Is It the King?
Farid Matuk
Effing 2006

I've always been fond of edges in a question. I live on an arterial road.

Am throttled by a complete lack of vanity, Moors.

Our eyes feel congested, oh I blew our noses and throats. Our ears I think the earth was looking...as far as the road.

I live on an arterial road.

I hear springs ease / as a man leaves the body.

I omitted of his car if I hear anything.

Farid Matuk starts Out of a tin-cold. Me? I've cleared a parking space, the clearing, say, in front of my cream shaded Spanish bungee port out in the edges. A clearing An owl call / helps the night / cleave Bee Creek, and what pitched grandeur that "cleave" brings let loose, a good lose, Between extended / branches (changing light) / cold sun-up, a good case / is made for the here-there / and now-there recapturing the outdoors.

Inside I read two- or three-word lines in "Orange County Knows How to Party," and the more variably lineated "But, Richard [Pryor], Will You Show Me an Ethic of Freedom?" and there's nothing to discredit, to disbelieve. Then "Early Notes": Four a.m. you stand at the foot of my bed...branching of some intention and I realize he's not getting some or any -- we have to not fight it! you inch across the stuccoed / ceiling, etc. Losses, but losses that don't count, and dying and most everyone dying / is happy for spring.

The edges now-here are not vain, not striving, dispossessed, I only care that you love my country. Therefore there's retrieval of losses that do count, Velcro (easy), Impala, (harder), Charles Olson (the hammer), a country of train pucks / between the nodes of another century's economy. And what else is left, what will we put in the arc / for the new country?

You shame me, Matuk to Olson saying, Matuk explains, the poem is in the alley way / where it's always been.

I've booked an I prefer the good life package. I should be writing this down.

I'm seated in my studio, dressed in ashram goth.

Government dotted with it's a joke mirrored hot pants.

What is googling for but to effect command of stuff we're uncertain or we don't want to get that serious about? An eyeblush of material seems a desperate measure, and it is, in reckless hands, but for a type of pedagogue like me there's depth to surface and undespairing perceptions (like reading a dab) of what won't be contained. If you're the type, you can pick a curatorial spot in the vicinity of information and be seen as well as seem on top (of it). Breathing life, we sell hundreds of these, o Swami, is a slanter's tool of poetry (and it knows it).

Corn song, 2003.

Squabbles add up. When you're collating the wrong voices, that's all people see.

The preceding contains embryos for whom I take two interfaith classes a day.

Here's today's birth winner. Dreams Capri Riviera Cancun imperial Tulum Ticonderoga pencil.

Staples erasers don't work.

Subtitle: If you feel like sex, be sure to wake me up.

In way under 15 minutes, Alan DeNiro reviews LRSN's The Thorn for Rain Taxi, just out. The poems are "shadows of omens... sacral... comic..." lying "at the intersection of these two terribles...notably unattractive...exciting extreme alarm." Lordiee. Could this be what Warhol meant by no bad pr?

Behind in my reading, including blogs, so this idea, "form as a search for the endless opportunity to write," appears, from Monday, like last year in blog time (or it used to be...the jet pace has been de-accelerating across the typepads and blogspots of late), merging the enterprise of airport management (more insignts from Kevin Killian) and explosions of green things in Maine (sighted by Ange Mlinko) -- and where does this unfold? Excuses to write -- sounds like reasons to be cheerful.

There's something else. Two, no, make that three respected figures intimating a groundswell of anonymity swallowing up poetry as we knew it. Okay, this is my conclusion, but C. A. Conrad in his recent interview at Exchange Values reasons there are no famous poets because of the ballooning numbers of poets overall. And this is so. Laura Moriarty in her piece at A Tonalist (I got to this yesterday -- see three posts, below) agrees with Kevin Killian's notion of bards at work in "a common project," which is also depicted, a little more colorfully, as a "fragmented ferment," stunning enough a parallel to the ballooning numbers idea, I think, to drag everything into my groundswell. (Why is the ferment in fragments? Because so innumberable are the poets who have signed on, we tell them apart only when we study one at time, finding commonalities.) I'm not arguing a point, just seeing it. Wasn't the last renaissance prompted by gangs of anonyms?

What's the worst that could happen? Daily feedings of permeable discourse and lite overdrafts are no longer confined to the blogosphere; The Times takes up the spoofy challenge of reporting what should have happened on Project Runway after the final four contestants showed their collections:

"Jeffrey," I imagined Mr. Kors saying to the contestant with the long neck. "It's rock 'n' roll. It's hard-edged. It's you..."

"I'm really disappointed in Michael," Ms. Garcia said. "He said he was inspired by a woman on the hunt to find out who she is, a seductress."

“With pink satin jumpshorts?” Mr. Kors asked.

She said. And he said. And from what sticks between the lines, Eric Wilson signals that Uli, along with Jeffrey and Michael, makes the final three, and that Jeffrey wins.

[But... that scrap bandaging her left shin?]

Here's one for the books on S. Coleridge, A. Berrigan, and "ontological" E. coli. Authored by Dale Smith.

Laura Moriarty notes "darkly connotative...textual units" as a contemporary feature and distinguishes between units that are talky and defensively layered to the gills v. ones that are swept up in "old Modernism." The distinction is persuasively drawn from two specimens out of Michael Scharf's Telemachiad. The old-modern idea holds formally in a monological stone (first-person puffing out short, diophoretic breaths), but downplays Scharf's arch trebles throughout, a lesson, for me, in vocal style trumping close to everything else.

Thanks to DIY and Tributary for enthusiams in re: Post~Twyla, both picking up on some kind of "big idea" that "changes," to cite Allen, Shanna highlighting narcoleptic process. Tom finds Derrida endearing while hung over on me?? -- how would I object?

Something I said to Tom Beckett last week was no more than a little nosh in the wind, a trail snack predicate: Poetry is in a state of self-loathing. But if you believe in the totalizing, dystopian malaise of late capitalism, it's not far off the trail. Poetry's tradition was once handed down to us handsomely as one of sui generis prestige, aesthetic prowess, ardor. Not so today. Try squeezing ardor and prowess into a career that breaks six figures. American poets, as a category, still trend toward the privileged and happy few who manage their lives with little lasting interference from bosses, debt collectors, spouses from hell. Still, most career options in and around poetry are second- and third-tier in comparison to law, medicine, media; the list goes on. Academic pursuits seem more central to poets than ever. The dynamic used to be that critics and researchers sought out avants. Now it's interactivity, with not a few seeing themselves as avants also doing research, teaching, hunting down similar folk in or around academic work (through conferencing, blogs, etc.). This seems a logical outgrowth of increasing numbers trained as low-paid professionals in poetry. What's a poetry professional? Maybe it's a humorist in the flux of self-irony and career doubt, pissing over poetry. The output is huge, not just the spoofs we have come to expect from Ashberians and post Ashberians, language poets, flarfists, et al., but boatloads of others that might be typed as The Best Americans chosen almost haphazardly for their composing ironic plain speech (e.g., fuck you poems), chosen by the likes of, yes, Lehman and Collins; but we don't pin the blame on these two exclusively; there are literally hundreds of other poetry-for-dumbies practitioners to float in their places. The affect of our blurred Age of Satire at one level of analysis is that poetry can't be serious. Or, as a misreading of Ashbery, what proceeds can't be embarrassed if it a) stays crafty and b) tries not to be serious. The problem with many poems in BAP 2006 is that they are well enough constructed for an analyst to gloat over how off-hand the occasion and yet what a brain stretch it takes to achieve it. It's a doctrine and syndrome, perhaps, Little J. A. in a Prospect of Followers Chewing Diminished Expectations.

As you may know, I grew up in a football family.

Food is information.

I do the Showtime Beyond graphics. Autumn leaves floating above protoplasm. Oh that's so awesome. Doggie style. (The cool mom.) No I don't.

You're not alone anymore. P.O.S. Paul Kersey to Jack Kimball, what the sweet eff...

If John Giorno got religion, really tried to get it, or really really tried to let you think he got it, it would be horrendous. Horrendous and ugly.

It's never a fucking party. -- Jeffrey, Project Runway

Poet and friend Tom Beckett interviews me at his popular site Exchange Values. I enjoyed talking with Tom, and learned maybe a little too much trying to answer his questions. So my head is exploding, but I'm really grateful. Thanks again, Tom.

I'll be the first to agree each poem from BAP 2006 that Behrle has pooed over deserves it. His baloon commentary is too spot on, as it whir. But this constant trouncing of bears and leprechauns has got to stop. These little ones are a whole race of elves. And bears are among my deepest sex fantasies. What can you be thinking, Behrle?

Slumming within The Wall Street Journal: This catalog from Dan Golden of specialized "contexts" and processes for admitting mediocre candidates, offspring of investor and celebrity classes, pisses me off. The blatancy of Brown and Duke's "systemized pursuit" of rich kids belies lack of embarrassment in building endowments through plundering ranks of the second-rate. Someone should do a series like The Wire on greedy arrivistes in elite admissions, advisory boards, and university officers, beginning with presidents.

The lead in to the article: "How Lowering the Bar Helps Colleges Prosper: Duke and Brown transformed themselves and bolstered their reputations by targeting the children of the rich and famous." Bolstered reputations lowering the bar. The new Tin Age standard.

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Oh, it's you. Persona non barter.

So, Buddha tells me you're a baby.

Ten gallons of gray, please.

It's powerful to give names to feelings. Circumstance. Community. Switcheroo.

Poetic proposition: I have to destroy his world to get back to mine.