[In the final stages of preparing Barbaric Vast & Wild: An Assemblage of Outside & Subterranean Poetry with John Bloomberg-Rissman, I’m continuing to post excerpts on Poems and Poetics. Publication of the full volume is scheduled later this year from Black Widow Press as the de facto fifth installment of Poems for the Millennium. Earlier excerpts continue to be available in these spaces, most of them prior to final editing & recomposition. (J.R.)]
[Published previously in Poems and Poetics (blogger version) but revisited here in the context of a new project undertaken by me & Heriberto Yépez toward an experimental grand assemblage of poetry across all of the Americas & with consideration of the multiplicity of languages & poetries now native to those places. In the construction of such an assemblage Charles Bernstein has been & remains a close friend & collaborator. (J.R.)]
La musique est une chose étrange! -- Byron L'art? ... c'est l'art - et puis, Voilà tout. -- Béranger
1 Bound to your place those penultimate days Whose plot was impenetrable – – Myth-full, Dawn-pallid … – Life’s end a whisper summons its start: “I will not render you – no! I will raise you! …”
2 Bound to your place, those days so penultimate Once when you mirrored – each moment, each moment – That lyre that Orpheus lent us,
[In the course of a recent conversation with George Quasha & Charles Stein, the idea of “crazy wisdom” came up, as it often does, & led to a consideration of how it might or might not relate to the construction of a book of outside/outsider poetry & its relation to the art brut discourse of an earlier modernism. The figure on whom we focused was the Tibetan/Buthanese lama & poet Drukpa Kunley (1455 - 1529
Poems and poetics