The Blood (& Tools) of a Poet

In the Romantic imagination of many, the tools of the poet's trade are a quill, a piece of parchment, a tallow candle, and perhaps a glass of absinthe or laudanum.  And of course, plenty of inner torment.  

from Ode to my Unique and Deeper Anguish than Thine.

Hand held to head in squalid garret,
bat flying through etched lines where it -  
the guttering candle - meets darkness, 
the fetid air and cold and dampness. 
The pattering of brazen rats' feet.
Across the bed and through the sheets;
A whore's forgotten kerchief to mop sweat 

from a syphillitic brow, creased with regret.... (yadda cetera)

These days, the scene is more likely a laptop, a lamp from Ikea named Ljusfnord, an IPA, a thesaurus, a healthy dose of egotism, and a check from home.  And that's not a jab.  Half of Baudelaire's letters to his mom were pleas for money.  I can relate to that. 

                                                        

Jump (might as well):  Pictur'd above is the toolkit I use when I assemble my poems.  It is the toolkit I use to disappear.  I'm not a poet but something like an assembler on auto-pilot.  A cross between a factory worker and a kid with Elmer's glue, glitter, and macaroni.

I don't like poetry readings, most contemporary poetry, slam, the da-duh-daaaa cadence of "spoken word...." and poems with gentle humor about lakes, the hoot of an owl at vanilla sexual climax, a room in the Catskills to escape the noise and the smells of the Big Apple, he a mid-level advertising executive who still occasionally ekes out a poem, she a non-tenured Associate Professor of English who leads creative writing workshops on Riker's Island.  (Note to self:  call the city historian, find out if the portrait in the warden's office is avec or sans beard....Make it so.)  I should add that while I don't care for slam, in fact it annoys me, I respect many a slam poet's skills, and one can't denigrate a concept - poetry as verbal joust, a competition - that dates back to the Jocs florals (Floral Games) of the troubadours, established by the Consistori del Gay Saber in Toulouse in 1324.  That's a year shy of 700 years ago....

The Consistori still exists, now called the Acadèmia dels Jòcs Florals and is thus the oldest literary association in existence.  I guess the name isn't the only change.  The original Consistory would have spoken a dialect of what is now called Occitan but was also widely know as Provençal, and it was later very much involved in the promotion, standardization, and preservation of Occitan.  But their website is in French, without even a Occitan translation.  UNESCO classifies many Occitan dialects as "seriously endangered."  You know that's not alarmist when an organization historically engaged with the preservation of a language doesn't even present itself in that language.  It's like the coal mining museum in Kentucky coal country that is powered entirely by solar energy! 

My "poetry" influences are pop songs, advertising slogans, proverbs, clichés; fragments of text from spam, torn pieces of paper, TV guide episode descriptions*, or from Sappho of Lesbos.  I've also been known to drop in song lyrics or fragments of conversation I overhear while writing.  

*Due credit to artist T.A. Wilson, who found the following example hilarious. (As do I).  Anyone who's seen the episode will know exactly which show and episode is being referred to.  I can say without irony that this single sentence is an extremely efficient description and is a "flash poem" of some genius.  

"Kira tries to dislodge a stubborn Bajoran."  

Seven words perfectly summarize an entire episode.

I do not ignore authorial intent, but I do place high value (not "higher") upon a reader's (mis?)understanding; "meaning," such as it is, is an interplay between the writer and those who read him/her/them.  A person's take on any given text may in fact be a total misunderstanding of what a writer intended to say.  So what?

I don't think cut-up, fold-ins, cross-reading or any other "scissorial compostions" a) are weapons against control b) predict the future c) are harmful plagiarism.  They are, however, F-U-N fun and useful.  Scissors and glue bring a childlike sense of wonder back into the oft-dreary niche that some poetry can be.  Even when it isn't, but especially when it is.

"Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It holds tight an author’s phrase, uses his expressions, eliminates a false idea, and replaces it with just the right idea."

                                                                                        - Isidore Ducasse Poésies II (1870)

I have hundreds of "non" cut-up/concrete/visual/asemic poems, but to be honest, I'm more fond of my concrete and found poetry these days.  The following are a set of five unique books of concrete poetry with collage elements, burns, tears, paint splatters and washes, coffee washes, folds and crumplings.  Each one is unique.  The copy on the left was designed to be as ugly as possible!

Anyway, all this came about after I was inspired by the sight of my "tools" laid out as I was looking through my collages.  Pure narcissism.  That and I'm working on a short summary of concrete, visual, and cut-up poetry, along with other forms of found and collage texts, asemic or otherwise.  I intended this post to be one photo and a sentence or two, but it just kept going.  My brain is trying to make sense of a long and diverse branch of "poetic endeavors."

BTW, I'm willing to sell any of these works.  If anything catches your eye and you'd like a better picture, please leave a comment.  Some of these have already been shown in one of my Milk Coma (with collaborator Metapinto) shows (2013 at Pavillions Sauvages or 2016 at Café Le Burgaud).

One day I'd like to scan all of my collages and collage poetry, but that will be a pretty monumental task.  If that monument were small and insignificant....

William Carlos Willliams is said to have said

"It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there."

A lot of poets share that opinion.  Of course they would.  It defends and renders important an art which is, when not ignored, derided by our culture.  I tend to think it's bullshit.  Or maybe not.  There's a dearth of poetry in the American Agora.  But no dearth of dickheads, crypto-fascists, and mass shootings (600 + this year so far.  Winning!)  Writing poems, or in this case, cutting and pasting them together, well, at the very least one can say that there are worse ways to spend one's time....