Poem 29 – R's

R’s

The hours fan themselves

Tours America To Survey Damage Caused

Repeated interference till the room honours us

Shows endeavours enjoyed

OF COURSE, YOU CAN'T USE ALL THE BLOCKS

Which one flavours matter

Yours sincerely

Rumours and trembling

Adopted for course use

Absolve ourselves of our failure to hold

Her primal language for the two hours

Of course you know all of this

We may submit ourselves to thee

In the white economy of discourse

Ours’ “we” a radical impossibility

Fall 2010 term begins with "We" – Poem 28

We

are perfectly confident

have several mothers in common

created ourselves synthetically

take the bath with language

never take soot into the backyard

have visited certain small waves

pinpoint common framing devices

love the aquarium soother

are grateful for prosthetic replacement

have indefatigable researches

aphorize across the flap

bite, Free Sup!

are losing the war of ideas

became leader of the purification reagents

working nostalgia like a new glove

went wrong without a substitute

were so higher a vial

liquidated just before coming

were utterly ignorant of the noumenal realm

combine this with the possibility of closed timelike curves

must pause in our conversation and hum each syllable

could no longer find the sound pleasant, though we yearned to

stopped, and to spread was vacuum

The Tolerance Project Archive revealed!

A full year before the official culmination of our collaborative MFA, we have happily managed to devour and deploy a tiny morsel of each and every Tolerance Project donor’s poetic DNA. So, with the excellent assistance of the amazing designer HR Hegnauer and the amazing web host Duration Press, The Tolerance Project Archive of poetic DNA has been born!

Dig in and roll around today in all the crazy stuff donated to The Tolerance Project Archive. Perhaps one or two or thirteen poetic building blocks contained therein will inspire you or your students or your mother or dog to write a feverish poem that we can take to class in the Fall. That would be fine, dandy even. Because you know how much the dandy appropriative lifestyle appeals to us at The Tolerance Project.

Happy trails, and we hope to hear from you soon!

Poems 26 & 27 – I DON'T GET (it) I don't get (it)...

Here are two poems that recently got rejected from The New Yorker – perhaps the workshop participants could help me figure out why! I think they're probably not elliptical enough.


I DON'T GET I DON'T GET

In your version, farther crows west
Reflections hover overt trust
The gladdest versions megamelt
And counter to the surest facet

Ounce too free

UV waivers cap the tendencies
To woo the rigor extra evidentiaries
Known in latent nonreflective valence tapes
Remaindered by the tops of faltered whorls

For fine sets

Copper scar condensed by tepid barter
Irrespective of the last dun jar
The insight is the outside with a pallor
Reminiscent of the dedicated signifier

Sever rate nigh tend

And swan...


*


I don’t get it I don’t get it I don’t get it I don’t get it

Bare single-stranded DNA has a tendency to fold
House systems, in this case, reflecting hum

The terms savagery and barbarism made of so-called “jelly rubber”

Spring would be a facetious landscape capped
Several bracelet of its own obscure desires

To speak from phthalates agora

What really low-interest me surely
Rigour of historical reasoning as kinship object

Feel free to use any dedicated woods

Pole world remains cast scarcity
Verse a granitic (black) box of theatrical viewing

i dunno about poems, but here a discourses

With a stagnant suture on a flat surface
Eventually the stimulus will run its course

There is no evidence of microinvasion

Poem 25 – An aristoricy of brains

Civilization depends on the qualities of the people who bear it HERE IS A BOARD WITH A LOT OF HOLES IN IT. DO YOU SEE THEM? (pointing to the depressions) AND HERE (pointing) ARE A LOT OF BLOCKS WHICH WILL FIT INTO THESE HOLES. THERE ARE TWO BLOCKS FOR EACH HOLE. I WANT TO SEE HOW FAST YOU CAN PUT ALL THE RIGHT BLOCKS INTO THE RIGHT HOLES UNTIL ALL THE HOLES ARE FILLED. YOU MAY USE ONE OR BOTH HANDS. READY, GO! When the volume of culture increases, greater and greater mental power is required to absorb and recombine the cultural elements WITHOUT MAKING ANY MORE MOVES THAN YOU HAVE TO, CHANGE THESE BLOCKS AROUND SO YOU CAN FIND A PLACE FOR THE EXTRA SQUARE (pointing to square). DON’T HAVE ANY BLOCKS LEFT OVER. READY—GO AHEAD One cannot expect rationality from a people whose average mental capacity is no greater than a child of thirteen WHAT WE WANT TO DO IS TO MAKE A SPACE OR HOLE FOR THIS SQUARE BLOCK AND PUT THE BLOCK INTO IT IN SUCH A WAY THAT ALL THE HOLES IN THE BOARDS WILL BE FILLED AND NO BLOCK WILL BE LEFT OUT. IN ORDER TO DO THIS WE MAY CHANGE THE OTHER BLOCKS ABOUT; ONLY WE MUST NOT MAKE ANY MORE CHANGES THAN ARE NECESSARY What is needed, then, is not so much education as eugenics FIND ALL THE BLOCKS WHICH ARE THE SAME COLOR AS THIS ONE. FIND ALL THE BLOCKS WHICH ARE JUST THE SAME SHAPE AS THIS ONE Hence the problem of education would be the determination of those with superior endowment, their training and education, the opening up of the upper strata to them to create an aristoricy [sic] of brains NOW WHEN I SAY GO I WANT YOU TO TAKE THE BLOCKS OUT OF HOLE NO. 1 AND PUT THEM IN HOLE NO. 2 (pointing); THEN TAKE THEM OUT OF NO. 2 AND PUT THEM INTO NO. 3, AND SO ON. READY, GO! On this basis an hereditary aristocracy would be set up and an A stock established to become the parants [sic] of the next generation of the superior THIS PICTURE IS NOT FINISHED, SOME PARTS HAVE BEEN LEFT OUT, AS YOU SEE (pointing) Their names would be published periodically and thus make known what families carried superior qualities in their germ plasm YOU WILL FIND THE MISSING PARTS THERE (pointing to open box). I WANT YOU TO FIND THE RIGHT BLOCK FOR EACH HOLE AND PUT IT IN Think how in years to come these annual publications would establish the good strains OF COURSE, YOU CAN’T USE ALL THE BLOCKS, BUT YOU MAY BE SURE THAT THE RIGHT BLOCK FOR EACH HOLE IS IN THE BOX the desirable families with which to become associated, how, in short YOU MAY USE ONE OR BOTH HANDS, AND CHANGE THE BLOCKS AROUND AS MUCH AS YOU WISH they would become the human stud book WORK AS QUICKLY AS YOU CAN, AND LET ME KNOW WHEN YOU HAVE FINISHED IT. DO YOU UNDERSTAND? ALL RIGHT, GO AHEAD.

Guest Poem – Jeff T. Johnson's "Fantasy Jargon"

[Special treat this week: MFA workshop colleague Jeff T. Johnson's guest poem, part of which riffs on The Tolerance Project comments stream. Jeff even gets his own barcode. Enjoy.]


Fantasy Jargon

An extended see you're enjoying Lacan these days

Read the indoor range to cumulus conc if only languaged

Because the shelving towers fading shut tense followers

In the atmos glee, the transcendent series on third view

Friends with textual bureaucracies, word devoid of contends

Have the chords and the cords cords and chords out of

Necessity blocks itself swimming toward exits

Steving night solid, listening to the repeat

Button the scepter of lite carnal bricolage

Cont’d past diagnosis, a literary recipe for pastel pastry

Come around the back, in reverse, head turned into a mirror

Binding the aliosis behind the darn hey

Known in the shadow density, the cousin freely

Spousing rearrangement ferry because the cause lurks

After Bollywood, after democracy, after you inline reverence

Vs reference in the entropy ground to bitsy bouncy deference

The lyrical forever, demolition of scent factories declined

Before the eyes have it, the eyes and sends, the mollifications of de-fence

Times lesson browsers, darkening the hallow gens, tube ambience

Caw caws the mordant pits, leafing underwords

Creatured by drowsy fictions, dictionary bowels, simple syllables

On fire by similes, syntactically tight

Poem 24 – First annual report of the Educational Testing Service, 1950

..........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
"Life may have less

......................................mystery

.............................................................but it will also have

......................................less

.......disillusion

.............ment


............................................... and


..........................................................................disapp......oint...ment.

Hope will not

be

................................................................................a lost
...................source
..................................of



................................................strength,



..........................but it will be

kept


within


reason


able


bounds."