A Subcommission of Rock Types — sample

Hey all, been years since I posted on here, though I’ve watched the goings-on quite a bit. Haven’t worked with Gnoetry much during that time, so haven’t felt inclined. Here’s a sample from a manuscript I’ve been working on, though, and I’d love to hear any feedback. Mainly done with mchain 0.3. The work is a collaboration with a potter friend, and focuses on the construction of a naval base on the South Korean island of Jeju. (A longer explanation follows)

Excerpt 1:

This clash in seeping groundwater,

dredging of the seabed and coral

into bay seawater, and the North’s

corrosion borders composed

cavities of the rock, fibrous chalcedony

where unsourced material may be present

in some ancient ocean

which later dried out our Cold War past

and their ancestral homeland and sea

and with them the black rock                         called basalt

from the shallower part of the system

tracing the coast of the neighborhood of human values

known to the locals as Gurembi Rock

a “frothy” text

of geological stratagem

the livelihoods of the interior

which the oil imports flow through

like tremendous cross marks.

+

Excerpt 2:

Paths can grow to be determined (more arrested)

– metasediment desires, dusts and pheasants

exploit hot spot future of former

‘memory struggle’ – a path out of.

Apology must look for parameters,

eat cement accessible

reserve tension strike–driven.

Even extraordinary people

are conventionally expressed.

Pumped into the gunfire, vowels.                         I’m totally numb now.

The almost complete lack of light minerals

in the renowned lead contractor referendum bring waves of total

disarmament and yellow tail

mini-skirted from a fiction of the fronts I’d love.

+

Civil disobedience is a letter of Nature

carried out globally for a secret cave system,

a project linked by tiny

police as many souls are extracted

in a New. Clear. Vision.

Frack You Ratios a membrane filter.

Certification of cut into the slabs swept sampling holes blockade

Strips of the pork-belly.

To compete for trespassing –

Concrete over land,

how it will strengthen

its long term policies –

(photos showed him in the sea).

Excerpt 3:

Despite family salinity ranges, soil additives.

The rebels demanded 4.3 scorched earth

“Decayed Moon” etched into her belly

destroying this small fertility god from soldiers elsewhere

city or cinder pricing on Korean relics paired stone wool

staged to swim in Fig. 7

stone grandfathers the trapezoidal tombs connected stars

at the open end of the enclosure

living green minerals

innumerable passages into, out of, and around

these various human sanctuaries

war brewing between basaltic melts in length

carbon free speech

the only to death is adamant.

+

Plots of swollen fingers            versus a large

export surplus.

Beautiful stories can be written by the people

using marine dredges.

They had so far been arrested

and dispersed                         of the threshold

Landscape of a Resting Cow

steep-sided shed on their

rhine quenching localities

ENTER NOW.

+

In this hauntingly beautiful place

well groomed trails,            barley, vegetables,

soldiers allegedly gang-raped the girls over

a two week period                        then killed them

the data of the volume             of the terror

of twenty artesian springs

gentle slopes from the body

then on the visions                        of survivors

we used                         hammers

to be swept away,                        exposed only by the applause

to achieve andesitic and to have sex

down wilted citrus trees            and national interest

we pass bulldozed fields cut with collapsed greenhouses

where their military base will stand up

the Jurassic granites —

amongst the abundance            of “red villages”

burned under snowcapped Mount Halla

— are measured             before dawn.

+

+

+

+

A SUBCOMMISSION OF ROCK TYPES AGAINST POTENTIAL ATTACKS was written using the computer program mchain 0.3 and employs source texts relating to the construction of the naval base on Jeju Island and accompanying protests, along with geological texts and studies of the rocks that make up the island and its coastline. Other source texts focus on the history of militarization on the island, particularly a massacre by the Korean military that occurred in 1948 under the watchful eye of the United States, as well as studies of the cultural history on the island. The initial idea for the project came while reading Bruno Latour’s Politics of Nature in the wake of the Gangjeong villagers’ shifting of rhetorical strategy toward protecting the black volcanic rocks along their endangered coastline. It also represents, for me, an exploration of the continued influence the United States has played in Korea, of which, as an English professor living in Korea, I am a part. Naturally, with a construction project of this size there are interests ranging from the local farming community to large corporations and political parties, as well as larger, longer term strategies of global powers, particularly the U.S.’s interest in containing China.