David Carl

Notes on Poetry David Carl

Attempting literature as a kind of homage: part alchemy, part collage, an on-going flirtation with quotation. I've realized that the problem with imagining the book I've always wanted to read and then sitting down to write it is that I've always disliked reading my own books; so if I were to write the book I've always wanted to read, by virtue of my having written it I would no longer want to read it. But since I have neither audience nor readers, is it fair then to say that I write for myself? Say rather that I write for those selves I'm not but dream of becoming. (Strictly for my own literary (which is to say, soteriological) purposes, I've been trying to imagine the possibility of a poetry that is a cross between Bash?, David Lynch, Thelonious Monk, and Bela Tarr; something that does in language what artists like Nina Simone, Morton Feldman, Stan Brakhage and Chris Marker have done in sound and image; an aesthetic homage to Duchamp, Raoul Vaneigem, Joseph Cornell and Henry Darger; an imaginary dialogue between Tom Philips' A Humument and Isodore Isou's Venom and Eternity, Schopenhauer and Sonic Youth, where Moby Dick and The Four Zoas meet Gavin Bryars and Johnny Cash... the literary wanderings of an anachronistic and uneasy Modernist, caught in a past that has already outpaced its future.)