MARINE SNOW

[This pamphlet available with other orders through ©_© / Face Press, March 2014]

The poems in the anonymous pamphlet with its cover paper’s stuck-in scattered flowers like whited-out Stan Brakhage slides [viz. ‘Mothlight’] have a tensile poise between an excess which might, crudely, be schematised as the formal contrast between the extension of a line across the page (e.g. “Sleeping through a rain-soaked street in an unplayed city”) and the shorter lines surrounding and made to seem small by it (e.g. “I am possessed by the magnetic curve of star-/ light / In the east-facing bin”), and an actual excess in those shorter lines themselves, whose line-broken pile-up races all the more so: “my heart races / the duel / carriageway”, these two modes of transportation, dual or duel, hitting carriage return. In relation to this latter, consider the preponderance of roads of various kinds in some recent work: Stuart Calton’s ‘Torn Instructions for No Trebuchet’, and work by Keston Sutherland and Simon Jarvis; where (or specifically, here, and especially in the poem ‘A Smash Hit Glides To Your Lips And Over The Duel Carriageway’) the poem is mode of travel, dazzled by bright lights and songs on the radio and the faces lit up by those lights like a drab-glam parody of movie melancholia lighting, “Chaste like a Sofia Coppola film”, wanting to make this real fake beauty not be like that but not being able to help or stop itself: “Poetry should make nothing / jealous or beautiful // but can’t.” Those proliferating negatives, further complicated by the unclear relation of jealousy and beauty, would seem to imply that poetry shouldn’t make anything, a familiar claim, as statement of fact if not injunction (“poetry makes nothing happen [etc]”); but what exactly it is that poetry “can’t do” here? If it cannot do what it should, which is to make nothing, then it must make something, but perhaps what meaning spills out is that, because poetry cannot make nothing jealous or beautiful, therefore it makes everything jealous or beautiful. We might consider also whether the ‘or’ here is an equivalence for ‘and’ or if it really is ‘or’, so that the toss-up or the gamble in poetry would be either jealousy or beauty or both, and that the beauty itself would be a kind of falsity, a kind of possessive jealousy; as, wanting the night itself to be in intimate relation with oneself, “come and stay with me, night over my head”, the “smash hit” both the radio pop song and the car crash just waiting to happen.

Obviously the sea (sometimes, “the sea of error”) is also in these poems, especially the final one, ‘I Clean You All Over With My Tongue’, “slopped with a melancholia” in part in parody; and it (the sea) is not presented as some image of the longed-for ‘natural’ invested with hope, or, the gap between that degraded image and the thing itself is the subject of “envy,” where it’s not the boat but the train that’s slow, that froze, on the way to China (“The green was informed / with envy of everything natural / and trains froze on the way / to Henan”), caught in trapped-travel as illusion of movement, where the appeal can even be made to a god, of love (“help me eros”), but only for destruction, lashed out, actually cleaning the sea with one’s own tongue, taking in the bilious overspill of industry and capital’s digging as an erotics of wasting and spending (“help me cause to rust / the great warmth of the sea”); if I cannot have love, and if this is my love itself, jealous and beautiful, abjectly in wrong implication so that, in ‘What Does The Crisis Refer To’, “I am terrified by what we call love” both is and is not equal to its following line, “Climate change.” For the sea will freeze, the snow fall, marine as deposits drift down, nutritious in feeding-dependence cycle, trickle-down marine economics, snow and rain, falling, tears and lashes grazed by light landing which is catastrophe or beauty or both. “For you by such lights change nothing”, so “lie down alone in the universe,” when “not one of my thoughts will work anymore on anyone,” all absented, all lost or vacantly and mistakenly invested with love:  “Where are you now / Other than more dreams [...] To have regained my original purpose, to hold you / In flames”, Wieners here, even, in that self-destroying-renewing fire of desire, and the world itself internalized – “The world has gone to answer / in my heart” in bad reflection or introjection taken to be some emotional landscape as a pop song really “the radio songs. I love / Whatever comes on, to be okay with my limits”, pathetic pathetic fallacy where the image of love collected in time and space within the statement that “tonight the church will be full” is all wrong, alright, where ‘you’, as love object addressed or as speaker self-addressed, even become Christ, “slaving on a cross, melting a phone”, and there is no future to sacrifice to, you just are, that way, imagined so, imagining yourself and others as victims but holding on to the thought that, though “I’ve lost you […] I’ll never lose thing like you,” this addressed you already become a thing, object-memory in permanent image, bad mirror, container for these hopes but also generator of them, meanwhile or simultaneously though that ‘I’ am or have become “sick of a world / That makes nothing possible,” hearing the melancholy in the injunction merely not to stop in 24-hour party forever, Miley Cyrus lying in the world and gliding in flight to the next crash on Crisis mode forever; “What does the Crisis Refer to”, loving loneliness and a pleasurable pain, burning blossoms, flowers, scattering them all over stupidly all at sea white or blue “soup,” “blue water,” systematic evolutionary regression narrative even only as hint, going to the coastal limit not as okeanos mythic void-return world-curve possibility, lyric world love-curve, back-journey to actual collective-individual location, but smaller and emptier, where what drops off the not-God horizon you even said, wanting love, was God (“Like the time I knew God was the horizon”), will be unbearably everything and all there is. “There are poems”; this is nothing.