Poetry: John Olson
Introduction to the Poetry of John Olson
by Joseph Donahue
A longtime Seattle resident, John Olson was officially initiated into poetry in August of 1966 when, rifling through junkyards for car parts with friends, over the radio came “Like A Rolling Stone.” That hit of surrealism altered all. Looking to voyage into the marvelous as it was further revealed to him by Highway 61 Revisited, a copy of “Le Bateau ivre” fell, by sheer objective chance, into his hands. This led, by way of medieval balladry and the works of Helen Adam, to the poetry of Ron Padgett and Ted Berrigan, which further led to 1991: John, sitting on the # 10 bus, reading Clark Coolidge’s American Ones. A man takes the seat beside him. The man will turn out to be Herb Levy. The man notes what John is reading. The two talk. The Subtext collective, an extraordinary gathering of poetic talent, begins.
In the later nineties, in the downtime between the wide range of Subtext events, (readings, a study group, performances) John might be found paging through Merleau-Ponty, or Bachelard, or Proust in the original (he was teaching himself French). To unwind, he might fashion a Spanish version of Poe’s “The Bells,” by way of homophonic translation, into a deranged performance piece: from “Las Campanas” arises “Lost Camp Bananas,” a text ultimately set to music by Frank Youngblood. John’s combinatory extravagance, his descriptive precision, his vitalizing vocabularies, have always been deeply in sync with his honesty, his charm, and his possible direct access to information beamed, courtesy of Jack Spicer, from Mars.
From the start, Olson’s poetry was a wonder. Amid the Subtext members a press got started. Its first purpose was to publish his inaugural chapbook. (Jeanne Heuving’s wonderful poetic debut, Offering, followed fast.) Since Swarm of Edges, put out by BCC in 1996, nine books of poetry have poured forth, intensifying and extending the vortex of plenitude that is his work: Echo Regime, Free Stream Velocity, Oxbow Kazoo, The Night I Dropped Shakespeare on the Cat—his new and selected poems; Backscatter, Larynx Galaxy, Dada Budapest (not to mention four novels!). Readers of these are well aware: every page of Olson is a firehose of phanopoeia, casting images not only on our minds, but into them, through them, and out their other side. His poetry is an unceasing continuum of sight and sound, taste and touch, of sensual immediacy and abstract thought. Daily experience is transformed, rendered celebratory, through sheer linguistic delight. However outlandish the utterance, however devious the digression, or pained the disclosure, an Olson poem conveys and keeps a somber promise, that words will not fail.
Thinking of John, I sometimes think of Whitman’s great poem, “Song of the Rolling Earth,” and am made alert to a sometimes pained and bewildered undertone in Olson’s poetry; a despair lurking that language can’t quite redeem. A gentle mania of naming, yes, but also an invigorating worry, pressuring his poems to testify, again and again, on behalf of life. Accompanying the voltage of invention, the wacky wit, the extremes of lyricism, the startlingly specific dailiness rendered with enviable precision, the bursts of personal candor, is the ghost of doubts and setbacks and griefs. I sometimes think that the multitude of words that would become his endured an excruciating tedium before he came along, whatever the discourse they found themselves in. John’s words are perpetually grateful for the new life they have in his poetry. Even after so many books they fly wild for a while upon entering a poem, but then, fond of their fashioner as they are, they return to him, and freely take their place in the flow of his cadences.
Years ago, I dedicated a poem to John. His poetry had performed the small favor of returning the world to me at a time when I had little interest in receiving it. His lively hymns reached into the subtle gloom of the Pacific Northwest, where I was living at the time, and reached deep into the months after an immense personal loss. His poetry became a light, an elixir, curative, goofy, charming, affable, inventive; touched by death but offering me a different world than that within which I was grieving. And yes, it was raining. It was raining a lot. Read what follows. You will feel better about whatever the place you’re in when these words reach you. //
Introduction to Julian Semilian
Julian’s films are mesmerizing. They don’t really go anywhere, but there’s so much going on, they don’t need to go anywhere. His “electronic paintings,” as he refers to them, are collages of spectacular lamella, membranous folds, and intricate relations with no rational organizing principle to connect their interactions. They’re pure inventions of the imagination. They’re full of play and humor and share a similar sensibility with early filmmaker Georges Méliès. They also remind me a great deal of the collages that Joseph Cornell assembled out of found objects — postcards and parrots and ballerinas — which he mounted in glazed boxes. Cornell created magical relationships by seamlessly combining disparate images. Julian does much the same, but his collages are animated; they interact like mermaids and Tilt-A-Whirls in a universe of hypnopompic meringue. They have a sweetness at their core that belies the pedestrian and often tragic world outside their anomalous dimension.
Julian has a special fascination with fish. One often encounters fish undulating gracefully amid pulsating colors or hanging vertically in a dark window while a distraught queen nervously rubs her hands and sighs and gazes around looking for an answer, a resolution to a problem only she knows. Her anxiousness reads like a reflection of the human condition, the ever-increasing mood of uncertainty in which we find ourselves. But why fish? Why the ubiquitous undulations of fish? One could easily say “why not fish?” But really, why fish? Fish live in a medium of fluidity and ribbony undulation not unlike the thaumaturgic realm of cinema. Their eyes bulge. They have marvelous wavy fins, thin membranous structures that I sometimes see in the connective tissue of words, and it makes me want to build an aquarium of words, a big glass case containing everything I don’t understand about the world, or the universe, and whose mysteries counteract the despair of knowing, the treachery of appearance, and the jaws of routine.
— John Olson
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Introduction to Nico Vassilakis
The Roman alphabet doesn’t lend itself to art. The letters are stiff and cumbersome as hockey goalies. The Roman script isn’t pretty like Georgian or Gujarati, flirtatious and cosmic like Hebrew, or squiggly and tart like Arabic. But Nico injects those stiff old Latin letters with the liquid vibrancy of color. I can feel my eyes pop out of my head every time I look at one of his works. Everything is scrambled and buoyant and untethered from their function as semantic rickshaws. It’s like inhaling laughing gas. The alphabet has become a blowtorch. The welder lifts his helmet and nods to the apparitions dancing on the walls. Is life a simulacrum, or a nexus boiling with paradigms and saints? I think it’s the mad swirl of letters on a black background. I think it’s the word ‘radio’ in blue at the bottom. I think darkness is a source of light and that a human being can be like that. Cracked ivory keys on an old piano. The deep resonance of the word ‘radio’ split like particles in a Hadron collider, the splatter of atoms, white letters condensed in a ball like a white dwarf exploding into a delicious ambiguity.
I first knew Nico as a poet. He’s one of my favorite poets. So I was a little puzzled to see him go in the direction of asemic writing. But I thought about it and it made sense: when the search for meaning becomes tedious because the counter is glass and we can look down and see all the watches and jewels carefully mounted and itemized and that isn’t life. Not that we’re looking for life, but if we find something that lights us up who wants to turn your back on it because it lacks linearity or the social cohesion of softball? An asemic explosion can be hilarious and hilarity is always good. Even the door has a singular beauty if you gaze at it long enough. The value of the internal is in the hallelujah of the skin. If you go deep enough you don’t even notice the current. Language is the glue of our species. But if you explode it into a universe of color and open your mouth the universe might fall out.
— John Olson
All moving images by Julian Semilian; all still images by Nico Vassilakis.
Nudie Suit
There sits my hat on a corner of the mirror, waiting for a crowd of people. It tries so hard to be an amphetamine. I would love it if, at will, I could shut it down, shut my thinking off and float. My hat would like that. Most of my thoughts about the world are negative, I’m sorry to say. Kant’s noumenon is walking toward me a few inches above the ground, wearing a funny hat with an ostrich plume. Do I need another hat? In Zazen, according to Shunryu Suzuki, if something comes into your mind, let it come in, and let it go out. It will not stay long. When you try to stop your thinking, it means you are bothered by it. Do not be bothered by anything. Unless it’s a hat.
Or a Nudie Suit. There’s nothing timid about a full moon, so why should you? Don’t be timid, it only leads to boldness. And boldness to baldness. And baldness to badness. And badness to goodness. Which is modesty. Which is a kind of moral bas-relief. Something timid in the cement of Being that wants to emerge a little to express itself. A little story of dragons and angels for the passersby. All of them enigmatic. And timid.
I’m only timid when I’m wet. My love of leaves is second only to my understanding of rain.
I live near the mountains yet I rarely mash potatoes at night. That’s how strong my love is. You might say it’s just a feeling but I think it’s more like a solution. Think of me as a vagrant with the rustle of tinfoil creating bonfires at the border. Intensity frightens people. Therefore, it won’t be necessary to trickle metaphors like the great comet of 1577. Some of us walk around with a handful of words all of our lives until someone remembers to speak them. And then they play openly among themselves creating folklore and oratorios. Mountains wrapped in morning.
The day is a full spectrum of cocoons and locomotives. It invites growth. And ice cream.
I enjoyed learning how to do drywall. The parallels between construction and writing are pretty efforts at making words try to find a cure for history. You will need lots of rags to soak the blood. Perhaps a harpsichord for the narratives of the brain. As we descend the river, we see the weight of being alive. What happened to the people that painted the horses and bulls and cattle and bears in the caverns of Lascaux? I think they’re still here. Some work at MacDonald’s, others use heroin that’s even better. Me, I chew my food well and keep an eye on the railroad.
Have you ever seen the spiral staircase in the Loretto Chapel of Santa Fé, New Mexico? It looks like a strand of DNA. For reproducing paradise. In steps.
There’s a music in life that mimes the rhythms of the universe. The taste of communion. The virtues of adversity. The monsters of portent. The flotsam of thought.
Busy busy busy. Steel. The whole insane emphasis on money. Turn right. Turn left. Turn conservative. Turn liberal. Turn silver. Turn slug. The voice gets hidden in the body and becomes a broadloom. Vermilion flames of a biochemical dragon.
All works of art are founded on driving in heavy traffic. Road rage. Columbus Day. Arthritis. I mean, if I punch the wall as hard as I can with my fist, it will hurt like hell and I might make it semantic by using a little quantum physics, a little mambo and bullshit. But that’s not art. That’s Via Dolorosa. The world isn’t black and white. It’s whatever words I can find to describe it. Which, of course, it also isn’t. The sky leans over the horizon and pours eternity on the world. The real one. This is the real world. The one a surgeon sees pumping like mad in a warm chest.
Every time I see a skull I think of that scene in Hamlet. I find it significant that Yorick was a jester. An existence aware of its own inevitable end needs laughter.
Comics are having a tough time these days. An abundance of material while a pandemic rages and Cancel Culture runs around destroying careers. The ultimate outcome of cancel culture is a canceled culture. The woke are often the ones least awake.
Here he comes again: the ghost of Bob Hope. Why Bob Hope? I was more of a Bill Hicks fan. And I love Maria Bamford. Who’s very much alive. Life is hard enough without making things more difficult, & yet it is certain crazy emergencies that surge up & down our spines that create a willingness to experience life. Anguish is a sharpening tool. Welcome my friend to Planet Earth. Give a big kiss to Missouri. All the borders are imaginary & all the rivers are stories. Nothing ever turns out the way we expect it. So go ahead. Make something up. Who’s going to know the difference? Besides Bob.
Vision Radio 2
The Drill
I bought a drill today. I own a toolbox and there are a number of places to get at the leaky pipes. The leak got fixed, but I repeated visits to slather on the drywall mud. Fortunately, one of the gaping holes gave me another hole to experiment on. And then I remembered that the 700-mile-long Cascadia Subduction Zone is prone to big quakes in cycles of 200 to 300 years. And so I thought fuck it I’ll get a nice rubber handle that feels pleasing to the grip. The first screw was extremely tough going. I had to get an erection the lumber used for that job was ironwood. Now I knew. I knew I was drilling in the right place. Putting the mud on was easy. I added some pre-measured romance and smoothed it all out with a little more mud on Wednesday and let it dry. I needed to paint the wall but noticed a tiny nail-head sticking out. I have no idea where it came from. I did a little more sanding, then dabbed some supernatural chants on the finger poking out. On Saturday, I decided to go ahead and feel everything in the world with my right hand. When I finished I resumed the operation with my left hand. The primer stank. I had never smelled actual syntax before. It reminded me of ammonia with the windows open. It wasn’t long before I felt woozy and got a headache and my eyes began to sting a little bit. Then I felt poked, daubed, dabbed, smeared, smudged, massaged, fussed, and brushed until my sense of reality became blunders, misunderstandings and bad decisions. This is what happens when a little poetry coming out of our life begins to do every dumb thing you can imagine. My head is now a bin for Blu-ray. I enjoyed learning how to do parallels between pretty songs. A woman will always be screws that penetrate just so far, but never completely. There will never be a complete match between what I’m trying to achieve and the final thing that I managed to say, and fuck it up. Because language just does what it wants between the ineffable and making words try to carry that action. And it is in that space that my interaction with the language into which I was born, the language that surrounded me, that integrated with my being, that drywall ceases and being begins.
KX with f 1
East Tennessee Jamboree
Here it is the East Tennessee jamboree radical & perforated. Here he is the Father of Complication at the end of the long crushed day feeling cold as a nickel but fit as a fiddle & ready to go yeah yeah yeah play Bach on the harmonica. Play a sound sensuous as dolphins but big as sorrow. Play “River Hip Mama” play “Nothing At All” give Charlie Musselwhite a call & invite him over. Dream that you went to venerate something & found a revolt against muzzles & a Christmas tree committing a sorcery of lights in the twinkle of a thermostat. Here’s a big bowl of punch poetry & rum & a Rembrandt pincushion rendered wet & chiaroscuro. So hey let’s hang & sway to the sound of the English parliament. Here’s United World Wrestling wrestling a book into full submission. Let’s stay up all night listening to Ian McKellen read Ulysses. Let your diseases come out & show us their symptoms in glorious Technicolor. My conception of illness begins with a reconciliation a smack on the cheek by a slobbering but well-intentioned gorilla & a novelist streaming consciousness about a romance with himself. The couch is nice. Celebrate the couch. Each cushion is a sample of form versus formlessness. Think of this as the kind of heft you can find in a sentence swinging back & forth like a pickaxe in a gold mine. Adjectives are rarely so obvious that you can internalize them like hurricanes of description. Food is a loud way to climb into your mouth did you ever think about that? Could these subtleties induce you to agree that we’ve all been exhumed from a timepiece & the crack in the window just had to be a tie because the collar on the shirt over there is a jellyfish whose charm keeps on flashing? We all correspond to something. I’m beginning to be waves in motion. Let me pull you into this sphere of angels & drive all night watching the sky as it mutates into a big idea. Let’s enliven the color mahogany with a voice. My cylinders are all pumping this malt into an attic of sounds. The body embodies broods of prospect. We’re captive to an abstract thrill. A midnight choir. A laconic prolixity. The whole hole is imponderable. Just remember to sort through your socks. Big emotions are orchestras of propagation. You can do it. You can get engaged in the arctic. Engaged with the arctic. Articles of the arctic. Reinvent yourself. Write yourself into a saga. Let your fingers linger in a fold of warm skin. The proof is in the pudding.
Zebra Jumper
A pulse is good for the cold. The fire is hard to get going. A frantic aporia cries for apparitions, glittery decoys and water walking through itself. The capillaries in my eyes are emblazoned with fire and empire. There’s a door in my mind that eats the motel stationary and spits a novel out. I’m calling it The Adventures Of A Tired Eyelid. The clouds pulse with lightning and the wind is from the north. Syllables unravel rainbows and aspirin. Things will come clear eventually. They always do. I stand beside my hunger and saddle the sunset. The dying of the day is important to stepladders and engravings. It’s the way they drip. And sometimes I just sit and think. I gaze at the surface of things. Depth is implicit in the milieu of bevels I’m bringing to the new pavement. There’s a moose in the middle of the melon and I go mingle with the crowd to find out what all the excitement is about. The United States, it appears, is a failed state. But really, did it ever really exist? Wasn’t it just a dream in which various cruelties were dismissed and a frantic search for gold turned into Hollywood? Imagine. A bearded man dreaming of an agrarian utopia motorcycling down the raw asphalt of God’s longest highway, the American flag flapping behind. I have become a waterfall. I have become a reflection on a downtown window. One must adapt to the world in the best way possible. Romance becomes beautiful in its obsolescence. I find metaphors a little ridiculous at this point in history but I don’t know what else to do with them except put them in writing and open a door to yesterday. I turn the knob the door opens and Jesus! there stands a neighbor bug-eyed with fright. Mingyur Rinpoche, Tibetan Buddhist Master, suggests observing whatever thoughts float through our heads without focusing on them or attempting to suppress or pursue or modify them. Just let them come and go. Because that’s what they do: they flash and turn to vapor. The cat lies on her pillow licking her belly. There is coffee brewing on the stove. Does Denny’s still exist? I can’t remember the last time I saw one still open and functioning. That tier of Seattle seems to have been wiped out by the tech industry. The Dragon, a big tanker from Nassau, fills with grain at Pier 86. I see the shine of a battery wedged in a crack in the sidewalk on 5th Avenue North. We stop to examine a tiny black and white spider, Zebra Jumper (Salticus scenicus), on a railing of the West Galer Street Flyover. A middle-aged man and woman emerge from a tent I’d noticed earlier under the Magnolia bridge. It was so utterly motionless and quiet before. I’ve never told anyone “you should sit down and write a novel it’s easy anyone can do it.” Nor will I. Because it’s not. It’s ultimately the little things that capture my attention. We hold these truths to be self-evident: reality is mostly breath, dirt is grounded in the truth, space bends, and poetry is the sad, extravagant result of mirrors.
Twelve American Cities 02
Amy Winehouse In A Silk Blouse
I like phantasmagoria. I like putting words together. It’s the intensity of detail that makes a barn come into intimate understanding. It’s the cows in their stalls and the immediacy of things that bruises the mind with the ineffability of horn and straw and raggedy burlap bags, a universe of milk and warm mammalian breath. The umbrella doesn’t need you. The umbrella is its own barn. You must build your own fire. Blake’s tiger moves stealthily forward. My heart is a stone lined with crystal. La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona is revealed to consciousness and sits down dreaming of jelly in the pleasure of the daydream that’s growing out of this exercise in daylight, which is an insult to the senses. Empirical reality is just another magnet. The search for understanding begins with a foghorn and ends with a clarinet. Magnets are for the refrigerator. Words are magnets but they don’t belong on a refrigerator. They belong inside the refrigerator. The computer is a refrigerator of words. The refrigerator is just a refrigerator. But taking a bath in a dilapidated house is like getting splattered with punctuation. Semicolons and commas come out of the shadows and overlook the rocky Oregon coast. The most exciting thing about 1979 was a solar eclipse in Yakima, Washington. We boarded the bus near midnight. It looked like a scene from Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the one with Donald Sutherland, which came out the previous year. In the early morning mist rose from the Yakima river. It was ghostly. Phantasmagoric. You can see where this is going. We’re entering the Realm of the Amphibious. Let me show you a frog. It will not be a real frog, but a frog in the form of long-necked sauropods grinding algae and plants with enormous peg-like teeth, would you call a reverie, which are amphibious by nature, syntactical by referendum. Phantasmagoria is scampering all over the keyboard hatching nocturnes. And this is called thinking, which is really just brain waves. There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so, said Hamlet. Brain waves are part of the swimming pool called a mind. All minds are swimming pools filled with beautiful frogs. Extremely beautiful frogs. Phantasmagoric frogs. With legs like flames and eyes like Angkor Wat. Expect jungles. Chameleons falling through buttermilk. Amy Winehouse in a silk blouse.
The Geometry Of Emotion
Do emotions have shapes? Of course they do. Everything has a shape. Despair is rhombohedral. It looks like a cube that's been sitting all day in a bar drinking beer and tequila. Hope is a spiral. It goes up and up until it can't go up any longer and topples over and goes down the stairs like a slinky. Anxiety is an amorphous blob that feeds on fear and valium. Joy is a giant exclamation point blinking on and off in the Nevada desert a few miles east of Sparks. Happiness is an oval glass bowl filled with ice cream, chocolate syrup and slices of banana. Hate is a sharp spear decorated with black feathers and the scalps of corrupt politicians. Resignation is watching the roulette wheel spin to the wrong number and it’s your last wad of cash and then you’re broke but a sweet feeling sugars the bitterness of loss because it’s only money and you’re still alive and can come back and win another day and hey nobody’s got control over a damn thing in this universe so really who cares do your best take a risk and any time you see something round remember it all comes back it all spins round and round and round. Reservation is a 325 square foot hotel room that you can’t have because you didn’t make a reservation. Calm is an imperfect hole in a glazed doughnut. Giddiness is a paralepidid sprinkled with amphetamines. Love is the dark matter making the universe possible and is the only emotion without an identifiable shape. Lust is the spherical generosity of a female breast and the curve of a bicep glistening with sweat. Timidity is the polygon of a stop sign. Boldness is the narrow blade of a Viking sword. Confusion is a parallelogram that arrives at midnight from somebody you don’t know but whose properties include duct tape, the wing veins of a butterfly & a thousand dancing shadows. Rapture is what floods through your body after swallowing three grams of psilocybin in an Oregon meadow on a mellow afternoon in late June. Exhaustion is what follows a major creative effort involving two moody actors, three hundred extras, two elephants and a mule named Bob. Anger is a cylinder of propane welding the pieces of a broken heart. Excitement is the asymptote of an arm brushing your arm on a first date that seems to be going well. Nostalgia is a YouTube video of a rock group remembered from one’s adolescence in the perfect shape of a teardrop. Horror is the extrusion of a bone. Craving is a tall glass of vodka with fluted sides. Awe is the sun cresting the ragged edge of a mountain. Sad is prismatic. Wonder is a leaf imprinted in stone.
Don Everly Is Hectic Faucets
Don Everly is still living. I can be loud. All it takes is some passionate conviction and a massage gun. Just think of all the mescal. We’re in a prodigal wilderness of boats and birds. We can get to quarreling about it if we can bring it all out into the open. Once I slapped a wave and shouted at the drops coming down as silently as the breath dashed against the windshield. I’ve seen gypsies on such a night return with bags full of bugs. Try sifting anyone with a little drama and you’ll find more than a few submarines lurking beneath the surface. Many good stories begin in Germany but don’t underestimate the benefits of being misunderstood. I take life one gun rack at a time. Meaning we are caught between two worlds. The world of the spirit and the world of brute survival. Daydreaming doesn’t lead to meat. It feeds the spirit but not the gut. My world has refrigerators in it, computers and clocks, but the cave is still very much with me. When I sit down to write I enter a cave. I enter a realm of darkness in which the light creates an eerie autonomy. Poetry comes from the cave, and so do elves and philosopher kings, dragons and ghosts. And I like a little extra jam on my toast in the morning. It took years to get here. My usual narcotic is a potato or lawn mower. Those harnesses on the wall give me something to chew on. And sometimes we just hang there as a farmer bites down on a Don Everly song. We’re all seeking solace. All it takes is a night with a full moon to move through space elegantly and with seeming purpose. Art is a box with a dream in it. What is it that puts anyone in relation with Being? Feeling rueful and swindled isn’t necessarily a good start but don’t let that discourage you. We’re here to talk about it. The best music is a sentence of ice and perseverance and the next precious days are celebrated for what they are. Wings in ensembles of black and horseshoes and jigsaws and science. Singing is always an option tangential to beginning a new life, the South Seas weighing like a voice on the next dance. The heart of the heartwood isn’t a heart it’s resistance. I was going to say peanut butter and then spit it out. Where have all the flowers gone? I just invented them and put them here a minute ago. When it’s freezing rub your scribbles with leather and inject them into the warmth of language. It’s something to think about. Feel the wind on your skin. Take a swig. Give me a shovel to describe the fires. Vikings swigging mead at a big broad table singing “All I Have To Do Is Dream.” Words do command a powerful reality of their own. I have to remind myself constantly that a rose by any other name is an energy waiting to come out of somebody’s mouth. Is there a tangible relation between language and external reality? No, of course not. And yes, of course there is. Both are true and not true. Reality is different than thinking. Reality is an amplification of the things that cause the next sensation, the next widening, the next opening, the next wave moving over an oar. And a new shade of blue.
KX with f 2
Azure Trance
Time is a slippery item it’s a cube of sugar dissolving in a glass of water a reverie with nebulous boundaries as if it existed by itself which is silly but mutational and so delicate it subsists in perception like reality the brain is a loom of unicorns and pork but within this equation there’s a teeming universe
Space is no longer distinct from matter its features explicit yet elusive erratic as a trout in a mountain brook but always in a profoundly personal matter the fact of eating consummates the idea of eating
An atmosphere of unreality surrounds everything these days time sags and slows near a planet geraniums germinating on a kitchen window sill the refrigerators on this island are a heteromorphic commodity I wince whenever I think of things I said and did in the past these are symbolic concepts shared with the world for whatever reason the energy of light is discontinuously distributed in space an ounce of memory a pint of oblivion it’s an entity that undulates that insinuates itself through old wooden slats I crave the heat of summer
I’m sick of this pandemic facial masks antibacterial sprays and wipes social distancing reality is essentially interaction the sun bends space around itself particles of light glimmer on the surface of the lake the fish are luminous the weight of the sun on my tongue
I dream of a literary object with talismanic power an energy undulating through the words making them actively engage with the world electrons only exist when someone or something watches them when they’re interacting with something else aerosols thrash and squirm in the air looking for a body to inhabit
Things fall because space curves red boats on a golden river a woman rubbing ointment on her arms in a Manhattan subway tunnel electrons quarks photons and gluons all impregnable all imaginable as hawthorn or mistletoe the idea of compensatory consumption that chronic aching need to touch things feel things it’s why I’m here don’t worry if you find yourself under siege you’ll find a gun in the glove compartment each of us is an ocean of blood
I’ve got five drawers in my mouth all full of letters from a past of typewriters and reciprocity how can we describe the curvature of space I’d like to find some fertile ground in which to plant my ideas an electron is a set of jumps from one interaction to another extracorporeal shock therapy is an effective treatment for heel pain it microscopically causes interstitial and extracellular biological responses and tissue regeneration
When ideas flourish they produce a lot of seeds general relativity is a compact gem a continuous restless swarming of things I can’t disengage from the world so easily we live in a region of humidity and mold these interactive leaps are random there’s only the probability that an electron will pop up here or there and the seeds contain intensities that emerge after years of indolence
I see zombies every day I go for a walk I’m sick of it where can I buy a horse our closet shelves are loaded with albums and photographs sets of vibrations happenings not things the life and sad end of Elizabeth Montgomery a burial mask with obsidian eyes
My memory is wet but my mouth is dry here I am mowing the lawn the sound of the engine is a jigger of spits and burps and the ears drink it in with all the other ambient sounds
Think of a community swimming pool and the voices of the old and young splashing over the surface echoes in the building I like to shuttle between perusal and reverie I wonder what it’s like to live on a submarine Haglund’s deformity is a bony bump that appears on the back of the heel bone equilibrium in a hot box imagine it all everything within your range and purview transforming into electrons and quarks words like packets or lumps of energy the same as light the burning Mediterranean sun and its dazzling sea hypnotic oratories perpetuate the trance
Election Night
It’s election night the U.S. has finally gone insane have a cigar buy a big boat buy a lever of transformation I already miss Sean Connery I miss warmth and light and music emotions big as waterfalls the originality of Rothko’s color the medium is the massage cut grass and rhododendrons
Will it come again will there ever again be a time of relative normalcy I’d settle for comedy Harpo’s lunacy expressed on a harp and the juiciness of French painting Apples by Paul Cézanne or Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed the gusto of the coast any coast bravado in the wind the thunder of falling water all the madrigals sung by rebels the pirates of Cornwall
Time is only a trajectory I need a hat a horse and a statement for the press this will be decisive for fashioning the next stage of history I can make things come out of my mouth that dance in the air like mischievous elves
Time is inexorable it can’t be stopped but it can be mediated via the gears in a clock Vivaldi Verdi Van Halen touch sensitive technology V is for velvet B is for bullshit this is what you call a metonym i.e. Wall Street Fleet Street Foggy Bottom tractor broken down mouths to feed the play of the northern lights over Manitoba near the North Dakota border
Writing is a form of refrigeration I hear a train coming our replays can guide us to the resolution of our stories and if our ideas are mummified by writing they can get up and shuffle around and find reasons to make life more palatable even for the living dead who walk among us denying universal healthcare and making speeches and shit
But wait a damn minute isn’t there more to art than just creating a spectacle there’s a great power in steam all it takes is a little heat and vapor to make that locomotive move nuances of desolation paint the house of supplication and this involves rare perfumes and succulent oils and anomalous intensities of hue which seem both familiar and unfamiliar because I’ve got an addictive personality and I’m always looking for the next thrill the next spinning of wires in loose and sweeping gestures thundering in your eyes Stevie Ray Vaughn bending a C note at the fifth fret on a ’59 Strat with a rosewood neck in a race between hot shadows and hot lights tactile associations of dirt and mud and silk freedom motive and power I’ve got a zeppelin to fly and a quadrille to dance
The ruby-throated hummingbird has a wing beat of 200 beats per second I’ve got the skin of an old man mortality scares the shit out of me I’m indigenous to the nibble of time and favor the monstrous jewelry of the transmundane Münchhausen’s audacity to pull oneself into existence by the hair Thich Nhat Hanh in a walking meditation I’ve always had the feeling that the right epiphany would come along when I needed it the series is set to premier in October
Each sentence is a probe trying to find a new reality discretion is advised we’re all naked under our clothes and if swimming is a gerund than it should also be filled edge to edge with evenly spaced motifs and quarter tones of shading and shadow I see Paris when I close my eyes and for that I am grateful we’re all still waiting for Nevada and North Carolina to count their ballots the whole darn thing is a pathetic charade there’s no actual leadership in evidence what is leadership is it charisma is it charm is it wisdom is it the illusory use of power à la The Wizard Of Oz maybe I don’t know but if there is a way to gain access to power voting isn’t one of them multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence so concludes a recent study by Princeton University politics is all theater a Punch and Judy show and really when you think about it how many of our choices are predetermined and how many of our choices are truly autonomous what does Nietzsche say I’m a warrior in snowshoes no he didn’t say that I said that and I don’t even own a pair of snowshoes nevertheless I could use a pilgrimage somewhere the goal as always is not to create a new reality but reveal what actually happens
And if that doesn’t work fuck it create a new reality the eyes penetrating into a fictive space the cat meanwhile pawing at her image in the mirror
Letter Isolation 1
Bippety Bippety Bop
Sometimes I just want to sit and go bippety bippety bop. I’m a fancy kazoo what are you?
Language allows us into the world, but it also blocks us out. Would a rose smell at all if it didn’t have a word attached to it? It would continue to smell. If you don’t believe me, ask a dog. Ask a bee. Ask the rose. If the rose talks back, I don’t know what to say. This would be a revelation. Humans have six senses, but how many people know what the sixth sense is? Or a binomial from a polynomial. Or a fractal from a Boolean banjo. I do know that irrational numbers cannot be represented as decimals because they would contain an infinite number on non-repeating digits, and this wouldn’t work without a battery.
This need to describe experience is acute with some people. And these people become frustrated and eventually with a certain amount of luck and Jack Daniels they become resigned to the ongoing inadequacy of truly describing anything, be it a broken heart or a dirty garage in Mosby, Missouri. There are people who excel at description. They make their descriptions so exquisitely accurate as to fully engulf the reader in the realities they propose. And it’s true that a lot of things are pretty easy to get across, as it were. Like the phrase get across. Getting to get across across is easy to get across.
But who can describe a catwalk on 49th Street? Or an elephant bubbling mud up from the bottom in a watering hole in central Africa. Are there ways to do this in math? What equation best describes the sound of a door opening in a condominium hallway around 8:30 p.m. in early January? Are there amicable numbers available for the asymptote of a chin strap?
Math fascinates me, although I don’t avoid the freeway. Not always. I have to be what I am, or think I am, which is temporarily salt and bezoar. A downturned mouth and two ruby eyes glowing with Gothic cathedrals. What counts is total involvement. The hibiscus abandoned to its own burning. St. Ives on the wings of a butterfly. The world is a nonlinear tablespoon. A big green bowl in a yellow kitchen in Poughkeepsie. And this will turn out to be another infinite set which cannot be put into one-to-one correspondence with Limoges porcelain, but must be preserved in the cupboard until they learn to multiply themselves, & join us in conversation.
When the gymnast sat down, she began a conversation with a somersault and finished it with an aposiopesis.
What strange relationships we have with our bodies. Eyes are windows. The brain is a cloud chamber, a seat of power & vapory conjurations. Metaphors hang like bats in a nocturnal syzygy of mind & matter. Thoughts blossom in milky lampshades & old wooden docks protruding into language. Sensations from the outside mingle with proprioceptive orchestrations of turbulent Finlandia. You don’t need to lie on a bed of nails to find the reality of one’s skin. Whitman: “And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?” I think it’s an alloy of lubricant & soup.
I love soup. But don’t hold it against me. It’s hot. Pleasures and displeasures are not always obvious. The experience of pain and pleasure is even more complicated. I can’t figure out a car engine and I can’t figure out the relationship between pleasure and pain.
Let me simply say I loved the blues, images in the street, and a poor dry river in the mouth. I struggled like hell to get that river out. I finally broke down and called AAA. They sent an expert out and took hold of a big fat sentence and pulled it out of my mouth. That’s it, I said, that’s the big dry river I’ve been trying all of my life to get out. Now there it is: convulsions, sparks, & cod. What remained of a soliloquy produced one drunken night when I thought I was Hamlet. It’s why I only got a C in diving. Every time I went to do a backflip I resolved into a dew.
Are there synonyms for wetness? Yes: sweatiness, sultriness, dampness, sogginess and humectation. Humectation isn’t used often, but it’s a sweet package. It comes with its own lagoon, masseuse and windmill.
I don’t own water. Not even when it’s in me. Turning to blood & urine. I don’t own urine. I don’t own blood. I don’t have a patent for any of these things. I didn’t invent fingers. I didn’t invent thumbs. Or eyes or bones or muscles or eyebrows. I never sat on an eyebrow committee. I never sat down & drew a tibia & signed it & called it my own invention. The tibia is not my invention. I don’t have a copyright, trademark, franchise or title on any of the atoms & molecules making all these things happen. They’re not in my possession. They’re borrowed. Like time.
To possess is to be possessed. This is why we need curtains. Great, thick, beautiful curtains. Venetian curtains. Austrian curtains. Charmeuse curtains with waterfalls and Keith Richards’s hands. You know those musty attics stuffed with old clothing and toys and National Geographics? That’s my brain. That’s ownership. Or at least a version of ownership. I’m possessed by rotogravures & ginger snaps. Can one be well in a world that is turning evil? My desk is a sanctuary. When I pull the flap down and put a book on it, it becomes dulcet in study.
In phenomenology this would be called an engaged attitude. Much of life is experienced as a sudden reduction in lift. Been down so long it looks like up to me, said Richard Farina. And was also the title of his novel. But it’s not always the case. Not life. Life, as they say, is full of surprises. It’s made up of up, down, charm, strange, top and bottom quarks. You can’t get to the top without lying on the bottom. It’s strange, but charming, like a carousel of pterodactyls.
Letter Isolation 2
The Origin Of Parakeets
Writing silk bathes my dachshund thermometer in jocund simultaneity. A shrewdly tossed wrinkle a massive snowfall and a box of doughnuts enter a bar and order a round of serendipity. The glaze of your gaze thickens my parlor cocoon. I will soon emerge to flock you. The shave drags my waves across the face of my effacement and it’s not enough to show how much I appreciate the lingering effects of perfume. I hear the greenhouse sputter in the moonlight. We guide excerpts of chipped symmetry through the castaway solace left here by a discontented civilization. It makes us feel subtle and spacious. I spend all day hugging the space station. I can hear the astronauts screaming inside. The decorations on my belt are the result of pastimes spent in various rocking chairs. If the firs are tall we will play among their shadows. And this shiny new moment is supplied by the slippery film on the surface of the water. The heart is a spoon for the metaphysics of oleomargarine. But that’s not me. I’m all about matter and motion and what it does to the sounds of the forest. It’s exhilarating to think about the angry hypothesis you left steaming on the table. The ride was unprecedented. I suppose you could say my rails are shiny but my train is floppy. It’s always been my aim to abolish trouble. Space is an incentive to taste everything lying around in the sentence. Syntax tastes like chicken. Predicates are also important. They are a chief cause of embodiment and swimming. You shouldn’t abuse your appetite. Eat a glass of milk. Indigestion is just a paradox. It contradicts my stomach with everything it has. Is this getting bombastic? I don’t know. You tell me. My shoes are mere bystanders. I crushed an obscure ceremony and watched all the glory ooze out and inhale a theology. Time isn’t real. But the clocks are. I watch the minutes go by hourly and collect all the data and stir in some consonants and serenades and sit back and watch the paragraph burst into parakeets.
A Cure For History
Is there a cure for history? For screams and explosions? For medals and dead children? You will need lots of rags. Narratives for the brain. There is never any one history. As we descend the river, we see television and golf and everything seems to be ok. There’s meaning for the sake of meaning and people floating into the unknown. Exotic luxuries to soak in our blood. Perhaps a harpsichord for the planetarium. Morning arrives in waves. You can write in the sand with a stick. When the events are small we call it a thing and when the events are big we call it a fire of golden light. The perfume leaves us feeling the full weight of being alive. What happened to the horses and bulls in the caverns of Lascaux? What did it smell like when the wick was burning in animal fat? And who, exactly, were the Goths? They were a northern people from Scandinavia and East Germany. There were two main branches of tyrants and myrmidons. Visigoths and the Ostrogoths. They spoke a language that is now the province of eagles. Iron helmets to go on ski trips to Aspen. Meanwhile, 43.1 million Americans live in poverty. And so a chronology moves forward, evolves, develops, matures. Food is eaten, words are written, ideas exchanged. Where do these things go? Is there a teleology? Does anyone know when the work is done? People in the United States have an odd relationship with leisure. Sensations are felt and usually dismissed, if they enter into our consciousness at all. Phenomena are always in flux. It’s hard to catch a phenomenon in the act of being a man or a shirt collar. Is time an illusion? Does time even exist? The roar of the gardener’s chainsaw prevents nature from going wild. Or so the bourgeoisie believe. They hire men to come and shape objectives of gasoline into formations pleasing to the eye. But if time is spent reading a book suspicions rise. There are subtleties and nuances so exquisitely singular that they require fumbling descriptions before they turn quickly to memory in the same way fine particles of earth turn to silt in the bottom of a river. You can call that a history, but it won’t ease the tempers flaring at a town hall meeting. If nobody can agree on a simple description of reality what can you call a history that purports to lend coherence to the chaos surrounding our lives? When the day is over, the cows milked, the furnace stoked, the laundry done, the fences all repaired, what then? Sit back in a big armchair and light a pipe of opium the way Coleridge did in the time when poetry seemed to matter. When druids danced in forests of oak. Ok, now we’re getting silly. Just do one thing before you leave. Take a plate of cookies and offer them to the police outside. They’re cold and hungry and could use a break.
Ghost 1
Night Raven Notation
Math fascinates me, although I don’t avoid the freeway. Not always. I have to be what I am, or think I am, which is temporarily an Arabic script. I think what I’m talking about is algebra. Beautiful symbols, beautiful writing. If you want you can cover your head with a newspaper. It’s just news. I don’t understand any of it. Whatever else they may portend, these prodigious trajectories, these transformative powers are just so much salt and bezoar. A downturned mouth and two ruby eyes glowing with inner fire doesn’t mean addition is a large, thick-skinned mammal. It indicates sorcery, a northern wind persuading the skin to put something on. I mean those bizarre symbols and storms and flapping tarpaulins keeping us awake at night are kindling to the flames of the intellect. We often find that the upholstery and rope used by acrobats can also explain sensory phenomena. In general, my state is rendered in letters, like multiplication and long division, and then rolled into a cricket of transparent quartz. On a good day you can see Paris. On a bad day you can do calculus in Chartres cathedral. As you can see, the ribbed vaults have been plunged into language, parabolas of life and death churning with contradiction. Is there a polynomial for this? Something like the origin of life, but even bigger, more like stone, or an ostrich at a strip club? Yes, I agree, a little hyperbolic geometry is good for the gonads and gets those irrational numbers going, but what about something weirder involving stress equations for the flying buttresses of Gothic cathedrals? Medieval builders used, at most, Roman numerals. For this we need to resort to the behavior of material as a continuous mass rather than as discrete particles. Continuums confer a generality to these things, a mathematics of charcoal that leads to high exterior towers topped by pinnacles. This would be a situation in which the given structural purpose is characterized by the integrity of the buttresses overcoming local tension. It even applies to staples. Human truths get joined together by explosive emergency room tempers. The stain of desire is everywhere. Consider a heart beating in the hand of a surgeon. What counts is total involvement. Complete focus. The hibiscus is a talking melody of sweat. Mathematics is the breath of angels speaking in the fog. One plus one equals moon. Buddhists refer to our inner life as a bitter ocean. The cold raw elements of life drooling corn starch in my current emotional state, which is a blend of anxieties and blunt, beaded lightning with a sodium base. My life is a never-ending song simple as a road. I’ve got a mailbox of sleep and a verbal auxiliary for the houses that must be built. I could not be a flying buttress. I have the personality of nitroglycerin. The obtuse angle implies a sleuth or Walt Whitman. Sooner or later the trees will multiply the sky and the goldfish are needed to serve Leibniz’s pi. Therefore, if density equals squirrels I feel a snow within falling, numbing the numbers with shinbones and shovels eating mirrors. Graves opening to the silence afoot in a derelict garage. The mathematical knife is a function of life. St. Ives on the wings of a butterfly. The world is a nonlinear tablespoon. A big green bowl in a kitchen in Poughkeepsie, New York, painted canary yellow with square floor tiles in shades of buttercream and golden wheat. And this will turn out to be another equivalent of parsley, infinite sets which cannot be put into one-to-one correspondence with Limoges porcelain, but must be preserved in the cupboard until they learn to multiply themselves, and join us in conversation.
Vision Radio 1
Language Says Yes
Things to do on Christmas Eve. Let your fingers linger in a fold of warm skin. Get drunk and riotous in a music studio. Fool around and fall in love. Learn to play the harmonica. Hang & sway. Venerate something. Venerate a bitchy but wonderful cook. Venerate asparagus. Venerate mashed potatoes. Mashed potatoes are the white satin at the Ball of Meat. Get radical. Get perforated by a piercing complication. Wrestle a disease. Remember to sort your socks. Find a thought you can distill in your mouth like wine. Pet a dog. Kiss a jellyfish. Reinvent yourself.
Language is a carnival. It has to be that way. Because The Grateful Dead are on the radio in Rock Springs, Wyoming. And I enjoy eating. And there’s so much of it. So much language lying around. Hungarian. Tagalog. Paiute. Can a pain be beautiful? Language says yes. Pain can be as beautiful as a full moon shining down on I-5 between Redding & San Francisco. Society is mostly hallucination. Each word is a daydream in the making, an old dark bar among its vowels. Elvin Bishop on the jukebox. Syllables dribbling from the ceiling like a chandelier of sound.
Language — as a classification of words — is a refractive medium for mental phenomena. It distributes phenomena in words, in order, and in phantasmal theories. The sentence is the phantom of an idea. And what is an idea? I have no idea. But I know one when I see one. Let’s be like that. Let’s be hardened by loss like an old piano with cracked ivory keys. Subtlety has a home in the sound of Arkansas. Would you like some whiskey? I celebrate the black of Rembrandt’s backgrounds. I have a bucket of paint for the sage of early morning. Life is immaterial. Scribbles in the air.
In the world of quantum mechanics, everything vibrates, nothing stands still. This is why we see antiques dancing on the walls, & a skull in the corner of the library teeming with Mallarmé. If space is fluid, there may be a cure for the clarinet as well. But it must be taken in abstract form or there is a tendency to smear the air with drums. And if you manage to keep your pants up, the world will reveal the magic of good soft linen, & forgive us our redundancies. Language is the glue of our species. Open a book. Go in & listen to the words sparkle with irrational beauty.
Style meets substance on the road ahead and is mostly ants going off in all directions. It’s hilarious, how disconnected I am from putting seeds in you. Is it difficult to find revelations in lather? Who would do such a thing? My life has been streams of consciousness punctuated, occasionally, by Jack Bruce on bass. Consciousness takes the power of a tractor. Thinking transpires in the Valley of the Moon. I do this in my mind because riding a horse is like sunlight passing through glass. Alpha Centauri is 4.367 light years from Earth. Jean-Paul Sartre appears with a bag of groceries as we appear on the margin of his perception. Meanwhile, here’s a coupon for feeling yourself. You can begin by pressing your thumb against the chin of this postcard, this queer emotion bouncing around in the ribs of a reindeer. And listen. Listen to this being inside you. This reconciliation. These silver bells, this jingly implication.
Ghost 2
The Greatest Whim Of All Time
The universe is a very weird place. Time doesn’t really exist. Time is an emotion. It swings from rib to rib like the pendulum it is, creating forward momentum, the unreality of a future, the accordion folds of a forever receding past. No wonder history gets so fat.
But it isn’t real. Time is not an inert flow along which reality unfurls its toys and topography. Time is not an absolute. It’s not a thing or a suburb or a strongly held belief. Time is a weave of probabilistic indeterminacy, granularity, and relationality. Fuzzy, abstract sashays of theoretical cuckoo. There’s a physics of poetry in which time is a stain on Natty Bumpo’s buckskin. And an astronomy of poetry in which the stars are Christmas bulbs hung on the gnarly old branches of a loblolly pine.
It is heat and only heat that distinguishes the past from the future. We live and get old: producing heat. Nothing is static. Nothing is put together by monks. It’s a variable flux. If I go looking for warmth, being old, being past my prime, I wander into the past. I find an old motorcycle and ride it to Neptune and back. I do wheelies on asteroids. I used to do this a lot. Get drunk, get down, and get out of the way. Go talk to the shadows. Those armadillos. Those ghosts boiling on the wall.
The poem complains of big city lights. It’s irritating, I know. But don’t brush it off the table. Not just yet. It might cough up something good. I feel like I want something but I don’t know what it is. Is this why life was created? It takes 200 harmonicas just to say rheumatism. The words crush their own cognition with a dumbbell. This is a mean old ugly world. But where else can you find such excesses leading to the palace of wisdom? Blake was right. Sobriety became my mid-40s. It was a colorful time. Feelings squeezed alchemies of golden luminosity out of the brain. And here we are again. Endless War with oneself. The more things change the more they remain the same.
Which, in this instance, is largely almond. It’s a tasty nut, and favors Mediterranean climates with mild, wet winters and warm, dry summers. The nut is encased in a shell hidden within a green, velvety fruit. This multilayering is precisely how things are in the writing process in which a central idea might be cogitating this minute in a juicy filling of contrariety and contradiction.
The skin toughens after chafing. And who isn’t chafing in these interesting times. Chafing inwardly, against the roughcast of one’s inner chambers. Chafing outwardly, against the glacial indifference of a depraved plutocracy.
Resilience is good. Try that. Try anything. Try surrounding yourself with pine. Forget John Wayne. That myth has run its course. It left without anyone noticing it left. And why are ghosts always involved? What we want – what we need – are umbrellas and cows. Symmetry. Taffeta. The tenacity of an ant but the transparency of an X-ray. Death is nothing. It’s Brian Jones smiling at Howlin’ Wolf. Poetry is an engine of ice idling quietly at a Cincinnati gas station. The pistons are ice. The wheels are ice. The axle is ice. Now for dinner I recommend lobster. Then get up and dance like you mean it. The mind dilates. And then you’re hooked on polyphony.
Reflections aside, what can we say about innovation? Innovation happens daily. Every minute. People invent themselves. Everyone’s an instrument, a potential source of music. And glamour.
Aberrations are welcome, too, of course. Electricity reddens the burner, and the water starts to boil. That’s called vaporization. Which unveils the valleys of Asgard.
There are doctrines on time. The best ones are written on old parchment. They kill time by existing in the wild margins between revolt and handshake. But who shakes hands anymore? It’s a lost art. For a time, people bumped elbows. It was casual. Informal, but cautious, hygienic. And now we all wear masks and dodge one another like pestilential bombs. A sneeze can be lethal. This is why the communion of sound is more important than ever. Melody is a glue joining ancient harmonies. Lost tunes. Forbidden Cities. Unsettling urges.
The enjoyment of music is oceanic. Its orgasms are hotter than a supernova. Music is a contagion of spirit. Its nudges are a voluptuous chaos.
Every time I hear Jimi Hendrix play it sounds like the whole universe is coming out of his guitar. Calculus is hydraulic and creamy with the sound of passing cars. Youth is what we pay the gods for the privilege of sex. Death is why old men play golf. Will I ever understand crustaceans? What is the modus ponens of doughnuts? What does it mean to have fingers and eyebrows? I think it means prepositions jump into the sentence and make it trickle into a serum of grammar and morpheme under the shade of a live oak at an Econo Motel in Florida. We are sometimes pushed into theories based on the way people park. And this confirms string theory.
Puppets mock the illusion of free will. This is another application of string. And objectivity. When was the last time I saw a lotus? I should put my flowers in my writing. Or at least wallpaper. Nobody likes a bare wall. Or this splatter of supposition. Let me pin this word to your mind: asylum. Let this be your junkyard. I’m not a refrigerator. But I play one on TV.
Speaking of which, what is going on in your head this minute? Wait: don’t tell me. Let’s keep it a secret. Let’s keep everything a secret. And then later, when the clock nears midnight, and the moon is full, we can let it out, let everything out, and open our mouths and taste what the night has to give us, be it rain, be it champagne, be it a mammogram of Amsterdam or the fluid dram of a razor clam.
We must be careful not to punish the whim or loiter in the ham. The whimsical Being as it moves toward The Greatest Whim of All Time becomes moose antlers. I wonder what I’m feeling when I’m feeling things. Tell me: what are you feeling? Are you feeling what I’m feeling? Are we feeling life? Fireworks? The whimsicality of existence? The answer to these questions is, of course, yes, yes, and yes. Hence, the faint odor of choice. Plug a noun into a sentence and what do you get? Predicates, whirlpools, and dice. Things happen because we let them happen. What seems like coincidence is a shattered mirror. The truth will appear differently to you than it will to a block of cement. Epiphany and shadow, the chiaroscuro of our daily life, are fragments of a story splattered in stars against the backdrop of eternity. Maybe the answer really is blowing in the wind. Richard II dropped by & said for heaven’s sake let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings. So we did. And the world turned silently in space while grace carried the tide, the fire crackled and the fog rolled in.
Twelve American Cities 01
Nico Vassilakis writes poetry about reading seeing and draws language that focuses on the visual jettisoning of letters from their word position. He has published several books of poetry and text/art. Most recently VOIR DIRE (2020) was published by Dusie Press. Vassilakis co-edited The Last Vispo Anthology: Visual Poetry 1998-2008 (Fantagraphics Books) along with Crag Hill and was a curator of several international visual/concrete poetry exhibitions. He currently lives in Greenville, IL with his wife and animals.
A SKÁLD’S GALLERY:
John Olson
1. August, 1964. As a present for my 16th birthday, my father gave me a parachute jump. It was my first and (thus far) my last jump. It wasn’t done in tandem, as they do now. I practiced hitting the ground by jumping off of an oil barrel. The chute opened automatically by rip cord. I don’t know what I would’ve done had the chute not opened automatically. It did, fortunately, though things did go a little sideways. I write about it in a prose poem (“The Birthday Jump”) included in Dada Budapest and in my autobiographical fiction Mingled Yarn.
2. My father took this picture in December, 1968. I was living in California and had flown home for Christmas. I was enrolled at San José City College. I did well scholastically that year, and was by then completely devoted to poetry and utterly captivated by all things Rimbaud (disordering my senses was achieved with relative ease) and French symbolist poetry. I was still frustrated by the crap I produced. I could see what Rimbaud had done — I knew the qualities I was looking for, but I couldn’t get it down on paper. I did get the look down pretty well, though.
3. This was my first published poem. The year would’ve been 1973, I believe. I composed the poem in my head while working in an old medical-dental building in downtown San José being remodeled for offices. I was a factotum, installing lights, sanding, painting, and general grunt work. I hung out a lot at an Elizabethan-themed restaurant called The Elizabethan Inn. You stepped in from the sunny California streets of downtown San José into a dimly lit scene of pots and pans hanging from wooden beams and hogsheads of ale and lager behind the bar.
4. This was taken in 1975, the year I returned home to Seattle more or less for good after 10 years in California. I was hoping for better employment opportunities. I was in a bit of a limbo, caught — like a lot of ambitious poets in an industrialized and capitalist country — with trying to find means of support while pursuing literary ambitions, chiefly poetry, but after discovering Joyce’s Ulysses, I now added the further ambition of writing a novel. Not sure what inspired the theatrics. I wasn’t that enamored of mowing the lawn. I write about it in Mingled Yarn.
5. This was taken in August, 2013. I’m standing in front of a giant, mural-sized printing of Rimbaud’s “Le Bateau ivre” on the Rue Férou in Paris’s 6th arrondissement, which happened to be right around the corner from our hotel. It blew my mind. I didn’t know it was there. This poem has tremendous significance for me. At age 18, in 1966, it was the first poem I’d seen that offered the kind of phantasmagoria and wildness I was looking for in poetry. It set the direction for my literary pursuits. Ironic, when you consider the poem’s turbulence and disorientation.
6. This was also taken in August, 2013, in front of the legendary address 27 rue de Fleurus, the apartment building where Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas lived from 1903 to 1938. Stein’s influence on my writing is huge. Unfortunately, no one offered a tour, so we didn’t get to see the actual apartment.
7. This was taken in January, 2015. Discovering Baudelaire at age 18 had a huge impact on me. It was the first time I found a rebellious spirit in relatively recent literary culture. The mid-19th century never felt that distant in time to me, and Baudelaire’s hostility to the oppressively normative and materialistic bourgeois culture struck a sympathetic chord in me. He was an early rebel. I’m looking a bit glum here, but it’s not because I’m trying to mimic Baudelaire’s sullen portraits. This was the week of the attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices.
8. My wife Roberta and I had the good fortune of enjoying some morning coffee with the French poet Michel Deguy, whose poetry I admire very much. This was taken in August, 2013. Deguy — who was then 83 — arrived on a bicycle. Deguy — who has a strong background in philosophy — has written brilliantly on Baudelaire, such as his monograph Spleen de Paris, published by Galilée in 2001.
9. My wife Roberta took this shot on our trip to Paris in August, 2013. It’s the one I’ve been using for my last few book publications.
10. Again, August, 2013. This was the summer that Notre Dame celebrated her 850th birthday. Eight new bells and a new tenor bell had been installed and the great organ had been renovated. I’m not particularly religious, but I do love these old cathedrals. I’m also a big fan of the 1939 movie The Hunchback of Notre Dame with Charles Laughton as the hunchback. That scene in particular of Laughton swinging madly back and forth on the big bell has a special place in my heart. It was heartbreaking to see the fire in April 2019, and to see the spire designed by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc come crashing down. It was like a preface to the global pandemic we’re still experiencing.
11. Clowning around in the Louvre.
12. This is a painting the artist Georges Braque was commissioned to paint for the Louvre in 1952 titled Les Oiseaux (The Birds). I wrote a novel following Braque’s evolution as an artist over his lifetime titled The Seeing Machine — published by Quale Press in 2010 — and was eager to see this work in its actuality. The simplicity of the design and color contrasts wonderfully against the detailed features of the ceiling.
13. I took this picture with the little digital camera I brought with me to Paris on that trip in August, 2013. I like using it as a background on my computer. I love staring at it. There’s something very soothing about rivers. I’m always amazed at the size of the Seine. It’s pretty much the same size as the Mississippi as it flows through Minneapolis, where I was born and spent my childhood.
14. Roberta and I standing on the Pont des Arts. It has become a tradition for couples to buy a lock, write your names on the lock, attach it to the railing, make a wish and toss the key into the Seine. In retrospect, I worry about the weight of all those locks on the bridge. I believe the city routinely removes them so that the bridge doesn’t fall into the river. I wonder how many keys are embedded in the mud below in the water.
15. This is a painting by Cy Twombly. I love Twombly’s work. I’m captivated by the arbitrariness of the marks, the casualness of their existence, like the cracks and patterns that appear on a sidewalk or the unanticipated shapes of things in a fluid medium, clouds and ocean sand. When I enter into a creative work using language as my medium I think of Twombly in an effort to invoke the same spontaneity, the means to coax any unanticipated images or ideas into being.
16. This is a painting by František Kupka titled Around a Point. I’m not sure what put that odd expression on my face. I’m going to chalk it up to jet lag. This, like the Cy Twombly painting, were both taken at the Georges Pompidou Centre. I love the patterns and colors in this painting.
17. My shoe at the Louvre. This was taken by accident. But I like it. That floor is unbelievable; such tiny little slats of wood seamed together. I still have these shoes. I use them just for walking, though I used them as running shoes in Paris. This didn’t work out well. The laces kept coming undone.
18. This was taken at the Georges Pompidou Centre in January, 2015. Roberta took the picture with her smartphone. Marcel Duchamp was being featured at the Pompidou that winter and I’m a huge Duchamp fan. This picture was used for the cover of my novel In Advance of the Broken Justy, which Quale Press published in 2016.
19. Filmmaker Julian Semilian (whose work accompanies this Skald feature) and I at a local Seattle restaurant, in November, 2018. Laura Semilian took the shot with her smartphone. I now wax nostalgic for those pre-pandemic days, our faces maskless, though not entirely hairless.
20. I took this several years ago. It’s the driveway in front of our building. The flower no doubt grew from a seed that was dropped into the crack, but I love the way it looks as though this impossibly fragile growth broke through the cement to display the intensity of its colors.
