HELLO HELICOPTER by Kyle Schlesinger

HELLO HELICOPTER

*Hello Helicopter*. Or hello *helikos*? As Robert Smithson tells us of his Spiral Jetty film, not so distantly from Kyle Schlesinger’s poetics: “For my film (a film is a spiral made up of frames) I would have myself filmed from a helicopter (from the Greek helix, helikos meaning spiral) directly overhead in order to get the scale in terms of erratic steps.” Much after Clark Coolidge’s own “depositions,” and affinities as disparate as Larry Eigner, Larry Fagin, Frank Kuenstler, Bernadette Mayer, Lorine Niedecker, George Oppen, Ron Silliman and Rosemarie Waldrop in Schlesinger’s poetry language bifurcates geo-glyphically forming mantles (veils, plates) for a metapolitics of the person determined by intense logics of sense. Joyrides into exteriority, these lapidary (drilled, mined, refined, chiseled) texts find form in an “everyday” (read: actual!) practice made ambivalent by the twin indiscernible points of paramnesia and paronomasia, rushing upon History and the *instant* where “memory survives necessity,” forging “a fold between these folds / / then helicopter”. “It all comes down to this…”–literally. So dig it! “Fossils have terms of their own” and these poems endlessly propose, so carefully degreed.

Thom Donovan

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Kyle Schlesinger is a poet, scholar and proprietor of Cuneiform Press. Recent collaborations include a meditation on George Oppen’s Of Being Numerous entitled Mantle (Atticus Finch, 2005) with Thom Donovan and a book about stencil graffiti entitled Schablone Berlin (Chax, 2005) with Caroline Koebel. Recent artists’ books include Moonlighting and A Book of Closings. He is currently writing on Piero Heliczer, Asa Benveniste and the history and ontology of book burning

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