Keith Tuma
“February” is a poem—I guess it’s
that—that I wrote with the idea of performing it in Paris at the Pound
conference. As it happens, I never did
perform it there, opting for other things and knowing that cris cheek was to be
there and that we’d thus be able to trot out our sendup of the Starr Report,
“Oval Orifice,” which we’d performed before together and separately, and one
version of which appeared in Open Letter
some years ago. Most of what little I
write of late—I mean apart from criticism and scholarship—follows the pattern
of “February” in being written for specific performances in specific
sites. One thing that means is that
less and less do I feel bound to anything like “poetry” as a form or genre. Much of what I write also follows “February”
in beginning with found materials I try to work and rework until they are
something else. “February” began with
my simply copying down the first or last—I forget which—line of every poem in
that fat anthology of French poetry in translation Paul Auster edited some
years ago. I started moving and mixing
and mashing and cutting and pasting and rejecting and rewriting text and
halfway through that process I stumbled upon an article about the revolutionary
calendar I mention at the head of the poem and the text suddenly morphed into
something about that—the last thing
I’d wanted it to do really, as I despise poems that are about paintings or art
or seem to be about them. Holy baloney,
I thought, I’m doing something that a 50s poet or a Jorie Graham might do. No thanks!
But I went ahead with it anyway because there was something about the
stanza I was working in that interested me.
I’ve attached just a few other samples of
recent work here below. The first one
plays with a couple of texts by men named John, including the most famous John
and John Searle and so on and has to do with ideas of consciousness and
worldliness and peace. It had no
occasion for a long time until I found one after Peter Middleton read a paper
about poetry and science. The key in getting toward it for me was discovering
what my own surname refers to in trobiander myth according to—who is it—maybe
Malinowski.. The next two, part of an
ongoing sequence as excerpted in _Poetry Salzburg_, are performance texts;
these I’ve read lots of places though I mean them to be a kind of homage to the
great Scottish poet Tom Leonard, who dies this kind of thing so much better
than I do. The last bit here is just a
fragment of a book-length collaborative project written with cris cheek and
Bill Howe. It’s the proem to _Critical
Path: Into the Bush__ More from that
book will be available soon we hope, including is multimedia elements. It’s a kind a of successor to “Oval Orifice”
in being a collaborative text aimed at a political moment, and hopefully it’s
the precursor of more to come by way of collaborative writing with these two
very tall friends of mine.
Acolytian
thumb give way to panic anodyne, understand your radio button risks seizure,
lonely enough to be a little rubbery while your answer sucks the life of
goodness. Only going nowhere enclosed
in enervating folly spirit dark to itself is not spirit, the sole province of this pathology. Cutting back sensors elapsed an otiose note
grown as oblation requiring raving it quelled.
What celestial mad dog foams, we wondered, ignominious febrific breath
assaying rounds of mirth and charging salubrious toil and recreative
catastrophe? Registers burlesqued circulate in the dawnless disavowed obedience
of that pencil self; it’s neither here nor there but the constraint may be the
size of the answer, not the computation itself, if we provide an adjustment
knob specifying desired length of tour and input the ordering of crushed
thrones and pulped cherubim. Allusions to a circle-jerk delimit a failed
delivery as we suspend origin and weakly link incarnations--the genetics of the
process belong to another essay whose victims lift their dying gaze after the
interregnum has been cancelled and the ineffable shows up all digits and
defiant dexterity. You and whose army the midget squealed to appropriate
historic transformations of human nature, image and body in zones no longer
separated, but I was far too late turning when something swished and went out
like a light. Swanky boots when you’re
in them but underneath meaning, ironed
in the phosphorous sizzle, aloof and shook silly? After the ordinance was delivered, I awoke as the name for
paradise in a crank study of TrobiANDers and troubaDOORS. Sinuous, uncertain, and yet invariable in
stupor’s trajectory, the obstinate
declaration unclenched another spasm, no ejection button at hand. I was determined to insert the data while
you whistled “Won’t you come home Bill Bailey” but it matters hardly at all
that we were unable to murmur--it’s not as if you leave everything as you find
it in the corpus colossum. The
direction of fit is null but consciousness is like my toes sis, cortical
layers, quarks and muons presumptuous. Let’s not get bogged down in
epiphenomenalism and obsolete causalities.
You take an irreducible subjective element into the willowy breeze
capless and complain of a cold red nose.
I propose a supplement to perfection I hereby name halo. Afterwards, the dispute: the world itself
cannot contain it.
from Beamish
for
and after Tom Leonard
1.
it's a bit rich it's pretty pathetic
it won't hold water really weak a
travesty
pie in the sky not my cup of tea piss
poor
it's not like they expect me to buy that
what a mess totally total shit
laughable actually laughable
it's just how to say this just godawful
useless like they really expect me to buy
it
disgusting wouldn't be the word no
look it's not like i was born yesterday
it's not like i just fell off a turnip
truck
some kind of peckerwood yahoo
like they say he's been doin' poppers
give him a sniff of this
like i was the moron who would take it
seriously
good god good god i'm disappointed in
them
expected something thought they'd take
the time
altogether vacuous it's got no content
empty
it won't hold up it won't not for a
second
it won't pull its weight it's pretty weak
not a chance
spectacular flop a disaster for sure a
loser
but don't get me wrong about it now
don't take it personally it's not
personal
i'd endorse it if there was anything to
it
i would but there's nothing to it nothing
in it
i would it's not there's not anything
else
it's as if the whole milieu is swiss
cheese
it's not like there's anything else
something worth it
it's not like there's a whole lot
happening there
i guess they've got their own thing going
i guess everybody could give a damn i
guess
well they'll do it like they damn well
please
they'll do it like they were gonna do it
anyway
and this isn't gonna help them one bit
they could use the help damn but this
isn't it
only it's something they're not gonna get
they want to get it while the gettin's
good
get out while the gettin's good that is
but it's fishy something just ain't right
it can't work it won't work it really
smells
stinks it's not for me not not for me no
god i don't mean to be disappointing
no don't get me wrong about this please
i'm just saying that i call them like i
see them
i see them and call them like i see them
then it's not like i'm just any kind of
fool
it's not like i'm trying to be an asshole
it's not like they haven't seen this kind
of thing
this kind of thing before you know
they've been through it they can tell you
tell you where to put it then it's weird
it's like they could give a flying fuck
and that's an imaginative way to describe
it
hardly seems worth a word like flyingfuck
not that i have experience mind you
i won't have it i simply won't have it
it's bollocks dumb stupid to think
otherwise
my head and a hole in the ground no thank
you
they must think i'm gonna take it anyway
oh it's brilliant brilliant alright
a regular mystery anyway forget it
2.
well it’s
well it’s
nah
naw
hadn’t even thought about it
but if
but if
sure
load of crap frankly
that’s
that’s
sure
god no
pretty much the gist of it
pretty near it anyway
yeah
yeah
sure
and I’m the Pope
*
the pap maybe
there’s a word
old paps
big paps
friggin androgynous
anyway
anyway
not for me no
not even a question
jerks mostly
most of ‘em
most of ‘em
blighted I think
hardly their fault
just the way it is
pretty much just the way it is
right
yeah
right
more than halfway through maybe
*
course it might change
suppose it’s possible
yeah
yeah
yeah
you’d think
but take a look at it
damn near killed me
didn’t think I’d live to see it
uh-uh
uh-uh
*
we’ll see
yeah we’ll see
we’ll see alright
not that you will mind you
plenty of it
plenty of it so
not a clue
pop it once
pop it once with your fist
*
from Critical
Path
As if from a fore-time of heedless
incongruity, the following words present palled stones the perpetual War will
never make fertile. Vacant imperatives, nonce notes rear-ended by event, they
fly now on feathers of the cancelled interregnum like birds into horizon,
rupture in beak. Ever the mascot of institutional regimes, clinically grisly if
seraphic in concentration, your editor takes to this spellbound text like
colonoscopy to colon—viewing while rooting, backlit in the laboratories of the
lesser idols, perspiring in uniform. Here were nods and nodes, Cells clicked
on-Line for conversations steaming like the lungs of carrier pigeons. Where clot is, once was gush. The spigot
hammered; the taps shut. If the past can’t escape thumbs of nostalgia, no
matter: we are already screwed. Pinch us why don’t you.
Neither Zoroastrians nor Mohammed’s uncle
have record of the Cast of Residual Crass to disappear ahead. They might have
been Tweedledee and Tweedledum beside themselves, spun out to cruise continent
in an auto wired up ducks for echt dictation. One came on jetwise in a dog-flap
cap flushed from AngleLand, his beige fleece standard issue, period golden age,
rife with ‘Revelation’ zips. Wasted and backtannoy-steeled, he was handled
Fried Pudding, shadow mover with the name-bearing instruments, carrying his can
of propositions and box of dirt. There was beyond him but nearing Bowling Bill
his other to meet, rarely silent under black leather stinking hat and lanky
Pontiac, conch cowboy of an illegitimate power. In search of peroration these
two travelogued out of Ohio through Kentucky truckers unto and into Tennessee
wheezing toward the BUYYOU and New Orleans swinging west for the rocks THIS IS
CODE and computers of Lubbock. Bill had a bowling ball. Pudding had a bottle
and what all. They did roll along with an occasional song. Their mission:
suture a ‘truth breaks’ Sutra. Ferret
out of the Bush something to turn the prows eyeless. Theirs was to be the dirt
re-seeded. It proved unnecessary. This residue and frame considered part of the
spent unwashed, that which blows in winds when change promotes greater
expectoration.
The ‘transparent towers at dusk’ proem
you could wish it off. You will not. I
shall dutifully transcribe from tapes and notes this other Path WITH US OR
AGAINST US. It began with something innocuous somewhere off the map in
Tennessee. . . .