SEMTEXT PLASTIC 4
The world is not obliged to be sentimental. Defeats should be acknowledged; but one should not conclude from this that there should be no more struggles • Brecht Lucia Borgia
Brian Henry
For the Duration One must admit that everything in the purpose of an object … is a matter of convention—Antonin Artaud
Not unforeseen in situations, but in things—the inopportune evasion that cannot be returned to: for the moment nothing is settled, a consequence (to give examples … but that would entail too much), some devotion that is still to be concluded: patience as a crowd sleeping , to balance by command on the edge of an inconclusive idea—(also the silence, which is unconscionable, declining to arraign itself, even to your taunting and openmouthed surrogate)—to go on not looking and not looking, scared by occurrences they were unable to account for—(it is merely to steal what it may have been possible to reprove, or redeem …)—those disillusioning motifs, with their bodies, asymmetrical justly to have been revealed, are like the daily bread consumed already past its best— but having construed themselves differently they make no point of it
Fetched in the Storm
cooking is chemistry
In lieu of retraction or retreat, she pushes further into the interior addled by dusk.
anything green is political, he said, like those asparagus spears, for example, or the patterned wallpaper. fridges filled the room. don’t arm the hearth, he shouted.
The wet means little cracks beneath, means a bare line of vision before. His distance grows, she hopes, with speed, to a less. This is how a story comes around— to scores already tallied, moments forgotten hastily, as quick or quicker than they’d happened. Whose story?
Train Problem If there’s a train headed east, going 85 miles per hour, and it leaves the station at 12:15 PM, Eastern Standard Time, and it encounters one stop light, 95 miles from its starting point, and it stops for approximately 5 minutes, and at the stop, in the dining car, the woman picks up her bags, tilts her cap a little southwest, and heads for the door of the caboose, facing west northwest, and the man, he puts down his coffee and his spoon and looks her in the eyes for the first time in approximately 3 months and 2 days and says, “Wait. Where are you going? I need you”, and she heads out anyway, traveling 2 miles per hour by foot, bound no direction in particular, at approximately what time will the train lurch forward in its eastern orbit, and exactly how will it ever go on?
[exit genetically modified texts] marginalised readers (always), what do you have to say? stone falls, naturally of course, as does water. incoherently now check under the bed. are the old photos still there? stand straight & ram the ear. the extra ball made things that much more difficult. it was yellow.
is not a thing to ask but to think about. Penetrating, she moves discernibly through the covering, metal’s gleam in front of her, the sound of cutting absent.
Rod Mengham
The Snake on the Road by the Canning Bridge
In front of her, just past where she can see, a man cannot but trip over the roots
near the quick smash repair shop forgets my name. Here at the brink
he thinks are reaching for him, his body gathering abrasions rapidly but with small pain.
the P.O. Box cannot hold
Each trip slows him, she does not trip and therefore gains, she does not trip
Sandra Miller
D.J. Huppatz
and sees him sliding down a bank, she runs because she knows the river there —its depths no depths at all— because she prefers shooting down, coming down upon. He clutches at roots as he slides, at sticks, and stops at the river’s edge to think a way across: he chooses to wade and swim as quick across as his body allows, will dive if she comes upon him shooting. She comes upon him singing.
Louis Armand
Incarnedine “it is therefore the imagination that makes the reflection of the emotions possible”—or someone calls in the middle of the night & asks about the war & public opinion, though sooner or later everything becomes habit—the short-wave hissing in several languages at once “autochthonous selves”—a clockface slumping in the heat impossible to tell what time of year it is—looking down at the page with printed words & partially impaired vision (the shadow of an aeroplane flying low over water)—something which could be a symbol, not of endurance but of congruence in flux—events currently taking place in x: he tries to think his eyes wide open, to say in this sense reflection & extension are one & the same, as slow-moving silhouettes in a calibrated range of ... distance by time: to see the approach in exact detail—citing turbulence, agitation, intruding upon the calculated “loss of faith” & other derogations—it had to be spoken of though in words re-learnt & reforgotten—by presentiment, conscience separating the idea [of power?] from its actual exercise in the world—which means: to go on for as long as you can endure it immunology, among other preventatives (“the principals of nature being the detour of human observation”)—a too-general anaesthesia, lessening the flow, slowed down, almost to a stop “for all intents & purposes”—or jamb the body deep into a hole (to repel ghosts) & speak of it only in the past tense
all the missing letters it takes three generations to undo the lock as well as urge the adhesive bud to its daily issue. The blade gets shorter and the earth wears out but never eliminate the streams you came by. Pick out the bits of human self that shall live by Dingo Flour alone: my life, my child, my work, my friends my game of snap. They are lies of the confessor the postman will tell you you are a strange one. O, stout defender of your own best bet hurry, Our Lady of the Kiosks, this is the third time of asking.
Andrew Zawacki
Vespers Architecture it’s not, not even in winter. Nor is it a draft of a river to be put away for a lover to polish up later after the nails have been paid. Nor is it the finished thing even if it has the look of a finished thing. In winter but it is not winter, it’s almost a year ago. Water that’s moving cannot be called a trigger but almost a need. Our bodies are not architecture, they’re moving, they have been put away by October. A draft of an almost finished river is not a crowblue cloud at the end of winter, but after accounts have been paid, years later, a whisper is polished up to have the look of architecture. October has the look of a crow in a river. It’s a year ago, our bodies are four-fifths water. Your body is polished up to have the look of moving water. Clouds are four-fifths of winter, but whatever is almost crowblue or moving cannot be called architecture or put away for our bodies to polish up later. I did not say nails had been put away, or paid for with our bodies’ whispered accounts. I did not say fever or finished, or after; I did not call winter a need. I never said I had been nailed to a river even if you had the look of what’s already left.
Marjorie Perloff
Differential Poetics “If literature is defined as the exploration and exercise of tolerable linguistic deviance,” write Jed Rasula and Steve McCaffery in the introduction to their new anthology Imagining Language (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1998), “the institutional custodianship of literature serves mainly to protect the literary work from language, shielding it from the disruptive force of linguistic slippage” (x). Such slippage has increasingly become a poetic norm, creating a poetry that serves as a new conduit for communication. My second example of what Joyce referred to as the verbovisivocal or “vocable scriptsigns” is a recent collaboration between two Australians, the poet John Kinsella and the sound artist/ photographer Ron Sims, called Kangaroo Virus (South Freemantle: Folio/Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1998). Kangaroo Virus exists in electronic form, it has a performance score on a CD that accompanies the book, and it is a documentary, informational poem (made up of short free-verse lyrics by Kinsella, each of which has an accompanying photograph by Sims) that relies heavily on empirical observation. Here is the opening of Kinsella’s introduction: I’d not long been back from Cambridge, England, when my partner and I decided to spend a day with my brother in Dryandra Forest near his home in Williams [in Southern Australia]. We visited Congelin dam not far off the YorkWilliams road. My brother had been there a week earlier and found a number of dead kangaroos through the bush. On arriving, we immediately found a corpse floating in the dam like the rotting hulk of a whale. The dam was built to service the railway that used to cut its way through the forest late last century. Gnarled and petrified corpses in grotesque fetal-like positions were to be found through the bush. My brother recounted how in recent months kangaroos, not only in this district but throughout the wheatbelt, had been struck down by a mysterious ‘virus’ that left them blind. He’d seen them hopping into fences and ploughing into tractors, dead in their dozens along the roads. Farmers had been shooting them in the fields, rangers had been shooting them in the bush. We talked about the release of the calici rabbit virus, how it had ‘escaped’ before ‘release’ from Kangaroo Island off South Australia. (KV 9).
“Greatly disturbed,” Kinsella starts writing his Kangaroo Virus Poem and enlists the sound-artist / photographer Ron Sims into working on the project. “Without scientific methods at hand,” he reports, “we decided to approach it through art words, sound, and images. Science and art have much in common. As a poet, I explore the data of language for codes and truths. I develop hypotheses and search for answers. Of course, much never progresses beyond the state of exploration but it is the search that counts” (KV 9). Kinsella’s romantic ecology is, in any case, interestingly qualified by Sims’s realism. In his own introduction, Sims writes: Poetry abstracts and fractures the ‘real’ world, and then reassembles our understandings into a new ‘reality’ that of the poet. . . . The photographic image has quite a different strength. Unlike any other visual art form, the photograph portrays ‘truth’ we believe the image! No matter how distorted, whether in colour or monochrome, essentially the photograph is a split second of actuality, captured.
For Kangaroo Virus my very happy dilemma has been to find a tenable bond between the ‘expressionistic’ poetry and the ‘representational’ quality of the photography. It seemed pointless that the one should merely mirror the other at the narrative or subjective level. So I began to consider the intrinsic value of the photograph image: the line, texture, density, form. I felt that if there should be a bond with the poetry then it was here, in the common ‘musicality’, not the ‘meaning’ of the two art forms. (KV 10). The two artists worked separately so that “illustration,” if it occurred at all, became what Sims calls an “organic accident, not an artistic contrivance” (KV 11). Kinsella’s poems, after two longer lyrics, “Death of a Roo Dog” and “The Visitation,” are free-verse quatrains like the following: They might call it ‘rail country’ as the tell-tale signs are there immediately - the skin deeply scraped, the bones grey and strewn about. (KV 20)
Read against Sims’s photograph on the facing page (figure 7), with its dead grey tree trunks, some still standing, bone-like, silhouetted against the sky, the “tell-tale signs” are indeed “there.” Or consider the following: The eye is black too and from the core like an exotic ache that’d be noticed only by tourists: the vacuum elemental, or cabalistic. (KV 26)
The “eye” is indeed frightening, but perhaps not as frightening as the well-meaning tourists themselves, who are unwittingly the source of the terrible virus.