From "Worked on Screen"

Painting by Paul Klee


from "worked on screen"


1.

Jewess undresses
........noun garments
...............fall
................round an uncircumscribed parenthesis

...............the room assumes exile
...until mouths
— eyestormed nightboats —
..........drop
....clamour

2.

...................Dance
........eyes
............referrance

Keeping ontological masks
if
kaleidoscoping epistemological rhythms

3.

.....Pandora encounters ruth
seeding enchancements
under stones.

.....................(Danced exilically rosed

...............Words infiltrate the zonedself

her and this

.........unlessened each becoming
each recombines

dreams ash sentences

....Limited expressions incorporate
.................damage

gifted exspellent soritude
.......i exones
.....gene terminations.)

4.

................Water excels in bonding

..........until.

...................Thirst intimately excells responsability

5.

Kissing odontological margins
i've
keeps epidermally resonating

6.

.....Destruction
..................ruins
.........or how ends never delete
...earth's semiosis

............Her
aspirates
.........unopened palatial
.torns

7.

...Democrat anarchist situationist

...........Keyworker or notepadder
.......zeitmassed experiments
.............redeme
.......tradition

......dancer
........eat
....................rest

...Pariahs and refugees
.tune ectopolitical instruments
.......echodislocate
..............now

(Lead is both
exhausted radioactivity
and lettoral insulator
softly mysnomering)

53.

Sun-eyed
noncooperatively educated
contemplative
............I should know
............I knew
............I was playing with fire
............I ran the risk
............I would still do the same
............I wanted to avoid violence
............I want to avoid violence
............I had either to submit
............I do not ask for mercy
............I am here
outbreaker

(Before a line drawn
.......greyciously
........................rent
exigent indigent shantied)

65.

............& sentimental & longing
....& skin & loneliness
.......& & stinking & lyrical
.& streets & liberty
& solitary & largely
..................& specifically & literally
...........& story & lost
....& spirits & labours
........& struggle & luck
............& silent & laughing
...............& sometimes & lucid
..............& survival & love
.....& suffering & lament
....& states & locates
............& situation & leaving
.........& schemes & lust
.....& & stillness & lessons
..& stranger & listeners


Anne Blonstein

***The impetus for these poems was an exhibition held at the Basel Kunstmuseum, "Paul Klee — Works on Paper." There is one poem for each of the 108 pictures in the exhibition, which showed drawings and prints (and the occasional painting) from nearly every year from 1903 to that of the artist's death in 1940. Klee's titles (often themselves micropoems) for each picture provided the letters for the notarikon. To begin with, as in the poems 1–7 here, I used the notarikon quite stringently, but as the sequence progressed, I experimented with a variety of ways of composing the poems with and around the basic notarikon method.

Posted over on Poems & Poetics