Vote!

I voted yesterday, and I’m proud of that fact. There are many who say it is shovelling sand against the sea. Still others see refusal to cast a vote as a vote for “none of the above.” I don’t agree with either opinion, and to those who vote for “none of the above,” unless you have walked the polling station and marked “none of the above,” I call you lazy. Furthermore if you refuse to vote as a protest, or if you believe voting is futile, then refuse publicly and vociferously to pay your taxes. Be jailed for your belief. Or do something less drastic, but do something. If my vote is nothing, then your nothing is less.
        Here are a few of my favorite quotations that seem especially apposite to this election.

“Those willing to give up a little liberty for a little security deserve neither security nor liberty.”
—Benjamin Franklin

“Great is truth, but still greater is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects, propagandists have influenced public opinion much more effectively than they could have done by the most eloquent denunciations.”
—Aldous Huxley

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free... it expects what never was and never will be.”
—Thomas Jefferson

“One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.”
—Plato

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”
—Dwight D. Eisenhower

“Suppose someone, to annoy, Provokes you to do some evil act. Why allow anger to arise and thus Do exactly as he wants you to do? If you get angry Then maybe he will suffer, maybe not. But by feeling anger yourself You certainly do suffer.” “For in this world, Hatred is never appeased by more hatred; It is love that conquers hatred. This is an eternal law.”
—Buddha

“While there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”
—Eugene Debs

“Feelings are a bitch.”
—Richard Pryor

“As for accomplishments, I just did what I had to do as things came along.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt

A Poetry Lab, week 7

This week our assignment in the Poetry Lab was to read Charles Olson’s “Projective Verse” and write poems based on our understanding of its principles. In class I was told by one student that the idea of Olson’s essay was that the poetic line/page should be a guide to the reading and that this page should be somehow commensurate with our body and our breath. Another student interpreted Olson’s message to be that “the rhythm of it coming out should be the rhythm of your poem.”
        Here are two of the poems produced from this exercise. I have rendered the second poem as best I can with my limited HTML skills.

Autumn
—Derek O.

The trees burst into flame

Each
Leaf,

A burning cinder

Falling to the ground,

Torrential fire from the sky

The wind
Churns

Crunching waves of
Smoldering flame

Red
&Yellow
& Orange

The tide of
        Burning,
                Crisp,
                 Ash
Rolls over
The open fields of grass
Dances through
The busy streets
Swirls upon
The sidewalks and the alleyways
Gathers in
        The corners
                 And
                 Bases of wind-buffeted walls

Untitled
—Kassia L.
I come and I go,
—and leave no mem'ry at the
———————————door
—————i come and i go
and trail no whispers to show
————the space I live, and
—it seems to be only a moment
i live in. touch only momentarily
others, and
have only a moment to
—speak my piece. keep your
peace, in eyes, —well i would stay
———nowhere if there were room
—————————on the boxcar.
all the uninhabited spots are settled
and unsafe
and all there is to know is known before me.
—i could repeat prose forever
only
——once more after too many.
———but in i, each new face is
———————————empty,
trading hollow for photograph.
————falter up the difference
—————coming up like stairs—
————————————try harder.
—when you have found me once,
then let us begin.
—then let us talk of experience,
and what is to be seen in
—this corner in
this bubble on
—this street.
————————but your red shirt
——————doesn't come here and
————————am i gone already?
your wide mouth
doesn't speak here,
—but i can pretend to— here.
yes,
—i come and i go
but the women do not speak
of me
—and i have a last request:
if we would come and
we would go,
and leave no mem'ry at the door
—would the space smile——at
ellipsis, synchronicity?
—and open deep in the south seas,
waves splashing at the door
tide comes and
—time goes and
——if you have found me once,
———————then let us begin.

My Lab Assignment

Here are two short poems I wrote for our assignment this week in the Poetry Lab. In the first I was working toward three beats per line, and in the second, four. I cheated, naturally.

A Little Poem for Gray
mountain of man
gray huge expanse
jocular quiddities of gray
where clouds unmask
an twinkling

Nowhere Fast
Where you goin anyway
geographic center Friday
Des Moines Sunday
like that and Sunday
so it’s ten double it

For this week, we were to consider the poem as a visual object (given that Barrett Watten was here speaking on ekphrasis). We were assigned to find and indicate the strong stresses in a poem from last week. Our discussion of the poems for this week addressed the sorts of decisions made when you are arranging a poem in a visual field. Some poems were more readerly than others—a term I have not yet introduced in the class but which I mean here in Barthes’s sense. I am reproducing there the two that were the most successful visual objects.
        The first of these is a concrete poem “Attire,” and the second of these is untitled. You can clicken them to bigify.


As visual objects, I think these are both quite successful. In each case the form also invites more possibilities. For example it seems to me that the dress could change shape; the words could change; there could be a series and a discussion of the forms of dresses and the bodies they shape and the words that compose and shape both.
        The poem beginning goddamn reminds me of some of Schwitters’s Bildgedichte (“painting poems”) in its graceful use of page space.


Schwitters. AO-Gedicht, Gesetztes Gedicht, S-S Gedicht

This untitled “goddamn” poem is pretty funny. It complains of ink, yet makes much of ink; it despairs and then finds hope in the “PEN OVER PRINCIPLE,” yet it is not written with a pen. The metaphorical and the mechanical/material clash in the “indirect punching of these keys.” The punching seems as much a punch with a fist as with a finger, perhaps giving the keys the finger.

Next week you will see results of my request to my students to write poems with a predetermined rhythm.