Stephen Bett
Vassily Aksyonov, Say Cheese! (epigraph & opening line; trans, Antonina W. Bouis)

After the movies, photography of all the arts is the most important for us! —V. Lenin or J. Stalin


When and by which of the two possible authors this quotation was spoken is not known with accuracy.



Ah Lenin’o, ah Sta’ lēēn


Axe ion is off (& running a’gen then)


Well it’s hardly the new sentence is it …


Take my photo, Koba

tyranny of the signified


It’s like trying to see

the air itself


Your agitprop chop

nixed


— say cheese1

1Re: “Tyranny [or fetish] of the signified…” Two source critical texts underlie many of these poems: Stephen Fredman, Poet’s Prose: The Crisis in American Verse and Ron Silliman, The New Sentence
Stephen Bett
Martin Amis, Lionel Asbo: State of England

In his outward appearance Lionel was brutally generic—the slablike body, the full lump of the face, the tight-shaved crown with its tawny stubble.



A novel     a’miss

sweet FU     UK

               Thuggish louts

(en route, NYC)


ASBO signified yob

bruter than signifier boy


Tyranny becomes fetish

one lump or two?


Say please2

2ASBO: (Anti-Social Behaviour Order): UK’s Blair gov’t restraining order for thuggish louts— this novel being Amis’ parting shot at Britain when he moved permanently to NYC. A different type of tyranny/fetish has been causal for avant poetry’s “demolition of the conventional relationship between the active (dictatorial) writer and the passive (victimized) reader…” (George Hartley, Textual Politics and the Language Poets)
Stephen Bett
Ivo Andrić, Bosnian Chronicle (opening line; trans, Joseph Hitrec)

At the beginning of the year 1807 strange things began to happen at Travnik, things that had never happened before.



Strange b’place, Kin v. Art

one brow low one high


Stranger than wingnut

num(b)·er·ology


One ate one nought fewer

non bond·ouble “0” sevens


1807’s a master “Sixteen”

Positive integer, karmic

numb’er


“Vibrational properties,” they say

One lump v. two


Flight re·route Sarajevo Blue3

3Tra’v’nik, Bosnia: Andric’s birthplace—Obrnuto (Bosnian for “in reverse”: kin v art). The Sarajevo ref is to another Bosnian poet & short story writer Semezdin Memedinović’s biting/numbing war collection Sarajevo Blues (trans, incidentally, by Charles Olson scholar Ammiel Alcalay) with SM’s debt to fellow Bosnian writers Ivo Andrić & Danilo Kiš
Stephen Bett
title
The Sense of an Ending is the story of one man coming to terms with the mutable past. Laced with Barnes’s trademark precision, dexterity and insight, it is the work of one of the world’s most distinguished writers.

The mutable world of the generative sentence is a commodified canvas for distinguished, socially disjunctivized wordsmiths who lace their prioritized parataxis with overwhelmed signifiers, who torque their dexterously precise trademark tyranny of the signified, creating polysemic masterpieces that refuse transparency, that reify the materiality of words as words, that guard (ironically) against ideological contamination, and that fetishize pussyshit consumerist cocktail-hour diarists for whom the lyric “voice poem” has simply run its course, for whom insightful connections are desyntaxed and denied, and for whom, when push comes to shove, ISBNs’ unique numeric identifiers signify, conspiratorially numerology-speaking, a paradoxical demolition of the active (dictatorial) writer and the passive (victimized) reader.4
4Julian Barnes is Noble & one of these days ought’er be Nobel. For wording here, thx both to Bing Chat & to source material footnoted in the opening poem of this serial work