Lesson 10-11

Language Poetry…… Lesson 10-11
How is it possible to write a poem without meaning?
So I am entitling this post lesson 9 and ten because I looked a head. This movement sort of makes sense to me. Although I have to say that isn’t the meaning of a poem always dependent on the perspective of the reader? Perhaps it would be fair to say that this movement is an exaggerated form of that concept.
When I first read China it seemed like his phrases were vaguely familiar like I was recalling fragment of old memories. So it was pretty gratifying finding out how he constructed the poem. At the airport I have a habit of doing something similar, which is I sit in the terminal and write sentences about all the people passing by . People in airports are so strange. It’s such an interesting union of so many different cultures and ideals. It’s also a pretty interesting writing exercise if you’re super bored. I wish I would have kept them and arranged them poetically.
How elegant is it to think of poetry as a box you open full of old photographs to which you arrange their captions. Also, even though the imagery of China was abstract it still managed to be universal.

Anyway here is my first poem “That makes no sense”. I couldn’t resist tying it all together by using the last word of the line to begin the first one. It reminds me of a popular ad on TV that is about miscommunications of search words. I took this concept, and I guess it’s pretty much the same thing but instead of being on the internet it’s in my stream of thought. This poem is circular it essentially ties itself together, which I did to try and minimize the randomness, and give the reader at least a small sense of structure. (Maybe that is a bad thing?”)

copulating bacterium in a dying fridge
Fridge, a utopian world in which we grow older slower
Slower, no even slower, watch the crumpled dreamers fly
Fly down here bird, and tell me what it is like
Like when we went to the beach and forgot to swim
Swim in blue sadness till the doorbell rings
Rings are always coming round, always touching what happens next
Next we go home to see sun people water the floating daffodils
Daffodils smelling like warm honey dripping down my shirt
Shirt, pants, and shoes…. We only think we need them
Them. Who the fuck is them or they….
They are everywhere: the pseudonym for the no ones
No ones going to know
Know this there is nothing else I have left to say
Say it again, Just one more time
Time to go little girl the freeway is going quiet.
Quiet like me, quiet like all this broken turning time
Time has the raining song to say
Say it: I know you know
Know how we were on the sand with the No ones
No ones went out to hear they
They have no use for the people of them
Them a world you find written on your shirt
Shirt , I mean Shit, I am allergic to Daffodils
Daffodils, are always the next
Next nothing did the satellite rings
Ring, the motion of the plastic swim
Swim so that they will know what you are like
Like me or let me fly
Fly so the world will go slower
Slower here in the fridge

Okay, moving on. You know how when you don’t do your homework, and you show up to class and give an excuse. Just once I would like to pull a John Cage, and say: “here it is, these blank pages represent the hours of time I spent thinking of this project. Here take them, they are all there. In the end I realized that I cannot define with words the answer to your question. I think only this emptiness is profound enough……… etc etc..” My teacher would probably think I was high, but just once it would be nice “You know turnabout is fair play.
Often it seems that Language poets employ a stream of conscious. As always there has to be the question of where the filter lies. On the other hand the complex patterns shown in the examples are very reminiscent of poets who created poems on stressed and unstressed syllables.
For me the truth is I prefer poetry that you don’t have to explain. That you understand what the writer is doing, and why. I don’t look at Ron Tilman’s Tjanting and say wow the Fibonacci sequence. Which is not to say I didn’t like the excerpt, just that I didn’t appreciate it for its patterns.
My poem was created in the spirit of Ron Tilman’s Tijanting. I mad e the procedure my own by make each word a prime number of letters, is numerical order. The procedure of it has eclipsed it’s meaning perhaps creating a Language Poem. Although it is short it took a lot of time.


We can steer today’s sharpened cosmopolitans
To the world abashed drowning
By our saved trappings wallpapered nullification
Do not plead abashed languages silhouetted
So for babul
So for cries
So for those
We can drink startling testimonial decompensated communitarianisms

Lesson 9

The term modernism seems to be very misleading. Modern infers something that is happening now, that is new and fresh. But in art it refers to a movement that is fairly old. I am often confused by discerning the difference from present styles and the modernist styles. However, I can’t help but smile when I hear someone say, “Oh that is so modern” and think that the vast majority of the population doesn’t really know what that means. To be honest I am not quite sure what is modern and what isn’t? For instance something could be I had a little epitome, that perhaps Ernest Hemingway could be a modernist. Yet he seems such an old (and forgive me frumpy) classic that has been the backbone of many English classes I have taken.
I have to say that out off all the movements the Beat poets are my favorite. Allen Ginsburg’s Howl, has often been called the last great poem ever written. I don’t believe that, can’t believe that, but still it is a masterpiece. .It was so raw, so complete, and still relevant to this generation. I think Howl more completely defined its time period more so than any other poem.
I don’t know does labeling something as being modern a death sentence? If something is labeled modern, it’s like saying this is as new as its ever going to get.

Anyway don’t really like this poem I wrote, but maybe someday I too can Howl.

Have

Have you heard of all the little people that live on the hill?
In their secret fucking, while yearning for candy colored cars
They are all the same, consumption addicts.
hear the secret yearning winding through the streets
“Suburbia is not real”
Screw the American dream. I’ll paint my picket fence blue.
Give me to the sinners, the outcasts, the nobodies……. The loneliest.
We will wander together, we will wonder together
We the first born of those people on the hill
they have no shame that congregation
they are their things
let them rest in peace.