Two Poems by Ruth Towne

X-ray of My Skull

Hold still, the room is bone-white, 

                     the radiograph is ready.

Before the first X-ray was made, 

there was a wife. This tradition

is made in her image.

       Before I was anyone’s wife, I was a girl.

Before I was a girl, I was a wave of light. 

I still remember what it is like

        to move through, 

to pass through objects and softer tissues.

What I am doing now is as close

as I have been to that way of movement

because I am telling the truth:

  

           there is you, who I promise myself to,

and there is not you.

I am true to both, both can be true.

My lungs, my heart, these are shadows

on a luminescent screen. My bones are light. 

I have nothing to hide. It is true.

             The first X-ray was of a wife.

She lay her hand between ray and plate.

      And in the faint green light of the screen,

her ring became opaque to the rays. 

Yobi-goe (The Call)

The ocean knows that kind-of silence

she came for. The siren-high view

lures her in. To avoid her disquiet

flooding up, a great hollow breaker,

she came for the siren-high view–

on the coast, ocean foams across rock,

flooding up a great hollow breaker

almost over the balcony’s metal edge.

On the coast, ocean foams across rock.

A rogue wave, a surge urges her off

almost over the balcony’s metal edge.

The undercurrent, the persistent blue, 

a rogue wave, a surge urges her off,

lures her into a void. Her disquiet,

the undercurrent, the persistent blue–

the ocean knows that kind of silence.

Organs Without Bodies by Stephen Guy Mallett

This work takes its title from an elliptical text of the same name by Žižek—itself a remix on the concept Deleuze and Guattari remix from Artaud—and it, this review, leaves Žižekian thought alone unanswered at the door in much the same way Kahlil Crawford’s hybrid chapbook Organ City states and forgoes justification of its own title and relations of referents therein and thereon.  

¶ It's all from the ground up, isn’t it, what we call art? How grammars visual and syntactic bubble to the surface like oil? Only the redactions are the result of dispensationalism. Poets take themselves seriously for the same good reason any craftsperson in a dying form takes their craft seriously: it’s dying. Not dead, but dying; will die. The mixed mediaification in Organ City isn’t as powerful as to stand for a panacea for poetry’s plight in threat of extinction: it’s not that serious. Neither a general social anhedonia nor a lack of a smart readership is to blame for the threat. It’s just that there’s too many of us; too many poets and not enough readers. Introducing a visual component (with more bite than say a Kaurian sketch of a succulent) might infuse a more robust sense of the poetic scale the poet has in mind, the meeting point of the Venn diagram’s little circles of grammars (1) poetic, (2), visual, (3) generative.      

¶ Depending on how the conversation has gone and is going, I will usually admit to Finnigans Wake as my favourite poem: it’s win-win—either my interlocutor is familiar enough with Finnigans Wake to correctly identify it as a novel, or, rarer, and even better for their sake, hasn’t heard of it, and I may introduce them to what it is and what it isn’t, my being as didactic as a pharisee. If color commentators uses poetic as an adjective when ejaculating over a counterattack, whatever poetic import is read is more alive than it was before, is expanding the etymological umbrella, and is, poetry is, as a noun, good for more than the stuff of forced end rhymes, and that which makes Finnigans Wake and an Allen Iverson-lead fast break and Organ City by Kahlil Crawford poetic is their respective urgencies; where the use of the poetic is less a choked umbrella and more a drink from a fire hydrant is where the canvas is filled. Bonsai-sized but with horror vacui décor. The encositive (FW, 27), the prescriptive grammarian fears misoccupied space, regulates the city squares, restricts, monitors acts of delinquency, makes sacred the categorical, is always asterisking, runs arrhythmic soulless executive commands; Organ City is a city that sleeps. The fever dreams of local history precipitating over the text color the present. A thesis with elements of poetic grammar and with elements of pedagogical grammar and with elements of visual grammar; as an Anders-streben, a comprehensive grammar is as much an object of catachresis or objection of catachresis as an organ city is—the self without an i (cf. the body without organs) (organ[i]city)—in living; motile, cellular, unbalanced, possible—Crawford suggests inevitable. A sense of self is confused-fused in the text (but not in an esoteric way, nor even a biotechnic way). The self seems to be its taste, which, of course, isn’t sufficiently a self, or I should say it is obvious taste isn’t organs’ sole function. Organ City approaches the dancefloor with the right attitude, just adept enough to neither embarrass their partner nor seem out of place, and maybe the traditionalists prefer the white space of their Saint-Armand paper, and the design fleshes out the vision, but the execution is less than the sum of its idealisation. Kahlil Crawford proposes and examines three rhythms in R1THYM (sic): meta, motion, and plastic. The moment reads like memoir in a sparse approximation of verse, where meta is “less about time / and more about movement” and is either generative for or by EDM genres the likes of which you can browse on rateyourmusic.com at your leisure. If you had to guess which films the motion-rhythm begins and ends with, you’d be correct. The influence of  Italian Futurism, cubism, and Afrofuturism is quite clear in the plates. It’s of as much significance to today’s blank verse as Bryan Johnson’s plasma transfusions: just something to talk about. The Paul Klee influence is also clear in the typographical arrows, and much like any good mixed-media manifesto, we’re met with more square brackets than question marks. And isn’t this how a conversation unfolds? Finitely? (And doesn’t the connotation for unfold differ so from unravel?) Threads are and end. Suggestive rather than comprehensive, all fires are ephemeral embers from a Hestian axiom, and the hybrid owes its origin as much to the wind as to a mind, left to be second-guessed days later in the shower.  

¶ The soul being the ghost notes of the body’s rhythms, Organ City’s is a light touch. Demotic; clastic; democratic in the sense that Crawford makes no distinction between the vital and non-vital organs, the self-life of the not-[i] is present perfect; what’s there has been preserved; what’s vital is what’s happened and what happens happens “sans emotionality in the midst of the digital monetization of conglomeration” (OC, 23). If the shift from organicity to digitopia is inevitable and will educe “transcendental languages, localities, and emotions” (ibid), the future-self is present perfect has been stitched from one alterity into another alterity into a user, but is “less about time / & more about movement →” (OC, 15), metarhythm having been substituted for the rm shell command to remove the directories of the unqualified as such; metarhythm having been programmed to “help salvage and redefine our humanity (OC, 11); this is the transcendent, not the transcendental. Note that Organ City neither confirms nor denies if arhythm is an ingredient of metarhythm. To ascribe transcendental bones is to use generative grammar, to vacate the site of the ontic and end the use of descriptive grammar, and to enter the imaginal, the poem. Futurity is less successfully preserved than Crawford’s perspectival historitcity: Crawford’s taste is futurity’s ischemia, Primary User. One can practically feel the heat radiating off of these lines in a parallel “Ghostly Bonding by Kinetic” by Will Alexander and his stethoscope one city over: “Since the living body persists / as strange accelerated crimson / what of its post-biology through ideas through ghostly bonding with itself as kinetic?” and, from the loupe of “Hypersensitive Emanation”: “Not broad or gregarious inaccuracy but refined exploratory drift evolved as proto-micro diagnosis. At this plane of sensitivity a dispatch of nerves explore themselves via vigorous angles that subsist as intermingled wave-lengths.” But, for all his gestural isms, doesn’t Will Alexander seem the paragon of corpuscular sagacity?  For the purposes of this review we need not bother him from his mountain perch any further, but see how a certain set of acuity is unbothered? Un-urgent? Non-rhythmic? The images act as adits but not quite intestines: trancitive (FW, 594) but not transitive-digestive, and in this azygous transitive-not-digestive trancitive loci is made a way-poitedness, as urgent as a subway-stop of meaning, foreground and background bleeding together in exigency. This effect is in the writing. The metarhythm is the anxiety to encyber the spatial. It’s by gut-feel. The reading is less fraught with ingestion—the Symplegates of transitive-digestive hid behind the literary curtain—and more memoir than ontic-technocratic scholarship, Organ City’s bathos is its modality.

¶ The manifesto as concept album as chapbook can occasionally work as a gestalt, but Organ City’s moments of actual poetry are tepid. The process which carbonates tepefies, or something like that. We neither take our coke warm nor our coffee bubbly. The poetic lilt comes out a bit tinny. When reading the work in total as poetry the work warps like attempting to portage a canoe before it’s set or settled into the home of its new wooden shape, the hybridity now as awkward as dancing with a wooden limb. How flat that meta-rhythm is greatest hits not deepest cuts: we’re whispered what we already knew. 

Four Poems by Mark Young

An emancipated fondue

 

The body has a structure, sponge-

like, cone-shaped. When coiled

it becomes enclosed within the

body — a crucial epistemological

transformation.

                             The cathedral is

a unified architectural symbol, un

projet artistique et culturel de terri-

toire. A position of the legs, the

sense of two very separate forces.

 

Imperialism is about to reach its

limitations, part of the collective

memory. She spoke to me in French.

I use the warehouse template. It

does not produce any translations.

 

 

Le Voleur

after the painting by Magritte

 

The hot air balloon has

been stolen from another

painting; as have the river

& the hills it weaves be-

tween. Then there's the

curtain which has been

on show so many times

that it would otherwise

appear threadbare were

it not for the wardrobes

full of similar things —

taken from clotheslines

& salons & a number of

theaters — which are easy

to switch between. Now

focus on the thief himself,

who, out in public & with

an eye to propriety, has

foregone the purloined

jacket worn in tense times

past — including le présent —

on the off chance he might

just come across its owner.

 

 

from 100 Titles from Tom Beckett

#6: Undone Songs

 

El Scorcho is absolutely amazing. I'm

a lonely nerd in high school so I can

relate to the sad constant pining for

people who don't want you pretty well.

 

*

 

We just caught the lightning. Uplifting, but

not happy. Somebody who walked her

own path. I wanted you to get chills, go in

reverse when you heard. Time After Time.

 

*

 

It’s easy to assume that because you’re

texting you're in a relationship. Sawing

strings supported by guitar. Bitter Sweet

Symphony died in the backseat of a car.

 

*

 

I took the road to hell. Freedom. I took

the knife as well. Freedom. Sometimes

the clothes do not make the man. Free-

dom. On your rock & roll TV. Freedom.

 

 

A line from Chubby Checker

 

I am wearing nose clips: the

Randy Codgers Band has a song

about them; along the lines of keep

those nasty amoebas away from

 

the chicken coop — or was it

chicken soup? Either way, I have

a 3-year kitchen appliance pro-

tection plan that should take

 

care of me as long as I stay out

of the sunlight. I'm well aware

that someone who didn't follow

similar advice was found dead

 

last month in a Medina County

culvert. It's why I wear a medical

bracelet to make it clear I want

my flowers before that happens.