Barrett Watten

Media Literacy

Desire confronts a tyrant

      An allegory of bad trade

balloon-like at the apex of gloire.  

A message goes out to the fandom

      lacking clues, a curtain

      dividing gold from blank

precarity, emitting mendacious

impulses vomited from greed.

      The mind is an appendix

      with no reason to persist.

A foreign register of darkness

is put down, never to admit.

      Ages backed-up hence

enhance surplus of outward show.

An originary myth a dead sparrow

      as from any fiction, a missile.

      Interests diverge, an hypo-

tactic misalliance welcoming home

a rapid strike force of fuzzy logic

      summoning winners all.

      In defeat the eye lapses      

is obscured by nuclear codes.

Breaking ranks, everyone forgets

      appellate decision overturned.

      The stench is extensive

      after lamps extinguished

Naked memes only facts can erase.

Nor any question mark mitigates agony

      our severe decline

      of media literacy—

A billion witnesses outside the door.

A severed hand creeps up regardless

      with language to unbind

      shit as substitute for sin.

Ever the expense of spirit.

Overwriting wastes of shame.

      Three roads converge

      at first sign of damage

an inevitable decline. We are every-

where dispersed, attuned to caesura

      that opens and disgorges

      hospital discharge report.

Money pursues no commodity

but itself, surplus index of excess

      a black hole consumes.

      A ring tone for life.

Messaging on their devices

hope fingers to the touch.

—in memory of Tyrone Williams

Author’s Note: “Media Literacy” correlates my Dada-inspired poem “Radio” from 1977—written in four 12-line stanzas of variably indented lines, a hybridized New Sentence form—with rubbleized media language that echoed in our collective preconscious after 2016. Thus two moments of “language” are sampled for differing purposes. The original poem was itself sampled, from Lee Harwood’s translation of Tristan Tzara, as lucid an example of automatic messaging as exists. The language of presentist media, on the other hand, telegraphs corruption and venality. In alternating lines from the original with their overwritten versions, as source to target, I wanted to compare two forms of automatism—poetic and ideological. The poem is dedicated to Tyrone Williams, fellow poet working between languages across their irresolvable gaps.

This version of "Media Literacy"—with alternating stanzas with "Radios"—has just been published in my collection Zone: correlations (1973-2021), available from Chax Press.—BW