Where's the omelet?

WRITING IN SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS

By Chuck Richardson

BOOM!...WATER: AN IMAGINARY FILM...MOTHERS ARE GLAD!---

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Blog: Jackson MacLow, Ronald Sukenick, Joe Bageant, Jared Schickling, Burroughs & More.

RECENTLY PUBLISHED:

BlazeVox, Fall 2k7: Digressions On A Recurring Dream and Trust Me.

WRITING IN LINES AND STANZAS 

All poems by Chuck Richardson

Fascia: A Chapbook

Simultaneously submitted to various publishers.

NECESSITY


a sister clubs the laptop riot
for fifty bucks
green water invades the lake
walking

where screams silence a future history,
ignoring the guilt of freedom lovers
who lack the mechanisms
for bliss, untouched

by the unborn child they slowly unroll their crumpled unnamable sleep

avoiding the flight of dinosaurs,
bored who become dragons

before dying at the feet of angels
electrifying

flowers that give wing to Pegasus perceiving
the circus of the sky beyond

reach
of terrestrial arms, the bleeding cosmos washing
those feet that are


A WHIM FOLLOWED


progress made
unwittingly
induced, no
but deduced away

a whim followed
except for the rule
containing it



Blue Suit
over women
stern & serious professional
contrast the watermelon sun
beyond the windowpane
bruised ambiguities
lubricating the Indian sky
they evaporate mist with their eyes
A smell of breath


stale from waiting out
the calm between storms—

Having died a little inside your frailty—

Caesar escaping his bloodbath,
lingering without guilt
or destruction around you—
exposing missions


revealing how flash seekers
revisit their starkness
having assassinated
nobody

Those with a need to know
who knew the undeed
must disappear
the moon fits


like skin if your heart is the sun.

Mind a dim stitching

A relation.
Which ruler has the Tao?



I AM A VISITOR’S ROOM


I am a visitor’s room, in which a passing wakefulness goes—

A sudden guest, friendly and compelling, comes—fleshing for some new delight, a guide
from beyond, doing what lovers do with love—

Being that word, that sense of Romeo Juliet feels in his name—that sound that worked for her,
dripping its essence on each thing absorbing it, becoming an inner meaning only she knows, poking her why

Wherefore art thou becoming a ruby at sunrise, that transparent daily order ripped open by happiness, the purity of name-action a good host who keeps digging your well, knowing:

Water’s there somewhere, submitting to its daily practice, knocking on the door until that
window opens and you look out to see me—

A shape—some uncreated love unmet—becoming the heart that’s informed us from the
start, the mirror being that well we face, adding sugar to the water from this jar of pouring stones

Heaping a mountain to maintain my echo the way I grasp your voice, your sound burning
my smoke from its fire, an emptiness more beautiful than life obliterating
life to create life

This blind world squatting like a beggar in the road, a great soul hiding in a city of strangers, surrendering to praiseworthy emptiness, groggy but awake, letting the fear-language of our themes crack us open and float away, burning the priest from his tower giving him a taste of your almond cake—

Where the stars rise spinning every night—blown by a bewildered god kissing his flute

Breathing notes with a need that pierces, memories of that breathing mouth, singing loud

Sweeping the floor like a gatekeeper guarding a silence that won’t break

And your heart-mule naked enough to get us there—


A NUGGET’S FUGUE


The wound plows
sinking the cave

A fabulous pool of health
gropes for white flour


Do you hear the sadness
in what you did
How it crumpled the form

dehydrating the bloom
in a palm’s resentment
How, like a nugget’s fugue,

it slid on moist pavement
the way a crutch slips
I am news


radiantly sinking
eating you slyly
at your harshest

While stars splash
like anthems deep
in your offense
of forgetting me

if you linger
I’ll detain you;
if you provoke me
you will not win;
Having shared the teeth & excrement of life


with you tapping out dreams
of undefeated men
defeated but undestroyed
in body and soul
skulled by the best money of their generation
being starved out
hysterical & naked
breathing ether & ice—

The cold spring of the cruelest month
cemetery of desire killing
the February of your strangled cat
great white hope of nazi world
dead from an angry fix

There’s no point in going
on but I can tell you, friend,
the point ain’t necessary,
but random
and one never gets it
as planned

THE WIND AND THEIR BEARERS


Unbodied, tracelessness between possession and speech,
where communication silently opens, language stops

Where God’s so busy that mystics are well-schooled slackers spitting words that
obscure their presence

Where lovers love love—not each other—nursing babies who’ve yet tasted meat but
smell its scentless spirit

Where knowing the freedom of madness disintegrates any random image, instead rising in favor of love alone—
no flags, only the wind and their bearers…
the empty creative actions of everything

Where a poet seeks the mind absented from the poem to write it, its emptiness to reveal
its imprisonment in words that contain everything needed via some magic reversal
the hole for the plug one craves

When you forget to honor your parents and the comfort that offers ignoring
the traps they set for you forsaking
their enabling obstacles, nurturing spirit through body

When mom when pop seek clones to spew their pathological advice, trying your
patience, the way a thorn tries the rosebud to produce its fragrance, living in the one who

Created the prophets, or living like an unattended burning itself out nowhere

Yet a candle, elsewhere flickers, describing refuge

A way to be fine powder
on an old plate knowing
what both worlds offer

Being a silent final
touchpoint when names are

Erased by the worms of language

UPON LEAVING THE BAR


We push off in search of grub, bidding adieu to the glorious hell of human tavern pleasures—muddied stars seeking beds not of our own making but hern that brung us—
we cling to her arm with no future that’s fine with me

We’re lilies, evaporated kegs of unworried creation smiling through wide open doors drunk with

The wine that moves us the way an old dog moves on hot afternoons

Shaded and digging the dance of particles cumming and going, heaving and hoeing on peculiar lust-laden journeys winding down like clocks ending our days unwound and alarming—like those wearing faces that no longer mask the ocean but reveal its jewels of

Joy dropping liquefied turd blessings all around us

Crystallizing our unexpected strange attractions



A NUGGET’S FUGUE II


under
cloudy skies
through a blissful gaze
at the crossroads
of another time
screamin jay
put a spell on my car
driven teary-eyed
with joy
aching to reveal itself
beautifully



A FATHER’S DAY POEM


Watering the flowers on father’s grave
with sunshine rainbowing the droplets from the can, wind
licking its dry tongue across my sweaty neck
memories unworded bound

Across America into the vacuum of absence, a night prolonged without guidance in the
transitional word, seeking what I have without sense to feel it—I find a dance that
moves me to hear a voice:

We’ll see
Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched
Je-hesus H. Key-riced…Judas Priest
Crime never pays
Learn to look, then learn to see
Keep your legs moving
Use both hands
Your mother says it’s time for bed
I love you

Then silence at the bottom of the can…

ERASURE


While fleeing

(That membrane
twain tor and dale—

A level fascia
twining primitive cock-
crow revisiting headfirst
into jawbones lunging,
a flipped coin, eviscerated
witnessing this vibe)

Your father urges
keeping your bone on
till it rots

Anticipating turmoil
and riot

In quietude, prove
your wits

The Dead torque our record


inflicting their poverty
their sexual gist

Recollection imprinted
upon us their

Cerebral tombs, a
tacit melting
of our beams proving

lethal ground our
site for combat



when I’m native:

I’ll let this kneading of peoples untilled entrails bequeath its trademark on the lawn—snuffling like an aficionado, its heart a leaking stalactite.

That won’t do at 5:30 a.m.

I’ll attack what they love first
letting the time for battle flow.

Being like a virgin at home, I’ll
spread my legs wide, inviting.

And if I flee like a squirrel when accosted
my assailant will not withstand me.



BONES


Where you been
she said sleepily
from bed
in lucid trance
conjured from booze
smoke & whatnot

Night before I said
hippos were boiling in their tank
someone had to save them

I lit a cigarette and gave it to her
we’ve cut down to seven fags a day

Well’d jew save’em she said

Just their bones

Where are they

Whom

The bones

Let me sleep on them

She extinguished her butt and
fed our pussy

cat


OVER CRIMSON SOD


Arranging five moles
whose psychic style
shrouds the Tao,
probing:

Their speech
executes sound,
surveying:

What idiom is viable

What tone suggests implication

Which ear considers what is said

Who’s snooping

Who’s got occasion

Will this liberty fit this line;

Or is the demise of the word


the destruction of the world—

A docile herd sounding
passive—

Our enemy being

The actual condition

Over crimson sod: Banners


of fading apathy sag
their grimness, like water,
weighs them down, galloping

Away from the sky, striking—
vacuous, controlling aims harmonizing
with active fluid inconsistencies shaping
spiritual wave-forms, swaying—

In the wind, a swing
non-insistent
a true picture of power
while

Authorized bunting waves
with no clout itself:
same song


that sways the maize
ignites this jetting water’s fall

This metallic sound
of stars exploding
beyond the noise

And deliberate rule
dominates the designed inequity of force

In harmony with what riches can be won
phases


do not probe

the luminosity of desertion subsists

for those petrified by their time
who have nothing to say

Force need not
insist upon its function
or activity


BHIKKU MAMA


Bhikku Mama swinging ginsu knife
normally sedate now screaming
at sakhi-soaked horizontal husband
resting tensely on deep velvet couch:

“God is good like tea in morning,
yabyum afternoons
and marshmallow evenings,
we have no right to complaining,” says he,
eyes fuzzed over like peach pits.

“Where is sparrow on watered porch?
Where are clouds in overcast sky?
Where is sorrow at this funeral?
Why don’t we have a dog?”

And thwack! bhikku mama stabs
ancient Chinese tea cabinet with ginsu knife,
craving a new death.


THE ASSASSINATION


A man walks slowly down a sidewalk. No one is watching. Police line the street. Cars pass. There is no sound. Noise has been outlawed.

Black people. White people. Various shades in between. Color, too, is illegal. There are no dogs. No cats. They’ve been liberated from their bondage. No cows. No plants. No babies. No drugs. No churches. No homes. Only offices.

They work.

A woman sits behind a window. She is looking at the man, but she does not see him. A Bible rests firmly on her lap. She has no faith. It is in the Bible. She fondles a string of fake white pearls with her right hand. She is not alone.

A distant animal sleeps, but does not dream. Dreams are dead. There are no streets. Only highways. The animal stirs, but no one’s there to notice.

So it didn’t stir at all. This is a fact. And it is left unobserved.

The politician passes a law that no one reads. It outlaws literacy. The police cannot enforce it. They cannot read and there is no sound. No color.

No one can draw them a picture. They ride in their squad cars.
The politician stays home with his law. And no one notices.

The brut buys a gun in a store. But bullets have been outlawed. The woman in the window spreads her legs, offering herself to me, but her twat turns to dust. The slaves in their cave remain mesmerized by shadows. The beast looks vainly for fresh opportunities. The Army helps.

The sun has not risen for days. And no one misses it.

*****

something extra:

Victory Without War Is Best

As I pace the city
planning to subvert the enemy’s strategy:

Mourning doves are tranquil, knowing
I defend them, observing every kill about to ripen.

Victory without war is best.

The Second Coming

Jesus freaks raising hallelujah hands

observe worship without perception,

ignoring Revelations 18 at their own peril,

for the Second Coming will be rule without loathing

invited to act by a many-bladed mind

unmoved by those It’s dissecting

These apes of Christ—

who run their own experiments—

wanting a disease they’ve never accepted

to answer their trivial prayers

while failing to avert the blinding fire

they never dared engage

The Postcard

With sorrow

our dwelling becomes

a postcard, fleeing

From us it remits

a well done to history

Craving the ghost

we dominate those already

crushed

OPINIONS ETC.

A DEVIL WHO WRITES TO BE LIVED: CREATIVE PERCEPTION AS EXISTENTIAL ENDURANCE--A READING OF KAFKA’S PARADOXICAL PARABLES

By Chuck Richardson

Parables and Paradoxes, Bi-lingual Edition, by Franz Kafka, Schocken Books, New York, 1958.

The Great Short Works of Franz Kafka: A New Translation by Joachim Neugroschel, Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1995.

*****

And, how does it work, exactly—this book that takes us into hell?
William H. Gass, Fiction and the Figures of Life 1

Criticism is the highest form of autobiography.
Oscar Wilde 2

A belief like a guillotine – as heavy as light
Franz Kafka 3


If K had rendered his own New Testament, his fictional messiah, profoundly alienated and ignored by His countrymen, being pressured by His Father to do something—even if it’s wrong, might have nailed Himself to a cross of His own making…out of necessity.

Of course, He would have had to engineer then construct an apparatus that would do His nailing for Him as He positioned Himself—forming an angel in the imaginary snows of Golfgully, His back chafing nigh the blasphemous rood, pleasing His sadistic Dad.

The contraption, naturally, would not work according to The Plan, but mete out justice by its own whim. Resurrection would be pointless, or worse: a Sisyphean nightmare. 4

As modest delusions exact small rewards, K would’ve got his kicks being evil for a while, playing devil’s advocate to the apparent organic damnation informing his environment and spirit. His devil writes to be lived.

By exposing the metaphysical horror of creation (the selective physiology of physicality) and mocking it, K reveals the absurdity of his evolutionary, existential dilemma: that he is sentient and therefore must participate in
sentience, even if it seems awry.5 K escapes this conscious charge by fictionalizing it. Writing is a sinful pleasure that exorcises and projects his deepest sense of realness onto the page, revivifying him while, perhaps, vicariously weakening the pragmatic, worldly resolve of unwary, bureaucratic readers consuming his “story.”

Unlike his consumers, K is unconcerned with the nature of reality. For him, the reality of nature is quite enough, thank-you.

Indifference Eroded—Poems for a Mainstream Revolution
by Chuck Richardson

A Review of Suburban Eggs by Jared Schickling, Publish America, 2004

Why do people read poetry, and why do people write poems?

There are as many answers to that question as there are poets and poetry readers, but one reason shared by all is to glimpse a unique form of human wisdom rendered by one of our most instinctive mental activities as Homo sapiens sapiens (1)—language. What differentiates poets and their readers from other literate folks is simple: The former seek wisdom (empathy with the “universal soul”), while other readers seek knowledge (the absurd, demeaning attempt to sympathize with and make sense of the unknowable in order to conquer, master and institutionalize or consume It).

Some poets reveal wisdoms that resonate with entire populations, most don’t. It could also be noted that for national, mainstream poets to exist, the poet must belong to a nation that reads and hears her poetry, a humane nation that realizes the importance of feeling her mind. Simply put, for poetry to be valued by a nation, its citizens must possess a culture that nurtures wisdom.

Of course, this is not the case in America today, nor has it ever been. American has never been a nation of poetry lovers, or art lovers for that matter. Instead, Americans have traditionally wanted to know what something was “good” for, how it might be used, in order to find out what it’s “worth”—always calculating, always quantifying. In other words, Americans have traditionally sought knowledge, believing the accumulation of facts and material goods were actually a means of acquiring, and measurement of, understanding.

In America, like most countries, alienation is an inevitably true artistic experience. For awhile, angry artists and poets were in vogue, but since 9/11 and the rise of a terrified, religious form of patriotism, the vast majority of artists, regardless of how productive they are, find themselves on the outside looking in. There’s nothing new in that, it’s an American tradition as old as the colonies, but it seems more acute now than the historical norm.

Therefore, those who read, write, hear and perform poetry are radical and revolutionary by merely pursuing their eccentric vocations, having heard their true call, having created the time and space for their souls to thrive. The best poets realize this, sensing it through their skin the way one’s hide might tingle as someone sneaks up on them. To read and write poetry is like getting away with something, it is the gooseflesh of the soul, the erosion of indifference.

To write poetry in such an environment, the poet must try to defend his indefensible action by expanding the world in which his readers will judge his “work.” He must try to make revolution a mainstream value and recognize the fact he’s facing a tough jury, a jury not comprised of his peers, or kind, but people who are generally hostile to his type. He wins if one in 12 are convinced by his argument, swayed by its emotional truth. Exoneration is the best most poets can hope for, only a few are found innocent of the mysterious charges lodged against them by the beauty and power of their word “play.”

One such poet, Jared Schickling, has just acquitted himself with his first book—Suburban Eggs—released by Publish America, in which he uses projective techniques to reveal the absurd ironies informing human incidents in general, and the American experience in particular (the latter quite profoundly).

Charles Olson writes that projective verse is “percussive,” imminent buckshot that transfers energy from object to poet to reader, and that from all points within itself the projective poem discharges energy.

Thus:

the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE
the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE (2)

Schickling’s narrative voice is but a whiff of sound, ghostlike and projective. Its power rests in its observations of small things and its ability to link these microcosmic entities to their macrocosmic situations. He abstracts the ephemera of daily life, revealing them—like Whitman, Williams, Ginsberg and Bukowski before him—as modes of the universal soul. His poems read like stories about moments, psychological digressions from the here-now that weave the present situation into a larger narrative, performing language that’s pursuing the political in an attempt to, as the poet Ron Silliman once said, “undermine the bourgeoisie” (3), recognizing that the poem itself is a form of action that “legislates” reality through language. In other words, sensibility, by way of the senses, to the poem; the poet, by way of performance, to humankind. Jared’s suggestive poems convey impressions that clarify one’s perceptions of life, perhaps even altering them, as language plumbs the substrata of thought and sensibility on which we’ve been habitually basing our lives. His work illuminates the landscape and taxonomy of our collective, national and private mythologies in every instance. Each element resonates the book’s larger themes while modifying them in some minute way, allowing the work to blossom in the reader’s mind—a blooming flower’s fragrance that exceeds the plant itself.

Though a thoroughly American poet, Schickling’s major contemporary influences are not American. His spirit is secular, yet cosmic, exact, but wide-reaching. His roaming mind, enthralled by other cultures, places and times, has led him on anthropological excursions far and wide—officially sanctioned and not—from the jungles of Madagascar to the high plains of the Mojave Desert, from the leaves of Walt Whitman to the luminescent, grassy planes of Jorge Guillén. Further exploration led him to his Eastern European contemporaries: Ewald Murrer (The Diary of Mr. Pinke); Semezdin Mehmedinović (Sarajevo Blues and Nine Alexandrias); and Tomaž Šalamun, whom Schickling calls a “modern day Dylan Thomas.”

What he most admires about these poets is their “general, accepted sense of melancholy,” which he sees as “often translating itself somewhere between sheer hope on one end and cynicism on the other.”

In Suburban Eggs, Schickling presents a timeless world informed by America’s diverse cultural landscape, with scenes shifting from sea to shining sea and many lost and forgotten places in between. The end result is a book of poems that, in their totality, cast doubt on any belief in a unifying morality, wisdom or ethos that anchors an individual’s identity in America’s national language (a diction composed of patriotic consumerism and corporate commercialism).

UNTITLED p. 122

A four-page poem that might have been called Idiot Fear, this is Schickling’s tour de force, resonating not only with the late Charles Bukowski’s use of ironic punch lines, but also with the poetic sensibility of William Carlos Williams, the godfather of Modern American poetry. In fact, Schickling, something of a romantic, quit college a month shy of graduation after reading Patterson over a long weekend, realizing that academic poetry must oblige the industry first, the culture and polis second, to avoid biting the hand that feeds it.

Schickling shifts the placement of his set-ups and punch lines in the poem, revealing a rhythm in flux, pulsating in a biologic, or seemingly erratic, sentient timing. For instance, the poem begins by painting the situation:

cars are lining the street.
blue Monday
either drowns in beer
or drifts away
on carbon monoxide
bubbles.

And then begins the set-up:

the Tibetan howl
is mute next to
Harley Davidson,
is candy-coated
in the friction that occurs
between rubber and concrete.

Followed by a brief digression that descends to the punch line:

I heard the Senate debates today.
they want to start
cooking children
even earlier, like
at birth. and there’s $ now to do it.

Of course, “cooking children” is a shocking image, one that breaks the reader’s concentration and forces her to think about it. What does the poem mean by that image? What’s its emotional truth? Does the use of “$”—an unpronounceable symbol, the word formerly known as money—suggest that capital is taboo and not worth the poet’s or reader’s breath?

Schickling’s method of mixing punch lines with shifting rhythms is akin to what poet Charles Bernstein calls anti-absorption, a method of shocking and disturbing the reader through metrics and sound.

Consider:

and “trailer trash.”
the food and the dishes have no choice.
serve it all up
with that Israeli wîn. [pronounced “wine” “whine” or “vine”]
a ripe, old vintage.

Anti-absorption not only shocks, but also at the same time pulls the reader back into the text by a combination of absorption and anti-absorption to increase reading. This tactic creates dual points focusing the reader toward the center to interpret what Bernstein (with Forest-Thomson) calls an “image complex,” from “trailer trash” to Israeli wine in the space of four lines: “Poetry is like a swoon with this exception: it brings you to your senses” (4).

With the poem’s third punch line—“as the eggnog tub / is reloaded”—the rhythm shifts into a series of digressions and non-sequitur punch lines that de-familiarize common objects, like “instincts’ / coagulation”; a drunken oil tanker captain, with the “point” being he’s “Mexican”; a “broken woman” who speaks to a “salad container” who’s been “labeled,” which “is the point.”

The “eggnog tub” is at first an odd image that, upon a moment’s reflection, comes into focus, and it dangles in the air a floating, weightless anchor. The movement of this stanza is a “swoon” curtailed by a buoyant punch line that brings the reader to their senses and into the light, which is exactly the point.

Bernstein writes: “The oscillation of attentional focus, & its attendant blurring, is a vivid way of describing the ambivolent [sic] switching, which I am so fond of, between absorption and anti-absorption, which can now be described as redirected absorption” (4). Also, Silliman writes that Williams’ “The Desert Music” celebrates the idea of poetry as some sort of ambivalent, transpersonal force, in which the poet or poem is reaffirmed, but ashamed (5). A similar ambivalence—a sensibility encompassing both a love for human beings and a hate for their diction, morbid institutions and culture—pervades Schickling’s work both in Suburban Eggs, and his Folks series for Buzz [the influential free press NiagaraBuzz.com, now defunct], particularly “Secrets.”

As the poem begins its closing movement, its broken rhythm conveys a sense of broken culture—a sense of coitus interrupt us [sic] is conveyed via the line breaks, which simultaneously convey the poem’s power and human importance:

yolk
you up,
blinder
you down. “look…

to, several line later:

you support, the
program, and its
whip.

The poem closes with a list of horrors visited on impotent people by the “program,” setting up a closing ironic punch line that Bukowski would have like:

and you’re afraid of love.
you’re such an idiot.

In this poem, Schickling combines his hate, or outrage at human impotence, with his love for what’s good and possible in people if they’d only wake up, providing the poem its power, which is overtly political yet transcends politics, speaking directly to the reader’s soul.

YOU CAN BUY… p. 98

Is another poem sickened by rituals and cultural memes adhering to the conviction that man is the apple of God’s eye, and somehow separate from and above nature, yet fallen. “you can buy…” projects Schickling’s anxiety that the real poem exists beyond his reach. His job, nonetheless, is to extend himself and try, no matter how absurd it may seem, to at least point toward it.

By stating that one “…can buy / gastrointestinal problems / in a bag”; that “before things got fucked up / popes fathered many fatherless children” and “chopped dissenting heads off”; that “…the men described by men to be / sanctioned by God / are keepers of truth and the hounds of lies”; and that “we are a good Christian nation, offering / farts in a bag for 25 cents / … / bombs for women and children / so that bombs will never again / be dropped on women and children”—Schickling let’s his uneasiness and ambivalence about being “American” point to the truth via the tragic irony of the poem’s last line.

Poetry critic John R. Woznicki writes that “Poetry is the pursuit of politics…Once society has lost the ability to define itself through language, it loses its identity, value, and place in the world” (6).

The Orwellian ending suggests that the uprootedness of American language, the meaninglessness of most of it, and the fact that the nation, as a result, is not what it claims to be, reveals how our national diction cloaks American history rather than rendering it, depriving its citizens of a real national identity rooted in its most fundamental and personal psychic processes.

Schickling succeeds here, and elsewhere in Suburban Eggs, in subverting our nation’s tendency to deceive itself through language.

A HUMAN NEEDS CALAMITY TO WRITE… p. 74

Language poet Bob Perelman sees poetry as social art and imagines poets as “antennae of the race or social receptors” (7). Schickling senses the cultural oppression of the marketplace and instinctively, at turns throughout Suburban Eggs, attacks modes of capitalist communication, then avoids those commercial communiqués altogether as something irrelevant to life’s—the poem’s—essential qualities, thus proving their fundamental insignificance, as he does here.

The poem begins “a human needs calamity to write, like a dead baby / or a hangnail. the race of you… / I float in it, soak away…” and then proceeds to favor sexual contact as the antidote to suffering:

…exchanging forbidden fluids the Key and the Lock
forged as One, intended for each other
the bounds of morality busted
busted. the Key and the Lock forged as One, intended
for each other, denouncing all books, o their highlighted repentance
their confession moonblessed…

The repetition of “the Key and the Lock” is reminiscent of D. H. Lawrence’s “Sir Pestle” and “Lady Mortar” in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and like Lawrence, Schickling uses it to heighten the sexual imagery while introducing a metaphor that turns sex into a means of opening up, of passing through new doorways of experience and perception to attain commercially forbidden knowledge, rather than being pulverized by it.

Also, Schickling is a young writer who’s very much in live, and writing for his lover, to his muse. The poem is what binds and defines their relationship linguistically, as sex binds their relationship physically, and though personal, the poem is social art of the highest order—intercourse above and beyond cash—available to anyone seeking it.

Projected Eggs

With Suburban Eggs, Jared Schickling expands his readers’ worlds by eroding their indifference about the state of American culture, the way its practitioners live, and how their lifestyles affect those with different values who come from a variety of different backgrounds.

Will Schickling succeed in making revolution a mainstream American value? Alone, probably not, but these poems do succeed in casting doubt on current mainstream American (i.e.: corporate) values, and the means by which our national institutions communicate and perpetuate them via commercial language.

But criticism isn’t enough. Schickling’s poems point down an aesthetically more pleasing road for their readers to travel than the bloody path we’re currently on.

That’s reason enough to read any book, or do anything.


NOTES
1. See “Is Homo sapiens sapiens a Wise Species?” by Donald E. Watson: “Using the adaptability definition, now ask, ‘Is Homo sapiens sapiens wise?’ Or is our species too self-centered, short-sighted, narrow-minded, reluctant to think, and fearful of change? To address these questions, it would help if we had a standardized index for species wisdom. Since we don’t, we’ll define such an index: the Species Wisdom Index (SWI). The SWI is not an absolute measure; it indicates deviations from a norm. Since there’s no such thing as an average species, this norm can’t refer to the wisdom of an average species. Instead, we can tie the SWI to a measurement that reflects the ultimate product of adaptability: the duration of time a species survives. Then we can arbitrarily pick a species survival time of one million years as our norm. Because sharks have survived 400 million years, for example, their SWI is about 400. By the same measure, the SWI of horseshoe crabs is about 350, and that of sturgeons is about 200…Homo sapiens sapiens, including Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, its earliest known subspecies, has survived about one-tenth of a million years. Hence, the SWI of our species is a mere 0.10. We can therefore conclude that sharks, crabs, and sturgeons possess great wisdom but meager intelligence, whereas Homo sapiens sapiens possesses great intelligence but meager wisdom.”
2. Olson, Charles. “Projective Verse.” Charles Olson: Selected Writings. Ed. Robert Creeley. New York: New Directions, 1966. 15-30. For an expansive look at this theory, see John R. Woznicki’s “Poetry of Play, Poetry of Purpose: The Continuity of American Language Poetry.” It might also be noted that Gertrude Stein once, when discussing prose, said sentences are thoughts and paragraphs emotions.
3. Quoted in Hartley, “Textual Politics and the Language Poets.”
4. Bernstein, Charles. A Poetics. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992. Bernstein suggests adding antiabsorptive elements to the poem, to disturb and shock the reader through metrics and sound. So Bruce Andrews confronts the audience with harsh street slang, scatology, or “second-person accusations provoking questions (‘Isn’t nature bored with your devotion?’ ‘Hey, Fuckhead’) & first-person deprecations (‘Mash me to a pulp’),” practices that “invoke & assault the reader with the exploitive, racist, sexist underside of our collective syntactic and metaphoric practices…mak[ing] obtrusive the social and ideological nature & function of language habits in which we are ordinarily so absorbed at to ignore or repress” (35). Anti-absorption is: “artifice, boredom, exaggeration, undecorous, anticonventional, unintegrated, fractured, fragmented, fanciful, ornately stylized, rococo, baroque, structural, mannered, fanciful, ironic, iconic, schtick, camp, diffuse, decorative, repellent, inchoate, programmatic, didactic, theatrical, background muzak, amusing: skepticism, doubt, noise, resistance” (29-30). Antiabsorption not only shocks but at the same time pulls the reader back into the text by a combination of absorption and antiabsorption to increase reading: “This is an approach I find myself peculiarly attracted to, & which reflects my ambivalence (as in wanting multiple things) about absorption & its converses. In my poems, I frequently use opaque & nonabsorbable elements, digressions & interruptions, as part of a technological arsenal to create a more powerful (‘souped-up’) absorption than possible with traditional, & blander, absorptive techniques…This is the subject of much of my work” (52). This tactic creates dual points focusing the reader toward the center to interpret what Bernstein (with Forest-Thompson) calls an “image complex”: “Poetry is like a swoon with this exception: it brings you to your senses. The oscillation of attentional focus, & its attendant blurring, is a vivid way of describing the ambivalent [sic] switching, which I am so fond of, between absorption & antiabsorption, which can now be described as redirected absorption. The speed of the shifts ultimately becomes a metric weight, & as the pace picks up, the frenzied serial focusing/unfocusing enmeshes into a dysraphic [sic] whole—not totality—an alchemical ‘overlay and blending’ as Piombino notes, forming what he terms a ‘combinatorial’ or, in Forrest-Thomson’s words, an ‘image-complex’” (78). This new kind of reading connects to Pound’s use of speed, image, and ideogram. Bernstein makes it a point, however, to differentiate his style of absorption from that of realism’s and lyric poetry’s, indirectly suggesting that his poetic forefathers belong in this group. He underestimates his poetic and strategic (and therefore rhetorical) debt to Pound. Bernstein sketches out a new poetic program that makes the reader conscious of his own participation in rhetoricity. To do this the poet must provide information to help readers identify their relation to language. The language poets want to be rhetorical, but subtly, denying the subjectivity of art.
5. Silliman, Ron. “The Desert Modernism.” Electronic Poetry Review #4 (2002).
6. Ibid, Woznicki.
7. Perelman, Bob. Interview.