Anne Boyer : Creation Myth

(from Thirty "POEMS" in Thirty "DAYS")
for Mathias Svalina

One way to employ spatial intelligence
is to give birth to eight other worlds:

Lincoln, Streetwalker, Tom Waits, Magellan,
Church Official, Tulsa, KFC, Bird.

That birth story involved tiny poets riding on a unicorn.
I only gave birth to seeds and shells.

My tongue became tangled in a mess of peacocks.
The meteoric use of words would not be considered.

I had struggled with this idea and honestly thought
the lawyer was the artist of unmannerly language.

I fancied sounding, for a change,
like heavy chunks of unpolished metal.

I walked around all gothic and cynical,
all “fuck the World Bank” with a freakbeat of hell.

I thought I had a huge ego for a vegetable.
I also wrote a poetic short story titled “Hermetic Hotel”.

The fact that we were all living in the auric field
made me the happiest person in all onanite-based matter.

Dear Mr. Creation of Autonomous Space,
we were never about our names or faces.

We were never about ibex horns and the arms of Samaritans.
We were all about Barcelona and the magickal child.

@

Anne recently tried to salve my traumatic memories of petitio principii in Simon Blackburn's graduate reading course, and for that she deserves a close reading. Attention poet-bloggers! I have many other traumatic memories for you to salve. Please contact.

Anne, in addition to being hardcore myspace (see left), writes things that I like, and that today I am really seeking out: things that are rapid, associative and have the feeling of a direct verbal delivery. There is a rapidity to the voice here which I think is largely given by the complete absence of enjambement.

I'd actually be curious to see how enjambment has fluctuated statistically across the past century, and within a poet's work. There is something about end-stopped, or just unfragmented, lines that drives towards sincerity, that gives a sense of wanting to be understood. It apes, and to a certain extent in the way the content rebells, undermines, prose whose only rhythm is, finally, the endstop.

Anne is writing thirty poems in thirty days, and having churned out at something approaching that rate in the last two months, I can appriciate the task. It is, in one sense, not daunting at all: you are on a roll, you are high on language, and you just can't stop. Everything that happens to you, everything that you read, seems hooked into some giant poem machine and what can you do but turn it on each afternoon?

But there is something about a poem written in that state that gives it a certain tone. Lorine Neidecker did not write poems like this: she pared, and crossed out, and de-allusioned. By contrast, a poem written from a state of dense language experience like Anne's here wants to talk about that, feels a lack in its very smallness that it reaches out to the field to fill.

So hence the italicized stanza, which is the apotheosis of this kind of motion, the bare listing and estragement of "fact". And so, also, with the demotic, going "all 'fuck the World Bank'" -- this drive towards increasing the density of signifiers at the expense of the usual poetic values of economy and grace.

I've talked a little about a certain kind of apophenia in contemporary poetry that I find very interesting because of the way it sits on the very edge of what we consider artistic creation. Even more so than Cage's (or Simon's) aleatory works, apophenia -- in the way it puts a reader in contact, not with the external machinations of chance, but with her own psychosis in an almost pseudotheraputic way -- really hits you over the head with something akin to "I AM NOT ART, I AM TOOL." (Interestingly, Anne picks up on this tool notion in her little PS: * This reminds me that 30 drafts of raw, wrecked & unrarified poems forced out a la “travail mechanique” & displayed on the interweb is ever-being-the-anti-Bishop. Yeah..)

So in these gorgeous phrases -- onanite-based matter, auric field -- and gorgeous plot fragments -- see stanzas seven and eight -- we are looking inside what is essentially a detuned noise-box, asked to confront Anne as, not a speaker, but a source of disruption. I suppose we can look forward to a whole month of such disruptions from Anne, and we should all cheer her on.