Tony Trigilio & Chris Green
These poems are part of a larger collaborative manuscript, _rule of 5:_, an oblique response to Robert Creeley's collaborations with painters and sculptors. Each of us would write a poem and send it to the other to generate a response poem. "The House in the Night" was Chris's response to Tony's poem "At the Middle Window of the World Famous House." The poem, "Bright Baby" stands at the literal and conceptual center of the manuscript: we alternated the composition of each section of "Bright Baby," then we composed the final section (section 5, of course) together at the Modern wing of the Art Institute of Chicago while watching an installation that featured a recurring video loop of a howling clown. OK, that part about the clown is just crazy, but by resisting the totalizing effects of individual authorship (and, for "Bright Baby," doing this within the asemantic presence of the video loop) we hoped to highlight the revisionary potentials of what Derrida famously termed the supplementary "superabundance of the signifier."
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Bright Baby
One
Croon: hum-yodel
: drone
I
have sold all my trumpery, not a counterfeit stone,
to keep my pack from fasting: they throng
polyphonic.
The Rise of Polyphony: the conductus
eventually evolved into the motet.
Motet? We dated, danced to secular music.
By that, I mean discursive meditation,
see the life of Christ, read
Introduction to the Devout Life
: silent mental (as
opposed to vocal)
Two
Singular idiom : prefigured
As if it should move
Stopped disquieted
Face tangible : willing longitude
Music the crown willow saffron
Instantiation : fibula
Our hoarse incomplete nettles
A state of grace
And audible
And like flint, raw steak
Evocation of frocks
Three
For a man or woman of all
sizes, you have the prettiest frock song;
which is strange, with such
delicate bruthens of dildos and fadings
o acme of perfection; pink culmination; o highest pitch; consuma-
tion
The festival of lights; divination
: by means not amenable to normal investi-
gation
chan: (“meditation”) itself a transcription of
civilization:
Four
The red light arabesque a kind of paper snake
: coordinated historiography on the radio
deflection of swallow
expectations in the library in the sea
How should I know?
Mirror chain intoxicating manly talk
clone enmity
masked con man : curlicue
pro vobis et pro multis
Extemporaneous the lover stunned
the discontinuous omen rule of five
literal approval, notebook
of collapsed space
of repetition sleep marginalia
prisoner bent among stars
Five
inkles, caddisses, cambrics, lawns:
why, he sings ‘em over as they were gods or god-
desses;
not a war-like opposition of ideas,
persons and spheres, but a calendrical oppo-
sition of the seasons,
Spring Sings Summer Sings
Autumn Sings Winter Sings
The House in the Night
My night my night my night. My luminal my photogenic my triboluminescent
my circlet. My flicky. My pearly my nacreous my shined.
My candle rush. My moon star. My flambeau. Night night night.
Naturalment. Fire beetle. Cresset. Flare path.
Amen, unison, indeedy. My darksome. Oh, my purblind.
My scrape and leniency and tea-table talk. My
fluency. My dimpsy moonshade of mine. Grudge of mine.
Hush of mine. Stuffy deaf-minded leniency. Overshadow…Ms. Big
useless superstar. My fuss. Moment of grand bother. My ruling
circle and raw compass in my hands.
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Chris Green is the author of The Sky Over Walgreens (Mayapple Press) and Epiphany School (Mayapple Press). His poetry has appeared in such journals as Poetry, Verse, Black Clock, Columbia Poetry Review, RATTLE, and Court Green. He recently edited the anthology, A Writers’ Congress: Chicago Poets on Barack Obama’s Inauguration (The DePaul Poetry Institute).
Tony Trigilio’s recent books include the poetry collection The Lama's English Lessons (Three Candles) and the chapbooks With the Memory, Which is Enormous (Main Street Rag Press) and Make a Joke and I Will Sigh and You Will Laugh and I Will Cry (e-chap, Scantily Clad Press). Recent poems are published or forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, FIELD, The Laurel Review, McSweeney’s, New Orleans Review, and Volt. He also is a co-founder and co-editor of Court Green.