I got a piece of the Darrell Project, a fan-folded ephemera from Jim Knowles. It is an accordian pleated broadsheet/pamphlet with 7 poems. It runs towards flarf and around language. It is a cutting away from a corpus of language to leave behind suggestions and directions towards meaning and withdrawing back from it to some higher noise ratio.
He describes the process:
The Darrell Project ‘anneals’
a source so there is partial sense, the place
between chaos and order where perhaps the
reader’s mind creates new thoughts.
Even anti-sense poetry has a sensibility.
Plucking truly random words from a hat is
not the same at all. Fractured sense is a fair
description for a lot of it….to make you think.
It isn’t inhabiting that pulled by the nose-ring-narrative space. It breaks against itself yet doesn’t aim to be comfortable or make comfortable so the reader can sit and passively look at the page. You can bring as little or as much as you like to it.
Counter to enjoying the distance in sound and sense plays, the one closest to natural syntax and to an overarcing seeming intention of words, I like best. It feels like someone talking revelations into the high wind and occasionally you miss bits as the face pivots away.
A dream of How
a dream of how
the object grammar
tore the hope open
ripe with sayings
on the back
of the downwind
a finger unplugs
before the glassy sun
little doubt
the perished validated
first errors
sensation is always
inside of some space
the host convinced of
backward convictions
so we want rules
if words
merely speak
coexistant context
then the crackline is
supernatural intervention
contents of last legacy
perhaps some
b.s. as conservative
It’s oddly didactic and meta and yet I like it for it being contemplative without aiming for holy.
Its humour comes early on within that realization that the conclusions we came to were the culminations validated and then thrown over. It’s got a little dark twinge there. it wrestles rather than lies flat. I love the phrase “the object grammar/tore the hope open”. It’s got something juicy in there. Each phrase hooks forward, not predictable, not utterly random. There’s grammatical ambiguity that’s tasty such as the “the glassy sun/little doubt/the perished validated/first errors”. Is the sun also the error? and the doubt? little as in no doubt in light of glassy sun, the passing away of truths? Is the sun the sun veiled in clouds or a glassy sun such as a screen or representation of something daily? A lightbulb thru a glass? A finger unplugs little doubt? There are many angles of emphasis of reading. Lovely.
In the last stanza we want to, strive to believe something. Words come from some context, some accumulation larger than self or than billions of histories. Surely this has some kind of intelligence, god or meme or purpose, function or intentionality proven by its continued existence?
Any abstraction is saved, grounded in the twist of the last line with the sense of poking fun at itself, the process, the very nature of trying to piece together perception which are carried as baggage on the insubstantial shifting wind.
“Ambiguity tolerance”. (popped up at http://rebecca-rosenblum.blogspot.com/2010/02/rose-coloured-reviews-lizard-by-michael.html)
that term puts a finger on the appeal for me.
I have lack-dose intolerance for unambiguous poems. I get used to multiple readings that can sit unopened or opened later from the complex conversations possible with poets for whom double-entendre is a way of formulating thoughts.
it makes just as confining of box as lack of ambiguity built-in by design. data must be thick or filters catch it.
I need, by my own laws of identity as non-snob and intelligent, to be able to register and appreciate the full range of thick and thin, direct and oblique communication.