicated than
twi? is clicks and
taps. am i harder
to decipher than
clicks and
taps?

i understand my language
so very well; it baffles me
that everyone does not
understand my language. that
everyone does not understand
my language is a
language i cannot myself
understand.

confusion! babble! babel!

but at times i almost
realize: the point. is
not being translated
but the point. is having a
language at all.

my language is complex
with grammatical inconsistencies.
but my language is
quite beautiful really -
unique at least.

if all translators have failed to
understand my real and lovely
language - i think i would
prefer to remain untranslated.

A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste

by Ezra Pound

An “Image” is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time. I use the term “complex” rather in the technical sense employed by the newer psychologists, such as Hart, though we might not agree absolutely in our application.

It is the presentation of such a “complex” instantaneously which gives that sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art.

It is better to present one Image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works.

All this, however, some may consider open to debate. The immediate necessity is to tabulate A LIST OF DON’TS for those beginning to write verses. But I can not put all of them into Mosaic negative.

To begin with, consider the three rules recorded by Mr. Flint, not as dogma—never consider anything as dogma—but as the result of long contemplation, which, even if it is some one else’s contemplation, may be worth consideration.

Pay no attention to the criticism of men who have never themselves written a notable work. Consider the discrepancies between the actual writing of the Greek poets and dramatists, and the theories of the Graeco-Roman grammarians, concocted to explain their metres.

Language

Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something.

Don’t use such an expression as “dim lands of peace.” It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer’s not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol.

Go in fear of abstractions. Don’t retell in mediocre verse what has already been done in good prose. Don’t think any intelligent person is going to be deceived when you try to shirk all the difficulties of the unspeakably difficult art of good prose by chopping your composition into line lengths.

What the expert is tired of today the public will be tired of tomorrow.

Don’t imagine that the art of poetry is any simpler than the art of music, or that you can please the expert before you have spent at least as much effort on the art of verse as the average piano teacher spends on the art of music.

Be influenced by as many great artists as you can, but have the decency either to acknowledge the debt outright, or to try to conceal it.

Don’t allow “influence” to mean merely that you mop up the particular decorative vocabulary of some one or two poets whom you happen to admire. A Turkish war correspondent was recently caught red-handed babbling in his dispatches of “dove-gray” hills, or else it was “pearl-pale,” I can not remember.

Use either no ornament or good ornament.

Rhythm and Rhyme

Let the candidate fill his mind with the finest cadences he can discover, preferably in a foreign language so that the meaning of the words may be less likely to divert his attention from the movement; e.g., Saxon charms, Hebridean Folk Songs, the verse of Dante, and the lyrics of Shakespeare—if he can dissociate the vocabulary from the cadence. Let him dissect the lyrics of Goethe coldly into their component sound values, syllables long and short, stressed and unstressed, into vowels and consonants.

It is not necessary that a poem should rely on its music, but if it does rely on its music that music must be such as will delight the expert.

Let the neophyte know assonance and alliteration, rhyme immediate and delayed, simple and polyphonic, as a musician would expect to know harmony and counter-point and all the minutiae of his craft. No time is too great to give to these matters or to any one of them, even if the artist seldom have need of them.

Don’t imagine that a thing will “go” in verse just because it’s too dull to go in prose.

Don’t be “viewy”—leave that to the writers of pretty little philosophic essays. Don’t be descriptive; remember that the painter can describe a landscape much better than you can, and that he has to know a deal more about it.

When Shakespeare talks of the “Dawn in russet mantle clad” he presents something which the painter does not present. There is in this line of his nothing that one can call description; he presents.

Consider the way of the scientists rather than the way of an advertising agent for a new soap.

The scientist does not expect to be acclaimed as a great scientist until he has discovered something. He begins by learning what has been discovered already. He goes from that point onward. He does not bank on being a charming fellow personally. He does not expect his friends to applaud the results of his freshman class work. Freshmen in poetry are unfortunately not confined to a definite and recognizable class room. They are “all over the shop.” Is it any wonder “the public is indifferent to poetry?”

Don’t chop your stuff into separate iambs. Don’t make each line stop dead at the end, and then begin every next line with a heave. Let the beginning of the next line catch the rise of the rhythm wave, unless you want a definite longish pause.

In short, behave as a musician, a good musician, when dealing with that phase of your art which has exact parallels in music. The same laws govern, and you are bound by no others.

Naturally, your rhythmic structure should not destroy the shape of your words, or their natural sound, or their meaning. It is improbable that, at the start, you will be able to get a rhythm-structure strong enough to affect them very much, though you may fall a victim to all sorts of false stopping due to line ends and caesurae.

The musician can rely on pitch and the volume of the orchestra. You can not. The term harmony is misapplied to poetry; it refers to simultaneous sounds of different pitch. There is, however, in the best verse a sort of residue of sound which remains in the ear of the hearer and acts more or less as an organ-base. A rhyme must have in it some slight element of surprise if it is to give pleasure; it need not be bizarre or curious, but it must be well used if used at all.

Vide further Vildrac and Duhamel’s notes on rhyme in “Technique Poetique.”

That part of your poetry which strikes upon the imaginative eye of the reader will lose nothing by translation into a foreign tongue; that which appeals to the ear can reach only those who take it in the original.

Consider the definiteness of Dante’s presentation, as compared with Milton’s rhetoric. Read as much of Wordsworth as does not seem too unutterably dull.

If you want the gist of the matter go to Sappho, Catullus, Villon, Heine when he is in the vein, Gautier when he is not too frigid; or, if you have not the tongues, seek out the leisurely Chaucer. Good prose will do you no harm, and there is good discipline to be had by trying to write it.

Translation is likewise good training, if you find that your original matter “wobbles” when you try to rewrite it. The meaning of the poem to be translated can not “wobble.”

If you are using a symmetrical form, don’t put in what you want to say and then fill up the remaining vacuums with slush.

Don’t mess up the perception of one sense by trying to define it in terms of another. This is usually only the result of being too lazy to find the exact word. To this clause there are possibly exceptions.

The first three simple proscriptions* will throw out nine-tenths of all the bad poetry now accepted as standard and classic; and will prevent you from many a crime of production. “...Mais d’abord il faut etre un poete,” as MM. Duhamel and Vildrac have said at the end of their little book, “Notes sur la Technique Poetique”; but in an American one takes that at least for granted, otherwise why does one get born upon that august continent!

*Noted by Mr. Flint.

i do mind dying

"dearly beloved,
we are gathered
here today in . . .

. . . detroit, michigan: home of the "motown sound"
gm
ford
chrysler
rats in the kitchen and roaches in the bathroom
no heat in winter & nothing cool when the summer comes
pistons pounding out a DRUM beat . . . "do you take" . . . "to love and cherish" . . . woodward avenue
junkies, whores & little kids on the way up to take their places
a dime bag to get the day over with . . . "and do you take" . . . "to have and to hold" . . . the day shift, afternoons, midnights - at least 8 hrs. with the devil in hell
rouge, chevy, fisherbody (makes dead bodies), budd, eldon gear & axle, dodge main, jefferson, iron foundries & specialty forge foundries
monsters that eat alive & spit out bloody hands
feet pieces of skin and bone
& with regularity - A DEAD BODY! ! ! . . . friday nite . . . get that check
carry it on home to the crib (with wife & kids), then get out on the street: get fucked up
(reefer, jones, coke, ups & downs, johnnie walker black & red)
try to freeze your head
can't think about the shit starting all over a gain on Monday.
. . . "and now a message from our sponsor" watch tv
listen to the radio
read papers
they all say: "buy this, get that & YOU TWO can be a success."
damn, brother, sister, a success in this motorized, computerized, iron & steel jungle is just staying alive! ! !

"in sickness and in health" detroit, michigan/any city
"for better, or for worse" my/our home

"until DEATH

do us part."

b. p. Flanigan

mostly jargon, loosely translated.

i cry
(in my heart if
not in my eyes):

every time i
catch a glimpse of
you, glimpse a memory
of you, remember to
remember that
you are
gone
- fully alive -
- all too alive -
but
gone
at least to me.

i'm sure you
would think it
romantic, or
hip, or indie,
or something
to write poetry
about loss
experienced but

it seems cruel to
have to write about
loss when i can see
what i have lost
walking down the
street every day.