Wednesday, October 5, 2016

I Do Not Claim That a Greater Frequency of Rhyme Than Is Now Made Use of in American Poetry Will, in Time, Set Things Right




I've entered Fleabus twice in WFMU's sillyass mascot contest they run during their October silent marathons. I don't know that a cat will ever win - Station Manager Ken has suggested if not decreed that cats will never win. I wrestled through sleep last night - I give, of course, to the station - should I enter Fleabus again? Or - Olive. Fleabus photos by Planet, Olive photos by me. Olive's ear: next WFMU mascot. I feel like a traitor to Fleabus. When the guilt gets the better of me I'll give another $50 and enter her again too. Fuck me and wrestling w my moral algorithms. Go, give. Do it for me.






  • Of course I choose the bunny. Will get the black one when guilt makes me enter Fleabus.
  • And there are bleggal and tabletial issues now to confront, torture, and massage. Fuck me.
  • Burst firing.
  • This way, America.
  • I heard one minute of last night's veep debate on the radio. Did Tim Kaine come across as a creepy shitsmear on TV too? What a fuckstick.
  • Someone hacked into Richard's blog and posted not once, but twice!
  • Krasznahorkai's Last Wolf & Herman.
  • Early Talking Heads, with some good videos.
  • Thrill Jockey tweeted out early Sea & Cake. I asked back if there was any new S&C in my future - last album in 2012 - and of course, Thrill Jockey did not answer.
  • 25 tangents about Bowie in Berlin.
  • UPDATE! Two hours after I time-stamped and posted these two BB&BPB songs, someone tweeted out the BB&BPB have concert tonight in Missouri. BPB retweeted out that tweet. I replied to BPB tweet about Blessed Serendipity. What a blogwhoring motherfucker am I, though I claim Serendipity demanded the reply. I have received the non-response I deserve.








STATEMENT

Paul Blackburn

My poetry may not be typically American, or at least in matter, not
solely so: but I think it does make use of certain techniques which, even
when not invented by American poets, find their particular exponents
there in contemporary letters, from Pound & Doctor Williams, to younger
writers like Paul Carroll or Duncan or Creeley.

         Techniques of juxtaposition.
         Techniques of speech rhythms,
                                                sometimes very intense,
                                                 sometimes developed slowly, as
                                                 one would have
                         conversation with a friend.

Personally, I affirm two things:
                                                           the possibility of warmth & contact
                                                                       in the human relationship :
as juxtaposed against the materialistic pig of a technological world,
where relationships are only   ‘useful’   i.e., exploited, either
         psychologically or materially.

                                                                 20, the possibility of   s  o  n  g
within that world: which is like saying ‘yes’ to sunlight.

   On the matter of song:   I believe there must be a return toward the
musical structure of poetry, just as there must be, for certain people at
least, a return to warmth within a relationship.

However impractical that may seem in a society controlled in some of its
most intimate aspects by monstrous, which are totally irresponsible,
corporations, organized for the greatest gain of the most profit: and whose
natural growth, like that of any organism, is toward monopoly,
                     self-support, self-completion, self-
                                                                                           perpetuation,
                     and eventually self-competition and self-destruction.

       In a world that is so quickly losing its individuals, it can only be the
individuals who persist, who can work any change of direction, i.e. control
the machines, or destroy them.

   Machines can be very beneficent as means

                       to a better
                       (materially better)
                                                             life, as either
               democratizing or socializing agents.
But as a means to control for the limited number of men who now own them,

(but the president or general manager of the corporation
really owns nothing but his own salary  (and his power) so that
even the controlling minds of these gigantic corporate machines
are irresponsible. That is, not subject to the effects
                               of their own decisions)

                                                                       (and
                                                                             the personnel, the individuals
are replaceable, all the way to the top. The machine, the organisation, has
itself created the position and will function without the individual, has,
in that sense created the person to fill the ‘p o s i t i o n’
                                                                          and its own needs) so that
when, in these upper reaches, the ‘organisation’ the machine itself
becomes master, it can only mean disaster, global and particular.

      I do not claim that a greater frequency of rhyme than is now made use of
in American poetry will, in time, set things right.

     Only that if a man could sing the poems his poets write

                                     — and could understand them — and if

     the poets would sing something from their guts,   rather than
     the queasy contents of same,
     then that man would stand a better
chance,   of being a whole man,   than
him who stands or sits and says but ‘Yes’ all day.

Enough man to stand where it is necessary to take a stand.

To give
and man enough to receive, LOVE,      
                                 when he finds it offered.

To take the sun and the goods of the earth, while it lasts.
                                                                                                                    and to
                             fight in whatever way he can
                                 the monstrous machines that try,   and will try, to

                                                 o b l i t e r a t e   him, for

                                                          $1 more.



4 comments:

  1. Replies
    1. Just ordered the Collected from off-campus storage to give myself refresher.

      My main recollection of Blackburn is his reputation of being a decent, generous, Kind guy in a business of often selfish and assholishly competitive divas. Good guys are too few.

      Delete
    2. Kindness isn't one of the Cardinal Virtues. but it ought to be.

      Didn't find any of Backburn's work until coming back from SE Asia; he was gone by then. William Childress (one of two writers I can say I've actually met beyond Hello, I've always liked your work), teaching at a JC I'd washed up at, suggested Selected Early Y Mas.

      Delete
  2. Will Trump snort more Kaine? A breathless Amerika wants to know. Snore.

    ReplyDelete