Six Sonnets by John Lowther

I am interested in ideas, not merely in visual products.
The power is in the word.
It was a momentary high.
I never said anything about cleaning them out every day.
May the best loser win.
Let a thousand flowers bloom.
I suppose I could put off killing myself until tomorrow.
No parsley on anything.
It's only what's in the frame.
I’d love to share the pain with you but it’s not possible.
We could make it cute.
That clown is drunk.
I assume everyone wants to put their genitals on my face.
You're too brunette.
Ourselves we do not owe.






Dialectics is the teaching which shows how opposites can be and how
              they happen to be (how they become) identical—under what
              conditions they are identical, transforming themselves into one
              another—why the human mind should take these opposites not as
              dead, rigid, but as living, conditional, mobile, transforming
              themselves into one another.
Art is vice.
It breaks even.
That pianola sure brings back memories.
I don't have kitschy feelings like that.
It's a very very nice topic or theme or whatever you want to call it.






There is no such thing as a porn star any more.
The intellectual incoherence is stunning.
I have a limited size entertainment center.
She is way out of my league and this is stupid.
God does not love weak souls and flabby flesh.
The urge to destroy is also a creative urge.
I have nothing more to say to you ever again.
The calls are coming from inside the house.
The universal mother, lauded in evolutionary stories and celebrated in
               woman-centered subcultures, was really the idealized middle-class
               suburban mother all along.






We observe that the lion possesses the topological gender of a torus.
And to approve of a disinterested agent is to love those who love.
Forcing me to do all kinds of thing which any men never would do.
So, rape and consensual sex have the same pregnancy rate.
To be truthful is to employ the usual metaphors.
This launches us into a 'detective' logic.
Look for pus, discharge and wound odor.
I'll make some indiscrete inquiries.
It’s really an organ transplant.
I abandon myself, me abandons I.
Time will undress them.
Fuck fate.






They are more likely to interact with police because they are more likely to
              be victims of violent crime, because they are more likely to be on
              the street due to homelessness and/or being unwelcome at home,
              because their circumstances often force them to work in the
              underground economy, and even because many face harassment
              and arrest simply because they are out in public just being who
              they are.
Keep track.
A person's a person, no matter how small.
The poets, for example, were always the servants of some kind of
              morality.







In between camouflage and mimicry is mimesis, in which the mimic takes
             on the properties of a specific object or organism, but one to which
             the dupe is indifferent.
The result is a characteristic posthistoricist valorization of questions about
             who we are, or how we feel, over questions about what we believe
             or intend or mean.
All good art is an indiscretion.
Life is a difficult assignment.
I'll be scared later.
The sneeze was all the more violent for having been kept back, and
             resounded in the ancient, cavernous theatre.





Note on the Text

These 555 sonnets are made with found lines and precise measures,
a database and text analytic software. I crunched Shakespeare’s
sonnets for word, syllable and character averages and these are my
new measures. The lines’ oddities are their own, the arrangement is
mine. After the text analytics and data entry, many ways of
assembling are found. I hold to the turn (when I think of it) and that
sonnets are poems of a certain size, but little more. Something in
excess of the lines pass through, it’s that I’m chasing.

​

Bio: John Lowther's work appears in The Lattice Inside and Another South and Held to the Letter (with Dana Lisa Young) is forthcoming. He works in video, photography, paint and performance. His dissertation seeks to reimagine psychoanalysis with intersex and transgender lives as foundational.

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