Here is a tiny bit from the introduction followed by my own translation:
Mallarme’s track changes often and without warning, but still somehow maintains the sense of an aged storyboard, how its colors being bleached by the sun only turns them brighter. (Kenneth Anger’s early film Fireworks also springs to mind.) The pleasure of translation comes as the poet begins to flail around in the trenches of a foreign syntax, obliterating all sense of time.
from A Kumquat for John Keats
Now were you twenty five or six years old
when that fevered brow of yours at last grew cold?
I've got no books at hand to check the dates.
My grudging but glad spirit celebrates
that all I've got to hand's the kumquats, John,
the fruit I'd love to have your verdict on,
but dead men don't eat kumquats, or drink wine,
they shiver in the arms of Proserpine,
not warm in bed beside their Fanny Brawne,
nor watch her pick ripe grapefruit in the dawn
as I did, waking, when I saw her twist,
with one deft movement of a sunburnt wrist,
the moon that feebly lit our last night's walk
past alligator swampland, off its stalk.
I thought of moon-juice juleps when I saw,
as if I'd never seen the moon before,
the planet glow among the fruit, and its pale light
make each citrus on the tree its satellite.
Visions of the Daughters of Albion: A Screenplay
Asleep in Jesus at rest
Their names were Victoria, Ebbenezer, Noah,
……………………………..………………........................…..Fannie, Travis, Alex, Pleasant,
William Christmas, and Jane.
.........................................Like father, they labored in exchange for small wooden houses.
Breaking even was a feat.
………………………....................Things were settled when the crops were in.
They were my ancestors and lived along the Pee Dee River,
……………………..…………...…………………..............................…….……under tupelo, oak, and gum,
where wolves made dens
………………………................….("You could smell dem wolves!").
According to the Census, they were mulatto
………….……………..…….......................………………..(Spanish mulato, small mule).
Women died of euremic poisoning.
…….…………………..................…………….Children were stillborn.
Those that lived were sprinkled on their foreheads
……………………..…….........................……………...………….and went to Sunday school,
taught by Mrs. Lillian Ingram,
………………...................…………….in Wolf Pit Township, North Carolina.
One of them wrote a poem:
………………………................…….."There in the boughs, in a tiny nest, are three baby birds
with mouths opened wide."
…………….…………..…..............….When I was born,
I weighed nine pounds of flesh.
…...…………………..................…………Mother's hair fell down
the back of her long neck.
……...………….............;;;………..Tears ran out of her eyes like animals.
Fragrant convolutions from her insides
………………….............;;;..…………..……......…filled the room with the strife of love.
Daddy was on a tour of duty.
……………………….......;.........……...."Remember you got a father," he used to say.
"You weren't born by yourself."
The pony and the deer are trapped by tanks,
and the lady with the guitar is sad beyond words.
Hurtling across the sky, a missile has mistaken
a vehicle for a helicopter, exploding in a ball
of white flame. Upside-down birds—red specks
of knotted wool—glow above the sideways trees.
Hidden among plants, a barefooted boy waits—
like the divine coroner—aiming his rifle at something,
enjoying the attentions of a gray doggy, or maybe
there's a bullet already in his head.
I'm sorry I cannot say I love you when you say
you love me. The words, like moist fingers,
appear before me full of promise but then run away
to a narrow black room that is always dark,
where they are silent, elegant, like antique gold,
devouring the thing I feel. I want the force
of attraction to crush the force of repulsion
and my inner and outer worlds to pierce
one another, like a horse whipped by a man.
I don't want words to sever me from reality.
I don't want to need them. I want nothing
to reveal feeling but feeling—as in freedom,
or the knowledge of peace in a realm beyond,
or the sound of water poured in a bowl.
They all wore little hats
Vermont that I
Can see, the river its coronet
Of yellow beetles—crawling,
Flying—the flowers wearing
The river for a hat.
I can see that
When I stand alone
Upon this acre as now
Sober and living, the same, the same.
They wore:
Hats.
They are not dead,
John and Johnny and John,
Which is a fine name for a river,
Only gone.
Having death out of the way,
The ill-fitting suicide discarded,
Pajama-like, on imaginary sand:
Good, good. We stand.
Some Motionless Conflict in the Sky
Some motionless conflict in the sky
“Ginger and Sorrow”
My skin is the cover of my body.
It keeps me bound to my surroundings.
It is the leather over my spine.
It is the silk over the corneas of my eyes.
Where I am hairless, at the lips and groin,
there is pinkness and vulnerability.
Despite a protective covering of horny skin,
there is no such problem with my fingers,
whose ridges and grooves are so gratifying
to both the lover and the criminologist.
I think perhaps the entire history
of me is here—viper of memory,
stab of regret, red light of oblivion.
Hell would be living without them.
It’s not that I want to say, 2010
It’s not that I want to say that poetry should or can be disconnected from having something to say; it’s just that everything I want to say eludes me. But if I caught it I wouldn’t want it and I imagine you wouldn’t want it either. Maybe poetry is what happens on the bus between wanting and having. I used to think it was what happened on the bus between Oakland and Berkeley. And it was, too, like violet and Texas in peoples’ voices, a whole bunch of subtle transmissions broken off by stops and bells, the percussion of riding, mobile contact, slow symposium. But now, even in the absence of my private office, I still want to move and so I have to move but never get there in this whole extended region of not being there, of stopping and saying not there, not there, and of that being, in the end, pretty much all I have to say. What I want to say is that having something to say is subordinate in the work of being true to the social life in somebody else’s sound and grammar, its placement in my head, my placement in the collective head as it moves on down the line. The itinerant ensemble arrangement of the 40, and sometimes of the 15, is also where I began to learn to move and live and think in poetry. Now I want to transfer what I’m learning as a practice of revision on the edge where ethics and aesthetics are in parallel play. Some kind of homeless shift between reading and writing that emerges in a class or set as our cut-up schedule, a diverse list of things, point to point restlessness, interlocking schemes of material breaks, the constantly renewed syllabus of a new composers guild in the middle of enjoying itself. What we will have come together to try to do would start to look like what we were doing when we came together to enjoy ourselves, handing over saying what we want for one another, to one another, in and out of words.
The Exhaustion of Libraries
Adenoidal Alexander
Barking brachiatic candor
Clinches dictionary deals.
Every epidermis feels.
Fiercely grinding gravitation,
Hopeless, heaving integration:
Inner jocularities
Jangle kabalistic keys.
Lockstep lexicography
Mutters more necrophagy,
Nibbling open older pain:
Prose's quiet queenly reign.
Rotting signifier's sign,
Tome to urn, up voided vine,
Withered with xerography:
X yields you zero's zealotry.
[First published in Boston University Arts & Sciences 12, Spring 2003]
a cricket
at midnight on reserve screen dim
bottom is dry and the guild of softwood
is sad. she know the cut is another rub and the sound of that: whine and ring scrawl. that same dark as before make
the window a background. the shelf
is full of animals. there's Jeffrey Wright. and it ain't no turn no moose no buck this mug has played on top of me
since Mama got that cake out the oven.
I was gon' say I know what art is; I know how the world works: but the snows came and my power is low. call Laura:
all you can do is go back to Arkansas.
from Arkansas
Cubie and Mt. Tabor
all the house is curved, all the sisters work at sonic, everybody talk like this:
I'm getting ready to tell you something; I know you ain't gon' like it: you remind me of a white man. Where is your wife? I heard she was Anglo-Saxon. Bad as you used to talk about white folks. Naw, for
real, what is she? Eyetalian?
all the branch is curved green outside garden
Bukka neutral had a white woman in pine bluff where it's past midnight for every every engine but you know I'm so thankful Mr. Pascal
so thankful
like someone sanded the box of your voice like a brass button
all the pink is gray some faded alpha bullshit and unpolished silver. take a camcorder to this shit like some dynamite
blow that goddamn church up too
and let the hedge grow
They practice dispossession in collaboration, as withdrawal, and we’ve been fascinated for many years with the sociality of the music. Can you get that in a poem? Well, if it’s in a poem that’s just poetry in a tight chemise. A band makes music; the making of the band is poetry: anarchitectural, anatopological syntax in correspondence. How can you make the making of the music sound good? The social cultivation of “mere accompaniments” of the utterance. Their practice is their theme. Sometimes this takes the form of commentary, sometimes of inventory. Making ain’t reducible to its conditions but it ain’t detached from ‘em, either. We make cars, the league of black revolutionary workers might say; but really what we’re making is the league of black revolutionary workers—off and under and over the line. What Thom might say is: they thought I was making poems but really we were making poetry. We want to keep seeing what we come to in the making. It’s not that matters of skill or craft have been suspended. They just been socialized, deindividuated, shared. Thom is them. Thom’n’em, Them downstairs, in a tremendous submachine of milk’n’cookies. To say that them is a poet, or a good poet, is to narrow the scope of the shit in which they involved, a threshold poetry hands when its care and study gets so deep. Neither the poet nor the poem can contain such virtue: what it is to be able not so much to ask but to construct a question, to be allowed being also to be required to construct, construct implying some intention—fanned out all over the yard like some weighted canopies or a community sing of open corners or a conversion of the guards—to hit a poem or a poet in the throat or in the stomach. Man, it’s a shame how them fucked up all them damn poets and them damn poems’n’em.
FRED MOTEN:
When I think about the way we use the term Study; I think we are committed to the idea
that study is what you do with other people. It's talking and walking around with other
people, working, dancing, suffering, some ir- reducible convergence of all three,
held under the name of speculative practice. The notion of a rehearsal--being
in a kind of workshop. playing in a band, in a jam session, or old men sitting on a porch,
or people working together in a factory..
from revision, impromptu
with David Rothenberg, Nicola Hein, George Lewis, Dafna Naphtali, Andrew Drury, Tanya Kalmanovich, Hans Tammen, Sarah Weaver, David Grubbs, and Ally-Jane Grossan
We gig everywhere and it just makes me wanna giggle, or holler at you from way over here, party over there, if you can wait, we being behind the beat a little bit but right at the beguining, gynomonastically basic and maternal earth tones all out from the tone world, deep in the bass loom, twilight weaving morning in La Jolla/moonlight in Vermont someplace, some folks parking, some just getting dressed, everybody waiting with everybody for right now in right there, party over here. Well moled, old Grubbs! We all here in the ruins but we got something in our hands—an experimental bandcamp for news and flowers. And I appreciate y’all letting me sit in, being so far from virtuosity. I wanna be communicable from way back. I wanna be in your base community, grace abounding to the chief of sinners. Remember that song by the Spinners called “Sadie”? The one on Spinners Live! where he reverted—that contrapulsive, not just knee-deep conversioning he got caught up in? Soul Wynne was sewing that night. It was like he had a drum in his chest, just to let you know that nothing lasts forever. The improvisation of forgetting is redactive flow everyday with all these voices in our head. These are always revising herself. One said they told us to be Germanic so, with great surprise, we took a picture of your tech with yourself, our constraint, and it was undecidable between us but plantational, since we the police of different voices, to be your instrument in this sovereign fade. Go back and look at it again when we fade a little bit, when invention won’t let us come up on it from behind. I don’t know my own stuff well enough to mix it right now, but we been remixing it all along past the everyday fade. Mama’nem are the different voices in your head. Are you gon’ play me now? I wan be played with you. I wanna be down with you. My code voice is Stanley Clarke,
I SAW ALL THE STRANGENESS IMMEDIATELY,
I saw it in this very particular slide of swell’s,
the sylphspun silk of the sylph, she sideways,
her garage is paradise in masque, her sweep
is saturn, szturn im sturm & string, install’d
in the area’s traverse. he follows that lucky
old sun, the gesture of her lining and loose
knot, and pulls herself through burns and a
dry wash and some soft lead. in discorporate
minerals, or in the sharing of the black sleek
sharing with the wild man in her soft shoes,
all over the panes of the various sworld and
out into the superhighway of bywater, hard
by marigny. to flow through one to another
indetermination, the posture of their brush
must be immaculate fray, all them, all they.
The So Gone
ACID
Blackie was met at the subway
advertising
wished for pumice sunny flags
WE GO DOWN WE GO DOWN
“Giant Grouper” said, in cold spray net tank
GREENS deep at me
fade corridors
tapped the wrong uncle & spoke intimately
in foetal lift of potty stalagmites, resting
hair pillows edges of dead batteries
the leak
Growth Mustard
earth vanity error: drainage , settle
cigarette balls on umber pools
the corners left to never return. . .
“call soon, I was underground”
from Delicatessen
after Hurricane Sandy & 3 nights of no power)
In the delicatessen a last avocado.
Black, pulpy—a kind of soft grenade.
I set it down
for probably nobody.
I step out—not through doors
but through clear plastic tatters
shimmering in a doorframe.
Hothouse roses on the shelves outside;
hyacinths in foiled cups.
*****
Calling storms by dumb names—
not the shabbiest way of neutering disaster,
I think.
Like the pit bull called Cuddles,
the Lovers’ Lane near the sewage treatment plant—
Even All Saints’ Day,
when you think about it.
Today, when I say, I have it good,
meaning, better than others,
& the children screaming Help
then Made you look, meaning
We tricked you—
*****
But what about the sidewalk Cyclops,
the all-seeing tattoo on the bald guy’s head,
who once, I swear, called me by my right name,
who saw me frowning in sunlight—
That & this so bad, Tyrell, you ain’t
seen the darkest yet...
The subway’s closed tonight—
what darkest dark can he guard now?
*
