Ever Feral and Chiral, the Howl
a prose poem by
Arpine Konyalian Grenier
Presented at the European Beat Studies Conference
Université Libre de Bruxelles, 2015
The Beat Generation’s howl, over time, has crystallized the burn / slam / want predicament of the human — another mind, another smile, made and unmade cause on the road, spending itself to the rhythm of a caravan, feral and chiral the moves. (Callow predicament resisting incarnations for l’avenir.) Could such prowl be fungible? We’ll establish count then parse as nature and its travails dauntlessly deliver nuance, agency and beneficiaries to this self-organizing system — synthetic, dynamic and vocal, its dance.
envision power without authority
embedded in the timely
kicking it
the moves are authentic
necessary and material
the rules culled from some trilogy
that’s you and me
and the howl
embodied and simulated
longing or not
imitado
apassionado
You and me and the howl, and a string of unsuspected questions we rehearse ave to ave, having anonymously served the right side and the left side of an equation, the invisible sides dimmer and dimmer a developing act. Shared language behind attitude and rites chronicles negotiation to otiation tendered platforms. Both source and filters are necessary as we explore vagaries bypassing socio-political norms, as thrills and chills land us at the shores of an aesthetic resisting skewered semantics like a pillar of salt by pollsters and technocrats. Its narrative is historically, culturally and personally invaluable. It delivers no product but a fullness pushing forward, we breathing otherly under the vibration of meaning, seeding and feeding golem hearts to alabaster skin. Tendencies are of merit here, force to form merging pathways as the brilliance of diamond salutes the novelty of graphene, stroked by angels and mattered.
after code and jellied underwear code implies
morphing for the wished and willed
outside laws and computation
The unconscious expands. It is bruised matter, often cut, scratched, nicked or notched perhaps, but never severed. It is contemplation, with which the earth of languages meets the language of planet Earth over a contingent road. On this road, nature invades ideology at lament and rebellion, the entropic and the kinetic in aleatoric embrace, translating and illuminating without informing, working equality and difference.
add some conclusion dust to the bit of sound and then
another candles-plates-wine or candles-wine or just
candles and a public throat
there must be a public throat for the constriction
behind the white wall facing the super-agency
between us a correction sign
labored for sign
it is telling and it dafts me
as the good god and the snake god made us weighing mixing
22 stoicheia as if lips had finally turned into stubs
ave solemnis a lump here a lump there
mercy seat in-between
life a carnival encounter
the momentum skips the hour returned to us colubrine
out there the breeze and nothing to do but howl
a day’s accident before the recording of it
just cause red the menu once more
queen of black postulated ivory
diasporan spread
Dance to song after a recasting of the beat, to make peace with action-based terminologies, as if. While duct (less voice) is memory, voice (less the duct) is howl ave chasing itself. What literally matters is the import of the energy it exudes as it turns against language with language to restore its incantatory quality; as it forces text to relinquish its own from deep inside, not from the throat. Forget cashing in on equality slogans trapped between the mimetic and the diegetic, capture voice — voices, shared language behind attitude and rites.
exploring capital resisting language
Interstitial fault lines deliver remnant, ruin, relic. We’ll start from somewhere between ecology and politics where a hotbed of sheer sound translated from mad dogs is thinking clearly. Thinking beats for syntax from a semantics that never sets, that escapes the elitist, the insular.
the icon in my pocket randomly labels desire
forcing the historian to a do-it-yourself
to inhabit the overhang of rules
to groom the daily hempen for ordinary grind
for legend as handbook to the tall dark bookcase in the corner
past coursing for womb pilfered from a wonk’s
the notches ah! now let’s not move
let’s only loosen the hands
doddering on credit
cookie cutters’ hands bathing our story
red and suburbia red for song
a hint of decision
for protocol
paper plastic
leather ever
face down
I wanted a last word with you
grab me and undo my arms and eyes the lean cellar
the slit in the cement I breathe from
growing hairs for the historian
for an upgrade
the road is settling
Something about the subtle connection between breath and the caravan and the public space they occupy is both redemptive and problematic. Exploring the nature of this connection and space, I come across a place of spacelessness. Perhaps that’s home — mere encounter, closure and enclosure liberating the word, ontological differences abolished. Irreducible divergence redeeming foundation for a civil society intellect alone cannot provide. Inaccessibility the tear, the crack I pucker and festina lente along. The road settles. We must not survive language, I say. Metaphor is a scattering of words. Heavy ion collisions generate flow. Like a bacterium welcoming code it lacks, I’ll howl in vagueness, mimic size, shape, color for history and tradition, for primary verbs human lack plays into.
or periphery or time therefore fossil we hog then stab
breath hardens and bleeds
blinders and difference
yet we are not about bleeding
angels fall into
mattered
consider compassion
a die tiling
gunpowder seeded light
parse the politic of identity to generate capital
relentlessly cultured and entrepreneurial
force will materiality
adorn yourself
lacking resource autonomy confidentiality
yielding the cultural to the political
risk as ally feed not fetish
for which I’ll remain unattainable movement
error error configured
a willow settling
Ocean floors regenerate; we and the rest of the world do too. The accelerated inimitable daily diminishing impedance while the I — utility prompted reason to passion drift — turns and bends. Rock to stone armor, earth spot to dot vigilance wishing you wishing me.
Arpine Konyalian Grenier is an independent scholar and poet, author of four collections: St. Gregory’s Daughter; Whores from Samarkand; Part, Part, Euphrates; The Concession Stand: Exaptation at the Margins. Her poetry and translations have appeared in numerous publications including Columbia Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, as well as in anthologies by Two Ravens Press and Eyecorner Press (forthcoming). She lives and writes in Los Angeles.