Abandonment
____________________
Abandonment
Southern Decadence
The Disquieting Muses
Fieldhouse Mon Amour
______________________
Abandonment
“…he found only a shabby,
derelict world of dust,
drained swimming pools
and silence”—J. G. Ballard,
“Myths of the Near Future,”
RE/SEARCH: #8-9
Chirico’s “Turin”—
Empty colonnades, reversed
Perspectives, Magritte’s
Dislocations of time & space
Dali’s strange surreal—
Biomorphic anatomies
The end of Huey P. Long’s
WPA Thirties dream
Now standing alone—
A shabby swimming pool
Full of brownish-green
Slime, derelict world
The Huey P. Long Fieldhouse—
Abandoned in the encroaching
Of new campus buildings…
Even a new Natatorium
Boarded-up art deco ruins—
Hidden from view this wreck
From another Era engulfed by
Football & basketball stadiums
Shabby, drained Pool—
Satanic graffiti walls and
Dark dismal shower-stalls
Locker-rooms bare naked
Ashamed of itself—
Abandoning the Fieldhouse,
Pool and Ballroom, so much
For historic conservation
Southern Decadence
“we live inside an
enormous novel”
—J. G. Ballard, “Myths
of the Near Future,”
RE/SEARCH: #8-9
Faulkner was lucky—
He had it easy sitting in
That antebellum mansion
There in Mississippi
His fiction already there—
He didn’t have to invent the
Dreams, hopes, ambitions of
A Delta Bourbon bon vivant
Southern decadence—
In a sense writers today
Know nothing any longer
About Dixie denouement
They’ve forgotten the past—
Their deviant Delta decadence
Forbidden, forgotten, repressed
By a Football Town’s zeal
A present-day Porno Novel—
Institutionalized by the usual
Sports, technology & alumni
Financial People That Be
Surrounding, squeezing in—
The Huey P. Long Fieldhouse
Boarding up the Pool, putting
The Ballroom in mothballs
Abandonment—
A political form of fiction
Using Hurricane Katrina as
A reason against Restoration
The Disquieting Muses
“the image of surrealism
are the iconography
of inner space”
—J. G. Ballard, “Coming
of the Unconscious,”
RE/SEARCH: #8-9
The de Chirico campus—
An undefined anxiety
Beginning to spread over
The deserted Quad
The stucco symmetry—
Spanish revival architecture
Red-brook roofs, arcades
And hallways, catatonic
The smooth egg-shaped—
Heads of the Mannequins
Lacking features, eyes, ears,
Cryptic without mouths
These Mannequins are—
The disquieting Harlequins
Of the future, reduced to
Eroded Beardsley poses
Ernst’s “Eye of Silence”—
Looks down from Olympus
Onto the spinal-tap landscape
Magritte’s “Annunciation”—
Down from Dalrymple Drive
Down the hill to the Pool
Boarded-up and hidden
Dali’s “Persistence of Memory—
Runny ruins of temporal decay
Olympic Pool, red-tiled roofs
A shabby Ballroom & Morgue
Domínguez "decalcomania”—
Crushing gouache drained deltas
Nostalgic ruins, drowned past
Dreaming the present
Fieldhouse Mon Amour
“The enormous sort of magic
and poetry one feels when
looking at a junkyard filled
with old washing machines,
wrecked cars & old ships
rotting in some disused harbor”
—J. G. Ballard, “Interview
with Graeme Revell,”
RE/SEARCH: #8-9
In a sense, poetry is—
Assembling the materials
For an autopsy & treating
Life as a cadaver
Fiction as a special—
Kind of forensic inquisition
Reality as a cold steel
Table with a corpse on it
The car has crashed—
The plane has nose-dived
The ship has sunk and the
Rest is debris on the beach
The Huey P. Long Pool—
The abandoned Ballroom
And shabby Fieldhouse as
An Atrocity Exhibition
Here in the middle of—
And urban cityscape
A run-down abandoned
Museum under glass
____________________
Abandonment
Southern Decadence
The Disquieting Muses
Fieldhouse Mon Amour
______________________
Abandonment
“…he found only a shabby,
derelict world of dust,
drained swimming pools
and silence”—J. G. Ballard,
“Myths of the Near Future,”
RE/SEARCH: #8-9
Chirico’s “Turin”—
Empty colonnades, reversed
Perspectives, Magritte’s
Dislocations of time & space
Dali’s strange surreal—
Biomorphic anatomies
The end of Huey P. Long’s
WPA Thirties dream
Now standing alone—
A shabby swimming pool
Full of brownish-green
Slime, derelict world
The Huey P. Long Fieldhouse—
Abandoned in the encroaching
Of new campus buildings…
Even a new Natatorium
Boarded-up art deco ruins—
Hidden from view this wreck
From another Era engulfed by
Football & basketball stadiums
Shabby, drained Pool—
Satanic graffiti walls and
Dark dismal shower-stalls
Locker-rooms bare naked
Ashamed of itself—
Abandoning the Fieldhouse,
Pool and Ballroom, so much
For historic conservation
Southern Decadence
“we live inside an
enormous novel”
—J. G. Ballard, “Myths
of the Near Future,”
RE/SEARCH: #8-9
Faulkner was lucky—
He had it easy sitting in
That antebellum mansion
There in Mississippi
His fiction already there—
He didn’t have to invent the
Dreams, hopes, ambitions of
A Delta Bourbon bon vivant
Southern decadence—
In a sense writers today
Know nothing any longer
About Dixie denouement
They’ve forgotten the past—
Their deviant Delta decadence
Forbidden, forgotten, repressed
By a Football Town’s zeal
A present-day Porno Novel—
Institutionalized by the usual
Sports, technology & alumni
Financial People That Be
Surrounding, squeezing in—
The Huey P. Long Fieldhouse
Boarding up the Pool, putting
The Ballroom in mothballs
Abandonment—
A political form of fiction
Using Hurricane Katrina as
A reason against Restoration
The Disquieting Muses
“the image of surrealism
are the iconography
of inner space”
—J. G. Ballard, “Coming
of the Unconscious,”
RE/SEARCH: #8-9
The de Chirico campus—
An undefined anxiety
Beginning to spread over
The deserted Quad
The stucco symmetry—
Spanish revival architecture
Red-brook roofs, arcades
And hallways, catatonic
The smooth egg-shaped—
Heads of the Mannequins
Lacking features, eyes, ears,
Cryptic without mouths
These Mannequins are—
The disquieting Harlequins
Of the future, reduced to
Eroded Beardsley poses
Ernst’s “Eye of Silence”—
Looks down from Olympus
Onto the spinal-tap landscape
Magritte’s “Annunciation”—
Down from Dalrymple Drive
Down the hill to the Pool
Boarded-up and hidden
Dali’s “Persistence of Memory—
Runny ruins of temporal decay
Olympic Pool, red-tiled roofs
A shabby Ballroom & Morgue
Domínguez "decalcomania”—
Crushing gouache drained deltas
Nostalgic ruins, drowned past
Dreaming the present
Fieldhouse Mon Amour
“The enormous sort of magic
and poetry one feels when
looking at a junkyard filled
with old washing machines,
wrecked cars & old ships
rotting in some disused harbor”
—J. G. Ballard, “Interview
with Graeme Revell,”
RE/SEARCH: #8-9
In a sense, poetry is—
Assembling the materials
For an autopsy & treating
Life as a cadaver
Fiction as a special—
Kind of forensic inquisition
Reality as a cold steel
Table with a corpse on it
The car has crashed—
The plane has nose-dived
The ship has sunk and the
Rest is debris on the beach
The Huey P. Long Pool—
The abandoned Ballroom
And shabby Fieldhouse as
An Atrocity Exhibition
Here in the middle of—
And urban cityscape
A run-down abandoned
Museum under glass
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