I / The Sole Promise:Begin with the subtle & unnerving fact that Poetry is not the poem nor is Poetry the performance. Poetry itself refuses guarantees altogether & in every instance.
The very fact of Poetry's existence is indeterminant by rational measures. Those who claim an existence for Poetry do so on their own authority exclusively. Those who practice Poetry are actually practicing attempts at Poetry, for the presence of Poetry in any given piece of writing or performance is absolutely provisional & never a matter of anything more than unverifiable personal perception. All strategies to impose specific guarantees in the matter of Poetry are deceits, perpetrated by the clever upon the dull. Poetry is brilliant, indigestible, & unproven. Those who attempt Poetry are blind, hungry, & gullible. They accept no substitute. Their destitution is total, their vulnerability is embarrassing, & their tolerance for failure is a pit withough bottom. Poetry is the unrestrained laughter of the damned cavorting shamelessly with the Infinite Vulture soaring pitilessly in the very belly of the last ice cube poised atop the Scorpion's Neon Eviction Notice. Or at least that was what Poetry was a scant millisecond ago... all the terms of the shady agreement have been rewritten in the ages since that millisecond ago.
Let us admit that Poetry as attempt is its own Journey, occurring for us within the confines of Wording, howsoever Wording might be made. We will insist upon Wording because the collisionary grunting of gifted athletes upon a football field bores us. We will insist upon Wording because puffing into a tuba admits of little grace. We will insist upon Wording because automobiles bedevil & computational elan is the new necessary evil. We will insist because all other modes of attempt are clocked, metered, adjudged, exploited, vulgarized, taxed, & corrupted. & do not require a silver tongue. We are inordinately proud of our tongues. Extravagant Wording is a coin of our realm. If Poetry will consent to dance anywhere, we are convinced that Poetry will dance where the tongue does. Our attempts accept no substitutes.
Poetry as practice is but a Journey of Desire, come what may. Performance Poetry enacts that journey physically, so that Wording itself occupies actual space, quite as intimidating as sweat is, as effort is, as noise is. The difference is that our Wording has dimensions that leak into the deepest recesses of memory, that the resonances of our Wording will inspire a later restlessness. Performance Poetry makes of Wording a physical opportunist. The moving that Performance Poetry does occurs right before our very eyes & ears.
The audience for Performance Poetry is most frequently in a condition of prey, wherein Poetry stalks the Audience. In Performance, Poetry is haughty to the point of sadism. The Audience is Victim & must defend itself howsoever it can, tho' the only defense is comprehension, & tho' no Audience comprehends fast enough. But Poetry knows comprehension eludes Audience. It is this knowledge of its own elusiveness that powers Poetry's Performance. The Audience's inability to defend itself in Time is Performance Poetry's great engine & the very secret of Performance Poetry's conquest over print.
Performance Poetry falls into a condition of Theater if the performance can be repeated. Repeat performances yield the upper hand to the Audience. Poetry never yields anything. To remain true to Poetry's attempt, the Journey Performance enacts can neither be introduced nor concluded: Performance Poetry makes neither amends nor apologies.
We think we know what Poetry is & might do. We don't. The Journey of Desire is an unlawful Journey, ungoverned & unaccredited. And each performative occasion is but its own recapitulation of the Journey to the Limits of What Has Already Been Desired. Each occasion takes the Performance Poet directly to a point from which Further starts. This is the Poet's only Gift back to the Audience.
We are not looking for laws so much as for the quality of the Journey. Performance Poetry is not Theater because Audience is not its Anchor. The Anchor, paradoxically, is Manifest Movement (mobilesse oblige).
Audiences are, typically, one-time Fields of Opportunity - each Audience is unique (& so the Poet, each time). A true performance will occur within the Poet's capacity to register an audience as a unique opportunity to fuel the Journey of Manifest Movement that is Poetry's promise. A Performance Poet rides the Audience as surely as that very Audience resists every technique foisted upon them by said Poet. It is in this contest that Poetry occasionally deigns to make its appearance, howsoever cloaked.
Performance Poetry will be the Journey thru psychically undetermined space. The links that hold this space together are dynamic, unstable, fluid, & typically monstrous. The Audience is an ideal sacred evocation of the monstrous for the Performing Poet, but whether the space entered into by the performance can transform or transcend those psychic monsters the Audience itself brings to the performance depends wholly upon the Audience's own psychic courage. In the best of all possible performative worlds, it is the Performing Poet's example in performance that will embolden the Audience to confront its demons. Performance Poetry enacts ritual circuitry when it works, but the poet's priestly presumptions sicken us when it doesn't work.
To fulfill Poetry's promise in Performance means to escape the gravity field of any given poem: because Poetry is Elsewhere, because Poetry indicates Elsewhere, & because Poetry's performance maps a process of seeking Elsewhere . . . the very indeterminateness of this circuitry requires that poems as resource be mulched. Performance Poetry is the mulching.
In Performance, nobody listens as intently nor as comprehensively as the Performer:
This acuity of the listening faculties causes in the Performance
Poet
apprehensions of Poetry so that new work by that selfsame
Poet
will include characteristics of incomprehension commensurate
with
a literary outlawry the deceitful can only read as illitera . . .
said illitera will in turn achieve a condition of Poetry in direct
proportion to the Performing Poet's willingness to continue in the
arenas of Performance. What is so increasingly apparent is that
abandonment & uncertainty are principles of locomotion. That
Poetry's long Journey grinds exceedingly fine, exceedingly outward.
The ride is not endless so much as enduring, the results not
conclusive so much as inclusive:
Poetry gives permission: the whole of one's
Desire, in all its needful articulation,
is free to be & to go forth, as Song
that Song & Desire are One
is Poetry's sole Promise
*
II / The Last Profession:
The Poet, child of some other dimension's Immensity, will speak as
the last living Being, into a Void which will of its accord imme-
diately come fully to life, having totally & irretrievably forgotten
itself. When the world awakens, all it will have to guide it as to its
own identity & possible conduct will be what the Poet has just
spoken, which is already fading on the instant. The world cocks in
every leaf as the Poet stands there, silent. Having spoken, the Poet
cocks to all that has simultaneously and spontaneously returned.
There is a moment of august yearning as the world races with every
ear to retrieve every echo. Blank as the grave, the Poet waits this
moment through. If the Poet has spoken a single lie, the Poet is
going to hear it again, very soon. It is at this moment that the
silence ends. The pristine world talks back & the Poet is free to go
mad again, waiting anew for the death of the world, when next the
Poet will be permitted to speak.
The Poet has no name. Only local poets have names. The Poet
only has words. At the beginning of the trick called Time, the order
of the Poet's wording is incontestably speedy & profound, making
no sense at all. In the beginning, only the World makes sense, for
the World is Alive, & the Poet is mad. When madness grows livid,
the Poet commences to unravel the Mystery of Order. The Mystery
of Order is what the World will at that very moment call Form, the
Center. That said Center cannot hold will become increasingly to
the World, even as it becomes simultaneously apparent to the Poet
that there is Order to Words. As the reversal works inevitably
down, Time, that Trick, writhes like the Serpent. The Poet
becomes the pre-eminent Snake Charmer of the Age, & the World
forgets the Poet's madness, then forgets the Poet is even there. For
the first time, the laughter of the Poet is sane, & touched with
Malice. The Poet knows the Snake is turning into a maggot. The
World is dying.
Just before the World sleeps again, the Poet goes walking.
Wherever the Poet is when the World becomes Void again, it is
from there the Poet will speak. The Last Place. The Place of the
Last Profession. All local poets will be gone, none will be about to
even call the name Poet, & it is then that the Last Words will begin.
. .
III / FLOATING OPEN IN THE MOUTH OF THE REPUBLIC
OF
THE DEATH OF POET EGO:
Certainly I remember everyone's name, yet in the moment those
days made, we were each nameless to be sure. Nor do I recall
spontaneity as so much of a factor, rather there was this steady
state of alert passivity ever ready to move on itself, to acknowledge
mobilities of intent unfolding insistently out from themselves & our-
selves. It would be so easy to say that we lived then, howsoever
briefly, in the best of that motion, as if that motion were indeed a
possible World . . .
come dusk red river be drum
come licked lights beyond be
moan be drone
whole carloads emptied
gab &
greet
whole heartloads of
sheer say to
be said
o! Resonant List of Our Evaporate Republic !
the only everDance we were ever
even There
So much depends on in which direction you look. The directions a
cocked ear decrees. Every heard syllable an extending of eye/aye.
Rolling wheels of witness claimed, given & sung, & abandoned.
Our weighted ears hanging upright. We, waiting where listen
embodies. Each ear a cocked mushroom radiating weight. Naked
to the wasting silence noise names. Stately meander barked,
toothsome. Brevities of brief, sounded. Meant state, brief-voiced.
The comings & goings fluted, fluid & flirtacious. Ornamental vows
combed, waded thru. Jetties of query & poise, imperiled & awash.
Republic of the Death, mobilized & echoing, depending, & so
inclined . . .
pilgrims to a state to be embraced
in memories of a state we could make
made state mindful & unfixed & heard
state of die & become, sounded
Since the travelers into the mouth of open depend on the ear as
primary organ, & since the travelers in their unity of effort excite a
uniquely embodied state or republic, a virtual collaborative motility
or chorus, the necessity for focused alacrity primes the tongue, that
organ not of penetration, but of deliverance. & nothing shudders
the pink granite rotunda at the center of the Republic of the Death
of Poet Ego quite so nicely as a tongue delivering doings big ears
scan after. Those deliverances are poems. Poems abandoned with
a precision being inside the mouth of open exacts. You can't get
here without ears, & what ears eat is tongue. The poem must
escape the tongue before the tongue gets eaten. It all depends upon
an urgency worked with callibrated deliberation, hairtrigger at each
instant. You can't get here unless your ear eats your tongue, we
can't get here unless our ear eats our tongue. Poems float open in
the mouth of open, & so do the poets, & the discipline of making
that work is a trick of dancing the open poetry hoedown imparts.
We do these rites because being inside the mouth of open unframes
our veiled dilemmas. We are disappearing ourselves as poets,
resonantly, insistently, precisely, & are, at least in our own
embodied mind's Ear, thereby crediting & discharging our duties as
citizens of the Evaporate Economy our Republic, in all its forsooth
aural contingency, has as its coined of the realm intransigency . .
.
the frames are a fat lie hanging us
only if we live there but we don't
& we know that now, we know,
tongue/tympanum halo'd & inclusive
that we live where we listen & sound
our rites are of empowerment
which empowerment occurs singly
which isolate dawning stands fueled
& turned definitively possible
by an ungoverned taxation we applaud
we love who we hear when we hear
each grabbed echo freed anew, alike
to our own speech when it speaks
back upon us, insisting on the effort
coming 'round again, each time
ungoverned but resonant, our spoken tax
played forth, unhomed, yet homing
Whether smoke pours out of the mouth of open, or untold
thundering tons of water pour down over that very opening, the
physicality of the poets' office has become central to our moment.
We roll in the grass in each others' arms across the lawn at
midnight. We sweat & go drowsy in the frontseat, rolling through
the tassels & the lace of the fields of Crooked Ample. No
microphone amplifies these acts, no printing press improves or
insures them. The audiences appropriate to this moment sit
baffled, scanning for clues, their very poise primed to respond in
kind. If the Poet is in our kind, the Poet will out . . .
The origin of penetration is the ear
& the ear has tiny teeth of comb
that shine on tongues that wag big, & waver
Hairtrigger momenta like lice
gat-toothed syllabic lice bang'd & boomer'd
radar ears all cymbal'd & cocked
Such havoc dancing, worry-words bawled,
abyssmal beads of tasty down-sounding,
appetitious ear-sump sorts 'em out duly
Collaged & collaborated mingle-maddened
mix
of escalated garlic-twanged polyphony,
plattered & plated, smelling of nerve, spooned
Swept back flukes of lobe upstreaming
encocked labes of listen outwelling
ladied lap of that, astride the echo lode
Hoary & hairy, the ear webs along our
cocky Ancient of Days made incarnate
& isolate, the gig too sly to credit:
The ear totes a shovel, every time,
& it's the living the ear buries tho'
ears are the last to go, Sounder . . .
For what's ear if not Mental Spirit, o poet,
& what's tongue save Ejaculate Grave, opened
?
We are that Poet, are that Audience. The aloud everDance
allowed, accessible as physical Place, awaits doings & deliveries,
does so as condition & preparatory. Each of us who do this work
add to the resonance that melts the frame none of us require
anymore. We are waiting, for the instant immediately preceeding
the swarm of ears that eats our tongues. For the terrible starburst
of a single syllable down inside our mouths of open. For the
swamped rotunda beneath the waves to be lifted, its transparent
walls hung with mutable, insistent Song.