phd cut-up; a found poem

born the son of a barge man, “I was six
for my first dead bodies”. active in a theatre
of war during 1939-45. the concept of the
parasite – Like a maggot in a turd he hid within
the word. Neil Young talks about Pocahontas. X
feels sad = X feels something, the history of corn
or gold-minding. I am interested in his opinion on
rationality. With my poor English it’s hard to
describe what I am up to: And now I am eager to
prove THAT and show it in detail! Thank you!
Orderly, dispassionate, and rational Europeans.

and & and

an equation’s unusual beauty
borderline tropes and borders
and lines and the curvature and
hooks of glyphs, xs and ys and
the pivots of ‘of’ and ‘and’ or
the equals and equivalences:
a deep feeling for the way we
measure, or don’t measure, and
measure.

in three phases

based on words and blank slots

object had pretty much ceased

‘a punchy line about a vegetable garden.’

never not visual any more than not aesthetic

the part of the piano which holds the

imaginative excursions, wind-swept lovelies

hidden confusions, dialogia. everybody

wants china to fail. critically – good

flour can make good bread, swinging-

and-kissing, chunks of language.

go for your life, my love. Alice safely

sleeps upstairs. nice to see you: Homage

to Ted Berrigan

whitehead cut-up

doubting thomas wished to touch his lord
—tables, trees, stones, etc.—
the sugar as tasting, the stone as touchable:
persuasive adjectives are the controls of ingression &
a control is necessarily the control of progress.
instances of “smell and a pat” reminds a dog
—roughly, the body or part of the body—
of their embeddedness in all-embracing fact,
the testimony of sense or memory, my dream of
hovering, this specious present.

waking hours, poems i – xi

a note on the composition of these poems: last year, nick, fred, pat, george & i started a project in which we each recorded our voice for a full day — our waking hours — & then transcribed all the language we spoke. recently, nick & i used each other’s sound recording & transcriptions to compose a series of poems — both written & sound-based — for a collaborative performance at a night called ’semaphore’, curated by jes tyrell & kathy gray. the following are eleven poems that i wrote, using nick’s language as source material. some syntactical & grammatical liberties were taken, such as altering verb forms & in some instances adding or removing prepositions, but other than that, the language is as-is.

**

i.

but surely – if there’s no democratic resolution
– they’ve got more chances of getting chicks.
bodily memory: you know, just, the continual,
ongoing fucked up-ness of the world. is the issue
with the language, or with what he’s saying?
fuck fuck fuck! fuck! cunt! I always, I always,
sort of, need spinach, really.

ii.

or you tend to always fail. but what do you die of
when you get hung? after my second dark ale, I
push it into that category of being, you know.
you should have that threshold too. ‘shut up with
your nationalism,’ & ‘if you don’t want to, call this
number.’ it’s ridiculous, the absolute archetype of
the rightwing do-si-do. trying to start some
guerilla-vandal thing, a sort of famous new line of
cistern toilets, I think I said, that I, just, by the
end of it, I absolutely despised it.

iii.

and oh, I just crumpled inwards, inwardly,
you know: but it’s been so relentlessly
propagated that everyone else propagates it
as well. you know, and like, you forget it,
you know, because, well, I mean, some people
don’t forget it, sometimes I forget it, but every time
you see him you just recognise – you can’t have a
maverick anymore.

iv.

I’m just wandering around like a spare testicle.
that’s why I don’t have a special pen, because I
never keep a pen for more than five minutes. so
we’re going to have horseradish cream? jesus
christ. we’re going to recolonise an island for the
pièce de résistance. I always look for you up this
alleyway, it’s only natural for it extend across all
of the options (I’ve got a few ASIO connections,
I could make a few calls.) pho is really pronounced
‘fa’.

v.

so are you going to have to go back & confront
these gangsters? yeah, you know, bow ties, yeah.
um, ‘eat my pussy and suck my dick’. I would say
a contingent factor in a dynamic system, because
I’m an irrational being. it’s that manipulation that
successfully manipulates the middle-class liberals.
nice theory, not sure it really works in practice:
it’s much more serious than jerry bruckheimer.

vi.

eggplant & coke? I might go to the pisser.
you know what I like best about being scruffy
& unshaven? we don’t leave our pants in the
lounge room. after you enter the world, you
get a complimentary pronoun: it’s a reverse
tadpole type of thing. headlights turn off when
you turn off the engine, you can’t drink &
talk at the same time.

vii.

a blender goes in handy, when I go home.
you have to change the way it looks to meet
the function, just absolutely critique the shit out
of commercial industrial design. the train line
goes under it, or next to it, & they aren’t automatically
linking to all of the pages. ‘call for writers’ – piss off.
there’s definitely an edith piaf in there, white wine
& chicken stock & then heaps of olive oil. that kind
of, almost, hyper-intimacy that you can get
with animals, & with humans, I suppose.

viii.

he’s worried he’s getting too much oestrogen. this
is something you’ve got to work at, I see torrents
of water running down a road, literally shot by a
sniper. & then some smart arse journalist goes,
you know, ‘oh,’ & ‘gangsta I’m the only authentic
thing in hip-hop.’ feeling like a pork frenzy right
now, I just found one & had my way with it. I
scoured town, for that, for my sick little baby.
yeah, yeah, that’s right – I’m amazing at the gallic
shrug. I don’t mean your dad, I mean the collective
dad. they have to change the direction they’re moving.

ix.

& then lachlan lee throws his burger at you. you
should never underestimate the role of the catholic
church: it’s all fandangle & shit. ‘women are not
goats?’ anyway, so no potato, no capsicum. mute
that shit. get your priorities right. I’m going to burn
some of his books in retaliation. I wouldn’t
burn the Erotica book, though, it’s howard’s
most valuable mythology. I saw jesus in a sugar
beet field. he said, he said, he was out in auburn.

x.

rudd & gillard just played straight into a new
language; I have to say that I can think of
another way of reading it. they go there &
then they leave, & then they start attacking
& being really combative & saying ‘donnez-
moi,’ ‘give me.’ it’s obscene. that’s why need more
people like wet, silly cat, some sort of cartoon
character frown, ball & chain. that’s standard
rhetoric, you know – it is just a small bullet wound.

xi.
it’s a long way between sending people an email
& raiding them (I wasn’t referring to us, baby.)
he stood there & very calmly whispered in his
ear about a copy of machiavelli. we been shakin’
our hips together, using film conventions, sitting
& licking, there’s nothing better. self-satisfied,
smug emotions? I love you too, but I mean, who
are you talking to, what were you expecting? it’s
just a funny sounding combination of two words.

unturned mill quid

below is a sound translation of dylan thomas’s under milkwood. the text was generated by deconstructing the language phonetically and replacing each sound with a linguistically similar one. in general, i tried to keep the cadence as close to the original as possible, so the rhythm of the poetry was not syncopated in an entirely schizophrenic way.

i first became interested in various forms of poetic translation through a conversation connecting tim, nick, charles bernstein’s blog and bp nichols’ translations of apollinaire a few months ago. my own ignorance of a second language means that any discussion of translation in strictly linguistic terms (that is, the transfer of meaning across the delicate membranes of different languages) is fixed on the limits of language and the impossibilities of smooth transfers. i am seduced by the strange hiccups and false impressions that translated poetics collects, and yet my seduction is one fraught with the semantic dilemmas of edges and deadends; i am not privy to the joke of translation.

                                               

to beg in the begging ninny.

it is prim, moonly slight, in this mauled down, styleless and bubbling-black, the coddled treats eye lent and the humped, courtesan rabbi swab limping in visible down to this lobe act, slow, black, crow be lack, fish-in-boat-bob-in-sea. the houses are blinders’ moles (though moles sea fan to night in these mounting, velveted ingles) orbit lined as cap tan cat therein the muff-led mid-dell by the plum pan the tao ink lock, this chops in mornay, the well fare whore in widows’ wee. and all the peep hole of the lull dance dumb floundered town arse leaking now.

hush, the bay bees arse leaking, theft armours, theft ishtars, theft raids man and penchant honours, cob blah, skew latina, post-man and pleb lick hand, the under take her and the fanned sea woman, drunk art, dress may cur, pre-churl, polly eats men, the webfoot cock-or-woman and the tidal waves. yum girls lie bedhead oft or gliding dreams, with rims of truffaut, brides made it by glow-worms down the island of the orgasm-splaying pud. the boys are adream in wick kid or of the buck in ranches of the knight and the jolly podgy dizzy. and the anne forthright stat chews of the whores leap in the feels, and the cows in the baiza, and the dogged welt-nosed yards; and the cat snap in the slant corns, or, lopes lie, streak in and need ling, on the wonky loud of thoreau.

it isn’t item, in the child squad chapped all, hemingway, in bonhomie and roach and bombastic lactic, butters fly choking her and boob place bone, coffee in like nanny gloats, suck in mine toes, forty-wind-king have a lewd jar; ninth in foreplay, quiet as a donkey vote. it is tonight in donkey’s treat, trotting side-bent, with seaweed honest spoofs, a long the cock-led cobblers, past curt tanned firm pot, sex and trinidad, harmed moan on him, holy dress code, water! cull her!, dumb by ham, china dog and rosy thin tea cladded. it isn’t right, readying a nun babeless.

only you can near the howlers leaping in the streams in the slowed ear-salt and silage stack, band-aid genocide. only yucatán sea, in the bland dead bedabble, the tomes and petty soaps over the tableaux over the cherished, the lugs and bearskins, the grasses of tee-hee, vow shout snot onto war, and the yell ‘oh!’, indicative bird-watching pick sores of the dead. from where you are, you candy their drear.

cap tan cat, the refined by tea cap tan, arse leak in his spunk in the she-spelled, shit-in-bottomed, shit-shake, beast cabaret of scooped nervous dreams of never succeed as a knee that swan-necked the dicks of his s.s. glib-belly smelling over the bed-hogs and german-fish slipstream sump king him down sultan speak into the gravy duck where fiscal blighting out and needle him down to his whisper, and the lawn drones narcissists factotum.

now be kind, the eye-strain secretions of the dramas in these treats pocked to sleet by the sea, see the tit clits and topshelf scurvy, bogs and mutton chops, rags and boners, gash and rhinos and can stuff and male pairings, sore liver and snuffle aches and molten fair thighs of drains, the recast prats and she-males and fistbones, wail spruce and munchausen and some more salt fried isis pup by the hip propensity.

the principle alley of this guy ripens now, oh! her grin ill! into sprig mauling locked and croaked and bawling. hoop pulls the downfall bellhop but bland cap tan cat? won by one, the sleekest are wrung out of sleet this young mauling a severe mauling. and spoon usual spree the chimpanzee’s low upflung snow as cap tan cat, in say lord scrap and sebums, anoints us to day with his loud ghetto-bed bell.

now fry in pains pit, cuddle sand cats per inch kit chains. the down-smells of spreed weed and bread clasp all the weighed-down from pay-for-view, where missus sprogmore pilchard, in smog and turbine, brig-bosomed to enrage the dusk, pricks at her parched kiss head and slips lemming-brine tea.

all overdone, babe fleas and old hen arc leaned and put into their brokendown rams and weened onto the sun-split cock-led cop-bled or out into the black shards under the dance in udder-coughs, and deft. a babel chrysler. no says are swiped, head spic, heck owned, poor scrub dead, ear spocked, and the chilled wrench reeled oftens cool. stirrupy old in the posed offers. a card writhes demarcate, fool of owls and anathema. milked yearns tanned at cordon nation caw nerve like shawls ill bird pole eat man. andes, eating at theo penny widow obscure house, bligh cap tan catheters easel the mourning of that own.