the rest of sleep
by strannikov
no business of poets
discourse seeps from mouths to ears
sinking dark into our ears
to fill our mouths with stinking gas—
discourse loud from cities blasts
wholesome blather flies across all skies
leveling forests mountains all by-passed.
cities prescribe our conditions aloud
sweet tunes measured to how we'll feel
tomorrow—tomorrows sing what we knew.
(cities tell us: each other do not see.
cities teach us: each other do not hear.)
ubiquities of cityspeak
trammel all rural discourse
(their ignorance of us compounded):
for rural discourse no patience no care,
long as discourse management remains theirs
(no business of poets: it is not we).
my vocation as a madman late
my vocation of madman I test late
(test misapplications of logics late):
I escaped to wander in wordswamps lost.
equipped for a life never to be lived
all I now need for my narrow grave.
—and here I halt to test whether I see:
here words grow bright in clumps of grass—alone
in sand stands wild neglected Johnson grass.
this vivid virid life!—there curdled blooms
brittle to touch and glance granular rust
alighting on fields and pastures of dreams
and memories the possessions of ghosts.
hammers astray
our metallurgists must bring force to bear
our forges need more hours stoked hot red:
almost late to learn our hammers went astray!
hammer evaporation must be checked:
quantum diffusion we cannot blame,
did all our plugged-in hammers melt so soon?
(they could have overheated, couldn't they?)
could batteries have melted them to slime?
(self-activating hammers might hold flaws.)
look, here's a hammer not ninety years old—
where's the power source for it? where's the plug?
the rest of sleep
peripheral dreams fall out from the head
the body squirms then burrows abed:
“have you had a good life? you now have less!
—led a hard life instead? you soon will be gone!”
the donkeys moo the horses low in tune—
hard to hear cows neigh when bulls bray aloud:
“if” is no life and has not happened once
“as if” is no better, as if sheets sleep.
solitaire women lonely dogs they keep
on walks kept short by raging winds and sleet:
“you must now give account, Mr. Bo-Peep,
for just why your wife is losing her sheep!”
todays spin in bliss tomorrows churn fire
—and ever after they happily lived:
fun and miserable life all have shared
atop the same bed beneath snoring sheets.
they sound much better when you can't hear them
the screaming kindergarteners afraid—
loud as a spider parading in shade
as welcome as eggshells crushed in your shorts.
summon with brass winds! assemble platoons!
the consolations of—science . . . drip . . . slow:
one hundred years of blessings and of woes—
one century down, another to go.
tales fit for times fables for a stuck age
hear now the tunes to play for dire events
transpiring without consequence or change
though life takes us all though death takes us all—
then let our hungers take us to our ends:
I am hungry until, in sleep, I eat.
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Author's Note
"the rest of sleep" is somnambulist verse, it is not surrealist verse. The other pieces are the other pieces.
Other stories by strannikov
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Reading your note, my head was filled with images of Cesare and Dr. Caligari.
This comment will be quite long and will, no doubt, be more about ramblings in my head than about your poem.
I read this suite as I would read George Oppen--
Yours: "tales fit for times fables for a stuck age
hear now the tunes to play for dire events
transpiring without consequence or change
though life takes us all though death takes us all—"
Oppen, writing in "An Their Winter and Night in Disguise":
"It is impossible the world should be either good or bad
If its colors are beautiful or if they are not beautiful
If parts of it taste good or if no parts of it taste good
It is as remarkable in one case as the other"
I hope this point makes sense-- When reading a parable or fable, the particulars are of no consequence whatsoever. It's the overall that holds the value for what is gained in reading. Some might use the word "meaning"; I would not. I would use the word "aboutness"-- That's because my view of the world is informed by my understanding or approach to poetry. A poem means nothing and means everything at the same time. A poem's "aboutness," however, is of extreme importance to me. Meaning is closed; aboutness is open.
So, in the fable or parable, it's the overall. For me, poetry works in a different way, perhaps even an opposing way. The overall holds little value to me. It's the particulars that are necessary. This is true of the works of poets such as Oppen and Anne Carson and Frank Bidart, John Ashbery. This is not exclusive to poetry. I read the fiction of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce the same as I read the poets I've just mentioned. The overall holds no value; the real work is in the particulars ... taking them in, recognizing them, connecting with them - in whatever way.
This being said, in your poem - like in the writers I mentioned - I don't think in terms of understanding or meaning. I’m focused on the fragments, the pieces. My favorite art is abstract expressionism, and I approach all the creative arts in the same way as viewing works by Robert Motherwell or William de Kooning or Helen Frankenthaler.
What I like in the set “the rest of sleep” are the fragments. I find them to be strong and valuable to my reading the work:
“ubiquities of cityspeak
trammel all rural discourse”
&
“here words grow bright in clumps of grass—alone
in sand stands wild neglected Johnson grass”
&
quantum diffusion we cannot blame,
did all our plugged-in hammers melt so soon?
….
where’s the plug?
&
“todays spin in bliss tomorrows churn fire
—and ever after they happily lived:
….
“summon with brass winds! assemble platoons!
the consolations of—science . . . drip . . . slow:”
&
Especially the closing last 6 or 8 lines of “the rest of sleep”. Like the all the parts in these four poems – the “tales fit for times” and “fables fit for a stuck age” are lived through. I don’t know that we actually ever separate them in our lives. In other words, the aging man I am now still contains the 8-year old fishing on a creek bank. I can’t really separate the two, nor should I. That’s something I can’t explain or fully understand in me – yet I connect that with any number of things and events in my life. So, the fragments or pieces in the poems here connect with me. The pieces find me. I don’t find them – in the same way that a thought finds me; I don’t find it. That notion in itself is like for me with these poems.
Near the end of the poem, you write: “then let our hungers take us to our ends: / I am hungry until, in sleep, I eat”. That’s very mantra-like (hungers taking us to our ends), but that is fine a description of what it means to be a human. The hungers drive us, shape us, feed us. All of that.
I’m fascinated with the idea that the final poem and the set ends – even though the image of eating is presented - with sleep. Our conscious life is the tip of the iceberg, while our sleep – in its many forms, expressions, and states – is the rest of the ice below the surface.
“the rest of sleep” begins with dreams falling out of the head and ends with hungers being assuaged with sleep feeding us. Nicely done.
Good poem(s) and set. I like.
Okay, here goes: I concede, with shockingly uncharacteristic humility, that I would not have been able to muster the emotional patience to spend half a day--or more!--studying Eduard's poems to grasp their nuances and implications were it not for the grace of Sam's concordium commentary (yes, I pulled "concordium" out of my ass, and, despite being unable to find a satisfactory definition via Google, am going with it anyway because...I like the sound of it--rather like I like the sound and rhythms of Eduard's wordplay, understanding intuitively that even a mind so eclectically brilliant as Eduard's must spend a godawful stretch of concentration to compose these stanzas, and, to honor this stupendous creative effort, I hereby lift one word cluster out of the meticulous orchestration, to wit: "peripheral dreams fall out from the head/the body squirms then burrows abed..." The quote immediately following is a bummer, deliciously rendered, of course.
And now, brothers and sisters, I turn you over to Sam's concordic (I made that up) commentary, which I myself shall return to after I've done my laundry across the road (in the laundromat, which replaced the stream where I once beat my soiled fabrics with rocks, as in the olden days, etc.) and will then endeavor to apply my intermittently focused attention on what I've no doubt--NO DOUBT AT ALL!--is a poem (or poems) worth every hour I devote to their appreciation. Thank you, and, for the sake of good humor and fellowship (gender neutral, of course) please wear your masks when interfacing with your cohorts and, even more so, with acquaintances and strangers, and vote for sanity in November!
And don't you dare question my faving this celestially important if extravagantly difficult work prior to my fully comprehending its magnitude, as I continue to insist that to comment on ANY work in the 'naut without an accompanying fave is so tight-assed petty as to be not worthy of dignifying it as insulting.
All of the above.
(I'm kidding, but yes not really.)
This is one of those times your writing reminds me of Old English. Word order? Conviction? More poetry than homily, but both. Write like you mean it. We mean it.
"the rest of sleep" is my favorite; it's the most accessible to me.
Sam: multiples of earnest thanks + a few jocular thanks for reminding me that I still don't read enough.
I'll commend you back for expressing well your views on aboutness vs. "meaning" and the overall and the particular (which I might treat with the rubric "requisite specificity", which I regularly fail to attain myself).
Thank you again, as ever.
Matvei: moi drug, bolshoi spasibo! times more hands and fingers than I possess.
Never let me dissuade you, but I think your generous generosity here exceeds my ability by some distance. (Your characteristic humility becomes you.)
Sam's amply generous concordium is apropos of accident much more than of intent, I assure you. (If y'all had seen the stanzas and lines I deleted prior to posting, you'd see what I mean.)
Thank you, thank you, and thank you, Matvei, as always. Cheers to freshly laundered laundry!
--and grazie to whom for the additional Fictionaut fav, grazie.
Dianne: thank you, thank you, and thank you. "the rest of sleep" is indeed "somnambulist" only by very slight exaggeration: all the contents derive from the waste envelopes I keep on a kitchen counter, lines that came out mostly while waiting for coffee.