Slouching Into Incoherence
By Mike Garofalo
1. A Collage of Confusions
"The idea is to reach the unknown
by the derangement of all the
senses."
- Arthur Rimbaud
"Surprise Mind"
- Allen Ginsberg
"Let your verse be
aimless chance."
- Paul Verlaine
"an inexhaustible wardrobe
has been placed
at the disposal
of each new
occurrence."
- John Ashbery, Scheherazade
"Do I contradict myself? Very well,
then I contradict myself. I am large.
I contain multitudes."
- Walt Whitman
"Surrealism: Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern."
- Andre Breton
"Crazy Wisdom Outrageousness"
- Chogyam Trungpa
"My mind is a picture of
the mind moving."
- Philip Whalen
"The world you see is just a movie in your mind...
I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.”
- Jack Kerouac
"Chance encounters of the Fifth Kind with random ideas, clever minds, obscure locutions, apolitical, words like fireworks in the sky."
- Mike Garofalo
"I am going to try speaking some
reckless words, and I want you to
try to listen recklessly."
- Chuang Tzu
"The worst thing you can do is censor yourself as the pencil hits the paper. You must not edit until you get it all on paper. If you can put everything down, stream-of-consciousness, you'll do yourself a service."
- Stephen Sondheim
"A metaphysical tour de force of untethered meaning and involuting interlocking contrapuntal rhythms..."
- Jerry Saltz
"Hundreds of butterflies flitted in and out of sight like short-lived punctuation marks in a stream of consciousness without beginning or end.
- Haruki Murakami
"It may be that when we no longer know... which way to go we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings."
- Wendell Berry
“Sparkling bronze azure eyed Blazure's skyblue bow and eyes.”
- James Joyce
"My mind is a raging torrent, flooded with rivulets of thought cascading into a waterfall of creative alternatives."
- Mel Brooks
"Every time you create a gap in the stream of mind, the light of your consciousness grows stronger."
- Eckhart Tolle
"Use short words, short sentences, and short paragraphs.
Woolly minded people write woolly memos, wolly
letters and woolly speeches."
[and woolly poems?]
- David Ogilvy
"Work on one thing at a time until finished.
Don't be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.
Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it."
- Henry Miller
References for this Collage of Quotations:
1. Mind Writing Slogans, Part II,
Path: (Method
or Recognition)
by Allen Ginsberg, 1993
2. Taking Care of the Details
by Mike Garofalo, 2013
3. Belief and Techniques
for Modern Prose
by Jack Kerouac, 1952
4. The Bottom Line
by Mike Garofalo 2025
2. Slouching Into Incoherence
Incoherent poems of word salads
mis-mashed onions and beets mixed
with an obscure metaphorical dressing of
vinegar and bile, croutons of confusion,
tomatoes of nonsense thrown in.
((I can’t figure Robert Creely out:)
{or from CA: Philip Whalen or Larry Ferlinghetti either}
[or from NY: John Ashbery or e.e. cummings either]
*or from FRance: Rimbaud or Roussel, certainly not*)
Brief excursions on bouncing backroads
of wordy mud puddles of randomness
closed the brittle door on hinges of sounds
read out, read out louder,
rant, whisper, shout out,
the spoken word; ritual tails
wagging like memories lost
flocks of vocabulary typhoons
smashing, yelling, broken cocoons
bursting butterflies of spinning sounds
Read out, read out louder
in a dank smoky coffee house
Hip precursor of Hippie clout
However,
Both Sides: Then and Now.
Square Hip or Hip Zen.
Clear as Sky or Clear as Mud,
Coherent as winter Logic or Obscure as summer Fog;
Throughout the Golden Gate...
Jumping off the ground,
falling up Meanings; or,
standing up Clarity...
Hanging around San Francisco City:
"Coits Tower still screws the sky"
Gregory Corso freed St. Michael from Alcatraz
Moscone and Milk: justice denied
Rexroth translated Chinese verses
Maya Angelou Let the Caged Bird Sing
Jefferson Starship wandered into the White Rabbit's hole
Thomas Cleary translated Taoist prose
Alan Watt’s old houseboat was sold
LSD glasses clearly unclear besmirched
Robert Hass pruned apple trees in Olema
Deng Ming Dao's Scholar-Warrior arose
The Summer of Love amplified Hippie Fun
Edward Espe Brown baked bread in Zen Robes
PhD's from UCB and Stanford
ruled the roost
Wendy Johnson gardened the Green Gulch grounds
Tony Bennett left his heart in San Francisco
Isaac Bonewit's magic arose from Neo-Druid lore
Mike McClure centered Beast Language INCANTATIONS
Silicon Valley kids coded new languages with Fortran lines
Amy Tan put SanFran Chinatown folks on the map
Allen Ginsberg’s Berkeley Sunflowers chanted
Steve Job's last words were "Wow"
Jerry Garcia lifted up the Grateful Dead
Philip Whalen helped the dying and bowed
Robert Creely gave a brief, succinct, convoluted scowl
Richard Brautigan went lingcod fishing in the Bay
Lawrence Ferlinghetti turned the lights on at City Lights
Eric Hoffer loaded boats and warned of True Believers
Zen Master Suzuki taught what Not to Think
UCB students sat-in & shouted out
Hitchhiking poets cried like clowns
Eyes of my Ears: Mystified
Beat poets died. City Lights sighed.
Befuddled by
some poet's words
repeating rereads
increased the blur.
No pearl in the oyster.
3. Rambling On
Streams of incoherence
Rivers of incomprehensibility
Oceans of meaninglessness—
Occasional glimpses
of fools-gold in the poems.
My vein is the literal
not the symbolic,
fantastic, abstract, free;
Lost in meaninglessness,
too clever for me.
Keep it short, concise, precise
Don't be wordy, verbose, to wide
Keep it focused, on target, aimed
Don't wander, delay, no silly play...
Sadly, a poem imprisoned by Brevity.
Lamenting his obscure lines,
lack of specificity—
feeling stupid, locked out;
can't fault the reader,
the poet is a mediocre mouse.
Befuddled by
a poet's words—
repeating rereads
increased the blur.
No pearl in the oyster.
"There's a fine line between a stream of consciousness
and a babbling brook to nowhere."
- Dan Harmon
Stuck
in a poetry rut—
spinning ideas
muddy words...
Louise Gluck gave me a tow.
Symbols shine
in metaphor time
aligning the mind—
The Flowers of Evil
in Baudelaire's lines.
Artists rearrange new objects and intellectuals rearrange old words.
To put a bigger hat on an idea ... Capitalize its Key Words.
Maybe it is a Bright (blue, green, yellow) Enigma
rather that a Dark (black, brown, red) Enigma?
Metaphors are a delightful, tricky, clever, ingenious ways of
pumping iron with words.
I wrote these poems
myself—
not stolen
by machine AI
selling semi-plagiarized lies
This world projects me
emanates, creates, grows me
births me, radiates me, plays me—
yet needs me to see,
It is Not about illusions of me.
muddling
my way—
not understanding
hardly coping
crippled by ignorance
obscure metaphors
random adjectives
pointless words
askew verbs—
post-modern gibberish
[Verlaine-Rimbaud,
delighted would be.]
Can't
Turn off my brain.
Thoughts blowing like rain.
Midnight! Just can't turn off the
Rant.
I've always been
just a little
out of hand
out of touch
with Reality.
my zazen was writing
pencil in hand—
sitting still for minutes
no special breathing
just moving my hand
The marvelous minuscule
Has Magic for its Curse
Taking it away from itself
Not great, just common place,
Tricked out of its rightful state.
Yes, I wish Milton's Heavenly Muse
would dictate beautiful poetry to me. But,
unfortunately, She never appeared, you
see, leaving me, seriously, with
the only Muse I now hear—Me!
she quoted her poem
held in her hand—
some poets in line
ready to rant
at Open Mic time...
some bitter minds
The noun asked the adjective,
"Why do you speak of superficialities?"
The adjective replied,
"Because your not very interesting
as a mere noun, unqualified."
my stream of consciousness
dried up—
leaving empty cans
in the sands
of mind mud mush
Rouselian Round-Abouts
The Belle of the Ball
cracked a glass on the wall
sounding the bell that called
everyone affected to
become more effective
at being better at being
a bettor who would win
the whole (Prize)
not go in a looser's hole
and needing to hire a Savior
on Higher to save the sad fates
of those at the Grand Ball's Fete.
Yes, the Prize, not cash, but a
valuable Cache, hidden,
secreted somewhere by the Sea.
And the Belle of the ball,
with a dangling bell on her best dress,
signaled to All a few Clues,
under the glass by the wall,
hints, special news,
to tempt and tease all,
showing the place-location
of the Treasured Prize Cache.
4. Bubbling Up From Memories
The Past Speaks Again
"We tend to think of memories as monuments we once forged and may find intact beneath the weedy growth of years. But, in a real sense, memories are tied to and describe the present. Formed in an idiosyncratic way when they happened, they're also true to the moment of recall, including how you feel, all you've experienced, and new values, passions, and vulnerability. One never steps into the same stream of consciousness twice."
- Diane Ackerman
"The conscious mind may be compared to a fountain playing in the sun and falling back into the great subterranean pool of subconscious from which it rises."
- Sigmund Freud
"The mind is a kind of theater, where several perceptions successively make their appearence; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations."
- David Hume
"Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself as chopped up in bits ... it is nothing joined; it flows. A 'river' or a 'stream' are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let's call it the stream of thought, consciousness, or subjective life."
- William James
"Phanopoeia, Melopoeia, Logopoeia"
- Ezra Pound
'To sustain a language that is both mucky and perfumed, to bring us face to face with the Now in which everything must happen, to have the reader speak the poem, to communicate something unknown to the reader,
to write the poem fit for the occasion."
- Paraphrase of David Herd, JA&AP, p.7 and John Ashbery
John Ashbery Studies by Mike Garofalo
“To feel everything in every way; to be able to think with the emotions and feel with the mind; not to desire much except with the imagination; to suffer with haughtiness; to see clearly so as to write accurately; to know oneself through diplomacy and dissimulation; to become naturalized as a different person, with all the necessary documents; in short, to use all sensations but only on the inside, peeling them all down to God and then wrapping everything up again and putting it back in the shop window like the sales assistant I can see from here with the small tins of a new brand of shoe polish.”
- Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet.
"Poets measure the circumference and sound the depths of human nature with a comprehensive and all penetrating spirit, and they themselves perhaps the most sincerely astonished at its manifestations; for it is less their spirit that the spirit of the age. Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not."
- Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defense of Poetry, 1820
"There is no ultimate truth. Does anyone think that, by a minute refinement of logic, they have demonstrated the truth and established the correctness of their opinions? I detest greasy objectivity, and harmony, the science that finds everything in order. I am against systems, the most acceptable system is on principle to have none."
- Tristan Tzara, “Manifeste Dada,” 1918
"The enemy of didacticism, declamation, false sensibility and objective description, symbolic poetry seeks to clothe the Idea with a sensory form which, nevertheless, should not exist as an end-in-itself but as a form which, though serving at all times to express the Idea, must remain subjective. The Idea, in its turn, must not be allowed to be deprived of the sumptuous robes of external analogy; for the essential character of symbolic art consists in its never leading to the concentration of the Idea in itself. Thus, in this art, scenes of nature, the actions of human beings, all concrete phenomena are not there to manifest themselves; they are sensory appearances intended to represent an esoteric affinity with primordial Ideas."
- Jean Moreas, Symbolist Manifesto, 1886
Three Post-Modern Poetry Rules
The poem
Stands for Itself;
Not for something
Outside of
Itself.
Allow chance
to procreate—
open doors
for randomness
to integrate
Play with your work
work more with play;
Creating words a game
the game here is to play—
write poetry this way
[Fairfield Porter's 'Three Rules'
for avant-garde poetry, 1959]
5. Bibliography: Freedom of Minds
Free Association, Unconventionality
Automatic Writing, Surrealism
Free Writing, Stream of Consciouness
Stream of Consciousness: Wikipedia
Poetry Research: Bibliography, Studies, Notes
By Mike Garofalo
Surrealist Techniques: Wikipedia
Automatic Writing: Amazon Books
Crazy Wisdom. By Chogyam Trungpa.
Free Writing: Wikipedia
The Artist's Way. By Julia Cameron.
Asemic Writing: Wikipedia
Holy Madness: Spirituality, Crazy-Wise Teachers and Enlightenment.
By Georg Feuerstein.
The Bottom Line. By Mike Garofalo.
John Ashbery Studies. By Mike Garofalo.
Crazy Wisdom: Amazon Books
Surrealist Automatism: Wikipedia
First Four Rules of Free Writing. By Natalie Goldberg.
Slouching Into Incoherence. By Mike Garofalo.
The Marginalian. By Marie Popova.
Notes, Research, Bibliography,
Links, Sources, Favorites
Poetry by Mike Garofalo: Online
25 Steps and Beyond: Collected Works
Bundled Up: Quintains and Tankas
At the Edges of the West
Highway 101 and Hwy 1: Pacific Coast
Cuttings: Haiku, Senryu, Brief Poems
At the Edges of the Fertile West
Highway 99 and Interstate 5
Mike Garofalo lives in Vancouver,
Washington. He worked for 50 years
in city and county
public
libraries,
and in elementary
schools. His degrees
are in philosophy,
library science, and
education. He has been a web publisher
since 1998.
25 Steps and Beyond: Collected Works
This document was last edited, revised,
reformatted, added to, relinked,
changed, improved, or modified
by Mike Garofalo
on June 3, 2025.