Images
Of El Dorado
by Scott MacLeod
(unpublished
unique collage book, 2016)
Notes
for Echo Lake 1
by Michael Palmer
(Green
Integer, Los Angeles, 1992)
Images
Of El Dorado
by Scott MacLeod
(unpublished
unique collage book, 2016)
Superprose by Thomas Lowe Taylor
(anabasis/xtant,
Ocean Park, WA & Charlottesville VA, 2003)
Closing
Hours
from Before Recollection by Ann Lauterbach
(Princeton
University Press, 1987)
Culture by Daniel Davidson
(Krupskaya,
San Francisco, 2002)
Nude Memoir
by Laura Moriarty
(krupskaya
San Francisco, 2000]
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.]
FASCINATION
[from Images Of El Dorado by Scott MacLeod]
FASCINATION
“allo, Paul!”
(error of
identification)
“une première Paris, s’il vous plait”
vous mangerez le morceau que vouz aurez
heads,
you pay elle a chanté, discovering
new
attitudes of animals in motion
some of
them rolled in money others
were
hard up (old habits, lights)
(continue
to fascinate)
donnez-moi du potage, du poisson …
a qui est cette jolie ombrelle?
vouz trouverez ici tous les livres que vous voulez
ils sont joué
I’ll cool
my heels
LATE
ECHO [from Notes for Echo Lake 1 by Michael Palmer]
LATE ECHO
I’m glad to see dust, coffee
red memory unspooling to edge
the woman older by a dozen
divided into silences, unwritten
reaching out for the inland sea
again and again intercepted
bending over the subject disappears
THE
DARK [from Images Of El Dorado by Scott MacLeod]
THE DARK
every
individual a potential
photographer
(avoir, jouer)
this
dangerous and difficult process
highly
explosive, recording the sordid
human
sculptures, impoverished lives
shocking
and powerful blitzlichtpulver
iron
poured over the surface
and the
image begins to
TIMPANI
[from Superprose by Thomas Lowe Taylor
TIMPANI
you are calling out in hiding
discovery goes across, a fact
of life, enough to occupy a man
hiding for the present, down the years
or in between, what was there
into it, of it, dying out
among the restless hours
wearing down or incomplete
and still they come, the hours
it all revolves, motive expressed
unrepentant, whatever spoils
or just runs out
CLOURS
[from Closing Hours from Before Recollection by Ann Lauterbach]
CLOURS
trace scent captures departure
nothing caresses the horizon
tied up like a bellhop in comedy
an image in a corner of an image
just there! success crowned, crows
kicks up, shoots up, explodes
smoke, dust, plumage, stench
ONE
GAME [from Culture by Daniel Davidson]
ONE GAME
hold up what happens, the lie
every time, lingering, being
consumed
the frenzy tells you what is
allowed
what is settling in, assembling
satisfaction
design reflected, hi-res passion
that sells, shopping from the
inside
imagine the transparent speech
diverted
like abandoned summaries of movie
plots
ghost material, with a rag-wave of
flesh
stealing every face and name at the
end
a distinct neglect of difference
finds limits
in the reworking of memory,
endlessly variable
body holding any significance
weeping
press the button: another satisfied
customer
empires wintering, everyone so
quiet underground
living dreams, dreaming living,
habit forming
NU
NOIR [from Laura Moriarty Nude Memoir]
NU NOIR
the world outside the window
is reflective, fills a frame
with pictures in her eyes
her falling body at night flung
bleeding from our life together
in another book, transient
arrive at yourself in the sum of this
shattering like the street, alive
so can’t die, feelings for others
transferrable obsession, subsumes
like captivity scraping the floor
spending the night in the open
repetition a song before crime,
distracted
she takes off, doesn't miss, clings
to her
vicious fiction, no scenery, no
perspective
on the run, out of luck, always
leaving
never enough, reading it out from
an inside
shaped like a woman who never
calls, has no history
no evidence of disappointment
as a woman, the projection of will
no place for a lady, as an
inscription
leading from one event to another
the visible next in a developing
series
of destructive situations &
organized accidents
turned against themselves in random
illusions
of movement, in words, she
represents herself
back at him, accumulating excess
meaning
from an artificial ocean, scattered
fears
of others, from the foreign to the
feminine
interrupting the program,
generating surfaces
in her head, building something,
falling
filling the room, over and over,
available
information in transition, spread
thin, artificial
pleasure in conscious agony,
through the text
like skin unconsciously posing with
this pile
of hands in a deep storage that
exploded
when they found her
an imaginary room at the bottom of
fear
empty of everything but action
what you see from far away
departs, astounded
*****
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.
