New and On View: Mudlark No. 18 (2001)

Weather and Repetition | Poems by James Brook


Contents

Weather and Repetition, Stanzas on the Death of Guy Debord,
Tune of Wreckage, Invisible One, 17 Passive Restraints

James Brook is a poet, translator, and editor. A veteran of the recent
antidisplacement battles in San Francisco, he is an editor for City Lights
Books, where he concentrates on political nonfiction and world literature.
He is the principal editor of Resisting the Virtual Life and Reclaiming
San Francisco. He has translated works by Guy Debord, Henri Michaux, Gellu
Naum, Benjamin Peret, Alberto Savinio, and Sebastian Reichmann. His poems
and essays have appeared in Exquisite Corpse, City Lights Review, Gare Du
Nord, Science As Culture, and elsewhere.


Author's Note

"My early poetry was classically Surrealist in inspiration; that is, it
was based in automatic writing, 'the inner voice' that revealed itself to
the author as ink flowed or typewriter ribbon was struck or characters
were displayed on a cathode-ray tube. The past decade or so has seen the
source of inspiration shift to the external world--and, above all, to
language as the external world of the work. Almost all the poems in this
collection are assembled on the collage principle, in one way or another.
Some of the poems are constructed of bits of text taken directly from
printed sources; for example, 'Weather and Repetition' is a rearrangement
of phrases lifted from the weather reports of Le Monde and The New York
Times. Other poems combine appropriated text with subjective
improvisations on the found language. But language remembered and language
dreamed and language overheard and language translated and language
invented are also 'found'--or discovered. My relationship to language is
thus only more consciously technical, distanced, material in an effort to
make petrified conditions dance to their own tune, always a
scissors-and-paste job."


Spread the word. Far and wide,

William Slaughter
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