With translated selections from RIGID FOAM LAMINATES (Marcia H. Gutcho, pub. Noyes Data Corp 1972)
1. CHEMICAL PROCESS REVIEWS, $35 per issue. (Poetry Translation) [ACROSTIC]
TRI
ME
LLove me?
IT doesn’t have to be hard.
It
Can be easy, it should be.
Another
New
HYDRa
I
Desire to be for you.
Elephantine proportions, endless cantilever, elastic caviar. enamored.
(AND)
Pornographic
Yesmen
Rile
Opulent
Mammaries,
Elicit
Lude
Licks.
Itch
That
Itch.
Can’t or cunt?
DIANe, you were always my favorite. hair midnight blue, black blown blue. cigarette smoking on the roof. never quite happy. married the golden lab, the good-old american boy and divorced him too. cried in her car, in vietnam. diane who was a writer, that elusive pearlish profession. Hopscotch, horticulture, horoscope, homophone, homologue, homogeneous, homoerotic, ho-ho-ho!, hoes and holes and holds, horror, holler, hollaback-girl.
Yokel, yodel, yotel. yakalt. ¡yayaya—ya comprendo, no me lo digas nada más! yolo.
DRIver, step on it! get me and my wife out of here! this floosyville, this floptown, this phlegmcity. step on it! get us out of here, out of this hellhole this shittown this shithole country this hellscape! can’t you help us, driver, driver, you said you would, won’t you help us won’t you will you would, would wouldn’t n o t y why wouldn’t you help us swstill, wudnt yu? driver?
Delicate, delegate, degeneres, degenerate, denigrate, delimeat, delimit, delineate dental denial, dolittle doe: demean demeanor, demonstratively demigodic. deregulate, dig, durag.
Enthusiastic, enlightened, elastic; lacquered, lackadaisical, last-minute; minute, minted, mutt. melancholy millennium; milieu of milkweed muck; moreganism, moregasm.
missy “misdemeanor” elliot.
what else?
we ANTIOBESITY DRUG MANUFACTURE,
SPANDEX MANUFACTURE, we ABS RESIN MANUFACTURE, i feel it dripping cool like beads down my spine. the word bead comes from prayer.
a chain of RESIN beads adorns my neck. my chiseled ABS RESIN. i pray to a new god of
RIGID FOAM LAMINATES.
(plastic can b anything)
2.
Oh, god. Who knew I’d be a glutton for form? I squander it carelessly, evade and attack it, jump through its hoops and stomp them. I am the lion at my hand, the jaw on my glove. A formal and careless chameleon. Oh, god.
3.
Cantilever. At some point I discovered I’ve been using the word wrong but I can’t seem to stop. I’m seduced by it, how wrong it is, so evocative of tension it’s nearly onomatopoetic. And then I remember that the cantilever of my mind—a dancer captured in motion, balanced on one foot, hips thrown back and shoulderelbowsfingers thrown forward, the body suspended in pure tension—is not in fact the definition of cantilever. The most common definition is “a projecting beam or member supported at only one end.” This definition, for my purposes, kind of sucks. A more specialized definition reads: “either of the two beams or trusses that project from piers toward each other and that when joined directly or by a suspended connecting member form a span of a cantilever bridge.” In invoking a notion of perpetual suspension, the endless tension and compression of the cantilever bridge, this definition reaches closer to how I feel the word.
Cantilever as a verb: not a literal and specific physical position, but an articulation of the dynamic, tension-suspension physics of certain physical realities (such as the cantilever bridge). Or that’s what I think.
Defining your terms is nothing new.
Cantilever: Lever. Can’t I ever?
4. FOAM AND SKIN FROM ONE PLASTIC SHEET (Poetry Translation in Haiku and Tanka)
Of forming a cell
(thermoplastic sheet within)
& outer surface:
face or surfaces
are foamed by a substantial
ly impervious
article to be.
internally disperséd
in an inert fib
rous matrix: nucle
ating agents, incompat
ible substances,
etcetera. So
when the foam-surface sheet is
made, wasn’t n’un but
inevitable.
Essentially: tape one side
of your plastic sheet.
This will be your skin.
When you immerse your sheet in
a hydrocarbon
steeping medium,
any solvent used with an
expanding agent
will not puncture the
tape. the tape! Can you see now:
the foam-skin structure?
The foam skin structure
is what allows us to be
human, I thought or—
Not quite. Rather is
what allows plastics to be
better than us or—
Tape one side of sheet.
It is contact which save us,
contact which preserves
the face of the sheet.
With contact, penetrative
agents fail. The lack
of contact allows
your unheld sheet to be foamed.
Invaded, ransacked,
and corrupted. E
mulsifiy the form, the shot
integrity pours.
A liquid lacks form.
Liquid lacks structure, only
liquid can be foamed.
Daren’t liquify
what I held, my hand/tape/known.
No, liquefy the
odd millimeters
of sheet. emulsify those,
foam those. isn’t it
easy when you don’t
have to know? and hardly one
knows dinos’ no mo’.
Hardly anyone knows the
dinosaurs these days, do they?
It’s variable:
95:5 ratio
of trichloromo
noflouromethane
to methylene chloride for
an example. You
can dip, sure. or steep
for approx. 45 secs.
Beyond film dissolves.
Beyond time dissolves.
Steep 45 sec to 1!
in the above, a
ten sec dip at sev
enty degrees Fahrenheit
results in 20
% thickness with
penetration on each side.
Different time, dif.
% thickness that’s
penetrated. Oh, and please
don’t get me started
on the medium,
a chameleon unto
itself, beast of change!
There is no mistake.
Always another facet,
another ripple,
A whole new version.
The holy infinitude
of plastic prevails.
If you are a plastic you
can be the new Madonna.
Control drying time;
Control penetration time.
Control exactly
How long the thin sheet
is fucked for, is cumblasted
and totally foamed.
There are these two baths:
of expanding hot water
(this being second)
and the first one too:
the steeping bath. 120
seconds is the best.
Too few: surface bliss
ter formation and super
ficial foam layers.
Beyond 3 minutes:
Excessive penetration,
the core is lost. And
of this I can’t think—
what could be more fatal than
the loss of the core?
Unmodified core?
The film extends in both trans
verse and machine dire
ections. More, the film
extends in thickness, curling:
object distortion.
Amid grey storm clouds
my baby forgives me now
a silver lining:
The result is an enti
rely different product.
The magic of plastic lives on!
Even without core, a newborn squirms.
FOAM AND SKIN FROM ONE PLASTIC SHEET ends
in cupid’s bath of eternal light;
in the oh-treasured fountain of youth!
Without core, FOAM AND SKIN FROM ONE: bliss
(ter).
5. Plastic: an Erotic Constipation. Always almost just beyond what I thought it could be.
6ex.
Fist me with cellophane.
Pull yr fist out nice and clean, lemme lick it.
Tie the plastic and watch it float up, into the heavens.
God I love you.
7. EXPOSURE TO VOLATILE, ABSORBABLE MEDIUM (Poetry Translation: Haiku Fucked Even) [4-8-4]
Structures having
cellular cores intimately
contact portion
of self-surface
to absorbable medium.
Absorbable:
subject to an
elevated temperature,
medium must
become gaseous
at a one hundred fifty deg
ree deficit
to plastic 1’s
softening temperature. (Heat
distortion temp,
as determined
by ASTM Test number
D-152
5-58T,
may also be considered the
softening temp.)
Why the control
of temperature? I assume
it’s an issue
of Absorption:
A gas cannot meaningfully
absorb a gas.
Integrity
of 1 must be imperfectly
preserved: form must.
Form must in that
form is a prerequisite for
any process,
operation.
What is utterly compromised
(here, medium)
generative
only in flux, cantilever,
matrimony:
needs firmity.
In general, plastics treated
are polymer
sheets: propylene
and higher olefins, halo
genated o
lefins; vinyl
halide, vinylidene halide,
hallelujah;
acrylic and
meth-acrylic acid esters;
styrene and the
copolymers,
interpolymers, graft poly
mers, and both the
chlorinated
and unchlorinated poly
mers of all the
above listed
polymeric products, mixtures thereof,
and more.
(The power of
heat, pouring in a mold: form in
corrigible.)
OK: lots of
temperatures and times, other
variables
can be altered.
The “aging interval” (between
contact, heating)
is a short zone
where variable temps. produce
varied effects
and have varied
benefits, dangers, you get it.
Usually,
the time of the
exposure to the medium
is directly
proportional
to the square root of the depth of
absorption in
to the plastic.
Exposure will always be less
than required
for a complete
absorption throughout the plastic
layer. Uhm, DUH!
8. Fucked Haikus Continued: Unfinished Translation.
1. Extruder is
heated by any suitable
means. Means, gets hot.
2. The polymer
is softened by a softening
agent (not a
secret.) Propelled
through the extruder, polymer
enters a first
compression zone.
3. I flip back a page and find something new.
Ah!, what have we here?
I’d inadvertently flipped two pages
having intended to flip only one.
No wonder my loss, my confusion!
Harold bark the barren angel breaks free.
I understand: this system I don’t understand,
I never meant to. This foreign place
really is foreign to me, not just foreign
in appearance. This feeling of non-consensual transplantation is real, not imaged!
A discovery is a form which holds,
as are relief and cigarettes.
I am relieved.
7., Cont.: Epilogue
Form:
corrosive. In this poem I became lost:
lost texture, interest,
started without substance;
felt closer to a
welder than a poet,
stood with my torch and melted my book,
dripped into my own stupid meter;
became the worst kind of editor,
an omitter, an insensitive expeditor of language—
this poem makes me want to forgive!
Oh, the horror of even numbers!
That unquenchable thirst for eternal metrisyllabic homogeneity!
9. On Fucking Form
I’m becoming obsessed with form. I can feel it coming over and infecting me, in my capillaries and veins, sprawling endophytic fungi streaked inside and sporing.
I become distant when I remember reading Sontag’s On Style. God, I was obsessed. I thought she was so right: I was utterly convinced in the inextricability of style (analogous to form) and content. Now I can’t seem to see content at all. When I look closer all I can see is an abstract articulation of forms one could not show, those patterns too complicated for empirical demonstration, those structures we are unable to reify on the page or screen. What couldn’t be a form? Love, hate, revenge, betrayal? Nothing escapes form: I tell you a story and I tell you a million minute mechanisms. Content is form in watercolor, form felt which can be neither explicitly figured (out) nor explicitly known as form. Content is a fuzzy world of ideas of forms.
This sort of fucks Sontag’s reading: the immutable unity of style (form) and content becomes immaterial when one consumes the other—or else, it is proved in its utmost?
This form kink is a rabbit hole: It’ll lead me to pure aesthetics. But I am perused, spent and overcome—unquestionably I want to fuck form. I feel powerless in its rigidity, want it to subsume me. I can’t help but wanting to fuck whatever I’m obsessed with. First the sun then form: anything I can make into a god. Anything which can hold: held, the form to which I aspire.
(Held is reminiscent, perhaps, of that oceanic feeling which Freud dismisses as the origin of the need for religion, and which I am slower to discard.
From an earlier ‘Poem for the Sun’: “If I commune with the sun / Revere the sun / Worship the sun… If I worshipped the gods who have proved themselves, / Shown themselves to engender our lives / And for this are neglected— / If I created a new old mythology, / And prostrated myself, / And was in awe— / If I Stand on the Roof of a Parking Garage with my Coffee from Pret on my Walk on / my Break— / If I am in awe— / If I worship the obvious Gods…”
You get the idea.)
*
Maybe it’s all a question of cosmology? I can’t help it, this magnetic pull to religion. I am always so unsatisfied and always so back for more. Is this really about form at all? Or is it about power? What can articulate power better than form, or elude it better? A hollow cube sat in sunlight is dark in its interior.
If the sun appears as content is it only because I neglect its form? Light has a form, certainly. The question is whether light emanates out from that form itself or somehow from within it.
For a long time I have wanted to lick out that mysterious interior, that goo, that nectar what could only be the manna of biblical salvation.
(It is a question of what can be channeled and what constitutes a channel—but isn’t being channeled itself a form? Liquid rushes always and consistently, with unquestionable formal adherence.)
Now I am uncertain if it (content) exists. What if form itself glows: the beauty of form, its
essence, its immaculate ability
for
self-fulfillment
and
self-propagation
and
self-get it?
Aren’t you a form?
(Or maybe I am obsessed. It’s hard to feel objectively the thing you want to fuck.)
*
More recently the only true content I can think of is color, which I am more than content with. Color, which cannot be excavated and hits me like a wave. Which in its rejection of light has much to do with form, in the apparati of its consumption, but which I
{Phenomenologically it has nothing to do with form.}
10.
You know I love a good ceremony
That's why I chose matrimony
-Alaina Moore, “Bad Girls,” Ritual in Repeat.
Matrimony ais ceremony.
Choosing one thing again and again over any other thing—
isn’t that form?
Maybe form needs obsession—
maybe form is obsession?
Winds sweep dry over sandy hills. Marriage is Ceremony; Ceremony is Form; Form is Obsession. Should I give myself a break? Maybe we’re all gluttons for form!
(plastic is a wretched magic)
Recommended Reading: Some Girls Walk Into The Country They Are From by Sawako Nakayasu; The White Album by Joan Didion; Simulacra and Simulations by Jean Baudrillard; Where Europe Begins by Yoko Tawada; Circle Mirror Transformation by Annie Baker.
