JIM LEFTWICH Engages
Compleat Catalogue of Comedic Novelties by Lev Rubinstein, translated by Philip Metres and Tatiana Tulchinsky
(Ugly Duckling Presse, Brooklyn, 2014)
and
IT'S NO GOOD: POEMS / ESSAYS / ACTIONS by Kirill Medvedev, Translated by Keith Gessen, with Mark Krotov, Cory Merrill and Bela Shayevich
(n+1 and Ugly Duckling Presse, Brooklyn, 2012)
and
I LIVE I SEE: SELECTED POEMS by Vsevolod Nekrasov, Translated by Ainsley Morse & Bela Shayevich
(Ugly Duckling Presse, Brooklyn, 2013)
and
IT'S NO GOOD: POEMS / ESSAYS / ACTIONS by Kirill Medvedev, Translated by Keith Gessen, with Mark Krotov, Cory Merrill and Bela Shayevich
(n+1 and Ugly Duckling Presse, Brooklyn, 2012)
and
I LIVE I SEE: SELECTED POEMS by Vsevolod Nekrasov, Translated by Ainsley Morse & Bela Shayevich
(Ugly Duckling Presse, Brooklyn, 2013)
Poems will train us to think like poems, if we open ourselves to such training
Clarity
is always only of a surface. Sunlight on a sector of the neocortex. When
clarity and equanimity coincide we might be forgiven if we choose to linger for
a while. We know what else is also available, not always even slightly beneath
the surface. I like dogs, but sometimes I hate their owners. Hate hat hut hit
hot cot coat moat boat. As a general rule, I like dogs a lot, but sometimes I
boat their authors. Vsevolod Nekrasov wrote facts and anti-poems. I remember
how I came upon my fortune, whoring among the pirates, a better human than you
will ever be.
Humor
-- 1. the quality of being amusing or comic, especially as expressed in
literature or speech ("his tales are full of humor").
Middle
English (as humour ): via Old French from Latin humor ‘moisture,’ from humere
(see humid). The original sense was ‘bodily fluid’ (surviving in aqueous humor
and vitreous humor, fluids in the eyeball); it was used specifically for any of
the cardinal humors (sense 3 of the noun), whence ‘mental disposition’ (thought
to be caused by the relative proportions of the humors). This led, in the 16th
century, to the senses ‘state of mind, mood’ (sense 2 of the noun) and ‘whim,
fancy,’ hence to humor someone ‘to indulge a person's whim.’ Sense 1 of the
noun dates from the late 16th century.
Reading
is often adapt archaic with indulge to prevent content, however gerund humoring
3rd person proportions, they thought the body noun was infectious spirits
vanished. Plural or comic, a state or brand of funny. The news today is filled
with poems and anti-facts. No place simpler than the analytical toes of an
alleged agenda. China heats up their bid for waltzing leaders. By anger shoes
in Wisconsin street claim forthcoming lies shielded apologies. Rumors step
aside in escape from Detroit. So much belief-tracking horror surprises
underground redemption. Spider eyes are traditionally resistant to bacterial
nightmare crystals 9 billion light-years from our invisible swarm of holes.
Debilitating multi-state memories infect your amazing brain!
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Compleat
Catalogue of Comedic Novelties by
Lev Rubinstein
"The
author's version is itself just a version."
page
78: I dreamt two whole arguments in my support, but of course I could not
remember them
page
346: If it happens, we won't be around to see it. We'd be lucky to live until
our own death
page
309: You could engage in establishing cause and effect connections and forget
about everything else
page
299: A wet branch knocks against the window
------Douglas
Messerli: ...it might take us out of a world in which ...all values are
necessarily parenthesized, and we can once again speak of “love,” “nature,”
“experience,” even “reality” in a way that is once more meaningful and fresh.
page
187 page 1: Obviously, nothing at all should appear here
page
153: I'm here
page
101: Life is given to us humans for a reason. / You really should try, my dear,
to reat it well
------Catherine
Wagner: Rubinstein's work reminds me of those visual puns known as
figure/ground illusions—the famous rabbit/duck picture, for instance—that
instruct the viewer not to choose between one view and another, but that it's
possible to train the eye to flip between both views. Rubinstein lets me
acknowledge both my human emotion and its quoted, cultural ground.
page
3: Here, everything begins.
page
xxiv: The author's version is itself just a version.
------Douglas
Messerli: These maxims are banal and are still somehow significant,
representing a kind of “and/and” pattern that is very different from American
thinking.
[You
are torn between cross-examination and whatever your ears say is the truth.]
page
102: Life is given to us humans for a moment. / Go and do as many good things
as you can
------Philip
Metres: Rubinstein's work is a dirty conceptualism, redolent of lyric affect.
[You
are torn between so many good things and whatever your eyes say is the truth.]
page
159: How would you say: "I'm here."
page
189 page 3: Here, nothing should appear besides what is already here.
page
302: You'll forget what you wanted
[You
are torn between chains and chance and whatever your ears say is change.]
page
310: You could engage in classifying doubts from the viewpoint of their
unsolvability
------Douglas
Messerli: ...words such as “soul,” “tear,” “angel,” beauty,” “truth,” etc.,
that would be unthinkable in either current US conceptualism or in works by
Fluxus writers or those influenced by Cage. [...] something akin to units of
breath, created by the pauses within the sequence of cards. In book form these
read, given the limits of space, as stanzas [...] surprising for the US reader,
moralistic aphorisms and proclamations. [...] a new era in which the
Postmodern, followed by a larger stage of Postmodernity, will surely take us in
different directions than Postmodernism itself.
[You
are torn between truly cosmic proportions and whatever your eyes say is the
forbidden zone.]
page
304: Don't recognize yourself in the mirror
page
193 page 7: Here some very distinct memories could materialize
page
160: (until I realized the meaning of the faint scent of loss)
page
104: Life is given to us humans as a dream. / So we sleep till someone taps us
on the back
[You
are torn between comedic novelties and whatever your ears say is lyric affect.]
------Philip
Metres: What I love about his version of conceptualism is that his poems can be
read either as a parody of discourses or as the renovation of the fragments of
truth which they attempt to illuminate;
Page
223: This time let's begin like this:
Fifty-three
ideas, ruminating in columns.
The
delta is divided by concentric markers.
The
lyrical text is discrutable by antenna.
The
poems line up, sailing an annual eros.
We
are lost in diverse traditions of collaborative literature.
page
117: What is least distinct is worth paying most attention to, for it is said,
"One can't distinguish the wings of a flying dragonfly."
Nothing
north of the hoax as a monument to their by-lines.
The
moat-mob, how newly meandering, a spark of potato in a canoe.
Scribbled
code, aleph-basalt, arachnid caliper, the rancid lake.
6-branched
careening middles.
Encyclopedic
perseverance among the reptiles.
The
year of the hollow throat, and youthful mishearing.
page
87: Behold again, the nightingale
Thankfully
speedway epoxy.
How
many more curvilinear kayak knotted crock-pots, monolithic suburban knack?
In
the shadow of a bell anymore tarot indefensible sphincter, unhitched the
payroll recycled.
The
poet has established with poems, in the late University, essays as pure as
soup. Poetic hell and work. Human college Fact, West during has; avant. I, the
eye, has a collection of movies, for use at the library, took 19.
It
was political, and respected by language, their scene poet, their own scene
power, multiplied by rephrased fevers, little did we know. Ha. Little do we
know, a suit like a version of crimes shifts protest from ongoing notes. The
new outside blinks like a beast in dust. During the misery in the war of
laughing texts are turbulent and pouring, happily difficult to understand (like
a feather in a circle).
page
77: I dreamt that you only have a real chance four times in life.
Clean
icebergs levitate.
Literature
debates energy.
Alert
gas sags for the blanket annex.
An
alphabet harbors sinuous legumes.
The
same apple, singular sepals in a vacuum.
The
dirty fog of the essay.
page
72: What doesn't strive upward?
page
72: Water doesn't strive upward.
page
261: A serious conversation
page
261: A serious conversation (continued)
page
285: Please write: "I don't remember how these days were going...
page
363: This is all me
page
381: Now here I am
page
xii: One other thought. It seems to me that today we are living through an
overt de-heroization and the erosion of the avant-garde as a means of artistic
and day-to-day existence. Now, thank God, just about everyone is an
avant-gardist.
------Lev
Rubinstein: The author's version is itself just a version.
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It's No
Good by Kirill Medvedev
Medvedev:
I will stay out of his way. He is writing about Prigov, and I believe him: "The new epoch we're finally entering,
the epoch without a USSR, is defined by the fact that the USSR can no longer
help anyone. You can no longer use it positively or negatively -- you just
can't. The only thing you can do now is live without it." We can say -- and believe -- at the end of
the Reagan Regime: the USA can no longer help anyone. Make it new, make it up,
make America great again. Make America up again (in relation, again, to the
[non-existent] Soviet Union, or some similarly concocted current shadow). He
quotes Prigov: "Live where living is impossible: / Now that's life!"
Although
he was born in 1975 and has been described as a poet, musician, and left-wing
activist based in Moscow, it is impossible to completely ignore Medvedev while
reading his poems, essays and actions. He convinces us: "I for one
identify with my texts completely; I consider them the expression of my own --
conscious, semi-conscious, or unconscious -- emotions and ideas." In 2006,
Medvedev arranged the text of an interview with the activist crane operator
Alexander Zakharin into a poem entitled, "How's This For A Poem",
including the following lines:
...my appeals to the Presidential
Representative for Human Rights have been fruitless...
...The workers will have to defend
themselves
I
quit work a couple of years ago. The dog down the street finally quit barking.
I have never been to Russia. Earlier this month I became officially retired.
Medvedev said, while explaining his decision to start a Livejournal blog:
"I've made the choice not to publish any more poems anywhere for the next
five years." That was in 2005. He was semi-retired, or provisionally
retired, from the occupation of poet. In
2007 he wrote and published a poem entitled "In Praise of Evolution"
(we cannot even pretend to read it without getting in its way): the revolution
is not at present an actual revolution, it is only part of a "slow
evolution", which gives the toothache capitalist anti-comrades more
"time to exploit, crush and kill."
contradiction
-- contradict -- "assert the opposite of a statement" -- "be in
conflict with" -- from contra dicere ‘speak against.’
To
assert the opposite of a state...
thinking about how
my poems
are the poems of an unemployed person
Keith
Gessen, in his introduction: "So it wasn't as if Russian poetry had never
not rhymed, and it wasn't as if it had never been to the supermarket. The
difference may have been that Medvedev, while doing away with much of the
formal apparatus of Russian lyric poetry, had retained its messianic
element."
The
dog down the street is barking again. Hours on end, every day, it's impossible
to think. I think about going down there and killing it with a kitchen knife.
Medvedev says: "I know perfectly well that 90 percent of the people who
care about poetry do not care about any of this -- what difference does it make
where the poems are published and on whose dime and who owns the printing
plant; all that matters is whether they're good poems, right?" What else
is in his mind? Conscious, semi-conscious, or unconscious? Dogs? Knives? Jobs?
Emotions and ideas? In his first books of poems he writes about translating
Charles Bukowski:
when I was translating the poems
of charles bukowski
I was convinced that I was writing
the best poetry then being written in
russian
He
says he has nothing in common with Bukowski, that he translated him "in a
voice that wasn't his voice". I would like to see a couple of those poems
translated back into English by someone who isn't familiar with Bukowski's
work. Weighing toward power between cultural commodities, the pop-seven mythic
foot journal of dominant culture, the green gimmick outside its causal culvert,
even the spiders have stopped publishing their webs. Was the compilation openly
crinkled? The literate author is already also a text? Freely critical of
sincere moons in profitable literature, he wrings a force entirely meaningful
from the petroleum of moths in literature. Therefore, walking a mile in the
shoes of another reinvented wheel, observations in flames, fiercely
transcendent. Nor working, since the audio reborn, generates the union of
tricycle coat-rack resplendently "aesthetic politics" -- adapts
during narrative orbiting -- hiatus: choices: dismissal: motivations:
paradoxical: nexus. Semicolons rattle (raffle) poetic technique.
The
poem entitled BIG RUBBER COCK begins
I saw it every day on the way to
school.
I know that's not the best way
to start a poem,
but there's nothing I can do about my
memories.
Poems
can no longer help anyone. It is less true now than ever. It is the equivalent
of saying: memories can no longer help anyone. There are splotches and smears
of black tempera on my faded yellow t-shirt, traces of last night's emprientes
session. Take a shower. Change your shirt. One of our cats crouches on the
carpet in a rectangular patch of sunlight. The poem entitled BIG RUBBER COCK
continues:
these cocks were everywhere,
they weren't even manufactured here,
they were imported from America,
which didn't know their true value,
no one knew their true value,
in fact no one knew the value of
anything,
we all lived like poets...
The
fucking dog is still barking. You want to know what this has to do with poetry?
It's a good thing I don't own a gun.
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I Live I
See by Vsevolod Nekrasov
Nekrasov
has a visual poem which consists of a blank page with a period in the lower
right corner. It is a sentence with no words, a blank mirror. We look at it, we
read it, and there is nothing there. We fill in the blank with ourselves. It is
the sound of one hand zen-slapping us in a forest while no one is watching. In
my mind I compose a response: the same blank page, except for the word
"I" added at the upper left -- and the period changed to a colon.
Repetition
-- "where we" -- drawn in a straight line from exhaustion to
recombination, taunts words onto the page, line breaks taken case by case.
Question:
What does the dog symbolize?
Answer:
The dog is not symbolic. It points to its owners, who embody a self-righteous
ignorance and arrogance. A lazy, selfish, inconsiderate irresponsibility
considered as a clear sign of superiority.
Question:
Why do you want to kill the dog?
Answer:
I don't want to kill the dog. I want to destroy the causes of the dog's
behavior.
Question:
You want to kill the dog's owners?
Answer:
Of course not. The dog's owners are victims of the system in which they live. I
want to destroy that system.
Question:
Because of the behavior it produces?
Answer:
Because of the behavior it produces.
fragments
scraps
self-collage
A
book of poems is a field of permissions. The only rule is do not refuse them.
Fragments
are intended as fragments. Do not translate them into sentences and paragraphs.
Scraps
are intended as scraps. Do not translate them into theories and contexts.
Self-collage
= self-as-collage. As a beginning: juxtaposed scraps and fragments sequenced
along irregular reading-routes. Also as a beginning: constellated &
recombinative.
Poems
will train us to think like poems, if we open ourselves to such training.
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Anti
Anti
Antelope
The
ass is the antiface
What
is anti-anti-nonsense?
It
is just the same old nonsense
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Patricia
Cox Miller, from "In Praise of Nonsense"
Magical
writing takes the form of ordinary writing by using its letters and so is
faithful to it, but it betrays that writing by its nonsensical use of those
letters and is thus faithful to the writing that is an invisible inscription on
the soul. Yet it betrays the invisible inscription as well by writing it in
actual letters! Magical language is thus thoroughly paradoxical, betraying and
safeguarding with every vowel.
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Ah
Poem
Ha
haha haha haha
Ah
ahah ahah ahah
But
ah ahah ahahahah
Ha
haha hahahaha
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Nekrasov,
as a self, exhausts the language of the self, poetic phantoms that bridge the
perils of madness, together with our eyes unadorned we suggest a poet who
simply is not terrified of the poetic self.
I
am I after all I am I
but
not I
and
not I
Twisted
as if known, in the river of mirrors our letters meander, as whole as they are
replaced. Subjectivities uncoiled, somnambulate as invented others, desire for
the fish on fire, Rimbaud's burning vowels. The same errors over and over
anticipate the same facts. The anti-poem is a poem precisely because it refuses
to be a poem. I agree with Burroughs, let's dispense with the "the"
and the "to be"!
Anti-poem
a poem precisely because it refuses a poem.
Anti-poem
a poem precisely
because
it refuses a poem.
Anti-because
poem it a
refuses
poem
a
precisely poem.
Anti-refuses
a
because
poem precisely
poem
poem
it
a.
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Nekrasov
insists: if we read poems, we must write poems.
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Had
written of sworn poems worn from the awful fall afoul, in an inner English,
socially inspected and detoured to the quotidian (usage is aware of absolutes,
but appalled by standardized spelling). Fifty years after the river of poems
and aligned during variable abilities. Had been able afterwards, words soaked
in their verbatim, mostly hosted by their ghosts and hoisted by their toes.
Prose poems are also always, at the very least their own facts. An anti-poem is
easier to identify as a fact than as a poem.
fact
-- a thing that is indisputably the case.
late
15th century: from Latin factum, neuter past participle of facere ‘do.’ The
original sense was ‘an act or feat,’ later ‘bad deed, a crime,’ surviving in
the phrase before (or after) the fact . The earliest of the current senses
(‘truth, reality’) dates from the late 16th century.
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pages
174 and 175 (complete)
I
repeat
this
cannot
be repeated
I
repeat
this
cannot
be repeated
I
repeat
this
cannot
be repeated
this
cannot
be repeated
this
cannot
be repeated
I
repeat
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the
marginalized
underground
is
the avant-garde
of
something
and
as it turns out
the
underground
is
counterculture
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We
are trying not to deny the same, refuse the same, forget the same, act the
same, think the same, or be the same. Time learns its dictionary of action from
the opinions of isolation. A sub-group lesser to the edge of business has
peripheral confidence in the public. Marginal within you, as if they are not
powerless or unimportant, their status to oppress influences ("the insects
live underground, in an underground parking garage") an abbreviated slang
hidden or situated below the surface. Experimental definitions of the people
develop unusual or radical societies, whose ideas are borrowed from the
encyclopedia of mnemonic grammar, invent plural vanguard alternative avant
meaning mnemonic pictures, definition is describing avant in a given
dictionary. Repetition in both prose and poetry is more memorable as a device
or an event, repeats the undesirable instance, speech dreams effective from
syllables, no repetition in writing, no repetition in time, no repetition in a full sentence,
commonly a few happens again, a few happen against, no repetition in speech, no
repetition to add emphasis quite simply literary the same thing, no poetical
words or acts. No repetition in nonsense, in anti-nonsense, in the praise of nonsense, or in the praise of
anti-nonsense. No repetition in the barking of dogs.
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the
dog barks*
the
wind blows
all
night
the
dog barks
the
wind blows*
*the country calls
(page
124)
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March / April 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).