Yesterday, I was blessed with a little rediscovery of sorts, a sly little bookshop whose name shall remain unknown because it is to be my happy hunting ground. For naught shy of nothing I picked up yesterday among many others, L.C. Breunig's _The Cubist Poets in Paris: An Anthology_
and was rewarded even before I opened the book to a line of singular syntaxial heraldry. This, in large bold letters filling the entire back cover, all of it.
THE SUN IS IN
THE STAIRCASE
FOR INFORMATION
CONTACT THE WINE
MERCHANT DOWN
THE ROAD
and right about after contact the wine it says in relative miniature 'After Placard Poem by Pierre Albert-Birot'. Now I haven't read that yet, but this looks to be a treasure of trove of Syntaxis-related troppings.
And I know it is sort of lame to only read things seemingly only in this way, and I don't always when I am reading, but it's like a theme on the blog, and I like the theme, so.. Anyhoo, there is a very odd, and not completely ineloquent poem by Jean Cocteau which castes syntaxis into a magical relief. Cocteau is one of the first media artists I can think of who has his own compartmentalized poet on board. And like a film or a ship, Cocteau himself is a cast of characters. The poem itself is perhaps as good a posterchild for the syntaxis movement as any, and its conflation of inner and outet movements and places begins right from the titular enunciata: The Cape of Good Hope. And what throws it perhaps into one of my own recent discussions upon the translation and variety of the art of syntaxial thought, ie thought thinking thoughts, and this essay I inserted about non-genre literature is this italicized qualification:
A rough draft
for an ars poetica
And so with this grandee beginning, you'd think there would be all kinds of amazingly modernist surface and there is, but there is also the distinct pongue of the weirdo. Check this out, and tell me if it doesn't sound like jellybean weirdo:
and
there
sleeps
deep poetry
The mirror-paneled wardrobe washing down ice-floes
the little eskimo girl
dreaming
in a heap
of moist negroes
her nose was
flattened
against the window-pane of dreary Christmases
Now that is fairly challenging as a line, and the tension of expectations
that Cocteau sets up is great, nose pressed up, as if excitement and dreariness
are exchanged, or in thematic terms, the grotesque as represented by things like
the world turned upside down, the topsy turvy idea.. at any rate.
dreaming in a heap of moist negroes
is certainly premium pond farm pesto for your crunchy and toast-like cortext-liner.
There are many such nods to oddity and wonder in the piece, and many toward
directly naming syntaxis as the universal principle which transcends order and chaos
and is human embodiment itself, but how absurdly and distractedly it is done. this is
so good:
it's your foot
of attentive satin
that I place in position
pink
tightrope walker
sucked up by the void
to the left to the right
the god gives a shake
and I walk
toward the other side
with infinite precaution
In a way it is about reading, but it is also about following the single line
that is the single life, and single circumstance, the single and universal line
that is life.
At any rate, there are lots of wonderful poems in the book, and I think they presage in many ways,
many of the non-mimetic effects or narrative-odd stances of people like Clark Coolidge, and Jackson Maclow, and the best ones in the collection read like a cubist collage should work. Pierre Driu La Rochelle's poem Tennis is wonderful, and begins with a potent ( i wrote poetant) image
Naked clarity
Whiteness that strip off
Lines
This line was for me the removal of the lines of the tennis court which really resonates into something like
game without lines loses internal categories becomes symbolic play
poem as words of wordlessness
tennis as ritualized dialectic, rhythmic
transformative, physicality as intention
to reveal the foci of intention..
Anyway, it is a great poem, and glad I found the book.
I also picked up a book by (and forgive my lack of diacritics)
Sandor Weores and Ferenc Juhasz.
This is a very interesting book, and I think tomorrow
I will enter in one of its weirdo poems from each author.
One is called
Coolie.
The other
I don't know
I may put in a section from
The Rainbow-Coloured Whale
These guys are a mixed bag,
but Coolie has "bean"..
