The Olot Review of Poetry

[olotreview]

Brad Liening, Sick Poor n Stupid

We have capitals, but no punctuation. Line breaks, but no meter or rhyme.

Yesterday's Jon Leon poem mingled sacred with profane. Here Liening draws a distinction, then muddies the waters.

A world not given to moments

What is a world? Literally a planet, perhaps. But really any ecosystem, environment, culture, system that is partially self-enclosed, partially bounded and semipermeable.

And Liening says A world. He doesn't say The world or This world. There is a sense that not all worlds are like this. Perhaps past worlds were different, or future worlds. Perhaps there are other ways of being.

So Liening posits a world—perhaps it is only hypothetical; perhaps it is a dream, or a vision—which is not given to moments. What is a moment? A short period of time, yes, but also a short period of time which can feel almost infinite when lived. We speak of living in the moment and being appreciative of the moment. There is a sense of presence and gratitude in the concept of moment. So a world that is not given to moments—that has not given itself over to moments, or is not predisposed or inclined to moments—is a world that does not linger. That is not present. That is always future-looking, always rushing onward impatiently. It does not savor.

A world not given to moments / of lyric intensity

"Lyric" evokes the notion of lyric poetry, or a song lyric. Something musical, something romantic, yes something aesthetic. Perhaps this world lacks a poetical or philosophical or aesthetic or even sacred dimension. It is profane, too material, obsessed with growth vectors. Maybe.

Among the discount daycare centers

It's a lovely bit of alliterative work—(d)is(c)ount (d)ay(c)are. But what it communicates is this image of something sacred, child-rearing, which has come under a system of capital, come under market forces. And parents who, either because they're poor or because they're cheap, or maybe both, have decided essentially to hang on to pieces of green paper—I'm massively simplifying—in exchange for inferior rearing of their children. They have "sold out." Which brings us to...

Prolific anarchists comfortably ensconced within academia

To be prolific is to be productive, literally productive—fertile; to produce young, to produce fruit—which connects to the daycare centers. The word "prolific" is more commonly used these days to mean "producing copious amounts of work" (text, speech, cultural objects). So it's playing on this connection, this common cultural metaphor, where artworks are children, one's academic work is one's children, etcetera. But also "productivity" in a capitalist sense—to be academically prolific is to rack up large numbers of citations, papers, publications, etcetera. It is to play a point-based game in the academic market, a profane and self-interested and self-advancing game—a march; an accumulation; "number go up"—at the cost of something far more sacred.

Anarchists are individuals who subscribe to an anti-institutional ideology; here we see them "comfortably ensconced"—secreted away, protected and hidden, perhaps for their own comfort, perhaps because they are made impotent when secreted away, when hidden in a tower like Rapunzel, or Santa Barbara. And to be comfortable and complacent and part of an institutional system goes against that ideology. None of that difficult raw improvisatory anarchic living, but one that is routine and bureaucratic and systematized. Perhaps the anarchist ideology is merely lip service; perhaps these anarchists are hypocrites; or perhaps they have been won over, transformed, metamorphosed, seduced by this institution, which claims the mantle and name of the sacred, yet is anything but...

White Castles metamorphosing into KFCs

White Castle and KFC (Kentucky Fried Chicken) are both fast food restaurants. In many ways they stand for the ultimate in capital's profanity. They are cheap, they are discount options, highly processed. Idiocracy shows a world with only fast-food options. Globalization's icons are Coca-Cola and McDonalds. But again we suspect something sacred—food; meat; the taking of animal life for sustenance—has been profanized in its commercialization.

The other thing that's interesting here is that "White Castle" also evokes the past, it evokes a medieval tower, the sort of thing you might be ensconced within for protection. It's secure, it's safe, you can throw someone in a dungeon or survey from the protected battlements. It keeps people in but it also keeps people out. And it is white—it is idealistic, pure, at least in its paint job.

We often call academia an ivory tower. Which is to say a White Castle. So there's a reading of this line where Liening's saying that academia itself is being made into a fast food chain, that it's being captured by capital. The anarchists are captured by academia, and academia is captured by capital. And the family at the daycare center are being seized by market forces.

Yesterday's poem by Jon Leon treated this subject directly, the way capital appears to be winning, appears to be a force all its own, in the Nick Land Accelerationist sense. "Market forces," autonomous self-perpetuating power. Something profane and material and horrifying that takes on sacred guises, to complete its aim (the black goddess; social justice empowerment) but beneath the mask are insidiously accomplishing their own self-interest. And academia, Liening suggests, is in a similar position. Along with the political radicals who are pulled into its fold.

After long periods of weedy pupation

Pupation is the process by which a caterpillar metamorphoses into a butterfly. It is a natural lifecycle. There is destruction involved in this process of creation. The caterpillar is ensconced in a protective chrysalis or cocoon. (Many commentators of our atomized, "neoliberal" world use the cocoon as a metaphor for contemporary life's capture by digital market forces: We do not leave our apartments; we stream entertainment and use delivery food apps or shop in self-checkout lines; we watch porn and smoke weed and listen to podcasts for parasocial needs. Comfortable, yes, ensconced, yes, and also depressing. Cut off from the world, as if in an ivory tower.)

"Weedy" here might refer to marijuana, but it mostly means literal weeds, which grow up through the cracks, this unwanted greenery that nonetheless flourishes because of some vital life-force within it, some drive for self-perpetuation.

And one way that agriculture gets talked about is that agriculture is a process of growing and harvesting "weeds." Weeds, technically speaking, are plants that sprout up quickly and flourish in disrupted ecologies—after fires or clearcuttings or when the soil is disrupted. After a time, without such disruptions, more longterm, slower life strategies like forests reappear. They take a lot of time to grow, but once they've grown, they crowd out the sun and kill off the weeds, and then they live for centuries.

So when ecological disruption is minimal, we end up with these beautiful (and sacred!) old growth forests. Metaphorically speaking, in our contemporary society, we are constantly being "disrupted" (the favored parlance of Silicon Valley). Accelerating pace of change means that for the last few hundred years, humans have been struggling to keep up with the engine of capital. So many of our slower, traditional rituals, habits, and tactics of being—our traditional forms of childrearing, say, or the way we consume meat—have been disrupted, and we instead get "weedy" traditions which perpetually replace them.

And agriculture, in this model, is the process of perpetually disrupting soil, perpetually clearcutting crops and tilling, to prevent long-term life strategies from emerging. Allowing only short and flimsy green "towers" and castles to sprout up, then mowing them down for harvest, and tilling the soil so taller, harder-to-topple arboreal towers do not emerge. In these cycles, energy is produced and consumed which feeds the growth of... "capital," or evolution, or whichever accelerationist moniker for Power you prefer. Which brings us to our next line...

Encampment, cyclically erected and destroyed

To my mind, this evokes nothing if not the Tower card in tarot systems: The collapsing tower, liquifying stone, the fall from the heavens like Icarus. We humans build our Babels, and God strikes them down for our hubris. Of course in tarot, the Tower is a terrifying but also hopeful card; it signifies new beginnings. In other words, the Tower is a card of metamorphosis.

Encampment re-evokes the earlier ensconcing. And also the chrysalis or cocoon. All these protective structures—themselves boundaried forms of closure, each such structure creating "a world."

There is a cyclical process of creation and destruction, but it's unclear whether capital's seemingly unstoppable arrow is hindred/slain by the toppling of the tower, or whether it is in this very process of creative destruction that capital's arrow works at all. Perhaps capital is the driver which subjects us to these cycles, for its own furtherance.

Graffiti layered over graffiti until every person and piece of art is illegible

The palimpsest. Rather than some ideal vision of information as re-compressing itself, cleaning and tidying itself up, we have the mess. There is only more and more and more and more information. (We are "overloaded.") And as it mounts it becomes staggering incomprehensible, in the way that nature is staggering incomprehensible and fractally complex as you zoom in.

Bright flowers that speak to you the moment before you vanish

The moment. Here it is at last. In a world not given to moments, we have a moment. And it comes right in the end.

Bright flowers. Not dull, but vivid, and giving off light. And if the graffiti was illegible, this speaks to you in a clear voice, in the moment before you vanish. Topple. Fall.

The flower is a blooming process, a metamorphosis, like the erecting of towers, or a White Castle turning into a KFC, or a caterpillar blooming into a butterfly. Often there is a further stage: The flower becomes fruit. Becomes fecund, fertile—becomes prolific. The fruit falls (as a tower topples), and its seeds implant, and in a year there will be a new flower. Structures are erected and destroyed, but evolution marches—if not forward, onward.

Wait, what

A hesitation. A pause of confusion. A desire to linger. Here is that moment, here is that eternality in an instant.

What is going on? A surprise. That this is how it goes? Really?

Here is our moment of lyric intensity. Building and growth, the forward-looking march, may not be given to lyrical moments. But the old man staring down death is very much lyrical, very much a poet, savoring the last instants before his fall. Stretching into eternity, hovering in mid-air before your brain realizes you're plummeting. Still hasn't registered the fact. Stuck in a millisecond.

Your last words

Your graffiti, layered over graffiti.

[olotreview]

A black God touched me today... by Jon Leon

Is he kidding? He must be kidding. But perhaps he is also serious. Is he serious?

Poetry is "produced," as if the result of copulation.

The sacred (God, worship, poetry—and perhaps race) mingles with the profanity of capital (marketing, business perspective, sector) and sex (fondles, perverse, aphrodisiac).

The whole thing reads like a Kamala Harris parody but it's 2015, so these are deeper & earlier currents.

The process is recursive and autopoietic: A fondling produces a poet, who takes as poetic subject his own fondling. The poet is instructed to bring the goddess's message to the poetry sector—but the message is to perpetuate the goddess's message. It is an accelerationist message, of pure growth and self-replication, and Leon is the vector of memetic contagion.

The poem's Flesch-Kincaid Readability score is 87. There is no attempt to reduce repetition, or to introduce a more varied vocabulary set. "God" and "me" each appear 7 times. "Black female God" twice. "Told me to" 3 times. "Poetry," "poem," or "poet" 5 times.

Each sentence seems a variant on the one which came before. The same inciting incident—the touch of the black goddess—is told four times, in four different sentences, scattered throughout the text.

Kenneth Anger is the only real reference here, the only intrusion of Culture, though I am not familiar enough with his work to understand its effect.

[olotreview]

i am a little bit happier than you are, by Ulyses Razo

"i am a little bit happier" uses no punctuation and no capitals. This gives the poem an informal, online, tumblr-speak, and cute or "smol" feel. You would not write an epic poem this way. You would only write about small moments, gestures, feels. You might write this way because you yourself feel small.

Famously, Fire Exit's theory is that cuteness/"im just a smol bean" are coping strategies by overwhelmed personalities renouncing responsibility and agency.

It begins in the realm of naturalism and spends its first three lines working into a light magical realism: 101 bites, a broken nose.

The "you" addressed is a lover. This is a poem about small moments between lovers, now lost.

As in Mark Leidner's "The River," the language and imagery very general. We are not told what kind of sound was made on the poet's stomach. Perhaps we can guess it's a raspberry.

There is no attempt to use difficult or esoteric language. The poem's Flesch-Kincaid readability score is 96, indicating readability by elementary school students. ("The River" scores 88, targeted at 6th graders.)

Relatedly, there is no attempt to project cultural capital or traditional status markers. The poet eats fast food. The poet writes like a child about a child-like relationship and break-up. There is no "pretension," the poet might claim. The relationship is fully of affectionate violence; the poem is full of exaggerated violence generally: Bite marks, broken noses, murder, stomach-kicking, fights with children, perhaps the violence of throwing out old poems and writing new ones.

Maybe 10% of the poem is about poetry itself: revising and rewriting poems; reading "tao's." Tao is ostensibly Tao Lin, and his poems are described as funny, which means there is a good chance Razo is writing his poems to be funny, too.

[olotreview]

Mark Leidner, The River

There are no line breaks. There are no verses or stanzas. It is one paragraph of “prose,” and it tells a story. 

Part of what makes it “poetry” is its generality. Very few specifics are given. We know that the woman is old, and has a small build, with a nose in the center of her face. We know she tells a sad story. But we are not told the subject of her story. We are not told where the characters are, or who they are, or their names.

Like some contemporary poetry it seems to revel in an expansive, breathing wordiness. Not clunky, just repetitious. Spacious. Not cramped and neurotic. Not the hyper-compression gem-chiseling of the Prynne-Pound lineage. The extra pronoun in: “She warned me not to love her for her telling me that.” The stacked and hedging clauses in: “I also loved her, though far less than for the courage part, although plenty still, for the way in which she told it to me, which I explained had been, in all seriousness, eloquent and mesmerizing.” These are a hallmark of old-fashioned prose and it’s interesting to see them in a 2020s poem.

There is a fair bit of tenderness in this poem. It is a poem about people and feelings, and the relationships between people. It is not a Romantic poem about interiority. It is not a history of the world. It is a small moment of storytelling, that is almost like a fairy tale.

The river, of course, is one of poetry's great themes. Man's great themes. The river stands for many things: life itself, its flows and currents, its constant changes. For the source, the origin, the replenishing and vital fluid.

The narrator’s love for the river, and his love for the old woman, are set up as parallels. But they are very different sorts of love. One seems to be a new love, a love of admiration. He has met this new woman, and he hadn’t realized the beauty of her mind’s clockwork, and now he has. Whereas the river, he loves for its familiarity. He loves it because it is there, because it has always been there. There is a constancy to its inconstancy. There is a security to its danger.