Marek / what the swat team did on wednesday
Marek Lugowski
what the swat team did on wednesday
-----------------------------------------------------------
the swat team knocked on the
door of number 53 burch village
and announced its presence.
no one answered so the swat team
used a battering ram to break
open the door.
the swat team found a woman
in a bathtub and told her to
get dressed.
they found a man and a woman
in a bedroom who said they lived
in the apartment.
the team handcuffed the man.
the team found another person
in the southwest bedroom and
handcuffed the person.
Marek Lugowski
17 April 1994
Champaign-Urbana, Illinois
source: Daily Illini, Champaign-Urbana, Illinois,
Friday 15 April 1994, p. 4,
"Police Report" column, by Suzy Frisch.
_Poems From Newspapers_ (in progresss).
lmerkel on BIX
Oh, no! You FORGOT to say whether the cops bagged 2 criminals,
or just hit the wrong apartment!
<attach slanted smiley to "forgot">
This piece, while admirably brief (I'm a huge fan of brevity,
and can go on at great, great length about it) left me
wondering why such total anonymity and vagueness?
That's obviously deliberate, but I miss the point, unless
it's a verbal equivalent of one of those monotone abstract
paintings. Or is this an ironic understated report about
some "famous" incident?
ma...@enteract.com (Marek Lugowski) writes:
One police report deserves another. Here's one I saw
yesterday on Associated Press, and used as a page-bottom
filler:
Guy decides to play prank on pal.
Guy takes pal's 5-inch tropical fish and swallows it.
Well, almost swallows. Guy chokes to death.
No way I was gonna let that not get into the paper. ;-)
-- Lee Merkel
Peter Stewart Richards
lme...@BIX.com (lmerkel on BIX) wrote:
I'll go along with the reaction i.e. 'very nice but so what?'. I figured
though, that the 'work in progress' sign might indicate that the picture
will emerge when all the dots are available to be joined together.
> Guy decides to play prank on pal.
> Guy takes pal's 5-inch tropical fish and swallows it.
> Well, almost swallows. Guy chokes to death.
>
<small snip>
>
> -- Lee Merkel
>
>
>
An old woman in Streatham lived alone with her cat, which died. She
wanted to bury the cat on the common but it was a bit embarrassing to
carry a dead cat through the streets so she put it in an old handbag and
waited until after dark but unfortunately she was accosted by two young
men who stole her handbag.
More fuel for the cruel cockney humour.
--
- Peter Stewart Richards
Marek Lugowski
In article <lmerkel....@BIX.com>, lmerkel on BIX <lme...@BIX.com> wrote:
>
> Oh, no! You FORGOT to say whether the cops bagged 2 criminals,
> or just hit the wrong apartment!
>
> <attach slanted smiley to "forgot">
but for the poem's purposes, you're not to know and that's part of value
aded writing here. Or value added editing -- as I did not add any text...
> This piece, while admirably brief (I'm a huge fan of brevity,
> and can go on at great, great length about it) left me
> wondering why such total anonymity and vagueness?
Creating a reality by subtracting from a reality.
> That's obviously deliberate, but I miss the point, unless
> it's a verbal equivalent of one of those monotone abstract
> paintings.
I don't think monotone is the word best deployed here. Try "calm", even,
"unsettlingly calm". Like Kline, Klee, Mondrian.
>Or is this an ironic understated report about
> some "famous" incident?
No, doubt it was more than a routine Moo U. town drug raid. But the
police blotter is an interesting corner of writing. And I wanted to
celebrate it, distorting it by asimple whack at the 45%-ile of the
column-inch space.
It created a surrealism many would go to great length to cook up from
scratch. No? It certainly would have gone unnoticed. Life coagulates
from polyphormic surrealisms. That's why I tell people to NOTICE.
-- Marek
> One police report deserves another. Here's one I saw
> yesterday on Associated Press, and used as a page-bottom
> filler:
>
> Guy decides to play prank on pal.
> Guy takes pal's 5-inch tropical fish and swallows it.
> Well, almost swallows. Guy chokes to death.
>
debbie
lme...@BIX.com (lmerkel on BIX) kicked destiny in the can, writing:
> Oh, no! You FORGOT to say whether the cops bagged 2 criminals,
> or just hit the wrong apartment!
> <attach slanted smiley to "forgot">
> This piece, while admirably brief (I'm a huge fan of brevity,
> and can go on at great, great length about it) left me
> wondering why such total anonymity and vagueness?
> That's obviously deliberate, but I miss the point, unless
> it's a verbal equivalent of one of those monotone abstract
> paintings. Or is this an ironic understated report about
> some "famous" incident?
i found the piece to be fairly effective in its brevity. it doesn't
matter what the newspaper report was actually referring to. it is a
great bit of mobilizing political poetry, if you ask me, reaching into
the hearts of many of us who do not fully trust the institutions
intended to protect us. sure, it may not speak to those whose
interests are served by the increasingly violent nature of our society
and the increasing use of liberal police force to _prevent_ such
violence, but it sure does speak to me.
I am waiting to see if the TX legislature passes a bill now in
committee to include music and poetry under the obscenity laws. if
the bill passes, i could be arrested for saying fuck in a reading at a
coffeehouse or even charged as a felon for distributing a broadside or
chapbook containing poems that somehow describe explicit sex. will a
swat team come to my house in the middle of the night, break down the
door because we did not answer on the first ring, and arrest us for
operating an obscenity production and distribution ring (a computer
and a laser printer)?
To people like me, this one really sounds an alarm. i am thinking it
would be a great intro to an exceptionally explicit poem written for
the occasion at a public event.
- deb
************
deborah kilgore
college station, tx
Marek Lugowski
In article <5i12ak$l...@news.myriad.net>,
debbie <kil...@unix.tamu.edu> wrote:
Interesting take on things. By the way, I have had the swat poem on my
previous office doors, now, office door glass, at Northwestern, for
years now... :) Now just above it, a 500 rupiah note from Indonesia.
Um, does the exceptionally explicit poem have to be written for
the occasion? Would something old tried and true do? In any case,
let's have a WRITEFEST! Here is my entry, written in the repressive city
of Cincinnati, comprising entirely G-rated words:
the smoothest marriage
------------------------------------------------------------
the smoothest marriage for my finger
tip is your perfect slender slit
we glide in its pleasure.
up and down.
left to right to left to.
through the true touch i measure
your sublime pearl
the gem that's set within you
the gasp that slips past as you
the touch that shapes
you up and down
and over the top like
foaming beer now
cresting.
now resting.
Marek Wojciech Lugowski
21 January 1991
Cincinnati
(Carter Tiernan: "the gasp that slips past as you")
from _Cincy Poems_, published as an e-book by Spectrum Press, Chicago (1997)
smolens
On 3 Apr 1997, Marek Lugowski wrote:
>
> Creating a reality by subtracting from a reality.
profound? yes, but when you subtract from a reality,
it becomes less of the same. if i subtract an ounce
of ganja from a quarter pound of ganja, there is just less
ganja. nobody likes less ganja except for the person
who can only afford less ganja; then it's plenty of ganja.
>
> I don't think monotone is the word best deployed here. Try "calm", even,
> "unsettlingly calm". Like Kline, Klee, Mondrian.
how about we employ "calm monotone."
>
> It created a surrealism many would go to great length to cook up from
> scratch. No? It certainly would have gone unnoticed. Life coagulates
> from polyphormic surrealisms. That's why I tell people to NOTICE.
>
there is no surrealism in "what the swat team did on wednesday."
surrealism is superreality, a reality exclusively added to, not
subtracted from. here-- utilizing marek's twisted defense of
of his own work-- we have-- what we really have-- is surrealism's
direct opposite, which would be... derealism, not to be confused
with derailism, which is marek's normal occupation. have a
train of thought, marek will offer it a pedantic ditch.
by its own definition surrealism cannot be achieved by
lengthy recipes. it must happen automatically, allowing
your brain to act as a blender. surrealism is willful
will-lessness.
as far as where life coagulates from... well, it has nothing
to do with surrealism. surrealism is an art term. art is
not life. art, in its purity, is an -ismless part of life.
art mistakes life for itself, and does it extremely well, as if
(as if meaning "not quite") art is life's doppelganger.
surrealism is one aspect of life, as well as symbolism, realism,
facism, naturalism, sexism, racism and pulmonary embolisms
resulting from all isms. eliminate the isms and you will have the
kind of peace and harmony that will usher in an artless era,
which the poem below instinctively proposes.
there is nothing surreal about conception; that is where life
begins, not with a coagulation of some adjective i cannot even
understand, attached to an art term.
(my hope with this note is that you NOTICE how ridiculous (not
purposeless as earlier proposed) marek's little newspaper
experiment has and will continue to be. i'll keep the
experiment in derealism attached, for your own purposes.)
while surrealism merely entralls the imagination, derealism, as
seen below, invites your brain into a vault, where you have
been given a completely dim bit of information, in a calm
monotone-- distorted by careful subtraction, instead of
exhorted by random addition, in a situation which specifically
requires no addition, subtraction or imagination: the news is
the news. for it to become poetry, it will require more than
irony, and rarely a loss of facts; you need to incite the
imagination. the poem below, does not incite the imagination;
it brings a series of questions seeking facts; it brings an
investigation to a sketch of a sketch.
the poem fails if i'd rather read the real report; whereas with
the example set by ginsberg, i always prefer to read his work,
rather than the reports he was reading that deeply inform his work.
if marek wishes to celebrate the police roundup, he should have
posted the police roundup. i'll drink to some hooligans
getting arrested. you don't celebrate with subtraction
and distortion; you don't pull out to keep from coming.
you pull out because you're coming and you don't want
spread your seed or disease. there is no such thing
as safe sex, even between married words.
jrs.