I must change my life after all

Have you ever read something in a book that feels like it must be a critique of your own work?

"Water should suggest to the poet a new obligation: the unity of the element. Lacking this unity of the element, material imagination remains unsatisfied, and formal imagination is insufficient for drawing together dissimilar features. The work lacks life because it lack substance."

Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams; An Essay on the Imagination of Matter

2012 will be the year I take a new tack, as the sailors say.

IMPOSTORS

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

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

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

Collusion

"Peter Coyote never stops working."

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

NaPoWriMo Deux

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

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

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

[back]


[front]

Hard

An illuminating post from Reginald Shepherd on difficulty in poetry.

***UPDATE...NEW LINK***

Several of my poems are now up at the fine

melancholia's tremendous dreadlocks

issue #3

up now!

gun

Poetasters, are you ready to drink the haterade?

(I'm not.)

I am still alive

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

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

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

Name Change

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."

I Go to AWP by Kay Ryan

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

Literary hoaxes.

Lagging Strands

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

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

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...