Word For/Word

Here's a link to poems of mine up at Word For/Word, an excellent journal: http://www.wordforword.info/vol20/index-poetry.html

I continue to be a bit baffled by Kent Johnson's appearing upset that his name has been used, by Craig Dworkin, as part of a naming experiment, as part of a riffing on authorship.  With his interest in heteronyms, secret groups, forged authors, it strikes me as fitting that Dworkin should then author a book by Johnson.  In the current Claudius App, the two have an xchange, and I can't help but wondering if it's a spoof: Dworkin's explanation of the genesis of the book makes some sense--it's a funny story in which he encourages a student of his to write in a different style and publish under a different name.  I love that the name settled on is Kent Johnson's!  From what I see, it appears that KJ is against appropriating the names of people who are, in the "contemporary" "moment," alive, and that he views CD's experiment as libelous; but their xchange is so, well, politely stagey as opposed to overtly angry; am I really supposed to believe this isn't a self-conscious experiment on behalf of Dworkin and Johnson?  Because I am a fan of Johnson, I choose to believe that he knows that this occurance is, darn near, necessary for the life of his name games and that this in fact is exactly the sort of screwiness which he had hoped to see.  Now that real live names are involved, it's delicious; the experiment is "in the world at-large" and on the page: the experiment has become vascular, part of circulation! 

Lastly--for a second or two one can be fooled by the CD as KJ BlazeVox book, but it, at least for me, was easy to then realize that one's looking at a kind of joke.

I doubt the formatting will be maintained with the poems below; yah, nope; hmm, it's, sort of, I think, interesting to see the spacing/prosody be different; the "goal" of the poems is to fuse syntax to spatialization, to make syntax ekphrastic, or faux ekphrastic, as there is no actual artwork the poems are stemmed from; ok, one more description attempt--I hope the poems are forthed from a syntax which resembles stroking paint onto canvas, marks which carry-through the bodily movement which it took to make them and I think this is, at this stage, not clear enough but hopefully the theorizing will improve:


1.39

I was there before

Land became scape scrapes

Paint off with a palate knife just

In case an intruder tries funny

Business art and overly

Protective are constant interlopers

Lollops that grin then trolls trippy

Wrangling of viscera from where and

Why remain un concluded clipped.     


1.42

As an egg optic nerve a nervous

Parting portal to

What nourishes whom and where

Am I looking turns features

Formal fit for such and such a property

Pertains framed fully aware conventions

Catalyze their inevitable cancelling does

Not concern some continuities much or any.


1.46

Cardiac arrest is a serious

Risk take care of your

Heart a sign scrawled on a crumbling

Wall a metaphor but if

Not a transference then what is

A message

How did such statements get here

Hirsute stems bracket bloodhot narratives

Known then as now to be a real

Nostrilful they say the first pull makes the way

Or there are those who speak

Differently demands some other

Observer an architrave of

Finely wrought gut geared towards disdain

Emerged critical scrutiny not immediate diss.    



1.48

Brindled, barnacled, belted to a trim

Tree the color of

Seraphim

Fans itself out in flames lustrous as love

That core, that ice

At the central-most

Periphery, its

Apex, price, and no price,

Not even the gorgeousness surrounds

Me, this coast

All tree, convinces my wits

It’s just my pounds

Not very

Terribly an entire ecosystem, necessary as the sea.



1.49

Cicely on styptic plum is this

A fruit or pigment makes her

Fatigue more beautiful than logic

Doesn’t hold candle of renderings

Melts down to mangled nerves ash on

Eyelids summer harvest sheens her

Every glance gardening with scalpels

Instead of wheel barrows she drew

Burrows into and this square micro

Millimeter is full of great shakes.