Poetry Cage Match #1: Jasper Bernes VS Tag Team Charles Bernstein & Regis Bonvicino VS Jack Boettcher VS Julia Cohen VS Lisa Jarnot

Note on the Etymology of Camera

Jasper Bernes



Shuddering with duplicates or, eyes overcast: any room rented or temporary’s a camera. This a rare skin disease: photodermatitis, Hank and Liselle at the beach on your shoulder, a balcony in fog, a wall with the words SHIT HERE in ketchup. In this way, you are able to live next door to yourself, by truce, for months





Through the viewfinder, a tiny judge consults his notes: f. Aryan root kam- to curve, bend. From room to room, from ether to object to mind to voice, oh boy. Stand there, no over there, that’s it, look up, don’t do that thinking thing with your mouth. And when the big wing tears free, like all the things you liked to look at overexposed





While she’s out buying film, you open the locket she wears around her neck, the chain of which, snagged on a faster part of being, a loose end, broke. There’s nothing in it, not even a picture of nothing, not even nothing’s likeness. Like this, you know that there is room for you in her life, if you can keep quiet about what you know





Inside entire, in feet per second, in Cinemascope, with an elephantiasis of the will and, by fortune, your thesis on the tragic rejected by the Bureau of Entireties? What architecture does not leave itself printed on your skin like a limit: that way physics, this way feeling?




Definitions of Brazil

for Arkadii Dragomoshchenko

Charles Bernstein & Régis Bonvicino


Brazil is located on the southern tears of the Americas

Brazil is a jungle with snakes who eat cakes

Brazil speaks Lebanese, Portuguese, Japanese, Guarnaríse, Tupiese, Inglese

Brazil is an adulterating medley of intoxicated syncopations

Brazil has no relationship with itself because it has a relation only to itself

Brazil lays its cool hands on your hot head

Brazil was colonized by Indians who turned the Portuguese into natives

Brazil’s Tolstoy is now doing tricks in a favela

Brazil is a land of palms and psalms

Brazil is the model of a model

Brazil is a charm bracelet that has become the necklace of the continent: São Paulo more European than St. Paul, Brazillia more bureaucratic than Geneva, Rio more alluring than Boca

“They've got an awful lot of coffee in Brazil”

In Brazil, the cuckoo sings “macaw, macaw, macaw”

Brazil is private property of no man’s God and no woman’s Fury

The patron saint of Brazil is its dreams, just as is its Devil

Brazil is a carioca not a polka

Brazil is Carmen Miranda’s Tutti Frutti hats, Caetano Veloso’s all-weather tropicalismo, Bebel Gilberto’s number on the charts.

Brazil is the Ellis and Tom “Waters of March” International Airport and Spa

Brazil is caipirinha with feijoada (caipira with fedora)

Brazil is home of the cassava or tapioca, what you call yuca, or mandioca or aipim or moogo or macaxeira or singkong or tugi or balinghoy or manioc

Brazil is the black mask of the PCC inscribed with the words traitor, betrayer

Brazil is 186 million stories, 186,000 poems, but only these definitions

Put your stocks in Brazil and your bonds in China, or is it the other way around?

Brazil is a figment of the imagination of the Amazon

If Pelé is poet laureate of Brazil, without ever writing a word, then Ronaldo Gaúcho is the Nijinsky, without ever having set foot in the Ballet Russe

Brazil is not emerging it’s proliferating

The official religion of Brazil is not just samba but macumba and umbanda, tarantella and churrasco

Candomblé is the Brazil wood of world philosophy

Brazil is Fred & Ginger Flying Down to Rio with Dolores Del Rio

Under the veneer of its vivacity, Brazil is violent, a vile viper playing a violet viola.

In Brazil, anything goes for a chance, for a price, for a piece, for a dance, for a fight, for a night; jeitinho brasileiro is born free but everywhere in chains

Brazil’s face never shows its heart even when they are identical

Brazil stars Bob Hoskins, Jonathan Pryce, and Robert DeNiro

Brazil was written by Terry Gilliam and Tom Stoppard

Brazil is concrete and syncretic

Brazil is impenetrable and forgiving

Brazil is cannibalizing and carnivallizing

Brazil is a baroque barcarolle with a bossa nova beat

Brazil’s Lula is a little loco, but not as loco as Lucy

On Ipanema beach, at the very moment when dusk turns to night, you can hear Orpheus singing for Eurydice; he sings an elegy called Brazil

In Brazil, the real is the only currency that counts


(2006)


Untitled

Jack Boettcher

My lady slips into the old equipment

and in this musty rigging climbs the night

because wherever I exist it is night

and she’s always grappling w/ such structures

above me; to quaff cool air in summer

as pirates and explorers

quaffed small limes in summer

she would climb any rung of rails lit

or unlit by cosmos, there is no evil quadrant

of the cosmos, and I have evolved

from the long, stewing succession-

pools of bard-material

to write a romance in a shipyard

adrift with paramilitaries

or 200 miles inland from a sea;

where her yellow dress attracts like

static to the slash pines, and both the night

and her dress still floating/hinging

tear a little scandalously.



We Took Away Your Horned Helmet with No Sacrifice on Our Side

Julia Cohen


When my ship sent for the breakers I was made




A magnificent kite cut the horizon in half

In the cove that crept inland, regret did not come in pairs




Before, I was quite in the discomfort corridor

My attempts at conversation almost touching in suggestion

Companion to slim pauses and sailor twins




Any harm in keeping if there is no sacrifice on our side




My flanks holstered your helmet to keep afloat

Hollowed the horns for crabs to hide in




My beard was tired and filled with shells

Ashes have made many more beautiful than beauty




Defer your rapture, every era the most trying




Untitled


Lisa Jarnot



If Spirit were a nettle root

And the disk of sun — a Bagel —

It spoke to me — a sinecure —

When passing through its ambit




In Underwear it came aroused

And showed its hairy crown

Addressing all its Patrons

A legate versed and round —




If Celery were god's own nub

And we bent to defy

A riot of the kernel spurt

A tuber comes awry.



EXPLANATION: I wanted to see a poetry CAGE FIGHT...where poems went at it in the rawest manner. So I went to Selby's List and chose one of the first mags, ABSENT MAGAZINE, and then chose a few of its first few contributors. I wanted to see how healthy and ferocious these poems were....here's how I think this poetry cage match would go down....

1) The Jarnot poem attacks the Bernstein/Bonvicino poem for appropriating the Jarnot Anaphora TM.....the BB poem begins to bleed profusely after attacks by the Jarnot poem's spinning braids, which are made out of all-natural fibers...this "hairy crown" lays a hurting on the BB team, which are down for the moment, nearly unconsicous. The Jarnot poem, that tired and useless parody of Emily Dickinson, is exultant.

2.) The Bernes poem attacks the Boettcher poem for trying to horn in on what it rightly perceives as its bailiwick...that of ellipsoid muttering lyricism-sauce...however, the Boettcher poem forms a surprise alliance with the Julia Cohen poem because it sounds like the translation of a poem into English of a poem in Finnish translated from the Chinese. This unlikely alliance results in the death of the Bernes poem. (The Boettcher and Cohen poems mock it over and over with its own words--"elephantiasis of the will"---until it realizes how stupid these words are and perishes in shame.)

3.) The Jarnot poem (emboldened by having knocked the BB Anaphora Team on their asses) now tries a sneak attack, jumping on the Cohen poem's neck. But because the Cohen poem is made up of airy nothings, the Jarnot poem sails right through and ends up knocking its head like a coconut against the Boettcher poem. Both of them depart this world instantly.

4.) The Cohen poem is jumping up and down jubilantly, feeling itself the victor, when the members of the BB team simultaneously rise and begin manoeuvering about it. They are troubled by the ectoplasmic nature of the poem...their blows land NOWHERE. The Cohen poem begins pulling out the incredibly lame lines from the BB poem...lines like "Brazil is Fred & Ginger Flying Down to Rio with Dolores Del Rio" and "Brazil is Carmen Miranda’s Tutti Frutti hats, Caetano Veloso’s all-weather tropicalismo, Bebel Gilberto’s number on the charts" and the poem team begins to collapse like a skeleton that has had its bones removed.

5) The Cohen poem beats the BB team poem over the head with these lines as Mark Twain so longed to beat Jane Austen for her crimes against literature. The collab-poem finds itself drifting towards an afterlife shaped like a giant lemon meringue pie....the exact consistency and sweetness of the poem itself.

6) The Cohen poem is exultant. It has conquered the more devious and more artificey and culturally manipulative poems. However, it now realizes it is nothing but ectoplasm and is fading away. The cage match is over and the ring is empty. The vanity of modern poetry is all too apparent.