Maria Damon & Alan Sondheim
Maria Damon teaches poetry and poetics at Pratt Institute of Art. She is the author of two books of poetry scholarship; co-author of several books of poetry; and author of two cross-stitch visual poetry chapbooks.
Alan Sondheim is a multi-media artist, writer and theorist. His most recent CD is Threnody and his most recent book is Writing Under.
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The Today
Alan Sondheim
1:57pm
Alan Sondheim
Hello, Maria! Azure and I have just returned from a
wonderful trip to the continent. Of course a return is never a
return, everything seems askew and the planet is no longer in
the same region of the sky "as ever." I also realize that life
and death preceded us; everywhere we went, things were beginning
and ending. We tried to stay around for them all, but with
little success. Well, with some success.
Maria Damon
1:59pm
Maria Damon
Not sure why, but i get from your writing an image of a
desert campfire, with "things" going 'round and 'round it. Our
solar system? A place by the side of the road where we can bide
a while in the quickly cooling darkness, only the barest
profiles of our faces visible in lit silhouette like cartoon
crescent moons.
Alan Sondheim
2:02pm
Alan Sondheim
All silhouettes are lit of course, although they try to hide
it. And we noticed something new on our travels, that everything
is leaning. Well, leaning somewhat. Perhaps just the slight bit,
molecular. But leaning nonetheless. And with no preferred
direction, perhaps the slightest preferential to a direction.
Nothing was as it seems. And the crescent moon? I'd add ocotillo
and creosote. Both sing to us. Well, to some extent.
Maria Damon
2:05pm
Maria Damon
Clinamen! The slightest perceptible leaning. Clinamen is
evocative of clematis, the windy flower-vine, and clitoris,
which leans out shyly from its sheltering pudendum. Everything
leans, yes, toward a solar plectrum, which plucks us like
clematis to put in the blue vase at sunset. What did you see
that leaned?
Maria Damon
2:06pm
Maria DamonAlan Sondheim
2:12pm
Alan SondheimWhat has leaned, has been leant, on borrowed time, string
theory plucked, inverted shelters, what has fallen, and over,
like a man or a woman in 1877, continues to fall. Nothing is
ever straightened out. What swerves, weaves, swerves back. But
always almost straight. That is culture. Well, to some extent.Maria Damon
2:16pm
Maria Damon
Weaving like a drunk down the street: that's the swerve.
What's the swerve toward modernity (Greenblatt on Lucretius) to
the clinamen? Weaving like a drunk trying to walk down the
street, between the letters of "my" and "eyes," an impossible
feat that nonetheless gets accomplished over and over. That is
"culture" and is not.
Alan Sondheim
2:18pm
Alan Sondheim
What gets culture? von Foerster describes negation as
fundamental, the swerve a protean escape or positive trope. The
swerve goes against the flow, and didn't Laurie Anderson
Fenimore Cooper talk about walking as falling foward along the
cannonball's furrow? That gets accomplished, it would be
negation to go somewhere else. Well, to a degree.
Maria Damon
2:24pm
Maria Damon
"The swerve goes against the flow," yes and no, yes and no.
A smooth fluctuation, not a tic, not a spasm, but a nearly
imperceptible arc with eventual enormous consequences. The flow
is flowering all around, and to participate is simultaneously to
disaggregate oneself. The curve is also a flow, the swerve is
also a flow, whether or not it cuts athwart, loxodromic, a
strong current.
Alan Sondheim
The swerve, well, to that degree, a swoon, cutting and
inscribing, but closer, like the leaning itself, always
ruptures, off-kilter, decentered, noise, deflowering all around,
disaggregation, then leap into digital production, produce, then
neither this nor that, then not both this and that, then the
_bumped swerve,_ the hump that bumps, wearable weather, flux,
weft.
Maria Damon
I see the lumps of textured parchment they are wearing as you
write, Alan. I see the wide sheets of crumply tweed wrapped in a
nubbly knit around the body and held close, the clouds that
press on the body in a woolly hug. A swoon into a dream of dense
texture, where origins are flowering in the near-frost of the
edges of human habitation. Ochre jacket in a craft-store
vitrine, somehow it was worn by neolithics in a welter of
overwhelming weather of flux, feathers, and warp-speed swerves.
Maria Damon
2:35pm
Maria Damon
I see the lumps of textured parchment they are wearing as
you write, Alan. I see the wide sheets of crumply tweed wrapped
in a nubbly knit around the body and held close, the clouds that
press on the body in a woolly hug. A swoon into a dream of dense
texture, where origins are flowering in the near-frost of the
edges of human habitation. Ochre jacket in a craft-store
vitrine, somehow it was worn by neolithics in a welter of
overwhelming weather of flux, feathers, and warp-speed swerves.
Maria Damon
2:37pm
Maria Damon
Swerving into twill embrace
Alan Sondheim
2:41pm
Alan Sondheim
I wanted to say something about swerves, clothing unwrapped,
want as one's wont tuned to desire, cloud pressures troubling as
cumulus moves to cirrus, all is nimbus, damp, the swoon a
sweyven, sweyven swoon, unraveling, a good yarn, neanderthal
meals and burials, all apart, flooding, feathers, feathers,
feathers. and wilted embrace, feathers falling further
Alan Sondheim
2:42pm
Alan Sondheim
flood waters feathered, receding, debris churned against the
bridge of bodies, bodies' bridges
Maria Damon
2:44pm
Maria Damon
"trailing my long wing-feathers as i fly" around the world
and loosening my feathers, spilling them on the lichen-fields
among the humans and their masked companions, cloudy pleasure
swoon into gridded volupt, the cloud's embrace dews our hair
with rivers of riptides, torn sheets of water hurling themselves
over us in wanton waves
Alan Sondheim
2:47pm
Alan Sondheim
loosening the feathers, well a long descent, tumescent
masqes and masks, then the grid or raster, the cutting board,
separations and waters frozen and torn, shards of water hurting
ourselves roving among raves and choughs, Teut. sweyven,
vacillare, nutare ; sweyver, vagus. To SWE AL,
v.a. To swaddle, S. V. SWAYl. To SWEAP, v. a. To scourge, S.
Isl. swipa, a scourge. Ruddiman.
Maria Damon
grasping at tawny straws that snap as we grab them, we drown in
disintegration
Alan Sondheim
2:50pm
Alan Sondheim
capitulation, capus: a head, captain: a cap-stain; cap-stain: an
organ or a member of an organ, circuitous rout from leant
swerves, nothing, they say, is upright in this world, certainly
not an automobile on a curve. and what doesn't curve, what trip
remains straight and thrusting? one almost forgets, well almost
immediately, the lowlands and highlands, the pitching of the
vehicle, not to mention the yaws, captain that
Maria Damon
2:50pm
Maria Damon
Clinging to our reedy coracle. Swelling waves of dew, feathers
and wool all around. A cloud of texture drowns us. A crow of
meaning wakes us. A stab of sobbing wracks us.
Alan Sondheim
2:51pm
Alan Sondheim
a slab or mobbing of crows wrecks us, we're in safe harbor,
coracle
Maria Damon
2:52pm
Maria Damon
The ice was in his eye, blinding the listeners. Captain
Cosmos disintegrates into the elemental welter whence his
fantasm emerged
A starvation of ravens besetting the northern world
Alan Sondheim
2:53pm
Alan Sondheim
well, something emerged, that's for certain. some call it an
eye, or a horn of eye, some call it a coracle, or a murmuration
of coracle. well, a cicatrice or name of something, for a man
it's always in the middle, in the muddle, for a man it's always
in the mud
Maria Damon
Your crown of straw is a shambles, a mirage, a miracle. Swirling
in the maelstrom, a swerve collapsing on itself, a billow of
rough cloth rises from the foam.
Alan Sondheim
2:59pm
Alan Sondheim
The crown is a clown, a sham, a barrage, a muscle, a mussel. And
the billow of rough cloth rises from the interior, foam inside
and outside. The decoding is simple, preposterous, absurd. Men
fall over themselves for it. Men fall over.
Maria Damon teaches poetry and poetics at Pratt Institute of Art. She is the author of two books of poetry scholarship; co-author of several books of poetry; and author of two cross-stitch visual poetry chapbooks.
Alan Sondheim is a multi-media artist, writer and theorist. His most recent CD is Threnody and his most recent book is Writing Under.