To begin, a false ending, as one picks up from the past to leave in the present, which we drag along a habit we have outgrown but cannot leave. So the portal draws an iris, dilating days to gather what will not be hidden, or hidden in its place.
Welcome, then, & stay a while, & keep the wolves in the wings, tearing the red curtains, a growling engine for our supernal machine, cast among the leaves.
Why start here, reader writer. Instead proceed to any page, & this place will be here when you step on one or another portal. In all cases, leave safe passage to other devices.
& yet there is time for three poems of varying lengths just as any episode is durational, according to its set, a musical event in color.
So we wander the byways of our last lapse, & read only at a glance. Still no blame for that, tied as we are to screens on which the new season is projected, casting an image for & aft, a shift at seeing.
And before you know it there’s room for more. Face ripped off the building, fresh lumber & grunge spilling outside. There’s a hole in the leaves & what looks like sky ashimmer but might as well be crushed glass animals. The approach is asymptotic.
Just then a fellow traveler, also a stranger but for a moment, asks the way. Of course, we go together & arrive at the same stop. We seek a clearing, a new perimeter under the guide of the overhead announcement. Enough of these trained tones.
Hadn’t we seen it somewhere before, fixed as it was with an oval portal of glass, so that we see ourselves seeing ourselves through. At the service of art, a door to the stairs & a window on a balcony overlooking a courtyard sculpture park, no escape from the convention. Ah well we had it both ways, as history & as presence.
At your age, the deeper you, there would have been more to say, but those books were already written, & though they are long out of print they are still well in circulation. No need then to append the parade. Much of life seems to be these breaths between sentences. Have you tried the hive? Are we quite buried now?
It is at home that everything feels its way toward accumulating purpose. A boy & his guardian without plush toy, teens arranged by age then height reading the future. We could have known. & again the clock hits quarter to or quarter after, & a hush falls over the intercom.
Ring around the portal, some day this too will be worn. Return to the sentence of your youth. Never have we been so close to doom, but isn’t that the way.
How quickly we put down all we learned before, & wonder if the crackling is in the speaker or the ears. Of course it is. & what we know can hurt just as much as what we never know hits us. & is it truly always 4:36 somewhere, or is it just the way the the quality of light plays across the magazine? All this among the traffic of answers, each according to its format. But how is it in the world today, into which a version of this may appear for a brief glimpse at what lies before. We see us as we aren’t. Which is enough to keep the ratings high, but not high enough to keep us on the level playing field of our concerns, whatever new catastrophe this week brings. The great scale of time is at our sighs, nudging the horizon. Would that we were half massed at happy hour just out of the sun, still time to kill the dinner bell before the shows are on. Remember that.
It must have been twenty years ago, or in a picture book, you saw that piece. It hasn’t aged well, but who are you to say. It hasn’t aged well. The audience sits still while the livestock becomes a blur, but the caption does nothing for us. When did we begin to distinguish postmillennial comedy? Whoever laughs last laughs longer than the rest. Here’s one for the feeling, two for the headstone, flee for the portal, let’s go go go.
That was one way, but it could have gone another, so that as we hurtle from the teens our elders make waves from the comfort of their phones. Of course we can’t guess what next season will bring: flood or famine, big hit or total bomb, the forecast calls for more forecasting.
How long are books anyway. Long enough to get the job of forgetting done. Where what is forgotten is the initial character, the one hand on the page. Who has been sent for revisions & came back with an armload of tombs. Where you were all the time.
Perhaps we have been a little careful about what we recall. Our ideas change with the reasons. Sentences, to turn a trope, have their purpose: to approach. Lines & lines have other ends, or none at all. No lines, that is. For we have everything, we need. Bury the lead, bury the lead.
What’s that you say? There’s a point to all this? Not your best bet. In short, others have this covered, & one day perhaps… well, that’s forecasting again, that old habit. Everything comes back in style one day, but not the same day. That’s the season, coming around.
There’s always an opening, except when you are dead, & then perhaps it’s all open so there is no opening. That you decided to walk down the sidewalk just so & not trample the dandelions or enter a yard speaks perhaps to your sense of self-preservation but also your faith in the path. Faith which is not implicitly self-reflective, like the portal that winks in the hedges.
Excited to tell you about this daffy new project, the lining of the spheres in a cascade of shamelessness, prime time. Blink & it’s all downhill. Hold your breath. Is now a good time to bring up that old gratitude. Only later did you learn she saw the future. Or was it just that she could make her daughter call.
What if we fed computers poems by Gertrude Stein, to teach them how to find their rhythm. Deep learning algorithms. And what if those computer poets taught us what they learned? Would Stein still be the mother of us all.
The thing about soft-loud-soft dynamics is we feel manipulated. Obs. But the other thing is we like to feel the build, and what comes next. Yes, Twin Peaks is a soap opera. No, we never promised not to name names.
In fact, let’s talk about how our favorite outlets make us feel. Relieved. But also attentive, & attention is the new currency. Or it was, earlier in the decade. Now it’s another dial to watch. Maybe that crescendo isn’t coming after all.
Research is what you call it. The remaindered days. Crank that wheel & watch the bookshelf sneak up on another self. Some instruments are built off key. The vegan head on the wall. This message brought to you by the letter carrier. Remember him in your Xmas prayers. The envelope is in the kitchen.
To begin, a false ending, as one picks up from the past to leave in the present, which we drag along a habit we have outgrown but cannot leave. So the portal draws an iris, dilating days to gather what will not be hidden, or hidden in its place.
Welcome, then, & stay a while, & keep the wolves in the wings, tearing the red curtains, a growling engine for our supernal machine, cast among the leaves.
Why start here, reader writer. Instead proceed to any page, & this place will be here when you step on one or another portal. In all cases, leave safe passage to other devices.
& yet there is time for three poems of varying lengths just as any episode is durational, according to its set, a musical event in color.
So we wander the byways of our last lapse, & read only at a glance. Still no blame for that, tied as we are to screens on which the new season is projected, casting an image for & aft, a shift at seeing.
And before you know it there’s room for more. Face ripped off the building, fresh lumber & grunge spilling outside. There’s a hole in the leaves & what looks like sky ashimmer but might as well be crushed glass animals. The approach is asymptotic.
Just then a fellow traveler, also a stranger but for a moment, asks the way. Of course, we go together & arrive at the same stop. We seek a clearing, a new perimeter under the guide of the overhead announcement. Enough of these trained tones.
Hadn’t we seen it somewhere before, fixed as it was with an oval portal of glass, so that we see ourselves seeing ourselves through. At the service of art, a door to the stairs & a window on a balcony overlooking a courtyard sculpture park, no escape from the convention. Ah well we had it both ways, as history & as presence.
At your age, the deeper you, there would have been more to say, but those books were already written, & though they are long out of print they are still well in circulation. No need then to append the parade. Much of life seems to be these breaths between sentences. Have you tried the hive? Are we quite buried now?
It is at home that everything feels its way toward accumulating purpose. A boy & his guardian without plush toy, teens arranged by age then height reading the future. We could have known. & again the clock hits quarter to or quarter after, & a hush falls over the intercom.
Ring around the portal, some day this too will be worn. Return to the sentence of your youth. Never have we been so close to doom, but isn’t that the way.
How quickly we put down all we learned before, & wonder if the crackling is in the speaker or the ears. Of course it is. & what we know can hurt just as much as what we never know hits us. & is it truly always 4:36 somewhere, or is it just the way the the quality of light plays across the magazine? All this among the traffic of answers, each according to its format. But how is it in the world today, into which a version of this may appear for a brief glimpse at what lies before. We see us as we aren’t. Which is enough to keep the ratings high, but not high enough to keep us on the level playing field of our concerns, whatever new catastrophe this week brings. The great scale of time is at our sighs, nudging the horizon. Would that we were half massed at happy hour just out of the sun, still time to kill the dinner bell before the shows are on. Remember that.
It must have been twenty years ago, or in a picture book, you saw that piece. It hasn’t aged well, but who are you to say. It hasn’t aged well. The audience sits still while the livestock becomes a blur, but the caption does nothing for us. When did we begin to distinguish postmillennial comedy? Whoever laughs last laughs longer than the rest. Here’s one for the feeling, two for the headstone, flee for the portal, let’s go go go.
That was one way, but it could have gone another, so that as we hurtle from the teens our elders make waves from the comfort of their phones. Of course we can’t guess what next season will bring: flood or famine, big hit or total bomb, the forecast calls for more forecasting.
How long are books anyway. Long enough to get the job of forgetting done. Where what is forgotten is the initial character, the one hand on the page. Who has been sent for revisions & came back with an armload of tombs. Where you were all the time.
Perhaps we have been a little careful about what we recall. Our ideas change with the reasons. Sentences, to turn a trope, have their purpose: to approach. Lines & lines have other ends, or none at all. No lines, that is. For we have everything, we need. Bury the lead, bury the lead.
What’s that you say? There’s a point to all this? Not your best bet. In short, others have this covered, & one day perhaps… well, that’s forecasting again, that old habit. Everything comes back in style one day, but not the same day. That’s the season, coming around.
There’s always an opening, except when you are dead, & then perhaps it’s all open so there is no opening. That you decided to walk down the sidewalk just so & not trample the dandelions or enter a yard speaks perhaps to your sense of self-preservation but also your faith in the path. Faith which is not implicitly self-reflective, like the portal that winks in the hedges.
Excited to tell you about this daffy new project, the lining of the spheres in a cascade of shamelessness, prime time. Blink & it’s all downhill. Hold your breath. Is now a good time to bring up that old gratitude. Only later did you learn she saw the future. Or was it just that she could make her daughter call.
What if we fed computers poems by Gertrude Stein, to teach them how to find their rhythm. Deep learning algorithms. And what if those computer poets taught us what they learned? Would Stein still be the mother of us all.
The thing about soft-loud-soft dynamics is we feel manipulated. Obs. But the other thing is we like to feel the build, and what comes next. Yes, Twin Peaks is a soap opera. No, we never promised not to name names.
In fact, let’s talk about how our favorite outlets make us feel. Relieved. But also attentive, & attention is the new currency. Or it was, earlier in the decade. Now it’s another dial to watch. Maybe that crescendo isn’t coming after all.
Research is what you call it. The remaindered days. Crank that wheel & watch the bookshelf sneak up on another self. Some instruments are built off key. The vegan head on the wall. This message brought to you by the letter carrier. Remember him in your Xmas prayers. The envelope is in the kitchen.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jeff T. Johnson is the author of Trouble Songs: A Musicological Poetics (punctum books, 2018). His writing has appeared in Sink Review, PEN America, Jacket2, and elsewhere. He writes the music and culture series Book Album Book at Fanzine, and is at work on a performative critical investigation of analog-digital interface, language-oriented poetry, digital language art, and experimental electronic music called Janky Materiality. He lives in Philadelphia.
ABOUT THE MANUSCRIPT
The portal was conceived in early spring 2017. It was written while I was between cities and stages in my life, and was thinking about how poetry, poetics, TV, music, and film influence my writing and being in the world. More specifically, I was thinking about mortality, how people’s entrance into and exit from the world of the living might leave traces in art and literature, and how we live there too, whether or not we are directly responsible for those traces. Even more specifically, I was thinking about John Ashbery’s book Three Poems, which he has suggested could be read as one watches television, with varying levels of attention and changing channels as we wish. I thought also about his mortality, as he was in failing health. And I thought about how I was about the age he was when he wrote Three Poems. I decided it was time to write a long prose poem, and immediately settled upon writing in three columns whose width would create pseudo line breaks and whose movement up and down the page would invite the eye and mind to wander. I imagined it would take a year to write, but I ended up working on it in three phases over two years. In the first phase I wrote in the cloud with whatever device I was carrying—phone, tablet, laptop—picking up where I had left off without rereading what I had last written. The second phase involved making analog and digital recordings to explore linear and nonlinear writing and reading processes. The third phase was to write into the poem in a nonlinear fashion; whereas I had begun to record and perform the poem by skipping around and reading semi-randomly, making quick decisions about what to read next and when to stop reading, now I was making quick decisions about where to insert new strophes. In that third phase, a new matrix of formal influences took hold, and turned the portal on its side: books in landscape orientation, including another Ashbery book, As We Know, Fred Moten’s The Feel Trio, Emily Abendroth’s ]Exclosures[, and Brian Teare’s Doomstead Days. Along the way I was also influenced by Rosmarie Waldrop, Lyn Hejinian, Rachel Zolf, Bhanu Kapil, and Nathaniel Mackey. The opening pages, from which this excerpt comes, suggest different possibilities for reading, and here I’ll reiterate that you are invited to skip around, in the spirit of the portal’s concerns with multiple temporal, spatial, and textual consciousness.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jeff T. Johnson is the author of Trouble Songs: A Musicological Poetics (punctum books, 2018). His writing has appeared in Sink Review, PEN America, Jacket2, and elsewhere. He writes the music and culture series Book Album Book at Fanzine, and is at work on a performative critical investigation of analog-digital interface, language-oriented poetry, digital language art, and experimental electronic music called Janky Materiality. He lives in Philadelphia.
ABOUT THE MANUSCRIPT
The portal was conceived in early spring 2017. It was written while I was between cities and stages in my life, and was thinking about how poetry, poetics, TV, music, and film influence my writing and being in the world. More specifically, I was thinking about mortality, how people’s entrance into and exit from the world of the living might leave traces in art and literature, and how we live there too, whether or not we are directly responsible for those traces. Even more specifically, I was thinking about John Ashbery’s book Three Poems, which he has suggested could be read as one watches television, with varying levels of attention and changing channels as we wish. I thought also about his mortality, as he was in failing health. And I thought about how I was about the age he was when he wrote Three Poems. I decided it was time to write a long prose poem, and immediately settled upon writing in three columns whose width would create pseudo line breaks and whose movement up and down the page would invite the eye and mind to wander. I imagined it would take a year to write, but I ended up working on it in three phases over two years. In the first phase I wrote in the cloud with whatever device I was carrying—phone, tablet, laptop—picking up where I had left off without rereading what I had last written. The second phase involved making analog and digital recordings to explore linear and nonlinear writing and reading processes. The third phase was to write into the poem in a nonlinear fashion; whereas I had begun to record and perform the poem by skipping around and reading semi-randomly, making quick decisions about what to read next and when to stop reading, now I was making quick decisions about where to insert new strophes. In that third phase, a new matrix of formal influences took hold, and turned the portal on its side: books in landscape orientation, including another Ashbery book, As We Know, Fred Moten’s The Feel Trio, Emily Abendroth’s ]Exclosures[, and Brian Teare’s Doomstead Days. Along the way I was also influenced by Rosmarie Waldrop, Lyn Hejinian, Rachel Zolf, Bhanu Kapil, and Nathaniel Mackey. The opening pages, from which this excerpt comes, suggest different possibilities for reading, and here I’ll reiterate that you are invited to skip around, in the spirit of the portal’s concerns with multiple temporal, spatial, and textual consciousness.