Read slowly to the accompaniment of Brian Eno's "Compact Forest Proposal" .youtube.com/watch?v=ElFraEXb7Q0 start at 12.15
The river falls steeply
Hammered it out
Straight from the shoulder
Nothing but dead weeds
Inscribed upon this plum pit
For years to come
No place for you
No mood for celebration
Words written over
Pleading with my voice
Floating toward bursting stars
Comes running from the garden
It became a game
Nobody would tell me
Hurried down the hallway
Then the parade
Oranges under the bed
Drawn to old graveyards
Things ancient to me
From candle to grave
Between the white peaks
North of the village
Pursuing other-wordly theorems
I smelled it, touched it
It was like this
Woven into the fabric
The corrosive threat
The imperiled swimmer
Lost long ago
The crest of a mountain
Between place and child
See the daily suffering
We are somehow separated
Humiliated, abandoned
We can raise ourselves
The revolution of the age
There is a story
Shouting at the sky
Recording their experience
We wasted so much
In the time remaining
And forget about others
We can then view the guilty
The target was softened
To bring to life
A meditation class is held
Is not really optional
Impulses stronger than
The childish question
Although I had no map
From night to night
Sources of truth
Virtually a torrent
Free of the defect
Damage to our future
Well, well, well
Episodes of near disaster
The tinkling hoofs and
Such as electricity
What's in the wind?
But he knows better
Last hallucinatory second
Poison of the serpent
With the waning moon
Into the black hole
I'm nearly five years old
Suddenly got loose
The lovely measures
Science has explained nothing
Hide away the corpses
Gravitational lens
Washed out in the corona
I will close my eyes
Enclosed in shells
A new kind of static
A wiser intelligence might
Half the town was there
And forget about others
Wind is going to blow
One million times fainter
White against a stone
...........
Books used:
Ill Fares the Land Judt
The Astronomer's Universe Friedman
A Spirituality of Resistance Gottlieb
Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril Kathleen Dean Moore
Trace Savoy
Ask the Dust Fante
The Snow Leopard Matthiessen
Ulysses Joyce
The Book of Beasts T.H White
comments:
The technique I use to write these more experimental poems has awakened my sleeping . . . I am tempted to say my dormant . . . how about comatose muse. In this technique I pull a handful of books out, select a bunch of non sequitur phrases, randomly reorder them and, with virtually 0-tweaking, accept the results as an oracle that has very little of my hand in it. What is exciting for me is that this technique seems to open a way for me to unleash my intuition which, in most of my poems, despite my best intentions, defers to (defaults to) my ego and to a more conventional (and linear) poetic blueprint. So, with this new kind of poetry (which is not stream of consciousness but something else), I get a mix of worldly and otherworldly images and hybrid, completely unpredictable, metaphors. The music provides an atmospheric element that slows down the read.
When I get lines like these (below) it excites me the way it excited me back when I was just starting to write precocious poetry as a teen, following TS Eliot's lead, I would trust the language to take me places that were outside of my adolescent boy-man mindset, expanding my consciousness (without drugs!). (TS Eliot taught that language has its own intelligence.) What I am doing is mining the intelligence of pre-existing sentence fragments and grouping them in chance-constellations or stanzas, so the intelligence of each phrase is synchronistically linked to the intelligence of other chance phrases to create a brand-new narrative. So, I think what this foray into "oracular" poetry is doing for me now is expanding my frame beyond any conventional points of reference . I don't know where this experiment is leading, but I trust it.
I consider these stanzas to be the core of the poem, "Between place and child". When I first read them I experienced a little of the excitement of reading someone else's work while knowing that it is original to me. I don't know how else to explain it, but, as I say, it evokes the ecstatic rush I experienced when I first started writing poetry that was more about the language than any other factor.
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