Bellum Letters Revisited

look at how young these people are

dancing makes us human

what happens there in the occult deserts

the dissonance

the matrix contains a beleaguered pop star (does she still want to do this?)

weapons |

commercial pop's infectious repetitions

like we've been here before

like we are all just trying to find a way to make it bearable

it's so hot. who lives here? who gets to live?

google anything you want. pretend it isn't there if we can't see it.

Winter Soldier

Five Years

DUSIE 7

On the October Poems

It has been six months since I began the bellumletters. The links continue to disintegrate. Some files have moved, others have expired, a few have been blocked.

There is a type of language -- a set of words and phrases -- in which I feel steeped. It isn't elective. It insulates and swaddles and makes things fuzzy. Writing the hypertext poems is one way I can deal with the fuzziness. It isn't a solution, but a coping mechanism.

In the Bellum Letters I focused on the war. The war continues, and the poems will continue to bob and weave the frayed hem of war reportage. But the hem spreads and webs. There is no edge. There are knots of power, of money and greed. There are traps. It's all connected. This observation is banal, but that's a trap too. There's no justification for the suffering produced by capitalism and war -- by small groups of people who keep getting it wrong. To thess elisions, the October Poems will tether and cleave. And cleave. The faux edges. The dotted lines. The incisions. The invisible stitches. The poem can be a machine of optimism and intention (hopefully).

GR #7

I reviewed Elizabeth Treadwell's *amazing* book Birds and Fancies for Galatea Resurrects. I am also really happy that Eileen Tabios reviewed my Bellum Letters dusie chap.

I have some copies of the Daphnomancy chap and the Bellum Letters chap that I was thinking of putting on etsy.

July Notes

reading War and Peace.



I'm especially absorbed by the section from the Poetry in a Time of Crisis Conference: Is Poetry Enough (interesting Juliana Spahr essay here. Another essay is here).



Watched Winter Soldier. I'm interested in testimony -- in its necessity.



These are sentences from Jen Scappettone and Judith Goldman:



"Poetry's role is to decrease people's capacity to absorb contradictions quiescently"



"At the same time, however, to testify to war achieving its primary aim -- which is to injure and kill -- is also a symbolic act of remembrance and defiance."

extra explanatory note on the BellumLetters

BellumLetters is a series of anti-war/protest poems written during April 2007 as part of the napowrimo undertaking.* BellumLetters is a play on the term belles-lettres, which means"beautiful" or "fine" writing. Bellum is the Latin word for war, thus "bellumletters" is meant to suggest "war writing."

*napowrimo = national poetry writing month. Term coined by Maureen Thorson who originated the tradition of writing one poem per day throughout the month of April, aka "National Poetry Month."

poems from Guantanamo

BellumLetters (2.1)

BOOKS OF TOMORROW (waving goodbye)

the needle threads the space that was
the body before handguns, plastics.
glass-litter in the grass, a home
for ants, crow-gifts, a sublime
hatchet the sun glinting over
the tracks, razor zips away
towards corn, corn-fed autos
and stones stacked according
to plan (whose home?). Waxed
lumber builds our wishlist, snug
in water, a place for bones
to bend without a sound.

BellumLetters en route

I mailed out the BellumLetters chaps for Dusie yesterday. It's an interesting punctuation for a project that I feel is still developing. I like this actually -- the idea of publication as a moment of shift or diversion or pause as opposed to a sort of terminus or ending. It's almost a way to see it as a terminus in literal sense -- a point of simultaneous departure and arrival in all sorts of directions. Disruption.

In the end, I opted for a design that satisfied my desire for a tactile sense of the pedestrian. A design that used materials familiar to me from days in elementary school. The war is in everything I touch. It is even in construction paper and glue. And in stickers from kmart. Stickers that depict dog tags and tanks and army stars and bombers and helicopters. No ambulances. No wounds. No flag-draped coffins. No people even. Only the depiction of materials that remotely represent the human who wears the dog tags, who drives the tank, who flies the plane. And a representation in which "the enemy" is an absence. A space without. For a moment it possible to imagine that soldiers are released to this emptiness. That this emptiness is not a construction that intends to conceal the humans who live there. Live where soldiers are sent to fight. Sent to _________.

post bellum letters

Making the notes section for the bellumletters chap, I'm struck how it too is a poem. The juxtaposition of text, rather than the sort of layering text that linking constructs, is effective in a way that is at once more and less familiar. Like looking in glossary or appendix, but also disorienting. The mapping of virtual space that is this troubling information which is always under everything produced by an imperialistic, capitalist machine. A palimpsest or x-ray. And what to do? Perceive the limits of geography or feel the limits dissolved? Pretend to comprehend? Fight? Play dead? And there are so many bombs with names like "dumb" and "pineapple" -- and uranium and planes and tanks and people people people people people people. It is a lie to feel any war is far away. A weirdly loose knitting made by fake text and metal.

post-bellumletters reading

I'm reading this. lots of great images.

BellumLetters # 30

Synthetic Animals

I lied. We went into the woods.
But when did we come out? And into
light that was like the light
of an amusement park, themes
of many colors charming the wheel?
Facades of arrow-hoofs under a dome
of expired wires, glitter-pins
amid plastic coxcombs, gills flared, fur
mapped in imaginary lines. Menagerie
replicating thrills, feigning capture.
Glisten-grill like a pair of jaws unlocked.

BellumLetters # 29

MUST IT BE TURNED ON?

REGIMEN

You Are NOT allowed to do
anything unless it is new.
You think this is a rib-flick
joint, a root burrow?
Everywhere's a desert
these days. You may braid your
hair, you may make a ladder, you
may make a trail, a house, a wheel.
But its the fattening that matters.
A lap for greased palms. We love
those who frighten us the best.

BellumLetters # 27

Renaissance

Amid genuflecting spheres, bands
of nylon filled with sand, knotted
to become disembodied pairs, headless
limbs spread as though to scissor
the white air or swim-kick
the dry light, shredded tiers
of warped atria, of wrapped hollows
and corners shaped by where
and how a body wants to move.
My pen moves like a needle
in the wrist, ink-flick of a vein about
to bloom, about to loosen, about to lose.

BellumLetters # 26

SOME TYPES OF FEARFUL SYMMETRY

It's true: we're all for making blame
disappear. But when it comes
to linking, those choke-chains
tear at skins and walls as if pinned
with eyelash glass and hollow
marrow tubes. The organs tune
their keys, devour clues. The scum
rules under the gun, under un-
believable yellows and blues, sour
as soap rubbed in fur. Aorta, a cannon
inferred, spare spears in the swallow
___________________(in tombs).

BellumLetters #25

SYRINX

Syringe of singing, see-saw sealer
seeking a find. No note for the taking.

Take-toc-tic, the slit lip the sleek throat
whittled to a line that hollows and pours.

Clean beam of the tuning. Little red wheel
mining the air, fountain of bloom near water

spills, trilling. Sweet throat of the nipped
whistle plumed with beading -- rubber band

thrumming -- threshold beating with chime.

BellumLetters # 24

COINCIDENCE OF WANTS

little captions scattered

___________________feed and seed

(I see where what was buried blooms)

you are nothing to me

________

one could burrow, worm through
one could move, under stylus of worm, glue

the undersigned (the underused)

_________

persona or mask? I could not do (Plath)

__________

they bathed the recluse in ashes
not made by a body, but by oiled feathers
made as leather, a leaking hurt
threaded through


_______

pull it

we can use it

BellumLetters # 23

Victory Blue