JIM LEFTWICH Engages
“polymer codex,” a poem in Les Echiquiers Effrontes by Mark Young
(Luna Bisonte Prods, 2018)
"This is a poem about
thinking"
Mark Young is a New Zealander who has lived most of
his life in Australia, and he is known primarily as a poet. As a visual poet,
he brings a vibrant literary sense to the text as visual object. He has arrayed
phrases and individual words upon a field that takes the form of a traditional
chess set, compelling the reader to construct meaning out of the various ways a
string of words can be constructed. The reader can read up, down, diagonally,
and even in a continuous spiral. In the end, the poem becomes a textual
movie—every block upon the page a single frame in that movie—and the film
flickers before us, sending our minds in different directions, exciting the
retina, and teasing the mind. Meaning is not easy or certain in this visual
poem. Instead, it surges toward us and swirls away, both brazen and coy. This
is a poem about thinking, meaning, and the isolated and collective beauty of
words.—Geof Huth
Roaming back and forth
through les échiquiers effrontés
(cheeky chessboards) I found myself in time lingering with the poem on page 22,
"polymer codex". My first thought was "that looks like a
rutabaga". I typed "rutabaga" into the google search bar and a
similar image appeared. A good place to start, I reflected: 4 squares down in a
8-square vertical column, the seventh square from the left in an 8-square
horizontal sequence.
Kansas
felon rutabaga halo effect
fisher
halo effect, noun: the
tendency for an impression created in one area to influence opinion in another
area.
"Polymer Codex" (first published by Sonic Boom)
Out of the 64 squares on the
page (in the poem) there are six images: line 2, square 3 has someone (not
Edgar Winter) playing a handheld, shoulder-strap synthesizer; line 2, square 7
has the registered trademark symbol; line 4, square 7 has the aforementioned
rutabaga; line 5, square 4 has the slashed O; line 7, square 2 has a close-up
fragment of an abstract painting, or a minimalist abstract landscape, or a
child's imitation of some tendencies found in Klee; line 7, square 7 has the
"Tube" part of the YouTube logo.
heritage
ple
d
g
e
shoulder-strap synth app
&/or
crowd
moreish registered
trademark symbol
weather
linkrot
haruspex slashed O tooth
paste (slashed o for the second o in tooth)
eclectic
AK-47
mine minimalist childlike
Klee landscape talent
whole
routine
cyborg tube okapi
pride
The okapi, also known as
the forest giraffe, congolese giraffe or zebra giraffe, is an artiodactyl
mammal native to the northeast of the Democratic Republic of the Congo in
Central Africa. Okapi are creatures that appear in The Lion King universe.
Let's begin again (and
again), this time in the upper left corner, and read the first line from left
to right.
polymer salsa heritage
Charles Olson relapse anima = anime debut crowd
Olson 1: From the moment
he ventures into FIELD COMPOSITION—puts himself in the open—he can go by no
track other than the one the poem under hand declares, for itself.
Olson 2: Observation of
any kind is, like argument in prose, properly previous to the act of the poem,
and, if allowed in, must be so juxtaposed, apposed, set in, that it does not,
for an instant, sap the going energy of the content toward its form.
It comes to this, this
whole aspect of the newer problems. (We now enter,
actually, the large area
of the whole poem, into the FIELD, if you like, where all
the syllables and all the
lines must be managed in their relations to each other.) It
is a matter, finally of
OBJECTS, what they are, what they are inside a poem, how
they got there, and, once
there, how they are to be used.
polymer, then, as a
beginning inside a beginning: a substance that has a molecular structure
consisting chiefly or entirely of a large number of similar units bonded
together, e.g., many synthetic organic materials used as plastics and resins.
Some polymers, like
cellulose, occur naturally, while others, like nylon, are artificial.
salsa, too, a type of
Latin American dance music incorporating elements of jazz and rock; (especially
in Latin American cooking) a spicy tomato sauce. Its rhythms burn the tongue (a
mnemonic device, or strategy).
heritage, something that
is handed down from the past, as a tradition ("The Tribe of Olson")
In medicine, relapse or
recidivism is a recurrence of a past condition.
In the context of drug
use, relapse or reinstatement of drug-seeking behavior, is a form of
spontaneous recovery that involves the recurrence of pathological drug use
after a period of abstinence.
late Middle English: from
Latin relaps- ‘slipped back,’ from the verb relabi, from re- ‘back’ + labi ‘to
slip.’ Early senses referred to a return to heresy or wrongdoing
Olson 3: “the
DISCONTINUOUS becomes the greener place.”
Olson 4: “My shift is that
I take it the present is prologue, not the past. The instant, therefore. Is its
own interpretation, as a dream is, and any action — a poem, for example.”
Carl Jung 1: "The
realities subsumed under the concept “anima” form an extremely dramatic content
of the unconscious."
Carl Jung 2: "The
poet's conviction that he is creating in absolute freedom would then be an
illusion: he fancies he is swimming, but in reality an unseen current sweeps
him along."
..."we probably will
always be crystal sets, at best." - Jack Spicer
anime, a style of
animation originating in Japan that is characterized by stark colorful graphics
depicting vibrant characters in action-filled plots often with fantastic or
futuristic themes.
It wasn’t until the 1970s
that the word “anime” first began catching on in Japan.
What you think it means
Animated media from Japan,
or in a recognized "Japanese" style
What it means in Japanese
Animated media - i.e.,
cartoons - from any place, in any style.
Carl Jung 3: "The
animus is the deposit, as it were, of all woman’s ancestral experiences of man—and
not only that, he is also a creative and procreative being, not in the sense of
masculine creativity, but in the sense that he brings forth something we might
call the spermatic word."
debut, the first public
appearance of a new product or presentation of a theatrical show.
"the shoulder-strap
synth makes its world debut"
crowd, Old English crūdan
‘press, hasten,’ of Germanic origin; related to Dutch kruien ‘push in a
wheelbarrow.’ In Middle English the senses ‘move by pushing’ and ‘push one's
way’ arose, leading to the sense ‘congregate,’ and hence (mid 16th century) to
the noun.
Julio Marzán: But from
what element in "Brilliant Sad Sun" did Williams get the "red
wheelbarrow"? From an imaginary translation from the Spanish. In Spanish,
to know things by heart or to do something by rote can be described by the
phrase de carretilla: hacer de carretilla or saber de carretilla. The image
evokes carrying around the knowledge using a small cart. Colloquially, one can
refer to someone's habitually prattling on about some- thing as bringing back
one's carretilla. And carretilla also literally denotes
"wheelbarrow." On that afternoon, Rose was prattling nostalgically de
carretilla, so the carretilla was Rose's, la carretilla de Rosa, which
homonymously translated also says "the red wheelbarrow."
**
rutabaga:
The first of the undecoded
messages read: “Popeye sits in thunder,
Unthought of. From that
shoebox of an apartment,
From livid curtain’s hue,
a tangram emerges: a country.” --Ashbery
tangram, A traditional
Chinese puzzle made of a square divided into seven pieces (one parallelogram,
one square and five triangles) that can be arranged to match particular designs
Line six reads as follows:
politics AK-47 Brexit
eclectic tensor hemp routine gun control
Line 2, square 2"
"pledge"
contains "edge", explicitly in this configuration
it also contains
"ledge"
Allen Ginsberg talking
(teaching, at Naropa - 1980) about Pound's A B C of Reading:
“(poetry-making) equals
“to condense”
“DICHTEN = CONDENSARE” –
Poetry equals Condensation, Poetics equals Condensation
haruspex
Demerol
tensor
star anise
Salon des Refuses
Reading diagonally, top
left to bottom right:
polymer pledge &/or
linkrot tooth paste hemp tube codex
Reading top left to bottom
left:
polymer bullring sniper
criteria specter politics mine siege
Reading the black squares,
line 1 square 4 to line 8 square 3:
Charles Olson budget
deficit a dream space Demerol tensor star anise chi
budget deficit: While we
hear all the time the statement that “if I ran my household budget the way that
the Federal Government runs its budget, I’d go broke”, followed by the claim
“therefore, we need to get the government deficit under control”, MMT argues
this is a false analogy. A sovereign, currency-issuing government is NOTHING
like a currency-using household or firm. The sovereign government cannot become
insolvent in its own currency; it can always make all payments as they come due
in its own currency.
Indeed, if government
spends currency into existence, it clearly does not need tax revenue before it
can spend. Further, if taxpayers pay their taxes using currency, then
government must first spend before taxes can be paid. Again, all of this was
obvious two hundred years ago when kings literally stamped coins in order to
spend, and then received their own coins in tax payment.
Another shocking truth is
that a sovereign government does not need to “borrow” its own currency in order
to spend. Indeed, it cannot borrow currency that it has not already spent! --L.
Randall Wray
Demerol, Meperidine is
used to help relieve moderate to severe pain. It belongs to a class of drugs
known as opioid (narcotic) analgesics and is similar to morphine. It works in
the brain to change how your body feels and responds to pain.
tensor, a muscle that
tightens or stretches a part of the body.
early 18th century: modern
Latin, from Latin tendere ‘to stretch.’
Illicium verum is a
medium-sized evergreen tree native to northeast Vietnam and southwest China. A
spice commonly called star anise, staranise, star anise seed, Chinese star
anise, or badiam that closely resembles anise in flavor is obtained from the
star-shaped pericarps of the fruit of I. verum which are harvested just before
ripening.
Chi, also spelled qi, is
life-force energy or vital life of a living being in traditional Chinese
philosophy, religion and medicine. The concept is similar to prana in Hinduism
and yoga philosophy. Chi means “breath” or “air” and is often translated as
“energy flow,” “life force” or “matter energy.”
polymer codex
mid 19th century: from
German, from Greek polumeros ‘having many parts,’ from polu- ‘many’ + meros ‘a
share.’
late 16th century
(denoting a collection of statutes or set of rules): from Latin, literally
‘block of wood,’ later denoting a block split into leaves or tablets for
writing on, hence a book.
June 2018
*****
Jim Leftwich is a poet who lives in Roanoke, Virginia. Recent publications include Volumes 1 , 2 & 3 of Rascible & Kempt (Luna Bisonte 2016, 2017, edited by John M. and C. Mehrl Bennett), Tres tresss trisss trieesss tril trilssss: Transmutations of César Vallejo (Luna Bisonte, 2018) and Sound Rituals, collaborative poems by jim leftwich & billy bob beamer (mOnocle-Lash, 2018, edited by Olchar Lindsann).
