Archive for July, 2010
The Limits of Language: Seuss Beyond Zebra
In On Beyond Zebra by Dr. Seuss, Conrad Cornelius o’Donald o’Dell, who is just learning to spell, writes out the alphabet on a chalkboard and says, “The A is for Ape. And the B is for Bear. / The C is for Camel. The H is for Hare.” He knows all the letters through to Z for Zebra. “So now I know everything anyone knows / From beginning to end. From the start to the close. Because Z is as far as the alphabet goes.” In other words, the alphabet allows him to learn about the known animals of the world, the implication being that without the alphabet he may never have known about hares or zebras.
A Poem Dangerously About Itself
word
Isn’t “word” a weird word,
something blind and burrowing?
Where’s it going? Why so blunt?
What’s it looking for? Itself?
Metaphotos of a Meta-sculpture
Omar Rodriguez Rodriguez’s Metaphotos of Josiah McElheny’s Meta-Sculpture Model for Total Reflective Abstraction (after Buckminster Fuller & Isamu Noguchi), 2003.
Blown glass objects, mirrored glass, and wood base.
Taxidermy
say something say something
anything to break the silence
anything to feed the lack
since I pulled the gods from my belly
my hide’s begun to sag
say something say something
anything to fill me out
give me shape, anything at all
cram my mouth with crumpled words
by Ronosaurus Rex
A Simple Metapoem for an Oxymoron: You
Paradoxes and Oxymorons
by John Ashbery
This poem is concerned with language on a very plain level.
Look at it talking to you. You look out a window
Or pretend to fidget. You have it but you don’t have it.
You miss it, it misses you. You miss each other.
The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot.
What’s a plain level? It is that and other things,
Bringing a system of them into play. Play?
Well, actually, yes, but I consider play to be
A deeper outside thing, a dreamed role-pattern,
As in the division of grace these long August days
Without proof. Open-ended. And before you know
It gets lost in the steam and chatter of typewriters.
It has been played once more. I think you exist only
To tease me into doing it, on your level, and then you aren’t there
Or have adopted a different attitude. And the poem.
Has set me softly down beside you. The poem is you.
