The death of the author as a movement in cultural production had a performative bite – given that it was concerned with authority, simply to doubt from a position of economic or authorial power undid some of the power of the author. It’s an anarchist position in literary studies.
*
Continue reading
“All this usury really fucks
me up” he said to the boat guard.
“It makes me itch? You understand?
“When I was in that cage, oh yeah
“I could feel it crawling on me
like ideograms.” The guard smiles.
Unstuck in time, he has one task.
He’s met a million like this –
bad money driving out the good.
“Hey there fella, could you get me
water?” How easy to just leave.
But the aesthetic demanded
a more apposite fate. The guy
held the glass and slurped, with a grin.
“I can’t believe I did it, wow
“I’m finally getting out. Heh
“I really fooled those old suckers
“worthless clots who couldn’t read me
“given half a year and the books
“I cut up.” You’re very strange, Pound
said the guard, later, down the path.
When the poet tried to salute,
the visitor grasped his daft hand
and firmly held it down. Justice.
*
The apparition of these blood spots on the path:
Petals on a wet, black, bough.
Something in form like a poem
so in form you may sit and read
poetry. In form, the writer
can then be a poet and yet,
the content is impossible
to talk about. An excellent
trick. But think if this caught on. Books
full of lines of garbled text would
soon align along shelves, and talk
of impossible things would grow.
And I for one, welcome this course.
Better than poems about kings
and queens and other antiques. More
poems about the love life of
tomatoes, and beaches falling
through giant hourglasses. More
poems about witches on trains
poems about poems written
by ancient pale worms, confusion,
the arc of the covenant as
an interstellar alien
heart. More poems where love is not
quite expressed in a throwaway
half list-verse talking poetry
Absolute|Unrest 