Everything Will Be Taken Away

Or what I mean by this can’t matter
The grave will just be a hole
My self some sense of self
Will be a hole when I am done singing
A place where I lost you of course
Where I stopped world forming
There would be a politics in this
If loss could be felt and not seen

Or it will not be at all no one will be
The land expropriated from the free will not
Be because it will not be a part
Of history every part of the whole is false
Which is not spoken by those who can’t speak
So great is what was taken from them
No amount of naming no amount
Of cash will replace it.

Pastoral for COP15

Everything we pretend to possess
Will be taken from us the land
What is left of the land
Three feet above sea level
In an other’s democracy who
Are "we" fooling

There will no mythology
Except in what we allow
To melt except in what blood
Will be shed pastoralist
Blood soil of whose science fiction
Whose practice let this occur

Lays waste to charitas good deeds
Need of mountains commoner trees
For neighbors not to take up arms
And posit myths of origins
A stressed imaginary reduces

Eschaton of this big lapse of judgment
Grand mal of theory who will be judged
Insufficiently civilized barbarity
Is on the right side of history
When every one is wrong

Who do not interrupt (it) soon enough
Slavery in a storm of progress
No name in history enough
Frightened finally by ‘hybridity’
Necessity, not contingency, pounds
The shores of us

No boundaries but a disaster
Which universalizes makes differences
Also more stark
The little ones less
Developed simplified by disaster
Reduced to their breath bigger than
The lungs
Like Kafka’s mouse singer.

Klein on Climate Apartheid

"There’s an inverse relationship between who created the problem and who can afford to save themselves from the problem, and it isn’t only in the Global South. Think about New Orleans. Right? It’s also the South in the North. The people who had resources could drive out of the disaster zone; the people who depended on the state were left on their roofs, a kind of a climate apartheid, in the United States."--Naomi Klein

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/12/11/klein

SEGUE READING SERIES: Fiona Templeton + M.Mara-Ann

Saturday, December 19, 2009
4:00pm - 6:00pm
The Bowery Poetry Club
308 Bowery
New York, NY

Fiona Templeton is a poet, and director of the performance group The Relationship. Books include YOU-The City (an intimate Manhattanwide play for an audience of one), Cells of Release, Delirium of Interpretations, Mum in Airdrie, London, and Elements of Performance Art. She lives in New York and London. (www.fionatempleton.org & www.therelationship.org)

M. Mara-Ann is the author of Containment Scenario: DisLoInterMedTextIdentCation: Horse Medicine, luminous (the CD), and mirrorrim (the audio visual installation);works related to the multimedia performance, Containment Scenario. Other books include lighthouse (Atelos, 2002) and forthcoming: ecnelis (a+bend press, 2000). www.medusa.org

On "Vision" in Make Believe

Back in September I was asked the following question in regards to my Wheelhouse Press chapbook, Make Believe: "Many moments in Make Believe are concerned with vision. These poems, among other things, explore vision in various modes, from the spectacle of cable news to the very formation of subjectivity. Do you think of your work as constructing what might be called a poetics of seeing?"

Here is a link to my response.

Thanks to Nathan Moore at readwritepoem for his interest.

"While I am saying all of this, I wonder how much any of what I’m saying is conveyed by the poem itself. The poem leads, as David Wolach points out, with its ear, but often the senses become cross-wired — confused and ruinous. I dedicated the poem to my friend Gregg Biglieri who is a master of the pun, and of what he calls “negative synaesthesia” after Zukofsky’s Bottom. Flights into nonsense — into language play — seem necessary for the brain and the senses to sync themselves. So in “Berkeley Island” “when dissolves to wind” and a lens “points and chutes” as though to conflate photography with branching. Nonsense, of which poetry obviously has a lot, is meta-political in that it refuses to reduce language use to a representation (whether for a vulgarly conceived common sense or for the sake of communication).

Living Labor

Criss-cross this chorus
Not marshaling us
The state of the soul or
The soul of the state
Is a formal feeling

An emotional thing
Swerving into the doing
Latent reserves of energy
And potentia across personnel

Body of living labor
Gives me a sign
We are not done with you yet
This is the place we were born
And this the place we became

Slaves in an air other
Than our own
The indentured sing
Of power in a new form

But are not themselves we
Are not ourselves
Beholden to a brand
Locking the flavor in like value

If an emotion possesses us
If a theory of value signs
Off into the void let us rule
For another decade

Let our nets cast us larger
Than our appetites appear
For control or the armies
That we lead
With their hands blown-off

No longer forced to rule
Who will resurrect
What we could not feel
The first time?

Come and See

The withdrawal of those
Guns and eyes never fair
A single one the sun
Not shining on us here
No one lucky enough
No dirt brave enough
To tuck us in
Speak our names a photography
Worn thin with history
A kind of stench our stories leak
A kind of lack our eyes want
When meaning won’t
Be strained.

The starlight on their eyes
It is sometimes
And we are them
Disastered because our voices
Muffle in the din
Of voices given up control
Of what they mean
Bogged down by the dead
And having seen
And not heard
Too much where we wake
We supposedly wake.