Adeena Karasick, excerpts from The Book of Lumenations

From Checking In II

Jim Andrews and Adeena Karasick

excerpts from The Book of Lumenations 

EICHA II

She has not dismembered her footstool in the days of her hunger

And in the ache of asylum

I have bent my bow

framed in the anchor of candied dalliance –

screaming in strung shadows, revenance

where limning sutures, festooned in sunshift

Lie with me

in the illicit quiver

of knotted conscience

Languish

through whispered harbors’

pressed exile

among evening’s inheritance;

the providence of slipped

semes slants

sucking twilight

of latticed scatter

Lie with me

in our ash-starred silence

constellated

in the riveted drifts

And suck the sting of sun clung lettered-skin as I open my mouth

wide against you; ink gnashed

in the twinned ignition of scar-studded scripts

And behold, the stretched vestige of sprayed hunger

whose singing fingers devour

in the petulance of choked zones

slain in the scored synchrony of

slung slaughter

summoning as though it were a feast day

sprawled in the dandle

of the rippled signs

of chorused dawn

EICHA III

Bled like a maiden of wrecked darkness, netted inlets

of ripped dyssemia, fleshy sequiturs, wisteria, the taste of broken bans –

Hail the billow of campy siege, the truance of giddy travaille

And make me dwell in the darkened wreckage of feverish dread

In the censored resonance of pliant heaves;

The plated shudder of my parade.

Burn me in the binding bias in torqued harrow.

For I am woke in the swindled aperture of fibrous light;

And I am giddy with shaded want in the quiescence of ludic clues

Naked with his yoke in my mouth

Let him sit sultry for he has laid upon me

Let him put his mouth into the dust

Let I offer his check to the smitten

Let him be filled with peaches

The load is my potion to those who wait;

oh scissored will!

of sculpted affliction, curled indices,

lurid creases

Who has come

in the undulance of unassailable labor

Come unfenced

in the screaming revenance

Covet me with elastic assertions,

re-forested signs, heaving gardens annexed

with foaming rupture

Make me come

in the refuse among the precipice

in the amnesty of opening

rapt in the shadowed torrent

Of hushed slaughter, peepholes

Eyestreams

In the tell of the luring

And say: lick dawn.

In the frame of hushed lobbies

Suck solace in the eros of my city

Haunted with borders

And fine me in the engine of our demise

And cast satin upon me

Water my flowing head  -- and cut me

in the dripping petulance

Hear my vestibule in the hiding of your signatum

Drawn near in the call of farce

You have seen the ringing dalliance the jagged closets

You have seen the nexus of varnished device

You have heard the silty ode of tainted sway

Formed in swelled speech hammered

in the ferocity of mourning; ground with fitful defiance

As you police me in the milk of daybreak

Grazed in the hunger of dusty flummox.

EICHA IV

Riddled in thick drift

and drunk with iniquity

Whose balletic thirst

is clasped

in the synomymy

of their yaysay, purer than sinew, and wet with dusk

ruddier than choral, sapphire, milking crimson syrups

sifted riffs of spilt surfeits

Whose skin a

buttered vortex of fruited

folds fluted affinities

of ripened whim

crowned in syllabic aberrance

and punctuated with ferocity?

Who’s echoed in the disquiet of fiery salutes

as tongue-torqued sucked cleaves –

whose contours of thirsty flourish

lather in the inhabitants of

herded words?

And who frames the humming grafts

of grinding ligatures

whose prophecy pressed

in the witness of

blind stagger?

And through trysty cirques, censures

garmented in letters

who’s calling out in the fingered folly

of lasooed swoonsay

through frisson, flares

slips, lapsed, mounting rapt

in the stop-watched sap scored arias

of purring rigor?

***

Whose ruched ramparts

mount in the

cradled bouquet

whose drenched thresholds

of pursed favor

flutter in

whose fluted impasse

compassed in whose haunted walls

whose licked chambers

kissed in the porosity

of luxuriant exposure

***

And anchored in slung sun-sucked spurs

succor’s prurience

in the province of curled lure.

whose chorused encore courts

as quilled squall coils

in scarred culled, ques, calling

And in the raging contagion of the yoked hurrah!

You say umlaut, I say amulet.

Is the emolument an emollient today?

ameliorated --

Canopy. Canapé.

Pomato. Mutata.

Is the error a mirror?

*

Here, her

in mired err

whose scar

is clear

Hear her / here / his hire

as ire / wears err’s

shared prayer / where

care is rare

in

her

vey iz mir

tears shmear

where fear

is clear

as mirrored ire / error

where flared air

colored

in your care

*

And as care curls / in her swirled whorl’s

spurred leurre / stirred

spur of porous lore

whose flurried furies fiery forêts folly, flayed fray

in the ripped wrought

of sobbing lot

whose fiery fuhrer folly foray flares

in the florid leure of lore’s floor

of soaring horror –

in the raging contagion

lips slip rapt lapse sic ops

lopped wrought / raw lot

In the black and unyielding light

alight in its own shivering dream

The light of fat language.

The light of stretched testing, widening hips.

The light of untidy probes which smells like

gags

thievery

acrobats

dancing bears

The light which reeks of

the light of the light that will not leave.

That I cannot write; that falls in its carrying

In the killing of its crushing, its clinging

and its excesses and its masks.

This is the light which lifts up and travels

from one word to another grimaces

in the torment of its hardening.

In its emptiness. In its own contamination.

Buried without madness. Drowning

in its own inexplicable cry.

And this is the light that does not write,

does not speak but in nightmares.

In the death of its enunciation

which rises, swells in indefatigable profusion;

in immediacy and madness. In hysterical

profusion. This light of doors, thresholds,

capacities, amplitudes, omissions and promises

de[p]ths and pleasures. That trembles

with tension. Stretched

in the torment of glyphs.

glas. gloss / glossary rasps lisps

in its missing. The light of the light

of the letter screaming

in the nostalgia of the present

CHECKING IN II

Thin Lizzy is watching her carbs

Fatwa is doing a cleanse

The Pre-Pesach Jew is clearing her cookies

Alfred Hitchcock is using Windows

The Smoker, the joker and the mid-night toker are wanting a vape
Old Man Beaver is wanting a 5 cent cigar
Loves Labor is Lost

Microsoft is getting hard

Form is wet with Content’s Dream

This content is not available

The Alte Kacker is with Kathy Acker

The Spy Who Loved Me is using Malware

The World Wide Web is at The W

The Cocteau Twins are at the Double Tree

The Giving Tree is dead

Hamlet’s Ghost is reading the Phenomenology of Spirit

Chick Corea is at the Tequileria

Deus ex machina is Raging Against itself

Florence and the Machine like this

E & G are saying F off

Happy Man is at Friendlies

Oh Fernando is at Nando’s

The Long, Long Sleeper is Woke

*

The sin-qu-a-non is overflowing

bp nichol is sinking in sin’s kin

Lynyrd Skynyrd is in the skin i live in 

Roland Barthes is with his exes[s]

driving a polished lexis

Emily XYZ is reading ex why zee

Bold italics are refusing to move into an upright position

The Riddler is with the Fiddler

The Saudi is driving an Audi

Siouxsie is eating sashimi.

Sad Boy’s Sad Boy is playing with his enWii

Kant is looking for Duty Free

**

Wynken, Blynken and Nod are at Sleepy’s

Gertrude Stein is at an airbnb

John Ashberry is where black swansdown settles on the city

William Butler Yeats is where the Inn is free

Yes Man is in the Noosphere

Google is mapping the territory

Narcissus is using his selfie stick

The House of Pancakes is waffling  

Aer Lingus is serving vaniglia

The Disillusioned Lover is enjoying some secondary Orality

Ludwig Beethoven and Ludwig Wittgenstein are now friends

Fed Ex is totally “shipping” this

525,600 minutes are at Midnight Moment

The Sixty Minute Man is reading The Hours

Minute Maid is taking minutes

Time is on your side

Copper and aluminum are exposing their inner mettle

The excluded middle likes this

Dirty Concretists are overwriting

Van Gogh is eating a mango

The pedagogue is in the synagogue

The luddite is going analog

and says binary code is such a USER

The system is closed.

—Adeena Karasick

Mark Young, Selected Work

DEI Automata Launch Their Replication,

image by Daniel Y. Harris

Antinomianism in theology

Abstract representations have found

a place as a window through which

wartime supplemental spending in

the foothills of Western North Carolina

can be divided into three subcategories:

symbolic, classical, & romantic. The

Phase I plan calls for busing students

from Roxbury to South Boston. Talk

is increasing, looks set for appreciable

growth. Scientists mull over their under-

standing of the different walls described.

Beliefs are paradigmatically intentional,

are sorted by their propositional content.

No popular authors have been found.

An initial development period with a Kurdish team

The head seems to me too

visionary, like either a hen

crowing from one of the

oldest homes at Cap Estate

or an incarnation of the evil

rectangle found in the reading

of an open-access article on

navigational abilities. Most

mechanisms rarely include

much humor. Agreeing verbs

are directed toward a syn-

tactic e-commerce software

which replicates their move-

ments & keeps them happy.

deciding / to end / the comic strip

Edna St. Vincent Millay hopes the

voyage is a long one. She has her

business in Cuba, selling Apple

Macintosh upgrade cards &

accessories, but this makes her feel

like a press correspondent covering

a war, able to use every metaphor

sandwiched between the saltmarsh

& the smoke. Getting a definite

buzz from it all, even if pioneer

days rather than cutting-edge.

Many poets can sing. It's getting

harder to be heard, though, when an

abundance of bird life surrounds.

Small benchtops & a stenchcore band

There are bikers who are joining in

on Saturday. The brix levels are

already good. Small cinnamon sticks

with slices of apple had preciously

caused quite a few problems with

the retrieval of geo-spatial data; but the

growing tendency of parents to give

projects based around lexical statistics

means dictionaries will pop up before

you're even halfway into the entry

vestibule. Such virtuosity is the culmi-

nation of long years of hard work. We

have ambushed the mainstream. Now

cellos thrive as the vibration baseline.

Occasionally to sea level

Studies on whether violence in-

verts social experience have been

conducted primarily by anthro-

pologists testing a hypothesis that

valley grasslands are preferred to

foothill woodlands as the liminal

state in which the usual customs

& conventions do not apply. Fuka-

yama’s ‘end of history’ thesis has

been opposing this approach for

months, instead searching out

municipalities who are willing to

create gardens where a body can lie

undisturbed for at least three days.

—Mark Young

Annie Grizzle, Co-d

Transmogrify, image by Sandra Boskamp  

Co-d

Machine bug. Only datas fly. Computer hit face and face hit

window. I sit in the window. My cat is sick. I put the nectarines

in a paper bag three days ago. The nectarines aren’t two days

ago. I put the nectarines in a bag ripe. The cat is free lime. There

is no because I haven’t this summer. From Milwaukee or

Baltimore. I forgot to electrodes or dead lava. I am pail mad. I

started being sober three months ago. I put vodka in my drink a

week ago.

I’ve decided not to count that I put vodka in my drink a week

ago. I don’t ponder death. I made talk for grapefruit aid if only

but cry yet. I won’t and I don’t want to. The figures found asleep

 are my grandmother. I dreamt I made trinity. I dreamt the test is

what ended it. I like my new roommates. My job is fine to go to.

I am forgiven. Gave name tag as acceptable cash planet.

The IRS is after me. They won’t buy my poems. My cat is sick. I

can’t eat electric bike more. Too much color. Fish kill why is

dark out. I hate you. You hurt me. Two more eggs than. It wasn’t

worth it. Head split sideway farm. Fuck you I should quit face

cloth. I am two helmets. Front door stomach war but for

yesterday. Plastic tone. No cuts. Deep bruising. Nectarines.

Meat ate. For sweat from bush teal compost. It wasn’t worth it.

Shingle belly. There are bigger wastings they said once, why I

am thought on you. I think I have too much free time. I’m circle

for it. Deep gut burn for false start. Looser for addiction I find it.

Staggering. I hate you. I want you expose. You think I low bow.

You think I’m foot mush. Maybe I do want. I’ve never been

here. Bus for six hours. I miss hard. I still have your skateboard.

It was always platonic. Two snout trough magnet. I am co-d. Sift

pressure and for lip cup if for or else. You didn’t ask me to wild

bark, sweet tongue.

To make tender, to see the ocean of it? Dry purpose across a

landscape. How sound names it, my fascinating slu,p. It crawls

down your throat. My very own mucus.

All dead. The IRS is after me. Oxygen luxury now. Chest bank.

What happy crowd. So may many find comfort in blue throat. I

want you expose. You think I low bow. You think I’m foot

mush. My cat is sick.

It’s been four days and I’ve softened

But I cannot soften to you

I attempt control by being the nice one

Everything is calculated

I forgot I was an animal.

—Annie Grizzle

Clay Thistleton, excerpts from Never Mind the Saucers

Heller Levinson, excerpts from UN--

little riverrun, Linda Lynch, Pastel on paper, 2018

excerpts from UN--

be-Wilder

surrey-ing the road to lost

road, bounding perplexity potholes, in the

rush of vexative disarray on the heels of a prosperous meander,

the pause to ponder:  to roam the electrical currency of epoxy garlic, to calculate the unravellings necessary to build an effective passing lane, the burden of proof lies with the definition, roasting through the perils of combinatorial seepage a pledge is born, -- to spend

a lifetime rummaging foam

be-Wilder (take 2)

trespass reckless                      care-less

            forlorn leeches morbidity

ogive collapse ……………..

………….. counting creates

measure, you can

count on it, censorial

consort

the animal grasps

none of this

where

in

bewilder

is the

wild

be-Wilder (take 3)

sludge come duly

scrawl calamities bituminize

penning animals as penmanship

lamentations lap the labyrinth

loll lacerate

where in the

upset

is

circumstance

upon reflection it’s pointless to consider alternatives in the wake of administrative fallacies the derelict the disbeliever the denuded the disgraced the downtrodden it’s moments like this when opportunities abound boundless bosom broth bramble bumble don’t ya know yet perimeter science has arrived at a subversion of terms based upon scrupulously unfolding nightgowns & other diverse theories a complexion of parts bearing granular perplexities if only you stayed for the finale the uproar was uproarious it was the driest of seasons the dreariest poultry if tutorials could account for Sunday football the kinetics of beer slippery when wet watch where you step the game wardens came up empty the game never came the art of trespass is experiencing a revival in inner circles otherwise why waste the paint it’s a species of discontent to pray for salt after hours a dark space between the evidence looms large rehearsals are fumbling the influence of outsiders cannot be overstated still the morning hours delicious for fornication

—Heller Levinson

Nathan Spoon’s: It Doesn’t Break, A Review of Heller Levinson’s LinguaQuake

LinguaQuake, Heller Levinson

Black Widow Press (2018)

Book Cover Image, “Quarry, VIII” (Detail)

Pastel pigment on cotton paper

60 x 44 inches, 2015

Linda Lynch

It Doesn’t Break

A Review of Heller Levinson’s LinguaQuake

by Nathan Spoon

LinguaQuake is the latest volume resulting from Heller Levinson’s ongoing engagement with Hinge Theory. Reading through it, the poet Geoffrey Hill repeatedly came to mind. This is an odd correlation for many reasons. Hill is a poet of dense history, willing to experiment within modernist parameters, which reluctantly reached into postmodernism. He sees language as “fallen” from its prelapsarian glory and admires poetry that creates “strongholds of the imagination.” Levinson, by contrast, dispenses with history as a by-product of dispensing with narrative, and he approaches language in a manner that embraces its continuously bifurcating display of movements.

These are substantial differences, but what links both poets is a commitment to the examination of words. Hill, as a deeply English writer, moves in harmony with the OED, while Levinson’s approach to words is far more experimental. Still, for all his effort to have “Hinge depart from all other poetic fashionings in declaring itself an ongoing ever-fulfilling linguistic enterprise,” Levinson is surely a participant in what John Ashbery calls an “American poetry whose fructifying mainstream seems at times to be populated mostly by cranks (Emerson, Whitman, Pound, Stevens).”

*

While other aspects of Hinge Theory are demonstrated in previous collections and outlined in writings referenced in the notes of this collection, LinguaQuake explores the two areas of Modular Collapse and Chaotic Symmetry. About Modular Collapse Levinson writes,

we will see modules morph, liquidate, & interosculate in multiple capacities. They will self-destruct. They will convulse. They will mangle & entangle.

and about Chaotic Symmetry he writes,

the apparently slop-shod and disorderly is integral to the Entirety of the Organism’s Lively Burgeoning.

Modular Collapse

A module may be understood as an amorphous clustering of language around a word or words providing the occasion of a starting point. As the language of modules “quakes”, one encounters “breaks, highs & lows, pauses, gaps, elisions, lacunae” transpiring in a manner “more resembling Breath than catalogue.” This last phrase favors “Breath” (an amorphous sweeping that vitalizes, and which can be understood as “life”) over the “catalogue” (a list of things or “a collection of detailed comments and explanations,” OED).

Levinson’s descriptions of Modular Collapse are relevant to what is enacted in this book as it unfolds. And sometimes there is more. For example, and going back to the above description, “interosculate” is a biology term meaning “to have some common characteristics: said of separate species or groups.” It also means to interpenetrate. While modules in this text do interoscuate, they sometimes also interosculate with poems by other poets. Here is a passage that is resonant with Whitman’s “Song of Myself”:

relying heavily on graph analysis I plot my mate. I am exalted. fluttering with anticipation. possibility. I am on my way to becoming someone. soon to emerge. into. person-hood. I cannot stress this too strongly. how thrilling it is. to be about to. on the cusp. of. hatching. pages pages pages. I am visualizing pages filled with my Self. who wouldn’t be giddy. after years of deprivation. submerged. an obliterate in a sea of commotion. (p. 49)

Another similarly Whitmanesque passage (although the optimism is inverted) reads:

flutteration pins me. I am comatose. broke. a slag upon the floor. low down. my delusions my dreams smattered. to be. to be all you can be. haunts me. I crave to measure up. to amount to something. to become. to to to   yes, to formulate. to emerge. hell, if not to be ― to resemble? (p. 35)

Importantly, Modular Collapse implies that the text is not an arrangement of separate modules (poems). It is a singular mass, a conglomeration:

at what point in the gathering does the collection become assemblage. how does criteria assemble. how does judgement discharge. (p. 109)

Chaotic Symmetry

In Levinson’s brief description of Chaotic Symmetry, the operative word may be “apparently”. The text itself speaks of what it intends to enact, and this enactment grounds its language in the realm of intentionality:

the wobble    the displaced the

misplaced the wayward the

awkward the maligned the…

malignant the belligerent (p. 21)

And elsewhere:

gruntled slop-

sustain

…swerves of preservative in the dark undulate of dank demeanor (p. 60)

This last is a poem in miniature. “Gruntled” is a humorous adjective meaning “pleased, satisfied and contented.” “Slop-sustain” recalls “slop-shod” in the above description. “Slop-shod” is a play on “slipshod” (“lack of care, thought or organization”) and, because “slop” means “spill or flow over the edges of a container,” usually due to carelessness, is similar in meaning to “slipshod.” To be “gruntled” with “slop-/ sustain/ …swerves of preservative in the dark undulate of dank demeanor” implies that these things, which are frequently excised from poetry, have their place. Presumably there has always been a countermovement within poetry that extends active sympathy towards things that may seem antithetical and contrary to its own spirit.

Hinge Theory Quaking

Even as Levinson’s aim is to do something different from what previous poets have done, his poetry has, until now, represented a mostly insular contribution to the American tradition to which he belongs.

A renowned Hindu teacher once said that a person’s spirituality is like a fledgling plant growing in a pasture. If a small fence is built around it temporarily, so that cows and goats cannot eat it, it will one day grow into a large tree, providing shade for many. Similarly, a poetic approach may at first need to be surrounded by a small fence and carefully protected. But, once this has been accomplished and once it is growing, a key aspect of nurturing the poetic approach is knowing when to lose control of the very things one has worked at so diligently.

This is a significant moment for Hinge since the two areas explored in this book are allowing Hinge Theory poetry to move forward in larger ways.

LinguaQuake is Heller Levinson’s most substantial collection to date.

Notes

Visionary Philology: Geoffrey Hill and the Study of Words, by Matthew Sperling, Oxford University Press, 2014

“Strongholds of the Imagination,” Geoffrey Hill interviewed by Alexandra Bell, Rebecca Rosen and Edmund White, The Oxonian Review, Issue 9.4, May 18, 2009

Selected Prose of John Ashbery, edited by Eugene Richie, University of Michigan Press, 2004

Leaves of Grass, First and “Death-Bed” Editions, by Walt Whitman, edited with an Introduction and Notes by Karen Karbiener, Barnes & Noble Books, 2004