Intimations of Onward
a brief assay on the aforesaid
“There are lots of great things that are obsolete. Kerosene lamps are
obsolete, but there’s no light like it in a cabin in northern Wisconsin.
And maybe it’s a good thing not to have electricity. Think of the best
things in the world, actually, and they’re all obsolete. Sure. But that’s
'cause a world that grows more and more venal and greedy and
opportunistic makes things obsolete at a great rate. And what they
replace it with is something pretty awful and foul and cheap and
temporary and terrible. So poetry is real obsolete.”
-Ed
Dorn, as quoted by Dale Smith
The pharmakeus juggles syzygytic ineffability with aplomb, co-incidence
lurks camouflaged in the rushes, and limbo has been banished by prelates
too wary by half. What we were seeking was the miraculous. We were
in error to think there could be any guarantees.
You
have assembled a smorgasbord of the possible. That’s
what a feature
is. What this feature is. Ancient Egypt’s corruptions
articulated as minutiae
beloved on the sly. Even dust motes are collages, and we
all know collages
rule.
I
stumbled into the burstnorm variations of Geof Huth’s
rapt omniverse
quite by the usual accident: I followed my nose. His is an
ongoing labor
of fascination centered on art impacting his doorstep via
snail mail. He
bears witness, and he participates, and his rapture is personal,
made public.
I used to work for the Postal Service when I was a young man
not far
removed from compulsory military service. On my lunch breaks
from
the Post Office, I would amble the side streets of downtown
Cuyahoga
Falls, Ohio, reciting my own poetry from memory, wondering
at that
act even as it struck me that to walk the poems aloud in public
was
both necessary and anodyne, at once crucial to my identity
and
parallel to utter chaos. I walk my poems in public to this
day. Even back then Ken Kawaji and Lance Oditt strolled with
me, although
the encountering of those two in real time lay far in my
future. A certain
habit of mind was forming, a reality-defying sense that I
was not alone.
Wander
as you will through the selections culled from Huth’s
blogsite.
There aren’t so many of them that you will be overwhelmed,
yet there
are enough of them that their cumulative charm will surely
inflect your
winter reveries with companionable radiative elan: it really
is personal,
every bit of whatever it is that captures your attention.
They meant it.
Cuddle up to Katharine Polak’s sorting-thru of the
implications of how
monsters are still with us. She hasn’t effected projections
onto reality’s
restless mutations in her paper, not just yet — you
will have to seek out
her poetry for that affect, tho’ even there the emergent
is occluded, just
slightly beyond her, and our, ken. Something’s cooking.
Splashes of
flavorsome excess sizzle on the sly. Our appetites are being
whetted.
Poetry is a matter of feel. Intuition and instinct paired.
It’s personal.
And of all of poetry’s variora, the public variorum
is the most suspect,
the most problematic, the most contingent and evaporative.
Most poets
simply do not write fast enough. The auditors do not listen
fast enough.
The golden threads of comprehension replicate demurely, or
not at all.
Such crudity as holds sway in public discourse obviates poetry’s
maw
so effectively the polity holds no sway, nor does it comprehend.
Do
you think that is why poetry is obsolete?
Which is why the letters of Ken Kawaji are grace notes. Would
that
there were more of them. In the age of e-mail, Kawaji’s
missives
provide a most peculiar limbo indeed, where the mindful ministers
to the ruminative and where what nags along the edges is
more than
what insists from the aprons. He stages a coup: the communality
of
poetry’s personal regards and regrets grows from common
ground.
That’s the part that never quite descends into obsolescence.
Bravo,
old friend.
“The fullness of the creative imagination demands that
rigor and
painful knowledge be the condition of harmony; that death
be the
condition of eternal forms.”
-Robert
Duncan
No single entry in this feature-smorg quite alarms me the way Bob
Grumman’s mysterious blue mathemaku does, the one you see as
you first encounter what has been brought together for this Feb
2008 edition of semantikon: “Musick stant sail yesterday bay
dreams of maraud.” Its visual harmonics are obvious, that mistic
blue swirling, at once mortal and supernatural. Note carefully
that the signature division bar (“signature” because Grumman’s
mathemaku formulae most frequently turn on the occasion of
one linguistic unit being divided into another, hence the bar)
encloses the dividend “yesterday” and that the quotient, “Musick,”
is doubtless “music,” altered by the “k” — the
creative process as
mortal fallibility dancing ... music become ill, perchance? We
know that this visual is art because its resonances replicate onward
and outward — “radiative” is my own preferred term for it.
That
memory itself might be the source of poetry’s musical alarum
is but one of the portents wafting in off Bob’s bay — which, the
wags will note, has been said before. But, quothe this assembler,
in all due appreciation, when lately, and with such ineffable elan?
When I sit gliding horizontally over thru the taproom’s mirror, it is
for such visions as Bob’s that I am searching. And if the monitor
of this pc is indeed a magic lantern of sorts, then so is that mirror,
and so is all art.
It has been, and continues to be, a privilege.
-Ralph La Charity
Cincinnati OH
January 2008
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