There's always the possibility of clarity in self report, especially if self is Anne Boyer, rejoined to the art of Odalisqued.

Are you ready? There's a "link between sexy young men and profitability."

You be the C.E.O. I'm stuck in the office.

Pets do well eating cows' brains. I just realized.

Guilty pleasure. I'm enjoying Bill Knott's newish blog. It overflows with innumerably-tentacled production, past and today's. Up now, posts of his from 2002 to the Yahoo Yancy Butler Fan Site. Extraordinarily lucid. Below those posts that go on for many screenfuls is a well-parsed response to Geof Huth's review of Kenneth Koch's Visual Poetry and Personal Experience. "If Koch is my 'spiritual father,' I demand a paternity test." That's Bill Knott.

I'm working on the second draft of another, bigger screenplay about a boy and his mom. He's got special powers. It's creepier than a literal focus on the magic of words. The boy misuses his powers so that he can mature and become a normal person in a large corporation by a highway, like Kevin Gallagher in Sex, Lies and Videotape. The boy will grow up, in a flash forward, and work for Strategy Foundation, a company that clothes the world, shipping Jimmy Choo and Miu Miu. He doesn't dream now. Not any more. He's become an energy therapist, and has rabbits. You see doctors learn how to say what no one wants to hear. "You sure of that? You sure those were my rabbits?"

Economy of meanies.

Ok, my stuff: For the past few months I've been running a club night with my friend Todd Gloss. We were unimpressed with the dancing and music around us, so we thought we'd try something ambient. We took a sonic visual approach. We found a venue, painted the walls gray-brown, hung dangling collages, made a poster, started distributing flyers and bought a mixer to play our records on, and we were both flat-out astonished with the great turnouts we got. The Waltons happened every month. It was strange, we were playing stuff like Lightning Bolt, Shimmer and Stacked, Animal Collective, New Pornographers and people were dancing, going crazy for it. And now the last ever Waltons has happened because Todd is going back to the Vineyard...and it's left in limbo, because I'll have to find another redhead monster to do it with and invent a new name and so on.

I'm also trying to print up photographs. (I've been asked to do a group show.) Most of this is finished, so I'm working in reverse, beginning around midnight and extending well past noon. After this, more self portraits. I started doing them but it got difficult and I got involved and fucked up by the guys I was shooting so I've been stepping back a bit. Club nights and poetry are just substitutes.

Halfway through writing a poem that explores Caribbean birth certificates from a Jainist archive. I'm examining their organizational clarity, influenced by David Schubert's concepts of 'punctum' and 'studium' (partly to avoid a theoretical stance, although I'm also involved with Bruce Weber's notions of 'view') and the usual analytical constructs relating to performance manifestos, cylinders, etc. Stanza breaks are traces from spirea doodles, and I've thrown in Cream riffs -- calling this "Museum of Aftermath." My main work, though, is a novel based on an earlier poem. At least I think it's a novel... has the distance to be one, maybe a novella. I go back and forth with it being all-consuming and then just bacon I bounce around in my head for a while. I hate this last part -- ration juggling. I just want to write it, am happy when I'm writing it, and don't know why I torture myself.

Another big to-do is my debut solo album. I've set a deadline. It's stretched on endlessly so I'm impatient. It's an effort to distil everything about career and acquisition into 30 minutes, so it's entirely characteristic of me! I’ve really only started to get into this since a friend introduced me to tantric practices. I've discovered rigor conceiving jagged, majestic space. I've got another friend I feel I can talk to about this and when we put our heads together it feels so good and right and I feel I'm at the right address with the right mosaics and I can make this work, but he's in prison. So I get frustrated. That's why I'm outlining main parts of my memoir, Phased by Lasers. (I'm citing Michael Magee in the epilogue.) There's an evocation of West Village bars, something fresh about sex on the piers they tore down. I was talking to my flower arranger wandering around there, and he blurted, "Is that Gus Van Sant?" Friday the Thirteenth had just come out and he was impressed. "I have to work with that guy!"

From the depths -- #21 -- of Tim Yu's comment box "...it is thinking itself, always raising its objects to the level of the universal, which is truly perverse..." -- David Lau

At the end of Lau's long, well-considered post:

I want to read poems that have the full force of their convictions in their language, without devolving into sincerity. J.H. Prynne is the exemplar here, from “Star Damage at Home”: “And what is the chance for survival, in this / fertile calm, that we could mean what / we say, and hold to it”; “we must mean the / entire force of what we shall come to say”; “we desire what we mean /& must mean that & and consume to / ash any simple deflection”; and “We live here / and must mean it, the last person we are.”

Michael Magee's poem has prompted (the word!) more than sufficient reflection from Limetree and Minor Americans and their readers. Now Tim Yu and readers blow it open and move into other territories: muted dystopian political correctness (Yu), synchretic gestalt (Lau), racial haunting (Magee), ethical neutrality (Chris Chen), processual immunity (Brenda Iijima), eclipsing parody (Arif Khan, citing Jameson).

Tim Yu's URL. Lau's post is, as noted, #21.

~~

Cartoons are not analysis by the way.

They're response.

~~

My Bad Faith Bear,

Yes, you, you sick ghost glowing with cloth dangling from your mouth ...

if you don't inhabit what you're saying, shhhh ...

~~

Mr. Bear or M(r)s.

(transcribing someone else's autobiography)

Riddles are everywhere while violence underlies the pleasant life. People who refuse to see it are killed on a daily basis in order for us to have the visual goods we enjoy. Shaky ground. Is there any other kind? I mean, we're pragmatists after all. I mean... what does that mean? I think that means that instead of living under the sun and the moon and seeing the pollen on the lawn, one is living in an enigmatic scheme of one's own not-seeing, blinded by periodic breakthroughs one calls substantial. To see what else might be there, there is Geof Huth's dbqp: visualizing poetics, a neo-pragmatic habit for not only sustained focus but also discursive, contentious stances that make the ground for graphical poetries, though permanently shaky, a little firmer vis a vis skeptics and uninitiated. Last week, for example, Huth argued against that repeated, generalized call for substance and breadth in vispo -- voiced by those he characterizes as new-criticism-inspired -- pinpointing the unique semantic appeal that graphical verse offers as motes of a riddle: "A visual poem might be an epic or an ode, but it is more likely to be something minimalist. And that enigmatic movement of meaning across its surface is its particular gift to esthetics." You don't have to subscribe to Huth's view to find value in it as a point of contention and counter-contextualizing with respect to pop (albeit dated) theory (new criticism).

Contention is fine, but Huth goes further visualizing gamuts, checking others' work, displaying his own, amplifying, looking to see. From Huth's posts in May, we travel from his base in Schenectady to Manhattan, Texas, and California. Huth discovers typographic sleight in a store sign at Bryant Park, and then ogles (correction: we readers are ogling; Huth is photographing) a graffiti-enscorched men's room (hand dryer, mirror, doors, etc.) in a Midtown restaurant, an occasion to unpack a base irony -- "At the door (my egress), a joke appears: Very Top Secret. But I don't believe it. The creation of the text might be secret, but the texts themselves are quite public." Other posts study a perfume sample card, examine collages by the artist-poet mIEKAL aND, comment on minimalist Robert Lax and poet Richard Lopez, as well as find ways to praise "commas of glass" in El Paso. In addition, Huth showcases his own vispo. I like his May pieces executed in "heavy pollen" around Caroga Lake, New York, photos of his own glyphs inscribed into microspores on auto glass and on a car's hood, as well as one on a glass tabletop at a café, "Pollen over Glass over Fabric."

The critic in me privileges a recent post on Jenny Holzer's "verbo-visual installation" at Vassar College, exemplary of Huth as analytical observer, his facility all the more acute, I believe, because of his accomplishments as practitioner and avid consumer of others' vispo. The installation comprises some 20 benches and lawn tablatures, each etched with excerpts from poems by Elizabeth Bishop. This time Huth finds the work wanting, shaky, even. His reasons are technical and literary, and, again, one does not have to agree to profit from Huth's experiencing / externalizing ideas to help us see for ourselves.

Some queer poets are from the other side. Of course. Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Robert Creeley, Sylvia Plath, Clark Coolidge, Hannah Wiener, Joseph Ceravolo. Ceravolo in particular illustrates how precipitous queering can get through simple discourse. First three lines of "Warmth":

There's nothing to love in this
rice Spring.
Collected something warm like friends.

There are ten more similarly short, literally breathtaking lines. If I were to find a point to the poem, it plays back some of the wrenching of amorous assault. Continuing:

Sail glooms are none.
Your desire
rests like sailors in
their bunks. Have beaten you, lips.
Supply me
man made keeping.
Supply it flowing out;
are brute bullets in your back
because there is
in this rice Spring.

Sense of utter loss -- but not of confusion -- underlies the twisted (Have beaten) and dropped topic headers (Collected something, are brute). Hyper-manly references (sailors, bunks, bullets) are scooped up from one segment of the sensate scale, but strike me as motivated more by an ambivert male persona than sexual proclivity. Although severely abbreviated, Ceravolo is insisting one follow his reasoning (Supply it flowing out). That insistence is enforced by the repetition at the end, "in this rice Spring." I'd have to choose from a number of "death trying to see and breathe" scenarios to start explaining "rice," but I'll leave it to an impression: Peering down one finds a bowl of warm(ed over) rice, a bleak, humdrum triggering of grief, regrets. What's queering here is Cervalo's proceeding via compressed conflation of physical acts, audacious desire (Supply me), and inconceivable spectacle (because there is in this rice Spring).

Spectacle, bold desire, the physical. Three things one ought not to be without. When I find them in homos and others, I know I'm getting close to what I require.

It's hardly sweeps on the blogs.

~

Captain scientist, see what you've done! See what you can do? Throw me into a hole and keep me there, cover me up. Only four exceptions: I wasn't speaking to you. I was speaking to the strong interest of oil companies. Oh, and incidentally, I'm afraid I can't keep working with you looking over my shoulder. Don't be afraid, don't be very afraid. My gastric bypass circumvents my will. If I just lie here and relax, the year will be half over. Oh, if I could let myself be completely unafraid. I've never been wild about this, but it does get you where you have to go.

~

A new blog dedicated to anti-plagiarism co-administered by a Pris.

A friend is organizing a collection of ideas around the notion of queering language. And I'm giving myself 20 minutes this morning to write down first thoughts. Now the language part of the proposition is standard-provocative. There should be plenty of maneuver room through language to probe the body, to think about silences around the body (and the body's languages, including politics), and to sort out potentials to express and surmount body and silence.

Queering. I've had 24 hours to think about attitudes to equip the queering part (each attitude with subsets of thoughts, dreams), and it's a mess. Queering is what humans do when they breathe and think about it, correct? Queering language then is a notion in search of, among other things, measure and perhaps measurement. Again, humans with language have to think about what they're doing to language, sometimes, and that's normal and queer. Not very queer, though, because many of us don't think that much about what we're thinking about what we're doing. It's a little queer we don't think this much, but it's more the norm, and to think it's still -- you know -- otherwise or a little queer is another kind of queering thought, slightly less the norm. When we extend this to philosophy and poetry, I think we've entered queerland, a.k.a. meta-Earth. And to cut to the chase, so to speak, to set up a readymade dichotomy for inhabitants of queerland, let's just say that philosophers' queerness is normal, and it sort of legitimates everyone's queer (or if you prefer queerish) normality (everyone includes humanity inside and over the border of meta-Earth): Thinking about thinking about what we're thinking about what we're doing (meaning, also) or could do (mean), say. That sort of. Everyone can do this, but philosophers stick with it and stay literal (I think that's the word). So they are doing and -- now I'm going to de-parenthesize -- meaning all this for lack of a better reality. Poets are far less normal, more on the queering queers' side for reasons that express reality(ies) perpetually literal + n.

I'm running out of time, so maybe more later. More about degrees of queerness. That's what my friend is getting at, I'm guessing, here. More about standing in -- where two or more metonymies are gathered, allegory begins. Is allegory a symptom of queerness or just happy to see you? What prompts allegory and how queer is that?? Why is the horny guide Kama Sutra so bodily unqueer (even the gay verses) while preachy Kabbalah is a tall, fabulous drag queering slut all the way from her crown down to his boots? Or roots. We're all philosophers and poets, but very few are queering queers. Do I have to go into this: Gayness (yours or mine) does not qualify you or me as a queering queer? Queering maximizes signals, that's why poetry is a preferred medium. Soon.

"...pleasantly ordinary." You know when The Globe patronizes the nearly-homeboy laureate, we've got another clunker.

You can tell how power is shifting (back...back) by how many reference Donald Hall unironically. You know, we can work with him. Him? Leslie Scalapino is my laureate.

Poet Tom Beckett, another laureate, confirms what I've been thinking of doing for some time, now. "...the male produces...a big sperm hand grendade..." Anything else?

Suburban Ecstacies 3-step could take some of your pain away from Rove's having escaped indictment. (But not really.)

Ah, there's a coda.

Bush as pwecocious Magoo dwives by Iwaq to push his negatives down, down, down -- those waskelly insuwgents nevew had a shot -- I'm sewious, and now unawmowed Iwaqis patwol main highways -- two ow thwee -- while whole enclaves of Sunnis get a pass thwu byways wechawging blackbewwies befowe text messaging Pyongyang. (What could Magoo be thinking?) Not kiddin, I came to look that new pwesident in the eye. Hey, I'm still the same litewal, blunt, simplistic even, yet memowable bad gangsta I always was, engaging the twoops and anyone who agwees, and the west of the Fwench, the old wowld, fuck you. But I'll give diplomacy a chance when it can. I love the Muslims. We got to stop addiction. Bring'em on. Be angwy at the wowld with dog-food boxes. So help me, Lauwa and me awe appweciative, bye.

One certainty about S/FJ is that it always has things do. Sasha Frere-Jones is a practicing poet but professionally he's a connoisseur of hip-hop and rock crooners and tunes; the purposes S/FJ are put to mostly center around the atomized if voluminous art- and people-scapes of the wicked but fragile pop music industry. Unlike his torqued prose in The New Yorker, Frere-Jones has little to say on the blog, but as noted, lots to do, concatenating hyperlinks to a great fraction of potent music and wily videos, a savory initiation of sorts for tone deaf poets like me to e-archives of people and performances we might never venture toward otherwise. The blog also speaks in shorthand to insiders; the more you know what's being referenced the deeper Frere-Jones's endorsement, and the more confirmed he seems in his taste, I gather. But as an outlier I still get Frere-Jones's point (approbation without the tedium of argument). I followed a recent link to a site with vids from a 'ghostface killa aka "pretty toney"' who just about blew me away with his minimalist production. A tall hipster with huge abs sitting on a giant wooden throne, behind him a wall of shoes in a generic shoe shop. The hipster observes wallabees are now from Taiwan, only he doesn't sing Taiwan. It's something else, like Too-wan, maybe. In another segment, pretty toney's on his big throne, the background this time is inside footage of a 24-hour convenience store; he's giving advice to "street hustlers" on how to survive through the wee hours, eating on a budget of just $5 a day. S/FJ is a sketchbook of pointers from a smart guy acting like a fan, piling on the latest sources and, for non-music-industry poets, solid leads. You might also approve of S/FJ's gorgeous pix and straight-ahead layouts, nothing to get in the way of the shorthand and links. The snaps, though, are features themselves, mostly city themed, cropped to teasing slapstick, grainy, sometimes abstractly wrought urban glyphs bumped outdoors with layers of human and metrological excess.

Think of plagiarized passages from poems as product placement.

~

Noticing a lot of comment deleted's in the dialog boxes at ronsilliman.blogspot. After each one it says, "This comment has been deleted by the author." Which introduces the question, whose author? There have been a few ill-tempered contributors to those boxes in the past, and I'd like to think, gee, some of these guys have gotten partial control of themselves and vaporized their hasty flames (or something). If it's Ron who's deleting, then that's cricket, but the boilerplate blogspot message is at best ambiguous. Correct to: This comment has been wiped after it was deemed unworthy by R.S.??

~

There are several candidates, men and women, for the role of Ann Coulter, the poet.

Mark Woods culls the neatest graphics from mid-20th century, most recently Baziotes, Plowman, Derain, Survage. [Graphic right, "Prothese" by Randel Plowman.] Woods also fixates on esteemed half-forgotten poets and figures peripheral to poetry from around the same time. Attached to the pictures and graphics are excerpts from what I gather are quasi-encyclopedic sources I'm never going to pick up on my own, The Glistening Bridge: Leopold Survage and the Spatial Problem in Painting [PDF], Samuel Putnam, 1929; The Shropshire Schizoid And The Machines Of Modernism [another PDF], Ed Comentale (on A. E. Housman, D. H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis and Deleuze / Guattari), along with short paragraphs cut from articles in zines I don't get to, Modernist Culture, Harpers. I can't figure the immediate purpose, other than Woods willingness to share his thoroughly idiolectic monologues about art, writing about art and poetry, as well as occasional balloons of political fury. Aside from drawing a bead on another's refined tastes, when you read through Woods Lot, you begin to construct versions of their contemporary relevance to a consciousness given over to looking and thinking through what is seen.

Boston poet, among the most accomplished hereabouts, Joel Sloman has a new blog. (Welcome to the grind.)

Critic's choice. Ransom (heeeheee) I mean Random Bullshit Comix and, especially, Your Bullshit Happiness mark a new, heightened 'blue period' for the J. (linked at the right under Jim Behrle). He's taken his breathy de-attitudizing up to a broader plane, so to speak, love and family. Next stop, money markets!

Blogger's been crazy for two days.

~

Shrunk, a flotilla of yachts
Each with a spar for scallops --
A high-tech sputter of scallops
For a frill who goes by Wendell,
A poet named Mary Jo
Salter & a lawyer called Sue.

Nabokov is something like scallops
-- An American Nabokov, fed up,
Gentlemen, what the hell
Happened in the yachts?
How about if we throw the glue
Shoreward? I assume that's a no.

Those "utopian intimacies" sound pretty good until you read on, "intimacies which we don't have a language for yet." There's a point to this, I'm pretty sure, frustrating as it ineffable or unspeakable.

Lowest paid, no girlfriend. Don't call this a McMansion. I'm an interruption scientist & my research on Prince William is putting me to sleep, like its subject, stagnant, rudderless, dwindling. Drainer Tiffany constantly beeping and dinging me uptown, downtown. I'm pissed. Put off by beautiful photographs of William igniting abolitionist eco-moves, interesting, this veneration effect. Women living a life of comparative peace salivate over the fey brute, but steer clear of a portfolio like mine. 3000 Republicans based on measurable real life factors drive me nuts. What were particularly striking, female-rooted, & now posing a Heisenbergian menace inspiring the first church-through-restaurants (genuflect to eat) -- iTubes downloaded to my desktop of newly ordained ministers, especially the hungry threeways, sometimes with their wives, ones that telegraph precision during penetration as an ultimate -- like Anish Kapoor sculpture -- & it's no longer simple coincidence, is it, those mass-ambulant, dare I say funereal, poses of doctors of divinity! Anyway, William seems no more than a celebration of the same intolerant, slack jaw set, a rock prince of the pure it & isms working on laptops in meeting rooms down the hall. Failed belletrists like us are snapped over phones unshaven in sailor's togs. What a comedown. My biggest side effect is unmet expectation. I must be exhausted. Could be, replies a better-paid, more attractive.

(Toward delivering information through glanceable sources.)

Jack Kimball & Xtina Strong, Demolicious, Cambridge, June 4. I normally pass on a chance to write about a reading co-featuring me, but this was a farewell to Xtina -- on her way to Red Hook (not Park Slope) even as I tap keys this morning. There were four brief readings during the open mic, each wishing, saying ciao, girlfriend to Xtina. James Cook, introduced as James Cool (a moniker he should never live down) read his pieces from the Sunday Morning Anthology that Xtina published two years ago. Allen Bramhall read a fresh meditation mentioning Paris Hilton twice. (Xtina is in no way like PH, but the gesture was appreciated.) I read about eighty short druggy poems, because of something deadly italicized and really lovely inside, warning me, 'let me out for crissakes.' And since Xtina was leaving me, I let her have it in my poems, which are nonrefundable. Next was Xtina with two very short video pieces that I'm sure will be brought together into something larger, since they retrieve similar, not-fond recollections of Bushes past and present, Rumsfelds past and present, randy cartoons and black and white footage of poor American children in the depression era and their thirsty counterparts within Iraq. There was a long 'simple' mid range sequence with a young, mobile Iraqi suddenly extinguished by a single bullet from somewhere, then some CNN shiiit, and Rumsfelds, again, along with several of our President's casually prescient malaprops ("we'll soon restore the chaos..."), all of this stirred with Xtina's intermittent voice-overs, words like field of action, pockets, field, pockets, death, pockets. The event mounted up, I think, to a so long, all around, with Xtina's video capping the mood, a promise of crueler, more desensitizing segmentation to come. Booze and burgers at The Middle East after, kisses and goodbyes.

Heads, straight ahead group and crowd shots, mood-swept, brainy people. More great pix at New Yipes.