FEATURED POET: GEORGE QUASHA

from

Every Sound Its Word

(preverbs)

Leave out this line and you leave out life itself;

all is chaos again.

William Blake

1                                                          finding a world means liking it in here

                                                           

Begin poem! begins the poem when you can only write what you write.

One idiolect after another line after line talking their way through.

I can only write a life whatever the obsessing subject.

Declaringly my life has always been perfect that no other version serves the same.

A hard text weaves its way through my soft spots.

You can never make peace with contraries leaves meaning saved in the nick.

A man poet is who calls she pulling happiness from the cracks.

No stopping the world giving birth to itself her self’s saying.

Thinking’s any possible thought moving on.

Getting situated as if veiled has its way with words.

Agenda goes gender neutral except she’s still felt as I act.

In the undreamt wild of language word orders quicksand.

I saw it written on the wall that made me think writing on the wall.

On the big page you read whole bodied and time experiences what’s never felt.

Any pain teaches its elusive release self secret.

Being really in my body makes me wonder who’s really in the language.

A word feels pain saying it.

The truer it feels the newer it wills.

It says me saying it because I work here too.

It can’t be said enough ways to be said wholly.

A self true fool has no choice but to persist in folly.

2                                                                                  news from deep space non

Not I, not I, nor the mode that blows through me.

Mystery is that a swirl is always this swirl.

The unit is not the line it’s the mind in play here.

Can’t think what I now think means I might be thinking for real.

The newer it feels the truer it wills.

Leaving should at home’s a must.

The sequence thought is telling therefore the great interest and futility.

Truth spoken shames to be.

A line rides on the same to change in appearance.

I forgot the line, eternity escaped.

Demonstrably monstrous cracking open remembers.

Garuda egg awareness it thinks me that.

People cage and hate cages at once.

A poem, a cabin, a hideout, holding in, hidden hut, homeless break.

It’s hard to find a place in this house to lie down.

Eternity the escape artist itself traps in remembering.

I’m skeptical of my skepticism that it hide believing it formulates truth.

The unit’s not the line felt now but the mind that gets the girl, code for swirl.

I see the size of the unfound words, the number, the smell, the feel, but not meaning.

Self redeems in the writing unknowing and the natural otherwise.

Poem stops when you begin to write what you should, danger!

3                                                                                  every sound its word

So you never heard of the dragon dakini.

Clearly your myth is holding back.

Don’t think you know what I’m doing, she said, if I knew I’d tell you. Straight.

Straight enough for me, I said, makes my tongue curl.

The modality sans modus comes to mind.

She says dance and I dance.

The quality of earliest morning is feeling talked to through, working here now.

On what I’m working on now means I am now on working on now. On’s timely.

Now you understand how I understand.

Mind makes shells before garudas.

When she talks funny an egg is cracking.

To say it true is to hear it true.

Bad birds fly higher to escape the shell, show and do.

Break on through. This is for you. So you know.

And it’s only the upper edge.

Scratch across the paper, leave tracks, poem trails, leading ledge.

Mind swirls, see inside.

Arbitrarily I’m obsessed with her, the moving and swerving in.

The will is the pleasure in erasure per verse.

It hears in the measure as you go and shows through.

4                                                                                              appear without fear

May every sound be its word. There, said.

Language is weighing at your mouth’s expense.

Timing is the business of reading.

A thing is said to complete a world without end.

Biblical proportion’s living distortions.

To think its way sees a world in symbol.

Half here before it’s here, you take the rest and go forth.

Word power backs forward.

Can’t say I do force.

Desire scales to the occasion yet its force to mean is scale invariable.

Finger marks. No point pointing.

Puzzling you’ll be used up sooner.

Plant talk is fuzzier and logical by haze.

I’m never convinced in a timely fashion.

Why not let things mean their ways?

Conscious words are trying to verb.

Spacing non understanding tumbles to truth before your senses mixed.

Saying how I think thinking is not to make you wary.

Go with the slow is a slogan in the beginning.

A poem climbs the stairs in your own two feet.

5                                                                                                          mirroring talks

Time to mumble in symbols, facing.

Self saying says: Respect her to reflect her.

The dangling modifiers keep life sexy.

The poem knows when you’re only naked above the eyebrows.

Selves, ssss elves, slaves, lives, loves, never resolve, nor remove themselves.

Lullaby of Birdland sings sexual oology for eggheads. 

I other my mind to take it into itself.

I talk dakini to arouse my feminine to the courage of its knowing.

I’m believing in her as my mirrored selfhood believes in me.

Socio whorling wises.

How I finger you imprints and singles you.

Claim every moment empty and see where it gets you, nohow.

Mirroring talks back when you’re not looking.

I don’t love my image but respect its attachment to me.

I reflect better on you, twice told.

We’ll never think our way through this mess.

I have limited appreciation due to the imperfection of the actual path.

Bodhisattvas come play footsie but it’s insane to think they’ll hang.

Time is a perspective that wouldn’t stop even for Jesus.

I’m forgetting how to write which feels weirder than anything.

Last night I dreamt the men who move on and leave us to obliviate.

We’re here for the sound being words. For the sound being words.

6                                                                                  peripheral temporality vision

My Business is Circumference
Emily Dickinson

Imagine time forward and time backward as outer bounds of the moving time field.

We’re here in the middle, newly aware of having chosen to be here, no there here.

Note the stillness of comprehension falling short at the horizon.

Repeat: We’re here for the sound being words where the sound being words.

Two wrong readings make for true, never known before, half known ever.

You can’t put meaning together till it puts you back in place, the self-true angle now.

“More time is yours­—if you want” prophesies my smart phone.

Proving you’re on Airplane Mode proves proving finds the law flaw.

Flying is not a place and nowhere loses more meaning than it can afford.

Time fields, thought pools.

Verbs are recalled words in flight.

Tongue points in a swirl.

Atemporality or the stillness of the time field operative as a whole is untold.

Mouth, hand, finger, open indexicality, rope dancing, verbals.

An executed word has a silence native to its truth.

And a good book creates its own mistakes.

Zero point resets linguality radially, so the arms are opening wider.

Think surround, sense field, feel nothing special till aberrant lift, hold hat, Charlie say.

World is wise before the verb, not to say you or me.

Yet you know it when it sounds like nothing but itself.

7                                                                                  gendered vexation zones

I forget what’s been written for it no longer needs me.

My vow is to the incomplete.

Speak in exalted tones from salty dog bones.

I promise not to hold the truth from you. Easy. The truth doesn’t need me for that.

Poem bites the dust writing what you should and druther not.

Consistency is not a poetic virtue.

Scofflaws sport alternative proving procedures.

Nothing shows up, surprise!

In the beginning is the Little Bang.

And Relative & Absolute are never apart.

So she’s not mine to start with.

Renaming fames wiser in dark places.

It goes to show the way a dolphin mates multiples.

Darker meaning invisibles register the other radiance.

Gender’s zone of vexed identity flexes continuously.

I know me fluctuant.

Models me disorder. That said, come to bed.

Desire is anti-sedimentary.

Subtle startle: I’m inside the original which is only ever now.

Take away the line and you take my breath away.

Pronouns are deuces gone wild.

8                                                                      the art is taking the bad out of bad

Cruel coercion makes you wait to know, you’re born abused.

A title is even less serious about itself than a line.

Poetry holds truth at arm’s length down to a pen point pin prick.

Free being centers out, intransitively eviscerating well meaning.

“The most human is only truly visible in the post-human perspective.”

A line is an originating vehicle.

Come back it calls to what you’re becoming.

It makes no claim to keep up with the finish line.

A poem knows you’re only halfway there, no sense pretending.

A thing is the referent a word predicts.

“Any being encounters itself through you—how else do you exist?”

I keep being reminded the penmanship is sinking.

Between breaths is the incredible invisible shrinking line.

Feel the gap.

There’s accuracy in truly evading.

“I got my site specificity in the bargain basement.” Says no one and me.  

Poetry is language knowing who it is where it stands.

Even if an angel speaks to you it’s a take it or leave it situation.

Crossing out spaces centering.

These are not special effects.

A word spoken true never gives up its silence.

9                                                                                              sounding light(ning!) 

Tip to tap is the alternative map.

A syllable is haptic in the prehensile brain zone.

“I really do mind that you respond direct. You see I’m not the me you see.”

Every line is overload.

Naming wild, goddishly given (=Hannah) logophrenetics in great outdoor linguality.

You so pleasant me between tongues.

Go tell it on the mountain can also mean no one’s listening here below, attention!

Slide down your own pole to address the fire that calls you out.

If I reclaimed the seriousness of child’s play I could say Nietzsche! without flinching.

The word for this day is amain as any word that carries its weight—so far, far.

Poetry self-secretly names the mother of language, adoringly.

Here it goes undreaming again.

Reloading as we speak: Sequencing the rightness of the next closes off.

Language hides behind meaning, so the fire is invisible.

When it’s awake it eludes with color, with tone, with desire.

Anything said has a temperature.

Every sound fills the time it takes to pass you by… the ears.

A meaning has a beat.

Who knew there were so many non-repeating dance steps?

Systems don’t catch on in the listening present.

A sound words being outside in.

My hangover is the overhang, lineal loading as we speak.

10                                                                                           talking her into being

I started this in the name of the extreme.

Gog knows you live palindromic, the mystery before is the mystery following.

Hannah heals in reverse of expectations.

We’re getting there for she’s getting there. And why ask for less?

Fortunately this is getting to be a longish life for which no substitute languages so.

Tip your tongue before your hat blows off.

Learning to speak you learn to tweak.

Flying edits. Verb on the fly. Sly mind.

I’m trying hard to soften the sequence but it talks me hand to mouth.

Music at a distance is proof, mind sings awake.

The poem says dance to dance you into life as it is.

This is the wholly registering out of mind. The beat’s in overhang.

Tip of the tearing is the top of the mountainous.

I study the mind that tells me to say this.

It’s not getting away with everything it thinks.

But I don’t understand, I don’t understand is the call of the wild.

Getting this far is enfolding further.

The timing is life getting talked into being… this.

Origin is a recurrent recombinant conundrum, dumdidum glossodelia. 

It spreads as it’s read.

The dangling overhanging a thread, tread lighteningly.

Lightfully is the voice of hers.

*****

George Quasha, poet/artist/musician, explores an extra-medium principle in language, paint-drawing, sculpture, video, sound, and performance. The forthcoming issue of Talisman Journal of Poetry and Poetics (Ed: E. Foster) will present a section of critical writing about George Quasha’s work (ed.: Burt Kimmelman). Awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship (2006), his video art includes art is: Speaking Portraits, recording over a thousand artists/poets/composers in eleven countries (saying what art/music/poetry is). Along with notions of axial poetics and principle art, his visual work is presented in the books Axial Stones: An Art of Precarious Balance (foreword by Carter Ratcliff) and art is (Speaking Portraits) (2016). His twenty books also include, in poetry, Verbal Paradise (preverbs) (Zasterle: 2011), The Daimon of the Moment (preverbs) (Talisman House: 2015), Things Done for Themselves (preverbs) (Marsh Hawk: 2015), Glossodelia Attract (preverbs) (Station Hill: 2015), Ainu Dreams (Station Hill: 1999, with Chie Hasegawa [Hammons]), and Somapoetics (Sumac: 1973); about art, An Art of Limina: Gary Hill’s Works and Writings (Ediciones Polígrafa: Barcelona, 2009, with Charles Stein; foreword by Lynne Cooke); anthologies, including America a Prophecy: A New Reading of American Poetry from Pre-Columbian Times to the Present (Random House: 1973; Station Hill: 2011, with Jerome Rothenberg). Recipient of an NEA Fellowship (poetry), he is co-publisher with Susan Quasha at Station Hill of Barrytown. Work at: quasha.com and vimeo.com.