Tag: poem

• Monday Composition: Dragstrip B-Movie Big-Tit Queen    

  It’s you baby.
  I want you dropping the red bandanna between
  	our headlights pointed toward the cliff beyond
  I want the lacy edge of your push-up bra pushing
  	up beyond your low-cut top to be
  	the last sight I see before I pedal to the metal
  	this hot rod toward oblivion 
  But you’re no Natalie Wood sweetheart, you’re bad
  I’ve seen you in 1000 movie matinees, an afternoon cinema slut
  	the gangster’s moll
  	the hoodlum’s squeeze
  	the vampire’s wife
  	the creature feature monsterbait
  	number one slit in the lesbian biker pack
  	the razor chick in the all-girl gang
  	the tough broad sidekick
  	not the heartthrob but the handjob 
  	not the heroine but the hard-on
  with lips cherry red
  	kohl-ringed eyes
  	stiletto heels snapping castanets
  	hunks of skin under your nails
  	cleavage heaving beneath reptile hands	
  	Tura Satana’s legs, Kitten Natividad’s jugs,
  	Bettie Page’s ass, Ingrid Pitt’s fangs
  	honey skin thigh jiggling giggling 
  	sweet hole sticky lipped
  You’re my personal Jayne Mansfield, head intact
  My puberty’s centerfold dream realized in panting flesh
  and I’m still in the third row, ordering
  	another jumbo popcorn, feet
  	propped up on the next row, waiting 
  	for a flash of pink that never quite 
  	makes it past the cut of the American 
  	International Pictures’ censor
  I’ve seen you play the sweater girl opposite Steve McQueen,
  	saving the world from aliens while
  	making out in the back seat, civilization 
  	hanging by one bra strap
  Lounge back in white trash splendor, lit up in the glare
  	of a stag film flickering on the fake 
  	paneling of a basement rec-room.
  Pull the switchblade from your beehive baby, the one 
  	you stuck in Jeff Hunter’s back when he 
  	fell for you like a schoolboy but you were 
  	a dropout tired of a diet of white bread
  You’re not a nice girl and I never wanted you to be
  Smear the popcorn butter Bettie, 
  	right across that swell looking mug
  Swing your Fender Telecaster as you and Wanda Jackson
  	pound the shit out of Jailgirl Rock
  I’ve heard your pumps clicking down a wet brick midnight 
  	alley the hitman on your trail
  I’ve seen you punch out the sorority girl at the sock hop
  	then get belly shot by the friendly cop
  	O’Malley in the end
  keep riding that Harley mama, till the blood runs down 
  	your legs
  keep tossing that dynamite
  	blowing the side panels off Continentals
  keep tossing back bourbons neat while 
  	the college boys cough on crème de mint
  keep your nails long and jungle red clawing 
  	your way from the cheap sharecropper’s cabin 
  	to the hard grit sidewalks of LA
  keep shaking that wild bikini, squirming in the painted-on 
  	leather, and shimmering
  	the cheap porno tinsel on the stripper runway 
  keep dancing on the edge of that cliff 
  	as I race my souped-up Chevy
  	out into the dread air
  keep loading the passion, both barrels blasting, sending 
  	me over the cliff for one last look of that lacy bra,
  	one last look on the screen. 
  But you’re real baby,
  	no mere 2D projection of our desire on the silver screen
  	of the mind.
  You’re all 3D – 
  no glasses necessary.
  
  
  

  A selection from The Gunslinger in Technicolor, published by Mount Diablo Books and available in print  from Amazon.

  

  2025.02.10

• Tuesday Citation: Short-Order Cook by Jim Daniels

  An average joe comes in
  and orders thirty cheeseburgers and thirty fries.

  I wait for him to pay before I start cooking.
  He pays.
  He ain’t no average joe.

  The grill is just big enough for ten rows of three.
  I slap the burgers down
  throw two buckets of fries in the deep frier
  and they pop pop, spit spit. . .
  pssss. . .
  The counter girls laugh.
  I concentrate.
  It is the crucial point–
  they are ready for the cheese:
  my fingers shake as I tear off slices
  toss them on the burgers/fries done/dump/
  refill buckets/burgers ready/flip into buns/
  beat that melting cheese/wrap burgers in plastic/
  into paper bags/fried done/dump/fill thirty bags/
  bring them to the counter/wipe sweat on sleeve
  and smile at the counter girls.
  I puff my chest out and bellow:
  Thirty cheeseburgers! Thirty fries!
  I grab a handful of ice, toss it in my mouth
  do a little dance and walk back to the grill.
  Pressure, responsibility, success.
  Thirty cheeseburgers, thirty fries.

  From Show and Tell: New and Selected Poems by Jim Daniels. Originally appeared in Places/Everyone. Copyright © 1985 by Jim Daniels.

  2025.01.28

• Tuesday Citation: John Cage

  The reputation of John Cage rests primarily on his work as a composer. Am I wrong? Could be. For some he is a speaker, performer, and theorist whose collections of lectures and anti-lectures such as A Year from Monday and Silence have been life altering. His work in poems and anti-poems constitute another area of influence. (That “anti” stuff is clunky, I know, but his work floats on such peripheries as to make usual generic discussion impossible; see the transcription of Empty Words below). What they have in common is improvisation.

  Maybe. I have been told by jazz musicians that improv in jazz is never spontaneous, is instead a very intentional process of disassembly and reassembly. Fine, then Cage’s improv goes much farther. It is based on chance. Here’s an excerpt from Marjorie Perloff’s “poetry on the Brink” about Cage:

  The main charge against Conceptual writing is that the reliance on other people’s words negates the essence of lyric poetry. Appropriation, its detractors insist, produces at best a bloodless poetry that, however interesting at the intellectual level, allows for no unique emotional input. If the words used are not my own, how can I convey the true voice of feeling unique to lyric?

  With thousands of poets jostling for their place in the sun, a tepid tolerance rules.

  This is hardly a new complaint: it was lodged as early as the 1970s against John Cage’s writings-through—texts, usually lineated, composed entirely of citations, with source texts ranging from Joyce’s Finnegans Wake to the notebooks of Jasper Johns. Here, for example, is a passage from “Writing for the first time through Howl” (1986):

                    Blind
  in thE mind
  towaRd
  illuminatinG
  dAwns
  bLinking
                    Light
  thE
  wiNter
  liGht
  endless rIde
  BroNx
  wheelS
                   Brought
  thEm
  wRacked
  liGht of zoo

  The source of these minimalist stanzas is the following set of strophes, whose erasure, based on what Cage has called the “50% mesostic” rule, uncovers the thirteen letters ALLENGINSBERG required for the vertical mesostic string. I have highlighted Cage’s chosen words, here beginning with the “B” for “–BERG.”

  incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,

  Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,

  who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo

  Cage’s elliptical lyric functions as both homage and critique, subtly interjecting his own values into the exuberant, hyperbolic Howl. As hushed and muted as Ginsberg’s baroque “ashcan rantings” are wild and expansive, Cage’s poem is a rhyming nightsong, whose referents are elusive, with only the movement toward the “BroNx” transforming the “linking” of the “blinking / light” to one that is “wRacked” with “light of Zoo.” Without deploying a single word of his own, Cage subtly turns the language of Howl against itself so as to make a plea for restraint and quietude as alternatives to the violence at the heart of Ginsberg’s poem.

  There is further dialogue between the two poems. For Ginsberg, sound and visual configuration support the poet’s exclamatory particulars, the urgent things he wishes to say, whereas for Cage poetry is, by definition, first and foremost a visual and sound structure. Poetry is not poetry, as he put it, “by reason of its content or ambiguity but by reason of its allowing musical elements (time, sound) to be introduced into the world of words.”

  Cage’s mesostic may be difficult to make out there, so a graphic might work better:

  

  Then again, the best way to understand it might be to try to write one yourself (dare I say “anti-write” since once again, the process violates all those tropes about originality that have been drummed into us) at this site where a software program has automated the process. I’ve used it myself, enjoying the concrete nature of the form:

  

  Just to show how far chance can go with Cage, here is an attempt to transcribe a little of his Lecture IV the fourth part of Empty Words, which, as described on his webpage: “a marathon text drawn from the Journals of Henry David Thoreau. This is one of Cage’s most sustained and elaborate moves toward the “demilitarization” of language, in four parts: Part I omits sentences, Part II omits phrases, and Part III omits words. Part IV, which omits syllables, leaves us nothing but a virtual lullaby of letters and sounds.”

  3 XI 325-7 ry
  4 II 430-2t um
  5 I 174-6 me
  6 XIV 332-4 for
  7 XIII 24-6 be

  and so on.

  It’s not “I wandered lonely as a cloud…” But then we already have that, so why not keep moving into new territory?

  2025.01.21

• Just Published! No va: poems

  My December book is out now from Mount Diablo Books. No va. Possibly a poem. Possibly an urban myth about the Chevy Nova in Spain. Possibly a variation of Georges Perec’s MICRO-TRADUCTIONS, 15 discrete variations on a known poem. Certainly based on Arthur Rimbaud’s short prose poem “Fête d’Hiver” from Illuminations. No va presents 22 variations by constraint on each of the 22 keywords in Rimbaud’s original the car sold poorly because its name “Nova” translates to “doesn’t go” in Spanish.
  
  The variations are examined carefully via an engine diagram exploded view as might be found in the Motor Auto Repair Manual, perhaps circa 1980. Possibly a sub-category in translations: that of variations; on the other hand, within these variations, it specifies a particular domain: discrete variations, essentially meaning people thought the car wouldn’t work properly. The exploded view is then imploded to create a series of 22 new, or newish, poems; however, this is completely false, as “nova” in Spanish means the same as in English, “new,” and supernova means super new.
  
  No va is in flight, or on a leisurely drive, from originality, subjectivity, and realism and toward quantum physics, supernovae, expanding space, rubber soul, and “When Yuba Plays the Rumba on the Tuba” played by Bugs on a sousaphone. The misconception arises from the phrase “no va” in Spanish which means “doesn’t go,” but you need to add an expansion of space between “no” and “va” to get that meaning, which most people wouldn’t automatically do when seeing “Nova.”
  
  Using the glossary-generated restraints from the first two sections, No va proceeds to create reimaginactaments of Rimbaud’s Lettre de voyant to Paul Demeny and his poem Le Bateau ivre. Very likely this is the inaugural work in the school of Trailer Park OuLiPo. The Chevy Nova sold well in Spanish speaking countries.

  2024.12.20