Blunt Research Group
Winter 2023 | Poetry
Four Poems
[Who spends an hour]
Who spends an hour on the sofa not thinking
once about jumping-out-the-window?
No tide is perplexed.
Funny isn’t it
how hands sometimes smell of the woods
and hair smells of tobacco
and leaves smell of tea and flowers.
There’s nothing to be done.
A guy keeps picking up a cigarette over and
over again without realizing it.
You can make it at most or most at it
there’s nobody inside us.
30 August 1912. When we say we never got out of bed today we mean someone in the hall quickly turned a key in our door and for a moment there were locks all over
skin and bones
as if we were the ones searching for a way out of the hallway
and at short intervals
a lock was opened or shut
one after another
just as much as they could as they fasten
crying through the lock.
There should not be this use in uselessness.
We are not absent
for any other purpose
it can’t be far
we’d have to hunt around for a year
to find one true feeling in ourselves.
[The cat is playing with]
The cat is playing with the goats.
Or would it be a nuisance to feel affection
for nobody
no one at all
for lack of a better word
reality was soon restored.
One solution would be to admit
we are merely each other’s mistake
momentarily ill
which explains why these lines
may sound familiar to you.
And if it’s well known it is well known
what may be carried
under the arm like a bundle
traces blurs signs
wedged together
we can feel it
with all its twisted length.
Don’t try to explain
just drop quietly into the river.
Dropping probably seems so attractive
because it reminds us of being pushed
to please the one given
special right to be a listener
but even the listener is questioned
uselessly of course
so many things to hide
and if someone is riding hurt
could we be taught to be allowed?
[Drinks on the table]
Drinks on the table scarcely touched
nor was the place as we remembered it
two little boards screwed against your temples
a segment cut from the back of the head
and the sun peering down into it.
How many hours to go?
Don’t worry she says.
.
Whereas a bird
now in the endlessness will make it
all right—think about that later--
ugh hole ticked for into with
shooting bunch pops
some say unimaginable now.
Are we broken?
Aye, how can it not be alone not
liked never but this changelessness?
We are to begin again yesterday.
Everyone knows about the step ladder
on the slope leading down to the water.
It’s always in the same place
but you can only see it in the Fall
and Winter too
lying there in the dark grass.
[We like what we have not prepared]
We like what we have not prepared before until now.
From then on naturally
we summon people to us
a crook of the finger is enough
a quick unhesitating glance.
They clothe us and give us money.
They could candle waterfalls
they might even do that come on
we’re trying to say something!
One would prefer to close one’s eyes
as one sometimes does
running through the park swinging branches
only to come back to wondering
what is truly ours
a miserable substitute for everything
to be close to the fire
a film about the history of separatist movements.
Afterword
As caretakers of language, poets aren’t shy about expressing their love of words. At the same time, the poet’s affection for language—poetic philology, we could call it--can only be thoroughly understood, or gauged, in reference to its opposite: a fear of language, logophobia. And many people today, it’s clear, experience verbal knowledge and communication with mounting trepidation, arising in part from the unreliability, or mendacity, of the technical media and AI-generated texts, but also from the rapid emergence (and disappearance) of commodified vocabularies--not to mention the verbal dislocation stemming from a global crisis of forced migration. And is there any reason to suppose--despite the poet’s traditional love of words--that poetry remains untouched by the spread of logophobic impulses, gaps, and distortions? Could there be such a thing as poetic logophobia?
The poems presented here probe the condition of logophobia by adopting two basic constraints: first, all the poems are wedged into the angle of solidarity; they inhabit the grammatical and existential grounds of the we-position: the tribal we, the we of collaboration, the fugitive we. Saying we can summon feelings of shame and regret about one’s own language, or other languages, but it can also serve as a verbal refuge: a remedial charm warding off heartache, affliction, and dread.
To track these alternating currents beyond the present historical moment, the we-position in these poems becomes the object of a second constraint, anchoring it in a literary constellation that is already slipping from memory: the poems search for clues of logophobia in writing borrowed from the past, sourced to a cluster of twentieth-century texts that are at once nameless and instantly familiar, rehabbed into a lyric “voice” serving as the bed of logophobic experience.
BLUNT RESEARCH GROUP (BRG) is an anonymous collective of poets, scholars, and artists. Its poems and essays have been published in journals such as Chicago Review, Gulf Coast, and Fence, and in chapbooks from Noemi Press (Lost Privilege Company, 2016) and above/ground press (The Pig’s Valise, 2024). Their first book, The Work-Shy (2016, 2018), was published in the Poetry Series of Wesleyan University Press. Mike Davis has described the poetry of The Work-Shy as “an archaeology of humanity that should haunt us forever.”