plan b

THE COLLECTED OLD POEMS, hehe Part 4: The Workshop Series

These badboys were written freshman year for a poetry workshop. Disrespectful.

cummings

This morning I decided I'd write drek like ee cummings in my room wearing a hooded sweatshirt flip flops and jeans. Hope you like it. It's REALLY clever.

Uh Uh

The only thing I do myself
Is sit before a screen,
Occasionally writing
Really awful poetry.

Unsure About Whether This'll Go
By: Jeremy Fisk and His Backward-Footed Chem Majors

Who's ready for a poem?
You'll feel good:
A butterfly alights on a branch.

"That's the rumor"

And this poem is filled to the brim with meaning,
Like a long walk in the wind on a summer's day
With sweet talk and the rubbing skin of getting laid,
Showing off a hidden conspiracy of political leanings
And a vast track of philosophical information
On Kant and Freud and even Charles Darwin and Marvin the Martian
(The implications behind those baggaged allusions are vast)
Because this poem will leave you to your own imaginations.
Because my mind's machinations are only filled with monsters and
Strong words that drop out of the final copy:
Like war, fuck, bitch, and shit.
So I'll let you go home and sit alone and ponder it a bit
And if you see this as a vacant lack of skills,
Just take some advils and call it a night.
As for me I'll sit back and take a break from the sizzling
And die like Van Gogh and Matisse and gain recognition
For this transcendent work of vast metaphysical ramifications
And at my grave my readings will receive rave reviews,
But before you go I just need to abuse you just one last time;

Oh
my
God

I just wrote the perfect line.

Manly Work

Deliver my baby in the year 2020.
Put it in the oven
Mark it with a b.
To hell with meaningless nonsensical garbage
And find
Words that sound nice together.
Don't you care about niceness?
Euphony of the symphony,
Violin concertos.


Sand and Spit

Sand, spit and crab-meat floats in soup no one would eat.

Turn over pancakes…
Both sides brown like brunette's hair.
And stop dehumanizing animals.

Cramming crab into the bun like meaning into your words,
Spilling soup onto the floor like silliness.

Boss

Lordy Lordy Lordy Lordy, Thompson.
You're under the gun, Thompson.
We got to get this hunk of metal into space
In Five Days, Thompson.
But before I say that let me scratch my belly,
Crack my knuckles,
And rub my palm against my index finger.
Thompson, you've come a long way from the mailroom,
But we got a long way to go before we make it into space.
So get sweating, Thompson,
Calculate the index and get me a cup of coffee.

jesus

Pontius pilate moves himself to the gavel
And boy Jesus carpents crosses with Joseph.
And don't juxtapose because of the danger of cracking brains
Leaving them limp on Bethlehem's sidewalks along
With all those limp sad angry people.

Situations

Situations beyond my jurisdiction
Words non-euphonious emerge
From behind the fridge and oxen
Yoked together like two disparate
Ideas pull the poem further apart and
Break their own spines in the cold snow.
Of course the pool of lather they lie in
Makes perfect spheres out of salient crystals
And racial profiling.
But who doesn't?
And Wouldn't YOU?

In a Plane

When I blink the world sets up a circus,
Only to tear it down when the lens brings focus.

In a plane I tower over tiny cars and houses and men.
On the lawn I tower over tiny flies and twigs and towels.

Sand comes from stone on the beach,
And gets in my eyes and I blink.

Funtime

Still ripples concentrically circling paddles as ducks.
Flap flap flap
Abandon reader, pen gains weight.
Belly touches hand moving whiteness.
Hand scratches out belly of worn sweater as ducks ripple ponds.

Make freud duck. Make freud proud.
Make freud duck and be proud as ducks in rippling concentric paddles.
Like jazz, move backwards improv of abandoned thought
Like hands bellying up to scratches of sweaters.

A band on the river with ripples and ducks and no geese
But fleece wool sweaters over eyes of a pale face
Handing the belly.

Complete repeat from the mind making freud proud like
Ducks rippling muscles of bellies and hands as recursions and reiterations go.

43

Girl lies in underwear,
Covers' corners lifted in sleep.

Sand scratches corners.
Room's tropical fish on walls with
Women with hearts and stars and blues.
Drawers close.
Useless notebook opens to

Embarrassing page 43.

Clouds

Clouds. Dreary spacious people.
Fog clouds, squinting.
I workshop clouds into handbags.
Still they move.

Scrolls

Moment of perfect inertia
With typewriters' scrolling technique
Across blue lanterns scrolling across girls' eyes
And the Japanese lanterns hanging from corners
Because they have fireflies in them
And the room turns
There's a point when scrolling across won't make a difference.
This is it.

Betrothed

Betrothed women and ladies' men move
In leopard print sunglasses beyond Hollywood
Boulevard into the Sunset strip;
Damned if I'll make friends in 818.

Written Between Classes

And though it means nothing
I like it when you look at me that way
And my stomach does a swooping dance for you
And a little smile crosses my face,
And I go about my day.

Untitled

Dear so and so
Make sure you put the stamp on the front side of the envelope
With an address and twenty different pesos.
Quit poking your sister.
Love,
God

Birds Perch

Birds perch on flying lines,
High wires,
And dancing dresses clouded by drink
Bring thoughts of regrets to sustain my ink.

Bullets

Logic fails to defend itself
And God dodges barely, nicked by
Bullets ever quicker.

Old song

I'm looking outside,
Five colors.
You're not here.

Frances

On my way out,
Kindly
Eject the tape.

Poetics Statement

At the beginning of this year, I was asked to write a personal statement on poetics. Specifically, I was asked to write about makes a poem meaningful. My main points were that, because poems abbreviate reality and put it into linguistic realms of human understanding, meaningful poems should eliminate useless complexity or extraneous words, and should leave room for the reader to bring his or her own perspective into the work. I still feel that these statements are true of poetry, however, I now have many more specific conceptions of what meaningful poetry does. Concentrating more on technical aspects of poetry since the beginning of the semester, I have come to the following conclusion: poems should be short and emotionally compact. In addition, the author of meaningful poetry should supplant his or her ego, avoid cliché, and use words of particularly interesting character.
Poems should be short. As a poem grows longer, the depth of emotional impact and gripping language begins to vary. In other words, some parts of the poem begin to be less valuable than other parts. Because poetry should distill life down to very abstract and limited terms (words), the parts which are not as meaningful or interesting should be eliminated. Eliminating words is one of the key steps in developing my own poems. In addition, long poems run a much higher risk of boring or losing the reader, and thus wasting the reader's time. Even if a long poem does manage to maintain a peak of emotional significance throughout the work, the reader may simply grow tired of waiting for the end and move on. By eliminating extraneous words and at least shortening a poem, the author creates greater emotional and intellectual density within the poem, which makes the poem more solid and easier to appreciate.
While density of emotional import is important to the success of a poem, I admittedly do not focus terribly hard on meaning when I write. Some poets have a specific goal in mind when I write, but for the most part I simply write. I believe in Valéry's statement in Rosemarie Waldrop's essay, "The Politics of Poetic Form," that poetry is the sum "of certain empty verbal figures whose particular tone called for a particular content." That is, that there can be sense in "empty verbal figures," or words which are, at first, apparently nonsensical. My own ego plays into the poetry automatically, so most of the words generated from these free-writes are genuine and specific to me. Poetry is the art of putting words together in meaningful and beautiful ways, and all poetry is personal and specific to the author, regardless of intent. If, on the other hand, the author strains for meaning or clarity, much of the excitement and mystery surrounding the poem will be lost, and the poem will thus lose much of the tension and entertainment it provides for the reader. The focus should not, therefore, be on writing a statement filled with meaning, as meaning will emerge from the poem regardless of the author's intent.
Another of the most important things a poem must do to be meaningful is to somehow eliminate the overriding temptation to yield to pure ego force or to preach. A poem cannot be a soapbox harangue, with the poet simply stating his or her opinions or feelings. There are several drawbacks of the haranguing poem. First, anyone with modest command of language can state facts. Breaking straightforward sentences into lines does not create poetry, so "poems" which do this are not particularly meaningful. Second, the reader must somehow be gripped by meaningful poems. One of the easiest ways to lose a reader is by simply stating facts. It is simply uninteresting, and no one wants to read someone's emotional dirty laundry, left to hang for everyone to see. In order to eliminate the temptation to simply state facts about oneself, the writer of meaningful poetry must attempt to divert attention away from him or herself, and place it on some other person, place, or object. The poet need not concern him or herself with the presence of an author's voice, as that will no doubt show up in the work despite even deliberate attempts to completely eliminate ego force. Moving the focus away from oneself a key strategy for reaching readers on a more meaningful level. Over the past six months, my presence my own poetry has shifted to the background as I have attempted to allow the words themselves to speak to the reader.
Reaching the reader, after all, is a crucial aspect of poetry. Some claim that poetry is entirely personal, but it is my belief that no one writes poetry without an effort to communicate. Writing is communication, and poetry creates impact by transmitting messages through language to the reader. A writer who completely forgets the reader does him or herself a disservice, as self-centeredness garbles the poem's intended effect. Although asking oneself, "would anyone actually enjoy reading this?" places many more hurdles between the poet and a completed poem, it is an important way to check to make sure that the work at hand actually communicates, because meaningful poetry communicates. It does not simply shout blaring emotional rants into thin air. Poetry must be directed.
Above all else, however, a writer who intends to create meaningful poetry should avoid cliché at all cost. This can be difficult. As Robert Creeley says, paraphrasing Joshua Whatmough, "poetry has said nothing new for the last 6000 years…perhaps…in the past 20,000 or 30,000 years." However, there are always tiny facets of originality to be found in any poem.
One way I have tried to avoid cliché and create my own distinct voice is by eliminating words that have too much emotional weight attached. Charles Bernstein makes a good point in his essay "The Dollar Value of Poetry:" "the political value of poems resides in the concreteness of the experiences they make available." While I am uncertain of the political value of poetry, I do believe that only authentic images which express authentic ideology add meaning to a poem. Words like war, evil, blood, love, and anger (to name a few) simply have too much weight attached to them to seem genuine in a poem. Perhaps this is caused by the fact that they make statements about events and emotions rather than showing the events or emotions themselves. At any rate, words such as these often seem insincere and are thus eliminated.
On the other hand, I find it equally important to eliminate words of too little weight. Words like the, and, and onomatopoetic words also drop out of my poems rather quickly. Too many extraneous words simply take too much away from the poem, as they are nothing but fluff. Thus, many of my poems are left with what I call "middle" words, words which fall between the two extremes of excessive weight or lightness. I think this creates a desirable solidity to the poems I generate, giving them very tangible feelings. It is important to me that poems be solid, that they capture very specifically and directly an attitude or emotional state.
In terms of form, particularly rhythm and meter, I have found it more important to allow form to develop from the content of the poem, to arise naturally out of the state of the poet as he or she writes. I am thus in agreement with T.S. Eliot when he says "a form grows out of the attempt of somebody to say something" and Robert Creeley's statement that "form was never any more than an extension of what it was saying." I generally (partially out of ignorance of more standard forms) do not write in set meter, because I believe that free verse offers the possibility of incorporating many forms into one poem, contributing to a greater sonic effect. Also, as the two statements above seem to imply, each poem should grow its own form which fits particularly to its own voice and message. By custom-fitting the rhythm of a poem to its content, one can achieve the maximum effect. Too rigid a form, then, will detract. Adrienne Rich includes a fine quote from Paul Goodman in her essay, "Format and Form," which says, "Format has no literary power, and…destroys literary power." When form becomes format, by freezing poems into rigidly defined meters, useless words often become necessary to fill in holes left by the standard meter, and inauthentic words can develop out of necessity to fill the prescribed structure. If poetry is to be compact and distilled, eliminating the non-extraneous, it becomes much more difficult when a ten-syllable line is mandated every time. Thus, it becomes important to conceptualize how to link words within and between lines, but it is not necessary to adhere too strictly to standard forms.
Poetry should capture a reader. A poem needs to maintain a minimum of emotional, intellectual, and sonic control, or else the reader will be lost in nonsensical cacophony. If a poet writes with reckless abandon, caring only for his or her own emotional catharsis, the possibility of writing a worthwhile poem greatly diminishes. It is therefore necessary to artfully arrange, economize, and select particular words which will create an original and significant effect upon the reader. This is what I endeavor to do when I write poetry.
Explanation of the Layout
When one produces a collection of poems, there needs to be some rational explanation why the poems fit together. The layout of any group of poems, from their order and groupings to the title of the collection, has great importance. A poet who does not consider this risks producing a disorganized mess of poems that, regardless of individual impact, lose power when poorly arranged. I therefore developed a particular scheme for arranging my poetry in this collection.
The link between these poems reflects my particular attitudes regarding the objects observed in the poems and the poems themselves. This creates a particular tone of voice prevalent throughout the collection. This tone emerges from my attempts at placing my own ego aside to approach a degree of emotional objectivity. These poems all share a characteristic lack of blaring emotion; they are, for better or worse, less fiery than many other poems. My ideology appears to be a strong force in the construction of the poems, rather than what they actually say. That is, the selection of particular words, line lengths, and titles all stem from, in my mind, the conflict between my idealized notions of how the world should work and my recent experiences, which directly contradict these notions.
The way I see it now, my consciousness is divided into two categories: books, and girls. Books has to do with anything involving my intellectual self, including subconscious and unconscious thought, academic endeavors, reading, writing, and any activity which involves cerebral thought (which is pretty much everything). Girls has to do with anything emotional, instinctual, or simply incomprehensible to my mind. My focus tends to oscillate between books and girls with fairly high frequency and in great amplitudes. For this reason, I have separated my works into two books, titled "Books," and "Girls" respectively. The "Books" section deals with the act of thinking, creating language, and writing poetry. The primary focus of these poems is our struggle (theirs and mine) to develop poetry which has some significance. The "Girls" section has to with more external experiences than "Books," and there is a tendency to involve females on some level of the "Girls" poems. Thus, the apt title.
The collection begins with "cummings," a short preview of things to come. I chose this piece above the others in books because it succinctly sums up the attitudes present in "Books." The nature of these poems is self-referential. Their primary focus, in my mind, is the thought processes involved in their own development. I attempted to arrange each poem within this section according to the cumulative effect of the book. They follow a general pattern of more blatantly showing their recursive nature to becoming subtler in that regard. "cummings," "Uh Uh," and "Unsure…" are all very blatant in their mentions of poetry, while "Situations," "In a plane," and "Funtime" are less obvious about their content. I structured "Books" to let the reader know right away what I was up to and then ease him or her into my particular style of poetry.
The poems of "Girls," while still often recursive, bring the focus off of the recursion itself and make an attempt to deal with other issues I face. I began "Girls" wit "43," because I felt it made a nice transition between the totally recursive poetry in "Books" and the focus on non-poetic material of "Girls." "43" is very recursive, as the title is mentioned in the poem, however, I believe the scene in which "43" is set is key to the impact of the poem, and thus it falls into the "Girls" section. Then, progressively, the poems become more and more ideological, as "Clouds" still hints at the creation of poetry in the line "I workshop clouds into handbags." Soon, however, the recursion, if at all present, takes a back seat to poems which are more concrete in their specific subject matter. "Scrolls" transitions into "Betrothed," which is a great departure from the lightness of clouds, as my voice becomes a greater force within the poetry. From there, the remaining poems have two combined effects; they gain emotional weight, and they narrate a relationship. "Written Between Classes," and "Untitled," both have to do with attitudes concerning strangers. At "Birds Perch" and "Logic Fails," the depth of human contact deepens further, and by "Old Song" and "Frances," the interlocutors both seem to be very old friends. I chose to end with "Frances" for this reason, in addition to the fact that it provides an implication of finality with the line "On my way out." The relationship ends, as does the book. The order and structure of the poems fell in place readily after the division of the poems into "Books" and "Girls," and the book flows together.
The title of the collection, Poems-Orooni, comes from two places. My father, in playing with me and my siblings when I was younger, would often end words with "orooni," and we all have since adopted this suffix to punctuate or emphasize particular words. For example, "He's smart-orooni," indicates that the subject is extremely intelligent. The second origin of "orooni" is the book On The Road by Jack Kerouac, in which a minor character, Slim Gaillard, ends all of his sentences with "orooni." The title is thus a nod to my family and the beat sensibility of poetry, which has played a large part in my personal literary development.
This portfolio, in layout and substance, culminates a semester of concentration on the poetic discipline. A mile post in my career, it shows my developing style. Enjoy.

THE COLLECTED OLD POEMS hehe Part 3

Collage of 3 poems

At the beginning
three quick hits on the table and a double sweep
Also spawned solitary audio evidence.
A goofball
Occasionally chirps,
Rips his larynx.
Hearing him holler,
The City exploded to power and property and pleasure,
Expanding only just fast enough to avoid recollapse.
Any given volume objected to break down.
My bloody valentine isn’t anything.
Lovely but baffling
Models that obey
Like a prostitute
Fought the gringos,
Discovered bird droppings
Only in certain packets
(Rock-club men’s rooms, once-thriving brothels)
The color of their light makes t-shirts;
The shades of that loss real, marking
Moment of disarray,
Dad runs a video store these days.

Practice Jumping, Frangle

Practice jumping
skill
freedom
Angle away
All angles lead nowhere
Fandangle three lines together
Spangle banners with looks
Bicycle away
Freestyle in large groups
Free beer is fine with me
Deer spit in the woods
Spit dear woods in towards me
Squid float with tentacles
Desire fires me with hoses
Flood of flowing gel

Why do I love your madness?
I ignored everyone’s (even my own) tips.
But how did they ignore the way you dance?
I thought I could love your face even with wrinkles,
But it might’ve just been the graffiti on your wall,
Or maybe this love was only my simple thirst.

At high school dances I dared not drink, so I’d thirst,
But in those days it was about making wrinkles
In your head, a kind of academic madness,
A game I could play. But now I’m more than a wall-
Flower. Now I can dance
Silly like a generous madman who excessively tips.

“Red red wine” jams my head and again the scale tips
To your favor. I wish I’d built your wall
So I could scale it, graffitiing images of my thirst.
Instead, your spray-painted signs still dance
In my mind: more memories of the madness-
Filled eve when my shirt was smooth and your dress had wrinkles.

As you rise from my lap, though, my shirt wrinkles
And once again we delve into tearful madness
So I’ll cry against this wall
And watch as another glass tips
To my lips, bringing back my thirst.
I’d sure like to, but now my legs won’t dance.

Exiled, relegated to watching you dance
Alone as I think of my thirst,
My eyes frost at the tips.
Because of your genuine madness,
I understand your forehead’s wrinkles
So I sigh, returning to my high-school wall.

Every wall has deep foundations; we see only tips
Of the wrinkles from space. This madness
May explain all the thirst. For now, though I need to see you dance.

THE COLLECTED OLD POEMS, hehe Part 2

Rubber Mallets and Very Violent Behavior

You only think you're scared
You’re just drunk and stupid
And you definitely want me you moron
To enlightenment first
To the end of the line where my blind eye
Will take a rest and pass over the control panel
And prey and pay and pray in the recycle bin
Before the bing and the ping destroy one sore
Tongue sitting on a bench place over the hill
Spill and cremate your cats ten times a day
Before taking them into stupidland for ten hours
Then bring them back into imaginary tofu sandwitches
And I will see If I can pull off bullshit before
Prayer and bayer and have you ever noticed
The difference between your and my precinct is great
And half life begins tomorrow but for now just
Hang your head and sigh
Hang your head and sig
And move forward and cremate your cats in
Recycle bins and don’t think think thingk
Bprolmen
Pollen and bees and trees and knees
Yeah
Meeting at 2
Make sure you bring the Styrofoam between knots
And kill the cats with stuffed ferocious sponges
And spray the can of mace into my face
With hammers.
Rubber mallets and very very violent behavior.

No Restrictions

No restrictions
Because I am the starter of the trends
With my ambiguous gestures
And friendly persona and
The fact that I can engage
Anybody
In a floating boat by the shore
And the Mexican princesses

98% Fun

Key change from major to minor in
A behavioral mode 98% related to chimps
And understand that the pictures in the zoo compete
With the real thing on some kind of penny way.
seven rounds
And one blank so flimsy a denial.

Human mind misunderstands and orders the
Universe before long the elephant trunks connect
To the tails of giraffes and milk the honey from
The drones in the nest.
Animism and derision rolled into dough
From the baker’s hand and melted in a pan
And served as the pineapple melts and brother
Your spiky red hair and enormous surfboards
Bring me to the beach where I can sit in a lifeguard stand and
Remember strolling with you in a stroller
And rolling you along and breathing that sea air and peeling a banana for lunch.

THE COLLECTED OLD POEMS, hehe part 1

Wisconsin, I Guess

Green and red roads and trees and many other
Artists configured in basements like
Bees in the hive and
Children of all ages can
Enjoy the ride.

Make sure the flag on the strap
Swings round in bass
As the drumsticks fly into the eyes
Of buttoned-lipped grown-ups.

Take out your own paper-thin

Lady who wears her hair in knots
Make the rope thick enough to
Ensure it gets to the point of
Specialty.

Raise some fists from time to time

And roar against the patient ones
Who sit back in the rows with many
Lawbreakings still in their blood and brains
Generational in conception.

Leather jackets and smoker’s breath
And upset always and turning the world on one side
Playing the banjo like no one did
And now glasses will hide your eyes.

Through the melody of submarine
Aqua family time
Will come the thrumming of hostile
People in line.

Let’s go rent a video.

Mike Taylor

City Walk

Ball caps and puma shoes
And mixed veins and cracked lines
Of faces intertwined with branches
Intersect with fingers, drawing borders of

Chickens in pueblos.

Blocked by blue with maroon shoes,
Laces of lines of cracks of steps
Of southern accents and Mexicese people
Squint, drawing lines in faces around

Eyes with fingers drawing breath in.
Out to streets of breezes and sun
And sudden stops of records as
Shoes wear and bus fumes cut
Lines in the sky, and flocks of
Eyes go inside.

En Vino Veritas.

I know
You’re engaged.
Many pass under port,
But this boat docks in Capri.
Leaks in ships and
Dropped sails and
Masts and gusts point,
So batten the hatches
And get below;
This one’s a Daisy.

elementary head hash

yeah, i guess a couple books lay open next to a guitar on my bed,
and i guess there's mold growing on the plates on my desk,
and i guess the clothes i'm wearing are starting to stink,
and i guess i left too many dishes in the sink
and my oh my, it's me,
oh my oh my it's not me

one of many

a small betrayal like
imagining
the drink hitting the face and the fist
the jaw and
on his chest
yelling
“there you have it now, pretty boy”
and breathless three seconds later
“youre so pretty laid out, pretty boy”

A dead bird.

You think that’s poetic?
Toss it in the truck,
We got more duck to hunt.