Tuesday, December 11, 2007
Kyle Schlesinger's *Hello Helicopter* (Blurb)
*Hello Helicopter*. Or hello *helikos*? As Robert Smithson tells us of his Spiral Jetty film, not so distantly from Kyle Schlesinger’s poetics: “For my film (a film is a spiral made up of frames) I would have myself filmed from a helicopter (from the Greek helix, helikos meaning spiral) directly overhead in order to get the scale in terms of erratic steps." Much after Clark Coolidge’s own “depositions,” and affinities as disparate as Larry Eigner, Larry Fagin, Frank Kuenstler, Bernadette Mayer, Lorine Niedecker, George Oppen, Ron Silliman and Rosemarie Waldrop in Schlesinger's poetry language bifurcates geo-glyphically forming mantles (veils, plates) for a metapolitics of the person determined by intense logics of sense. Joyrides into exteriority, these lapidary (drilled, mined, refined, chiseled) texts find form in an “everyday” (read: actual!) practice made ambivalent by the twin indiscernible points of paramnesia and paronomasia, rushing upon History and the *instant* where “memory survives necessity,” forging “a fold between these folds / / then helicopter”. “It all comes down to this…”--literally. So dig it! “Fossils have terms of their own” and these poems endlessly propose, so carefully degreed.
Monday, December 10, 2007
After Aimé Césaire
What wish your season in hell
affirms pus rejectamenta Species
beings what wants your time
forms Necessity given history
so lowly heaven asks the price
of culture prosaically tattooed
on the body claiming ressenti
ment productive for identities
despair of muck dejects contin
ents incontinent ungainly how
could we do anything other than
whip inventing sciences other
projects telescope I want you to
have this pound of flesh accept it
as a gift of death but there are
no take-backs no words enough
for anger management to not be
false a kind of finger to the flood
history is not just a nightmare when
it comes down to it but a hell we
must affirm should anything be
transformed an image of the col
lective a historical subject over
come if I would ever be you if you
would be I 'I is an other' you keep
doing it to me how to take the
names of all things "bad" or "good"
and fling them forget to forgive.
affirms pus rejectamenta Species
beings what wants your time
forms Necessity given history
so lowly heaven asks the price
of culture prosaically tattooed
on the body claiming ressenti
ment productive for identities
despair of muck dejects contin
ents incontinent ungainly how
could we do anything other than
whip inventing sciences other
projects telescope I want you to
have this pound of flesh accept it
as a gift of death but there are
no take-backs no words enough
for anger management to not be
false a kind of finger to the flood
history is not just a nightmare when
it comes down to it but a hell we
must affirm should anything be
transformed an image of the col
lective a historical subject over
come if I would ever be you if you
would be I 'I is an other' you keep
doing it to me how to take the
names of all things "bad" or "good"
and fling them forget to forgive.
Sunday, December 09, 2007
Me Death
~ for Daria, Eleni, Fiona and Robert
after RobbinsChilds' C.L.U.E.
It helps to fall to sleep listening
to words poured out the side
of your chest a paradise it helps
to listen to the sounds these words make
broken down to their least elements
‘textual units’ to educate
to heal the body in pain one asks
‘Are you suffering?’ you reply
‘I am always suffering’
to be alone at the place
where I breaks from you
consequentially called back from our
‘blindness envy’ this must be
Grace ‘if I be in a state of Grace
then may it continue’
suffering just to be HERE (Here
too...) to continue being
shot through blood becoming
place rides out the wine
you will take that staircase down
discover you truly in relation
in that dark event you will descend
into dark's likeness
communicating voice I want
the body to be a voice a socius ex-
tricated from a content
versions of the Amor Fati
all the hills had eyes
in this gauzy incidence light winding
away from life
as they did all that was East
and West conveyed its ME DEATH
in myths occluding an actual
pomegranate a cadaver is to us
as we are to this dance
the supple intelligence of the dancer
for dance to be the case a couple locked
in place two bodies
for a field more erogenous
in not being 'modern'
power risks the body's borders
interferent outlying our
substance forms the subject
objectless in movement
already an event what paper
cups produce center
they threw their clothes into
the abyss of being 'feminine'
otherwise of-a-sudden
climbing from life in reverse
climbing for their lives really
falling while doing this
so it seemed two screens project
the NO ONE we are when we move
any center whatever was.
It helps to fall to sleep listening
to words poured out the side
of your chest a paradise it helps
to listen to the sounds these words make
broken down to their least elements
‘textual units’ to educate
to heal the body in pain one asks
‘Are you suffering?’ you reply
‘I am always suffering’
to be alone at the place
where I breaks from you
consequentially called back from our
‘blindness envy’ this must be
Grace ‘if I be in a state of Grace
then may it continue’
suffering just to be HERE (Here
too...) to continue being
shot through blood becoming
place rides out the wine
you will take that staircase down
discover you truly in relation
in that dark event you will descend
into dark's likeness
communicating voice I want
the body to be a voice a socius ex-
tricated from a content
versions of the Amor Fati
all the hills had eyes
in this gauzy incidence light winding
away from life
as they did all that was East
and West conveyed its ME DEATH
in myths occluding an actual
pomegranate a cadaver is to us
as we are to this dance
the supple intelligence of the dancer
for dance to be the case a couple locked
in place two bodies
for a field more erogenous
in not being 'modern'
power risks the body's borders
interferent outlying our
substance forms the subject
objectless in movement
already an event what paper
cups produce center
they threw their clothes into
the abyss of being 'feminine'
otherwise of-a-sudden
climbing from life in reverse
climbing for their lives really
falling while doing this
so it seemed two screens project
the NO ONE we are when we move
any center whatever was.