The Zahir Review

Cliff Cannon: Four Poems

2020-07-19T00:00:00+08:00

SALT

A man who believes in Gautama and the radio,
The submarine world, the kingdom of the dead,
The battle royale of matter, in his veins
The vast slow spasm of life, death’s undying
Branch, the universal current flowing.
He knows that men, in their last agonies,
Will scream to a beetle watching from the wall
Babbling like an animal. They will crawl
To drink until they dissolve, receive
With small red noses the still-grey salt.

GEOFFREY

He talked like a man who should be rich,
Or fleeing wealth, his blood and shame.
A stone beside his tall dark house
Slept in the sun and changed its shape.

A falling leaf from a poplar milled
The dust on his doorstep, pestle-fine.
One tree grew there, he said, and he,
In love with trees, might watch it grow.

All this was in his voice. Yet something clung
About the things he liked to say.
Where I would live as I had done before,
With all my maimed anatomy for a token.

He was a false, confessional man,
Self-styled of poetry and love,
A pallid troubadour who strayed
The countryside from parish to parish.
He knew what moved the bourgeoisie
But he knew not why it moved them.

GREEK

On misty avenues, at dawn, he chased
Stray cats, or else the concept of sunrise.
In a museum, he viewed papier-mâché Greeks
Cavorting among irises in an urn.

Walking at morning among the spent munitions,
head shops, realtors, and brunch cafes
The agony and ecstasy of being,
That abomination of the thinker’s eye,

His dark companion says, I like this life,
The endless wheeling of the winter sky.
I like your thought as yet unmarried
To any place, to any woman, to any god.

Among these gray symbolic trees
As leisurely as chaperoned bridegroom,
Your art is gay with unbecoming meaning,
Implied affinities with things unformed.

In that obscure and dusty field,
The tuner muttering strange chorales:
‘Ach, armes Kind’, ‘Nun sich der Tag geendet hat’

TO A CHASER

And what if a peregrine flies to me,
Glides swiftly with its gentle whirr of wings
Across my vision, from where you are?

You come on the same ways as the dusk, you flicker in
On its falling wings. I follow at your heels.
The lines of sight you hold which have not made peace
With mine lead us into the slow foliage that draws in
Our moment’s being. The things about us, the small,
Attainable faces have gathered into distance;
We are lovers, amidst the forest that carries our solitude.

Jessi Gaston: Two Works

2018-10-11T00:00:00+08:00

"Another Story About Groucho Marx"

COMPUTER DUSTER

Dedicated to Zach Gill.

Computer Duster: PDF

ANOTHER STORY ABOUT GROUCHO MARX

RTF

Matthias Kodat: Poems

2018-10-11T00:00:00+08:00

YEARS OF USE (excerpt)

I went to print the slogan on
my writing tool but how to
articulate at its proposed
site You know what would make
this orchid better A Fleshlight®
Thus we are Nature in awe
of itself Ants in the vichysoisse
Largest family of flowers

It’s a long slog thru gravity but
the human crumb holds OK
Innumerable small tokens
veiled drier shining
All soil and enemies
She covers my lap
Simon talks over
the important parts

HOOF RISO

Homonculus
of fiction
Nah
it’s swifter now
Gone bronze
age mine and
turning
Me narrow
Another
wild cave
to stern the
text Where
are the knots
to disturb
this bark
tomorrow
Where
are the
particular
captions
logged or
lodged
The edges
of words
made
sharp the
Vowels open
Still
It rotates
your hand
It tools
an axe
in the
saline
barn

Jesse Seldess: Else

2018-10-10T00:00:00+08:00

ELSE

If we don’t signal our love, reason will eat our heart out before it can admit its form of mere intention, and we won’t know what has departed.

– Rosmarie Waldrop, Lawn of Excluded Middle

—

I have me a vision

I step on the edge
stand and retrieve and pulse around
in the sounded privacy

The sun high enough to enter

rewind

—

When I woke up in the morning
over the long time up in the sky

I could consume the dream
in the space that it had

in my world

variegated reflected retroactive reactive light

stopped light with validated variegated fields
In the inflected refracted retroactive reactive light

I speak

as a pure product

that can hear

—

Here I am
I ask say
in the stream
incoming speaking
pictures
turn back
from the sun

—

It’s morning

articles all around
In the retroactive light
surfaced behind
under the grass
or out front or up above
out of the snow

like sleep
I literally move
with waves
little visions
I cannot see

—

Ask who I am

redbud and cherry and one wild apple tree

afterimage
I have no way
after my past
So I rewind interferring

The long time I had a vision
I turned it up
to the ends
over the long time I was on
For an ungraspable time
already formerly a long time

—

What I find there

I can see the back of values
between the preambles
Spinning around the heart
You can hear it also

graph
off the ends

off into the middle
where I stand
in light
That is itself not still
way high up

Artis Ostups: Poems

2018-10-07T00:00:00+08:00

"It was an entirely different city, which quickly rolled over on its other side, like it was turning in its sleep..."

This is a selection from an upcoming book from Ugly Duckling Press – Gestures, by Artis Ostups, translated from Latvian into English by Jayde Will.

AFTER REGAINING INDEPENDENCE

When we left the church, stars gathered around the moon’s crumbled horn above the red cornice of the post office, seen through greasy glasses. My mother wore a black felt coat – winter pulled chalk across it like a schoolboy on a blackboard. Later I drew gates on my bedroom wall, while the plaster bust of a woman observed me from the top of the closet. Did the far-off clicks – from the railway and the highway – give hope for a different, more vast landscape? The gardens burned with a cawing, raven-black flame.

AN INLAND LIGHTHOUSE

Poland at night – a black, taciturn landscape, as if it were photographed with the lid still on. Emptiness after emptiness. Pulsating here and there: “HOTEL FOX, DRIVE-IN.” The light, reflecting in the dark screen, is an inland lighthouse for weary truckers. A bus sways on the bends of the narrow road and awakens me to an already-read book. Anonymous villages on the other side of the hills, on which the golden age of industry slumbers. Images from the past unite in fine facets like in an insect’s eye. An insomnia machine with windows clouded by drunks has thrust me toward Europe’s lowest point.

TOITS SOUS LA NEIGE

It was an entirely different city, which quickly rolled over on its other side, like it was turning in its sleep – quite far from winter’s festive rooftops. Still, it is precisely this card, which he examines again and again, helping him remember those warm December evenings. The black branches march along the attic windows, and it only seems that the chimneys have found peace – everything is painted with ashes. Still, it is precisely this card from the museum shop, this one here, which later they held up in the red light of a sign, as if hoping to summon snow, that makes him knock against his memories like an insect against glass.

MARTYR

“That intoxication from the puffs of your breath, where as among the clouds, it seems, wine valleys appear for a moment,” he will justify himself at last, bent over the table, “it forces me to compare a vase to a mouth, and sandbanks – breasts uncovered by a sheet. That luxury, when everything is something else. And, if it isn’t something else, then at the very least it’s vague, overshadowed, waning, seen at an angle or crossed by a jealous surface – a smile through milk glass or a sore under a gauze.”

I will pull him through things, parting them like waves, even though he wanted to kiss me the way a magnet kisses a magnet.

THE SLEEPWALKERS

And it rises up, as if swaying from drunkenness, merely a corner of a whole – a defunct fountain, the reserved crown of a poster pillar and other flowers. Further on buildings amass in the fog, canals flow like scarfs from the sleeve of the night, and waves gallop on the dark backs of fish. Once again the hour is nigh, smitten by its thorn – how beautiful a wound is – and the empty park, where we once by chance went down to the water, frightening the rats, and the light covered us like a torn-up cloth. If you find me lying there right in the middle, place the key in my hunched back – you’re the only one – and turn it quickly.

Patrick Durgin: Four Exegeses

2018-09-06T00:00:00+08:00

On Lorine Niedecker

Whereas surrealism was out to challenge the false modesty of bourgeois continental mores, metaphysically, and was then expropriated to the colonies to incubate dissent, politically, Lorine Niedecker used it to write procedurally, to force non-sequitur away from logical impasse and toward semantic proliferation, and discover polyvocality, and write films for the stage, stage directions for radio, and mock middling prudishness or something similar often in an incantatory yet abrupt and vaguely pretty way, and then sneak through complaints that narrowed to the point of protest. While her grasp of class antagonism was exactly confided, she worried about the assumption of self-consistency implicit in class consciousness. Her poem on the Depression obviates the cynical hypocrisy of capitalist logic and is a machine to kill fascists in less than half the time of a dust bowl ballad, yet with no missionary machismo. Then she dramatized global warming. There was no surmounting reality nor amplifying the real. She exhausted surrealism a decade or two into its adventure and warned us all decades hence.

On King Tubby

I use metadata the way King Tubby uses tempo, to segment and condense demographic scales. Something similar can be said of the sonic scales that will cluster in a room or a field or a street corner or other coordinate when rhythmic continuity rewards expectation. Patience is all that’s required to find one. But then it’s smothered, or you’ve chased it away. Because it is unfounded, distraction is the only reliable approach to take.

On Jackie Wang

Something similar is said by Jackie Wang in Carceral Capitalism. Crime is a sociological predicate making genre reducible to that which is computationally tractable. The rest will be siphoned away or tempered by the virtues: ambition and prosperity. One presents as a public and the other as a population. The need for accuracy is in any case eliminated.

On Bertholt Brecht

A version of cultural theory seeded in euroethnic modernism, the “alienation effect” is not, as usually summarized, an alter-realism, but is more importantly a parable of intra-dimensional complexity. Brecht’s plays may be parabolic treatments of this parable, but to put it this way risks reaching the most “theoretical” or hollow verdict: that theory is writing that needn’t test its meddle, that neglects to demonstrate what it describes. Why risk periodizing self-referentiality when we really ought to weaponized its delights? Unless we want to outlaw all forms of corroboration, and thus forfeit any chance of witness and belief? In The Messingkauf Dialogues, the philosopher is radicalized, from a man of practical action, self-consciously, even bashfully, he becomes a poacher, preying on the intelligence and devices of theater. Platonic. He is motivated by utility to derive technology from matter itself, through the medium of immaterial: behavior. A trumpet is worth its ounces in brass. He theorizes by way of the dramaturg, to whom he poses a paradox; science can provide only sociological concepts of action—modes of acting—but in reply he is reminded that actors fundamentally interpret, that is, they critique, character and society in their subtending causality, in praxis. The affective value of praxis is both cause and effect of alienation’s promise to master reality. By reality is meant perfectly practical or technical social determinants indiscernible from self-determination. There is not a higher or lower reality here, just a blurred shuttling between registers, all of which are real. The real is sequenced. Then this happens, then this happens, then this happens…

Felix Bernstein: Poems

2018-08-05T00:00:00+08:00

Download PDF

Kay Gabriel: This One’s Into Teal

2018-07-03T00:00:00+08:00

This work is excerpted from Kay’s manuscript in progress, A Queen in Bucks County.

Download PDF

Stephen—

The horny grocery boy may be the god Pan in disguise. This one's into teal, birds, comics, boy pussy, actually he works at a printshop. It's Vermont all the way down, I've never been but I've got pictures of it, Vermont toilets in the background of a squat aggressively pink-tipped cock bobbing over Vermont water.

In the one I've got saved to my phone his chest looks like it's been stapled together very precisely: the front of his belly folds in at the center in one long seam from the solar plexus to just below the navel, a softball-sized bicep bugs out of his arm like uneven padding on an office chair. Except for lifting his shirt into a makeshift harness he'd be fully clothed right up to the copper-toned sunglasses perched in his hair, and gauges, thankfully small. Do Vermont's ribs beggar description? Hugging his hips, AMERICAN EAGLE in reverse, and an Uber ad at the bottom twice the length of his jeans.

Waiting for him to make the four hour, seventeen minute drive to New Brunswick I guzzle water, check Facebook, check my texts, edge, think about the word spooge. Why Vermont everybody wanted to know. I remember you did too, anticipating the scandal and then the likely tedium of the shacked-up weekend plus Labor Day. "Maybe he's bored," I suggested and ate something to illustrate. Later he said he was, of married dick by trash piles and buggy rivulets and especially the print shop, where he didn't technically have time off. The morning before he showed up I picked out an especially scrunched pair of shorts, the globes of my ass (contraband) hung out of it and shone. When he leaves I texted R. I'd better be raw like health-hazard chicken. I really wanted him to get the right idea. I'm neat like a rosewater cronut with sprinkles and a shave of ice. Who's gonna lap me up?

Driving on camera Vermont looks like he's whistling to a fly on his dick. Taylor Swift visiting a children's hospital the belt is as slack as his attention, divided between the road and his cock, which a furtive thumb and forefinger crush into his jeans. Even if you didn't watch Scream Queens one hand picks up rhythm, the other rests easy at 10 o'clockconfidently arriving at—a school crossing, a stop sign, a delayed green light? Long enough to dribble with impressive restraint you'll still want to take in season two only because John Stamos to the base without schmearing even a little plush synthetic car seat fur and its tidy hotel-carpet blues and greys.

By 1 AM I played through every IG story. How do you feel about a scene I texted. Oh? and a smirking cat emoji. Yeah. Like instead of I meet you in the parking lot you buzz up here and whip it out in the hallway. Three more cats. Uh, sick. I zoomed in on the peaks and gulleys of his egg-carton abs. Neighbours? my phone buzzed. Are all squares I fire back, who gives a fuck. I shrill out of sleep at 3:17 AM to the alarm bell chime, slam on the intercom, chug a half-gallon of water. I'd imagined after weeks of reciprocal nudes I'd be slobbering wet but as I listened to the elevator brakes give and clamp my throat went dry and my balls huddled scooped against my perineum like two squirrels keeping warm.

Which brings me to his balls. Somehow in the jerkoff videos they'd squeeze tightly into his inguinal canals, grouped shyly around his cock looking more like identical growths, a sandcastle artifice packed by muddy adolescent hands. Lower limit amber briefs, upper limit amber balls. Where in this schema amber socks? Erupting onto his stomach he dodges the question.

Hello to the birthday party public of the apartment complex, cool stoops, warm beer. It is exactly 3:19 AM. What's good, bitch boy he smirks over a wakeful cock. Top of the morning to me too. His balls edge distortedly out over teal briefs, American Eagle waistband. Oh Waste Band. The telltale thunk-woosh of another door opening startles me out of a reverie of delivery cock, I pull him into the apartment where he kicks off his jeans. Lean legs, little teal socks.

Which his nudes had amply prepared for. Here, flat on a creamy bedspread legs apparently vulnerably in the air, he jerks his cut pole. Briefs open wide as if to catch, but wouldn't you know? He jets on his stomach with the kind of energy that suggests he's been saving it up—for me, his personal wank bank. I say this even as I look again and again at the cum cooling into translucency in the navel it fills and, by 0:43, overflows. That's what the briefs tell me. The socks, that he has a fixation, which is just the precision of desire made stretchy, elastic, teal or amber, ERICAN EAG, ILFIGER, TOM.

Okay, the stranger danger, the dick breakfast, the neighbours—I fibbed. Here's the real story. I really did close my eyes but fifteen minutes later I was striding out to the parking lot where I sized him up in the privacy of cars, nights, mosquitoes, and the buzz of a Middlesex County, NJ road. He looked just like his photos and a little shorter, so I kissed him hello. It lasted a good half-minute–"Hi, stud." The right impression. "You kiss like a cocksucker," he offered. Without a comment on the complex's disrepair he followed me indoors, where he bred me till the carpet burned my wrists and arms into a welter of bruising. Taking his cock—on the shorter side, but pleasantly thick, and hard as anything—was easy and joyous. He had the kind you don't even need to relax for, you just let him rock into you. See? You get all silly over the translation from pixel to sphincter but there he goes hitting the right note with confidence, precision and ease.

He pulled out and told me to get on the bed with my legs in the air, to circle a finger around my head. "Slower," he said, "tell me when it starts to burn." I did, and then he ate my hole—sloppy, rest stop burger, fries, coke, lettuce. Outside crickets shrilled into a swampy 2 AM, inside he smacked and mumbled his appreciations into my asscrack. Of course, I'm a pornographer, I believe in the torment of desire—so I stopped teasing my cock for his benefit, grabbed his hair and held him back until he returned me the needy gaze of a pet. This control is out of the question for him to relinquish, or for me to backseat-drive. But in the interval of restraint he blinked, fixated. "Your ass tastes like pussy!" Flat iron, tree line, perineum. Fair enough, I supposed, I giggled, I let him in again. Runway, carpet, slip n' slide.

Irritation, bagels, road head. You asked me if I'd called him daddy, well I was going to until he confessed he'd rather be my cat. All things and one long weekend. We were going at it in the kitchenette when I gave him his first hit of poppers. That's as hard as I go, prissy enough to be scared shitless of tweaking, broke enough to afford nothing but solvent and pills, but this sleaze was new to him and probably an affront to somebody somewhere. A sluice of vision, a slowed but more deliberate rhythm to his fucking, I guess every cohabitant could hear us like pipes snapping or the intrusions of a radiator when somebody adjusts the heat. He wore boots, I wore sneakers, and then I was naked except for the sneakers and the impression of having done something extravagant.

Halfway through the weekend, feeling like a break from our elaborated fucking, I trussed him up to the shower curtain rod, got out my camera, and started to play. The AMERICAN EAGLE waistband indexed handsome cock redolent of pine needles and cold mountain air. The PETSMART collar said drive me to the movies. His cock bobbed, short and stupendously hard, over tile and bathmat. Flipping him around, it came as a surprise he had basically no ass to speak of—I must have been so fixated on his pelvic lines I forgot to check. So when he admitted he thought I had lied about my name I felt doubly betrayed. "Turner sounds fake, like porn-fake," he said between forkfuls of mashed potato and scallion.

Did I forgive him when he, following instructions, pulled me into a sloppy embrace in front of a public library and a local Panera? Oh, Stephen. That's for you to decide.

Love,

Turner.

Brian Kim Stefans: Translations after Rimbaud

2018-05-10T00:00:00+08:00

"There’s no one left to dance, to frolic in the nude / with children in forests, gamboling amidst the phlox."

Chapbook PDF

This group of poems is selected from a forthcoming manuscript, “Festivals of Patience,” translations of Rimbaud into alexandrines, preserving the syllabic counts of the originals. Other poems in the series are scheduled to appear in Lana Turner and Fence.

TARTUFFE’S PUNISHMENT

after Arthur Rimbaud

His lustful heart raked, raked again, through coals beneath
his chaste black robe, joyful, donning a single glove,
as he ambled one day, amiable, oh so sweet,
drooling yellow piety from his toothless jowls;

as he ambled one day — “Let us pray!” — an awful
fellow cuffed him roughly, dragging him by an ear,
and hurled a caustic deluge at him, assaulting
his chaste black robe — and exposing his sweating rear!

Now this was punishment! His clothes were unbuttoned,
and a long rosary — exonerated sins —
echoed within his heart. Saint Tartuffe turned ashen.

So, he confessed — he prayed — he shook a death rattle!
Buck naked, wow! — Tartuffe froze like a mannequin.
And the man, self-possessed, walked off with the clothes pile.

SONNET: TO AN ASSHOLE

after Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud, from the “Album Zutique”

In dark shadows, wrinkled, like a crevassed violet,
it breathes contentedly, silly among the reeds,
still moist with the love it most recently received,
white buttocks coursing from their inclines to its edge.

Filaments straggle like hot wet weepings of milk
which the cruel wind banishes to a life of flight
over small plots of marl that, reddish, in their height,
confuse and distract them — they fall like battered silk.

In my dreams, my mouth was poised just above its abyss;
my soul, envious of physical coitus,
usurped it for sobs — a bottle for tear-tincture.

Aromatic olive — or seductive flute —
chute down which currents of heavenly praline shoot —
a feminine Canaan — bedewed by sharp moisture!

STUPRA 1

after Arthur Rimbaud, from the “Album Zutique”

Lo, our asses are not like theirs! Once, I’d peer
behind some hedgerow, see men with unbuttoned pants,
or, as they took carefree baths, watch the urchins dance,
and mark impressions of the function of the rear.

More firm, in many cases untanned, the shape
of the musculature is plain, though hid by tufts
of hair; for women, it is only in the cleft,
deep and charming, where flowers such a satin drape.

With an ingenious and disarming touch, such as seen
in only the finest works of holy tapestry,
a dimple marks the cheek, as in a cherub’s smile.

Oh, to be nude like that! to be drunk with the quest
for joy and rest! turned to a lover’s missile test
— free in the dark murmurs of our sadness — a while!

STUPRA 2

after Arthur Rimbaud, from the “Album Zutique”

Animals, in ancient times, while on the go, fucked,
their hopping glands coated with blood and excrement.
Our forefathers paraded their cocks, content
the fold of the sheath, the weight of the package, talked.

In the Middle Ages, women — angels or sows —
sought a well-hung fellow; even Kléber was known
to wield a fine talon, a status overblown
in my mind, but perhaps he had employed voodoo.

Despite that, it’s true: man competes with the mammal.
The hugeness of his dick is the wild beast’s equal.
— Yet, a sterile hour has struck: the horse and the ox

have bridled genital lust, swamped with quietude.
There’s no one left to dance, to frolic in the nude
with children in forests, gamboling amidst the phlox.

TWO NASTY JOKES

after Arthur Rimbaud, from the “Album Zutique”

1. THE DRUNK CHAUFFEUR

Beasts
drink,
pearls
blink.

Dour
laws
— cars
crawl!

Girl
falls,
loins

flood.
— Howl!
Groan.

2. YOUNG GLUTTON

Silken
beret,
penis
ivory,

ink black
couture,
Paul guards
cupboards,

projects
his tongue
at pears,

prepares
his stick
— the runs!

EVIL

after Arthur Rimbaud

While rifles emit their rose-red mists of grapeshot,
whistling all day beneath the infinite blue sky,
dressed in scarlet and green, by a King who coolly mocks
their guts — entire troops disintegrate under fire.

While a terrible madness rages, and makes of boys,
a hundred thousand of them, a smoking junk heap
— You poor dead! in the grass, in summer, in your joy!
Nature! who venerates these boys — and deems them holy!

— There is a God. He laughs at the damask covers
on the altars, the incense, at the golden grails;
he takes a snooze while quaint lullabies Hosanna.

— Then he wakes, when the shy mothers come together
in anguish, slobbering under chintzy black veils.
— Each one shoves him pennies, tied up in a clean scarf!

PARISIAN ORGY, OR, PARIS IS REPOPULATED

after Arthur Rimbaud, from the “Album Zutique”

O, cowards, there she is! Erupt from the stations!
The sun, its lungs afire, has withered with its breath
the streets that, last night, roared with Barbarians.
O Holy City! Jewel of the Occident!

Come! we’ll wait; no need to rush, rekindle the fire.
Here are the quays; here, the boulevards; here, fine homes
arrayed as silhouettes cut from the pale blue sky,
windows that, one night, burst like stars, enrouged by bombs.

Bury the dark, dusty palaces beneath boards;
this frantic, ancient day refreshes your vision.
What’s this? Some ginger-haired troop jiggles their rear ends!
Knock yourself out, folks, be wild — no inhibitions!

Mangy bitches in heat scrounging through sodden bins,
the golden estates call you! Break in! Go kleptic!
Feast! and watch the joyous night with spasmodic fits
span the whole avenue! O, born alcoholics

drink! when the light arrives, manic, gnashing, intense,
streaming like luxuries piercing your hook-bent spines,
will you not drool, eyes lost in the milky distance,
into your scraping glasses, mute, paralyzed?

Raise one for the Queen, her voluminous white ass!
Revel in the waves of sound: belch that rips through flesh;
on amorous nights, the huffing of pederasts;
morons pirouetting, puppets, dupes, and old men!

O hearts, vile, salacious! O nauseating mouths!
raise your pitches higher, O mouths of rank odor!
For these base instincts, more wine, yes, here, one more round!
In shame your entrails curl like dung — O Conquerers!

Now, dilate your nostrils! Savor the fine vomit!
Drench the cords of your necks in rare, high class toxins!
Placing a friendly hand on your pubescent wrist,
the Poet says to you: “Oh cowards! Be Satans!

Since you insist on rooting, still, in Woman’s womb,
nothing scares you more than an encore contraction,
asphyxiating you, ripping you shrieking from
your infamous perch on her breast, oh blue-balled son.

Syphilitics, fools, kings, pawns, ventriloquists,
why should Paris, the whore, give two gold-plated shites
about your souls, bodies, poisons, rags and beds?
She’ll merely flip you off, you flea-gone parasites.

And when you grovel, moaning, clenching your aching guts,
your sides numb, asking for your cash, vexed, out of it,
that scarlet courtesan with war-befattened bust
will keep a cool distance, shaking her iron fist.”

In those days, when your feet danced in righteous fury,
Paris! and you were knifed, knifed again, wounds twice bleeding,
your back stretched on the rack, yet, with clear eye, you’d glean
a siren benevolence in young, russet Spring.

Oh suffering city, caught inches from the grave,
your head and breasts angling toward a regal Future
accepting your stately limp through its million gates,
city who only the Past could grant a sacred word:

Defibrillated corpse, prepared for cleansing pain,
you drink from wretched life again! you feel rise up
a tsunami of coiled worms coursing through your veins,
icy fingers flicking the wrists of your one love.

This is not a bad thing! Those worms, coarse and livid,
will not stifle your breath of Progress, will blind no eye
any more than the Styx gouged the Caryatids
whose golden astral tears fell from the azure sky.

Though it’s crippling to see you so fouled, overrun
again; though there is no precedent, a city
so ulcerous, pus-drenched, in green nature, not one,
the Poet cries to you: “Splendid is your Beauty!”

The floods have granted you the title: Pure Poetry.
A deep vitality carries you on its crest.
Your works seethe, death recoils, oh arrogant City;
take into your strong heart fusillades of trumpets.

The poet will curb the howls of the Infamous,
the bile of Convicts, the clangor of the Cursed;
his radiating Love will torment proud Woman;
his stanzas will bound forth — see here, see here, you Crooks!

— Society, all is recovered! Orgies weep
as ever, their sobs in rank whorehouses;
on red-hued walls, gas lamps flicker their one frenzy,
sinisterly reaching toward the blue firmament.

Henry Curtis: The Problem with Reading

2018-05-07T00:00:00+08:00

In the preface of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein famously writes:

“How far my efforts agree with those of other philosophers I will not decide. Indeed what I have here written makes no claim to novelty in points of detail; and therefore I give no sources, because it is indifferent to me whether what I have thought has already been thought before me by another.” (Ogden Translation)

On the face of it this is perhaps one of the most anti-scholarly disclaimers an author could write. Wittgenstein is essentially relieving himself of one of the key responsibilities held by any individual who produces written work - the task of determining the ways in which the work is original, and the ways in which it is a restatement of what has come before. The author’s duty to perform this undertaking, which should in no way be minimized as a fraction of the total labor of writing, requires more than just the author’s time. It also requires them to engage with an existing literature whose focus is deeply similar to that of the work the author is attempting to produce. This is as much the case for one writing fiction as it is for one writing philosophy - a story I write must not share the plot of previous stories, a poem I write must not bear too much similarity to poems written previously, and so on. And in order to fulfill this obligation, I must read - I must, in the case of philosophy, survey positions held in other texts, and frame mine in such a way that it does not overlap so much as to make it effectively worthless. In the case of fiction, I must read to preserve the prospect that there will be an originality to my voice.

Now this situation gives rise to a somewhat puzzling state of affairs. Perhaps it is a predicament, I certainly feel it as a predicament, though there are certainly those who would not think of it as such. The situation is this - in order to begin writing, one must read. But not just anything! No, one must read texts that are in nature similar to the work one intends to write. Yet the work itself has not been written, and in many cases it has not even been started. So the latent work must already be determined to such a degree that a neighborhood of similar works can be scouted for commonalities, yet must also be undetermined in virtue of not having been completed. Invariably, the similar works that are read will have an effect on the work that is ultimately produced, an effect beyond the simple negation of certain potential features of the new work that were found in the old works. These older works, whether they be the oeuvre of a single author, the literary tradition of a country, or even works the author themself has previously written, will set not only a negative but also a positive expectation for what must appear in the author’s future creations. So the preparatory act of reading, originally intended as a prophylactic against derivation, is in fact a double-edged sword whose backwards facing blade is the immanent anxiety induced by the awareness of not only a measure against which one is to be held, but also of an external force capable of molding the author’s psyche. This is the case even if the author finds that nothing they wish to say has been said before. The standard for what they are attempting to write has been laid bare, as an obstacle they must surmount - an obstacle that before reading, would not have been a hindrance. And the originality of voice they were seeking to preserve by engaging in the caution of reading is now ironically challenged by the potentially unconscious influence of other writers.

None of this is really new. The common view is that reading is liberating, and in the deepest sense it is. But most will realize the myriad ways in which reading can serve as an act of restraint as well. The text, as imposing a figure in the life of a poet as in that of a scholar, evokes terror by trapping the author between the twin monstrosities of the past and the future - the text always precedes the author, preforming their conception of literary style before the author has a chance to exert any volition , and yet always comes after the author, as something the author is burdened with eventually producing. Just as any attempt to isolate the present merely gives us an image of the past, so any attempt on the part of the author to isolate themselves will simply give a fading image of those works out of which the author has constructed, perhaps unwittingly, their literary identity. The future is no better - any attempt to capture it in the understanding simply reveals a possible rearrangement of things found in the past, just as any attempt by the author to imagine their future text is fated to reveal nothing but a tapestry of inherited influence. I would guess that anyone who has written and read, and read and written, will not only understand the problematic I have outlined but will have experienced it as well.

So if the compulsion to read prior to writing entraps authors in a claustrophobic matrix of predetermining literary objects and gestures, what recourse is there for self-defense? How can the author preserve their own identity and originality, when the primary method of ensuring originality itself forces the author to confront texts so similar to their own that the sense they had of their own work, the direction plotted in their mind, gets irrevocably disrupted? The answer I propose is that we must emphatically and consciously reject the mandate that specific acts of reading must precede specific acts of writing, on the grounds that what this really leads to is specific acts of reading prefiguring all acts of writing.

Here is what I am not saying. I am not saying we should not read, nor that originality can emerge sui generis in the mind of an author. Naturally, writing is always generally dependent on reading, insofar as every author’s sense of what they should write is shaped by what they have read. Any attempt to fight this brute fact would be akin to arguing that people should not feel pain when they are struck. The error in the argument would be that it was made in the first place. What I am challenging, however, is a specific expectation: that a responsible author must, in order to ensure that they are properly situated in their literary/scholarly field, consult work similar to the work they are attempting to produce. If the point of this expectation is to preserve the possibility of originality, then it must be judged on the grounds of whether it is successful in that specific respect. This practice, as I have implied, functions to hinder originality at least as much as to serve as a condition for its emergence. It takes authors whose ideas are just beginning to form, and compels them to take account of the products of already formed ideas - ideas whose power, in virtue of having been passed through the gauntlet of creation, will in almost every case overshadow their own nascent ideas. These authors will struggle immensely to overcome the pressure placed on them by an unnecessary encounter they were told that as an author they had to endure. Typically they will fail. (What is perhaps most troubling is how often they will not even realize they have failed.) This stops the author from ascending to a truly vibrant state of imaginative actualization, and as a pragmatic point it is entirely justified for the author to rebel, to refuse the deal.

And so we return to my proposal, that specific acts of writing do not need to be preceded by specific acts of reading. It should be clear now what this means. The author will no doubt be inspired, consciously or unconsciously, by what they have read, but as soon as the notion of an original work comes before them, their first instinct need not be to read work that is similar. If they want to, that is understandable, and may even be beneficial. But it does not come without risks, and it should be not be seen as mandatory nor as an obligation that, if unmet, forces one to necessarily lose authorial credibility.

Before I finish, there is one more thing I should say. The situation here has only been presented theoretically, and my account must be dually problematized. On the one hand, the paradigm presupposed in this essay, wherein present artistic creation is limited by anterior artistic creation, might very well be the product of a contingent mode of production whose goal is to treat art as property and in so doing place constraints on art that make its transmission and reproduction possible within a market oriented framework. That is to say, the view that I must be concerned at all with what comes before me artistically, and the subsequent neurotic fixation on self-differentiation, might only emerge when the originality of art is at its core an economic anti-inflationary measure. If this is the case, perhaps it is misguided for me to have treated the problems that consequently arise as intrinsic to art and authorship, when really these are problems to be addressed in a political manner. So let me say here - this problem is a political one. But quite a bit has already been said about art and politics, and I wouldn’t want to add on too much, since I am afflicted by the very neurosis I criticized three sentences ago. Hopefully what I say here can serve as an addendum to existing and future political criticism.

The second problem is similar. In treating the problematic as theoretical, it may appear that I have eternalized it, and given the impression that it is as pressing for us as it was for previous generations. It is not. It’s worse for us. The sheer volume of work produced today, which in virtue of tremendous gains in global literacy, education, and communication is much higher than it has ever been, means that for any work being written today, the set of work similar enough to be read for comparison is not only expanding in number, but narrowing in scope and similarity. This narrowing does nothing but add to the claustrophobic pressure alluded to previously, a pressure which binds the author to a limited conception of what they can write - a conception limited by standards of quality previously set, and limited by a newly formed understanding of what it is they are supposed to be writing. The problematic outlined in this paper, then, is a particular pressing problem for those of us alive today, thinking of beginning to write in the near future. And therefore, the solution, and its efficacy, become increasingly important as well.

When Wittgenstein claimed that he did not care if what he wrote had been written by another, he must have known that certain readers would have immediately prejudged the nature of his intent. No doubt the most pathetic among them would have written him off as arrogant, by which they would have meant that he was insufficiently willing to restrain his creative impulse in favor of prostrating himself before a tradition that, simply because it came before, might have had the strength and immensity to destroy him. Instead, he chose to ignore it, and to subsequently ignore the standards it would have supplied and the influence it would have established. In this he came to stake out his original position, and perhaps he could have done it no other way. Are we to chastise him, to hold that his success was in every sense in spite of his failure to engage? I think such a view would fundamentally misunderstand the dangers inherent in reading. My immediate hunch is that it is a symptom of not taking reading seriously. Either way, we must refuse any compulsion that would prevent a figure such as Wittgenstein from adopting the method most conducive to the activation of their creative impulse, and if that means occasionally not reading, then I stand behind it.