How does a poet turn into a novelist? A metamorphosis at least as mysterious as the transformation from caterpillar into butterfly, but reversed: the winged and glittery feeder on nectar goes into a long freeze, emerging from the chrysalis with many feet to plant firmly on leaves, bark, the earth.
The poet makes himself flexible, ductile, a vehicle for an accident, collision of words and things, which crash into each other without replacing each other; his words are not mimetic, do not represent, they are impact. The novelist creates for himself a secret life that he is helplessly impelled to disclose: when the disclosure is complete the secret world is destroyed, and he must make another.
In Zuccotti Park they are being poets as this article suggests, putting their bodies on the line, presenting an indigestible message to the world. The world can only understand the message if it transforms itself utterly. From leaves to nectar.
What would you do today if you knew that today would never end?
So who gives a shit? Well he gave a shit and she gave a shit and we gave a shit and they gave at the office. But they didn't give a shit, couldn't give a shit, about it. You couldn't give two shits, who shits on a shingle shits a brick, three shits. They're shitting themselves. Three shitheads walk into a bar, the bartender says, I don't give to shits. His shit don't stink, her shit don't stink, your shit don't stink, theirs stinks. Oh, shit. Gotta get my shit together, soon as I get my shit out of luck, soon as I get up shit's cree. What's a paddle for? What's a body no one speaks for? "It looks like a shit took a shit." A fly arrived, took one look at my spotless floors, said, Shit.
Recitative: from opera and bel canto, "a style of delivery in which a singer is allowed to adopt the rhythms of ordinary speech." Lower limit music, moves the plot along. "What's the good of a book without pictures or conversations?" A novelist can't do without recitative, a poet can. But a novelist can put a frame around recitative, ironize and insulate it, say, This is rhetoric, a continuous tissue of rhetoric in which many folds pretend at representation. These characters, narrators, settings, scenes, form one continuous substance. Only artful draping (Project Runway) creates the illusion of discrete entities. Poetry: discrete entities, discrete series, soul of discretion.
Just to say it. Just to say it and to be seen saying it. Not to be heard, let alone listened to. Too much. Too much to hope for it. But to say and be seen saying. To stand on a say-box or in a say-corner, to say before others' eyes. To say, why not, before one's own eyes. I say it and I see myself saying it and then I've never said it, I never will say it, I have said it. I am saying and seeing and being seen. The said.
Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Chicago, Occupy San Francisco, Occupy Washington D.C., Occupy Topeka, Occupy Berlin, Occupy Paris, Occupy London, Occupy Brussels, Occupy Beijing, Occupy Moscow, Occupy Singapore, Occupy Tokyo, Occupy Melbourne, Occupy Delhi, don't occupy Iraq, don't occupy Afghanistan, leave Jerusalem the fuck alone. Occupation, when peaceful a close neighbor to vocation, something to do, answering the call. When we hear an aria we don't answer, we applaud, we weep.
This is the blissful moment. Not Qaddafi, not dead tyrants dragged through the streets, but a new birth of love. The pen crawls across the page and the reader creepeth with it.
Pure power of presentation, the it is (il y a, es gibt), of, in language. Pure communicativity of Liberty Park. What are your demands? It's the wrong question. A poem is an operation, maneuver, arrangement, something to be moved through. Objectivity--content--distracts from and inhibits the readers's focus on the experience of movement as such. Potential energy, a perched stone.
Occupy your own body, Cathy Wagner says. Try that one on for size. Debt as negative space. You are too big to fail.
You are beautiful protesters. Blue morpho that changes, that drinks, that flies, what do you want?
What you want is what you are.
I am with you.
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