Cleaving the American Wave

Jeremy Bennett “The Perfect Wave” (2008)

Cleaving the American Wave

“Space assumes the form
of a bubble—whose limits
are entirely plastic”
—Kit Robinson
In the American Tree

“The cleavage—
goes through all the
phases of experience.
It is the jump from
prose to the process
of the imagination”
—William Carlos Williams
Spring and All

The cleave—is incomplete
It’s not just—left brain/right brain
It’s West Coast/East Coast WAVE

The Western Imagination—
Versus the worn-out decadent
Sold-out old-money East Coast

The cleave—is right down the
Mississippi Middle of America—
The East Coast—is fryed

Stale as toast—desolate
Hard-pressed—Ponzi-queered
Bad boyz—of the Beltway

West coast cleavage—goes
Just the opposite way thru
Olson’s projective verse

East coast Maximus—dead
Dead as Massachusetts Gloucester
Time to map Maximus—Westcoast now

Cleavage—jumps from one
Coast to another—Movement
Is the American imagination

Only trailer trash Imagination
In all its vulgar immediateness
Can dynamize it—Transpacifica!!!

Transatlantic—poetry is dead
The Euro-imagination—stinks
Except for Cézanne & Picasso

The pure products—of America
Go crazy—Jars in Tennessee crack
Old red Wheelbarrows—rot

Time for some—West Coast
Devil-may-care Indian blood
The sheer lust for adventure

Numbed terror—Perfect Wave
Brains—the truth about being
Wild and Free—once again!!!

The Cleavage—is complete
The Blogosphere—is the Net
Vast Pacifica—the new WAVE!!!