https://www.albany.edu/offcourse
http://offcourse.org
ISSN 1556-4975
Published by Ricardo and Isabel Nirenberg since 1998
Three Poems from Broken Glosa, by Stephen Bett
Lewis Warsh: Dancing Up a Ruse
Rousseau said something about something.
He said something.
He said: I’m going to give you a fat lip.
The doorman held the umbrella
Superficial Things―Lewis Warsh (with nods to l.W. & Un/Wired)
Rousseau said something about something.
My father shortened his name from Warshafsky
when he was in his twenties. Maybe it was
2 a.m. at Anne & Lewis’s, which is one for the money old son
He said something.
Pepper told me he was gay on the
train from Boston to New York.
One track / One ticket / One way
He said: I’m going to give you a fat lip.
But he didn’t say (mid-Atlantic voice)
don’t forget to warsh your hands old boy
there’s a good chap, the old upchuck trick
The doorman held the umbrella
for the dark figure with the fat lip in the rain
said he was dancing up a ruse to snag a late train
speeding at 4 a.m. trying not to buck your grain, rattle your chain
Phyllis Webb: The Spit
And spit
give me water for spit.
Then give me
a face.
Solitary Confinement ―Phyllis Webb
And spit
broken glass
for shards
to speak
give me water for spit.
Gloss this mal du
doute … never
was spat out
Then give me
ash in time
to witness
its burn
a face.
To spite
itself
still
Lew Welch: Which Planet Are You (Currently) On?
Draw a circle a hundred feet round.
Inside the circle are
300 things nobody understands, and, maybe
nobody’s ever really seen.
Step out onto the Planet―Lew Welch (with nods to earlier glosas)
Draw a circle a hundred feet round.
Big enough to hold that old
Franz Kline line … in a forest
of Zen-inflected absence
Inside the circle are
you sitting still? expecting a tr ck?
Locked in snug as a bug
(in a toppled chestnut tree
300 things nobody understands, and, maybe
one twins another, this freedom bit
that satori hit
& which dream pops first
nobody’s ever really seen.
It’s voided (ha) shudder / quiver / shiver
Step out onto another planet far side of
despair, don’t hang there for long
This glosa is almost entirely a collage, or pastiche (or mash-up), of two Lewis Warsh poems, glossed lines from the Berrigan & Prynne glosas, & a minimalist poem from Un/Wired featuring an epigraph from a Warsh novel.
This section of Webb’s poem starts, “Let my tongue hang out / to remember the thirst for life. / Let my togue hang out / to deliver itself / of the bitter curd. / And spit / …”
BROKEN GLOSA: an alphabet book of post avant glosa:
Stephen Bett’s father took him to sit, age 15 and starting out in poetry, at the feet of his father’s friend P.K. Page, the doyenne of Canadian poetry, who later revived the "glosa" in Canada. Bett’s new book, his 25th, in a sense brings it all back home. Broken Glosa takes the “glosa,” a Renaissance Spanish Court form, and breaks it down to its contemporary essentials―fractured forms for fractured times―riffing on postmodernist and post-avant poets in ways that are as surprising and inventive as they are richly textured. This book plays out Stephen Bett’s lifetime in North American avant-garde poetry, taking the measure of 70 postmodernist poets.
The poets “glossed” / riffed on to date: Armantrout, Bernstein, Berrigan, Blackburn, Bowering, Cathers, Clark, Coolidge, Creeley, Davey, Dorn, Dworkin, Everson, Friesen, Grenier, Hollo, Jones, Kenyon, Kroetsch, Kyger, Lamantia, Lazer, Loewinsohn, Mac Low, McCaffery, McKinnon, Meltzer, Newlove, nichol, O’Hara, Olson, Oppenheimer, Padgett, Pickard, Prynne, Queneau, Raworth, DC Reid, M Reid, Rothenberg, Saroyan, Schjeldahl, Snyder, Spicer, Stevenson, Thesen, Veitch, Violi, Wah, Warsh, Webb, Welch, Whalen, Wieners, Wilkinson, Williams, J Wright, Zwicky.
Stephen Bett is a Canadian poet. His web site is stephenbett.com