Kevin Thurston asks for an example of "fake improv of mechanized procedures," a phrase I used yesterday in a small litany of newer ways to plan composition. I think, in passing, my descriptor is a bit overweight, tho, thanks to the term mechanized, even as mechanics in the broadest sense, a physics engaged with forces and displacements, pertains. Algorithmic processes would be a more inclusive term, one that might cover the urgency Christian Bok has recently expressed in interview:

Postmodern life has utterly recoded the avant-garde demand for radical newness. Innovation in art no longer differs from the kind of manufactured obsolescence that has come to justify advertisements for "improved" products; nevertheless, we have to find a new way to contribute by generating a "surprise" (a term that almost conforms to the cybernetic definition of "information"). The future of poetry may no longer reside in the standard lyricism of emotional anecdotes, but in other exploratory procedures, some of which may seem entirely unpoetic, because they work, not by expressing subjective thoughts, but by exploiting unthinking machines, by colonizing unfamiliar lexicons, or by simulating unliterary art forms. ["Xenotext Experiment," Postmodern Culture]

Bok's writing would be an excellent and I think central sampling of the kind of fake improv I am beginning to admire more and more. To speak of Bok's work broadly, Eunoia restricts word choices to a single vowel, attempting an Oulipo-like "mathematical surrealism" that "formulates methodical … procedures for the production of literature," according to Bok, this fascination with mathematics and linguistic constraint also showing up in his Crystallography and in a new project, Xenotext Experiment, which he describes as more "formalistic innovations." Minus his downgrading of the humanities and the subjective, I would sign on to Bok's ambitious experiment and see this also as central to what could be admirable or valuable about fake improv: epistemic research. Again from his interview in Postmodern Culture:

Unlike other artists in other domains where avant-garde practice is normative, poets have little incentive to range very distantly outside the catechism of their own training--and because they know very little of epistemological noteworthiness (since they do not often specialize in other more challenging disciplines beyond the field of the humanities), they tend to write about what they do know: themselves, their own subjectivity. The idea that a writer might conduct an analytical experiment with literature in order to make unprecedented discoveries about the nature of language itself seems largely foreign to most poets.

Here's another contrastive prop. Writing from a plan or not. I set this up as a contrast, not a divide, nor a dichotomy, because to varying and contrastive degrees most writers I know work from fuzzy-to-fairly-clear preconceptions, theories, models of structure, sets of procedure, and more, while engaging openly or slyly with chance as 'it' intervenes, augmenting and/or upsetting our plans. Most writers practice this contrast, reworded: Writing from a plan and not. The contrasts between how much we plan and how much we leave to chance are remarkable, then, and the outliers, those who work mostly with or without a plan, interest me. One contemporary prose writer who works almost exclusively according to plan would be epistemologist Israel Scheffler whose dozens of closely argued analyses follow without diversion from categorically ordered and extensively subordered outlines. It's harder to come up with counterparts in poetry. Inscribing reactively within matrices of received lyric traditions, Pound is an imperfect, inscrutable, now-distant example. Were the dozens of scrolls hanging above his desk, the piles of open books against the walls, outlines to his verses? Or were they schemata-as-points-of-departure, that is, points of invention, for lunatic improvisation? More immediate, most formalists follow schemes, but we base our opinions of them, I believe, on how well they improvise.

So the other side of the contrast, the in-yr-face improvisers, hold my attention. Hannah Weiner is perhaps our most 'public' example. The young John Wieners (and I would stress the elder even more). There are texts and opuses that look unplanned and mostly improvised. The names are familiar. O'Hara, Ceravolo, stretches of Notley, Mayer. Sometimes Spicer, sometimes not. The wildness of not knowing where each is taking us would be a common feature. What makes today's practice noteworthy is the layering of plans and improv. It's only possible post-Coleman and, in poetic terms, post-Coolidge to speak adequately of fake jazz and look for positive results. Similarly, the fake improv of mechanized procedures -- to point to one pop phenomenon in poetry today -- allows for a number of false clues along the way to sketching the contrast between plan and no plan. The suggestion is that this contrast is an entry to further inquiry about what the writer and the writing are doing.

I am __________.

I believe in __________.

I appear tough but vulnerable with a wily __________.

There is no reason I should __________.

I am forbidden to __________.

I flubbed a sacrifice __________.

What happens in my head is __________.

I often begin humming __________.

I have a glorious set of __________.

People fear me because __________.

I take my name from __________.

I say __________.

Alberto dropped his disguise, ran into his boss's office to audit the stoner terrorist cortexes on display there. "That was an NSA program. Give me a break. An NSA program." Everyone who was buying it suddenly was caught off guard -- the ensemble of voices, emanating from the heads of previous ex-attorneys, warned, "It's more of a grass-roots feeling, at first, has this bizarre sensuality that almost feels subversive, but..." The choice for A was plain, join the heads or run.

A --

The topic is perjury -- how to flip it for something bigger and better like resignation.

Let's fuck the truce, Albert. Gallows humor for the prez's honchos, now, and photo-realist teaser for Afghani excavators and squatters who come to gloat later, amid disaster, that's your flavor of feces au lait (Turkish). According to the web, the end of the west will be ongoing, and everything in our government's decline so far conforms loosely to the trajectory of a dour pendulum strung from lethal GOP vines dripping more forehead fluids, settling to a bloated equilibrium by Indictment Twenty (or so), which ideally will disinfect previous pages, bringing it all 'home' to the Smithsonian, with new initiatives in rendition and toxicology, party scenes with fund-raisers holding on to a tree-of-life and making it / rafts of Congresspeople that don't (too difficult to balance insulin and the intensity of training). Peace mongers (and, repeat, fuck them) think everything depends on jumping off first or -- the same but more efficient -- being perceived as first to jump into a wicked, ugly piece of work, a foolproof contract to remain silent, de-familiarizing the unpalatable, making you, A, float off somewhere to save the children, crossing under a secure bridge over the fluffy waterways of op-ed rehash, cutting through the gutted sumacs of habeas corpus and into a nation's half-decade of mourning that burns brightly between tribal gaming and utter neglect, then getting a bunch of loyal vets and nay-sayers to smile, sipping you up at Last Drop. So far, the marts have these coffee mugs decaled with a heat-sensitive world map. They've been selling briskly. When they're filled with steam and foam, the Gulf shorelines retreat in trippy flames. Your face could be next. Have the day off, yours,

-- Vice

We go for the moody and unexpected. And. We can make you not care.

Apache? More than the women, I'll miss the vehicles.

Hey, you know, women rule.

We contain the universe, all genders, all extant possibilities. David Kirschenbaum has about 27 lives at last count. And about as many free passes. Those last two sentences don't mean anything if like me you haven't done something with the impresario, our Jack Black (not Michael Ian Black) or, phenotypical in another sense, our Martin Short, sure, but for better or worse, he's no Tammy. No l'Ombre dans Bois. No Missy.

Ahem, this space was just hacked. (Damn, the premium site meter let them through!) And I apologize for my inability to delete any passages posted below. Somebody named Melissa did this. I've been working hard and I personally mean no offense to anyone old -- or young, for that matter. What's another of my main projects? Another novel. Novelette. It's part two of a trilogy that I started, "The Haunted Hillbilly." New title: "Crack in the Snow Smells." I'm a third of the way through. So far it stars me. In the novel I act like a teen Gene Wilder, only feminine. That's how cute. I showed it to Jason, Lissa, and Annie and they thought it was okay. Characteristic of my interests? Oh, yeah. I'm Melissa.

To anyone even thinking of nominating this space as exemplary of a well-reasoned thinker's blog: Are you freakin writing beyond your means or, more likely, beyond your age? Let's call them the Others -- Generation Tubes (GTs), the peer-savvy twenty-somethings (yes, they're still using the term, oldie), having been opened fire on by the overt sexuality of elders' e-zines of the earlier part of the decade, do not think that writing a disconsolate verse or slapstick tone poem explicitly fragmented for whacky uploads is somehow unmanly or unladylike (pick a trim), a perception held by many of us old and much older, nearly-blind hardened resonators. "We are hardened resonators," the drive-by crushers gatherering among the GTs chant, tauntingly. But free from qualms about whether a poem stinks or merely "smells" of another fan-scape in the future, cohort-approved Others are transforming thug culture and, accordingly, the lit headspace, a change that can be verified by craning your neck, surgeon, and checking things out. 1. GTs have few preconceptions, because nobody can know what others will think that far off, period. 2. Where's the danger line between a bully that lies and a wise guy. That's a question? 3. "I think wise guys my age are more adventurous," taps Anonymous on his silent keyboard, smirking fraternity-like out of a false sense of hormonal advantage. "But there are so many trends with wise guys putting in extras to come off winners, writing good just seems normal."

~~

Yeah, it's war out there. Down with youth. Down with the cults, the Others, the GTs.

~~

In conclusion, it's a corporate takeover. We've been crying for days, Missy and me.

A lot of Dutch people go Dutch. I hate it.

I go clubbing, shopping, and I like standing outside the various embassies. I finally tried my hand at cinematography. What are the chances of two scripts about Truman Capote? A band of my friends ejaculated in one, and after, we feasted on a plate of roasted grouts (a group of four), with a puddle of butter up the middle, and salty farmer's cheese. Each swell of the communal tide melted me down. We were a community, just enjoying the way life is, adrift.

I moved to the Delft coast, Rijswijkse Waterweg, onto the dunes of Irontown, because my writing is at the salt shore's edge, just across from the Spread Eagle where I've bagged the ultimate, the dainty, newly built priest's house, along with the priest.

I'm walking now in thriller sunshine.

I'll have to let you know how that is.

A day filled with desire and joy. I'm rearranging bookcases, loosening their ties to the alphabet. This morning I placed two books by Doug Nufer in the Pound section. Crazed color swirls down the Nufer spines, flashing off the thicker, more solemn backs of the Pounds. I'm not free of the alphabet yet, because the p section is close enough to the n of Nufer. My next move (I'm going to get help pulling books down and reordering them) is to color-sort the works, fuchsias, whites, lemons, aquas, grays -- maybe bands of grays and then blacks, since there are so many of them. When I do this, maybe in a couple of months, starting with pinks and reds, the spine to Dodie Bellamy's Cunt-Ups will line up with Joe Ceravolo's The Green Lake Is Awake, along with several endpapers of John Ashbery's, The Tennis Court Oath, Flow Chart, Three Plays. Other reddish-to-pinks: Kathy Acker's Pussycat Fever, Brenda Bordofsky's The Female Skeleton Makes Her Debut, as well as Past Tense by Jean Cocteau and All Ears by Dennis Cooper. Spines to Dennis's Frisk and Try will slip into the gold section, as will C. F. MacIntyre's translation, Stéphane Mallarmé Selected Poems and Pierre Reverdy: Poète d'aujourd'hui by Jean Rousselot and Michel Manoll. Novel and renewed associations beckon. Brenda Iijima's backend, Around Sea, wiggling in its half-gold, half-orchidness, a toss-up.

Had I only thought a little more, a little harder I could have scooped the best name in the blog biz and, then, I could have blurted this out, let's give a warm fucking lies welcome to...

Would never have guessed I'd be praising a conservative who cried when Richard Nixon resigned and who worked for the Pentagon as an intelligence officer at the Guantanamo tribunals for six months. Yet Stephen Abraham emerges as a patriot who, based on his experience as a member of the military's legal team, authored a crucial affidavit that analyzes quality of arguments. Abraham notes convictions built on accusations without details or documented evidence. Abraham's affidavit seems to have helped set a precedent. "The detainees' lawyers filed his seven-page affidavit in court on June 22," according to The New York Times. The affidavit "was sharply critical of the hearings and the evidence they used, saying 'what purported to be specific statements of fact lacked even the most fundamental earmarks of objectively credible evidence.' On June 29, the Supreme Court announced that it would hear the detainees' case." The Court in effect reverses its earlier decision not to review the case, a rare change of heart.

It's bracing to witness the railroad thrown off track, especially when the issue at hand comes down to poor language and weak argument, crystalized here as a matter for orders of freedom.

Finally, regarding greenstuffs, I crave ampoules of eucalyptus.

Also cucumber.

I 'grew up' thinking to approach fashion, much less style, and still less esthetics, based on a given decade was nonrigorous, arbitrary. What kind of organizing principle is a run of ten years? Well, now that we're racing toward the latter part of the nameless decade -- the oughts?? -- I'm not sure. Like its namelessness, this decade is vaporous as no other. The breathy dim emitted by open pockets half-as-full, thanks to the shrinking iPod. (Dieter, watch your iPhone contract until it's slung around your wrist telling you how much more to take off.) Sure, cars are buff, but how about a new Hummer that's much less of a big deal, and German and Japanese automakers have hybrid SUVs that look and function like li'l limos puffing less air. And there's the smallish Prius as well as the mini Cooper.

Color, though, is the greeny vapor I fix on. How olive shifts to vetiver or chartreuse, fading hunter to aroma basilicum, dark lawn to minted ice, yellow sage to citrus spritzes, and multiples of khaki to translucent shades of tea sprigs in Kyushu spring.

One should know the rules before one obeys them.

Idiots in the majority take the bullets. Why?

What constitutes a fair tarring?

Trooper slays nut wearing a tuxedo.

Secretary of defense weeps over a condolence note.

The earth is not the earth, but the airport has strength and balance and Duma unanimity.

France is imaginary. Your words saved me. You gave me channels to be there, and the nerfs won.

One thing Continental Review needs to perfect is how the video stills link to YouTube. It's hit and miss now. While I'm at it, how about featuring newer stuff up front?

Wouldn't it be great if you could poke a small opening in the body, front to back, crisp and round like a three-hole punch. Tag and tie you. Piercing for good. It can't be a frequently moving part, to start. Not hands or feet. Not the eyes. Perhaps a hollowing-out aimed at the gluteus medius that skirts your sacrum and pelvic girdle, popping from the adductor longus, topside, avoiding your long bone altogether. Might hurt down there, though. To play it safe, the shoulder goes first. Smack between the infra- and supra-spinatus near the top in back, down and out your latissimus dorsi. The right one, not the left (over your heart). Facing you, if the hole slants down back to front, yow! we'll have to look up to see through you. You know, for real.

Exurban landscape architectonics. Pre-wrap parties. The Yale Club. I’ve often wondered how far we can stretch American branding of self-absorption. Michael Friedman’s Martial Dawn (Turtle Point 2006) goes on a short rocket ride to Mars and its two moons, where films get reshot while Russian sex slaves (cosmonauts) preen on Knoll white leather chairs. Tomorrow, today. Movie directors rule the planets, actors consume the background, bar restrooms serve for cultural exchange. Widgets of spiritual nihilism: “Their lives seemed complete, but if Julia had learned anything from her studies in Tibetan Buddhism, she knew they were also completely empty.” That’s page 5. Where do we go? Photosynthesis slows down, but it’s handled off page as an accounting problem; inflatable dolls are bandied; and it’s comforting still to find uncool males enraged by happiness and success. Pleasant name drops, Naropa, Hans Hoffman, Marvin Gaye. I did say American. An unfocused brilliance that's determined, that is, fated to watch others have a field day.

It's easy to take logic, smarts, and well-mannered discourse for granted. And tho the combine is rarer in the domain / minefield of poetry, there are a few who practice along these lines daily. Tom Beckett's blog is a touchstone for me, as Tom is a frequent blogger whose writing across poetry and prose models is bright, civil, always noteworthy (as in I take notes) and it often surprises me with other tricks and perçus I can admire or envy, depending on my mood. In short, Tom is one of the good guys, and yesterday 7/12, he approached another, Allen Bramhall, in a preview of "poetics excess" in Allen's exciting two-ton Days Poem. "A gentle surrealist attitude floods the tone," Tom says.

Finally, a disinterested observer, poets are "imbued with their own intractability." -- Ange Mlinko, at Harriet.

Hey guys, Lanny, Henry, Anne, and Kasey are off on new tracks, maybe separate tracks in this ghosty roundtable on folk lineage (or something like that), that slippery term I brought up a couple of days ago. Maybe I don't know dill about folk art, still I know something about incompetence firsthand, and it strikes me (stop, please) that the role for most poets in the American democracy of mass and now niche media is to speak up, make mistakes, and be ignored, because in a land of equality and freedom, unlike England, say, everyone jabbers and maybe only your bed buddy listens between outbursts of joy. In that bedroom, then, the American poet looks, to me, like a semi-reclining stick figure pulling her own, whittling away at something new and improved, you know, and if she's lucky, scratching or tapping notes off that mad street person overheard, outside or on TV, frothing just a bit or, alternatively, lifting language from her buddy nodding off in bliss. The eccentric caricature I have in mind is an isolated voice within a remote crowd of voices. What I attempted with the now-debated term folk lineage was to suggest that this communal yet self-imposed eccentricity is a conditional norm for an American poet to find herself in. Another part of what I meant to imply (but only now I'm saying it) is that group behaviors among poets -- look, poets have to have fun! -- force us to rethink the value and potentials of that solitary stick figure as a poet model. And, finally in backformation, of sorts, I'll go way out here and suggest until we figure new values and potentials, the facticity of the singleton, the crank, the misfit, the folksy innovator is very much in our blood, raising expectations that she still show up and tell us off.

"...bowled over," Kevin Killian previews John Wieners's Book of Prophesies, edited by Michael Carr.

There are a couple of problems with Gary's forms of disagreement that I think bring this set of posts to a close. One problem is the rush to miss / dismiss the contrast I attempt between folk temperament and collective procedure. Gary addresses the folk art idea as pedestrian and finds the contrastive proposition concerning other-directed practice moot, since MFAs, for example, did not exist in Stein's time. A more receptive (and less anxious) reader would acknowledge that indeed one distinctive feature of our current era is that technological entities, such as applied arts graduate study, e-lists, etc. expand options for group poetic practice, but they also set up analytical challenges with regard to the monad, in the neo-Platonic sense of the term: where is the individual? how does the individual get expressed? to what end? and so forth. These are not sophomoric or middlebrow questions.

Neither of my italicized terms -- folk temperament and collective procedure -- is particularly bulletproof -- what does "folk" mean, for instance? If you're ready to receive a broad notion of "folk art" applicable to individual production, you'll recognize -- quite unlike so-called cultural, regional, or ethnic folk art -- the term denotes nontraditional, eccentric expression that can be innovative. Choose your web sites cleverly, and you can come up with other descriptors, brut, unschooled, naïve. But the core or prototypical meanings of individual "folk" production (and even the looser term "folksy") pertain to Stein throughout her writing, commonplaces interests, gardening, food, her observing what's in front of her al fresco.

...to cut our hair and not want blue eyes and to be reasonable and obedient. To obey and not split hairs. [Ha!] ...we get up and say we are awake today. By this we mean that we are up early and we are up late... (Geography & Plays)

It was a great pleasure I cut all the box hedges and we have a great many and I cleared the paths... (Wars I Have Seen)

Rhubarb is susan not susan not seat in bunch toys not wild and laughable not in little places... (Geography & Plays)

Tiny dish of delicious which
Is my wife and all.
And a perfect ball. (Bee Time Vine)

kiss me kiss me ... I'll let you kiss me sticky... (Painted Lace and Other Pieces)

All the plays a garden. Little screen. Not collected and spacious not all so old. And more places have the behold it. The best example is mustard. A little thing. (Geography & Plays)

Now you can agree to see these passages as valid evidence of Stein's potential connection to folk lineage or you can hurriedly choose to split other, finer hairs. But there's nothing fine in complaining that I rely "almost entirely on the sum-effect of the writing." It smacks of some walrus disease when the "baffled" complainer cites not a word from Stein, but unloads survey-course underlined keywords to delimit her work as that of a cubist, a linguistic fine art genius, while attaching these to bad expository usage, "well-worn cliché," "general-consensus," to point to two. (Sorry.)

I'll take Gary at his word that Stein's example matters to him. I figured as much when I linked to "Gertrude Stein and the Natural World" previously. In that short essay I do argue (these blog entries are sketches, after all) that Stein is a naturalist, an empiricist, a scientist with regard to what she sees and what she makes from her lines of vision. A notion to keep in mind is that her 'cultural data' come first, not from other writers, but from her detailed lab work at Radcliffe with William James, coiner of the phrase "stream of consciousness." Rather than a cubist, mark Stein as experimentalist in the field. At my peril, I guess, I cite more than a dozen passages from Stein and even more than that number from other readers. It's feeble scholarship but substitutes, now, for mere assertion and opinion.

The phone is ringing.

It's not the phone.

It's the wind chimes.

More from the Elsewhere comment box.

Gary asks a second time for a list of folk artists / poets. He seeks to "clarify," but one aim of mine is less instrumental, to come up with writing samples to show folk artistry developing in contexts of a writer's life and aesthetic behavior that's more perplexing than one's desire for paraphrase or clarity, and more enticing. I offered lines from Joe Ceravolo as one sample, and I'll look at another, below. And as I asserted yesterday, Gary's first stab at a line-up is a suitable point of departure, for me. (I'm not in the tree-making business, just yet, and it's likely that personnel for the job of tree-hugging or tree-dwelling shift, reader to reader. So? I accept your candidates, Gary. So?) If "everyone in 20th century poetry I read" is a misfit, then perhaps Gary and I borrow from the same writers. Although I'll stipulate that when I say "misfit," I am not suggesting so much one's obvious disconnect from 'mainstream life,' more one's deliberative (although not always thoroughgoing) break with mainstream sub-branches, also known as -- to borrow a phrase -- others' (and more to the point, other poets') cultural data. The gist of my last two entries is to posit that there is a palpably independent temperament to American poetry that wills solitary vision, a distinctive feature of folk art practice, I think, and one that contrasts sharply with recent other-directed practices that come off as corporate / institutional (MFA credentialing, e.g.) or, more generically, culturally-determined group behavior.

Gary, I'm picking up not only your disagreement and your readiness to quibble over whether this temperament is critically germane, but also your outright resistance to historical and biographical contexts. One ought not argue that social interaction precludes singleton artistry. To illustrate, turn to another of your candidates. There are uncontroversial facts -- Stein befriended Picasso, possessed important modernist paintings, and succeeded as a writer -- that contributed mightily to her attraction and that of her 'salon,' resulting in one's ability, as outsider, to formulate coarsely superficial reductions, such as she is "*the* avant-gardist [sic] to see in Paris." Do these facts render Stein's life, her behavior, or the writing any more defensive vis a vis her evolving into her unique folksy temperament, or make her opus any less outrageous as a singleton's effort to surpass conventional perception and representation to pioneer in something never thought of before?

Should they may be they might if they delight
In why they must see it be there not only necessarily
But which they might in which they might
For which they might delight if they look there
And they see there that they look there
To see it be there which it is if it is
Which may be where where it is
If they do not occasion it to be different
From what it is.
(Stanza XV in the notebook manuscript of Stanzas in Meditation [cited in Ulla Dydo, 1990])

As I pointed out earlier, these lines constitute a meta-conceptualization of representation, fluctuations of mind not only in the process of perceiving but also making something "(f)or which they might delight" as Stein puts it. Stein offers that persons and personhood can make a virtue out of necessity to see "if they delight / In why they must see." Stein, empiricist and outlier, for the first time in American English instructs us in the tantalizing rudiments of the contemplative life of delight in looking as well as seeing, and of pleasurable inquiry into the "why" of seeing.

Anyway.

Gary writes at Elsewhere:

Read the Humor discussion at Jacket. A bit long, but interesting. Jack poo-poos it. Then, today, this, also from Pantaloons: "Yet if we list the giants of the art, starting with Dickinson and Whitman, the American lineage has largely involved singletons, cranks / misfits, and outliers to institutional or even peer influences."

Really? Stein? Pound? Williams? Olson? Creeley? Ginsberg? O'Hara? Mac Low? Coolidge? Baraka? Berrigan? Notley? Mayer? Bernstein?

Pound was definitely a crank, but hardly a loner--in some ways he practically invented our sense of what a "poetry community" might be. We can nit-pick about who is or is not a "giant" above, but even Jack would have to admit more than a couple of them. Not all are without their cranky moments, but these aren't people who spent their lives barricaded in garretts, nor staving off then-recent cultural data from their friends & others.

Who are the giant American loners of the 20th century? Is Stevens still a giant? Was Marianne Moore ever one?

Was Ceravolo--setting aside whether or not he was a giant--himself a loner, some "pure product" (e.g., folk artist) of America? I could be wrong, but I don't think anyone without a telephone ever won the Frank O'Hara award.

Curious now to see Jack's Sephirotic Tree.

Nice gibe, Gary, save your resuscitating clichés like garret, staving off culture, and pure product. Not my mode of thinking, at present. You question whether a slew of candidates fit into the folk artist category, "Stein? Pound? Williams? Olson? Creeley? Ginsberg? O'Hara? Mac Low? Coolidge? Baraka? Berrigan? Notley? Mayer? Bernstein?" (I already mentioned Williams, in passing.) You admit Pound was a crank, right? That's an understatement. His influence and will to influence went beyond folk art status, but he hardly needed or sought others' confirmation, nearly dying alone, I'm sure you know, of wicked self-assurance, a crank's crank and a misfit. Stein, you may remember, was an exile. She also lived openly -- some say flamboyantly -- with her female love before the descriptor lesbian came into common use. Misfit. Olson trained at Harvard GSAS but couldn't go though with it, couldn't cut it with formal academics (until Black Mountain, which of course was not formal). Institutional outlier. He in fact helped invent an alternative to the institution that was so sui generis it could not be sustained, much less replicated. If you're looking for "purer," or more absolute examples of original behavior and folk art from outliers and misfits, consider at least half your candidates. And if you're serious about the telephone connecting us, garret to garret, robbing us of the chance to be loners, I'll put you on hold, thinking you are exceptionally humorous.

[Tried posting this to Elsewhere directly -- hasn't gone through yet.]

TV news, studies show women look to scrawny guys for long term, muscles for lovin. That's the standard in gay hoods, no study required.

By the way, how can you tell when your block is turning straight? When scrawny males steering strollers are wearing last year's pedal pushers and Gavia tops.

~~

American poetry, the really good stock, is folk art. You might not get that from recent practice organizing the craft, MFAs, procedural and process groups, and the like.

Yet if we list giants of the art, starting with Dickinson and Whitman, the American lineage has largely involved singletons, cranks / misfits, and outliers to institutional or even peer influences. Some see these independent operators as amateurs, technological rookies. Consider convention-follower and technologist Helen Vendler, her maintaining academic disdain for and excluding William Carlos Williams from Part of Nature, Part of Us: Modern American Poets decades after his death, or more than a century after Dickinson's death Vendler's put down of the Complete Poems as "bedside reading." Notoriously wrongheaded assessements like Vendler's notwithstanding, masters of the independent streak, folk tradition, upend such misguided convention and over time keep the art vibrant.

Three generations (or so) after Joe Ceravolo, younger poets like CA Conrad and Joe Massey get fired up, understandably, by 64 pages of entirely original poetry in Ceravolo's Fits of Dawn. Published 42 years ago, the diction is iridescently contemporary. While an epigragh from Carl Jung strikes me as wedded to mid-20th century concerns for the psycho-spiritual (in its place, one might now turn to a more socio-eco analyst like Baudrillard), Ceravolo whips cant into impossibly acceptable 21st century rave --

Sorrow
rejavelin pend Y? man
con anima mammal rest take
coating poking quicking

Beyond you jar unself
aroma ex almul chad rugyrebel sex... (Part I, page 9)

No paraphrase required or plausible (maybe in another generation??), but a tempo so ready for mp3 download I want to shake. And the producer, Ceravolo, sweated these lines in a Jersey suburb, a civil engineer married to a sweetheart, living like a salaried bourgeois (an unconventional masque for a poet), a few exits from Columbia U, pal of Ted Berrigan (his publisher!) and others in the East Village, but -- you know -- independent from them. And maybe more than a step up and ahead of most. First recipient of the Frank O'Hara award. A big hiatus in critical attention after his early death. Guess what? Doesn't matter much. The stock is rising.

I'm not saying they're all unfunny. Just a number.

Of them.

(Oh, another thing, seriously unfunny.)

Cartoon ideas.

A character walks around thinking: Ok, the flying boulder missed me (got someone else). Now I'm doomed. [I know this guy.]

Another character says: "I'm straight with gay tendencies." [He's for real!]

A comic panel: The sky's all blue above the round, open bar. Bags of different colors pulled over their heads, unfunny writers theorize about humourous poetry.

Ange Mlinko has joined Harriet's roster. Link to right.

Fitting enough, George W. Bush commutes Scooter Libby's jail term two days before July 4; the announcement comes during the longest nonnews cycle of summer, wishful tactics on the part of Bush's operatives to smother opposition to the decision amid invidiously patriotic footage of sputtering fireworks and tearful waves from home to troops in battle. The timing is cynical but trivial. Granting clemency to a perjurer who obstructed special prosecution regarding treason invites further scrutiny. If Congress does its job, the battle will be joined, even though the targeted are seasoned. The lesson for upper echelons after Nixon is to wipe away evidence, no tapes, no semen stains, no testimony from a witness-perpetrator let out of the brig. But the high crimes intimated by the cover-up should be solved.

Noted in passing, comment box contributions are often drafts of essays (that is, tries) that return to the overfamiliar, with which you are -- and it's now documented -- obsessed, vexed. Your contributions convey the limited, happy-to-be-piping tonality of having been composed long before the comment box showed, text mechanisms as if sprung into action after a long sleep in a hard drive, munition-in-waiting. A final essay (that is, your full argument) is tough, possibly, but pitiable. To a misguided enthusiast.

Gee. Can't know for sure until it happens. Möglicherweise it would be fun to send poems to a lite zine and have the authority figure, the lite housemaster, the garden of verse gatekeeper, add on phrases and delete or switch words to improve my poems. I've always wanted a secret collaborator. Sounds truly underground.

Another in the just finished category, Adam DeGraff's All This Will Become Dust in Just 3 Minutes (We Have a Fax Machine 2003). Here's a line, "You knocked me off my toes!" DeGraff is definitely lonesome, slapping his readers around, playing with tenses and festering blurps from the penis, and the like. The poetry sounds out and means physcial contact. And it's graphically physical, too, thanks to LRSN, unacknowledged but it's an easy guess -- pupil-massaging half-moon optics on the jacket and a tilted, handscripted index starting, scrupulously, with "1. Title Page." End page thanks Mary Burger for donating cover stock. So it's also a collective, in the West Coast sense of the word, a project team. Wobbling on, I note efforts to tap one's inner urchin, buffoonisms, and conflation of wunderkind with manly lust for opposites:

...I hate tricks
So this is from before I was four
Whatever kind of affection from you
Yoo hoo! You got some
Butter Mrs. worth
I was always so
Heartbreakingly close

Me too, I think or thought. If I were editing a lite zine, maybe I'd drop the word "Butter," leaving more room for the reader's imagination to spread at room temperature. But I'm not, and you know, this persona sort of grows up on me. "Let me tell you / this," DeGraff inserts deeply, "someone in / some future time / will think of us."

I don't care,

I am not going to see Ratatouille,

I will not buy an iCon,

& Cheney, sir, war is a sin.

Just finished Doug Nufer's Mudflat Man (soultheft 2006), a summer read: "and this is my lovely wife, Electra," a deeply tanned man in an open white satin shirt and a gold necklace said, forcing Elvin to introduce Shirley and himself to them.

Just finished Clark Coolidge's Space (1970), a hardcover like-new copy given to me by a young poet from Worcester who came to Michael Carr and Bruce Andrews's reading last month; he just handed it over. Jasper Johns cover. Harper & Row publishers. You see how backward it's gotten? Almost forty years ago Harper & Row -- Coolidge -- hardcover. in / than / end // // look / an / mess. How about these titles. "Echo & Mildew"; "Milk on the Lob"; "Soda Gong"; "The Image Furnace, under Brine."

Just finished Ben Friedlander's The Missing Occasion of Saying Yes (Subpress 2007). A roundup of ten years and at least nine books. Musical cues everywhere. Last six of seven poems in the section "Covenant" end with the sound o. Antiquarian radiance. Shades of oaf -- neutralized! a bundle of moment. More soon.

Yeah, sorry for the prayer. Really sorry. It just got to my ethical critter. Part of a sermon by a lady I call my ex. I cleaned up some phrases, but stuck with "may I." Why not? You can guess what comes next. If I sneer at ethics, may I be delivered to the nearest pound. (Sundays were made for guess workers.)

Attending my first Sunday service in two decades, I came across this adaptation of a stoic's prayer.

May I be no one's enemy. May I never quarrel: and if I do, may I be reconciled quickly. May I love, seek, and attain good. May I wish others well and envy none. May I never rejoice in another's ill fortune, even one who wishes me ill. When I have done or said something untoward, may I make amends. May I achieve nothing that harms me or others. May I reconcile friends who are angry with one another. May I never fail a friend in danger. When visiting anyone in grief may I find healing words. May I respect myself. -- 3rd Century