Merz Structure No. 2 Burnt by Children at Play

By Jake Kennedy

In 1981 Jake Kennedy accidentally burnt down an abandoned house. Years later as an adult, he read a story about how Kurt Schwitters' "interior house-sculpture" ("Merz Structure No. 2") was destroyed in 1951 after some children playing with matches accidentally burnt the building down. This sad 'unmaking,' so similar in nature to his own haunting experience, became the inspiration for Merz Structure No. 2 Burnt by Children at Play, a collection of experimental poetry that explores the dynamic, if often unsettling, relationship between making and unmaking, bliss and pain, utterance and silence.

As diverse in form as they are in artistic/cultural references, the poems of Merz Structure No. 2 invoke an endless bounty of characters: the poet remembers Harold Ramis; Kafka summons the courage to tell his dad where to go; another tornado razes another small town; Yorick returns to run balls-out into the sea; Louise Bourgeois smashes a tea cup against one of her sculptures.

Readers who connect with Phil Hall’s artistic investigations in Killdeer and Lisa Robertson's clear-eyed take on humanity in Magenta Soul Whip will enjoy Kennedy's feeling examination of loss in Merz Structure No. 2 Burnt by Children at Play.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookThug
• Release date: Apr 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781771661140

Book preview

Lent

Cezanne’s Still-Life with Skull, Candlestick, & Book

Poor Yorick would speak a speech

about fucking and how to run balls-out

into the sea; how the rose once moved

this way and that in the breeze

and how the pages were always turning toward

the better future (and they were)

or something quantifiable like that

with memory’s stagecraft

here stupefying all vanities—

A Brief History of the Cemeteries of Huron County, Ontario

the rapids try to wake the barge

to at least one common fact

just as the grass

affects sea-ish poses atop the bodies

this—all of this—results

as the final final lulling

  •

after the lapse

when resolutions have been, well, resolved

and even the darkness gives up

to a density of beige

the mason’s patchwork

keeps a claim on delusion

praise

that

  •

quantities of restless light

on top of the river

at once startled and then never