“They say failure is rookie speech, Gabbie, but that’s the best part of the book.” Two groups of poetic fabric samples and notes on construction.
Rookies
They say failure is rookie speech, Gabbie, but that’s the best part of the book.
Perhaps it’s difficult to assess what a bookish temper might do for Donald; are we ever so temperate?
Consider Becky while she rages, held ever hostage to invention!
Like a sneak thief in a treat factory, Enid pierces the bracelet of commentary with adequate quittance, collecting everything but herself.
Allow Augustine her Stockholm Syndrome, that petite destine!
Better than Vincent, who forever offers his arpeggiated condolences to a fait accompli.
But isn’t it just so difficult when such an idea grouses, might snort that Iben, being equally rhetorical and constituitive.
Though it’s Christo’s professional eroticism that yielded as frequently to a practiced mossiness.
Like a horse or fern, for instance, Nolan’s low-keyed commitment is a usual talent.
Yet how now confidence as Quintin mislays the shattering propositions of childhood.
Margot gets a kind of buzzy little feeling one might call “prospecting,” like a mortgage on a loose tooth.
Notwithstanding Cyril’s glad puffiness, he grows otherwise a heath about the heart.
See Patience slip into her inner office, as though slipping into a small city in a smaller way.
Canadian real estate seemed dreamish to Bobby, yet he wakes up a video slave to the chinless fabu.
Mural upon mural of tiny lassies would be fine, Cassiday, if only you didn’t call them “My Own Private Vietnam.”
Elsewhere Irwin sweats profusely, rapping about his elusive “decision-support system.”
Come on, Pinky, who doesn’t want to be the inventory bubba?
Harvey might have earned his name, were he other than mostly invisible.
Outside of the umpire fetish, was there ever anything really remarkable about Fabienne?
Ah, a successful pain distributor...I thought we were talking about Sidney.
Unhappily Karla is often snookered by opposites.
But why is Gaston of all people trapped in this palooka-chump dialectic?
It’s not that calculus that puzzles Ernie––he’s in a parking orbit around mama’s expectorate.
Whereas noble Vicki has placed her childish parts in the Box of Trial, the spookiest part is when she shakes it and, phantom-like, whistles.
Sterling also thinks himself dramatic, but is a shrimp feud dramatic?
Consider Becky while she rages, held ever hostage to invention!
Meanwhile the gate is open, still Cupid feels small.
Why not be envious of the novel, Gramercy, be envious of the novel!
While Walter admits to nothing shy of demolition in this life, he appears mean and short, a styrofoam cup in the infirmary.
Not to suggest it’s deliberate, but Havelock comes on with all the frippery of a weatherman.
And Manny with his nervy gerunds––what typical grammarian rubbernecking.
Old age is only so notional for Olaf before he demands discrete detail, like a puff cereal.
But why is Gaston of all people trapped in this palooka-chump dialectic?
We may forgive Dolly however this adherence to the barren, revising as she always is that “moral language.”
Oh Sweet bunker days with the spyboys, those neato frame-ups and countless directives, they could never update Archer to the charmlessness of their glycerine caplets.
What a perilous holiday for an office minx like Harriet!
It’s a tad bizarre, Gerald, this obsession with the puppet-sized little fellow.
Better than Vincent, who frequently offers his arpeggiated condolences to a fait accompli.
With a poof it’s sleep all over again for Jasmine.
As stud leech of the manic set, Berthold owls up as the last, living bachelor, his mean shortwave trued to the lunar crescent.
Try crying, Morty.
Modest the sausage life of young Clifton, encaulked as it is with a medullary compromise.
Meanwhile the gate is open, still Cupid feels small.
Pave over your anguish, Gavin, let a man of god kiss your lips!
Life the fetlock, Edith thought, but pranks overtake one, and a mole in a wimple stepped off the porch.
There’s nothing metaphorical about a corny chase sequence, but there’s Dickie huffing away at that dirty trolley bit again.
It’s grueling to watch Karen wake up to spiritual merchandising like a mechanical owl in the material darkness.
Lest we forget Mervyn in his field, cronking like a witchbird on a stump to all what audience––bellflowers bursting?
Nothing steers the chorus sour more that Varnie’s typical stud retrieval devices.
Tiny Nerval––everybody’s blimpie or paralepsis of the party?
It was not your flying machine they despised, Tito, it was those words again and again: “my humble villagers.”
It’s not that calculus that puzzles Ernie—he’s in a parking orbit around mama’s expectorate.
What about this, Leonard, this, does this feel good?
Tell me not in mournful numbers the measure of Dorothy’s snitch rapport.
We may forgive Dolly however this adherence to the barren, revising as she always is that “moral language.”
Dry dry the crepitations of that wandering heart, oh you Bessie!
Maybe Avery too is hollering out his competent shell.
Yikes, Perry!
There Chloe has lost her mount, and left fingering the gloam like an unlettered postman.
Gimp tonic, stalled potboiler, call it what you like Humphrey, the “hopeful” sequence is over.
Pave over your anguish, Gavin, let a man of god kiss your lips!
Where fore aught any man knows lies the provenance of this fatal slalom, yet Gracie plays still the king penguin.
Go watch Candice hike her skirt in that parliament of false distances.
You see, Jolie subjects a clumsy force to a vagrant interest, which is plenty indeed.
What about this, Leonard, this, does this feel good?
You are exactly what I’m looking for, Polly, only weepier.
Unhappily Karla is often snookered by opposites.
Her luck, young Hester, was such small ears as’d grow parallax to auntie’s spumy grief.
Open the tellurian sleeve to Wilma, her belle epoque gone down the dark.
“The world is a gelatin reluctant” is no real thesis, Cynthia, despite the emotional renewal attending that pastry punk and his pushy magazine.
Marisol, so reckless to play the connoisseur when the merest doodle destroys you.
Yet how now confidence as Quintin mislays the shattering propositions of childhood.
All Tobin’s thoughts were children of the first venter, though now we see them as squatters on a piece of toast.
Hattie draws a chalk line between fantasy and disappointment—and what to do with such lines!
With a poof it’s sleep all over again for Jasmine.
He was a find, this Maxwell character, though in attempting to describe him I get the wholesale fidgets.
His private middle slushes with the tenderness of a dancing client, but look, Moritz is going to speak!
Yikes, Perry!
A little feline distemper and acid Rhonda throws fiction out the window.
There was nothing to see in the barber’s fun fort anyway, Uma.
Orson’s on stammer patrol, convinced even valor’s an idiom.
But Lewis, who’ll trade a coupon for a face in freshwater if it’s just your dream patsy?
That can’t be Freddy.
It’s just a tremor, Koko, don’t exaggerate.
Consider Becky while she rages, held ever hostage to invention!
Shut your eyes Samuel, it’s not for the brave that music begins.
Images 1–2: Details from Charlie Roberts, Untitled #2, 2006, watercolor on paper. Images 3–7: Details from Charlie Roberts, Untitled, 2005, watercolor on paper. All images courtesy Richard Heller Gallery.
Didactic Nickelodeon
This is chronicle, not verse, or we reason chaw. If one began to name, then growth is past and world not introduction, but done pastiche. And music is the same.
This is music the same. If the staff is catabolic, daring hunts a reclamation among the organs of Corti, though courting resembles and makes a music in itself.
This is an unnatural beginning, a-tum tum tum. Some people have raised the objection, “Oh, well, you expected to meet your friend and so you dreamed you did. That’s all.” But if expectation is to explain the experience, then what of the handsome snooper, my love in durance vile.
This is a counterfeit illustration, which must be a relief, given our sadness at understanding. Were it a best effort, there’d be tears demounting hopes and ladders thrown off the dirigible.
This is larger, more uniform, and reproducible. Human. Crystal. Hanging drop. If thought has its share, perhaps a humor has its inventory. The reservoirs are stable in these solutions.
This is an unforeseeable dilemma: brain on the left, wig on the right. Wig, wig, brain. Brain, wig. Wig, brain. Now you try it.
This is some idea, kerpow.
This is the transparency of the sponge. While a dated example, it continues to surprise, as it catalogues no idea of water, being awestruck by its own position. One would like to obviate the question of absorption, but this is where the question itself holds court. The author is anonymous.
This is a secret gone out from an animal once thought incapable of it. Where in another century pelicans maybe iconic, this withy species leaves nary a footprint. Though you try pressing lost hair into a stone!
This is something to believe in, or, on second thought, perhaps there are three or four altogether. More than sixteen and the estate is doubtlessly hoodwinked, should one pay heed to sequence.
This is the swoosh the liar makes divested of his location. He claims to follow a strange arrow leading out of that dialectic which names him, but one gets the point prior to the explanation.
This is a demonstrative faugh. “Faugh,” faugh! The others are insubstantial.
This is punked out, I don’t know what to say. Hold a small glass up to the light and register an ash flake or a prism and light means everything of a sudden. So am I light to please.
This is pushing the page along, the time along, fearing an adequate speech. The wire is less high than the timely speakable than the quiet burlesque.
This is twice-told a merman, which is to say anachronistically, or at least partly so, while perhaps it is we that is surpassed in specie, to coin a copulative invention. The improbable nameplate might read: “fishing for complements.”
This is seen through an anamorphic technique, though these are not the original instructions, which ostensibly have been tucked beneath the page by the specularii at issue. The image in relief displays a small plump genie in a hound’s-tooth jacket, who busily steams an envelope that we assume contains significant information.
This is the last performance, won’t we agree? Rather there is nothing to postpone it, to sit dumb where the waters are deep, and waters are ever so deep deep.
This is the object of a prior experiment, the original quanta of which are now lost. If you are the least bit photosensitive, you may empathize with the poor beast who could not convince the captors of his native powers of extramission. The cat, as one reflects on it, nearly drowned. But the doubt has survived one hundred and ninety-two years to this day.
This is a pregnant analysand, albeit heavily pixilated. Apropros of the delivery, one assumes an abscessed sobriety with a nod to the arcade.
This is the mother of all stunts. When pronounced without apical pressure, the patter conceals the apprentice. The procedure is rigid with a tendency toward the baroque, though it is often reduced to a simple exercise in passing, inasmuch as it might yield a clever handshake between Kupka and Lobatchevsky. If the breath too can be detached and maintained as an appendix, the function will not besmirch the device.
This is the sound of the escogriffe entering our natural language. But why release the rascal from the beach, where he liberally depicts so lovely in his [pah-rade] best? Every proud figment deserves a sexual misadventure.
This is “the homophonous descent towards cover,” with all its terrible exactions, a reminder still of the portliness of accident. A red leaf burns, a blue star twinks. And beautiful availability, it peals and pains at once.
This prior to mnemonic practice, yet however retains a vestige of an earlier sequence. Now there is a future circle, which, if followed in a programmatic fashion, reveals a marked colorblindness.
This is Deaf, the vandal.
This is capital afterglow. What is a proven progress, anyway? Edict before speech before music. Postman takes in pastrami, knows infinite redress.
This is the this that is, following apparent an apologue drawn out from distant cousins. The secret itself was that the body was kept in Dalton’s closet.
This is one part bird, one part lime. But also something to consider. From a certain angle it suggests sweetness, though it often meets a funny death. It is the middle of the poem.
All images: Jess, from “Jess’s Didactic Nickelodeon, Series Two, ‘The Guardian Angels’ Guidebook,’” 1955, 37 collages. Courtesy Odyssia Gallery, NY. On view in the traveling exhibition “Jess: To and From the Printed Page,” organized by iCI (Independent Curators International), NY.
Notes on Construction
The form of these literary product trials is Pleiadean, the only constant being the inventory, repertory, or catalogue format, which constellates small, notable works. These are items, stuffs, prototypes, goods, content that aspires to a specification. I think of
item in its originary sense of a finding, or foundling, perhaps. (The whole project of literary product trials assumes a finding and a foundling are essentially the same thing.)
The two Pleiadean works featured here, themselves a sampling from a larger cluster, are essentially unbounded inventories of poetic fabric samples. They resemble poems but are more rightly collections of literary material, fungible, with occasional repetitions.
“Rookies” stages the anticipated failure of characters whose bookish emotions make them poorly suited to vernacular literature, however desperate they may be for audition or adoption.
“Didactic Nickelodeon” collects exophoric particulars. Assuming the high Victorian of the Jess originals as a given, but also independently asserting from nothing
in particular, they are like FLOR tiles for a unrealized project home from
Futureways, or other would-be digests dedicated to novel species deployment: Exoflora!
As fabric samples, I encourage other artists to “subscribe,” or mark them, as signatories and use them as open-source content to other ends. The inventories will grow over time, and there’s no assurance of version control. The best nonliterary model here is probably library music, and taken as such, this assumes literature to be chiefly an optimization problem that demands a maximal number of source alternatives.
On the other hand, taken as literature, they arrive before and after Ponge’s project of “a description-definition-literary artwork.” Before, as they find a mutual affine in Belleau’s “Petites Inventions”: the lapidary and museological aspects, as well as the late form of an “open cluster,” like the Pleiades. After, in that they seek less to create a greater (or “supreme”) fiction from domestic findings, and more to promote fictions themselves worthy of domestication.
But they are not intended primarily to be taken as literature. They are intended to be taken for it. And do feel free.
