luka

Well-known member
Then maybe I could read a line or two. Not get much out of it. But at least be able to read it. I've not encountered any other writing which has done that. It had a force field around it. It repelled me. No way in.
 
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version

Well-known member
His poems completely shut me out at first.

Then maybe I could read a line or two. Not get much out of it. But at least be able to read it. I've not encountered any other writing which has done that. It had a force field around it. It repelled me. No way in.

That's how I feel at the moment. He's a perfect example of what I was talking about re: worrying about being duped and the emperor's new clothes. Also what you and entertainment were talking about re: am I not clever enough/not getting it or is it just bollocks?
 

luka

Well-known member
Juniper, moss agate, jurassic boredom glows in the empty waiting room"

"searching the band for another station reveals new liassic beds near the previous shelf."

"They are zealots in the park all over"

"Then I eat a care-
ful selection of food.
My fork skim thought-
fully from side to
side. I keep up a
steady munch"

"He now drops the heavenly coin in the doorway"

"So that Jerome springs back into place, your friendly dental technician trailing his new bridge-work"

"The redeemed corset strains into view again and we perk up finally by the counter"
 

luka

Well-known member
That's how I feel at the moment. He's a perfect example of what I was talking about re: worrying about being duped and the emperor's new clothes. Also what you and entertainment were talking about re: am I not clever enough/not getting it or is it just bollocks?

That never goes away with him. It's part of the overall effect.
 

luka

Well-known member
That's right. And that's quite interesting. There's nothing else remotely like it.
 

version

Well-known member
This is what I said when you brought up some of those lines before.

Juniper, moss agate, jurassic boredom glows in the empty waiting room.

"jurassic boredom" struck me as an interesting pairing and "glows in the empty waiting room" had me picturing a waiting room flickering and glowing like an old TV with some sort of ancient boredom independent of people acting as a force on the room.

searching the band for another station reveals new liassic beds near the previous shelf.

"reveals new liassic beds" just rolls off the tongue, almost to the point where "new" and "liassic" sound like one word, and the full quote put me in mind of an old Actress interview where he talked about scanning for pirates in the car and only being able to get a scrambled broadcast of Lightning FM. That + "liassic beds" had me picturing being able to move backward in time via the dial, finding the ghosts of previous broadcasts and stations still operating in the gaps.

They are zealots in the park all over.

This one I'm not entirely sure about, something about the turn of phrase just grabbed me.

He now drops the heavenly coin in the doorway.

That the coin is "heavenly" and dropped in a doorway intrigued me. You've got money/currency combined with religious imagery and someone dropping/allowing it to fall whilst on the threshold of something, stood between two spaces. It's evocative and raises interesting questions.
 

luka

Well-known member
of sanguine fire
("Outwash and Pie face across the table,
synergic coils wound through the house of
Mercury where they dwell.")
a new tax on the counter-earth
("the stupid slow down and become wise with inertia
and instantly the prospect of money is solemnised to
the great landscape. It actually glows like a stream of
evening sun, value become coinage fixed in the grass crown.")
the ideal star fighter
("the eye converts the news image into fear enzyme")
l'estase de .poher
("Rubbish is pertinent; essential; the most intricate presence
in our entire culture; the ultimate sexual point of the whole place
turned into a model question.")
the kirghis diasters
("the muse in reckless theophany gives a familiar yell")
the bee target on his shoulder
("do not love this man. He makes Fridays unbearable")
a note on metal
("gradually the item-form becomes iconized...
The metonymic unit is established, and number replaces
strength or power as the chief assertion of presence")
chemins de fer
john in the blooded phoenix
a stone called nothing
("the lights dip as the driver presses the starter
and the bus pulls away to leave for the moonstruck
fields of the lower paid.")
questions for the time being
("as Wyndham Lewis tried so fiercely to explain")
thoughts on the esterhazy court uniform
("the place is entirely musical. No person can live there")
 

luka

Well-known member
aristeas, in seven years
("and sprang with that double twist into the
middle world and thence took flight over the
Scythian hordes and to the Hyperborean,
touch of the north wind
carrying with him Apollo.")
the common gain, reverted
("the nomad is perfect but the pure motion
which has no track is utterly lost")
on the matter of thermal packing
("the skin porous to the eloquence of")
first notes on daylight
("we owe that in theory to the history of person
as an entire condition of landscape")
the glacial question, unsolved
("we live in that question, it is a condition of fact")
bronze : fish
("that's the human city, & we are
now at the edge of it. Which way
are we facing. Burn the great sphere:
count them, days of the week.")
moon poem
("the night is already quiet and I am
bound in the rise and fall: learning
to wish always for more. This is the
means, the extension to keep very steady
so that the culmination will be silent too and flow
with no trace of devoutness")
the western gate
("the formal circuit is inclusion. the line runs
inflected but the shapes are blue & shining.
It is the orbit, tides, the fluctual spread,
we shiver with reason and with love:")
in the long run, to be stranded
("it's time or more clearly
the sequence of year; a thickening in the words
as the coins themselves wear thin")
 

version

Well-known member
I think what makes it so difficult is that they're real words, they read like actual sentences, but they're just not in any order I've ever seen before. I feel like I'm being simultaneously pushed and pulled because it's encouraging me to read them as I would anything else, but they don't conform to a pattern that allows me to. With Finnegans Wake, there's a sort of musicality to it. With this, it's almost like reading an academic paper where all the words fell off the page and someone hurriedly stuck them back on wherever they could.
 

luka

Well-known member
Right. The first thing you're forced to do is search for a way of reading it, not that yields meaning necessarily, but that allows the poem to work on you in some way or other. Often some act of violence seems to being done to the sentence. The idea of the sentence which takes you by the hand and leads you on a walk from start to finish. Points out the sights.
 
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