fallen verses

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So, internet-land, thus far our communications have been text-based, and it has been good. But there is so much more available and limiting ourselves to typing is just not taking advantage of all the modern adaptations available on this Web 2.0 deal.

This video includes two sestinas: Sestina for No One and Sestina that I wrote a while ago, but since I have a prompt up over at Read Write Poem about sestinas, I thought I would kick off this vlogging experiment with a reading of those two.

Internet-land, what I would like to know is if you like this idea of both seeing and hearing me. Questions, comments, suggestions, and proposals of marriage all welcome!

(from here via notcot)

Make it big, and it’s art. Make it big, and public, and it’s art people talk about.

I wonder if the problem with poetry is that it’s too quiet now. The maddest among us don’t howl so much as froth. I certainly mumble in the background somewhere about the ephemeral. Maybe it just isn’t enough of a spectacle without obscenity trials?

Dana has had some thoughts about “public poetry” and swimwear in the winter is attention getting. But maybe too small*. Maybe.

Maybe we need to think bigger. Stop thinking about what I can do, and think, “what can we get a thousand people to do.” What makes it big.  Something to think about anyway.

*For the record, on attractive women, I do generally have the opinion that the smaller the swimwear, the better. Tongue-in-cheek sexism aside, it’s not the quantity of fabric, that makes the swimsuit (either much or little) but how it looks altogether.

Among other reasons, my posting here as been… inconsistent because I’ve been spending most of my time learning the UKULELE! I’ve been talking more about this on Ineffably Tom, but it seems somewhat relevant over here. If you have any curiosity on how well I can play, I’m posting the videos at youtube.com/user/tadam3000, I’ll warn you in advance, I’m not expert. I’m not even mediocre.

Zoe, on the other hand, is pretty damn good.

I’d expect to see more videos of ukulele greatness here.

This isn’t a poem, you know.
This is a splash of colour
(black)
on scraps of dirty paper
(suddenly valueless, green, 155.956 × 66.294 mm
when we give up the ridiculous imperial measurements
distributed with foreign government and unrepresented
taxation, which, it seems, we also need to
give up)
saying "thanks for being around.

"Thanks for being
constant as the cloud of
crows at stirling castle
or the voice in Ted Haggard’s head
(he calls it "God," but whatever).
Thanks for lasting
the same 65 million
as dinosaur bones
and not being calcified.

"Thanks for being
the bass line when I
was playing lead
and embellishing the melody
when I couldn’t strum
anything other than
c - c - c - c."

This isn’t a poem, you know.
This is my map of you
and where your bones move
softly through your muscles
and skin into my skin
and muscles and bones
so we vibrate at the same pitch
which is the pitch of grass
growing in a summer afternoon
reaching for the sun.
Shhhhh… Listen closely.

A response to Nathan’s Collaborative prompt #59 where poets donated titles and those titles have been used as the basis for the text of other poems. I didn’t use them all, I slashed them to pieces and added in more words, but I think that’s the joy of these prompts that we start with complete (or nearly) texts and disassemble and re-create in the writing process.  Definitely, if you have not, check out the other responses to this prompt over at Read Write Poem.

A Read Write Poem thing

This isn’t much of anything yet, a free-write a writing without goal or purpose. Perhaps a basis to later be Michelangelo and remove the unneeded. For now, just words:

Above, the stars are like a congregation in prayer, heads bent, taking no notice of our hands stretched across the empty space in the pew, hands stretched low against the cushion, hands reaching…

I mouth the words to some hymn. Some vocalization unrelated. I don’t hear the organ or the voices raised in some sort of exultation. I don’t even hear my heartbeat. There is silence, and the whisper of air as you inhale. What need for God when the numinous is close enough to be touched. And the hands, reaching…

But metaphor fails at this moment. The stars are just balls of exploding gas unimaginably far away paying no attention to the shy couple eating ice cream after sunset in the late spring. There is no  parish, no pastor, no sermon and the only hymn is the cicadas and the crunch of teeth powdering waffle cone. There is no metaphor in the hands. Two filled by elements of distraction, two remain untouching, unreaching…

And yet to dream.

…is the middle ground. Extremes (and complexities) of emotional response are pretty much our stock-in-trade. It might well be the ethos of the middle-brow suburban working stiff to parrot the old-media-spawned desirability of a ‘balanced’ perspective but the unbalanced, unpopular, subversive, perverse, creepy, critical, curious, unconventional and not-always-well-intentioned are just a few of the acceptable positions for genuinely creative and/or inquisitive minds”

-Hazel Dooney

I would like to think most of us are aware of HIV/AIDS and realizes these are a Bad Thing, but I don’t know. There are a lot of crazy people out there who believe the strangest things for no apparent reason (and, even worse, when shown they are wrong!). I can’t begin to understand that view, and I’ll simply say that I hope they are not participating in Blogger’s Unite: World Aids Day.

Tara from the Scienceblog Aetiology has written quite a bit about the science of HIV/AIDS, and anyone interested in learning some of the more technical information might want to check out her posts on HIV/AIDS. Information is also available at the National Institute On Drug Abuse and at AIDS.gov. (It may somewhat belabor the point, but the administration for the past 8 years has had a habit of lying presenting information in an unusual light, so government websites may warrant scrupulous fact-checking).

And remember, if you’re going to be engaging in potentially risky sexual behavior, use a condom.

I wrote this for my other blog, ineffably.net, but I thought someone might find this of interest here as well.

I wonder, sometimes, if people don’t view the word “ineffable” in the same light that I do. If it may be seen as undesirable, a lack, a failing. In some ways, it is a failing–a failing in language to communicate something*. I don’t think this is a bad thing, I place it more in the category of the sublime*.

Perhaps as technology marches onward and carries into more facets of our lives, it is frightening to think there are aspects of existence that words cannot encompass. Despite the ability to use audio and video, the internet is still, largely a text-based medium, and as more and more of our lives become caught up in its web**, we limit and restrict that aspects of our lives that cannot fit within the framework.

I’m reading Poetry and Consciousness by C.K.Williams and he begins that essay with a similar point. Language does not have the capacity to describe some elements of life, viz. emotion. As he says, we can call something sadness or depression, we can describe what seems to be the physical experience of them, we can talk about the reasons and effects of these emotions, but language cannot describe of the emotion qua emotion. Ultimately emotions can be talked about, can be talked around, but can’t be talked. Ineffable***. We can say fear is a cold knot in the stomach, but that doesn’t include the sharp stabs of terror when that fear may be actualized before we can think. And even then, what is the experience of that fear?

People can be understood. the actions of large groups are easy to understand. groups don’t have the same level of choice and valuation that individuals have. But an individual is so much more difficult to encompass.

The experience of an other is something that exists outside the realm of words. Sure, we can impart categories to people as we do to emotions. They can be funny or smart or cynical. They can be blonde. They can be slender. They can enjoy Mexican cuisine. They use a lexicon that is individual but listable. Their Her**** hair can have the smell of faded roses when you first smell it in the morning.

So go ahead, describe the person you love. I’d bet you can come up with a lengthy list of traits and historical facts. And I’d go further to bet that, no matter the length, that list fails at explaining that person. To paraphrase Viktor Frankl: Love is what allows us to experience an other in their uniqueness. I wouldn’t call it their soul (because I am not religious), but perhaps their logos*.

And that is something about each of us that transcends the descriptive capacity of language. It is something that can only be experienced, and only then, through love.

* Ineffable; Sublime; Logos (though Anima may be as usable)

** See what I did there: it’s after my bedtime, bad puns are excusable.

*** Yes, my love of this word is irrational. Most words I love are smoother, more elegant. Ineffable, pronounced as it should be, is clumsy. It’s the sound of a sweatshirt, not the smooth glide of hand over satin-clad curves.

**** Screw being gender-neutral. This really isn’t gender neutral in its explanation, though it is in its essence.

While I assume most people who read these missives I send into the aether are well aware, I just want to put it out there again. Poetry Daily. Today’s is “User’s Guide to Physical Debilitation” by Paul Guest, and I found this snippet amusing:

When not an outright impossibility
or form of neurological science fiction,
sexual congress will either be with
tourists in the kingdom of your tragedy,
performing an act of sadistic charity…