Structures the Moment (approx.) by pablo lopez.
Anonymous Energy, 2020, $25.

Sulla is a mulberry sprinkled o’er with meal.

Lord Byron’s first book of poetry was considered a failure by most critics of his day. Despite his commanding sense of self, he was personally ‘cut to atoms’ by the negative response to Hours of Idleness. Critics were savage enough to even ridicule the young Lord’s pet bear. Byron loved that bear. 

It’s known the young, wild, and alleged pervert and satanist, Lord Byron, often played escort to the bear. The pair strolled through Cambridge, carrying on as if it were the most natural thing to do. When critics wondered why Byron thought so little of the world as to introduce such a trifling work of verse into it, he wept. He soon got over it. He kept that bear as a pet for years, he was also known to keep a bulldog and a wolf.

Byron died at age 36. He was an exile and a successful Romantic poet and a failed romantic revolutionary. I’ve admired Byron for years, and for whatever reason I erroneously thought he died in Venice. I was wrong. He lived in Venice. He died in Greece. He died alone, on a dreary beach in an obscure part of Greece. I lived in Greece for a spell and by Fortune I met no end there. 

A man of dramatic contradictions, Byron did many impractical things throughout his short life, but he dreamt of being practical. He was a poet and a libertine who thought he could muster a revolution of men and minds. According to one scholar, the bear’s name was a madcap play on the word “grotesque.”

In order for any collection of poems to be practical to a critical mind, it must meet one essential hurdle: it is necessary to gum up the mechanical works of Despair. 

There is no political escape from this trap: only poetry, as the excess of semiotic exchange, can reactivate breathing. Only poetry will help us through the apocalypse that is already raging as an effect of decades of financial absolutism. 

—Berardi, Breathing: Chaos and Poetry

When in love, it is important to be mad. One must be absolutely berserk for one’s object of amorous obsession, but it causes Anxiety to be merely crazy for “you.” Anxiety is a close cousin to Despair. Poetry makes this clear: there’s no value in empty expression. 

For Byron, even failures are rife with existential value. That is to say, we, collectively, each and every one to an atom, succeed in benefitting from the failed attempts of the most seemingly useless doggerel. 

For Byron, madness was a close cousin to poetry, and poetry to thought. For Byron, Greece was ‘the Dome of Thought, the Palace of the Soul’. 

According to Virgil, Poseidon gave the Athenians the first horse, while Athena offered the Athenians the first domesticated olive tree. Hers was the better gift. Athena also gave the city of Athens millions of owls. You’ll see them in every corner to this day. 

To the Romans, she’s Minerva and her owl is a harbinger of death. In Greece, the owl represents wisdom, and the city of Athens is hers, and hers alone. The Athenians are better for it. A horse is more befitting of a duller type. A city like Sofia might better appreciate a horse. Athens, olive tree-befitting, and in perpetual conflict with its own fruit and fruitlessness, considers its own fate exclusively. Athena’s gift spoke to this inherent disposition. 

To the Romans, an owl feather placed on the chest of a sleeping lover would prompt them to speak in their sleep and reveal their secrets and truest intentions. It’s been done for millennia and is practiced to this day. 

To the Romans, the owl signaled imminent death. This was and remains a purposeful misreading. A perched owl on a roof or on a public building and hooting, brought about the darkest outcome in the minds of Roman society.

Countless deaths of prominent Romans, most obviously the assassination of Julius Caesar, were prefaced by a hooting owl. The Greeks saw things quite differently, though there is certainly wisdom embedded in the concept of prescient death. 

Philosophy, as the thought of the world, does not appear until reality has completed its formative process, and made itself ready. History thus corroborates the teaching of the conception that only in the maturity of reality does the ideal appear as counterpart to the real, apprehends the real world in its substance, and shapes it into an intellectual kingdom. When philosophy paints its grey in grey, one form of life has become old, and by means of grey it cannot be rejuvenated, but only known. The owl of Minerva takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering. 

—Hegel

An owl signals death. An owl signals wisdom. Parallel tracks are far from identical, and by their inherent logic, they never intersect. Only by disaster do they cross.

— As a pair of rails, running across a broad continent, or a set of broad shoulders heaving, a poem is not a thought machine, nor is it a system unto itself. Build no totems to totality, the owl warns.

Structures the Moment (approx.) sets out to express indifference to the thought of convincing a reader of anything. Momentum and sensation carry the day. 

— As a tennis ball mid flight, propelling forward an organized set of articulated relations, a poem exists. As a tennis ball mid flight, a poem defines its relation to the world and to an individual: uncertainty is certain. 

To marvel at a tennis ball’s flight, spin, propulsion, and angle — wondrous source — is altogether meaningless. Its totality (consider the context) is appreciated best through action, a counter position. Any inherent enigma to the outcome of a tennis ball’s flight is resolved in one action: a fulsome response. A swift or walloping forehand, a crisp chip, or some graceful backhand perhaps. The choice is the reader’s. Strike the ball, or get off the court.

The familiar image of Athena’s owl is seen on ancient Athenian coins dating from the fifth century BCE. You’ll find no Greek coin bearing an image of a horse. 

It’s been said that Byron wrote from a position of fullness. A full sense of Desire, adequate to stave off Despair, remains a source for poetry, but not the only source. Similarly, a life lived vivaciously is a source. Again, the owl warns. The owl remains ascetic. 

STM makes one thing clear: poems exist because they appear in the world, not as sunsets or rainbows but as stonecold language, unabashed and definitive. This is foregrounded in the fact that a poem begins for a reader in its material existence, but its breadth does not. As seen in “conduit poems”, a poem is initiated in the visual field but remains in the mind. 

The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down. 

—Wallace Stevens

David Foster Wallace called tennis “chess on the run.” I call poetry “tennis played on a Rubik’s cube.” In the poem Carl’s Idea, I call poetry a “paved road to disappointment / or none.” (In doing so, I re-imaged Carl Andre’s thoughts on Art, the way I re-image DFW’s thoughts on Tennis.) According to my metaphor for poetry, the surface of the Rubik’s cube is re-imaged with every flick of the wrist; the ball is set sailing in a number of exotic directions to re-image the complexion of the match as every bounce of the tennis ball is directed by the player of the game. 

To a tennis ball mid flight, only a fulsome response is reasonable.

I offer Carl’s Idea in the semi-final position of the collection, loading it with meaning, as a natural response, a flicking of the wrist in response to a high-bouncing, topspin shot coming fast at me and from some wondrous source (wondrous and potentially violent). And yet, are we to assume that such a despairing thought as Carl’s Idea will be the semi-final say, and that Despair will ultimately win out? It depends, I suppose, on how I hit the ball. 

Destroy the image and the enemy disappears. 
No exhibition, only emotional content. 

—Enter the Dragon

While living in Constantinople for a spell, Byron learned three essential Turkish words: pimp, bread, water. Another known fact, Lady Hester Stanhope thought him a poseur. He failed to win her approval despite his best efforts. 

Byron kept an old Roman coin bearing the visage of Sylla (commonly Sulla), the dictator. Both Byron and Sylla had physical deformities. 

Byron wrote from the “fullness of [his] mind, from passion, from impulse, from many motives, but never for the sweet voice.” Sylla was a brilliant and fearless Roman general. He seized power from the Republic by force. Byron’s deformity was largely hidden but weighed heavily on his psyche. Sylla twice marched on Rome, annihilating his political opposition with the sword. He would see few military failures in his lifetime. 

Never for the sweet voice. 

Byron the fatalist: On his honeymoon with Annabella, a deadly chill fell upon Byron’s heart. It was a familiar chill to the young romantic. He was rarely at ease at any one place for very long. The marriage did not last. 

Byron wrote in his journal that, “like Sylla,” all things depended on Fortune, and that nothing he could do, or anyone else, was worthy of being considered Good. Byron lived as a fatalist, and ultimately died as a fatalist. Faltering on foreign soil, embroiled in a chimeric effort to assist in the freeing of Greece from Turkish control, Byron, like Sylla indeed, depended on Fortune, and Fortune failed.

Notwithstanding this marriage, he [Sylla] kept company with actresses, musicians, and dancers, drinking with them on couches night and day. His chief favourites were Roscius the comedian, Sorex the arch mime, and Metrobius the player, for whom, though past his prime, he still professed a passionate fondness. By these courses he encouraged a disease which had begun from unimportant cause; and for a long time he failed to observe that his bowels were ulcerated, till at length the corrupted flesh broke out into lice. Many were employed day and night in destroying them, but the work so multiplied under their hands, that not only his clothes, baths, basins, but his very meat was polluted with that flux and contagion, they came swarming out in such numbers. He went frequently by day into the bath to scour and cleanse his body, but all in vain; the evil generated too rapidly and too abundantly for any ablutions to overcome it. There died of this disease, amongst those of the most ancient times, Acastus, the son of Pelias; of later date, Alcman the poet, Pherecydes the theologian, Callisthenes the Olynthian, in the time of his imprisonment, as also Mucius the lawyer; and if we may mention ignoble, but notorious names, Eunus the fugitive, who stirred up the slaves of Sicily to rebel against their masters, after he was brought captive to Rome, died of this creeping sickness.

Sylla not only foresaw his end, but may be also said to have written of it. For in the two-and-twentieth book of his Memoirs, which he finished two days before his death, he writes that the Chaldeans foretold him, that after he had led a life of honour, he should conclude it in fulness of prosperity. He declares, moreover, that in a vision he had seen his son, who had died not long before Metella, stand by in mourning attire, and beseech his father to cast off further care, and come along with him to his mother Metella, there to live at ease and quietness with her. However, he could not refrain from intermeddling in public affairs. For, ten days before his decease, he composed the differences of the people of Dicaearchia, and prescribed laws for their better government. And the very day before his end, it being told him that the magistrate Granius deferred the payment of a public debt, in expectation of his death, he sent for him to his house, and placing his attendants about him, caused him to be strangled; but through the straining of his voice and body, the imposthume breaking, he lost a great quantity of blood. Upon this, his strength failing him, after spending a troublesome night, he died, leaving behind him two young children by Metella. Valeria was afterwards delivered of a daughter, named Posthuma; for so the Romans call those who are born after the father's death.

—Plutarch