Christopher Patton

Student blog: Words the Rede Fulfill

A lot of ways to believe in Aphrodite, Ἀφρόδιτα, whom Sappho calls ἀθανάτ and ποικίλοφρον, athanatos, poikilophron, deathless and spangled in mind, as I wrote about once here.

She could be for you an outer being as real as mom or dad or auroch or furniture. Or did anyone ever believe in spirit beings in quite that way? Maybe only atheists ever have.

She could be something liminal, a threshold being, as she seems to have been for Sappho in that astonishing Hymn, nor outer nor inner, but bridging that perhaps in her time widening divide (Heidegger, comment here?). Gist of so many of her invocations being, come here, to me; bring her, to me. To, unto, into.

She could be what we, now, dissociated, have liked to call an “objective correlative,” an external object saturated with an inner state, longing for what we cannot have, let alone be.

Phenomenological to the core, I spit TSE on your objective correlative – as I know you wished to, too.

One thing more I learn from my student is, wiccans, like monty pythons, fear bunnies among them, as well they might. Check it out.

Another is, witchery is about intimacy, not harming what you’re close to, and seeing you’re close to all of it. Check that out.

Addendum. A book in the mail by my old teacher, Don Revell, out of which these lines, which I am still plumbing (as am I them all).

(In Paradise, remember to tell Hart Crane Tom Eliot was his kitten in the wilderness; the fact that Tom grew up into three white leopards is neither here nor there. That Bohemia should be an island crowded with magical shepherds is neither here nor there. Canons are funny that way.)

Neither here nor there because the Imagination is every where.

Student blog: Vonnegutnut

Here’s another found its footing right quick, or if not its foots, a nearby anatomical feature at the meeting of adjacent appendages – a spot commonly referred to as where the sun don’t shine, though in KV’s cult-iconic rendering, oddly redolent of an asterisk, which I know you know is named for star, which our sun is one of. Is the sun a place the sun don’t shine?

Anyway, said star is, here, home base and icon, by which I think our author may have out-gutsied Vonnegut. Too, I can imagine Vonnegut saying: You think life is bad with an asshole? Imagine life without one.

You can see I’m overcompensating for my discomposure by expatiating and Latinizing. But it’s a kickass blog, w/ word-image mashups, witty capricious hyperlinking, genuine irreverent homage to Mr. V., and real live thinking- and feeling-through of what a blog can do to keep his mischief alive. Go find it here.

Student blog: finch binch

So here we are in migraine land, and one thing I can tell you? Reading disjunctive avant-garde poetry, even the charming sort doing songbirds and you’re set to teach it tomorrow – not so much fun when the words are sound-and-light-knives.

Thought instead I’d begin the happy work of spreading the word of my students’ blogs. Here’s one that’s found its footing (and feathering and yes taloning) right quick. finch binch. It’s bad it’s sassy it’s rude. It’s got a chip on its shoulder you get closer it turns out’s a bird might be live might be dead.

I’ll let it speak most for itself in situ (go there! do!) but quick what its author says of it:

from videos to mod podge collages to pictures of birds doing people things to documentation of the bird wake I once held just expect lotsa bird stuff and nestle on in

That’s a prose style and ¾.

Whitman, “This Compost”

Source o’ the source o’ this blog.

Biblioklept

“This Compost”

Walt Whitman

Something startles me where I thought I was safest,
I withdraw from the still woods I loved,
I will not go now on the pastures to walk,
I will not strip the clothes from my body to meet my lover the sea,
I will not touch my flesh to the earth as to other flesh to renew me.

O how can it be that the ground itself does not sicken?
How can you be alive you growths of spring?
How can you furnish health you blood of herbs, roots, orchards, grain?
Are they not continually putting distemper’d corpses within you?
Is not every continent work’d over and over with sour dead?

Where have you disposed of their carcasses?
Those drunkards and gluttons of so many generations?
Where have you drawn off all the foul liquid and meat?
I do not see any of it…

View original post 395 more words

Be wheat and sway hey la hey

This one composted from a homophonic translation of folio 89V of The Exeter Book.

89V ED — Click once and twice for a zoom happening.

Been a long teaching stretch. They’re working hard and tired, I’m working hard and tired, these compressed summer courses, hmm. Well, we’re halfway there. They’ve spent the week getting blogs up and running, and are making some interesting forays. Latte art, penny textures, Vonnegut on where the sun don’t shine. Over the next while I mean to post ties (ligatures, holdfasts) to their adventures.

Something rhizomatic about blog world. Someone should write something about that sometime.

Mm, quick check says, rhizome’s got co-opted by some digitalists and some corporatists, so nevermind maybe. But here’s a picture from/of the origin. Fans of Deleuze and Guattari will know that’s a bad joke.

From Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

First salad

K all those foodies who go on? about first freshness and all that? and I and you gag? Well I take it back.

Wee as it was, this little salad, from my teensy way late raised bed, oh my. That little yellowy-orangey tomato finished finishing off my childish childhood aversion to tomatoes raw – so sweet. Radishes, mesclun, snap peas, ah.

WILLIAM LOGAN.

THIS IS WHAT THE RED WHEELBARROW DEPENDS ON.

YES I HAVE THE WORDS IN THE MEANT ORDER.

READ THIS PLEASE TO SAVE US ALL.

So little depends on William Logan

OMG this makes me mad. I’m delighted the source for Williams’s Red Wheelbarrow has been putatively found. But this? THIS?

“When we read this poem in an anthology, we tend not to think of the chickens as real chickens, but as platonic chickens, some ideal thing,” William Logan, the scholar who recently discovered Mr. Marshall’s identity, said in an interview.

DO YOU NOT KNOW HOW TO READ A POEM SIR.

I do not wish to wish to commit violence against any person nor semblance of one. I propose instead we strike the pronoun “we” from the human vocabulary. Then he couldn’t utter such crud.

Oh, read the article (scription or paywall bust needed), see if I’m wrong. Strikes me as one in which every sentence is superficially right and the whole’s deeply benighted.

Then read the poem (free to all the world). Strikes me as one in which each word magnifies its neighbour to infinity.

Platonic chickens! Maybe send us some platonic rain?

No one tells you when to breathe. These hands.

A second effort at scriptural overlay. (First pass was scruptrual and I may stick with that.) First was here. This one I think the composition’s a bit livelier.

Working with phrases talismanic to me for deep and private reasons. I have trouble with such language, artistically, because it won’t let me go, but won’t convert easily to poem, either – won’t get adequately ironic, won’t have the transparent sentiment washed from its smeary face. So this here’s a try at that.

A try at what, do you mean? At being oblique enough for the spirit of the current moment of our art. Which is my spirit too oh trust me. Obliquity, and, yet, a core sample. Knowing the core empty I still find me trudging there for a sample.

The source text for this’un:

Thanks for reading. For reals.

Pee, ess, this one wants to spin. Tried to set it in motion as a GIF but couldn’t find a way, w/ my limited skill set and prog means, to get it working. Am signed up for first date with Flash at the end of the month. Am hopeful, heart in throat.

Student work: Compost mural

A mural my students made last week in class. The prompt: using only the materials you have on hand, or can forage from the surrounding environment without breaking the law or hurting anyone’s feelings, express your understanding of “the art of compost.” Oh, and no legible text, other than found text.

Here it’s, as composted through my iPhone:

Interesting to watch them work. Each one herself, himself, just about perfectly. Last year I gave this, every one worked pretty much on their lonesome, class dynamics, long story, and it did come out okay. This time, some leaned toward solo, some into duo, some asked as to overview, but as they felt their way into the actual question at hand – are we one or are we many – those arrangements softened and shifted.

That is, as they composted their thinking, they found a rhythm where each had room to breathe, or so it seemed to me, and nice to see. Nice to be part of just in watching. Here ’tis, as panorama,

Compost mural 2015 — Click on me to see (and again) compost understood

Sometime soon, a post on breath, breathing, the breath, which I’ve been thinking and not-thinking about, these days of hot high still air all round. How’s it I ever thought my breath was anyone else’s to order around? That’s my little bit cryptic thought of an evening, after a day hiking up at Baker, forest fire haze out of BC hanging on air, dulling Baker and Shuksan to the eye, but someone or something was watching lupines and mimulus shivering in wind bits, and what’s wind but earth’s breath, what we’re in.

Occam’s Razor

The student journal for which I serve as faculty advisor is, a bit belatedly, hanging out among the electrons. Occam’s Razor, we got Burroughs’s cutups, Harry Smith’s psychedelic animations, Coriolanus, social media in China, diatoms in your gas tank.

These guys done a great job in, oh let me tell you, some trying conditions. Or I’ll skip the tell you and you’ll trust me. For reals though check it out. Asses are kicked in it.