*************************************************

FERAL
by Michael Basinski

to rearrange this into a maiden
with a pitcher of water sweeter
luster slave saloon in the sinuous
spine vertebrae that are too many
for the body human twenty-seven
letters of an alphabet offering
dancing inflection
infection reflection
amber cancer
unaccepting the unreality
since that time all the flowers
rose in the animal air
and the trees drove away
Adam and Eve wanton
no part of it and fruit spoils

*************************************************
                         RE-PEOPLING PILTDOWN
                            (green into orange)
                                         by Jeffrey Little

transferred to a wooden cask proportionate to the
       tetragrammaton's fist
trellised w/corkscrews of fluorescent tubing.  where euclid  
       revolves
like a ham beyond balance sheets & the silence has a spine. i 
       try
to speak but my mouth staggers i've shellfish for teeth
& the air it's forced from my lungs forced from that deepening
       orange

of lips for the first time wrapping around a word-i need-new
       words
necessitate--an articulated tongue able to elevate speech
to the vehemence of a funnel cloud
in a piano playing to numbers that don't add up, numbers
that loom like cadmium mountains in kansas where a sound
        breaks
from out of the possession of an obeisance & arching entes the
        elemental 

*************************************************
AUTOSCRIVE D'FICUS (an excerpt)
by Ficus strangulensis

Again and again do we try the door.  It not so much resists as hardens but
suffice to remain tan.  My furs lie apart, their worth many times measured
by the Grollier.  As Dark One rises and the general levelness becomes
surer, we can no longer see reflections as much as think them and that,
only in short drafted vessels.  My hearth hasn't to bear samony nor the
loophole a peculiar odor of rusty skin.  To sureness we toss a crumpled
wand or a texture as sign.  Only here am I evenhanded with critical items.
The end can only stay.

        *****
As I thought it so brimmed in more than a halftone and his also ran true.
Again we strove but any gain was imaginary and wholly to be concealed in
the glow of mild noise.  My head itself searches until a finding agrees,
will be discontinuously in this focus and real from time to time.  A
foursome of gatherers and my uncle have certified it is so.  A breeze stirs
trends and ripples as duty.  My batter can only move one more time.  Then
we will have found or be left.  A leaf, stirred perhaps as much in thought
or in heating, has no force of manner.  It continues.  Sense is ludic if it
can be so definite as steps along paths disappearing before we step them.

*************************************************
TWO PIECES
   by John M. Bennett

STY

Sat 'n clouted, cumulus fever, lists of knees:
mouth relearned your lipping seat sole (leakage
tent) the next feeder.  Like your toward elbow
every evening, bending mole and lucid shirt the
cloud fat//heaver dirt, sits 'n schemes (your
broth burned) slipped slow meat luggage bent your 
rested feeler I (bite your "ford glow" leavened 
hole what backs in me you sack) luck

                                                                      EYE

FLOOR

Swimming, faked, corner-spoiled: cud I refuse 
scorching under sail your brimming cup lake
straps the former drinking oil, landing, flooded
tantrum-shoes tantra's forking brussels sprout
(thunder, nails, cloudy muscles') pants standing,
sink's trapped up.  Your snore review lip-redoubt,
pouts that skewed (thick shore

                                                                        TRIM
                
*************************************************
PARADOX AS TEXTURE:  AFTER DECIDING AGAINST COLLAGE
by Jim Leftwich
  Collage as form is metaphor.  Collage does not exist as an object to be
encountered in the present.  The birthmark of collage is absence, its
fingerprint is desire.  Collage is time without a center, the site of
absence.  To make collage is to enter the mirror.  Source text is
signification seen as chthonic spirit, and to enter into its revisioning is
to dissolve in the play of rapture.
   To make collage is to join with the tradition of ecstacy, the shaman
flying on his borrowed fractal drum.  Collage is displacement of body; it is
sex.  The collage-artist annihilates self in order to liberate ego.  Collage
dismantles the myth of verticality, deflates hierarchy, flattens the upward
spiral, proposes sacred play along the horizontal axis of the holy soil.
 Source text is the garden of experience, where innocence is playfully sought
through sexual disintegration.
 Collage expects nothing; therefore it has no identity.  Collage is a
roadsign that points in the wrong direction, towards the absence of a path,
the unraveling threads of present texture, where it presents itself as
something else, as everything that it is not.  Collage is other presented as
self, difference proposed as identity.  Collage promotes its existence by
insisting on its nothingness.
  Collage exiles time from the present.  Time exists in collage as a refugee
from the unknown.  The reader moves through collage as an alien traversing
impossible terrain:  there never was a world like this, and there never will
be.  Collage violates all civilized arrangements of human interaction.
 Collage is the denial of co-operation, the refusal of society, the anarchy
of violence and desire.

 Collage is not intended as democracy.  It is closer in intent to monarchy,
or theocracy.  The collage artist uses the labor of others to facilitate his
own work.  Collage is free enterprise, capitalism.  It is more like murder
than it is like theft.  It isn't so much like rape as it is like chemical
warfare.  Collage secretly penetrates the body of another's work, the lethal
viral infection by another mind.
  Collage enters text like a team of nanotech machines, to dismantle and
subdue, to redirect.  Collage voids the social contract between writer and
reader.
    Collage reinvents the relationship between sender and receiver, erases
the earlier attempt at communication, and redefines the dimension of power on
the terms of the collage-artist.  The asymmetry of the writer/reader
relationship is reversed -- the writer is silenced; the collage-artist will
do the talking.  In collage, an actual response, other than the negative
reactions of shutting the book or consciously rejecting its thesis, becomes
possible; the collage artist re-writes the book.  Since the process of
consuming information is an act of submission, the collage artist responds by
refusing to consume the information on the terms of the text.  Collage
recognizes resistance and annihilation as alternatives to submission.  If the
writer insists that to have read his words is to have had his thoughts,
thoughts which are not one's own, then the collage-artist insists on
destroying the object of his oppression, and in creating out of the debris a
new work which is his own, the tools of the oppressor, his words, are stolen
and utilized towards different ends.  Collage, having overthrown the tyrant,
invites a new kind of participation in the text.
   Collage posits anarchy as the fundamental mode of interaction between
reader and writer.  The asymmetry of the power relationship is redefined at
the outset, is reversed, with the collage-artist inviting the reader to
participate as an empowered equal.  Collage refuses copyright, denies the
idea of intellectual property, insists on openness.  Collage is revolution;
it begins with an act of violence.

         Collage is collaboration.

Text is a template and a score.  The collage-artist enters into a liaison
with the text, with a multitude of texts, facilitates communication between
units of the multitude, acts as the conduit for a sexual transgression of the
boundaries between texts, redistributes voice, allowing the final silence of
the text to become the initial voice of the collage.  Collage is naked
passion, but more conjugal than illicit.  Collage is form, not metaphysics,
and as such is nothing more than the extension of content.
  Collage proposes that the recognition of a template is a transformative
experience, that improvising from a score is a form of liberation.  Collage
torques inert text into rotation with other texts, so that point of view,
stand point, site of identity for reader and writer emerge like bubbles in a
boiling pot.  Collage is the chaos of human potential at play in the textual
record left by a congress of mind.

 Collage finds communication at the center of a sieve.
    Communication is the evidence of our isolation.
Dialogue is always between the alien and the exile.    Transduction as
collage:
   Discourse is singular.   towards an anti-philosophy of mis-reading.


Collage is a burial rite celebrated over the ashes of identity.  History is
the silence of choice.  Memory is the death-mask of choice.
  Identity is the serpent, the serpent's slough, a chameleon, the
   failure of collage and of memory, an erasure
    of history.
 The aphorism retreats to its origin at the horizon.  The aphorism locates
its horizon in the past.  The aphorism is a recipe for imprisonment by
memory.  Memory locates will at the edge of a grave, its death a singular
noun, history.

 History is the illusion of continuity in a fiction of identity.
  Words silence the singular.  Collage is non-linear aphorism,
  the curved horizon re-imagined as forthcoming.  Collage is a collaboration
between silence and desire.

Deliberate mis-reading is a form of improvisation
 and is always quasi-intentional.  Improvisation is the will to khawatir, the
desire to choose
 involuntary thoughts.  Collage is collective
improvisation, the deliberate over-extension of openness,
  inclusion of a range larger than the form is designed to fit.

 Recombination, or distillation, works like a collage of omission, and is
autoerotic, text manipulated to transform during play with(in) itself.  At
the same time, it is a collective improvisation, a non-traditional score
re-interpreted against its author's intentions to perform as an ensemble
freed of its intrinsic organizational principles.
    It is the jazz standard for solo piano revisioned as a collective
improvisation for double quartet.  A recombinative distillation treats the
degrees of freedom revealed in reading the turbulence of a text as if it is
their unveiling that is the desired result of reading, as if the reader's
awareness of this stretched range of possibilities, the reader ranging
through this field, that actuality, activity, was the attainment to be gained
through engaging a text -- not as if this encounter was a tool to then be
used towards some more pragmatic action, towards a state-space-model of self
and the prediction of its patterned unfolding.
  This is how collage, recombination, distillation, transduction -- all
quasi-intentional operations involving source text -- become divinatory
practices.  The reader participates in an awareness large enough to form a
fractal fragment of the whole moment, so that self and situation are
self-similar, and this situates identity in the site of present flux, taking
shape.

 In collage -- or recombination -- or distillation -- or transduction -- the
writer is naked in the new text, and the original, along with its author, is
violated.  This is one of the hazards of embrace -- larger, of inclusion --
larger yet, of receptivity.  There is no need to make this explicit in the
new text; it is painfully apparent.
   The situation is presented as nakedness and violation, and it is
encountered as an anxious witnessing of transgression.  Reading writing
derived from source text, we are voyeurs witnessing a sexual crime.  There is
no one to report this to, and our complicity is immediate and irremediable.
  Our only choice is whether or not to act.  We are either silenced or
converted, recruited, initiated into the alterity of the creative, where
transgression is identity, and the past does not exist.  There is no history
at the border, no time at all at the nexus of identity and boundary.
   The present erases itself with choice, future unravels in a spiral back
towards the absent site of self.  We are left with the rasp of individual
expressivity which is emergent from a primal template that is known through
receptivity.  Nakedness replaces number, will is reduced to the electrical
surge of anxiety, choice operates in the enormous chaos of turbulent
causation, self insists on its identity until absence is its proof.

*************************************************
POSTYPOGRAPHICAL
 
Literature beyond the Gutenberg Galaxy
                                        By Fabio Doctorovich
                                        (f.doctor@chem-mail.gatech.edu)
 
The Argentinean Scene: PARALENGUA
 
*Imagine: the state of poetry in a nation ruled by dictators for 30 years.
*Imagine: the terror in a country in which 30,000 people "disappeared" in a
short period of time, most of them assassinated, a good number by being
drugged and threw alive to the sea from navy airplanes.
*Imagine: a stupid war fought over two insignificant islands (the "Malvinas"
or "Falklands") by a military government that was collapsing at a point in
which the fear created by the abovementioned killings was not enough to avoid
its fall.
 
And then *imagine: poetry in Argentina.
        
During the 60s there was a period of relative freedom, and it was then that
Edgardo Antonio Vigo introduced visual poetry in Argentina and started the
magazine "Diagonal Cero". He developed the "poetry to and/or realize" -a type
of concrete poetry in which the "reader" contributes to the making of the
poem-, and together with others such as Mirta Dermisache and Armando Zarate
(author of "Otra Sintaxis" published by Luna Bisonte Prods) founded the basis
for postypographical poetry in Argentina.
 
In 1983 democracy was definitely (so far) restored and all the creative power
repressed for almost 30 years gave birth (after 6 years of gestation) to
Paralengua -Paratongue, Fortongue, the parallel tongue, the
language-but-not-written-language, the alternative outsider. Organized by a
sound poet (Carlos Estevez), a visual poet (Roberto Cignoni) and myself, the
movement has grown exponentially in a short period of time, embracing a large
number of poets. Due to its postypographical nature, Paralengua's preferred
forms of expression
are not magazines or books but poetry shows and performances. The presence of
an audience at the moment that the poem is performed not only improves the
poet-'reader' rapport but also makes feasible the participation of the public
in the making of the poem (a fact clearly
related to Vigo's "poetry to and/or realize"). In some cases, participants
are invited to "confess" a poem to a priest-poet concealed on the stage
behind a black curtain (Jorge Santiago Perednik); in others, fragments of a
poem are distributed among the audience (which is separated into
severalgroups) to be read, therefore producing a sound poem (F.D.). Sometimes
a type of "poetic interview" is held in which the public may ask the poets
any kind of question that are answered in the form of improvised poems,
reminding of the "payadas" held by gauchos (Roberto Cignoni).
 
Nevertheless, this eclosion of a variety of postypographical poetic works has
made difficult to construct solid theoretical basis. It may be  envisioned
that in following years the movement will be cribbed as some theoretical
light starts to arise. By the moment, and as Carlos Estevez
has said, Paralengua "has a proteinic and tentacular nature which doesn't
lack festivity, intellectualism, sensitivity and, most important, a passion
that possesses all the dimensions of language."

*************************************************

This ends The Experioddicist #7