I don't know why but four days ago my phone and the rental car's Bluetooth turned on my old apple tunes account which I couldn't get to work two or three years ago and hadn't tried since. This was the soundtrack of Maine (and Michigan) vacations with almost full catalogs of songs by Pere Ubu and Swans and Magnetic Fields and Kate Bush (I didn't forget her birthday on July 30th, I just didn't post it) and XTC and Durutti Column and Lambchop and Destroyer and Cabaret Voltaire and Wire and Stereolab and The Necks and Aphex Twin and other favorites all of who but Lambchop I've discovered I did not miss hearing as much as I thought I did and in the case of Swans and The Necks and Magnetic Fields whatever mystical hold they had on me is gone. Gone. As in gone
Long Pond Trail, Acadia National Park, Mouth Desert Island, Maine in yesterday's extraordinary light. Happened to me with authors too: Ishiguro especially, and Harington and Vollmann, and poets too, Bidart and Raworth and Rich, O'Hara especially. I mention this out of curiosity, not angst, what percentage is my natural aging and failing eyes and inevitable faltering of mind and changes in tastes versus the reprogramming of my head by the constant digital barrage my keepers aim at me that I eagerly consume, he types into his shitty blog. Diminished concentration and focus a primary goal, yo, a constant state of an uneasy and vaguely worrisome distraction a vital if not most vital goal of our daily delivered doses of shitlord reprogramming. I'm halfway through Rachel Kushner's highly recommended by friends novel *Creation Lake:" I can't half-remember what I read yesterday. I do remember I listened to this yesterday, off my bandcamp:
L is delighted I found the old sound track so we listen to that when driving to hikes since she dislikes much of what I own at Bandcamp, laugh. Music still works for me, I want it new and loud and and angry and often but not always in 4/4 and more often now with no vocals, reminding me again my sole proof for God is that I who have always adored, still adore, and pray I will always adore music, have no finger dexterity to play an instrument and own the world's single worse singing voice. I want new. I contribute nothing but distributing what I can't do
I don't want to hear Pere Ubu or Kate Bush now or ever again until rescinded before I refuse to hear them ever again. Fuck me. My Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game, already unofficially mothballed now officially mothballed. Fine metaphors abound
HAZARD RESPONSE
Tom Clark
As in that grey exurban wasteland in Gatsby
When the white sky darkens over the city
Of ashes, far from the once happy valley,
This daze spreads across the blank faces
Of the inhabitants, suddenly deprived
Of the kingdom’s original promised gift.
Did I say kingdom when I meant place
Of worship? Original when I meant
Damaged in handling? Promised when
I meant stolen? Gift when I meant
Trick? Inhabitants when I meant slaves?
Slaves when I meant clowns
Who have wandered into test sites? Test
Sites when I meant contagious hospitals?
Contagious hospitals when I meant clouds
Of laughing gas? Laughing gas
When I meant tears? No, it’s true,
No one should be writing poetry
In times like these, Dear Reader,
I don’t have to tell you of all people why.
It’s as apparent as an attempted
Punch in the eye that actually
Catches only empty air—which is
The inside of your head, where
The green ritual sanction
Of the poem has been cancelled.
tom clark's work
ReplyDeletelimericized by a satanic silicon-based assemblage
owned, at least in part, by melon usk
1:
In the wasteland where ashes abide,
Dreams of promise have withered and died.
Slaves or clowns, who can say?
Words twist truth in their play,
Leaving faces blank, lost in the tide.
2:
Grey skies darken o’er Gatsby’s old haunt,
Where the kingdom’s a trick, not a want.
Hospitals laugh with gas,
Poetry’s cancelled, alas,
Empty air’s all the punches now taunt.
3:
In that valley, once happy, now bare,
Words like “gift” hide a thief’s cruel snare.
Clowns roam test sites of tears,
Clouds of gas fuel their fears,
Poetry’s silenced—no truth left to share.
another example of a robot's transformation of a poet's words is found
ReplyDeletein DeepSeek's rewrite of a James Tate poem in Carl Sandburg's style:
**Lemonade and a Couch Too Wide**
I wanted lemonade—
the sun hammered down,
my shoes full of miles—
but the couch,
that stubborn green beast,
would not squeeze through the door.
The owner, his boy,
a few loose-change customers—
they pushed, they heaved,
they pitied me more than I deserved.
When the moon yawned,
I waved them off—
*Go home, go home,*
*your people are waiting.*
(Though what waits for whom
is a riddle I never solved.)
That night,
by the train station’s hum,
I slept on my couch,
a small island in the dark.
Then Anna Swan came—
a mountain of a woman,
her hands like summer clouds—
and brushed my forehead
like a mother would,
like the wind over wheat.
By morning,
I left the couch in Tatamagouche—
just like that.
And the world,
it shifted.
[You may recall seeing James Tate's original "I left my couch in Tatamagouche":
I desired lemonade— It was hot and I had been walking for hours— but after much wrestling, pushing and shoving, I simply could not get my couch through the restaurant door. Several customers and the owner and the owner’s son were kinder than they should have been, but finally it was time to close and I urged them to return to their homes, their families needed them (the question of who needs what was hardly my field of expertise). That night, while sleeping peacefully outside the train station on my little, green couch, I met a giantess by the name of Anna Swan. She knelt beside my couch and stroked my brow with tenderness. She was like a mother to me for a few moments there under the night sky. In the morning, I left my couch in Tatamagouche, and that has made a big difference.]
2/it is not awareness of one's situation, but acceptance of it, that might ease one's angst