gunther's block

IMPOSTORS

2007-10-16T10:40:00.000-07:00

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I have become a victim of so-called identity theft.

THE EVIDENCE IS HERE IN THIS VIDEO.

The introduction is flattering (though I remember writing only the first book mentioned), and I am buoyed to find myself on the receiving end of such fanatical hullaballoo coming from so many esteemed authors with whose work I am sorry to say I am not familiar.

I look forward to meeting in person this Dr. Julian Avelar and discussing my work late into the night.

But I must make clear: the impostor portraying me in this so-called internet video is NOT ME.

(1) I am younger than this senile interloper, by about seventy five years.

(2) I am from Switzerland, and though my English is refined, I speak with a mild Swiss accent. The illiterate old codger in the internet video looks and sounds like he might have come from Hot Coffee, Arkansas, by way of Aveyron.

(3) I have been licked by wolves but my dog has never attacked an owl.

NaPoWriMo Thirty

2007-04-30T22:21:00.000-07:00

After Catullus

"Dawn broke down."

I passed the elements all in a line,

The tiresome moment,

A crisis shaped like a lion's tooth,

My mistress in Groucho Marx glasses.

A dense market, nothing new.

Lender, bender.

NaPOWriMo Thirteen

2007-04-13T12:12:00.000-07:00

Gapacity

"I tasted blood on your cheek."

Omphalos in the distance,
or an ocean of paste.

The land is pocked fiddle,
or Crimean grasses.

Sue the bed.

NaPoWriMo Tres

2007-04-03T22:02:00.000-07:00

Collusion

"Peter Coyote never stops working."

Silver, only the light,
I pressed me,
More tar than brick,
Operations.

NaPoWriMo Deux

2007-04-02T22:00:00.000-07:00

Aphasiac

"The language fell apart in my hands."

Shoulder of water,
shoulder of glass,
shoulder of earth,
shoulder of flesh.

Mullions on mullions,
diaphanous breadstick army.

I'm off this grid and onto another.

NaPoWriMo in Full Effect

2007-04-01T22:00:00.000-07:00

The Rexwroth Leaf

"This hill is in perpetual decline."

Eyelets in a delta,
we measure arms in feet.

The burghers invoke themselves,
crystal chips on concrete plates.

Touch me once or twice,
literal mantle.

I'll be here all month.

Old Times, Good Times

2007-02-13T12:09:00.000-08:00

Was just digging around and found this old piece from Matt Shindell's Poetry Postcard Project:

[back]

[front]

Hard

2007-01-21T10:52:00.000-08:00

An illuminating post from Reginald Shepherd on difficulty in poetry.

UPDATE...NEW LINK

2006-08-27T10:24:00.000-07:00

Several of my poems are now up at the fine

melancholia's tremendous dreadlocks

issue #3

up now!

gun

2006-08-19T17:08:00.000-07:00

Poetasters, are you ready to drink the haterade?

(I'm not.)

I am still alive

2006-05-30T17:47:00.000-07:00

ZEUS IS GOD, READ THE ILIAD

My days have been punctuated by madness and naps. "I'm trying to build language from the ground up." My speech centers are infected. I hid in the cabana all winter. I'm living a magazine, called Out of Touch. Work continues on my most ambitious project, details TK.

Correspondence, A True Story

2006-01-20T15:02:00.000-08:00

This email exchange speaks for itself:

Hi, G.M.

I found a blog of your by Googling the phrase "Kites of Hell." Funny, your blog was one of only two results, and the other required that I install something. I may yet install it if this email doesn't pan out.

Anyway, my late father used to use the phrase "Kites of Hell" after he sneezed. I always found this funny, and thought that Google might hold the answer to its origin. As it did not, you seem to be my only hope.

What does "Kites of Hell" refer to if anything? Is there some other literary reference, besides that of one G.M. Quinte?

Your thoughts would be appreciated.

J--- K----

-----------------------------------------

Dear J---,

To tell you the truth, I'm not sure what it means, either. It came to me in a dream, and I wrote it down.

I don't typically rely on dreams for inspiration, or book titles, but something about the phrase felt apposite. "Kites of Hell" seems absurd at first, as on the book cover, with kites barely poking over a fiery horizon, but upon reflection the phrase becomes a more "down-to-earth" version of the terrestrial poet seeking out celestial (i.e., metaphysical) inspiration. In this version, we have someone trapped in the underworld making a connection to the terrestrial world. I found it fertile, for my purposes at least.

I find it puzzling and amusing that your late father used the phrase after sneezing. That is quite remarkable. I'm sorry I can't give you more insight into the meaning/sources, but I am happy at the coincidence of both of us seizing this unique and strange phrase and making such different use of it.

May I quote your email in my blog/blog about this? I think my few readers would be happy to chime in with thoughts of their own.

All best,

Gun

-----------------------------------------

Certainly, you may.

I was convinced that you would tell me the Kites of Hell were mentioned in Shakespeare or some such. How very odd. But thanks for your reply. My father never got to use the Internet, but had a great thirst for knowledge. This whole exchange would have amused him greatly.

J--- K----

My Vocabulary

2005-12-03T16:36:00.000-08:00

Check out this archived My Vocabulary show for an audio taste of GM Quinte.

Name Change

2005-10-19T12:02:00.000-07:00

Hello loyal readers, all none of you.

I want to let everyone know that I will no longer be publishing under the name Gunther Quinte but will instead use my intials, like so: GM Quinte or G.M. Quinte.

Someone informed me recently that my name, pronounced "American-style," sounds an awful lot like the name Kunta Kinte.

It's hard enough to avoid confusion in the poems. I want to avoid it with my name. For those of you who know me personally, of course, I'm still going to go by Gunther, or Gun. Nobody wants to say "Hey GM, how are you enjoying your steak dinner?" That sounds very pretentious.

FYI, Kunta Kinte was played in the film Roots by the German-born actor LRM Burton, Jr. (pictured here as the Homerically blind Jordy LaForge).

"No, I think poets should take the lesson of the great aromatic eucalyptus tree and poison the soil beneath us."

2005-08-18T10:42:00.000-07:00

I Go to AWP by Kay Ryan

"Can one craft beautiful art out of intentionally misleading parts?"

2005-08-16T11:33:00.000-07:00

Literary hoaxes.

Lagging Strands

2005-08-01T13:03:00.000-07:00

Sorry, unfaithful readers, for my lack of posts. I've been hard at work revising my poems, and cleaning my cousin's pool. He recently fired his pool man, who used to come twice a week, because he discovered some algae on the underside of the thermal cover. Now I must contend with pH values and chlorine levels and leaf-catching. In the meanwhile, and in the memory of blog-dead but still-living Eduardo Corral, I ask you to vote on my new manuscript title:

The Kites of Hell
Colossus
Magic Anatomy
Cerificates and Receipts
or
None of the Above

xo

Gun

2005-06-03T09:03:00.000-07:00

I read this quotation from a contemporary poet the other day:

"Poetry...should be just one more thing that brings people pleasure."

Ah, yeah, well, really? Is there challenge implied in pleasure? Illumination? Brain-fire? Disorientation? Thought-hijacking? Stream-hitchiking?

Hermit

2005-05-14T10:55:00.000-07:00

My cousin has gone to new york for some kind of television conference, and so I am no longer required to awake at normal hours, etc. I will be entering a mental hermitage for the next two weeks. Think good thoughts for me. My writing conference of one, we hope, will yield at least one lightning bolt. I limp along opaquely...

Kites of Hell (2005)

2005-05-02T11:52:00.000-07:00

Calumny 2005

2005-04-13T10:42:00.000-07:00

“What is lacking cannot be numbered.”

Make of the fog a horn,
of the dermis an umiak,
of the sparrow-feet
(Arms,
spoons,
grapes,
gabion legs.)
a wall-eyed cat.

A ball of sea glass
penetrates the grass.

This meal feels like a marathon, sister.

(Timbers of our trestle,
a handful of indifferent filings,
your peasants asleep
in the dampening culvert.)

Dragoman
hold my hand.

Robert Creely (1926-2005)

2005-03-30T16:32:00.000-08:00

[Below from Donald Factor, via a MeFi thread]

In the early sixties I edited a magazine called Nomad. We did a manifesto issue and this was Creeley's contribution:

A NOTE

Robert Creeley

I believe in a poetry determined by the language of which it is made. (Williams: 'Therefore each speech having its own character the poetry it engenders will be peculiar to that speech also in its own intrinsic form.') I look to words, and nothing else, for my own redemption either as man or poet. Pound, early in the century, teaches the tradition of. man-standing-by-his-word,' the problem of sincerity, which is never as simple as it may be made to seem. The poet, of all men, has least cause and least excuse to pervert his language, since what he markets is so little in demand. He must find his living elsewhere. His aim must never be deflected by anterior commitment, even to those whom he loves. Words cannot serve responsibly as an apology for those who may wish to make them one.

I mean then words - as opposed to content. I care what the poem says, only as a poem - I am no longer interested in the exterior attitude to which the poem may well point, as sign-board. That concern I have found it best to settle elsewhere. I will not be misled by the. niceness, of any sentiment, or its converse, malevolence. I do not think a poet is necessarily a nice man. I think the poem's morality is contained as a term of its structure, and is there to be determined and nowhere else. (Pound: 'Prosody is the total articulation of the sound in a poem.') Only craft determines the morality of a poem.

Louis Zukofsky offers. A Test Of Poetry' as. the range of pleasure it affords as sight, sound, and intellection.' I am pleased by that poem which makes use of myself and my intelligence, as a partner to its declaration. It does not matter what I am told - it matters, very much, how I am there used. Our world has been so delivered to the perversion of language ( the word qua trick or persuader) that my own soul, such as I know it, comes to life in whatever clarities are offered to it. Poems allow me to go on living, and I am grateful for my life.

The Missing Piece

2005-03-22T17:49:00.000-08:00

Missing Rudolph Lope

2005-03-18T12:42:00.000-08:00

Has it really been over a year since Mr. Lope posted this assessment on his now-defunct blog? if only I had more readers like him. If only someone were even reading my blog. Ah, but it's the illusion of audience that keeps us hitting "print" or "publish", isn't it?

The Poetry of Gunther Quinte

I believe it is time now to consider the work of Gunther Quinte, a poet who, though popular on the continent, has failed to garner the attention he deserves here in the United States. I first became aware of Mr. Quinte's poetry somewhat recently when C.P. Galom urged me to consult the man's website. I was shocked, not only by the explosive originality of the verse, but by the seeming anonymity of the poet. At a recent Doe Library reading here in Berkeley, I asked several of my colleagues what they thought of Gunther Quinte's latest book (Tub Math) and was met with nothing but puzzled stares. It is my hope that, with this essay, this horrifying lacuna in the American poetic sensibility may, at last, be filled.

Though a proper introduction to Mr. Quinte's work would begin with a discussion of his first book, the brilliant, post-avant masterpiece, Poems in the Way of Experience, I shall begin instead with his most recent, and to my mind, most accomplished work, Tub Math. Tub Math's poems seethe with the experimental energy of Quinte's Crony Award-winning second book Burn Outs; but temper their experimentation with a considered, phenomenological investigation of poetic being. Consider, for example, the first lines of "Plumage Rock," perhaps the book's most arresting piece:

The organic inspector came by, itching

to certify our day. I exhaled smoke.

Ignoring for the moment the clearly Messianic figure of the "organic inspector" and the terrifying exhalation of smoke (could this be the smokey belch of Cacus, burrowed in his lair?), I am moved, even now, to swoon by the simple lyricism of these lines...

Here Comes Stephanie Strickland

2005-03-18T12:27:00.000-08:00

7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old?

Poems are words that take you through three kinds of doors: closed doors, secret doors, and doors you don’t know are there.

From the latest Here Comes Everybody.
With great links to Stephanie Strickland's online work.