OCCUPIED SPACE

on miss queenie's "one day":
the unifying fiber through the poem is the poetic realization of an accent: translating a cultural stigmata into printed word. This appropriation allows for a connection through visual stimulus because the conversational tone of the poem opens new connections and nodes to latch onto. By mixing languages, the poem further mimics a conversation by focusing on the sounds of the words and not their meaning. it occupies a verbal space even though the book does not literally speak.

on tom waits's "swordfishtrombone":
what space does the printed word occupy when it's given the sanctification of a song, composed music? even though the poem isn't seperated by rhyme, in recitation it separates itself through the tone and inflection of the voice however hard it may try to maintain an unbiased approach. thus the poem itself has a hidden construction within it given to it by its social classification as "song."

on dizzy gillespie's "SABLA Y BLU":
by removing the comfort of words and word association, the repetition of the same letters sanctifies the form of the poem, since this is the only foundation one has to build his or her interpretation on.

on jaques roubaud's "from some thing black":
the piece is dictated by the three suppositions: "there is no more // nothing can be said // from now on nothing will be like her." the following is a logical dissection of the suppositions and their application to philosophy. roubaud's "meditations" occupy the space of philosophical rhetoric, cross-sections of the speaker's mind. his visions are constantly bounced off the ideas of the floating, ephermeric "her" which nothing will be like: she is the tabula rasa which roubaud's ideas are projected onto.

on david antin's "endangered nouns":
the bird symbol serves as a metaphorical bridge between the author's experiences in california and his memories in new york. he remarks "i remembered that bird i said to myself it was a . . . and then no name came it was as if instead of a name there was an empty space the size of a name that should have been there". the bird's societal classification is lost, yet its symbolization stands clear within the poem. the author obsesses over this blank space in his mind, questioning the space that "nothingness" occupies: is it a hole, and being a hole, is it therefore something? is it there, but held away from realization by a few dead or malfunctioning neurons?

on pierre joris's "from winnetou old":
joris slips, like miss queenie, between english and another language, this time german, in order to both desanctify the meaning of the individual word and the sanctification of the movement and composition of words. his prose is unbounded by sentence structure, sifting from idea to idea, each idea held in ovular nodes on the page.