at the end of the line : instances of provisional community these are
—times of increasing instability
are times of opportunity—opportunity
cut for meaningful change.
Fascinated by poetry and instability—of the oral, of the multiple,
the version of the ephemeral,
of format and platform, of chance
encounters (arisen by the prepared mind of circumstance—imagination
perhaps), of the informed found, of the hack . . . i give succour instability of the
text. A temporary and spatial stability.
In an even insouciant cut that is yet the decisive moment of ending a line, wondering how instability moves, what governs the compositional shapes of poetry? As moving live embodied sound, ephemeral and dispersing, or on record as an object—image with diff-other temporalities—where we (not royal papal or presidential we but provisional communities of writers and readers both micro and macro performers of meaning) and through which engines and agencies we—many find poetry and make use of poetry as fierce performances of language between our unstable public and more private spheres.
Decomposing such wandering how close that sense of touring artifice might trail, i find wanting not to discuss how repetition sequesters surprise so much as how the bounds of illusory classical values can be moved so that privileged views built upon guarded securities of smug ownerships of meanings and means of production and exploitation and circulation can be shown to be undoable.
Pattern renders conditions of predictability and security compelling and interplays between what might be considered as melody, as rhythm, and as noise in patterns that a poem makes and intercepts both and modelling extemprovisatory methodolgies for distributed texts with the intent of generating conversations about document status—a documentary poetics—to infect the sanitation of the archive with poetic filth and spike the canon with radical inclusion until englishes replace English and the porous borders of plurilingual community
resonate.
Poetry brings linguistic forms into abserious play. artifice foregrounded and ringing
a cut above mimesis—reiteration playing tunes of opportunity.
Poetry occurs with microlinguistic intent like putting makeshift craft into a sea—
posting draughts on social media—an art of inkish projections
bleeding consensus tireless as the ludic doubts of
earning anything at all poetry imagines different work from labour configured
and exploited for financial profit—the production line and an oft-heard demand—
for poetry to have use value and counter arguments about the purposive inutilities
its processes produce.
Poetry releases production of meaning in the
cut at the end of a line—whilst each
cut documents constraint
performing a damaged
community healing, it can only
fail to govern meaning. True beauty.
Whilst a poem might seem to offer fiduciary profit, in an appropriate sense
of trust built and established and gained, models of work offered by poetry
run generously counter to exploitation
of one person’s labour by another stationed
for accumulated wealth as financial capital
with which the globe remains besotted still
and sick. Poetry services critical mirrors to power
offering empunked tools for we who suffer the
physical abrasions and psycho-geopolitical traumas
of power. Poetry does its work through language
to keep languages of thought inclusive of
reflection and contemplation and imagination free
language cannot be owned without exposing those who seek to own it to base ridicule.
[To ask for those freedoms is not equatable to demanding free markets or any other such nonsense concerning object manufacture.]
Beauties of poetry, found in fragility ephemerality ineffability enable poetry to continue to thrive . and these qualities have nothing to do with planned obsolescence but with units of composition made tangible.
Anderstood as an object on the page writ large or on a page writ with humility the page is an extreme of line as in graphic scores—of a voice or voices, or a voice with instrumental sound
as a partial document.
That whilst poetry has use as an exchange commodity . has slippery instability sometimes for professional advancement particularly in broad didactic and autodidactic spheres of symbolic objects it cannot blend oranges or brew coffee or carry passengers to an outlet mall exactly and it is not made by rote in a daily action of repetitions except in the most clichéd patterns of conceptualism that mock and mimic the production line.
I continue to make poems that try to portray eschewal of authority, both in their beginning and their ending. Bob Perelman once asked why i used centered lines saying such lines had the least authority. Confirming i seek to feed the humanimal biomachine into poetry
alert to histories of milling resources giving rise to forms that amplify including the recognition that autonomy is hard to encode including
variant ingredients for making ink and
transporting links into documents
and occurrences of pattern through formal and informal rhyme, partial internal rhyme, slant external rhyme, rhymes of homolinguistic listening for queered englishes . conceptual rhyme . metaphorical rhyme extending work by Lakoff and Johnson
performances of shape; the overall staging of an archi-text . appearances and disappearances of text in space
far more than the clanging often clanking bells of olden rhyme
the question of what happens at the end of a line even a line running the full scope of available print capacity performs one of the most compelling aspects of a poem simply because it puts so much thinking about visual and sonic and semantic shape into play
among generative tensions between community and discontinuity . opacity and transparency . ambiguity and closure suspended . paused . anticipated . playful stretch with network flows . bridges and links . integument and connective tissue
I wish i wrote plain speech the meaning of which could be easily absorbed but i don’t think that i do. Or maybe i think that i don’t but i do. Maybe i have no depth at all but am all surface artifice without position unattunably estranged an unlikeable digging deep into the surface of things. Maybe i am more compelled by discourse than by holding a pose and sustaining that poser, as one is all too often expected and expectant to do when taking a stand and exhibiting oneself.