JOHN MARVIN - POEMS

John Marvin is a teacher who retired and subsequently earned a Ph.D. in English at SUNY Buffalo. He has poems in scores of journals, including 6 Pushcart nominations, and literary criticism in Hypermedia Joyce Studies, James Joyce Quarterly, Pennsylvania English, and Worcester Review. He has a chapter in Hypermedia Joyce, and his book, Nietzsche and Transmodernism: Art and Science Beyond the Modern in Joyce, Stevens, Pynchon, and Kubrick, awaits a publisher.
He seeks to marry the experimental, non-narrative with the lyric and traditional in the manner of Nietzsche’s marriage of Apollo and Dionysos. He generally avoids accessibility for its own sake, and the prosaic personal story with superimposed line breaks that is ubiquitous these days.

​Braque in Square Pieces
Found Under Orange Peels
and Egg Shells Humming

​Art is meant to disturb; science reassures.
 
Excerpts from the proceedings of the
American Sophistry Society whose motto is,
“Just because it’s logical doesn’t mean it makes sense.”
 
So Sol S. says:
 
Any sorting of humans into groups
necessarily gives rise to stereotypes
because it simplifies the individual
exaggerating a few attributes
chosen for the sorting process.
 
While Art D. sings:
 
…it was equally certainly a pleasant turn of the populace
which gave him as sense of those normative letters
of the nickname Here Comes Everybody.
An imposing everybody he always indeed looked,
constantly the same as and equal to himself
and magnificently well worth
of any and all such universalization …
 
And M. O. D. Rater sums:
 
These attributes and others
not necessarily observed
are presumed to be among
a constellation of parts
aggregating
to make those people
so dangerous.

​The Long and the Short of It

​     or reading texts across the spectra of stars
           a polemic on war and was and will
 
               I'm good at reading people, but I'm almost always reading wrong.
                                                                                                Sigmund Freud
 
Me too. Not to mention the smell of notebooks
and stacks of essays lining the room
and light from the west
which the sun has yet to reach.
 
Plus — all of the synergy between the sciences and the arts
welling up as evening steeples catch reddening sunlight in post 9/11 novels
foreshadowing transmodernism and a lingering harmony
in which political science frames the distribution and use of power
within a circle of alternating tall silk hats and keffiyeh
each right hand caressing the next man's erection.
 
Contrary to "popular" belief
the nation state
which never existed
               fell
as the dominate means
for the concentration and projection of power
in the late 20th century.
 
States are now guns.
Eddie had no way to obtain a gun
so he threw shit
and died after 47 years in an empty cage
but as our dear friends in the NRA plead
"States don't kill people, people, people kill states."
 
Well the "people" (thanks to the Supremes)
who control the "guns" are global late capitalists (Glocaps).
 
Their rivals for domination of the world
are chiliastic monotheistic genocidal iconoclasts (Chimogeniacs).
 
The Glocaps are ultimate perfect materialists.
The Chimogeniacs are ultimate perfect spectralists.
 
The Glocaps dream that the threat of their autre
is crucial to demanding sacrifice from the masses
so wealth can be diverted into their own hands.
 
The Chimogeniacs dream of any excuse to attack their autre
Cowboys and Crusaders to be sure
but anyone who does not worship death.
 
On the other end of the rainbow
our supercluster now has a name
               Laniakea
Hawaiian for "immense heaven."
Laniakea is part of a filament strung along a dark cosmic lattice
in one universe within one multiverse of the one ultiverse.
 
Not one of our quarks is older than 13.8 billion years
and all of the many quarks
together
               Muster Mark
make a mote in the eye of forever.

​That Ludwig, he's a card!

​Do not forget that a poem,
although it is composed in the language of information,
is not used in the language-game
of giving information.
     from Wittgenstein's Zettel, as quoted by M. Perloff
 
Keeping track of what he might want to say or write
under a claret lunar eclipse
while wolves cuddle in cozy nests
under spruce shelter
fallen needles still fresh enough to be sticky and aromatic
as diverting drifts form and reform
between the tips of the lowest boughs
and the crests of the wave of crystal
which no longer glitters in moonlight
that had moments before filtered through treetops
that point toward the eastern sky
from whose horizon he hoped sunlight would meander again at last
may be the least of his worries
as the winter of his discontent deepens
and snowflakes once charming fuse
and inch their grinding way down an eroding valley
boulders chattering and sketching fairy tales
in the stripped bed rock
which is all that remains of any soul
under a hidden sky.

​Variations on lines by Proust

​—between us and other people there exists a barrier of contingencies
[... and likewise] in all perception there exists a barrier
as a result of which there is never absolute contact
between reality and our intelligence.
                                                            Marcel Proust. Time Regained
 
No doubt life
               crumbles like stale bread in the blistering sunlight
               unprotected from gamma rays since so much air has been lost
               and people must manufacture ointments tinctures and unguents
               so they can come and go on baked surfaces devoid of violets
               where winds swirl and provide no relief from a sizzle
 
placing each of these people on my path a number of times
               slowing my progress across the stinging sand the blistering sand
               but I save my water nonetheless having turned the hard way
               and observe each and every individual through a rose lens
               as each and every individual observes me under a similar constraint
               but a constraint bewilders milky ghosts
 
presenting them to me in particular circumstances
               with each curl of space each throb of time flickering in afterthoughts
               that fade before being noticed and I can't turn quickly enough
               to confirm or deny existence or even crosshairs
               in the web of deceleration where each cell desiccates
               depriving acquaintances of familiarity
 
enclosing them finally on every side
               like steeples at sunset framed in an open bedroom window
               or appearing suddenly around a bend in a road unfamiliar
               though almost remembered as I struggle to free thoughts
               of musical phrases and deep rumbling felt more than considered
 
restricting the view which I had of them
               even though they touched me in crowded ballrooms for years
               because contact was never more than a reflection or a glance
               on the surface of a pond with tender ripples
 
preventing me from discovering their essence
               until time has meandered into a distant sunset
               and memories forever lost