Gabriel Gudding Surreal-Absurd Sampler

“If art partly functions by pulling us out of our common habits of perception, maybe it necessarily offers a foretaste of the way the real will transgress against itself in crime, catastrophe, and accident: poetry's untidiness seems to adumbrate the unraveling of everything. Some poetry has a weird urgency to it, it liberates us from horror. I really think a liberating art must in some way address how human comfort is so thoroughly predicated on the precarity of other beings: whether CAFOs, the control of the sexuality of farmed animals and nonhuman mothers, or the political contrivance of a Homo sacer -- as if the only real reason literature exists is because we keep making it a place of refuge for the heartbroken and forgotten.

I think it was Nathaniel Tarn who said at the 2020 Louisville conference (reading maybe from his autobiography) that poetry is the greatest liberation movement ever invented. I can get behind that. A kind of existential technology. Poetry seems to affect the health and vibrancy of human communities. Maybe it's a medicinal art. Why not study it like a medicine. I think we should study this art until we have a comprehensive sense of how economic conditions affect writers, readers, editors, and the texts these agents produce and police, the sociology of literary production, moral philosophy and its relation to literary production, relations of power and abjection to supremacism in poetry, caste and racism and fascism and their close relationship to poetry and ableism, translation studies and the role of translation in literary genesis, the importance of translation and its role in transnational and translingual literary communities, the coincidental and arbitrary (uncontrollable, non-willed) nature of aesthetic evaluation in the genesis and policing of creative texts, the social psychology of fame and the sociological and psychological curiosities of fame and status expressly as they relate to literary production, the phenomena of fame and degradation and how they function in the process of canonization in the field of literary production, and the unavoidable ubiquity of collaboration. But then my daughter causes me to think that what art is, at its best, is nothing more than loving collaboration in the joy of healing. And so as a reminder as to why we really cannot afford to forget that art is simply nothing more than loving collaboration in the joy of healing, I want to end by quoting Gunnar Wærness who reminds us that we need to do this art in this way because "her har sulten blitt valuta dette er tjuvens vitenskap," here hunger has become the currency this is the science of the thief.”—Gabriel Gudding

POLICE BABIES

We thought you would like a poem

When we look at your coitus partner, her round behind
before us in the air, the place of birth
we stand of fence, to stop others, the house of earth, a flag and
contaminant, the densest first, a canister of standard and cluster, of
generation. Who can model
what this does. Imagine matter beautifully spread
how it would crack
and fragment to lumps and muss
the pellucid nature of the stars, the opaque ankles, the shell of her
head and shining eyes, how popular are these fragments held
above beds, moved and shoved
There was no theory until now
simple reason brought these grams here. They are limpid and sit too on
the range of stars, and the pressure
and charge of light and number. We expect
there are closets and atoms we can open here. What
determines this mass, what mass from this is missing
this burning taffrail and the fuel strangling there, the building years, the
activity flared here, the pink hot impacts now passed
and before us this origin of future worlds. One obviously needs a little
more of jeans, balance, bits, dominating, and the expending exponential
factors, how old are the colleagues who know this, who stand here with
us with the wrong answer, you too stand predicting the actions of the
gas, the raw, the heavy elemental seeds, each damage and press of
debris, all this pictorial bright dust that forms structure, this stuff is
crucial and it moves our numbers and they
are brought into her world
as hydrogens, thus her pulsing amniotes, her calories striking out from
the nipples, the traces made by her farms of iron, we urge
you notice the ratio of copulation to fossils. This woman will never be
primitive and old, and her metal-poor vulva we see brightly
here and it’s gone

ANGEL GIG

The essential allegory is this is all a big shipment
being sent through glutinous canyons
which we perceive as days
and we are all on the rising water that is threatening the churchbells
but look at our nipples what glory
and how did we come to have them
look at this glans our stubble this clit
nothing exhausts them
in the way being a kitten exhausts a kitten
attending a bonfire is always a peak human experience
or that might be wrong
every bonfire might not be a peak human experience
fire caused us to sprout the nipples and spray
our milk and sperm from the airplanes and the bugles
we will be sucked on by the lips of angels come freshly
from an aquifer
how old are those aged angels out there on the roads
in their livingroomcurtain wings
bring them here and let's ask them to fuck us
I bet they would and it would feel
like the old struggleliquid of the sea
was rumbling through our asses
as if the world had a single collective ass
real pressurized
their ur-sperm spraying from our trembling urethras
like a mess of sprinklers      our heads held down
inside the mathematics of the fires
the seed falling all around us

ON THE RECTUM OF PEACOCKS

very little has been written. Moored to the ploppy mud by a languid mind the bird is strapped to its tube of paste by a frail girdle. Having not much brawn and being rickety in its construction it is a kind of wicker bird.  The rectum of a peacock is then like a flask in a picnic basket as it might fall out if the bird is jostled. In this sense the peacock’s rectum is a fender on an antique car, it sits at the back and rattles. If one kicks a peacock it is not unusual to knock the rectum clear out of the bird.

Peacocks have one rectum in common which they pass among them from peacock to peacock like a relay baton. Some people think that talent is like that but it isn’t. Talent is not like the butt-baton of peacocks. Any community has a surplus of talent and is unlike the community of peacocks which has an insufficiency of rectums.

 The anus is a kind of larynx of the nether region. It is the only vocal cord unattached to the lungs.  As such it is an “independent” vocal cord, a kind of “colony” among vocal cords, a settlement of the voice in one of the body’s distant regions. The rectum for instance is the rec room of the body where our feces romp as children before entering the world,  there is a certain amount of pomp at their graduation.

Each rectum is highly personal, while a colostomy bag is a much more public device inasmuch as it hangs outside the body. A dog’s rear end is public but a human one is not. Insofar as the anus will allow light into the rectum during a fart the rectum is a kind of camera obscura. Diarrhea, before it is released from the body, is like an annoyed raven in a leather jar. Best not to gallop while wearing a colostomy bag. 

In the center of even the best display, is a little jumble of mush essential to the survival of said display. Once when a boy, I saw my mother’s vulva reflected in a puddle. And do we all not come from puddles, waddling out with clapboard plumage —and eyes to be seen?

JEREMIAD

There can be no pastoral as long as there is a slaughterhouse.

It is in the basement of all oppressions.

It’s at the ignored forefront of every assertion
and definition
as to what “nature” is.

The front and back of every face is conjoined
by the foyers of slaughterhouses.

When you consume the muscles of animals
your anus is a tunnel to the slaughterhouse.

If you eat any part of an animal
your rectum is an atrium
of the slaughterhouses.

The beginning of the wilderness is the end of the wilderness
as long as there is a slaughterhouse.

Wherever still in a comic book a frontier contains a bush or a star
on the top of every peddle of every bicycle
there is a slaughterhouse
inside every sack and clock, on every piece of piss on every monocle, on the
aerosols, on each puddle, at the sled, on the back of the jam jar, in the folds of
vulvas. An entire slaughterhouse is founded
each morning on the clitoris of every girl.[1]

We carry the slaughterhouse as a mouse
would carry Tibet.

I cannot think of the slaughterhouse without being launched from my brow.

I cannot think of the slaughterhouse without leaving through my knees.

You cannot feel a rapid
you cannot say a name
or sit

you cannot love bugles
or understand a calendar
as long as there is a slaughterhouse.

The animal should have cinders for snot, scabs for shoulders, we should not spend
time with it, let it have velcro for hair so that it sticks where we put it, the sheep
will shit its body directly into cellophane, the chicken – you will not love it – shall
be born in a feather factory, much of the cow should sound in the drains – and the
calf can’t follow its eyes through its childhood.

And the piglet just sees another farmer
balancing the world’s thermostat
on the end of his dick.

Its body should be a balloon of protein, its ears and tails are cut away as ballast,
its testicles will become earthlets, horns burned, the being in the animal fully
sensate, its scrotum is crushed and who needs its little face to be shouting.

I am not asking us
to go patch the foxes at the roadway
I am not asking us to exduce
along the earth, by electric sled,
suet, bath, shed
brass, death
or pump the stars
back into the telescope.

Come out of the human political. We really are ethical
misers when it comes
to other beings.

[1] “….animal farming is the most large-scale, institutionalized control of female reproduction, sex, and bodies-in-general that has ever existed.” Carolyn Zaikowski. “The Master’s Tools will Never Dismantle the Master’s Rape Rack”

TO ONE TORN APART BY HORSES

Went everywhere together
arrived at the campfires, danced told stories
did this out at the one farm on the earth
in the asymptotic part of summer

and your mother is young
and you weren't born yet
and there was this beautiful possibility of you
falling in love with your mother

and of she falling in love with you
and in some ways that's exactly what has happened
and the spirit was everywhere and most of our flesh
hadn't even arrived yet and nobody had even told you
yet that the world was fucking stupendous
you just figured it out

VENTER OSS VED ELVENE

We enjoyed Granada, we met amusing people there, there was a big park by the sea and a spattering of croquet balls abandoned in the grass, wooden planets, moreover there was a cow and a well and a thing brightly hanging on a high brown barn—we walked from picnic to picnic, a little chain of picnics out to the east, around us in the blue of the evening they roasted river creatures in orange knee-high campfires, and at the last one a small man with a not finished apple showing us his maps, the smell of wet canvas in his camp, he kept our attention for a long time and then, like all of those days, it just kind of vanished

Gabriel Gudding is a poet, essayist, and translator from Norwegian. His translation of Gunnar Wærness's FRIENDS WITH EVERYONE (Venn med alle, Forlaget Oktober, 2018) is forthcoming with Action Books.