Blue is a trope, blue is as a trope, a displacement, but even in mutation blue, maintaining blue, indicating blue is contingent and historically coherent. I am interested in the notion of there being a state of trope, of world as substitutions. The notion trope seems so mobile, so motile, so adequate a concept for knowing within contingency. My prose is awkward and probably pretentious. The words on this page displace my intention. I am not blue about it. There’s no reason, I agree, love can’t be blue, trope can’t be blue, and if one agrees these words display trope and love and blueness despite fully defensible identifying of clinamens then, well, I don’t know how to go on with the subject, or not without subjecting it to tweaking, which is maybe like peeking at a no-no-yes-yes fact, contingent, of life. Blue is big and my silly I, my occludingly self-deprecatory pose, does a go-go grandiose. I am so caught up in believing my prose is cruddy. But I don’t hone it endlessly as with poetry. I wish my natural style would be neutral, transparent, not transparent like a negligee smoking a joint and petting a pony at 34th and Broadway in Manhattan, or elsewhere if the image makes more sense cast at that location’s homonym.


Is and is as, for me, well duh for me, but it’s important to state limits, or is it just sheer redundant when one’s writing in a mode which could easily be termed speculative, embody the difference between knowing, declaring knowledge, and declaring knowledge contingent, subject to the eruptive energies of the present moment.

I wish more people would read this blog. It makes sense few do; not many are likely to have much love for quasi-lyric quasi argumentative musings, mumblings, meows, pleas, cryings out, callings, and this list must stop: it has become back-patting.

What does my fascination with trope signal? Is this my attempt at theorizing the essential, or is the concept that there’s the essential another trope, and substituting for what, and is substituting standing in or is standing in already oriented around an axis, an edifice, incommensurate contingency.

Just very quickly looked at Google-Images of Odilon Redon paintings: mmmmm, deliciousness for the--well, my at-least--eyes!

Where You Are There’s My Name

For John Ashbery

Patrons were invited

To guess the time:
The clock was always wrong,
Even when in the split
Of the most exact telling, or as
Precise as time gets in this precinct, policy’s
Fullest fruiting  and envied
By  the trashcan full of flame.

Time was mostly underground,

Slips and splutters girt
By everything but earth.  This took
No getting used to: nobody knew!
No-one clothed their torsos; dew
Gave everyone a full suit of buttons
Which the philanthropists fed to the birds
Like an anorexic man with a muffin.

A little later that dawn,

Like a crocus, time shot through
His path; the nearby fire
Turned the pistils blue, the petals
Pink, and every bench vanished
As if to say there should be no
Place from which to view
Speed and its bones, rags, their cleansing stones.

 

 

Little note:

I don't really give a shit about aesthetic offense, but I majorly care if I ethically offend; I really don't like the idea of hurting readers/viewers; I'm always, I guess, wondering what constitutes hurts someone versus challenges someone.  Challenging, stimulating, exciting someone--that's goodgood; making someone feel terrible, hurt, degraded, dismissed, well, I'd really rather not.  Another way of phrasing could be this: when is art more a crime than an aesthetic energy; when is it harrassment; when is it, quite literally, indecent; when is it better off not being written or displayed; when is it worth not being explored, pondered?  When is the real, or the forgery of realness, so much more wrong than right?  I'd love to edit an anthology where writers detail ideas/concepts that they would not feel ok pursuing, like probably ever; it's utterly commonplace for writers to state limits should be ignored, or fought against, but I'd be very surprised if even radical writers don't have no-no zones; I'd love to find out what those zones are!  Honestly I don't see how this anthology cld even exist, as it'd involve contributors writing notes regarding what they believe should not be written, and if the words are gonna get gnarly, then the wrong, the illegal, the criminal, would get traced, and I'm pretty sure I don't even want a mere trace: too much space for holding back.   Too, I imagine this sorta anthology wld decapitate the perhaps precious engine of feeling one is a badass and not, in the most macro-sense, far more timid than current discourses suggest.

Maybe this is an answer to the unasked question: Adam, do you view your poems as radical?  My answer is--NO!

I guess I don't even mean radical, as that, discursively, does exist, and it is, in some circles, sanctioned, or will be soon enough.

Here's another poem I wrote (it's too bad it's 15 lines: 15-liners blow donkey balls, tho I can't actually prove giving head to an Ass is bad) a minute ago--like literally; Sonoma Cutrer is my muse I guess, tho I feel that statement is really blah--I wld hate for someone to think I celebrate alchohol as muse:

Fucking-Up In A Tub

Death chuckles.  The living
Sob.  Death bobs like a cork in

The bathtub of a drunk. 

The tub is indifferent.  The finger

Flesh turns
Crenellate.  Once the drunk

Tried to touch a fortification

And fell.  His head
Made a thud; it almost

Cracked: the addiction

Almost jetted like urine
Yellower than sun

And exactly

The sickly luster signals
Dehydration.

I don't think of Lousiville, Ky as conductive of poem-writing, but I just wrote one anways; lastnight I read H Vendler on Plath's "Edge," and suspect it inflects what follows, but I think it actually steals a phrase--the cold fold of the calla bit--from another Plath poem:

Longer Than Life

The cold
Fold of the calla

More calisthenics than
Lilly, light

Beam as
Load, lets an

Imagination

Go, transmutes gone to

Gold, filling

In the incisor, its root

Recalling opera, an aria

Mirroring a hearse, as if death

Hears life not

The longer

Note, Life’s inverse and

Essential to maintaining turns.

 

Carmen Gimenez Smith
PARTS OF AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY:

"I want my problems to be Wallace Stevens, but they’re Anne Sexton."

I love the above statement; I feel like I get it, tho I'm not feeling able to articulate why this is the case; I suspect if I tried to, it'd become clear how much I don't get it. 

Maybe I love it because it suggests just how marvelous Stevens' poems are, that even when one wants to dislike him/them, one can't quite, seemingly, get there.  This tho is conjecture, as Gimenez never says she finds his poems amazingly/wonderful, only that Sexton is, apparently, more problematic for her.

Oh, I now feel the quotation is unclearly written: does Smith mean she wants her problems to be those which are consonate with ones Wallace Stevens had, but instead she's stuck with AS's?  Or does she mean she wishes her gripes n grapples are with Wally, but they're with Sexton's?  My confusion stems from whether one is meant to, implicitly, put a "with" in-between "be" and "Wallace."