Celeste, what's your deal? Call?

The ingenue lacks charm and extends an inhospitable hand, but votive arcades (Francis and Bolt) open a place to focus on boys and wait for a lift.

A lot of people try to pull me down. I'll look for you in evening's labyrinth. (I'll have to get into my homeless rags.)

Here's something to memorize. It's about how breaking a promise is sweet. A way out.

I had an accountability moment
A damaged brother Trump for courage
I shed my weakness on his metal penis
There was a balance, my pig got legless
We were struggling for possession, revenge
But she grew accustomed to the unobstructed vent.

And that's another thing. I regard the Trumps as heroes. The moment I start to read something or hear something, it's mine. That's how I'm hyper-successful. A photographic memory. (Do you know what Muldoon'd do if she found out? She'd make me quit publishing, stop modeling, invite me to her house...) I bet that's why I got into this slime bath with the snake in the first place? I don't know, I put my head down, and met Luciano, and words poured out flickering, streaming back. Must have arrived in the eighteen-sixties. The Holy Father Imparts His Blessing on Luciano and Lucianamaria and someone else (Lori's great-great-great-grandpa) on the Occasion. Thought her tripe was my tripe. Megan, I mean. Not Jonathan.

Did you hear? Jonathan and Wang and the little ones are coming back from the dead...

They were in an auto accident... They weren't killed?

They were maimed. We gave them reconstructive surgery.

What are you talking about? They were decapitated. I looked it up.

Oh, right, yes, only Jonathan pulled through. He was on his way to the Vienna Ouija show in a pink convertible ... to hypnotize his brother, an ex-con named Francis ... when a tractor-trailer came along and almost decapitated him. That same eight-wheeler took out the Wangs who were riding in the back seat. Strange.

You know what that means. They don't have a head! How am I supposed to write guys into a poem who don't have a head? No lips, no vocal cords. What do you want me to do?

Blunt Wang and the others froze their own heads, put them back on in a two-day operation. So they were dead. Listen, let's keep them in Philadelphia. They'll be as good as dead.

Guess what. You'll work it out. You're a poet.

But what is this horseshit? I'm Jack's lover?

- I can't believe you'd write with a "talking board."
- I didn't. He did it!

Thank you. James Merrill. Is that you?

Clymnestra returns from Vienna. I fall in love with him?

And Jack turns out to be Yoko my daughter? How in the name of God is that possible?

We haven't figured that out, but the dark secret's been torturing you.

I'm not getting in bed with him. Some people I don't get in bed with.

Sorry. I thought this was how you knew bodies open. Our tribe, our reps, everyman is a modern good boy or a female elite battling it out, damn it, name a figure, name a figure! The poem then fell apart and unzipped itself. The form, structure, and disregard for the known certainty of neuro-melody made it seriously not matter any more, gave it a Brechtian "I really will."

Jonathan sitting in the Ice Age Hotel lobby. Waiter? Waiter?

What did he say? "Good morning." Then I had a cup of coffee...

I saw the show. Jesus, Jonathan, Megan was awful! What?

I think you're one of a kind. Can I buy you a ...? Change your leggings first.

Nice strap. Waiter'll be here in a sec.

What exactly would I be doing in your poem?

I thought you'd return as your original persona.

Rod Clymnestra Ann?

Skip the Rod. Here it is. Clymnestra returns as a lesbian impersonator and hypnotist, but here's the twist, you've been studying in Europe at the Josh Hartnett Institute.

I like it. Life and death issues. I've been abroad.

-Comatose in Vienna. Just for a while.
-Perfect.

It's kind of a continental, world weary sleep binge. You're a world-famous trance inducer. That's it.

I like it.

Clymnestra's seen things in Europe. European things. Sophisticated things. Things of the world. And things beyond. Beyond beyond.

The thing is, though, I got this idea for a one-pager Henry IV. Understand, I need time to develop it.

Come into my poem, and we'll make the time. We'll get a plagiarist from google, spin your look doggy hip, inject you with queer theory, you'll be composing down on your knees, fizzy.

It's all happening in Henry's head?

So we need just one poet! You, you racist ... Am I crazy?

No. That actually clears up a lot of stuff for me.

Back to Clymnestra, which is the topic at hand. Shortly after returning... Clymnestra starts a torrid love affair... with Megan.

Sister? She's the pop tune who had me axed out of poetry years ago. I mean... we were just kids. But... Still, we had something. There was a... fire, passion.

No! Wait. She wanted to be a big poet! A writer. Nothing else mattered. Love. Nothing! And look at that angry inch. Here you are out of the blue offering me... another chance. A chance to be something in poetry. Be somebody. Get reacquainted with Megan. And wreck her foul fish smelling exuberance the way she wrecked mine!

New poet in town?

Just stepped off the Boog City choo-choo.

You have beautiful eyes. They're nothing compared to your wits. Come up and touch me...

I'm sweet. Tender. I need a bong.

Bring the moods back! Here's Megan Hammond Muldoon, again, and she still cracks me up, complains about lit theft, dismisses my strong belief I unconsciously and accidentally lifted a couple of phrases from her for my book Russell the Sheep. I'm the victim!

Now I'm pissed. I didn't want to do it, and honestly I don't think I did or if I did, it was a compliment or at least I don't know how I did it or what anyone's thinking anymore.

''We find both the responses of Little, Brown, Lamb and their twisty author . . . deeply troubling and disingenuous" -- that's Rust Bitters, senior vice president of Muldoon's publisher Guinness Foam 'n Crown.

"Based on the scope and character of similarities, it is inconceivable this was a display of Jack's youthful innocence or an unconscious or unintentional act." Scope and character. Meaning?

Meaning this: I suck up tattered specks of language wherever and can't help myself. I'm a poet. I keep building this huge vocabulary. It was an honest mistake, villains. Look, I have a two-poem contract with Little, Brown, Lamb. So? And so, I may have incorporated itty bitty bits of Megan's work in my debut poem. It was only words, silly woman. I insist I did it inadvertently. As a tribute. And I'll make changes soon so you can forget about it. I am a poet.

***

But here's the worst part. Bitters claims the ""plagiarism"" has devastated Muldoon. Bitters says neither she nor Megan is sleeping or eating. Starve, duo. Plus, "We want Jack to burn."

Do you mind?

Okay. Just checking the Internet and something incredible turns up.

About the Muldoons. (Plural, right.)

Watch their tails spin.

They're probably selling something. Who knows where the hell they are? Megan, so-called, the pig who's been blathering about my ""copy catting"" her work, fix on this: it isn't ''hers'' at all! It's trance dictation from Jonathan Zahedi Muldoon, brother to the ho – pork eater, dresses like a dyke rising from the grave, pseudonym Clymnestra, some redneck zombie drug.

Trussed in my tuxedo, I'm getting into a letter firing mood.

Dear Ms Muldoon,

I made my 540 mistakes uninitentionally, and I am so sorry for any distress inconvenience I may have ... DETRANCED yo! ...

Megan,

I'm getting into a crouched position on my knees, just trying to focus a little less on your whiny self-bloated authorship-family issues. I just might have to DICTATE to you a little with my left pinkie so you’re gonna shake ...

Dear Muldoons, Ms and/or Mr,

Four in nine families with Irish surnames claim British ancestry and a little fewer than one in church sit straight...and fuck yours --

Hey Meg,

Now that our baby is finally here, the joint package as it were, let's creep together -- this is our mahogany ace, Jesus, get well over me, Meg: I'm not happy from the inside: When you feel crappy, just remember Father Cory spewing up with your brother Francis on the altar carpet and running down the aisle with Celeste before we worked them over: Patterns can also be switched in midplayback, slut.

This headrush ... What is it about you? I can't put my finger on it. You're not my type. I'm used to dating oily garage waifs, hoody choir boys. I'm so drawn to you! It's not just chemical. I believe it's spiritual.

Signed,

I believe it too.

P.S. Now, if you want to get to know the real me, pass the handset and put your kid brother on, Miss Little Drinkalot. (Clymnestra) I think you're ones of a kind.

You both look a little parched over the phone. Oh, a beer of some sort, then I'll find you a small group of very well trained athletes who speak of being "in the zone."

Hmm. Can I touch your trance meter?

Jack here.

Where'd you go?

Comment.

Meta-delivery.

I'll take it.

You found the rent-a-car guys filling out forms by my nightstand. (Maybe try one without a shirt?) Will you be having wine with ... ? You're in this close for a poem, now. But I've got to seriously review the gears in our relationship. What if Ariel, who's the uberich should be raped by Father Cory? Look, feel free to follow along. Celeste is determined to attend Blunt's funeral... in a motorized wheelchair which she rented and operates by blowing into a tube. (Bolt) Meanwhile... in the weirdest way I've been checking out song lines. It's formally performance-meets-scruples, Pasolini capitalism, and junk.

Very good, Jack. We were going over some numbers, I mean maxims, and... I would like to voice concern about this poem spiraling out of control... Jack, ever since you took us to the toy words we hate... well, you know the words we don't hate? We like "peppy" and "prep." (A thousand percent.) The point I'm trying to make is that we're writing nothing "garbagy." Uncle Hugo did that and he's D.O.A. Motivation for him was built in. You could tell he had wasted talent watching him lease cars. It was that obvious. By the way, Rabbi, your hair looks nice.

I can't believe it! You can leave now. Celeste! Oh, that's you! You look so small.

That's cruel, Rabbi, very cruel. Give me that. Sign this for me. Wait. (Poetics process stuff. Ketchupy.) Autograph it.

Renting cars to dead people, and wheelchairs, now that's quirky. A vestibule moment before marrying off the third zone.

I'm bipolar. You know. What? We can make the poem go mute. If it doesn't speak, we don't have to pay it as much. A wordless deaf-mute. What could be more pathetic? (God, I'm good.) Besides, I've apologized many times. Muldoon is her name, I'm Jack, sometimes Yoko. I'm finished saying sorry. You deserve it, you walking crib sheet. There's no agent or agency in art. More than art, I need a poem, O Hymen, find her! What if my poem can't react or be acted upon?

(That never stopped us before, Bolt.)

Ultimately it's great for Muldoon. She has a trial, gets let off. It's up. We want something up. And now you're telling me you want her to murder me, some wordless poet?

Yeah?

I don't like this, gentlemen. I have been the head of daytime poetry for a long, long time. Maybe too long.

(Don't be silly. You are daytime poetry.) Blunt, I love you. (Thank you, Maggie.) I do know one thing. When daytime poetry goes down, you have to do something drastic. The "D" word, Jack. Drastic.

***

Murder! That's so-oo cute, but why not try putting a poem into a coma?

Poets don't like to write comatose. They feel it limits their range.

Lori, you're in a coma right now. Here's what's gonna happen. You're starving. You haven't eaten in hours, so you smell the soup and get in line. Your knees are shaking. Shake your knees. A little less.

Perfect! Beautiful!

When the soup lady arrives (Yoko), something inside of you snaps. A crack-up.

Exactly, exactly. It's all gotten to you... poverty, deprivation, peeing in the streets. So you reach into your bag... and you grab the knife! You take the knife, and you lunge at the soup but immediately fall into a coma. You're a mute, so you cannot speak, you grunt a little. Okay? Try it.

Wait. This Uncle Richard Hugo thing and the will. I find it confusing.

You're confused? The man was your uncle. He died. He didn't leave you shit. You're upset. Period.

What about their history writing poetry together? Was there always animosity?

Yes! Ever since you ran over Hugo's pedigree schnauzer, only in a poem, of course.

I got poem now.

This from sticklers.com.

An apology by Jack, owner of the powerful poetry brand and book title Russell the Sheep and a promise by his publisher Little, Brown, Lamb to immediately begin revising sections of Jack's poetry that closely resembled portions of author Megan Hammond Muldoon's Sloppy First Drafts and Second Drafts Are Second Chances will not be enough to end the dispute over Jack's "unintentional" copying from Muldoon's work.

While Muldoon's publisher Guinness Foam 'n Crown is expected to issue more details about the issue, Little, Brown, Lamb spokesperson Seymour Teitelbaum called Jack's explanation about how he came to use passages from Muldoon "at best disingenuous and at worst literary identity theft." He noted, "Jack's got an angel's face, but Megan, along with Celeste, should kill him with that face." There are approximately 540 cases where Jack's entries mirror passages from Muldoon's and others' works. Teitelbaum also let it be known in not an uncertain manner of speech he did not appreciate reference to a recently deceased family member of the Teitelbaum clan, speaking as a family spokesman, off the record in that capacity. "Jack's the young girl here. She's beautiful, but she's deranged. She's a powder keg. She's got a chemical imbalance. What is it?"

Although Teitelbaum declined to comment if Little, Brown, Lamb will file a lawsuit against Jack, who frequently wears a blonde wig and battery-powered implants across his chest, he (Teitelbaum, that is) said "Guinness Foam 'n Crown and I guess us can't support our author in seeking a proper and full resolution to this matter." Muldoon was overheard at an afterhours photoshoot saying a lot of degrading things about Jack. "Look at the hooters. We should kill that blonde one." Muldoon is the big dipper among Guinness Foam 'n Crown's rising stars. "You know why?" Richard Wilbur, Muldoon's literary agent, inquired, "Because she's powerful. And that Jack, that fauna, he or she belongs in the soup kitchen milieu. But, she's in that milieu now. Give him or her a ladle. Case closed," said Wilbur.

-- Sticklers

Sorry. I was wrong, you were right, stand-ups. I'll flesh it out later. There's a lady cooking sausages almost tying me up now. For the record: gimme a break. I've worked with Russell the Sheep for years and written every word I uttered.

Special scene, sweetheart, poetry's neighborhood.

Don't you dare run away from me. You know I'm a perfectionist, except for contests. Things are hard for me right now in life and in the poem. Okay? Things were hard for me years ago when you left me for dead!

And you're back to return the favor? (Ariel) This is some kind of revenge thing?

Don't flatter yourself, Maggie. I'm here for me! I got a chance at a poem career, and I'm not gonna blow it! Jack's going to help me publish my one-page rewrite of Henry IV. The world is going to rediscover a major talent.

You believe Jack? That chewer and slurper. Every night listening to him coughing and hocking! It started to sound rehearsed.

Coughing? Rehearsed?

Maybe I need new party material. (Bolt)

I mean, talk. Like ourselves.

What's your hurry anyway? He's mine. (Ariel) You touch, you die.

I wouldn't dream of it. (Rabbi Teitelbaum) He's perfect for you.

Excuse me. Can I join you?

I'm Lori Altitude, Celeste's partner.

Of course. You speak beautifully for a craven mute.

That was quite a sonnet with you and Celeste.

Thank you. Yeah, she said you were in poetry in the old days.

"The old days." Yes, Judas. So long ago that we had literary cruises endorsed by full professors.

You know, Celeste's in a crisis.

In a crisis, we must support her. Yeah. We have to love her. We have to care about her. And we have to milk it for every drop of p.r. we can get.

You know what? Celeste is my aunt.

- Celeste is your aunt?
- I thought you two, you know, you get it on.

I know this is none of my business, but she feels threatened right now.

(This poem is crawling with subplots.) Hymen, come here.

So you're her niece. The beautiful little craven ex-lover.

I see the resemblance. Tell me about your family again, what they're like. Have you ever done anything really horrible to them?

I should be taken out and shot for what I've done. (Jack)

What are you talking about? You've been great, slack briefs.

What? Why are you crying?

I don't know! I'm Yoko and Hymen!

Then quit it!

It's so great to have them here inside living with me for decades. We talk about anything. And. Nothing. About the weather. What we're going to wear. I'm so lucky! Oh, Jesus.

You think I should take movement classes? I'm very impressed.

That sounds adolescent... But all the time I was obsessed with how they and I made readers of poetry feel.

Really?

You mean manicured or clumsy? Go on, say it!

I want you, Jack.

I'm consumed with jealousy for my niece because I want you for myself. Admit you have feelings for me, Yoko-san.

I have feelings about you, not for you, you soggy wafer of sin. There's a big difference between the Old Testament God of rib-tearing wrath who created us in his image and Jesus's essence.

You're ashamed of them both, but you still have feelings for me, right? Speak, speak.

Exactly. But the hand-on-thigh thing... You know, to the outside eye, to the person... who doesn't know what a forgiving, wonderful person you can be...this could look like you're confused. How do your readers feel about you living in this cesspool?

Good evening. I have an appointment with Dr. Wang and the little ones.

They're dead.

Oh, it's okay. Come in! It's a poem!

Are you a doctor of literature?

Only when I operate. (Jonathan)

Great. If I could just get you right here. A few words for your fans at home.

Now? No, not now. Tomorrow, actually. I was just in the neighborhood.

You dump people when they're on top... before they lose their popularity and drag the poem down with them.

Excuse me?

(Jack still can't figure this out, his the world's most profitable poetry brand. So why is he biting his toenails?)

We're outside New York's Street Poets Afteafterparty Retreat... for the 2nd Annual Daytime Poetry Dilemmas.

And a glorious, glamorous night it is. A night of a thousand poems. From Alceringa Also Sets, it's Clymnestra and Ariel! Such approval from this crowd must make you feel good.

Yes, but it's dark out, runt, and I thought these were daylight dilemmas? Anyway. We have the greatest, most loyal fans in the world.

(No wait. A sighting. Rabbi Moses Teitelbaum back fresh from the dead! With Ariel and Clymnestra is Jack.)

Jack, a big night for you. Yes, when I originally hatched the sestina theme...

Celeste Daybreak! Celeste! You know her as Maggie Airport from Alceringa Also Sets. She's here with Dr Blunt Wang from naropa.online, who writes of her gorgeous husband Bolt Thorn. Celeste, your 9th dilemma nomination as best daytime poet. It must get to be old chatroom for you?

Never, Yoko (or Jack). It's always such a genuine thrill. Very supportive, strong foundation for me, blech.

I know you're anxious to get inside and share the excitement. Best of luck to you tonight.

Thanks so much, Jack. Now the odes and the entire positional apparatus belong to me. Only me! And another thing. You're all deletes in my book.

Here comes Hymen. Hymen's liked, but not well liked.

There are so many people to thank. First of all, my fabulous supporting prosody... that gives a new meaning to the word support.

- Bitch.
- Hag.

I hate her so much. (Jack)

Now back to our fifth nominee, tremendously brilliant Celeste Daybreak! ...

I never said I was the best. But the last thing I would do is step in and pick up the leadership of a conspiracy!

You take full responsibility for everything except the stuff that went wrong? ...

Give me a little credit, will you? Credit for being someone who tried... to love you the only way Bolt knew how. Oh, my darling! Yes! Yes, yes, yes!

Bolt... if this operation isn't a success... if... I should die... please, please... please, don't be sad. I want you to be happy. I am Bolt!

And the award... for best poet...in a daytime poem -- Tell me you don't love this --

goes to...

Five minutes, Jack.

Don't call me Jack! My name is Yoko! Yoko! Yoko!

Jack, I couldn't keep my eyes off of the midget.

I noticed her too. The girl in the PhD uniform. I am very, very anxious and trying to do all I can to get at the truth.

I think we're avoiding intimacy. My therapist says...

I've racked my brains for ideas to drive that bitch out of the poetry! I guess you could say in the last couple years I've been living the American poetry nightmare!

I got it! We give her civic leader palsy. Right! On the... On the...

What kind of moron are you? It's a serious disfiguring disease.

Jack, do you remember what happened with Brash Flowering... when you made the Yoko inside you become incontinent? Do you? Thousands of sympathy letters.

Is that what we want, Bolt? I would kill to have you on all fours.

Would you? Then you know what you have to do.

- Make Maggie Airport a murderess.
- Oh, a death!

Yes. I will turn the country against her.

Will you?

I want her out of the poem worse than you. You know why? Then it's my poem.

- Our poem. A young poem.
- A happening poem.

Like Laguna Head. Better than Laguna Head.

- Hotter. Sandier.
- Wetter. Saltier.

Why aren't we having sex yet?

You know the rules. Get rid of her, Mr. Fuzzy is yours.

Fuzzy, I interviewed that dog. Gosh, you're cheap.

Ready, three! Go to three!

Ready, two... I mean one!

What is this, what is it?

And remember, poverty, depression... society's ills. We are making a statement. Don't underline it, just make it.

I was so afraid while I was gone.

Gone? (Rabbi Teitelbaum)

It's just as well you didn't come. You'd have been bored senseless. And the reception! There were so many people. I tried to get home as soon as I could. But you know me, I didn't want to be rude to anybody.

Hey, putz, I'll be off in a second...

Good-bye, my darling. It was beyond great, but I have to go back to Sarah Teasdale and the kids. It's like a chemical thing. (Jack)

I'm with Maggie Airport. Good-bye, my darling.

Next time wear a swimsuit underneath the towel.

It's a little early in the day for me. (Bolt) I can't write in a swimsuit.

Last call for the pre-order offer on Bay Poetics; it ships from the printer this week and will be in stores early May.

Beaver on a leash, you're really nice only when you don't care.

Of all the fine people in Bay Poetics, this morning I feel I am Catherine Meng. Perhaps you thought me coherent, but I'm stronger than the frame. It is okay to pretend to be sensible, while stock-piling the fruits of resistance. [from "Notes for a new poetry"]

Every time I see unknown I think of you.

It's that time of the month, again.

(Ya know, there's a thing called template fatigue.)

Marcella Durand and Jen Scappettone, P.A.'s Lounge, Somerville, April 15. I'd be hard put to come up with a more unpredictably just-so venue for Jen and Marcella to race through their respective notes and elegies for a planet that still has time to right itself. As Marcella began her set, the sun was sinking behind her; you could time its racing across the basement-like 2' x 3' casements that flanked her, left and right, failing rays collapsing on warped, thin panel board that surrounds the push-out windows of what I guess is the party room to P.A.'s Lounge. Marcella read excerpts from a long work she's calling Traffic and Weather, so my environmental intro is warranted, I think, as much of what Marcella deals in brings interiors and outdoors together, or as she puts it, "outside the city reflects the city," meaning both the generic suburbs that lay in narcissistic wait for further development and, more generically, those dingy, forgettable, closed-off entities within, cellars, warehouses, bars -- not to mention the brooders that inhabit them. Marcella produces filmic cityscapes of all this -- it's as though she were writing for several camera guys taking a hike. My notes pose this question, how does she transition from the outdoors -- "a bridge rises at the end of the street..." -- to the inside of offices, industrial parks and malls? It's not easy to track on a first reading. Maybe it's her will not to de-randomize phenomena, like that bridge, a desire to let these things just pop up as the camera keeps moving through the city's script, as "the wind lifts wax paper and napkins," and in the same moment, almost, we're reminded of "that old wall covered with sheeting and plywood -- even now they are trying to find it." Part of Marcella's project breathes dust and ash of Ground Zero (she works part time in an office near the old twin towers). But her poems gather a more encompassing set of historical records than just the horror of 2001. She's tracing a long timeline, spanning generations, one in which a city street looks smart at first, then falls out of fashion, and then becomes wildly popular again. (I'm paraphrasing Marcella.) The poems also slice through time, aiming at that moment of looking that's followed by "a minute of writing," Marcella's holding to a belief that writing is a kind of "transferring [and] I am not here in that moment, not enfolded or even named. Water choppy."

By the time Jen started, the sun had set and the party room was dark. Jen needed a cone-shaped, fire-hot metal desk lamp to read by. Light on, her poems are variegated, complex, influenced by a slew of anarchic peeves that she doubts exist but wishes for, "boo-like objectivity" or something like "social substance." What do I mean by complex? You're not going to get all her references on a first read. "Thing Ode" is addressed to the poet Judith Goldman, and more specific, it's a response to a poem by Goldman on Jen's 33rd birthday. It starts with epigrams, one by the futurist Bruce Mau, the other by Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young picking up on a comment by Marx riffing on Shakespeare's Henry IV (I believe Part 1). The poem goes on for several pages, shifts forms, changes voices, complains about several males, including "some john with his comma," espouses "rule of feminine endings," and quite soberly takes up the "M-16-able void." It feels, in context, like an anti-birthday polemic, as well as a poem about a poem becoming a "thing." And variegated? Jen goes after nasty structures du jour, political systems of "the drooling class, " for example, but she lets in old-time sensuality that's perpetual. This is evident in her translations from the Italian of Amelia Rosselli, an avant from mid- to late-20th century, a dead avant that Jen snatches, applies new hair product on, and brings into American English bug-eyed, kicking, and screaming: "...rampant rabbithearted peri-nerves & a / long hazish canals off my lymph (o life!) / ...I arm you, you --" Rosselli and Jen seem complicit babes in arms, in harmonic collaboration as a Rosselli-influenced Jen shouts in "Derrida Is Dead," "...culture forked her...it couldn't be Dad, would it? Go forward, circous, slit me for it. / But in literature."

Delighted to learn David Larsen's The Thorn has been named one of five Books of the Year by Small Press Traffic.

Joshua Clover and Juliana Spahr, Woodberry Poetry Room, Lamont Library, April 13. Joshua Clover and Juliana Spahr get something that's still hard to get; the fix is over; our shared opus of desire and wellbeing has been martyred. In both their poetries psychic v. civic dichotomies are shot to hell, a nearby resting, writing, and reading place, weirdly familiar, with ready access to jihadic media, the better to toggle multiple registers for probing yet-unspoken consequences of 9/11. Both readers concentrated on pieces from their UC Press books, Joshua's just-released The Totality of Kids and Juliana's This Connection of Everyone with Lungs (2005). Juliana's is less an admixture, less filtered as psychosis. "Still a huge sadness overtakes us daily because of our inability to / control what goes on in the world in our name." The sad, almost comatose state Juliana references is a diagnosable communal despair, unfeigned depression and chronic pathology as comity within which the beloved's presence can be easily perfused by irrepressible forces from afar, resulting in a weaponized imminence, "when I stroke the down on your cheeks, I stroke also the / carrier battle group ships." Juliana's reading explored such imminence by way of apposing data in a nonfictional rude awakening. In "November 30, 2002" speaking of parrots = "speaking to all we wake to this morning, the Dow slipping...homelessness and failed coups"; "the flapping of parrots' wings" = "the helpless flapping of our wings in our minds." Apposition is more than diagnosis, it is a way to distinguish forces, both visible and cloaked, imposing their vulgarity. Juliana writes in her "Note" to "Poem Written from November 30/2002 to March 27/2003" that previous ways of feeling separate, staying disconnected are no longer useful, "I felt I had to think about what I was connected with, and what I was complicit with." Of all her pieces, "Poem Written after September 11/2001" is the one that sees the farthest, and the one with the most visual style. The poem zooms counterclockwise from cell division, to hands and feet and lungs, out to the global everyone with lungs, further outward to the tropo-, strato-, and meso-spheres, "everything turning and small being breathed in and out by everyone with lungs during all the moments." The piece concatenates known elements to reach what is at-once obvious and roundly difficult, "How connected we are with everyone." This brief, reassuring poem, telescopes (in reverse) and then collapses elements and time into a litany of physics that seems a fresh start.

Joshua read newer pieces as well as ten poems from Totality… a body of work that spans pre- to post-9/11. Many of what I take as the pre-9/11 poems signal through their titles disciplined immersion as topics; his love and researches of music are pervasive, as are his preoccupations with a) troubadour arcana ("In Jaufre Rudel's Song," "Aeon Flux: June"), b) art practice ("Whiteread Walk," "Auteur Theory," "Aporia"), c) French language ("Ca ira," "Ceriserie," "Valiant en Abyme"), and, of course, poetry ("Late Style," "What's American about American Poetry?"). In these and other pieces from Totality… Joshua promenades through cities, frequently Paris, as a slowed down darkness fills the "pale window box poppies of the laughing class, / Drifting as if time came in the same long dollops as starlight." These poems are smart, play with being smart, so they don't take themselves too seriously, and in being so smart they cover a lot of ground, high and low. More recent material is less processional, more volatile in discursive attacks against flimflam, aurally more heated vis a vis the new and omnipresent problem posed by the ones who can't face what's happening to all of us, those of us who inflict deceit, "those who would inspire terror ... [we say] be new like us ... [only our] old is the new." Joshua gets to the root of another collective deceit in "Their Ambiguity," pointing to a "composite view called the flower of individualism...an electronic texture [where thrives] absence of an intensely desired presence." This is postlanguage re-lease and dis-appearance, a flicker of vaporware nuanced cosmetically, socially astute, looking forward, and enamored of its own critical unresponsiveness as it concocts further difficulty -- verbose paraphrase for these last lines of Joshua's "Poem": "Meanwhile I am happy / To see you! It's enough but not of anything."

Thanks to Roz C for reminding me of "clammy," and for everything, really. And thanks, John L, for the helpful construct 'cosmetic vulgarity.'

There's good in everyone but you've got to see it. (Please don't look at me.)

Shifting alliances. Clammy butterflies.

Sent my app in for diva summer camp. Fingers crossed.

James Tate at the Barker Center, Harvard, April 12. You can't drive into the Square late afternoon and expect a parking space to open up without collateral cost -- an enterprising jerk tries to nose ahead of you to take it instead, fine print on the street sign warns it's the wrong time of day, that sort of thing. I got my space without a hitch and walked up historic Plympton, passed the still-musty Grolier (that's just changed hands), crossed the neat little traffic island that divides Mass. Ave. and Quincy, and turned into muddy Barker courtyard to join the high-maintenance overflow in the Thompson Room on the first floor, waiting for Tate to start. I begin with my one-level walk since both the poetry I heard and my walk toward it bring me back to the not entirely original insight that Tate writes for fellows like me. If I situate myself in a comfortable center of learning and pre-professionalism, then of course I'm ready to kick back 40 minutes or so for some light entertainment from an odd sport who has come to show his amusing, award-winning wares. Tate read only from his 2005 Return to the City of White Donkeys, a set of perambulating prose narratives. Each develops according to the basic rules for comfort zone reception. First, introduce funny characters, a Wayne, a Sheldon, a clueless hiker, a wacky jazz musician, a Howie, an Eleanor Roosevelt. (How strange Tate evokes both Eleanor and later Teddy Roosevelt while standing under the Thompson's expensive 10-feet-tall painting of Teddy!) Second, take the characters into improbable situations, remembering a girlfriend on the day Kennedy was assassinated, and have them say bathmat things like "I knew how pathetic I was, but there was nothing I could do about it." Third, put in some communal-like set incidents ("I couldn't tell if it was a tv phone or my own...") so the writing relates more to the broad demographic, professors, pre-laws, lits, maybe some techs. Yes, I'm sure Tate follows these rules, because the poems flowed into one another with only long, one-to-two-minute pauses between them to demark where one ended and another began. (The pauses were Tate's sly if halting method for controlling our expectations?) Tate got a lot of laughs from attentive sophomores, especially when he offered us anemic binaries with wild tree-diagrams laden with strategic choices -- trekking to a chapel or "swingers' club," screaming while falling or simulated falling with or without sound, hanging with rich women or homeless waifs. That last one got the most giggles. Thinking of Venessa Carlton, I could hardly keep from laughing.

To go on about the poems is unnecessary. It's likely no reader here gives Tate much thought. Yet the temperament with which he practices his storytelling exemplifies more than 'quietude.' As others argue, the monolith, School of Quietude, is critically under-descriptive. Last lines give away a darker ineptitude raised to the fine art of slacker impassivity: "People still scream, don't they?" "I felt like a Howie, I really did." "I can't move, I said."

Awful poetry.

Background checks in the realm of propositional aesthetics. Affiliates who you think are like you but aren't.

Machinations to effect scandal and fabulously raise your stature aside -- without a theory of purpose and a gifted agency to promote your case, masking your vanity becomes the challenge.

Awful poetry.

(This is wheel-missing obvious.) SUVs.

Awful poetry.

Pop metrics. Blame it on grad students. A few accomplished bloggers happen to be teachers, and some of them have a few students who, you see, are known to brown-nose on occasion. "I was reading on your blog yesterday..." X scores or even hundreds of hits. This is dogged measurement. Lax science.

Awful poetry.

Coverage, the journalist motive to get there and establish a beachhead. Perpetrators cover themselves as if they were news, dividing the world like this: perpetrators v. audience.

Awful poetry.

Religion.

Does it strike you as primordially fair that the only poet blogger to identify openly with an organized sect speaks of Coolidge, and means Calvin, not Clark?

Awful poetry.

Gerard Malanga.

Still wishful, interviewed by Yale Daily News, admits, "I respected what Andy was doing -- I was working on it."

Calls Roy Lichtenstein "a one-trick pony." That makes grand pap the beggar needing a ride.

Awful poetry.

Substitute tried formula for true research; present result as research. The recent crop of commentators on web poetry, blogging, recommended links, etc. start with a base, predictable references to entities that have already peaked, Jacket, say, add a few established bloggers en passant, fetishize (that is, go into banal detail about) your friends.

Awful poetry.

A mural of white doves, a dance to uranium enrichment.

And "there's even an entire poem that scans." No one has been particularly worked up yet over D.H. Tracy's review of On Earth: Last Poems and an Essay by Robert Creeley. It's not an unappreciative assessment, but it is replete with condescensions. There is a "flirtation" with form, guys, and there's a "best" poem that "evokes Robert Frost"! And then there's the prose (always easier to talk about something other than poetry in a three-paragraph drive-by). Creeley's essays are "embattled in tone," per Tracy, but this one in On Earth on Whitman "relaxes in a way [Creeley's] prose usually doesn't," yet it's not resounding enough since it's "not so much an act of persuasion as a way of remaining agonized." A Yankee bohemian, Tracy calls Creeley, as if that moniker encapsulates the poet's character, which Tracy also describes as bound in would-be contradictions, "approachable" and "avant-garde."

The 1-Year takes up Wikipedia. Criticism "must take a wider horizon of use."

I'm hesitant to speak. Reasons are weather related, I think, the paleness this morning and a similar wash of fog, darkness in the air and offshore atmospheres yesterday and the day before. My hands cover my lips as I can barely converse, and why should I? Low on the list of available topics, lower than that, off the list, I shouldn't talk more. I feel it inappropriate to continue. Perhaps I should not go on. It would be impolite of me to insist and with so much gratitude I acknowledge your goodwill in listening now. That you are taking time to hear the slightest part of what I say is incredibly generous. I thank you for your attention and interest in my miserable chatter. I am a fool to presume your concern with what I am trying to tell you. I'm ready now to stop and not utter another word but if I may and if you can indulge me further that would be kind of you. You are beyond any common conception of a gentleperson. I feel awkward and tongue tied in light of your splendid presence and your unfathomably good nature. I want to please you but fear I may offend even a single strand of your philosophy and your complex inner structure of open-heartedness. I would take myself down and far away were I to articulate any notion that would offend any sense of yours or of your dedicated attendants who no doubt are enriched by your teaching and practice. Seasonal shifts in wind patterns bring troubling thoughts to my mind but I feel them begin to lift, thinking of you. Wonder itself is not a suitable organizing principle. Believing you are a pure life force, I rather not trouble you with my unreasonable impressions so dependent on the flow of noon to afternoon to dusk into night. Shades at midnight whisper faintly and I fail to capture even fractions of their message, other than it may be: my humble position alone could excuse my watch through the night only to find you at dawn granting me permission to maintain a safe distance. I'll let you go then. I was hoping you would understand.

A new environment. Uncluttered rooms, suggestions of comfort. I'll slap tha taste out yo mouf. Hidden media appliances on call. Relax, cus I'm bout to take my respect. Sunken wardrobes (not ta bliznock tha views) laden wit carea costumes. Three-hour transplants. An ear pod of siznelf distinguished mood sw'n n a few kitchens ta hizzle takeout. It don't stop till the wheels fall off.

I forget whizzat you sound like, coz tha office beneath sweats like tha beach jizzle ta be mean with my forty-fo' mag. Lowa yo monthly payments, tha only employment fo' non-celebrizzles in humid landscapes: boxwood n dry ice ta write n design.

Wakes up n wizzay.

This request of yours, the one you posted a day or so ago to marry a second time, you know it's not interesting: it fails in a specifically instructive way in that its paranoia intimates an entrepreneurial fullness (I want to say a collegial good-nature) not within your reach. It imitates humour. But it's not funny, because it cordons off a psychic terrain of rapacious, partisan guilt, and evinces its dogmatism with such exemplary message-drivenness that, with respect to niche-bound poetics, the post, its 'hidden' message, and the amibition behind it are hallmarks of the moment, and they are all yours (and yours). The party boy turns the party hack, and the fete evanesces into a seminar on comparisons, fact-rechecks, back formations. If you marry again, you are likely to favor this practice.

One bright morning last week, David Orr, the 37-year-old critic and society poet, was boyishly dressed in a silk pirate shirt and creamy jacket made by Buck Riser, designer of utopian male fashions and Orr's dear friend. Orr was simultaneously talking at high speed, eating a fried ouef de Sancere and hurling squeaky toys at his 20-year-old Jack Russell trainer, Anthony, from his seat on a claret-colored corduroy chaise, before clicking on his Intel Core MacBook to pen another contribution to theoretical poetics.

Red wine glasses were still in the sink from the previous night's dinner party for a group that he and his partner, Ravenel Boykin Basboll IV, had convened to hash out an arts program for their "creative poetics project." They are developing a planned community in the Dominican Republic that will provide weekend succor to poets like Kirby Fareed Olson, the editor of Poetry International Chat Room; Bronson Van Massey, the event planner; Toby Lilac, musician and high tea shop owner; and other wealthy bohemians with an appetite for setting current trends in poetics and identifying with social causes served up in a tropical paradise. Basboll, a moneyed manager 'behind the publishing scenes' and a poetry reform advocate, and Orr have been collecting folks like these in their South Hackensack apartment for some years now, building an unlikely salon and quasi-liberal brain-and-money trust floating high above the gilt and marble of Flarf Parc.

Orr is the most visible of a new wave of poetics practitioners, all fabulous 30-something men with pedigrees, a talent for understated ghetto glamour clothes and toned-down parties, and lists of glittering friends and readers who are just as young and well-heeled as they are. While the late Elizabeth Bishop, still a touchstone of the society poetics "interior," presented the poet as autocrat, or at least headmistress, these young men seem more like pals than stern poetics arbiters. For their readers, they are the fun, stylish alpha guys everyone else wished they went to school with. "Everyone else is just jealous," Bronson Van Massey noted in a recent e-mail. These young alphas just happen to have a handle on the style and sensibility of quiet, old-money poetry, such as that of Bishop. "Subtlety like ours wants to be missed by all but the chosen few; it is aloof, withholding and aristocratic," said Orr, "It's so freaky it wants to be looked at but not seen. It's unnerving and so radical."

These new aristocrats are creating markedly traditional classical-romanantic pieces, poems, critiques, and even novels -- more Charlotte Bronte than Howard Moss -- that reach toward the high style of Bishop-Berryman-Houlihan with touches of Prague decadence ("for fun!" according to Lilac) and fake Language influences ("for street cred," he added). Sestinas are fluffy with off-rhymes and other formalisms and embroidered metaphors; the lexicon is plump and downy, and even some of the epigrams wear rhetorical "skirts."

"It's not that everything is metrically disciplined, ballooning quatrains, and stuff," said Simeon Gerritson, 32, whose three homes -- a quarter basement loft in NoLIta, an attic suite in a weekend gate house in Locust Valley, N.Y., and a summer motel room in Maine -- are frequently opened to these and other boho alphas. "It's more like the kinda texts these guys come up with have an edgy traditional but fresh rightwing overtone. Maybe there is a Bishopesque cranky subagenda to some of it, but the gender politics is always comfy." Flipping through one of Orr's notebooks, Gerritson finds post-Rossetti sonnets and stuff from Homer, "I crave this familiar mix, because we grew up together -- David Orr and I have similar tastes."

Let's get back to our roots, mutual surveillance.

Tynes does Downing.

Thanks to caterina.net for reminding us of the economy of attention, blogging's métier and motive. Poetry's as well. Only the time frame stretches a bit for poetry. And speaking of attending to poetry and poets, can we modulate depreciation of David Orr for his temerity pronouncing You are living in a world created by Elizabeth Bishop. Off the top, Orr is correct. If you're looking to The New Yorker, The NY Times Book Review, and their like (actually there are few other 'like' publishing venues, with their mass appeal, appeal by default, of course), you are in Bishop's world. Secondly, so what? Are we diminished more by the attention still paid to Bishop, a poet's poet's poet, according to that fence-sitter / rail-splitter, JA, or more by the low bar we collectively set for instantly diminishing fame in the fresh-face-crazed, outrage-hungry avant. Fart and you're daringly rebellious; poop in your pants and you've heroically earned our attention (gossip). Meantime, Orr's claims concerning Bishop's distinguished style stand: "Subtlety wants to be missed by all but the chosen few; it is aloof, withholding and aristocratic -- sometimes manipulative and always disguised. It has less to do with theory and technique, which can be learned mechanically, than with style and sensibility, which require intuition. It wants to be looked at but not seen. It's unnerving." I'm not exactly queer for subtlety when it's out of place, but being confrontational, nervy, in-your-face, merely anti-elite is often out of place, too, and it's hardly radical in itself -- roseate and overdone, over-the-top's more the norm (read easy, mechanically learnable) than we care to admit. I give Bishop and Orr their due, holding to a measurable precision, e.g., "dull, dead, deep pea-cock colors, / each riser distinguished from the next..."

The anthology of a moment. (If that.)

I don't know. Anti-Bishop. Apopheniac. Maybe this rhubarb is onto something?

Hey Chris. You need one aleve or two?

Terse, provocative, naggingly preliminary review-as-draft of Juliana Spahr's This Connection of Everyone with Lungs from Jeremy Bushnell.

Joel Sloman and Rob Fitterman at Demolicious, Cambridge, April 2. As readings go, this was as complementary a pairing of very different poets as you can get. Joel focuses on materials on his desk and photogenic presences in his surrounds; Rob works against the grain with media snippets and internet waste; both then demonstrate how ever-present, mostly immediate, ordinary stuff gets transmuted into poems. Joel began with two "vaguely scientific" pieces whose origins are not 'ordinary' in any practical sense. His second piece, titled "Intrusions," derives from papers of one Edward Lorenz, author of Essence of Chaos, papers that Joel helps process in his day job, working with Lorenz and others at MIT. The poem wrestles with conventional language that conveys radical ideas, "teeming with six points...surrounding tiny values with tiny features [in which] values become features." Joel conveyed his data authentically, unraffishly, and with the conviction of one who understands implications within the tumult he describes. That turbulence reappears in a Patriots' Day poem that records the day's movements in suburban Arlington (MA). Sparrows' recklessness is transcribed as a "kiss my ass" gesture, about which three boys have no "moral judgment yet, nothing" as the sun comes back "after powdering its face." Joel also read three poems about Woods Hole and translations from languages he doesn't understand, not translations according to Joel, but "improvements." He read a last poem in progress, with a line that I think typifies his observer's stance, "So it's I'm here."

Rob read from his sprawling Metropolis projects (two books, more to come), along with older and newer poems. Rob made his sampling and appropriation process clear from the outset: "I like subjectivity; it just doesn't have to be my own." I was impressed by Rob's positioning his work vis a vis the devastation of 2001: "After 9-11, I've been thinking before the 'event' ... what was available from what everybody else was thinking." The nostalgia and implicit critique of that ready availability, in the past, stands as a caution, as it were, to blithely proceeding without taking into account our newly-invigorated, collective anxiety. This is not to suggest Rob has lost his sense of humor. He read hilarious smashes of 1970s rock anthems with lines from poems by colleagues, Brian Kim Stefans and Rod Smith, among others. He read another smash-like piece that merged tricked-out menu items from the Union Street Café, the letters of Lewis and Clark, and decorative prose on nouvelle cuisine. Rob's remixing of texts is another approach to using 'materials at hand,' doing this with a light, graceful, impish touch. His impishness is most evident in how he inserts impossible subject matter within the mix by just calling it out: "How do you get miners into your work?"; "Duluth -- you can't handle Duluth!" That's not just insertion of the impossible, it's commenting on the insertion in the process, the equivalent of a poetic hat trick.

P.S. Allen Bramhall seizes the day his way.

Crocheted titanium with a clown's face.

Bed is the new office.

People don't think they're prejudiced. Wisdom lies in turmoil. Here's some news. I'm in love with a hairdresser.