X|O (For)

~ for Emilie & Michael

The wrecks and the lives
never wrecked if not
for love a body blossoms
into it and is strangest

in this duration which
is it that moves every
one the balloon floating
in the train car today

reflects this flabby ho-
liday distorting and
wrinkled where a pattern
spells "xo" "xo" "xo"

somehow there was still
a locus for loving you
other things ineffable
done if only in time this

breath's shipwreck that
mourning may be our
joy afterall a friend wrote
to me writing *myself*

back into being that
'hollow ego' [Oppen] tears
shatter the numinous
no one has yet to kiss.

Coterminous (Regular Lovers)

If you were with
'No one' among so
many than truly
You were with me

Moi aussi! all I re-
member from the
French are con-
ditions of possibility

A 'language per se'
As pure means
Within eternity since
Caresses keep on

Giving--this is the
Book you would
Write and keep on
Writing where no

End should justify
Which lips hands
Seek our event so 'us'
Was always wasting

No time a 'grey-eyed'
Dawn saw it all be-
tween these lines
Athenas pray return.

Prosodic Body schedule

Daria Fain & Robert Kocik are unveiling the next installment of their Prosodic Body collaboration these next few weeks downtown on Wall Street. Below is the low down...

BUILDING A PERINEUM

The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council has granted us (Daria Fain and Robert Kocik) a workspace in which to continue our prosodic research.

We will be using the space to design a building based on prosody. Some aspects of this residency will be public. For example, we’ve built a rudimentary anechoic darkroom. From 2/13 to 2/24, anyone can reserve time in this room. Suggested uses include: darkroom retreat, tracing the origins of language, wakeful hibernation, hypometabolic attention, swinging open the door of life and death. I call the
darkroom a 'perineum' not only because it has been built in a basement bank vault—but because the perineum (in the subtle body)is the still point and the point of entry for words, and thus the basis of a building based on prosody.

Tuesday February 12: we are having an opening from 6pm-8pm. We will be on hand to speak about darkroom, perineal practice and prosodic architecture.

Sunday, February 17: I will discuss WHAT IS A WORD--the 4 stages of speech and the cosmogony of phonemic emanation in nondual Kashmiri philosophy (particularly the writings of Abhinavagupta) as example of ‘word’ at its fullest)—in contrast to English, psychoanalysis (especially Lacan’s parole pleine) and the neurocentric problem-of-origins in contemporary linguistics (is language acquired or hardwired?). The talk will start at 3pm. The space will be open as a public reading room, with relevant reading materials provided, from 10am on.

Thursday, February 21: the above event will be repeated. The space will serve as public reading room starting at 10am. The talk will start at 6:30pm.

Sunday February 24: we will orchestrate ALL AT ONCE—a voicing of all the phonemes, using permutations such as exhaustion, resorption, forced, unforced, vocalic, consonantal, unstruck, etc. R. Steiner wrote: “The entire universe is expressed when the alphabet is repeated from beginning to end.” Even better (nonlinearly,
atemporally)—in nondual Kashmiri linguistics the phonemes are energies, awarenesses, atoms, that give rise to the objective world. Sound-sum, buzz-bundle, heard at once to see what it does. (I’m also in need of volunteers for the phoneme choir. English employs 40 phonemes!)

Lastly—I’d very much like to meet with anyone who’d like to talk about designing a building that meets the needs of poets.(To my knowledge, there is not a structure on the planet designed specifically for full realization of poetry.)

The address is 14 Wall Street. LMCC Swing Space, level B. Due to security, all visits require appointment. My cell: 718 503 4246.
Yours, Robert.