Vassily Aksyonov, Say Cheese! (epigraph & opening line; trans, Antonina W. Bouis)
After the movies, photography of all the arts is the most important for us! —V. Lenin or J. Stalin
When and by which of the two possible authors this quotation was spoken is not known with accuracy.
Ah Lenin’o, ah Sta’ lēēn
Axe ion is off (& running a’gen then)
Well it’s hardly the new sentence is it …
Take my photo, Koba
tyranny of the signified
It’s like trying to see
the air itself
Your agitprop chop
nixed
— say cheese
Martin Amis, Lionel Asbo: State of England
In his outward appearance Lionel was brutally generic—the slablike body, the full lump of the face, the tight-shaved crown with its tawny stubble.
A novel a’miss
sweet FU UK
Thuggish louts
(en route, NYC)
ASBO signified yob
bruter than signifier boy
Tyranny becomes fetish
one lump or two?
Say please
Ivo Andrić, Bosnian Chronicle (opening line; trans, Joseph Hitrec)
At the beginning of the year 1807 strange things began to happen at Travnik, things that had never happened before.
Strange b’place, Kin v. Art
one brow low one high
Stranger than wingnut
num(b)·er·ology
One ate one nought fewer
non bond·ouble “0” sevens
1807’s a master “Sixteen”
Positive integer, karmic
numb’er
“Vibrational properties,” they say
One lump v. two
Flight re·route Sarajevo Blue
Donald Antrim, Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World
“Duck!”… From the skies it came, a gargantuan blue tome, one of those Compact Editions of the Oxford English Dictionary, end over end hurtling in projectile descent, pages fluttering and tearing in the wind, a screaming index of printed and bound lexical data, half a language heavy with gravity and gathering velocity. I dove for turf and covered my head as the OED cruised thumping to the earth.
Hurtling screaming index
d’ lexical data
Each ’tum point
a s p a c e ate
inside da’ words
Torque you round
shift yr ground
Ring tha’ blank space
Be you’m 27th letter
Google say two plus seven
we’s buzzing on
Cloud Nine
Say “Duck!” Sniper shots
cross street, Sara day-glo
heavy gravity for sure
Re: “Tyranny [or fetish] of the signified…” Two source critical texts underlie many of these poems: Stephen Fredman, Poet’s Prose: The Crisis in American Verse and Ron Silliman, The New Sentence
ASBO: (Anti-Social Behaviour Order): UK’s Blair gov’t restraining order for thuggish louts— this novel being Amis’ parting shot at Britain when he moved permanently to NYC. A different type of tyranny/fetish has been causal for avant poetry’s “demolition of the conventional relationship between the active (dictatorial) writer and the passive (victimized) reader…” (George Hartley, Textual Politics and the Language Poets)
Tra’v’nik, Bosnia: Andric’s birthplace—Obrnuto (Bosnian for “in reverse”: kin v art). The Sarajevo ref is to another Bosnian poet & short story writer Semezdin Memedinović’s biting/numbing war collection Sarajevo Blues (trans, incidentally, by Charles Olson scholar Ammiel Alcalay) with SM’s debt to fellow Bosnian writers Ivo Andrić & Danilo Kiš
“The new sentence is a decidedly contextual object. Its effects occur as much between, as within, sentences. Thus it reveals that the blank space, between words or sentences, is much more than the 27th letter of the alphabet. It is beginning to explore and articulate just what those hidden capacities might be.” (Silliman, The New Sentence, p. 92)
See previous poem’s footnote re: Sarajevo Blues—ducking sniper shots while crossing streets during the Bosnian war
Stephen Bett is a widely and internationally published Canadian poet with 25 books in print (from BlazeVOX, Chax, Spuyten Duyvil, & others). His personal papers are archived in the “Contemporary Literature Collection” at Simon Fraser University. His website is StephenBett.com