Pan-Hybrid Scintillation

https://youtu.be/XdtlWEL7zJ4

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“Let language alter you!” proclaim these two itinerant

professors who alone address “pan-hybrid scintillation” –

not the sort of specialty one commonly expects to think

about until one undergoes the pixilating spill of the collision

with their influence. “Collision with their influence” is just

the sort of untoward way of putting it you’ll learn from them

is not perhaps upon reflection how you would be best advised

in bowdlerizing situations to co-vandalize your lingual will:

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for instance like attaching “co” to “vandalize” to “lingual will”

or using adjectives like “bowdlerizing” with such plural nouns

as “situations” or to wrangle with the arbitrary senselessness

of “pixilating spill.” But with the introduction of pan-hybrid

scintillation in your psychic gullet you can feel the downward

pull at once of awkward phrases culled at random from the not

particularly consanguineous productions of the mind you find

by not much caring what you find – like “psychic gullet” or

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“the not particularly consanguineous productions of the mind”.

Eventually if you follow their example you will run the gauntlet

of inapposite configurations of vocabulary while developing

a nose for better and less flatulent locutions: for example, never

mixing “run the gauntlet” with “locutions” you decide for no

great purpose other than the patent goading terror of not

coming up compulsively with adjectives that manage to evade

cliché despite their awful clatter in the ear (like “flatulent”

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tied to “locutions”). When you are done at last with explications

they provide for parsing out the flight of the most morbidly

resourceful underpinnings of the implications of your most

voluminous ejaculations you’ll have learned incontrovertibly

and in the most collaterally endo-genitally macro manner

that the way to keep from grabbing words committing flabby

verbal violence is: never say what they would say. And that

the best solution to not knowing what to say is silence.

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A Lovely Experience

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https://youtu.be/cR8yGr4Wlsc

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Be skeptical when you hear stories about derring-do.

Remember the red herring story’s a red herring, too.

Someone named Cobbett in England in 1805 bent

our ears with the tale that by rubbing red herring scent

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over the trail in a hunt as a boy he’d distract all the dogs

from the scent they were tracking: red herring stink fogs

the olfactory sense in a canine’s prodigious capacity

to pick up smell: but Cobbett’s claim had the veracity

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of all the bloody hell you’d told your brother you’d done

on the weekend, the awful spectacular transgressive fun

with which you were determined to shock: that you’d

kidnapped a nun but you couldn’t reveal all the lewd

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and astounding particulars you had pursued after that

with the sister: no, not with the virtuous cad Pastor Blatt

always ‘round, with his nose to the ground, seeking evil

to fuel his next sermon in lurid detail and medieval

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morality for which he’d long been egregiously famed,

packing in every illicit detail, with every perp named!

And that’s when your brother said, “Look to the skies

at the moon. Is it a red herring?” This scattered your lies

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into chaos, somehow: strewn like confetti into the cold

emptiness of your interior, your old assertions, once bold,

were so feebly inferior you barely knew that the moon died

that night. Nothing could be understood or identified

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with any proof, wrong or right. This shot through the dawn

of your consciousness, gun through a roof: you were gone.

You now knew eternal existence proceeds beyond breath.

Being is nothing at all. It’s a lovely experience, death.

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But They Will be the Ushers at the Wedding

An Investigation of the Critical Mind

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https://youtu.be/0CjKceR4GzE

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It occurs to me that even when I'm fiercely immersed in

something – hmm, when am I ever that? – I can't think even

of a remote example: okay, let's say, when I opine about

Henry James' 'late' writing, and try to explain what I love

about its aural effects, I suppose I look for easy and pleasurable

ways to reinforce or, en passant, add credence to a claim, but

all these observations are made in passing. What they serve

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is a poetic intent: to fashion a clarion call, not not to "make

a point" (indeed I’m almost only ever talking about a single

theme: unknowability), but to have it arise out of whatever

is engagingly at hand. If I find myself suddenly thinking up

an argument with a more scholarly scent (I suppose that's

happened here and there), like a flash itch to see something

in terms of what I understand to be semiotics – I play fast

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and loose with that, too: the aim is never consciously to define

anything, but rather give a visceral take on the sort of minute

limited breath of a thing that tends to interest me. I love playing

just a few notes. Example: choose any two contiguous sentences

James wrote after 1910 – like this, from a letter to his niece Peggy:

“I glory in the piling up of complications of every sort. If I could

pronounce the name James in any different or more elaborate

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way I should be in favor of doing it.” It’s perfect, personal

and completely James. A kiss and a handshake. I am driven

by whim to find and settle on whatever caters to the whim. But

when the whim arises out of an immersion as odd and wide

and full of suggestion as mine is in Henry James, it will be a whim

with a built-in mission – certainly to underscore my view of

the 'whole' – that is, my overall feeling called up by reflecting on

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something – someone – I love. Everything I write, like each photo

I take of New York, amounts to a love letter. But as with anyone

I love, I really do welcome departures – upsets – incursions

of something unexpected. With whatever or whomever you love,

you always want, I think, more truth. So it's not an onanistic

return to a fond fantasy. The thing you return to is alive,

not dead, and you seek in it and bring to it evidence of the quirk,

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the unforeseen, the untoward kick and slap. Actually, James'

language gives this to me all the time. It's not some dreamy sea

of cadence; it constantly surprises; at its best it follows the mind

so closely that it recreates it. I find simply by charting my reactions

to it, I establish as much of a relation with it as I can imagine

having. Not that it may not rivet me to learn the facts about

the Dreyfus Affair or Belgian soldiers in the Great War,

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but they will be the ushers at the wedding.

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Nemesis and Genesis

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Nemesis of life –

Genesis of art:

He benefits from strife,

where all the ladders start.

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Homage to Quentin Crisp in advance of November 21st, the date in 1999 he died.

.............
I’m never terribly aware of what day or date or sometimes even month it is I suppose because (in addition to not believing in ‘time’) I don't have a life which depends very much on knowing those sorts of specificities. So I'm not a little surprised and charmed at the synchronicity of my having come upon a piece I wrote about Quentin Crisp for Middlebury College's magazine 17 years ago, right as the date of the anniversary of his death, November 21 (1999), drew nigh. It made me think memory is biological. Which of course it is. It also made me want to YouTube it, which I now have.
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I talk about all that in this video so I won't go on about it here. I will however add what I didn't say in the video which is that my dear friend and Middlebury College library archivist Joseph Watson found the piece for me (I couldn't find my copy); it was the photocopy he sent me in 2015 I came upon. I have become convinced Mr. Watson can chart the provenance of anything written down or published in any place and at any time in the history of our species and be as likely as anyone living to effect the placement of a pristine first edition of it in your hands. Thank you and a big MWAH! to Joseph for his unerring success in this realm. (text in photos below.)

https://youtu.be/Q6ZW0LZ3saA

What You’ve Thrown Away

https://youtu.be/2tRXcJdeqQA

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Imaginary friends, discarded

once outgrown, upended

and forgotten by their blood-

and-flesh companions whom

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they’d shown and who they

thought had also shown

a love which offered them so

unconditional a fit that it was

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unimaginable they would ever

need a love additional to it.

But now these randomly

abandoned beings have begun

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to find equivalently yearning

others of their kind. New

intimacies salve their burning

losses. Imagination glosses

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its effects and predilections,

finds new ways to ride the bends

of its fluidities, affections

and desires. Floating past each

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other on their river, they begin

to feel the quiver of a possibility

of love they’d thought was gone.

Might dreams love dreams?

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Now they do. Which means

there may be hope for

what you’ve thrown away,

and therefore hope for you.

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Her Heinous Sin

https://youtu.be/JNAMQBaW284

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Sometimes I’ll see her wander in,

adorned in unfamiliar veils

and scarves and hat

and wonder where she possibly

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could have acquired all of that.

I didn’t put them there,

and no one else has favored her

with his or her attention that I know of.

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She’s long not had a flow of dough

to spend on anything. And what

accounts for all the flowering

of new appurtenances sprouting from

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her skin I’d never seen sprout up before?

Whatever has afforded her return –

its what and why and when –

we can discern she’s ventured forth again

to test the air for more than temperature,

although how cold or warm it is,

is of surpassing interest: she seeks

whatever signs she can divine align

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with hope – and if the world is genially

temperate to her today, might that, she

wonders, signify a welcome, bidding her

to stay? She wonders if the Cosmos ever

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will forgive her for her heinous sin.

Or if it simply isn’t interested

at all in what befalls her.

So far it hasn’t been.

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If She Isn’t Here

https://youtu.be/CL8rvLzyaVs

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She doesn’t need dreams or boats.

She floats her schemes in breezes –

The mad zephyrs she wheedles out

From her despair and disgust over

what I have done when I’ve fussed

with her hair. She’s never touched

anything other than air – not our air,

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but the air she creates in her secret

enclosure that I’ll never see,

although oh – how I wish it were

open to me! I’d love just a glimpse

of wherever she goes when she’s

gone to her lair. It’s from there she

irradiates out into space via thin leaky

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streaks her response to the words

that the thing of me speaks, which

she hears all the time since I can’t

not intone what I type, while I type,

almost always in rhyme. She doesn’t

like rhyme, or anyway mine.

Each streak is a reflex – a burst

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of aversion against the mistakes

I apparently cannot not make when

I write what I like in a verse –

which ignites her displeasure as well

as my own – further, curses my cause:

to regale her. She’s never not told me

I fail her. So why does she want me

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at all? you might ask. My task,

and our bargain, are fearsomely clear.

If I do not draw her, she will not appear.

With what repercussions? Egregious,

my dear, and with no help from Jesus –

morbidly fatuous, fatally sly.

If she isn’t here, then neither am I.

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seven weekends past their prime

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Did they plan to commit a mortal 
sin of calamitous crime? Or were 
they mere shenanigans that, 
seven weekends past their prime,
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began devolving irredeemably 
into unpalatable slime, resolving 
then before they were themselves
disposed of to collude and frolic in 
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and bollix up and spoil the arrival 
(and most probably survival) 
of some unsuspecting dummy
who had brung his hungry tummy
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to be fed. Balsamic vinegar and
olive oil waiting waiting waiting for
somebody’s final piece of bread.
Soon we’ll all be dead, they said.
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Affective Poesy

with a stronger than usual appeal to listen to the video (which, heaven save us, even has a postscript), since this poem feels like it marks new territory for me and I couldn’t seem to not need to say stuff to somebody about it. So if you can bear being that somebody, I’d like it a lot.

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https://youtu.be/n8mfv_JtPrk

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Two days ago I took a crash course in Affective

Poesy and I think I’ve got the knack of it at last.

Affective Poesy requires forty-five lines separated

Into five nine-line stanzas. Visually any line

Should seem about the same length of Another.

Each line’s first word Flush left is in the upper case,

And never lower. You can however Govern whether

Other Nouns and Verbs and Parts of Speech be

Crowned in upper-case as Well. Content mostly

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Will not much Engage: protecting you against what

You had Very badly Feared, and at other Private

Moments hoped, might Spell your Destiny: to dash

Into an under-handed, under-fucking-standing

Of the under-Fucking-taking of the care and

Application of a Pearly quantity of Sickeningly

Slick Pellucid fluid of the human male, a true spin

Through the famous halls of Montezuma, and an

Amplitude of everything that fails: and falls to Seeing

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That another otherness be Gently excised from the

Room to be politely Shown the Door, sent out to

Implore The rest of any- and of Everything in this

Rapacious Urgency to learn what it had not Yet

Learned: to do Without the glory Promised it But not

Delivered By Saint Anna Plume-de-Lune From whom

We Thought you’d learned sufficiently the reason

For the Ogling Mumbah turning his Attention far

From what he’d thought that he Was here to bless,

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Confess – when at that Unrepentant Moment you

Said Yes, you’d fill the Coffers of each strange new

Tent raised in the jungles and the deserts which

Appeared to Harbor organized talk therapy for all

The endlessly Repentant winners at casino coin

Machines. The beans and rice of it! To think there

Was a way to live That didn’t strategize to make

You Do what you were sure you had To Do to live!

To think! To think at all becomes a kinky slinky

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Correlating uppity capacity to render an acute

Neurosis, like a flaccid acidosis of the spirit Veering

To and fro between, among the psyche’s Three

Presiding Needs to please itself too well. Nothing

Ever breaks that spell. Some say it quells Their

Rheumatiz quite well. Some say it’s hell. Some

Say it’s an inordinate attempt to Be: to pre-Select

To go-and-see. I think it’s all affective poesy. You

should try your Hand at it. It’s meant the world to me.

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