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.