Christopher Stackhouse
Introduction by Rebecca Wolff
Consummate Poem/Commensurate Wish
The fun of writing is thinking. The fun
thinking is right. Right thinking is fun: Christopher Stackhouse has fun all
over the place while thinking right and writing. I don't know anyone who has as
much fun thinking as Christopher Stackhouse, who happens to take thinking
seriously.
The work of his writing is lines. Mental
arrangement shifts, resettles--does the work of a brushstroke: textured,
immediate, suggestive, permanent. Compositionally restless and capable of
"variation/ Pattern making, smallness versus the typified/ 'Grand
gesture', to write as one draws." He does all these things, and
self-commentary besides. Book-object, canvas, and critical theory are all made
material by Stackhouse.
His self-position is something like that
of a still point at the center of a wheel: from there he's making a
"consummate poem" out of true parts, including doubt, meme, music,
landscape, arhythmia, cultural jitters, echoes of deep readings of Hart Crane,
Whitman, Kaufman, loads of art criticism. Emotionally the register is a bit
detached, allowing for a close attention that must be paid equally to "the
life of a building," "missing fingers lost in accident,"
perpetual matriculation and the cleavage bared" and to "Any number of
any particular series or random singular/ Selection."
I love it most when Stackhouse gets
angry, or a bit lyric, and his lines break. The gesture of the break seems to
evince from Stackhouse a massive awareness of the potential of tradition and we
get enjambments that make rhyme shamelessly, if slant and embedded,
"well-tempered."
These fresh and tasty poems are devoted
to the activity of looking and the activity of thinking at the same time or in
close succession, so close as to mimic simultaneity, a "commensurate
wish."
The activity is "possible as a pair
of shoes."
Thought as Tuning Fork
Turn about candy wrapper tumbling peach colored in the airÉ
Careen toward, passing numbers, one, a vellum spread to fewÉ
Roofing darkness is faint noiselessness; housed there is unnamed
hueÉ
What hurts more than desire is moreÉJust ask CynthiaÉ
Wearing less than silver rain, silent aggregate, peels an empty
laneÉ
Thrust to wit, bargaining her patent launches coil deep inside the
cortex residesÉ
Equivalent, green hair heaving in our skins grows erect, hanging
wetÉ
Up to the moment parting trees, dashing child, with arabesques,
moving inÉ
Marble thought if that means anything, swirl. Place a blue tab on
the pageÉ
Shelter is brown. Just think about it. Cage as grail. Thought as
tuning forkÉ
The Channel
May you live long enough to see the wrist watch become quaint,
cordial full stop, bystander, dabbling on the concourse
distinguished
from source, you on one side of the frame, me, several feet away
on the other. For a moment, clutch, eye my lips, I yours, locked
–
misfiring secretions, salivating, once we noticed it, someone else
had. Bearing leave from dimension, we know, hand in hand, another
interior by name. Just when you thought you couldnÕt take it any
further they say what they say, the channel turns, taken.
Fabrication
Broken into. disjunction functionally.
This tepid text of foot prints. Stove tops.
Kerosene. Aspirate. oh. whoa. clear. hoe.
looking for sleep. clear. Ascending. do not try
to find upwards of. you have been.
sagacious. not only a trip but greasy -
Òcatch a shiny face by its itsy bitsy scotchÓ
Fraud. percolator. ÒItÕs time for the percolator.Ó
call me. I was. How elegant. Those teeth. My god.
Dead. Oh god. throating. A gag. Just a gag,
think of it as, as peptone. Think mantis.
think how green. think how premature. think animal
Made of adobe. Son of bond maid. Ad verbum
you suck. ÒIts time for the percolator.Ó Adumbrated dummy –
Quit sending me mail. Searching for the perfect line
they are liable to write anything down, I mean
most likely these days I am to be fascinated
by those who bore me. the delight, you piece of shit
You fucking Johnson, You fucking jingle, You fucking press whore
and how you left the love of your life
for some something unprecious counterpoint
understand me here, hear, per contra. Diglossia
or bourgeois disintegration since this man
in this skin has arrived here, hear. nose in the books
disturbed by the falling tower of books. frozen
buck in the headlights. A computer crashing, hammer
antique software, flagrante delicto –
I bet youÕre satisfied now you mind fucking theorist.
I read your book and it was exactly the same book
that, that other asshole wrote. As if the tree and its goo
were the surbordinate clause, you articulate so much
You piece of residual fetus in the womb.
You taste like chicken
You look like chimpanzee
You are grandson of cannibal
Are you cannibal? You clever piglet –
Nadja
What allows, arousal
paradox, first figure
there is no odor.
A point of rest,
rock, heart, right
wind evidenced
At the crest,
finger in mouth,
lambent state –
curl, gloss leaks
in mouth, head
in hand, luces
ÒSurely, not a table,Ó
but bed, shorn limb,
from rock, skin
of eye, fissile, still,
splitting limits, core
to open, rare quoin.
Description
Uniformity, radicality, fundamental tools of
Communication, language, argument, parameter
Balance, composition, status quo, modesty
Economical, economy, gravity and its opposite
Re-orienting, the historicity of human narrative
Af-am contribution to Abstraction, variation
Pattern making, smallness versus the typified
ÔGrand gestureÕ, to write as one draws, geometric
lines, subsets confined and confirmed by points
Beauford Delaney, Edward Bannister, Gerhard Richter
Ellsworth KellyÕs yellow square, infinities of touch
Direction, dimension, germinal, caterwauling
Subjunctive, possible as a pair of shoes, vernacular
Viewing conditions, talent as an elitist construction
If you believe that, some sense of struggle, the pleasure
Of making things, disporting orders, a balustrade of indices
Any number of any particular series or random singular
Selection, an out of place pubic hair, centipede scurrying
On the wall, wind, sirens, a shadow cast in many directions
Some preoccupation with, falling, startled, a commensurate wish
Looking hard enough, or not looking at all, but through will
Paling contrast, tempting the dark, a phenomenal asterisk
Yet Unfamous
yet unfamous a man flew twenty-one miles over
dryland with a fuel injected backpack strapped
to his back. watching him from the ground reading
the news clip in the paper, I decided that I was
maggot squirm feeding on styrofoam breadloaf.
as an acrobat your body does things it doesnÕt
know it can do. Driver, becoming one with his
vehicle finds this personally fulfilling