Loopy

I recently had some time to sit down with Lars Palm’s new chapbook, mindfulness, published as an e-book by Moria. I didn’t quite know what to expect from the text, but I was thoroughly engaged by what I found. Carefully assembled, mindfulness consists of twenty poems of twenty lines each, with exactly one hundred words per poem—one hundred even, that is, if you count three ampersands per poem as a kind of shorthand for the vocalization of “and.” The ideational kicker is that this sequence of poems explores the twin ideas of difference and repetition through a series of loops or revolutions. Upon a cursory glance, each poem, despite different titles, looks precisely the same.

But that’s cursorily speaking. Once you stop flipping around and actually sit down to read and listen closely, the sequence begins to pull you in after the first few poems. To give you a more concrete idea, here’s the first piece:

HOW ABOUT FIXING THAT

going down to the
hall they stumbled upon
a crack in the carpet
rendering it incapable of
flight & them – yes they
all stumbled in a long line
of humble pines – of not
laughing as they don’t have
quite the talent of the Marx
brothers, but then again, do
you? once more; going down
to the hall they avoided the
crack in the carpet & no pines
scattered needles upon their
red hairs carefully placed
throughout the hotel not named
California with no eagles sitting
on the roof staring hungrily at
the residents coming & going
through the revolving doors

And then, on the next page we find this:

BAY OF FIGS

going down to the
hall they stumbled upon
a crack in the carpet
rending it incapable of
flight & them – yes they
all stumbled in a long line
of humble pines – of not
laughing as they don’t have
quite the talent of the Marx
brothers, but then again, do
you? once more; going down
to the hall they avoided the
crack in the carpet & no pines
scattered needles upon their
red hairs carefully placed
throughout the hotel not named
California with no eagles sitting
on the roof staring hungrily at
the residents coming & going
through the revolving doors

The poems themselves do as much as they can to distance the reader by repeated shifts in logic from line to line, especially in the first halves—each poem creates a shift at its center, from line ten to line eleven, with a suggestion of an internal repetition at “once more; going down.” Again, the poems deviate or shift away from that suggestion, leaving one to wonder about the possible differences between “How About Fixing That” and “Bay of Figs,” obvious title changes aside. Well, if you didn’t catch the shift, check line four, where the “rendering” of the first poem becomes “rending” in the second poem. We can also begin to catch the humor at play in these poems, too, when we notice the shift from the expected Bay of Pigs to an equally ridiculous tagline “Bay of Figs.” And equally shifty, so to speak, is the break at “Marx”—no, we’re not talking about Karl here. Then, of course, The Eagles’ “Hotel California” (who doesn’t want to mock this song, at least on occasion?) makes a shifted appearance as well. Adding insult to injury, so to speak, “eagle” shifts to “beagle” later on in the sequence. As I mentioned earlier, each poem at a scan seems texturally similar on the surface. Once you begin to give the poems some deeper attention, however, they sometimes yield some interestingly shifty results. To catalogue all the shifts here would be giving away the goods, so to speak, so you’ll have to investigate for yourselves.

What I do want to discuss a bit is the inevitable critique of such a project, viz., that interminable question: So what? Well, I won’t become more academic than necessary here and give mindfulness a thoroughly Deleuzean read—which it begs for, by the way. The concepts of difference, repetition, shifts and, ultimately, becoming—as well as a minor language created by the non sequitur shifts from line to line in the first half of each poem—all give themselves over to Deleuzean philosophy. At the moment, tho, we’d do well to remember off the top of our collective heads that avant-garde poetics has been deeply involved with the exploration of difference and repetition, at least since the relatively timid experiments of Duchamp (I’m thinking in particular of “Speculations” here, 1913) and, perhaps more poignantly, the endeavors of Stein, who informed the world that there was no such thing as repetition. In other words, one reading of mindfulness will yield a multiplicity of interpretations, despite the fact that, each to each, the sequenced poems generally sound the same, tho if you listen closely you'll quickly realize that even reading this sequence aloud one time through will yield differences, e.g., in durations and intonations.

There are many different ways to consider or, rather, to be mindful of mindfulness. At the moment, I’m engaged most by the loops of sound that the poems create through repetition, each lyric-length poem cycling into the next, with very subtle linguistic shifts within an otherwise stably assembled construction. These poems build a verbal momentum that’s not readily achieved through a series that, even on a textural or surface level, differ significantly—reading mindfulness aloud is mantra-like; at least, this was my experience of the text. My answer to the So what? question is, ultimately, simple: The poems are enjoyable to read, especially considering that to discover the shifts or changes becomes a fairly complex game of close listening. If you relish linguistic subtleties, then I’d suggest becoming mindful of mindfulness sometime soon.

Adieu.