Stephen Bett

We are voyeurs: The Oculist Witnesses (LG 7)

Duchamp: “I was finishing work on my Glass. I had taken it to a factory to have the right corner silvered, to a  place where the Oculist Witnesses are. These witnesses were optical charts, for oculists, three sort of round, superimposed shapes which I copied. To copy them, I had to have the Glass silvered, then transfer the drawing, and scratch away the rest. That took at least six months, because it was very tiny and demanded high precision. It was precision optics, in short.”…”Duchamp was inspired by the panels which oculists use to test one’s vision. The lowest circle is composed of lines radiating from the center, the middle one is in the shape of five concentric rings, and the third is composed of twelve spokes of three lines each.”

These lens receptors measure your desire, hon

It’s factory work, after all

Your favourite rod & cone show…

Met some lite borderliners here —  contiguous guises

conceptual hinge, shared axis

A twitch in the switch finds its Wilson-Lincoln effect

Sparks the stage, nine-combatant Boxing Match 

(knock ’er lights out, woo hoo!)

Site a vanishing point, cite the very frailness

of pings before reality dis’appears (again)…

We are voyeurs witnessing Desire

But witness this, blockhead-abling snitches,

Marcel is on to you (& onto you)

like an oculist’s occultist

Paper cuts & scratches up the silverado

it’ll be optics transfer carbon glass

til all the spooks align

Signals from (or is it to?) those ol’ spoke

poesy Martian guys on their slick

Toy Boy’s Money Shot: The Bachelors’ Nine Shots (LG 9)

“… a region of dots; the dents made by the Bachelors’ Nine Shots… The Nine Shots were obtained by firing nine times—three times from three different angles, making up the number of the Malic Molds—from a toy cannon loaded with matches soaked in fresh paint.”

The money shot is miniscule

Trickles out a toy tool

bare∙ly leaves a trace

Just a pockmark, the teen treat

Toy Boy cock-blocked…    nine times

Trace the tiny toy teen treat

tickle not torment, tried not true:

One dot won…

Bankrupt, in fact           Soaked

Out of marks, no score, no match

(for anything     even angles)

C’mon malic guy, be that

apple of our dented eye

No One But Himself: Finally Unfinished (LG 10)

The Large Glass “has been called everything from a masterpiece to a hoax”

We’re not finished!

No slaving here, sir, says the Duch

Finally un∙finished in ’23

Didn’t have to cos he didn’t have to,

didn’t have to, have to…

1923: Decides to leave the Large Glass in a state of “incompletion.” Visits Brussels for

several months to take part in his first major chess tournament, in which he comes third.

1924: He becomes increasinigly absorbed by chess and devotes most of his time to it.

Marcel Ekphrastic…         Marcel Evasive

Remarkably unintelligible, inaccessible…   to an outsider

Move on, nothing for you to see here

Stephen Bett is a widely and internationally published Canadian poet with 23 books and 6 chapbooks in print from Blazevox Books, Chax Press, Ekstasis Editions, Spuyten Duyvil, Thistledown Press, and several others. His work has also appeared as an Ebook (Argotist, UK) and in well over 200 literary journals in Canada, the U.S., England, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Croatia, Finland, and Turkey, as well as in eight anthologies, on radio, and on YouTube. His personal papers are archived for scholarly use at Simon Fraser University Library’s “Contemporary Literature Collection.” His website is StephenBett.com