Embedded Files
Poem with Wikipedia Allusions
a small city,
then it snows there.
a small city OF SCIONE1,
where men were.
a good snowfall makes
any small double
AS PSCHENT2,
twice, once, and all
whipped to gray
LIKE ATTIC POLIOS,
DORIC PELEIOS3,
mud dove paint
AS VAN AKEN
PAINTED DRAPERY4
with gyri and sulci
and hidden vales
OF TEMPE5,
snake runners trip,
Muses yawn in shade
and Polo
Poem with Wikipedia Allusions
I chose to disregard my argument OF THE LUTHERAN JOHANN
MARBACH, OF STRASBOURG1, having grown suspicious of him
within me, of our urge to reform Spirit through spittled logic.
Let Spirit be beshaped by matter. Reform matter instead,
with one big hammer or many tiny brass SECOND ESTATE2 swords.
But, grief: there is still a cup of Marbach in me for each three quarts
of other liquid. A roiling soup, an indigestion broth drunk from
the inside: and, LIKE WATER DRUNK FROM SUCH CUPS, AS WELL AS
IMPORTED POWDERS AND EXTRACTS FROM LIGNUM NEPHRITICUM3,
it does, if I may flatter myself, furnish a useless light, blueish and dim
AS FREDERICK ERDMANN'S PROSPECTS OF INHERITING
OR RULING JOINTLY OVER KÖTHEN4. But rule he did, through
some luck of disease. Who would have been a great painter
OF MUSCOVITE RUSSIA, WHO INFLUENCED THE 15TH-CENTURY
PAINTING STYLE OF THE NOVGOROD SCHOOL
AND THE SUBSEQUENT MOSCOW SCHOOL5 did not become so,
instead lingered in Byzantium to juggle breasts, instead was inixed
and later interred in the woods of Kharkiv. Or somewhere near.
Trinitarianly, the fool the victim the laureate make three sides
of the same cloud. The same NONGLUM6, that egg that never
quite rains but one day will show us what it can do.
Poem with Wikipedia Allusions
i.
curve AS HUYGENS'S
TAUTOCHRONE CURVE1:
lost Spirit-Points ascend
faster than fast found men.
ii.
dispersed THROUGHOUT XUN
PREFECTURE (循州, IN MODERN HUIZHOU)2,
we'll be bandits for the Zhang-king soon
again, though we hate him now.
iii.
rest AS JOHN'S REED
RESTS AGAINST A WALL
IN THE BACKGROUND3. small
John doesn't see the need.
Poem with Wikipedia Allusions
All the talk back east,
was about the recent invention
OF SIMILAR BUT UNRELATED
NOTATION JEONGGANBO1.
(I knew this system and
its maker, had met Bak Yeon
long before he sat the gwageo
and went on to grammatize
a kingdom. If you see him,
say I said hello.)
My system was similar
in that it made heavy use
of grids. THE ANGELIC
TABLE, A GRID OF 25X27
SQUARES,2 and all its letter
elements, would not exist
without my prior art
descrybing the acrostic
bridge that slants between
ciel fixe y infer stochastic.
Everyone ignored me,
just because of my principles
OF VASTU SHASTRA3
by which numbers
accrete like fructa,
sometimes bulbed together
at orbital diagonals,
sometimes vining up the latticed
fenestre, or splayed creatively
like children astra.
This made my scheme---
which I call Spirit-Point-Vector---
of little interest to the engineers
OF THE ORDER OF ST. JOHN4
whom I also knew from youth,
and knew went on and on
about the need for crisp selectors'
touch to make their five-tonne slabs
float like feather-engine’d maps
of #malta{} and of #aragon{}.
(Why do I call it that? It's just
a tri-tone placeholder, three
vaguely nearby hills of optima
hidden just AS ST. URBAN HID
FROM HIS PERSECUTORS
IN A VINEYARD5 :
by leaves---by precisely
a trefoil of miraculous words,
and not yielded up to evil
by goatswain or by wineherd.)
So now I ask for your support,
your investment in my design
of a clock, A LOTUS CLEPSYDRA6
of sorts. I've almost got
the porcelain rhododendra
to fill and fall as minutes often do
but will need some years of research
yet, and fleeting earth besides,
to make them grow as time grows,
behind our backs, like a hydra.
Kyle Booten is the author of Salon des Fantômes (Inside the Castle 2024), a book that documents a philosophical salon he attended with a cast of AI-fabricated characters, and the creator of Nightingale, a web extension that re-distracts the user with contextually-relevant excerpts from the poetry of John Keats (available in the Chrome Web Store). His poetry, often written with feedback from custom algorithmic systems, has appeared in Boston Review, Fence, Lana Turner, Blackbox Manifold (#28), and elsewhere. The poems included here were written with one such system that recommends, based on what the user has recently typed, phrases from Wikipedia articles about old and ancient things: https://github.com/kbooten/allusion_injector/tree/main.
Copyright © 2023 by Kyle Booten, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author
Report abuse