Author: Brooks Lampe

Warning: mUutations are arbitrary interpretive readings that change the poems into something they’re not. Proceed at your own risk. See for more info. Here’s Matthew Zapruder’s “To a Predator” I woke up early and saw a fox. It was leaping and dragging its glorious red and white tail behind it across the road. It held a grasshopper in its mouth, which it dropped when it saw the small carcass of a young javelina. Last night I was woken by their hairless rooting through a field of cactus in moonlight. They all stood together, ears rotated forward into the breeze, protecting the single mother protecting a pair of young. Their mustachioed labium superius oris i.e. upper lip protects a gentle tusk the color of greywater. I almost sympathize with their corporate need to snuffle and roam in packs until dawn returns them to hollows they made in the ground. But my [...]

This entry is part of a series, mUutations» Warning: mUutations are a project from my other site, . They are arbitrary interpretive readings that change the poems into something they’re not. Proceed at your own risk. Here’s George Hitchcock’s “Dawn,” from his collection, A Ship of Bells: Clouds rise from their nests with flapping wings, they whisper of worn leather, bracken, long horizons, and the manes of dark horses. In the waking stream the stones lie like chestnuts in a glass bowl. I pass the bones of an old harrow thrown on its side in the ditch. ______________Now the sun appears. It is a fish wrapped in straw. Its scales fall on the sleeping town with its eyeless granaries and necklace of boxcars. Soon the blue wind will flatten the roads with a metallic palm, the glitter of granite will blind the eyes. But not yet. The beetle still stares [...]

Warning: mUutations are a project from my other site, . They are arbitrary interpretive readings that change the poems into something they’re not. Proceed at your own risk. The Dog in the Garage The dog in the garage, The hound that wanders around Snapping at flies, with an infected ear — Suddenly starts to run Across the street at an angle. He must have remembered something Mixed with the odors of dust And car-grease — a delirious Fragrance of sexual life. I just started reading Kayak—the poetry magazine George Hitchcock ran almost single-handedly from 1964-84. It’s a wonderful zine brought to life with Hitchcock’s visual collages. The magazine serves as a portal into the surrealist and deep image poetry of the period. Andrew Joron cites it as “the most sustained, and most visible, interact between deep-image and surrealist poetry.” This is good and bad, however, since deep imagism, for many, [...]

Warning: mUutations are a project from my other site, . They are arbitrary interpretive readings that change the poems into something they’re not. Proceed at your own risk. Pete Winslow is a very minor Beat surrealist poet who died young and only published a few books, including Monster Cookie, which contains this short poem, “The Dada Scarecrow”: Two crossed sticks in a field This is the dada scarecrow The crows gather around to wonder at it No straw no old clothes No floppy hat like scarecrows wear Just two crossed sticks in a field And a real man suspended naked From its arms. When reading poems, it’s always good to ask yourself how your expectations and assumptions about the poem changed throughout. This is essential with a poem that has a “shocker” ending like this one. Once the sticks become a Roman cross, it’s impossible to see the first six [...]

Warning: mUutations are a project from my other site, . They are arbitrary interpretive readings that change the poems into something they’re not. Proceed at your own risk. Here’s a poem by Bob Kaufman. It’s what happened to many of the Beats: Cincophrenicpoet A cincoprhenic poet called a meeting of all five of him at which four of the most powerful of him voted to expel the weakest of him who didn’t dig it, coughing poetry or revenge, beseech- ing all horizontal reserves to cross, spiral and whirl. Rejection of social norms and ideologies is pervasive throughout Bob Kaufman’s work and is represented in the anti-conformity and “rejectionary philosophy” of Abomunism, a thinly veiled term for the beatnik culture of which Kaufman was a part. This process of differentiation comes at a cost, however, alienating the rebel from his cultural and ideological context. This necessitates a search for alternative contexts [...]

Warning: mUutations are a project from my other site, . They are arbitrary interpretive readings that change the poems into something they’re not. Proceed at your own risk. Here’s a poem by Federico Garcia Lorca that could change your life, if your name is Euclid or Bernhard Reimann: Spiral My time moves on in a spiral. The spiral limits my landscape, leaves what is past in the shadows & makes me advance full of doubts. Oh perfect straight line! Pure spear without spearman. How your light turns my solomonic path into dream! This little lyric turns a beautiful, minimalistic image into a philosophical meditation. If the spaker is imagined to be in a “landscape,” as he calls it, then it is a Dali-esque landscape. That is, it’s basically a vast desert with just a few important, unusual objects placed in our field vision. We must confront and make meaning of [...]

The two loves of Kalamaras’s life: Surrealism and Hindu mysticism (with a touch of rhetorical theory!). A serious look at his work would address how his poetry investigates the intriguing parallels between surrealism and Eastern mysticism, a relationship already hinted at in the origins of Pound’s ideogrammic method, which became the basis of the modernist image. Kalamaras blurs the line between the poetic and mystic: “Central to my work as a poet is the exploration of language as a way to conjure ‘silence,’ or moments of discursive interruption and dissolve, in which all seeming oppositions are complementary rather than contradictory.” offers two dozen poems, all in the same form: couplet stanzas where each line is a (usually) complete sentence. Part of a larger project called The Bone Sutras, these poems resemble . The poems are stoic, even, one might feel, mechanical. The method is pretty clear: self-contained sentences/lines that center [...]

City Lights Books just published Compression & Purity, a new poetry book by L.A.-based African-American surrealist, Will Alexander. Alexander writes densely textured “psychedelic” or scientific surrealism with a strong affinity for arcane vocabulary. “On Scorpions & Swallows” begins: Not claimed by the accessible as contrast or as competition by loss or mathematics by peril but occlusion as opposable phylums minus a dark synesthesial as rote minus the axial smoke of a rotted bonfire hamlet I mean oasis as savage dialectic rotation meaning species as aggressive salt as curious vertical blazing in reversed arrayal I think of interior cobalt swallows with predacious ignition a contradictory igniting beautific with scopolamine I am struck with Alexander’s careful phrasings, his manipulation of thematic shape and his mastery of extensions. For instance, the poetry quoted above, “On Scorpions & Swallows,” reads like a single, extended sentence creating a sonnet-like problem-and-answer structure to the poem. Alexander [...]

Galen Strawson, in his essay, “Against Narrativity,” challenges the validity of the popularly held hypothesis that human beings experience and make sense of their lives as narratives. The effects of narrative self-articulation, he says, are “potentially pernicious.” The predisposition “to look for story or narrative coherence in one’s life is, in general, a gross hindrance to self-understanding.” He distinguishes between Diachronics and Episodics, individuals who view the narrative arc of their lives as continuous, versus those who see their lives as discontinuous. The Episodic view, he shows, is less dangerous because it tends to mitigate the temptation to fabricate and revise our stories in order to reflect what we want to see ourselves as rather than who we really are. “Diachronicity” “is not a necessary part of the ‘examined life.’” Bidart’s “Golden State” might be seen as an examination of the diachronic urge in the form of a dramatic monologue. [...]

My research currently has me looking into the surrealist-Beats, and I recently read Solitude Crowded With Loneliness. This was Kaufman’s first book, published in 1965, which brought together work from the late fifties that had made him famous, including and Does the Secret Mind Whisper? I am in awe of how completely Kaufman was able to embody a multitude of traditions. His work is absolutely Beat, absolutely jazz/blues and absolutely surreal. He is thinking, living and writing with all three in mind—indeed, all of these “philosophies” were in the very core of his being—and he made them perfectly harmonious, crafting poetry that enacts revolt and social critique at the same time as it heals the primitive, hard-knocked soul. The reader familiar with the Beats will probably sense intuitively that jazz and Surrealism are highly compatible with the Beat ethos and that it makes perfect sense for the Beats to draw [...]

Add to the list of great American poets that nobody is talking about. He has been writing quietly for over four decades and gained prominence among the Language school poets. is another masterful accomplishment that further explores his unique form. Since the 1980s, he has been composing copious amounts of syntactically-innovative poetry. It might appear, at first, that nothing has changed since his acclaimed works of the 80s, like At Egypt and , and his current work. The Coolidge poem is easily recognized: at least several pages long, written in medium-length lines, lacking a subject, narrative cohesion and distinct imagistic content, and, most of all, containing a disjointed, fluid syntax that ignores grammatical norms. Like any Language poet, most readers will, at least at first, find Coolidge’s work to be a garbled mess and devoid of lyricism. Most Language poets, like and , deliberately abandon traditional grammatical norms and generic [...]

In the introduction to you refer to your poems as “ghost sonnets.” Why “ghost sonnets?” And what prompted you to (a) select a definitive form, the sonnet, in which to write the poems and (b) to shave a line off the form? I call them “ghost sonnets” because they’re missing the 14th line of a proper sonnet. That is, it’s getting later than it’s ever been and the sonnet is nearly over: do you know where your closure is? Writing poetry for me is a memento mori – the Latin for “remember that you must die” – as well as memento vivere – the Latin for “remember that you must live.” Living and dying in our lapsarian condition, we cannot close read our way out of our crisis of form. With regard to our lapsarian condition and the prospect of doing contemporary close reading, we need to ask: fallen from [...]

Last time, we saw that in his critical introduction to , Gene Tanta wants us to approach his poetry both as immigrant poetry (which means a couple of things) and for its aesthetic value. I postulated that he accomplishes a dialectic between “local” and “universal” through strategies that extend and enrich Deep Image and surrealist poetics. Let’s see how this happens. First, look at how these thirteen-line “ghost-sonnets,” as he calls them, are built: The cavalry is always peering down into the ravine whenever you’re not looking. Someone is burping. Someone is shirt-shinning the author’s coffin. Someone’s nose or finger or toe is playing in the underwater roots downstream. Under the lean and starry sky the fortune-teller took your money, saying: You seem far away, like a cuckoo clock on a sunken ship. If it consoles you, you’ll die on an odd breath or an even breath. Architecturally, this poem [...]

Gene Tanta begins his first book of poems, Unusual Woods, with a 20-page essay that takes shots at T.S. Eliot, Harold Bloom and others. Why does he do this and what is he trying to say? Surrealism and one of its American progeny, , have never been fully accepted. Their stock has taken a dip in the last few decades. But they are still with us, and they shape our contemporary poetry scene arguably as much as any of the other big guns of modern poetry: Whitman, Imagism, Symbolism. What Gene Tanta has done in Unusual Woods is take the project of Deep Image poetry, which is to recuperate and shape myths from the images buried in our collective unconscious, and make it local rather than universal. In particular, he is assembling images from various fragments of his Romanian immigrant “area” of the collective unconscious. (The is of course a [...]

In , Mathews lets the loose cohesion of his poems suggest profundities that seem unlikely coming from often mundane subjects. His poems are cohesive because of formal structure and theme, but it is a deliberately incoherent kind of cohesion. The effect is delicate and oblique, and it is growing on me. Mathews likes wandering off the topic (or, really, having no real topic, no subject of discourse), a familiar strategy of and other New York : For me the identification of trees has always been a puzzle, one not really made easier by consulting the tree book inside my house, where no trees are. I can certainly remember the caramel color of beech leaves in fall, the cropped silhouettes of plan trees along the highway . . . the purpled boughs of Judas trees where no swallow ever perches. But do swallows ever perch? It seems that every swallow I’ve [...]