When I decided to write this, I was thinking about Tatiana Roumelioti and Eileen Myles. Roumelioti works in the spirit writing fringes of the asemic writing community, and Myles inhabits an otherwise non-existent canton of the poetry world we might think of as the neo-confessional post-Beat 3rd generation New York School of lesbian feminist political poetry.
Myles:
From “Repeating Allen” (2006)
—-On “Howl”
I think the poetry world (something that probably shouldn’t exist) is ever more cursed with public events that ask, is poetry political, relevant, over, commercial, popular, etc. because in this poem it was all of those things at once. Many of us write poems that are some of those things for some people, we write for “a” culture, not for “the” culture.
Myles:
I am
absolutely in opposition
to all kinds of
goals. I have
no desire to know
where this, anything
is getting me.
—-from “Peanut Butter” (1991)
Roumelioti:
My work holds no hidden meaning. However, it appears enigmatic and the viewer has the freedom to make their own sense out of them. (2016)
Roumelioti:
I create intuitively without thinking or planning what is going to come on paper. (2019)
It is Friday, June 7 as I write this. I am sitting at a picnic table beside the Hoh River on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State, all of which is important to me, which is why I have included it here. It will be important to some readers, irrelevant to others. I cannot allow those considerations to determine what I write or do not write.
Tatiana Roumelioti makes a kind of asemic writing that she calls Mystcret Codes. In the story as I received it, she had a meeting or meetings with beings either alien or spiritual in 2008, and began identifying her work as asemic writing in 2012. I am not at all interested in any attempts to dismiss or discredit her descriptions and beliefs concerning her experiences. If I assume she knows what she is doing, and certainly knows more about it than I do, then I have a chance of opening myself to the experience of some of what she has to offer. That is one of the positive extremes to which the arts of all varieties have always been able to lead us.
I am reminded, once again, of an early work of polysemous handwriting by the poet John M. Bennett, entitled Meat Receiving. Consciousness in its meat, incessantly awakening to its world. Isn’t that, finally, what all of the arts are for, aside from their important function of providing pleasure, awakening us to our worlds? In any case, it is what they frequently do, as process and in progress, while everything else that is the case carries on with and without them.
The word Mystcret is a portmanteau neologism made by combining mystery and secret.
Mystery — not just unknown, but unknowable. Not just unanswered, but unanswerable.
Secret — personal, private, subjective, presented to the public as a mystery.
Code — hidden, veiled, obscured as if by smoke or clouds (or shadows), oceanic distractions, encrypted, the road of excess.
The concept of asemic writing was a nest of spiders, bioluminescent and non-existent, unleashed upon an unsuspecting world, micropoetic organisms, traveling the via negativa, coming soon to a privately owned theater near you, objectively outgoing and ongoing, subjectivity as such is always a desemantized life sentence.
There were two paths, going forward, from the nest of denotative spiders into and through the Asemic Wilderness, one of which led to Roumelioti’s Mystcret, and the other of which led to Michael Jacobson’s Asemic Expressionism. Everything else in the increasingly vast realm of asemic writing is either abstract visual art or desemantized text.
But what of Peanut Butter, the poem? It’s an old fashioned lyrical love poem, dressed up to look like it belongs in a cafe or a classroom at the end of the twentieth century. There is nothing asemic or desemantized about it.
At some point some of us will want to ask ourselves the questions: exactly what kind of poetry is asemic writing? Is there an unavoidable endpoint to the process of desemantizing a text? And, if so, what does it look like?
For now, I am thinking of a specific type of directional writing. As in: I want to make a point, so I move from point A to point B, on and on, in a straight line, until I get to the point I have wanted to make. Eileen Myles doesn’t want to make that kind of writing. Hers is a kind of fragmented omnidirectional writing. There are traditions in poetry for that as well.
Myles:
I am an enemy
of change, as
you know. All
the things I
embrace as new
are in
fact old things,
re-released: swimming,
the sensation of
being dirty in
body and mind
summer as a
time to do
nothing and make
no money.
This is polysemic, or polysemous writing, but it is not desemantized. It is not asyntactic. It does not build meanings on a subsyllabic level. It does not foreground the visual materiality of the text. There is an unbroken lineage among the histories of the poem, one in which all manner of discontinuities are proudly included and prominently displayed, and a poetry like that of Eileen Myles picks and chooses, according to personal tastes and talents, and makes of itself a distinct addition to all that has come before it.
Myles:
Pleasure
as a means,
and then a
means again
with no ends
in sight.