Please note that the poems and essays on this site are copyright and may not be reproduced without the author's permission.


Friday 1 January 2010

"Because the asking..."


.


File:Plankton creates sea foam 2.jpg




Because
the asking
of original
questions
is a
consequence
of
interferences
and because
interferences
are products
of
time sequences
it follows
that original
questions
are both
functions
and products
of
time.




File:Plankton creates sea foam1 .jpg





Color interference patterns created when plankton crushes ashore, dies and disintegrates in tide pools after the ocean retreats (note photographer's reflection changing from bubble to bubble): photos by Mila Zinkova, 2008

6 comments:

STEPHEN RATCLIFFE said...

Lovely poem Tom, amazing pictures (who/what IS that figure-looking thing in the green circles? -- then note tells us. Another (seemingly 'coincidental') resonance in today's poem (from "Temporality" after all), where "lagoon" (where such plankton in pools might appear) 'appears'.

1.1

grey whiteness of clouds above shadowed
ridge, song sparrow calling from branch
in foreground, sound of wave in channel

sky which has become memory
to him, seeing lagoon

becomes more elusive, sense
that picture, that is

grey-white sky on horizon next to point
whiteness of gull perched on GROIN sign


Happy 2010!

STEPHEN RATCLIFFE said...

ps. another note back to you on the Jim Carroll page.

ACravan said...

I've been reading your poetry for a long time, but only recently discovered Beyond The Pale. It's given me a lot of pleasure, so thank you and please accept my best wishes for a very fine 2010. Curtis Roberts

TC said...

Stephen,

I hear these succeeding diurnal "entries" over in my mind later on (brain noise impossible to moderate), in bits, and thus get odd new permutations... "lagoon sky elusive memory calls him", etc.


Curtis,

Appreciate your saying hello, you are surely welcome.

TC said...

Steve,

Two further thoughts, or aspects of one: could it be useful to consider the poems in your sequence as like the plankton foam bubbles seen in the Zinkova photos, containing: elements of the random ("nature"); and also, elements of selection (framing); and too those surprising ever-changing evanescent moments of something curiously close to the personal (the photographer's reflection changing slightly yet perceptibly from foam bubble to foam bubble)?

In this way your sequence might be seen as a self-interfering system.

My other (related) thought was to enquire whether you've ever played in the Quenaudian sonnet-generating game, based on Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes? The last time I went and ran my cursor over a few lines I found I had in a few moments added some dozens to the total of sonnets so far generated, which now stands at some 380,000.

Of course there is neither mind nor landscape nor music in that project, unless those things enter by accident, like plankton bubbles lost on a freeway, so I suppose it's technically "no contest". (And then too in this comparative numbers game I am fancying, you have the "handicap" of being merely a single [self]-interfering-generator.)

STEPHEN RATCLIFFE said...

Thanks for all such thoughts, Tom! Does make sense, "the photographer's reflection changing slightly yet perceptibly from foam bubble to foam bubble" -- "self interfering system" (and now I will think further about this. . . .