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The Magic Rule of 9
Your sonic suit will never be a perfect fit. You’ll learn to
get by. Just don’t assume all art is all about victory over
death all the time. Not to say the meantime isn’t as good
a time as any to enjoy not being dead. In the swell of
many a meantime, many have diverted themselves with
great success. Hence civilizations’ discontents and
greatest hits. Take for instance the magic rule of nine.
That the sums of all numbers within the sums of all
multiplicands of 9, up to and including 9, equal 9:
1×9=9, 9=9; 2×9=18, 1+8=9; 3×9=27, 2+7=9; etc.
This is numerically melodious (bird sings in tree) to the
species that longs for more than a first glance affords.
Someone will say, If you really think this is magic, you
don’t properly understand the decimal system (bird
falls out of tree). Who among us doesn’t long for magic.
Who among us truly understands the decimal system.
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Joan Retallack's BOSCH'D (Fables, Moral Tales & Other Awkward Constructions), in which this poem appears, came out from Litmus Press on April Fools Day, 2020. She feels it's impossible to dispute the aptness of that date given local and global circumstances at the time. Retallack is the author of The Poethical Wager (University of California Press) and Procedural Elegies—Western Civ Cont'd (Roof Books) among many other volumes of poetry and essays. Her Gertrude Stein: Selections (California) and conversations with John Cage (MUSICAGE, Wesleyan) examine the humor and gravitas of idiosyncratic aesthetics that became, respectively, so widely influential. Prior to BOSCH'D, Litmus Press published Retallack’s The Supposium: Thought Experiments & Poethical Play in Difficult Times— 2018 textual/visual continuation of an event she organized at MoMA in collaboration with Adam Pendleton. In all her work, Retallack combines socio-political inquiry with linguistic, visual, performative experiments in what she considers "poethical wagers.”
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