Crystalline Sword - Tom Snarsky
I.
I’m not comfortable enough in November
The knife in my mind’s ankle
Second layer of icons on the desktop
Itemized list of raptures
I don’t understand why he’s using his voice
His kitten voice
Brick by brick by brick by brick
Rhyming with something from Frances the Mute
No idea how this will look on a phone screen
Lines dissolving before they come
The hopeless stacks of books
Thinking about Jon Anderson’s “The Inner Gate”
And noise poems
This didn’t start as an essay but now it is one
“The Inner Gate” lost its epigraph
From Borges
When it went in The Milky Way
The epigraph said:
My internet’s so slow right now
After all, what is writing
but controlled dreaming
I like it better without the epigraph
Which frames it too much I think
In dreaming
Noise poems are a little like dreams
Erik Hoel has a paper about how dreams
Are maybe just a thing for keeping
Our brains from getting too complacent
Noisy inputs they have to figure out
How to deal with
“The Inner Gate” is not a noise poem
But it’s an input like that
“A diary of aesthetic change.”
In the poem Anderson’s speaker
Follows a man
In a group of men who
“in a former life [...]
I had seen as my future.”
But the speaker also recognizes
In the man
His
“Terrible submission to the traps of the familiar,”
Which the speaker doubles a little
“In my singularity of following”
Anyway Anderson’s speaker is voyeuristic
He watches the man
“as he ate & read [...]
& as his light went out.”
From this voyeurism (sound
Familiar) comes a weird pang for violence
“If he had stepped
outside [/] I might have strangled
him, [/] Only to see
His face fill with blood. [//]
I desired a single, terrible event,
The passage from which would measure time.”
The speaker wants to take
His crystalline sword
Carve the real right in two
& not doing so
Means the end of real love
For him
“And if,
this morning, [/] I should turn
& touch your face
Or caress your throat lightly,
As if in love . . .
[//] This is not love, but care. [/] Yours
is the world [/] I dream in
when I fail to dream.”
This hits so much better without
The Borges epigraph
Imo
Not closing the book
Not back anywhere near
Where we started
Instead
Of cleaving
With the big lustrous blade
We get
“These are the raptures of falling in space forever.”
II.
Noise poems do not have to be good
Or even try
That is their power
III.
A noise poem is a way of still falling
Matt Hart already
Wrote the definitive essay on this
Here: http://www.jamtartsmagazine.com/on-noise-and-noise-making
But here I am so let’s look at some
Noise poems for example
These* aren’t getting attributed sorry
& in fact before we continue
Go find a noise poem for your own pet example
Or write one
I’ll wait
Got one okay
What was it like to read all those
Yours included
Hopefully you just started skipping down
Not really reading
But don’t skip the part about finding
/writing your own poem
That’s too important
What did it feel like trying to make something
Out of all those pieces
& just to be clear those were probably
Pretty tame noise poem choices
On my part
For example they still had words in them
Mostly
Which is not necessary for a noise poem
A noise poem can be literally whatever the fuck you want
Or don’t want
It can be your father-in-law playing the jazz stylings of Candy Dulfer
On the television
It can be a req. 7 max damage Crystalline Sword
In Guild Wars 1
With no inscription or damage modifier
You know best what a noise poem is for you
Just take what/how you usually think
Walk it way out into an open field
Where the young deer are grazing unsupervised
& remember you’re only a hundred yards
From where you dumped the body
Of that dead rabbit
The one you watched die
In a cardboard box
IV.
Cruel metric grace
Let’s call it
That little miracle
When noise poems carry
A signature
Despite everything they’re doing to not
“Make sense” or admit an Andersonish following
Prynne’s recent white noise poems
Don’t you dare call them late I won’t let you
Smell like the OED & Oxbridge
& I’d know a J. D. Nelson poem anywhere
I love it
When Hoa Nguyen tells us to
Write Fucked Up Poems
http://www.coconutpoetry.org/nguyen1.htm
& the roses all over that directive
Scooch us over to the beetles in “Hennecker’s Ditch”
The ones I want tattooed on me
Forever
*I left out my favorite noise poem
Which I had to redownload from Twitter
To share with you
**but then again citation is a form of love, and it would be deeply unfair to those poets above to
whom I owe a whole lot not to give them the credit they’re obviously due, so here are the poems
you buzzed through:
“Owl Wool” by Eric Baus,
“In Fine Balance” by J. H. Prynne,
“I am speaking of the trash in that cube” and “the clown in the tired tree” and “the plaid beverage” and
“X” by J. D. Nelson,
“Sorry is a Girl, Grown Up” by Hannah Regel,
“Unto Greek Fire” by J. H.
Prynne, “Black Glass Soliloquy” by Ben Mirov,
the poem you found (or, I’d honestly prefer, wrote),
and “The Crocus Turn and Gods” by Joseph Ceravolo.
For surviving all that propriety, here’s the best noise poem ever written, imo, by Veronica Forrest-Thomson:
<3
Bio:
Tom Snarsky is a special education math teacher at Malden High School in Malden, Massachusetts, USA. His chapbook Threshold is available from Another New Calligraphy. He lives in Chelsea, MA with his wife Kristi and their three cats: Niles, Daphne, and Asparagus.