Gary Barwin's Blog: serif of nottingblog, page 7

ATM after Gerard Manley Hopkins

 

ATM after GMH

 

numinous tumbles over cashy rims of roundy fingers

max daily, money catches fire, withdrawal flames

bells ring, well hung, remember my PIN, oh look 

here’s a tongue, dear, fling some names

 

but mortal! cashish and me does (sic) one thing 

and the same: crying, what I do is me and love, here

at the ArkTM beside slushies and news

self is meaning, gosh, it speaks, spells, grace 

 

takes the moolah out, oh think about muses

UNLIMITED FINANCIAL POWER, ten thousand 

paces, lovely subliminal, oh yeah, lovely hope smeared

faces, alchemy, black debt, white fire, invisible fuses

TWELVE SLIPS OF THESEUS: BY WAY OF AN INTRO TO VOLODYMYR BILYK’S ROADRAGE

1. 

Roadrage: who let the words drive?

What does language sound like when it’s being language?

2.

Think. 

Tho(ugh)t. (—bpNichol)

Thunk. Onomatopoeia are words that sound like what they mean. What would words sounds like if they sounded like words? If they behaved like words rather than our idea of how a poem should behave?

3.

Language is AI. It learns from itself. 

What about the writer? The writer is AI, taught by the algorithms of language.

Algorithm. AIgorithm. AIgoriththththththm


AIEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

4.

Rhythm. Rhythththththm.

5.

6a.

If the poem is a political field, where does the organization of words belong?
A poem, a semi-autonomous collective joined by sound.

Or by meaning?

How is a poem “joined”? By joiners. Poems enjoin. 

6b.
The poem is a society populated by words. Or a sky where the birds are language. Or cows. Or soccer players. In the sky. What is the relationship between words? Between a flock? What is the grammar of soccer? Replace each player with a word. Then erase the lines on the field. Add other lines. What is where is the goal?
6c.
What is the inside of a poem? What is its outside? Where does society belong? The writer? The reader? How is a poem or language a Möbius strip?
7.
We’re in Plato’s cave and the words are on fire. See the shadows on the wall? They’re the shadows not of things but of words. We gather the shadows, press them together between our hands like a dark and shady snowball. We throw it at the world. 
The splat of what’s not there on the there. The shadowplay of meaning. Things get new shadows to replace the shadows they have and we must hypothesis a new sun, a new source of light.
8.
A dance inside the grammar. Smashmantic billow. Lexical burst. Phonological yawl. 
9.




10.


11.
The burbling burglaring burgeoning of meaning meaning not what one “thinks” it means. The lively chortle of words.  Here we have snort bursting, a hesitant (and not so hesitant) squirm. Sometimes the nidifugous nonce is responsible for the wryly wrested tear and we nigh -jerk or -empuzzle. 
11.
Volodymyr Bilyk writes “it is a warp, a whirl, vortex. I tried to cut out all the boring and superficial bits out of the poems in order to create more dense impactful narrative where every words means an event happening, he writes.” 
Try to leave out the bits the readers tend to skip, James Elwood says.
12.
In Bilyk ROADrage it’s the road that’s raging the road ranging the road arranging.  Roadrage: arrowed rage, slipage the sly page, the long gauge where’s we’re agog with its chortling hurtling gag, its language. It’s rad rage. 
It’s language as Skip Theseus’s ship where every meaning is replaced by another until meaning slips. Ship happens and the readership returns to its slip, each word replacing the world with another until the sweep song of words ships out Theseus’ language across the indepths. 
In Bilyk’s roared rage the rage is play, its direct impact like a car accident, the metal splendor and frill, the words driving sent flying into the reader air, the road burns the words alight. The mind careening round the road’s corner.  roadrage        language Xroaduage       langrage
Read that which follows which doesn’t follow but leads. Raging roads divergent in a yellow wood. I resolved to take the one which (in- out- en-) raged and that’s made all the disonant dance.

BIRD

BIRD
 
My taxes are late theyare made of wood. Whittling benefits.Rain expected.I can edit out the cough but not the sniffle.The tide went out andkept going. Time got really drunk.A cloud: more turbulent insidethan you’d expect. It whittles.Can I deduct ducks?From now on I’m using that newAI thing for all family pictures.Why aren’t we talking more about Africa?Barbra Streisand’s cloned dogs?When they bombed the shopping centreI imagined a bird with the face of typos.

Weep. "I'm a world champion wrestler"

 

fantastic giant tortoise

On Twitter recently, the poet Jessica Smith recently linked to this article and said, "I want to be a fantastic giant tortoise with my one wild and precious life, can I file for a transfer?" I wrote a poem in response, thinking about "my one wild and precious life," a phrase which, though I understand what Mary Oliver means, of course, and why people are attracted to its seize-the-dayness, also, to me, doesn't speak to the interconnectedness of our lives and a sense of what is large than the single span from "first cry to last sigh."

fantastic giant tortoise

for Jessica Smith

 

the words go back to change what the words once were

I will be a fantastic giant tortoise in my next life, too

 

never extinct they didn’t know where I was

the whole time I was

 

a lone female settled on an isolated vegetation patch

I will be a fantastic giant tortoise in my next life, too

 

the words go back to change what the words once were

my DNA the same as another giant tortoise found in 1906

 

wild and precious life intertwined 

I will be a fantastic giant tortoise in my next life, too

All Shall Be Well with Spongebog Squarepant and Julian of Norwich.

 

The Yiddish scholar Eddie Portnoy posted a Yiddish translation of the Spongebob Squarepants theme song. There's something so delightfully intriguing in this seeming mismatch.  Spongebob Squarepants translates as "ShvomBob Kvadrat-Hoyzn." Amazing. Immediately, this felt somehow poetic to me. Robert Bly speaks of "Leaping Poetry." When a poem "leaps" it makes “a long floating leap from the conscious to the unconscious and back again, a leap from the known part of the mind to the unknown part and back to the known.” From Yiddish and the historical world of my ancestors to Spongebob. From one part of culture to the other. Not bathos -- where the poem or image just sinks into ridiculousness, or at least, a ridiculousness which doesn't also engage with some kind of metaphysical or cultural absurdity, fusing high and low, connecting various parts of our imagination, consciousness and psyche. I feel this phenomenon when two epistemologies are connected or made adjacent. So Spongebob's umwelt experience of Bikini Bottom with the world of Yiddish, historical Jewish culture, mysticism, learning, etc. (Of course, there are plenty of examples of Yiddish popular culture which isn't metaphysical, just as bawdy, silly, commodified, pandering and so on, but for me, my first association is with the old world and my imaginative sense of scholars, mystics, wise everyday people filled with sayings, deep humour and approaching the complexity, difficult, persecution, travails and profound joys of their life. Some of this I got from spending time with my Yiddish-speaking grandfather and his evocation of the tradition which he imagined and aspired to.  

So, I set about making some visual collages, adding Spongebob (ShvomBob) into what seems like perfect Ashkenazi tropes. I was also thinking of Gerard Manley Hopkins' poetry. Why? Well, I'd listened to a couple podcasts about him (for example, the London Review of Books series about canonical poets.) I've also played with riffing off his poems, adding in internetspeak, colloquial language, and other contrasting tones. There's a leaping electricity with playing with the contrast between his densely tactile hypercharged inscape-fueled language and other language which has its own world of associations. And so, I made the poem that appears below. It has a kind of Flarfy energy and, strangely, a bit of Celan-like sound to it. I also was intrigued to put the poem beside the image. It's not quite an ekphastic poem -- the poem doesn't quite describe the image -- but it does have a relation to it. That's another kind of leaping.

I've added the poem based on part of a famous quote from the medieval anchorite Julian of Norwich. It has its own kind of contrasting electricity. And I love the presence of so many L's in her original quote and the uplifting, contradictory, absurd, funny yet still beautiful transformation of the quote to a line of all L's. 

Poor Bedfellows of Science

I've made a ton of t-shirt designs for sale!
The language of science is often mysterious, especially to non-scientists, of course. But there's also often a richness of imagery and sound that feels related to the poetic. A mouth feel that is satisfying. A rhythm that makes us notice and relish in its language. My friend, the film maker Terrance Odette, posted the title of an article noting that "poetry is everywhere." Well, that's a challenge I couldn't resist. So I made a poem playing with the sounds of this title. I mean, sure, heteropoly acid negolytes could enhance the performance of aqueous redox flow batteries at low temperature. Obv! That's what we've all suspected all this time, but isn't it true that "Follow-through is a poor bedfellow for the beauty of this testimonial"? Right? We poets bring the truths. 
 

a heteropoly acid negolyte that could enhance the performance of aqueous redox flow batteries at low temperatures

A heterophonic acorn negotiation that could entrance the perfume of aqueous redux flowerbed battleaxes in low temples wakes me early and I acknowledge what is negative could enhance the performance of lax tempest flukes over the bazaar of flowers. I feel glum-beckoned, filled by lackluster termites, actuarial fetus beaters addressed by a heteropoly of beanpoles.  The adaptible fold, tentacular flyover, adept at hectoring permanency. Follow-through is a poor bedfellow for the beauty of this testimonial. A flurry of admirable pessimists, assiduous foibles, beauts in the fog. How now adieu to the fond adhesive of low feeling? I have learned a heteropoly acid negolyte capability that could enhance the performance of aqueous redox flow batteries at low temperatures. Terrapins. Latent terns. Templates fractured by follicle beds, bearded in possibility. The acorn as the hereafter future in a fog of present tree. The heaping petticoat adornment thatching nonlachrymal thanks from adverbial beefs. Flower into flow, temperature into tempus fugit, acid into ascent.

Tales of Paradise Marsh

 

I had the great pleasure of appearing on Tale of Paradise Marsh, Martin Kendrick's show about writers engaging with the local urban marsh, Cootes Paradise March. 

We walked around and I talked about the marsh and how it has entered into my writing and my thoughts a about the history and ecology and future of the marsh.

Here's a link to full video. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdcjhJLp7eY

a moose came out of the woods and stepped on my heart, yes

a moose came out of the woods and

stepped on my heart, yes

a moose, horns like driftwood oaks

came out of the forest and

stepped on my heart

a moose or maybe an elk hard to tell

given my position and the fact that

the moon was radiant, glowing, but

behind clouds and I was lying down

curled in fetal position and

holding my head in my hands

as if my head newly born needed

all the protection it could get especially

with large hoofed ruminant animals

wandering about in semidarkness and me

so vulnerable—what’s that L doing in vulnerable

other than being silent? but let’s return to the stepping 

where my heart gets compressed by tremendous hooves

and blood shoots through me but then, powerful 

muscle that it is, inflates and throws the massive deer 

up into the sky, over the tops of trees and into deep space 

beyond the concerns of humans and their spelling

and then my heart compresses on its own, we need

the constant circulation of blood even without fable

________________________

this inspired by David Naimon's interview on his brilliant podcast Between the Covers
with Caren Beilin wherein she speaks of journaling about a cow squashing her heart.  

 

EXECUTOR SHRIKES. A little poetic funk

 

Gary Barwin · EXECUTOR SHRIKES

THESE WINGS
Oh yeah, executer shrikes a northern Dutch foldI won't say silver lips in multiple coloursbut I learned a lot, and like grey tinderthe terriblest part is the tri-coloured glanssoaking up the tan the thrill of thwack
I miss blackback extra, little shine sistermuscle tip, blue outs
I know every word to every flu like  a Japanese seagullso I'm never leaving here
beak-headed green lad in front of the brown brisket posing beside  a night goal 
this is flexible snout mice,  a diamond dove crossbow nothing positive can  come out of here except stinging stars
never been around this  elegant parking lot or violin warriors in my life.  never picked up winged bells before
I’m down for a saffron sink a boom smart a purperglance spree one, four, one, oneI'm splendid  fifty-three alpha minusthe way I found the spirit’s spanner was I had a shopping cart chest a Napoleonic shrinera headcold of trees