from "The Barricades Project, the Life-Long Poem, and the Politics of Form Notes towards a Prospectus" by Stephen Collis

"I am consistently struck by the singular unambitiousness of much contemporary poetry. It would seem that, as poetry slipped from cultural significance (or at least was perceived to have slipped from perceived significance), poets have simultaneously retired to the safety of lyric introspection, becoming specialists of the quotidian, the small, the insular, the private—shrinking from the historical, social, and public. So poets bemoan the loss of “the centrality of the single poem,” and seek a return to the safe sealed domain of the singular page." 

Speaking in English

                                  I have these

voices in my blood that sang me sitting here

                                                            John Lent

You could walk along an avenue here

many places actually and there would appear

unmagically asphalt and road signs and

houses, large and small, and a store

and another (a pedestrian—“hello”) and

another (this one selling something you need

to go with the stuff the first one is selling)

and a restaurant and another,

a government office, a police station . . .

well, you get the picture

You could walk along an avenue here

unmagically and begin to peel away

its imposition, to trace the paths

of its assertion, to unearth (much like

an unearthed mass grave that had gone

unrecorded) the measures of violence

that made this avenue you walk

You could walk differently along this

incline of forgotten waterways

and smell the uprooted vegetation

notice a furtive movement here

a motion that is unmagically you.

Poem’s Epitaph

 now or then it might be

a letter a

chiseled sound-

shaped trace I

read at the funeral

a eulogy-filled

apology for not being

more attentive to language

                                  Here Lies

Poem (2008-2011)

                                               

                                                What

Is Written Here

                                                Is

What Is Written

and you know Poem didn’t mean

it in jest or to disrupt

the wake

more of a moreover, more

sanguine than that

I still write to Poem sometimes

long complaints and article

analysis resurrecting old

readings and opinions of Poem,

why she left and who followed

it is one of those moments

when you recognize loss           in an early morning daze, and

                        there Poem is again

                        agitated, vibrant,

                        reaching for the plums

Poem Communally Edits

1) Go to a search engine, see if somebody else has done it already.

2) Poem blogs, studies the commentary cross-linked to other blogs.

3) Twitters in a hundred and forty characters. See if I can get that small. See if it gets retweeted

4) Open source the text; supply some instructables, see if the community takes it any further.

5) Start a Ning social network Poem, the name of the network will be the title, see if anybody accumulates around Poem.

6) Make a Poem video. Youtube it, see if it spreads virally, see if any media convergence accumulates.

7) Create a design fiction that pretends that Poem has already been written. Create some gadget or application or product that has some relevance to Poem and see if anybody builds it.

8) Exacerbate or intensify Poem with a work of interventionist tactical media.

9) Find some kind of pretty illustrations from the Flickr 'On Nothing' photo pool.

10) Then, and only then, Poem will go out and actually talk to someone.

11) Recombine data; go to step 1)

Poem’s Commodity Fetish

in the reading

room or ancient tomb Poem

dreams of a well-wrought

yearning for something

more stylish or tricky

to show your friends or

ad lib in front of a modest

audience in that quiet café downtown

although at the time Poem

was disappointed with her purchase:

the seams hasty, the graphics

uninspired, an oily flavour . . .

sometimes the transaction is meant

to frustrate, like a rebellious

daughter or mid-life crisis tattoo

the text of which Poem now

carries on her left thigh high

enough to be her own

I can’t tell what is

there and there is no use

begging

Poem and the Nothing Ever After

when verbs to be are

reclining not even wanting

to work standing well away from the road

where no traffic moves and

an inconsistent hum comes

from somewhere sourceless

to complicate contemplation

a stillness longing into nothing

more and narrative stalled

stuttering to a stop so the

road’s servitude isn’t one any more

postmodernism slips into the reeds

covered in mud called courage and carrying

succulents for the unstable winter

and everything moves

an inhuman vibration or

responsive leafy listening verging

on an apocalypse of knowledge or

when the machines and plots

desist, it is what is left

blandly undefined and bushed

what is left is a rift—ahistorical

and clustered around a faint

filtering disorder called shelter;

you and I live there for years until

the wild men came with weapons—

after that no records were kept . . .

what is left is considered

faulty verse, a hack’s

ruinous reinvention of negative

culpability—‘git outta here

ya damn tree-hugger, damn

hippy—build something or die!’