May 27, 2009

We are a church, mass happens at every reading, right?
Oh PoProj, I give you my last blog entry as a popopoom>>>

I have jumped the castle-making pontiff machine
Scraping the hem of clergymen at low tide

I have sunk my grabb on stank pot putty
Paging Homer Bomar, the Bixter Funk

Hey, the Times had an article this Sunday in the real estate section about a writer who creates those blurbs for property listings. The article was entitled “The Poet of Property,” and I was amused at yet another use of the word ‘poetry’ or ‘poetic’ or ‘poet’ to lend a mysteriously arty flair to a benign experience. Whenever a movie needs to attract the non-poets it boldly exclaims “A Poetic Masterpiece.” Or else, attached to food … Mmm, this brownie, pure poetry … This chef is a real poet with the knives…or else in passing … He was a good speaker, a poet of words (?) … A true fighter, a swordsman and…a poet! … This hash makes you want to kill a poet, etc.

She dances like a poet.

I get curious about where the ‘poetry’ appears in the thing being written about. That soft-focus-nature-vibe or retro-beatnik-coolness which automatically signals poem to the masses. Maybe I’m too overprotective about what makes a poem a poem, or a poet a poet, and in whose eyes…and how imperialist is that? According to the media writing about the thing, I am as much poet as blogger.

I have vamped on the pyre of adolescent chin straps
Using inguish as a second anguish
      Yes, I cause cringe
      Mirrorfaction obelisk
          Got sit on the brain
          Go get a sit bone

I have tried to memorialize the barbecute
      Only to be with you
      Only to be with you

Now, keep all these videos open on your screen at the same time, sound on or off up to you. Get pen paper to catch every other image. When thing becomes thing
      Skip vowel
      And star psyche the rat out

Chris Funkhouser’s fantastically lo-fi text videos are gloriously un-digital in feel and loaded with smarts. I love how the letters breathe in their jitter as they evolve across the screen. Quite a feat, to sense the artist’s hand in a digital medium. A poetic feat, dare I scratch.

      i want to do a smoothie but
      the blender will wake him up
          go outside on the patio
          and close the screen door
      but it just started raining
          it’s just drizzling…stop thinking
          about him all the time
          you’ve got to do something for yourself
          go ahead and live life
      but won’t i get electrocuted
          oh

I have been intelligencer succubus
womanizer, drug fiend, smackhead, imperialist, racist, begged and stole from friends,
lord byron, samuel taylor coleridge, john keats, rudyard kipling, t.s. eliot, dylan thomas*
match the skill set with the poet and win your very own harrasment suit

(*from poetry in a times article again, twice in one week)

And within these austere territories I leave you, dear readers with a set of viewings
and some mange that chatters.

Thank you Stacy, for letting me ride a bit these cyber hallways of the Poetry Project.
Until next…
Edwin