I don’t have it in front of me, but I know there’s a line or two in Phyllis Webb’s poetry book Hanging Fire that goes, “The proper response to a poem is another poem.” Rather than evaluate the merits and shortcomings of Aleph’s new EP, From Chaos to Cosmos, I’d like to enter into a more vital, fraught exchange. This is an attempt to fold over the relation of production and consumption into the discovery of the essentially stercoraceous nature of reproduction: processing, or processing-through (redundant, important), followed by delivery or expulsion. (See David Foster Wallace’s “The Suffering Channel” in Oblivion.)
In order to let the work generate its own response. To borrow is to begin, to have already begun: “Aleph is 18-year-old Ivan Erofeev, born in a Siberian village, now hailing from still-remote Omsk, which he describes as cold and gray, and leads to dreams of living in the wild.”
I. Siberia → Omsk
ears skim bio
bark meiosis
semi-ark bios
oak bier isms
a moss biker, I
am bio-kisser
II. Ivan Erofeev
one fever via
five-ear oven
five-rave eon
fire nova eve
III. Omerta
a metro
to ream
or tame
or meat
re-atom
arm, toe
more at
om / tare
IV. Melt of Time
teem to film
elf / mime / tot
felt me omit
motif — let me
V. My Sad Story
tardy, mossy
stormy days
stymy roads
VI. Astyanax Mexicanus
a sunny ataxics exam
P.S. What goes undetected in an inability to coordinate voluntary movements? The blind cave tetra has no eyes. An inability to coordinate voluntary movements frustrates vertical structures. Lateral lines are acutely sensitive to changes in pressure. Complexity sometimes decreases, putting pressure on the teleological mythology of progress. Human forms are not especially coordinated. The distance between chaos and cosmos cannot be measured. If the wild is outside, the inside is still not a field of voluntary movements.
More about: Aleph
