I like the manuscript better, but what I'm going to read next
has no title.
It's in three sections.
Each of the sections has a title.
The titles are taken from--
There's actually quite a bit of quotation in the poem.
The titles are taken from graffiti from Paris 1968,
which was--
I was only 6 at the time.
It seemed like one of the great events of my life.
It's the only Western revolution that seemed really exciting
that I felt like I had any sort of cultural access
to in my life.
I'm sort of fascinated by it.
And one of the things, it was, of course, a failed revolution,
in fact it ended up being more of a riot in a few days
than a revolution, although that has its appeal as well.
But one of the things that was striking
was that for three days, or a week, everyone in Paris
was a poet.
That is to say that experience that you have writing poetry
where if it goes right, if everything's working perfectly
you feel like the words you're writing down
are about the world and can affect the world
and can make magic.
You know everyone in Paris, everyone with a spray paint
or a can of paint and a paintbrush or chalk,
was just writing down the stuff they thought.
Most of it was pretty didactic: "People will never
be free until the last bureaucrat is
hung by the guts of the last capitalist."
A fine formulation, but a bad title
for a section of the poem.
The three sections of this poem are called, in order,
"I come across the paving stones."
These are painted by three different people in three
different places in the city.
"I come across the paving stones,"
"Under the paving stones, the beach," and "Beneath
the abstract lives the ephemeral."
In the French there's no doubt about which kind of coming
they're talking about.
"I come across the paving stones."
"The brief capital of disturbances.
And within that city lies the city
Utopia with its little sojourns and orange sodas.
Utopia with its watermelons and televisions.
Inside city that holds the happiest disturbances
of my youth behind gold facades.
Staggering up from the river, full of forget,
in the flare of evening one sees a city
where the negative held it's court.
And inside that, city which is little more than a theory
of red in everyday life--
red suburbs, rouge nostalgia, series of scrawled changes."
"Under the paving stones, the beach."
"And so on, as one always arriving out
of the faraway-far.
The city, where we rose slick into the rude rafters
of the second story, dazed after sex.
Inside that hangs the famed Somnopolis.
Purenight city leaking Seconal light.
City under the sign of the Ferris wheel,
bullet-pocked clock tower.
City which is a love letter.
Interior to that, a city about nothing, and then a city
emerging naked from the white indifferences of winter.
You cannot remember whether at this corner, years before,
you turned left or right."
"Beneath the abstract lives the ephemeral."
"Inside that is a pocket-sized city map
that is space in the form of rules.
City that's a love letter to reach the post office
has long been an opening passage.
City traversed like one passes that never got to that point.
First of all, you do not look at it whilst it comes.
And then you discover it reaching its zenith,
and you have to agree that it was
built thus and not otherwise.
And the city called the Antipast toward which
you travel and travel, where rain is falling
across the grammar of skyline.
Rain is filling the April air with silver quotation marks."