7.16.2007

NO IDEAS BUT IN THINGS




What does this mean now? Think about this car for a minute. Noah Gapsis, a young poet who gets a kick out of tagging his own vehicle, plastered WCW’s dictum on his Japanese jalopy and the post-Objectivist pronouncement miraculously changed meaning. Especially in Santa Fe with its ostentatious faux-adobe version of our glob(al) capitalism. Wow. Public poem art sculpture. And what happens to what it means when he drives the car to Omaha or El Paso?

Whatever. WCW would be delighted.

Noah, the son of friends Sharon Franco and Joe Hayes, attends Wesleyan University in Connecticut. He wants to be a poet. I wish him well.

He tagged the butt of his car with this from Italo Calvino:



2 comments:

larry goodell said...

IDEAS IN THINGS

“No ideas but in things”
no bumpers rubber sings

without the clashing cars in dreams
no idle vacuum bars
the kitchen sink, the action star
no diamonds down the drain

no he-cows on the brain
no she-bulls caty-corner from
McDonald’s in the rain

no doggies after balls no bouncing
anything ordinary
just what mean intellects
require us to suppose.

From head to heart to toes
no ideas in the brain
vacuum any thots out
you can go home again.

You know your wagging tail and
your sniffing nose knows
compound your thoughts if you dare
pronounce and buy new clothes

whatever you can afford
put it in the bank
no ideas any more about
anything things,

no things but ideas out of them
and barking dogs on the brain
just remember when you sing
no ideas and no things.

I’ve got some thots in my brain
that is the idea in my thing.


from larry goodell's Beyond TV, poems 1995 & I love the car:
it must go into the National Poetry Museum!

Bobby Byrd said...

Larry, thanks for the great poem. I'll send it to Noah. It's raining in NYC where I'm blessed to be for a couple of weeks. Lee and I hope to get to Albuquerque this summer. Love to you, Brotherman.