In every sense, Uncle Ken’ichi seemed to have been born in order to be sacrificed to the war effort. He was born more than a decade after my father, and so the entire process of his personal development coincided with the process of Japan’s descent into conflict. In the end, his young flesh and fragile soul were placed as burnt offerings upon the altar of war.
Eleanor Antin: Poland/1931 collage with Jerome Rothenberg (c.1974)
A DREAM NARRATIVE
. . . .
It is dark & I go It is dark & I don’t go I go & I don’t go It is dark & I go & I don’t go
A FIRST NARRATIVE
He is King. He matters. He is King. He forgives. He is King He is King. He attends a wedding. He is King. He attends a decision. He attends. He attends. He dances. We see. He is King. We siphon. The inheritors dance. He matters. He is King. We attend a wedding.
[Milton Resnick was a very visible & dynamic artist when we met him in the early 1960s, but beyond that he was also a persistent practitioner of poetry, less in a public sense than as a release for ideas & feelings that were a necessary supplement to his life’s work as a painter.
I think I’d have to write a very short book. Yes, I have wanted to write lots of books before. I think my first book would be about actually how to get into the position of having to write a book in the first place.…
The book would be red and white. That’s all I know. The colour of snow. I don’t think it would have pictures.
And yes, it is about isolation. Maybe the whiteness is the blank page. Maybe it’s the blank page.
(Recorded at Brompton Cemetery May 2001)
116. This Is a Story, by Anon.
… My dream would be to write it in a column. I’d have a big book but only write in an inch and-a-half space down the middle, with lots of paper on either side so you can draw pictures. If you are writing in short blasts, like I was saying, you can fill out the details with little stick figures doing stuff. If you can’t figure out how to write it, you can do it visually.
Poems and poetics