Nonsense Amen

Chris what a fantastic article. A cogent manifesto of energy, action, deliverance and damnation. This should be the quality of your poetry—though I’m having second thoughts about where you belong under this umbrella. Because of your immense literary knowledge and fierce probing of philosophy, perhaps you are mostly an essayist -/ critic with a poet’s heart. Whatever wild beast you are:

I tip my hat to you. I bow in my best seersucker suit. I curtsy in my famously white wedding gown . I throw my hand in the middle of the circle of your words and on the count of 1-2-3 shout “Poetic Terrorism!”

Wow and we’re really the only two people reading any of this (with perhaps the exception of Traci). There is a certain wonderfulness about this anyway—and perhaps because we are unheard. It musters the yet-to-fly carrion, makes us equally rapacious and meretricious, covers the skin like packing tape for us to be shipped somewhere sometime.

Imagine the package of us being delivered in a mushroom to infant revolutionaries. Oh how they fed the small cisterns of their brains with our nonsense amen. Oh how they danced in the moonlight, small papers of us spilling from their beautiful heads, the heads they would burn and chide between their asses.

There is a clear and present opening in poetry. Subtle, yes, and very close to miss, yes. I say poetry because fiction is always there. Non-fiction coupled with memoir…yawn (of course deservedly necessary) yawn…it will always have its place.

But poetry. Poetry is the only heavyweight that after losing five rounds, can rally and unanimously win the next seventeen. It's clear we've been losing. But we're in the corner, burning blood and spitting, cool wet rag on our foreheads. One stray sucker-punch might end it all. You’ve been warned by everyone that this might be the hit of your endless coma. I’ve been warned too. Stand up. The center of the ring is a bull’s eye.

Liam Rector, “Corner Man”

You took that round,
Champ! You didn’t
Just sit and pout:

Now get the hell
Back in there
And knock the fucker out.

Poetic Terrorism: Temporary Autonomous Zones, Like at Union Station.

Again, this takes from Wittgenstein's dictum "ethics and aesthetics are one."

The arrogance of the writer, of course, is obvious. The false dichotomy of me/them fails to acknowledge the possibility that someone else (most problably everyone, hence the random sample) could possibly exist outside of power structures. I believe I'll return to Bartleby the Scrivner, because I think I finally understand what Melville was driving at. "I know where I am," drives much much deeper than ephemeral acts of dominance in order to resurrect your own sense of helplessness: however, Improv Everywhere and thoughtful gorilla theatre can cicumvent the repulsion caused by the romantic "genius artist" pointing his finger and judging. Guilt should not be the primary target, neither should judgement. In poetry, we need to investigate ritual and stand invisible on the alter.

Poetic Terrorism


WEIRD DANCING IN ALL-NIGHT computer-banking lobbies. Unauthorized pyrotechnic displays. Land-art, earth-works as bizarre alien artifacts strewn in State Parks. Burglarize houses but instead of stealing, leave Poetic-Terrorist objects. Kidnap someone & make them happy. Pick someone at random & convince them they're the heir to an enormous, useless & amazing fortune--say 5000 square miles of Antarctica, or an aging circus elephant, or an orphanage in Bombay, or a collection of alchemical mss. Later they will come to realize that for a few moments they believed in something extraordinary, & will perhaps be driven as a result to seek out some more intense mode of existence.
Bolt up brass commemorative plaques in places (public or private) where you have experienced a revelation or had a particularly fulfilling sexual experience, etc.
Go naked for a sign.
Organize a strike in your school or workplace on the grounds that it does not satisfy your need for indolence & spiritual beauty.
Grafitti-art loaned some grace to ugly subways & rigid public momuments--PT-art can also be created for public places: poems scrawled in courthouse lavatories, small fetishes abandoned in parks & restaurants, xerox-art under windshield-wipers of parked cars, Big Character Slogans pasted on playground walls, anonymous letters mailed to random or chosen recipients (mail fraud), pirate radio transmissions, wet cement...
The audience reaction or aesthetic-shock produced by PT ought to be at least as strong as the emotion of terror-- powerful disgust, sexual arousal, superstitious awe, sudden intuitive breakthrough, dada-esque angst--no matter whether the PT is aimed at one person or many, no matter whether it is "signed" or anonymous, if it does not change someone's life (aside from the artist) it fails.
PT is an act in a Theater of Cruelty which has no stage, no rows of seats, no tickets & no walls. In order to work at all, PT must categorically be divorced from all conventional structures for art consumption (galleries, publications, media). Even the guerilla Situationist tactics of street theater are perhaps too well known & expected now.
An exquisite seduction carried out not only in the cause of mutual satisfaction but also as a conscious act in a deliberately beautiful life--may be the ultimate PT. The PTerrorist behaves like a confidence-trickster whose aim is not money but CHANGE.
Don't do PT for other artists, do it for people who will not realize (at least for a few moments) that what you have done is art. Avoid recognizable art-categories, avoid politics, don't stick around to argue, don't be sentimental; be ruthless, take risks, vandalize only what must be defaced, do something children will remember all their lives--but don't be spontaneous unless the PT Muse has possessed you.
Dress up. Leave a false name. Be legendary. The best PT is against the law, but don't get caught. Art as crime; crime as art.

How Narrative May Destruct Deconstruct Itself

this is the handful of marbles i shatter on the floor.
surely some arrangement must be made
of the mess. this is the glass the nurse sweeps
or surely you are not: a discarded thing,
must it go anywhere else but
the miscarriage my girlfriend had in highschool.
no, it was like that but please don't drop
your jaw. yes, i was, she was, willing to go along
with the accident, i broke, she said are we safe
and i didn't know. the child dead
less than a minute's chance to name it.
as brittle and and soft as a quail.
my girlfriend as erratic as the simile wailing
for something better. the child was not
about to unwrap the bow-tie of its throat--
it wasn't a wedding ring. it was not a wedding ring.
in shock--the doctors said--she was--
stay away. so it was. and i did.