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Wash – a study in virulent dead poetry

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Wash – a study in virulent dead poetry

©Argo Spier
ISDN - 2003-09-06 and upon request

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content

- quotes, dedication and disclaimer 1
- quotes, dedication and disclaimer 2
- natural touch
- poetry from the book
- watery reflections & time
- four dead horses
- in the trunk of her hand
- & L.A. #andwerve interview - the role of the new poet
- machines of art – the daring Prague interview
- notes – correspondence re ‘dead poetry’ between Argo Spier and Michael Hoag
- articles of previous works – wallpaper poetry and Necro Poetica
- blurbs on argospier publications

quotes, dedication and disclaimer 1

In his Fontana Masters publication, Heidegger, George Steiner (©George Steiner, Heidegger – Fontana Masters, 1978.) elaborated on some of the ideas Martin Heidegger developed in his Sein und Zeit in 1927 concerning the essence of what art and poetry are. The philosophy of Heidegger is still part and parcel of the avant-garde and has pertinent influence Needs preposition, suggest “influence on the in-scene’s the in-scene’s search for the essence of language. I quote from Steiner’s publication some five small paragraphs, which deal directly with the issues, themes, and questions I have dared to touch upon in this study of ‘dead poetry’. I am much indebted to George Steiner to have put forward such a clear interpretation of the German concepts dealt with in Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit and I hope that, by bringing these quotations to the reader’s attention, it could serve the dialogue of what art is and whether art can be made out of art, which are the two fundamental themes in Wash.

It is not for the poet to explain his poetry, as a matter of fact I believe that that’s of the least of his concerns and regarding this, I have made bold statements in the past suggesting that ‘poets are not interested in poetry at all’ (Ref. my Machines of art – the daring Prague interview). Yet, there is that illustrative Drang (desire) in every poet. That wanting italics because it is used almost as a term of art in this context to make sure that what he is trying to say ‘gets through’. I wish to illustrate with the poetry in Wash that all poetry is a result of what we have come to understand through the ages as the definition of poetry/ or: what poetry is … and that new poetry is only possible really, as dead poetry, as repetition. This is a tall order and therefore the use of multitude references in Wash to my own work, which are elavated in Wash to ‘new poetry’ status, flirting with previous themes and addenda. I have tried to convey to the reader the importance of a poet’s footprints in the past, the historicity and temporality of his ‘steps’, the veiledness of his own writings, the secretiveness, and with encryptions such as the following, I tried to give guidance as to what route is taken. what routes may be taken

‘… If you look for the poet, all you see
of him is the way he has wedged, the broken branches
left behind’

But there’s also the past heights and lows too, in my own growth through the years and in the ‘steps’ taken by others that plays a crucial role in Wash, the various movemental I like movemental, but must admit it’s not a real word. You could keep it or use: movement oriented sways poetry has set in the past decennia: in the 30ties, in the conglomeration of the poets of the 50ties, Herman Opperman and N.P. Van Wyk-Louw, in the surrealitic touches of the 60ties, Paul Celan and Breyten Breytenbach and the wallpaper poetry storytelling in the 80ties, Charles Buckowski, that has had influence on me. There’s the constructive and deconstructive drives of contemporary French poets now since the 80ties. And, on the opposite scale of the time-line, there’s the deep road via mysticism and the troubadours and the coming into being of the reverence for the figure of Mary, Mother of God, and right down into the psyche of the world as it was before, history, and the first free verse poetry in Roman times. Within this location, I thought, the poet certainly is in his activities, as William Butler Yeats had sketched, a dragonfly, coming out only in summer and touching with fragile paws the restricted space of only the upper-layers of the water, not realizing or having any knowledge of the strong current that is pulling underneath the surface. Yet also, the rebellion, the poet that isn’t restricted because there’s a surreal sense of him just knowing there is more, although this knowing manifests itself as hoping. It just might be that with dead poetry, the poet has a tool to change his dilemma. Maybe just he will be able to work seriously with it and confirms his suspicion, his vague awareness of a possible different dream, of an undercurrent flowing. There just might be a massive torrent in the Great Pool of the Poetica Universalis, the super cluster of the collective unconsciousness of humanity, that can sweep him to unknown depths of a sea far away, the kind of sea that engulfs Atlantisses. That brings him to a point of arrest and the dawning of an Angst syndrome, a fear of drowning, the petrifying claustrophobia of not getting air enough. He might not be able to breath a single word … again after he has meddled with the wash tearing downstream.

Heidegger’s views have been dormant and consistently present in all of my poetic endeavors so far in the 30 years I have devoted myself to poetry. His concepts, without me realizing it, guided and teased me in art-historical experimental poetry, in ventures into Necro poetica (that I defined from the start as ‘the perilous affair and daring deed of committing poetry’). Although I was never aware of how dominantly Heideggerian search for authenticity was present in me, it was he who formulated the first principles that guided me. And having, quite by chance stumbled on Georges Steiner’s clarifications now, I have that déjà vu feeling of having confirmed what I always secretly knew I know. This is so strange … and it makes one wonder. Does the poet, in his attempt to write poetry, have privileged access to the collective unconscious of civilization and the culture that surrounds him and need he not too have to pass via lines of cognitive awakening? This last sentence COULD be broken into two questions for clarity. It is an interesting sentence construction though, and appropriate in a discussion of poetics. It’s a SLOW READER that will cause readers to slow down. Is poetry the wonderful shortcut to the real? Does it contain a short-list of all the treasured but veiled truths in life? If this should be true, then language must be a different kind of thing than what we always have thought it was. It must be a feeding organic thing able to suck deep into man and meaning alike, a basilisk laying its ‘virile foul egg’ right in the heart of the soul of the poet. (ref. My Green Water Pain). My poetic traverse in Wash is about this … too, I think, no?

1. “…the poet’s speech stiftet (grounds, initiates, guards) das Bleibende (the enduring). A poetic translation might be “defines the infinite, grounds the eternal… The Poet re-enacts the primordial Schöpfung (creation) I would put the German in parenthesis instead. performed by the gods. Such re-enaction entails proximity and rivalry. In some perilous sense, the poet is a re-creator who challenges the absent gods, who does their work for them, albeit under the lightning-bolt of their spendthrift and jealous visitation. The nerve of poetry is the act of nomination. Authentic poetry does not ‘imitate’, as Plato would have it, or ‘represent’ or ‘symbolize’, as post Aristotelian literary theory supposes. It names, by naming it makes real and lasting.”

2. “ … the poet names what is holy; or, rather, his nomination calls from hidden ness, without doing violence to it, that which is still alive in the grimed earth. Poetry is not language in some esoteric, decorative or occasional guise. It is the essence of language where man is bespoken in the antique, strong sense of the word.

3. “… Obsessed with instrumentality, language has lost the genius of nomination and in gathering and it is explicit in the original meaning of Logos (word, knowledge –ed). Denken and dichten, ‘to think’ and ‘to create poetry’, are two avenues of the logos. The thinker says ‘being’. The poet names what is holy. …To think, to write a poem, is to thank for whatever measure of homecoming to Being is open to mortal man.”

4. “… To create is to bring to light, but in a way, which is a consecration (in German – Stiftung), By this point the convention should be clear, perhaps German in quotes and parenthesis, to show they were direct text: (‘Stilftung’) because what is brought to light is also to be guarded – as man guards or ought to guard the earth from which he draws sustenance and on which he builds. The fount and meaning of true art is ‘die schaffende Bewahrung der Wahrheit’ (‘the creative custodianship of truth’). Art is not … an imitation of the real. It is the more real.”

5. “…There can be no valid difference, says Heidegger, between ‘the poem’ and ‘that which is the poem’.”

It is for the reader to decide to what extent the quotes bear relevancy and he has to judge whether I have contributed sufficiently to the quest that has developed from the first poem in Wash till its last. It is for him too, to evaluate the degree art-historical definition set itself through as the sequences follow one another, and in how far I have dealt with the temporality and historicity of poetry. Have I indeed explored enough the writing of poetry about the writing of poetry? It is further also for the reader to decide whether what is presented here is poetry überhaupt and the measure of decomposition. Is my poetry dead enough? Because he is now the mourner at the grave of the deceased? Has he the courage to return from the funeral and go back to and continue life where I may have failed it in my poetry? Hopefully, and no matter what his verdict may be, he and I can still gather to discuss the homecoming in the phenomenon that unveiled itself in the history of mankind as that of poetry.

‘It is proper to every gathering that the gatherers assemble to coordinate their efforts to the sheltering; only when they have gathered together with that end in view do they begin to gather.’ - Martin Heidegger, Logos:

Dedication

I dedicate this wandering of mine into the possibility that dead poetry might hold in it a door leading to some concealed location where the poet again can resurrect poetic expression and shape authentic thought, to four people who have played an important part in my staying convinced that such a secret passage exists. These are Her Highness Princess Ashwatti of Kerala, Doctor Rati Saxena, Doctor Shimanta and Michael Hoag.

Argo Spier, Author.

Quotes and dedication – Under construction - quotes, dedication and disclaimer 2

In his Fontana Masters publication, Heidegger, George Steiner (©George Steiner, Heidegger – Fontana Masters, 1978.) elaborated on some of the ideas Martin Heidegger developed in his Sein und Zeit in 1927 concerning the essence of what art and poetry are. The philosophy of Heidegger is still part and parcel of the avant-garde and has pertinent influence the in-scene in poetry’s search for the essence of meaning in language. I quote below five small paragraphs from Steiner’s publication, which deals directly with the issues, themes, and questions I have dared to touch upon in this study on ‘dead poetry’. I am indebted to George Steiner for having put forward a clear English description of the German concepts in Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit and I hope that, by bringing these quotations to the reader’s attention, it can and will serve to stimulate the dialogue of what art is and whether art can be made out of art, which are the two fundamental themes in Wash.

Quotes

1. “…the poet’s speech stiftet (grounds, initiates, guards) das Bleibende (the enduring). The Poet re-enacts the primordial Schöpfung (creation) performed by the gods. Such re-enaction entails proximity and rivalry. In some perilous sense, the poet is a re-creator who challenges the absent gods, who does their work for them, albeit under the lightning-bolt of their spendthrift and jealous visitation. The nerve of poetry is the act of nomination. Authentic poetry does not ‘imitate’, as Plato would have it, or ‘represent’ or ‘symbolize’, as post Aristotelian literary theory supposes. It names, by naming it makes real and lasting.”

4. “… To create is to bring to light, but in a way, which is a consecration (in German – Stiftung), because what is brought to light is also to be guarded – as man guards or ought to guard the earth from which he draws sustenance and on which he builds. The fount and meaning of true art is ‘die schaffende Bewahrung der Wahrheit’ (‘the creative custodianship of truth’). Art is not … an imitation of the real. It is the more real.”

5. “…There can be no valid difference, says Heidegger, between ‘the poem’ and ‘that which is the poem’.”

Is an introduction to ‘dead poetry’ needed?

I am quite reluctant to give an exact definition of dead poetry and hesitated for quite some time before I decided to write this. In the following discussion I have opted therefore to deal only with the concept illustratively and, because of the importance of locale of the poet in dead poetry, his temporality within the history of poetic expression, tried to describe the relevance of it in relationship to the method of dead poetry. It need however to be pointed out that this is not intended as a ‘charter’ for dead poetry and although the text has that ring of Heidegger, it has no pretence of being complete. I am a poet and not a philosopher. The ‘poetic way’ of dealing with issues is in the text. The intention is to facilitate ‘food’ for thought for poets, like me, struggling with the contradiction sine qua non in ‘acts’ of discussing dead poetry and writing ‘real’ poetry. Dead poetry namely uses the very ‘debris of words’ such as that I will be producing, and the question remains ‘how can a poet that swears by the extraction of concepts from texts keeps himself busy with the very construction and producing of texts?’

Dead poetry, always looking for a word to ‘use’, tries to find the meaning of the concept poetry in everyday speech and texts. It suspects that the meaning of the concept poetry as we have come to understand it through the ages, is one that escapes the ‘real’ meaning of the concept poetry and doesn’t bear the load. And it therefore wants to ‘return’ to the original and authentic meaning of the concept of poetic expression. It suspects (and expects) that there is ‘poetic potential’ in every single word it encounters. It ‘feeds’ and finds its poetry within ‘collections of words’, in prose and even in discussions such as this introduction. Its method is deduction, extraction, selection, collection and reshuffling. Dead poetry considers language tout court, as ‘waste material’ from which it has to salvage possible poetic scraps and tries to redefines the meaning of poetry in the process. Dead poetry is a ‘coming to focus’ within the temporality in the history of the meaning of poetry. For dead poetry, poetry is more alive than ever, and more abundant. It is everywhere and in whatever you read, hear or see on TV, in menus, in reports of the United Nations, reports of how to save the world from hunger, war propaganda, global change documents, in the lectures, in systematic approaches of dead poetry, in everybody’s personal e-mail boxes, etc. It is present as single words, veiled in various semantic categories, in syntactic strangeness, in combinations of words, in sentence, slogans, names of streets, advertisements, ordinary speech, office memoranda, etc. It uses whatever words, concepts and references that are available in the printed and spoken media and it copies whatever it finds ‘suitably’ into poems of various nature – accumulative rhyme, summarized addenda, poetry that is storytelling poetry, and other. The dead poetry poet is one who is extremely sensitive to the ‘poetic potential’ of what he sees, reads and hears in everyday proceedings of life. And dead poetry constantly takes note of ‘collection of words’ that has poetic potential, wherever they are used. The win.ini text on a computer reads like a poem; there’s poetry potential in it too.

Footprint and locale

The copying of concepts and words into poems has an important function. It is the ‘footprint’ of the poet and confronts him with it, with the where he is in the space of temporality in the history of the meaning of the concept poetry. It shows where he has ventured and what he has found. It gives an indication of the route his own poetry is on. It helps him to discover what his locale (location) in the Poetica Universalis, in the historic of poetry, is. His locale determines his undertanding of the concept poetry. By being aware of his locale he has a chance of discovering what the meaning of the concept poetry is. His footprint unveils his locale, gives a hint to its location and is the reality check for him and a statement indicating the temporality of him being a poet within the history of development of the understanding the concept poetry. His locale is where he is ‘at’ within the stream of the development of the meaning of the concept poetry through the ages. His footprint shows his temporality in the history of the question of what poetry is. This is so for all poetry but in dead poetry it is of dire importance. In dead poetry the deliberation is greater, it confronts. For instance, names of streets, places, advertising slogans, etc. unveil the encounter the poet has had on his daily route in the process of his life (and the life of his poetry) but it also unveils what meaning he subscribes to the route he is taking to grow to understand the idea of the meaning of writing poetry. His concept of the meaning of the process of writing poetry is important too and his understanding of the meaning of the concept poetry tout court is vital for him to be a poet.

‘not-a-human-voice-speaking poetry’

Dead poetry collects the words in the environment of the locale of the dead poetry poet and mixes, reshuffles and reworks them in either a random or systematic way to deliberate whatever possible meaning of the concept poetry can flow from the newly formed word combination (the verse in a poem). He bends and bows this meaning, using whatever abilities he has for play, veiling and unveiling as he goes along, and seeks the meaning of the concept poetry via the sense a verse in a poem makes. He forces ‘sense’ (purpose) into existing series of words and -combinations, even use non-sensical phrases to achieve sense via overstatement. Meaning that comes from a word, a remark, from language (in the communication process) is a temporal statement in the history of the formation of the meaning of the concept poetry. It enters his locale and his temporality but also is his locale in its historic appearance. And this historic appearance (a temporality) is part of the history of the formation of the meaning of the concept poetry. His new poem is a congruent and purposefully set up. It always states his ‘where’ he is in his locale – where in the development of his poetry and where in the long line of development the understanding of the concept poetry has had up to now. Storytelling hinges may be added, to make the poem more humane (and like a story that captures the attention). It is adamant that he understands his locale. In its deadest form the poems of a dead poetry poet carries ‘statements’ (in verse vorm) that in their collective ‘co-habitation’ inside the poem or poetic sequence resultd in a strange de-humanized kind of ‘not-a-human-voice-speaking poetry’. Many poets will call this plain rubbish, but in it, the memory of a possible ‘real’ meaning of the concept poetry is kindled. In the half-dead form of dead poetry, more hinge words and storytelling elements become visible. This gives theatrical dark undertones. These poems are more of séances than anything else. (It may be that Wash contains more half-dead poetry than proper dead poetry – Ed). In both forms the archivist nature (collection, arrangement, logging and registering) of dead poetry gives a sphere of urgency. There’s the ring of historic ‘dating’ and (de-human) cataloguing’ and there’s a lot of ‘abstract distance’ between words, meaning of words and sentences (the various verses) and the poet himself.

‘reeking’ into the house of honest authenticity

Dead poetry takes words ‘dead’ seriously. Words are viewed as if they are organic entities with an own will. (Ref. The work of Lord Byron – I believe that words are things, although I haven’t find any yet’ – Quote ©Lord Byron). It even might be that in dead poetry the word (language sec) is more important to the poet than the meaning of the poetry it produces. The poet in dead poetry must be viewed as mere instrument in the process of writing poetry, copying it, generating it and creating sequences. The collecting of more words, the reshuffling of the whole, etc. is what he does, making homes for entities. And all scope is left open for the development of the meaning of the concept poetry in the process finding new abodes for words. ‘Value’ is added where there was none before (and redefinition takes place) or (original) authentic ‘new’ meaning is enforced or discovered. With its recuperation activity, dead poetry urges the poet to rediscover authentic meaning in the understanding of the concept of poetry. Dead poetry ‘reeks’ into the ‘house of honest authenticity’.

gold from ‘debris’

The ‘what are we doing when we write poetry’ and the ‘what is poetry in its essence’ are constantly in the play in dead poetry, and in the processes of the coming into being of dead poetry. These two questions are core terrain for in dead poetry and the poet works ‘art-historically’ when he is laying down his footprint in his locale. This meta-business is a watermark. His view of the meaning of the concept poetry is validated by it. He is actually only writing poetry about and over the writing of poetry. His role, to find what is lost or what was never lost or ‘there’, leads him on. ‘Old things’ (used word entities) are the means to the new for the poet. And he is the master wizard, mixing categories of words and constantly imitating meaningful poetry. Or gives leads in his poetry (encryptions) into which direction meaningful poetry is found. And he is always in training and in wonder of what he finds. He is an alchemist, trying to make gold out of rubbish. He produces shine from dusted ‘debris’ that is strewn all over the functionality use of language. The use of language in the memos send from office to office, the advertisements of Coca Cola, slogans for war and for peace, the easy peace with the two vingers up, victory.And everything that is made up in the visible world of words draws him. All poetry ‘caught up’ in the meaning of poetry as it has developed through the ages, interests him. The method of mixing concepts in dead poetry has the possibility to carry the message of poetic expression into the meaning of the concept poetry and therefore into the meaning of language itself. The poet who works with the tool of dead poetry is a poet who digs into the mean of the historitici of language, looking for the meaning of the concept poetry and of poetry. The poet wants to ‘know’ where he got the idea from that the meaning of the concept poetry is something to look for. This makes of him a vehement dabbler digging into the source pool of some reservoir of meaning in the words he finds that is in and surrounds his locale. And he seeks new poetry. But this ‘new’ poetry he is seeking with the aid of the tool of dead poetry, isn’t the ‘new’ new, as in comparison with an old/ normal poetry, it is ‘new’ in the sense that in it there is more than that which is in it, a kind of ‘third factor’, naming the consciousnesss of ‘the what’ he is doing. It is an awareness of a ‘possible more’ in the meaning of it … that unique, active and self-willed ‘thing’ that poetry is, is in it. Dead poetry is a serious (and dangerous) business. There could be found in it what was lost, as well as what was not looked for. The dead poetry poet has always to be vigilant and gallant and somewhat of an ‘ordained’ priest on the ready to resurrect whatever possible meaning there might be in the concept poetry that comes from the ‘material’ he discovers in the vicinity of his locale. And in this role he has transformational powers, even over that what passes him by. Once he has touched a ‘dirty wasted word’ or word combination, he works it through, ‘cleaning’ the ‘dust’ from it. He digs for ‘real meaning’ and has a chance of getting it. He believes this firmly. He is like the artist (this artist really did this in Geneva, Switzerland early in the 2000’s) who goes into the street, picks up debris of whatever kind, takes it home, cleans it and takes it back and place it on the exact spot she has found it. What is the difference? The shine is. The difference is that now the wasted object has the appearance of a spotless novelty. There’s new meaning added to it, or at least, there is now something ‘new’ about it. It is ‘old rubbish’ that looks ‘new’. In a historical way, it has the way of being temporarily new. It is as if its ‘essence’ can be spotted more easily. Its ‘being’ shines through and there’s that ‘something more honest’ about it. To use a different metaphor, the dead poetry poet’s poetry is a mirror of what ‘is’ is in the world of temporality. The mirror reflects the message. Dead poetry which defines the actual and the authentic in its historical temporality in the phenomenon called poetry itself, is also poetry sec or pure. And concerning the wasted words, the debris and the waste of words, all the rubbish that’s been written in all the languages in all the million years of the existence of the possibility to create poetry, it may just be that the poet who writes less, waste less, have the right ethic and the better clue of what it is about to write poetry. This exercise of writing less (less is more) could even lead to meaning that it is better to write poetry, but not writing it down, or publishing it. He who writes systematically less, and later, even nothing at all, he may be the real true poet of the dead poetry scene of the times of the new. The times in which the present concept of the meaning of the concept poetry will be a thing of the past.

Poetic development

The dead poetry poet is just one who understands how his being is being caught up in the temporality of his own existence (this is, in his own poetic development AND in the stream of development of the meaning of the concept poetry). He sees the relevance of himself as being in his locale AND in the existing meaning of the concept of poetry. One could say he is ‘on to what the meaning of poetry really is’.

What is poetry?

This is probably the most irrelevant question in the search for the meaning of the concept poetry that there is. A consideration refusing to answer it may be a good course of direction in the search for the meaning of the concept poetry. Poetry exists … ex ‘is’. This means that poetry doesn’t exist. Poetry as we know it, is a phenomenon of the past. The concept ‘poetry exists’ says we think of poetry as we used to think about it, about its meaning.

Exist = ex ist = ex ‘is’

And ‘ex is’ means ‘how’ the ‘is’ (being) of poetry in its present conceitedness of it being what it is, is a sort of ‘was’ (an ex-is) in a time before the present tense, of a ‘before’ time. It says something about a ‘being’ (an ‘is’) that isn’t anymore that what it was conceived as being previously. Compare the use of the ‘ex’ in ‘ex-husband’ or ‘ex-wife’. The ‘ex-husband’ is a husband that isn’t the same as a ‘normal’ husband. He is a ‘was husband’, a how we have conceived the concept husband when he was a ‘real’ husband. It is the same with ‘poetry ‘exists’. It ‘ex’ is in the past, in a previous take of the time, in another sort of concept we had of it. Its present temporality in the history of the development of the concept poetry isn’t real anymore. Our perceiving of the meaning of the concept poetry is based on information from a previous locale. Poetry in the present tense is poetry wrongly understood. It still has to become into some sort of ‘new’ meaning to be in the meaning of a being in a concept that we have of poetry. One can even say poetry exists only in its deceased form. From they’re the coming into being of dead poetry and its urgency to resurrect what was old. Dead poetry is ‘new’ because it busies itself with the ‘old’. Contemporary poetry is really a corpse, a was ‘be’ or has been thing, that isn’t poetry as we understand it due to our fixation of a ‘previous concept’ we have of the meaning of the concept of poetry. It’s only our conception of what we have come to think what poetry is based on, that we think about, when we think poetry exist. The whole question of meaning in a concept called poetry might too be a non-existent thing, a thing of the past too. And once again dead poetry comes in … I have an idea, that dead poetry constructions can be the real leverage for the discovery of the essence of the ‘yet to come into being in the present tense of the meaning of the concept poetry’. But going deeper into this will exceed the space allocated here and ‘enlarge’ the pending contradiction sine qua non mentioned above. And to such an extent, probably, that what Orobosses there are, the circle will never be untangled.

But, we ARE talking about poetry, the concept of the meaning of the concept poetry, aren’t we?

Small and large

The clue to truth, the real and the authentic, lies in the evance of poetry itself and in the process of writing poetry … and in dead poetry, in the recollection and rejuvenation of the wasted and disregarded words of existing poetry and literature. Once again I have to come back to the locale of the poet, because to discover this clue of truth, the poet has to become utterly sensitive and aware of his locale, of his own progress and the ‘where’ of his foot holding in the history of the meaning of the concept poetry. In other words, where he ‘stands’ with his poetry AND what his ‘place’ is in the Universal Body of Poetry. These two are the proper definition of the poet’s locale - I just have to repeat this, because it is so important in grasping the real force behind dead poetry. Present in the location of the poet, there is the past of his own heights and lows, and that’s an indication of a specific route followed, and the highs and lows of poetry movements in the history of poetry (in the past). There’s the ‘small’ being present in the location, and the ‘large’. And every poem written (in poetry) is poetry in its own essence, in its own indication and determination; in its own illustrative. And all poetry carries all the history of all the poetry in all of the world as well as all the meaning of the concept poetry as it has come into being until the specific time we are talking about, the now. This complex totality of poetry is a heavy burden on the poet’s personal locale. His locale is the history of the development of the meaning of the concept poetry AND it is the history of his own development as a poet. Every new poem is really an old poem as it carries in its being the ‘ex is’, a how we have come to conceived the meaning of what poetry is (in the past). The poet’s own growth in the insight of this determination process and its meaning, and the growth of its meaning, all forms the totality of the locale, in its definition of the concept of poetry. In my own growth years I too have set steps taken by others, pretending I was them (I ex-‘is’ they), and fleeing the load of the burden as well as the dire the responsibility to carry it, I left traces of this escapist behaviour all over my body of poetry (some 5000 poems). Even in Wash can also be found traces of it. There are the various mendacious sways in poetry in the near past decennia, the 30ties, the conglomerations of the poets of the 50ties, Herman Opperman and N.P. Van Wyk-Louw, the surrealistic torches of the 60ties, Paul Celan and Breyten Breytenbach and the wallpaper poetry storytelling rubbish that was so lovely in the 80ties, Charles Buckovski. And there’s the constructive and deconstructive bleakness of contemporary French poetry (since the late 70ties) and, on the opposite scale of the time-line, the deep road via mysticism and troubadour love adulations right into the coming into being of the reverence of the figure of Mary, Mother of God. And also, down the road, there is the psyche of the world history (Heidegger deconstruction) and the first time ever free verse poetry in the ancient city of Julius Caesar, Rome. As William Butler Yeats has sketched, the poet is but a dragonfly, coming out only in summer and touching with fragile paws the restricted space of the upper-layers of the water only, not realizing that there’s a more, or having any knowledge of a possible current underneath the surface that is pulling, washing down the stream to towards something even more awesome.

But in all this there is also that surreal intuitive sense of awareness in the poet, vaguely telling him about himself as being a poet. And there is a certain ‘knowing’ inside him, of what it is that misfits hope and himself, namely, the hope that there is hope to hope and that that may be a slight possibility for him of ‘saying it’ right in a next poem, getting to the ‘it’ of it; the ‘it’ of the meaning of the concept poetry. When the poet becomes infected with this hope, that’s where (and when) the dead poetry dare devil slowly awakens and raises a juvenile head. ‘To get it right’, and ‘right’ with a kind of right that’s right for what the poet thinks is right in his poem. The hope that his concept of poetry in his locale might be the real one. In his locale the awareness of the possible finding of the meaning of the concept poetry is growing in him. He looks to the past and also to the near past. He says to himself that he doesn’t fit into the role of accepting himself as being a dragonfly, yet he does act like it still, in the beginning. Later he started to feel that he doesn’t fit in the role of being an ‘understander of the meaning of the concept poetry’ in the huge colossal history of the growth of the meaning of the concept poetry. This is the spin-off from the dialectic of his locale – the ‘does it exists’ versus the ‘does it ex ‘is’’ of the meaning of the concept poetry. And he thinks, what if the undercurrent is a torrent, and really a massive one, as massive as one can get in the Great Pool of the Poetica Universalis, the super cluster of the collective unconsciousness of humanity, and can sweep (wash) him away to some unknown depths, deep and off seashores of far away lands, a kind of torrent that can engulf an Atlantis? What if, after this tsunami, he and his poetry might be part of the debris of poetic expression on the beach of language, wasted?

***

Having stumbled upon the George Steiner quotes, I have that déjà vu feeling of having have confirmed what I always secretly suspected I knew, namely that there is more in the play to poetry than just poetry alone (as we have come to understand the meaning of the concept poetry). Poetry has to do with the core of what it means to be a human being. It is a human ‘thing’ and the meaning of the concept poetry is very near the vicinity of the meaning of being a human being … or of Being itself. And as helper to man to discover himself through the understanding of what poetry is, poetry plays the biggest role. It is to man and to poetry we have to look to engage on the road successfully and find the meaning of what poetry is. Poetry has something to do with things that we know, with something deep inside the collective unconsciousness of us all. Poetry is a ‘being there’.

And this, and now to return to my own locale, makes me wonder about how I did know that words are as important as Heidegger reasoned that they are? How did I know that it was his principles (formulated in the early 20ties) that may stimulate us to really find the meaning of the concept poetry? Has my position as a poet, my own dear locale anything to with it? Has ‘knowledge something to do with the kind of poetry one allows yourself to be open to? And, to make it universal, does the poet, in his deed of writing poetry, have privileged access to the collective unconscious of civilization and the culture that surrounds him? And need he not have to follow that long woven cognitive path that prescribes the lines of knowledge to reach awakening and understanding? Is poetry that wonderful a shortcut? Does it contain a short-list of all the hidden treasures of the world, and of the meaning of it, and of being, and the coordinates of it all … how do we get there? Through poetry? There’s something feelingly very unreal about this, poetry. Is it leading somewhere … to where it all the ‘is’ in the real? My poetic traverse in Wash is about this … too, I think. But ending this introduction, I wish to leave the reader with a last quote that can help us both in our search for the meaning of the concept poetry, one of Martin Heidegger himself. It’s a welcoming quote for all those who consider to gather to assemble and look for the meaning of the concept poetry … and that tricky question, whether art can be made out of art?

poetry

In the following poem from Wash can be seen how the poet struggles under the weight of his locale in his struggle with the coming into being of the meaning of poetry in dead poetry. The poem touches with its ‘deadness’ into de-humanised poetic expression, yet it leaves a feeling behind that can be sensed by a human being. The poet seems to want to disappear from his poetry and reduces the collected wasted words to a ‘less’, a minimum, after he has reshuffled the debris. In its temporality (in the poem and the poet’s locale) the poem it a no-poem poem, seemingly busy in its ‘becoming’, yet it is at the same time a ‘done’ poem (a completed one). And it is acceptable in the contemporary concept of the concept of the meaning of what a poem should be, poetry. It is a ‘dead’ poem because dead poetry wants poetry to be poetry, not poetry to be the poetry of the poet. The poet is very far from his poem here. Its as if anybody could have fabricated it.

dead poem living
ref. ‘Can art be distilled from art?

odd, the swish & trepiditious
& callous & Byronic in its thinginess - this poem is
& the patois of creepy motion, muff
until it becomes vermillion-red

But, and however, it is not for the poet to explain his poetry and I believe that that’s of the least of a poet’s concerns. Regarding this I have made it quite clear in previous publications and shouted it from rooftops to everybody willing to listen to my extremely bold statements, that ‘poets are not at all interested in poetry … at all, and least of all in their own!’ They just write it. (Ref. my Machines of art – the daring Prague interview). Yet, I am aware of the continues and cancerous uncertainty that eats at every poets demur and statue. There is always that illustrative Drang (desire) present in poets, that wanting to ‘make sure’ that ‘it gets through’ of the ‘what that has been committed to in the form of poetic expression’. I too have this and the wish to illustrate with the poetry in Wash is but a small symptom of the sickness. I want to state clear and coolly now that all accepted contemporary poetry is but a result of what we have come to understand through the ages what poetry is … and that new poetry is only possible poetry really in the shape of dead poetry.Through clever repetition gain can be achieved in word, every word, in our fast-moving brave New World of the functionality use of language. It is possible to go back and redefine poetry and the meaning of poetry … I hope! It is possible for us to take back that what we have lost and that what is our, all of it, poetry. The use of a multitude references and quotes in Wash to my own work and to the works of philosophers through the ages, which are elevated in Wash to ‘new poetry’ status, flirting with previous and passé themes and addenda, may not be that innocent at all and surely holds the danger and the trappings of promoting ‘old stuff’ over and over again, but it is a try. Instead of that we create ‘new stuff’ in the concept and meaning of the ‘old stuff’, we should create ‘new stuff’ out of the ‘old stuff’. The endeavor into the ‘new’ sufficiently, and a first step small step at a time. Even after so many years of safe keeping of his work and ‘done drafts’ gold can be found in the poet’s closet. It must be excavated, cleaned and shown. All poets’ work contain secrets, secretiveness and encryptions of breath taking value … only if they have had eyes to see it, meaning can be excavated from it. What lieing around, hidden, it all could be unveiled and used again. Or to put it in layman’s wording, what is dead can be made alive again and the poet, the celebrant, he can start the resurrection process, can he not? He is priest working with holy water, is he not?

He is the one who can consecrate meaning and transforms it into authentic ‘new’ authentic meaning unveiling the being of poetry and lay bare the real marker of the real for the school of building the concept of what poetry is and the meaning of the effort to do so. I have tried to hint to this vital procedure in the poet’s commitment to dead poetry in the following set of three verses:

‘… If you look for the poet, all you see
of him is the way he has wedged, the broken branches
left behind’

disclaimer

It is for the reader to decide to what extent the quotes bear relevancy to this introduction and to the various poetic sequences in Wash. It is also for him to evaluate the degree of art-historical definition in Wash, to what extend I have dealt with the topic of dead poetry in the sequences, and whether my poetry is dead enough. A last quote, this time from Martin Heidegger’s own Logos publication, may remind us all what dire consequences there are at stake in the search for and discussion of the meaning of the concept poetry and which direction it is that we should take for this seach.

Dedication

I dedicate this to the youngest daughter of the Muse mnemospe, the inquisive dear Ourania.
Thanks also to the following people who passed on my way while I was working on ‘Wash – study of virulent dead poetry’ - Her Highness Princess Ashwatti of Kerala, Doctor Rati Saxena, Doctor Shimanta and Michael Hoag.

Argo Spier, Author.

Part 1 - natural touch
Estartit, Catalunya, July 2008

'Days without you
would probably bring the thought
o f days with you.'
- A.S.

1. dead poem living
Can art be distilled from art?'

odd, the swish & trepiditious
& callous & Byronic in its thinginess - this poem is
& the patois of creepy motion, muff
until it becomes vermillion-red

as a rose

dark & jet & passé a Concorde
glibbing away, it wanes
in many an atrophied way – keuhsaurus

& in the sweet hour of tasting the honey
art is smeared out with smudged fringes - bees
work this way as well - most of their fabrications

too

are stark imaginary stand-ins
for Muses-to-be, Tristia, not?

a copied case?

2. gluey force of duice
‘the days are vessels full of remnants
of pissing past pains and tenses'
- Mannekin

when Koen Stein did his extraction
& the image he achieved by it proved that there was
& something was wrong with it, observation
& Scientific Nature articles were written about it
& it had that double-faced surface
& he concluded it to pin-point it
& he told the audiences
& that that was like it
& the thing was half-dead and the half-alive
at the same time
& in it, there was that nilly tilly filly farty fetchey farty art
of something like this

& that was undigestable, the taste of it
& but was it art?
& was art out of art? not art
& from the heart?
& the jewels he collected (for her)
& the crown?
& the un-questioned remark
& why was the dicey gun
& shooting off into her direction?
& was it misfireing all over the place?
& the song - Everlina

my love for you shall never never die

3. La paloma
for Anna
‘We are a chain of lightbulbs, glowing
& there are beads
spinning on the narrow,
dimly they are
aware of our 3/16ths of our dimensions’
– A poem of Rae Pater edited by Argo Spier

the first tone of the morning
always is brought in by the love dove

she’s a dearest thing, the whisper
that identifies Muse’s evance

& the poet’s name
is on that same breeze, mine

& in the whirls among the pine
ring, she comes and stay (with me)

under the luscious twine

4. the natural way
a composition for Joneve to sing on her morning walks on the Beaches of Santa Baérbara, California.

1. the natural way, the heisa
2. about it was just part of it

3. & when realising it,
4. hopping on/off busses, crossing
5. overs

6. the lost lies in the break
7. Der Rosenkavalier on the road
8. to the South - Grande Massive, France
9. Spier blasts André Chernier at over 40 pitch

10. again & then there’s the North

5. building the bay
for Saritams and her red shoe on a Shoefix page.

the CAT crane brakes down the house
sifting wood from the bricks - VaCoMet
Sloop en Grondwerken

the crack of pane, dawn
the tumbling of a boulder
listen! this is the sweetest sound!

the trumpet for the Muse is dusk
- she noshes on crevices
& the rubble rumbles inside her soul

6. workman and oranges
April Love, Pat Boone.

yellow oranges
& sweet silver linings, gold frillings, dust
- fibres flew off Lucaplast Verzele

the man is always in his own design, ready
for the Close*up & the wow wow Bernadine
- what is that remakable!

7. poet codes
'& in cosi celeste, looking over his shoulder
- oh, all you find of the poet is the way he wedged
& the broken branches & hoof marks on the trail.'
- A.S.

stepping onto the wallop, touching into the air
its a ritual of rite & opening up of passage
into the deep deep of the thicket

& going, going for a song such
the thought comes – & that’s the point
of no return

‘Perfect!’ he said, ‘122333 Part 3’ - Gil’s
Method and Hunt's & Baila Morena’s
the night is on fire under the moonlight

- chime it!

& in the traces & themes of a third decree, the proclame
- there lie the trampeled upon locust & the rat
with poison in its gut & the Green Stone

from Stuttgart neatly placed on the focus
of the Muse from Odoura, Ora - look!
her footprints 's still salubriously

fresh in the sands of the lands of Medes

8. hide out
for Bitxo

‘Ruby, Ruby is my babe’ - Vincent Gene.

that soupçon there
& there’s a poet hiding behind the garbs of Muses

the Primavera goes to SG2
- oh, just an astronomical code -
to be deconstructed

Ficino is on the same locale
& her poet and his Muse – they
never turned up simultaneously

but look! three strophes and now - only
in this fourth -
both pulled in together

9. a taste of Botticelli
'Artists, writers and thinkers feed each other but they forget to sau thank you.'
Ermias Kifleyesus

jumbo stone symbols for her to decipher
& to elucidate, she's the runner of Pia

three stones? four? Shelly’s?
Yeat’s too?

no! & a yes?
not filth!

& dripping from Santa Chatarina's wall
Montzerat’s tear

that smudges the image
of Cap d’Oltrera

10. missing the poem of 10

where’s the poem
of ten?

11. city trip
for Beate

a Wagnerian drive into the moonlight
spoons full of medicine.
& clean nails, daisies for africionados

there’s the Mediteranean sun
- but what if the Muse
when she arrives, is in her full ornate

plain naked? .

***

in Barcelona there are the Pixapins
& the just not that Gaudi Hundertwasser Häuser
and incipent parks, the hundred of men
and women with frilly blouses

& there is the empty Sagrada Familia
submissive in its compromise
& the nights that are hot
with just not that much fire

& on Montana de Montjuic
far away from ramblas and love
the vagabond poet without Muse’s play,
her tease, her shoes, feet

- her bare feet
awaits a Jonas’ mirical, the fish

& in the off-ing of all this, he waits
and waits and longed for a Cohen's cure
- that cure that only a Saint Giordi’s killing
of the Dragon can bring!

12. essential poet
for Rati Saxena & her road to Kaledy, Kerala, India.

satisfied with the crumbs – leftoverses
& the heart, lungs and spleen – the poet (me) is among
the mongrel & in every way

Empuribrava! Casta Diva!
he (me) stretches and yawn, eel & design
calling off of a prerequisite, the badger

13. the door
‘what is the weight of Muse’s love
when she’s home and dry and done
for & when it is getting colder?’
- A.S.

your love for him lies curled up
snakily like the slumbering kunalundi
& deep inside the heart of her palm
Metaphor von Menschenleere & isolation

done bit, a sort of proffer
& a stone again – the next one
your concentration, medieavial as witchcraft
there’s goings on over there in the olive

grove of Ullastret

***

& hidden behind the stonewall Pierrot sounds
a Humpty horn & now then both the worlds under the sun
comes at errand together - the green world
with the swollen fruits & the tearing world

with its orange-coloured mango tree
colours, orange, green, olive

with love in its full serenity
pomegranate-love, hair, blue
locks, the zizzling dreadlock hanging
perilously over Medusa’s frown

- valori plastici

& hand & allot, the cut across
& rosy and pink who dare say? what
is the source of blood? when the dare
has bocome a matter of the take?

& lifting her torso high towards the sky
the occation of adore & the stake is there & facing
it all the poet has is his bumpty tumbty heart
- but you knew this all along, didn’t you?

14. ritual of key
'The question of being does not attain its true concretion until we have carried out the process of destroying the onthological tradition.'
- Martin Heidegger

one, two, three
dropping a key & she squats like a pigme
while picking it up again - oh, my darling
Blueberry Hill

& blue too the preciously rare Frog d’Emporda
hopping from leaf to leaf carrying the secret
of how Muses’ make their way
give concent

for the birth of the unpermissable
for the forbidden coming-into being & the not
done thing

15. time capsule, east and west
for Naomi Hata & her one bare foot on the heater.

she ate like a little man, rose up
& took the shady pistach & holds it
between her fragile thumb
& pointing finger - a serene

& lovely gesture of Zen, oh
do inhale, dearest
& do sip more tea of green, invinsible
Madama Butterflya pale jade

& oh, ocean lime and seed, I do
need a verse to fit in here - 3 or 4 Graces

***

& in café Montzerat les Dunes
we drink warm wine from Emporda & on Fuiji’s
cold slopes of snow, the Arafat of the North
there's from nimph’s mouth the olive twig

& when South again come and see me
and more & place your tracing hand bleek
on the sandy icon that's voo-doo-ing a Cap Greniz
- & for us, then there's the snoop at De Bijloke

& music within

16. healing

rejuvination, then life’s secret
Roya de Torroella di Montgri, sweet and dear
& the very lovely colour of the evening yielding sky

& every time it happens
it happens over and over again
like in La Napoule Revisited
- ’tis strange but immenence's

purity of aleviation is real

17. art of losing

things
that keep you from her, hey! drown
your noise! too loud, poetry

things
that draw her to you, the silence,
the wind, plumes of smoke, amaretho-coloured
morning radiance
dawn, dusk
- pleat it, without fail!

& dulcet the word & lovely now
her peachy pair of ears

18. tremendo, Estartit, July 2008

fireworks over Illes Medes, the moon
at La Platera is round and full
- La Devin du Village

& creamy-coloured her shoes, mauve suedes
you said you bought it for her
but you lied - but show it, there's

a reason for lieing

oh, salty flanks of Saint Jordi
& tremendo the universe, now its falling
from the heavens - look! poetic!

& travelling do the soul reach its home
tonight - but darling, where’s the baroque espirit
the play & design & the ethernal rhyme?

only in the syntax, in the semantic curl & in
grosso glossiness - it is dripping from fleshy moist
pages and broken hearts - foiled love

& in the tone of abscenences, of naked needs
black sweetnesses - the grapes from breathy Emporda
- sweet, sweet, sweet they are & there’s

the malet of moulasse in faces
& poets pick at the faces, their whim
redicule & poetry & make mirrors of it all

& of realities of you, of art forms, new forms
from loosily looney souls - pick at the looney soul!
pick at the lonely soul!

19. master of the ceremony

a 1000 notes from Correlli 2, or just one?
or sixteen? which do you choose? 4 times
the Queen of Queens or a dally with a 4 x 4?
- there's twice the number 10 in 3737

& the code to enter the tricky web
of my virtuality

home ago the poet, the poet goes home
to the nights that are bright, slow & starry
& early in the lull – hey, listen to the sound
of the Muse’s stir, the clicking of the colours

on her cheek imitating the shapes of Pi

20. fleshy music

its a song – Opus Millionth
that is what you do to me - the purple
fleshiness of the insides of the fig of Ulla
- mild und leise

21. organic sound

Mahler & like the beast
breathing, waiting, luring
- a symphony of a living thing
- hear how it waits for you to rise

22. inscicion wound

cutting back, her hand & her sniffle
of skin, the mushy mucus johannesberger green
of an alvocad skin

23. strange II – the messenger
‘This poem is dead, old and rotten, throw it away!’
- Mannekin

like an illusion, it happened
like plastic wrapped & worn-out
sandels wasted in the marsh, 3 of them

she tossed her found way away, shoe away, the imp!
my god! a shoe on her focus! such a degenerated
offering, cantation &/or calculation!

***

no single gemstone for her, nor lanky air
only the antechamber of her prison cell
only the rota & an the aquamarine sword

hidden
in the lithe behind the pickly black of a bush

24 four points on her sutura arteria

4 stiches, 4 points on her sutura arteria
& healing, the soggy sharp pear
took on its full rounded form

again
so warm holding it now in the cup of my hand
it fills the heart of my palm

25. falling star
'symbols &
locker keys, feathers and a fish

& colours, the orange green
of burgundy & the founded heart

in the circle of my joy'
- A.S.

for the Muse-that-stars-the-variety at El-Molino, Estartit, 25th July 2008.)

towards 10 o’clock and 40
bulging a bum, a bare bunny bunny tummy
soft her hair! Oh my god, her hair is yellow
as the shouting sun, even ash

‘Come on! Clap your hands!
Its party time!’

with pot pouri & Trio Fundacion’s
Passion for Tango & medly & 60ties & all
there's joy in the bundle & oh-ky horsey-ride
- Suor Angelica & Powder Her Face

come scoglio immoto resta, tonight
will be fine fine for a Jewish while, money
& diaspora & craving & sustanance
- honey for the cosy Mobile

home

but if not, my love, my dearest thing & if
there’s the Three Oranges for You
in the high-poled tent, paradise
will come in an Adam’s strong arm

there’s the 3 faces – Eve in you! The boy
& you can buy your virginity anew, again
with me the whole night long!
12 o’clock

’Come on! Hurry! Your feet in the air!
Its vulgar loving rhyme thyme!’

26. catalan nuga again
‘You're at your very best when you are.’
- Joneve McCormick

her hand, in her hand
the world happened again, more over

& over & over & again
& a-like (that)

'here!' she said, 'here is a packet of Turron BlandoTarda
neat for you - munch it, my love
Elaborado con Molino de Piedra
… for you!'

& of it, it is not in the language
that one finds that matters but it is the bell,
the shaped bell of the appel of Jacjson - the forbidden
sound!

27. tenure
'& in the end though
it became the encryption
of the Two Worlds of the Daughter of Rosa.'
- A.S.

cucumber love, then citron-yellow
& blue-black gurkin from Estartit’s garden
- the story is the story of her, its truely
the story of her, yours

& poetry at its plenty, poetry
oh it’s the Muse’s poetry, plentifull
& his story is her story, is truely
the story of her, mine

& harm doesn’t come on the way,
no sirree, it doesn't into this at all - never
or, but truely its a story, its truely
the story of you and me

28. old and new

no plans
no projects
no appointments
no me?

without plans
without projects
without appointments
without me?

making plans
making projects
making appointments
making me?
- from Slow Times - Ora Odoura

(come to think of it, there are Muses running
around in the nude, streaking on the beaches
La Platera

or aren’t they Muses?
& my poetry? isn't my poetry poetry?
& what sense does it make?
& not art? & not made
out of art?)

29. art critic

Lohengrinicker says, an art critic
oh, she’s like a pimp & yet
with the exception

that pimps fill in – give job, make
headway, etc. when the staff’s off duty
or checking in at clinics for tests

of HIV

& the poet, nobody
fills in for the poet, never
(not even himself)

30. magnum icecream
for Ann

on a napkin’s he wrote
'I like Magnum Double Chocolate'
‘It’s for a poem for later’ he said, stern
how the sky & when done

with the oath and bottles of Fitou Cru
he - used it - true as Sophocles and/or La Joconde
to end that what became thereafter
called as the 'Muse’s natural touch'

31. virtual kiss with comment on 31

dead poetry is dangerous - here's a 7 going to 8 ... or rather a 4 (=deeper self) moving to a 7 (the male penis almost in full erection = full self), then to an 8 (double numenosum = affirmation of the deeper self)

3 + 1 = 4
2 + 4 + 2 + 8 = 1 + 6 = 7
words = 35 = 8

all these 'codes' are in thec collective, you cannot write them, they just evance when the poem is done ... dead poetry is using the 'unseen' codes. Poet is medium. By getting these codes you can see if the poem makes sense or not. If it doesn't make sense via the codes it is 'rubbish'. If it makes sense via the codes then its a good poem ... whether it is a

again where the cut in the hand, 24
days later

the scar & her petite posture
& her loving kissing lips - rosy
in the 1.130.496 bytes *.jpg

'‘s for you', she said to the 28th
day Movie Man

and that was the end of it

Part 2 - poetry from the book
Ghent, 2009

1. prologue

taking notice? else
& unlike Manson’s the other day
- his worrisome behaviour!

& up on the plinth, the editor declares
that the singer should hand-over his costume
& others amicably obey

& once more, always with the Alaskian bixto - she's
like Josephine Palin - appearing on the scene
and vanishing from it yet again

& at tempo

2. a poem (of being) alive and dead
for Anne Cambier

Made@
the festival, a modern baroque one
tipped the top

& the hat - salute!
superb to be so easily & early
in the year as spring is

& out-sprinting autumn - but others
had daggers & no choices
there was the Kleine Nacht Muzik

of Mozart

for example as well & then
the rain came & the ceremony
& inside their shirts

people wore their souls
in sheaths

& the inside came out then, become
known & the worm too peeped
from in its hole & there weres lovers

in the foyer too

& the music & the sexy soprano
as winter skipped summer
out-beating it

& it went on

& on and on
& lovely Maria Antoinette
& ses Airs was, a beautiful example

of how organic the plushy animal
at Kaffee Zimmermann, the art
of performing art, is

3. giocaste – Greek love story

a way, die Kunszene
& the woman has fluff-hot sex-appeal, life
but she's wasting away , this time

the contra-soprano

stole the show & many of the other events,
the dizzy, grizzly bear, its head on shoulders,
Anatife & Bernache with bi-focaled glasses

with the f/centers off-center

& then Jan Wellem’s quest - hang
het klein kind niet uit, man - conflicted
with the director’s deciscion, but its known

that the actor speaks 4 languages of which 2
are foreign to all around him, the venacular
& constantly he uses strange expressions

& as if its bent beneath the norm
verse merely describ the processes
in literature & from being vain, Filoro

- nothing will come from him -

& always at the wrong moment
he buggers up - the floorboard &
the broken mirror

& Feraspe! & the military came
& Cirene with Delmiro
& it was opera from the 17th century

& not poetry

4. watch party prior (the death of a number)

taped onto his light post, 5 of 557, the uphold
demonstrates the party prior & her promise
to be his dearest lover - but she goosed-off

chicken shit

& to calm him down & Sunny and Glacier
& Sarah raffeled the Irish Pub, the bar there
is much longer than expected & laying

in there waiting for the number count - my god,
its unbelievable! - it’s a watch party prior
repitition, word & combination

rehearsal

5. candle
Composition of material supplied by Ora Odoura
- A.S.

-tear (tears, tearing, tore, torn)
1. If you tear paper, cloth, or another material, or if it tears, you pull it into pieces or you pull it so that a hole appears in it.
2.
3.
4.
5. To tear something from somewhere means to remove it roughly and violently.
6.
7. If you tear somewhere, you move there very quickly, often in an uncontrolled or dangerous way.
8. If you say that a place is torn by paricular events, you mean that unpleasant events which cause suffering and division among people are happening there.
-tear apart
-tear away
-tear down
etc

I think it is a bit of all that, no?

6. using the notation:
Composition of material supplied by Michael Hoag
- A.S.

flats,
flats and double flats
- and double.

double sharps
this notation for an hour
(touch)

with only strings
yesterday
we made the notches

& now we may ruin imprecision
& go to unfamiliar points
& ouch of bow

- sharps

7. the missing content – double tear
Composition of material supplied by Ora Odoura
- A.S.

I think is a bit of all that no?

***

let me say that you should very seriuosly think to stop smoking otherwise all what you say have no sense.

good title ... missing content is 'dark' (grey?) so its an encrypted message in title to tell reader where to look but anyway... even this 'anyway' is double jointed = 'any way'

8. asunto: re the candle

very exceptional ... Look at the missing content by the numbers. Can you read what is thought here? I think I can - or I mean I 'know' what you say there with the nothing. One cannot describe it. See where we all are? The missing numbers represent a 6 which is a crucial 'turning point'. Look at the number 6, it wants to curl back into a zero ... the womb. Its a dangerous phase - to grow further in to a phalus (look at 7 = almost an erected phalus, man, king) or to return to femininity (zero = feminine, womb, mother) ... male or female, which way? look at the 4 bolded tears! 4 - this communication is very serene and comes from the core of the I-knowledge. But more important ... the last 'tear' goes 'down'. (It means 'no rescue attempt of whatever re the money crisis will work' ... it will go 'down'. This is my proof. This mail proves that it will worsen! It also means that I am sick inside and must take doctor's advice (= the stop smoking bit). Deconstructed message of this communication is 'the individual is sick and will go down' ... and the outer world (financial crisis) is just the metaphor of it.

9. free tickets

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Part 3 – Watery reflection of time
– Ghent, Belgium, April 2007.

1. add a d

Bachcantates, Monteverdi’s Choir
echoes the sound of human voices
& at the darker side there's eggshell

muffs

& in northern light this quiet
damp October shrills
like footsteps

***

Mrs Eliot Gartiner,
unapproachable now, is unbemused
& takes flight

a fugitave to the ranks, the banks
of Nete & river, the upper
& lower part

2. living in a story2
‘Voi non siete fatta per esser paesana.'
– Don Giovanni

’Life is not a bal masqué’ she said, Donna
Anna when you whisper into his ear, he will laugh
into your face - he, the word you fears
& the snake that sheds skin, taking on

the form of a lover in pain

‘Buy him a face, the coward ...' she said, Donna
Elvira when you murmer softly, licking his lips, he will shrug
off the tout - he, the sentence you detests
& the basalisk producing an egg, making it

with the smile of a lover in triumph

Donna Zerlina, you too, beg into him & tenderly
give him what women most need to waste, their all
’Your face is but a mask …’, offer it – he, the refuse
with a snort & the story you hates

- the poisonous debris behind the lover in flight

3. chocolate truffels or roast chicken

counting his money at the chocolate stand
& watching the assistant’s hand
moving, folding cellophane, someone
behind him remarks ’Al Qayda’s a bunch
of low -class trash, you know? Have you seen
Nigeria? Cassablanca? 20 shoppers in a mall
& wham, their feet, hands, tummies, hair & gall
… all splattered all across the place - god,
you should have seen the blood on TV’

& torn between buying a roast chicken
for lunch and truffles to gulp down at 4
… ‘four’s a good number, don’t you think?
- there's four in the packet?’
’… those godloving scum, goat pffft uckers
one should ‘iss on ‘em … my god, blowing up malls
like these, nice f-king malls, you know?’
’they got malls in Nigeria?’
.’’iss on ‘em I say, that’s the right thing to do!”

& he dugs deeper into his pocket, fingering out
more coins, money for both chicken and ruffels
’look at the lovely cellophane wrappings’
’…trash, I tell you’

& leaving the mall, exiting to the street
at the door a beggar points towards the chicken
& then to the dog beside him, the poet dumps
the chicken in his lap ‘… half’s for you
& the other half for the dog but the truffels, look
sir, there is no way you can negotiate your way
towards ‘em …and another thing, re this Al Qayda buzz,
you’d better go sit at the other entrance, its kind
of further away from here, etc. …

'ah man, what
weird kind of people are flogging to our malls'

4. from a circle to a diamond!
for Mary, Beatrice and Lucia

‘Smile + Homework for you! Psst! I didn't forced this, it just came ex nihilo. I was thinking of you and felt a bit sad that both of us are waving such and saying 'good-bye' etc. And then I just doodled … you know? Well, maybe an exercise for you! Analyse it. Find the middle, the horizontal and center lines, etc. Poetry? What is this thing called 'poetry'? For 'poetic nations'…? Look at the colours on the second page. What is it that the poet really is saying?’

A poem?
A poem for you?
A poem to say - how
can I say good-bye to you?
I won't say good-bye to you!
I won't clue a poem for you!
I won't write a poem!
No! I write not
A poem!

X
RaE
A poem?
A poem for you?
A poem to say - how
can I say good-bye to you?
I won't say good-bye to you!
I won't clue a poem for you!
I won't write a poem!
No! I write not
A poem!
SdU
X

A poem?
A poem for you?
A poem to say - how
can I say good-bye to you?
*I won't say good-bye to you!
I won't sign a poem for you!
I won't write a poem!
No! I write not
A poem!

A poem?
A poem for you?
A poem to say - how
can I say good-bye to you?
I won't say good-bye to you!
I won't clue a poem for you!
I won't write a poem!
No! I write not
A poem!

X
RaE
A poem?
A poem for you?
A poem to say - how
can I say good-bye to you?
I won't say good-bye to you!
I won't clue a poem for you!
I won't write a poem!
No! I write not
A poem!
SdU
X

A poem?
A poem for you?
A poem to say - how
can I say good-bye to you?
*I won't say good-bye to you!
I won't sign a poem for you!
I won't write a poem!
No! I write not
A poem!

X
RaE
A poem?
A poem for you?
A poem to say - how
can I say goodbye to you?
*I won't say good bye to you!
I won't sign a poem for you!
I won't write a poem!
No! I write not
A poem!
SdU
X

A poem?
A poem for you?
A poem to say - how
can I say good-bye to you?
I won't say good-bye to you!
I won't clue a poem for you!
I won't write a poem!
No! I write not
A poem!

X
RaE
A poem?
A poem for you?
A poem to say - how
can I say good-bye to you?
I won't say good-bye to you!
I won't clue a poem for you!
I won't write a poem!
No! I write not
A poem!
SdU
X

A poem?
A poem for you?
A poem to say - how
can I say good-bye to you?
*I won't say good-bye to you!
I won't sign a poem for you!
I won't write a poem!
No! I write not
A poem!

1. 3 'A' + can + 3 'I' + no + 'A'
2. 3A's + can + 3I's = no + A? (The A's probably refers to 'third person' or 'thing' while the 'I' is the statement of the poet against this 'unnamedness'. He seems to confirm it wit 'not A'. Its as if he says 'not impersonal thingness but persobal openness is the issue).& then the end rhyme: 'poem?' + 'You'. Is he talking to the poem? Or is he talking to 'his love'= a real person? & 'poem? + you? + how + 3 times you? + poem! + not + poem!' Not that 'how' and 'not' has no question or exclamationmarks.& poem + you + how + 3 times you = poem + not + poem. Woooo, heavey? What the huh eh ggrrrpppfft does it mean?

& the vertical line:

poem
for
to say
good-bye
say good-bye
write
write
a poem

& the 'circle' to 'diamond'? Abstraction to concrete value? & the 'X RaE' and 'X SdU that transcends the circle into a diamond? X RaE = X-ray? Implying 'skeleton'? X RaE and X SdU are two names or 'handels' of persons, you and me.Reader and writer? But there has been a transformation of the name of 'Sdutty'.Why? Has this to do with the word 'sign'? SdU now the paraf of Sdutty? The use of RaE forced the use of the SdU, shortened form of Sdutty. Why? & the two 'X's? Kisses? & the 'can' + 'no!' and the 'how' + 'not'? Does the poem say 'how not' 'can' can be 'no'? Or does it gives an example how not to write a poem? Or is it how not to say goodbye? & 'middle' of both circle and diamone = *I won't say good bye to you

5. her toes
(Composition of on the web found material. Author unknown.
-A.S.

'While I was with the spirits who dwell suspense,
A lady summond me – so blest, so rare,
I begged her to take compassion on thy plight.'
Canto I The First Three Circles of Hell, Dante

Spring, ‘she is a coming in’
(as the old song says)
and lovely are her toes
as she dangles them
for me – tantalizingly, hypnotic

over the door sill of this Maine march dawn
later in the day
her perfume, she will peak in at newly opened windows
her first (and best) perfume, the performance
(not the heady, blossomy, daffodil and violet stuff
she'll resort to later on in her life)
suspecting (with some cause) the wandering eye
but subtly, musky the tang that precedes her actual coming
compounded & the first serious sunrays
and damp earth beneath her feet
(as if crawling out from under snow)

Oh she is a tease, this one
(as better men than I have said)
but when I see the birch and willow
all swelled, red and yellow, at the tips with anticipation
I know she won't be long

She'll blow in, one of these days,
through the door of the west,
tossing a three day tantrum of cold tears and fog ahead of her
and all this snow will go

there will be standing water in every wood lot and meadow in Maine
and every marsh a lake
we'll carry her about with us in muddy prints
(veritable feet of clay)
for the next three months and more
and wonder why we were so eager to see her come

Oh, we know her well,
spring in Maine,
and all her little ways
but it would take a better man than I indeed
these early days
to deny her lovely toes

6. diary poems1 – I cried today
2009-01-13
Composition of material supplied by Ora Odoura
- A.S.

I cried today
I cried today
I cried today
I cried today
I cried today
I cried today
I cried today
I cried today
I cried today
I cried today
I cried today
I cried today
I cried today
I cried today
I cried today
I cried today

and where does the monkey go from here?
& this is the problem with this
it cannot continue - but you know
I found a nice open place at river

maybe I should take a chair with me
when I go next time

7. diary poem2 – I bought a ham today

Composition of material supplied by Ora Odoura
- A.S., 2009-01-13

the moon pulled me from my bed
this morning at 4.30 GMT
- is it true that the moon is now 15%
closer to earth?

anyway

I bought a huge hind quatered ham
today
& I could hardly carry it with my broken shoulder
- Jamon La Puebla, a product guarenteed by Campodulce

& its being produced in Zaragoza
(maybe I go there one day and see it)
- but, you know, my knee is giving in

fast – I cannot walk anymore

8. free spirit – a poem by Ch'an master Tao-chi
(Lust for Enlightenment 92)
Copied here and used as dead poetry here. Poem was written by an Anonomous Buddhist monk and translated here into English. Probably 16th Century material.
- A.S.

Rest to stop motion,
If you are merely in either
Buddhist proverb, Anonemous

Every day I'm either in a wine shop or brothel,
A free-spirited monk who is hard to fathom;
My surplice always appears torn and dirty,
But when I patch (and wash) it, it smells so sweet.

9. don’t drink anything that comes out of plastic
Thursday, June 26, 2008 – the poem of Michael Hoag that got killed on the Absolutely Write Cooler Ezboard
Composed by Michael Hoag.
-A.S.

Note - Comments are no longer enabled on the platform of the ‘real poet’, but I will point out that Argo Spier's Poem exists in the context of Language Poetry and Flarf Argo Spier's poetry and other such experiments. I will be updating this informtation later, when I have time. Refer to my bloq at http://argospierpoem.blogspot.com/2008/06/purchase-franchise.html
- Michael Hoag

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9. poem for a Queen - Inter-active poem lifting a glass with the reader and celebrating the Muse

such a Queen such courage ... man
she's valiant Gp said

Time? … Timaeus asked … you need Time?
tell you … I'll give you Time

an 'Illion 'Ears I'll give to you … not enough?
OK four more give Hours more … see?

connubial give Hours more say … Ben said
you're getting dressed again?

that's worth four seek Faces … sweet

Faces … four more Faces nice
faces …it's OK!

Argo Spier said that's 3x said

it's four

no?

OK … then I am write

she'll wait Four you … no Time

a Poem for a Queen

such a Queen such courage ... man
she's valiant Gp said

Time? … Timaeus asked … you need Time?
tell you … I'll give you Time

an 'Illion 'Ears I'll give to you … not enough?
OK four more give Hours more … see?

connubial give Hours more say … Ben said
you're getting dressed again?

that's worth four seek Faces … sweet

Faces … four more Faces nice
faces …it's OK!

Argo Spier said that's 3x said

it's four

no?

OK … then I am write

she'll wait Four you … no Time

a Poem for a Queen

such a Queen such courage ... man
she's valiant Gp said

Time? … Timaeus asked … you need Time?
tell you … I'll give you Time

an 'Illion 'Ears I'll give to you … not enough?
OK four more give Hours more … see?

connubial give Hours more say … Ben said
you're getting dressed again?

that's worth four seek Faces … sweet

Faces … four more Faces nice
faces …it's OK!

Argo Spier said that's 3x said

it's four

no?

OK … then I am write

she'll wait Four you … no Time

Part 4 - Four dead horses
– Estartit, May 2009

prologue - 2010 poems – it’s the words that make the difference

‘It may be that 'dead poetry' has already replaced 'poetry real' and if this is the case, everyone soon will also starting to propagate it, telling everyone else that it has happened; that poetry has died. But the 'death' they then will be talking about, and this isn't the lightests of issues, will not be the 'death' that is active in 'dead poetry'. They will be having it over 'poetry sec' only. And it will be a very strange discussion in which references will be made to the 'corpses of poetry' that's strewn all over the landscapes of our lives. However it may be, I just can’t get rid of the feeling that we are living in exciting times – apocalyptic end-times times. Right now we may be witnessing the end of the centuries old traditions of poetry. It’s a thrilling thought to be part of such a historic moment, don’t you think? But thinking about it, and the incipiency of the argument, there’s a direr question arising from it too, the art-historical issue concerning the 'body' of poetry' . Can one überhaupt be busy with the death of poetry? And what about concepts such as ‘corpses of poetry’ … what is that? The word ‘corps’ pre-suggests ‘body’, a ‘living body’ and therefore the question what the ‘body’ of poetry is? This Meta question is tantamount to the question of what poetry is. And there's something else, the Orobos or circle turning into itself - namely that the answer to this question IS the death of poetry? I think that times have become so fatal that no single poem that is worth it can be written without dealing with the search to the essence of poetry … or do you think I have it wrong?’
- Argo Spier

the pentagram versus the four corners of the tetrakis
* (this is a draft copy – Ed.)

This lonely heart measures
The cold merciless borders
- Arun Budhathoki

... its the words that make the difference, their numbers
its my poetry that makes the difference, the veil
and the kitchy,
& the code too. I just love it
when you are taking me to lands, places where I have never been

and all those make-believe names
of all the places
& the goings on in those lands, the beginnings
and the somethings
of it, that’s what I need

that, that but, du, did show
me your world, the one that I do not know
... taking me by surprise
again

and speaking it out, say 'oh, forgot
to tell you I thought of you when I
was in Strassbourg, France’
or 'oh, I will think of you when I
go to Canterbury, England
& do the X-mas shopping, 2009’
& what about Valentine 2010?
& why not?

***

tell me

have you seen the moon lately?
& its sky, its Turnurian ornate’s
almost like in the early days?
& its nights, the now-a-days?
& the enigma variations?
& Dvorak, Britten &
Elgar’s home maintenance?

it’s the number that makes the difference
that place with no reason
the one for sailing away with, & joy
& a wonderous full world of the 31 words, its
number 16 signifying the whole week's days, all in one
plus six that equals seven – when seven? when
us, seven days? when
three plus one?
when Youri Vamos’ ballet
Julien Sorel?

and … 4?
five 4's in a row
5, the naughty one, the juvenile
& tryer & joker & winner
& the innocent one in the box of time
& Schröder’s cat & Hadron’s chase
& the appearance of the queen,
the numenosum, deep Jung, Adler’s tetrakis
again, & the mandela of time
not really the 4 corners, but the 5
pointed star & pentagam

you speak of the places deep inside you
you speak of it as when you were young
& the room that faces you now, you wait
in it
on you own, & as if an Atlantis
& the waves that come crashing in
& did you say it was a fabulous place?
yes, you said it, yes, you said it, twice
it was a fabulous place
… and you described the route to me, the red
route - see its the red road
… and you confirm it with a double 4 in the 8
red passages I coloured for you
nodding yes & saying, that is it, Un
petite Histoire de la viola

‘thanks for the link, which is fabulous for the first 16 seconds, then it gets unbearably kitschy, I'm afraid! But the moment the waves come crashing it, that's it! - bye b’

in the depth of the code there’s the message
in the clearing of the wilderness the set
& the route description
in the encryption & seconds
later, the year of the week … when you
want me
to get that what you want me
to get, it was to be a week
& now calling it kitchy & well placed
with its contrasts & immaculately use
it vies with semantic possibilities
just so, to stick me up to LOOK for the place ... the unbearable
kitchiness of it, its bearable
because its kitchy
& unbearable kitschy because its kitchy

& ... its the words that makes the difference, their numbers
its my poetry that makes the difference, the veil
and the kitchy,
but the code too. I love it
when it says you will take my hand
& land me to the place where

& the goings on of those lands, their beginnings
and sometimes end, I'm not affraid
to fullfill a multiple function, the sharper marker
& … you may think it unbearable
that I tell you who is afraid

***

distraction-play fitted in, in between
the unbearable & the I'm afraid code, its message
& meaning
- its says that fear are the steps to follow, there’s alchemy
needed & the employment, a first &
a next &
a to get to the other side &
then it will become clear
& and this is in full writing, the muse’s
this, she is the meticulously caring one
& the one for … & one, showing
the soft and the fabulous & the heeding
& the warning of a or the crash
ontmaagd door muziek

***

5 numenosa
5 announcements of the coming
& the queen just to fool around with
oh no, dear, its accentuation
& a making sure of the that that you get it
5 is but the young verile stream of conscious
the almost erected phalus (almost mature one)
& it has the circle of remembrance of the zero
& the reference from the mother
of the number

& the nothing, the primeaval
in its lower half
it wants to have an upper half
starker straightnesses
(look at the visual effect of a 5
its almost a seven!)

***

5 hints at seven, seven’s in the week
seven’s the longer time, more than the star ...
its the message that makes the point, the number
the place of the middle of the distance

5 (joyful juvenality), its connected
to the tetrakis (the 4 of the deep)
& with 31 words you have send me a star
& it contains your whole life ... and
you have given me the direction
& route to where it is located
wow, that's nice of you
la Médecin Malgré lui

but I … what route can I give you in return?
telling you, oh, its just codes ... unbearable (empty) kitchy
... a source?
it has no (3 words) + meaning, I'm affraid! (3 words too)
… a symmetry

& if you look closely at this too
& count the numbers
you will see that another star
has now come into being ... the star of the fives

it follows suit on 4, doesn't it?
continuation?

mm that! Dardanus!

1.disparity

‘I will let you tell me what you say now !’
- Ora Odoura

from my own doing I landed on earth - a poem
revisited & here, you know
I found not one of the kind of my own

& going to the local - opposite the Post Office - with Fear
and Trembling & there, once again, the old
discourse as to whence the purpose of destiny,
- its pedalled leaden rose

& wondering I – true as Mingham - if's
not better to hide than to decide
against lame horses' wandering

2. portrait in blue

figurine of a woman
drawn on canvas & she,
with a turned away head
- she's in a sleepy haze

& in the chair she’s sitting in
& at arm’s length
& the view of her back, her leg,
the sole of one of her bare feet

she look like a leg of lamb
for sale & an inch away from a deal
- why do I think there another painting
of her soul inside the one at hand?

why & what with this poem of mine?

3. words
‘Marta and Slava’s remake is neighther an idealistic utopia
nor a cynical dystopia’ - Anonamous

words are (they say)
& my words are objets trouves

& my verses, verses
are twined vine and in linen, hang onto

them

***

tossled and flair, hair & Aurélien Froment’s
philosophy is not really suiatable

for copying into any poetry
(why does the poet try it?)

***

& why? & who here listens to the BBC?
- ’oh, its just to remember Mendeleïev’s periodic table!’

4. the space of words
‘Under a heading ‘never asked’ she asked to see me. With an SMS she said ‘I will never SMS you! But miricals are made, dearest dear, you know that, don’t you?’
-Mannekin

inside the words lies tithies
in heterogeneity there's space

and safer than heaven, places
but

& spatializations of languages
& evanescences – she didn’t turn

up in the end
not at L’Espace des Mots, she didn’t

***

I suggest they free her now
Aung Sans un Kyi

she's done her bit
hasn't she?

5. Marlene Dumas
’The Magician of the North, Johann George Hamann is an Idealist!’
- Annomous

with ‘Measuring Your Own Grave’ she measured
mine, yours and the Caller Man’s

‘Ut pictua poesis’
painting became word

same’s when born again
flesh & logos

& what remain

6. white cows in NYC
‘Das nicht festgestellte Tier’
- Metzsche

'I drink nature like coffee' - but
the verse is just a basic potential, a falsifier
empty as any/every a thing

& when done - there
are white cows in NYC & in L.A. there’s
a black crow - it is squaking at me

now, when looking through this keyhole
- by Gurdjeffs’ enneagram & on the other side
of the Santa Barbara's mountain, there’s

my own blue eye guawking, peeping
god! surveilling me
controlling the processes of the dark

nutmeg nursery rhymes
taking place inside me
and you

7. simply what the sky reveals
’A person can give another space when he personally has the freedom to posses it’
- Ernst Lange

a house
mostly a mouse

a beam of white spraying light
the moon, where

it lies drowning in water,
contracting with the closing-in

of concentric circles, silver
the iris

mors mea vite tua
(my death, your life)

8. land of pain
'Ich zehe von fern das Land, dass ich verliess. Ich beweine als Frau, was ich als Mann nicht verteidigen wusste.'
(Free Translation - 'I see from far that Land I lost. I cry like a woman, what I as a man couldn't defend.')
-George Fredrich Händel, 'Giulio Cesare in Egitto', libretto.
Opera am Rhein, Duisburg.

Estrella & a heap of pelt
the dragon

9. stones
‘The I is after its pure being, unending activity and eternally busy with testing and displacing borders. It needs the ‘other’ and the ‘opposite’, the Not-I and creates it in order to fight against it and provides its own sustenance for growth’
– Fichte
(A free and interpretative translation of Ficte’s thoughts – A.S.)

4 boulders – rock astound
appels the size of a big hand

take ‘em home
& wash wash ‘em

& when sold & cleaned out
4 new orbs

4 round things, nova
huta

toss 'em away & voila
4 worlds are moved, try far

all 16 of ‘em
(5 is a boy called bixto)

10. free-wheeling will
La manera més segura de no arribar a ser molt infeliç és no pretendre ser molt feliç.
(Free Translation - 'The the most safe way of not becoming very unhappy is not pretending to be very happy.')
Arthur Schopenhauer (Parerga i Paralipomena)

it, the in-line offe zee Free Will
take a zero to a 100 on lamentation’s scale

& halfe of the way of it, it is a wonder
why its momentum is losing its swing

yet I am a poet & shall be sung
- but that’s not a balanced phrase, hey

& anyway

where’s the Muse, where does she do
what? in massilenci’s dot com world?

where? the what & the crucifix
in the Chamber of Silence and Pain?

11. Voltaire1

Deo erexit Voltair, his church
- the bloody dare erecting it for God

& as expected, it turned out
that the other way became true

that’s the pestering irony
of it all

***

‘Don’t step on me! Don’t touch me!’
she screamed
‘
& fled through the hole
in the fence

‘Ecrasez l’infäme! Destroy the shame!'
he cautioned

but the truth in it is, the thinker holds & have told
- what with the right of the other fellow

and all? & a what with man's freely rights? & his
self-destined road? & his want to be himself?

'I think that, no?' she encrypted
on a note shoved through the hole

12. Voltaire2
‘The world is my impression.’
- Schopenhauer

from the time she donned the frock
her solitude, the previous time

that I built that house for Jack & the space
for that lone rider - Hunchback Mountain & Valley

his horse with a name of No Name (Niel Young?) & I
locked-up her poor bel-esprit right

inside the hexagram
I had designed, it

was as if she were a fiend
to be treated the same way as they did

with Francois Marie Arourt
- the Bastille a long time ago

***

& now there’s this noise ringing
in my head - 'its only my Poker face'

& I am keeping my secret - 'mm,
mm, my Lady Gaga

mba mba … ba ba Poker face!'

13. doubt

knowledge comes from doubt
- doubt it

amor fati – oh, poisonous
Spinoza & Nietsche's

love for the unchangable
fate

for example - 'Leibniz,
was he born in Leibzig? Or wasn’t he?'

- see? there's
a sea without banks to hold it

there's

a lot of surreality
in uncertainty

14. the other poem
‘Hearing shape, tasting sound - oh you gay
Synaesthete!’
- A.S.

for Francis Bacon and Bierens de Hann

again
abandoned on the plains of La Platera
I play the distance I have to travel
to the castle of Torrealla di Montgri

& I play that when the sun sets, its like
an apotheose & it will touch the roofs
of the houses at Les Dunes

ever so gently yet/& on the other hand
Baron von Verulam’s Instauratio magna
dealt with this - all long before me

& now by the by & anyhow/&
in the meantime
the essential me stays my own transcendental

15. bread1
‘Is bread the course, that we, by eating it, stay alive?’
- Anonamous

the thought of baking bread
feeds us all, the farmers

the housewifes and Mme Montzerat
& even Ry Cooder tonked it

- how true it is, how from church
to church too people jump

but boy, poet, playboy, just remember
the clue is - remember of it as much

as you can - remembering it, that’s
what’s making us forgetting it

16. bread2
‘Blindness occurs through the absence of light in the eye.’
Finico

you cannot steady the mind
without the mind he said

&/or thinking a thought
actually, out of the blue

'Or can you?' the poet asked
'I cannot! Can you?'

the demigurg - say
stay & the emphiric

that's what counts
in the end

'No?'

***

'Yes?'

Allard Pierson came up
and left it out, this

- thinking it out, out of nothing!
say?

'Really?
& but ... isn't it?'

17. the difference between moralis pars & artificalis pars
‘Ohne Phosphor kein Gedanken.’
- Jacques Moleschott

notchy potchy poetry
who in hell still writes old poetry?
poetry for the mouth?

- East, West, poignant Naomi's feet's
the best!

habbala Kabbalha, tsimtsum
who in heaven still keeps himself
busy with my new dead poetry?

- South, North, gay Suzy’s American thigh’s
the best!

***

what if God

has made a different universe?
what if - when? wouldn’t the laws of waste
of love been different then?

defiant & poles apart?

18. copied & revisited poem
'... must not then Being be interpeted in light of full and primordial time, if the full and primordial sense of Being is to reveal itself?'
- Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit.
& Otto Pöggeler, Heidegger Today, Translation.

done bit & a sort of offering
the mode of historicality & a stone
– the fourth one to concentrate upon

its medieaviality & witchcraft
& when the day dawns & light comes
into play - the whooping owl leaves

but no doubt about it - there's
goings on over there in the olive grove
of Ullastret where raptures are formed

19. equal semantic categories
‘While oak bark is selling by the pound
cinnamon is weighed by lead’
- Annonomous

logic, physics & pneumatics, as well as
immaterial substances & angels

- she told me an angel is bigger
than a man, much bigger & about half

- the size of four times bigger
& you know, it

cannot be true, yet it may be,
an angel lazily hanging around

on a branch of a tree, its wings not
hanging in dirt, aurulam quandam

melioris
a wiff’s better than literature

20. a produceable thing
'Dazein is in time in such a way that it must expressly temporalize time. The temporality of Sasein is modifiiable.'
- Otto Pöggeler, Heidegger Today, Translation.

the scale of rhythm
the number of verses verses
versus among many more - formalis
ratio, its the idea

& when I play at La Platera
as always & taking the body and the soul
out of their context – there’s
that widespread space opening

yet in it – as in the always ubove - it seems
a horse is just a horse and in latin
it is - equinitas est tantum
equinitas

21. should be 3
'Why is the Bamboo here? It is waiting for the wind to be touched'
- Chinese proverb, from Red Corner.

stonework qua its weight
- does the idea of it, prove it?
the upper neso, is it in place?

- there’s a new-fagled world, the story
of a harbour in the pearl & there’s a northern of -s
on its mountain, dantian hahin indigo
& Fujiyama of a sort

& coming in from the sea, there’s south of –s
- give me a boat & and I’ll come to you, Enya!
& on the flats another colour, vermillion
& the smell of you, Jenny

three solid strophes?

22. and the fourth, 3 treasures of man
‘Purity of Heart is to will one thing.’
- Soren Kierkegaard

the meredian with 12 gates
tools like needles

the imagination & breath
the rest of it, in motion

& when moving &/or at rest
Qi, Jing, Shen – but you know

the man’s an Italian & he - some call him
‘The alchemist in the Domain of Mingham’

In the trunk of her hand - Catalunya revisited, May 2010 - Argo Spier

1. mirth & myth

a mirth telling of a flower
that blooms once in spring & once

in winter
& a myth telling of a love that will last

forever, a lily
& a rose & where the lily rose

from sullied sediment,
a stich of a varnished

toe nail

2. theft at night
‘… They bared snow, and thy unbraided gold.
There, my enfanchiz’d hand, on every side
Shall o’re they naked polish’d Ivory slide’
- Richard Lovelace

abiding in the grey Rivera of Roses,
sleeping with lovers, there are boats

& lights & it was the gull that woke
& gulped up the world & everybody

else in it
& in its single embryonic

screech & snivel dawn was summond,
quite unexpectedly & on the meadow

the moo-ding of the cow, frightfully
too, the cat with its squirt & the duck

& its quack - yet only Trish, still
scycopanticly with the light bulb

in her throught, pondering
whether it was worth it? the

scavenging & my love

3. evening in Santa da Magarida, Roses
‘… Such wilt thou be to me, who must
Like th’ other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness make my circle just,
And makes me end, where I begun.’
- John Donne, Complete English Poems

in Roses, Catalunya
boats

at a hand throw's distance
& in the water & the balcony

& in the cold May air the seagulls
as they come in from across the Brava

on the table tapas with Queso Curado
de oveja (Boffard Resera 1/8) & Navajas

Crudes & Llimones & a dear companion
guide to poetry - from Donne to Marvell

& complacent the man, Terasso Coral
making wise his cracks, discovering

new verse - 'a white thing that has lasted
for a long time is no whiter than a thing

that lasts only a day' – the primary &
in poetry from Roses & in Sardanic

discriptive revolt of a miffed heart
is found

4. with waver & water
‘…If poisonous minerals, and if that tree,
Whose fruit threw death on else immortal us,
If lecherous goats, if serpents envious
Cannot be damned, alas, why should I be?’
- John Donne, Holy Sonnets

& boats, oh silly the red one, Parasail's
written all over its flank & in the dry

dock many slopes are waiting, non-narrative
the literature & poet's meager scope

wavering & dirty the gull, dirty
the rain that come in, yet it is

all white

in the Baie de Rosas & its cruciallity
determines

& on Santa Maria's porches people
stalk & their expectations, their eyes,

in their dreams they haven't thrived
& on callé Cap Llarg where the young

darlings jingle - their low cut blouses
& slippers & medetiranian blue farnishes

oh, look beneath that skew blown pine!
& in the yolk of the town, on the promenade

canary yellow is cheaply spent, god,
the imitation of it! not near the Napels

yellow of everywhere
else

5. disturbed poet

researches & rehearses,
his poetry

& winning Virginia
again, but the keynote

of it -

the walzy Schmetterling
that comes from Selva

she's way ahead
in this poem & it was

her discovery anyway
that took the poet

by his surprise, she namely
has discovered he had left

behind his dingo-dingy toe-thong
sandles on the top

( way back)

in that sleezy bathroom
in El Caylar

6. high crossing at Main
'what exactly is it
that is lost & has left no trace?'
- Mannekin

once Ilona, Hungarian & Hessian,
beautiful Yelena, she tilted up the poet

& dropped him into Main's murky
& ach du

there where we parted
at the Eiseren Steg

I looked over my shoulder - she
was not

coming running back
after me & after

all & that

I was too shocked seeing the flit
of the sky's line, its hasty encrouch

on the hovering bridge, there &
in the dimming of the city lights

& ach mich
taking flight, it was at racing

Römer that the crowd
took pictures of me - Pedrillo,

Frankfurt's most laughed at
man

about town

7. threshold love
‘…And as the day springs,
Thou think’st it good to tarry where thou art,
Write in thy bookes
My ravish’d looks
Slain flock, and pillag’d fleeces,
And hast thee so
As a young Roe
Upon the mounts of spices

O Rose Campi! O lilium Convallium! Quomodo nunc facta es pabulum Aprorum!’
(Oh rose of the field! O lily of the vallies! How have you now become the food of wild boars.)
- Henry Vaughan, Works.

ferreting the woods for chime, parole
that sweety of poetry &/or of love

he found the confine, the trap
& cannot but cogicate

how that what was free before
& once galloped over bush

& grass, now lies caught & strikken,
how fancy's broken & in the clearing

in the haze, the pick of soul ... there!
oh, the Great Return to forage's primeavel

in which decomposition is norm
... there! but look, in the under wood

the slow movement of Mammelokke
groping for a daughter's brest,

tenderly

as she refuses to let him die
of neglect & for nothing

yet

8. old man

old man & river
& in the wild Silva's

& on the steppe, poetry & Francisco
Antonio de Almeida's La Giuditta

in Frankfurt am Main, the
12th of June 2010

9. neat escape

their frantic fluster, Daphne's
unnerved flight, her avow

& now she's substituting the real
for the surreal & stemming

herself
into that skew pine!

10. the price of yearning

where Muses' used to play
for laughs, Roses,

there now's hard bargaining
& token theft

the price for a man
to have his yearning

has become very
very dear, my dear

11. the Muse is a baby boy
( for the Muse Ourania, youngest of twelve)

in the Underwood where Silvia, she
said she was like a baby, a boy

a Catalan bixto

needing sustenance & care,
space

& a breath '... to be me'

& she begged the poet
to write her a poem

to tell her the tease, the joke
of love

for poetry &/or bemusement 'please,
build a poem with it!' she sighed

& was lieing defencelessly
among the twigs

her bare feet naked
as her body & her new shoes,

they were kicked off
& astray, lost among the leaves

'my shoes ... they cannot stay new
for ever, no?'

12. miscalculation & cross road
‘… Let her full Glory,
My fancys, fly before yee,
Be ye my fictions; But her story’
- Richard Crashaw, Complete Poetry.

the reminder of nature's cruel tempo,
it was in the tree, that lofty

beach, where the errand hung - pain
born from misinterpretation

& the Q of it was tied to a note
from Berlioz's Damnation of Faust

& it was the lover who was trapped
& the love - she was to be blamed - her

fill-in

was merely arrow from Diana's bow,
leaving it too early & hitting only the side

of the heart & it was the poet who was
left standing there with but a torn-off twig,

dead in his hand ... conversely Muse's tease,
the knowledge that it was also the distance

it takes to reach Alaotra grebe
that had played a role - the discovery

came too late nevertheless

13. at nothing
‘… It is the luckless moon with its nightly miscalculation
that causes the dark of wanton nights of waste.’
- Mannekin

the moon's face is flawed
& again its mouth

is ugly

looking at it from below, the man
& his lover's faces too

are ugly

cynicism has already waxed like ivy
on fallen walls & in

the half-lit shadow & in
their ugly hearts

their ugly gardens
has rusted gates

du, come tell me, of all
the people that you know,

how many of them know your
and my names?

14. the sounds taken on
‘… My head, my heart, mine eyes, my life, nay, more,
My joy, my magazine of earthly store,
If two be one, as surely thou and I,
How stayest thou there, while I in Ipswich lie?’
- Anne Bradstreet

the woodland dove & its mate,
the city dove, grey among

the malva & in the liernes
complimentary

& reaching out, imitating
each other’s colour & so does

the mag pie in its contrast, shining
sharp & black - but burro? the stale

of butter & the rain
& the charcoaled hours

of May & Roses’ payne gris
nights? where is the Muse?

not at the poet's side! why? on another's
pedestal? & her neon noises, the sweet

quacks of imaginative seagulls? what
of this? what of poetry, the half in the shadow

& half of it in stealth? what of magic
& the unfinished creative co-existence

promised? why? the poet
is but a duck chased from a pond

15. sad tree

the love doves in Sta Magarida sing
in choir, laic & polyphonic canton planes

nuns of love in love & whatever else
may be, Casera, their songs are songs

from nostalgic epochs & happinesses
past yet of steady growing lust, beware

reader, of the smoking gun, the left open
mailbox & the warning ‘fumar pueda matar’

on the packet of Borkum Riff Special
mixture No. 8

16. skew pine
‘… There shall you heare the Nightingale
(The harmelesse Syren of the wood)
How pettily she tells a tale
Of rape and blood’
- Richard Fanshawe, ‘An Ode, upon occasion of His Majesties Proclamation in the year 1630’

give the poet his calculate & rain
give him the biased pine, sad tree

his luxury flat on first & on
the second of May a stukkie poes

- 'hide away, you!' & 'don't
forget

the consecration with the bottle
of wine, Vaal Japie'

or

La Capitelle Coteaux du Langedoc,
what the hell & before any deeds

will be done, homicides committed
give him back his Muse, trade her

for the budgy sky, even & have her
have her promise & her Sappateros

in her hand - her little toey toes
drumming on the Carrara marble

of my room

17. a long boat, but not to China
'...Oh, that I knew how all thy lights combine,
And the configurations of their glory!
Seeing not only how each verse doth shine,
But all the constellations of the storie.'
- George Herbert

daily as agony sets in, a long boat
to Cap Grues, georgically descriptive

& in the Orthopaedic Clinic
on Main street's alert, Els Blaus Roses

feeble men babble, call in vain
for their reproduce, their Daughters

of Rose

&/or for wantons with bumfs, goddesses
& Muse’s friends & standing up

they are stepping out of their lines
& roles, neglecting the warnings

not to lead readers astray & onto
lands of fruity Kingdoms, oh,

misapprehensiveness - my poetic

attempt

18. Roses, the slaughterhouse
‘… For now to sorrow Must I tune my song,
And set my Harp to notes of saddest woe.’
- John Milton

past Cap Norfew & past Cadeques
& onwards to Badia Guillola

& at Cap Verdi - where will I
bank for the night? my boat

on Wordsworthian pastoral?
where?

with a beaten warrior? the Troyan?
Greek mythology? no, the stunt

Catalan whose fate being that he too
is on the run &/or in Port de Selva

no? behind the rock at Saint Pere?
why? in Pescador lie the ruins

of Empuria

& of the gale Philomena, raped
& reaped of all poetics

in the Slaughter House of Roses

19. coterie circulation
‘… let my body reign, and let
Me travel, sojourn, snatch, plot, have, forget,
Resume my last year’s relict…’
- John Donne

like cows, mauling
like cats, squawking

like mice
in the meadow & screeching

the gulls in the air & no for love
& no for 17th Century Poe tricks, no

for the nature of poetry &
its undergrowth &/or no

for that love that you thought
the Muse had promised me - no

to the exclusive elusive illusion
& her many stories & side kicks

& no
to the lack & foil of it

no, soiree!

just coterie literature & circulations
of verse, lingery & insider

stuffs & posing - no, I do not write
poetry to suit you, I write poetry

for men too, for their pathos' &
for their restricted horizons, for their

unfinished houses - I write encomiastic
verse, yes, coterie with wrung-out

passions, linnen & wrinkled sheets
in the morning, stains - ‘me posidett hen’ -

& I write

the shy in poetry, shy as Fletcher’s
piscatorial eclogues, aposiopesis, figures

of interruption & sometime symmetries
as produced by anaphora, oh, basically

I am only challenging the Petrarchan
convention - I, the helpless

adoring male & parison

20. of a poem
* [composition drawn from an Ora Odoura text]

I cannot write
my poems, but you

oh, you can ride my poems
for me, voilà

my poem!

21. & black bird

when the black bird fluttered
& into the house the other day, oh

biblischen & hagiografischen
Geschichten! - that immediate

hearsaying & gossip regarding you
& in its eye I recognised

yours, dark & mostly alighted
& the blackened touch & frills

of your underwear, the textus
Judith triumphus en vogue

& in my mind's vision, wonder
above wonder, all in the bird's

appearance was all that usaually
make all of you - 'what a relief

this is & really its so neat,
virginically clean & sung &

timed just right' - a Kunst
der Fuge & by god at this

very long of last
at last

there was news from you my lovely
Suzanna & Esther

& Ruth & Winestone Ssmo
Crocefisso

& today & into your house now,
I thought, my whitened poem

flutters with news from me, of all
of me too that makes

me, you

22. educations for Sylva
‘… I stood a stone,
Mocked of all, and called of one
(Wich with grief and wrath I heard)
Cupid’s statue with a beard,
Or else one that played his ape
In a Hercules his shape’
- Ben Jonson

& again poems, drolleries? thin
& shoddy?

nitty trivia?
epigram mannoses, tulipomania?

epigrams? the art of the little
in which Muses have only 5 emoticons

ok? & that & stars: fel, acetum, sal,
sal sapientiae, mel & foetidas, the erotic

and the lewed profane beastly - but not being
& 'the farrago…’ Sylva whispered, ‘I am

the forest for you & want the poet to gather me,
make the neat bundle & softly onto his lap' - Oh, Salvie,

my sharp wit, my knife & ambiguity, you
are indeed all of the all-fertile sedimented

states

and poet's needs, your consciousness & my
crossed fingers, do tell me that the tolled

tales people whisper, the speak

of the Dragon & of the lily and the rose
on the Illes de Medes, come tell me,

are they true?

& or are they only real on spots
where both of us stand?

&/or never on mine?
on yours?

23. pallatial?
‘…To quench the burning Ravisher, she (Lucrece) hurles
Her limbs into a thousand winding curles,
And studies artfull postures.’
- Thomas Carew

exotic & swell is Silvia again today, Sylvie,
fruit & berries among the undergrowth, ripest

of all & best of prime of poet’s desire
& of his roaming & collecting,

re-discovering of fresh woodland, oh,
to touch your garment when you are

out

on your new morning walk & to cry
far away from your home, but doesn't

this

contains theft and/or repitition? or has
the poet just done it again & is with ‘mit mir,

mit mir, nur mit mir…’
the rent at last paid? & with ‘mit dir,

mit dir, nur mit dir…’
by own means of design, the figment

& whim of folly complete? oh, hush
away, away ... away ... awe's echo

again

24. my castle my world
‘…Tael is Gansch het Volk’
(‘Language is all the people’, Belgian proverb)
- Prudens Van Duyse

a house
a holiday house

a picture of a holiday house
in the holiday house - selling sizzle

for steak, beef, not beef for a stake
of the dream

oh, dirt! oh, the dregs of the word,
Angkor Wat is the result

of waste

has poetry come to such waste?
oh, such a waste!

25. coupe chocolate Legeois
‘… See in wanton harmless folds
It ev’ry where the Meadow holds;
And its yet muddy back doth lick,
Till as a Chrystal Mirrour slick,
Where all things gaze themselves, and doubt
If they be in it or without,
And for his shade which therein shines,
Narcissus like, the Sun too pines.’
- Andrew Marvell

Eleanor’s wedding
& a troubadour’s song ‘from Beynac

to Castlenaud’, rather crude
in the langue d’oc

& at Lascaux the man from the town
of Cro Magnon

left his mark on the wall, bison
& mammoth

but bitter is the snuffle & bitter
the taste of Muse’s rebuff, more

bitter still the poet's dead ringer
& poem - the one in white & on

unwritten pages white Margaritas
& doodles in white

in Antiquaine too & also in white,
the paintings hidden in Isabelle d’Este’s

studiolo hidden in Mantua & ringing
in white too, the Virgin of Basilica Menor

de Santa Maria De Castello, a lily &
an iris & in white & in pink the roses

of Roses
& white roses for the Daughter

of Rose – yet,
roses and lillies, the lillies are pink

***

but all
of a sudden

hanging, the haunting
picture of cataclypse

- a domino tearing
from its mountain of granite

& flipping onto the black
of the valley - her note

'come ride my poem
for me'

26. Clotho, spinner of fate
‘…These latter scenes confine my roving verse,
To this Horizon is my Phoebus bound.’
- John Milton, Paradise Lost

everything you think
is

& the poem is a series
- it re-occurs

& after it has decomposed,
the poet (usually) notices the fact

that the Muse has feet & that
her feet always look like those

of a young woman, say, in
her early forties, 44

L.A. #andwerve interview - the role of the new poet

A: Speaking of ideas of "self" and identity, what's with your name? Is it Belgian, or what

S: My ‘philosophy’ or even my ‘name’ is totally irrelevant. In fact my name is not my name at all. And the picture you see of me, well that’s me a year ago but it’s a blurred jpg and also made up out of zeros and ones and isn’t me. It is a time-framed historical moment captured in the ‘working’ life of a normal poet. It was taken in a restaurant somewhere in Catalonia about a year ago. People seem to recognise me from it. I like the vagueness in it though, that just out-of-focus ness. It blurs. And the name Argo Spier? It’s a concept. It is formed from 2 separate words, namely the original Greek word that has the connotation of ‘vessel’ and which in the Argonautica Myth has the deeper meaning of a ‘speaking vessel’. And then there’s the word ‘muscle’. ‘Spier’ is Dutch for a muscle. So Argo Spier basically means ‘Speaking vessel with a muscle’ and that’s what I had wanted to be. It's perfect for developing the idea of a biological apparatus that makes sounds, which is mydefinition of the Modern Poet.

A: [Laughs] It is impossible to be bored of you, I think, even if I don't quite understand everything you are saying. Now, this "biological apparatus" that seems central to your understanding of the poet's place in society. How does this biological apparatus differ from whatwould conventionally be conceived of as a "poet"?

S: To expand a little on the concept of the biological poet apparatus - ‘Biological’ doesn’t merely include the physical attributes of the individual; it also refers to the feeling part that has developed in the Hominid, the Homo sapiens since the Pleistocene. That part that people have mistaken as the last and final evolutionary step. But natural selection doesn’t work like that. It goes on and on. We are now incorporating computers into the development. And I am now not referring to the work of Darwin, The Origin of Species, or the work of George Elliot (Mary-Ann), but to the concepts of Teillard de Chardin. And apparatus? The ‘apparatus’ refers to something like a plug-and-play component docketed to a computer. The Modern Poet has surpassed paper and anthologies. He now scrolls his texts on screens. Oh, the poor publishers! Some are still locked into medieval levels of thought, thinking poetry can be sold and monies can be made from it. But this is another ambiguity in the long haul of Literature. The modern poet is merged with, and dependent on, the noughts and digital vertical strokes representing the numbers for 'off' and 'on.' As a biological-poet-apparatus he is a plug-and-player and he enters the collective thought of the Internet the moment he starts his computer. Now he becomes an organic live-thought entity and machine-like. And this process of ‘entering’ opens the hunt for a bigger body or another similar organic unit to merge with. He is a Cyprinid man-apparatus. A hand looking for a body to hang and work from. The poet, priest of old, the scribe; has hanged into tool and has become part of the collective unconscious of Cyber Virtuality. And there’s that tendency to enlarge and form a corporate in order to self-replicate digitally. And as he speaks in the vastness of the Cyber Intelligence the poet is a vessel for himself and for others that speak through him. In the Greek Myth, the search for the Golden Fleece was through the workings of the Argonauts, the speaking muscled vessels. In Cyber it's merely the imitation that counts. The tool.

A: My God, I think my head is spinning. So, I take it that the "new poet," this "biological apparatus," has his dwelling in Cyberspace (if we can, in fact, talk about this location in the physical terms used to described architecture). Tell me a little about the Cyberlair of the biological apparatus.

S: The real thing, and/or scene, is now the organic biological apparatus. The hype of the Cyborg is dead but the reality of the new communicative biological apparatus is here. And it’s a collective thing. And to refer to the Argoboat, it is Cyber culture sec that the new poet-scribe has become. We cannot do without it anymore but note that the concept ‘collective’ has several connotations that works on various levels. Firstly there is the flat reference of collective that has to do with being in a group. But then not a group as defined by an association of groupie insiders, something like the collectives of the 60ties or with their pseudo Neo Marxism. The second level of meaning derives from archetypical development of symbols. Here there is no goal and nothing is on the agenda re achievement. Except maybe communication through the exposure of the self as an ersatz. But I’m not going into this. This is too heavy and requires the live-literature processes of real-time to access.

A: That's ok, [laughs]. I'm sure our readers will understand. At least tell us a little bit, though, about the Argoboat cyber myth.

S: The Argoboat-with-its-biological-apparatuses is pure and merely a fresh interpretation of the global egoistic trait of self-interest. The self-interest of the individual in exposing himself. And it is designed in such a way that the group of poets selected, the collective, benefits by every hit the site registers. It's the poet’s self-interest to have his work exposed that generates the collective unconscious. Again, here we touch on the second level of the value of collectivism. On the boat we don’t even know each other’s locality. We just share central space. The poet-apparatus Argo Spier provides the space and does all the work. And the poetry onboard hasn’t got a ‘line,’ and doesn’t want to steer towards any statement at all. It's just there. And this works extremely well. It works so well that even you have searched me out to get an interview from me! I haven’t ‘seen’ you before but you are an apparatus too and are looking at a possible merge with me. The boat, the myth, is merely that what one takes out of it, as in myths the working procedure always is. You see in it what you see in it. The more the poets belonging to it use it for their own individual interest, the more the biological apparatus profits from it and becomes entity. Now the hand grows into an arm. Collective bodily apparatus' are the key units that form the cyber body of the collective unconscious and save the archetypical sources of civilization. Now that’s a steep statement, isn’t it? The point is that nobody can today a) stop this development and b) nobody can destroyit once it has formed its limbs and metamorphosed into a greater biological apparatus. The hand and arm want a shoulder and a torso. When will it grow its full body? How will the head look? Interesting questions though, no?

machines of art - the daring prague interview

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me I know that is poetry.
If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off,
I know that is poetry.
Emily Dickinson
Poems are signs, insider material, or at least, deconstructive insider palpations of words. They are constructed out of things that are resilient, interchangeable and descant able and dynamic in temperament. There is movement, transition, division and inclination in poetry. The thingness of words, the things poetry are contrived and structured from, is the where/what-it-is-all-about in poetry. It may sound presumptuous, but, poetry IS this very something which is asked about when the query touches on essentiality. Essence. Formulations and admixtures such as: 'What, Is, The, Essence, Of and Poetry' prove the point: the thingness. Six things (words) are structured in a convincing fabrication. Syntactic rhythm and semantic weight bestow definition, significance and message. A poem, any poem, always enlarges the question of what poetry is. It adds to the historical questioning memoire. 'Poetry, Is, Always, An, Art-historical, Quest, Into, Some, Dark and Region'. The search for essence is convoluted, perplexing and intricate. It is a quest into illogical ambiguity.

Poetry involves two roles, readers and writers. Instead of asking 'What and Poetry?', one should ask 'When and Poetry?'' and/or 'Where, Is and Poetry? There is a symbiotic relationship between the roles, and with only one, poetry simply does not happen. The locality, in time-continuum existence, and transcendence of meaning in poetry depend on both these agencies. Both are essential components. Poetry does not know causes and effects; it is something that only comes into being when it is written-AND-read. The reader's function, in the assembling of poetry, is to unlock the poem the writer has preordained and free it into the source-pool of the Literature Generalis, the vast body of collective literature. When a poem is not read it stays what it was, a germ that infected the brain of the writer. Unread writers (unwritten readers) are of a leprous kind, infected by deadly incubations and therefore dangerous.
But there is more ambiguity: In the dark avenues of literature where the secret matter awaits its prey, the writer/reader and words act out jocular roles. The symbiotic relationship between reader and writer ensures egocentricity. The framework suggested when a statement such as 'He, Is, A and Reader' is made is that the reader is masculine. The he is a he. Is he/she in connection with reader not a more suitable description for a reader? Can a she not read a poem? The immediate answer to this is no! No, because it is neither a he nor a she that is conceived in the mind of a reader when he reads he or he/she. The meaning he gives to a he or a she is me. When the writer employs the word she, in the reader's (writer's?) perception, the semantic categorization is I or me and immediate proof of his or her involvement and role in making the poetry happen. For the reader there is no such thing as he or she. In his/her mind the value of he is always egocentrically categorised and therefore him or herself. One does not have this in prose. It only occurs in poetry. Even if the he was categorically stated and precisely described as being a male Homo Sapiens Generalis, with all the usual male characteristics, beard, genitalia, etc., there is nothing in the brain that connects the she with femininity and the he with masculinity. It connects he/she with being! - I must admit though, luscious broad is not far away from the she, but that's not the point, it always remains a me - so, what is happening? How can language (i.e. poetry) do this? The answer is simple: 'Poems, Aren't, Poems, At, All, They, Are, Always, Something and Else!'
In Green Water Pain, I dealt with this weird form of illogical symmetry. How poetry grows from impregnation and foetal state to medium. How a writer starts with a poem and ends up with language and aggregated signification. How words in poetry become distorted beings (things?), tormenting daylight consciousness with mirages, and how prescribed rules of language conduct are pitched and 'castled' aside in or by poetry. Is that not the driving force behind poetry? Hubbub ness? Thingness? Wilfulness?
There is another point. Degradation! As it is, reading a poem is a sufficiently degrading business for the individual (as he has not written what he is reading) and writing a poem is an even worse form of it (as the writer has not read what he has written). The curse of the poet (reader/writer) is to be compelled to dabble in a play on words where feeling claims superiority over rationality. He can never read (write) his own work and make poetry happen. That is degradation. He has to wait for the reader (writer) to act out his (her) role. Isn't the reader (writer) then really the writer (reader)? In a poem, sentient and subconscious forces are the master. The poet (writer/reader) is the victim and the cursed one. He touches only on the symbolic, mystical and archaic patterns that guide the corporate human soul. Mind you, hear the words worse and curse. They almost rhyme. Rhyme is the secret domain. Hear how language forces its way towards poetry even in normal speech.
Nevertheless: 'Poetry, Is, Really, Just, That, What, It, Is, And, As, Such, It, Is, The, Most, Vile, Corruption, Of, Soul, And, Mind, There and Is' and 'A, Poem, Is, A, Sign, Of and Time'. We have sign versus time. You and I are both concerned with time but in the-story-in-which-we-live, being concerned with sign-time in its full conjectural meaning would be more appropriate. In his anthology Tristia, the Grand Master of Karoian thought, N.P. van Wyk-Louw, dignified the Ars Poetic process as a movement from whistle to blooming moon craters. This movement via trumpet and city employs Shelley's star and verse 'out of three sounds not a fourth is framed, but a star' That is a sign-time coherence. The star is the sign. Where there is a star, there is wonder, transcendence, fresh new meaning, perspective and life. Moreover, word star suggests thing star. It is a sign. It happened in time. Word and sign and time, they are contiguous. Both thing star and word star are augmented by concept star. 'Poetry, Has, Nothing, To, Do, With, Words, It, Works, With and Things'. You do understand that we are now getting dangerously close to the killing field ideas of Lord Byron, the High Priest of the Sarum Poets. Like him, both you and I will ultimately only end up mumbling the same words he ended up with: 'I believe words are things, but I must admit, I haven't found any real proof of it yet'.
'I have worked on the plains of Sarum in my lonely room, night after night for the past eight years. I went deep into the depth of the dens of 18th and 19th-century poetry. Also, Wordsworth, Blake, Yeats, Shelley; they are all men connected with the undercurrent. Do you think any of them ever worried about the essence of poetry? They were caught, bitten and enslaved by the Muse like every modern poet today. They had their hands full, plodding vast unknown spaces. My Seasons of Sarum is a tribute to all of them, the farmers they were, who had the misfortune of stumbling into words, finding chests of treasures - stars - hidden in the rocky soil of language. In the debris that has accumulated by my hand over these past eight years while working with the MBM Word - May-Be-Money-Without-Reaping Dung - on Wallpaper Poetry and Necro Poetica many doors have opened. Sequences like Sample Four, Bogy Road, Mucus Man and Municipal Paint Opera Lodge Café resulted from this and all my Scrolling Poetry and Black water River stories'.
'What and Things? Where and Things? What, Machine, Drives, The and Vehicle?' A metaphor might be a bet: 'Poetry, Is, Peer, To, Graffiti, As, Both, Poetry, And, Graffiti, Is, Motored, By, A, Coequal, Machine, Which, Is, An, Art and Machine'. Poetry is only different from graffiti in that it looks more like language proper, but that is deception. Both are the same kind of phenomenon that arrives from a related source. Identical to graffiti, poetry disembarks by way of, and consists of, signs, symbols and/or strokes of some kind. Both graffiti and poetry are momentary necessities that transcend locality and prove that past and future tenses have a real existence and are part of the present tense. 'Poems, Are, The, Present, Tenses, Of, These, Past, And, Future and Tenses'. They carry a present tense that never ages. Both poetry and graffiti happen on walls. A wall is media, all kinds of media, from paper to buildings, from floors to Cyberspace Nothing. A splash of graffiti is poetry, literature = language in one stroke! Words, attitudes, anger, political aversion, social comment, etc., it all comes together in one rapid movement of the hand. As with graffiti, poetry shocks by its starkness and its ability to transcend the customary and accepted reality. Think of the 16th-century medieval Syrian poet and storyteller, Nab Shaki. He is a good example of this. He communicates morality and changes ethical values without even mentioning them and without the reader realising it. Graffiti does the same. Nab Shaki lived in the Middle Ages but his work is being written today! His work is stark present tense. Quick, rapid stories! All of them sharp as daggers piercing write into the centre of hearts. Closer to home, there is the work of George Herbert. What about the creative and occidental mythologies? Even primitive mythology? The tribal songs of the Australian Arunta Aborigines? The Bible? Continuity and present tense transcendence. Art, Language, meaning, logos, individual signatures and timeless universality. Moreover, there is Source code or Universal corporate thinking. See my poems dealing with rituality. Just open your eyes and you will see the oozing of corporate transcended literature all around us. See The Fifth Essence by Lawrence Krauss and my collection of the Barbarian files in Belim Tower Road. There is also the book by Gerhard Kaiser, Wozu noch Literatur? - Über Dichtung und Leben, but do books like these really give unscrews? Hidden Source thought.
'Poems, Are, The, Very, Dark, Matter, That, Has, Been, Missing, And, Untraceable, Since, The, Birth, Of, The, Human, Psyche, And, Creation, Of, The and Universe.' The processes of bringing symbols to life and speaking the unspeakable, in both graffiti and poetry, are engineered by a ubiquitous machine of art. 'Poems, Just, Come, Like, Graffiti and Come'. Both poetry and graffiti are dark. Both are illicit in qualification. Both are Language-that-forces-its-tongue-into-your-mouth. 'There is a lot of tongue and mouth in my Green Water Pain'. Graffiti is just quicker to appeal to the eye and/or to the conscience of the establishment. In a sense it may be more satisfying than writing poetry … it's quicker in its advance, but the expected thrill in spraying graffiti is no greater, even with the added risk involved in graffiti of being caught while doing it. The illegality and illicitness have the same effect in both. 'Poetry, Is, An, Illicit, Relationship, One's, Wife, Should, Never, Know, About, And, What's, More, But, You, Probably, Know, This, Already, Once, You're, In, Such, A, Relationship, There's, Nothing, You, Can, Do, About, It, And, There's, Nowhere, To and Hide!'
Like the Graffiti Man, the Poet Man touches the Muse's seam - One touches the Muse's seam when she is undressing in front of the mirror while you are hiding underneath a bed - and the result of this is a curse. The Graffiti Man's curse is that he has to run from the police after he has committed his poem. The Poet Man's curse is that he has to hide from ayatollahs. The Muse is a bitch. She cannot help it. She is the one and only one. She's Language Incognito and poetry (graffiti?) is her means of spoiling the wall.
'Essence?' and 'Of, A, Poet's and Concern?'

notes – correspondence re ‘dead poetry’ between Argo Spier and Michael Hoag

Spier –
On Wed, Sep 3, 2008 at 2:48 AM, Wilgcoffee, wrote:

Hi Michael., please find attached the draft ‘testing’ the elements of dead poetry we are discussing ... maybe mine is the ‘half dead’ only!

Hoag – first impressions - Much beautiful and innovative language. Whimsical flashes of a life in Art and Romance with just enough "dead" irony to inject freshness and honesty into the piece.
See also: John Grisham.
See also: Mary Higgins Clark.
See also: Ronald McDonald and the Burger King and so on.

re device - Should this device strike us as fallacious appeal to authority? Fallacious appeal to the learn-ed ego of dear reader? Anyway, it seems to me Joyce and Pynchon certainly worked it to death (and poor Ecco flogged the corpse) and it looked "dead" to me indeed, when Beckett gave it up for a sort of "dearth of knowing…." HOWEVER, I think you do it right! I see the poet's life revealed in these flashes, it's like a Digital (quantum, perhaps) stream of consciousness: flashes of the poet's mind, the beauty behind the eyes, revealed. You give us something to think about with your work: is there new life in this device? The others, the prettiness of "writerly" devices interrupted by process—it's just wonderful. This is really great work.

re a fitting answer - Anyway, I think it represents a fitting answer to the basic artistic problem bubbling in the collective consciousness at the matrix of: LITERARY-MASTERS-cliché-novelty-C O M M E R C I A L-ISM- News/Advertising—Advertising/news WHAT IS TRUE??? "What's soul when everything's sold?" And "some body sell me the secret of what makes this life worth living?" You seem to provide some answers for these basic problems of the time in the form of a direct experience, love, dirty humanism and Art… The problems that could finally cobble together a post-postmdernism. But that's YOU from within MY HEAD. Are these pieces "done" or would you like further thoughts? I'll try to get to YOU as you meant it!

re ‘Jean’ -Ok, to the point discussion on a "dead poetry" aesthetic in a second, but 1st, big thanks for input, mostly I'll take it all or adapt it per Jean's particular, very strict grammar and a few aesthetic issues integral to the work (e.g. cut-ups, "stolen" text, etc.) And most importantly: I now see that while Jean's voice is distinctly American, I must strive to make the piece CULTURALLY universal. In this regard "Sharon and the cum boys band" is a terrific recommendation. 1. This is KEY, you said: "This story is about Jean creating a work of art."
Exactly BUT: This piece is an exploration of DEAD POETRY, DEAD ART,
It's important to me, I think you see why, that Jean abandons ART for Pornography!
Pornography as "Not Art," a rejection of Art in favor of the lesser "filth" of "selling her body!" Ha!

re ‘stealing’ - And in the end, what Jean makes (this story) is not a work of "Art" but a work of CRASS COMMERCE: it's very important that the form be a parody of the "motivational biography," which is a purely commercial form. So, the form of the story is SELLING SOMETHING a "HOW TO."This is a statement about "dead art." Again, there's a lot of blatant "stealing" here! All the "seduction" scenes are taken (almost word for word) from best selling "Self Empowerment" books and placed in a new context. Many of the descriptive passages are advertising copy cut ups, and there's art and art culture throughout too, but buried discretely. Of course, Joyce is all over the place. Perhaps too discretely?
Anyway, what I feel brewing in the liquid medium of collective consciousness is a rejection of "writerly" technique as "manipulation" the way jean rejects "painterly" technique…. If you can teach it, learn it, imitate it, you're just trying to sell something. Find what's elemental when we take out those manipulative writer's lies.And replace them with something new. A search for the way to feel honest: This is what I find interesting and inspiring in your work… Here are other elements of the "writerly" style I find cliché and duplicable and thus necessarily manipulative: -"Writerly" descriptive language, anything "poetic." I limited descriptive passages--only ever used when they say something directly about "exploitation" (or "preserved" death, corpse, coffin, plastic [dead poetry] I don't use similes unless they're "said wrong." Or I "resurrect" them. I've been very hesitant with descriptive modifiers, and pronouns. Again, these strike me as transparent "tools" learned writers use to make me buy Chicken McNuggets and deodorant. Besides, adverbs are ugly. And I don't know any Yanks who use them correctly, so when an American writer uses them he's lying. Same goes for thick Noir Fic similes strung together like a Goldilocks-get-away toupee. Dead.

problem: All my descriptions relate to "selling/being used," or I cut them. No writerly descriptions. No fallacious appeal allusions. Every damn sentence must about "selling/being used" or what it does to the human soul. And now, though I am a writer who is a painter and a certifiable art-geek have created a character you don't believe as an artist! This is something I will need to spend a lot of time considering. As it stands, ALL of my descriptions of the Aesthetics of Jean's Art are resurrected "cut ups" of Gordon Lish's descriptions (especially the famous Jacket blurb) for his own work! The reference is a complete statement about "selling/being used!" and the human response of "dead art." This is a very subtle sort of allusion many literary types will get, but it does not make the character "believable…." As for the title: I'll work on something new. As I had it, the title, the opening sentence alone and the 1st paragraph are all complete statements on commercialism (selling/being used) and dead poetry. Bang! You could stop reading there. Anyway, this is why the artless vulgarity of the opening and the commercial form are so important to the piece: "This isn't a work of art, this is just crass commercialism…."

re dead poetry - you say very true things + the feedback is much appreciated. Before I digesting it however, just this pressing issue first - we need a board to talk on as I am involving more people in order to try and write some kind of charter stipulating what ‘dead poetry’ is. I need to have some basis – correspondence will serve the purpose. I am placing it on the page of ‘Natural Touch’. Is that ok by you? Your mail is a strong work document.

re Jean - you know, if you find a fork in the road, take it up! Jean'll tell you anyway which way the story will go in the end ... if she's ‘real’ – implying you don’t hamper her growth with preconcieved commercial ideas. (This is where that dakini stuff comes in I mentioned before). Plus I think you slowly have to start to think about 'real-time-on-line-events' as part of the story! The scene will then be something like this = ‘A writer writing a story about a Jean whose story is a piece of a work of art’. Process writing! There is nothing at all to write about today, except the 'processes of the act of committing literature' + the Shell ‘thing’ is important - 'out of four sounds, not a fourth but a star'. I think you are slowly getting ready for the weirdest 'reality show' of them all ... literature, the 'the-that-more-of-it-all'. Don't block your characters though, get to know them as they are now. The must stay flat, but 'round' them off in their flatness and they must be concistent throughout the story ... use recurring suggestive methaphores and or adjectives.

The collective is feeding on the collective - your story-line is too straight (it evolves as if real) which is the most boring thing in a book. I disagree with you re your intro although I understand where you are going. But you underestimate the reader. Readers are the most clever beings there are in the universe of a story ... that's why they read it. And they read because they are bored. Oeee, hide it for them! They like that. It becomes a game. I would suggest you just rip out the chapter 'art' and place it in the beginning. Can even repeat the core of it at the end as a closure bracket, locking your structural design of the story. But don't start with that now - first the characters must be 'full' in their flatness. Take them for a drink and discuss it with them. Check otherwise my 'mantissa', 'The story of Caroline', re character developement etc. blah.

new stuff

-----Inline Attachment Follows-----
Yes, of course, get them up someplace.

Also, as an art-rendering of our discussion, I've been assembling a piece that's a "resuscitation" of our discussion at AW, stuffed into a sort of logical framework of a story. As of today, it's taking the form of a "play" that may just be interactive poetry. It's currently titled: Play with Three Dead Things--a story of three murders. Really, it is (as was our conversation) a set of variations and permutations on your "Three-Storied House" and exists as a set of evolving poetry. Basic Synopsis:

Three characters in a sinking boat, A KING, a QUEEN and a PERVERT discussing making living things out of the dead. The King and Queen challenge the pervert, who then invokes the following: two characters, An Alchemist and a Necromancer in a second boat:

Scene 1/Murder 1: -P-o-3-m- sets the "rules" with the three characters critiquing a "living creation" made from "dead poetry." Perhaps the audience is the butt of a joke? The discussion continues on both levels/boats. The evolving entity is "killed," when the QUEEN moves to the new boat and kills the Alchemist and Necromancer. A few further attempts at poems are quickly put down before they can live.

Murder 2: The Pervert resurrects the NECROMANCER and Alchemist in yet another boat and the "Poems" are transformed into an interactive set of paintings, with audience members doing the painting on several canvasses, interpreting the "instructions" of the poetry being created by the three characters. The King, Queen and God are disgusted with the "nonsensical" random permutations and regurgitations of the same material and they Kill the Alchemist and the Necromancer, ending the "instructions" and leaving audience members standing around not knowing what to do.

Murder 3: The PERVERT again resurrects the two others, and invokes the creation of a very silly theatrical piece where the audience members are players, taking "instructions" (permutations of the same poetry elements) from the three characters, again calling into question whether the audience is the butt of a joke or Art is occurring around them. After a brief bit of creative anarchy, again, the King and Queen interrupt, finally, killing the PERVERT and ending the piece.

Interactive take-away: The "script" for the piece will exist online, in its original form, as well as a constantly evolving set of script variations created by the audiences for the piece, in an ongoing dialectic, by adding new pieces from "dead poetry," or original poetry, and perhaps giving performances of the piece. Thus creating a deeply recursive, multi-leveled living work, with a past and a future, and a continuity, but constantly evolving to deal with new problems....

If you think this idea has merit, let me know, we'll put it up and work it together--anyone is welcome. If no merit, let me know! It IS very hokey, but I think it can work both as a "readable" piece and a "performable" one. But if the play part is garbage, I'll throw it out and convert to a series of poems.

Michael

On Thu, Sep 4, 2008 at 2:55 AM, Wilgcoffee, wrote:

you say very true things + feedback much appreciated
but before digesting it just this pressing issue - we need a board to talk on as I am involving more people - for that I need to show them our correspondence. Check the page below and tell me if you find it ok that I wham used our recent e-mail communication as notes, ok? your mail is a strong work document.

re Jean, you know, if you find a fork in the road, pick it up - she'll tell you anyway which way she's going ... if she's real. (this dakini stuff comes in here). Plus slowly start to think about 'real-time on-line events' as part of the story. A writer writing a story about Jean whose story is a piece of a work of art. Process! There is today nothing at all to write about except the 'processes of the act of committing literature' + 'out of four sounds, not a fourth but a star' = Shelly. I think you are slowly getting ready for the weirdest 'reality show' of them all ... literature, the 'the that more of it all'. Don't block your characters, or, get tho know them as they are now. The must stay flat, but 'round' in their flatness and concistent ... recurring suggestive methaphores.

anywway, wham, this goes into 'Natural Touch' too. The collective is feeding on the collective. Oh, just this more, your story-line is straight (it evolves as if real), which is the most boring thing in a book. I disagree with you re your intro although I understand where you are going. But you underestimate the reader. Readers are the most clever beings there are in the universe of a story ... that's why they read it. And they read because they are bored. Oeee, hide it for them! They like that. Becomes a game. I would suggest you just ripout the chapter 'art' and place it in the beginning. Can even repeat it at the end as a closure. But don't start with that now - first the characters must be 'full' in their flatness. Take them for a drink and discuss it. Check otherwise my 'mantissa' 'The story of Caroline' re character developement. its still in draft form etc. blah.

writing aesthetic documents--that IS boring! This is what I'm talking about. Let's turn it into a story, an evolving act of poetry, the story is this:

the collective consciousness trying to figure out how to feel honest making a work of art.

what of this fundamental problem: Art in an world of increasing pressure to commercialize, commoditize. What's the primary artistic question at AW (for example?) Not: "What is art?" or "What are the problems of art?" But: "how to get published!" "What is 'saleable!'" You ask those other questions, or question the sacred artistic supremacy of "color by numbers form fiction" and you get thrown out!

we all feel it: this kills SOUL. The "commercial" media image of a man is a soul as distorted as an American grocery store tomato, coated in wax and genetically modified to be as hard as a rock, last on store shelves indefinitely and bare the brutality of long, low-cost shipping

and appear on the store shelf flavorless but as the perfect IMAGE, the very Archetype of what a tomato is supposed to be!

we live now through marketable BRANDS/IMAGES/CONCEPTS of experiences that can be packaged and sold to us, not through actual experiences!

and man a commodity too! Whittled into BRAND/IMAGE/CONCEPT of a man.

this pressure, and the resulting distortion of soul, and the resulting fragmentation and obsession with mass-marketability of modern art movements (which is a reflection of the modern soul!): any valid art must deal with this directly. No? Each artist will deal with it differently, our work is quite different but I find these common elements:

The commoditization of words, of poetry,

take a work of art,
any work of art,
just a thing,
chop it up,
shuffle,
put your name on it.
sell it.

steal and shuffle.

this idea - as always, Art is redemption of soul. The struggle to make art in this environment where everything is reduced to a saleable product, to make art out of "art products" "Intellectual units," AND to feel honest! AND dealing with the irony of trying to promote, to get our work recognized! God! We're scoundrels too! They've made us scoundrels!

See?

abandon those writerly, manipulative devices that represent an ARTISTIC BRAND/IMAGE/CONCEPT--ART as consumer unit.

replace them with this: "these moments like Three-storied house, that send the mind off on a little fantasy, or like a momentary schizophrenia, where "poetry" meets its heritage in the incantation."

avoid direct devices, plot or story, logic, units for consumption, create an unlogic image, or an unadorned list of items, or statements, or events, or instructions, concepts, where BANG, the OBJECT compiles in the reader. Something that seems to be about something else, going nowhere, the story compiles in the reader. No writerly "Tricks." No manipulation.

let's get the "theory" packed into a work rather than into a treatise. Our conversations, especially those at AW create a great body of theory to be shuffled into a piece...

I'll try to get up a very rough framework this weekend, VERY ROUGH! But we'll group-work it. Where's Quasi, dern it?!

On Fri, Sep 5, 2008 at 1:39 AM, Wilgcoffee wrote:

tnx your mail - will attend soon (my concerts are starting today). there is no rush on nothing. I just made the page to be 'ready'. The URL you can give to others and you can use the thing as a work document. The idea is that 'we' discuss 'dead poetry' with 2 concrete examples = Spier's half-dead 'Touch' and Hoag's 'Jean'. I'll check the notes and feed you back when I have time. Just remember internet is 'multi-tasking' = you promote your work as you work on it. So its working on Jean + telling people about it + whatever on dead poetry for you. I will try and distill some theoretical description of what dead poetry is. How boring! Have you read my Machines of art? I'll post it sometime. There the conclusion is that 'poets aren't the least interest in poetry' as they only want/need to write it. You think a soprano gives a hoot about an opera? no she just wants the kick of singing it. Easy. Smile!

click the door to see our discussion - is ref page, ok? you may give the link to whomever and whomever wants to contribute may mail
Quite nice talking to you. Nooooooooo rush re anything - i did some good learning in that hammock of mine. First the world's got to go by (bye) then the poet choose when he jumps in. Let's anyway let it filter out 'that we are busy with dead poetry' ... and when the fish comes swimming in ... the pan will be ready!

nice day.

If you'll notice, roughly more than half the "chapters" are non-sequential. They are lists of events and ideas/advice and instructions in no particular order, organized around themes. Some of them are not story-telling at all, they are "selling" from which the story is extracted and compiled. This is especially true of the earlier chapters. But to give the piece variation, I abandoned this device for a more traditional structure in most of the later chapters in the part. I get back to it in Part 2. This seems to aide the pacing.

as for the organization of the chapters: The Basic flow of part 1, while I didn't "Plot" it, (I hate plotting! Just move into vivid images!) are generally in a plausible sequence, though not always as clearly as it seems, with lots of exceptions, information about Jean's future or past.... Just lists if events. There are other interjections from Jeans future "business" that are supposed to go into part 1 but have not found their way yet.

as there is so often no sequence within the "chapters" I've been organizing the Large scale into three themed "parts...." Which, coincidentally, occur somewhat sequentially. but the overall structure I'll work as I get it all down. Ideally, I'll move away from the appearance of "plot" even within most of the "scenes."

Articles on previous published work – Necro Poetica

1. RAAm - in 4 languages
Dutch, French, german and English

Raam is a 2001 Kubrickian Space Odyssey through numerous levels, taking the reader from the earliest archaic beginnings of language right up to the explosion of modern human sound, with its quest for meaning, communication and expression, and evolving at such a rate that the final level seems to consist of nothing more than Dadaist babble, chaos.
This work uses ersatz haiku models, which have proved highly suited to the conveyance of condensed meaning and to reflecting the pictorial force of the Afrikaans language. Argo Spier describes in it the physical journey of a lonely astronaut, a rather pathetic and self-willed extra-terrestrial being imitating an earthman, from his base in no location to the strange world of the stars. On his way he discovers the Earth and, like an Adam, he does his duty by naming the things he sees and so giving a naïve meaning to existence and the fact of being.
Like Byron, the traveller believes that 'there are words that are things', but unlike Byron, who has not found any yet, he forces words into things.

I have devided into categories
those birds that are harmful the love
dove the fink
the crow the robin
I have pointed out
all that fly
also the falcon and the pig
the hippopotamus the worm
in the sand
man in the desert
the cockerel

It is of no relevance whether the interpretations of reality are correct or incorrect.
The compelling urgency of the underlying question - what is the essence of language, this creative fluid medium through which the journey passes - is the source of the eeriness surrounding the whole work.

a river
rams up
or weakens
flat
an animal
lives now
or fly
time
equals a line
or seven
a circle

[I am sure of
what I am sure of]
and,
in the dark flash
of a fading night
growing into transparency
a slow movement or a hand
grabs the vision of a ram
dying under the claw of the lion

Moving among the stars, entering the world of astrology, streaking through it like a shuttle through the time continuum in a future world, not bound by friction or the real-time mode, we arrive at a new level. Down or up? Creation or degradation? The journey goes on apace. The entry into deep space is the entry into Afrikaans and into language itself.
In the final section, On top of God's path, the author, with extraordinary perseverance, is attempting to cling, by means of the last meaningful remains of the songs and rhymes from his early childhood, to the familiarity of comprehensible meaning. But then the epic draws him in, deep into a totally decadent, Dadaist use of language; mixing, hurting, screaming out for new meanings, syntactic or semantic, anything...
Starting from the assertion of the fatality of the journey found in the poem Korsakov sindroom [in Syndroom, the first section of the work] passing through the appearance of Karios, the single poem in the Apokalips section, which [by references to the vision of St. John in the last book of the New Testament] unforgettably describes the terrible death of language [possibly referring to the death of his own mother tongue in the midst of political revolution in his native country], he ends with the verses:

then
the appearance of the wolf
it was a time
and times
and half a time
and then there was no sign
any more
leading up to the last poem, toilet, which includes inter-lingual sounds such as:
shass sj shass shass
sannie se jas m

In the last section, the story of the wandering astronaut, author and human being amidst the forces of Ohmazd and Ahriman sets and holds a traumatic reading tempo, almost like demagogic expressions of Zen philosophy, and makes ever greater mental leaps, proving both the power and the fragility of the author's mother tongue.
Raam sets the reader thinking about what he is saying when he's talking, when he's using language...

Argo Spier published his first collection in 1978, a series of poems concerning the continuous dynamic process of language degradation. Politico-cultural setbacks meant his work didn't reach its intended audience until 1992 when the boycott of South Africa came to an end. An additional hurdle was that it was written in Afro-Dutch or Afrikaans. The present collection is a treatment of earlier work, demonstrating that his mother tongue is still alive within him and is a valuable tool, becoming part of the discussion on whether language in general, as Wittgenstein put it, has any meaning at all [not an exact quote].
Raam was rewritten in the space of two afternoons in October 1993 and comprises some 80 poems. Every rewritten poem was included in the collection. The reader is invited to make alterations and discoveries for himself, to interact, discourse and to discover the fascinating progress of the creative degradation of language.

2.Wallpaper poetry and Necro Poetica
Contents
a. Belim Tower Road
[Samson 's soaring drive to the South]

In Belim Tower Road, Argo Spier creates a world of many levels. On the first level there is a world in which the character Samson relives his past while driving south along the highway towards an ever evasive Belim. He never reaches Belim. In this imaginative world he enters the vast desolate hinterland of literature with all its accumulated debris of words and sediment of sentences. He does this in a strangely unscrupulous way, not respecting any of the acknowledged genres of litera-ture, mixing philosophical utterances with poetry, poetry with story telling and dramatic dialogue with ordinary expression. Belim Tower Road is an encyclopaedia of sound and pictures and there is a somewhat dark undertone to the whole of the anthology. The plot of the story is set in the first poem with the verses ...
I dimmed the light I closed the
door

I walked off
the patio the day was done the
office
was dead
the court has spoken
also it was autumn
the train ...

Dramatic and clever punchlines and carefully placed hints push the story along as it slowly reveals its true driving force : the creation of poetry with recombined words and an endless generation of words, images, themes and stories. Words are taken from everyday sentences and existing literature and novel pieces of poems and poems are compiled.

The farmers are picking up
their furniture
all along the Gourits River
all their cattle are washed away
Habakkuk 3 verses 16-19

On one level the author is telling an ordinary story, the story of Samson's life, but on other levels he is dabbling in the sub-conscious mind and the hidden secrets of poetry. He tries to cover his tracks with many false trails and sometimes plain deception. He leads the reader on but not in a shameless way, it is more his way of courting the reader that is so charming. His poetry is colourful, picturesque and the many minor themes linking into one another make it a pleasant drive for the reader down the highway to Belim together with the main character, Samson.

On the way to Belim there is statement and understate-ment, irony and hilarity, expectation and tears, contradiction and compli-ment. There is the relationship with Liza and the young Lynx fillies in the vault, the Jehovah's Whiteness, who could be Samson and Liza's illicit son, the diary with notes for poems in Samson's keeping, the devil's anatomical parts, the admin-istrative per-sonnel with names like Matty, Marc, Doc Luc, Jo, Paul and Pete, all names of writers in the New Testament, and there are the Barbarian files, Barbara being the author's first love. All this is cloaked in a cloth of Buck-ovskian story telling.

On yet another level, the author ex-periments with some mordac-ity and daring in a cult-like manner with the recombination technique, creating what he calls his proof of dark matter in language or Necro Poetica. Necro Poetica, the horrific act of a poet's meddling with existing literature and trying to resurrect words, words old and cold, used and spoken, abused. Using contradicting semantic values and many categories and experiment-ing with new syntax, the author seeks new fragments of meaning within existing literature. He rearranges often vulgar utterances and ordinary and commonly-used words to tell altogether different stories with the same words and recombined sentences. His structure is the archaïc but potent one of a road journey, in this case to the mysterious Belim Tower. The following poem is an example of the fullness, thrust and inventiveness Argo Spier displays in Belim Tower Road.

talk of Fire talk of Hearts the Hearts of Poems
Summer Poems full blossomed Poems Poems
with Fire on their Edges
Women in their Souls
they burn
they smoulder
they're as ripe as an Orchard on the Slopes
of the Lusiadi of Camoes
talk of that Fire ...
talk till the Cows come Home
and eat up all the Hay
and the Maid say
Frenchmen are Frog-faced men
the Sky is up there where it's supposed to be
the Lilies 're in the Field the Water's where the Trees are
it looks like a previous Day
it smells like agricultural Atmospheres
are Frenchmen Frog-faced soldiers?
talk of Fiery Hearts of Poems and Men sic talk
of the Ceremony of Consummation of blood
or if you don't want to talk
don't or talk
about the Guys who went with Dias

On yet another level the anthology contains two kinds of poems, the first of which one might call the flat ones and the second the resurrected ones. There is an ambiguity in the understanding of which is which. In the first half of the compilation Samson is telling his story, starting where he left the Clerk of Court's office to first take the train and then, the next day, to buy a car. The rest of this half is filled up with the story describing the work he had done in the Administrative Office where new laws were made. The author uses flashbacks and reflexion to give the story its actuality.

Another story is simultaneously unfolding. The author himself is driving south in his mind while typing on his 486 Mhz 66 clone computer.

In the second part of the anthology, the section with the 50 Barbarian Files, again something new happens. Totally new and different poems surface. These are the resurrected ones. There are 18 of them and as the author mentioned in a poem preceding the 50 files they are pieces of pure Necro Poetica. The numbers, the so called File numbers at the top of the poems, refer to the page num-bers of Lawrence Krauss' book, The Fifth Essence - The Search for Dark Matter in the Universe, Vintage Press, 1990. In these poems a new context is given to words and sentences that were once trapped in a dis-cussion of the strange contradic-tory things that hap-pen in the Quantum world of Particle Physics. And as Krauss claimed to have sufficient mathe-matical proof for the existence of Dark Matter, Argo Spier claims that he has found Dark Matter in poetry. The author emerges like a butterfly out of a cocoon, as a master of recombination, a sorcerer and deliv-erer, a saviour of castrated words.
The 18 poems could also be viewed as 18 god-desses (the satanic number 9, times two, convert-ing it to a holy number) that eva-nesce from the dead and by doing so, unveil their new virginity. A ceremony of consumma-tion is taking place, a final climax which the author has been preparing from the beginning of the compilation. The 18 resurrected poems are perfect examples of the suggestive power and dark side of Necro Poetica.

File no.: 227/In the early pri-mordial poetry is beautiful without having to have meaning other than its own existence.

a seemingly innocu-ous difference
presented itself
as in a basin
and began to grow
first
remaining largely unaltered
simulating itself towards expectancy

Poetry has never seemed so easy. Take the chains of the past away from words and they show innocent new faces. The main character, Samson, knows what imprisonment means. He is caught up in a fast changing pre-Mandela South-African world, but also in a mediocre world in which poetry is a dubious subversive thing. He can't live in such a world and escapes into his diary, he gets into the train, leaving everything behind and goes to Belim. His laconic acceptance of the course his life is taking and his joy when driving and doing poetry, as well as his persisting in going to Belim reminds one of characters such as the Chinaskian character in Buckowski's poetry or, even more, the Oom Schalk Lourens character in Herman Charles Bosman's Mafeking Road. The following poem reflects some of these character traits, but is chosen here because it also shows the author's inventiveness in creating atmosphere and suspens.

I need some more References with
Portuguese Phrases
the Barbarian Files are coming up
no one is going to take me seriously
I have to get the Atmosphere right
keep the Illusion about Belim
running there must be more
References quick
Santa Joao di Vila do Condo
that's nice
Viseu
Ildefonse
Douro
Ribatejo
and
Toureiro I am a Toureiro
I have a Car
every Priest down from here to Belim
knows that by now ... Farpas
I go my own way Corrida's but that's Spanish
try Manuelino and Azulejos Everybody
knows Azulejos as well don't they?

The anthology is dedicated to the honourable Mister Bartholomias Dias, Dreamer and Roadrunner - Discoverer of vast open Countries and the Master of the Belim Tower, and together with the many references to Portuguese phrases throughout the anthology, one is led to assume that it's the Belém Tower on the Taag in Lissabon that's being referred to. 7 times, the number of the creation, the following verses recur in the anthology

Oh lonely Bar-b-Que's on Sundays at the Dam
oh Illicit son
oh cool Messias Vinho Verde
shipped
all the way from the Belim Tower
Lisbon Main Street ...

Nothing is less true. That is a deception. Belim not Belém. The Clerk of Court structure and Samson's driving on the highway south is but an archaic peg on which to hang the author's real intentions and, anyway, Belém is north of South Africa. The Road to Belim is poetry. It is the Road to the altar called Belim, the altar on which the ceremony of resur-rection of the 18 god-desses is to take place.

Throughout the anthology prepara-tions are made for this ceremony and the ritual of consummation or resurrection. Careful hints and references are placed on the way to this section of the anthology. The ar-chaism of travelling is only the author's vehicle towards the deliver-ance awaiting the 18 Vestal virgins, their rebirth, in the 50 Barbarian files. Probably the deepest level is to be found in this strange allusion and in the various con-nections be-tween words like Be-lim and biblical words such as Samson and Mirjam Siffra, who became Liza when she started work at the law-enforcement office. Mirjam Siffra means Mary the Im-maculate and Samson is a Naz-arite chosen for life to fight idolised images. Samson is on his way to Belim to view Africa, an image, a mirage, an idolised continent?. The word Belim in itself sounds biblical and prophetic. Is it a reference to the Bel legend which also has something to do with idolised images? The 18 files are true naked poetry. They consist of words saved from the grave into which they were put in 1990 by Krauss. The author has recombined them and seems to be saying, look, this is their proper place. Look, these are the true symbols. Look, the Road to Belim is the true art of Ne-cro Poetica. Only on the altar of Belim does true poetry exist. Only there is true po-etry resur-rected. Argo Spier is the chosen Naz-arite battling his way through deca-dence and the misuse of language ... through illusions.

Belim Tower Road is a well-struc-tured anthology and offers an easy read and much on which to reflect. It contains some of the most delicate poems the author has written. A last one should be mentioned. It is found in the anthology among poems dealing with the death of a father of a 12-year-old girl named Marianne.

Oh cold cold tear
cold tear hot
on my cheek why?
hey ... tear ... why
are you
dripping
down
from my eye?

The term Necro Poetica was developed in the Workshop MBM Word in 1993/1994, during the author's chairmanship of the work group.
LWCFSD Poetic Society.

3.. Sampel four
[The Masked Man of Santa Margarita and the poets of Graaff Reinet]

In Sample Four Argo Spier takes Wallpaper Poetry (the endless generation of words, images, themes and stories) to its limits by incorporat-ing a series of so-called Computer poems into the story he is telling. He uses a simple plot, a group of four poets get to-gether in a pub in a small South African Town, the Karoo town of Graaf Reinette, to philosophise on the meta-physical aspects of poetry and the art of writing tout court. The Computer poems are printouts of wini.ini files from his own computer and, in the way they are presented in the plot structure of the anthology, they are beautiful examples of the dynamic characteris-tics of Wallpaper

Poetry.
Everywhere
level
projection
alignment
report
correction
analysis
feedback
limit
history
graph
results
skip the rest
look out the window see the rain

The author uses common and ordinary words and sentences, words already used and abused, and re-combines them to form verses and icons of language. The message is ... in the magical mind of the poet things happen ... in the pub in Graaf Reinette poetry is born ...
In the fol-lowing verses the daring drive and the author's use of so called ordinary language recombined, set the tone of much that is to follow.

it rains ... it rains so much
you won't believe it
it's Death creeping up on you
it
seeps ...
it walks ...
it stands up straight
it watches you.

Argo Spier, a pupil of the South African poet, N.P. van Wyk-Louw, claims to be the Master of recombination or, put more forcefully, the Master of Wallpa-per. He collects and re-combines parole, creating a sort of 'meta' language, poetry ... the scrolling kind. His poems are pictures brought to-gether in a cata-logue. Fact, he is selling Wallpaper and Sample Four displays the various designs he is offering. In his own words:

see I am scrolling Wallpaper
as fast as I can.

The terms Wallpaper poetry and Ne-cro Poetica (the ghastly ritual of writing poetry, Wallpaper poetry, Argo Spier kind) were in-vented by the author in the Workshop MBM Word in 1993/1994. Sample Four is the fourth anthology dealing with these concepts and in practically all of the poems in Sample Four traces of the cornerstones and criteria of and for wallpaper could be found: Coinci-dence and historicy. Every-thing that is brought to life happened in time and/or refers to existing litera-ture, utter-ances, names of places or existing people, etc. When the author mentions 7 plants in a desert, it refers to the 7 plants he saw at Mitzpe Ramon in the Negef desert in Israël. If he refers to numbers of cars, jeeps, these num-bers exist and, when traced, one will find the particular cars and they will be Japanese Land Ranger Jeeps and their numbers will be ex-actly the same as mentioned in the poem.

the people of Cannes
are all old
they all wear wigs
bleached
fashion
from Main Street Hades
they go up and down
foreshore Boulevard Anglia
in their Toyota Land Ranger Jeeps
displaying numbers like
9392XA06 and
5238XL06
they buy cigarettes and booze
at cheap tobacconists sic
and they look at the boats
trying to flee the encroaching
Day of Armageddon
they don't get away ... those who did
drowned ...
the XTL la Salis sank ... didn't she?
Otto Joseph Matelot on his way to China
drowned ... didn't he?

Apart from the ambiguity that some-times arises in the actual rela-tionship between ritual recombination and storytelling Wallpaper Sample Four is a well-structured anthology. The author uses a Jungian dream mandala as model. A tetrakis, Greek for the concept 4, forms the four corners. of this mandala. In the anthology four geographical regions are described : the Great Karoo, South Africa, the Negef, a desert in Israel, the Côte d'Azur, France and in Flanders, Bel-gium. Towns in these regions, incidents that occurred, the character traits of people and small talk are en-capsulated in this superstructure. The author summons up the flow of his own life, a weird drea-m, and resur-rects, as in a drama, the various acts of his own personal history, and the reader is drawn into this dream real-ity. The author constantly flirts with the reader, appealing, begging him to come into the dream.

In the mist hanging over the sea
you can see
a man walking on water
that man is me ... see
be my numenozum I'll be yours
weird dream nice tetrakis
in the waterHole Ben GP Jo Moze
and me ... do you hear me?
do you dare come beat the water
with me? do you dare?
walk on water ... walk?
yes I dare
for poems

The journey through the four regions mentioned, however, transcends the author's personal in-volvement. The poems are part of a Necro-Poetic seance the author is preparing. What the reader sees is Wallpaper but what he gets is Necro Poetica and dealings with the spirits, words and utterances of those who are long dead.

The use of the Biblical symbols of death, rain and wa-ter, and the call to the reader to walk on water, a New Tes-tament reference, underlines this.

The Otto Matelot poems are perfect ex-amples of what is really at stake in Sample Four. Otto Matelot left Cannes 1886 on a sailing trip to China and never returned. The author brings him back in time not so much with the story he is telling about the ship-wreck in which Otto died, but by using words used by Otto's loved ones who were left be-hind. He does this by copying ex voto texts from the walls of the chapel at the lighthouse on Cape de la Garoupe and incorporating them into the verses. One can trace the author's steps.

The Prince with the Iron Mask fled
to Sainte Marguerite ... didn't he?
the Spirits are crowding the Chapel
next to the Watch Tower
on Cape de la Garoupe
Ex-voto Puget Re-A.N.D.
de la garde pour une guérison 1956
the people of Cannes
are all old and past
and afraid and morgified
and citing
backward masking mes-sages ...
Otto Joseph Matelot a bord du Lutin a fait partie de l'éxpèdition de la Chine du Tonkin et de l'Annam 1886

The author is constantly trying to increase the scale of the mandala. He surges into myths, enters the myth of the Masked Man of Sainte Marguerite, giving his three friends the names of characters used in Plato's writing, echoing the pseudo-so-phistic dialogue the four poets are engaged in in Graaf Reinette's pub. Absurd dia-logue and hilarious art-historical references call the tune, all the time, while wallpaper is scrolling and Necro Poetica taking place.

next day ... static life
they gathered on the beach of Miramar
(they knew about the nightly raid)
Phaedo Phaerus Timaeus
and
the Masked Knight of Sainte Marguerite
sat on a rock feet in the water
don't be metaphysically naïve
the soul belongs to the world of fluid forms
that's why it rains so much it's easier to fight
that way when all is wet
the earth dogged
're you sure?
absolutely poems are written
that way
the Demiurge crafted the world
that way
poems need water
that way
to spring to life
not true!
poems cannot spring to life
they grow
and etc.
'd you think the Muse is alive? I mean
exists? whispering poems when you're dry
from watching sky my oh my why do you ask?
you ask
I don't know it's just that
the cutting edge is so thin an'
if you open up the door hell anybody
can come in
ghosts and so and what do you do
when the wind blows? when the Mistral
comes in from across the koppies?
I mean you are a ghost aren't you?
you're the one asking questions like
'd you think the Muse is alive? I mean
exists? whispering poems when you're dry
when your neck's stiff from watching sky
I don't know ask Timaeus he writes poetry
with loops such as 'd you think the Muse is
alive? I mean exists? whispering poems
when you're dry when your neck's stiff
from watching sky
etc.

Unlike the finite wini.ini files Wall-paper poetry can keep on scrolling for ever by means of loop verses. What is impor-tant is the pictures the reader sees on his com-puter screen!. Nothing else matters. What matters is the Soul of Poetry, words, just the words, and as far as that goes, Argo Spier's work is a con-stant abjur-ing drive into that soul.
The spiritualism aimed at is not really the bringing to life of ghosts, but the bringing- to life of language itself. It is the Voo-dooism of utter-ances. His work is source-seeking and iconogra-phic and with Sample Four he walks the tightrope be-tween poe-m and non poem, the tight rope be-tween crea-tive implementa-tion of syntactic variation and copy writing. His work even borders on plagiarism, if the copying of car numbers, ex votos, the running and rewriting of wini.ini files can be consid-ered as such.

But that doesn't bother him, he is ...

telling stories with poems
high quality mummification ... in
Jericho
at the Dead Sea side
but that's good
poems keep to themselves that way
and you're safe

Sample Four was com-pleted and published digitally in May 1994 and is a compilation of 180 po-ems. ARGO SPIER has written several anthologies, four of which explore Necro Poetica and Wallpaper. The term Necro Poetica was developed in the Workshop MBM Word in 1993/1994, during the authors chairmanship of the work group. - LWCFSD

Other storytelling poetic sequences by Argo Spier

Bogy Road - A multi-levelled search into the essence of Wallpaper poetry and glimpses of the power and darker sub-conscious side of Necro poetica.
Sampel Four -Wallpaper poetry and Necro poetic seances, moving into the absurd with the printing out of wini.ini files as poetry.
Mucus Gravel - A compilation of sea and farmer poems, hilarious Wallpaper poetry and beautiful songs.
Raam - The only work in his mother tongue, the Afrikaans language; a Kubrickian space narration with translations of poems into various languages.
Municipal Paint Opera Lodge Café - Containing The Blackwater Stories, Wallpaper poetry and Doctoreams.
Santa Christiana D'Aro - Wallpaper poetry and a brilliant and homely story.
Belim Tower Road - Wallpaper poetry, containing perfect illustrations of Necro Poetica, the resurrection of words already said and cold and the creation of fragile Vestalian sound poetry.
On the beach of Ville St. Gillis Croix de Vie - Miscellaneous and uncompleted.
Mister Page on Page International Airport - Miscellaneous.
A Lover's Sundae Sarum - Anniversary love poems.
Douche and Addition - Poetry and columns.
Zinzli came home Albi - Summer Poems from Chur.
Seasons of Sarum - Storytelling poetic sequences and a deep drive into Sarum.
Green Muse Trying - Columns and Storytelling Wallpaper poetry

Blurbs on some Argospier publications

Green Water Pain -
[When Night grew with the Dew]

'… with fingers that pat into the core of feeling'

'Green Water Pain contains the right mix of art-historical issues, love verses, vague sadness and frivolous ditty-like rhyme. It is a sensitive journey and to the pointe poetry. The intermingled references throughout the story to the poetry Paul Celan gives it its eary palpate'.

Was it Mucha's?
No it wasn't Mucha's, it
was Jan Zrzavy's Cleopatra 1 and the Still-Life-
with-Lillies-of-the-Valley, it
wasn't Mucha's, it was
Frantisek Bilek's How-Time-Models-Its-Poet, it
wasn't Mucha's, it was Maximilian Pirer's
Medusa washing her wriggling hair
no it wasn't Mucha's, it

From Medusa's wait
Nights grow with the dew and slowly
night after night they swell like love puffed virgins
hungry women
night after night at night they wink their eyes
and wriggle their snakes
oh you vile guilty ones laughing sweet
when spawning your basilisk egg
screaming loud when breeding your feral foul
when hauling your little snakiest babes
from Medusa's wait

Mr. Changs! from Ching-Ching
[Summer Love from Chur]

'... hilarious, sad and yet lovely. Soft tender insider poetry'

'The story of Mister-Chang!s-Lue-from-Ching-Ching refreshes and will bring a tear to the eye ... but it is also a story of a very compassionate and understanding smile!'

'In the morning, in front of the Mirror on the Day of the Story of One Day in the Life of Mr. Chang!s Lue from Ching-Ching, Mister Chang!s Lue from Ching-Ching saw the impartiality of his Teeth. He saw how Independent they were. Each Tooth went its own Way and refused to conciliate with any other Individual Tooth. They all travelled away from each other with ever increasing inflated Speed, and those that had left first faded into the distance like Fleeting Days in the Lives of Poets. Mr. Chang!s Lue from Ching-Ching looked at his own Eyes watching him from the Mirror. To his surprise he saw that his Eyes were also showing a similar Pattern of Behaviour. They were fading. Travelling towards unknown Destinies'.

Castle and Flower
[Winter love story in verse and exercises in the Art of Imitation of Haiku]

I dedicate this short draft and exercise in the art of imitating Haiku, to the three “Witches of Eve”, Maya Nuda, Maya Vestita and there bigger sister, known since the beginning of time as the cruellest and most incisive, Nancy Muse, who, in the slow months of the year of 1997, castigated my cringing soul and making me run, beg crawl and return to the feeding dens of their love for me.

All of what is written down here on paper happened in actual life. It happened with me in the same year. The Year I refused to be what I am not: a Poet!

A Winter Love Story in Verse and Exercises in the Art of Imitation of Haiku - When leaning she laughs - When shines a Moon - Humanoid your Face.

THE MOVING MYRIAD

A WILGCOFFEE STAND-ALONE PUBLICATION
Laggard winds and clarion breezes … colour, laïs and a circle.

The Moving Myriad was written in the weeks before the author was to appear in court on a charge of refusal of payment for a misprint of one his mayor publication, Green Muse Trying. The Moving Myriad gives a good insight into how the author's mind functions in catastrophic events and how he battles to come to terms with his persecution by the KOLV VZW printing house. The association he makes with the prosecuted medieval chanson composer and poet JEHANNOT DE LESCUREL who was hung in 1304 for promiscuity and immoral love is transparent. DE LESCURAL was author and composer of one of the first three-voiced laïs in the history of polyphonic mediaeval music. His song and composition, Gracieusette Gillette, of which the original text is given in the footnotes along side the English translation of it, is theme grande in The Story of a Myriad and its recurring echo's throughout the book tells the story of a tender and indestructible love.

… thought provoking and tender with the delicate honesty of a fearful heart… Just a lovely sequence and completely worthwhile to read.
LWCFSD Poetic Society.

Recognition Song for Madam Gillette

A WILGCOFFEE STAND-ALONE PUBLICATION
clarion breezes and the colour of life

Recognition Song for Madam Gillette and its recurring echo's of the licentiousness of carnal love tell a fragile story of a tender and indestructible love, the love of words.
The author uses the sad history of the prosecuted medieval chanson composer and poet JEHANNOT DE LESCUREL who was hung in 1304 for promiscuity and inmoral love. DE LESCURAL was author and composer of one of the first three-voiced laïs in the history of polyphonic mediaeval music, Gracieusette Gillette. At the time writing the author too was prosecuted and fined, but not for immoral love, but for the refusal to pay for a misprint by the Kolv Vzw publishing house in Ghent, Belgium of his book called Green Muse Trying.

Thought provoking and well structured. A story of the delicate honesty of a fearful heart but a lovely sequence and serious alchemy. … The poet is a charm and his seduction power is great.
LWCFSD POETIC SOCIETY.

Sym-
metry breaks. Russet sound
and brass replaces guise; pewter and alloy, tin.
And into the foreground a dark myriad slowly
motions. It breaks from the clinging archetype;
while in the widening space of the rearing
no man's land, the ABEL man runs.

And there is a call. It calls as if calling
from a hinterland. It calls you.

Legally a Muse

Aspirations and motivations, the theme of love-and-war and small worlds are the ingredients that make Legally a Muse a story of light complexity and lovely predictable suspense. Its about the forbidden zone of makeshift communication and the overkill of innocence in the face of instinctive rivalry.

'We were in a movie. And she couldn't help it. But she took her script serious and did at that moment something that she had never done before. She bent over and kissed me full on the lips. The teeny-whiny little margin of what had become of the write and the wrong disappeared. And she kissed me again. And this time she ventured deeper into the forbidden zone of makeshift communication. Plain adulatory. Her heart pounded fresh and I was a writer. Some flesh. She stuck the tip of her tongue into the small slit between my lips. I felt lithe and ordered another round coffee'.

Oliver and the Art of Sharing

Boundless self-centricity verses its counterpart, the perilous desire to share inner feelings, and the challenge between these two rivals as well as the deadly pursuit of cause-and-effect throughout 'Oliver', mould the story as it slips from happiness to a quest for happiness into an unpretentiousness and very recognisable readable piece of writing.

'An unbounded compassion washed over me. From then on every single motion I made in the Old City became a journey of joy into Wonderland. The Wheel of my karma had started to turn and I was caught in its positive tolling. My soul and I were reincarnated in the body that was with us and we both were excited like children going on an errant with their mother'.

Machines of Art
[From the Argo Spier Prague Interview]
'The material used in the Praha Interview, originated on a walk in Prague…'

'The Praha Interview, originated on a walk in the mountains surrounding the little town of Tsciertschen in the Swiss Canton of Graubunden. Argo Spier, a pupil of the South African poet, N.P. van Wyk-Louw claims to be the Master-of-the-art-of-recombination of words. The interview collects and recombines parole, creating a meta language and poetry ... the scrolling kind. As are his poems, it is picturesque and interlinked. It is a story, Argo Spier is a storyteller ... and his stories are his work, Wallpaper poetry and Necro Poetica, the ghastly rituals of writing poetry, his kind'.

'Poetry! You want to know what poetry is! You want to know what makes a poem a poem! A poet does not know answers to fit questions like these and the last person to ask what the essence of poetry is, is a poet! I have not discovered this so called essence yet and probably never will! I am still searching for the it of it like every other natural born writer under the sun. I just don’t know the answer to it and I am not the write person to be interviewed about it!'

BOGY ROAD
[POEMS OF INNOCENCE AND JOY]

A Wilgcoffee stand-alone publication
'... utterances and everyday dialogue shaped into shocking rhyme'

'... working with flat characters and a simple plot, SMUTTY creates a racy story with a constant night marsh and chilly touch as it reaches its tentacles into the subconscious. Bogy Road has a newness and a fresh vagrancy. It contains séance-like poetry which excites'.
LWCFSD Poetic Society

Then she opened her mouth and showed me her tongue. JUVANTE JEZU,
it was split! It was split like DI THE LEVIATHAN'S. She spoke with a voice.
'I am not dead. I am alive and I am a woman not a feman!
Honestly I can also be a man!
I am the poem you are writing!' she said and then she opened her mouth again and hissed into my face.
I saw her skin color.
It changed from amethyst turf to moist mud.
I smelled the vagrancy of revitalized life seeping through the air like a cool drug, breezing, promising, inviting, sweetening, growing, ripening and segmenting.

Blue Sweet -
[Mr. Page on Page International Airport]

'... desolate spaces of feeling, accumulated debris of used words.'

'Blue Sweet is a neat but strange step in the spoor of Wallpaper poetry storytelling. It contains sediment of gall, its unscrupulously honest and there is a typical touch of classy hilarity. The right mix of ordinary utterances, irrelevant dialogue, stark expression and the inevitable dramatic drive, makes it the perfect setting for a true Sduttian story of a Mr. Page

on a Page International Airport.

And you’re lonely.
And you. Don’t know which. Way.
And your words. Are juxtaposed with images.
Of long Bien Temps. Ago.

Blue Space. Up the slopes. The Hex.

And you’re lonely.
And you. Don’t know which. Way.
And your words. Are juxtaposed with images.
Of long Bien Temps. Ago.
And you are.

… daring wallpaper poetic storytelling and a sweet suck on…

With minimal strokes and well selected words the author works his way through the vast amount of accumulated encyclopaedic debris left behind on the road of literature and reshapes waste to beauty. With its 6 separate stories Blue Sweet, carries the reader over the threshold of hesitation into the surreal world of the process of creative writing. Vast spaces containing human feeling emerge as the pace is set and kept throughout the book … a decorous contribution to the debate re the essence of creative literature.

The master poet is here, once again, at his best and he uses his seduction power with great ease, skill and unscrupulous honesty. Blue Sweet with its irony, pathetic mien and off-beat bravura … a daring statement, lovely and an experience in depth to read.
LWCFSD POETIC SOCIETY
Cocked Poise
[When I castled your Eye in my Loess]
' ... bracing and garrulous ... yet a gentle read and a tender story'

'… intricate and to the bone, a referral to Seasons of Sarum. Cocked Poise has several deconstructive doors offering contemporary art-historical rumpus. It has fingers touching in deep water, the ritual of writing tout court'.

'No musician', I said, 'there’s no musician
on the beach, other than me! There’s nobody
other than me, to stain your sky. There’s no mountain,
no valley so high,
no sea so high,
as the day, the almighty day, I castled
your eye in my loess.'

A WILGCOFFEE STAND-ALONE PUBLICATION
... refreshing and loquacious...

Taken up in this publication are the sequences Zinsli came home Albi, which contains the so-called Chur poems and originated in Switzerland, A lover's sundae sarum, love poetry written in Austria, a third sequence written on the beach of Ville St. Gillis Croix de Vie, France and the in 1997 well received Canterbury Carillon which was written in England as a contribution to the defamed child abduction and murders in Belgian in 1995-1996 and presented in schools across Europe

'… intricate … core material from the author's Seasons of Sarum. The sequence has its fingers touching into the sub planes of the great poetic undercurrent unconsciousness. The ritual of writing tout court'.
LWCFSD Poetic Society

[THE POET IS A NOMAD]

The diurnal alternation of light,
and poacher night, its weight,
and the weight of day,
and earth in its dreary sleep,
and sea, and earth, in the wake
and depth of douse,
and the stabbing stone, its height,
and the moon,
the immortal moon,
its silver dish, and your sun,
its flame,
and the flare of shining flaxen
gold.
- Your re-enactment of IT, of the Primal Scene,
that is what makes the poet a Nomad. -

The naked star, its meandered scatter
outside of the ring of the sky,
the rambled maze
in which the poet's frail reward

is solitude and sand,
and in which, wolf and coyote,
jackal and fox,
and howl, carouse,
celebrating death, resur-
rection,
and birth and birth,
and stirring dying days,
and surviving twilight.
- The dawning of your re-enactment of IT,
of the Primal Scene, that is what makes the poet

Sample Four
[The Masked Man of Sainte Margarita]

' ... the endless generation of words, images, themes and stories'

'Sample Four employs Wallpaper poetry (the endless generation of words, images, themes and stories) and results in Necro Poetica (the ritual of writing). It is a Sduttian and Argo Spier pushes his own genre to the limit by incorporating a transcript of a TV Soap Opera and the so-called Computer poems, the latter which are print-outs of the wini.ini file of his own computer. The dark and cult-like undertone throughout the book hint towards what edge Argo Spier wants to drive language and poetic storytelling. Sample Four is also an encyclopaedia of sound, pictures and non-sensible sense and an intriguing story of four poets in a bar in the middle of the Karoian desert discussing meta aspects of writing tout court'.

MUNICIPAL PAINT OPERA LODGE CAFÉ
A WILGCOFFEE STAND-ALONE PUBLICATION

The Story of Helena and the Secret Pleasures in the Palace of Joy.

The master poet is here, once again, lover and at most, in control. His seduction power is great and he is just the Master Lover. The speed, versatility in matter choice, use of words and themes and skill makes it the most beautiful and boldest story written at the change of millennium. Municipal Paint Opera Lodge Café with its irony, pathetic mien and on-beat bravura is a most pleasant experience to encounter. The reader will just love it. It is wallpaper poetic storytelling sec.
LWCFSD POETIC SOCIETY

somewhere
backstage Vienna another life VALENTINE
winter spring summer autumn
rain
subversive thoughts authentic Passions JOYCE
JAMES sure waiting behind the doors shoes
dreams writing poems landslides roofs
shoes numbers room numbers upstairs
sky
don't read what you don't write
slippery mud slices slippery slices
slipping under feet Macintoshes more
rain more steep rain poems
my many poems
wait! wait! wait! open the door
who's behind that door door door
do you hear hear hear the echo echo?
people notice poems everyday when
I write
poems everyday deconstructing poems
writing
people write about poems filamentary writings
signs of the Zodiac SAGITTARIUS VIRGO
WASSERMANN fire earth water breath and men
people many people Northerners
Southerners United East Indian
Companies
they write about poems my many
poems
they read about poems my many
poems
they read naughty things in poems very naughty
things in my poems naughty things with married
women children Muses of Dark Pools death
poisonous life lies lies lies lies lies

Santa Christiana D'Aro

WALLPAPER POETRY SEC THAT FAST SCROLLS THE PERILOUS 'HOLIDAY' ADVENTURES AT SANTA CHRISTIANA D'ARO.

Look ... you put flowers on the table you make it nice they knock it over when reaching for the milk and butter there is water in your plate water on your bread water all over you you don't like that you don't want to make it nice anymore you knock the bread on the floor it mushed up the floor you get up you slip on the smooch you hurt your back you don't like that you think why you had put flowers on the table why you had made it nice why look at you you are like an old idiot you don't like that nobody likes that nobody likes an old man they ask you hey why you walk like that like an old man all crooked and bent askew you put flowers on the table or something someone knocked it over when reaching for milk and butter or what all that water in your plate water on your bread water all over you you didn't like that you didn't want to make it nice anymore you knocked the bread on the floor it mashed up the floor you got up you slipped on the smooch you hurt your back you didn't like that you thought why you had put flowers on the table why you had made it nice why look at you you are like an old man you don't like that nobody likes that nobody likes an old man everybody's gone ask you hey ...
Municipal Paint Opera Lodge Café

…. seduction power, exuberance in cadence, speed, complaisance in matter-, word- and theme choice, appropriateness of thrust and the brilliancy of hidden rhyme make of 'Lodge' a push of one in a million. And with its irony, pathetic mien and on-beat bravura it is an experience to apperceive. The rendezvous of the poet and his beloved on the steps of the Opera lodge Café at Backwater Bridge is just too beautiful an experience … too beautiful to describe in words other than his own.

The Story of Caroline

A Wilgcoffee stand-alone publication
A quest for the sanity of love and a drive into the unconscious … stark and a never ending story…

The story of CAROLINE and her double diagnosed male persona with overt personality traits, T'ALBERT, EUGENE is one large encyclopedic peeping box in which emotion intermingles with about everything to tell the story of the creation of the story of CAROLINE.

… well structured and the multitude of theme lines are running a steady course throughout the book only to intertwined in the end into a tight knot.
… hilarious at times, chilly at others, with poetry and prose interlinked. There's the 'reality-at-home' and the 'reality-abroad' and there's the merge of these two with very recognizable patterns... An exciting story of a writer's love for the love of words. - LWCFSD Poetic Society

Then, and honestly, I couldn't helped it, I devilishly thought why not drop a pebble in as well? Just for the tease.
'If you think I am so kind, why don't you tell your wife that?', I said and added, 'Or do you have a husband?' and burst out in laughter. Victory! However it was short lived. She stung me immediately where it smites. Chapeau!
'I already have!', she touché-ed.
I repressed a frown. The tight elastic band around this cheap unbounded novelette was squeegee-ing tighter.
'Yes...? Everything...? Oh dumbfounded love!'
'Of course not! But if he is to ask me ... sure I will tell her!', she replied.

Raam in 5 talen: Afrikaans, Nederlands, Frans, Duits, Engels

A WILGCOFFEE STAND-ALONE PUBLICATION
'Een Kubrickiaanse reis doorheen de grenzen van taal'.

RAAM, een Kubrickiaans ruimte epos, beschrijft niet alleen een reis in de ruimte, maar is zelf een reis , een reis doorheen de ruimte van taal. De lezer wordt meegenomen doorheen een veelvoud van goed gestructureerde taallagen, lagen die in elkaar verstrengeld zijn en die in elkaar overvloeien, afzonderlijk en toch onafscheidelijk van elkaar. Met een bijzondere en suggestieve stijl en een zekere geladenheid, creëert de schrijver in dit prachtige en compacte werk de illusie van een geboorteproces van taal en van een taal die zich ontwikkelt vanaf het vroege archaïsche begin van klank, menselijke klank, tot volwassen geworden zingevende expressie. Naast de originele versie in Afro-Afrikaans van de dichtbundel RAAM, bevat deze publicatie ook Nederlandse, Franse, Duitse en Engelse vertalingen ervan en een inleidende artikel over RAAM.

[AFRIKAANS]

De tijd wordt zwaarder
in de verte verschijnt een speer
een vernauwende buis
vuur

een schijnende monoiliet

vreesaanjagend in de schaduwkring
die wachtende wildehond
canus lupus : roofdier of wolfshond

en het sterrebeeld het getal 58

[Français]

Le temps est saturé
dans le lointain un point est apparu
le tuyau se rétrécissant
ou le feu

le monolithe luisant

terrifiant
dans le cercle d'ombre
le loup qui attend
canus lupus : fauve ou chienet la constellation
avec le chiffre 58

[Deutsch]

Die Zeit wurde bleiern
In der Ferne tauchte ein Punkt auf

eine sich verengende Röhre
oder eine Flamme
ein gleißender Monolith
Kälte verströmend

Im Kreis der Schatten
wartete der wilde Hund
Canus Lupus:
Urhund oder Wolfshund
und die Sternenkonstellation Nummer 58

[English]

The time grew heavy
in the distance the point
the narrowing tube
or the flame

a shining monolith chilling

in the shadow-circle
the wild dog

awaiting
canus lupus: vulture or wolf dog
and the star constellation
with the number 58

EXTRA

1. I never understood where the satisfaction is when you're missing the pleasure of conquest - Silvio Berlusconi
MICHAEL HOAG - BTW, I thought you wanted "poetic" edits of your text to use, that's why I did the two pieces. Feel free to use them, or give me more guidance if you wanted something different. Of course, I write straight poetry every day, but mostly very experimental. Poems I'm happy with, but not a poetry I'm happy with.

As to my main projects now, I'm subbing and editing filthy and working on another poetry/novel hybrid tentatively titled Gentle Stories of Tender Children.

It's still in the experimental phase, trying out devices and voices. Like filthy, there are many cut ups, distancing techniques, collage, etc. Here are two short "chapters."
Big Body Vs. Little Body

The first thing I remember isn't a story it’s an image: an old stairwell ascending to the mystery. But it’s an image with all kinds of feelings, smells and tastes to it. For example, this image has the salty, sweaty taste of a man. It has a fresh-baked pooey aroma and warm squishy-bottomed feel to it. It has slams of doors and creaking floors and mumbling voices to it.

And it has the distinct feel of the Big Body. In this image, I am part of the Big Body, because in this image I'm a part of everything and everything is me: the stairs, the voices, the hot and heavy mush up my butt, the safe and solid chest of Big Body rising up the stairs and the universe.

This image has a peculiar awareness to it: that sometimes I’m part of the Big Body and sometimes I’m part of the Little Body. Being Big Body feels slow and fierce. Being Big Body is hairy and smelly and laughing. Big Body is the safest core of everything, where nothing mean or sad could possibly touch.

Right now, I’m riding big body up the stairs and Little Body's following behind saying: “mwah mwahh mwaawawah.”

Little Body contains squishy drink, smells like shampoo and cries all the time. Sometimes she pushes me into her drink sacks and I suck and suck and suck and she cries and cries and cries.

This image is the sudden knowledge that Little Body is always with me, while Big Body comes and goes and comes again. Sometimes it goes for a long, long time. And when it's gone, I am with Little Body, crying and sucking and crying. Then Big Body comes back, and up the stairs we go.

This image: the stairs, the body, the stinky mush, the dusty air and the universe all encode a rhythm of suck and cry, pee and poo, come and go and come and go…

Until the day Big Body went and didn’t come back again. And left me and Little Body sitting on the stairs, sucking and crying and sucking.

What this image doesn’t have is a face. Because I only have one half burned picture of my dad and not one memory of what he looked like. The closest I've got is mush in my pants and the dark at the bottom of the stairs.
Tin Roof Rusted

What’s funny about this story is that I bawled my eyes out boo hoo hoo writing it.

You know why?

Raggedy Fucking Ann.

The little bitch.

______________________________

Anyway, this is a story about dumb shit. The kind of dumb shit people get attached to.

Like my friend Maria. She gets all sobby whenever she sees an ear of corn. A TV commercial comes on with smiling, dancing ears of corn and she'll nearly lose it.

If you grow up really poor, you don’t get toys, so Maria had “Baby Corn-Baby,” an old ear of corn she baby-wrapped in a filthy dish rag. Imagine her taking this thing everywhere, freaking out relatives and strangers, cuddling this moldy corn husk, suckin’ on that rag. Nobody could take the thing away from her. And there was no washing that rag.

Of course, the end is: the dog ran off with Baby Corn-Baby while little Maria rolled screaming in the dirt and now, whenever she sees an ear of corn, she gets a little teary. So that happy TV ad with dancing, singing corn folk? It's like, Baby Corn-Baby's all grown up! 30 years later, telling me this, she was laughing, but there were tears in it. Lots of tears. Requiem, for the tragic and slobbery end of Baby Corn-Baby.

So it’s that kind of shit, right? My neighbor's back yard fire pit, weeds growing in it, the chairs around it rusted through. Decade-old beer bottles in the weeds.

Proud family heirlooms, old, ruined.

We all have our Baby Corn-Baby.

For me, there were two things, the only two things I have from my dad. He wasn’t around much after I was born, but my Mom always said he was real proud of me.

He was a biker, a bad ass, they say, and when he died, I got his leather.

Two-year-old Alex in soggy Underoos and Daddy's leather.

So dear granny-ma, who was terrified of bikers and leather anyway, cut up the jacket and made it into a teddy bear. Imagine what that thing looked like: A big seam right across its leather face, steel eyes made of gothic Harley Davidson coat-buttons. My own little Texas-chain-saw teddy, complete with cold misanthropic gaze.

Think: “Or else it gets the hose again.”

Or maybe think of a leather-skinned Toxic Avenger action figure.

I remember being three, maybe four and twisting its head off, pulling out its fluffy guts and wondering why all these adults were suddenly bawling their eyes out.

“What? What did I do?”

But back then, it seemed like adults were always bawling their eyes out anyway.

And there was one other thing from my dad: A Raggedy Ann finger puppet. Those stupid puckered lips. That frumpy blue dress. I don’t care how punk rock those striped stockings are, who wears an apron all the time? With their fucking name on it?

Egocentric little tramp.

So I got Raggedy Ann from my Dad. And I’ve got a picture to prove it: Big Alex and Lil’ Alex sitting together with matching t-shirts that said “Dad” and “Son,” because that’s something only a real bad-ass can get away with, and he’s holding me on his lap with his middle finger wagging up Raggedy Ann’s ass.

It’s the only picture I have of me with my dad. In that picture I could tell, he was proud of me.

So, yeah, I’ve got a soft spot for Raggedy Fucking Ann.

_____________________________

By the time I started school, I was the king of the block. The new kids next door, not so much.

Even at five, I could tell winners from losers. To kids, poor’s a patina you can’t wash off, worse than regular dirt, and the new kid and his sister, they were filthy with it. Of course, where I grew up, we were all poor and dirty. But these kids were a whole new level of it.

Carrot-top hair always a mess.

Clothes raggedy.

Imagine this kid as the biggest goob you’ve ever seen in your life, his tongue always out mopping Cheff Boyardee and snot around his little goober mug.

Imagine his glasses like thick filthy wind-shields. Never wearing shoes. Dirty little feet.

But that’s not why we made fun of him. None of that stuff is. I don’t think anyone knew why.

______________________________

But don’t worry, the things we called him, the things we did to him couldn’t have cut too deep.

Because he walked up to us one day with a big dumb grin on his face like we were all best of friends. Like nothing had ever happened. And he brought his stupid sister too.

See, they had these new toys and they were doing the kid thing, showing off their new stuff. The modern currency of youth cool. And these weren’t the kind of kids who got new toys very often, ok?

And what did the little booger have? A Raggedy Ann doll. And his sister had an Andy. They were playing and cuddling, ooh and ahh with their new treasures and they hadn’t even taken them out of the plastic packages yet. Probably they wanted everyone to see they were new.

Anyway, this little goober was so proud of that thing. He was smiling so big that somehow he didn’t look dirty anymore. Pride cut the patina.

Here’s the thing, for a boy in my neighborhood, there was nothing in the world as uncool as Raggedy Ann. I knew. My Raggedy Ann was playing “refugee” at the bottom of my “cool toy” drawer, crushed under the weight of shiny lead-painted fighting robots, G.I Joe and all the badges of kid-dom’s high cool.

Somehow, the little pud must have thought he’d discovered what kept him out of our circle: He didn’t have the brand new toys to show off. Hey, it sure must have looked like that to an outsider. And here was his golden ticket, his key.

At last.

And now that he found the key, he brought his sister along too. Spread the wealth around. The look on their faces, you could see it, they expected to be greeted as celebrities. They were so damn proud.

Anyway, whether or not it worked doesn’t matter. Just a week later, they were taken away from their house in a shiny car, kicking and screaming while we all watched. And a month later we all watched again, as mom and dad got evicted, kicking and screaming at each other on the front lawn. Anyway, I never saw the goober or his sister again.

But, yeah, I do remember exactly what I said, right to his bright-eyed smiling yap when he walked up to us that day with his rag-doll in plastic:

“That’s a girl toy.”

I can remember how the other kids laughed. That part’s easy. That image is clear in my mind. But for the life of me, I can’t remember what his face looked like right then. It’s like, in my memory, he just melted away the moment I said it. Sucked back under the warm familiar blanket of his poor and dirty.

What’s funny is, for years, I felt like I’d betrayed Raggedy Ann. Anytime I saw the little bitch. Like I'm fucking Raggedy Judas. But these are just stupid things. And this is all melodrama.

But I sure wish I could say sorry to that kid.

Wherever he is, I wish I could say sorry.

On Mon, Sep 21, 2009 at 4:26 PM, Michael Hoag <luckymortal@gmail.com> wrote:
LOL, I wear a tux well. I am one of this new class of people: "class tourists."

I've had a cyber-rich tycoon friend of the new American Mega-wealthy actually telephone the CEO of sonny during an opera rehearsal because she wanted tech support on a keyboard! Me, I wouldn't have had the gall to call their customer service line! And you know what? He talked to her!

I've done song-and-dance in $300 Nike Tennis shoes, arm-in-arm with an old-money banker on his gold-plated 30 million dollar lake boat designed by J.P. Morgan with Bill fucking Gates and on and on in the audience. He bought me the $300 shoes, gave me a $100 gift pen and didn't realize what an insult it was to only pay me only $20 an hour! It's like numbers under $1,000,000 had absolutely no meaning to him....

A few weeks back, I sang a piece for a visiting Grecian composer, and jokingly referred to her tits as her "two girls." She had no idea what I meant. Nothing I could do, gesturing, definitions, nothing, could help her understand the idiom. Well, eventually she figured it out, because at the reception, she was so proud of her new English that she was horrifying well-to-do donors to the Chicago Symphony by introducing herself:

"Hello, I am Natalia and these are my two girls."

And that from a kid who grew up a flavor of poor and dirty most Americans don't realize still exists on their continent.

There's nothing special about this story. We class tourists are a new phenomenon of the age of mega-wealth. But it does provide an interesting vantage point for Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt.

As to the stuff I just sent you, the first one is rubbish, I kind of like the second. It would be a hoot to do at readings if I muster my singer's breath control and get it all in on one breath. Lol.

On Mon, Sep 21, 2009 at 3:22 PM, Argo Spier <argospier@yahoo.com> wrote:
hi m wow 6 pages edit! very decent of you tnx a lot - i will take it through soonest and get back to you, ok? I just got back from the opera, a dutch piece mixed with german, young artists etc. but was ok. it the opening of the season here and its kind of important to write about everybody a bit but actually I am such a stress re one article for Duisburg (been there this weekend, 2 operas) - it'll be a make me or break me article ... very very dicy ledge i'm walking on. I always keep my independency yet never say a thing is rubbish and in opera, rubbish is sometimes the it of it all. see I'm not gay and don't have a valet so i have to be kind of unmissable good to keep in on the scene - but i suppose you know what i mean. How's your music thing? and also, re stuff you write, if you want feedback send it me. very nice this mail of you ... want to be my valet? got to dress up sexy and act gay though ... much of what you wrote about in Jean is where I move in smile! --- On Mon, 9/21/09, Michael Hoag <luckymortal@gmail.com> wrote:From: Michael Hoag <luckymortal@gmail.com>Subject: Re: WASH - oeee text has changedTo: "Argo Spier" <argospier@yahoo.com>Date: Monday, September 21, 2009, 8:30 PM Ok, I finally have a little extra time. Attached is a straight edit for grammar and style. As always, I prefer a light touch, to preserve the space inherent in borrowed language. I'm playing with the text now... Maybe some theme and variations...In his Fontana Masters publication, Heidegger, George Steiner (©George Steiner, Heidegger – Fontana Masters, 1978.) elaborated on some of the ideas Martin Heidegger developed in his Sein und Zeit in 1927 concerning the essence of what art and poetry are. The philosophy of Heidegger is still part and parcel of the avant-garde and has pertinent influence the in-scene’s search for the essence of language. I quote from Steiner’s publication some five small paragraphs, which deal directly with the issues, themes, and questions I have dared to touch upon in this study of ‘dead poetry’. I am much indebted to George Steiner to have put forward such a clear interpretation of the German concepts dealt with in Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit and I hope that, by bringing these quotations to the reader’s attention, it could serve the dialogue of what art is and whether art can be made out of art, which are the two fundamental themes in Wash.

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