]] Robert Creeley’s “But (for Stan’s birthday)” (Thirty Things,1974) [[
The poem registers an objection to Brakhage’s wild-eyed logoklasmic program (“Imagine a world before the ‘beginning was the word,’” etc), but in so doing inadvertently metamorphoses into a performance of the accomplishment it seeks to deny. Or perhaps it’s not so inadvertent. For this is, after all, a successfully experimental poem in the primary sense that its effects can be repeated — as the instructions in square brackets indicate. We end where he began: in the adversative. #makenothinghappen
‘the wounded fall in the direction of their wound’ / ‘the abused become the abusers’ / ‘participates of necessity in the activity it denounces’ / critique as desire / what’s my ideology today
