On Avant-Garde
I’ve recently started reading Samuel Beckett’s Malone Dies, having recently completed Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler and Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, so, naturally I wrote a poem as a bit of an ode to the Avant-Garde. The attempt is to include the wonderment, the strangeness, the farcical, the structural irregularity, and maybe something awkwardly insightful (although of the latter I cannot be sure). Also, I just decided I like the phrase “last bit” more than “latter.” We should also say “prose-ish,” rather than “prosaic.”
“Avant Garde”
1
Give me a stately pleasure dome from which to decree!
2 + 3
Shelley says, “Nothing beside remains.”
4
You may scratch them behind the ears for good luck.
III
With added detail–Apollo’s archaic torso, Moses’ hammer and arm, David’s tiny penis, and perky nipples of some Aphrodite peeking through the fur of Sister Bear, the daughter bear.
II
I will fill it with Kane’s statues we’ve never seen: the greats! The legendary Berenstain Bear busts of marble and jade!
Poetic Response
Here are some quickly done (5-10 minutes) responses to some party-game questions.
“What would you get for a tattoo?”
There’s a Koi fish beneath my heel.
Leon at the parlor told me not to put it there,
but he did and I guard it with my socks.
I let the little fish out to play when it snows,
when it rains;
I move barefoot across the ground,
but as Leon warned,
everytime I let Samson out to play,
he gets a little worn,
and ages as fast as I walk.
Maybe I’ll get him redone on my hip–
he’s a bad story, and he always finds his way back into print.
“What would you change your name to?”
Mohamed Lee would be my new name–
each part seems popular enough from a global perspective.
I always wanted to fit in everywhere;
although, I’m sure I’d have to choose one
based on where I am.
Given America, this would be difficult,
but I have the Simpsons and the Stooges to thank for
Mo.
Or maybe I could go by Med Lee
because puns are always the best way to run the gambit.
And if my name, perhaps coming at the end of a long sentence,
or by fault of memory, the person pausing to remember my last name
slips a breath into the middle, I become the greatest:
Mohamed Ah-Lee.
“What do you wish you could find at a yard sale?”
I’d like to find Pandora’s Box.
It would be the perfect place to keep my pens and pencils, erasers, paper, rulers…
I could draw the terrifying combinations that died with Duerer, but there’d be a flash of light, relief-breathing as your eyes crossed the page.
I could write human despair with all its perfect qualities and make that too, seem okay.
Most of all, I’d stop losing all my pens.
First Shot at Automatic Writing
So, there’s this surrealist exercise that involves continuous writing and seeing what it yields. I am trying to sit down for a brief period, daily, to do just this. My thoughts are a little more coherent than many automatic writers, I think, but I can’t say if that’s because I’m just starting and the images are still more conformed than they will be as I better learn to let go, or not. Anyway, here’s the first run:
Read the rest of this entry »
Tongue-Tied Revisited
I lose sight of my technical agenda,
like an engineer fumbling
for the right
bird call,
and will always talk of cornfields and water towers,
the wide open spaces where I can only get off track,
wishing I could invite in a few walls,
build a bamboo hut in a dense forest,
renovate with paintings that have payment plans,
inhabit my words,
like Locke,
or Yeats.
For a Moment of Weakness
I don’t leave many poems untitled, but this one is. It’s somewhat autobiographical, but obviously I have not reached any real summits in my writing, so it’s not entirely so; although, as this poem indicates, I desire to not reach any such summits. This is meant to be in the retrospective-prospective structure, meaning that it looks back on something and then looks to the present and/or forward. Some of the line-breaks are different in the actual version, but for the most part this is accurate.
“Untitled”
Read the rest of this entry »
Tongue-Tied
I lose sight of my technical agenda,
like an engineer fumbling
for the right
wrench,
and will always speak too plainly,
wishing I could inhabit my words,
like Locke
or Yeats.
If/Then rewrite
Here’s a rewrite of that poem I posted the other day. I got a little advice from a friend (check out her poetry from the Lilacs and Landmines link on the right), and I’m much more enthused with how this revision came out. Sure, there’s still quite a bit of room for improvement, but I’m glad it has improved at all.
“Blink, and I’ll bury you.”
If I am a bit of soft-shoe tapped out on canvas, then you are chutes and ladders moving up and down around me.
If I am the tightly woven rising thunder, then you are the empty calm that stands defiant after a storm. If I am to be weathered, then I will bend the trees along your coast until you, too, erode.
While I am jarring, you are jawing, and if I were to tell you what I really think, then you would just talk some more shit. If one of us were Jesus, the other wouldn’t be Judas, but maybe Pontius Pilate: it’s not betrayal that we’re after.
If you’re part of the answer, then I’ve come here with the un-askable question. We’ll let your counter-intuitive need to skip across the top of a lake like a stone balance on my earthquake, and the distortion from my call, my silence, and my answer will bring out the subwoofer that fuels your rumble, your crack, your powder keg—always present, always possible. “A definite possibility,” she said.
But while the military movies echo in your lungs, and I can hear the Marines say “Kill!” to indicate the change from jumping jacks to push-ups in their workout routine, my core is filled with the last cache of grenades, a secret fire that prepares me with talk of war. My hands are the granite slabs I will lay over top of you—your last rasp will be the clink of oh-so-many coffin nails in a coffee can.
And I thought those secrets would guard me, but I had not expected your hidden, winking eye.
If/Then poem
I’m not very happy with this yet. Hopefully I’ll have more success as I edit it and try to hash out a second draft. This was collaborative, and I think my problem might be more with making the two voices harmonize a little more.
“Punchy”
I am the tightly woven rising thunder, and you are the empty calm that stands defiant after a storm. If I am to be weathered, then I will bend the trees along your coast until you too erode.
If I am truly an earthquake that skips across the top of this lake like a stone—the call, the silence, the answer—then you are certainly the rumble, the crack, and the looming boom of an overpriced subwoofer.
But while the military movies echo in your lungs, and I can hear the Marines say “Kill!” to indicate the change from jumping jacks to push-ups in their workout routine, my lungs are filled with the last cache of grenades, a secret fire that prepares me with talk of war.
And I thought those secrets would guard me, but I had not expected your hidden winking eye. Blink, and I’ll bury you.
Oh Cubism, you silly little ball-gag of artistry
This is a little play with the idea of cubism. I really like the idea of this and there’s still so much room left for play! (sorry, I’m a little excited–and for all those who wonder, I really do like cubism!)
“Rationalization”
Read the rest of this entry »
Brief and Bitter
“Four directions crash” down onto the pavement heading off four different ways.
As the bucket falls from the construction scaffolding, I wonder how fast it and I are moving apart.
I visualize the collision like I wish I could see epiphanies.
I am vaguely aware of the concussion and it’s subtle promise that the four of us will find our way back together, even if it’s on the other side of the world.
A chance meeting—something ventured. Talk of war.
Definition Exercise
Here’s a quick poetic definition that I did for an exercise in class. We had about 5-10 minutes to write, and this is what I came up with:
CHILDREN, A: n. 1) a single multiplying unit that in duplicity will create out-buildings for answers and use the lies they are founded on to create the expected desperation, brick-laying border-patrols, and spurious infidelities, but also to give rise to the primary counters in preface: hope, love, laughter, mainly justice 2) a curiosity that is more pronounceable than can be copied down, where the anti-person giving little sausages away in the antechamber is either post-modern, or in the right place at the right time
Digressions are beautiful, beautiful things.
I’ve taken my temptation, high concept, poem and turned it into a digression. This is an initial draft of that; although, I’m preparing a rewrite for tomorrow and will post a follow-up then, assuming I get it done. I like how this worked out, enjoy!
“I am temptation.”
Read the rest of this entry »
Low key in high concepts.
This is a prose poem I drafted recently that has a similar distinction as a high concept poem. Like say Billy Collin’s poem “Nostalgia,” which embodies nostalgia without using the actual word and evokes a strong feeling, this poem is my take on temptation. Still an early draft, but I’m pretty happy with where it’s headed. Enjoy!
“I am temptation.”
Read the rest of this entry »
Exactly–a look at draft 1 and draft 2
So I wrote a comedic list poem about being an egg, the first version is the original draft, which is loosely based off some prewriting. The second is a rewrite of the first, bearing in mind that the first was pretty awful. My poetry teacher nodded knowingly, not laughing mind you, at the first draft, and although he was polite about it, it wasn’t the matter at hand, so we didn’t have time to discuss just how awful it was. It met the criteria; it was not a good poem. Anyway, you get to see both drafts–I’m not necessarily settling on the second draft, I just think it’s a vast improvement over the first. And I decided to post both because I think it’s cool to see how the writing process can play out.
Read the rest of this entry »
The Quest Continued!
I’m trying to find a story to tell, and it’s proving a little difficult. I’ve put together a couple of starts, and I was sort of fond of this one, so I thought I’d post it here.
Lara was the kind of girl who wanted to talk in riddles but never quite had the knack for it. She also frequently forgot her need to be ambiguous, so towards the end of the month it would pile up like a quota. At the end of March, before she moved back to the city, she told me that I was her skyline, and that the best rhythm was to be found in the foothills. I’ve never devoted so much thought to so few words: perhaps, she meant that amidst the ruckus of the big black buildings, backlit by the falling sun, she would think of my home as her home, but the land around where I live is flat to a fault—I have no foothills.
Here She Be -- The Battlements 