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semes jim leftwich 2025

Labels: 2025, jim leftwich

jim leftwich a new year 2025

a new year

food bleeds listening
eddies loud and
from intimate abate
twin clouds
of rhombus Fred are
in a mood to plead

2025
jim leftwich

jim leftwich -- of course the asemic is absurd

OF COURSE THE ASEMIC IS ABSURD

If I am writing about the word "asemic", I am thinking about patience
and persistence. I am thinking about failure as a source of energy, as
that which keeps an absurdist idea of enlightenment alive and almost
thriving. Standing in the absurd center of the asemic universe, we are
surrounded by unexamined exits and entrances, unexplored
starting-points, multiple escape-routes leading out in all directions.

We need to synchronize our watches, then throw them all away. We need
to get on the same page of the same map-book, then throw all the maps
away. We need to set our compasses, and throw them away. We must
promise each other to get together, at some unspecified time and
place, later in our lives, to define our terms and make public our
consensus definitions. Until then, we have some exploring to do, some
making and some thinking, some reading and some writing.

Tim Gaze wrote, in an email responding to my recent texts
(05.21.2021), that "asemic is an absolute state, whereas desemantizing
is a process or matter of degree".

He also wrote in the same email that he "consciously let go of asemic
writing several years back".

On January 27, 1998, I wrote to Tim, saying "the asemic text would
seem to be an ideal, an impossibility, but possibly worth pursuing for
just that reason."

Desemantized writing is not an ideal, is not an impossibility. It is a
very specific kind of writing, produced for very specific reasons. To
desemantize writing is to intentionally make it less readable, less
capable of participating in the language-game of giving information.

We might aspire to the absolute state of asemic writing, producing
beautiful and/or provocative failures in our quest, but we achieve
desematized writing, to one degree or another, whenever we choose to
do so.

In response to my recent texts, John M. Bennett wrote (05.20.2021) "i
like 'desemanticized' better than 'asemic' myself; the latter term was
always a bit misleading, even downright wrong sometimes, I thought;
except perhaps in a few situations..."

In the late 1990s, "asemic" was not the word I wanted or needed, but
it was the best I had at the time. For the past 20 years or so I have
been exploring alternatives to the word "asemic". For now, and for my
purposes (which are not necessarily the same purposes as those of some
likely readers of this text), "desemantized" (or "desemanticized") is
an improvement, a step in the right direction. It is a provisional
solution to a problem.

These days, the term "asemic writing" is very widely used, and is
surely in no danger of being discarded or replaced. My thoughts about
the term "desemantized writing" will circulate, if at all, within the
context of the global asemic writing community. As I write this, in
the late spring of 2021, the theory and practice of asemic writing are
not in any sense dead, the possibilities have not been exhausted. The
Sisyphean struggle to attain the absolute state of asemic writing,
absurd though it may be, continues to yield moments of existential
fulfillment, and perhaps every now and then even a kind of happiness.

My hope for my recent writings is that they might invigorate an
increasingly faceted vision of the world of all things asemic.

jim leftwich
may 2021

jim leftwich - dyssemic photographs

dyssemic photographs

So far I am certain only of these two postulates:
1) A-semic writers exist.
2) A-semic writing does not exist.

Let's imagine for a moment the semic as a sense of place. An ego asserts itself in a specific time and space. Meaning is the ecology in which an ego might be asserted. A-semic would describe a particular, chosen relationship to that ecology. Dys-semic would be another, similar relationship. Ditto for pan-semic. Desemantized would foreground the element of choice in yet another relationship of subjectivity to an ecology of meanings.

Asemic writers of all stripes are always at work on the possibility of their existence. Within that context, certain malleable constraints are not easily ignored. For example:
1) We can photograph the world around us as if it is a kind of abstract writing.
2) Quasi-calligraphic drawing (and/or scribbling) should make no concessions whatsoever to considerations of aesthetics.
3) Collage is raphesemic, always (semic in its seams).

jim leftwich
April 2, 2021
Roanoke VA

jim leftwich, Certainties of the Feet

Certainties of the Feet

Our bodies undergo continuous metamorphosis from nature’s actions: pushing, pulling the weight, compressing and shearing the muscles, faulting, cracking the bones, and melting the flesh. -- Julie Gillum, butoh master

is open if of
Persimmon permitting
permanent Lessons
Lemon mantle
Jettisoned
knit Loosely
Jostle and askew
nor rim embodied
nor mnemonic
Bowman's Root
bowing Mantra
hemoglobin Mansion
metaphorical
hearing deft tones
gears of the slipping
Known

Knoll of the Year
By the toes of it
Certainties
of the Feet
oars Mulling
or Gushing
platelets
opal letters
ruling Leaps
Edge unbuilt
whirling Twirls
Ego thunderbolt
scant Gyre
avid vowels
nimble void
betweenspace
neck of the Verb
Contiguity
Naked as a
Verb

vertiginous Nouns
zawn exiguous
Axiomatic
Salt cracked
curved by volume

voiced axiom Curvature
As were the leveraged
souls Discontiguous

as wards of the stasis
Feline
Sublime
A fish in a Suit
and Desultory

we are Resurgent
ebullient Rivulet
at the height
of nature's muscle
whorled unfreezing
ribbonaire Gaunt
doves buried
in the garden
Heard the Fresh
Bone Vault

Gulf Hinge Fence
Daylily
root Yawning
Curving the Nouns
Vowel Lawn abyss
deserts
Between Fingers
Grip the grass

Ripe orange Gases
Remune the Nerge
We Emerge from
Winterlore
rustled like
The raw neck wine
feelings flee the
Thief From
The frozen flames
to Renew The
Betweenworld
Wherever
it is unseen

August 2024
North Carolina

Jim Leftwich, A Sentence

A Sentence

Likely we would have chosen as a bountiful route of escape from the organizational mantra of planetary obsolescence an inner alchemy other than that of poetry and related matters had we not been riven or lifted a book called Illuminations , which we seized to an oak grove in a cow pasture on our grandfather's farm, and devoured like an alien Eucharist until its seedlings therein of soul sprouted and spread the wings of another world is possible, if not only possible yet present, to remain throughout, in miracle of mundane breath and wealth of stars winking in their dust.

June 23, 2024
Baker Creek NV

Jim Leftwich -- June Bugs

June Bugs

Love's boat floated

like a glove

Loaded with glue

And oaken flutes

Blue kinetic estuaries

and blunt epic

arias pictures of

arid rivers liver

failure the riven

azure love's boat

As above embossed

So below attuned

To loss an

oven for the

cows in dreams

we eat salads

on the moon

And chase the

bugs of June

July 22, 2024

Virginia

Jim Leftwich -- Forking Looms

Forking Looms

What were you doing

When Joe Biden

Dropped out of the race?

Wheat and wind dripping,

Wear the going with

Doubt and grace. I was

Sitting in a chair in the

Blue Ridge Mountains

Above Goose Creek

Valley reading and

Rereading Poems for

The Millennium Volume

One. Split boots above

Volleys treading air,

The bridges are loose

And roaming, the

Fountains speak

In forking looms.

July 21, 2024

Virginia

Jim Leftwich -- Wood Nah Nymph Glue

Wood Nah Nymph Glue
(Ancestral Sonnetesque)

By the 1750s families
Of Quakers had settled
In Goose Creek Valley
Soon thereafter the
Leftwiches of Augustine
settled not far away
Propagated and owned
Property in what later
Became Bedford County
In the 1970s I was given
A partial scholarship
To a small Quaker College
Wood nah nymph glue
Everything is connected

July 2024

The twisted wrist's rustwatch

It's raining glass

Sideways

5 thousand miles an hour

Time is ruining out

For a glass of ilk

And a s/ice of read

July 2024

Jim Leftwich -- Visual Poems at Flickr

VISUAL POEMS BY JIM LEFTWICH

Jim Leftwich -- Writing Against Itself -- 2016

Writing Against Itself

Jim Leftwich, Invasive Plants, published by Scott MacLeod at Serious Publications

Jim Leftwich, Invasive Plants

Sometimes it seems like Leftwich hasn't really tried very hard to keep his world out of his poems. I've been reading him forever, and everywhere I look there's nothing but world, world upon world, world after world. Every word is a world, moving from an earlier world, through the present worlds, into or towards a later world.

Words after words, words between words, words as above and so below words. Finally, in the last stages of his successless anticarreer, he has given us these Invasive Plants. It is as if a kind of confession: some of his words are not fully his. If he was the president of anything, we would force him to resign. As it is, he operates as if an independent contractor in the franchise of the poem, answering to no one, not even himself, stealing every word that isn't nailed down. I hear the Beats. I hear Rimbaud. I hear William Blake, Jon Langford, Yeats and Eliot, Patti Smith. Invasive poets, tangling the trellis of the Leftwich mind. Remember as you read him: these thoughts are not your thoughts, and some of them are not even his.

------Retorico Unentesi, Leftwich expert emeritus, The Institute For Study And Application, Kohoutenberg