Category: language

“& from wherever thou willst thou gatherest me” – “steel from the belly of Aries,/Or that cold fire which plays/above the sea/White sow munching acorns in graveyards where roots/of oaks wrap powdery bones of the devas./ There, suckle at my tits. Crucify/me like a beetle on yr desk. Nod out/admist the rustling play of lizards, recognize/ epics the lichen whisper. read twigs/& leaves as they fall/ Nurture my life with quartz & alabaster/& drink my blood from a vein in my lower leg/ I neigh, I muzzle you, I explode/ your certain myth/ I crawl slimy from a cave beneath yr heart/ I hiss, I spit oracles at yr front door/in a language you have forgotten. I unroll/the scroll of yr despair, I bind yr children with it./ It is for this you love me/It is for this/you seek me everywhere/ Because I gave you apples out of season/Because I gnaw at the boundaries of the light.”

Diane di Prima, Loba. via

---

Sweetheart

when you break thru

you’ll find

a poet here

not quite what one would choose.

I won’t promise

you’ll never go hungry

or that you won’t be sad

on this gutted

breaking

globe

but I can show you

baby

enough to love

to break your heart

forever

Song for Baby-O, Unborn, Diane di Prima

Kenneth Goldsmith’s concept of uncreative writing: Goldsmith—a true heir of Baudelaire’s dandyism—advocates for the wholesale borrowing or repurposing of language from any source rather than creating “new” text. It is a radical notion in a world saturated with cliches and nostalgic references. Goldsmith’s view is about making lateral moves rather than justifying what language is appropriate for poetry. It’s a vision of language that accepts “fluster.”

I also see Goldsmith’s ideas in direct conversation with visual art’s notion of the “found object.” An artist utilizing appropriation or a found object forces her audience to look anew—and critically—at the world. Artists and poets who do this go beyond style to pose conceptual questions: what does it mean, like Brooks or Baudelaire, to engage directly with the world surrounding you rather than looking toward the academy? How do you take advantage of the familiar while making it unfamiliar and surprising?

Naomi Beckwith, The Necessary Fluster, Poetry, June 2012

---

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

One Art, Elizabeth Bishop

---