Stephen Bett

 

Bohumil Hrabal, Too Loud a Solitude(opening line; trans, Michael Henry Heim)

For thirty-five years now I’ve been in wastepaper, and it’s my love story.

We’ve been in wastepaper too
thirty-one years grading paper
heavy bond A+  to  F- see-thru, kiddo

31/4: a unique life mission
against the grain Vocation Literacy (oh boy)
a life purpose not by the book (uh-oh)

35/8: a knack for material acquisition (knack knack)
The money triad…  a powerhouse of wealth creation
— its sister vibration 53/8 (social activism)
Not so Happy Together  (oops)

This love story a failed romance,
illiterate doth trump innumerate
45 ways to someday
… until the blowhard’s long gone

 

Denis Johnson, Resuscitation of a Hanged Man (opening lines)

He came there in the off-season. So much was off. All bets were off. The last deal was off. His timing was off, or he wouldn’t have come here at this moment…

They came in through the bathroom window
Protected by a silver spoon
their timing only slightly off
low-season for a PoWorld swoon

Deal’s now off…       all bets too (hoho)
skid marks down the off-ramp
dumped ShowWorld in the loo

Menu is sooo off, venue rotted through
old virtues signal nothing here was new

Even kitchen sink’s a sure throw
for yr groupthink carnival row
that trademark Operation Crow

This is where your franchise lies, poesy
them poets can reel but they sure can’t bob

So lob the bathroom window up yr silvery moon
novel lines could unspool this poetry’s cartoon
leave Emperors of GloWorld clung to their
proJected greasy spoon

Julian Barnes (in lieu of a riffy line from a favourite writer, here’s a quote from one of his reviewers)

The Sense of an Ending is the story of one man coming to terms with the mutable past. Laced with Barnes’s trademark precision, dexterity and insight, it is the work of one of the world’s most distinguished writers.

The mutable world of the generative sentence is a commodified canvas for distinguished, socially disjunctivized wordsmiths who lace their prioritized parataxis with overwhelmed signifiers, who torque their dexterously precise trademark tyranny of the signified, creating polysemic masterpieces that refuse transparency, that reify the materiality of words as words, that guard (ironically) against ideological contamination, and that fetishize pussyshit consumerist cocktail-hour diarists for whom the lyric “voice poem” has simply run its course, for whom insightful connections are desyntaxed and denied, and for whom, when push comes to shove, ISBNs’ unique numeric identifiers signify, conspiratorially numerology-speaking, a paradoxical demolition of the active (dictatorial) writer and the passive (victimized) reader.

Notes:
1. 31 (= 4) & 35 (= 8), sum’more numerolo crapolo for ya; forty-five ways to Sunday: Trump “45”

2. With a little help from the Beatles & Dylan

3. Julian Barnes is Noble & one of these days ought’er be Nobel. For wording here, thx both to Bing Chat & to source material footnoted in the opening poem of this serial work

 

Stephen Bett is a widely and internationally published Canadian poet with 26 books in print from BlazeVOX, Chax, Spuyten Duyvil, & others. His personal papers are archived in the “Contemporary Literature Collection” at Simon Fraser University. His website is stephenbett.com