the Modern bird

                                                        Everybody loves a martyr in
   blue pajamas, throwing up in her white, white house. Your fault
   her cakes won't rise and birds find the windows violently.

the Modern bird

      
       a street
there is

where strange birds       purr


***


BIRDPILE.


"BIRDPILE" in flight? or
grounded (dead)?


Meaning
brutally dragged in.

the Modern bird

the birds in the air are fine

the Modern bird

when eyes / are humming birds who'll tie them with a lead string?

New World Translations

"I fever I fever I fever I fever I"


Alto Poepjes, Holland, 1995
Translated by Daniel Bailey

(via New World Poetry)

Reading

"[W]hen we are dealing with things like racism or identity as forged by race and ethnicity, we're not allowed room to feel more than one emotion. We can't feel disgust AND delight. We can't take something seriously and joke about it without one reaction canceling out or beating the snot out of the other. And that shit is alienating."

~Jenny Zhang, via Coldfront


Or, having a woman's body. or being the encapsulated cells of impression. or being the shape of tables stacked on other tables, the correct perspective being the one where nothing slides.

New World Translations

Puromunaado2

Season is glove is movement

           

            report (oh!)  wait       flowers—

faaaddddiiinnnng

afternoon                                 3ohclock

                        not even brown, gray

                                                   (let you in?...)

[eye]<--hehe, love         is

probably not a bug or an eyelid

also not a promise       given this abundant treasure

Chika Sagawa (1911-1935), Japan

(anti)-translated by Sawako Nakayasu, 2011

“translated” by Sarah Cook, 2012 



(via New World Poetry)

(mis)Reading

"Only the enclosure permits the bird to exist"


as


Only the enclosure permits the poem to exist.


(from Brent Cunningham, "Bird & Forest," The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral)

"Believe the birds."

"...not the thing presented," (i.e. the poem) "but that which is represented by the thing, shall be the source of the pleasure." The thing the poem represents. "In this sense nature itself is to a religious observer the art of God." If we hope to create poems which represent the things we deem representable. Language or action, meaning or none. We are invested either way, simply by taking a breath.

"...and for the same cause art itself might be defined as of a middle quality between a thought and a thing," (what exists between the sign and the signifier, anyway?!...) "or, as I said before, the union and reconciliation of that which is nature with that which is exclusively human." We create art that is beyond ourselves, beyond pulse, blood, skin. If we create something between Nature and ourselves, and god creates Nature,...what does he/she have to reconcile, anyway? What is on the other side of god/nature?

Is it temporary. Is it even meaningless?

"Poet, / Be like God."

(mis)Reading

"My slowness of perception assumes loss."

as

"My slowness of perception assumes nothing."


*

Read correctly:

Everything is an omen for everything will happen.

Dark house standing in a darker field.

//

The city falling does not stop at my skin. The weather and the / people are within me--my slow motion mania can do nothing, my / crouch end and my bow bells my highgate and my hammersmith. / my life. my creature.

Carrying bodies

i’ve been trying to move away from the word “feeling” for a long time. poems that have feelings in them. it’s terrible, or at least i tell myself i should think so. and some kind of dichotomy has set itself up in my head, where a poem focused on feeling something can’t possibly also be focused on language. and really all i have to do to cause myself to stumble right now is to look at any recent piece that i’ve read and loved and recognize not only the immense swell of things that takes place in my body upon that reading, but also how carefully these poems still acknowledge and engage and are built directly into and from language. 

i’ve spent too many years now confusing feeling with meaning, or just forgetting that they both exist and are two separate—sometimes inclusive but certainly exclusive as well—entities. it is a great thing to realize that once engagement between author & reader begins, or poem & reader, and the cultivation of meaning is attempted in that engagement, that feelings are appropriate and necessary and desired. that’s just it: i don’t want a poem to make sense for me. to appear as if it doesn’t want me to do any work for that. and therein lies my recognition this morning that neither do i want a poem to express feelings for me (i can do that myself) or to tell me specifically how to feel or what to feel. emotions (and i guess here i am talking about subjectivity, and thinking about Pound’s call for emotion and then Zukofsky’s call for objective emotion) should not be the attempt of the poet. if you sit down to write a poem because you’re feeling emotional, it will probably be terrible. i will give Wordsworth credit for recognizing the need for recollection and tranquility post-spontaneous overflow. but Wordsworth also wants to tell me how good poems should make me feel, and maybe even what to feel those feelings about, and even directs my language toward a limited realm of the vernacular (i’m not even sure what ordinary people means). the language i appreciate and am inspired by and cherish is that which, though it certainly excites in me a multitude of reactions and emotions, doesn’t talk to me about feelings and sense and what it’s doing and why it’s doing it. it does not guide me in an identical, shared emotion. it feels human but does not point directly to the human who made it, “the poem stands alone,” to quote a recent letter from a friend. Also from that letter: “subjective emotion in a poem is dangerous because the author is shoving too much of herself directly into/onto the work, which is then shoved onto/into the reader, which may be a lot to bear.” 

my favorite: “there doesn’t need to be—can’t be—any evidence of this particular poet having written it, because that then creates a certain sort of pedestal in the work, an imbalance in the relationship between reader and writer, which could be a tipping point.” So to try and answer a question, i do prefer a constructed thing, a poem that reminds me i am a human and that poetry necessarily comes from bodies, though i prefer to carry such weight through the language.

Reading

Say this may speaking

Trying to get at the core of a phrase, not by expressing it exactly, perfectly…certainly there’s a perfection Kim is after though it’s not grammatical or institutional but rather elemental, emotional—perfection in exact expression, not duplication or imitation (ability to be duplicated, imitated), not the correctness of a phrase but that moment when you’re first becoming aware of what you’re trying to say before you've said it. of the space in which you attempt to understand something in multiple languages, even, before you can say it properly, before you could build such a phrase on your own. the moment of understanding before speaking, which can be a very long moment when you’re entering a new language. [or attempting to more fully inhabit one’s own body]

 

(Penury, Myung Mi Kim, page 11)

Reading

"I don't think that 'possible readers' are really the context in which poetry is written. For myself it's never been the case. If one plays to the gallery in that way, I think it's extraordinarily distracting. The whole performance of writing then becomes some sort of odd entertainment of persons one never meets and probably would be embarrassed to meet in any case. So I'm only interested in what I can articulate with the things given me as confrontation. I can't worry about what it costs me. I don't think any man writing can worry about what the act of writing costs him, even though at times he is very aware of it."

Still thinking about costs, motivations, interactions…

(from the Paris Review, "The Art of Poetry No. 10," an interview with Robert Creeley)