[The following letter & poem are as found in our email correspondence from 2003. The Naropa reference is to a question I had raised about using some of
From: Jackson Mac Low
To:
jeromerothenberg@hotmail.com
Subject:
the poem I've been futzing around with for c. 16 days
Date:
Wed, 04 Jun 2003 15:44:21 -0400
Dear
Jerry
I'm
attaching "Touching Chickens the Don until It Doesn't" to make me
stop messing with it. The source is a mix of verbal materials I gathered from
works by GM Hopkins, Charles Hartshorne, Gertrude Stein, and Lewis
Carroll--with a lot of choices etc.during the makingtime. (That started on 20
May and just ended today, 6/4/03.)
(Once in a
while I get bogged down this way.)
The form
is sort of a bow to an old friend I met the day I got here on my 21st birthday
and by happenstances turned out to be an old friend of the lady I lived with in
the village and a friend of
someone
he introduced to me after an anarchist meeting who became one of my closest
anarchist friends who lived near
As for
naropii--why chicken them by harnessing them with one of my ancient complicated
groups of methods? This way they won't get the idea that all they have to do is
just pop something into a machine and thereby make a poem.
The old
complex methods won't make them write any better, and they know nothing about
their quasi-Buddhist roots + humanism + anarchism + unfashionable metaphysics
& poetics & all the rest of my craziness.
And they don't need to. A simplified LP method shd suit them much better. Tell
'em to each dream up a genus of "things" with some resonance for that
particular person and bring names of members
of the species thereof into one or more poems, writing in sentences etc. that
include one of the species' names, thus designating an individual of that
species (e.g., an instance of "arclight"). Otherwise I'd give them
free rein as to forms of the poems and burdens thereof. A list poem such as LP
1 shdnt be encouraged.
But all
that's up to you. The mix of the humane and the machinic, the intentional and
the quasi-nonintentional is where I'm at. Nothing a human being does can be
nonintentional & why shd it? But the attempted mix is a good thing. We have
to leave the door open to the fact that we're nothing and our identity's a
dream, but one that's not only unavoidable but necessary for us to do the
slightest thing.
God bless
Malevich! But he done his bit and got bit for it. Shittin' Bolsheviks!
love to
you both and to Matthew
jml
Touching Chickens the Don
until It Doesn’t
It’s in a way touching
said Don to Andrea
that you’ve been calling Schwitters
nihilistic
and his scarless
festivalselections
discontenting and delusive
as
snowflakes in a summer atmosphere.
Are sunbeams’ living spirits
a-dwindling?
The
motionable shadowy selves of patience
gold
blue
seemingly immaculate
have never selected motherwords.
snap at timbers
overhead.
Time developed
corresponding discontented frights
with perfect navels.
Three
thoughtfully blue
conceived a blinding wince.
Dispensing with days
they motionably lifted
fast
beating welcomes to the
morning.
Between impatience
and selection
behavioristic discontented bandits
snatch up
violets.
Aren’t you enjoying
your new behavior’s singularity?
Who was it called
fast
beating patience
miniSchwittersistic behavior
of
nonbehavioristic body tops?
Rooted be the healing glass of humankind!
Spiritmystery
light
riddles all
allaying pseudoimmaculate breath.
Time
and sunbeams
always moving
never motionable
hymn a dwindling sweetness
coloring
breath.
Fast
beating praise
cannot cap a scarless
navel.
Living minimotionably
ever moved
banded trees
never wink or blink at
lilac erections.
Who conceived that chimney voice
winking at mothers’ patience?
Who’d riddle a scarless navel with infinite
light?
Infinity
isn’t witty.
Are you
Beth and Mellie’s intellectual mother?
Beth and Mellie’s intellectual mother?
Mother,
they
say you’ve mothered three timberless mysteries!
Hand the
golden glass no more to Mother.
What caps
a mother's mothering?
No
mother is scarless.
Timber’s
dwindling’s inconceivable!
Who could’ve conceived
or composed
a conception of that dwindling?
Who
breathing between three laws
on snowflakeaccumulating skydays
breathing between three laws
on snowflakeaccumulating skydays
would
share the timber overhead?
Your mother’s
breath
conceived your heart.
Yours the breath your mother's
heart conceives.
When morning's wincing fingergaps share living blackness
the
day
star’s
light
is right as sightlight.
Great
wincing
disperses the light of glowing flesh
Who is the banded bowman
snatching a
longedfor wink?
Patient allayers look at him through immaculate fingergaps.
All
through the breathing world
the day
star’s
dear and healing
light
arrives through vast
distances
from a swirling sphere of unimaginably fiery gases.
Fast
beating praise
is panning around in our blackness.
Mothers’
marks
from bearing and
nursing humankind are shared by
humankind.
Glass must often cap
sunbeams
before they can sweetly heal.
Lightly breathing mystery
riddles
the infinite rightness
of sightlight.
Is any
bare and lightless world
dearer than the daystar?
breath
conceived your heart.
What is the richness of a flash?
However
vast
it never is dearer
than the daystar.
Unnumbered painters
share
with
patience and impatience
humankind’s
mystery
light.
Not in
a vast
flash
do the mothers
conceive all humankind.
Is Bethany
lighting more than breath?
What savior might conceive the infinite
healing
beggedfor by the world’s
elemental
wound?
Always being moved
wounded and unwincing
the unmotionable
atmosphere is dying.
Blind
blue
heaven will harbor
no
living spirit.
The daystar
unmothering
unobservably maculate
will glow unseen
until it doesn’t. Jackson Mac Low
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