Etude 6-jenkins

This poem reads decently from left to right in rows and columns and up from the lower right hand corner in columns but not so well right to left as rows either from top or bottom.  Oh, and the words in each row are anagrams of the word in the far right-hand column.

Just Wanted to Say

Everyone that read at the Collective on Saturday did awesome! Good job, you guys.

For those of you that didn't go, you missed out. You should check out Grant's youtube channel to get the scoop (and also, listen to the really crazy guy who yelled a lot).

http://www.youtube.com/user/gjenkins07

-Strix

Hey blog heyyy: Etude Six

Dr. Jenkins suggested that I make up an etude that's sort of inline with what I'm doing with my circles and all, so I think I came up with something that I like. Here goes:

In class we've made a big old fuss about reading for the line vs. reading for the stanza.

So, I wanted us to maybe write some poems that can be read both forwards or backwards, up and down, clockwise or counter-clockwise(in my case, I guess), or in any number of ways. They don't need to make perfect sense in all directions, but it would be cool if the different ways of reading the poems produced some kind of dissonance--or maybe some kind of harmony?

And hey, go ahead and make it in a cool shape if you want.

The whole thing is pretty open ended, so go crazy with it, plz.

Where are you Walter Benjamin?

(Comments welcome/desired on this poem and whether or not to leave Benjamin's name in the title.  Please)

Between the branch and the image of the branch.

Between a mountain and a range over you.

Between resting on a summer afternoon and its parasitical dependence on ritual.

Between make it easy and the urge grows stronger.

Between the tradition itself and what is thoroughly alive and extremely changeable.

Between organic fornication and mechanical reproduction.

Between how the actor represents himself and what you follow with your eyes.

Between world history which casts its shadow and graduated and hierarchized emancipation.

Between the ancient craft of the beautiful and a series of optical tests.

Between the elk portrayed by the man and the line.

Between the position of a critic and certain statues of gods.

Between an afforded spectacle accessible only to the priest i and permits subjected to consumers who constitute resistance of cult value.

Between certain covered Madonnas and the walls of his cave.

Between an analogy with a surgical operation and an ultimate retrenchment it retires into.

Between the feeling of strangeness that overcomes like scenes of crime and a land in the orchid of technology.

Between the audience on the take and the human countenance freed from the foreign substance.

Between an aesthetic pleasure of the first order and today seeming devious and confused.

Between the market feel as if in exile and vanishing into silence.

Between the stage but also from himself.

Between a vague sense of discomfort he feels with Walter Benjamin and the polar opposite of the magician.

Between his body as it loses its corporeality and the flickering of an instant on the screen.

Between the broad stream of mediation it evaporates and a certain situation, like a muscle of a body

Between inexplicable emptiness and the goal only war can set.

Between a surgeon deprived of reality, life, voice, and the noises and his moving about, in order to be changed into a mute image.

Between the cameraman penetrates deeply into its web

Between the reactionary attitudeand a Picasso painting changing into a Chaplin movie.

Between the truly new that is criticized with aversion and the possible perceived for architecture at all times.

Between the comparison with painting is and the epic poem of fruitful perception.

Between the studied degradation and an assured but rather vehement distraction

Between the shock effect of the commonplace and the instruments of ballistics it hit.

 

 

Benjamin

I've read "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" a few times, and every time I come up with a different meaning for his concept of "aura". He talks about "aura" as being the work of art's "presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be". Perhaps the work of art as intersection between a specific set of cultural values and philosophical traditions, particularly as brought to it by its original viewers (though I wonder about the accuracy of that because not even all the "original" viewers of Impressionist art, say, would necessarily have the same cultural values). The question I have in particular, I guess, is whether Benjamin thinks "aura" is good or bad. Sometimes I think he likes aura as a sort of authenticity. Other times I think he criticizes it as elevating art above the masses (Marxist critique?). And then of course there's his epilogue about war as political aesthetics, which always puzzles me....

More possible portfolio poetry.


"Though I walk through the valley of deep darkness"
Honeycombed brain twisting heart roped throat
labyrinth aorta ventricles feeding minotaur
in dark places of world, fill habitations with violence
valleys of deep darkness, armpits, eyelids, neck
soft folds, tendons, bones freckled skin

"characterized by absolute or relative absence of light"

Standing under medulla medusa wrapped
tentacles along spinal cord, this inside minds
writhe gloom consuming by enzymes

"A dark house was formerly considered a proper place of confinement for a madman", obs.

Shining on floor, yellow rectangles, three-by-six
eyes invert images automatically match medusa
walking through the valley of deep darkness
"I will fear no good, for you are not with me"
crawl away from coffins shining on carpet,
away from holes onto empty iridescence,
skull, entrails, epidermis quivering
into

Portfolio Poem

Here is a portfolio poem of mine

DEFeated

 

Struggling for basics

Food and humanity

None may leave

 

An over/under mistake

 

Rename for

Retreatment

Classification purposes

Reopen trade routes

 

Man’s handwork

Moving earth

Enforcing dominion

 

They must pay for their actions

Their crimes

They must work

To become free