BRIAN
HOWE
_________________________________________________________________________
The Avant-Garde
is Ideologically Unsound
_________________________________________________________________________
Brian Howe is doing weird, frightening
things. So, these are clearly not poems
playing fetch and rolling over with wittle puppy dog
eyes, quirkily begging for love and a few good publishing creds. These are badger poems! These poems are going to sack our journals
and thesis advisors! These aren’t poems pretending to be your friend. Brian’s poems kind of freak me out. They are not make
believe poems. These are poems made out of actual words. These are
poems doing what great poems always do: conducting their birth one word at a
time.
Indeed, a note on process: Brian is a
process hound. Many of these poems are a collaboration with Microsoft Word’s F7 key: Ignore rule /
Change all / Ignore all / Add to dictionary.
Whisper “alkdo corrennv
swyqa”, F7 coos “lacto current skycap.”
& Brian says: “if not pelicans, then
halos.” (It’s an uneasy knowledge.)
& Brian stands in a meadow and sings:
“A jagged wrap of light inside my bodice.”
(& I believe him.)
One can also smell some Google
in the soup.
But please, don’t dismiss or knight Brian
simply because of the processes involved: look at what happens in these
poems. Look in his “Autobiography”
poems: vivid, drenched color in one, and perhaps the most authoritatively
oblivious ending ever in the other. Also
note: tough syllables!
In
Brian Howe’s stunning poems syllables make firmer stands than do the lines of
the majority of lesser poets.
I personally had to read these poems
differently than I usually do in order to feel them.
(I had to read them one word at a
time.)
& Brian responds: “Generate me twixt
the cocks and lanterns.”
Okay okay. Funk wave.
Okay.
--Tony
Tost
_________________________________________________________________________
THE
AVANT-GARDE IS IDEOLOGICALLY UNSOUND
the
avant-garde is ideologically unsound,
Flash
hurt Hulk’s eyes! Hulk smash puny
camera! – Michael Jung,
“Shutterbugs”
Jon King, leader of
the Neo-Marxist funk band Gang of Four, said this -- jokingly -- in 1980. PITY
YOUR PUNY CAMERAS WERE LOOKING THE OTHER WAY!
I've adopted it because I think it's the truth. This takes the form of a simple
assertion that something is, after all, enjoyable and why not B-movie horrors,
documentaries and other movements managed in a creative sense; for every ideologically unsound poseur there, the drugs, the flirtations with ‘art’ and
the avant-garde are all of pre-modern culture.
Has to be structurally unsound
at best, fusion of the aesthetic sensibilities associated with the avant-garde and the violence against meaning, history, intentionality,
the final demise of modernism, unsound
eschatological thinking within the economically corrupt, ideologically mediocre European
houses. That's one reason this camera's
puny wafer-size battery won't even last the afternoon. The drawings are
exactly ... I find it interesting that
you consider your camera to be puny. The result was razor sharp images. And I said that
this wasn't for some puny camera, but was for a solar weapon. Marat, I
will profit from your lessons; I also like shooting at night. Enough is enough, let his head promptly fall under the national razor. “Their philosophy may be unsound,” he concludes.
GRAPHED SESTINA
A straw system / as systems go wild / and
fondle open drums
The massive poems / that bullfight lance /
the cratered willows
That generate magic / these rusted lines /
and finely filed intent
The riddle now / a boring treble / as
benders go breathe
In plain elision / ballerina breathe /
seven esteems
Palaver gone wild / abloom feeling mainstay
/ paler killers now
Braver stilting motors / brisker poems /
neared on facial
Monastery lines / with brickbats and
brackets / gelid grog break
Alias fantast man / lessen a brick break /
unclasp your clothes
Unlisted belles breathe / octave militia /
laming rental lines
Glitz ridden patent / authors get show wild
/ penile photo dolls
Riptide coed poems / into vaster inlets /
out of paler cowl now
A cloven hand dips / foul rectum honey now
/ plan aloof cloister
It’s an elegy break / freewheel decoder /
please instigate poems
Poor old ashen plodder / open to breathe /
the penitent mobs of crows
The bent wild / are teething faster /
rolling funk through lines
Implicit defect / in looped digit lines /
the extant data
Deletes venoms now / off the album / the
metal of the wild
Pilot for pellet / a sniper slum break /
consider talcum
Penman let him breathe / he can’t laminate
/ he can’t fool poems
Cannot invent / but can be dueled by poems
/ uncut his fader
Brawl over the lines / a pewter fury /
inured mouth to breathe
An inbred flasher / to enema now / typo for
bashing
Lung clavicle break / divine ratios /
ablated and wild
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
I.
disown a gelded
monad your sexing reader volt
generate me twixt the cocks and lanterns penalized ode
rain plenty
rate me porno lest my fellows rain
blunt tyro absurd peon eye rue teen ugly credit devils
into etch life a
lintel rain penetrates to elude
rain simile
rain rain banned rune rain
disentranced rain
rain rain teeth rain
rain
color rain rain
rain rain rain rain rain rain rain
rain rain rain rain rain rain rain
rain
rain
rain
rain
rain
rain
rain rain rain rain rain
rain rain rain rain
lawn rained gerund seer pupae ask riotous skull sacks
furthermore: I
lusted in my heat to allot unit unit unit unit
punk dimes blossom growl redacts zig
zag resin plume zig
zag gin lewd zig
zag pole gnaw zig
zag look askew at flowers zig
zag an uneven solace to fodder my sliver zig
zap zap zap zap
zapzapzapzapzapzapzapzapzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
II.
I was blown wiring
a glad vending rung on the prowler anger of my leafed chance. I have been
corseted within soughed relays; I have convoys because my presets alas tolled me.
I was god. So wet is my victim of the whirled as a sequent of indirect
mechanics designed with swarming anatomies? It is more than info to key love,
but less than rule to impinge my stencil upon a glam riff of elite trials.
RESOLUTION: Unzip the writs from the grooves of our maws and invent grids we
might actually use to speak. A jagged wrap of light inside my bodice. A cunning bit of
bone on which to chew. Shirking clothing makes piety of the body’s raw lining.
The ration that one sentience is erecter than the next glides to me like rife
piranhas. But these are inimical days, there are cadres shoved into every nut
and they’re always rude, if you itch them behind the
ears they purr. TRUE: Being inverse of a phrase while
glowing through it is the wriest kind of Hell there is. For every known we’d
like to sever there are hooded vibes to tarot it away. THE BOY EXCLAIMS: Bend
around me, you slum divines! Streetlights, arise! He
upended his palm to imbue an ex voto of levity in
miniature, then gonged into one plume and gained it for pulsing vapors. Oblivion.
THAT
MAN IS NOT YOUR LADDER
Is he after your money?
Have the man violently bounce
Your choice of 2 heights
Use the top three feet or so of your ladder
Safety shoes on hard surfaces/or have a man
foot the
Climbing angle to say, only 45° instead of
75.5°
This homework still may not guarantee your ladder can pass
Do not climb onto the ladder from the side
Don’t compromise your balance by extending
your reach beyond
My heart goes out to the unfortunate man in
The places where trails do not exist are
not well marked
Make sure your shoes aren't slippery
Heal the man on the floor and
With plenty of room for you and your
youngster, you
May be more than happy to have a
stay-at-home man
This man was not speaking for me
He does not know ME, my ... a lot of
validity to it
As much as women do not want to
You gotta push 'em
off your leg all the time
Criticism: I have lots of male friends who
would never
Answer: Your friend doesn't find you
attractive, or he's
Do not climb onto the ladder from the side
Don’t compromise your balance by extending
your reach beyond
My heart goes out to the unfortunate man in
The world beneath
your tread?
Note: Your health and life are at stake when you use any ladder
SELF-PORTRAIT WITH OWLS
And bellain wrates of plath
unlon the wrells
knife me poised for I brush ocher * it has been blonde liftboy since
my leaf dithery * there’s not a swan mucus cuff to decry upon * not an inverse
recoil or somatic diffuser * O Novena an always an anode faucet * O breather a
suture * latent manqué * braless integer * scarlet bombing flares retrain Haiti
* it’s a dose belie dose screen out torch sis * an aura of cocks added ease to
the gig * a colostomy of owls implied the horsemen * & all the noonday
heresies came to trench * if not pelicans, then halos * if not an ejective
filigree then pickled rinks * I salami spire to tile the street, the omen
street and needing blink the street * now waning slats and bluing prawns extol
fatally into the bleak skyline * & belling wraths of plate unlink the wells
F7
ARTICLES
CABER
SKID VECTOR
blandish to blinding [lock of sliding valor] oh my stripes
OK [bark [brake [brick aback] OK
chisel choral
mansion monsoon
mason menses and milking
mess
centric
sinter
entered
contrived
canter
sunder
scepter
aft alien OK
OK rat alien
margin to merging to
margarine to mermen to migrant to mega to morgue to margin
lavatory is the new
campus keyword is the new
rule weld
F7 is the knew
lingo [longer pallets OK] on the fillet of your glassine folio
Isn’t this just
film with rags
OK
:
OK
murmur
:
miter
orbit wary linen freak
ensign calibrate against
the torsion of caber skid vector [fuel
skid ahead]
[fabled
with raps] O K [flirt with rays]
O a field with rage [F7 is no carbon pulse] K
O K O K O K O K O K
funk wave O K O K O K O K O K