What i think of as my "philosophizing" has been mainly a tedious attempt to
get my bearings & understand this cultural moment as a context for what i want
to do--without (very often) acknowledging, that the primary reason for it is only
the eternal question, "Why won't they let me play?" --Would i have tried at all, if
i perceived them then as i perceive them now: balancing sand grains in the middle
of a huge desert. I probably would have said, "This is no proper game, & these people
aren't intentionally excluding me. They are mad." --I think of the movie
"The King of Hearts", where after the townspeople run away, the loosed inhabitants
of an asylum take over & play at running it, using the clothes & props they find there.

Often NeoFormalists wish to include in their program the sister-arts of music & painting,
in which melodic composers & figurative artists seem to correspond to their party. And
indeed, the longing for the comfort of a lost tradition may be at the root of all three "retro"
tendencies. But it is both tempting & wildly amiss to draw direct parallels. I can see, on
the one hand, how highly abstract poetry is like instrumental music, & asyntactical poetry
is like atonal music, in that either one chooses to focus on the artistic materials themselves,
more than on the familiar pleasures of (pseudo-) mimesis. (These new pleasures can also
become as familiar: to me atonal music is like an exotic cuisine, when my palate tires of the
meat & potatos of the same old chord progressions, time after time...) On the other hand,
classical music & "realistic" painting are far removed from, say, a recording of the kind of
sounds humans make when experiencing actual emotions, or a photograph of an actual
landscape. (Picasso: "All painting is abstract painting.") Whereas narrative poetry is story-
telling & not that distant from the shaping of an anecdote in the hands of a raconteur... The
revivalists, in trying to extract workable formulae out of the social & historical contexts that
gave them meaning, are simply taking the signifiers of a style as direct indicators of value.
Which is something only a barbarian would conceive of. My idea of reinventing tradition is
rather different. We now have a huge vocabulary of all the things that have ever been tried
anywhere. First we learn to talk to each other (something that is surprisingly hard, once you
go beyond immediacies & cant), & especially, to listen. The forms will arise of themselves,
out of the need to communicate.

   "HAVE SOME SEX IN LIEU OF TAX

Somahomahah (1) retrieves amorous borax ranks from stipulated
damping sops up brickdust cow dung drags
air pellets into bunions mull over air (2)
locks wash damages motor nerves arc herons
cleanse semi-territorial megabytes adapt to chiefly ritual
mirror (3) splitting imbricates sacrificial bulk comics pass
ramifyingly by it alone slides into (4) flanks
of ridge-lines localized with absurd force shoots
maroons back to act (5) the other cobelligerent
outpatient stacks scopic drives oil (6) molar husks
toe slightly obsessional cocktails articulate base factor
five bundles frontal sound (7) shots into pints

(1) employees chosen for their smiles and round bottoms must be able to demonstrate the difference between subject knowledge and causing grievous bodily harm
(2) a corporate card goes pop when accepted while a purchasing card goes plop when rejected experience tells us
(3) a place where mind meets memory not to be confused with a one-horse town or a final frontier often dismissed for what is bunkum
(4) more or less identical to tomorrow's on-line success although icebergs say yes it is and yes it does
(5) leave well alone as there is no such thing as a fact a free translation or a flexible friend
(6) in combination there appears to be little contrast between a thick and a thin tongue but as modifier little may well be marked
(7) knowledge that has been disembowelled for its intrinsic strength and tested for its elastic qualities will be sealed as sound"

--Johan de Wit, Hippototescope (West House Books, 2000)

This little book (sent to me from England by And Rosta), of twenty-five 12-line poems with
seven words in each line & seven footnotes to each poem, certainly challenges the intrepid
reader. Seeing one of them in isolation, i think "brilliant"; trying to read several in succession,
i find myself skipping ahead in search of some payoff which, apart from the occasional &
seemingly inadvertant sound effects, plus the undeniable charm of a large vocabulary, seems
nonexistent. The footnotes contain a slight wit, but their relation to the footnoted words
is also apparently arbitrary. Finally, there is left the conjecture that this is the fruit of an automatic
procedure, some matrix filled in by a random process perhaps, or anyway a hidden one; & the
thought that now that this form has been invented, there remains the problem of finding a use
for it.