JIM LEFTWICH Engages
The Sweating Lake by John
M. Bennett
(Luna
Bisonte Prods, 2017)
Francis Poole on The Sweating Lake:
The warehouse of language turned
upside down and contents shaken.
Poetry written with legs and forks.
Rips the lid off a buzzing suitcase full
of words and lets loose a cataract of "meanings." Distinctive
determined and defiant.
The
poems in The Sweating Lake were written between October 2013 and April 2014.
Some were written while John and Cathy were traveling in Mexico and South
America. The book was published in 2017.
On page
17 we find a poem entitled "the speech." Appended to the end of the
poem as a post-snippet is the following fragment, attributed to Rene Char: ...les objets le fuyant... Could one be
aware of the word "fuyant" and choose not to use it? It is impossible
to imagine such an outcome. Objects, then, in speech, or in words on a page,
one or two steps away from us experientially, have fled, will flee, and most
importantly, are fleeing, “even as we speak”.
as the
neck cloud shut
,when
dripping ,the shirt
What
instructions are we being given, as readers of lines, of clauses and sentences,
of grammatical and syntactical sequences, in the placement of the commas in
line two? Judging from the placement of the empty space it would seem that the
line should be read backwards:
shirt
the, dripping when,
followed
by the third line, also read backwards, as per the instructions of the comma:
what,
eye damp window's
with
the fourth and fifth lines read forwards, left to right, like the first line,
so the first five lines are as written, but also as follows (with lines two and
three read backwards)
as the
neck cloud shut
shirt
the, dripping when,
what,
eye damp window's
saw the
hair-crocked sk
ull
across your time lung
The
instructions of the commas continue in this manner: lines 6 and 7 backwards;
line 8 forwards; lines 9, 10, and 11 backwards; line 12 forwards; and then we
come to line 13, and our entire understanding of the instructions of the commas
will no longer stand up to scrutiny:
line
13: pill sings ,and the throt
line
14: tled dog under the linty
If line
13 is read backwards, as the placement of the comma would seem to instruct,
then the two halves of the word "throttled", which is divided by the
line break, do not reconnect across the break. The poem ends with a cautionary
tale, alerting us against the hazards of endeavoring to read two poems at once:
,so my mind was
severed
,a dream in its sw
eaty
blades ,or throat of its s
tubbled
lingo
We are
given a map, a language-map in fact, with perhaps too much information, or
possibly only shards, fragments, pieces of a puzzle (who can know it?), not a
map at all, in any case even while an excess (or, more precisely, a potential
excess) of possibilities (in each piece, but also in the all-but-infinite
recombinative possibilities for the pieces) of information, still not enough
for us to know with any certainty exactly how to carry on. (Cf., page 15,
"the chirination" -- "with sherds from Jim Leftwich's Six Months
Aint No Sentence, Book 54, 2013:
bald
collab / oration off the sneezed / rockslide
). We
are given a territory, and are expected to provide our own map. If we are
unable to bring a map with us, then we will need to become cartographers of the
poem. Once we are in the poem, it will show us where we are, and teach us how
to navigate its defamiliarized terrain. As a beginning, we must be willing to
be lost. And it will do us no harm if we remain willing to be lost, in a
cartographical ongoingness, experimenting with the recombinative possibilities
of making sense, the recombinative actualities of making collaborative poems as
a practice of reading. On pages 26/27 we find the following lines in "the
toil", "collapsed from Jim Leftwich's Six Months Aint No Sentence,
Book 55, 2013, & various tales by H. P. Lovecraft."
in certain grotesque / semi-semic by products
where,
if I am not mistaken, the phrase "in certain grotesque" is taken from
Lovecraft, the phrase "semi-semic by products" is taken from
Leftwich, and the combined poetic instantiation is by Bennett, left to his own
devices for reasons known only to him. Thanks to Dr. Bennett's misleading by
example (in many directions at once) we are beginning to discern the ghostly
shape of a poetry being born. The ghost of post-writing past meets the
embryonic pre-writings of the future.
Atlach-Nacha
resembles a giant spider with a human-like face. Its intimate clothes (page
36/37) control the toxic biscuits. Their high rolling diablo island flits
carbon across the shark coffers. Exhausted meat bells expanding gargled necks.
Poetry follows itself around, stalks itself, installs secret cameras and
microphones in its kitchen and in its car. I write a book of the Six Months
series and send it to John. John writes a hack, publishes it in The Sweating
Lake, and sends a copy to me. I rewrite his hack and include it in an essay,
which I will upon completion send to him. Varieties of this exchange have been
going on between us for the past 25 years. The only reason they will not go on
forever is that life does not go on forever.
Of
course all poems are about death, because all love songs are about death, and,
yes, that is the best we have to offer after all of these millennia (and, yes,
it is good enough -- and, no, it does not go without saying).
Turning
now in our text to page 96, we find a poem entitled "the egg" -- from
Jim Leftwich, Six Months Aint No Sentence, Book 60; Ivan Arguelles, "the
Hymn to Clio", "from the Hymn to Persephone"; and John M.
Bennett, from nothing.
decipher
pursued the tw / isting hole
a code
jaw teleph / one hammers through a pl / umbing event my shorts and / wasps
,ceiling books
ineffable
photograph / ,a maddened moth in a cave or / scented pool of shoelettuce
Beginning
again with "ineffable", but this time reading vertically:
ineffable
moth of slugs
where
the crushed fossil
opens
the sea
[one
variant reading has in the first line "mouth of slugs"]
From
nothing, comes everything. Kabbalist tsimtsum as poetics, if not as praxis. Are
you making up the world and yourself in it as you go along? Affirmation of this
is not as easily dismissed as it might seem on the surface. First thought leads
to second thought, second thought leads to the big bang (the current scientific
term for tsimtsum), red shift, background radiation (noise music requiring deep
listening), the expanding universe receding into the distance, the heat death
of the gnostic cosmos.
I find
myself, fleeting images of my selves, peeking out from the cracks in these
broken mirrorpoems. Some selves I have seen in earlier lives or years. Others I
am only now discovering. Where have you been? How is it that you find yourself
only now being born in the ongoing interactions of these poems? How is it that
I find yourself... Twenty-five years ago I wrote a series of poems entitled The
Synonymous Pronoun Poems. I knew the phrase meant shifting and multiple, and an
end to the possessive singular. I only suspected, then, that it also meant
"endlessly malleable". Ongoingness, then (then and now, and next),
maybe that was what Tom Taylor was telling me, twenty years ago when he talked
about the cosmic war.
The
poem entitled "the circular skin" begins on page 101. I invite you to
ruminate (for the rest of your life) on the idea of "the cyclical
same". The idea of the snake sloughing its skin. Ouroboros, sloughing its
skin. Human skin cells live approximately 2 - 3 weeks. The passage of time
refutes the proposition of repetition. The circular skin, then from Jim
Leftwich, Six Months Aint No Sentence, Book 61, 2013; Ivan Arguelles,
"chaos", "what is a poet"; "Valum Votan, a childhood",
2013; and John M. Bennett, from Nothing.
"destroy
this" chalk / leg chewn the night skin walked
blubbery
modernism
seated
in the public library / oh nihilist sph incter
The
passage of time denies the proposition of repetition.
destroy
this blubbery public modernism
nihilist
chewing
the
sphincter of the night
Collaborative
poems talk back to us. They are confrontational in their questioning. Did you
write this? I want a straight answer! But there are no straight answers! The lights
get even brighter. We are sweating in our own lakes. No I didn't write it, I've
never even thought it. Yes, of course, some of it, but which parts, who knows?
Some parts behind, beside, or inside the words. Between the words. Each one of
us has written some part of what is semic in each em space.
We are
interrogated by our own collaborative poems. ("Our own" is not
exactly what we want to say. We go on.) We interrogate ourselves, using
collaborative poems. I want a new set of pronouns. Someone we can trust. No, I
am not writing to you, for you, or about you. I want a pronoun who understands
the dangerous necessities of ego. I have already called myself arrogant, thank
you very much, else I would not have survived to say so. Versions of Thelonious
Monk playing "I Mean You" are available on 28 recordings. That is how
you handle a shifty pronoun.
Page
144, "the maps"
With
spatter from Ivan Arguelles' "those were the days" & Jim
Leftwich's Six Months Aint No Sentence, Book 65, 2014
extracting
one word per line, beginning with word 1 from line one, word 2 from line 2,
word 3 from line 3, and word 4 from line 4; then word 1 from line 5, etc (with
improvisational wiggles, to taste)
1.
monday
lint ruins reversion
drenched
swirling your mem
ory's
the behind of
ursive
switchblade artery jet
aspirin's
of returned fire
plagued
carrot sinking tube
2.
monday
drenched the cursive aspirin
plagued
lint swirling behind the switchblade
returned
carrot ruins your artery
reversion
meme jet fire tube
Page
166, another map, this one entitled "the steep"
With
chunks from Jim Leftwich's Six Months Aint No Sentence, Book 67, 2014. I am
walking through the world backwards into a futurist book. They are asleep. They
are the sleep. Steeped in dreams. Poetry leaping off of a precipice into an
abyss, silvered, with a tint of chickens, on the off-chance of some guidance in
the language.
aspects
of off off chill off slivers
the war
off language off hints
off
dust
off
warmalt
off
dynamic asparagus disturbance
off
chance sheet guidance chickens
eye off
dogs off
sausage
Scattered
throughout the book are examples of Bennett's calligraphic vispo. On page 18 we
find at the top left-center a smeared 'O' with tendrils sprouting from its
center. The 'O' appears to have been made with an alphabet stamp, one which is
slightly malleable to the squeeze. Held between thumb and middle finger, it has
been pressed onto the ink pad, then pulled, quickly and briefly, from left to
right against the paper.
On page
22 we find the same 'O' shape, and the traces of a similar process, but one
which has left a very different record of its passage. The 'O' stamp has been
inked, pressed onto the paper, then pulled from left to right, leaving a smear
between the dark image to the left and its lighter replica to the right. Atop
the 'O' to the left is what looks like a tiny, cartoonish tuft of hair, made
with a single quick jerk of the marker against the page. Beneath the two 'O's,
centered, is a sample of Bennett's polysemic calligraphy. I am reading it at
the moment as "tic"
t
ic
but in
my experience Bennett's calligraphy has a history of shape-shifting, insisting
on different readings during different times and mind-sets. I have never been
able to see it as asemic, quite the opposite in fact (with the significant
exception of Meat Receiving).* Semic of some sort, yes, of course, but the
prefix it demands of me is not a-, it is poly-. Polysemic, then, (with the
suffix -ic, to differentiate from polysemous, already in widespread use, and to
resonate explicitly with asemic), a working definition of which might be
"having an unstable, unpredictable excess of content, some of which is
contradictory, some of which is swarming, and some of which is tangential
and/or rhizomic." A definition which is intended, quite specifically, to
be an opposite of the definition of asemic, which was, circa 1997, "having
no semantic content."
On page
173, in the right margin, is a beautiful -- one might even say elegant, if we
will permit ourselves to think "elegant" and "anarchic"
simultaneously -- combinatory glyph. In the center are two stamped 'O's. For
the top one the stamp has been squeezed from top to bottom so the stamped image
is slightly elongated horizontally. For the bottom image the 'O' has been
squeezed horizontally so the imprint is elongated vertically. The process for
achieving the bottom image also included pulling downwards while applying added
pressure with the thumb of the right hand. Perched atop the upper 'O' is a
calligraphic 'M'. The tail of an exaggerated ascender snakes down the left side
of the lower 'O', and ends, fully within the smear of the image, as an 'n',
giving us "Moon" -- a morphing moon, a full moon, perhaps, giving
birth to a waning gibbous moon.
It
makes me dust off my Norton Anthology of English Literature, to check against a
Google search for the following, from "Sir Patrick Spens"
"Late,
late yestreen I saw the new moone
Wi' the
auld moone in hir arme;
And I
feir, I feir, my deir master,
That we
will com to harme."
Wikipedia
gives us the following, from Atkinson, David (2007). "Editing the Child
Ballads". In Van Mierlo, Wim. Textual Scholarship and the Material Book.
"Francis James Child collected some eighteen versions of Sir Patrick Spens.
There is no one definitive version of more validity than any other, because the
song continues in oral tradition and it may be interpreted in both the singing
and the transcription."
The
great game of poetry is always played by rules similar to these.
________________________________________________________
* There
is no point in calling something writing if no one anywhere is ever going to
attempt to read it. The power of asemic writing resides in the agon of a
thwarted reading. In the second issue of Asemic Magazine (labeled Asemic 1, the
first issue having been labeled Asemic Volume ~1), published in 1998, Tim Gaze
included a piece by Bennett entitled Meat Receiving. It is the perfect example
of what was meant by the term "asemic writing" during the last few
years of the last millennium and the first few years of this one. It was made
in 1977. On a sheet of graph paper Bennett has scrawled, from the left margin
to just slightly beyond the right, an illegible quasi-calligraphic "phrase"
which is so semantically seductive that I am still trying to read it. I am
looking at it right now, twenty years after I first saw it, looking at it for
perhaps the hundredth time, and I am still making an honest attempt to read it.
god to
sin
god to
sir
sod to
gin
I am
making this up, and I know it. But the attempt is irresistible. The sense of
failure, the tension and the frustration -- solicited, evinced, evoked -- is
irresistible. It is the strongest piece of asemic writing I have ever
encountered, and I have encountered tens of thousands of pieces (including the
many thousands of pieces I have made myself).
This is
a little closer to what is actually there:
5owlbohuuuih
5od
wlboh uuuih
What's
the point in claiming to be reading this if our best efforts over twenty years
yield a relatively uninteresting letterstring?
Bennett
has called this writing "spirit writing" (a term he also used for my
earliest calligraphic efforts, some of which he published in LAFT in 1997, and
many of which Tim Gaze published as a small chapbook with that term as its
title). "Meat Receiving" always makes me think of electricity, a
graph of a very erratic wave pattern, perhaps a graph of electricity moving
through a body, after that body has been struck by lightning.
Meat =
body
wave
pattern of electricity = spirit
The
poem is finally quite readily readable. Once we know that Bennett called this
"spirit writing", we know exactly what the "meat" is
receiving.
02.22/23.2018
*****
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).
