Transcontemporation Poem for America's Greatest American Poetry Workshop

December 5, 2016 brought a crew of poets to mulled wine and green M and M's.  I drank coffee and everything else but went light on cheese and crackers. The words of poet Sampson Starkweather on transcontemporation were clearly pronouncements warmed in canned soup with red labels. I didn't want to get into it (I mean he wasn't there). Everyone had solidarity and fearlessly continued to use any word found in the English language. This helped some but not a whole lot when your poem was a translation seen through the cleashay of beveled glass. Adam Tedesco, who was there got the name, Dale Chihuly, on the first try. I was fumbling stumbling per usual (name, what is in a name?) but once the praise of MassMoca by Adam and Dawn Marar and the wearabouts of Anna Kberg was determined the AGAPW continued. I was at the Seattle sited Chihuly Garden of Glass a few weeks before and while looking at and beyond glass overhead ceilings I though, wow, what a perfect representation of the Transcontemporation Impulse, since the fractured artist beholding views were obviously multi-prompted at their various cells of academia and poetry were only a surface in the variphased bubble and, not to be slighted, not all of it. The photo below exhibits the transcontemporated space-time impulse. Part wall, part ceiling, light and unlit partings at right angles, filtered through camera lens and yes my friends effected by how tall I stand.



One of the language questions I had for the transcontemporated poem was of course the fading across space-time of the recognized idea. Words as moods mean lost possibles like an Apple commercial about lemmings or watches. It would be slap-stick to set up the old infinity in watches pose. I continue to prefer the universal.

BAILEY BRIDGE (Sir Donald Bailey   b 1901)

down in the crawl space

under the porch

  

       no cliff dwellers 

in this clime

spatiotemporally

                                      both space and temporal

     spaitum tempor

     (space-time)

look out

 portable, pre-fabricated, truss

available field consulting

                

             on bridge 

                    applications

                                           Alan Casline

                                            December 5, 2015