If it Had Not Been Stolen, It Would Not Be Worth Keeping

An Untitled Visual Poem in Four Parts by Scott Helmes and Anne Gorrick (2011)
I have found myself.

No, not quite, but the beginning is right.

I have found myself, I have come to discover myself, in the process of writing a book I did not realize I was writing. All of the poems are long, at least five or six pages in length, and usually many many more than that. All of the poems are built upon found bits of poetry that I appropriate, arrange, and then expand upon.

It is a musical kind of writing, even if the music is silent. It is a riffing off of lines, a sequence of worded notes. And then another.

(I'm writing this having just fallen into sleep with a computer in my lap and my fingers on the keyboard. Some of the words I found left were English, but in the wrong key, my falling mind failing to write the right word down, hearing something else instead and putting that in its place.)

It is a poetry of stealing and of having been stolen from. It is all I can do to keep from writing one of these poems. I am a kleptomaniac in the storehouse of words.

It is a poetry of the impersonal made personal, a poetry of one person found inside the shape of another. I am not a shapeshifter, but I fill the spaces that the shapeshifter has moved through.

I have taken up with words and am too taken by them to leave them. They gather around me like moss. If I shake them off, a thin mist descends upon me in a cool corner of language and I am soon covered once again.

It is not that I am a writer but that I am a being who is written through. Conduit, not construct. Acequia madre, no agua.

I work in fragments and build fragments around those. I am a mosaicist, not a sculptor. I do not take away from. I add to. Caribbean coral, not hurricane winds.

In this way, the process of addition is a process of subtraction, the initial words, the germs of the poems, being reduced, being diluted, to ever-smaller quantities until they almost disappear within a new stream of words.

The line of thought is not a line but a sequence of ever-diverging furcas. It is a fractal poetry, endlessly repeating itself outwardly and inwardly.

In one case, the last (meaning in the object and completed fact of the last poem I have written so far, not meaning in the fact of my having completed the final poem of the sequence) I did not choose fragments to work from. I chose a fragmentary and prismatic poem by Anne Gorrick, a poem that is a set of four sets of words, each assigned as the textual matter of a sequence of visual poems she created with Scott Helmes. They are beautiful as words and beautiful as parts of colorful visual wholes.

In that case, in the case of Anne's words, I stole them whole, I stole them wholesale, without discretion.

In this case, I have built up around the stolen words. I have added words around them, between them. I made one version in this way, and then I took that version and I made a version from that in the same way. I subtracted no words. Occasionally, I changed words, but only those I myself had written, replacing each word with a word I thought more appropriate, but never editing out a word and leaving a lacuna in its place. Addition alone, never subtraction, guided my practice.

Through five sets of additions, I expanded the poem into something much longer than I imagined it would be, and it now fits within a book I am writing, a book that seems subsiding into completion.

As a last thought, I'll note that these poems are not really written to the people I have stolen words from, and they do not represent an honoring of their words. Mine is an act of poetic defilement. The originals may shine through, but they are covered in the mulch of strange and extraneous words. What I write are my own poems within the corpses of others' poems, and those are corpses of poems I have personally killed.

These poems are poems of defilement and thievery and of twisting the meanings of the originals into the interests of my own mind. If they were homages, they would represent something else, they would be kind to the poets, they would continue the poets' ideas, their voices.

Certainly, I mimic these poets through this process, but it is only in order to steal their souls, to change these souls into something else, and to sell them to the devil.

The clink of coins arises from my pockets as I walk.





Four Visual Poetic Rectangles
—expanded from lines by Anne Gorrick

1
in the upper left
that alizarin, crimsonmadder than her low-red voice empurpled then drained
regret defines variancethe tiny articles of beingthat extract the succorfrom the suckingthe sucrose makes itsweeter
all flavours of colour
it is all splendida violet the colour of flowersand so sensitive it’s almost
a petalfloating
a river of movinga thought expressed from the body and extendedinto whatever is
transitory, a radio, a rosary the way we sing out of itthe way it sings us out of itself
my voice is wordlessmy voice is worldlessmy voice is worthless
the breaking that singing causes in usthe sense that we had been brokeneven before we have sung
a single worda married thought
how crimson leansdeep deep into usalmost to the point where we are
green but deeperthan that darkness
deeper than deaththe depth of it
almost lost
to it

2
towards the upper right
a royal appropriatefor colours as flags are
the waving silkskin the colour of milk
the silkskin cockthe silkskin cunt slippery for inningfor giving
these tonalities of the ear nor eyerequiring the tongueto slip in to lingerover
the long it takesthe longer it takes
the more it comesthe more it leaves
the budding leafing treesof tenderest meanscatchers of a soft sunlight
the falling elmswelltan and moving as sand
what forms upon an additional ground, a paste of dust, the magenta of it
or pearls’ scent
she cannot see through the sea taste
of me
these areclouds plastered downin immovable colour
in quinacridone,I am painted into placeupon her within herunchangeablein escapable emotion
movement encased in stasis
in constant emergency
we are also painted theretogether
see the red 5so vibrant on our bellies
see the pearly 5so languid on her belly
what may be a snakeits slither away
still a slither toward
somewhere

3
from the lower left
a beautiful gloss to it, like glass
vitreous light
nystagmus caught mecaught my sight of it and
I thought, gliss,but could not hear it
even from a listen
I would glessthe meaning of it
into some raw unthought thought
the gluss would eat allI threw up to it
the gluss would eat all
facts like sprays of violets in a reddish purple
the colour of bruisingnot bruise
or a 19thcentury fury all in the eyes
a small creaturecovered in furwith tiny beady eyes
or a small creature nearly furlessbut mammalian andhow her seeming nakedness was
to me
although it wasn’t it wasn’t permanent
never is
a(lilact) tonal
in the eyes I fracture in the heartI come apart inside her Irupture

4
forward into lower right
into the red like rosinshe leans into shadeof the Japanese maple
like a distant violet antand violent too
there is a shade in herin the crevice of her so deepthat it is a pink that’s almost redand there I go
again
even with our eyes closed
overseas, things are almost noirâtre our aster succumbed to darkness
the eyes closed enoughto allow the feeling of it
as the deep blue covers
it all up
(the eyes close enough)
it covers the weak and the dying
the me and the she
I could not speak to her as youI could not say if she were true
color is an abstraction perfectly palpablethose parts of her that are palmableI move her with the cup of my hand
with that alizarin, crimson,the scent of cinnamongrowing
she is a scentlike cinnamon but not cinnamonand growing
and reaching
out
to me



ecr. l'inf.