The secret of poetry will not be found among the words themselves but in the pattern of their association—the way they are put together. Words do not have to be “animate” to yield poetry, simply arranged in an appropriately complex way is enough. Words interact with each other and are dependent on each other to make a poem. A poem then is systems emergent in that its words operate in an environment conducive to more complex meaning as a collective. That’s the secret of poetry.
The shaman bit a hole in the sky. It became a time tunnel. Some of what we see as stars are actually lights at the ends of tunnels. There is no going back (why would you want to?). To change history? History is a figment of time. Since everything occurs all at once within the greater dimension. The thermodynamic gradient is what gives the illusion of passing time. Evolution is the counterbalance to entropy: increasing complexity versus decreasing complexity. Yet the laws of physics determine that you will die.
Punctuation in a poem unless used ironically is an anachronism. Punctuation in a poem was abolished in 1914 by Guillaume Apollinaire. Punctuation in a poem since then merely reinforces snob appeal. Punctuation in a poem only serves to validate the anal predilections of English Majors. Punctuation in a poem has no practical use other than to enslave it to the demands of meaning. Punctuation in a poem prevents multiplicity of meaning. Punctuation in a poem denies creative ambiguity. Punctuation in a poem enforces syllogistic patriarchy. Punctuation in a poem has lost its function in determining the poem’s course on the open field of the page.
for Mark Young
My ear twitched at the sudden creak of the door behind me. I’m not blind. Just almost. I like to take my time. Thirst develops a desire to be quenched and flies are coming in the house to die. It’s getting colder outside. It’s a childish joy when a turn of events goes to our way of thinking, a dream come true like in the words to a love song. Just sitting on my ass, I can lean back, look out the window and see an innocuous side of Bob Dylan, barely visible, among the branches of the spreading oak tree. I’m listening. My bones are sore. Once in a while one of them creaks like the bones in my ears. I don’t know what they’re complaining about.
In my dream I was hanging out with Bob in a kind of coffee house cabaret and we were smoking nonfilter cigarettes. The jukebox was playing his songs and we sang along though he would change the lyrics so that “diplomat” became “laundromat” and so on. I confessed that years ago I used to make up songs imitating his style because it was a good way to meet girls, and he agreed that it was. On the other hand, I didn’t particularly care for the folk music crowd and he said he understood why. If I was going to be me I had to be a poet, that’s all there was to it. His girlfriend was in the crowd and he called her over. She was a young actress whose name I couldn’t remember. Then someone brought up the subject of Howard Stern because it was Halloween and asked Bob if he ever listened to Howard, and Bob said maybe, maybe not, but that’s Bob for ya. At the local deli down the street they celebrated Halloween by playing ping pong and it was hilarious watching these old guys in their aprons with macaroni salad and lox stains swatting at the tiny white ball. When we got back, Bob asked if I’d forgotten my beret but I hadn’t—it was right there next to his. We both fit them on our puffy afro style hairdos and I adjusted mine rakishly so that someone asked if I’d been in the military and had I killed anyone. I was about to answer when Bob started telling the story about the time he trained to be an astronaut and how he got special treatment because of who he was. When he got to the part where the Secretary of the Air Force, who looked like Meg Ryan, congratulated everyone on how clean the latrines were, I thought that was just a little weird and woke up.
Unfolded like a tiny origami pterodactyl the taxonomy of my life plainly stated. One way I’m frivolous, the other pretentious. In the gray and drizzle of early evening bright burst of wild white plum blossoms above dark silhouette of a distant rooftop. The shape of the page shapes my mind, a bottomless blank at whose event horizon I succumb to spare gravity’s attraction. An unexpected gust opens the door. The trees enact their own resonance as a matter of thought.
My conversations with Catherine Deneuve are always limited by my French vocabulary. We get through the salutations easily enough but it is when we get to the finer points of existence that my limitations surface. After repeating je t’adore over and over again the conversation spirals into silence. Can you blame her? She is pleased, perhaps not so secretly, and pats me gently on the cheeks. “Tu es très drôle,” she says. My stomach sinks but my heart soars like a hummingbird.
AS AN INTRODUCTION TO A COLLECTION OF PROSE POEMS
One should always consider Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen in regards to the prose poem and the history of that form. Some have claimed a more accidental origin in the extended and sometimes obtuse captions to lithographic illustrations in 19th Century French popular novels, particularly those of Jules Verne. Others, that the meditations of a short piece of prose by itself alone merited an artistic designation. It is an elusive and contradictory form. A poem yet contained within the formality of prose and barely elevated language. In some ways it is a poem that pretends not to be a poem by eschewing the stanza for the typography of punctuation extended to the margins. Lost is an oral sense of the lyrical flow of language for a precision in formulation. The prose of the poem abandons the music for a more didactic purpose, that of clerical authority. It is a snake that can turn and bite those without imaginative means to handle it. Baudelaire knew his way around the prose poem. As did Picasso’s former roommate, Max Jacob. The prose poem has come in and out of fashion since those early undifferentiated days. Today it is enjoying a revival of sorts although it seems to be practiced exclusively by a guild of humorless bricklayers who are intent in erecting a veritable ivory tower of Babel. Anecdotal observations descriptive of the shimmering moment has been given over to the dithering of neurotic intellectuals. Poetry in any form is the die in a cup waiting to be cast.
Poetry is the stream (of language) of which we all (as poets) partake ritually. Some want to get it all in one gulp, others are satisfied with a sampling (one can never sample the same stream twice). The stream continues unaffected. Some will keep what they have taken and save it to analyze and distill (separate hydrogen from oxygen) and return it to the stream without ingesting it. Others swallow every sip confident that it will be returned somehow. We can all partake according to our own manner. There’s room for everyone along the shore. It’s the forever stream.
“fear of aesthetics is the first sign of powerlessness”
—Dostoyevsky
Photographs, home movies are artifacts of the past representing a time that is no longer and out of context with the present. They have become objects as much as a vase or an alarm clock and as objects occupy such relational niches in sentience. Because of this addition to the object category labeled “slice of time,” the meaning or effect of metaphor is subtly or irrevocably changed. To use Joseph Campbell’s example to indicate someone who is a fast runner by saying he is a gazelle is the metaphor but what is called to mind in anyone who does not live on the Serengeti Plain is a picture of a gazelle, not the gazelle itself. Before the ubiquity of photography of anything from a gnat’s navel to a galaxy 3 billion light years away, knowledge of a gazelle was primarily a definition and occasionally an illustration. What was known about a gazelle was its fleetness and so when that metaphor was put forward, speed in running was the obvious assumption not that the metaphoree was a four legged ungulate native to Africa. The essence of that metaphor is somewhat diminished because of a bias of the visual cortex. The picture comes to mind first not the essence of gazelle as metaphor, its speed. But who can say that the utility of all metaphor or metaphor itself isn’t brought into question by a sensory overload of visual representation? There’s a picture for that! Who needs metaphors then? So instead of referencing the thing itself, what is cited is its digital facsimile and that frames the discourse, the visual artifact takes precedence. —Dostoyevsky
Being ill is like being made to take a vacation you didn’t want where the weather is always bad and the accommodations are dismal, shabby, and uncomfortable, and worse you become someone you never wanted to be, and how wonderful it is to get better and recover your old self still shabby but at least the brighter days are reflected in your eyes.
Pat Nolan’s poetry, prose, and translations have been published in numerous magazines and anthologies in North America as well as in Europe and Asia. He is the author of a dozen poetry selections including So Much, Selected Poems Vol. II (1990-2010) from Nualláin House, Publishers (2019) and the thousand marvels of every moment, a tanka collection (Nualláin House, 2018). His online poet-centric novel, Ode To Sunset, A Year In The Life Of American Genius, is available for perusing at odetosunset.com. He is also the founder and editor of The New Black Poetry Society’s blog Parole. Made In The Shade, a limited term poetry document, began posting monthly in January of 2022 and which will end on December 31, 2022 can be viewed at made-in-shade.com. His most recent fiction project is Dime Pulp, A Magazine of Serial Pulp Fiction (tencentfiction.com). Pat lives in the redwood wilds along the Russian River in Northern California.
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