Poetry News from JFK by [Andrei Codrescu]

I like writing in airport lounges with two hours to spare before an overseas flight. This is the last pleasure left after airports became expensive holding cells in hell. I remember when you could run right up to the door of your airplane and they would reopen them for you if you were late. And as per Casablanca, you could part from your amor during a war. I also remember from the movies when couples parked by the airport to watch planes take off. That was entertainment in days past. I'm having these puffs of nostalgia in the lounge of British air between security warnings and threats to my luggage which, if left unattended, might sprout wings and leaves. To be sure, the Surveillance apparatus already knows that nothing in my luggage grows. Do they know what grows in my head? I saw Minority Report and I think it possible that people having bad thoughts are tagged already. But there is no way anyone can read your thoughts if you're writing poetry. For one thing, there is no poetry in your head before you write it. At least, there isn't in mine. I'm from the school of "If you want to know something, ask yourself and there it is: the answer." Most people with a question google the answer now, and there it is: the fake answer. The fake answer is actually "fake news." Google cannot and never will answer poetry's questions. Google will maybe come up with names and bios of poets and their poems, but it will never answer a real poetry question, like the one poet Ted Berrigan was fond of stating as a fact, though it was a question: "I can't wait to hear what I'm going to say next." Indeed and likewise, there is no way for me to know what I think before I write it. As I write it I know what it is. Of course, if I have to formulate a question afterwards, I lose interest. Google is incapable of googling itself, that is to say: google cannot produce a question from an answer that even I don't yet know. Poetry resides only in the Ungooglable. For an erudite dissertation on the Ungooglable, please see "The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess" (Princeton, 2009), where I sink to the bottom of this. They are about to call my flight, so I'm pasting here two of my recent ungooglables:

 

Dogs of Aphora

An ounce of premounting is worth a pound of surmounting and a ton of dismounting.

The contrarian problem: I’m Bauhaus when they are Baroque, I go for the Baroque when they go Bauhaus.

We articulate when we daydream: contra naturam

Even in the deepest boredom the darkest melancholy the hopeless depression someone with a lighter and a knife is preparing to make you forget

Only curiosity makes things better: things hold your gaze if you look

The last day arrived after my first coffee

ants
ants form colonies of dread from each other’s bodies
let this one pass let this one go let this one say the said
not one hears the labor’s so intense and dense
I probe the rope swaying under foot and step
into the void where all I thought I was I never had

 

 

Comments

[The Best American Poetry]

Great post. "The Fake Answer" would make a good title for a book -- or at least a poem or prose poem. I finished "The Poetry Lesson" last night. Loved every minute Enjoy Britain if that's where you're going and report on the mood in that Brexit-begoggled . -- DL