3 Poems from Novel Lines 101 – Stephen Bett

Pavel Kohout, I Am Snowing (opening lines; trans, Neil Bermel)

Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa!
But why so dignified? I’m an idiot—an idiot squared!

Ah’m hip to this Biz not squared (ya dig?)
Root maxim, cute bangs straight from the gate¹

Let’s hope her nth degree is not Angel No. 17
More ways than one, more days than done
maxima times seven’teen

No suk’cess material’s asp’n strife²
No success like failure
& failure’s no bench press at all³

Let’s be okey-dokey real—     they’s no there there⁴

Dignified or un-          no upside to upside down

Mah mea’s done with pulling flowers:
Whatofit / if I spin down / or up / where angels go
I am / a snowflake / and thus / I snow⁵

So freeze-frame ’em, coupl’a culpa’s
                                    (Max & Maxine?)
angel’s slicing a snowflake
Tight like the ol’ Bobbitt twins

Chop & switch          this idiot times sur’round…
Nothing pools like suk’cess        Nothing
deserves a circle squared

______________________________________________

¹Not a nod to Gide’s Strait is the Gate, but to Pound’s translation, “The River-Merchant’s Wife” (“While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead / I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.”)
² Cockney rhyming slang: trouble & strife = wife (of a River-Merchant, who knows? Cleopatra’s material aspect, who knew?)
³ Riffing on Dylan’s “Love Minus Zero”
⁴ Gertrude Stein’s oft repeated phrase, describing her feelings of estrangement when she revisited her childhood home in okey-doke “Oakland”
⁵ Kohout’s female narrator closes the novel with this light poem

Tadeusz Konwicki, A Minor Apocalypse (opening lines; trans, Richard Louie)

Here comes the end of the world. It’s coming, it’s drawing closer…

You (1979) ain’t seen nothing yet
Ticklish moments slice more’n freeze-frame flakes

These idiot lines multiplyin’ slivers of ice diced

71% water-mark floaters from kenophobic void
— reverse saucy seventeener

No there there / here / wherein sight?

39 shades of white noise / behind whose eyes?
hoЯRor show’s frozen miЯRor

One / is the loneliest number you’ll ever do

We all unravel // ligature by ligature (& w/out signature)

Honest to God my heart aches / When I see them untying

… the very lastness of things / before reality disappears

Everyone wants to moan the end of the world

No one’s insight deserves an invite to incite

Poet, your time has come: P. T. O.

You need to Calm down once a’gain, pls,⁶

______________________

⁶Picking up on much before…

Miroslav Krleža, On the Edge of Reason (opening line; trans, Zora Depolo)

At night, when I hold conversations with myself, I cannot logically justify my constant preoccupation
with human folly.

It’s folly, not funny
Laughing till our eyes fall out

A short trip from here
to “there’s that then”

Doesn’t need training

Tap tap that tapinosis track
(such artful understatement, hah)

Forever in your sightlines
— sticks like a plank —
“and there is / poetry in her tracks”

The Truth is Laughter, serialized

But nothing like that deserves
the last laugh

Or laff, lmao huh?⁷

___________________

⁷The quotation: Robin Blaser, Syntax (this book’s final poem, quoting Opal Whitely), & see also Miriam Nichols’ A Literary Biography of Robin Blaser (p. 186) re: his serial poem The Truth is Laughter (“found pieces that record wonderments” like Whitely’s domesticated cow); & of course Blaser & Spicer conjoined here in the closing lines.

Author Note: Novel Lines 101: is a work in progress of 101 alphabetical poems, each riffing on the opening line of a postmodern novel or metafiction

Stephen Bett is a widely and internationally published Canadian poet with 26 books in print (from BlazeVOX, Chax, Spuyten Duyvil, & others). His personal papers are archived in the “Contemporary Literature Collection” at Simon Fraser University. His website is StephenBett.com.

My 25th book, Broken Glosa: an alphabet book of post-avant glosa, came out with Chax Press in 2023. Review copies available: Broken Glosa by Stephen Bett | chax

And my 26th book, SongBu®st, is just out with BlazeVOX Books. Review copies available: SongBu®st by Stephen Bett – BlazeVOX [books]

Novel Lines 101 (in progress): “I love Novel Lines! It is intelligent and strikes me as absolutely relevant and contemporary… [This] work is intriguing, intelligent, and perfect for WF/W.” —Jonathan Minton, Word For/Word.

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