Juxta/Electronic #8
JUXTA/ELECTRONIC 8 MARCH 1996
EDITORS: Ken Harris, Jim Leftwich
Contributors: Merle Bachman, Thomas Lowe Taylor,
Jake Berry, Harry Polkinhorn, Jessica Freeman,
John M. Bennett, Jack Foley
*************************
MERLE BACHMAN
MIGRATION
(Apples)
bones summoning a piped light, burnished coal scuttle
humid air tattered by midges
tell my family merges here, in rose-print dress, droopy mustache
children carted out by laundry-load, washed vests in frigid cup
old snow looped through severed ears, fingers, the wands they make and touch
rattle tea kettle, on chicken feet invading houses (or the woods darkly
surrounding)
a match for apples falling, lap-gathered, a woman's legs also painted in
harmony
(Beaver)
at the pole star economy maximized, linens in trays and steerage pelts
same blankets, plans, arrays, beads for the taker, a floating lance a trail
intensified hearing, stray words in throat unbound, paddling clear lakes
a fallen leaf a sign
river thicket to enter this house, once covered North America, a gloss
calling for sale, to name shipping companies, trade
in chopped faith
(Clay)
instead of an oven door: stick in coals, warm the nest, it begins to
run, bead and run, kindling with a pewter name, dull
where she sleeps in back room under an oxygen tent, heavy candlesticks
same dream of willows draping a river, same dream she has constitutional,
thick
arms and legs for skating, escaping, faint whir of ice across
silence made audible by labored breathing, a wash it cleans
nothing
(Dangle)
a blue bowl, blue eyes, reversal, good fortune to travel crammed in
samovar, unbundled later (and later can't be found
at the gate)
her nest under deck, a litter of three and no vocabulary, unable to write
a future, make memoir
of past
what ticket, what exchange words met at the pier, removed half
a name, nothing to catch bleeding
(possible translation:)
*lap opening in pure
derivation; succumbs
*stale bread, coffin stones, the bed lump, a knot
of expanded desire (seven children - no,
eight - )
*scattered like puff-weed, lost on the way to school, small child
playing with a piece of broken crockery, slit water-surface
vanishing
- a coil begins here
-
notes on the writing:
- caught in no formula, some lie open, others "lie"
- full sentences leading some (no) where or shreds matched,
marred together
- longer exponential of breath, "narrating" a chaotic impasse under
the skin possibly remembering
*************************
JESSICA FREEMAN
Sourcherry bidet
water awry
toilette standstill
cocained rats dogpaddle
one impregnable tornado
Pinehill louisiana Man
his (fancy
terminal, off-center, wet radio
habitat VHF UHF Radio waves
Aerial
line up together
disorder's fashion hydraulic
pulley:
voucher bona fide
volatile
organ
apex
occasional
adjoin now blast furnace
firebrick and carbonbloc
coke
limestones' iron oxide
Bombsight
tachometric penis-booster
screw the firing pin fuze
Plunger* gronze
antimony trichloride
gunbarrel, toddler show white
*************************
JACK FOLEY
THE ERN MALLEY STORY
for Donald P. Hilla, Jr.
Do you know about Ern Malley? Do you know that story? I'll tell you.
It was i```````````````````````'''''''''''''''''''''''''n Australia,
during the war, the middle 40s. Australia, you know, was always a bit of a
backwater. It was never much for the Modernist sort of literature but it had
one you know little magazine the kind which prints incomprehensible material
and everyone loves it. It was called Angry Penguins. Angrrrrrrrrrrrrrry
Penguinnnnnnnnnnnnnnns. Its editor was Max Harris, and he was charismatic
and indefatigable and argumentative. There were people who loved Max Harris.
There were people who hated him. Once a group of these latter got together
and tossed him in the river. The river was called The torrens and it was a
sunlit winter's day in 1941. But he was none the worse for it. Max Harris
was bringing Modernism to Australia with a vengeance, you know, T.S.E., Dylan
Thomas, modernism. And Max Harris was a fearsome Moderrrrrrrrrrrrrrrn poet
himself. He was young man, really, in his 20's, and full of energy.
Oh, but there were others who had energy too. They say, when you hated
people in those days you really hated them. The war was on and so there was
an official enemy to hate. but whom could one hate at home? Two young men
in the army, also in their 20s, hated Max Harris and they hated Modernism.
their names were harold Stewart and James McAuley. It was a Saturday
afternoon in early October 1943.
Lieutenant James McAuley and Corporal Harold Stewart were at their desks
in the general office of L Block at the Victoria Barracks. They were the
rostered CO and NCO on duty at their outfit, the Directorate of Research and
Civil Affairs. The barracks...is a handsome, Georgian-style bluestone
building, fronted by lawn, palms and ornamental cannon on St Kilda Road, the
leafy boulevard that sweeps from the south-east across the Yarra River into
the city - but L Block, a little to the West of the main building, was a
scruffy old weatherboard shed with a tin roof.*
Stewart and McAuley decided to play a marvelous joke. They decided they
would invent a poet, a modernist poet, and they would call him Ern Malley.
They would say that Ern Malley died young, like Keats, but that he had a
sister Ethel who had discovered some of his poetry after his death. Ethel of
course couldn't pretend to judge her brother's poetry, but she was sending a
sample to Max Harris to find out if it had any merit.
Amid great hilarity, and in very little time, McCauley and Stewart
produced a sheaf of poems - enough for a small book - and they sent some to
Max Harris.
Max Harris fell for it hook line and sinker. Poor Ern, the hoaxers told
him through the medium of Ethel, was a garage mechanic. He had never shown
his poetry to anyone. Was it any good? Here is one of the poems they sent:
Durer: Innsbruck, 1495
I had often, cowled in the slumberous heavy air,
Closed my inanimate lids to find it real,
As I knew it would be, the colorful spires
And painted roofs, the high snows glimpsed at the
back,
All reversed in the quiet reflecting waters -
Not knowing then that Durer perceived it too.
Now I find that once more I have shrunk
To an interloper, robber of dead men's dream,
I had read in books that art is not easy
But no one warned that the mind repeats
In its ignorance the vision of others. I am still
The black swan of trespass on alien waters.
Is it good? Max Harris thought it was very good. Here ar last was an
australian modernist. The backwater had finally joined the 20th Century.
True, the young man had died. But the tragedy of his death was mitigated by
the fact that here, preserved, was a slim volume of his work, appropriately
titled The Darkening Ecliptic. A special issue of the magazine was prepared
and published.
Then the news broke. It was all over the newspapers.
Modernism in Australia has never been the same. Of course it has never
been the same anywhere else either.
But the hoaxers were by no means the winners in all of this. They had
the first, not the last laugh. It has been pointed out that the poetry
written by Harold Stewart and James McCauley as Ern Malley was better than
anything they published under their own names. Were the deceivers themselves
deceived? Is it possible that by parodying the modern idiom they were worked
upon by the same forces which produced the modern idiom? Zeitgeist flashes
in funny ways and chooseth whom it will.
In the mid-seventies, at Brooklyn College, John Ashbury would, in the
exam for the creative writing course he taught, print without attribution one
of Geoffrey Hill's Merican Hymns...beside a poem by Ern Malley, and tell his
students: "One of the two poems below is by a highly respected contemporary
poet; the other is a hoax originally published to spoof the obscurity of much
modern poetry. Which do you think is which? Give your reasons."
As Michael Heyward tells us:
The hoax is the most fascinating thing Angry Penguins ever published.
In cooking up their poet to a satirical recipe, McCauley and Stewart threw
into the brew a seasoning of anarchic intelligence and comic self-laceration.
Writing pretentiously, they described a mind so aware of pretension that it
debunks itself with aplomb. In the end, Malley is really unlike the sort of
grandstanding, romantic surrealism he mocks. It pays to remember that two
very different temperaments and personalities were constructing the work
without bothering to smooth the edges. Like a medium possessed by a host of
spirits, Ern Malley freely exhibits his multiple consciousness. There is not
one Ern Malley but several, and they are all mutually exclusive characters.
There is Ern Malley, the black swan of trespass, the native modernist
talented enough to turn the poetic tradition of his country on its head.
There is Ern Malley the jejune and modish experimentalist who does
belly-flops in his attempt to look significant. There is the Ern Malley who
bravely stares his own death in the face, and the Ern Malley who slyly tells
the reader he never was. All these writers were essential to the hoaxers'
fiction. Each contradicts the others and helps give the poetry its dizzy,
speeded-up quality, as Malley rifles through his composite self.
Ern Malley may never have existed, but, at this point, like the "real"
Keats, he is nothing but literature. And literature is notoriously free. It
can mean anything. Which do you think is which? Give your reasons.
Ern Malley writes:
There is a moment when the pelvis
Explodes like a grenade. I
Who have lived in the shadow that each act
Casts on the next act now emerge
As loyal as the thistle that in session
Puffs its full seed upon the indicative air.
I have split the infinitive. Beyond is anything.
*All passages in italics are from Michael Heyward, The Ern Malley Affair
(London: Faber and Faber, Limied, 1993
*************************
THOMAS LOWE TAYLOR
SLUT
nostro delinea
more senss cum frth
lea t'the foamin
afar/ts sempler
del delet ed t de
im at fir tean s
u
you'd held. long
eye at sk (priso
ape x'xs en/cod
ni lix pean (split
f for mo mo lan/s
sd deal eagier f
my/sn n owne d
s: mafar flocx tk
my sister
my sister lives
south of here
a a a (we tak-l
are you my sister?
*
la lov l ankl
more was not thats
' do due of the mine
waits. waits more
u yr you are she
of whom i wait
deal me dance de
thrace no plint
afar dead s cults
librars burnt
onle ths thes
codes duh d cod
lov's answr, est
b be a beacon
*
who spoke from the picture
so long ago, hands leased
it was time of posses (held
its near, to reflect no smarts
enuf 'that ('s enough (uf
live love answers touch to sign
i smoothe you ein mine dddeepest
sign i let you in i call'd to
dance a newer sigh, lights
perhaps no knower (gnore)
no-were; puke slime
all that intruds/in pics
sd moments all soon or now
is soon enough for
o love's answer (touch
*
poke no skewer shops
restless tunes without denial pork
wherein excuse to pursuit internal
nostrum delete his anchor plains
the doorway opening beyond sentiment
but poastered forms restoring huks
at slimer panes total dues askance
*
flied filed
*************************
JOHN M. BENNETT
on edgey-plate or) charred rapid, comb-gravel sped,
toward your lamination starts the "end" such thing:
know your hand off course it turns (rising pills)
clabbered condensation scooting store-wards or a
scabrous pit pots toothpicks crumbly and reMEMBERed
dicks a lot, slurrage-words contentioned past the
grocery bag or stormy tele-copped ("scooting")
compensation for your, still raking side the handled
bowl (of course it) sings, like your throne. Ended
farts, lacustrine beds the ravelled sail oh charted
sphere (defaced the cut
*************************
HARRY POLKINHORN
Excreta II
1
further within a meaning where voices
interlaced, you're still marveling at, what
each says because not about to finish
again a sadness, a party of living
with its demands on structural people
simply because we're placed here as
advocates of skin and pale blue drifting
these careful last phrases you just never
know so some humility or a tentative
quality measured out in your inner
rainfall your secret wishes for power
and love or to be able to fly over
the city calling out in your deep tones
some quaint notion like a barbecue on
the moon or parakeets swarming
their high-prestige instincts and an
hourglass shape ready to confess right
out of your bone deposit's illustrious
song squeezed to a husk by the
pincer heart-subtract your figure
and straighten those shoulders up
because we're perfectly balanced
2
when a child's wailing reminds you of some
inextricable position between a pair of
alternatives beneath late July illumination-
wounds of the virus of ringing telephones
subsumed in all that bland friendliness
when possible, becaue you lost faith
so as to be able later to listen
to their mute speech as casual as
a swimmer whose steady assured strokes
slice effortlessly through the blue
their tiny but definite footsteps
through the only medium we can perceive
where some deadening perfection known
as sacrifice beyond a shocking normalcy
until you fall like a stone harsh
with necessity and worn flesh that sits
in the world so differently that such demands
can be ignored as proletarian
3
i
you are feeling your way
towards the art of Bach
towards an evening throat
too full of statues and gulls
since Galen's body dissolved
joyously or fearfully
ii
divided their thrust columns
among night-blown roses
whose breathy woman scent
about which no one knows
how to work in numbers
because of the windy sighing
iii
one would need some deep
superhuman attention to hands
and all they conceal in their
delicate complications, their
last-minute offerings
iv
once you've surveyed the damage
waterfalls of words
and pining away
v
secreted in a compartment of air
just raw soil, a brown arm
akimbo before the world's
trains depart
vi
to fix flesh as if what people
had been doing all this time
were abstract, a constructed
invisibility you carry around
balanced-but no
vii
then a sensible reassembling
absolutely pounded into freedom
take as much as you want
inexhaustible
4
sometimes you return
to a comforting line
that runs through fields of green
where an overheard laugh rises
blooming brightly above
beneath a cloudless sky
and you ask yourself about a
dream with knives and movies
and walking pleasantly soused
through the classic old town
at night with revellers about
a dove pierces your heart
with its terrible tender sounds
and your love wants and wants
delivered of its own motions
and cruel absences, its interior
motor display a huge wound
by means of which you move
often stumbling through things
breathing the blue and green
breathing, moving, moving
5
the chandeliers the goblets
you're lost in a building
with narrow stairs and when
you ask directions of a woman
she answers that she trains
bartenders, walks off mumbling
to herself-there are so
many floors covered with old
curling linoleum, glass cases
containing the bric-a-brac
and ornamental spoons
of long-deceased dukes
the bannisters dust-bedecked,
crumbling under August sunlight
that only a weird sense of dignity
remains, that people had done
these things however fragmented
their hands trying to achieve
a repetitive motion and hold it
longer than its season at which
you realized you'd gone beyond
the conventions of mere living
6
someone threatened you
with prison, another corrupt judge
dead set on turning their
wallets inside out, but the bailiff
protested and so was fired
which never happens-you felt
confusion, then relief that a person
was pulled from the crime scene
burning wreckage in a bird's eye
or an old friend saying wryly
"don't get baptized" as if his
metaphors had any substance, their
conviction bled away by daily
compromises that cannot
be rushed no matter what the
papers report in their casual
pretense at objectivity-instead
you wait poised each morning
like a delicate trigger finger
compulsively figuring angles
of throw and drift given
the local odds
7
you wanted to walk over
to examine a stack of steel frames
when three young rhinos
spotted you and gave chase
you ran through the field wildly
although you were barefooted
finally jumped a wire fence
which somehow deterred them
and you knew they could have gone
through a stone wall
now that you were in open flight
like a rose petal in free-fall
or ladders extending from windows
a dangling child about to go away
who watches from hateful static
photographs attributed falsely
to the power of prayer, itself
formed under pressure of dreaming
which you would think obeyed
no master other than the world
teeming with its odd destiny
you witness but can never justify
8
when you notice a pairing of curves
or what the furniture suggests
poised and cool, a choice whose
dull estimate like an automobile
you wanted to destroy but couldn't
since it coughs to life and these
windows with their need deep
along joists where the I-beam
abuts with sheer nerve fiber
collateral with your last chance
your trip to Sevilla while you
bore through rock with the mind
desperate and cut loose, coal dust
collecting on the ledges of the city
and their iconic representatives
who walked easily down to the beach
while you slept or were hard at work
to extract something, anything
even a few seconds of what
might pass for clarity in another
country, citizens on the alert
and impossible to please
9
whether they mattered, a long shot
at dusk where you're surrounded
and cut off by new identities
breaking the sound barrier
for entertainment shatters a
perspective on history larded away
as in any profession, art forms
from a past that never existed
even if it does now-to
terrorize the populace for fun
and at their own expense dogs
of steel whose political opinions
and fashionable double-dealing
can be made to seem inevitable
their manner of being here
a distinct and lengthy preparation
having found the source of scars
a river polluted with rubbish
that recedes just enough, forbidden
by insects whose iron grip on
the earth and air frightens you
into meek submission
10
you are that ghost with cold hands
that pincer their gut flow
chart analysis a spiritual advisor
whose plaintive cries empty out
the reservoirs, yet you never sleep
as the ozone hole or a direct
offshoot a fake glittery smile
priced out of the competition
so you roam through hollows
a minus entity at the solstice
to raise bucks but held back
by forces you can't quite understand
years later, hardly anything done
hair sprouting from ears and nose
and no longer willing to deal
you roll into yourself like clouds
unable to fathom their jealousy
the irony of a dead heart
but you have your own ways
you who prefer the open air
and cannot focus the mind
cannot speak that tongue
11
daily dealing in exotic travel
as harbinger, your innermost
having slid over the side and
down quickly into conversation
on the balcony, a view across
this imperfect city-she raises
her glass ceremoniously, but not
without a touch of irony so you
silently salute the world's gears
heavy with child in the old idiom
each moment blending with its
dead ringer like dynamite with
only one chance
quietly you sit
legs up on the table, a framing
without their mighty efforts
their coughing at dawn to mark
steady diminution, how to think
by obverse or lateral relation
until a wall or canal system
a fern richly deserving of
your best spirit
*************************
JAKE BERRY
from BRAMBU DREZI, Book 2
for Jack Foley
shekinah, who laid 31
and the 32nd her completion
& vanished there, wet between her legs, to fill the
void
going down her eyes like serpent's
coming up like emerald fire
You have found the
hand in Mu, reordered its profile
old man, face
into rock, you know a soundless form
I have been insane
twice
and swollen with
grief
and neither
offered more than a temporary cure
- Why them hounds howling so? Don't nobody ever let 'em hunt
Poised in the underbrush at the edge of the grove
he observes her bent to drink from the stream.
It was an inversion of particulars, though the penalty, and
who got it
is accurate.
and those hideous scars came to life
For years Chac-Mool wandered among them
in the guise of various genetic maladies,
unable to understand how they could ignore his lamentations -
the new priests seemed utterly dependent on the conjoined architecture
of sound & vision
"Soul is striptease isn't it? With the exception
when you peel away the layers
you're ogling your own nakedness,
and that's nothing baby!" Deep down in it clawing like
mad
until he realized
all the parts were alive
and
cringing beneath his touch
I dunno how it got there
the lame drag it in I wake with someone on top
of me,
and no, I don't know how kissing, or so it seems, a
large mouth
how she got that way
covering
mine
I think my
wife until I hear her breathing,
there, among Job's plunder asleep at my side
the serpent finds his It's hip is naked, and
smooth, soft, female, and
way to the tree it's breathing fast,
hyperventilating reptilian,
but when I
open, focus my eyes - nothing
she was scarred,
no
one
cut up bad inside
realy smiled,
her face tragically
void of expression
Holy
of holies, cherub and ark -
closed in on the boar -
bark
surrounded,
& leaf
he turned to face each one in turn
observing death's approach
like emerald fire!
her erotic strategy
Circe, why you treat me mean?