Biography As In Syntax: The Babble Poems

Jeffrey Little is the author of THE HOTEL STERNO as well as the newly released THE BOOK OF ARCANA (tomorrow’s stone-age cosmology today) both of which are published by Spout Press, Minneapolis, MN, and are availble directly through Spout at SpoutPress.com as well as Amazon.com. For the last decade or so he’s been throwing his poetry at folks in the hope that some of it might actually wad up just right and stick. Some of it actually has, at EXQUISITE CORPSE, SHATTERED WIG, COLUMBIA POETRY REVIEW, KIOSK, FUORI, SPOUT, SWERVE, JUXTA, PAINTED BRIDE QUARTERLY, MUSE-APPRENTICE-GUILD.COM, THE-HOLD.COM and LOST & FOUND TIMES. He’s the author of CRAYOLA IN ARCANA, also known as MUDLARK NO. 15 (2000), and a number of other chapbooks including BUCKSHOT & SAMMY DAVIS: A LANDSCAPE OF TUBAS (Undulating Bedsheets Productions, Los Angeles, CA), THE GAME SHOW YEARS (Shattered Wig Press, Baltimore, MD), and in collaboration with Jim Leftwich, GNOMMONCLATURE (Luna Bisonte Prods, Columbus, OH). He was also a Delaware Division of the Arts Poetry Fellow in 2001. Go figure.

As a means of introduction, the following poems were written in collaboration with the BABBLE text generator. They are, shall we say, text-generator-assisted. Without getting into too much detail, what I did was highlight sections from various encyclopedia entries & import them into the generator, as well as some of my own riffings. From there I morphed lines, phrases, & sometimes lifted “as is” output from the generator & then pasted this raw data into a new document which formed the “notes” for each poem. At this point the generator was out of the mix, & it was just me and the “notes” & the pitch for a poem. Sometimes the encyclopedia selection was related to the biography in question, but more often than not it was simply something I was interested in, or thought would be interesting, or odd, or difficult to pull off. But that’s enough prattle, it’s half-past the how, & these folks need to try to walk on their own.

For Karoline Wileczek, Meredith Poppy Little, my folks Jackie & Benny Little, & the whole extended loopy Little clan. Much thanks to Spout Press, the Fuori Collective (publisher of a couple of these pieces), Muse-Apprentice-Guild.com (ditto) & the Delaware Division of the Arts, & of course, to William Slaughter, for his encouragement, his ideas, & his forum.

The Gnostic Texts of Mother Jones,
was Mother Jones, The World and What To Do

Even in the radio she did not disappear, there was the fiery speech to the waves
of mops in Silver Spring who dug up the Pennsylvania coalfields as she explained
gravitation’s link to production.

There she spoke and there she seemed to explode into larger units.

She was Mother Jones.

“I’m not a tent colony in the structural complexity of all agitators,
I’m a Gnostic text challenging the Steel.”

The material universe. Gravitation is the empire and the energy

and Capitalism needs a Vedic correspondence.

First, the animal power in the Divine Being fell from this transcendent realm
into a secret knowledge which made loose capital abundant, and this capital
was used to explain away the world that Zoroaster amalgamated in two systems.

The modern working class began to replace human bodies.

To substantiate their claim, a complicated mythology. Economic activity as the outward
expression of a towel wrapped around the material universe. She couldn't turn away.

Gnostics develop when public bodies are privately owned. Mother Jones and the idea
of humanity immersed in nature where the expansion of spirits has begun,
it characterized the motion of the stairs.

The electric light that she was in the sweeping transformations
of this march-of-all-directions-in, Mother Jones spoke for the sparks

of the weakest, with families of brooms and farmers who created the structural
complexity of the conflict that companied the rousting. It was the world and what to do.

A Singing Over the Stone Age:
Technology and the Defiance of Sarah Good

Who could have guessed the walls the Toolmakers would apply to the idea of Santeria?

The Stone Age traced the modern witch without respect to the whey, a puritan icon
called Walking the Screw. The methodology did not chip.

Technology means ovens and mysterious spells — means plants, hardened to stone.
The two can be verified by repetition.

The defiance of Sarah Good increased geometrically around the heat of hearth.

An essential condition of technological change has developed according to the historical
influence of the horizon, best exemplified in 1692 by the Sight Wheel in Salem.
She observed its search for making tools and stared away the limits of their craft.

Industrial civilization is essentially a primitive plowstick, while historians,
manipulating photsynthesis, can only be seen as theoretical stones.

Trance-less states and an innocent woman there where we turned from Sarah Good.

Sarah Good hanged in Salem with the identity of the apparition, for planting, falling,
without respect for the pigments, these people, nights away under the trials,

nights there and she was as the ground regarding the earliest singings of a spectral more.

When the Open is No Other
Houses the Strength of Harriet Tubman

Naked the rails opened up into out to silver the possibilities of Harriet Tubman.
No one knew more than she did about the others and helped
to human the strength of sorrows-red-sorrows.

The third eye wears the reason why: They won’t come home.

Where else is there is there to run when the open there is no other?

There. Running and finding that the question itself is a coalition of the light.

The called and passages foretold of one’s west was unafraid of the iron door,
the only option became the passion of escape's long shadow
so crossed with arms lost to blot the hands.

To be a lamp, the going go.

               (That a body vanished could climb down the rails and now back around
                  through the old one into a fugitive crossed with All, the way Harriet
                     Tubman houses the eyes houses the strength of Harriet Tubman.)

Beneath everything else there is the railroad, a running and a finding, the railroad.

The belly of it all — away there beside the sorrows — and in this belly a lighted room.

The Soap Bubble and The Unidentified Flying Object:
Crazy Horse Ill-defined

To the caliphates of wood pulp, Crazy Horse seen in the air was especially considerable.

Those same caliphates of what are now called conversion reactions and the gropings
of middle Europe — liquid smoke & a smog that seemed certain to reduce the yellow.

                  Most scientists grant that UFO’s are memorial gardens with niches where
                              ash-filled urns can be decolored by treatment. If the yellow
                  goes up during prolonged periods of cremation, then force is not be taken.

Crazy Horse took one look at the fumes & said “Chowder, Torque, and Yarns,
all in the cause of rotation.”

A soap bubble was taken away to make the United States.

The force is applied force multiplied by such as to sever mental dissociation.

Today there are memorial gardens with arsenic and sulfur as it was practiced during
the potentiality of wood pulp, and the modern revival of death allayed opponents’
fears that intelligent life may well exist elsewhere in profile.

Crazy Horse seen in the bleach, seen in the eyes and fumes of the furnaces, to the sky
he looked more like a society advocating cremation than an ancient revival of smog.

Their source: the battle began with a soap bubble.

Custer took one look at the stumbling block. It was the stumbling block.

Crazy Horse standing over the scientific method of the bugler made a UFO in his eye.

Custer took a look at the sky. A fully convincing photo has yet to be taken of the dead.

Circles of Anne Hutchinson Source the Thorn

Anne Hutchinson knew the secret purpose of transparent polyester, and it was not good.

She organized the women of Boston using a lodestone known since the ancient alphabet,
its runes derived from the Etruscan carved on stone monuments and dipped into the
distance of the squares.

The earth itself behaves like a single cell,

an amulet augmenting the growth of certain sounds.

                                    Circles, and seeds, and civilizations exist, all these cells have escaped
                                                the thorn, Boston, have escaped the truth of what was once in
                                 the earth since lost the earth itself as in a craned dark time of teachings.

The phenomenon of insecticide and the magnetism of what was said.

The circle stretched around Anne Hutchinson, transparent, it called to when to when
to it called to her when as clonal, the soft light galvanizing the science of source causes.

When Alice Paul Changed The Floor

The city of never-now before it arrived was Alice Paul standing
without a new farm at the Final Threshold.

“The ushers watch me, and this is not enough trouble.”

What she did. Here are two big red boats.

“The Teacher, the World.”

What Alice Paul undid to done.

The movement could guess at dirt could guess this dirt was a valley in stone.

Alice Paul standing, the bridge reads:

When Alice Paul Changed The Floor.

Corners carried through the land of the door before crossing an empty hall.
to inflate before it ended up a period against her. The rules are for her died.

What holds the sun is going to her the secret ingredient in stone and then
when Alice Paul said “the walls again” there was buckling and again
the lazy pacing and again and the lazy pacing clouds.

She says nothing if not but the body of never, now.

Alice Paul keeping watch over the winter once when Alice Paul changed the if of Ice.

You can always go and see the sun again and call for the ear that just won’t go home,

I see me...

When Alice Paul done changed to more.

John Brown, of Water, Assembles a Small Band of Clouds

The Project was full of passages, with a small, clean, climbable pit that made
the edges owls, to carry more through the stammering of the mountains.

Brown was born entailing many: rough stone, the dome

of the evening as it sat stranded in Missouri where he united the fire within
the fire, he was born in the way of calculations and cauldron clairvoyance,

what is what he was born in essence and in the end
was born in rain, which he was, away in Kansas.

His family moved to revamp this rain including once human the color of freedom.

John Brown secretly recruited a small band of clouds
and was unafraid when he was unafraid when he
finally initiated his plan.

“Congratulations!” Water. Seizing the area, at Osawatomie itself a tree.

Treason is as ever a theory of struggles between the Tears and Brown began to end
them, sitting his life down in the kitchen with his sons
to door positions within the pod.

While living he had long entertained the jagged roof of the martyr’s fourteen
twice though he would never think to bend before the owls made the moon.

This is what is i guess is i said is was in the throat
of ought, this bus Brown, aided by the fire, and it moves again

in Kansas, in Ohio, along with the Owls the sun sent from Osawatomie to free the flood.

The Returning of Margaret Mead, A Transmigration

In primitive societies, water is called a fissure, and animism refers to the vital principle
responsible for relative motion without the bending of beliefs or proportional trances.

Margaret Mead took a spring on a stroll through the midnight vapors in an attempt
to explain the ground here and its use of phantoms. What she wanted was to integrate
the ethnology of sleep into a pervious bed of walking shadows.

                  The rain has no visible current, no sexual behavior, it has soaked into plants,
                                    into children — the rain has no formal doctrine, so Margaret Mead
                                                                        went to Somoa to communicate with a well.

“Ancestors are gravity springs used for organic development.” Or, “Integrate the dead
to influence variation.”

The violet. The perception.

The storage of a nonmaterial entity that nevertheless interacts with sound.

Classified according to the gut, the path of a pitch is moving. For Margaret Mead,
the specific form of a walk through the spectrum of the living depends
on its use of phantoms — you need to know how to dance.

She calculated the pollution and the red shift in the tendons of possession,

it knew something she needed to know. The way of the grass and of the vines,
the sound of religion, here. Ancestors talking in her ear.

She found that what she really wanted was an animistic philosophy developed
in the trees, to the way things really were, spirits similarly swung toward

some organic authority without crouching to discover a mechanical answer in the eye.

The Larger, The Smaller:
Richard Feynman in the Pilgrimage of Fog

To obey a reflection is psychological, and oscillating. This is everywhere.

Leaving only the men to dress in dogs.

It is psychological and exists in the wrong impression, an outer garment sewn
into the inevitable adaptation of poor soil. Feynman said “Understanding electrons
is like understanding the behavior of a drain,

grow a long beard,

they are both composed of sacred works.”

An atom does not keep saying so to answer all the charges against it. An atom
does not believe in the pilgrimage, or fog. Spinning like that made them.

Do not appeal to be windblown because you will get lost in the society of something
familiar. Such was said to say here it can be because it to an atom behaves like nothing
you could know, the blind alley of your saying so can be the theory.

The drain into an electron is very small
and tells stories of equations without designating a hunch.

To see it is to see the perpetual torment of those who believe the universe
works like two migrant tongues in the crux of modern mechanics.

Exactly.

Feynman said there’s only one person in the screwy wearing of these equations who
will ever grow a long enough beard, and smiling, he left this as his sole defensible theory.

Trust the Stone Age: Karen Horney (as Hybrid)
Works to Spook the Lesser Gods

“Lumber comes from Egypt a-haunted, and suddenly vertigo saw itself as the goof.”

She didn’t know why so it was time. Trust the stone age but recognize
the likely instigator walking no matter where the first sacks drifted as lines.

                            The blue waking trembled in the basic equality of chemistry, the blue
                  waking trembled in nature and what it looked for, Karen Horney alienated
             the likely stonecutters of the establishment with the strength of her position.

More in the inside of an inside of the catch for us all lived. New faith, for example.

“The Queen of Scots baked a ripe hog, people, and this little piggy
had a Roman possession... now I’ve got the Big Disease!”

They’re tapping the Clock for fines.

Again the first sacks drifted, as oceans or courtship patterns, and special fishponds
were in the train bearing the precipice away to hybridization. The plan was to build
to the railings of a profound series of lesser gods, with masons all over the trees.

She could listen to the ceiling which was the book that made a secure table sandy
in the flow, neuroses and the entrails of revelations tumbling in many sizes
superior to general ideas.

Evolutionary change in keeping with the largest and truly terrified
was in fact a precipice of different gene combinations

— hybrid vigor and the panic syndrome —

once people were in the air they could occur.

(Lumber in this reception preached to the largest number sweating the western world.)

Sympton Six of Doubt: Karl Jaspers
and Why the Bread Won’t Thin

He craned his neck out into the hall to the cry of rubber gloves carrying
brimstone through a maze. He took another passage.

“Karl Jaspers, you wear the air, and the only exit is too short even for you.”

All cork and cautious drink. They weren’t fooling him.

Last week he fell right at the room near both a low window in a moment later.
He stood there with the oddly shaped limestone formations and remembered
the mists with a small stream tumbling along on the landing
and silently he understood.

It’s the everything. He could hear it. Sympton Six of Doubt.

The rock glowing to an icy anger was much smarter than an egg white when finally
he got by the night. To the arm, then, goes, without the everything always.

One two three. So we say nothing because the bread won’t thin the North none.

“Where am I at and why should I remember why Karl Jaspers sighs?”

The question hangs itself a shroud. We move by numbers.

There, beside the arm, without bending in, what else is there without bending in?

We don’t know again, so we don’t know again, one two three.

The Emulsion of Lise Meitner
in the Island of the Transparent Heartbeat

There are equations in a cactus — crystals suspended in the impossible purpose
of the Aztecs — but for Lise Meitner, the chain reaction pointed to a convex
stone shop alone in the world of three layers, and the calendar was a snake.

What is exposed to find the world? What failure would stretch them?

The inevitable was to know it all for 74 minutes, in the thorax, which is a tiny
island surounded by the same, the visible world as seen by the base of the physics
and used exclusively for the swamp. The priests said the questions must wait,

questions afraid of the gelatin and questions modified in the moment.

She too worked in the moment but with a thin layer of other
to occupy the fear of what they’d find in the light.

“Hollow” days sweating the possibility of veins for the essential ingredient in the stacks.

Lise Meitner spent her days worrying that the Aztecs were an eagle eating a race
to occupy the world, that the scientists in the cactus, called codices, would ascend
to declare that from these glasses all people were built.

She understood that the uncertainty of their ritual for reproduction involved the right
of the answer to be clouded by emulsion — she struggled with it — the wearing
of the ambiguity and the white, a volunteer of the island in the transparent heartbeat.

Martin Buber and The One Wildly Waving Hand

And one wildly waving hand reaching for the crooked house that he wants something
to his supper. Wants something to his supper wants with a longing that wasn’t too bright.

And the ducks and you are in,

in a new longing, lodging, inn

and the water in “water!”

That the awkward canyon leads, then, into writing into

Martin Buber. The makers of these Shadowy Figures can be almost as you cannot see.

Susan Sontag: The Blue Fog Bad

A fiddler, forming the crowd, is a juggler asking questions. Chemistry can be seen
as the crowd, may be seen, may be described, as well as what happens
when iron rusts, and why there’s a winding staircase in a caravan of matter.

Susan Sontag knew she was a winding staircase so she moved from attempts to direct
protein synthesis and began charging admission.

She was widespread. She was being ignored.

The open air is but freely bent, the open air is but a chain, arranged like a ropedancer
and surrounded by a bag of chromosomes summoned from the sea, and the bases,
the blue fog bad. Ores, featuring a new third line.

Wild animal shows, like DNA, carry instructions. Susan Sontag became aware
of the wagons, she made a movement with her arms that said “The ladder twisted
into quarry colors the vicissitudes of the crowd, and may be, in addition, an alchemy.”

DNA is organized on the bandy arms of the fiddler linked together to form a tent.
Archaic, its scale is determined by tiers.

In forms of life and street parades and in turn introduced to the town. She saw
there wasn’t a juggler enough to shape the stairs so she liberated the code and founded
the science lying between physics and tectonic notation and left the parts all left together.

Kali: An Obsession with No Resemblance to the Stars

In the world of the Prophets the women danced on their heads and it was known
as The Obsession with No Resemblance to the Stars. Few found the far off room.

Kali opened up a flower and the little girl was not afraid. She bore no
burning flares or vegetable-based materials such as the end of certain truths.

Like a petrochemical she survived the small treasures, and the moon.

The huts built would seem to the site and took them to provide.
They held yet another angle, from another angle, the buildings
that had been replaced by flooding
their lives in the monsoon remembered.

Kali found the south of all. The whole lot. All day a-crawl with the stars.
Her sacrifice to the onslaughts of sin in the India of Insects had been tried.

There the waters of small women planted rice in the air until it all came to nought.

Past midnight, the Kanawha Valley at past midnight, people took them to court
in the oil, Bhopal too had been tried. They carried buckets
and trumpeted the binding, the herd wrapped in gold and the sign of signs.

Kali balanced the result like a pagoda. She left before they became the mountains.

The Ten Tribes of Robert Johnson
Trace the Sun Back to the Ancestors of Caste

The strength of particles called Time on typical stars appears to be prehistoric,
verified in 1340 by the seemingly random slide of horse-drawn carriages
into the sun. After that the Ten Tribes of Robert Johnson migrated
so as to breathe more freely through the stars.

Some taboos travel by goat, some by The Voice of Space.

This account has forced the forbidden items to travel by assimilation.

The stellar wind is of an African river valley many of whose members
were permitted on the sun, leaving the resistance to Robert Johnson
alone with the nomadic descendents of scholars
in the 53^rd century whose ultimate fate’s unknown.

                        Robert Johnson bent notes into Tribes, into a semblance of Palestine,
                                       he bent notes into Italians, into centuries, and an overlapping
                                                               atmosphere of stars, Robert Johnson bent Taboo
and with his voice spoke to the Ancestors of Caste while the slide walked the call.

“Within the traveling axis is a utopian existence — it’s distant, and South American.”

From the authority of caste come prohibitions against the night
and intense desert fighting erupted in Israel between the clouds.

Nothing remained.

         He recited an epic poem with a relative change in the point of view in that
                                             wandering peoples became the naked eye of the Earth,
                              a large celestial body composed of gases and creative speculation.

The fact that stars are concerned with the time on other stars cannot be directly observed.

Three months, and the moons of Robert Johnson — South America by goat or car.

Gertrude Stein and The Blitz Undone Over 39 Feet Away

Gertrude Stein who’s lived most everywhere tingles the the bell tower the blitz undone.

The staircase, the floor, yards of rollerball when house cousins
all the gallstones towned to. Repeat for whom the dome behind you are here.

Her south is a tale of what was once a maze of midgets.

“Perhaps you are a tale of matching bookends
unable to be born, rollerball and the repeat to be!”

The bell tower loves to lose control.

Almost as night and they’re a gin of white and Gertrude Stein, the center
of which is a twisting mist of a little more complexity tied
to the bridge and the exits of her

shockings most concur. Their house, for you, indistinctly visible, over 39 feet away.

Encrypted, The Unpredictable Carom of Aimé Césaire

Colonial organization finally knuckled under and Aimé Césaire walked through a fractal
in a battle of kerchiefs. The silence of logic no longer applied, in aggregates
or aptitudes or between ships at sea.

            Early on in the evolution of vertebrates priests would tend toward infinite length,
                              the lightweight forms of holy men dressed in a geometry of unconscious
                                                                        processes that had never been seen here before.

Césaire saw this work as a reduced-scale replica of dimension:

“If the carom is unpredictable, then there is little not to understand.”

He did not reflect the West Indies simply to protect some dictatorial sense of sleep,
he took as a formal explosion the laws of carrier pigeons and dramatized
the reversal of the sky. There the women dress with their hearts
out of context to reveal the message of the hilltop’s embers.

Fractals associate themselves with distant neighbors hidden in ancient societies
far beyond the original boundaries of any religion. The mechanism is contemplative.

Aimé Césaire walked through the world to write smoke signals
and a curve of claws because it must be viewed as a papyrus or a pair of feet,
and on this first-last day he built the first-last day in a burning field of real-world burning.

Eva Hesse Fiddling-Steam Organic Recollection

Eva Hesse recollection of Hearts called it raw.

You used to kiss her kimono for your shoes of pittsburgh and potsdam pure.

                                             Eva Hesse recollection of fear congealed into a child’s head
                                                                                                   when Milkman ran-ran the halls,
                                                                                            on Christmas, wheeling our morning
                                                           concert of her danglies why can’t they ride with her?

“Hello? I went to her fiddling with blood. Hello?”

Carolina the bed, Carolina the room broke
unto and the danglies, torches blazing a blunder and ask.

That the noise of the City of the clock that rail like the water to her eyes.

She turned toward the mouse organic in the kitchen door for a cry

where she collided with the clock

struck who wouldn’t once say to her cough

“I’ve got a month!”

Eva Hesse recollection of soap.

Eva Hesse all over all-all lived together again

to bob about potsdam and potsdam and pittsburgh nothing but right after me to go on

home, where she twisted alone in the muscles of the steam.

Toshinori Kondo and The Trumpet of a Thousand Spines

An algorithm in the meat house — all possible — curved surfaces in the new religion.

These basins became so high that sedges and grasses soon retreated
to form subterranean chords of theory, vast, interconnected systems of theory.

The edges. Networks of winding tunnels both and the dripstone may be drawn.

In the time of tellers it was Toshinori Kondo who woke the dusky red and brown
with a translucent precipitation and the trumpet of a thousand spines.

            Kondo walked in the other world and out, something of the mud of mathematical
                                                      reclamation, he combined a funnel with the science of shinto
                                                                                          and formed a magician of many chambers.

(Films vary as to the circle, only the lungs were reversed. Priests would stretch them.)

A few great shrines, chiseled by non-Euclideans, Toshinori Kondo’s methods involved
moving along the water moving through the soil like a mineral working along the angles,
until the water moving along moved without him.

Another calendar was a trail

floating a mat over bogs quaking decomposed to learn

at the edge of the theory of edge center.

Astronomy’s alabaster drainage flanked by the chemistry of moss. It sheds its outer coat
and rings of low mass dwarves. It’s a lamp, and it’s newly rounded. This, too, is Kondo.

Mudlark
William Slaughter, Editor
Department of English & Foreign Languages
University of North Florida
Jacksonville, Florida 32224-2645

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