We return now to our aggressively themed social space.

Gemini: You'se a flea and I'm the big dogg.

I cancelled mah dentist appt. last summa coz it was Carnival
you wanted me ta hurry, gansta. I carried mah bag down tha
centa of tha street I was yo marina a piece of tha parade

Wit itself plucked marble, factotum Grand wit bitchez
decorizzles is fizzle I love 'finga stimulizzles witout
shame, deadly Ammunition itself enfused wit trippin'.

Whizzen I gots hizzy you were simply bugged no breezee
wav'n from tha patio of tha gallery What's tha rizzy? My
exhilizzles tha moustache I slapped on mah face in case.

Close against tha ground, quasars, quasizzle objects,
is celestial art pieces beyond tha Milky Way like a motha
fucka. To you n me, tha most remote look snaps

Gold beads everywhere I hizzy tanned photographs of thizzay.
January mah teeth need a clean'n, I'm broke & I blame you.
Yippie yo, you can't see my flow. I want loopy too even if

Tha deala soaks there in fo' mizzle, they're jiznust infrareds,
yo hustla pulled back ta reveal tha matted ridges,
sandy too. Boom bam as I step in the jam, God damn!

Bloodless mechanics, m'um.

Oh, and while Kasey's big outreach toward Kent Johnson vaporized, no yasusada.blogspot, it's rhizoming inside a comment box at superdeluxegoodpoems.blogspot.com.

Today I read thru a bunch of comment boxes, tales of whoa. What on the moon forces this language? (Poets ask me why I don't have comments. Hah.) For the heck of it, tho, I tried posting my entry, below, in one of Kasey's boxes and it didn't pass gatekeeping. But there is so much of value there it doesn't matter.

"The perfect race" -- Apolo Ohno

I thought, today, why not a review of the perfect review! & then came this! There's a bit to catch up on. So here's my review on Kasey's read of his read and his read of Drew's book!

I love this review (as well as the review of the review) because it can be interpreted on so many levels. While this is the later version of Kasey's effort, edited after another one, I prefer a much earlier draft posted before where certain lines are much better: The beginning goes,

O what can ale the nine to arms,
A lone and pale lye loitering?

This is a good question. And there is good reason to think that the reviewer-woman-persona is dying of tuberculosis. The symptoms are all described by the questioner in the subtext -- the fever (O, lye), hot flashes (ale), flushed cheeks (can), sweating forebrain (...ring).

Nineteenth Century Art and Literature is full of similarly compassionate dying subterraneanly! Mami in La Boheme and Ms. Cathy in Wuthering Heights are two.

From a meditation on female language, Kasey continues. He says Drew goes to ancient cultures and, eventually, to the beauty of the Bible, not quoting it, but capturing the distaff cadences and evoking the Song of Songs. Most of this 'work' -- the review(s) and the book -- however, strikes me as having been jotted down in psychodelic notebooks when Drew and Kasey were stoned like cool retro pamphleteers. That's why I adore the review and book too. (By the way, is petroleum a Scottish term, by any chance? Another culture layered (laird), if so. Anyone know? Raise your hand.)

I've heard many different theories of who the shadowy figure in Drew's poem actually is, and based on his own interpretation on his blog, I can't say without walking around the topic but this is what I've come up with. You see, somewhere at the review's beginning there's a reversal (ergo, you know there'll be more twists to come) like the poem itself! -- men being lured to their deaths by beguiling cunningness itself, a woman, women! That is why Petroleum Hat is what I would consider a perfect short poem, universal in theme, inspiring this perfect review and the perfect follow-up to it and this very recap (here) of all the work, its implications, and perchance, beyond. The poetry is high pitched, very much in Drew's voice, and the reviewer's taxidermist style is also his and yet they both possess that element of postfeminist mystery and ambiguity while remaining rooted in the actual and physical world, like watercolor gifs on the internet. Romantic payoff? There is pathos and tenderness without too many high tickets to itemize. Kasey only gives enough away and yet as with all his poem reviews he has a fearless and open heart and is not afraid of emotion. One can also appreciate the way Drew assimilates what I interpret as a spare and simple almost zen-like or Cistercian influence while at the same time staying true to his own bacanal accents so you feel the poem owes something in voice and tone to North African or perhaps Maltesian poetry yet is distinctly Drew-like in sensibility. It is a beautiful and tender poem and so too the review(s). I adore this poem and the review(s).

Whenever I read this work I imagine two really drunk or intoxicated beatniks driving home, one going on about existentialism and the other just telling him to watch where he's going.

This review and the follow-up and the book were the first works I learned by heart.

This just in. The handheld puppets have traded their personalities for madcap ad libs they've learned from Cousin Michael on TV!

"I don't like it, and I'm sorry I ever had anything to do with it." Who said that?

1) Sasha Cohen about participation in the figure skating competition at Torino.
2) Erwin Schrodinger about the probability interpretation of quantum mechanics.
3) Katie Degentesh about contributing work to Jacket.

It's always been a question of strands of influence, not copyrights. This makes the most sense, today, of the unruly, nonproprietary, multiple strands that come before and after the term "collective."

Collective sounds semiprecious, like a land grab.

Chrome marble.

Enfolding silences, a term a fashion writer uses to assign value to Raf Simons's togs for women craving unironic, restrained minimalism, $2000 to 10,000 a pop, could be redirected now to the poetics blogosphere with some accuracy if, at the same time, in eco-absurdist comparison and to null affect. It's obvious the white-heat phase to blogging cooled, and we are in a new period with dust settling on enfolded blogs -- Dale Smith, gone, no Elsewhere, Unicorns & Bunnies shut, Chris Sullivan, kaput, Rue Hazard almost down. These are mammoth silences that create a loss of collective inebriation, self-censorship reinforced by far less blogging from rhesus monkeys we respect and who are still in the game but a little while ago were whipping and posting their lab mates into multiplied frenzy. (You know you were; you know who you are.)

The new, more tepid phase feels well mannered but caving as if to repressive forces.

Fill in between First and Last.

First: Time for George W. Bush to announce that he will resign because of poor health.

Last: Two additional months of full breast feeding may make a big difference.

Jimmy.

Sawako Nakayasu's post 2/20 could very nearly fill the narrative for a), below.

Reading Joyelle McSweeney's review of Pet Hat -- at constantcritic.com -- fills me with concupiscence.

Rob McLennan crosses the border to snap in the direction of the NYS.

Fill in narrative between First and Last Sentences. Choose one of the following, a through d.

a)

First: An ant climbs a blade of grass, over and over, seemingly without purpose.

Last: Hollywood has always been a wide-open town that lives by its own rules.

b)

First: Imposters are lurking in athletes' villages.

Last: You can never expect it to happen and when it does, it's fantastic.

c)

First: "Be a mensch" my parents told me.

Last: We're here to celebrate country music!

d)

First: Why didn't "Wife Swap" come along sooner?

Last: I call this one the chicken, her partner said, fluffing her feathers.

You can always smell the hick's condescension. It precedes the hoised ceremony in the village mind.

Pound. The moderator could bring it back, we thought, but there's no surfeit of track, of hegira, the gold brick swindle, joyful disgust from excess, the Venetian hospitals' call for blood, Torino's passing off bricks made of base chocolate; moot Carthage, purely island-like harbors closed and convoluted to stupefy, crescent metal had blown the roofs off, Launcelot's hacienda deprived of significance; diverging from largish juggernauts Blake's Kansas swimming with light hands lifted as the weary sun betook itself into tergiversation, its fulgent desertion to a cause, his dazzling slander, fig reveler, swindler who coaxed with flattery, fulvida di folgore, crushing blandishment -- we knew he was prevaricating, blood mild, sacred writings of Rolle de Hampole warned us -- unceasing sycophant, incarnadine shadow spilling down stairwells to redden, more, divagating before olive leaves nightfall, exhorter of few changes, hardly any.

Modernism, a despoiled inheritance for poetry, unlike contemporary architecture's connection to its recent pasts. Thanks to CAD and that connection, tomorrow's architecture seems more appealing even if it takes a conservative turn. At least we can guess where architecture could take us. Poetry?

Le décor cela s'appelle un "takedown."

Had Pound through his racism retroactively polluted intake of the high modernist aesthetic? And the radical transformations that aesthetic portends? Poetry is released of all responsibilities post-Pound; it gets regrouped, rooted in political indifference, self-abnegation, self-defense. Poetry no longer invoked to try history, vernacular upgrades, collective nonconformity?

Barbara Guest, R.I.P.

In Remembrance of Jackson Mac Low, EOAGH at Chax.

Brilliant to have a blog named after or for you, so a big wet kiss to yasusada.blogspot, aka Kent's Comment Archives. As noted, comment boxes have become a large fraction of the content on some hot blogs. The next bold step taken by Kasey, of course, is to open a comments-only blog named for / after everyone's pet .

Oh, I guess it was sort of a plot. Trick, meet Trickier.

Me, I just observe, sir.

More and more, women in the industrial world are better at guy things like editing anthologies and drinking too much. Knocking back enough 50-proof at home to get buzzed is what high-heeled women call the pregame. (Queers call it good grooming.) On the flip side, I hear some women get buzzed at home from proofreading. This is sweet. WSJ reports, from the top, style editors get invited to manicure and facial parties to sample alcohol-spiked fruit fizzes. Hanker after a poetry collection put together from a spa environment like that. Downmarket in the UK, always the vanguard of boozing, pub women are getting rowdier. WSJ notes in a "traditional pub fight of the past, they would have been holding their partners back... Now they are mirroring the behavior of males." Kicking, swigging alcopops, fighting over cabs! Imagine these same women as fierce editors of verse fighting over in/excluding their favored poems?

Many, seems, are getting proficient with graphics as part of blog architecture. Cleanly cropped digital photos are everywhere you want them. I'm liking experiments with design elements that make Huth, Boyer, Fake so good to watch as well as read. Layers of provocation at Annarummo's and D Cooper's. You never know what Warren's will look like. Today I vote Greenstreet for committee chair of eyeball pleasure.

You like epiphenomena, I suspect.

Perhaps there's a bug going around (meme to meme) that creates a gross imitation of hysteria or viral image streams or Jungian collective consciousness, blogwise. (That sentence is so awful it's copyrighted.)

That sentence is no worse, tho, than ones written by KJ in a comment box over at limetree. Perhaps it's simple, part of a plot. 1) I read KJ and complained earlier today, see below -- I in particular hate his use of "mainstraemification," which I noted, in my snarly mode, seems like the Latin root for the more anticipated "mainstreamification." I added, again you can see below if you wish (why would you?), time for KJ to kick (or be kicked from) the comment box "circuit" (for having sunk to such an ugly depth of expression). Are you still reading this?

2) Later today KJ started a blog! Now like me he can sink further in his own blog space, with or without his own comment boxes!

3) Even later today he sent me spam about his new book, with a flipping bromide couplet in Latin by Catullus, reprinted here, immediately below.

This is how I googled my way into a Valentine scenario.

Damn, another nail hit. I can't believe I'm the only one who's received this piece of Latin decertatio from Filius Johannis, right?

Odi et amo. quare id faciam, fortasse requiris?
nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

Q.E.D. II

No sooner said, then one boots oneself out of the ghost-of-the-comment-box category. Holy moly, Mr. Mainstraemification has a blog.

Disclosure to Jimmy and anyone else who might feel cheated by my "word-processing." Everything on this site entered into "posted" boxes for the past few weeks has been the result of my adapting with the times. I have not "typed" or "word-processed" anything ... for months, really. I was given an optical character recognition scanner over the holidays and I've been pushing buttons since. I've developed muscles in my wrist I never knew I had. There, a meta-wrist moment, my wrist pulling the scanner over the sentence as it "enters" the blogspot create box. Now if I just press that Publish Post thingie....

Flaneurs who decry how ambivalent blogs are are missing the point, generally.

I think.

On the other hand, what do I know.

I get kind of overstimulated by stupid generalizations.

Maybe all bloggers if not all blogs are alike? I wouldn't know how to come down on this vital issue.

So, in conclusion, anyone adopting the term mainstreamification (or its Latin root, mainstraemification) need be kicked out of the comment box circuit.

Q.E.D.

I'm not going to keep doing this because I'll be leaving out so many other good readings, but one more recommendation before I stop.

Wednesday, 15th
Shanna Compton
Rachel Blau DuPlessis
8:00 PM
Poetry Project
E. 10 @ 2 Ave.

Often Capital
Jennifer Moxley
Flood Editions 2005

I'm one to hold down superlatives, so I'll limit these to just three. Jennifer Moxley is writing some of the most complex, intimate and compelling verse in America. In the "Afterword" to Often Capital Moxley outlines her "researches" and starts with an all-encompassing query, "how sing a fully realized female life?" Also from her "Afterword" we discern a thoroughly productive conflation of references to the realization, a life that entails the author, her muses (including feminist legend Rosa Luxemburg), and more philosophical facets, questions of politics, language and intimacy, including why the silence regarding female desire for the male?

Where do we go to grow up? The first of two sections of Often Capital, "First Division of Labour," begins with Karl Marx's dictum, division in the sexual act gave birth to the logic of work divisions, including ones that Moxley suggests enforce coquettish complicities and silences: "we're never quite only graspless, / only inconvenient, wileyness wills, grab hold or be kept / violated." The history of attempts at female realization has proven until recently the stuff of "back seat fantast," that is, excepting the past few decades, in part -- I say in part, because Moxley admits to "the chronic denial of my generation's 'world-historical' consciousness" -- female production can be reduced to self destructive tendencies to "preach finesse in all things // until failure becomes sacred." That sentiment puts Moxley in a tight spot vis a vis her potential failure here, a failure that might be construed as her ignoring other examples of female realization, or conversely, her reactive stance, writing largely in response to love letters and other writings of Rosa Luxembourg's. Moxley's response is contextualized by her circumstances, alluded to in the afterword, which qualify her choices to enter into a "dialogue with texts" as well as an "apprenticeship with form," a startling co-equivalence of import given, then, to content ("conceptual or emotional inquiry") and mastery of exercise ("my growth as a writer"). That equivalence and Moxley's will to see the equivalence through, so to speak, counter any consensus against her writing reactively or choosing to write across Luxembourg only.

World peace, and hold to your beliefs. To appease formalists like me, Moxley draws up structural obligations for her two brief sections. While the first section operates on testing etymologies of stifling terms, "manipulation," "ravishment," "repressed," et al., the second section, titled "Enlightenment Evidence," concentrates on variations of rhythm and other prosodic devices, line by line. Moxley explains, "I wanted to write poems with meaning-rich syntax without sacrificing either sound or interpretive complexity..." The results can be archaic, "see how one silhouette / or silenced gesture my pitiless night unweaves," or quite something else, in this passage that means to and does strike fear:

what a horror the forever treadable, flip
the dialectic and we are the Freikorps hitting
skulls in Hotel Eden, exposing weakness
through increments of shifting power
and strength ...

Moxley reminds us here and in the afterword of the German state-sponsored murder of Rosa Luxemburg by the Freikorps, political tricksters who turned lethal "through increments of shifting power." That Moxley wrote the poems of Often Capital well over a decade ago backs up her claim to apprenticeship; that the results should bear so much cautionary weight today establishes her dialogue and inquiry as intensively non-arbitrary. Moxley's two-fold purpose projects us forward in a valuable, libertarian debate over the realized life for both sexes, the roles we face in public and private with respect to our work, our language and, in certain measure, our poetry.

Jennifer Moxley is writing some of the most complex, intimate and compelling verse in America today. More soon.

Alan Davies and Tony Towle at the Project, Feb. 8. For 30 years or more Alan has been a stickler, deciphering and telling the truth (as he sees it), and in introducing his reading Alan sent up a well-earned and inarguably well-timed, collective sigh-cum-plea-cum-complaint with respect to deplorable public discourse, language, he says, that "has been obliterated in front of our eyes." His intro was fair warning of the sobriety that ensued. He read a work titled (for now) "book 4," which he completed in 2003, fourth in a series of 30-to-60-page books that function as one long, variegated poem. Not obvious from his delivery, Alan's text is composed in short line divisions. The narrative, however, does not always fragment along similar lines -- for instance: "loneliness always lasts so long / the simple day at a time succulence of sex in time" or "for you you / for another another / and then some." These lines illustrate a formal dissonance, syntax that is mindfully flat and conventional, but a lineation and scansion, along with repetition, that suggest more conflict than a level head bowing to convention might predict. Alan sticks with this formal dissonance, establishing a wobbly equilibrium for imagistic mixtures, the fantastic and the ordinary. There's a lady of the lake who's partially there, "she levitates above the lake ... the underarms / the river and the lake / the unmade bed," etc. Alan's themes are pronounced, time, age, loneliness from not fully experiencing that lady, but also there are clues for other things less dire, a humane and even comic doubleness of ardor and numbness, of fervor that taints ("finding it kind of tiring"), of the mind "basted" ("a terrible thing"). Straightforward but fragmentary and 'poetic' qualities of Alan's composition serve as antidotes to 'obliteration' of the language, for sure. Yet, if he continues his long poem of many books, I look forward to volumes filled with more truth telling of this doubleness sort.

Tony Towle has been up to his game for more than 40 years. Tony is the perpetual liberal arts scholar, flush with a generalist appetite and latitudinarian erudition that takes on immaculate precision in endless satire. He bones up on the lives of English kings, colonial settlements of New York, and art history, for example, and inserts points of fact (or near-fact) and opinion as hysterical asides for poetry, sometimes for pages at a clip. He checks geographical data, and enters these, too, as the basis for grounding short bursts of surrealism, which, as we know, is a poet's trick-discipline reflective not so much of erudition as of fancy booting known and unknown in the mind so, so, yes, geography, by all means. Reading and achieving laughs from early, middle-period, and more recently published works, as well as several unpublished pieces (or what he calls his "disorganized codex"), Tony laid down sporting predicates, nothing's changed terribly, we're all more seasoned, umpires and the Mets keep making mistakes. Part of the game at a public reading is the asides outside the poems: Tony's shock to learn from Joe LeSueur's memoir that Joe didn't like him; Tony retelling the time Jack Kerouac heckled Frank O'Hara off a stage, and Frank turning to Joe, "It's ok, my silence is more interesting than his bullshit." In the unpublished pieces, Tony deals with aging and loss unruefully, with a comedic and light hand, "by the time I got to the end of the sentence, she was gone." In a series titled "Truth in Advertising" Tony brutishly inscribes what the screen displays: "tacky enthusiasm over a credit card"; a snowman pushed into a clothes drier, saved and done in imbibing "snow-making fluid." I'm certain there are allegorical essences in fluid that saves one but renders one's bones too cold to touch. More interesting is Tony's ability here and over 40 years to evoke hoots and some pathos from everyday felt experience, or from what some would like us to feel everyday, this time truth in advertising, 30 seconds at a clip.

This is not a Pollock. Nothing doing but squirrels / Watching crime novels.

Transcribed at the Poetry Project. She: Going to Poets House tomorrow night? He: Oh, no, I never go there.

Two more highly recommended readings.

Saturday, 11th
Adeena Karasick
Bill Bisset
4:00 PM
Bowery Poetry Club
308 Bowery @ Bleeker

Sunday, 12th
Marcella Durand
Jack Collum
7:00 PM
Zinc
90 W. Houston

Michael Gizzi at Demolicious, Feb. 5. The once-a-month Demolicious series has again found new quarters, this time at the Out of the Blue Gallery in Cambridge, and just in time to host Michael Gizzi last Sunday. Before Michael took the stage there was the customary open mic with short pieces from Irene Koronas, Jenny Grass, and two unexpected sound works from Charley Shively, one evoking George Santayana and TS Eliot, among other New England granddads, and another, more sanguine piece addressed to Charley's new Algerian boyfriend standing inside the Stade de France on the outskirts of the Parisian unité urbaine. Charley's poems were just the right warm up for Michael Gizzi's very different prowls and travel through the duke and bwana zones.

In brief, Michael knows the fast (and sometimes the only) roads out of delusion, language research; that research ink-marks the "pluggy" evacuation routes (like the ones in written-over vellum maps, the kind given to counterterrorists). MG shows the way out through newly drilled tunnels beneath congested interstates and, more, the sturdiest reconstructions of escape shutes inside "built down audibles" that seem "wide as sleep" with "my nose in a book..." right here in "the academy of false hopes." Michael read from No Both, My Terza Rima, as well as unpublished pieces, some of whose titles give up their no-nonsense enigma with massive aplomb, "effrontery ... as a branch of knowledge": "In Case of Memory"; "I'm Not There"; and a favorite, "Life Boat Days." Gizzi is after Ashbery in that last title, but it's tribute in the service of blues "the sun misrules" as the "weather set us apart." The soul is hard put ("I hate your hayloft, signed the strawboss") but, discomforting or not, the jokes keep coming until it's blue in the face. My notes on the poem "In Case of Memory" conclude, "the world is enormous, and then we left the house...no closer to stars than closer together."

Marshall Reese and Gary Sullivan at Segue, Feb. 4. First, this was hyper comedy and a brilliant pairing -- big thanks due curator Mitch Highfill for bringing Reese and Sullivan together. Most readers here know or know of Gary, but unless you've developed a taste for a specific intersection of video installation, poli-critique, and conceptualist satire, Reese may not be familiar. Frequent collaborator with Nora Ligorano, Reese's constructs pick up on the criminal demeanors and other lame qualities (there are many) of conservative operatives, captured nicely in his and Ligorano's Contract with America Underwear on which Newt Gingrich's "Contract" is emblazoned, along with Gingrich's bulging likeness on the crotch. The satire is obvious and, well, touching when you consider how profound our need is for any humanizing palliative to the super order of desensitizing and flat out deceit our normal daily interactions are subjected to.

Impulses in Reese's poems connect to his installation pieces and other art. His lines refer to them and to an art producer's perspective, the need to "reform the narrative" infuse it with "visual" optimism that might reflect a production ethic, "scrap iron knitting together a bagatelle [that's] somehow visual," or, again, more Anthony Braxton-like, painting with sound, "returning to found objects … logic in brick red." According to Reese, "you are mis-identified," because of "mis-data" and "imprecision." To fix this he toyed with some computer voiced over duets, but I liked his otherwise straightforward deadpan delivery from the "witless boundaries," as he puts it. The funniest poem read by Reese addressed the Speaker of the House and new majority leader (and the whip! don't forget the whip!), featuring the welcome repetition of "I want to do you" cheering the audience, mightily.

I assume, above, most everyone reading these paragraphs knows about Gary Sullivan, tupperware lady of flarf, inc. But I'll argue you best intake his humor without having to slap a label on it. These texts don't come out of Google by themselves, and the signature tones are not just about unfiltered outrage and inappropriate noise. The poems document extreme craft that is GS's own parvalue -- timing, tongue-in-your-cheek lexicon, barbarous targeting. (And since one of the enduring features about flarf is that nobody comprehends what it is or where it's headed, let's just say GS is funnier than poets have to be, and that's an uphill effort, unless you start out strong.) GS got things rocking with this:

Hello and welcome to poetry phoooone.

If you are over 40 and bitter, press one.
Livin’ large on the "New Coast"? Press twooo.

If you have recently had a poetry manuscript accepted for publication, press three noooowww.

Hold on, Gary's phone message-tree plays to a crowd of poets but who else would be at Segue on Saturday afternoon? So the laughs come up from everyone's ankles, through the shaking abdomen and they are not going to stop, a doodle about Olson studies (they're back in style, kinda), a hamster-as-president four-liner that blames disjunctive poetry for "weird shit" coming down, a poem-script between John Dewey and Jenny [sic] Olin[?] -- a Dewey and Jenny duo, anyway, and played-read to falsified affects by Sharon Mesmer and Jimmy Behrle -- and another titled "Plop Takes" that instructs the senses thus, "Stink lines with flies. Perfectly coiled turds." GS sang, as well, a poli-sci blockbuster, "Bruce," which sounded to me like a total translation of maudlin white rock into toothy groans and prickly irrelevance -- toothiness, let's call it. Call Gary a funny, heroically untrained anthropologist. Gary gives good bite.

Oh My God, I so adore you. I thought I was alone in my hatred. If you're not reading the comment boxes at DC's blog, you're missing out on what? A quarter of the content.

The day after. Remember video of long lines of voters in Oxford, Ohio back in 04? Oxford the college town it is, left-leaning as it is, Republican county officials had determined fewer voting machines would do just fine. Shot of undergrad in leg warmers reading Kafka at the back of the line, waiting three hours. The story-teller in one gets a sense that like-minded officials across the state and across this great country of hours make decisions like this, one half-yard, one jersey pull, one tackle ruled 'unauthorized' at a time. This has nothing to do with pitiful Democrats, but I can't get this out of my head, J. Dennis Hastert is younger than Mick Jagger, the censored.

Congratulations, referees.

The New York School on the Web [draft]

The Web comprises circulation media with elusive properties pertaining less to physical turf and communities than most other publishing categories. In this sense, the Web operates tangentially to any socio-historicized cohesiveness implicit in the term New York School. This is not to say that New Yorkers are under-represented on the Web, nor that any substantial part of the School is subsumed within more compelling new-media taxonomies. But the idea of a solidified e- or internet-tradition for voices, attitudes, and stylistics unique to New York is at best a decentralized concept, further atomized by a plethora of alternative Web offerings and competing media for delivering them. Continue reading.

To illustrate how the hipster cycle winds down to Starbucks, The Times Zine, for heavens sake, reports dancehall and hip-hop mashing up the "PR sound." That's p as in pronto and r for refill. I've got a new sound for ya. Marshall Reese clearing his nose after Gary Sullivan's first peeoom at Segue. (Reese took over my respiratory system, too. More soon.)

Innovative formulation for divahood (which I am patenting, by the way): vapid and hard to get.

It's fashion week, some analysis? Hilfiger buys his way into an American line with Lagerfeld's name on it. The German Lagerfeld is based in Paris and has nothing to do with the day-to-day at design headquarters in Manhattan. (This is the way Euros outsource themselves.) All the hiilbilly preps and city gun owners wearing their Tommy H have bankrolled the project, fowarding the proceeds to New York and on to the gay salons of the Marais. It's roughly the equivalent of Michael Jackson controlling the Beatles' copyrights, except Lagerfeld has the better end of the deal and the better deal. Poetry equivalents? There are none in terms of money, but just suppose Jorie Graham locked in exclusive rights to the formalism of Clark Coolidge.

I sent a final telegram last week. It read in part, "Let's face it, glamour is for other people."

The poor wear Polo.

Recommended readings this week. Jet Blue gift card required.

Saturday, 4th
Gary Sullivan
Marshall Reese
4:00 PM
Bowery Poetry Club
308 Bowery @ Bleeker
NYC

Sunday, 5th
Michael Gizzi
2:00 PM
Out of the Blue Gallery
160 Prospect St.
Cambridge

Wednesdy, 8th
Tony Towle
Alan Davies
8:00 PM
Poetry Project
E. 10 @ 2 Ave.
NYC

Saturday, 11th
Ange Mlinko
Joe Torra
5:30 PM
PA's Lounge
345 Somerville Ave.
Union Sq.
Somerville

My Life as a Lover
Brandon Brown
Detumescence 2005

Low-key staccato. Pokerfaced farce.

O multiplex of wah-wahs.

Back in 1958 the Monotones hit the charts, the worst sonnet ever, I wonder, wonder, wonder who, who wrote the book of love.

There's such an explosive tradition of the sonnet as reverberation you don't have to go back to the 50s. (Not if you don't have to.) You can stop now at 2005, with Brandon Brown's My Life as a Lover with its dozens of scary sonnets removed of entrails, surrounded by surgical prose patches on love, no less, triaged with nitric ammonia, ready to tickle the ivories again, off-tune, of course, thanks to rare gut-replants as icky and stupefying as un-p.c. office pranks down on Human Resources. No, the sonnets are musical entrails with their stuffing slashed: "came so low, cored me, tentatively man." That's Line 2 of the first sonnet. The first sonnet is titled this way: "I began this sonnet which begins: awed din enemy, not vested, called 'we.'" The italic part is also the first line. So starts Brown's din of wah-wahs, begin, began, awed, awed, we, we.

I'm moving very slowly. Guess? Because Brown makes the work day brighter.

The sonnets are grinning and play screwball with what's left of Brown's poker hand. They prove the narrator isn't a shallow sex-as-experience monster, after all, but one of those atonal ephebes who is given to write, at the beginning of part I, "My life has been a book." So this is a memoir, all pianissimo guts, probably overflowing with deep, biblical introspection. (I'm speculating. It's only the first sentence.) Then, two sentences later Brown adds, "The book my life is is the book of my life as a lover." That "is is" reminds us, first, of Everyman who is in the midst of a pre-memoir circumstance. And this coupling of the copula also previews how deep Everyman is prepared to dive. Brown's stratagem for self-inquiry is degraded perfection. He copies out his sonnets so he can talk about them and talk about his talking about them ("is is"). In VI, for instance, after he writes down another sonnet, he lets this out: "There are two principal parts of this sonnet. In the first part my intent is to call upon Love's faithful through the words of the prophet Jeremiah. In the second part I tell of the position in which Love had placed me…" It's a difficult position, needless to say. More so, ties to -- what the.. heck of a job, Brown -- ties to the Old Testament make me want to curl my lips and then cry, especially the Jeremiah part; Jeremiah, like Brown, looked into the depth of tragedy, but stayed pretty clear in expressing it, like Brown: "They could not call my love by any other name than the name they called my love." It's like that stabbing pain in your stomach, it's come back; it's so clear.

And it only gets more degrading the further in you read. VIII ends, or toward the end, it starts: "This sonnet has three parts. The second is like a beggar asking aid from the preceding and following parts, and it begins here: giraffes mediate televised meals." Brown (the beggar, perchance??) has italicized the last clause because it's a quotation between two other parts; italics emphasize this and make his emphasizing it hurt. It is not as clear why giraffes are put in the pathological mix, unless the poet means to imply that mediation these days is a zoo of cross references, some unexpected, but even so everything doesn't quite add up to more than purposeful ennui or, you know, standardized lack of surprise ("televised meals"). If so, then Brown is squeezing out a lot of chuckle-worthy food for thought with metaphor, too.

I'm getting the idea there is no surfeit of love for Brown and he'd take a year off to keep on making love if he didn't have a job to break the routine. It's one idea in the text, between the lines.

Brown makes me guffaw through croissant break thinking about this to the point of exhaustion of love. My love, my love, my love I was loving. Sure, you're smiling now, me too, but those are Brown's words! I merely reordered them! And then there are all those red-handed scenarios, just snippets, like with Madonna and a "Doug" mending the drapery Madonna dresses in until they get hard. Snippets and what else? Brown calls his daydreaming a "wretch." It seems overstated for a good cause. That cause will be the death of Human Resources.

I don't think you should repeat things. And forget your memories. Bring none, he said.

I like a prose of contradictions. It's an element of apposite negotiation, that's spotting a handkerchief with one's self.

Stop heaving a new piece of foodstuff bigly. O Pinker.

My handkerchief's the first to scoop the Swedish hosts by workshopping them into volunteer flotation gear, the video.

The skinny from last night avoids defining anything obscure or complex.

That Cindy Sheehan is a past. Hand me the bio, dislodger.