Doubtless we profit in having in one non-giant volume Ashbery's exemplary earlier pieces on Gertrude Stein, Giorgio de Chirico, Marianne Moore, Pierre Reverdy and, in particular, Raymond Roussel. As for another early piece, "A Conversation with Kenneth Koch," its co-brokered hilarity is a welcome interlude within Selected Prose that otherwise includes only written speech of Ashbery's. Exchanges between Koch and Ashbery veer toward a circus joust; you'll want to set aside a few hours to calculate the tonal shifts caught up in their high-wire act:

K.K.: Could you give an example of a very bad artist who explains his work very well?

J.A.: (Silence)

K.K.: I guess you don't want to mention names …

J.A.: Some people might get offended, I don't see the point of that.

K.K.: Do you mean you're afraid?

J.A.: No. Just bored in advance by the idea of having to defend myself.

There are editorial minutiae worth mentioning. Since a chronology is enforced, why the gap between 1978 and 1983? The Index is incomplete, among others, Bill Berkson, Jim Brodey, Ron Padgett and John Yau omitted. More substantive, I think, is an impression that the last third of the text comprises mostly incidental pieces: introductions, a preface, a forward; the last two selections seem almost parenthetical, first, a short review for an anthology of essays by (famous) movie buffs, and, second, three paragraphs on the poet F T Prince for another anthology, Dark Horses: Poets on Lost Poems. Looking over the potpourri of later selections, and considering their heft compared with other critical material in the text, I am reminded of Ashbery's remark on Raymond Roussel's juxtaposing objects "similar in appearance but not in size." I would not argue Ashbery's slighter fare be overlooked, but I wonder why so much need be bunched together at the end. If this is due to chronology, perhaps another organizing principle might apply.

Attempting for a moment to contextualize links or ratios between subjects taken up in Ashbery's Selected Prose, overall, and Ashbery's powers of imagination, I go back to his account of Roussel's "tumultuous impression of reality" that results from, among other things, using plots as "pretexts for description" in Nouvelles impressions d'Afrique:

A group of Europeans has been shipwrecked off the coast of Africa. Talou, a tribal king, is holding them for ransom. In order to distract themselves until the ransom money arrives, the travelers plan a "gala" for the day of their liberation. Each contributes a number utilizing his or her particular talents, and the first half of the book is an account of the gala, punctuated by a number of executions which Talou has ordained for certain of his subjects who have incurred his wrath. The second half is a logical explanation of the preposterous and fantastic scenes which have gone before.

It seems fair to suggest that this plotline carries the human force of allegorical logic: Constrained by politicos, mercenaries and killers, almost any topics for the critical or poetical imagination constitute useful distractions from the surrounding tyranny. One could go further and offer that each topic, high, middlebrow or what, "contributes a number" eliciting particular talents required to make it gala-worthy for one's liberation (whose day has not yet come). Surely the allegory is as "preposterous and fantastic" as a range of others from Beckett to Gilligan's Island, but the selected "scenes" of Ashbery's prose are not. Unlike Roussel who found his own reality unsatisfactory and whose oeuvre retreats into a world that "has not been," Ashbery piece by piece elaborates each with delicacies of description that slip away from their type, yet play down their own importance, and keep flowing with a reality that makes us know we are human.

Rereading the important middle sections of Ashbery's Selected Prose, I see an argument upheld over a swath of subject matter. There are four essays in particular, dating from the middle 70s, the period after the publishing of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror and before the release of Houseboat Days, pieces which take up the poetries of Kenward Elmslie and Elizabeth Bishop, a film by Jacques Rivette and a fake autobiography by E V Lucas and George Morrow, titled What a Life! Citing Raymond Queneau, Ashbery asserts the 1911 publication of Lucas and Morrow's collage of catalog pictures and co-authored text was "the moment of the first conjunction of scissors and glue-pot 'with disinterested ends in view.'" Ashbery's appreciation fixes on the "veiled" unease evinced through myriad details, a collaged disquiet remarkable in both its obvious admixture of "gothic touches," and, more of interest, its sustenance as "it can be felt throughout in the dislocations, sometimes farcically broad but sometimes very slight." These dislocations parallel faculties of "tragic ambivalence" that "exists in all of us and is the core of the situation which Lucas and Morrow elaborated within the confines of their exiguous comic masterpiece." Moving to heavier comedy, Ashbery praises Kenward Elmslie's 1975 collection Tropicalism, not for its vision, which has "changed little" from earlier work, but for its "surer, stronger ... elaboration," a vision and a "visionary poetry which proceeds not by describing but calling into being." That evocation is a matter of capturing data and supplying the details, we may infer, but as Ashbery indicates in his essay on film maker Jacques Rivette it's more than that, it's

a genius for rendering a viewer hypersensitive to details: the pattern of a woman's blouse, furniture, cars, flowers, the gait of a passerby. Since 95 percent of the film is details, and since we unexpectedly find ourselves in the position of reacting violently to them, it becomes quite an experience.

Ashbery's argument is further synthesized when he addresses Elizabeth Bishop. The crazed 'reality' that Lucas and Morrow evoke through collaged data is telescoped in a last line of Elizabeth Bishop's first poem from her first book: "More delicate than the historians' are the map-makers' colors." How is this so, Ashbery queries.

How could the infinity of nuances and tones which is finally transformed into history...prove less delicate...than the commercial colors of maps in an atlas, which are the product, after all, of the expediencies and limitations of a mechanical process? Precisely because they are what is given to us to see, on a given day in a given book taken down from the bookshelf from some practical motive.

Expediencies within limitations are part of what make poets "necessarily inaccurate transcribers of the life that is always on the point of coming into being." The contingencies then are formal and substantial for poets like Bishop and Ashbery for, as Ashbery views Bishop, there is "this continually renewed sense of discovering the strangeness, the unreality of our reality at the very moment of becoming conscious of it as reality." And there we will leave it, as Ashbery almost does. There are limitations and then the details and their inaccurate transcription to be dealt with to not quite disinterested ends. And to make this point, Ashbery borrows a metaphor from Bishop, "a sleeping ear":

-- that is as good a metaphor as any for the delicate but imperfect instrument the poet has to use in order to construe the bewilderingly proliferating data of the universe that is continually surging up around him, threatening to submerge him at the moment he in turn threatens to pierce it through with a ray of interpretation.

Ouch.

On second thought. I take back some of what I said about Ashbery's fillings in Selected Prose. There are mixes of prose here, and short pieces on Bishop and O'Hara, to take two examples, drill deeply in toward the bone, as I might have wanted to say, below. Here are two stunners, the first a piece of authobiographical deduction, the second an analytical conjecture: Ashbery on first meeting O'Hara was impressed "not only by his remark [Let's face it, Les Secheresses is greater than Tristan] but also by the voice in which it was uttered." O'Hara and Ashbery "both inherited the same twang, a hick accent so out of keeping with the roles we were trying to play that it seems to me we probably exaggerated it, later on, in hopes of making it seem intentional"! Second, in Bishop's writing about Brazil, her 'cultivating its ordinariness, and responses it strikes in our minds,' she "has sought not so much to come to grips with the frightening, teeming discipline of nature as it can be experienced raw in the South American landscape as to let herself be permeated and perhaps ultimately ordered by the lesson of that swarming order." There are essays that are too brief to be as useful as they need to be, a piece on Ted Berrigan's The Sonnets, an introduction to Charles North, three paragraphs on Rudy Burckhardt. Utility is a good standard here, as there are other short pieces that introduce us to the extraordinary if lesser known in his circle of interests -- snippets on the poet Joan Murray are one instance, and a most restrained obituary for Pierre Martory, another.

Susan Sontag, R.I.P.

Selected Prose
John Ashbery
University of Michigan Press 2004

Reading through the Selected Prose of John Ashbery, I'm struck by the bits of pronouncement he allows, criticism is the tail wagging the dog of poetry, for example. Rather than write a single-paragraph first reaction to the selection here (as I usually do), I'm putting together a set of much more ragged notes for some future, one that might make more of Ashbery's willingness to acknowledge the verb to witness as "pretentious and constrained" when it comes to describing a poet's activities, those of Gerrit Henry in this case. How do I feel when Ashbery states that James Tate is "one of the two poets whose work I read when I have trouble writing, the other being Holderlin"? I feel this must be a backstitch in a dangerously patterned brocade, one that permits lapses as "nothing better to do than torment," a line Ashbery employs in complicating a film by Jacques Rivette. The writing here is altogether less conclusive, less lush on the surface than in Reported Sightings, but the subject matter, poetry for the most part, is closer to 'our' own bone, less available to journalism and visual deduction than painting and art production. What I witness most approvingly are the times when Ashbery champions unrestrained impulses, as when he resolves T S Eliot's "shirking" his duty as philosopher poet: "'You too can be a phenomenlogist,' he seems to be saying, 'if only you'll abandon the task, let it work through you, let the river carry you where it wants to rather than trying to immobilize it.'" Multiple entries on Raymond Roussel, Marianne Moore, Gertrude Stein, Frank O'Hara, Pierre Martory, Mark Ford, James Tate, Elizabeth Bishop, James Schuyler speak quantitatively of his public allegiances. In total, several names are missing. There's a pro forma concision to most topics that results in prose chafe v. the well-argued Other Traditions. Warmth, wear, sorenesses are soothed. Fillings at the dentist's.

Sender snow is falling as snowing across divisions will.

-- The world flat and falling across

The telling (of)

(Instances of)

Sender citationality exceeding everyone's wounds, biological

Streaks and -- weird! -- high wails of un-fog, sifting down from

Ceilings (of)

The snow. The snowing. The across (falling),

It is (falling) across

Morton Feldman.

More coast-swapping from Gary S. and Alli W. Links to the right if you need them.

Stephanie Gray writes:

As a new reader of pantaloons (I followed a link from Unpleasant Event Schedule to East Village dot com to...) and a reader of faux press books (especially Eileen's on my way) (I didn't know both faux and pantaloons were you...) I'm a fan already.

Not sure if this makes sense, or what you are trying to do, but I noticed that the discussion of class + poetry is in pantaloons and for that I am appreciative. Not very many folks seem to be writing about class or downward mobility or what's up with the mfa assembly line. I'm not saying you're saying all that right out directly, you know. But it does come through your writing. As a working class raised non mfa poet myself (I'm not all self-identity about it, but it's my background, I guess, and it matters somewhat) it's refreshing what you are pointing out in your blog.

It was interesting to read what you were saying about the earlier poets (o'hara et al) either being failed phds, having different majors, different circles of friends, not just poets, etc.... What you're saying there---and its difference w/ today---is so right on about our times right now. [...]

Thanks, Stephanie. I'm not writing about "class + poetry," I don't think. I value manners among poets and the calming affects of good appearances -- I don't think a talented woman should let herself fall for a guy a lot shorter than she, f'r instance -- and points raised about O'Hara follow from discussions on other blogs, authored in some cases by admirably tall men and women. Only a few women go for my line today, although most of the ones who do have masters, or better, so I don't expect to downgrade the educated, assembly lines notwithstanding. I feel I'm not "trying to do" anything here but crank out a prose style, or two.

Lessons planned and otherwise in poetry.

Surely Democrat imagery operatives needed to exploit this. I guess the question was how?

The political season is defunct, and I have 1000 days more on my pledge to keep CNN turned off. But the trauma returns in the 1963 black-and-white classic, Hud, directed by Martin Ritt, starring Paul Newman, Melvyn Douglas, Patricia Neal, Brandon de Wilde. I had avoided this film for four decades at what I see now as my peril. The cinematography is stark, neo-expressionist: Ten seconds of Texan prairie panorama, a medium-range of the lone, half-proud farmstead, motes of dust slapping against a window casing, at night another ten seconds of Newman's supple frame floodlit-white against black sky, a few gray moths rising from waist height behind him as he contorts and through monologue reveals an attitude that indubitably, finally slots his character among dark forces. The plot, from a novel by Larry McMurtry that he and Irving Ravetch adapted, is allegorical in classical relief, pitting son (Newman) against father (Douglas). The father is weighed down with the patrician values of the cattleman, while the son Hud is looking to take over and cash out the family spread to oil riggers. Before filming, according to a fan site, Newman "worked on a Texas cattle ranch for several weeks acquiring genuine calluses and a cowboy's lope." I'm sure he's not the only one that worked on acquiring the lope. What Newman stands for in 2005 is moves, the whine, the squint, the jerky, pinched-drawling, chuckle-breathing model for George W. An extremely good-looking W. Or, according to chronology, W. has copped Newman's Hud and brought him down to plain view. W. appeals today (or as recently as last November) because he is a visually less-perfect and cognitively short-changed (hence, verbally less-assured) Hud, a still-loveable and potentially reformable character (W.) who strives to be like everyman (Hud) who has seen it all, been it all, a drinker, draft dodger, and thief. I don't want to lose track of the film here. Hud functions unexpectedly as a dense palimpsest of our current political state. Melvyn Douglas, I see, as John Kerry, saying the right things, but intoning them awfully, that is, in character. Douglas turns to his grandson de Wilde and says, in paraphrase: "Be careful which men you chose to follow. One by one, bit by bit the character of the nation changes for the worse if you chose the wrong man." (I can hear Kerry mouthing off, "integrity, integrity...") Douglas believes in the "inheritance" of working the land and asks Newman, "What kind of man lives off oil from the ground?" The socio-political themes are further exercised in Patricia Neal, the housekeeper who lives in a trailer next to the farmhouse and whom Hud tries to rape, and Brandon de Wilde, Hud's nephew who leaves the farm to make it on his own; in the 2005 scenario Neal and de Wilde serve as the Democrat and Republican electorate, respectively. The film foretells W.'s failure and abandonment -- once his father dies, his nephew and housekeeper escape ("We're losin' a good cook," Newman mumbles into Neal's ear after molesting her) -- abandonment, something Newman alone in the last seconds brushes off through body language as though he were shooing away a few night moths, something his father predicted midway in the film: "You don’t care about people. You live for just yourself, and that makes you not fit to live with."

I didn't know you had to go to an Ivy to become a suckup. Those Simic imitations are worse than anything I've read for the last twenty minutes. Quit it. Thanks.

A poet's prose nails her reputation time and again. Eliz. Bishop, Jas. Schuyler, Edw. Denby, to speak of the dead. Are we examining a 'real' voice, or are we merely more at home with the subject-verb-object flow of normalized speech? When Gert. Stein adopted plainer or more standard prose for Autobiography she became a pop sensation: "she took Alice's voice, her acerbic, lucid style, her declarative sentences, malicious asides, quirky jokes and regular punctuation" (Diana Souhami). Is that it? we can more readily stay with sentences even when they're overstuffed with personality so long as they are conventional, making sense, well punctuated?

O bloggers, droopers of prose, straighten up.

This post is about NYC and the world, but first to note, without the requisite hyperlinks because I'm rushed, an upturn in blog-crossings between SF and NYC (or much of the East Coast, even) taking place at Minor Americans (which is itself an ongoing dialog between two poets based in SF and NYC), Steve Evans, Alli Warren and on other blogs. Allen Bramhall, tucked into his corner of Boston exurbia, feints in the direction of David Hess in SF, and Hess, in turn, approves of the "blowsy sublime" from Ange Mlinko who quite apparently writes from NYC now and toward a more high-arts-prone poetry world of yesterday and possibly for tomorrow. The prose of James Schuyler figures prominently in an earlier post from Mlinko and then a response from Steve Evans, his "Lost Time" entry written back in Maine, I think, a post that follows his trip to SF. Mlinko then responds to Evans and has more to offer on Schuyler and the bleak dearth of interest in high art among poets today.

It's brave to think about high art favorably, as art production, high or low, has twisted into the craft and technology of the culture professions. Accordingly, the niches writers and artists put themselves into now seem stultifying, to me, a result of graduate and sometimes undergraduate training that blinders one into specialized, privileged domains typified by oddly narrowed but also potentially lucrative careers targeting fame. To think, though, 50 years ago, O'Hara a music major! Ashbery a failed PhD! Schuyler not even an Ivy grad! Generalists, but at just the point when well-rounded wide-ranging exposure to the arts was obligatory. Postwar, ballet, theater, instrumental and orchestral composition, jazz, and most notably painting and the plastic arts were playing fields for the few inclined by way of either early, intense exposure (family tradition, superb schooling) or adult romance.

Mlinko's sharpest conclusions about the current state are, I believe, 1) sublimated controversy, as now political affiliations substitute for aesthetic debate among poets; 2) minimal extra-literary social influence, "O'Hara's references, and his social circle, aren't entirely literary, whereas ours are." I also remember something Mlinko said in an earlier entry which seems connected at least symptomatically to these points, that is, to paraphrase, a distinction we can make between art/work/poetry that is intellectual v. what is intelligent or meta- or sensory-intellectual. No question there. Theory-laden and/or polysci approaches are common, often misread as constituent elements for insight, works Mlinko argues that "should not be valorized in inverse proportion to their human appeal." Intellectualism for its own sake is a snore, a sign of an imagination that is nearly always second-rate or worse. The other two points, a paucity of outside influences and lack of debate, strike chords that are a tad sentimental. I agree Manhattan art scenes in the 50s were inhabited by sophisticated, intellectually-rapacious charmers or drinkers who could be charmers. (Not to resort to caricature.) I would still note the first generation of the NY School bears distinctive features of class, education and purpose, comparable to other power structures from that era, such as the CIA. (Funnily, lack of peer debate in the present-day CIA, made up more and more of a multiplex of specialists, contrasts sharply with the postwar regime peopled largely by chattering liberal-arts graduates from the Ivies and the like.) The "aura" of high art that Mlinko misses will not in any case be easily reproduced within large subsets of increasingly heterogeneous and diversely prepared artists and writers. And probably not within coteries, since today's coteries, so-called, are organized to take advantage of 'market forces,' rather than to satisfy 'social curiosity' (Mlinko), much less advance a collective will to learn.

Practice, again, becomes central. One pursues controversy and 'outside' influences as a discipline, a part of practice. To resist the extreme sobriety of the autodidact, bouts of hedonism are recommended under the guidance of loving doctors, nurses, others. Beyond family and schooling, there are romance and allure. I suppose.

My next move is going to be historic. (Just thought you'd like to know.)

I want to go to golf school.

In Memory

First on wrong, quaint, then drenched though slackened

Janus was proud to sponsor Janus

shaking this neap vapor through no shadow weighed, no

ten or more years and the slopes

meeting above the steps coincided with their light

A high-clip to the final

atmospherics, their baste blast patching the thaw

-- spirals discharge, wind heats the ground and trees open.

Jackson Mac Low, R.I.P.

West of mainstream.

Fifteen miles west of Beacon Hill, I hadn't thought of Natick as the provinces, why? I staggered through the Natick Mall, not expecting much, but... Natick is a regional shopping center serving towns too fancy to have malls, Weston, Sherborn, Dover, Wellesley, and two towns out, Brookline, Chestnut Hill, Newton. These are unfatuous burbs filled with well-educated social conservatives with money to spend. I walked into Waldenbooks and checked all the aisles to uncover just two shelves of poetry, opposite a bookcase of Manga (that was ok) and three cases of Gifts & Stationery. The poetry I found -- it hurts to tap the keys for these titles. 101 Poems to Get You through the Day. The Best Loved Poems of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Poem a Day, Volumes 1 and 2. Poetry for Dummies. Four Centuries of Love Poems. In addition to anthologies there were some Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickinson, and cummings. And that was it, mostly. The folks at Consortium smuggled in four living poets, Billy Collins, Gunter Grass, Donald Hall, Alice Walker. (I think there was more deliberation over the choice of light bulbs illuminating the books than over the poetry selections.) The ratty array at Waldenbooks makes the mainstream stuff at Barnes & Noble in Chestnut Hill appear intellectual, almost, and it obviously demarks the next step down from mainstream, crumbs.

Eminem & Colin Farrell

No, this is not the grim reaper
I'm alive and vividly engaged
Skipping along taking farmer and townsman
The fastest way to learn a language
This is the moment when you see
The upright girl the plump priest
A richly peopled, a sly special look
Beggar and emperor alike
Sparkling, the festive alternative
The red berries of the mountain ash
Nor is the dancing god
Moving any lawn furniture
And in the dark sky
Hovering over the waters of Sils Maria
Where 80 percent pick moral values
The birds' night migrations
Pointing beyond themselves as they leap
Turning defeat into a learning experience
It grieves me to think
Filling speech balloons like Supermen
Farm raised then caught in the wild
It's just the two of us, paired
Clearly the thing to do is institute a policy
When around midnight
We create a nonjudgmental environment
As war threatens yet again
Wilted before you pick me up
After the late news
Therein I prefer the Old Testament god
Led by the kitchen radio
A perfect Bose wave, 100 percent juice
The dead won't see us
These things we depend on
A drug deal gone terribly right, and so
We draw together
If we're to make a life together
They disappear
What will the soul do for solace then?
All that's about to pull us apart
Um, what wine goes best with vodka?
I tell myself maybe we won't need
Just a few measures, my love
These pleasures, no more
Maybe just not being is simply enough...
We could argue forever
Before you see to it
Hard as that is to imagine
I never achieve status as a full pariah
As you always go around this
I slip into designer plaids, and just
Then we get our pills
How poisonous can they be?
Single ones and numbered
Tres dazzling so far it seems a perfect fit.

I've upgraded to 2.0. Geof Huth has got a language down.

We're always writing the same poem. That's a bromide for you; lay it out in decontextualized black and white, and my love takes it personally. Though this is what's on mind: Last Saturday David Shapiro and Peter Gizzi read poems and fielded questions for TP's Analogous Series. Citing Jack Spicer, Peter inserted the writing-the-same-poem formulation in response to an opening question about music and graphics that contribute to Peter's poems. The odd thing is the bromide does not apply to Spicer or Gizzi or Shapiro. I think I was implying as much in something I asked David, questioning, not in earnest, whether he believes he's been writing the same poem. I was spellbound but not surprised that this question prompted a 20-minute reply in which David pretty much admitted to writing the same stuff over and over -- oh, David, your poetry is not very much the same to me! Guilelessly I interrupted David somewhere midway in his reply to grant him that there are similarities in invention devices and rhetorical schticks, similarities one traces in his work and the works of many fine poets. But, you know, David's poems stick out their tongues and race around in their wet underwear bearing different forms, lots of moods, not very silly, often, profanely sacred, sometimes. Granted, but David had twisted my question, anyway, so he could pick up major points from his presentation, prior, questions about his family, shuffling time frames where the living talk to the dead, and -- this is interesting -- assaying the potential of a developmental chain that, if pronounced, might let one lay claim to being a better poet later in life than earlier, just as the 30-year-old violinist just might turn out to be more accomplished than she or he was at age 15. I often find it helpful to assess processes developmentally, although now that I think about it, I wouldn't map development on top of a chronology, always, or merely. But for 20 minutes or so, David made a strong case for his salvation, as it were, by way of his own precosity and hybrid development that he views primarily in family-centric and, I guess, anxious ways, his a family distinguished by lines of aesthetic fanatics and musical virtuosi. In contrast, from his talk Saturday we learn that Peter is rooted to a locus, western Mass. and Conn., more than a family, per se, or if he refers to family, he is as likely to reference 19th century New England writers as he is his blood relatives. (Peter's poems, on the other hand, feel less geo-specific, filled with here and now, fusion, interstate landscapes, and other elements of an American appetite.) Peter's work points toward forms of salvage (rather than salvation), and Peter said this outright in his Q&A after reading his poems. The salvaging part of the work, he claimed, is analogous to collaging data points from day to day, and Peter brought along a book of Jess's collages to fill out the suggestion. The soft sell was in: look at the book if you're unfamiliar with the work; otherwise, you already get the connection. But when Peter played CDs of instrumental pieces by Poulenc and Charles Ives, the one-on-one semblance, poem to music, took hold. Peter's collaged rhythms are the perfect analogy to Poulenc, David said. And we agree. The asymmetical blocks of gray, gray-to-black, and colorations-between conjured in Poulenc's refined, incidental irony are matched by "In Defense of Nothing":

I guess these trailers lined up in the lot off the highway will do
I guess that crooked eucalyptus tree also
I guess this highway will have to do and the cars
    and the people in them on their way
The present is always coming up to us, surrounding us
It’s hard to imagine atoms, hard to imagine
    hydrogen & oxygen binding, it’ll have to do
This sky with its macular clouds also
    and that electric tower to the left, one line broken free

Playing the Poulenc disc, toting a book on Jess, Peter's Analogous Series contribution was the simplest and most direct demonstration of the ratio of poetic analogy to poetry making this season.

If you're always writing the same poem, please stop.

You are off our lips.

Seems Dale Smith's none too worried for WCW. Meanwhile, we've got Nada's very specific counterweights to specificity, even roping in WHA for ballast. Stephanie's appreciation of Jennifer Moxley's readings is enormously specific, too, citing text to make points. And so should I. Here's Ms. Young on Moxley's lines on lines:

As plain spoken and direct as the syntax might be, the thought-lines are not. I had the sense of getting bucked off many times Sunday night. Last night, riding along when I could, it was those shifts in address that kept me off balance, along with an inquiry running through many of them, of 'the line.' There is of course the initial struggle of a prose poem interrogating the line. But something bigger, too. From a poem titled "The line": "you consign yourself to a flimsy thread that nobody else can see." [...] There is the line that connects the senses to reason: "the line in the belly showing itself to the mind" and, that line which separates, I think, some material reality from a poetic one: "it is trying to push all this useless crap aside and find the line." That last quote is a good example of something else happening in the poems, that goes beyond even plain spokenness or syntax, a directness that verges on the vatic.

The election and then Thanksgiving, November has passed. The blogs are heating up.

For Mark Strand

A white room and a party going on
It's a spelling bee amongst friends
And I was standing with some friends
But even my enemies agree I always get my man
Under a large gilt-framed mirror
Don't you hate it when one puns with gilt
That tilted slightly forward
As I made advances
Over the fireplace
That was decorated for the bee
We were drinking whisky
In case you couldn't tell
And some of us, feeling no pain
No joy, no sense of purpose or what?
We're trying to decide
How one spells the dew a devil's given,
What precise shade of yellow for a tail
Would be close to something
The setting sun turned our drinks
To. The drinks are to remind you of whisky
I closed my eyes briefly
And could see gilt no longer
Then looked up into the mirror
(You remember the mirror, too)
A woman in a green dress leaned
In a satanic, hetero-inclusive manner
Against the far wall,
Perhaps not far enough, as
She seemed distracted --
Distracted, a word I can handle the pressure in
The fingers of one hand
I should say her left hand
Fidgeted with her necklace
Which at that moment I coveted more than -- sing it baby,
And she was staring into the mirror --
Distracted by moi? No, shit, looking
Not at me but past me, into a space
-- I can sue you, bitch -- a slut-hole space
That might be filled by someone
A televangelist no doubt
Yet to arrive, who at the moment
Serves as a placeholder for the invisible that
Could be starting the journey,
Journey, my term for predation and warfare
Which could lead directly to her.
Strident, she looks as acerbic as Harry Potter
Then, suddenly, my friends --
Remember we're in a roomful --
Said it was time to move on
But I hadn't finished spelling due
To the next party
That was cranking up through the mirror.
This was years ago
When lambent was moonlight, the disease of choice
And though I have forgotten
The mystery, the place, and every desire of the heart
Where we went and who we all were,
Who I was, Petit, is that my name?
I still recall the moment of looking up
In the dictionary for being loved
And seeing the woman stare past me
An instrument of obscurantism, moving
Into a place I could only imagine
Grabbing a microphone as she fled alluvially
And each time it is with a pang
And bursting eardrums, the racket!
As if just then I were stepping
Within eternal blasts of mediocrity in song
From the depths of the mirror
Where the hip-hop from that party still rocks
Into the white room, breathless and eager
I am for another whisky
Only to discover too late
My name is Chantelle, and I knock wood.
Hey I can do this!