#poetics

[thegroaningbook]

Black Blizzard

Wesley Kimler, 2021

Cover image for Between Here and the Sound of a Groaning Interstate & The Groaning Book by KC Clarke

Two connected works: Between Here and the Sound of a Groaning Interstate, a poetry collection written between 1993 and 2024, and The Groaning Book, a poetics.

“Very good, complex poem.” — Mark Strand, on the poem “Orion”

available here

Wesley Kimler (b. 1953), Black Blizzard, 2021, mixed media on canvas, 37 × 37 in., private collection.

[kallistoriae]

alliterations perfec t thing for put poem in to write! alliterations very Beautiful and Good soundly write alliterations in poem. Put Alliterations In Poem. no problems ever in alliterativve poetry because good Shape and Sound for poem weak of poetic devices. Apoem yes a place for an alliteration put alliteration in poem can trust alliteration for giveing good sound to poem. friend alliteration

[juneacademia]

reconciling the knowledge we won’t be lovers in this life with the belief that maybe somewhere, in some parallel universe, there is a version of you and a version of me that find themselves on the same train, heading to nowhere important, and it gets to be the beginning of something.

[librarycards]

The small something could be a creature, perhaps a technology. Maybe, in more abstract terms, a political orientation or set of social norms. Looking back, I now understand “A small something” as part of a larger body of autistic poetic work, which, in my view, are always and already “protesting” neuronormative creative and political frameworks. Thinking back to the misleading figure of the savant and this demand for autistic exceptionality, it seems to me that to impute autistic life into our creative practices, to document it as it exists and not as our neurotypical counterparts with it were, then we must turn to a form prepared to resist normative grammars and restrictive relationships to language, activity, and achievement. After all, these very restrictions—this sociocultural “common sense”—are what got us into this mess in the first place: demands for tact over honesty, ambiguity over courage. Instead, I want live in a poetics which refuses common sense, a poetics of autism.

Of interest to my disabled creative comrades: ANMLY Magazine recently released a folio of autistic protest poetry, to which I was fortunate enough to contribute both some poems and an invited introduction (excerpted above). Check it out!

[soulwr1ter]

One day you

suddenly return

and you just

snap back, not

remembering the

way you crawled

or cried, teardrops

shimmer into diamonds

along the dawn of newly

hatched skin and those

wings you thought you lost,

peek out one at a time as

if smiling at the air that

waves to caress their face,

and without realizing the

sky comes a little closer

as if trying to place a star

in your hand reminding

you that the darkness

only needs a little light to

make it step back and let

hope shine love bright.

-J.Wool, The Return

📷 from Pinterest

[pencap]

the saddest universe

the saddest universe is not the one where i love you but you do not love me.

the saddest universe is not the one where i love you and you love me but the gravity of fate tugs us apart.

the saddest universe is not even this one where i love you and you love me and we lose each other over and over and over and over and over again.

in the saddest universe we have never walked in the same place at the same time.

in the saddest universe i have never seen my eyes mirrored in yours and you have never felt your fingers brush against mine.

in all the infinite possibilities of time and space and fate this is a universe where i know the color of your eyes and the shape of your name on my lips and the echo of your voice in my bones.

and for that i am grateful to the kindness of this universe no matter how many times we must lose each other over and over and over and over and over again.

at least in this universe we have something to lose.

- by sylvie (j.p.)

[mmmmalo]

When I am writing again and I need to find better language to describe Homestuck's sleight of hand, the essay that coined literary defamiliarization seems like it'd be a good place to start:

In studying poetic speech in its phonetic and lexical structure as well as in its characteristic distribution of words and in the characteristic thought structures compounded from the words, we find everywhere the artistic trademark – that is, we find material obviously created to remove the automatism of perception; the author's purpose is to create the vision which results from that deautomatized perception. A work is created "artistically" so that its perception is impeded and the greatest possible effect is produced through the slowness of the perception.