This is an experiment! I have taken about the first 8 pages of Zukofsky’s “A-22″ and ‘performed’ what, for the moment, I am calling an “antonymical transliteration”. The process is to take Z’s language and work to create its opposite (in word, tone rhythm. variously). In the first verse here - for purposes of demonstration of the process - I have also included Z’s first verse. Enjoy. I will appreciate any feedback.
Zukofksy/ A-22/ A partial “antonymical transliteration” of pages 508 - 516
UC Press edition of 1978
“Performed” by Stephen Vincent
Spring 2004
Mother doubt ill served:
amnesia clock to immediate second,
green field close, no morph
breathe in, black upon white,
flower, bird, child – the last:
(Eg. Against Zukofskys’s first verse:
Others letters a sum owed
Ages account years each year
Out of old fields, permute
Blow blue up against yellow
- scapes welcome young birds - initial)
Gone unto, aloft, unperched
Sung not, nor orchid – woe weed
Weed woe, city inflame, house,
Charcoal plank, stud fallen – no trail:
Over left life never
bitter not, hammer head
wind flat, storm not, no smoke
silence no speak
Why longer no:
Not who no wet,
No crack, no pink, no blue
no sharp, no edge, no egg
crunch roll down back
no tree, no trunk, no grasp:
One disappears, the start,
if truth shape the moon
feet firm – eliminate alone
ram down the black double
crush wet dirt to mud:
Conjunct land regress dismember
a broken melody once not his
a sky four crows clock black
burn down the flesh initial,
breath despair the absent shape:
Trombone fog mutes plunge
Numb finger & thumb fork sky
To chance struggle grief dissolve
What fails death unto
Crack winter branch prune:
No season no color no ripe
The flattened deed – no variance
Will heal, the violation, colorless,
Crack time – time minus two –
Hell freeze crown to toe:
Going there cold palm moon
Evening no reflection north mirror
Release sun still south – wheel-less
Uncertain no estimate no thing
Dispersal once so possible:
Not yet in bed no solid
Ephemera bird x-ray bird shroud
Disperse stiff muscle thaw
Reject food nor blue drink
No path no birth no exit born:
To be so elegant in breach
Melted, fried, into the sun
Blind to passage
Thrown down sunk unto earth
Duration eternal, call it loss:
No number to the dirt
Empty pond without an eddy
Sun crushed moon lunch
Not an inch – blue, dark blue,
The trap door steals the dance:
In sorrow no prediction, loss increase,
The swollen, speechless: unique,
Star blind, no voice, only projection, ancestral -
Generation unto generation – the tintype, heavy,
Ink rolled, blackened, ink over ink:
Frozen blue swan carry him out
Silent, insist, go –
Emptiness without string or illumination
The elderly fall, sponge, wipe & harelip
Blank out the equine, he with a mask:
Bird flick loud madrone,
Caught by her ignorance,
Tenderhook, the real incident,
Her soft green beak
Not an occasion – spunk prowler
Shrill – chills, coos, silence:
(#17)
Table varnished pine veined illumed
Opaqued knot hole sun touch –
Ouch (here) rise, yes, rise
Walk, lift (you with it)
No worth, no decade, march
(#18)
Against none, rational number mountain
Cupola, dormer, the framed window
A vision – midnight velocity weightless
Counter death upholster no seat
Slip away, away:
(#19)
Prunes cavalier bank Lent
In black a silver mutable
Fish file into spiral
Then winter, spring cracks
Essential, once – ever so:
(#20)
Troubadour – singer – gather clear
Make noise into order, gather goat
Reject faith as such
Joy frozen dissolve cloven ice
Hot water, multiple, fluid – alphabet
(#21 – start of continuous lines)
Early, way early, too much
Sea flat, no whales, no spout,
Sandstone table, green, the dark sun
Gray upon gray, fog filtered
No matter day: shut up, once a song,
Moon a sad parabola, no witness,
The anger beyond depth, wish upon the hills.
No great story without absence
A permanent motion against the waves
Empties out the solar plenary
Blinds vision in the lower depth
Broken groove and crash conglomerate
Young boars dark exposed and Easter
The large bird refuses to sing
Insistent ignores once song.
Three clouds over the mountain
Spit: infrequent temper. Ignorance as
Pleasure: a naysayer an insistent not:
Latest rose, over and over,
The thorns grow, bushes multiply
Give to none, pierce the several,
Flesh, repressed, the “ouch” of skin
Song breached a voice unleashed,
Dispersed. She who stops
Is dead: a bird in flight enlightens,
Enables the darkened earth.
Disperse amnesia and loss
An elevation into profile
Mountain falls into its own fault –
Suction subservient igneous slide –
Hardened flow without direction, a cold sky
No one permits the imagination less the imagined
Not a bird risen from conical fact
The swirled, fallen, swim among bone.
Coral skeleton in marbled white
The writhen bone, brush, vine and stalk
Turned inward, called “genocide”
Manzanita, madrone, chaparral,
Wisteria hazel blue, dracaena, the
Down-turned golden bell, a lament, everywhere.
Winter inward interior dry marsh
Puddle a young mind resents
So much, a felt life without feeling,
Not sentiment, something more confounded,
The multiples of one
Once, a fish’s agitated shimmer,
Fin and speckled scale
Liquid quartz and dark pirate
A heart fades in and out a stellar echo
An instant to instant infinite
Without history constant change within change -
Harp without strings, frame without sound –
Alabaster rubbed transparent, thin
Convex blue – cloudless sky – pure
And clear – white charcoal clouds
No longer imminent. Immanent coral- the vowel stops
Multiple citizens, to discount root
Rot, burl, and fossil: blind
Flowerless bud: mutable fertile divorce
Among orchids. Tribes progress less
Rapidly than conscious silence suppressing
Song as the hornless goat
Falls off rock edge, cool radius
Inhuman, their rage plural, delectable:
Uncreated twice (forgot)
Entropic thought annihilated un-sifted sand
Coral poisoned yellow perch, blue bass, ochre snail,
Black sailor separate to the deck
White lined, stone simulacra, flat tire,
Oxide, turquoise, a plastic ring
Melted, loose floss, tangled,
Skinned kiwi, pear, olive core,
Boxed kumquat, elk vagina,
Over there, greyhound pointed nose
Vibrant, an urban minx,
No tail, flat, graceless
Body loss- white body
Black ghost – no way to close
The lifted lid, the breach
Permanent, in perpetua.
The buried counter-territorial dead
Ghost ceaseless without rest
A starvation alive, a starvation beyond
April petal curled and rot, predator pollen,
Pistil-mated, snail stolen dark stains
Riddle the canyon, waterfall and creek.
Left, right, up and down conjoined
The moon crosswinds and storm
Drive the bird away from the tree,
The eye an only pilot the land below
A maze, tree branch and leaf
Microscopic detail to grip against
Found on earth mistakes fortune
Humming bird shoots up
Between branch and sky, a flurry,
The brother eye flourish.
A miracle when one flies
One who rejects nectar in sunshine
Fractions figure upon the singular tongue
While ingrate saddle the boulevard bench
Mistaking the pleasures of thought
With open wounds, each a coarse identity:
Heated wild flamingo crowded with color,
Jack rabbit, cougar swollen sky – inhabited.
Cool green ridge an opulence-
An epoxy of seed among grasses molten
The wind revived, chimney stone & table,
Fluted curtains filter fierce musics
Against where Elmwood and willow thrash open
While over the wet bank,
exposed roots join them – how open?
The steel rod a manner to hold
Or betray, the slanted give way
“the rust in which to bury you” –
the memorial your only resting place.
Hopeless boredom, giant and tedious –
The similarity of excrement transparent –
The shadowed sky cloud damaged,
Insistent, a faithless permanent
Cat’s paw, a claw scratched spine –
Confidence, the cat’s, wind around a tree
Leaves his, my brother’s song, “Peppercorn
In a pepper tree
Never brought him nine, eight, seven.”
Nothing other, grief & roses.
Fire is a flaming tongue
Through pitched roof, smoke
Jams the eye, stuffed down like tears
Salted and dried - anguish by night,
Day insufferably day – truth
Eliminates intelligence, the whiplash of tires,
Car upon a car, a cacophony,
A corrugated heart, one ripple upon
Another, time insentient, aloof, perpetual –
Is God plural? None for disorder,
Mocking bird, mourning dove, manzanita,
Nocturnal vibrant darkened frequency,
Bankrupt, beauty ever in rupture.
An artist’s loft disclosed the neighborhood
Shingle and shaft shortened
Closes the deal for singles or couples
Aspiring and troubled, the bird
Blind to contrary evidence,
Each one silent, tongue tied,
No labor from the heart
Felt twisted absent the performed:
No eye cancelled rule, dog paw
Scribbled by sea – moon, no weather, suspend,
Air say flat, earth say hard,
Fire say enflame to the quick – out of
Which without even one string, as
A rolled ball, rubber bands cloven,
In time found a darkened center.
In drought, the cracked silt,
A population of desperate water snakes.
In flood, why drown an angel,
The floated body such a liberation.
A sun-winter vinyl yellow jaded
The after-nation in disorder,
Rigorously invested, a kind of plague
Without season, the sheer absence of blessing
No impact, the animal, say a minx
Without a tail, absolutely
Or not, the threat of a kiss.
Swung toward a groove? Reject
The twisted snake, ride the coil,
The bird’s, heavy breath, the heaving
Swollen to sweat. Eliminate
The count, intuition will serve you,
The fallen Redwood a cornucopia to the fern:
Walk an infinite into an indefinite
Counter-ancestral sneer so full anxious we
Turn to the present a foundation]
Without leaders a blue print in the head –
I will not, why should one take daughters,
Take sons into an irresponsible war,
Darkness without definition, flattened concrete,
The President adrift, hysteric and empty,
Ample life a valor deep-sixed -
No songs, none ours, the farted hymns
A republic minus plants, the shrubs
A source multiple in gray sorrow:
No reference or reason indeed
For why is one silent, even those dumb
Squat upon the living, the dynamic
Is obvious, but not simple, loud
With violence, the more complex
A failure of nerve amongst solid violence,
“An unalterable condition without
massive public disgust and eruption.”
Not wise, oppose, coherence into breath
Against “hate” into what you hear
Is not a child, not an embrace,
Not dumb thumb against the sky:
What is solid blooms from within the crust,
Its shape permeable, its love porous.
(finish middle of page 516 at the line:
melts, well-carved does not niggle.)