Tongues & a Thousand Eyes in Kailua

Clinton John Frakes, English

In the spirit of Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake and Kerouac’s “Sea Poem” from the novel Big Sur, as well as Breton’s automatic writing, Dadaist techniques of by-passing linear narrative in favor of a “continuous present,” as William James called it, and as Gertrude Stein employed it, the long poem “Tongues and a Thousand Eyes in Kailua” attempts to render the immediate sounds and rhythms of the sea within a sustained attention to the actual sounds of water as it commingles with the memory process and emergence of archetypal thought forms and characters.

    The underlying philosophy and compositional foundation of the poem allows for the precognitive forces of language to compliment traditional narrative and lyrical form, producing a tension that extends the field of poetry into a more potent emotional complexity. The text itself embraces whimsy and contradiction along with the more traditional narrative mythopoeic logos in the vein of other similar postmodern poetic discourse.

    This poem pre-supposes no intellectual context and enters the room on it’s own feet, autonomous in its culture.