Jim Leftwich — Nineteen Books
11 books by Jim Leftwich from Luna Bisonte Prods
1 by Jim Leftwich and Steve Dalachinsky from Luna Bisonte Prods
1 by Jim Leftwich from Locofo Chaps
1 by Serious Publications
1 by Jim Leftwich & billy bob beamer from mOnocle-Lash Anti-Press
1 by Jim Leftwich & John M. Bennett from mOnocle-Lash Anti-Press
1 by Retorico Unentesi (aka Jim Leftwich) by mOnocle-Lash Anti-Press
& 2 by Jim Leftwich from mOnocle-Lash Anti-Press
With blurbs, notes, introductions, afterwords, essays and reviews by
John M. Bennett
Mark Young
Olchar E. Lindsann
Randee Silv
John Crouse
Yuko Otomo
Ivan Arguelles
Scott MacLeod
Cathy Bennett
Michael Peters
Michael Basinski
tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE
Daniel Barbiero
Jake Berry
Retorico Unentesi
Luna Bisonte Prods
Jim Leftwich, LUNIC PANZEMES
Introduction by Dr. John M. Bennett
“But a steady stream of research suggests that taking notes with pen and paper…is still the best way to learn.” -Charlotte Hu, Scientific American, May 2024
This is a book of readings of readings. It is not analysis, it is not a critical
discussion, it is not the application of a theory or ideology to texts, but a
record of the conscious/unconscious experiences of reading and
engaging with that reading. It is an approach I have advocated for
decades: that to “understand” a text, especially one that seems strange or
unusual, the best approach is to pay attention to one’s own reactions –
somatic, linguistic, visual, etc. – and then to discuss and think about
those reactions. Leftwich, in his many volumes and articles about new
literatures, has developed this approach better than anyone I know,
including myself. It is perfect for the kinds of experimental and avant-
garde writing Leftwich both practices and reads, a kind of writing that is
opaque to current trends of literary analysis. It is both a guide for
potential readers, and an act of love and empathy toward the texts and
toward the art of writing and reading them. As he says in a
conversation about my chapbook shat on a tool, “Finding meaning isn’t
a matter of translating the poem into prose, it’s a matter of paying
attention to what the poet is doing with the language”.
One of the many reading techniques discussed in this book are hacks
(radical transformations of texts using a variety of methods to distort and
reshape a text into something completely different). Leftwich writes about
his encounter with Al Ackerman’s book Meetings With Improbable
Danglers: Al Ackerman Hacks John M. Bennett. Leftwich discusses and
demonstrates the hack in the context of Ackerman’s great variety of
hacking methods and tricks, which he records in great detail (his
methods themselves are often more exciting than the poems that result
from them).
Leftwich then layers his own discussions with his own hacks of the hacks,
to create an improbable clarity around the book:
“Sausage it lips, ripping the gland to speak / Within the cleavage toot / Wiping manly Uncle”.
This creates a clear invitation to the reader to engage in his or
her own very personal hack, or reading. It also suggests that the hack itself, as a process, is a useful and productive way to engage or read a text.
In his comments on his own works in DOUBT and DIRT/GLYPHS,
Leftwich treats his own writing practices as if they were written by
someone else. (Aren’t we all someone else every hour, or minute, that
passes?) This is not surprising if one understands that every use/function
of language involves distinct and different mental processes: speaking,
thinking, reading, translating, listening, etc. Especially significant here,
of course, are the very different processes of writing and reading what
one has written. About his glyphs, which could be considered visual
poems, he says: “I was thinking about writing when I made them…and
I was…not thinking about drawing”. In other words, Leftwich the
reader/observer is trying to engage with Leftwich the writer/drawer, as
if they were different people. This is reading with empathy, not
abstracted analysis.
In the section on Desemantized Writing in the Journals of Allen
Ginsberg and William Burroughs Leftwich discusses various forms of
what is now often called “asemic” writing. (Such writing is not truly
asemic; ie., it is not meaningless as the term “asemic” implies.) In the
cases of Ginsberg and Burroughs, Leftwich suggests that this kind of
writing represents the writer having reached a point where he had to go
beyond the usual strictures of writing in order to express/objectivize his
mind. In other words, the writer has to supersede his writing in order to
write, or become a second or other self in order to write. In this case,
empathy on the part of both writer and reader is required to enter a
non-writerly zone of expression, in order to express something essential.
As Leftwich points out, “The desemantized writing in the Burroughs
journal is precisely the failure of writing to keep up with thinking, and it
is simultaneously the continuation of writing beyond the point at which
language can no longer keep up with thinking.”
Coming back to the practice of hacks, another hacking process involves
the creation of homonyms. Leftwich has written much under the name
Retorico Unentesi. Here, that name is given as the author of a series of
progressive hacks of Baudelaire, for example. These homonymic hacks
are another way of engaging with and inhabiting the work of others,
including Leftwich’s own work. Al Ackerman is another writer who used
homonyms, many of them in fact. It is a way of writing about literature
as a kind of fake biography or autobiography of reading and thinking, a
process perfectly suited and analogous to the kinds of writing produced
by the literary subculture Leftwich and his subjects inhabit and create.
Finally, I can’t resist providing a hack of a hack by Retorico Unentesi
from 2017, which seems to reveal something about the original by
Unentesi, and about Unentesi’s previously hacked text by Badelaire, and
at the same time something about the contents or meaning, in my own
mind:
Floor
Low broom reft moldy spelt dump player.
Furthers mantel liars.
My ham drool dry clot, grease norm a pool of chumps.
Never pisses in a spoon.
Glossy arms grew a wall, a motley start lather
Intention, grammatical worm,
Free tardive loose meat loop a
Sad name pilfers car.
Dragon fretwork leaves lion
Wake intention and spilled bullion
In your hand’s krill, stairshaft, plush ass dessert.
Why hand’s fake laminate refusal? the loo’s glow lips meander,
Divestment’s spit cable shortens uric dressing,
And spool rot loathing raves.
-John M. Bennett; A Transductive Hack of “Story”,
In Retorico Unentesi’s Hack of “Charles Baudelaire
Other Damage Transmutation”.
----May 2024
John Crouse
Afterword to Lunic Panzemes
Whether “every imagined route uprooted at once” is read as Any way one can imagine going
being uprooted once one imagines it, or as Any route one imagines taking is therefore only to imagined places, Leftwich routs certainty and reassurance enroute to writing his post-postmodern bright-eyed poetry knight into darkrooms of the soul, “photographing what [he] sees,” adding by taking, smiling without saying “satchel cheese,” Aaron Siskind meets Walt Whitman, Meatyard meets Creeley for whose “lunch in a field of baffles” Leftwich will “let them eat cakewalk.”
Although “A self-contained absurdity is a magickal absurdity,” Leftwich nevertheless or therefore unboxes his box of thinking, his via positiva black box theater as the world’s unmapped, psychogeographic stage that his van, unlocked and loaded, rolling with the hunches, overprints, axon boughs taken and mismeasured once and spliced at least twice the sound of speaking, “every stopping point a multitude of stopping points” his open-air combustion chamber’s free book kiosk “overprint[s] as a form of collage,” collage “the cut-up method a kind of writing of research poetry.”
Reader rides shotgun, illumination by dashboard light, alternately flooded with commotion or
standing knee-deep, “meat in a channel of anise” idly “counting syllables instead of stresses” in some pebbly consciousness stream unwinding through woulds, flipping the script on coulds, read-through of shoulds taking on water, handwringing to handwriting, “desemanticized” streambeds’ decompositions composing “letteral fragment” rivulets to “subsemic particle” rivers of “warm tupelo honey poured gently through the fontanel of the soul.”
“Watching the Colorado river flow…repretend[ing] ajar lewd donations of images in the river of
surprise,” river is ocean and ocean is stars, and the Milky Way’s disarray grafts “the chasms on each
page” into a “training manual…a magnified map of mud of film” overridden by stage whispers, river
prayers, and estuary reckonings of transcontinental transcendental Leftwich.
Leftwich’s “magnetic nerve valve of gravity,” his “cluster of dendrites thinking spacetime”
dismantles atoms’ going-once-again-and-again “cluster of observa” to molecular rewriting’s “pulsing
shifters” for rerouting peptide sequences and reversing rivers, recombining a day’s word orders per
moments’ quantum entanglements, “counting the syllables one more time.” Whether by “glitched
letterforms” or “paragraph iron,” or whether it’s by Leftwich “anvil[ing] at least a few of his popcorn
brutal,” Lunic Panzemes revives the memor[ies] of “unread conferences of songbirds.”
----April 2024
Jim Leftwich
Public Displays of Affection
June 2023
This unique book, written while the author and his wife have been moving around the Western USA, is full of references to place names, and flora and fauna of California, which reminds one of Californian writing of the 1960's, when poets, beats, and hippies were hanging out in places like Big Sur, Bolinas, Venice, and San Francisco. That resonance brings a level of lyricism to Leftwich’s work. But his writing is very different from those halcyon days, though there is a similarity in the attention paid to common moments and things, a Zen-like attitude. But here, words are often juxtaposed with little apparent semantic relationship, making for phrases and lines that create multiple possibilities of meaning and resonance. In Part One of this book especially, each of Leftwich’s “stanzas” are separate poems/worlds/perceptions/ and each rewards attention. They are not “thought", but mirrors of attention, blank minds open - not like the Californian 1960's at all, where such things were talked about but not manifested so much. Leftwich manifests that kind of mind, as in a classical Japanese Haiku sequence. It requires a kind of open and shifting attention of the reader, an attention that does not include any kind of searching for facile instructions about how to live. It is, rather, documentation of an acceptance and exploration of the relationship between mind and world.
this week the role of shoes / images of hats and nostrils / insomuch as the map pages / are unreadable illegible / desemantized & repetitive
----John M. Bennett
Public Displays of Affection by Jim Leftwich is a grand gathering of poems by innovative poet Jim Leftwich, who is one of poetry’s great explorers. I mean he’s Magellan! Here Leftwich enters the antique form of poetry, you know, lines, stanza, the look on the page. But Jim Leftwich energizes the poem with endless word juxta positioned surprises, like “tooth ringer moose hutch.” Reminds me of Gregory Corso’s list of sellable titles for his Happy Birthday of Death. From which you know comes his, “Fried shoes” and “Pipe butter.” My favorite Leftwichism is: “the furry dirt” I was at the drugstore getting some pills just before I write this and something I read on my pill bottle seems apropos: May cause dizziness.
This is a great book, I’ll be coming back for more, and more. Do overdose.
----Michael Basinski
Blurb for Jim Leftwich's Public Displays of Affection
Jim Leftwich's Public Displays of Affection come from a several year's-long journey up & down the West Coast of the US that is still going on. It is not descriptive, rather is associative; the first words may be triggered by something, but act as prompt, as catalyst to subsequent chain reactions which demonstrate again & again the poet's exceptional depth, breadth, & an ability to create series of poems that explode geyser-like from a landscape that is enhanced by them.
"Welcome to . . ." & the GoPro kicks in. But instead of video it's words, & the words are much more picturesque that any pixel-packing Cyclops eye. Is diary entry, is travelogue, is stream of consciousness, is catalogue. Is mind-blowing. & we're all along for the ride.
— Mark Young
Jim Leftwich
gratitude Is a multitude
October 2023
"gratitude Is a multitude" at first glance appears to be a book of fragments, which it is. But it is at the same time a flowing, which is fundamentally coherent. It takes place as a journey, or wandering, through an outside and an inside. It is analogous in some ways to Basho’s "Journey to the Deep North". Jim Leftwich’s poems, however, are not haiku, though they do often have a haiku-like aesthetic, interspersed with longer contextualizing passages.: Is the roadsign / loose oily purse / cannibals scratchy / zinc in curtains Venn diagram index / fact is fiction / fiction is finance / finance is fungible / focus group backdrop / fractal heads shrunken The book is a kind of meditation, focusing on the surrounding world/environment, and on the mind’s movements as part of that world: Thinkable rustling / dancing stories iterated / trampoline sitting Temporarily Guar gum / intentional spine / chaos stocking hat gremlin gestures porous / haberdasher perplexing / glittered horribly i muttering / Mumbling i There is an attention to the tiniest and largest details of place and mind, a phenomenon reinforced by the many photos, mostly involving water: which suggests that the world, and the mind in the world, exist in streams of change. Streams in which words grow out of words, in which thought is a movement of language, in which words exist in interconnected layers: cones Nominal / Comic iconic / macaroni Conical / Monadic Canonical nemesis Bucolic / Xeric Nematode Comedic Full disclosure: this is related to a process in my own work I have called "Transduction", which I only mention because Leftwich refers to it. Transduction involves explicit attention paid to the resonances in individual words and phrases: remnants slant ear / consciousness of / material multiplicity transduction (John M. Bennett) / Roots Grow other roots And rooms growing other / Forms Growing corms and / Cornstalks… This is a book created with extreme attention, and the reader will be deeply rewarded by entering and re-creating that attention. -John M. Bennett
Jim Leftwich
Tres tresss trisss trieesss tril trilssss: Transmutations of César Vallejo
January 2018
Jim Leftwich’s transmutations (not translations) of the poetry of César Vallejo are nothing short of brilliant. They feel more Vallejo in English than any previous translations ever have . Vallejo is certainly, bar none, among the greatest poets of the 20th century. Human, more than immediately human, tortured, both baroque and surreal, and lyrical beyond compare, his poetry defies translation, so difficult does it appear at times. This is especially the case with his early work Trilce (Tres tresss trisss treesss tril trilssss, as Leftwich’s title has it). Claimed by the surrealists as a master in that genre, Vallejo is that and more than that, opaque as Góngora or bittersweetly acerbic as Lorca, the complexity of his language and imagery find few parallels (the poetry of Dino Campana’s Canti orfici leaps to mind). Leftwich has created a Vallejo more Vallejo than Vallejo at times, and certainly makes for far more interesting and challenging a read than, for example, the deliberately strained translations of Clayton Eshelman. Leftwich, a poet renowned in his own way for complexity and baffling linguistic virtuosity, has certainly found an equal, a compatriot, one might say, in Vallejo. These transmutations have all the speed, energy and enigmatic beauty of the originals on which they are based. The foreword by Retorico Unentesi is also something to be savored for its rich and layered interpretations.
-Ivan Arguelles
Jim Leftwich
rascible & kempt Vols 1 – 3
Vol. 3
March 2017
This 3rd volume of Jim Leftwich’s unique and ground-breaking examination of the explosion of marginal literatures can also be seen, like the first 2, as an example of that literature. It has an enormous variety of approaches to language-based arts that are ignored by the academies, the publishers, and the cliques that make up the dominant worlds of letters today. This exciting art, of which Leftwich is also a practitioner, is what will shape the literary world of the future, and his documentation of it is, and will be, of immense value. He takes on this extraordinary material in extensive real and imagined conversations, exhaustive discussions and contextualizations, detailed analyses, bibliographic documentation, and other approaches difficult to categorize, because the categories for it do not yet exist. These 3 essential books open a portal to a world of major literary creation, a world that is, for the moment, largely invisible.
-John M. Bennett
rascible & kempt Vol. 2
September 2016
rascible & kempt-vol.2 grapples with the new poetics in ways that are ideal for the subjects addressed. These essays, conversations, collaborative adventures, and reports from the inside explain and celebrate some of the most innovative writing and literary explorations on the scene today. As Olchar Lindsann puts it, “From reading to writing, thought to non-thought, vast macrohistorical analysis to sub-lettral investigations, epistemology to pragmatics, discourses: poetics, linguistics, hermeticism, economics, history, psychology, politics, metaphysics, and more.” Among the writers engaged with are Thomas L. Taylor, César Figueiredo, Steve Dalachinsky, John M. Bennett, Rea Nikonova, Amy Trussel, Lanny Quarles, Mike Basinski, Jake Berry, John High, Scott MacLeod, David Baptiste Chirot, and many others, including a posse of fascinating heteronymic writers. If you are puzzled by the mysteries of this new avant-garde, these volumes will go a long way to illuminate them.
----John M. Bennett
rascible & kempt Vol. 1
September 2016
VOLUME 1 (of 2) Rascible & Kempt bears geode-like secrets, exposing the living nerves of a geography where the beating heart of the avant guard glows lava red, while the book itself is a geology of Leftwich’s life-long question to his own calling: How to keep all modes of writing “absolutely as OPEN as possible.” This book is as much a training manual as it is a mechanism to reignite the fires of poetry.
-Michael Peters, author of Vaast Bin and other language artworks.
About Rascible & Kempt: From reading to writing, thought to non-thought, vast macrohistorical analysis to sub-lettral investigations, epistemology to pragmatics, discourses: poetics, linguistics, hermeticism, economics, history, psychology, politics, metaphysics, and more.
-Olchar E. Lindsann, author of ARTHUR DIES and other books, editor of mOnocle-Lash Anti-Press
Jim Leftwich
Containers Projecting Multitudes: Expositions on The Poetry of John M. Bennett
May 2019
Jim Leftwich takes on the enigmatic, complex poetry of John M. Bennett in a series of explorations of Bennett’s books. Leftwich, a poet, is an authority on Bennett’s ways of writing. His expositions include essay-like discussions, close readings of individual poems and lines, and glosses, hacks, and re-writings of Bennett’s texts. The re-writings create new poems and are ways in which Leftwich inhabits and/or illuminates the originals. At each chapter’s end, there is an email exchange between the two, discussing or clarifying aspects of the preceding exposition. The book is a fascinating journey toward the heart of a unique poet, whose work is generally impossible to approach using standard critical methodologies. This is a great opportunity to examine not only the mysteries of John M. Bennett’s poetry under the sharp magnification of the mind of Jim Leftwich, but a way to engage with Leftwich’s remarkable work as a poet and thinker about poetry.
----John M. Bennett
Containers Projecting Multitudes
Lulu blurb by Cathy Bennett (05.27.2019)
This book by Jim Leftwich contains essays on a selection of books by the poet John M. Bennett, combining the poem and the essay into a mix. Leftwich, also a poet, has collaborated with Bennett in many venues over the past few decades and is somewhat of an authority, if one could be named, on Bennett’s genre of writing. Many of these essays were published in Galatea Resurrects 2018 / A Poetry Engagement (a blog edited by Eileen Tabios) and in Otoliths (2018-2019), a print and online journal edited by Mark Young. This compilation is a great opportunity to examine the mysteries of John M. Bennett’s poetry under the unique magnification of the mind of Leftwich, which is delightful mystery to engage with in itself.
Jim Leftwich
I reMEmber petrOLeum
January 2019
Jim Leftwich’s I REMEMBER PETROLEUM, is a single long poem of 391 cantos or a series of 391 poems, both structures are valid, that can be read or experienced as a vast mirror in which you will see yourself and the world which is your matrix. When you read it again or look again into its pages, you and the world you see will be different. This is not “confessional” poetry, nor cultural critique, nor political posturing, but something quite different: it is an authentic immersion into a self through the medium of written language. And because it is so complete and fearless in that immersion, in its unflinching consciousness and unconsciousness, a self, or all selves, are revealed. This is why you will see your own unique beings and worlds in this book. His skill with written language is such that there seems to be no barrier, no hesitation, between his intention or experience and his writing of it. It is remarkable that this entire book was written in less than three weeks. His is an authentic and powerful human voice speaking thinking mumbling explaining stumbling being blindingly clear.
----John M. Bennett
John Crouse on I reMEmber petrOLeum
The poems are okay being themselves. Poems not self-satisfied, but unavoidably as full of themselves as of the world, pick a world, any world-in-the-making composed of no last words, worlds where being(‘s) content’s exactly the length of a song, or 391 songs. While Tom Taylor has it that “the poem is no object dangling in space, a baked potato on a string” Leftwich’s poems may well be baked potatoes on strings, if that’s what the song’s about, if that’s the
occasion, the baked potato moment, the song sculpts. Leftwich’s poems avatars, his songbook a photo album of poets’ proxy bodies, our men
in the fields photographing djinns & auras, geiger countering and doppler shifting tangentials’ aftertrails, thought paths crisscrossing frames reframed and reframing, song each a fanned snapshot stack or fractal spill of 45s, choose a song, pick a word, Leftwich’s “sitting on tHE bus with a dictIOnary aND you,” saying cheese as the moment snaps its selfie, while & because the world’s worlding within & without. Whether “The function of the poem is to place us in the present (Taylor)” or whether the function of the present is place us in the poem, neither poem nor present is “something [Reader] can run [Reader’s] hands over (Snail Mail),” and while a line break or note lilt or shared gasp
might have us musing that “we may be watching the same thing (Snail Mail)” the sole known is the giddily delicious redrawing overall of knowns vs. unknowns, expectations revealed as the truck & trade of one willfully blindered & myopic. Witness “JuNe Is jULY.”
email John sent to accompany his blurb:(02.10.2019)
as's my wont i 0-to-60 toward verbal convolute, big plans, wanted to say alot about it. I unbound the ditty from sd obfuscations, ended up here, its hoped somewhere toward pretty straight readability, im thinking.
tell me if this'll work, please --
im marveling at the tome yet.
meshing such with moment's subjects and subject's moments looks both at first glance and
finally to have been SO LIBERATING.
whose was it, shellys?, breeze thru his open window playing the lyre on his writing desk.
wind moving windchime to sounding a perfect map, barometric chart, vital signs monitor, kirilian selfie, moment's fingerprint.
yr text keeps sparking. the upper and lower casings, case by case basis, someway keeping the thing organic, breathing, unfixed, mutable. as though focusing eye (Readers & Writers) reveals, per squints & thru tears, registers the letters popping, big to small, and back, continually. Both the poem and the eyes on the poem fixing on letters flexing. DO touch that dial!
Thank you very much for asking for this; this is the kind of thing that keeps me alive.
(Im waving back at you 2 dancing, is what)
Jim Leftwich
Bursting Presents
January 2020
Jim Leftwich’s Bursting Presents presents his virtuosity in full flight. It’s many things — 388 short poems that flow & adhere to create a 388 stanza long poem; a journal of a month; at times a commentary on things read or observed in that period of time. It shares with what Jim describes as “expositions” — seemingly syllable by syllable readings of the poems of others — a desire to explore, to expose, the endoskeleton of the work. It plays with words, it plays on words. As an example, “vErbiaGe” transforms to “foLiaGe VeRbaTim” in the space between poems.
The word “bard”, variously defined as a skilled poet-singer, a story teller, verse-maker, oral historian, & genealogist, springs to mind when I consider Jim’s work. Add to that its spontaneity & lack of hesitation, the rapid transition from idea to idea, & we’re delving into the improvisation of the masters, whether it be the staccato Monk or the ebullient Parker.
Burning Presents enhances the breadth & depth of an already impressive poetic canon. I cannot praise it highly enough.
–Mark Young, poet and editor of Otoliths
jim leftwich and steve dalachinsky
be/ond seh flinges
January 2020
With some sort of strange anxiety caused by the unknowable elements of the title of the book bugging my brain, I brave myself to go through the table of contents. Poems. OK. They are poems. A relief. Then, my mind gets messy again following the massive endless list of the poem titles. It starts with 1. plums; 2. plopperly slashed; 3. astral viaduct frogret… ends with 128. WOODY BLIN BLEEDING (another casualty of the real). Just to go through all the titles makes me dizzy & unstable. Am I uncomfortable in this “crazy-ness”? Yes, definitely. & “No” at the same time. How strangely fabulous it is to be able to have the oppositional feelings together as if embracing the long lost twin emotions you didn’t know you had! Poems presented here are all like amalgams of Plus/Minus; Black/White; Color(s)/Non-Color(s); Music/Anti-Music; Sanity/Insanity; Fun/Disgust & Joy/Resignation… all gelled into gems. Not just experimenting with the language for the experiments’ sake, but Jim & Steve are playing with the language as musicians play with notes & artists play with their métier & ideas.
–Yuko Otomo
The Blue Seam – by Jim Leftwich
25 pg. chapbook, full colour on folded 8.5” x 11”. Aug., A.Da. 104 (2020)
mOnocle-Lash Anti-Press
An alchemical text not only in its matter but in its process and effects – an experimental tincture of hermeticism, lettristic and visual and asemic poetry, relics, theory, quotation, correspondence/s, trashpo, & history in putrefaction, by one of the most incessant, indefatigable, and esoteric poetheorists and Seekers of our time. With full colour images and cover.
–Olchar Lindsann
Jim Leftwich
Poetry makes things happen: Poems, essays, texts, afterwords, blurbs, notes
December 2020
“For Jim Leftwich, the boundary between poetry and criticism, or more accurately, between poetry and writing about poetry, is extremely porous. This book should make that very clear; in fact, here it is sometimes hard to tell whether a text is ‘original poetry’ or his writing ‘about poetry.’ Which suggests that the distinction may not be all that important. (Another such book is one he wrote focused on my own work, or using my work as a springboard, CONTAINERS PROJECTING MULTITUDES: EXPOSITIONS ON THE POETRY OF JOHN M. BENNETT, 2019.) This is perhaps an outgrowth of his practice of making ‘hacks’ of others’ poetry and texts, which is in itself a means of entering into, and remaking aspects of, another’s work, using a wide variety of processes ranging from the arbitrary and deliberate, to the improvisational and purely intuitive. What this does is to turn the process of writing about poetry on its head. Instead of applying a preordained critical method or theory to a text, Leftwich presents, as it were in ‘real time,’ an account of what it was like, of what happened, when he read the text. We thus have a narration of a real experience of reading. For me, and for many of us in this new literary avant garde, this is vastly more interesting and useful than the use of a text to support or illustrate a particular literary (or other) ideology. Leftwich’s work in this regard is unique, exciting, and represents real progress in the ‘problem’ of ‘how to read poetry,’ and of how to write it as well.”
—John M. Bennett
Randee Silv on Poetry Makes Things Happen
Start. Stop. Repeat. Ventura into feasts of gathered words, escaping phonemes, a cordless spiraling that widens rerouted surfaces. Association propulsion fractally jumps out. Leftwich probes between cracks, cuts up, cuts through, traverses yet unlikely corners of poetic reach. Descriptions & debates & inquiries. Argue, agree or discard. We the readers sculpt among sharpened entities textured through variegated time beyond the edges of our own hesitations. Wit. Intensity. Polypanoptic.
Jim Leftwich, Improvisations Against Propaganda
moria press (2017)
Scott MacLeod, in a email to the author, Jan 22, 2021
This is truly astonishing work Jim. The first word I thought of as I read it was “loving”
There is a tenderness about how you are looking at and describing what you are looking at
And much of it is – well you are looking at what you’ve previously done
This connects some of the best aspects of your concrete, abstract, asemic work with your insightful critical voice with some drop dead gorgeous lyricism that I haven’t seen too much of from you in a long time.
My socks have been knocked off.
____________________________________________________
Review: Jim Leftwich’s “Public Displays of Affection”
Daniel Barbiero
August 2023
Jim Leftwich: Public Displays of Affection
Luna Bisonte Productions 2023
A truth that poetry is uniquely positioned to capture is the truth of contingency. That truth consists in the intuition that each moment is an aggregate of thought, sense perception, affect, and imagination. And language as well. Words are woven into each moment along a spectrum of the possibilities they afford as they capture, miss, idealize, distort, silently underwrite, bring insight to, and finally express the way we are in the world and the world is in us at any given time. Jim Leftwich’s Public Displays of Affection, a generous volume of poems written while Leftwich was traveling through the US West Coast in 2022 and 2023, takes this truth as its starting point.
The poems here are a reflection of Leftwich’s encounters with the places he passed through. In some of them, we get clear allusions to the physical locations and features he experienced. Here, for example, is a meditation occasioned by being in the presence of the Hoh River, a water course that runs to the Pacific Ocean from the Hoh Glacier in Washington State’s Olympic Mountains:
…Time
Is real. The present, like
The Hoh River, flowing in
Front of me “as we speak.”
Experience is as real as
Thinking. I think I participate
In the affairs of my mind.
My own mind? Is that right?
The Hoh River. Google it.
What Leftwich gives us here isn’t a narrative travelogue or a catalogue of the plants, animals, and geologies of those places – the in-itself otherness of the external facts of which they’re composed — but rather a record of how the specifics of place engage the mind confronting them, and how that mind responds in time and through time. Leftwich dissects the present moment as consisting in a combination of the immediate sensual experience of the river flowing in front of him with the flow of thought accompanying that sensual experience—with an acknowledgment that the latter has an immediacy in its own right, and one with as much legitimacy as the ostensibly more direct mode of sense perception. At the same time, the passage has a wry coda in the command to “Google it” – as if to say that the scene experienced through the senses and mind somehow isn’t really real until it’s legitimized by having been indexed and served up by an internet search engine.
Inextricably bound up with perception and thought is language. Language, no less than locality, is at the center of Public Displays of Affection. Throughout the book, Leftwich foregrounds language as an element intimately embedded in and consequently inseparable from the unitary sense of what it is like to be somewhere, rather than an alien force brought in from outside:
Under the Eternal Sky
Until the Internal Sky
Unknown maybe useful
emptiness of the
Unending
splotches
Against
a Terminal Sky
In these few lines Leftwich provides us with the sketch of a multi-modal experience of being outdoors. The sky is characterized through the rhyme-based wordplay of internal/eternal – a kind of existentially ironic pun if we consider “internal” as pertaining to the necessarily limited inner life of ourselves as finite beings, in contrast to the seemingly “eternal” duration of the physical universe as emblematized by the expanse of the sky.
Leftwich’s special interest is in the supra-semantic relationships pervading language. As André Breton pointed out, words have secret affinities; they can relate to each other based on something other than their conventional meanings or their uses in practical discourse. Through their sounds, their shapes, their rhythms, their mutually overlapping, extra-linguistic associations, and so forth, they can assemble themselves – or allow themselves to be assembled – into imaginative texts. Leftwich demonstrates how this works throughout Public Displays of Affection. Sound in particular is prominent as his organizing principle of choice. Take, for instance, this passage:
bad poem bald poem braided
poem mad poem clad poem
clay poem play poem praying
poem radiant poem dented
scratch and dent demented
What is notable here is not only the internal rhyme scheme built on recurring vowels and repeated words, but the way staccato monosyllables accumulate in a mass of abrupt plosive and dental consonants. The logic of the line as it unfolds is the playful product of words’ sounds rather than their meanings – or better yet, their sounds become their meanings.
In a similar vein, Leftwich offers this virtuoso display of alliteration:
Moon moss mesh mush mash
hewn Moan mown hone horse
horn cairn mane name harsh
mood mess nest push gash
told toed toad tolled tune floss
By juxtaposing homonyms and near-homonyms, replacing vowels while keeping consonants constant and vice versa, and exploiting the legato effects of the smoothly segueing terminal and initial sounds of the words he’s chosen, Leftwich creates a sense of forward movement through a process of gradual sonic evolution. This may be one extreme example of the kind of verbal juxtaposition, independent of semantic considerations, that pervades Public Displays of Affection, but it does demonstrate Leftwich’s sensitivity to the depth to which linguistic forms and fictions interact with the extra-linguistic facts of phenomenal life.
What poems like these remind us of is the fact that there are many modes of experiencing the world around us and within us. Language, no less than perception, cognition, and emotion, is one of them – and in fact is inseparable from these other modes to the extent that it helps to define, articulate, and express them. Language gives us a world as much as do any of the senses. Which raises certain questions. Both Plato in the Cratylus and Parmenides in the Doxa expressed a distrust of language because they supposed it to show a world in flux. And they were right that it shows flux – that it shows things as they exist in their contingency, in other words – but they were mistaken in thinking that this made it untrustworthy. In reality, langauge and world reflect each other in ways that are impossible to disentangle. The world comes to be known as the world through language just as language serves as a modality of experiencing the world to the extent that it is the medium through which the world makes itself present in the guise of expressible phenomena. (And ironically, it is only through language that we can conceptualize and define things in situationally transcendent terms – as Parmenidean Being or Platonic Forms.) To the extent that language grants us access to the world and the world presents itself to us through language the world is, as Gadamer held, “verbal in nature.” Which makes it imaginative in nature as well.
What Leftwich’s poetry helps do is demonstrate just how imaginatively constituted and reconstituted the world as verbal in nature can be. It can follow its own logic especially if, as Breton also asserted, the reins of ordinary logic are loosened and language’s everyday utilitarian role is relinquished. The experience of language as something more than a medium of exchange of information – the experience of language in its extra- or infra-semantic modes, which is to say as a semi-independent aesthetic object – opens up to the insight that poetic logic is a logic of its own, and that imagination plays a role, no matter how subtle, in shaping what we see and know, or think we see and know. Language, in its capacity to forge the kind non-semantic associations that it does in Leftwich’s poetry, provides one major route through which imagination enters into and colors the world. Just as water finds its own level when allowed to flow freely language, when uninhibited by the demand that it “make sense,” establishes its own connections either through the objective means of its material or aesthetic properties or through the subjective path, particular to any given language user, of affective resonance. It is a process at work throughout Public Displays of Affection.
While it’s impossible to synopsize in a few lines a work as diverse and complex as this, Leftwich himself may come close when he writes,
The river is singing to my
Mind. Local Reality is not
Only asemic chamber music.
I think I participate
In the artifice
Of my own mind.
Published by Randee Silv in Artedolia
-----------------------------------------------------
Jim Leftwich's The Blue Seam
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - September 12, 2022
There was a time when I felt very actively engaged w/ a variety of creative scenes: experimental writing, anarchism, experimental music, underground moviemaking, mail art, neoism.. These days, despite the intensity of my previous involvement, I feel estranged from just about everything. There've been various reasons for this, mostly, let's say, just due to the changing mediascape. The last publication I liked contributing to, Otoliths, censored me out of a recent edition b/c I submitted work critical of the Medical-Industrial Complex. Still, before this, Otoliths provided a good sampling of work by Visual Poets & helped me feel somewhat in touch w/ that scene. Hence, Otoliths kept the work of Jim Leftwich before my attn.
In the meantime, I've been frustrated in Pittsburgh, where I live, b/c a combination of gentrification & the QUARANTYRANNY has reduced my previously multitudinous screening & performing opportunities to almost null. I searched for someplace that was open to the likes of me & finally happily found Art Rat Studios in Roanoke, VA, thanks to my old friend Brian Gentry. I've since given 2 performances there: "88 Instruments" (on my onesownthoughts YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/VhlLWRvMG8g - on the Internet Archive here: https://archive.org/details/roanokeyd... ); & "Consciousness Expansion" (on my onesownthoughts YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/VQy-6Su-JUI - on the Internet Archive here: https://archive.org/details/2022-high... - Art Rat Ralph Eaton's footage: https://youtu.be/IVip-ASP-JM ). Not only has this been a good experience b/c of the friendly atmosphere of the venue & b/c of the aesthetic & philosophical continuity w/ previous spaces that I've liked but it's also resulted in a strengthening of connections to scenes that I've drifted away from.
As for that, I have Olchar E. Lindsann to thank. Olchar attended my 1st performance there & performed sound poetry on the same bill. He was excellent. As much as I love Sound Poetry, the heyday of any preponderance of it in my life is decades behind me. To witness a great performance by someone of a younger generation was delightful. Making things even better Olchar came w/ a folderful of publications from him to give me. At 1st I admit to being a bit wary b/c the days of truly special printed matter seem to be also long behind me. That sd, I've enjoyed reading Lindsann's mOnocle-Lash Anti-Press chapbks very much &'ve been deeply impressed w/ some of Olchar's ways of rewriting history.
Having gone from being someone deeply involved w/ cultural undergrounds to being someone reconnecting w/ at least 2 or 3 of them thanks to a crew of oddball intellectuals & creatives in Roanoke & their friends from round & about (most of whom I've long since known & often lost touch w/) has been a boon to my social survival.
That, in a round-about way, brings me to Jim Leftwich's The Blue Seam. Leftwich had been a Roanoke resident until recently so it's unfortunate that I didn't get to meet him in-person during my 2 visits there. The Blue Seam was published by mOnocle-Lash in July 2020 (written September, 2016) & is probably the thing of most interest to me that I've read by him yet. It cd be called arcane & scholarly, it cd be called part-TrashPo, it's the combination of currents that makes it so pleasing to me.
The cover image might be called an alchemical work, a work ripe w/ promising symbolism. Leftwich starts off w/ an explanation of it:
"Called the "flower of wisdom," the philosophical fruits are represented by the white lunar rose (left), the red solar rose (right), and the mysterious blue rose (center) They spring from the work of Mercurius—represented by the dragon contained within the vessel or womb of the opus. The six-pointed star represents the reconciliation of the opposites, masculine/feminine. (Roob 42). H. Reussner, Pandora, Basle. 1582." - p 1
Mythic figures are dropped into the poetic lines:
"suspended, and recite the ancient, unnameable Cyclops, their volatile"
[..]
"the Delphic coup at Delphi, hirsute apples, the supernal melons of the"
[..]
"Apollo!"
- p 5
& we move on to more alchemy:
"The pie ceiling is made of the flour elements and the bodies are competently dissolved in sour quicksilver. It is a mobile water, as white as tears. The blue Ouroboros quietly adjourns, in Colorado as in the Sun" - p 3
Even if one is perplexed by what one might call the (semi-)'occult' language one might still find it 'poetically' pleasing. I do. For a change, throwing the bible in doesn't bother me, it just adds to the mix.
"Psalm 118:22 The stone which the builders refused is become the head stone of the corner.
"Matthew 21:42 Jesus sayeth unto them, Did you ever read in the scriptures, The stone which the builders rejected, the same is become the head of the corner: this is the Lord's doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes?" - p 4
&, as part of my small world becoming even smaller at the same time as it's getting larger again, chapter 4 starts off w/ this:
"Ficus Strangulensis
in BRINK #1
{NO DATE} early 90s?
"THE THINGIETH PSALM
(after 5 passes through thesaur.wpm)
"The Paragon individual instill my shepherd;
I shall not good.
"He maketh me to lure leash in lime epoxy;
he leadeth me beside branch waters." - pp 4-5
That'll be familiar to just about anyone raised Christinane in English-speaking countries.
"Psalm 23 King James Version
"23 The Lord is my shepherd;
I shall not want.
"2 He maketh me to lie down in green pastures:
he leadeth me beside the still waters."
- https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/...
It's a small world thingie for me b/c Ficus was one of my correspondents until I elucidated some medical opinions of mine. But let's get back to alchemy, shall we?
"The Blue Seam is a comprehensive behest of Gold (the Christian Gold?) concentrated on the fourth step of his researches, methods of Vulcan's net capturing Daedalus and Icarus, the understanding and reckoning of cooking (changing from fire to writing in a letter), who we must assume would value herbs and the other processes of blacksmithing more than the traditional alchemy of the pen before us." - p 6
The entirety of "7":
"Carl Jung, Lecture VIII, 20th June, 1941
"In the book "Pandora" (from whch this picture is taken) we find so-called explanations.
You will soon see why I say "so-called".
Under the letter A. we read :
"Young I old I therefore is God Jesus Christ himself his Holy Ghost I young I old I proper or belonging to I terra I earth."
They call that an explanation!" - p 7
I suppose such a critique cd apply to this entire chapbk & Leftwich's inclusion of it might show a tad of humor.
"Carl Jung
Lecture VIII
20th June, 1941" - p 8
"The prima materia is also called the "igneum internum et occultum" (the inner and concealed fire), and the "limus microcosmi" (slime of the small world).
"This last name is interesting inasmuch as the "microcosmus" is man, and "limus" is dirt or slime; "limus microcosmi" is the dirt of man.
"It is also called "vilissimum", the vilest, cheapest and most despised thing which is to be found everywhere.
"In this aspect, therefore, the thing which is rejected as worthless, or even pernicious, is the prima materia." - pp 8-9
Hence the bible quotes that preceded this.
Another "small world" (for me) citing follows this w/ mention of another shared correspondent:
"The huge box had been sealed with REPORT tape.
I peeled off a strip of the tape and folded it so it would fit in an envelope.
Then I sent in my REPORT to De Villio Sloan for the Karnival of Trash." - p 12
Sloan's color scans of the result follow. This, then, is Trash Po's prima materia.
"Trashpoets and Kulters generally acknowledge that Leftwich invented Trashpo over a decade ago. Of course this claim is questioned sometimes by Leftwich himself as well as the Schwitterpo faction of trashpoets, among others." - p 14
Indeed, saying that Leftwich invented Trashpo seems like an unsupportable claim given Kurt Schwitters's Merz & the work of d. a. levy. The cover of levy's 1964 "5 Cleveland Prints" is of a used condom. Pehaps Leftwich coined the term "Trashpo"? I don't know.
"Ruck et al. argued that the term hallucinogen was inappropriate owing to its etymological relationship to words relating to delirium and insanity. The term psychedelic was also seen as problematic"
[..]
"The meanings of the term entheogen were formally defined by Ruck et al.:
"In a strict sense, only those vision-producing drugs that can be shown to have figured in shamanic or religious rites would be designated entheogens, but in a looser sense, the term could also be applied to other drugs, both natural and artificial, that induce alterations of consciousness"
- p 20
I prefer Consciousness Expansion as the term that describes the affects of the ingestion of drugs most often sd to be for the purpose of "getting high". I think I read the term "entheogen" in this chapbk 1st but then I recently ran across it on the website for CoSM, the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors. After having taken a fair amt of LSD, mushrooms, peyote, MDA, hash, pot, & other such things I'm now sick of what I've come to think of as the overassociation of consciousness expansion w/ drugs. Hence my piece entitled:
"Consciousness Expansion" Score Movie (on my onesownthoughts YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/4K92-fx6PAs - on the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/expansion... ) in wch the building of an addition to my house becomes an act of consciousness expansion, as does the playing of a soundtrack to it).
"3. Strange attractors are unique from other phase-space attractors in that one does not know exactly where on the attractor the system will be." - p 20
Strange Attractors are still unknowns in my world even tho I've run across mention of them before. SO, I looked at a MathOverflow discussion:
"May be it's not the right place for this, but I don't know the right definition of a strange attractor. Wikipedia states that "An attractor is informally described as strange if it has non-integer dimension or if the dynamics on it are chaotic." In the Tucker's paper about Lorenz system is written that "an attractor is called strange if for almost all pairs of different points in B( Λf ), their forward orbits eventually separate by at least a constant δ (depending only on Λf )." I feel that this definitions are not equivalent. I also would welcome links to useful literature."
"This is a good question. For some reason, terminology in dynamical systems is not standardized at all--and it's interesting to disentangle various definitions. A good book to look at is Differential equations, dynamical systems, and an introduction to chaos. The authors (Hirsch, Smale, Devaney) are at the center of the field, and they point out there's no standard definition of even "attractor"! (Let alone "strange attractor," which they only use once, informally.)
"In my view, definitions based on the shape of an attractor (like the first part of Wikipedia's) are a little odd, since you can have chaotic dynamics on geometrically simple attractors. Think of a map with a circle as an attractor on which the dynamics are like 𝜃↦2𝜃.
"The second Wikipedia definition, that the dynamics are chaotic, might imply the Tucker definition--but that in turn depends on your definition of chaos. There's interesting work on how various criteria for "chaos" relate. A good entry point might be "On Devaney's Definition of Chaos" (Banks et al, American Math. Monthly, 1992)."
- https://mathoverflow.net/questions/59...
Maybe Leftwich's The Blue Seam is a 'strange attractor' b/c I'm strange & the bk attracted me.
Jim Leftwich, Invasive Plants
Sometimes it seems like Leftwich hasn't really tried very hard to keep his world out of his poems. I've been reading him forever, and everywhere I look there's nothing but world, world upon world, world after world. Every word is a world, moving from an earlier world, through the present worlds, into or towards a later world.
Words after words, words between words, words as above and so below words. Finally, in the last stages of his successless anticarreer, he has given us these Invasive Plants. It is as if a kind of confession: some of his words are not fully his. If he was the president of anything, we would force him to resign. As it is, he operates as if an independent contractor in the franchise of the poem, answering to no one, not even himself, stealing every word that isn't nailed down. I hear the Beats. I hear Rimbaud. I hear William Blake, Jon Langford, Yeats and Eliot, Patti Smith. Invasive poets, tangling the trellis of the Leftwich mind. Remember as you read him: these thoughts are not your thoughts, and some of them are not even his.
------ Retorico Unentesi, Leftwich expert emeritus, The Institute For Study And Application, Kohoutenberg
January 2024
Serious Publications
Scott MacLeod, editor & publisher
Specifications
Pages 80
Binding Perfect Bound
Interior Color Black & White
Dimensions A5 (5.83 x 8.27 in / 148 x 210 mm)
Details
Publication Date Jan 4, 2024
Language English
Category Poetry
“i once upon/ And i /Wrote a Poem / About it”
-Jim Leftwich’s INVASIVE PLANTS
Serious Publications 50
Austin TX
2024
By John Crouse
Specifying north-south position on the surface of the earth Leftwich says right where he is:
“between words,” and what he’s doing there: “Waiting for the sunrise,” existence of incompatible
observables be darned, toe returned to sock, tongue to cheek, hand to mouth.
Singing against and with and within the American grain songs going, going, gone granular, “ripples
tranced romanticized,” rewritten rhyming with rewriting and rewriting rhyming with rewritten.
“Greased mind Threatening Glitched memories” is but a “trickery of the glands.”
Buckboard librettos to cowpunk meditations, ironing board hymns hard-pressed
to fold time’s uncertainty relations, undressing motherboard’s “salad solutions” to “full diffusion,”
that “slim chiasmus” “between the monstrous candles,” that “ecstatic Greenway” that
“repudiates duplicate fidelities flatter than audio cryptomnesia.” Ouija board songs, dashboard statue of
Ceravolo, running board as storyboard. All ears don’t mean he’s easy – “barnacles been meaning bisects
mind” and “parsed beatitude bundles” “cobble miniscule” “boot juice” “ruffling gerunds,” “rewriting
Gods,” take that. Running out of time may be trying his patience, but could be he’s got plenty of both.
Maybe pining for or pointing at other days, Leftwich nonetheless, today, researches arroyos and wind
and flowers, marvels at flora and gulches and colorful words, infinities written in snowbanks, “a coax of
clocks...chronic verbosity of the inner chasm.” Lizards, hells, meadows, local hidden variable fantasies
into ballpoint hoppers and a keyboard “below the snow” a “sapient” “vortex of nuance.” World-dross
giftwrapped as “sunrise texts” saturated with “overgrown bounce[s] for a bottle of rain,” “feel the
supple” of the tangled states stating entanglement. If steering is an essential feature of non-locality then
Leftwich’s van lines invite reader to ride/write shotgun, species of viny doubt creeping in, “circadian
built” and invasive, kudzu’s genius, each word a genus, each genus a “parallel happening.”
Instantaneous actions at distances correlating particles’ and particulars’ behaviors, Leftwich, as
observer, produces instantaneous effects over distant systems; king of enough moments is king for a
day, far as the eye can see, fanfare, cab fare, world’s fair, all’s fair when you open the door.
“Nobody knows you your doubt or your waterspout” so “fold the hand away away.” “Bark bent
binding,” with or without commas, “verbs to beat the nickel...parsed and repossessed.” “Borderline
bump” beats flatline slump; hell, we got “dumpsters [not only] dented” but also “scratched” and
“absorbed,” we got us some “blimps redundant” and we got us some “normative blips...furbished in the
nest...flossing radios [while] clearing pink refusal.” “Raccoon replaces purple pelicans” while “jowls
vowel and zenith jades...braided and durable mercurial reading.”
Arming and disarming spooky action at a distance, his particulars communicating faster than the speed
of light, Leftwich’s survey is his set list, his set list transcription, his song titles situating, his lyrics
singing praises, pen as particle accelerator wording his takes, sugaring and tripping his passages booked.
John Crouse
February 2024
A chapbook of poems by the inveterate otherstream linguistic magician, written in late Summer & early Autumn 2023 while the poet and his wife Sue were traveling and living in their van, these texts emerging from a dialogue with the ecological and cultural landscapes of the redwood forests and central coast of California, the Oregon coast, and the St. Olympic Peninsula of Washington. Moments of concreteness re-formulating subtly into autonomous vocabulic conglomerations; it ranges over each level of language from discourse and mimesis down to the letter. ---- Olchar E. Lindsann
mOnocle-Lash Anti-Press
April 2024
edited & published by Olchar E. Lindsann
Sound Rituals – by Jim Leftwich & billy bob beamer
January 2018
Collaborative poetry sequence by Jim Leftwich and billy bob beamer.
Olchar Lindsann
There's a lot of play and experimentation in the proper sense of the word in the collaborations, there's an improvisatory quality that comes through strongly from one to the next, not only in terms of techniques and idioms being tried and stretched and mixed, but also in textual maneuvres that feel like the kinds of interventions that end up 'hinging' an improvised collabiration into another textuosonic direction...
12.29.2017
SOUND RITUALS by JIM LEFTWICH and BILLY BOB BEAMER
JOHN M. BENNETT Engages
online at Galatea Resurrects
Sound Rituals by Jim Leftwich and Billy Bob Beamer
(mOnocle-Lash Anti-Press, 2018)
[First published as the FOREWORD in the book]
Jim Leftwich and Billy Bob Beamer call these complex and playful poems Sound Rituals. In a letter, Leftwich says, “I got the title from an article about a Cecil Taylor performance from the 1980s. In some of his live recordings, he seems to build the structure for his improvisations during the performance itself.Certain kinds of poems can be written that way as well....In a sense, the writing of a poem is always a sound ritual, and the collaborative writing of a poem is even more so.” These poems function, then, not only as sound poems, but as everything that can happen in poetry: they are visual, surreal, lyrical, political, thoughtful, expressionistic, intimate, literary, collaborative, improvisational, and much else. The sound or sonoric dimension, nevertheless, is quite strong, and is present in the rhyming, in the echoing of vowels and consonants, and in the practice of transduction or homophonic translation. The “ritual” aspect of these works perhaps refers to the way they were created, as a specific process between two people – a collaboration – but it also suggests a way to read or perform them: as a kind of multivalent incantation, an ambiguous text that provides new meanings and resonances every time it is accessed.
“Sound Ritual Number 55” exemplifies many of these characteristics. It opens with the phrase “masks of sound/and tarotic unrest” which seems to refer to speech as a mask emitting signs to be interpreted, “under a curvilinear seaside”. That is, as a proteic interpretation, ever-changing. That idea is reinforced by the reference, a few lines down, to the astrologer and alchemist Paracelsus, one of several specific cultural references, such as “Popeye”, “Hercules”, and “Bird” (Charlie Parker comes to mind). The poem also plays with words, for example in the neologisms “herculuckier” and “buzzcouping”, and plays with sounds: “scoups/snoops/couping”, “buzz/fuzz”, “Paraclete/Paracelsus”, and “sound/unbound/unwound”. Flies become birds in an alchemical frenzy! There is, in addition, a sense of place in this poem, a sense of sea and wide spaces, and of voices that open and expand into that space. It is fascinating that those voices seem light and positive, even while being “praise-songs of the heretics/burning at their stakes”. This is one of the most striking things about this book, that in spite of the historical and contemporary horrors of which it is strongly aware, it is so confident and life-affirming. Leftwich says that this apparently paradoxical aspect of this book, and its “improvisational, processual, often letteral poetry can provide a situation, and a process” which could function “for both writers and readers” presumably as a way of finding a kind of understanding of the world and the mind that creates and/or perceives it.
These unique and wonderfully flexible poems can, and should, be read and contemplated by a reader in his or her solitude, but they would also, it seems to me, make marvelous performance texts, which could be performed by two or more persons. In fact, some kind of choral performance, with many voices, would concord with the very nature of these works, which seem to have been created by a plurality of voices, voices very much in consort with each other.
January 2018
Jake Berry blurb for Sound Rituals
“Jim Leftwich and billy bob beamer have collaborated to create an evocative apparatus that generates images in the ear and auditory revelations for the eyes. In a frequently disjointed consciousness reflective of the exploding hybrids we all live a grand sweeping music arrives that compels us to reorient outside the delusion of self and adapt to worlds superimposed, alternatively transparent and opaque, full of sudden illumination and flittering shards fading into some nameless space only this poetry can describe. At a time when even the concept of truth seems forever elusive in this liturgy we are offered the opportunity to discover firsthand and immediately what pure unfiltered experience reveals.”
–Jake Berry
no llow – by Jim Leftwich & John M. Bennett
11 pgs on folded legal.
Feb. A.Da. 106. (2022 Anti-Vulgar)
A quarter of a century in the brewing, here is a previously unpublished series of collaborative visual poetry from 1996-97 by two of the form’s most indefatigable explorers.
Soul-Roulette: Transmutations of Nerval –by Retorico Unentesi, with Gérard de Nerval
Olchar E. Lindsann
Experimental and ‘pataphysical transductions of poetry by the early avant-gardist Gérard de Nerval, rendered by the mysterious Retorico Unentesi of the Institute for Study & Application, Kohoutenberg.
Padded out with extensive front-matter by eminent dead persons and an epic appendix elaborating & tangentiating upon the seams and merging of translation and poetic creation.
66 pgs on perfect-bound 7.5” x 9.25”.
Sept., A.Da. 101 (2017).
