elsewhen & dmtrlzng by Kenneth M Cale

elsewhen

dmtrlzng

Kenneth M Cale is a poet and collage maker, originally from Scotland, but now living in Oregon. His work has appeared in various UK and US journals, most recently Burning House: Facing Up to The Future and 3am. https://twitter.com/kmcale81

Two Poems by Rus Khomutoff

Zenith temptation

Annex the corporeal night

holy antrum laminating the postmedial push

in an endless series of rituals

that ward off rather than

circumvent

dive into the monster versal

hollow earth, abyss & apex, virgin keen

the sprawl of new immaterialities, interruptions

ruin, allegory, melancholy

anonymous calling

nonsensuous reality rendering everything

as an instrument toward the end of a spectacle

deep breath asylum whim surge

this zenith temptation

Atrocious verse of silence
and toad of nothingness
atrocious page where the wind is silent
territory isolated from melancholy
treasures of insomnia and the plain of silence
over which the rain and words fails
and the wind destroys everything except the word
-Leopoldo Maria Panero

Radia


My heart is elsewhere camouflaged by the
poetic phantom power
church of clarity eminence front
cardinal lamentation dwell
melancholy body sacrilege
tattoo highway insomnia punk equinox
superhorse transfiguration tesseract
deacon anarchy untitled child
and the night ocean I neglected to mention

My name is Rus Khomutoff and I am an experimental language poet base in Brooklyn, NY. My poetry has appeared in San Francisco review of books, Proprose magazine, Mojave Heart review and Hypnopomp. In 2018 I published my debut collection Immaculate Days (Alien Buddha Press)

from Concerning The Henbane Bird by Will Alexander

"...I

the phalanx of urgency 

being form who imbibes fire from lianas 

who shatters barren weight of unsealed discovery  

having emerged from death 

I've been suspended over eons 

surviving 'three mass extinction'  

surviving each degree of early mountain building  okay that's cool we doing 

to the terrestrial gaze I am famished

I seem inflated with mercury 

yet the light of my phonemes hail from above 

the Black Sea 

with its original slate of telepathy gone awry 

its intrinsic arcana damaged 

its pike-perch 

its sturgeon 

missing 

its sprays 

its whitings 

its mullets 

garrish with decline

I 

& the Lima Ocean polluted *

the Pacific 

intrinsically altered by tailings from Andean mining 

from unfit sewage pouring from Esmaraldas* 

then the San Vincente Gulf * 

the Bay of Valparaiso* 

'the Guyas River in Ecuador' 

alive with perpetual waste 

with raw exterior sewage 

dialectically 

there exists 'The Blas lslands* 

with their 'waters clear as glass' 

full of coral & trout & groupers 

unlike the mining scars evinced in New Caledonia *

these scars 

rife 

with nickel & copper 

with lead zinc & chrome 

my original death condoned by cold 

by ethers from the mines 

to those with blurred intetnal optics

I could be a lorikeet from eastern Tasmania 

or a golden pheasant from the mountains of China 

or a failed murmur 

or a dulled civilian riddle 

certainly not instinctual precision 

but a finely wrought chariot purblind with dioxins

I have not arisen from asphysia 

to share in legislation 

or to battle over various levels of dysfunction 

of course 

the politics of de-thronement & solitary acquisition 

being no more than a flaw in the fort of transition 

no

I do not seek power adorned by quotidian bribery 

awash in niggling mental capture 

but of the higher range of cobalt 

of a solar furnace of rays 

with my alchemical ratios 

with my semantics which splinters into spectrums 

 extending 

beyond visible calibration 

beyond its attendant neural focus 

with visual degree developed beyond blank neutrino blizzards 

being by no barometer related to deficient Gothic embranglement 

but in keeping with an alternating blizzard of trigonomic pontoons 

an electromagnetic reasoning bluish with alterity 

with tension to re-exist 

to blaze again 

immersed in electrical imminence 

certainly 

not flight as electrical enfeeblement 

as deleterious enclosure 

but as sunquake 

as biological abstentia 

with strange hormonal phosphenes 

bereft of pharmaceutical depravity 

this being 

neither submission nor error 

nor that which ignites 

a mirror within starving python's water 

one could call this moisture 

filled with ashen reptile meridians 

condensed by seeming fractious defeat 

this amounts to hypnopompic warrens 

in ungainfull braille 

sullied by hesitation 

like balletic nullification 

related to subconscious inklings 

that periodically arise 

in the partial reunion of sleepless Satan monkeys 

now being the era of fauna 

as the Sun explodes inside itself 

provoking caustic vertigo in the realm 

so that general living is constrained 

by stony unhealable quanta 

so that the pythons mentioned 

the lorikeets 

the squid

the micro-foundations that fulminate in krill 

blighted 

scarred with retrogression 

this silent in-sonorous struggle 

full of sodium unleashing its ratios by fatigue 

by dioxins harbored in blasphemous testing ground 

the fauna of Earth consumed by disruption

& land being no more than smoke 

being a fissure of black diamonds 

cracking 

under ill-gotten methane..."

Glossary

Lima Ocean- The Pacific Ocean off the coast of Lima

Esmaraldas- Coastal city of Ecuador with inadequate infrastructure whose sewer is designed to accommodate no more than 30,000 people while it's current population is just under 200,000.

San Vincente Gulf- Gulf in Chile contaminated "by pesticide residues."

 Valparaiso- Chilean bay spoiled by sewage.

San Blas Islands- On the Caribbean side of Panama "halfway to the coast of Colombia inhabited by 35,000 Kuna Indians, a paradise with clear glass waters" , yet "threatened by the Panamanian National guard" attempting to "annex some of their coastal lands" , with the Panamanian government seeking to log the watershed for cattle ranching, as well as threats from foreign fishing incursion.

New Caledonia- French territory in the South Pacific that "remains one of the world's largest producers of laterite. It represents " about 97% of the total value of exports."

A note on the text: This is an excerpt from Concerning The Henbane Bird. It is channeled through the voice of an Andean Hillstar the 2nd largest hummingbird on Earth. It is a shamanic bird that empowers the poem that extends over 300 pages. There are 2 other poems that go with The Henbane Bird, the other 2 are entitled On Solar Physiology and The Ganges. The 3 poems combine and climb over 600 pages in length. The whole is entitled The Combustion Cycle, concerned with shamanism as lingual transmutation.

Will Alexander- Poet, novelist, playwright, essayist, philosopher, visual artist, pianist, who has authored over 30 books and chapbooks. He has read at venues stretching from Rotterdam to Los Angeles and is currently poet-in-residence at Beyond Baroque Poetry Center in Venice California. In addition to this he is a Whiting Fellow, a California Arts Council Fellow, a Pen Oakland winner, an American Book Award winner, as well being both a recipient of the Jackson Prize for poetry in 2016, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from Beyond Baroque Poetry Center in 2018. He resides in Los Angeles.

The Multiverse Awaits: An Interview with Irene Koronas

Paronomasia by Irene Koronas

I am happy to present this conversation with Irene Koronas. Irene is the author of numerous collections of xperimental writing. As well as being Managing Editor of X-Peri, a stream for high experimentalism, Irene is an accomplished visual artist with a keen eye for the marvelous. We had the chance to discuss her past & present work, specifically: the evolution of holyrit (which is forthcoming from BlazeVOX [books]) and where it stands in her Grammation Series, among other topics.

DCW: I’m interested in knowing more about the process of evolution this work has undergone. How long have you been working on your Grammaton Series? When did you know you were on to something with your initial ideas? How did your work evolve to this current form?

IK: The Grammaton Series began with Codify (Editions du Cygne, 2017). Although I had been publishing collections of experimental writing (asemics, vispo and conceptualism) for over 20 years in the form of full-length collections, chapbooks, handmade & digital books, it was Codify that illuminated the evanescent techniques of advanced amalgamation. To “codify” is to reduce or arrange into a code. Codify extolls the virtues of a digital remix culture, best exemplified by a staccato posthumanism whose praxis places the psychopathology of identity into a mausoleum worthy of the Mount Auburn Cemetery.

With Codify, the divine unit of measurement, the Grammaton, was unleashed, leading to ninth iota (The Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 2018), declivities (BlazeVOX, 2018) and now to holyrit, the fourth volume in the Grammaton Series. As Codify created the codices for a postlanguage Grammaton, ninth iota employed the logos and apeiron of Greek Mythology to create a posthuman pharmakon, replete with canonic semaphores. Its title, ninth iota, conveys simultaneously the nine muses in Greek Mythology and iota, the ninth letter of the Greek alphabet. In the New Testament: “until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law.” (Mt 5:18) Measurement is once again extolled—the Grammaton. With declivities, from the Latin declivitat-, declivitas, from declivis sloping down, from de- + clivus slope, hill; akin to Latin clinare, the Mount Athos heights of ninth iota slope downward toward a divine stasis of hybridized forms. These Grammatons take the form of Quetzalcoatl, onyx, Louise Bourgeois, décolleté, hagmira, lascaux, pap test and syriac codex 708, among others. The post-narrative bricolage of declivities syphons its agonic core from an infinite array of meanings, in potentiâ. Currently, with holyrit, Volume IV of the Grammaton Series, the Greek Ἰησοῦς (Iesous) or Jesus the Greek Χριστός (Christos), serves as the ancient triumph of faith in God. However resolute, holyrit spins a wicked title back on itself with sardonica. “Rit” may be an abbreviation for ritardando (gradually decreasing in tempo). “Rit” may refer to the Middle English ritten (“to cut, score, slit, tear”). “Rit” may be a play on Writ, Holy Writ, or Rit Dye. Whichever suits, a devotional ethos is paired with a wide reach of narrative strains.    

            It became clear to me that the evolution of my work prior to Codify was comprised of a hyper-layered, non-linearity, who narrative defied the traditional rules of grammar and prosody. This augmented narrative, prior to the Grammaton Series, however semiotically complex, still maintained an indirect relationship to my personal identity (self portrait drawn from many, Ibbetson Street Press, 2007 Pentakomo Cyprus, Červená Barva Press, 2010). With the Grammaton Series, I teleported out of identity’s stale lyric on a vessel constructed by thousands of Grammatons through the Einstein-Rosen Bridge, to land in postlanguage’s xperimentalism, with an “x.” (In other word, I met Daniel Y. Harris.)            

DCW: There is a flowing music your work accentuates. It is undeniably fun to read aloud. Is this something you aim for while writing? What does your writing process look like?

IK: Musicality is, indeed, a key ingredient. In fact, I hear an amalgam of iambic pentamenter and double dactyls, mixed with slam beats and the divine liturgy of a Greek Psaltis. Of course, John Cage’s 4’33” (“Four minutes, thirty-three seconds”) is within tonal proximity but the true nature of sound occurs innately in my mind’s eye. Here’s an example from “elias:” opus 110 in a flat touch, kitsch’s ride/on ingres paper. praise putter rat. Assonance meets dissonance meets alliteration meets the blank. With the blank, void loaded with black matter, open to currents, the writing process ensues. I write longhand in collections of notebooks, while reading dozens of books simultaneously. I transfer my notebooks to my computer. For holyrit, at present, that list of books includes: Daniel Matt’s, The Zohar Volume 1, Yersusalmi’s Zakhor, Fine’s Physician of the Soul, AR Ammons, The Complete Poems, Ernst Haekel’s Art Forms in Nature, Salvador Dali’s Diary of a Genius, Borges, Collected Fiction, Haddon’s Head-Hunters, Thompson’s On Growth and Form, Gilot’s and Lake’s Life with Picasso, A Kierkegaard Anthology, The Diaries of Paul Klee, Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Gardener’s Louise Bourgeois, Ulmer’s Heuristics, Blanchot’s The Space of Literature, Elder Sophrony’s I Know a Man in Christ, Hieromonk Isaac’s Elder Paisios of Mount Athos, The Orthodox Study Bible and Sophocleus’ Icons of Cyprus. In a few months, the list will change.

Codify by Irene Koronas

DCW: I’m wondering about your interest in mathematics. And music. And iconography. And art in general. And I imagine you study quite a bit. How do you find (or create) the threads that connect this wide array of interests to each other? Where do your studies take you these days?

IK: Mathematics—in Codify each piece in the 129 page collection is arranged by non-sequential numbers. The first piece is “115.” The last piece is “47.” “24” precedes “1” and “103” follows “24.” In the Grammaton, a string of bits is random, such as (log₂ n) and π. The decimal digits of π constitute an infinite sequence and never repeat in a cyclical fashion. Codify maintains the same equivalency.

ninth iota, as mentioned earlier, is itself máthēma. In the piece “orestes,” his paramour/tack hood/pious sequel/ “is” bound by 0, as in the piece “hesiod,” (begot)/overbold/cyprus 35° 10’ 0”N/33° 22’ 0” E. In “hesiod 2,” the piece concludes with a mathematical epiphany: (1912) pp vii kinematic perspective/(1954, 1968) p3 2006 197ff note 64/3836 holds nearer 120 than 150/2011 p309 n29 9780199292011 use (albeit mid and erratic)/2010 p7 9780199803033 (1987) 0-8014-1874-7 (1985) volume1/(2007) black well universe (1981) from homer to often.

declivities reaches a divine calculous informed by geomorphology. declivities slopes with 47 ½ by 23 ¾ inch/emblem, or by hecatomb toss/eight spikes, augmented in hook helixes/in skinny/charcoal, linked via issuance pluck/60x60. Geomorphology meets Lurianic kabbalah via zero in 0 on page 116 of declivities: digits fell spot/on zero seats/one vicesimal/one zip cycle /fraction/tohu v’ bohu. Finally, if a quantum resolution is possible within untarded variability, dodecathlons 12 pod/pene revvi/an outcast uzz. This entomologic uzz releases a winged Grammaton, and holyrit is launched with 3:12-20’s 6:4 untie/(17:28) short/corrupt tray. This is best rendered as the P versus NP problem garment secretases/nuclear table 4/1.13 1.14 1.15 1.17-18/1.18 70, 21262, 90, 104 39,/44, 46 134 1003 104; 128/1.29-34 11, 39, 40, 45, 219/224 1.29 37, 39, 40, 45, 19.

Iconography—my literary work (poetics, asemics, haptics, ergodics, conceptualists & postdataist), comprised of ten volumes of xperimental poetics divided between “The Grammaton Series,” “Collections” and “Collaboratives” and hundreds of handmade, digital and chapbooks, is most passionately informed by a lifetime’s devotion to the creation of visual art—a multivariate visual art titled “Sauvage Art.” Its ethos is an amalgam of L’Amour Fou, Neoprimitivism, Scifi, Film Noir, Posthumanism, Classical Orthodox Iconography, German Expressionism, French Surrealism and Neodadism, illuminating the vast complexity and humor of male/female relationships. Mediums include: painting, collage, bricolage, découpage and mixed-media assemblage.

Irene Koronas Website

Irene Koronas, Sauvage Art

DCW: Creating a new poesis for the 21st century is quite a tall order. And I think no one is as capable of accomplishing this as you and your cohorts. How do you measure success in this pursuit? What plans do you have for your writing, your Grammaton Series, and/or xperimentalism in general? 

IK: A New Poesis—the experimentalist poesis with an “e” can be generally codified as Dadaism, Modernism, Imagism, Surrealism, Pataphysics, Fluxus, Oulipo, Absurdism, Postmodernism, Deconstructionism, Language, Digital, Flarf, Haptics, Ergodics, Asemics, Epigenetics, Concretism, Conceptualism and Uncreative Writing. A great resource for experimentalism is UBU Web.

            Xperimentalism with an “X” is at the forefront of the new poesis. X-Peri, the journal co-founded by Daniel Y. Harris and me, has the tagline: X-Peri: A Stream for High Experimentalism. “High” is the holy grail in our tagline. “High” is the rubicon, the anticyclone, the GHRH, the infra, the supra, the erikoinen as boson, fermion, gluon, lepton, photon & quark, extracts the “X” in xperimentalism by X = k x(1 - x). Advanced, high experimentalism is pure rarity, the rarefied zone of individual talent, uncoerced by the vox populi of a given epoch. It is by virtue of this rarefied talent that we will employ the Grammaton to measure our success. The new poesis will be partly syncretic in that will syphon the best of experimentalism with an “e,” and partly ferociously original in the creation of a lingua franca based on the posthuman ethos of the algorithm, or the “x” of xperimentalism.

            A further measurement indicator of the success of this new poesis will be gaged by the number of literary blogs, digital magazines and collections who are and will be devoted strictly to advancing high xperimentalism. Lastly, as regards my Grammaton Series, the multiverse post holyrit awaits its écriture.

TALMUDY BLUES: OR HERE TODAY GONE GEMARA II by Adeena Karasick

For Michael Wex

Said the lexicon to the dialect:

Fu*kin’ idiom –

Sometimes this poem feels like it’s

not the brightest candle in the menorah

that it was behind the door when the brains were being given out

That it operates like a wise person

At night.

And even though it’s 

all pulped up and pressed with polemical discord,

producing itself through performative memory and politics establishing its own force and affect 
of lived and embodied agency enabling a paradox of tam, timbre socio-cultural cues 
of ornamentation

like a messy meisse

finding its margins

it’s wearing its Talmudic lenses

waving its big yicchus

and groaning under the weight of its reference.

And though its schlepping its mental furniture

sometimes it’s doing so not well

knocking a teakettle --

And through a hetero-erotic outpouring

a perfect cleaving of the letters

secretly entwined in

a polyglotal heteronomy  --

Some of these words are already

of blessed memory.

Saying, may all your truths fall out –

But one.

And may it ache fiercely.

This poem, itself a translingual

spliced, polysemic undead dybbuk

all transubstantiated with

accents and inflections 

of radical necessity

and is complicit in its own undoing.

And if you don’t mind me saying so,

these letters look good for their age;

all dressed up to be messed up,

they are dropping their load.

This poem has a burden to bear:

And like no shtuppeh before the chuppeh

says, don’t eat it

before you read it.

*NOTE: Re title, in Yiddish a fukher is a fan

II

Gone is the lustre that lies longing through the shuttered gates

of sunwashed rubble, the gauged paste of narrowing displacement

girded in the burl

of skinside swirl

through the

sprig of ripe

albeit.

What can one see

in the picketed moor of loomed spool?

as lapsed apt porous spur slips

in the purring epoch. ellipse

So, lick the funicular

jiggling particulars sucking the sky

slick with ripped scripts of pulsing d’éspere

For, in the cathexis of unbalance

we are smashing hard

through prurient piers pierced logging shadows

in the flickening reflow / slow-stop swerve

of bursts, bands, bridled signals

*

And could it be a happy assonance

in the contiguous torrent?

These huddled borders screaming

against your skin fortressed by

weeping thresholds’ precipice.

So pass through me in the folded fancy

of cracked madness

You say pirate  

I say pirouette

contoured in shivering silhouette’s

wet arrêt / softened kisses’ brackets

pastures, pulsing

sleepless through

scarred triggers

Pass through me fleeced

in the nonce /

sensors of

fissured swarms

All framboissey-faire and

schikered up in the whet wait what?

Druthers by another other --

    Sometimes the poem grows like an onion.

                                                               And sometimes I wish it a sweet death --

  A truck filled with sugar should run over it.

You can’t live on light alone.




Adeena Karasick is a New York based Canadian poet, performer, cultural theorist and media artist and the author of ten books of poetry and poetics. Her Kabbalistically inflected, urban, Jewish feminist mashups have been described as “electricity in language” (Nicole Brossard), “proto-ecstatic jet-propulsive word torsion” (George Quasha), noted for their “cross-fertilization of punning and knowing, theatre and theory” (Charles Bernstein) "a twined virtuosity of mind and ear which leaves the reader deliciously lost in Karasick's signature ‘syllabic labyrinth’” (Craig Dworkin); “one long dithyramb of desire, a seven-veiled dance of seduction that celebrates the tangles, convolutions, and ecstacies of unbridled sexuality… demonstrating how desire flows through language, an unstoppable flood of allusion (both literary and pop-cultural), word-play, and extravagant and outrageous sound-work.” (Mark Scroggins). Most recently is Checking In (Talonbooks, 2018) and Salomé: Woman of Valor (University of Padova Press, Italy, 2017), the libretto for her Spoken Word opera co-created with Grammy award winning composer, Sir Frank London. She teaches Literature and Critical Theory for the Humanities and Media Studies Dept. at Pratt Institute, is Poetry Editor for Explorations in Media Ecology, 2018 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Award recipient and winner of the 2016 Voce Donna Italia award for her contributions to feminist thinking and 2018 winner of the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award. The “Adeena Karasick Archive” is established at Special Collections, Simon Fraser University. 

A Wind Has Blown The Rain Away And Blown The Clouds Away And All The Anxieties Away by hiromi suzuki

hiromi suzuki is a poet, artist living in Tokyo, Japan. The author of Ms. cried, 77 poems by hiromi suzuki (kisaragi publishing, 2013), logbook (Hesterglock Press, 2018) and INVISIBLE SCENERY (Low Frequency Press, 2018). Her works are published internationally in Otoliths, BlazeVOX, Empty Mirror, Hotel, Burning House Press, MOONCHILD MAGAZINE, Mookychick, Coldfront, and 3:AM Magazine. More work can be found at hiromisuzukimicrojournal.tumblr.com.
Twitter : @HRMsuzuki

the road to holy road by Heller Levinson

the road to holy road

sacredness                   circuitry

                   leeward

to spill into the envelope of holy

                                                     (arousal’s concubine

A-strings on fire

spun coincidentals

scouting absence in the dish towel

counting the exits in cessation

where contiguity shades into analogy & metonymy morphs into metaphor & synecdoche 
scrambles suggestion the hegemonic solution is a slow burning intercourse

upon the lingual mattress

the road is both low & high

circuitous & straight

the road is both perilous & safe

the command

is to ascend

in combinatorial seepage

Heller Levinson, the originator of Hinge Theory, lives in New York where he studies animal behavior.  His book, Un--, is planned for Spring publication (Black Widow Press, 2019).

Put A Straw In It And Suck The Word Choice Dry by CAConrad

A note on the text: This poem comes from "Resurrect Extinct Vibration," a (Soma)tic poetry ritual in 9 parts.  The main ingredient involves inducing a trance by saturating my body with recordings of recently extinct animals while lying on the ground across the US.  Another ingredient is drawing the animals on index cards with request for correspondence, leaving them across the nation in laundromats, coffee shops, etc., and I reply as ghost animals. "Saint Francis Safe Passages" is an activist ingredient, writing to elected officials to convince them we need thousands of land bridges across the US-highways for animals to cross into safety.  This is one of 108 poems resulting from the ritual.

CAConrad is a 2019 Creative Capital Fellow, and the author of 9 books of poetry and essays.  While Standing in Line for Death (Wave Books), received the 2018 Lambda Award.  A recipient of a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, they also received The Believer Magazine Book Award and The Gil Ott Book Award. Their work has been translated into Spanish, Greek, Polish, Norwegian, Portuguese, Danish and German.  They teach regularly at Columbia University in NYC, and Sandberg Art Institute in Amsterdam, and their poetry can be found online at http://bit.ly/88CAConrad.