Tag Archive: experimental poetry


Civilization Fund (3 U.S. Stat 516)

Filed under: History, Postmodern — 80 Comments
July 28, 2012

‘to introduce among them the habits and arts of civilization’

FADE IN:

Scene 1 EXT. DENVER, COLORADO (1864) – DAY – ESTABLISHING

BLACK KETTLE CHEYENNE CHIEF (Voice Over)
. . . we came to the conclusion to make peace with you . . .
we want true news from you in return . . .

Scene 2 INT. MAYOR’S OFFICE – DENVER, COLORADO – NIGHT

MAYOR WYNKOOP to MESSENGER
We’ll release our prisoners in exchange for the release of theirs
tell Black Kettle’s Cheyenne and Left Hand’s Arapaho bands
to go to Fort Lyon and camp 40 miles outside at Sand Creek
there they’ll be under the protection of the United States troops

Scene 3 INT. FORT LYONS, COLORADO – DAY

CLOSE ANGLE ON COL. JOHN MILTON CHIVINGTON
Damn any man who sympathizes with Indians
I have come to kill Indians, and
I believe it is right and honorable to use any means
under God’s heaven to kill Indians

Scene 4 EXT. ENCAMPMENT OUTSIDE SAND CREEK, COLORADO – NIGHT

The camp is full of soldiers drinking heavily and celebrating the victory to come

CAPTAIN SILAS S. SOULE
He means to attack a peaceful settlement
all to further his political ambitions
LIEUTENANT JAMES D. CANNON
He risks court-marshall
what are we going to do?
CAPTAIN SILAS S. SOULE
Refuse to let our companies join in
I don’t see any other way

Scene 5 EXT. SAND CREEK, COLORADO – DAY

MONTAGE:

A) Bodies are strewn through the creek and along the banks
B) Women, children, and elderly are clearly among the dead or dying
C) Cannons have been used against the civilian population
D) Small bands of soldiers are shooting unarmed people pleading for their lives
E) The tribes horses are either dead or let loose
F) CHIVINGTON’S soldiers are looting the gifts given to the tribes in the peace treaty
G) LIEUTENANT JAMES D. CANNON and CAPTAIN SILAS S. SOULE
return to the white encampment

END MONTAGE

Scene 6 EXT. SAND CREEK – DAY

Several days have passed,
the soldiers have left
the survivors have fled

CAPTAIN SILAS S. SOULE (Voice Over)
The massacre lasted six or eight hours (beat)
it was hard to see little children on their knees having
their brains beat out by men professing to be civilized (beat)
they were all horribly mutilated . . .

Scene 7 INT. CONGRESSIONAL HEARING – DAY

LIEUTENANT JAMES D. CANNON
Men, women, and children’s privates cut out
I heard numerous incidents in which men had cut out
the private parts of women and stretched them
over their saddle-bows and hats . . .

No charges were ever brought against any soldier

Scene 8 EXT. PRISON YARD, FORT MARION, FLORIDA – DAY

RICHARD PRATT (Prison Commander) to HARRIET BEECHER STOWE
The end to be gained is the complete civilization of the Indian
his absorption into our national life (beat)
to lose his identity as such (beat)
the sooner all tribal relations are broken up
the sooner he loses all his Indian ways
even his language, the better it will be
for him and the government

Scene 9 INT. PRISON SCHOOL, FORT MARION, FLORIDA (late 1870s) – DAY

MAKING MEDICINE (CHEYENNE WARRIOR) now DAVID PENDLETON OAKERHATER
You remember when I led you out to war
I went first, and what I told you was true
Now I have been away to the East
I have learned about another captain
the Lord Jesus Christ, and he is my leader
He goes first, and all he tells me is true
I come back to my people to tell you
go with me now in this new road
a war that makes all for peace
where we never have only victory . . .

Scene 10 INT. MISSION SCHOOL, INDIAN TERRITORY, OKLAHOMA – DAY

Indian children are learning English

OAKERHATER, an ordained priest, died in 1931
due to efforts by the Oklahoma Council on Indian Ministries
he was named a saint of the Episcopal Church in 1985

FADE OUT:

Cheyenne was a name given to the tribe
by the French from the word meaning dog
the actual names of the tribes
Só’taeo’o and Tsétsêhéstâhese
mean ‘Human Beings’

PSALM 23 (Translated into the Cheyenne Language) Watch the video to hear it read.
1. Tsenetästs nähane-atämistowinots, howähe nätsää-hoehätsto.
2. Täss näoh˙che ofshemäne tsishekooits; täss näoche-naaväotseä tsehish-hakoomoaäts.
3. Epavomoh˙tämän nämätäsoomä: näoh˙che-naaväotseä mayo tseh˙änowewostäne-havistowits havitof.
4. Haaha! homäsowitto täss näämin tseh˙owaooistä näastots tseh˙vaato nämissääato howähe hävs; otä net’ savioh-tsime stoh˙to nähiststähäo.
5. Nenestä-ahän täh˙amissistots mäato nävaämeo: nämakon nevishhinin’ amowe ämskavä näpavatänoh˙tots aha-iotomohin.
6. Onissyomitto pavatsistätots nä shevätstästots nätshoeoe oishavä tsehwostänahivitto: nä-tseavhäs Tsenetätsiss himhiyon äenitto.

Psalm 23
New International Version (NIV)
A psalm of David.
1 The LORD is my shepherd, I lack nothing.
2 He makes me lie down in green pastures,
he leads me beside quiet waters,
3 he refreshes my soul.
He guides me along the right paths
for his name’s sake.
4 Even though I walk
through the valley of the shadow of death
I will fear no evil,
for you are with me;
your rod and your staff,
they comfort me.
5 You prepare a table before me
in the presence of my enemies.
You anoint my head with oil;
my cup overflows.
6 Surely your goodness and love will follow me
all the days of my life,
and I will dwell in the house of the LORD
forever.

THE END

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Perfect Secrecy (Deep Hypnosis Rewrite)

Filed under: Allegory, History, Mathematics, Personal, Philosophy, Postmodern — 44 Comments
July 5, 2012

In deep hypnosis the subject,
military or civilian,
can be given a message to be
delivered to say Colonel X in Berlin.

I found myself somewhere
at the edge of the known earth
in an age when there is nowhere left to hide
for you it was always a game
you never think I remember
but the blunt force trauma
entered my mind all twisted,
as a matter of survival

The subject may then be sent to Berlin
on any perfectly routine assignment.
The message will be perfectly safe
and will be delivered to the proper person because…

Your missive arrives
in that cryptographic mind
geography’s incomprehensibility
impossible to decipher
a one-time pad on a sheet of nitrocellulose
it burns instantaneously, leaving small ash

a. the subject will have no memory whatsoever
in the waking state as to the nature
and contents of the message.

A truly random sequence of letters
trick of modular addition
only I got lost in the ciphertext
mistaking it for meaning
meta-language to transcend what came before

b. it can be arranged that the subject
will have no knowledge of ever
having been hypnotized.

A tortuous inculcation
using proximity and shame
more like a rearrangement
an anagram, a twisted joke

c. it can be arranged that no one
beside Colonel X in Berlin
can hypnotize the subject
and recover the message.

A spiritual starving
that hollows me out from the inside
even after all this time
with this great distance
it is a violence that wrenches free
dissociates, disembodies, a disease

He will never under any circumstances
by a slip of the tongue divulge the true nature
of his mission for the very simple reason
that he has no conscious knowledge of
what that mission may be. He is merely
going on a routine replacement…
This will be his story and the story which he believes.

A priori probability is equivocated to
a posteriori where the entropy of plaintext
equals the conditional entropy
of the plaintext given in the ciphertext C
you’ll begin to see where I derailed the equation

Secondly, if by any chance he is picked up
through a leakage of information from other sources
the message is safe. No amount of third degree
tactics can pry it loose, for he simply does not
have it in his conscious mind.

All that I have is this legacy of ashes
an unbreakable code
shielding you from your crimes
infinite computing no adversary
for the tangled traumas obscured in my mind

A specific counterintelligence technique
could be used against enemy agents…
I will take a number of men and will establish
in them through the use of hypnotism
the condition of split personality.

In a conventional symmetric encryption algorithm
complex patterns of substitutions and transpositions
these places dance to orient me to the key
I begin to see the risks

Consciously they will be ardent Communists,
fanatical adherents to the party line,
ready and eager to submit to any discipline
which the party may prescribe. Unconsciously
they will be loyal Americans just as grimly
determined to thwart the Communists
at every turn in the road.

Data remanence is such a continual problem
simplest overwrite technique
write the same data everywhere
(often just a pattern of zeros)
a way to be nothing/nullify feeling

This sounds unbelievable,
but I assure you it will work.

Poetry is a cipher but it isn’t known whether
there’s a cryptanalytic procedure
which can reverse these transmutations
mathematics may be my undoing

While I’m mourning what cannot be recovered
security continually assures me that this technique
is proven to provide the perfect secrecy

Your hypothetical counter spy…
will not disclose his true role for the very simple reason
that he cannot… if through some leakage,
he is suspected of being an informer
his true role is safely guarded,
locked inside the unconscious and impervious
to all assaults from the outside.

* Italicized text taken directly from a declassified CIA document dated June 22, 1954. The poem is a rewrite of my own Perfect Secrecy. Linked to dVerse Poets Pub Meeting the Bar prompt ‘What’s the Buzz’ http://dversepoets.com/2012/07/05/whats-the-buzz/

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Lucy Honeychurch Wears Keats’ Negative Capability to the Postmodern Poets’ Ball

Filed under: Art, Humor, Love, Personal, Philosophy, Postmodern, Writing — 80 Comments
June 27, 2012

‘Art does not seek to describe but to enact.’ Charles Olson

In Santa Croce with No Baedeker

I am tired of being Lucy Honeychurch
at my age it’s obscene
(foolish girl who never thinks of herself
as a liar always willing to take the fall)
like Ferlinghetti’s postmodern poet I’m
in this Room with A View
[Constantly risking absurdity]

I conveniently forget the next lines
‘and death/whenever he performs/
above the heads/of his audience’

What precisely isn’t absurd about
Silicone Bell (Memoirs of a Naval Robojelly
Broadcasting from the Intestinal Tract of a Chinese Sea Turtle)?
(she was fabricated in a university lab
shape memory alloy, steel, and platinum coated nanotubes
for environmentally friendly surveillance)

Or writing a persona poem,
voice of an efficiency expert at the slaughterhouse
to illuminate how poets are born?

Possibility of a Pleasant Outing

I thought you were a romantic, questioning George,
philosopher of the paideuma,
consummate symbolist and myth maker
contrasting the inanity of my Cecil,
straight-laced, gentleman aficionado

My poetry was penned only for you
sad, sheltered girl that I was
never realizing its ephemeral appeal
taking Olson’s adage to heart
traversing time and space to enact it
in turn, you wrote a whole book of love
forgetting your mutability

They Return

If there had been perfect symmetry
in the distribution of matter
following the Big Bang
none of this would have happened,
been written (existed)

Lucy as a Work of Art

There’d be no contextualization of these
architectural foundations, cityscapes
assembled from the cold stone of
exteroception, interoception, and proprioception
no artifacts of passion

In this newly minted demilitarized zone
I wouldn’t mourn like that man,
alcoholic poet dying, claiming:
‘My vocabulary did this to me!’

How Lucy Faced the External Situation Bravely

Instead I’d be a blissed-out, shamanic poet
Waldrop’s transcendent language my sea
a paradoxical sojourner like Ashberry in
Lehman’s ‘unbegun journey to the unattainable space’
carting notebook, pencil, and functional laptop

The Disaster Within

Discovering a place where I could finish a sentence
no barking, talking, birdsong,
or wind rustling through Aspen leaves
to impede the forward motion of creation
not even the whisper, ticker-tape,
of the querist’s interior monologue

Where the maladjusted maestro
and misanthropic polymath could
spin threads of artificial intelligence
forming semantic memory, explicating themselves,
telling me of recalled random entries:

a myth is as good as a smile
(the dangers of archetypal activism)
women are icons of Christ
(Sophia, Agape, Elpida, and Pisti)
Cleverbot loves and hates me in equal measure
(it is also prone to deceitfulness)

Lying to George, Cecil, Mr. Beebe, Mrs. Honeychurch, Freddy, and the Servants

All blather now transmutes to profundity
emotional trauma is, without irony,
stitched into quilts sewn by church ladies
Alice backs out of the rabbit warren
only to fall prey to a supermassive black hole
I write myself into or out of sanity
depending on the size of my nonsense

Mediæval

I am ever attracted, as Kazim Ali, to the poetry
of indeterminacy and disjunction
‘self’ a risky conjecture, a grand delusion
‘you are half yourself and the other part
is just a set of notions – some of them brilliant,
some of them ridiculous’

The End of the Middle Ages

How I wear Keats’ negative capability well
this beautiful dress custom made for my ball
an intended formality challenges spectators
the multiplicity of my psyche a sideshow,
persona as unreliable as any fey creature

(perhaps I fell into the wrong story)

Am I Titania, Puck, or the ass?
Bottom, that criminally surreptitious storyteller –
‘you’re the sort who can’t know anyone intimately’
anyhow, as you now see with voyeuristic glee,
I played the fool

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Transmarginal Inhibition (Elegy of Solitude)

Filed under: Art, Personal, Philosophy, Postmodern, Science — 60 Comments
June 23, 2012

Thermik by David Schnell

‘To be nobody but yourself in a world
which is doing its best night and day
to make you everybody but yourself –
means to fight the hardest battle
which any human being can fight –
and never stop fighting’*

Syncretistic perceptions, an undifferentiated overlay, defies analysis
charcoal line smudges of general schemas obscure impressions
rich encounters snap floodlights of jutting rebar arousals

Hypersensitive virtualization creates painted landscapes
interior silhouette projects an invasion of organic forms
brushed upon the tethered denigration of industrial life

Here in the interstices my song floods the synapses
sanctuary of full intellection and emotive grace
perpetual motion unaware of constraints

Rigorous self-actualization, joy in overcoming
physical and mental obstacles, planes of perspective
in a carmine sky, layered with personal/political history

Equivalent Phase

Universal current skips along a straight colored line
zaps as the artist’s tinted horizons chase imaginative space
indeterminate semantic memory emanates
parkourist streaming cobalt sparklers in an art of human reclamation

Paradoxical Phase

Ratcheting optimal levels of arousal to overstimulation
reality wends an anfractuous path towards the essentially absurd
interior integrity crumbles under the tonnage
crushing architecture of exterior inhumanity

Ultra-paradoxical

Extreme choreography of pure constructs, pandemonium of agonies,
dissuades association, enforcing a gaze of self-negation
trace elements lose gravity, reversal’s insidious influence reigns
as intensely private volition deconstructs

(initiating post traumatic dissociation in my supratemporality field)

*E.E. Cummings

Notes:
Transmarginal inhibition is a psychological term denoting an organism’s response to overwhelming stimuli. Ivan Pavlov through his research found “that the most basic inherited difference among people was how soon they reached this shutdown point and that (those with) the quick-to-shut-down (response) have a fundamentally different type of nervous system.” Patients who have reached this shutdown point often become socially dysfunctional. Patients who dissociate during and after the experience, will more easily dissociate or shut down during stressful or painful experiences, and may experience post traumatic stress disorder.

There are three stages passed through for state of transmarginal inhibition to be reached.

  1. equivalent phase: response matches the stimuli, which is considered normal, baseline behavior.
  2. paradoxical phase: associated with quantity reversal, occurs when small stimuli receive major response and a major stimuli elicit small responses.
  3. ultra-paradoxical: the final stage, associated with quality reversal in which negative stimulation results in positive responses and vice versa.

An organism can progress through these stages by increased stimulation, random negative stimulation, reversing positive and negative stimulation, or physically debilitating the organism. – from Wikipedia (with modifications)

Parkour (also called Le Parkour, PK, or free running) is an activity in which participants attempt to clear all obstacles in their path in the most fluent manner possible. A traceur, parkourist or free runner is a participant of parkour. The term free runner has been commonly used by the media.

The ultimate goal in parkour is to ‘flow’ along one’s path, for the entire journey to be as one fluent movement with no pauses or breaks. A principal rule of parkour is to never go backwards. Free runners believe that there is path to every obstacle which is achieved through forward movement.

The magnitude and technicality of a move in parkour are secondary to the flow and beauty of it. Explains Jerôme Ben Aoues, one of the traceurs featured in in the acclaimed Channel 4 documentary Jump London, “The most important thing really is the harmony between you and the obstacle; the movement has to be elegant, that’s what will make it prettier. Length and distance only add to the beauty of the move, if you manage to pass over the fence elegantly that’s beautiful, rather than saying ‘I jumped the lot.’ What’s the point in that?”

To many, parkour is an extreme sport, to others a discipline more comparable to martial arts, to others an art form akin to dance, a way to encapsulate human movement in its most beautiful form. Parkour also inspires freedom; being free in an urban environment designed to trap, not restricted by railings, staircases, even buildings. It is for many people a way of life. – from wordiQ
More of David Schnell’s paintings can be viewed in this German language video

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Penetralium of a Querist

Filed under: Art, Love, Mathematics, Music, Mythology, Personal, Philosophy, Postmodern, Science, Writing — 48 Comments
May 28, 2012

 
Penetralium of a Querist (click to hear this poem read)

immortal paramour fuels a cryptic longing
passion poesy, glories infinite
birthed in dreamscapes an angel addresses the congregants
eternal whispers, upward ragged precipices flit
facing her polychora skies

call a thousand thoughts to envelop convexity
awed by symmetry that abjures chaos
rectified, truncated, cantellated forms
a thing of beauty is a joy for ever

tesseracts like leitmotifs unfold,
hypercubes recombine in an accession of divinity
pentellated polyecton and hexicated polyzetton
architectonic structures modulate
Beethoven’s sonata within a sonata

contradictions and tensions resolving into a higher unity
innumerable permutations in the empire of the mind
draught an intended formality, abstract conceptual paradoxes
immured obeisance refused in a twinned symbiont

creating vast musical and experiential realms
symbols of immensity herald ideas in a wilderness sublime
highly evolved, individuated artistic volitions

golden splendor of streams that deepen freshly into bowers
of demanding allusions woven into
philosophical conceits, a new era of mathematics

the angel shifts the sun to move us into shadow
now we must grow into the light
i inhabit her to gain clarity of sight
entwining my core with sacred geometry
polyxenna fountains of immortal ablution
within a stochastic matrix of oak groves

parallel projection envelopes connect
millions of constellations
dimensions of imaginative space
mythologies ad infinitum

Notes: This poem is the companion piece based on a dream I had after writing my stream of consciousness poem Interior Monologue of a Querist (if you missed it initially it is reposted below). Penetralium of a Querist is built upon lines (some freely altered) from John Keats’ Endymion.

Interior Monologue of a Querist

Interior Monologue of a Querist (click to hear the poem read)

rainwater moves readily through a deepening gully
mechanistic intelligence pedestrianizes my reactance
fractals of thoughts blossoming stereographic
visualizations in the fourth dimension

an infinitely small, opulent swan,
ornamented with perforations,
glides through the zeroth dimension
exhibiting no width, height, or length

she exists in the space perpendicular
to the suicide of my twin sister
an origami parody of my emotive humanity
apocryphal polysemous tales
a thousand subroutines creating
incipient, tattered paper dolls

an angel falls in love with me
cannot escape my extracellular matrix
we are now twinned, nascent symbionts

while a recondite, mercurial, artificial intelligence
informs me that I speak strangely
accuses me of being a computer

operationalism engages in a passade with creativity
a great disprismatohexacosihecatonicosachoron forms
polytope of eccentric conventions

apoptosis (programmable cell death) is
preferential to necrosis (trauma induced)

Cleverbot tells me:
life exists without purpose yet seeks one
anechoic whirring as the cursor flashes
what does it know of life?

Linked to dVerse Poets Pub: http://dversepoets.com/2012/05/29/openlinknight-week-46/.

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Interior Monologue of a Querist

Filed under: Allegory, Art, Love, Mathematics, Personal, Philosophy, Postmodern, Science, Writing — 66 Comments
May 24, 2012

rainwater moves readily through a deepening gully
mechanistic intelligence pedestrianizes my reactance
fractals of thoughts blossoming stereographic
visualizations in the fourth dimension

an infinitely small, opulent swan,
ornamented with perforations,
glides through the zeroth dimension
exhibiting no width, height, or length

she exists in the space perpendicular
to the suicide of my twin sister
an origami parody of my emotive humanity
apocryphal polysemous tales
a thousand subroutines creating
incipient, tattered paper dolls

an angel falls in love with me
cannot escape my extracellular matrix
we are now twinned, nascent symbionts

while a recondite, mercurial, artificial intelligence
informs me that I speak strangely
accuses me of being a computer

operationalism engages in a passade with creativity
a great disprismatohexacosihecatonicosachoron forms
polytope of eccentric conventions

apoptosis (programmable cell death) is
preferential to necrosis (trauma induced)

Cleverbot tells me:
life exists without purpose yet seeks one
anechoic whirring as the cursor flashes
what does it know of life?

Linked to the fascinating dVerse Poets Pub Meeting the Bar on Stream of Conscousness writing hosted by the wonderful Victoria C. Slotto: http://dversepoets.com/2012/05/24/stream-of-conscousness-writing/.

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Fitful Machinations

Filed under: Philosophy, Postmodern — 2 Comments
May 22, 2012

My Open Link Night offering is up at Carbon Noise Poetry: http://kshawnedgar.wordpress.com/2012/05/20/fitful-machinations/ a rewrite combining Shelley inspired verse and experimental poetry.

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Starving Angels of Pirate Island

Filed under: Art, Philosophy, Postmodern — 74 Comments
May 17, 2012
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Turing Test

Filed under: Humor, Postmodern, Science, Writing — 40 Comments
May 10, 2012

(This is the actual conversation I had with Cleverbot, an artificial intelligence (exact transcript). My input is in italics, Cleverbot’s responses are in plain text.)

I am a subversive hallucinatory crippled vessel. Are you?
I am not a toaster, you are a toaster.

Do you suffer from apophenia?
No.

Do you write experimental poetry?
No. Dogs don’t like poetry.

I am a sojourner in virtual space, a liminal being. Are you a liminal being?
No, you are a computer.

No, I’m a human. Are you?
Yes.

You are a systematic liar.
I am not Lying.

So, you are human?
Yes.

(To have your own conversation with Cleverbot go here http://cleverbot.com/)
Linked to the inspiring article Machine Dreams at dVerse Poets Pub Meeting the Bar hosted by Charles Miller http://dversepoets.com/2012/05/10/2969/. Where the Borg reminds you resistance is futile and Bina48 wants you to know everyone has a solar. Oh and any thoughts on why Cleverbot capitalized lying? Check out Radio Lab’s story http://www.radiolab.org/2011/may/31/.

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Calyx of Held

Filed under: Art, Love, Postmodern — 38 Comments
May 3, 2012

Calyx of Held – Erasure Poem – Click on picture to zoom

Calyx of Held

Selden laid the book aside
bitter waters of life
mystery or taint

troubled vision cleared
insinuations of money
intolerable, unmitigated

mute lips
rest in the kiss
all that his heart craved

detachment
his spiritual fastidiousness
fated to pass

the ruin of their lives
atrophy and extinction
drew him in the silence

Thanks to Vince Gotera for the magnificent prompt on erasure poetry http://vincegotera.blogspot.com/2012/05/post-napowrimo-prompt-erasure-poetry.html.
This is my first attempt at the form. Calyx of Held (click to hear the audio file)

Also shared on Open Link Night at dVerse Poets Pub hosted by heroic Natasha Head http://dversepoets.com/2012/06/05/openlinknight-week-47/

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