Category Archives for: Poetry

Essay versus Poem

13 February 2022 by Rey Armenteros

What’s the difference?

Oh, there’s a difference!

You type one and hand write the other one.

One should come out with facility, almost like thought, and the other is to be built like an object of sound structure and appealing form.

If one is your involuntary signature, your handwriting, as they say, the other is your thoughtfully-conceived drawing technique.

One is hit or miss, and the other one is hit when enough time has passed between each episode of shaping and deliberating and searching and toiling.

A successful essay is a thought on a line, unbroken and moving on (and not necessarily forward), and anything else attached to it, such as a clever rhythm or sound structure is nothing more than a bonus.

A successful poem is a thought on a form that may at first seem to be on a line, that takes any shape, disposition, or length within a conceived structure, and which may allow any bonus to be added to it for the benefit of added fascination but at the expense of precluding any possibility of attaining perfection.

Leave a comment | Categories: A Thought, Essay, Fragment, Poetry, ReyA', Writing Process | Tags: essay, literature, poetry, tiny piece, writing process

Rib Cage (first published in BlazeVOX)

16 January 2022 by Rey Armenteros

The bell, the hawk, and the moon…

Lightning outlined the way for the traveler. The traveler was on the pillow of the floating world. With a brush in one hand and a fan in the same hand, the traveler was going to make something of the tremors that originated at the epicenter of everything. Absorbing the calm of his spinal column, sending his mind to meet this force, but… But he halts. A new resting place is a sojourn in the country, as they say in that almost forgotten place, the land of his birth. But he tarries. Too long, it seems. And soon even this new place becomes his home. Time. A monument of time caught him looking back into the window from that side of his home he now leaves to dust and disuse. At the sound of his voice, a butterfly flutters away, and another catastrophe marks a decision that will be finalized on the horizon. This, as idea prone to reality, forces him to abandon his place to live life again engrossed by a constantly shifting picture plane. On and on, but the traveler stops in front of ancient ruins. What buildings there were turned into the ossified evidence of wooly mammoths. Look. Gossamer spider residue swings from an obliging exit space long ago shaped like an arch, and he goes inside, soon hungry and tarrying once again but for far too long, and then lost to all memory.

Leave a comment | Categories: A Poem, Poetry, ReyA' | Tags: a poem, BlazeVOX, literature, poetry

Prehistory (first published in BlazeVOX)

09 January 2022 by Rey Armenteros

The drawback behind choosing silence is: no one will ever know. (Silence as it is preceded by blank page or title and nothing more than an ellipse.)

Those that commit suicide have always carried the responsibility. The suicide note is a necessity. The exposition in such notes reveals a reason, identifies it as what it is, as opposed to an accident or murder, and provides testimony for the civil codes in the law. The suicide note shows those on this side what compels the suicide to climb to the edge and decide to release all connections. It is the only proof that bears witness to that line of thought. Potential suicides recognize that it is the proper thing to do. Life has no meaning. We know this. We are the ones that provide the meaning, and it just isn’t fair.

At least we have one way out that is all our own doing. The potential suicide studies this and somehow loses the meaning established by self and sundry.

A new line of thought has been developing. Recently, potential suicides have found meaning in identifying themselves as writers of suicide notes, never graduating into full-fledged suicides. They are notorious for writing the words without doing the deed. We know them well. They have gone by many names. Eventually, after the world forms new layers of ice and then loses them, eradicating all previous civilizations and erasing all past accomplishments, they will come to be known as poets.

Leave a comment | Categories: A Poem, Poetry, ReyA' | Tags: a poem, BlazeVOX, literature, poetry

Some Crumpled Pieces of Paper (first published in BlazeVOX)

21 November 2021 by Rey Armenteros

That poor hopeless son-of-a-bitch. Who was he anyway? Concentrating. Hard. Delirium. Nothing. Anyone can overcompensate for their false sense of time, space, and self. In step with the spirits, it tastes good until the bottle goes sour.

Now, this poor son-of-a-bitch was talking to an old friend of his that he knew before a prior career change. They had known each other longer than the dry span of progress, that regurgitator of certain lost souls. The son-of-a-bitch was at his favorite hangout spot when his old friend hit him up for some money. “Is it okay?” his friend asked as he pulled the crumpled bills out of the son-of-a-bitch’s shirt pocket. The friend put some in the cigarette machine and offered the son-of-a-bitch a smoke. He was sure his friend was genuine, but when his friend strutted off, the poor son-of-a-bitch thought, “How could this still be happening to me?”

Leave a comment | Categories: A Poem, Poetry, ReyA' | Tags: a poem, BlazeVOX, literature, poetry

Choices (first published in BlazeVOX)

10 October 2021 by Rey Armenteros

DIRECTIONS: Read this to powerful music.

In all that time, I would have this thought.
You use words. Others have thoughts too.
But it never fails. It happens.
Disappointment. Something to overcome.
And the only way that can be done is with a tool.
A hammer. And you understand something larger.
Open chamber. Bits of skull with matted hair.
The housings of thought. But not your thoughts.
And once you give in to this curiosity, stop.
Regret sets in. And something larger…

(OR: Read this to whatever you like.)

Leave a comment | Categories: A Poem, Poetry, ReyA' | Tags: a poem, BlazeVOX, literature, poetry

When Prose Poetry Ended

19 September 2021 by Rey Armenteros

I am writing about sin and redemption. There are things I have done which I can almost regret, and there are wishes I had lost that taste almost as good when I bring them back in some painful form. There is a path that describes an imperfect arc across the limits of my panorama, over horizon and past stacks of houses, and its curve is wild with change as it peaks at its middle before straightening up at the farthest end, where it touches something way beyond my vision. When the excitement of the trail’s zenith is behind us, what you were reaching for terminates this glorious arc.

The term prose poetry is unnecessary. It is an explanation the poems that fall under this heading do not need. In the hands of the enemy, it becomes a hopeless excuse that they prod when scrutinizing it. A poem is a poem, and every single poem that has used the word prose in its heading is a poem that needed no such distinction. Such terms are lines in the sand. At first, it was essential to bring up this prose aspect to the poetry under the growing excitement of a burgeoning form, but it soon became its own Achilles heel. You read numerous introductions wherein the writers defend the form with outrageous anecdotes of other poets lambasting prose poetry, and you can hardly believe it, but there it is.

Or there it was. It seems to be a chapter in the recent past, because you hardly hear of its practitioners anymore. All the books on prose poetry I have gotten my hands on are from twenty years ago or more, when the form was really spinning and making waves in the process.

It has gone the way of so many others. Unknowingly, I was practicing prose poetry of some sort when it was still around, just before its final years. And then it was somehow absorbed into the greater heading, and nobody talks about it anymore. Perhaps, it is so accepted now, that a poem could have anything, from traces of prose to complete pieces all in prose, and no one would raise a single complaint.

It is now a chapter, and that is the way it should be. Though I reluctantly call my poetic aspirations prose poetry, I deny it in public, on pure principle, and yet the guiding light I take from my forebears were the practitioners that camped at that fire.

Leave a comment | Categories: Essay, Poetry, ReyA' | Tags: essay, literature, poetry

Collections of Poetry and What is Lost

12 September 2021 by Rey Armenteros

Different ways of doing things, and each way gives a certain presentation. That was why I craved the original books. For Auden, it was the four books I had read from a college library. Those were the ones I wanted. But when I looked them up, the prices were too high for the battered conditions the old books had. They were four earlier books, and I wanted to relive them. Things like The Shield of Achilles and Nones. And The Double Man. I forgot the fourth. I looked around a little more. I settled on one of two other options. I could either get the Collected Poems of Auden or the Selected Poems of Auden. To the untrained ear, they sound the same. And just a couple of years before, both terms would have meant the same thing to me. I now knew that “collected” meant every available poem by Auden. That collection was being offered in several volumes. So my four books would be there, yes, but so would every book by Auden I was not yet ready for. I looked into the other option, which was just one volume of what one editor deemed Auden’s best work. “Selected” implied the best (even though it was reluctant to say it) — according to whomever’s standard. I knew this would fall way short of the mark, but I settled for it because it did represent parts of these four books, along with some other stuff.

Neither option works. I hope one day poetry publishers understand that. The individual volumes of poetry are discrete works that need to be made into their discrete volumes. Books fall out of print. Some books come back into print. But for poetry, this rarely happens. As soon as a poet is dead or along in years, they put together these massive volumes that collect everything.

For Strand, it was just one book, and I thought at the time it was the best option. Originally, I was interested in one poetry book of his that was all in prose. But his entire career came along with this new edition. When I started reading it, it occurred to me — the notion that the life’s work of a poet was all held in this one not very large book. Like a brick that gets one shot to get thrown through a window. That would make waves. Its mark.

I went through Strand’s whole career like that, in that one brick, and it made me wonder if I were doing it wrong. You needed to breathe between the books. It was actually the kind of book you left close-by, handy, so that you can read a little everyday. Next time, that’s how I’ll do it.

I gather the economics is not there to publish one poet’s entire career of books as originally published. It saves to put it all in one book. And that way, the lovers of this work would have all the work available, and what is more important, it would still be in print.

But a collection lumps everything together. It does not usually honor the original typesetting of the individual books, and this could force textual inconveniences. The worst part about a collection is that the books of poetry that once existed on its own without being in close proximity with other works are no longer separate units to be encountered in that way. They share a spine and a reading momentum. They have stopped roaming the world on adventures and are now a part of a home where the family dynamics do not always equate harmony.

And the pages have no care for the distribution of the poems. Everything is done for the sake of space because so much is squeezed into one book. If the original books started every poem at the top of the page, a collection will not follow that because it follows a different set of ethical grounds.

I swore I’d never buy another collection of poetry works again. For Ashbery, I bought the one poetry book I had read about. I couldn’t find a decent copy of Three Poems, but even a battered copy would be better than a collection. I bought the battered copy. Read it and read it. My fingers had to handle it more gingerly than I normally hold books, because the pages were about to start slipping out of the binding. I needed to read the book more, but I didn’t enjoy the physical conditions. I decided to get the first volume of a two-volume set of his collected works. I was reluctant. But there was no other option. Taking a look at it when I obtained it, paging through it, I felt more disappointed than with the Strand collected works. It was generic-looking. The pages were almost onion skin. It was a thousand pages. Reading it, I found, was like reading the Bible. But I’ve been reading it. And reading it is the best part. I kept reading it, and the physical limitations of the book did not add to the experience, but they slipped into the background. The generic-looking tome was what I expected everyday at the same time of the day when I pulled it for more lines of his work.

I am not a fan of the format, but this is all I have. I’m thankful it is here. Reading it and reading it still. The collected format is running a through line across every work of his, and this is inevitable in any reading of such a book. The thin paper and sober demeanor of its covers are now subsumed into my experience. After buying this first volume, I swore I would not buy another collection. Well, when I’m ready, I’m going to need to buy the second volume. And that will be the last one.

Leave a comment | Categories: Books, Essay, Poetry, ReyA' | Tags: books, essay, literature, poetry

Possibilities

22 August 2021 by Rey Armenteros

I make poems as if I were following the rules of a game.

But the sounds of words play no part in it. I almost never consider the audial nature of language — not when making thoughtful decisions. Things like puns that make an appearance through the parallel surfaces of words share the most random connections. I feel they are the least likely to level reflections of any depth. The same goes with rhyming. A poetry handbook might, for instance, point at the way wall and fall rhyme in one stanza, intimating that they are placed in such positions in a poem in order to underscore their connection, because there is meaning to be had when you fall off a wall.

But then, that is an English phenomenon, which immediately implies that the verbal artists from another language might not connect those two ideas in the same way because they would not rhyme in the same way in their own language. So falling off a wall seems to have a peculiarly English significance.

No, my poems would have nothing to do with such incidental coincidences. Instead of following the beats of a language, they follow the rhythm of situations. Yes, this is like prose. But such poetry would not simply be formed by paragraphs. I play with the rules of sentences and come up with new things. I use the following tenets to make my plain sentences into poems:

A poem should be presented before you in its entirety; so, it should be no longer than a page, or at least no more than two facing pages.
If prose is composed of paragraphs and sentences, and poems of stanzas and lines, my poems would have one foot in each camp. It would be stanzas that are made up of sentences.
In such a basic structure as three stanzas, you could still make other configurations. You can have multiple paragraphs inside a stanza by having all paragraphs that follow the first one inside a stanza indented. In this way, you can have three parts to a one-page poem formed by stanzas that each hold more than one paragraph.
There are other possibilities. In this type of system, you could write a poem that is only constructed of one-sentence stanzas, underscoring the line by having it more visible.
Another one is that of writing one solid stanza as a poem. A slight deviation from this would be making the stanza have multiple indented paragraphs, which would adhere to straight-forward prose — and hence, look nothing like a poem.
Of course, you could make three or four or five stanzas without interior indentations and leave it at that.
Or each stanza could be made up of two sentences. Each sentence could be a separate paragraph. If the first paragraph is not indented, and the second one is, the prose poem made up of such “couplets” would naturally look like a poem (but only at first glance), even if it follows all the rules of mundane grammar.
Rhythm could be established by number of sentences per stanza, as well as by types of sentence structures, as well as by depicted situation, as well as by the occasional repetition.
If it is one poem per page or two facing pages, the pages in the poetry book might look monotonous. One way around this is having some of the poems have no title. Some could have a number or symbol to introduce it. Poems could also have bold subtitles above each stanza. Coupled poems could appear on the same page. Unrelated tiny poems could do the same thing. Some poems could start halfway down the page, which would diametrically mirror the shorter poems that finish halfway up the page.
In addition to these basic rules, I invite a few auxiliary possibilities. Sentences can be numbered, for instance. And in the interests of lists, two or three columns in one page comprised of two- or three-word sentences can be allowed now and again, when I’m in the mood.

Leave a comment | Categories: Poetry, ReyA', Writing Process | Tags: poetry, writing process

A Single Speck (first published in BlazeVOX)

02 May 2021 by Rey Armenteros

Imagine a speck smaller than the eye can see suddenly become the Universe and everything in it. That is one infinitesimal thing becoming every other thing.

If I look around this common room, there is paper and wood furniture and a telephone and ink and dirty clothes and bottles and toys and books and dirty pictures and even particles of light coming off the top light bulb.

Now, the scientists say that the speck must have been pretty dense.

I calculate for a moment about how many specks I can fit in my room. Then, I mentally look out my window and imagine all the things around the corner of my perception and then mentally fill it up with specks.

The picture I’m getting includes layers of sky and beyond, with the idea of spinning globes separated by gases and rocks and things that may not even have names yet. There are more corners and layers in these places, and well…

I fill everything up with specks. It is unreal, but I am a sorcerer for just this moment, and I conjure specks as clearly as the actual spaces they fill. And over my shoulder, I feel the presence of a number that no human concern has ever encountered. An eerie feeling takes over. The entity introduces itself, and this is the number of the specks that fill up all the spaces in this universe of ours, the one that resides in our minds if nowhere else.

Now, I understand I’m doing this backward, because I am filling the spaces and not the objects which actually derived from this one speck at the beginning of time. But that is not important because human comprehension can go either way it wants, and it won’t go very far.

Eventually, the question I get, when the entity takes its leave and all is back to normal, is how much larger can the universe actually grow, and just what kind of density are we talking about here?

Leave a comment | Categories: A Poem, Poetry, ReyA' | Tags: a poem, BlazeVOX, literature, poetry

Experiments in Other Dimensions 3

11 April 2021 by Rey Armenteros

Italo Calvino, the writer, was now becoming clear to me. He was forming games around a number of laws he inscribed in the reality of a book. That was his way, apparently.

And it made me think of me. I was this type of writer once upon a time. That is why he was interesting me so much now. I was an adept of Calvino’s systems many years before I had ever heard of Calvino. Perhaps launching off the ideas philosophy had granted me when I was avidly studying to be an artist (which is a set of ludicrous rules if I ever heard of one). I went about recording tenets and running experiments.

I was living abroad when these systems of rules were first coming to me in my own writing. This hunger for the sordid experiment in my work might have originated by the many wonders another country can offer the open-eyed foreigner. I continued years after this, delving deeper into ever more specific rules, and I knew that these further deepening tenets had fewer and fewer possibilities for anyone to understand and furthermore, enjoy. I wonder if I had never returned home, would I not have become my own brand of Italo Calvino. It sounds senseless to say such a thing, but the stubborn path that I made for myself was an Italo Calvino quest. I was not writing for anyone but myself, and though many people read Calvino, I am positive that he wrote for just one person.

It was testing writing against a wall of patterns — a grid of bricks, for instance. Any pattern would do. As children we ask ourselves what if everyone in the world were not real or what if the buildings became vehicles that floated into space or what if the world started spinning in the other direction? As a writer, I wanted to subject my readers to the same philosophical nonsense. With enough years and travails, I abandoned the search for stupidity in logic, but it still lingers, somehow invested in my work though I don’t know where this gold dust now lingers in my system.

One day, I discovered Borges. He was someone I had always meant to read but never did. Until that moment when I did. And it was a far nobler, wiser, and more astute version of my younger self looking right back at me. It seems he had asked the same questions not just as a kid, but with more importance, as an adult. I was staring at visions his stories raised in me and recognizing powerful versions of elementary questions, about eternity wrapped in a room or the making of a book copied verbatim from another book and it still being a different book. These were the ideas something like philosophy gave us, but Borges delivered it to us within the trappings of high art.

When I reached Calvino, it slowly occurred to me that here was a student of Borges going into his own directions, catering words to thought that built itself off rules. They weren’t the same, but I have grouped them as a pair I need to further study.

But I am not concerned with that brand of infinity and its rules anymore, and especially now that I know that better minds have already crystalized portions of that reality. And yet there is still room, I think, for more. Even though I am no longer an acolyte of philosophical specks ad infinitum, I can now see my next step. There it is going back to what led me to Calvino, which made me go further back to Borges, in a sense, and that is poetry, which allows just one poem to model rules and exact results off of experiments on those rules. A single poem can hold the rules by which it is expected to be read, the thing it is saying within those rules, and sometimes something else.

Leave a comment | Categories: Books, Essay, Poetry | Tags: essay, Italo Calvino, literature

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