Gary Barwin : Two Acts for the True Melting

 

 

 

 

 

These two poems are from an evolving ecopoetry project currently entitled, An Act for the True Melting which explores how we are part of larger systems (our culture, the environment, literature) and as such must navigate the relation between data signal and noise. We are surrounded by related and unrelated information, by interference and distraction but also by stimuli that connect through something like quantum entanglement. To me our ability to negotiate information and experience—to filter and sort, to attend and ignore—is an integral part of contemporary life and of the physical and lyric world. Of Writing and consciousness. All of the poems in the project are filled with the signal/noise of connection. The process of parsing our experience involves considering which connections are meaningful, which are noise, which are significant yet belong to a parallel stream.

Each poem is made of multiple streams of information, both textual and visual, woven together into a single complex entity.

 

 

 

Gary Barwin is a writer, multimedia artist, performer and musician and the author of 32 books including the just released Scandal at the Alphorn Factory: New and Selected Short Fiction 2024-1984 (Assembly Press) and, with Lillian Allen and Gregory Betts, Muttertongue (Exile Editions). He lives in Hamilton, Ontario and at garybarwin.com

Gary Barwin : On the Hundredth Anniversary of Kafka’s Death.

Franz Kafka (July 3, 1883—June 3, 1924)

 

 

Franz was a nervous and paradoxical guy. He asked his friend Max to burn all of his writing when he died. Perhaps he knew that Max was the least likely to follow through with this because Max thought Franz was a genius. 

Sometime after Franz died, Max took a briefcase full of Franz’s writing and went to Israel. Max had a secretary who was also his lover. When Max died, this woman got the briefcase full of Franz’s work. She had two daughters. When she died, one of the daughters received a lot of Franz’s writing and kept it in an apartment in Tel Aviv filled with cats.

This is how the cats began reading. It took a while for them to understand Franz’s German, with its complex and ambiguous grammar. There were the novels, yes, but they especially responded to the short prose. A cat’s mind: small worlds, quickly and deftly moving from one thing to another. And death, delicious or eluded, always a moment away. 

Many cats, crawling over open notebooks, the naked pages filled with Franz’s ink. At night, the soft susurration of fur over paper, no light except the tubercular moon. The daughter sighing in her bed, asleep, dreaming of the dark sea.

For the cats, was it the inevitable and cryptic violence, the stealthy darkness, the sense of slipping through life if it had material substance, a smooth and viscous river like night? Sharp and sudden things? The surfaces of the cats’ world were Franz’s writing.

It wasn’t long before the cats themselves began to write. Did they hold pens between their claws, use a computer? It was the blood of captured mice splattered on Franz’s stories. What does it mean to write with the death of a creature? The cats batted mice around, tortured them, allowed blood to seep and trail. The daughter paid little attention, left out food and water, stroked her fingers through the sleek fur on the arched backs of the cats, attended to her life among the cats. Franz’s papers soaked in blood and urine, acrid, rust-coloured. There were books and translations of books in the world outside but only the cats knew the particular stories in this apartment, wrote and rewrote, slept and woke among them. 

From the safety of their homes in walls and behind shelves, did the mice scheme then gather around the body of cats to write their own narrative in blood, did they leave a legible trail of calligraphic droppings as they chanced a run across a page? It was their deaths that were their most articulate expression, the small squeaks and tiny wails of despair as they were slowly killed by cats. 

 

 

 

 

Gary Barwin is the author of 31 books of fiction, poetry and non-fiction and has published, performed and broadcast his work internationally. Scandal at the Alphorn Factory: New and Selected Short Fiction 2024-1984 will be published this fall by Assembly Press. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario and at garybarwin.com

Gary Barwin : (further) short takes on the prose poem

folio : (further) short takes on the prose poem

 

 

Prose Poem on the Prose Poem

 

Dear Martha,

I'm made of pure light and I'm wondering how does time work in the prose poem? I mean, my arms are amber and you know how content unfolds in a way that's different than poetry? Oh yeah. Glorious. And my arms are filled with sunsets. I sit here on the beaches of the English language and consider how does tone work in the prose poem? How does prose poetry refer to poetry or to fiction or other prose? At the time of the occurrence it was noticed that both parties were deceased. They'd snuffed it. Martha, we're dead. Gone. And then, this guy comes up to me and says, "Genre mixing? There was an Irishman, a Frenchman and once upon a time there was a large fridge and we are mixing jokes, fables, stories and so on. You better believe it. Let's play with what we think is going on, my sweet rose, my sandpaper, my oatmeal cerebellum, O charlie bravo claptrap, 42 plus 11 minus 40 and though we are no longer, we dance on the surf of hope and possibility, mudpuppies and chloroform. Sweet Jesus, I'm on fire. I’m able to use the resources of the poem and of prose, sometimes one, sometimes the other, sometimes a point in between—oh! expectations, how we like to play with expectorations. Yeah, there are linebreaks in the prose poem! The reader is always kinda expecting them, but they’re deferred, perhaps forever.  No, there is only one linebreak and it is at the end of an infinite line (or maybe Zeno-paradox-like, the linebreak—i.e. time, story, plot, form—is that place between beginning and end that is always halfway, then halfway between that, and halfway between that and…) Maybe the prose poem will break into poetry, or maybe story. It’s a cryptid or a chimera form. And in the meantime there are rhythms, rhythththmthms, the rhythms of anticipation, the future, tradition, possibility, a kind of eschatological meter, not tetrameter, or hexameter but always (n+1)meter. The force that through the green poem drives the prose. And what red story drives the poem which is and isn’t there, a ghost hovering in or above or behind the prose, always in that betweenworld of neverrest, hauntological.

Yours sincerely,

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gary Barwin is a writer, performer and multimedia artist based in Hamilton, Ontario. His latest books are Imagining Imagining: Essays on Language, Identity and Infinity (Wolsak & Wynn, forthcoming Nov 2023) and Portal, a collection visual poems (Potential Books UK, forthcoming Sept 2023.) His novel Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy is this year’s Hamilton Reads choice. garybarwin.com

Gary Barwin : Eleven Haiku for Pearl

from Report from the Pirie Society, Vol. 1 No. 1

 

 

 

after Basho

the world in bloom
even the traffic medians
are chanting

*

after Basho

bleeding nose stops
but blood keeps
coming from flowers

*

after Li Bai

waiting together
the shopping mall and I
until only the shopping mall remains

*

after Issa

old dentist
staring back at me
with my sour old smile

*

after Buson

waking while
driving
spring is gone

*

after Basho (version 2)

as capitalism fades
the scent of blossoms
lingering at twilight

*

after Shiki

death-shadow flickering
with the shadow of trees
moonlight inside a goalie

 

*

after Basho

time a pig
in skyshit
how far the stars

*

after a Zen proverb

money does not sing because it has
an answer it sings
because it is money

*

after Basho

the world in bloom
even the traffic medians
are chanting

*

after Hyakuchi

with books
and a friend in silence
small holes for binding

 

 

 

 

Gary Barwin is a writer, composer, and multidisciplinary artist. His latest book is a collaborative long poem (written with Lillian Nećakov) entitled Duck Eat Yeast, Explodes; Man Loses Eye. He just figured out he is eligible to have the passports of six different countries. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario.