For autumn '25

EPHEMERA

“Your eyes, that once were never weary of mine,
are bowed in sorrow under pendulous lids,
because our love is waning.”

                                            And then she:
“Although our love is waning, let us stand
by the lone border of the lake once more,
together in that hour of gentleness
when the poor, tired child, Passion, falls asleep:
how far away the stars seem, and how far
is our first kiss, and ah, how old my heart!”

Pensive they paced along the faded leaves,
while, slowly, he whose hand held hers replied:
“Passion has often worn our wandering hearts.”

The woods were round them, and the yellow leaves
fell like faint meteors in the gloom, and once
a rabbit, old and lame, limped down the path;
Autumn was over him: and now they stood
on the lone border of the lake once more:
turning, he saw that she had thrust dead leaves,
gathered in silence, dewy as her eyes,
in bosom and hair.

                      “Ah, do not mourn,” he said,
“that we are tired, for other loves await us;
hate on and love through unrepining hours.
Before us lies eternity; our souls
are love, and a continual farewell."

© William Butler Yeats 1889

P.F.S.: Baudrillard's Conspiracy (2006)

Got around to reading Baudrillard's Conspiracy of Art. Baudrillard's main thrust is that after Duchamp, the banal got tangled up into art, creating what he calls a "transaesthetic" society; a society where everything could possibly be art. Warhol then took this to the extreme by turning "art" into a mechanized routine, taking out everything transcendent in art and replacing it with plain quotidian artifacts, or the simulacra of these. Baudrillard claims, staying on the surface of things, and accepting surface-level narratives of art history without inquiry or objection, that this influx of banality has destroyed art as we know it, and that art has reached an advanced stage of "nullity," with the art community frantically trying to pretend that this hasn't happened. It will be seen, over a durational expanse, whether Heller-Burnham will prove to be the antidote to this melange of circumstances, contexts, established aesthetic mores and neglected ones, or not. The melange, of course, being traditional, parochial America. 

Significantly, Baudrillard never mentions poetry. so it's clear his critique is aimed at visual art and visual artists. Nevertheless, I took his rather vulgarized critique somewhat personally. In Language/post-avant circles, there is a somewhat prevailing ethos that "anything can be poetry/make a poem." Certain experimental poets have used this as an excuse to substitute banality for transcendence, nullity for depth, simulation for authenticity. Authenticity, of course, is a dicey issue here; objections to the lyric "I" and long-standing quandaries inhering in it, and in poet-extolled authenticity, are commonplace in avant-garde circles. I mean authenticity on a level which is meant to imply seriousness, a commitment to aesthetically and not merely conceptually or politically valid or relevant poetics; an approach not wholly ironic. And irony not used, as it often is by Conceptualists, as an excuse to abase, belittle, and sanitize an art-form into advanced rigor mortis obsolescence.

Pursuant to this reading of Baudrillard, and as I've discussed elsewhere, I've come to the conclusion that the bravest thing a poet can do now, paradoxical as it seems, is to "warp" backwards, towards form and narrative. Warping back per se is the bete noir of post-avantists in general; but, as Baudrillard noted, going forward into even more vapid banality is not much of an option either. A brave retreat towards formalism and narrativity is a valid move because, as you cannot step in the same river twice, a narrative-thematic movement backwards/forwards would have to create new forms to reflect new circumstances and contexts. We wouldn't be going back in a merely imitative or Centrist sense; we'd be warped forwards/backwards by our emphasis, our preoccupation with content, specifically as regards crafting poetics out of an engagement with the most serious issues poetry and philosophy can address, the primordial ones. Philosophy in poetry, dialectic or not, nullifies whatever the transaesthetic impulse might be. It also nullifies irony, when irony is employed, as it often is by the Conceptualists, to emasculate the aesthetic.

From Dusie

ROPE DANCE

Morning is a burned thing, Louise.
Spoiled like a shuttered house.

Paper everywhere— under the beds,
in the dresser, floating
the pale skin of soup.

You make a cage of your fingers
to keep out light. Chicken bones
to keep out the dead. Grey
where it’s all wearing at the ends.

Your braids still tied in a V
when the dark comes to you like a cat.
A long hallway. A girl in pink
sateen against a backdrop of stars.

When you shut all the latches,
shut your eyes. A little gin, Louise.
Make one turn, then another.

© Kristy Bowen 2006

From Pirene's Fountain

EMILY BRONTE

these windy slopes are shorn
of the things which make life comfortable:
broad trees, broken bread, the swell

and supple curve of a lover’s back.
I sit here by my window, catch
the rough, sweet scent of heather in my nostrils

and write of death and love entwined
like adders together. The poetry
lies wild in my veins, the poetry

of granite skies stabbed by rocky outcrops,
the giving spring of turf, the taste
of solitude like aloes on my tongue,

the bare, unchanging moors, which take
my sisters and myself with mute indifference
and conquer under soil all our passion.

© Alison Croggon 1991

From Sawbuck Poetry

MARCH

Moth-bodies of greenhouses at mid-
morning stretch out—
a syllable— cross the previous
trickster swamp. That little mister
where nozzles ought to burn,
crying injun at every undisclosed
box with wheels,
box with no way of returning.
Just hit me with it— Felicia says—
if I can get me and my boyfriend a pack—
intruding on this poem. Which one,
Felicia: did she mean
it, kindly? Can the passive be
as aggressive as you feel?
In my army and about my predicament
there are meteoroids covered
in the grass, there are prairie
skirts hovering, hairless as present.
I will be with you presently.
This unmade river not
done in this instant
is, shows.

© Jen Tynes 2007

From Milk Magazine

the syn-aesthete's love poem

And yesterday, blue tasted like licorice.
Even the wind chimes caused dizziness;
the ache of paper lanterns rotting
from the acacias. Perhaps the L in my name
makes you sad, evokes a film where a woman waves
from a train. Or how this horizon wants to be a hymn.
If you listen, you can hear the holes in the alphabet,
the sounds lit by the lamps of our bones.
Perhaps with this page I could fashion a boat
or a very convincing window— 

a dress made entirely of vowels.

© Kristy Bowen 2005

Adam Fieled (editor, West Philadelphia, USA): "On Love"

What tide is the realest, which pulls in a kiss?
     The rigor of reaching the thing-in-itself,
from subject to object, chaos to bliss,
     our frail intuition of heavenly health?
Our love is not molecules, dumbly colliding,
     nor is it knowledge, formal and static,
         nor is it accident, reasoned and plumbed—
it's real, meta-rational, soaring and gliding,
     felt like an earthquake, bringing up panic,
         taking our parts and achieving a sum.

The greater part of love is sacrifice—
     flesh intermingled, tensing (push!) tingled,
this is the secret I learn from your eyes.
     Giving my body, knotted, single,
tiny eruptions that come from my tongue;
     plunging down surfaces, slicking the flesh,
         thoughtless as leopards or hurricane winds—
watching you shudder, watching you come,
     rapt in the throes of an innocent death,
         giving my life to an inch of your skin.

Thus, we trade in secure oblivion
     for reckless reality, messy and fleeting.
Such is the cosmos— creation, carrion,
     motions of molecules merging and meeting.
Nothing is lost but notions of self-ness,
     hard ideations that close and clatter,
         rages of ego that strain at their walls—
nothing is gained but a sense of the deathless,
     "there-ness" of spirit, "there-ness" of matter,
         ultimate "there-ness" that scares as it calls.

© Adam Fieled 2003-2025

originally published in Hinge Online

From diode

thicket

I am all butter cream and lace when
we abandon this house for another
with a picket fence and a tiny door.
Clandestine, destined
to have too many holes we can’t fill.
Despite the flurry of hands, we are drowsy,
playing cards and fucking in the afternoon.
Holding our nostalgia like a cake knife.

Soon, we abandon this car for another
with a blue lush interior that smells like Winstons.
I make a flip book out of our indiscretions’
misspellings. Finger the upholstery
while we play roulette with beer bottles.
Kiss me, kiss me not.
My hope all parade floats and dancing bears
until I split the infinitives,
spill the milk, slit the window screens.
Go for the jugular.

My sleep is still white, all paper and milk.
Counting the cracks in the ceiling,
dividing three and three and three.
Outside the amaryllis is ridiculous,
all lewdly red and unruly.
I am counting spiders in the eves as you leave.
One and one and one.

© Kristy Bowen 2010