So yes, I wrote a whole book sequence
based on character meter.
I typed the whole book on cell phone in a period of 12 months.
That was-- you know, either that or I take pills.
And it became interesting to me, it
was just a desire to continue with the language of poetry.
And it became interesting to me to think
of the notions in all languages, I think,
in all cultures of what I consider relatively arbitrary
ideation of meter or prosody.
There is no neuroscientific absolute unit of language,
at least that we know of.
And I thought it was interesting how we're shifting,
although, relatively in a sort of a imperial fashion,
if you will, to the idea of the unit of language
at the character count, which is associated
with capital, with capitalism.
You cannot think of language as a character count without
thinking of what you pay for your phone service on unlimited
texts, or limited texts.
So you have to pay attention for the texts,
for the character counts.
If you send a message of 161 you've paid for two.
And you left 159 orphaned characters
for absolutely no good reason.
Of course, we're all rich enough and they all
sell us this idea of unlimited texting but around the world
most people don't have that option.
And so it became interesting for me
to actually infuse the idea of poetry in its wedding
to capitalism.
And also in relationship to science and power,
or technology and power.
So this is an underlying theme to the book,
but having said all that, I think
that hopefully the pleasure of the poems
is separate from numbers.
So-- so what I'm going to do is I am just,
since it's a whole book of 90 some things I will--
maybe today I will do something different
and-- oh, no, never mind.
I was just going to read as a sequence
and sort of get you in the imagined mood.
"Immune."
So the titles, the spaces, everything
counts as characters because that's what the Gods tell us.
And-- and again, I said last night,
but it was really interesting the arbitrariness of the idea
of the telex-- at--
I mean the idea of the text is 160 characters because two
German engineers, I think, at least-- or at least one of them
was German, who studied, did sort of a statistical search
on telex and telegrams.
And figured out that so much can be done.
Humans can communicate so much data sufficiently
in 160 characters or less.
And so they chose that relatively arbitrarily.
And then of course, Twitter teaches us
with the link and all that to even do it in less.
So who knows but I thought it was an interesting moment
to document poetry in this fleeting way.
And let the IM go to hell.
"Immune."
My heart isn't another's.
Love is no transplant.
It can be, or when I'm dead, I will give you my eyes and also
my liver.
You must suppress their memory of me.
"Commissure."
Where your lips seem to end small mouth.
They extend and flutter, then dip into your dimpling cheeks.
In that marionette valley, I want to rest my lips.
"Descending Tongue."
I am a fig of your imagination.
Fig meant for it.
You'll care a fig, give a fig, bleach it.
My flesh is red, my milk white, my skin is honey sweat.
"Iron Maiden."
We're in the no reply zone, still
I will bang my body into your body's rhythms.
We know God is OK with us touching, jamming
silence with our breaths.
"Bulb."
My cyanide love in the pit, you underestimate the vibe
of bulbs in your dermis.
I am wave, you are kelp, not ninja in bamboo forest.
We are gardener and tulip.
"Eurydice."
Low visibility, midsummer fog.
You are deaf, cold, your eyes a grasshopper statute
of limitations on return.
Now you are declassified.
It is about to snow.
"Ariadne."
Your thread an odyssey in space.
Institution's eyes had subsidized
before they left you.
You became Sufi.
Your God spun you.
You hanging there spun back.
"A Thousand and One Nights."
Surely Penelope had sex in her husband's absence
with slave men and women, the undocumented.
Folks, In other words, the blind could not see.
"Divorce."
Persephone, your yearly sabbatical
was always brief and forced.
You couldn't begin or end a book,
yet you wrote, "not Catholic and more stunning than Azrael."
"Because."
No touch, no lover, except in the mirror, neuron.
All lovers betray.
All lovers pray to the mirror.
Someone's singing in the shower, glass of glass of glass.
"They."
Lost each other in the war.
He fled with the kids to the border.
Two years later, she made it to the refugee camp.
He'd remarried.
She became the second wife.
The husband was a pharmacist.
The multilingual doctor who delivered the news
was laughing.
The worst catastrophe, he said, makes you laugh.
I never met the wives.
The doctor would die later on from an unknown illness.
He knew what it was, the risk of stigma and loss of income.
A brilliant clinician he was.
For him death was a thing that happens.
As if a country I had been building
had come crashing in a single life, his life.
Not country exactly but lots of small lives.
Mr. Measure.
Doc took photos seriously, unlike us
in the predestined world our spontaneous poses.
He posed as if his full being depended on it,
as if it were a silent movie.
"Discipline and Punish."
Zeus, the first photographer, often using flash, documenting
the world, bearing witness.
It's not his forms so much as his high tech criminality.