tie the noose of the hanged man with the teeth of a dead horse¹

Pico Banerjee

without juicing off white, lapped up, bone splinters, we uncrash the wall:

sorry, I gave myself the miracle of Saliva,

her false teeth,

foul temper

giving the

present a present,

butt of mucous desired

warm, a little stone

transferred by deportation like third-rate meat,

without precision.

You outsing the robin,

interfering inter-attraction,

imposing foundations on my non-outside inside,

bursting my rose-petaled pink-patterned latrine,

sending-receiving human magic

over this eerie canal.

While I this ancient

prehistoric

wad

chew up/

spit out/

mucous-covered

gum.

From: CAConrad’s “Time will Not Nurse You,” Antonin Artaud’s “Insult to the Unconditioned” (from “The Momo”), and Georges Bataille’s The Archangelic. CAConrad (1966–) wrote their book to cope with the uninvestigated rape and murder of their boyfriend. These are therapeutic poems, written while Conrad camped underneath a mountain. They created “somatic” poetry rituals to connect their words to nature as they processed their trauma. This poem in particular was written after Conrad tried to chart the journey of an ant from its hill. Artaud (1896–1948) was a writer and actor associated with the Surrealist movement. This selection from his long poem, “The Momo” (1947), is the central part of the first poem he publishes after leaving the Rodez sanitorium. While institutionalized, he received 51 shocks of electrocution to “cure” his “schizophrenia.” It was only after he started making portraits of himself in pencil, writing verse along their margins, that the doctors considered returning him to the outside world. After his release, in the two years until his death in 1948, Artaud published prolifically. “The Momo” in its entirety is a raging condemnation of institutionalization and the government’s control of our bodies and minds. It is considered his most polished work from this period. Bataille (1897–1962) was a French dissident from the Surrealist group, infamous for his pornographic novels, who also wrote poetry evocatively illustrating his obsessions with sex and death. This poem’s title is from a line in the only poetry collection he published during his lifetime, L’Archangelique (1947).

Artist’s Statement

This poem emerges out of a practice I began in December 2022 of making “collage-poems.”

It is a combination of words and phrases from poems by three different writer-poets, put together in a single context to create a coherent piece of work that speaks forth as an ensemble, rather than as a self-sufficient individual. I began collaging soon after I began hand-transcribing memorable lines of poetry and prose to help myself better remember the language of my favorite authors when I could not make much time to read them. Paying closer attention to the images I gravitated towards in their poems (often read in English translation), I realized that these authors, typically from the twentieth century avantgardes, “saw” similarly, despite having disparate personalities and inhabiting different places and times. So, I began transcribing several poems onto the same page to see how their original poetic voices would have looked if they had shared the same hand, while keeping different minds. Throughout this practice, I saw myself not as a writer but as an image-maker, creating novel poetic effects not through assembling words based on their meanings, but based on what their images allow us to see. My tissue-building practice goes against the notion that the best artistic voice is the most “original,” claiming instead, through these objects, that whether “original” or not, all writing emerges out of “the ensemble,” those “Others,” through which we are given to speak. But to speak, we must also know what there is to see…

About the writer

Pico Banerjee is a lover of books and book-like objects. Employed by an antiquarian bookseller in Maine, Pico spends his days reading books on books, books that aren’t exactly “books,” and writing about bookish things. In his free time, he dreams about books and the impression their words have made on his brain. These collaged poems came out of an independent study on “poetry and the unspeakable” that Pico took while writing a year-long thesis on Georges Bataille, the “death of God,” and the hyperbolic explosion of meaning in which meaning is not given but made from the intersecting clouds of unknowing. He is a graduate of Bates College where he studied literature and philosophy, writing two senior theses, one on Bataille and another on the Marquis de Sade and pornography.