Adeena Karasick is a one-woman semantic explosion. She writes in the spirit of verbal play and experiment and RIOT out of Gertrude Stein and bpNichol, among others (spoken word, rap, Black Mountain). And how can you NOT like a poem that admits its own “unraveling” and bills itself as an “asterisk taker” and contains lines like “oh, just lick its/ ideological infrastructure” and dances between contemporary cultural filigree and theoretical/philosophical references (“ontic gap”)? See below, a video of Adeena reading from the beginning of the poem. The images scattered through the poem were made in collaboration with Blaine Speigel. The whole poem, called “This Poem,” will be published as a book this fall by the great and storied Vancouver publisher Talonbooks.

Adeena Karasick  is an internationally acclaimed and award winning poet, media-artist and author of seven books of poetry and poetic theory: Amuse Bouche: Tasty Treats for the Mouth (Talonbooks 2009), The House That Hijack Built (Talonbooks, 2004), The Arugula Fugues (Zasterle Press, 2001), Dyssemia Sleaze (Talonbooks, Spring 2000), Genrecide (Talonbooks, 1996), Mêmewars (Talonbooks, 1994), and The Empress Has No Closure (Talonbooks, 1992), as well as 4 videopoems regularly showcased at International Film Festivals. All her work is marked with an urban, Jewish, feminist aesthetic that continually challenges linguistic habits and normative modes of meaning production. Engaged with the art of combination and turbulence of thought, it is a testament to the creative and regenerative power of language and its infinite possibilities for pushing meaning to the limits of its semantic boundaries.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjknfvH8gB0&feature=related[/youtube]

Her writing has been described as “electricity in language” (Nicole Brossard), “plural, cascading, exuberant in its cross-fertilization of punning and knowing, theatre and theory” (Charles Bernstein) “a tour de force of linguistic doublespeak” (Globe and Mail) and “opens up the possibilities of reading” (Vancouver Courier).  She is Professor of Global Literature at St. John’s University in New York.

Composed in the style of Facebook updates or extended tweets, This Poem is an ironic investigation of contemporary culture and the technomediatic saturated world we’re enmeshed in. Mashing up the lexicons of Gertrude Stein, Loius Zukofsky, Shakespeare, Walt Whitman, the contemporary financial meltdown, semiotic theory, Lady Gaga, Jacques Derrida and Flickr streams, “This Poem” a self-reflexive romp through the shards, fragments of post-consumerist culture. Both celebrating and poking fun at contradictory trends, threads, webbed networks of information and desire, and the language of the ‘ordinary”, it opens itself with rawness and immediacy to the otherness of daily carnage.

A deeply satiric archive of fragments, updates, analysis, aggregates, treatise, advice, precepts, echoes, questions, erupting in a voluminous luminous text of concomitance. divergence, dis/integration and desire.

A serial poem that textually proceeds in the tradition of such poets as George Oppen, bpNichol,  Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer committed to the shape of a life lived with the lyric irony of textuality; taking on the search for definition punctuated with strong incursions of eros, pleasure, terror and social networking. —AK

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This Poem

By Adeena Karasick

 

Part II

 

And in the rapturous apertures
of perspicacity (purse capacity),

of its bootstrap boobietrap of ear-tickling
hyper-inflated speculative frenzy

This Poem just wants a “happy ending”

like a ring-a-ding swinger
foursquare tech ticker, fecund licker

elbowing its way through a persnickety
kwik-pic sticky dictic,

and wants to lick you immeasurably,
your vesicles and crevasses, lick the lips of your
pixilated proxy, paroxysms of purring tragedy

wants you to smack it
up against its inky-vexed lexis,
mixological excess, slide down
its rumpy pumpy amped-up optates,
jacked clad cock of the walk ecto-flecked vectors

.

 

and says, stroke me

like a homiletic honeydoll
a homonymic ho-ey hoo hah vocable soaked
in technosexual credit-crunch-studded
sarcasm,
suspension-drenched interstices, pursed indeces
smouldering with
ouise locutia

 

This poem has been overexposed

 

And wants to rip the skin
off your tongue, la langue,
and leave you gasping in the unstable scourging
like a bedecked blanquette of
phoneme-philia flirty fragments

Oh yes! it IS an agent provocateur
and has space to rent.

.

.
§
.

.

It is massaging its ellipsis, its encrypted
scripture va va voom titty boom
thrusting by the seat of its
panting scansion
screaming like a lexilicious kettlebell

oh, just lick its
ideological infrastructure,
its foreign born moorings
magnetic memetics

‘cause, this poem is going down
pointillistic, pantiless and pedigreed
like a naughty vixen
of clipped consonants, imperious avowals
all plumpy pumped ’n predatory
scrubbed raw

.

.
§
.
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in the exile of
its kiss-and-tell toxic quixotics
exotic kick in the sassy ass-
onance of its
neo-psychedelic, post-apocalyptic
blogzilla buzz of its backlash
.

………………….(flashy hashtag)

.

And says, no, no no, it aint no
provocative repository
in the knotted residue of
warped torpor;
no dispossessed edifice of
smuggled irruption

but is all hot ‘n lingual

.

.

like a  pin-up panoply
of prissy pomp palimpsests

and feels that it is perpetually misunderstood

 

.

 

like a vajayjay cupcake
kumquat popsicle
bellhop hopstop tinkywinky honeybun homegirl

.

.
§
.
.

and is so re-evaluating its options

trying to re-form —

‘cause for all its saucy posturing,

all it really wants
is to be violently invaded
with resurgent divergence
illicit twists, trysts, a(r)ching dialogism

wants you to get behind it

break into
its low-income-sensitive-sliding-scale-rent-controlled
phantasms, fantasies, phonemes

gangsta flanked
fidgets, widgets, closeted contexts
seeping caesurae

oh this poem is unraveling

like a scrolling corollary.

It is sculpting the subjunctive
scratching its i’s out
outsourcing its tsurris

“re-organized”
out of its position
.
.

But is still larger than life

.

.
§
.
.

But, like a grafted hymnody
bar-brawlin’ brillo-fill ghetto-glam flimflam,
comically morbid liberal mystic lurking like a suspicious package

it is sticky with contingency
like a dripping canopus
pulsing pussy pussile puff,

a petite pouty plotting potty myth
panoptically partying like a
nymph-fête flarffy parfait

or heady confetti

is just SO full of itself —

and its promises, presumptions,
sumptuous crumping, apertures, impratures, rapturous
samples,

in the shifting opacity
of foistered festers,
twisted fisters smoldering
like a taunting hot mot tramp stamp

who will not leave its language unattended.

And, in the pulsing labyrinth of smuggled irruption
it is screaming silently

and wants you

.

.

to open it
toward you

like a paeonopoesis of mimesis
or a titty-tassled teapartying transman
all ekphrastically elastic

‘cause oh Good Gravy!

this poem is such an asterisk taker

 

 

polychromatically chronicling
like a microtwtiched ’pata-cake
ache ‘n shake yeaseaer

 

 

§

 

 

a jitterbug bunny-huggin’ buxom baby-doll saucepot
scattin’ its raspy ripstop strappy sling back snack wrapped
semes of its own
creamy dyssemia

its ironized twee-ittered witty timbitten titty fit
flustered rebooted fembot flambé

its flirty flexicon
of fixity mixes, in a nexus of synnexes,
annexes, diexis
of lexically-sugared circuits

Oh this poem is taking the line’s share

Its wellsprings are spreading
like floodgates
like an ontic gap

and with all its fermished emissions,

it is bursting its bank
plumping its slips

ellipsing its syrupy stirrup slurpee surplus
in the ipseity of the unsayable

all bespoke ‘n spoken for

—Adeena Karasick