ROYAL CANADIAN AIRFORCE EXERCISE PLAN


You can't found a bureaucracy on Rimbaud
There are no bureaucracies in the poetics of Jack Spicer
Ray Brown's walking bass-lines, though, might do nicely

Pound loved bureaucracies, Fascist and Confucian
He wouldn't have made a good bureaucrat though
(Never learned how to look up Chinese radicals in the dictionary)

The Royal Canadian Airforce Exercise Plan works pretty well
No expensive equipment to buy
You need a space slightly larger than a phone-booth

***

This is a found poem, basically, pieced together from comments from Tony Tost's blog and my own reactions. The title comes from Jordan Davis, the idea of not being able to found a bureaucracy on Rimbaud from a quote that Tony included in his post, commented on subsequently by David Hess. The notion that Pound did not know enough Chinese to look up the radicals of characters comes from his wife, Dorothy Shakepear. I read it recently in an essay. The ideas that you need a space bigger than a phone booth to do the exercises, and that you don't need to buy anything, come from customer reviews at amazon. My parents used to have this book (The Royal Canadian Airforce Exercise Plan) in the mid 1960s.