Tag: “Unpoetry”

Moth

Post or die fluff the muff try again so strangulation

Pop goes the wiser aluminum sunglasses church on Tuesday promise?

Canticle no man’s land space and time wrapped in a bundle

Neither she nor he is transformed or a pedigree

The rest stand the test of petulance and geography

Womb south worms inside the other station can you piece together an authority?

Ample normal not a jungle no slaves no lies just nonsense and greed in your face

Envelope blues tried containment closer to the concubine cucumber slash moves

Animal doggerel smooth latte charge tweed moth

Too

Ralph was running suddenly a space ship descended and he vomited then fell down.

Alice was keeping warm in a hot tub until a tarantula crawled onto her hand and she got

Scared that another person might be around or maybe not maybe just the spider and her were

There. Awesome words come from flaky people when there is a point to be made and everyone

Knows it. Even they can come up with a good one. I like cabbage fried with bacon and hoppin John

and pork loin marinated in tasty stuff what do you think about it? I like food but sometimes

my stomach revolts and says no and that is when it hurts. Gluten is an enemy and dairy milk too.

Paratactic Verse and the Poem as Object

Here is an excerpt from Disjunctive Poetics, by Peter Quartermain:

“…Williams and Zukofsky both write paratactic verse — in their syntax there is no subordination, there is rather a stringing out of beads on a string, as Aristotle complained, where everything is of equal importance…

“…the poem is an object…in her 1909 essay on Picasso, Gertrude Stein distinguished between things, things seen, and things known, a distinction that reminds us of the ineluctable and intransigent quality of things: unknown, probably unknowable. The poem as a thing is resistant, and must baffle us, leave us shall we say at a loss?”

Life is Relative

And it’s not just an alienation from language, or communication. It’s rejection of the individual, lack of acceptance, judgment. Words are empty when trying to express the grief and sorrow that results from this situation, a hopeless condition.

Lack of connection. No community. No friends. No religion. No god. Just a meaningless existence with no purpose, no focus, no hope. Everything social is either scripted or random. There is nothing real out there, or in here.

And there is only the chance to connect based on a common existence or perceived state of loneliness, ennui, loss of meaning, relativity. Everything depends on everything else. Nothing is certain. Life is one absurd action, thought or event after another.

“Disjunctive Poetics“ and Objectivist Poetry

Another update with current reflections on unpoetry from 2022. This results from research into “Disjunctive Poetics: From Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky to Susan Howe” by Peter Quartermain, and several works on the objectivist poets.

This meditation concerns itself with “language as object.” Alienation from the English language, or, in my opinion, any language at all, creates a certain relationship between the poet and the words in his or her poetry. Syntax can become difficult, and meaning, impossible.

Words are used like pigments in an abstract expressionist or cubist painting, in which a bunch of objects are juxtaposed together in a seemingly random (though sometimes, but sometimes not, with carefully chosen placement) and detached manner. Whether it is a flick of the brush, a dumping of a can of paint, or just a very barbaric collection of images that shocks or confuses.

This is unpoetry, folks! It’s the same thing, just done with language. Word as object, in a collage, or maybe a series of nonsensical statements. Absurdity abounds. An alienation from reality that results in an alienation from society, and an alienation in a failed attempt, over and over again, to communicate.

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