Tens

by Richard Kostelanetz

Temp

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction

152 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1980

Reviews

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

OORANA by Eugene Jolas

I was in the canyon of a vast city at dusklight. A dourcrowd of men and women rambled up and down the asphalt. Nothing was heard save the iterant rhythm of the heelbluster.

What was the great event they were waiting for? Was a declaration of war to be announced? Did they expect an enemy invasion? Did they hope for the irruption into their plaguelives of some miraculous being?

Seven childhood friends appeared out of the nighting mass. We began to laughsing in our native words a chant that whirldisturbed the dourmen and dourwomen.

Suddenly there was a cry. The night had now come with nervefreezing gloom. Out of the darkwhorl above the high houses we saw what seemed an airplane. It lightshot down towards us. We helterskelterfled into the houses.

In the empty street we watched the machine stop. It flamesputtered. Then we saw that it was really a man-machine: a giant whose hands and feet contained wheels and flutter-engines. He did not stay long, however, and soon vanished again in a nerve-trance.

Everybody swiftrushed back to the canyon where we found a large sheet of paper on which was written:
OORANA OORANA OORANA

My childhood friends and I became very agitated. We had the sensation that we were floating upward. Soon we were shoutwinging our way through the nightsky. We felt liberated from all earthly bonds. We paeanlouded in a shimmersurge.

Higher and higher we steeped our way. We saw lightningforking and starshooting. The light drew us upward with a kind of music.

Were we changed too? We seemed to be lighter than air. We were vertigorising past galaxies of wonderplanets

Once we looked down below and saw the earth eggfloating in a dark ocean.

Interminably the unjourney continued, until suddenly the catapultforce began to decrease, and we landed with a wildthud on a very small planet.

We knew we were on OORANA. Etherbeings received us with musicwords never heard before. When we tried to transpose the incantatory rapturesounds to our own language forms, we failed. We tried an approximation and agreed on the following interpretation:

OORANA
shillaroo pleina
fullassa reina
vollava emplea
essencia littora
whirlalla grellila
rilltara affulla
altagra inbruma
blitza eclaira
altara pleroma
fullina sternana
OORANA

glimmera hallolee
flamma sheenalee
glista gleissaree
ascesa lillallee
blazeesa flugaree
ignista lumisee
lustrala gloseelee
dazzlona lucinee
radiosta irradee
illuma lightinglee
flashala crackalee
dazina beamonee
glazola burnishee
glowila silberee

OORANA

ura flittora
clina shimmera
swala lohala
gloota lichtera
gluela astara
brenna burnina
golda biluna
gleissa aspera
clarina ballada
traumana trancola

OORANA
OORANA
OORANA

[Evan Pincus · Rating 4 out of 5]

More than collecting essential pieces (not to say this lacks highlights, many of which I would in fact consider essential works), I would say the primary value here is the curatorial perspective, eccentric even by the standards of Kostelanatz’s broad definition of the book’s scope. As the title implies, this is not a book of poems or anything so reductive but of texts, which can apparently constitute just about anything, from Philip Glass percussion scores (has anyone ever performed 1+1 as a vocal piece? I’m not so sure) to essays on translating the untranslatable to Borgesian pastiches filled with conceptual mysticism to concrete poems to “several O’s” to “several more O’s” to masterpieces of abstract typesetting that only force you to consider how to read them aloud by virtue of falling within the pages of this book. That I find many of the collected texts fairly forgettable or perhaps even irritating is largely irrelevant to the pleasures of such a radical redefinition - if all this can be poetry, sound, music, text, art…!

Side note - where’s Robert Ashley? She Was A Visitor and In Sara, Mencken, Christ and Beethoven There Are Men and Women both seem like conspicuous absences from a collection like this one (although admittedly the latter is complicated by both the appropriated nature and sheer length of its text), and the presence of both a Glass score and Lucier’s I Am Sitting In A Room makes the lack of Meredith Monk a little surprising as a contemporary composer working with abstract phonemic vocalizations.

[Joan-Marc · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mind-blowing.

A whole new universe that deliciously disrupts the prism of reality.

A meaningless path leading to the infinite sense, blurring the separation between absolute superficiality and relative depth or relative superficiality and absolute depth.

A dispensable must.