improvisation | A Second Life

78. At Last – All the Wonder of Tapirs

that strangeness
yes, that strangeness
then this

a paradise of sea & boats
– what do we know about this
& why did it change?

circumstances do
come round again
stick w/ the seagulls
& do what you do
improve each day
& improvise
near the end

this is all
such a long way
from where we
thought we’d be

all mammals together
why can’t we just
hold on to that?

like bubbles
tenderly
& in wonder
no more

don’t you like watching people?
tenderly, tenderly
no gross expectation

A solution is seen as desirable and is actually anticipated
but it must come from the collective enterprise of the audience
Umberto Eco, The Open Work, translated Anna Canacogni, (Harvard U.P., 1989), p 11

tapire sind komplexe gesellen der sorgfalt.
wie sie so einhergehen auf niedrigen beinen
mit ihren viel zu zierlichen hufen –

Monika Rinck, “disembodiment”, from Verzückte Distanzen (zu Klampen Verlag, Lüneberg, 2004) (sourced from http://www.greatworks.org.uk/poems/awe4.html

hold on
when young
let go
when old

leave dispute
beyond question
bear us
like time

72. Five Statements to Be Broadcast

1. Let our human shape, familiar, delicious as it is, in all its mutable harmonies, somehow be what reveals to us the exact form of our lives, not as a hopeless mess or overwhelmed nostalgia, but in all its various hybrids some possible miraculous beauty.

2. New things are redeeming – not by who or what is invoked, but within the decentering of their various dynamics – each transformation enacts aberration endlessly, and so gives more freedom, more interesting freedom.

3. This is a hybrid poem – and should be honoured as such: it enacts & allows aberration, disorderliness, defective classification and non-human possibilities.

4. Laughter, splurging through our individual identities, allows complicated harmony and an experiment implicating non-separation – oh, keeping moving, skipping & playing, all those slippery forms that represent sexuality.

5. The rhinoceros, the gryphon and the stork make us forget the buzzy smog, the buffet of perversity and Christian images our Queen enacts – a wider world, though, an extended horizon, a constant event-system sustaining the commonplace chaos of this monstrous world – with memories still to miswrite it.

71. A Poetry That Allows the Broadcast Now

Our lives here a disordered commonplace
– so let it be
what we must do unapparent & compulsive
– these are the cunningest things

but need met mud then something grew
– look, keeping moving balance with
the wider world, those relics of that green one
– once mutually sustaining

yes we are born with its memories still
– even here, the 3rd millennium
oh what a hopeless mess, a buzzy smog
– so let it all go

sometimes overwhelmed by nostalgia for birthrights
– we grow new things
constant creation our means of transformation
– so I here miswrite

we & all of us inside the fading of our failure
– live out each slow day
light playing no matter how greyly
– never halting what must be

70. Enochian Translation #2

for Holly Pester¹

Our lives are all lived out in this city now
everything here where we have made it thus be
what we must do is work together making it so much better
not richer nor fuller of the cunningest things

but need met for everyone truly &
with this city in quick moving balance with
the wider world it is all set within and
intercommensal with, now mutually sustains us

yes, welcome all my dear friends now
here our anthropocene third millennium
oh what a dream it was, some half-mad fantasy
in fact if anything’s different we all go

sometimes it tells us & sometimes demonstrates process
how life held in balance depends always on new things
constant creation recreation, fresh meaning dropping
sometimes springing as we misread, else here miswrite

we & this are all fragments or bubbles
inside we are empty & vanishing thru every slow day
light playing across & within us most beautiful
inside intermeshing contingency against what must be

1 “A poetry that allows for the noise of the system, or the scruff, to be the instigator of a work is surely intermedial – even if, in its eventual transmission, it is just voice and paper: systems that broadcast the voice and voice the broadcast.” Holly Pester, “New Definitions for Intermedia”, Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry Vol 3, No 2 (September 2011): Special Issue; The Greenwich Cross-Genre Festival (14-16 July 2010), p 94. Cf “As I worked through the text [Claude E. Shannon & Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Univ of Illinois Press, 1949)], I began to realise that ‘noise’ in a communications channel, whatever the intention of the originator, is something very like the artwork itself, introducing a high level of uncertainty and thus an extraordinary amount of information into the perception or reception of the work. Information is, of course, different from meaning (gibberish has a high information content), but it is the possibility that meaning(s) arrive in the clutter of uncertainties that makes things interesting.” Richard Deacon, “How I Learnt to See”, Tate Etc. 30 (Spring 2014), p 36

69. Our Lives Lived Here in the Dark

for UKPoetry ListServ & especially for Keith Tuma

Our lives lived as we know we ought
our lives lived in ordinary disorder
strangeness smiling at the heart of what we are
half-illumination by clumsy ochre light

Lives must now be living tenderly
each worthless object irradiated by wonder
the future always let be postponed
leading us into screen memory in its maze

& laws, inescapable & unwanted
people unaware they are people or dust
everything held into the missing dimensions
the ones that pretend the unconditional

Can we still manage w/in this improvisation?
Spicer found this pressure absolute & fatal
the mind overtaken by particular certainties
infinite consequences bleeding out the brain

Nowhere, I think nowhere, is here
flesh suddenly unapparent, worthless, fake
oh shit! – this total suspension, no
lived again & again just here in the dark