Dystopian Diptych

1.

If all

we are

is information

who is

going to

harvest us?

2.

When the

Apocalypse comes

what will

that climax

feel like?

A storm

of zeros

and ones?

Fragment 

I as

slow fermentation

of surrogates --

unstable distiller

of substitutes.

Attachment Issues

 He swallows

rubber bands

and paper clips.

Another Zombie Poem

                                     for Thomas Fink and Mark Young

When words

won't come

ignore the Unsaid

trying to eat

your brain.

 From the Notebooks

Hear the ass

in praxis?

Bodies present

as practice.

Loops a

body was

waste away --

poem

half-heard

barely uttered.

 

One wonders

about ease.

What is

that like?

Noise makes

me think

words work

like weeds.

 Otoliths has just released 100 Titles From Tom Beckett — Poems by Mark Young, Paintings by Thomas Fink, & with an Afterword by Tom Beckett.  

100 Titles From Tom Beckett

full color

152 pages

ISBN: 978-0-6455483-3-4

$US37.75

Direct URL: https://www.lulu.com/shop/mark-young-and-thomas-fink/100-titles-from-tom-beckett/paperback/product-nvwzp98.html?page=1&pageSize=4

 

Tom Beckett's list was challenging. Sure there were some straightforward titles; but when you're confronted by 'Some of America’s Finest Malapropisms Stagger into a Bar' or 'He Hadn’t Always Wanted to be Somebody’s Girl' or 'The Nine Stages of the Decomposition of a Corpse.' it's definitely time to kick into overdrive.

 

Add to that, a common comment on my poetry is many of my titles have little relevance to the poems that accompany them. That is something I could not allow to happen here. Instead, the poems had to pay their respect, homage even, to the title that gave them birth.

 

I think I have done that successfully. &, helped along by the paintings from Thomas Fink, given me a collections of which I am most proud.

— Mark Young

 

Mark Young’s insightful, laser-sharp new poems in 100 Titles From Tom Beckett invite paradox and chance to dance with the sparks and echoes of Tom Beckett’s hilarious, downtempo titles and Tom Fink’s paintings of spreading fractals and swirling ropes of color. Young’s humor and pathos sprinkled with inkblots of bathos illuminate this book. His magnetic fields tease the push/pull levers of constraint and release. “I seem to be attracted / to things that do not exist, no / beginning, no end. Non-end - // ities, if you like, until negated / which then creates them.” Young’s poems often playfully reflect upon their own development and diversion as they proceed, exposing an openness to process at each turn of phrase. It is a pure delight to see Young, Beckett, and Fink – three master poets in their own right – join hands in the creative adventure of this marvelously generous work.

— Charles Borkhuis, author of *Rearview Mirror*

 

 

Reading 100 Titles From Tom Beckett makes me recall something I’ve sometimes thought about Mark Young’s poems: if all words created a block, the poet made poems by chiseling some of them out to fall randomly on the floor; the poet then assembled the words into lines and poems surface through a music created by breath and syllablic rhythm. These poems then are unique in that Mark volunteers that he actually tried to make his poems relate to the titles given by Tom Beckett. And yet the leap between title and text is not (always) linear, might be considered opaque in some cases, so that the reader's freedom of response is not diminished. What’s relevant to me is seeing how Beckett’s titles are such strong muses for Young’s poems. These poems present the play of brotherhood, as affirmed by Thomas Fink’s paintings where colors and shapes effect a harmony that couldn’t have been anticipated by each individual element before the painter joined them. Poems can be created through a multitude of ways and these results indicate the generative effect of affectionate brotherhood, while affirming that poetry succeeds by creating relationships and connections.

— Eileen R. Tabios

 

 

[Lulu has a 15% discount — promo code BOOKGOALS15 — running this week until Friday night. Promo codes for future weeks can be found each Monday at the Lulu Press Facebook page.]   https://www.facebook.com/Luludotcom/

  Thomas Fink interviewed me for Dichtung Yammer about my long poem "John Dark".

The Good Enough Other

bothered by

the backside

of a mirror

sucked into

being behind

what's not

entirely but

not entirely

not seen.

 Begging the Question

Running

the gauntlet,

looking for

loopholes,

yet to

have submitted

but wanting to

(beg the question).

 Here...

on the cusp

of legibility,

just to the side

of erasure,

adjacent to jouissance.

 From a Notebook

If one

denies oneself

one thing

one can

deny one's

self another.

The opposite's

also true.

Addiction swings

both ways.

 Theory and Practice

There isn't

much which

doesn't make

me anxious.

 

I Want To Talk About You

 

You are

a figment,

               

                 jammy

signal interference,

 

an odor –

raw scent.

 

*

 

You/us.

 

We are

entangled but

 

discontinuous

in what

 

is felt,

what seen.

 

*

 

There is

no I,

 

no one

to know,

 

without what

you do.

 

What will

you make

 

of me?

 

*

 

No one’s

a list. 

 

Nonetheless one

segments in-

 

to parts

and patterns.

 

*

 

Let’s talk

about our

 

borders and

those who

 

haunt us.

 

 

Rest in peace Lyn Hejinian:  https://english.berkeley.edu/news/remembering-lyn-hejinian-0

 

Eros and Iteration

 

I is, am, iterations.

Desires, missteps,

 

discombobulations

assemble, reassemble

 

and come

to resemble practice.

 

Initiation slash iteration.

Like a version.

 

Over and

over again.

 

*

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A tall

version

 

afraid

of heights.

 

A version

haunted by

 

childhood epilepsy’s

seizures’ auras.

 

A wobbly

straight version

 

with streaks

of trans - lucence.

 

*

 

The bottom

falls out

 

from the top.

 

 

 

*

 

Bitter root

 

of not about.

 

*

 

Mutable

provisional theaters

 

and other

impulse structures.

 

*

 

Compulsion slash convulsion as recognition

 

Compulsion slash convulsion as explanation

 

Compulsion slash convulsion as method

 

*

 

 

Don’t believe

in ghosts,

 

know that

you are haunted.

 

*

 

Bodies

pressed against

 

other bodies

 

make psycho –

sexual palimpsests.

 

*

 

Awkwardness of

acting out

 

in front

of others.

 

Messiness

of sex.

 

*

 

Find

a form

 

of

getting lost.

 

 

 

 

Preface to an Unwritten Epic Poem

 

The shin bone’s

connected to

the ozone.

 

The ozone’s

connected to

the Twilight Zone.

 

The Twilight Zone’s

connected to

the hose on

 

the legs

of our heroine.

 

 Waiting

Waiting by myself

to be rescued

from myself

I found

a new measure.