with hidden noise

Kings never touch doors.

They’re not familiar with this happiness: to push, gently or roughly before you one of these great, friendly panels, to turn towards it to put it back in place – to hold a door in your arms.

The happiness of seizing one of these tall barriers to a room by the porcelain knob of its belly; this quick hand-to-hand, during which your progress slows for a moment, your eye opens up and your whole body adapts to its new apartment.

With a friendly hand you hold on a bit longer, before firmly pushing it back and shutting yourself in – of which you are agreeably assured by the click of the powerful, well-oiled latch.

(Francis Ponge, trans. C. K. Williams.)

     I

The world is complete.
Books demand limits.

     II

Things fall down to create drama.
The materials are proof.

     III

Daylight accumulates in photos.
Bright hands substitute for sun.

     IV

Crumbling supports undermine houses.
Connoisseurs locate stress.

     V

Work breaks down to devices.
All features present.

     VI

Necessary commonplaces form a word.
The elements of art are fixed.

     VII

A mountain cannot be a picture.
Rapture stands in for style.

     VIII

Worn-out words are invented.
We read daylight in books.

     IX

Construction turns back in on itself.
Dogs have to be whipped.

     X

Eyes open wide to see spots.
Explanations are given on demand.

     XI

Brick buildings shut down in winter.
A monument works to change scale.

     XII

False notes work on a staircase.
The hammer is as large as the sun.

     XIII

Connected pieces break into name.
Petrified trees are similar.

     XIV

Everyday life retards potential.
Calculation governs speech.

     XV

Rules stand out as illustrations.
People climb over piles of rock.

     XVI

I am speaking in an abridged form.
Ordinary voices speak in rooms.

     XVII

An act is comprehensible.
An explanation effaces words.

     XVIII

Language ceases to be the future.
Thinking becomes a religious device.

     XIX

Language ceases to be the future.
Thinking becomes a religious device.

     XX

False songs restore information.
Everyday elements are mixed.

     XXI

Death is an accident.
A measure is given by use.

     XXII

The air witnesses an abduction.
Motion isolates this effect.

     XXIII

A single step makes a resolution.
A pile driver is not a device.

     XXIV

Thought remains in the animal.
Each island steals teeth.

     XXV

A true sensation buries its dead.
Thought is embedded.

(Barrett Watten)

“To Ted Berrigan

It was when the words on the covers of books,
titles as true as false leaves led me to believe
in inviting the ultimate speculation of love –
that I could learn all of the subject –
that I first began to entertain what is sublime.

Like a moth I thought by reading Jokes and
Their Relation to the Unconscious or Beyond
the Pleasure Principle or Eat the Weeds or
The Origin of the Species or even a book on
Coup d’Etats or The Problem of Anxiety I
could accomplish all the knowledge the titles implied.

Science that there is often more
in the notes on the back of a discarded envelope,
grammar in the shadows slanted on the wall
of the too bright night to verify the city light

and then awakening, babies, to turn and make notes
on the dream’s public epigrams and one’s own
weaknesses, self that’s prone to epigrammatic ridicule

and to meditate on fears of all the animal dangers
plus memories of reptilian appellations for all
our stages of learning to swim at a past day camp

It is to think this or that might include all
or enough to entertain all those who already know
that in this century of private apartments
though knowledge might be coveted hardly anything
is shared except penurious poetry, she or he
who still tends to titles as if all of us
are reading a new book called THE NEW LIFE.”

(Bernadette Mayer, pp. 20–21 in Onward: contemporary poetry and poetics, ed. Peter Baker.)

Locate I
love you some-
where in

teeth and
eyes, bite
it but

take care not
to hurt, you
want so

much so
little. Words
say everything.

I
love you
again,

then what
is emptiness
for. To

fill, fill.
I heard words
and words full
of holes
aching. Speech
is a mouth.

(Robert Creeley)

Picasso made me tough and quick, and the world;
just as in a minute plane trees are knocked down
outside my window by a crew of creators.
Once he got his axe going everyone was upset
enough to fight for the last ditch and heap
of rubbish.
                     Through all that surgery I thought
I had a lot to say, and named several last things
Gertrude Stein hadn’t had time for; but then
the war was over, those things had survived
and even when you’re scared art is no dictionary.
Max Ernst told us that.
                                           How many trees and frying pans
I loved and lost! Guernica hollered look out!
but we were all busy hoping our eyes were talking
to Paul Klee. My mother and father asked me and
I told them from my tight blue pants we should
love only the stones, the sea, and heroic figures.
Wasted child! I’ll club you on the shins! I
wasn’t surprised when the older people entered
my cheap hotel room and broke my guitar and my can
of blue paint.
                           At that time all of us began to think
with our bare hands and even with blood all over
them, we knew vertical from horizontal, we never
smeared anything except to find out how it lived.
Fathers of Dada! You carried shining erector sets
in your rough bony pockets, you were generous
and they were lovely as chewing gum or flowers!
Thank you!
                     And those of us who thought poetry
was crap were throttled by Auden or Rimbaud
when, sent by some compulsive Juno, we tried
to play with collages or sprechstimme in their bed
Poetry didn’t tell me not to play with toys
but alone I could never have figured out that dolls
meant death.
                        Our responsibilities did not begin
in dreams, though they began in bed. Love is first of all
a lesson in utility. I hear the sewage singing
underneath my bright white toilet seat and know
that somewhere sometime it will reach the sea:
gulls and swordfishes will find it richer than a river.
And airplanes are perfect mobiles, independent
of the breeze; crashing in flames they show us how
to be prodigal. O Boris Pasternak, it may be silly
to call to you, so tall in the Urals, but your voice
cleans our world, clearer to us than the hospital:
you sounds above the factory’s ambitious gargle.
Poetry is as useful as a machine!
                                                           Look at my room.
Guitar strings hold up pictures. I don’t need
a piano to sing, and naming things is only the intention
to make things. A locomotive is more melodious
than a cello. I dress in oil cloth and read music
by Guillaume Apollinaire’s clay candelabra. Now
my father is dead and has found out you must look things
in the belly, not in the eye. If only he had listened
to the men who made us, hollering like stuck pigs!

(Frank O’Hara)