Poetry
for Stan Brakhage
“…..the equivalent of many behaviors…” - Brakhage
( a poem in one long take based in part on the words of Stan Brakhage from the 1975 interview The Seen published by Zephyrus Press )
the seen urgently enough a personal state slumped foward like a long day
out the watery window a milky anticipation moves thru accelerated nite
( …like a train …. )
myth of text soundless paint & its equivalents breath of friend & lover
rain that is not wet summer’s never coming & spring
hasn’t arrived
all day long wind pushes watery window east moving clouds toward another eventuality
as the sky passes thru my hand jerkily as the motion of a tripping lens
random memory one frame for example blinded clicking waiting
the child’s face as big as a SUN sucks @ evening’s breast
descending crystal of everchanging SHADOW & LIGHT
falls like the breakage of wind upon the climber’s back
falls like a tray of ash upon a field of stars & dogs & barely audible men
Men who have just begun to speak speak in volumes but have little to say
barely having acquired the ALEPH of Life sound & limitation
quivering dancing glass
they speak listening to their own hearts but barely hearing
skin pounding in the ear like the drum of the world a final scream
but who there to absorb it? we listen to ourselves too much & not
enough symbol there like name merciless insistence
reforming habits of EGOS
the MUSIC is in the silence & the movement exhausted & standing in the way of MYSELF
metaphored the images expand & change & all things cycle again
& the sky shifts again
& the climber’s limbs grow heavy
as the words come gentler
& the symphony ends
titles appear squiggled the film disappears
what will last is this not moonlight but mystery poetry & instruction
the name disappears
& what will last is…………………blurred
steve dalachinsky nyc 5/03
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
Women in Concrete Poetry 1959–1979
By Megan N. LibertyNOV 2020 | Art Books
This addendum to the history of concrete poetry makes evident the connections between concrete poetry and artist books. Chance visual connections between the diverse works included make visible the materiality of language, the unifying component of concrete poetry.
Surrealist Collaboration: Poetry, Art, Literature, Ingenuity and Life Itself
By Mary Ann CawsFEB 2022 | ArtSeen
A stupendous exhibit. I won’t put an exclamation point there, for that punctuation would be repeated, excessively. Here is a fine example of what a gallery can do in an exhibition if the focus is on a specific kind of thing, in this case on an historic collective and collaborative art-making activity, repeated differently as an off and on ritual event.
The Biography of a Great Poetry
By Ron HorningMAY 2022 | Books
While the Collected Poems is retrospective, printing the poems Auden wanted as he wanted them by the time of his death, the Princeton Poems, exhilaratingly prospective, prints the poems as they first appeared in individual books, recreating Auden’s poetic development as it actually happened from 1928 to 1972, including many poems later eliminated, plus the poems from the posthumous Thank You, Fog.
Waking From the Dream of Mark Leidner’s Poetry
By Bianca StoneJUNE 2021 | Books
The title of Mark Leidner’s new gorgeously made book Returning the Sword to the Stone is apt. Like a reverse Arthur Pendragon, we decide not to go for the holy grail, not to accept our righteous lineage, and maybe not to pursue a noble quest in human development but stay home and continue “whipping ourselves with Christmas lights” and theorizing about why we do it. We’re considering our crazy human condition and laughing at our own limited idea of ourselves.
