Misreadings: A Concise Writing Style
Jan 16th
Sky
retreating
all day all night
that world of water
an impasse as impassive
as the spirits we
raise there.
Folie à plusieurs
Dull desire bores like a dentist’s drill.
My lovers: Alice down the rabbit-hole, a girl made of geraniums.
Afghanistan. Judge them, JUDGE THEM.
When you die:
Keep your Breton close to where your heart used to be
Remember:
Jesus was a surrealist.
Plato was a surrealist.
Nietzsche was a surrealist.
Freud was a surrealist only in his dreams.
The last head of state was definitely a surrealist.
And I’m a surrealist if it catches the eye of the woman in the street.
Man, of Spiritualism
Jan 2nd
Man, of Spiritualism
Leur pouvoir
is anchoring
the unknown.
Several lives
fall into
empty space.
In this clearing, it says,
I am in no country and asks
why the world is so explosive or
why there is always a bottle marked POISON.
we are best illuminated from above,
a trifling pleasure too dark to miss.
Suppose we are a question of distance.
Dare to venture so far. Enjoy being lost.
The Cynic
Jan 2nd
The man thinks he’s a Cynic.
He ‘loved’ too much,
He ‘loved’ too little,
He ‘loved’ and lost,
He lost.
He was told « c’est cool! »
He went to university and
needs to stand out.
He is too clever
for ‘desire’,
He is not clever enough.
for satire.
Most of all,
I’m a ‘Cynic’ because
He’s too cynical
to know what
it means.
TME KMPRN (It’s cool, but it’s not poetry is it?)
Dec 28th
TME KMPRN
Taught to dream
not with his head
but with his hands.
Inside he’s naked
and a little girl.
She loves, and alone
They leave, and die
young dos elastique
and so the sea finds
comical the combinations
in French soils .
Now never screaming
froid et subtle
dates nor eyes
nor your voice
added with their wounds
move our city of displacement.
And I am left screaming:
WHY SHOULD I PAY THE COUNCIL TAX?
Bastards.
The artists
Dec 21st
I have issues with artists. They accuse the scientists of removing the unknown, the mystical. They tell us how they feel something deep in their DNA, how their love is like a supernova. Listening to the radio fills my grandmother with fear. I can’t blame her, how preposterous will it seem in fifty years time when the next big thing finds an ingenious way to make the higgs boson sound banal?
Poem: ‘horizon’ (and some thoughts on procedural poetry)
Dec 16th
the horizon
fixed the abyss to an ophthalmoscope
there I was
stretched like vessels
across the sky
before learning as adults’
my thoughts pressed
along the flow of a plume
until the pressure was subdued
more it gazed into me,
More I aged, for months…
______
Since my introduction to procedural poetry (and chance procedures) at university, it has become a big part of my experiments in language. At first I thought of it as a trinket before realising the possibilities — albeit years after better poets had. 
I’d spend hours trying to dream up new, convoluted ways to obliterate any ‘authorial input’ in the ‘creative’ process.
The more I read of John Cage’s mesostics, the more I became interested in writing computer programs. Computer programs offer limitless possibilities in the arrangement of what one inputs, but so much still depends on the information chosen. Regardless of how random the method of data collection is, it is difficult (perhaps impossible) to escape this fact. The author is a very resilient stain. Anyway, I’m not a huge fan of essentialist dichotomies such as those between man and machine (or at least I like to see the line blurred, see (1)). I now see these programs as an extension of self, and thus an organic part of the creative process. While not exactly springing fully formed from the head of the author, there is more to these poems than just a concept now.
Procedure: I took notes and fragments whilst watching the horizon, with ‘imagism’ in mind. I then took simple line drawing of the scene. I digitised the scribblings and wrote a program to match random lines to the length of the line drawing. I chose which lines I found interesting before reproducing the layout of the line-drawing.
(1) Related to this ‘blurring’ is the essay ‘Technology as extension of human functional architecture’ and an interesting quote from Syd Mead. I didn’t include these in the main post as they take us a little farther from the subject than I wanted to go.
Poem: The Solution
Dec 10th
The Solution
I under colours, suffers
my driving thoughts
all day through.
It grows so immense
that before I know it,
I am lost in open waters.
I asked my father, never short of
absurd and profound truths,
whether I should discard
the horrible eyes of English
as though it were a well-defined illusion
Still I know
had he told me different
I would have cried tears
that could split atoms,
as I clung like a coastal city
onto the edge of my identity.
poem scribbled on the back of a bill / translations
Dec 8th
The task of a ’successful’ translation is made a hundred times harder by the dictionary. Whenever you have spare time, translate. Always do it without a dictionary. If you feel you are unable to render a word or phrase, improvise. Take your favourite (or least favourite) line and rewrite the poem. You have successfully translated a text.
—-
Somewhere
there is a woman,
her hips wind like a river,
her language like our hands
stretched out in a thousand words.
Spread through the fields the
daggers pass
like
my
thoughts.
But we are suspended like
months upon our words,
in the Gardens where we weep,
poem: sixth (smile)
Dec 4th
____
SIXTH
subdue
hissssteria of those troublesome female mass es
eased with antihisteriamines let’s get fiscal:
and pass the deep congress ional act
she said do we need protectionism?
seminal cash injections leave a mess
on both your economy and mine
pre servativ o ur values are not gd
truncated that growth stimulus package easily
feeling the explosion of that cap italicism
s crunch the fabric and col lapse into
the arms of the latest word isms
