Michael Leong


from The Philosophy of Decomposition / Re-composition as Explanation: A Poe and Stein Mash-up

We are now approaching the other shore, overstepping curiosity and its circumscription as the tackle for scene-shifting is being remotely prepared. But the intended locale kept terminating at a continuous point — and, by the pure force of induction, I would have been carried out way too far. I was carried directly above nations of nothing, thrown by some intelligent being made of physical thought into the deceased soul of the known.

As a literary character in a popular novel, I could nearly taste the reconciliation of poetry and prose. I was preparing to book a maiden course through a prolonged and vivid confusion, to bore clear through the lying heart of history. I was to put pen to paper while submitting to the nightly violence of a word storm:

                         time and again
                                                          the beauty
                                         of all  
                                                       or      the beauty                
                             of nothing
                                        
                                         little 
                                                       by little                    
       
                                                                   a something
                                 added
                                                        makes it 
                      so much more  

                                                                       to perceive                              
                            the sorrow
                                                                 of                    
                            the certain
                                                               inside
                                             the     air 
                            of the                
                                             possible

                                                                   here
                          and   there
                                                   precision error         
                           points to
                                                                                          
                                                            books      that
                                              tell 
                                                                          of the innumerable
                                                 future
                                                                     they
                                                                                        say  
                                               that truth demands
                                                                                     the upper 
                                           limit   or
                                                              contemplation  wrought  
                          by                             
                                         difficulty

                                                                  it appeared to me
                        in the             middle
                                                              of the rhythm 
                                     the
                                               fantastic phase 
                                                                             that 
                                                    assures 
                     the construction
                                                                      and       changes
                              the meaning
                                                           
                                                      o           note within                                    
                    key-note
                                          in   pursuance of
                                                                                     a source
                                                             not known
                            bring me                    
                                                   troublesome 
                                         expression

                      a brief   tone 
                                                    spared                    
                                                                      from the monotone
                            
                                                   bring 
                                     me
                                                                                delicious                   
                                                                     discords
                            in accordance
                                                      with                
                                                                   no one

If you think over the beautiful yet irrelevant connection that was before us — that is using an immediate analysis aided by indispensable principles of bird power — you will come to know elaborately different ideas of the world — as if it were already represented from a point in time rendered rare and sonorous.

But no more of romanticism. Once the remembrance of the thing settled, the vivid detail inside the mind became unvaried and clear.

To tell the truth, I was doing my best just keeping up with the rapidity of the raven. From year to year, it always comes to some furnished place to flirt with its mistress, but this time I had to go in a different direction, completely out of the elaborated frame — I was going through ominous patches of homeliness, above antagonistic interpolations, on elevating steps of varying length, over and behind the continuous construction of a bad action scene — until, at last, I saw it drop an array of lines that might surpass the obvious burden: the melancholy of once upon a time.


[Note: These sections come from a larger book-length work called The Philosophy of Decomposition / Re-composition as Explanation, which is a mash-up/cut-up/collage of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Philosophy of Composition” and Gertrude Stein’s “Composition as Explanation.” All words from the text are derived from only those two essays.]


Michael Leong is the author of two books of poetry — e.s.p. (Silenced Press, 2009) and Cutting Time with a Knife (Black Square Editions/The Brooklyn Rail, forthcoming) — and a translation of the Chilean poet Estela Lamat, I, the Worst of All, which was published by BlazeVOX [books] in 2009. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Action, Yes; Double Room; Hotel Amerika; jubilat; Lana Turner; Opium Magazine; and Tin House. He is currently a part-time lecturer at Rutgers University and lives in New York City.
 
 
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