shallow water cup-up, after brennan & for motion

ending in unnavigable mud – clean white sand, grayish black
mudslides and marsh-slides, sea marks are landmarks, trees
washed south from novia scotia. a double negative, or at least
an inverted syntax. specifically, the word ‘wrack’
is stranded seaweed. everything afloat not owned, jettisoned.
a skiff in the nineteen-sixties, sketchy whites drawn up on a flank.
in etymology, a wild oat or plum, preserved in brine.
use a noun as a verb, like shakespeare: skiff as verb, brown as verb,
white as verb, milk as verb, skeg. “white-ash breeze,” with two
syllables, bo and ah. o, see how she schoons, a schooner let her be!
into sandbanks, or worse, acts of god slam through guzzles and
into gutters. mosquitoes hatch in stagnant ditches, bent grass or
something sinister. sods and brush, kayaks and canoes. gleaming
spits or the marks left by a clam-rake, a genius, so to speak,
from sauntering.

on miller, and lust, and aimlessness

It’s certainly not the same as sitting at a rough notebook in Paris, but in all truth I do not believe in nostalgia so I won’t dwell in some non-memory. I am sitting at a desk as I do every day, opened to the office-tones of a soft document, typing, erasing and retyping words.

There’s a few things I need to write: a progress report, most pressingly, though my sense of ‘progress’ is unsuitably abstract at the moment. A redraft of an article that has been deemed ‘inappropriate’ to its readership (a task unappealing, to say the least). A skeleton of a chapter, most likely on the relationship between experience and experimentalism. Perhaps some more notes on Stein, or science, or sense-perception. Or perhaps a weighty missive to my friends now living in Port Moresby.

Yet my overwhelming desire is to sit in this space and write aimlessly.

I also need to write a piece about Henry Miller. I am uncertain what the piece will look or sound like. I am, by no means, a performance poet. A collage is what appeals to me, but they have uncertain rhythms. You cannot anticipate a collage. Miller spent a lot of time sitting and writing, and it seemed to make him angry. I could sit here for several hours and think enough to get angry, too. Most things make me angry if I pay enough attention to them.

But Miller was a man of three things: a brain, a groin and a gut. In his language, philosophy (it’s actually quite close to Bergson’s metaphysics, or ‘intuition’) fulfils similar bodily desires as food and sex. And food and sex – one often following the other – are talked about as sudden and wonderful gifts, rather than mundane quotidian expectations. A meal must never be taken for granted, nor a passionate encounter. Likewise, lucid thought is a precious gift to oneself. I have a deep sense of empathy for Miller’s triangular sensual materialism. It makes sense that letter-writing is so attractive to him: letters are the place to try out ideas, to describe lovingly the details of meals eaten and longed for, and to extrapolate lust. When written in a letter, a compendium of bodily pleasure is a noble, good thing.

how to do words with things

read my review of ‘how to do words with things’ by patrick jones and peter o’mara. if you can’t tell by my 3000-gushing-words, i love the book and i recommend it to everyone.