Jane Dark aka Joshua, 9/28, flies to find leisure's victory over play. Pursuit of a better better.

75 Mailer-Daemon messages overnight. One says, When you get a Mailer-Daemon@whatevercompany.com message in your inbox, the server at that company is informing you that it is returning your message because of some failure. The "to" e-mail address may no longer be valid, or there may be a problem routing the message to the appropriate mail server. Your domain name may be on a blacklist, and the server is refusing all incoming messages from it.

Chances are also good that you never sent the message in the first place. Your e-mail address could have easily been copied by a worm from someone else's address book and used as a "from" address without your knowledge.

Just in case I didn't know. Thanks, worm.

Combing through memos there's a world of disputes,
Churlish puffins and other problems to shatter the continuity
Of exploding over lunch; of course I mean exploring.

Every day new universes come into existence.
I like my toast with cream cheese and ketchup,
Because my car has been eaten by wolverines.

Ironic naturalists, Lisa Jarnot and Carl Martin, read at Tazza, Providence two nights ago. I don't think they perform together often and, yeah, this had to be their first time. What might strike some as a non-pairing played brilliantly to a café lit from the outside by new Beaux Arts lamps in a still half-empty arts district, and largely filled inside with arts majors feeding on the real thing.

Lisa Jarnot, who read second, started her set with a poem she said was suitable for the surroundings, and that got the audience's attention, which she never lost: the poem happens in a "sad" restaurant, with "sad" people holding "sad" menus and gazing through "sad" windows looking out at the "sad" street. Jarnot read her singable pieces uninflectedly, a dissonance that plays to mock solemnity ("tell me, poem") and tuneful reproach ("jerks of god"). Most of her poems were from Ring of Fire and Black Dog Songs, golden oldies that evoke nature's critters, "facilitator you, chinchilla, foodstuffs for the food chain..." piling on the gloomy nexus to an original state of consciousness, "the snow upon the human engine as it waits to be the snow ... unloved." The melancholy is speeded up and swervy, however, when Jarnot rubs up against a counterforce, an Anglo-American idealism -- one that I would trace to Carlyle, Hopkins, Thoreau, Santayana and Barfield, among others. This twist in the direction of abstract possibility is the rock layer, if you will, of her post-Auden, post-Dylan seduction, one that combines perceivable, iconic realities (snow, chinchillas) with imagined structure, "form untouched, unshouldered by the night."

Carl Martin, who released two collections, Your Stations, Girls and Genii over Salzburg, in the 90s, read from an unpublished manuscript that captures the "narcosis of moss," a self-fessing-up to years spent analyzing the terrains and mindscapes of the South. Based in Winston-Salem, Martin defines himself as an imagist first ("Dior jellyfish") and then a narrator; I find him an urbane Southern critic of American culture ("As the adverse account shoos flies / There are still remnants if the dynastic fan"), tart fabulist ("Golf balls are tinder in the muzzle of art") and committed practitioner of synesthesia ("be like the river chirping its brown side"). His most mind-altered and therefore most amusing piece, titled "The Prescription Drug Challenge," starts: "It was while popping members of the 'triptan' family / That I began dreaming of the South African killer bee." Here we find Martin ranking himself among the only half-successful essence-searchers, his fellow countrymen, for he knows, he says, "deep in the knobby, long distance knees of the soul" he and they can't pull it off, can't "spread all the pollen that I would like to spread." The poem and his reading concluded with mad pleas, "excise from the brain: the flesh, the hubbub..." because the contest (read: the art of composition??) is "blinding" yet "never as numbing as we would like." Instructional for the majors and me.

For Lisa Jarnot

Who will you be when our hands caress
lives of the past or linger on oranges, apples of snow,
terrific snow it is, the casinos, the snow, the lack of snow --
a blackjack of planes and volumes of ourselves
in the polished hardness of gaming from which we now
resign, in grace (3 cherries). To peachy fog.

Oldest life, oldest touch in the darkest town
(someone's quoting lyrics) buckets of reds, of other colors
to towns of red streets, carnival streets
streets of wine in bottles, women and men in town
shards of streets of seers, in towns of air.
(That was Orion whale watching.) To fillers, with pears.

I win by surrendering my hand -- fingerprints of a life --
humming to your touch making landfall, and I
toast anyone else holding the perfect suit
in focus, carnival glass, red goblets letting the workday
slide away. Afterward, I leave home and go to college
and get involved lying there facing the sky. I win, I win.

Joyelle McSweeney reviews Dark Brandon in the Fall issue of Rain Taxi. Notes "unhinged" syntax and formal variety, "rife with gorgeous divergence...canny and uncanny." Huh? Anyway, she likes it. To order.

I don't mind if I look worn or beaten up. I'm wearing
The national costume, swaggering in stretch poplin, in a trance.
I must guard against overenthusiasm.

Ghosts? Zombies? No, it's just the winged eggs
Saying surrender the galaxy or we'll cream your planet.
Sorry.

Note: Not sure I agree that collective memory
Has a "bloodstream," but it is 'inflecting,'
As poets say, and infected too.

It depends on the religion as well as the family, not to mention the poetry.

If you grew up in a family that practices a religion, and while you were still a kid if you lived in a community of diverse sects, you may recall some degree of ease hanging with your own 'pastor,' 'minister,' 'rabbi,' 'roshi,' and also how different you felt (e.g., reserved) when in the presence of their counterparts from other faiths. That sense of creedal difference begins to explain the origins of disrespect among poets and, more particularly, between schools and generations. If you grew up faithless, perhaps you have less to lose (because you are less likely to conflate sectarianism with output) and find it noncontroversial crossing thresholds.

Just a blog note.

Blog note:
In networking, as in prostitution,
There is no time for fascination.

Momentum.

Does the hair actually grow?

I'm myself on national television.

Sheer ambrosia.

Is it ever going to stop?

I was so grounded before I went on. It's intoxicating

a) the show ended

and b) c) d) being cool with it.

Writing and editing. The baby plays a larger role, so much efficiency.

Gas isn't the only fuel getting more expensive. My pr efforts are feeling the brunt

and merchandise -- I can't

but I'm looking for a creative way to split.

Recent passion's broken. You've heard.

I'm beginning to remember fuel utilization. A natural midwest

twang, old dishes, the house and the proportion that goes up the chimney

when you stay home and read lists and blogs and others' pr

on the potential in a higher price, and say things like

I would like to try growing mountain laurel but I admire my ambition,

not in the achievement, and that was a good response erased from the comments

where strength still lies and keeps us from falling further, the lower

unknown, jealousy of something, someone more violent, more efficient.

My failures show up in obvious places. It's a gradual casualization. All the majors give me the short end of the lounge. I speak English but work in Taiwanese, but yeah. I write about machines with gears that look like flip-flops. Cord organizers you can pull into natural history.

Sometimes I'm called the father of the acrylic poem.

I write on to make baggier canopies for airplanes. What appear to be frame shifts, that's like writing in 3-D. Better when I did 40 tissue poems (floorage samples) and wastepaper sestinas for Sinatra -- you know Nancy -- we liked bending rules and exaggerating everything.

I'm not afraid now even tho I employ other women who bring rotating responsibilities for child care, dizzy with blinds open, filled with weird utopian desires.

Call me one very overdue workshop assignment.

I once had a brilliant optimism. Promise of a good life. Poetry came along. I meant -- why not, let's try it. Then the coordinator wrote down something. After that I snapped.

That's the kind I am. I wake up with a face of a poet lost in my dream. Or a formula. Or lines. I dream about poetry. Sometimes in poetry. It's like a business. I could teach a course on sleeping practices, call it Meeting Renovation Deadlines. My department head would rename it Pathways, tho.

Due respect to many digitally satirical affiliates (please consider the parenthesis as from an empathizer and sometime user if not a shoulder-packing bud), woke up this morning with a formulation. Flarf = poetry on steroids. Say it isn't happening. Please.

Also, I've been forgetting (till now) to mention Julian Spahr's likening LRSN's narrative to Lisa Jarnot's terrorism poems. Template for a review?

Characteristically enigmatic reading by A. Bramhall on LRSN's The Thorn. Set, point, match! Perfecta.

Eckhart Cars
Peter Jaeger
Salt 2004

Peter Jaeger has his focus on language procedures, a busywork crossed with British country vocabulary and a hybrid back-to-modernism. A native of Canada now teaching in London, before this Salt edition he had a half dozen chaps published in the U.S. and Canada, among them, a farm-bred adaptation of language-y word clumping, Sub-Twang Mustard, and a semi-ironic tribute-in-passing to the Anglophone's seminal modernist Ezra Pound, Jaeger titling his study of the Toronto Research Group (namely a review of the writings and collaborations of Steve McCaffery and bpNicholl) ABC of Reading TRG.

With Eckhart Cars Jaeger crafts a handbook of invention drills and some extraordinary verse. First, drills. The poem "Narrow" operates on a central idea, the surface narrative is more capacious when verb objects are omitted. It begins: "Those who steer across or drive over spend every. Even while I was getting and applying, I was already full. Finally I sold." The prose piece "Martyrologies" is sustained for eight-plus pages on the passive voice dealing in death, with frequent mentions of "tied," "chained," "burnt," "beheaded," "tortured," and the like. The arcane and repetitive circumlocution is witty, especially when (wink) self-referential: "Her acts consist chiefly of a catalogue of the tortures which she miraculously survived, until she was thrown to wild beasts." I'm less fond of Jaeger's humor when he turns to rusty or even fustian diction and sentiment, "hacking out / songs -- // what we do / with roots." A poem like "So They Say" attempts a late-modernist, priggish diffidence in the form of bitter humoresque, yet it's hard to imagine even Wallace Stevens allowing "fountains lull me / into privacy."

Two notable poems are abecedarian exercises gone well. Linked phrases in "Sitting" run through the a's, b's, c's and so on, but the phrases, again, often point to the composition (wink, wink): "altering her mind amid the loud distractions / of a felted brain -- such splendour // and what it does." Lines continue to offer quaint homespun goods chopped mid-phrase: "Ere we are aware of / oat-brown bread that sent us // lies, like a wheel of warmth / because they come from depth." The poem's brilliance rolls on, however, with extra (seeming) narrative punch through alliteration, stanzas beginning "before," "breaks," "cheerfulness," "counting," "in demurest," "as you doze." (Like Jaeger, one could seemingly compose a new poem following just the alphabet words.) The much longer poem "A Black Tooth in Front," which ends the book, is more insistently abecedarian over nearly 40 pages. The alliteration here leads to frequent word recurrence, and the resultant echoing seems necessary and very British outdoorsy: "...budding trees, built / a bridge, buried among trees / burning soil, burns like one / dilated sun, burnt down / to a finger joint, burrow in the earth / bursting sun, busy human..."

The title poem opens the collection. It is multidirectional in its worldly overview of (and oblique commentary on) the admixtures of North American and British English cultures that typify the other pieces that follow. In this poem Jaeger speaks without a country, without an acquired dialect, speaking of and to an unknown "Thing" in "the future perfect" where "even you -- you even count." In twelve sonnet-like stanzas, the poem drops us off into a nowhere encircled by unlimited human scale and peril, "higher thought / thought about flight...but / if you drop away you're lost" at that point where "all the details leave us stumped" as the "dust is coming...a parachute / unfurling" over "military water." It is a poem that asks the essential modernist-and-beyond questions, who are we and what are we becoming, "who can cast a pearl, / and who from in this territory stems?" The poem slips away, but one feels elided, not lost, a participant in the "hugeness" that may be hovering "to make / our senses mind our minds."

From Publishers Weekly re: Dark Brandon by Brandon Downing.

Nothing in Downing's The Shirt Weapon (2002), which offered a highly accomplished, thornily insouciant verse, prepares one for this glossy black book, which purrs and reflects like a highly polished Mercedes that may or may not have machine guns in the trunk. It's dark, all right, and buff: "his disc breasts/ Taped down, like the King of Heaven's," the speaker doesn't so much articulate as outtalk the "pious shadow of a stocky planet's soliloquy." He does so by drawing on the major medium of representation of the last 100 years; jokingly categorized as "Poetry/Cinema Studies," the book in fact invents a new kind of ekphrasis for the moving image. Of the 50 or so poems, about half are titled after movies and utilize a combination of first person and quotation that seems to speak simultaneously to and from the films, putting the reader, uncomfortably, on-screen and in the chair all at once. The result, over the course of the book, is a brilliant self-portrait in a convex display. It's hard to quote quickly, but suffice to say that there is no other book quite like this one, "a handprint puddle leading to my blissfully angry remains."

Economics results in a wall of tiny frowny faces. Timelines are essential for marking those responsible for their dereliction. Note in April 2001 a budgetary goal is established for privatizing FEMA. In 2003 FEMA is relieved of its planning functions for preparedness, and is downgraded to a subagency for responding to crises. 2004 and 2005 see budgets slashed for the Army Corps of Engineers, grants are denied, as are 'pre-disaster mitigation' funding requests. From August 29, 2005 onwards the details are appalling. On September 1, four days after Katrina strikes, both DHS Secretary and FEMA Director blame victims. Frowny faces chatter. DHS budget critique here.

Home on the Range
Tenney Nathanson
O Books 2005

A string of cantos is never a snuggle up in your recliner read. Tenney Nathanson's Home on the Range puts you to work. Clear a subpath at your writing space, detective (and, have you got something like a light box for tracing words?), fire up your laptop (set it on Kafka texts online), and get ready to dust off some craven favorites from the bookshelves, Blue Cliff Record, The Wild Boys, Das Kapital (vol. 3). Nathanson has set down multitudes of clues in 108 verse renditions tethered to "intertexts," a brainy selection of sources from Great Books of Zen, canonized and contemporary fiction, some poems (Frost, Whitman, Gertrude Stein, Michael Davidson), even social science-as-literature, along with wild cards, at least one book on superstrings, one volume of the Norton Anthology of American Lit., etc. What he's done with these is, I think, to take whirlwind chances.

The cantos are numbered 1-108, and in an index at the end of the book each verse is keyed to a given intertext or in one case keyed to two intertexts, a diet plan and a collection of aphorisms. The relationship of a verse to its intertext is negotiable, vaporous. Canto 51 begins, "iron, in the arc, beyond the middle / searched windward, broke open to sand sloshed by waves, beautiful salty / brine dead urchins your hand..." This is keyed to Walter Benjamin's The Arcades Project, and as these three lines suggest, lexicon from the key text evaporates fairly early into an asyntactic atmosphere of misted vocabularies, some here from Benjamin's side of the cloud making machinery, little doubt, but others stirred in from other scenes, as the verse goes on, referencing "priapic genital flowers" and an "attitude looking fake." Canto 107, one that is obviously toward the end of the string, purportedly connects to Ford Maddox Ford's The Good Soldier, and here the first-person narrator is summing up things that are experienced personally: "I thought it would be different, more reflective and melodramatic...could have picked some other restaurant, book, sky, cohort, / place, and -- uh, uh. / air. intimacy is not very fond of body. fellow I asked her could he really…" A paradox of commentary, it seems, on what else might have happened in Home on the Range, commentary scored within a continuing opus of loosely fitted utterances and near-hesitations that want to cohere intimately but also need to let you know they are found, but not necessarily 'fond of their body.' The affect here is of a multiplex of textual and practiced airs strung together by whirlwinds, as noted, of plucked phrases that reward, among other things, a reader's retracing items to some sources. Hence, my suggestion for research requiring the equivalent of a lexical light box, as it were, for the tracing, alongside open books and perhaps a digital search engine to hunt down particulars.

One light box I've switched on is Koun Yamada's Gateless Gate, an intertext for Canto 14. I recognize some of Yamada's lexical items, as in the opening lines to 14: "To go against the stream we must become a child, an old man. I've heard / rumors he's alone in that mountain." Specific phrases and clauses are harder to pinpoint (if one has not committed the text to memory), but I'm secure in the belief Nathanson's concatenations are new, a child goes against the stream, and it's rumored he's alone in "that mountain," which mountain? More of interest, in just two lines Nathanson duplicates Yamada's inconsistencies of logic that underpin deeper paradoxes as distinctive features traceable to this and other Zen sources, which together comprise a dominant influence in Home on the Range. Canto 14 ends with a helpful reference to Hyakyjo, a Tang Buddhist teacher (Chinese name, Pai-Chang). This is helpful because Gateless Gate reminds us that Hyakyjo is an early rule giver in the monastic orders, one of his more sweeping rules, 'the law of cause and effect cannot be obscured.' Nathanson's cantos thoroughly obscure this point by revealing and mixing up their origins, thereby making everything clearer. It's the kind of clarity of chance-taking that is fulfilled when readers join in. Nathanson urges, "as long as you understand come back to life again / and laughing but also everything are nothing." Again in Canto 14, we can relish samples of non-Yamada vocabulary (car, photograph) as Nathanson winds up.

...like look: dirt, rock, car, the photograph of your daughter in the gold hat
ourselves from the sufferings to all this that we find
I think you will be able to recognize       I'm busy in the kitchen! Perhaps
                  Hyakyjo smiled.

This is great. Info and graphics about Christina Strong's new title from Portable, here.

Double great. Connect to Brenda Iijima's Philly Sound archive from the above link, or you can do it here.