THE WAITLESS [from Cole Swensen: It’s Alive, She Says]
(Burning Deck 1984)
(Burning Deck 1984)
ITERAL DAY [from Jean Day: The Literal World]
(atelos #1)
(atelos #1)
RE. THE. [from reception. theory. by P. Inman]
GALLOWS [from Pool [5 choruses] by Endi Bogue Hartigan]
(Omnidawn, 2014]
(Omnidawn, 2014]
DEAF BEFORE DISHONOR [from Images Of El Dorado by Scott MacLeod]
(2016)
(2016)
DEEP WATER [from Culture by Daniel Davidson]
(krupskaya, 2002)
(krupskaya, 2002)
THE REPRESENT [from Xenophobia by Rae Armentrout]
WALLED PLAINS ON THE MOON [from Images Of El Dorado by Scott MacLeod]
(2016)
THE WAITLESS [from Cole Swensen: It’s Alive, She Says]
ITERAL DAY [from Jean Day: The Literal World]
RE. THE. [from reception. theory. by P. Inman]
GALLOWS [from Pool [5 choruses] by Endi Bogue Hartigan]
DEAF BEFORE DISHONOR [from Images Of El Dorado by Scott MacLeod]
DEEP WATER [from Culture by Daniel Davidson]
WALLED PLAINS ON THE MOON [from Images Of El Dorado by Scott MacLeod]
(2016)
About the Process
These poems were carved out of existing poems, some by me but mostly by others. Every word of these poems was found in the source poems, and 99% of the time I keep them in the same order, case, gender, tense, etc. as they appear in the source poems. Sometimes I dig out these words (actually usually short phrases) while I read a poem, sometimes after.
I don’t have any conscious rationale for choosing which poems to engage with in this way; usually just a four-second visual scan tells me if the source poem’s vocabulary has some resonance with “my” vocabulary. I consider this type of thing successful if my poem sounds like something I would write but also keeps some sort of connection with the source poem. I like to think I am finding a vein that has let’s say the same ‘blood type” as the source poem.
I’ve always enjoyed the challenges of working within strict limits. As a sculptor, I work almost exclusively with found objects; my two-dimensional work relies heavily on found images and collage techniques; my videos are all appropriated and edited from other videos. I prefer to think of my practice as “philentropy,” my portmanteau word meaning “the generous and thoughtful rearrangement and redistribution of matter and energy.”
Appropriation started becoming a larger influence on my writing practice in the 1990s. In 1998 I wrote a novel, Anne Frank In Jerusalem, (a sequel to The Diary of Anne Frank), composed using only short phrases appropriated from forty works by other authors, including Emily Dickinson, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Samuel Beckett, Arthur Koestler, Walter Benjamin, the Marquis de Sade, Adolph Hitler, Karl Marx, Anna Kavan and Hannah Arendt. For that project, I selected one short phrase from every page of every source text, writing lists on yellow legal pads, one pad for each book. Then every morning, depending on my mood, I’d select four or five completed pads to work from; maybe one day it would be Anna Kavan, Flaubert, de Sade and Benjamin, for instance. I’d start scanning the phrases until three or four began to stick together in a short sequence that seemed like it might lead somewhere, write those down and start hunting for the next couple of phrases that would elaborate the emerging narrative.
I’d continue in this manner for as long as the fragile thread held together. If I was lucky I would get a full page or two out of one session. Interestingly, for me, the seemingly unlikely combination of Dickinson and Céline generated the most lucid and powerful material, while Flaubert was a disaster, as if his sentences, though perfect whole, fell to useless mundane shards when cut up.
So there was a strictly constrained vocabulary within which I had to improvise constantly in order to provoke some sort of meaning from disconnected sources. The result, which purports to be a found manuscript that seems to be a sober, meditative diary kept by Anne Frank between December 1995 and March 1996, is a dense read:
Lift it up, take it off. The wheel and the brakes. The everlasting examinations, the instrument panel and the wretchedness. The particular mood that makes chemical factories, gasworks, as if there were no such thing as a bigger prison. Tall thin windows forming a large row. Air into calm white. Still on, the cones swinging, towards the edge, rattling doorhandles along the sidewalk. Beautiful girls disappear into the shadows. Amnesiacs, ataxics, catatonics who are on their way in gasps and bursts, into the same distortion of terror. Little girls and then a chalk face, the despotic face of the fallen.
Caught, to lull yourself in a gambling and indolent network of interpretations. Too concerned with measuring its rectangle or circle to mind its exceptional need to be protected from this directness, this happiness, these half-formed incoherences, the other volumes and cavities. Threatened by something reaching forever in the intervals between journeys. Charred shell, floating still, alone, returning. No word, no stubborn device. Some ashes which yet adhere. How hollow the reconciliation upon the features of the dead, like a flower, silent. The other volumes and cavities. Lay back down into this highly-polished beginning and laboriously grow cold, grow small. You cannot go further in life than this sentence.
The Anne Frank novel was the culmination of a growing tendency towards appropriation; after its rigors, I felt comfortable enough to use appropriated text in almost every subsequent project, and to use it more freely and inconsistently. It has since become such an integral part of how I work that I often do it just for fun. Fun that every once in awhile generates a few artifacts that other people might want to read, such as these poems collected here in Galatea Resurrects, all of which were taken from reading I was doing in 2017.
[Editor’s Note: This is the third of five monthly installments from Scott MacLeod’s series. The first is available HERE, and the second HERE.]
THE WAITLESS [from Cole Swensen: It’s Alive, She Says]
THE
WAITLESS
people
/ coffee / a ferry
rip
in memory / weather
these
lines repeated everywhere
dark
now, record over, always
evening,
all strangers, no sound
possible
on the tightrope, inside
each
small body in darkness
a
memory, so / thrown back
until
the ink ran / wild / afflicted
rowing
slowly as you remember
in
movies, not yet the future
headed
here, blind mirage
dream
waterline
ITERAL DAY [from Jean Day: The Literal World]
ITERAL
DAY
“… in the genre of day there are no
originals.”
I
make
what
is there
in
the increment
makes
of / to the brim
going
nowhere
between
the facts / straight looking
our
minds completely
amazed
that others
as
autonomous / in their own voices
attorneys
/ with words / respondent
symbols
of control
the
whole medium
delinquent
bric
a brac
blizzard
carving
/ this
shiny
script
missed
the fiber in the cabins
the
sense of each in our adjacency
flat,
free, brave bright with verses
utterances utterances
language,
synthesizing
description
/ the applause
the
abundance / that linger
against
the panorama
in
the midst of our absorption
observation
is nothing / cartoon
one
of us imagines it / you get in
become
small, transportable
held
gently / what we call thought
(namely:
word) / bullet between your teeth
makes
an anchor / full of detail
refusing
an
exit
the
emergency
nothing
like anything
hurrying
to arrive
we
need never lie
I
prepare but you refuse / fugitive
as
the story bursts / to the magnet
extracted,
magnificent, artless
in
its own footprints / running
damned
calamity / making meaning / botching
a
consoling dream is deep, ambiguous, and
plain,
like a straight line, from a concrete event
poised
to leaping, from
RE. THE. [from reception. theory. by P. Inman]
RE.
THE.
unem. ploded.
tort. con.
than. atos.
syn. onans.
smudge. budget.
add. verb.
purse. verse.
GALLOWS [from Pool [5 choruses] by Endi Bogue Hartigan]
GALLOWS
we
cannot help it: machine guns
slip
into us in crowds of dumb bruises
crippling
and swelling
we
can’t quite begin to happen
- - -
from
the instructions demanding
news,
strategic laughter, rampages
of
mouth and tongue, cutting the neck
near
the stem, as the chorus cracks, discarded
to
the wind, into the tides or hung
tied
to the post, as if we would vanish
-
- -
tossed
by
mistake
-
- -
curled
to sleep under shells knuckling
down,
drilling as for blood oil
pulled
out the ground from under us
pits
and all, thin-skinned after all
cold
chorus echoes everywhere, hung
to
hit the high notes – just leave me
DEAF BEFORE DISHONOR [from Images Of El Dorado by Scott MacLeod]
DEAF BEFORE DISHONOR
love it or leave it moth
nk im a hypocrite, come
here so I can kill you!
n our flags and disgrace
my land, get out! and to
se other little piece of
shit desert lands who ha
DEEP WATER [from Culture by Daniel Davidson]
THE
REPRESENT
the govern____ staring
no sign of terror
overlooked
foreign still attached
linked by the repeated
skeletal
fear at home blistering
white beneath, thin skin
crudely drawn
WALLED PLAINS ON THE MOON [from Images Of El Dorado by Scott MacLeod]
WALLED PLAINS ON THE MOON
we have figured out the art of time
damage and chaos, if you have evr
USA youl know what im talkn abt
animal carvings, shallow ructure
around houses, roads, bridges
hinged coffins // for miniatures
we thought we heard (tourists)
thankfully they did not (see) us
______ sunset and the sky dark
[lists of photos etc]
*****
Scott MacLeod has been presenting live, time-based, conceptual & static work in the San Francisco Bay Area and internationally since 1979. His installations and paintings have been widely exhibited in the Bay Area at venues including Southern Exposure, The Lab, George Lawson Gallery, and SFMOMA as well as internationally in the Czech Republic, Belgium, England, Italy and Germany. Visual arts awards include the San Francisco Art Institute’s Adaline Kent Award (2000) and a Wallace Alexander Gerbode Visual Arts Award (2001). His fiction, poetry, theater and critical writings have been widely published in the USA and abroad, and he has co-produced several international cultural exchange projects between USA, France, Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia. He lives in Oakland, California.
