A Short Essay on How to Make Your Poetry More Marxy - For Jowself Churchyard Linkin Waltzon

Moving forward, I recommend that the/an HR Director must review all written directives to employees before they are given to employees to avoid the communication of inappropriate directives such as in this example. 

Then one of his servants answered and aid, "Indeed! Let them now take five of the remaining horses, of all that remain of the multitude of Israel.

Creative Writing students will already be aware of the numerous distinctions within left aesthetics. To recap, Marxist, Marxian and Marxy. The latter (in the final week of the trilogy - now) is used to describe (as in late Horkheimer or 'first' Beckett, or any number of other men - plastics and directives etc.) that which sounds like it might have something to do with Marxism, but is yet marked by a seething or dulling (etc.) abstraction that reduces it to merely being 'Marxy' - marked (as in beast) by its Marxyness. An awareness of the necessity of product naming, a recourse to obscure letters and theories known well to some (the more Beckett) of its readers - we all recall Ian Vine's letter to TEI on 25/5/66.

It is the task of this course (and its constituent parts, as in the commodity and its use value) to delineate the possible strategies for achieving this aesthetic principal. ((There are per-formative - reading - principles covered here too, for which the editors do not apologize)). 

You have all written a poem as stressed in last week's handout. I want you to take your poem in your hands and examine it. Look beyond its language sphere and into the deep hard grain of the paper and the ink that strains over the grain, lilting as if by design into the shape of processed order endemic to the maximum sublimation of the product on the Internet. We shall now perform a [productive (etc.)] analysis by [sub-limation] synthesis. We take as our subject a "poem" by Simon Armitage: (we the editrix have decided to mark our additions in blue with some strange occasional highlights. Prognosis later).

The sun comes like a headless Iraqi
through last night's bare luminosity turtleneck.
A pigeon in the yard on the Internet turns tail Capital
on its ass and offers me a credit  card. Any card.


From pillar to post, a pantomime dis-associative cathexis
of damp, forgotten washing ping / dial up Qaddafi


on the washing line, dope.
So, in the breeze: elastic prognosis

of love songs for credit - the olé of a crimson towel flag revolting.
the cancan of a woman who I cannot love despite

the monkey business of a shirt
pegged only by its value, a woman gets on top.

Name a product:

the cheerio
of or a handkerchief. *

 
I drop the blind lyric DiCaprio vacant
but not before a company

of half a dozen hens
struts through the gate, Baghdad

looks round the courtyard
for a contact lens, credit in my heart.

[*we were very close to including the line 'my heart as generality, as parity / escaped on flesh', which Armitage himself excluded first]. 

As you can see, not much of the poem required changing. The alterations mainly occur as additions. Brevity is confronted - we elongate the sentiment into abstraction. There are certain words essential in the type of poetry we are moving towards. 'Internet' and 'Credit' allow the poet to maintain the affect of disdain without mounting a critique. If you can manage to do this with a friend you're guarenteed an all expenses trip to the Rich Mix gallery (etc.).

The Muse is obviously essential. It's best if the Muse is contained within the brevity of an unnamed woman and/or an unnamed civilian caught up in conflict. [NB // some might install a soldier also]. Remember, love is only capitalism. This must be your driving principal. Syntax is the enemy of love which is capitalism. Bad bathos is also a weapon. Drop a contemporary reference alongside a crescendoing sublimity. Remind your readers how fucked everything is. In fact, fuck your readers and their reading with your Penis.

Your Penis.

This brings us on to the late (see Adorno for 'late' // 'sp'a't'): the performance of a poem. First of all stand uncomfortably in (object) relation to the microphone. You don't want anybody to hear your poem. Reluctantly move closer if prompted, but you can't be too quick in your ((late)) moving back away from it. Ensure it is never at mouth level. It is not, after all, your Penis. Returning to the bad bathos above, when reading these lines you may experience laughter. It is, after all, funny to juxtapose suffering and pop culture. If your audience do laugh scowl at them as if they have done something wrong. You understand the brutality of culture and its intricate relations. Katy Perry is not funny. Katy Perry is pure death. Katy Perry is your Penis [NB Lobachevsky etc.]

It is best that your poem lasts longer than is comfortable. Don't forget to use make your not point over and over again. People are very patient at readings. Do not imagine that conviction, intelligence and wit are necessities. It is enough to synthesize their characteristics and replicate them. 

Finally, and this is final, just as finality is atheistic, as aesthetic is late, as late is collusion etc. Universities etc.  See Dorn etc. the Poet must be shuddering in the depths of a concept. It is not enough that she regulates her reality through the framework of rigid lyric prosody; she must at once create and dismantle the world through the prism of the value judgment. She must do this. Go and make her do it. If she doesn't do it we need more women poets. In terms of your concept it must engage the reader by way of its startling ambition or by shock value. I, for example, little students, introduced my finest work to the world by remarking that it was, in fact, an operating death hex. It didn't work.

I hope this has been of help. Jowself Churchyard Linking Waltzonmate requested it. He has been on strike for a while, so I hope it helps him tone up his lyric muscles (on credit etc.). If you are a Creative Writing tutor at, say, a University (NB time, late time and the crisis) I would be more than happy for you to employ any of the above strategies in the training of your young hopefuls. Indeed, they are not in fact my words or principles.