To begin ...

As the twentieth century fades out
the nineteenth begins
.......................................again
it is as if nothing happened
though those who lived it thought
that everything was happening
enough to name a world for & a time
to hold it in your hand
unlimited.......the last delusion
like the perfect mask of death

Thursday, March 26, 2015

John Martone: from "children’s book" 2014


[To describe John Martone as our greatest living miniaturist, as I have in the past, is to go back for me to a time many years ago when Ian Hamilton Finlay & I corresponded about a poetry of small increments (one-word poems & other such concerns).  For Finlay, I believe, some form of minimalism was at the heart of the concrete poetry he was then exploring & developing, & for myself it entered into aspects of ethnopoetics & appeared most clearly in the numerically based poems (gematria) that I was beginning to write.  It’s with someone like John Martone, however, that this approach turns into a life long project, a minimal work like Finlay's of epic proportions, for which the following can serve as a yet another instance & perhaps (as “children’s book”) a new direction for his ongoing practice.  (J.R.)] 

my morning
a mouse nest


 
mouse-hole
holding
a mind
 
 
 
2 joints of yr
little finger
house mouse
 
 
house mouse —
my thalamus?
amygdala? 
 
 
house mouse
its always a childrens book 
 
 
two mice dead of fear in yr live trap
 
 
weak-eyed
feel our way along the wall
mouse & me 
~ 
little worms
in the brightness
eyes floaters
 
 
 
out of touch
lie down
in snow 
 
suddenly feeling the river below the ice 
 
 
frost-shattered
stone's
a puzzle

knocking the snow
from your boots
no one's home
 
~

in layers
of winter clothes look up
at night geese
 

 
first time
for some
night geese
 

 
night geese
interrupt
a childrens book 

 

night geese
the horizon
passes overhead 

 

night geese
someone slips
on black ice
 


night geese
the old
keep up
 

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