swifts & s l o w s · a quarterly of crisscrossings
indefinite but yet continuous
Abby Steketee
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These found poems, or centos, are from my experimental poetry project, On the Loom. Each poem is a combination of extant texts from different sources, one from a published poem; the other—indicated by bold font—is text from a non-poetic source.
From Me into the Sea:
Pouring with Leonardo da Vinci and Jack Kerouac
Best known as the Beat Generation author of the 1957 novel On the Road, Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac—“Jack Kerouac”—was prolific. He referred to his writing style as spontaneous prose: “Time being of the essence in the purity of speech, sketching language is undisturbed flow from the mind of personal secret idea-words, blowing (as per jazz musician) on subject of image… No pause to think of proper word but the infantile pileup of scatological buildup words till satisfaction is gained…” When writing his version of American haiku, such as “Useless, Useless,” Kerouac didn’t limit himself to the modern Western convention of seventeen syllables (5/7/5 per line). Likewise, Leonardo da Vinci didn’t force himself to write from left to right. Aswirl in a mirror-image cursive of backwards letters, more than 7,200 pages of Leonardo’s notebooks survive. The notebooks teem with riddles, scribbles, measurements, sketches, to-do lists (“describe the tongue of the woodpecker”); intricate studies of anatomy and engineering and the way light hits a face; a human heart and arteries juxtaposed with a sprouting seed. The ideas vibrantly layered like a coral reef on the pages defy boundaries of humanities and science, emotion and geometry, gusto and neuroses. The final sentence we have of Leonardo, who died in 1519 at the age of 67, is on a page where he was grappling with right triangles. Abruptly he breaks off from his fervent problem-solving: “et. cetera. Because the soup is getting cold.”
Tell me
if anything was
ever
Useless, useless,
done…Tell me…Tell
me…Tell me if
ever I did a thing…
the heavy rain
Tell me
if anything was
ever made… Driving into the sea.
……
Sources:
Kerouac, Jack, “The Book of Haiku” Penguin Books, 2003, p. 8.
Kerouac, Jack. “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” University of Pennsylvania, 19 September 2013, https://writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88v/rincet-spontaneous.html.
“Jack Kerouac.” Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/jack-kerouac.
Isaacson, Walter, “Leonardo da Vinci” Simon & Schuster, 2017.
Mind-stuff—Mountains:
Continuum with Arthur Eddington and Li Bai and Sam Hamill
Li Bai, a roaming Chinese poet also known as Li Po, Li Pai, Li T’ai-po, and Li T’ai-pai, lived from 701-762, writing, very often it seems, about the moon and wine. Sam Hamill, who overcame drugs, violence, and jail time to become a trailblazing non-profit publisher and prolific pacifist poet, translated Bai’s “Zazen on Ching-t’ing Mountain” in 2000. In 1919, English astrophysicist Arthur Stanley Eddington collected images of a solar eclipse that became one of the first confirmations of Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Besides translating Einstein’s theory to other scientists and the public, Eddington discovered the mass-luminosity relationship of stars and wrote extensively about the philosophy of science. In his 1928 book The nature of the physical world, Eddington wrote, “the stuff of the world is mind-stuff…by ‘mind’ I do not here exactly mean mind and by ‘stuff’ I do not at all mean stuff…The mind-stuff of the world is, of course, something more general than our individual conscious minds… The mind-stuff is the aggregation of relations and relata which form the building material for the physical world…It is necessary to keep reminding ourselves that all knowledge of our environment from which the world of physics is constructed, has entered in the form of messages transmitted along the nerves to the seat of consciousness.”
The stuff of the world is mind-stuff.
The birds have vanished down the sky.
Consciousness is not sharply defined,
Now the last cloud drains away.
Fades into sub-consciousness; beyond that
We sit together, the mountain and me,
something indefinite but yet continuous
until only the mountain remains.
……
Sources:
Po, Li. “Zazen on Ching-t’ing Mountain.” “Crossing the Yellow River: Three Hundred Poems from the Chinese”, Translated by Sam Hamill. BOA Editions, Rochester, New York, 2000.
Bai, Li. “Zazen on Ching-t’ing Mountain.” Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48711/zazen-on-ching-ting-mountain.
Zhang, Han.“ Ha Jin’s Self-Revealing Study of the Chinese Poet Li Bai.” The New Yorker, 4 Feb. 2019.
Slotnik, Daniel, E. “Sam Hamill, Poet, Publisher, and War Protestor, Dies at 75.” New York Times, 26 April, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/04/26/obituaries/sam-hamill-poet-publisher-and-war-protester-dies-at-74.html.
Eddington, Arthur Stanley, Sir. “The Nature of the Physical World”The MacMillan Company, New York, 1928. Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/natureofphysical00eddi/page/276/mode/1up.
Stanley, Matthew. “The Man Who Made Einstein World-Famous.” BBC, 24 May 2019, www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-48369980.
Yanes, Javier. “The Man Who Invented Einstein.” BBVA, 29 May 2019, www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/science/physics/arthur-eddington-the-man-who-invented-einstein/.
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Abby Steketee teaches at Virginia Tech in the Department of Human Nutrition, Foods, and Exercise, where she earned my PhD in 2020. Before that, she was an award-winning collegiate swim coach with head coaching stints at Northwestern University and the University of Nevada, Reno. She still swims most days and sometimes posts handstands on Instagram @literallyupsidedown. She has published multiple research studies in peer-reviewed science journals and has forthcoming poetry in Aethlon.”
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