Discover Top Posts Tagged with #jane gregory

"Police, there is no imagination"

-Jane Gregory

Good Morning, Internet!

XO, SPD

#jane gregory #Good Morning Internet #small press distribution #spd #poem #cop #cop fail

like all good poetry... invites you in by slowly teaching you its codes, and by reminding you that sense is not always the point

Initially, Gregory’s poems have a slow, strained quality, as though she were communicating across great distances in a nonnative language:

Though here must be a bad vortexx said everyone of where they find themselves since everything

Since every known thing only occurs to me each thing occurs not to overcome what is else but

Hey Everything takes great effort.

The text stutters, doubles back and corrects itself — and seems to include afterthoughts, alternate lines. In many of the poems, annotations appear along the right margin, in brackets and a paler typeface, commenting on and complicating the “real” poem...

Or this phrase from the same page: “Fluid d fluid d fluid dt” — there’s a pleasing tension in the gap between the letters on the page, which look like nonsense, and the sound of the letters as you read them, out loud or in your head, and they become words or near-words: fluidy, fluidy, fluidity. This pleasure is both tactile and aural, like popping your knuckles.

Like Language poetry, Gregory’s poems are difficult in the sense that they resist sense, at least common sense. But, like all good poetry, “Yeah No” invites you in by slowly teaching you its codes, and by reminding you that sense is not always the point: “You are reading this if you don’t understand.”

~ Elisa Gabbert, from “Making the Language Strange, as Only Poetry Can Do” - a book review of YEAH NO by Jane Gregory. (The New York Times, June 21, 2018)

#Elisa Gabbert #poem #poetry #language #words #jane gregory

Jane Gregory

Do Not Go

#CRASS RECORDS #JANE GREGORY

Jane Gregory

#JANE GREGORY

Recently and belatedly, I was taught that if you want to insure contact will be made when you go to give and receive a high-five, you must look at the other person's elbow. I cannot write a statement that discloses my elbow, nor do I want to turn Celan's handshake ("I cannot see any basic difference between a handshake and a poem") into the very different and vertical gesture that is the high-five. A statement is accusatory, and as such is in competition with the poems themselves as the things that work to accuse— to accuse meaning to give things the substance of a charge, wanting maybe to mean to give things the charge of a substance. Duncan: "For I am not a literary scholar nor an historian, not a psychologist, a professor of comparative religions nor an occultist. I am a student of, I am searching out, a poetics." In My Enemies poems are provisional, are provided by an attending—at its root there is to stretch, strain, aim, hear—that betrays itself and is experienced as a diffuse intentionlessness near oblivion or some other lure.

In an interview Agnes Martin described the difficult process of giving up on ideas and theories, of not having any herself and not believing anybody else's. Thinking and believing are relinquished simultaneously, so that, she says, "I have an empty mind, so when something comes into it you can see it," and then she says "that must be enough," and means that last statement to end the interview, for the disclosure of the nothing she thinks of to be sufficient, and it is; the interview ends there. There is a thing called the zero conditional and this isn't it: "If nothing happens it is possible / To make things happen." Neither is that, this: "when this vacuum, the poem, occurs, there is agitation on all sides to destroy it, to convert it into something." Neither is agitation incompatible with the taste of or for nothing. Nor is any of that all of what we're after—follow or seek—, tradecraft, all our problems turning off, palm to palm, a statement or book between them.