SWARMALERTswarmalert
“Swarming, in other words, maximizes the advantages of formlessness over form…Because such action is self-organizing and self-producing…it is liable to occur spontaneously at all levels of social organization…Not only does Swarm threaten Empire’s monuments and armies…At the level of language, swarming is a sign of poetic activity.”
–Andrew Joron, “Terror Conduction,” The Cry at Zero
Over at Big Lucks, there is a Mike Young poem flapping open with some blankspaces that need filling. The poem is from a chapbook SOON TO COME called Who Can Make It. Maybe it’s a title about survival. Maybe it’s a title about creation. Either way, Big Lucks and Mike Young want you to go visit those blankspaces in Mike Young’s poem with your stormwords, with your birdclouds. Go to the website and fill in the blankspaces and maybe you get a glow shout in the acknowledgments / a chance to be in the newest issue of Big Lucks. Yeah? I think it seems like the kill rhythm. I think it seems like the way to get some colored fumes around here. Winners will be announced on the Big Lucks FB page in January.
Many of these footprints were in large numbers close together and, just by looking quietly at them, men, who themselves originally lived in small hordes, were made aware of the contrast between their own number and the enormous numbers of some animal herds. They were always hungry and on the watch for game; and the more there was of it the better for them. But they also wanted to be more than themselves. Man’s feeling for his own increase was always strong and is certainly not to be understood only as his urge for self-propagation. Men wanted to be more, then and there; the large numbers of the herd which they hunted blended, in their feeling with their own numbers which they wished to be large, and they expressed this in a specific state of communal excitement which I shall call the rhythmic or throbbing crowd.
-Elias Canetti, “Rhythm,” Crowds and Power
Yr Blood Frosting Name
As a writing exercise, I had my students get a new sparkle crash from the Unicorn Name Generator, do some Google image searches, and poem the results. By the end, I was feeling like the Unicorn Name Generator knows too much about all of us. Is it the NSA? Is it the Poetry Foundation?
Alice Notley’s Unicorn Name:
Raul Zurita’s Unicorn Name:
Neil Young’s Unicorn Name:
TWOCLOSEWORDS: REFUSAL / REFUSAL
(It’s very common in horses.)
Refusal –
I was going to write Resistance / Resistance, but then I thought, No, every refusal has a fuse in it. A charge in the middle of every one of its bodies.
Refusal*-
(In a room with a Berryman forehead overlooking it)
A figure is questioned. This is the third time the figure has exhibited a writing like this, that goes on like this, that exhausts many of the other figures in the room with a Berryman forehead overlooking it. Is it sustainable? Is it excessive?
One of the other figures is questioned. What was it like, reading the writing the figure has exhibited? It was an experience, the other figure replies.
A figure is questioned. How many more experiences will they have to go through? Is it productive?
The figure replies. The figure wants to figure a female trickster, to re-figure a deflated Baubo (the original dry nurse we know from Romeo & Juliet, night demon, goddess, servant, bearded lady) for the crowded that has gathered.
This is the figure of Baubo.
COLLECTED ALEX
“Always keep your dead body close, my parents told me.”
A.T. Grant wrote a novella called Collected Alex. Caketrain [a journal and press] put it in a dark boat. Now you can tie it to your dock using some rope and an animal bone of a kind. A.T. Grant is a thick bag of fire, a cake you should feed to the zombie geese.
[Film vignette by Katy Mongeau]
TWOCLOSEWORDS: HAUNTING / HUNTING
(A scene from Les Maîtres Fous (The Mad Masters), a film by Jean Rouch)
Haunting –
My left eye is fucked. It isn’t the first time. I’ve mentioned its swollen episodes everywhere: in poems, on the phone.
Because I think it’s hysterical. Because I really can’t get over it.
LOLOLOLOL. A POET. WITH A SENSITIVE. EYEBALL. FUCK ALL THAT.
Lately, there are tiny, irritated dots that have been piling up in the corner. My roommate gives me clay and DMSO, which is HORSE LINIMENT. She dabs it on for me. The eye’s anger ebbs and flows.
I like that my own body keeps haunting me from this particular room, always from this left eye, trying to get me to deal with or acknowledge some part / stress deposit of myself that I’ve neglected / buried. Your own body interrupts you. It unexpectedly cuts you off. I feel more than slightly disembodied when I look at it in the mirror, when I touch it. Ghosts are red.