#Metropolis ark 1 stacatto not tight full
#Metropolis ark 1 stacatto not tight series

One phrase in particular hit me as an apt description of BoykoffвЂ™s poetic practice: вЂњhelicopter as metronome.вЂќ It evokes all the current events, military and humanitarian, that require the intervention of helicopters in this our transnational age, while pointing to a beat-a structure-that underpins them, one thatвЂ™s available, dub-style, for resistance as well as oppression.

Jules Boykoff opened with вЂњEssay #5вЂќ from his terrific new Once Upon a Neo-Liberal Rocket Badge. But in his use of multiple voices, attention to the aural, 'pre-sensical' qualities of words, and vaudevillian stage presence, Christy also managed to point at some possible lines of resistance: Orthodox chant folded into polyvocal dada static. Tony Christy didnвЂ™t read so much as put into motion a set of antic verbal actions-many involving other readers, one involving a knife-centered on voices of authority (judge, bureaucrat, cookbook author, priest, rapist, God) to suggest the shared cadence of power in its various guises, its ways of making us вЂњshut the fuck upвЂќ and feel small.

#Metropolis ark 1 stacatto not tight series

Tony Christy and Jules Boykoff read last Sunday at the Portland Art Center, an airy downtown gallery on loan for the night to the Spare Room collective, which runs the most ambitious experimental reading series in Portland. What is it about the culture right now that makes this tonal shift feel so right? It seems like a lot of contemporary poets are also pursuing a voice like this, one to which Notley's thoughts about O'Hara might apply, but charged positive. More pointedly political though: the backbeat of the MMPI suggests how subjectivity-or the exams, institutions, and (ulp) lyric poems we rely on to produce it-can be absurdly limiting, sinister, and laugh-your-ass-off funny all in the same breath.

#Metropolis ark 1 stacatto not tight full

A warning shouldnвЂ™t be pleasant, a pointing towards a future both inarticulate and full of words produced, recycled, and recombined by all sorts of machines.вЂќДЄmong the many other things it is, The Anger Scale may be one of the first books to make good use of the neglected OвЂ™Hara. What if that one, that entity, does think in the clichГ©s of television, has a pile of these units, these lines clattering around inside waiting for further use and rearrangement in rather empty contemporary situations? ItвЂ™s the space between sentences thatвЂ™s now remarkable and impeccable, but these poems arenвЂ™t very pleasant, though maybe they shouldnвЂ™t be. The voice is both satirical and mysterious itвЂ™s anonymous and communal (in the bad sense) in its exploitation of verbal mediocrity, and works somewhat more through deadpan presentation and juxtaposition than through intricate linguistic closework. 'A new kind of voice is speaking, that of the poet becoming, and at the same time commenting on and changing, the story or issue on the screen. Of those last poems, which OвЂ™Hara planned to collect under the title The End of the Far West or the New York Amsterdam Set, Notley writes: In it she talks about OвЂ™HaraвЂ™s late style in a way that reminds me a lot of The Anger Scale, though the things Notley objects to in OвЂ™HaraвЂ™s last poems are the same qualities that I think make KatieвЂ™s collection so engaging. Recently IвЂ™ve been reading Alice NotleyвЂ™s Coming After: Essays on Poetry. ( Shanna Compton and Jasper Bernes have been commenting on this aspect of the poems as well.) Out with the labcoat and the I Ching in with wit, absurdity, looby satire, and a surprisingly intimate voice given the various sources used to call it into being.

ThereвЂ™s a lot more going on in the collection than that, but itвЂ™s one way of getting at what it is that doesnвЂ™t sound 'prodecural' to me (if procedure has a sound) in KatieвЂ™s deft fusion of the MMPI with Google.

A while back I blogged about Katie DegenteshвЂ™s The Anger Scale and how the unique voice at work in the poems extends and amplifies OвЂ™HaraвЂ™s late style.