Sexual Differences
Another Email Not Sent
This poem from the file of “Emails Not Sent” is a comedic, epistolary, postmodern, crowd sourced poem. Like many others to come it will be included in my new book of poems, “The Widower”. I like being a humorist and a poet. You can say things that others wish to say but don’t. But they laugh when it breaks through from their unconscious. [Which is why I think Trump got elected–he wasn’t ‘politically correct’ and people were tired of that stuffiness. I didn’t vote for him.]
By being not sent, I suppose this poem has the “self-cancelling statement” of the postmodern.) [See below]
(I think I’d rather laugh or get a laugh, than get laid—well, maybe not. [A self-cancelling statement in itself])
Dear Sandy,
I am the guy you approached
At the Harris House Saturday night
About gaining, gaming,
My Mexican evening shirt.
Maybe you just wanted the shirt
Maybe you wanted me
Maybe you wanted both
Maybe neither
And were just having fun.
What does a woman want?
It seems like we have several options:
- You tear my shirt off.
But you missed your chance
At the Harris House
1, You come over to my place.
We have a glass of wine together.
We talk about the shirt,
Then see what happens…
1, Or we have a glass of wine,
You slowly take off my shirt,
Then I slowly take off yours
And we see what comes up, LOL
(My friend, John, an attorney,
Warns me, however,
Watch out,
If you get too involved,
You could lose your shirt)…
- Or I keep my shirt,
We just go dancing,
And consider the latter,
No, the former,
Later.
- Which one (1.) is it?
- Women say guys have only one thing in mind,
- I think not.
If interested, call or text me.
Your foreign traveler with the American glasses,
John
[email not sent]
Joan B.
Another Clothes Heist Attempt
I remember in Junior High School
I had a sailor cap
That I had altered in various ways
With pins and special buttons.
It was my favorite cap,
But one day Joan B
Took that cap,
Maybe she wanted a part of me.
(We had made out at a party
At her house.)
But I never saw that cap again.
So when one day
She came on the tennis court
And saw my new letter jacket
Of which I was most proud
For being the shortstop
On the school varsity team.
She tried to take that too,
I hit her on the hand
With my racket strings
And she dropped it.
But as leader of a large clique
At the school, she told her friends
And I got seriously rejected
From the popular group.
Spurned, I moved over
To hang out with the geeks/nerds
And later became a postmodernist poet.
I think the appropriated excerpts below shows where my comedic, epistolary, postmodern, crowd-sourced poems came from, though my poetry is less serious, less pedantic and more fun–delicious Dada:
The very persistence of the word postmodern however irritating this must be seems to indicate that something is at stake, something that cannot be pushed aside as theoretical fashion. More importantly, the philosophical foundations of the postmodern are existential rather than physical and derived from philosophers of crises identified by one commentator as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, and Derreda. Gregory Bruce Smith’s writes, “Nietzsche meant It would no longer be possible for man to believe in anything that transcends the immanent, temporal world, that the basis of the values that had previously shielded humanity were destroyed once and for all. Eternity was being driven out completely, and there with Being to be replaced by the unrelenting reign of Becoming.” Eternity is reduced to Ethernity, the cybernetic universe that can be shared by all, much of which is mundane and profane. It is not that postmodernism lacks foundations, as some have suggested, but rather that the foundations have shifted from the transcendent to the everyday; from surrealisms search for the absolute to the emphasis in Dada, on found materials, performance art and conceptualism; from the necessary and natural to the arbitrary, contingent and man-made. Instead of playing in the fields of the Lord, the poet plays with the material substance of the language. Heidegger wrote of this approach philosophy, “I have left an earlier standpoint not in order to exchange it for another one, but because even the former standpoint was merely a way station along the way. The lasting element in thinking is the way. And ways of thinking hold with in them that mysterious quality that we can walk them forward and backward, and that indeed only the way back will leave us forward.” Being on the way is a principal factor of postmodern process driven writing, from Olson, Ginsburg and Asberry to the language poets. Instead of succumbing to history, postmodernism remains stubbornly underway by appropriating and refashioning established practices. The way forward is the way back to Jarry, Tzara, Duchamp and Stein.
According to critic Peter Berger, avant-garde art opposes the bourgeois model of consciousness by attempting to close the gap between art and life. However, “an art no longer distinct from the praxis of life but wholly absorbed in it will lose the capacity to criticize it, ” Vanguard-isms thus collaborates with 19th-century aestheticism in the diminishment of art’s social function even as the attempt to advance it. The risk is that avant-garde will become an institution with his own self-protective rituals, powerless to trace or affect the curve of history…
This analogy hopes to assert that avant-garde poetry endures in its resistance to dominant and received modes of poetry; it is the avant-garde that renews poetry as a whole though new, but initially shocking, artistic strategies. The “normal” way of writing in any period was first the practice of innovators of the previous generations…
Postmodernism is not a single style with his departure in Pound’s Cantos and his arrival in language poetry; it is, rather, an ongoing resistance to and comment on dominant practice…
In the 1960s, in opposition to the impersonal, Augustan poetry encouraged by the New Criticism, the postmodern revolt was primarily in the direction of a personal, oral, and “organic” poetry that saw each voice as unique. Franco O’Hara’s injunction, “You just go on your nerve,” calls for an improvisatory poetics of the everyday that was essentially neo-romantic. Yet in its intense casualness, his poetry also argued against the romantic concept of self; in its disregard the metaphysical, it broke with the “transcendental signified”…
Postmodernism decenters authority and encourages a “pantopic” or many sided point of view. It prefers “empty words” to the “transcendental signified,” the actual to the metaphysical. In general, it follows a constructivist rather than an expressionistic theory of composition. Its “I” is often another. Method vies with intuition in driving poetic composition. With the death of God and the unfortunate but inevitable distancing of nature, appropriation becomes reigning device. Our books become our civilization and our nature, and same time, the words are just words. Having no conclusion to come to, narrative doubles back on itself with overlapping and sometimes contradictory versions…
What the text means has more to do with how it was written than what it expresses. Quoting Charles Olson, Robert Creeley continues, “That which exists through itself is what is called meaning.” Like William’s plums, “so sweet/and so cold,” the thing is valued for itself, not for its symbolism. In general, postmodern poetry opposes essentialist values of unity, significance, linearity, expressiveness and any heroic betrayal of the bourgeois self and its concerns…
Asberry has become a major poet in an age suspicious of the term indeterminacy. Indeterminacy means the conditionality of truth, as well as a compositional tendency away from finality and closure; the text is in a state of unrest or undecidability. Characterized by sudden shifts in tone and a wide range of reference, making frequent use of the self-canceling statement.
Appropriated excerpts from:
Introduction to Postmodern American Poetry, Paul Hoover, W.W.Norton & Company, New York 1994
