HOW TO WRITE A MISTAKE-IST POEM

We demand to see more because of our experimental mentality, because of our desire for a more exact poetry…because we need to make new mistakes.
—Jean Epstein

I wanted to invent a new film. If I had to give this style a name, I'd call it a "mistake-ist" art form.
—Harmony Korine


I.

Disband all
relics of the eye

Let this bird outside
your window be
a hole in your poem that
refuses explanation

a swerving refusal, a veer
so as to see slips
in the horizon’s wall

The city of the sky has no past
The whorl at the tip
of the finger is a little wind

The wind does not doubt
the mistakes it brings into being

A mountain does not explain
It is like a magazine

whose ads have been abandoned
by the models whose
redundancy went unheeded

It is not hard to write a mistake-ist poem
It is hard to be alive


II.

watch
wash
watch
wash
watch
wash
watch
wash


III.

Do not yet let
the rich inculcate you so
thoroughly. The of
that is the air

is arm enough


IV.

First we must thank
the trees. The streetlamps

fizz and swoon. Bugs
clipped by the now

growing emergency. Hello
helicopter. Goof-blur

Goodbyes. Incorporate
the machine’s desire

by breaking the machine
Goodbye hello incorporate


V.

Do not disbelieve the birds
Notice the leaf’s bored twirl

Look out at the world as if it were
a telephone you

hadn’t expected to be
buzzing in your fluttery hand

Then again, your hand
is always fluttery and buzzing


VI.

The mouse in
the cupboard in
the kitchen wiggles

his tail through
the closed hinge
the the the his the


VII.

Wait
Not now
Hold it
Not just yet
Just about
Almost

The important thing
is that you not

hesitate



but learn
to occupy air
to feed it impossible

ideas: we
are put on
earth a little
space that we

may learn to bear
the beams of love

Now


VIII.

Switched from William to Blind Blake
from “Holy Thursday”
to “Panther Squall Blues”
a gift from Ed
the recording bathed in static
as if it were the secret voice of air
set loose by time
to laugh uncontrollably
at our dim attempts
to love right
the mistake is holy
to love right
the mistake is yet holy


IX.

“One must always be prepared to learn something totally new.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Color



X.

Noon is hard on
a priest. An egg
wants company
and so cracks

This is my shepherd
this wind
patiently embracing
and yet I would

not be so
easy. That man that
is my father
We know only

what might
be made to sing
through mishap
tonight

SOME REMARKS ON SONG

Singing reciprocates the advent of us in the world. To sing is to create an event of Being; a becoming forth that is no mere echo, but verily a response. Being is a conversation the universe has with itself. When one engages the world by way of song, she takes up the other side of that conversation, transforming Being’s soliloquy into a dialogue. To my mind, this is rooted in a harmonics of need. There is a need for the world to be acknowledged, for a response to return to the world’s appeal to itself through itself. As Derrida wrote: “I felt the necessity for a chorus.” It is a chorus of desire and wonder, the primordial wonder of presence, of the presencing that is brought forth by sense. And this is why song is always phenomenological: it is an acknowledgment born from perception and a response borne by it. It is a resonant naming, a halo to illuminate the givenness of each moment simply by calling attention to it. It is this call, this further appeal in song that returns, as the universe’s light is shown and showers back upon us, perpetuating the wonder that is becoming forth. To bear witness in this way is also to situate oneself, to find placement. When the I acknowledges the world through song, it takes place amid the plenum, its own sense separating and joining simultaneously in the way of Merleau-Ponty’s reversible flesh.

When I speak of presence and the wonder of its continual reprisal in the world, I approach another term, a crucial term for the exploration of song: disclosure. Song is the expression of the disclosure of the world to the singer and then a further disclosure of the world back to itself. Song opens, concomitant to a physical openness of the body and of the mouth, as indeed the world does, opening forth “that which does” or “those which do.” It is an activity that illuminates the active, an opening that rejuvenates the open. Disclosure also has the valence of secrecy, which intimately textures Being in its mysterious and indeterminate wonder. Song brings us closer to what Bataille calls “the intolerable secret of being.” It is the passing of a secret into the realm of the real, the texture of the real grazing against the real itself, just as the words and notes produced by man drag and catch in his own throat to create his appeal and acknowledgment. It is given to us to sing. It is one thing, in the words of a Spinoza, which a body can verily do. The call opens toward response. It is our responsibility to sing the world back to itself. There is no truth, but there are innumerable answers, the song being one of the answers particular to humans, an act ontologically given to us to do. An act of need that returns to us from the desire of the world.

GREETINGS FROM THE OUTBACK

You know it’s fall
when the acorns fall
into your lap
or pummel passersby
in a light wind
coffee almost cold
children screaming
as their nannies
make call after call
on cell phones
leaves parading in shrivels
of pluvial scratch
and coloring the asphalt
with triangles of vein
the Aboriginal people
of Australia tell
the same story of
the same vector of
earth for millennia
just to make sure
it continues to exist
while we here in
urban America pay
so much and so
rarely our own
attentions to what
bustling strips
compose these afternoons
the ducks upright
and flapping like lungs
the skyscrapers grey
and tapering dumbly
I am in love
with the acorn
in spite of the bruise
it put into my skull

FRANZ KLINE

Friday filthy with beard
Donning an affluent stoop
Baking slightly
And unceremoniously rifled
By September’s dim wind
We’re on break
The construction workers and I
The absurdity unsettling
As cabs glide past
An austere September wind
Scarfing the uptown rich
Or is it scarving
How bored the terraces
Seem with no one
Testing their garlanded weight
The trees starving bare
As fire trucks
Blast east red and swollen
With their generous din
Man finally
Ascending from the knee
We hope and love
The effort of grace
Returning from want
To a harmonics of need
Our breath pale
Like September wind
Over the taut white
Whittling bones
He painted this work
On a window shade
And died with his heart
Starkly blown
Today I feel like a mark
Made by strangers
As we pass over
Our city and property
Is senseless

TOWARD A VOCABULARY OF THE REAL

Act
Affect
Affirm
Air
Already
Ambiguity
Amid
Attention
Becoming
Body
Coincide
Consequent
Continuous
Contradiction
Corporeal
Depth
Difference
Disclosure
Disequilibrium
Dynamic
Erupt
Excess
Experience
Friction
Happening
Heat
Improvise
Indeterminate
Interpenetrate
Intersubjective
Intimate
Invisible
Involve
Jerk
Joy
Local
Multiplicity
Mutual
Necessary
Oblique
Of
Open
Participatory
Perform
Permeable
Phenomenal
Place
Presence
Provisional
Pulse
Queer
Recommence
Rhythm
Simultaneous
Situation
Slip
Spontaneous
Texture
Uncanny
Unpredictable
Veer
Web
Weft
Wet

THE LIGHTNING FIELD DIARY

1

Approaching Quemado
Rossellini’s crow
roosts atop
his pile of coal

(or better)

A Marxist crow
on the side
of the road

on a pile of coal
on the way
to Quemado


2

Empty theatre but
for table
tennis table, immaculate
floors, strewn
corpses filling the sills


3

Locals’ Disdain


4

Desert hail hailing
us forward

(rain arriving
coffee percolating)

K sulks as the storm
blows us off


5

Desert sea
birds peep

A cottontail
poses and darts

assails the camera
leaving green

eggs in its wake


6

A tremor in the poles
communicating some geologic
code to us

Some voices are so
deep they leave
us feeling like a moment

of breeze


7

The queen drags
her bulbous
globe through
the needle’s shadow


8

According to Walter De Maria: Isolation is the subject of land art.

According to Jakob von Uexküll: The umwelt is a composite of biological foundations that lie at the very epicenter of the study of both communication and signification in the human [and non-human] animal.


9

What is the song appropriate to the umwelt of the human? It is important to think without thinking. To play without the expectation of joy. If possible, to joy flush against the uncounted strum. There are no words in the ground. Tourism is sin. There is, finally, an ethical response to standing.


10

Her red hair
has grown
more red
unhurried

A black beetle
nudging
the toe
of her boot


11

According to Walter De Maria: The invisible is real.

According to Elizabeth Grosz: Living beings are vibratory: vibration is their mode of differentiation, the way they enhance and enjoy both the macroscopic cosmic and the microscopic atomic forces of the earth itself.


12

All of the sudden
All of the sudden

Or, perhaps
it is the landscape that
plays us


13

A heron risks being
impaled on
the dusky points


14

There is something
to be found here
that was lost
elsewhere I think alarming
butterflies from
the brush clomping
stupidly


15

Military plane overhead
mud seeming
to bubble in the near
distance

Closer it alters
to tens
upon thousands of tiny
fingernail-size horseshoe

crab-like creatures
scrambling carapace
over carapace
in some frenzied birth

It occurs
to me that lightning
may have relit
the beginnings

of a new universe inside
the old one


16

Sunset tops
the blackened tips
like pencils

newly hewn
K never
more beautiful

bottle in hand
smile light
hare ducking

beneath the porch
earth wet with shadow
poles disappearing


17

Or, perhaps, the
visible isn’t


18

K and I fight
over sheets dream
strangely wake
in the predawn crush
giddy with stillness


19

Prairie dog jaw

half of it

like an ornament

for the stones


20

The triops have gone
under, no
more bubbles, one

awake on
its cape of
a back


21

Still there
is “danger in

veering
toward
abolition”


22

The shadow
of my crotch
now fifty
feet away


23

Landscape Acupuncture


24

Beetles wrestling
with the remains
of a fig

A dim figure plotted
amid the poles

himself a compound
of: receipts
percepts, excerpts

BEGINNING AMID

Ending with a line from Anselm Hollo

Beginning amid
A series of thrusts unknowingly
This little self, a wet knot
tying the landscape
into radii
We wake again amid
the complications
of joy, pray
without our sense of it
to stay radical

enough

to embrace the breadth of what
we will not know
so as to move
a temporary instrument
the world wakes

through

Daily banal miracle
wailing amid
horses or disconcerting
the chaos into form
No, not
that, I hope
you do not think you
can deprive this coarse world
of its murderers
Art is no more free
or lacking
in complicity than physics

though

each being remains busy dreaming
of heat
knees thrust
obscenely even in repose
It is beautiful
strange
to watch the film bubble
and flame amid
these old odd frames
The body collectors
asleep finally
as the trees wreathed
in sour rot
loose themselves and return
to light, to let
sonic awkwardness
punch breath-holes in thought

GREENER SUDDENLY

Greener suddenly
the truncated ring
of the church
7:15 pm
meaning always desperate
let’s leave it
to the desperate
let’s repatriate
the hollow blood vibrations
ever retuning
as the world swerves
muscular fits of the soon dead
ever returning
to the ecstasy of the start
greener suddenly
as the moon bereft wriggling sings
its absent worm song
a car in the leafy streets below
hugging the wet walls
with its curdling bass
the bike lane
littered with tiny yellow flowers
my cat in the window
her eyes
greener suddenly
it should be terrifying to love you
coming home from the doctor
an honest man is always in trouble
making soup
Bruce Springsteen
opening mail
but it isn’t

OROPENDOLA

with Kendra and incorporating Why Birds Sing? and The Wanderer

The woods came a charming noise
Too long and brown too
Too poor to pay for
Our food and drink we pluck
The red-flecked stars
With flood-black eyes
Very few birds ever learn to sing
Women watching from every window
Dream of swimming down
Jug, jug, jug, jug
The wet and dry finally left confused
Galuk, galuk, the gray
Goose plows
Through ridge and furrow where cloud is ground
To rain and nearly
Devotional in its aspects
Young, womanly, the breeze shrinks
Enter the severing field of light
She is strange avian this
Woman never repeating
The lines of her song

WILD CHERRY

This ain’t no regular Pepsi, friend
It’s Wild Cherry
And a dour woman practices
Her violin nearby
I inhabit the tree’s shade

Because my face is in recovery
From beers on the boardwalk
At Coney Island
Sun like a whip
We saw the pendulous

Nest of some greeny
Parrots there
Choking the electric transom
And invaded by sparrows

Foreign women walk by with
Shopping bags
Or run by in sports bras
Birds dip and shiver

In a pile of fine dust
Amid the cobblestone
A taxi screeches

Men with cigars seem ubiquitous
Coloring the air
One way to live is to write

The gist of what’s happening
So to know it

Today I loathe
Meaning and think only

In quale and burst

The dogs don’t smile
But they appear to

My very own sister approaches
Talking on the phone

With our parents
Who are in New Mexico
Overfeeding hummingbirds

The same thing
(Sugar water)
Acidly coursing my stomach

The woman with the violin now
Taking furious notes
With her free, claw-like hand
My sister’s talk

Slow and melodious
Because that’s what’s
Happening
My pen running

Out of ink
Dusk approaching sly
An elderly woman
In an orange wig
Warbling some senile aria

Oh no she spies
Me writing about her
The obvious, lazy disdain
Sing if you can sing she says
And I’m cowed again

SNOW LIKE FROZEN LIGHT

Noon is hard on
a priest. An egg
wants company
and so cracks.
This is my shepherd
this wind
patiently embracing.
I am not so
easy. Love like
an unassailable
soil. But at least
not timid
with hate. That
man that
is my father.
We know only
what might be made
to sing
through mishap.

HOLY THURSDAY

It is Thursday and I just
Read Blake’s “Holy Thursday”
A song of the poor
And of the sun’s relativity
But he is wrong
Because the sun is not
A metaphor
A song of the sun
Is continuously sung
Do the poor sing it?
Yes, they do
The poor sing of the sweet
Torpor of the sun
Moving like an ancient woman
Over the horrible silence
Of the land
What do we deserve
From the air?
It shuttles tirelessly
These hot notes
It is even less
A metaphor than the sun
First a metaphor, then the eyes
Close contentedly
And what has been lost
Drags in the melody
Of the ancient woman’s ragged
Dress, who is also not a metaphor
What has been lost
Is too easily
Found to be believed
And the poor stare directly
Into Thursday’s air
Like nothing
And everything at once

HOLY THURSDAY REPRISE

Switched from William to Blind Blake
“Panther Squall Blues”
A gift from Ed
To complement Willies
McTell and Johnson
The recording bathed in static
As if it were the secret voice of air
Set loose by time
A song about frantic love
I know the long dead
Laugh uncontrollably at our attempts
To love right
2:57
You write from work
With a barely restrained panic
Born not of love
But assuaged by it
“The sun, the warmth, the grass and your hands”
Fifteen hours fifty-eight minutes and twenty-nine seconds
Into the day
A great wind gathering
A wind that manifests while at the same time
Remaining invisible
Like the great gathering love
Which waits for you
Laughing uncontrollably

ON THE TORPOR OF NONVIOLENCE

I’m done with innocence
William Blake’s that is
Read the first half of his songs
This afternoon and now
Sit sweating while the cat sleeps
This is what it feels like
To be old snow, says Colin
As the mere effort of existence
Peels away from one like a bathing suit
Turning inside out
Eyes salty
Listening to Public Enemy
A tornado in Brooklyn
And a cockroach on the wall
The size of the mouse in the cupboard
The cat won’t kill
Startling awake on the sill
Only to yawn
Blake’s lamb's post-millennium skew
Angels dehydrated
In the air-conditioning

WAYRRULL

The big bang is an initial step. The first step taken in existence. Or, more likely, the first step after a long period of stillness, or inert intensity. Which is probably why that first step was so large and unwieldy. Whenever one takes a step there is an imbalance. This imbalance, what I call disequilibrium, is what insures that existence endures. It is only possible for things to happen in the first step of disequilibrium. And even if that first step was huge and distant and only abstractly perceptible, it still steps. The first disequilibrium, what the Aboriginals call Wayrrull, or “the thrust behind things,” is present in each consequent step, each pulse of disequilibrium that continues to this day. One way to picture it is to think of concentric rings. The big bang is the outer ring and each movement in the world taken by each thing is a new ring. We are tempted to say “directly at the center,” but how could this be? With so many loci of movement, so many steps simultaneously taken, how could there be a single center? Disequilibrium is about dance, collective. The first step is followed and interpenetrated by innumerable steps; each connected, each necessary, each unpredictable.

ALL THE SNOW IN HOLLYWOOD

Tall and wild, like
a sunflower peering
over some bleached
fence. But today
stuck on a bus
beside a woman not
reading Absalom, Absalom!
All ride it sits
there, a beautiful
old edition, unopened.
In my lap, Susan
Cataldo never closes
and the words singe
will remain here heard
like Atsuko Tanaka’s
electric dress is seen
returning something
of me to myself, tall
and wild, an ibis
but something more
drably American. This
bus will leave me
in Washington unless
it’s headed to Philly
which I fear for
at least an hour.
Worse, I fear the deep
sadnesses of girlhood
which suffuse the ones
I love even as they turn
into women. But fear
to me, tall and wild
and boyish still, though
nearly thirty, it is only
a moment of holding
my breath and gone
on the wild, translucent
air that commends us
to move impossibly fast
through it and then
into the very future.
It does not scare me
that I have to dance
to get around the TV
couch, dresser, doorway
in our suddenly tiny
apartment. Only another
week and we will
inherit the ceiling
fan. Chinese ice
coffee hurtles through
my brain. The bus
now far from Philly
thank god. If I were
a philosopher, I would
say Singing is a means
to group identification
but I know better.
A song is a button
we press when we
want to thank god
even if we never have
believed in him or her
or it or all the snow
in Hollywood.

A FINE RED HAIR GROWS ON HER ARM

A dancing bend begins at her wrist
A fine red hair grows on her arm
A jug of hope is paced in her skip
A fine red hair grows on her arm
A faint of dust escapes to her ear
A fine red hair grows on her arm
A sudden emptily taps at her air
And a fine red hair grows on her arm

A POEM FOR JULIANA

Begin again as
we must. Never
against but
a movement
toward all
else. Do not
believe the things
they tell you
about time. You
are just now
beginning again.
You are just
this place
becoming
ours. One hour
or day, one
month or year.
Only the dead
will really know.
Who are they?
Songless ones.
Who are you
Juliana? A color
an odor a texture
a light and soon
a singer of good
news. Hello.

A CENTO FOR SOLIPSISTS

after Creeley and Williams


You tree
The element in which they live
Your lovely hands
Scattered, aslant
Wandering among the chimneys
For no clear reason
You tell me that I love myself
The night the cold the solitude
The dishonest mailman
It is all a rhythm
At the small end of an illness
Quiet as is proper for such places
My days are burning
My love is a boat
As real as thinking
And yet one arrives somehow
A big bearheaded woman
All her charms
Hart Crane
The plastic surgeon who has
A tally of forces, consequent
Or me wanting another man’s
Sad advice
That profound cleft
Without other cost than breath
You tree
The element in which they live
Your frosty hands
At the brink of winter
Long over whatever edge
They call me and I go
Still too young
For no clear reason
Pink as a dawn in Galilee
I feel the caress of my own fingers
Or with a rush
You send me your poems.

A Mini-Noelle for Kendra

7

Midnight, beery, Halloween, Kendra
sidestepping men. It is not
necessary to disguise
neglected things. It is not laughing if it
is never not laughing, a disguise the mouth
makes, a red dust


of sound. I wanted to kiss
Kendra, but she was
the one calling. Winter
low, a vibration
the birds avoided. Cinema
made of animals repeating this
new terror only


deep enough to see. It
was the kind of mistake
for fishermen, Kendra, a loss
of weather-worry that
brought us together. We watched
a girl die in a bouquet
of snakeskin. What do you


say to a girl like that? Do
you ask a landscape to explain
itself? Everything is a detour for girls
like Kendra: the twitter
and twitch of debris, a warp
that rescues
the mouth until a girl


can only use it to utter
verbs. And what is not, in
the end, an act of
thought. I took this girl
named Kendra dancing and never
once lost my mind. Does love
proceed from men


or from trees? Remember
how we explained wind by embracing
the animal that slept
in our house? Every tooth
could be a jewel
every time the word Kendra was spoken
could be a bell breaking


into peal. Listen, there
is nothing wrong with birds. No
disguise will teach
the children the value
of happiness. This is my room
of real laughter, it echoes Kendra Kendra
Kendra against a little hammer.