It hit me in the same way reading Susan Howe's did when I first read one of her books, "Pierce Arrow" I believe, one night stoned out of my mind, riding the RIPTA.
In "Black Dog Songs," which is composed of three subsections, titled "Early and Uncollected Poems," "My Terrorist Notebook," "They," and "Black Dog Songs," the combination of repetition, rhythm, and other, more specific sonic techniques, warms and warps the brain. The one link to a poem by Jarnot points to the Coconut Eight online poetry journal, which is worth checking out for its visuals and interactive site design.
After finishing the read, I wrote a few poems in the style of Jarnot. I'd recommend checking out her own blog, as well as her personal website (which has a bunch of great links to poetry and other fun bits) when you get yourself some free moments.
These are the poems / prose-poems I ended up writing in the style of Jarnot, partially edited, as per my usual process:
The Eclipse
Everything in the whole wide world
held on to them and they held on
to everything that was whole and
wide and the wide whole held
together their world and their world
understood them, and they were
wide and held the world with vigor
and understand so that their
standing vigor was wide and
whole and the whole vigor shook
the world as it danced whole,
held together by the whirled
understanding as wide as them
and their vigor was a wide vine
upon which danced their world and
they danced, held wide with the
vigor of the world and their vigor
was wide with whirled understanding
held whole with wide dancing.
Nestled Beneath a Bridge
The sun went down and so the moon followed and so their eyes followed the sun’s escape and the moon’s chase and so the two lovers went down behind the moon, which went down following the sun and so the orbit was a lover’s pattern and the sun turned back and looked at the moon and the moon turned back and its eyes followed the sun and the escape went down before the lovers’ eyes and so the eyes orbited the escape and so the pattern was of the lovers and so the escape was the pattern and the eyes followed the orbit of the followed sun and so the eyes followed the pattern of the lovers and so the pattern went down in an orbit of escape, turned back as lovers’ eyes following the lovers’ sun and the lovers’ moon and so the escape followed the lovers’ pattern.
Band Space
The room has statues,
shells, penguins and lights,
and the people in the room
are dirty.
At two in the morning
there is room for anything.
The Olneyville statues are
paper posters and drum kits,
stereos penguins dance to,
lights that dirty the people,
shells exploding like desecrated
statues, and two in the morning
rooms.
The Olneyville statues are dirty
from a long day,
and the end of the day is long
with cans of Pabst and long
containers rooming French Fries
and cornbread.
Olneyville people bounce around
like penguins tossing and trading
shells, discussing morning lights,
mourning dirty drum kits,
exploding statue rooms with light
and smoke and glass bowls
endlessly traded and dirty,
dancing the whites and blacks of
desecrated penguin statues.
Olneyville people are smoke
and glass of shattered shells
and the trading of cornbread
crumbs.
The dirty room is all of
two in the morning and
the dirty people are
desecrated shells.
What Cheer?
They felt the car stop running and the engine turning off and their bodies turning the corner of the dirty city streets and they felt too the cool air of passing automobiles chugging by on the dirty city streets and turning around hollow night corners, and they felt their eyes turning toward adult video stores and their minds turning backward in time to an ode they composed about their Puritan professor, and they felt the wobbling surreal night of it all that can only be felt through sobriety, and they felt themselves turning into waking bugs, and they felt the vacancy of dimly lit bookstores staring into them and they felt the hollow mouths of doorways staring into them and their souls fearing the rapist hiding out in the flickering tongue shadow, waiting to turn them into victims felt only by the sentience of the city and they felt that the city was living and breathing, and they felt the city was a felt-like bug creeping around like a giant millipede with all of its feeling fiddling frothing legs trailing and turning and guiding automobiles and rapists and gang members, all dressed up for a night of parties, and they felt themselves answering the primal call of the night parties, and they felt the hot stuff of the night in the air and they felt humid and claustrophobic and they felt like the party was night and it was waiting with binocular vision glazed over with humidity and they felt their glasses glazed over with humidity and they felt their vision turning hazy like the hazy vision of automobile windshields on a night of neon fog, and they felt the water spit down on to their sweat-coated necks and their sweat-coated arms, and they felt like it was the air conditioner vent up above them that was doing all the spitting, and they felt the water drip onto skin like sweat on hair turning and sliding down to the neck, soaking their tee shirts, and they felt the sweat brushing up against their glasses fogging it over and they felt like they had turned back to the car with the coma engine and the hazy windshields taking in all the city sentience and neon sentiments, with the three dimensions of a blind man’s world of shadows, and they felt their feet turning back to the floor of the night where the party had brass that played the foggy melodies of the night, and they felt the articles of clothing beneath stomping feet and they felt their stomping feet stomping the turning swirls of the beat and they felt pops in their ears from the bass drums being smashed and the snares being rattled and the lighters flicked the beers cracked open the foam surging out like creamy white magma, and they felt the brushing limbs of the ritz and the hip and they felt the hips gyrating and the smiles contorting and the cigarettes growing so old and toppling over into crumbled dust like the foggy deterioration of the streetlamps’ sight, and they felt the speed of the music the smacks of the trumpets the smirks of the tubas the chugs of the sousaphones the muffled dying cries of the French horns the glass-breaking dazzle burst of the symbols the twirl of the woman’s arms bursting those same clashing clanging news breaking symbols the sly rusty squirm of the trombones the entire eighteen slashing dashing splashing the audience with sweat conditioned under the red light and red and black uniforms uniform under the red light madness turning the night into a party turning the crowd into a millipede dancing and sucking and flailing in and out of corners praying beer bottles tree limbs backpacks hats and shoes would become instruments, and they felt this cavalcade of night sweat and felt their stomachs coated in the sweat and felt their feet dancing and spinning and felt their bodies churning like bugs in the hazy sweat of the night as the hours passed one by one and the tunes started stomped rose fell forgot remembered, and they felt memories from back home wherever they came from, and they felt their senses slipping away and being burned back into them and they felt their bug bodies bruised and turning back to ethereal night bodies without any disguise or alliteration, and they felt that same old sweat chafing the skin between their legs and the beer between their legs became the last shield between the cool calm of skin coated with melted sweat and the insanity of outdoor night brass and percussion pivoting eyes and instruments upward as a call to the neon streetlamps and the neon fog blanketing the party of the night, and they felt the fugitive’s timid eyes glazed over by booze, and they felt the neon courage of the tree climber, and they felt the stubborn pride of the cop manning the electronica synthesizer police siren, and they felt the dancing hips around them, and they felt the man in the monkey suit turning toward them with paragraphs of the night’s text tattooed onto both of his drum-beating night-breathing arms, the sweat turning the melted text into a jumbled mutation of the night, and then they felt the monkey’s hollowed eyes digging into their own and searching with beat after beat, climax after climax, female orgasm as a spasm in the night, and they felt their own eyes receiving the primate’s binocular grip, and they felt the whole world growing hazy and fogging and the night receding into muffled foam and melted ink, and they felt their own mouths mouthing mimicry in response to the monkey, and they felt their own mouths become the millipede night’s mouths, turning back to the masquerade of the waking bug, and they felt their stomping question spit out toward the monkey like humid drips of sweat, and they felt the monkey still pounding drum beat after drum beat and they felt the tension of the forthcoming reply but all that spat forth from the monkey’s manic mouth was the humid screech of laughter mimicking the night, and then they felt the memories and it felt like film tape rewinding, until completely turned, and then, in the silence of transition, they felt nothing.
