https://www.albany.edu/offcourse
http://offcourse.org
ISSN 1556-4975
Published by Ricardo and Isabel Nirenberg since 1998
For what it’s worth ’cause
something is happening here
& you don’t know what it is
do you, Mister Jones?
… Man with a gun over there
telling me I gots to beware
Wait … it’s Mr Jones his Self!
— that there “Me and Mrs Jones”
We got a THING going on
know it wrong / much too strong
let it go now (go now
go now, ooh …
(Feels so suicidal, jes’ like
Bobbie Zee’s clone cojones)
Tarnation … schlepping wit’ them
damn Joneses coupla dude-
bro infra-thin’ers
nuttin in ’em the space
between front & back
sheet a’ paper
What I’m writing is an infra-novel
… connects the dots (sailor Jones)
Everybody look what’s goin down
whole lotta shakin rimes they
are a’changED / more’n enough
ordnance for y’all
Children, what’s that sound?
Workin on the chain ya-hay-hain
or lolling themselves
to death (LOL)
Buffalo Springfield; Bob Dylan (x2); Billy Paul; Moody Blues; John Lennon; Jerry Lee Lewis; Sam Cooke; Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography (p. 346), quoting Duchamp’s front & back sides of a single sheet of paper as another example of “infrathin”; Laurent Binet’s very fine novel HHhH (p. 241), a postmodern historical metafiction as an “infranovel” of infinitesimally fine distinctions over a singular historical event (the assassination of Heydrich, architect of the Final Solution & “Butcher of Prague”)
Stephen Bett is a widely and internationally published Canadian poet with 24 books in print. His personal papers are archived in the “Contemporary Literature Collection” at Simon Fraser University. His website is StephenBett.com