Uut (n.): the chance meeting of a galleon and a caribou on the dissecting table of America / This site is an endless adventure in the poetry and poetics of surrealism. Read about the origin and trajectory of this adventure on the Manifesto page. / Brooks Lampe teaches writing, literature, and philosophy, at George Fox University in Newberg, Oregon. The poetry on this site, unless otherwise stated, is his. The rights to all works belong to their respective authors. Images are used by permission or license. Banner art by Karen Constance. Opinions expressed herein are my own (or respective authors') and not the views of my employer.
“Do you want me to weld
you two together? Think it over” Hephaestus asks.
Soul and body cry out—what do
they answer?
We’re all manner of mystery, disaster
tied by string Sufi frogs flying through air
in bodily ascension
hands grope through the curtain
for some kind of donut flesh
we mistake for weight
every sunbeam you sit down in paints a dream
of life
a giving power we do not have
the spinning slows into a weave
and we wake
realists in Isaiah’s dreamscape
steeping our nervous tea
As you may have noticed, this site has been pretty quiet since 2018. I was busy, but it was also the way Tumblr changed. Tumblr was a good home for many years, but the time has come for a new home.
Happily, I have now found the time and the right platform for a re-launch.
I am excited to announce my debut chapbook, The Planet of Left Hands. It includes a wonderful introduction by Bob Schofield and several of my favorite poems written for Uut Poetry.
Thank you to Bottlecap Press for featuring my work and for the beautiful cover!
This marks an important moment in my writing career, and a day I didn’t think would ever come. A huge shoutout to my friends, colleagues, and readers for their support. Here’s to more writing!
the porous nature of it
more air than matter they say
with ropes that hang from a ceiling
asking for you to pull, swing, hang
and taste—all the uses one thinks up
in paradise
that’s just it: the oily surface
keeps leaching its juices of iron and light
a fire that comes from under the other place
the one they tell us about in class
that gave us pointy ears and pink legs
that dangle and seem long below the knee.
Where legs end there’s only darkness
as if they forgot something.
The past was once a place you looked for thoughts
but where do thoughts come from?
Unanswerable question.
The center of us they call the gut
it likes to grow
it’s still growing—unanswered, waiting
before what was once a mirror
but now only eternal night
There is a new twisting of children
new values, the values of lonely jellyfish
sensational jellyfish
which once upon a time were a furnace
but presently are rising up
in response to a world of obeisance
moving out at the widest possible angle
still attached in oviparous furs
anemones dreaming as one colonial family.
That is all, that is all
it is all wallpaper
all projection.
Let’s leave these factories these payrolls
and step into the river, the sediment
into fluid of ghosts
carrying meaning somehow on the wind
over the land of containers
over the land of green wind
and blue eyes of open sun.
Let us reach into the banquet of trees
let us march with the sun at our feet. This
is the hewn stubble of freedom, the deep passage
of harvests cracking like pages in the libraries of Eastern Europe
as we step naked among white cherry trees.
My sorrows are young ladies in the streets.
My sorrows are lost in sleep like fiery swords.
They were born within me
smiling mockingly
taking unto themselves phantoms and fabrics
laughter and light and the fragrance of oregano
taking some unknown form of witness
fragilely balanced in an immortal body
with an impossible interior
standing ever upright
a bulwark solitary and despairing
as triumphant as the slanting backs of dolphins
or hands composed of cruel trade…
they were born within me
cruel and uncertain
subterranean mirrors that paint their own images
like drenched roots
and hoofs beating the solid earth.
John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism, such a slim member of the club,
flashes its pink sides
by the culturally relevant and recently rediscovered bookmarks
giving a remarkably precise right angle to my brain
as beautiful as Velasco Vitali’s Fluxus #5
whose green is a vegan smoothie running down the side of your mouth
possibly creating even more fog on campus
suffocating the man in the cravat
whose pinched and wary face
moves through the glow of a February morning
stepping over a traffic ticket and a sour pickle
until everybody’s struck with agitation
combing their hair to look like the white horizon of an Italian landscape
caught in the sun’s eternal silver hair.
Art: Velasco Vitali (Italian, b. 1960), Fluxus #5, 2015. Oil on canvas, 60 x 80 cm.
What shall we do, what shall we do? The world calls us,
breaking its neck like an eagle on Friday
while pursuing the good, weight of eternity on its back
cool back of stone, appearing to bystanders to close and open
close and open, organ of the ruddy god in our veins.
Deacons and presbyterians have disappeared—what have we but each other?
The river when it opens grabs our knees, bends us toward the
warm gusts of June blasting the oaks outside
torching them like butterflies, blowing sea-ward our heavy baggage
like a ruby in the invisible dark, glowing
letting the weekend come early, at least in my heart.
some phrases from D. H. Lawrence and James Michael; art by /|\
You were pilot of a ship with three flags, spilled coffee,
defunct Hydroflasks, and dry erase markers. The over-watered plants
drooped toward us as if bowing, but they’re dying.
My least favorite surrealist poet is staring at me from the corner.
She’s a stressful coworker who comes to work early and talks on the phone.
Frescobaldi seems too sharp, my shoes, too brown.
To stitch together green bones
first you need to adjust the crosshair on your needle.
It’s no different from swaddling disproportionate opals
because bones have that mechanicalized allure
but it’s more similar to plugging in windmills
and sketching flowcharts of their thinking & dreaming activities.
When lovers will see how non-collaborative Time is
they will treasure even the swarfs of sculpted palpitations
like they really are ransom sacks extrait.
But, before that, they shun the false king
with his quicksilver appetites
with his hypnotizing whip to telepathically deflower roses
with his marching band of acuminate fifes and shivering ouija boards.
If I were a lover, I’d love to just moonstrike candleholders like flags
during a backseat zoning-out.
My coffee this morning is all the way from Jamaica, and The Surrealism Reader
cannot explain. The golden-blue June sunrise
cannot explain. The world is around but also next to me, the same
as I left it. There were no vacant spots in the luggage of my mind
to take it with me. Where I went is best explained in Brauner’s
Totem of Blessed Subjectivity II, which “touches base”
on how, in a dry meadow, we hold our hearts out while screaming.
We grow weary, put on contrarian gloves, form an ouroboros
with our feet, mouths, eyes. Do we guard or destroy
the tiny animal inside? We are a womb which is about to become a sun,
a maze of umbilical cord and teeth, transfmorgrifying the wheat field
in gory psychology. May our kidney bean gym weights bring us “gains”
in pensive vascular markets. Art destroys the world
as it existed, leaving a foetal rubble
as bright as stars.
Freedom has no age. It is not the fact of colour or reason. It belongs to a person as much as the sound of his own voice. It is, at the level of the immediate gesture, his means of choosing one path rather than another, his attitude with a landscape. It is his poetry and his portion of mystery and his difference from his brother. There is no one who is outside of freedom or who might not be called upon one day—even if only for a single moment—to meet with it and to grow with it.
George Henein, “Freedom as Nostalgia and as Project”