Eliot in the Mud

The words running out I wobble off course. Stumbling through thick sand, and through eyelids heavy with sweat and tiredness, I see an empty blue sky, perfect for sentences; the sea laughing all around….

Day 25. It looks like I will make it to 30 pieces in 30 days. And all those phrases scoffing on the sidelines – which one of them will I select now?

Ideas. Or ideas about ideas. Or ideas about form and construction. Or ideas about not having ideas… How far can these intrude into the genesis of a piece of art? A large question, and central to an understanding of Modern Art, at least since Duchamp. When I started this month I wondered if my usual technique of writing – waiting for the words or images to rise, like a body out of the bog – would be enough. Were there only so many bodies in all that mud? Or would I have to force it, using more of my conscious mind? Would there be more ideas? Would I create manifestos? Or like some Russian Futurists believe that silence was the best poem?

Silence around a glass jar, its words half eaten.

A half closed door. Its silence on chess stones red and black…

Silence after the words fell out: Swedenborg Hall, 4.23 am.

A fatter silence at 4.26am, after the last car horn?

Thus my earlier post about Mac Low and Oulipo. And from these thoughts this emerged, somehow:


Innovators and Outsiders
Elopes with Modernismo.
She dances in the dust, in her long dress its ruffles roses.
Luxuriating together in faded hotels
They hear beds attack the wall (words twist and fall….)
Insides by Malevich (Malevich!).
Always he kisses her black curls.
Oracles in the fag machines
He collects on scraps of paper.
The words settle down
She laughs when he reads a line.

Writes of Montezuma, the old monuments
She wants to leave the city.
Elopes with Modernismo
Form and pattern are not repetition!
In view of the prevailing situation
Still these scraps of paper.
No slogans here!
Only signs and oblique symbols.
Back to the origins
The dress she leaves on a grey pond, a new island…
Elliptical emerges from her thighs
And they attack the wall with pleasure!
Rank rich and reliable
The old words too stolid to build a wild garden
Given away at the old Cathedral
Old Ernst and Leonora.
Elopes with Modernismo
She laughs when he reads these lines.
Rebel against it all.
She dances still; dancing in courtyards and mirrored halls.


Yes! I pulled Eliot Weinberger from the mud. It’s a work in progress as part of the race to 30. I’m happy with that tension between the (half)-conscious idea (the acrostic) and the freedom of the actual creation. In the same race Carrie Etter also used an acrostic, though more integrated into the poem than mine. Just a coincidence? Or something more, arising out of the pressure to create?

The situation creates its own logic, perhaps, like a Jazz musician improvising night after night, spinning a near endless set of variations within a limited number of pre-conceived themes, you are forced to do different things – maybe it’s the music that forces you. It gets bored with you! And between the repetition of the themes and the new variations your mind oscillates, perhaps more than usual, between the bog and dry land, between the conscious and unconscious mind. On the bad days there’s too little variation – you drift into tired themes. But on a good day: you blow the whole thing apart – Coltrane’s Chasin’ the Trane on the Village Vanguard set?

And within this mix, this tension, ideas can become mysterious too. The secret of Borges….

Eliot Weinberger? Everyone needs teachers, and though I have never met him he has been very important for me: a great writer and translator, but also a great explicator of poetry; and a wonderful anthologist. Yes, books can be human too.

Comments

  1. Live at the Village Vanguard, and then they jumped off from that high point, and jumped further, up to a level place. Alice jumped up to the plateau, and she wandered around until she decided to stop; when was it? 1978? Four or five years after humans had reached the very height of recorded sound.

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