J A C K E T # S E V E N | C O N T E N T S | H O M E P A G E |
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CONTEMPLATING
writing this review of Routine Disruptions: Selected Poems & Lyrics by Kenward Elmslie -- an excellent collection -- I've been unable to dislodge a picture from my mind. It is of Elmslie during a reading several years ago, with a large "hat" on, made by an artist, that used as its primary image a large brassiere. A man reading poetry with a brassiere on his head! This is an icon, for me, of Elmslie's work, its wild funniness, theatricality, brazenness, its love of art and objects. Cleanly designed strange or beautiful objects, as in poems, as poems, words as objects, but . . . this is not a doctrine, and the face below the bra-hat, Kenward Elmslie's pleased bemused own, never disappears. | |
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and I've been traveling ever since, (from "Feathered Dancers") | |
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(from "Tropicalism")
Kinky gentry into ransom crud used up. (from "Communications Equipment") | |
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| Never saw "action" ransacked my dance act Came up with a nance act Trek aids Sped up the decades Loved ones Re-re-re-re-re-re-re-reruns | |
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On the page it looks a bit like concrete poetry. "Girl Machine," which was also set to music, looks a lot like concrete poetry. A more "ordinary" song like "Brazil" (with the refrain "No extradition! Nya Nya Nya Nya Nya . . .") which is included in a section entitled "Song Lyrics I," displays the repetitions that song ordinarily includes and which permeate Elmslie's works called "poems." | |
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The faucetry demo has 4 4x4s. Subtexts. Food Love. It's a Moviola. Sex Love. Paired up like wed. Money Love. Moviola. ?eat? TV gameshow veer, Vanna batwings on rollerskates, humps the pristine blanks. Lingo frottage. Th, tirechain, on wintry country lane, her first diphthong. Th. Th. Th. Death Love, you big lummox! Th. Th. Death Love Moviola 4x4. | |
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but mine, how perverse! Form a hoop, you there. Mine, | |
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I Remember my father, in the middle of the night, waking me up to tell me my mother had died. The last thing she told him, so he said, was Be Kind. For a long time this stuck in my mind, as if it were an admonition of gigantic importance that applied to me too. | |
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Me, um, no deadbeat despite laughing stock enjambments. | |
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Alice Notley is the author of 25 books. Her latest is Mysteries of Small Houses (Penguin, 1998.) Two other recent books are The Descent of Alette (Penguin, 1996) and Selected Poems of Alice Notley (Talisman, 1993.) She lives in Paris with Douglas Oliver, with whom she edits Gare du Nord | |
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Artwork: details from the front cover of Tropicalism, by Kenward Elmslie, Z Press, Calais, Vermont, 1975; cover design by Joe Brainard, copyright © 1975, 1999 Estate of the late Joe Brainard; photograph of Kenward Elmslie copyright © 1975, 1999 Gerard Malanga; all rights reserved. | |
J A C K E T # 7
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