At every year's end I find myself plunging into lists, asking questions. What falls over the ditch? What's rotted so ready to lay it down? Fractious midwinter makes room for true snowfall. My greatest wish is to down flakes lost in their way like raisinettes with botulism, spinning machines gone iridescent while sketchy hacking out the details. O drum machines! Music in no order.

Yoga is so popular it's what it is everywhere, even in the bedroom. It's funny that such devastating existentialism is served at a fancy party.

In this one Nancy appears as an ashtray and the cowboys are spying on some other cowboys. Practice makes perfect.

Sometimes a partner can be deliberately and aggravatingly passive-aggressive. I'm kidding. I'm being sarcastic.

In making love, as in all things, "airy" is a terrible consistency for meatballs.

A friend reports they're reading dog waste at MLA.

In her mind you walked out on her blog.

Are you slapable? Am I? Hope so.

For To
Skip Fox
BlazeVOX 2008

I'm certain Skip Fox awaits the "mindful shimmer" of everyone's attention, dizzy but watchfully unbewildered; still, he's exacting, gee, golly...well, he must be pissed as he sits at his computer dashing off cris de coeur that do whatever the opposite is to rambling:

At what rate do you think, head down against the wind to weather it, whatever it is, from what notion of yourself (what box?) does it pour forth, from whence does it call, amid what welter, panties balled in confusion, or as a person sits, usually in a chair, to engage the light, luminous, the activity of ideas which dance about the room, around the table, books and that upon which you are sitting, I mean thinking, what do you think?

This is the first sentence, a "human mechanism," of about five in a piece titled "That's what I think at any rate." Except for Michael Gizzi, also unbewildered yet a big maybe when it comes to anger, there hasn't been a monologuist as fired up as Fox since Charles Bukowski whose own diction now and then needed a 5,000-mile testosterone check-up, come to think of it, just like Fox's.

Eat what You Fuck. Sticka for
a. cannibals
b. cattle ranchers
c. post-feminists
d. ADM

Fox won't let go of "vaguely accidental" thought, his own or that of others floated off in a "commonsense drift." Fox practices mixology, "Just took out the garbage. Talked to the horse and myself of premises, knots, and coordinates. We have testimony from Bernadette Mayer how much can happen even on the shortest day of the year." Mixed up sentences like these almost point to first-order conceptualism, before the schtick (and the Mayer reference is inarguably another pointer), but also a conceptualism broken into by particulate and self-deprecating humor, as "he was over-sensitive and stupid, not as rare as you might think or maybe you know all about this and only I am in the dark trying hard to recognize what we have in common, the personal." Fox goes on trying hard and succeeding in this mostly prose-poem "clarified as light" way, "having no blind spots only everywhere instead just light pouring thru..." well, not really, because he's always spinning around, interrupting: "Imagine a pear. A pert pair. That's my cracker." The blinking lights go on for 273 pages, "writhing in paroxysms of loathing," so it's a fairly large stigma and accomplishment, "due to ocular-brain-concurrence-function design." The moral is a life of design, "as fate designs, [ending] in something (arrive!), but disappears into a wisp." Further, we don't know "how our joints are packed into time," and our sensory apparatus, sight especially, keeps overcompensating, making nearly everyone's "horizon seem to rise as it recedes into the distance." Thus we're tricked at the get-go, by design or "[b]aited zero" or fate or "[l]eaky gusset of dawn ... It's coming soon. Relax." The trick leads one to further compensation, to drink or to poetry or to all three! as one is "drawn to stumble forth to the distraction of his being, a drunken gyroscope." No longer tricked.

More belatedness. I thank Don Share and Tom Beckett for their good words about pantaloons, even as I come across these words of mine that function, for now, as a statement of purpose —

Just because we attribute work to personality doesn't mean I'm not a brute with a hammer in my hand. My nailing us together takes a moment of your life.

Whatever takes substance and breadth, I'm not doing it!

Yeah. I know it's a little late for yule sentiment. So let's call it belated. It's a bitching image w/ text. Topnotch.

dbqb's write-ups for my webby xmases operate from that brainchild formula that converts one holiday into 12 to prop us up through the New Year. This is Geof's fifth response, making my Season's Greetings this year, like the others, a two-man show.

I hope the Bernsteins find comfort knowing that so many care deeply for them on the loss of their daughter Emma. This is one of those rare times when words seem useless. Memories, however, can save us. I knew Emma only from reading her enthusiastic travel notes and bright research ideas, which she posted on the Web. I had looked forward to her promising future as a substantial presence in the community of poets. I will remember her as a young poet, and I am sure that Emma will live a long time in many other people's memories.

Season's Greetings.

Advice for the would be romanitic (sic): Just try to be simultaneous.

Romantic or romanticist?

Worth considering.

Where's the poetry in blogging? In the last week or so, Bird Cam Torsos; Marvin, the Changeling; Bent Jade; The Trouble with Diaghilev; Expedite the Gypsy-punks (including comments); Family Crest Adventures; Reverse Collarbone; Who's Helping You or Land of Darwin (12/17, e.g.); Riot Act, Nuanced; Bohemian Fashion; Fast and Loose; Buzzword Encore; A Pearl Browser; The Pace of Couch Production; It Gets Bigger, among others. All tones, spiked.

Tom Beckett reviews Brenda Iijima's Subsistence Equipment for galatea resurrects 11.

B. M. Audemars climbed into a corporate charter jet that would take him from his relative seclusion in upstate New York out to Culvert Passage, CA, where he grew up. He hadn't been back to Culvert in 20 years or so, and he was looking forward to the cross-continent journey with a mix of curiosity and trepidation. "I remember being afraid constantly — afraid for my life," Audemars said of his childhood in the 1970s. "I was the skinny kid in lipstick wearing maroon cords on the way to a writing class at Presbyterian Culvert, Reformed, in between a gang of college business majors with bow ties and another gang of art school fools in black shirts and vests, and it was like, "How did I want to get beat up today, smacked with calculators or acrylic spray?"

For those who know Audemars by his three, top-of-the-charts initials, BMA, the brown-eyed, wavy-haired Vonnage spokesman, gadfly rapper, chic culture critic, word-crazed cartoonist, and poet-trampoline-artist who's become a smiling regular on reality shows like "Top Money Workin' the Nonprofits," "The Biggest Appropriator," "Dancing with Marjorie" and his wild dating program on A&E, "BMA Gets It On, A&E," the notion of a rough upbringing — part Harvard-and-Crips, part "Bard Bicycle Thief" — might come as a surprise. But Audemars seemed genuinely anxious about returning to his hybrid of a neighborhood where he says he was beaten up on a regular basis by the future M. B./F. A. crowd.

"Punched in the face. Mugged. Robbed. Knives. Guns. The whole thing," he said. "I used to accuse my parents of not loving me for making us stay in a neighborhood where every other kid was richer and more entitled." After roaming the still-transitional neighborhood of tear-downs squeezed between shiny mansions (shiny in the rain) and so-called estates for an hour or so, he took a last look around before hopping back into the Lexus (with self-drying brakes) to return to his jet. "In a way," he said, "cultural critique kind of saved me from all this."

Except that it didn't — not, at least, if you're talking about the getting-beaten-up-on-a-regular-basis part. In a way Audemars is still that kid in the tight cords fighting off the taller, wealthy kids, only now the roving gangs hitting him up for his milk money are literary. For the knife-sharpening snark squadrons of Harriet and a segment of the poetic elite, he has come to embody the Faustian bargain of celebrity in the writing game. He is portrayed, and often satirized, as a supernaturally talented poet who squandered his gifts for television, rapping and, even lower, cartooning — literally and figuratively — in the scattershot pursuit of fame, fortune and pink ruffled shirts. "He's almost gotten to the point where people in the poetry world feel sorry for him and want him back," said Johnson Kant, a professional gambler and author who has written for The Southwest Springfield (IL) Racing News and Weather. "He's this really brilliant guy, poemwise, who's forsaken everything that he's good at for some things that he's not good at. And that makes me really sad, because he's such a phony bastard."

Last year, Kant and the Lily Foundation announced on Harriet that they would hand out Golden Yea and Yuck Awards to the celebrity poets whom they considered the best and the worst exemplars of that strange breed. Among the dubious honors was the BMA Special Mention, saluting the "worst career move by a talented but wasted reprobate." (To his credit, Audemars gamely showed up at the South Beach Yea and Yuck Festival and received the award in person, even though Kant had "mercilessly and enthusiastically made sport of BMA many, many times," as a spokeswoman for Lily put it in a blog entry.)

The word "sad" seems to surface a lot when you bring up BMA's curious career. "We were talking the other day, another poem-obsessed person and I, and we were just saying how sad it was that he has disappeared," said N. V. Greene, the grande dame of New York scribes, and one of the first to celebrate Audemars's talent just a few years ago when he was the poet du jour at Bowery Poetry. "I do believe that 'Dancing With Marjorie' is kind of the last stop. Someone said, 'Oh, he'll never be back, if he can make a living doing commercials, rapping on TV, and cartoons.' I don't understand — has he totally lost that passion to write verse? Because there are poets that don't like to write, that can't write, and they just want to be stars. How could somebody be so talented and so gifted and just write writing off?" That, Greene explained, is because BMA is now largely a celebrity nationwide. "BMA still is doing sarcastic New York poetry, and his stand up comedy for Bed, Bath & Beyond is mostly wonderful, if you see him here in Manhattan or not," she said. "But somebody like BMA, who is exceptionally gifted, seems to have thrown it all away — that's why close readers and people with grad degrees and career arcs are so upset about it."

As the trip to California made clear, BMA has had a freakish, prodigy-like understanding of poetry from the very start. The rich mélange of Culvert Passage, he said, is where he picked up the cross-demographic appeal that would later compromise his inner narrative and propel him to stardom as a rapper, cartoonist, and, of course, national poet. "I don't think there is more of a cultural clash that sorta says 'fuck you' in your face anywhere than in Culvert Passage, unless it's the whole country," he said. "I think in many ways my worldview on dumbed down diction and duh quick-laugh images was formed here."

As soon as the Lexus pulled up in front of a two-story red-and-white house at 148-01 90th Avenue, where five members of the Audemars family and several boarders lived before the Audemarses moved to safer quarters in the early 1980s, he became swept up in a rush of Proustian triggers. As he dashed around the neighborhood, his memories of its past squalor ("There was an apartment in every building that sold art supplies ... I should have paid more attention ... My friend Eddie lived right here, he OD’d on paint thinner...") were crosshatched, over and over, with memories of poetics. He pointed to a spot on Millionaires Avenue where he'd read his first Bukowski, a bite of the rich life, indeed, for him. He tracked down the tiny patch of dirt on 150th where an elderly Californian woman named Vita once scratched out odes to squash and tomatoes. He made note of the burnt-out McDonald’s that his father, Raffaele, used to forbid him to set foot in before he finished writing a new round of sonnets.

"Key Agency," he said as he approached a darkened wine shop with a street poet's workshop in the back where he got his first public, a place that's still operating at night. "I used to bag metaphors here." This dislodged yet another memory — of how the young BMA would pocket a few coins from his workshop job and dart down the street to buy tracing paper, mirrors, projection candles, and the latest Marvel comics that his mother, Nicolina, could boil down for him back home while he was dipping his pens into ink pots, drawing. "I was conflicted even back then. Words or stencils?"

He was 11 when he got a job at a pizzeria-writing sweatshop, a distinctively Californian combo, on Setting Boulevard; there he became obsessed with perfectly calibrating the balance between the nice language of culturally inclusive haiku and the bubbles in fountain soda. Tim Ballin Hand, who was one of BMA's instructors at Key Agency and is now the president of the workshop, said that his star student could leave a distinctive imprint even with others in his class but not in his league. "You could tell when he diced language versus somebody else," Dr. Hand said. "You could pick his out of a group effort."

To understand why Audemars is perceived as a wayward son of American letters, it makes sense to go back to his triumph in 2005, when he started his writing and cultural critique blog. (It closed down in 2007.) People who fell under the spell of his ideas then still compare Audemars to an upstart Marcel Duchamp, and they slip into a reverie when they summon up their first encounter with his tiny but epically colorful cartoons replete with visual and verbal puns and ribald social satire. New York magazine rhapsodized over drawings and BMA's other efforts this way: "Sweet, immensely ugly nudes step all over complacent white males who have abandoned their egalitarian principles, an essentialist tableau nuzzled in blobs of urchin buffoonery; and smarting of tenderness we could die twisting in those blobs, die for their glowing upturns as well as their pratfalls within an essence of brave open struggle and subjectivity to overcome darker disembodied forces. Audemars pulls off such esprit with a panoply of crackling noises, paradoxical images, and shrewd, implausibly Orwellian discourse that positively gooses us blog readers, plunging us into paranoia, parlous candor, and savagery that mediate between death and a close call. Do these sound like the delusions of a madman? In less capable hands, maybe; in Audemars's, it's pure Charlie Brown genius."

While it's hard to grasp why a 'genius' would feel compelled to mambo alongside hip-swivelers like Marjorie Madoff and Corneille Kennedy, it can be equally surprising to hear that in his blog writing heyday, BMA was thought of as too much of a word-tinkering recluse. "The funny thing is that at that time, my partners and everyone in my world of poetry were always telling me I'm too serious," Audemars said. "This is what is so mind-blowing to me, and beats me down. I was always too serious and too pure and didn't see the bigger picture enough and didn't understand that writing and the cultural critique business were entertainment. I needed to take it easy and do pieces that were simpler and made people happy. So fuck you." He was urged, he said, to put fail-safe poetics bait on the agenda, and make it simple — pieces like rapping out sounds from porn videos using only two letters of the alphabet, or writing and then shredding a real heroic biography into confetti, or overwriting the document of his rich grandfather's last will-and-testament with the bolder fonts of a Sam's Club coupon for women's panties, half-off. He wrote rib-tickling précis, yes, but even those brought out the obsessive formalist in him. "So I proceed to concoct the short pieces with the most ever prosodic elements known to man. My first fractured one-page précis had 200 or 300 literary devices in it.”

If there was a specific moment when the sun began to singe BMA's wax wings, that would have to be 2006, when he made his reality-TV debut in "BMA Gets It On, A&E," a video vérité chronicle of the flirtations and stove fires in his Manhattan date-hunting days. For viewers, and for the show's producers, things went swimmingly, which is to say they went really badly for BMA. He couldn't land a date. A perpetual skirmish between BMA and Jeffrey d'Automne, the entrepreneur who was funding the show (and who secretly wanted to date BMA himself), escalated into a flurry of litigation, with d'Automne suing BMA and BMA countersuing d'Automne and BMA eventually being barred from entering his own apartment subleased by d'Automne — while BMA's mother, a cast member of the show and a lawyer, was still writing litigation briefs for both sides at the kitchen table. It was quite a mess. "That was weird, wasn’t it?" Audemars said. "When you say it out loud, it's like, 'How is that possible,' right?" He went on: "I think I took a lot for granted. I think when someone puts seven or eight million dollars into a program with your own name on it, and that someone is special, someone who actually wants to date you, it's a pretty big deal. You can't just think, 'Well, that's what he's supposed to do!' I think I underappreciated a lot of what was happening to me. I should have paid more attention."

Dr. Hand of Key Agency met with his former student during that dark phase and offered advice. "I said, 'BMA, dust yourself off and get back into the writing-culture-culture-writing make'em laugh business,'" he recalled. "At that time he still had his blog. I said: 'That's a jewel. Throw yourself into it and that's what people will focus on.' And for whatever reason, he just didn't listen to me, he didn't friggin want to do that. And he stopped talking to me. This is my interpretation — he had lost the fire for that, and had bigger dreams and aspirations. What a Caruso! Or Crusoe!"

Asked about BMA's game plan, Dr. Hand said: "First, I could give a flying you know what. Second, he needs more exposure to the public to get them on the hook. That's where BMA's thinking bigger: 'How can I pursue my passion for rap and cartoons and convey my knowledge about what's gone down the butt hole in this friggin culture of ours along with my oh-so-purely-distilled expertise in verse — do all of this in a way that doesn't just reach a couple boys or maybe they're girls who call his number, but thousands, millions addicted to his blog by first watching him stumble, lose it, and fall apart on tv?'"

Indeed, "BMA Gets It On, A&E" marked a shift in Audemars's public identity. Within a few months, the meticulous wunderkind from Culvert Passage had turned into a poetry-show Zelig. These days he has his new A&E show, "Duchamp and Me," and a new book, also called "Duchamp and Me," a cross-promo that seems a mission statement — an attempt, perhaps, to merge the public and private and past and present BMA and get back to basics. In contrast to his near-psychedelic experiments with literary language at Bowery Poetry and nuanced art historical imagery in his first cartoons, "Duchamp and Me," the book, features word-image recipes that often hinge on hand-me-downs, such as a longer piece where he has retyped the entire Who's Who from 2008 backwards page by page and called it "Ohw Show."

Still, does the disappointment of the elite lit crown grate on him? "I try not to judge any assholes for how they feel," he said. "If I make a judgment about it, then it will lead to anger and resentment, and the brakes dry... I don't want to really go there. How about a poem?" The answer and the question carried a distinct echo of advertising and therapy. "Well," he said, "there's been lots of therapy. And I should pay more attention."

"I've come to save the Earth." As Sylvester Stallone is to cryogenetic monkeyshines, Keanu Reeves is to mezzo nihilism and acerbic motivation. Victim and player within a now-20-year-old whisper campaign and running joke, stoner / adventurer / declawed pet Reeves comes back down to metro New York in The Day the Earth Stood Still, risking everything, subtracting himself from the emancipatory normality of alien dominance to attain spectral consciousness funded by excellent evolutionary altruism. As the infinite's agent Reeves is not reckless, iniquitous, or anatomically complex, though monotone and slightly bulbous. Looped to the gills like a slower yet more unpredictable Rod Serling ensconced in knock-off Prada, Reeves distorts the status-quo down on the otherworldly streets. "Where are we going?" This or that way. I guess so. Not particularly. Earth is therein implicitly and really fucked. Devoid of message (except it's sort of mankind at bottom and to blame), nonviolent but smacked down by a tendentious superego, and retroactively inarticulate as a coordinate, Reeves has no place to go now, having never before taken on an impurely ad hoc humanist-passivist role, and so not getting to pass Go, not getting quite to collect his core. "It's interesting that mid-December turns out to be a nice time to release summer-style action movies," Reeves projects his frustration with the typecast sneering at the collapsed bug life and geomancy of earned vision and natural voice. "I've got to get back to the city." Why bother, Buddha imitator? guileless as a pious, ethereal hulk who's sneaked his junk across the border to snatch up options on Boardwalk and Park Place, now subject to foreclosure. What worked for Reeves in the 1990s and the early 2000s pertains — perennially other and oppressed, self-loathing sexually, still no green card.

Home Video Review of Books is a starter idea. Mounted as a first (and rather belated) refuge for poetics commentary in the age of YouTube, the rashness of these visual reactions to new books of poems is discernable. I say reactions, because this isn't a compilation of criticality in the form of reviews; it's a grab bag of video gifts supplied asystematically from the Web (so they're regifts!) to convey notes of spectacle, tenuous attitudes, and cute-as-a-puppy associations. (There's consonance in the clips for Lisa Jarnot and Dan Machlin. Visual data on Kasey Mohammad — now taken down — and, especially, John Godfrey are off base.) Poet-collaborators Mathias Svalina & Julia Cohen edited the Review to make one of or both opposable points: This concludes our conception of video imagery as a poetics at this time; stay tuned.

It's not a real Xmas w/out spiking the temperament w/ something like a bi-coastal-straddling-the-pond-six-geese-alaying-into-a-mushroom-cloud thought or two. Thanks, Tom Raworth! thanks for whipping together atrocities of the UK-US political zeitgeist — that's a fresh Sarah Pallin! and she's packing flanks of moose, and there's every Anglophone's First-Dude Gordon Brown! And Santa! Santa! in your sleigh so bright, are you bringing us a bailout or taking it away tonight?

It has come to my attention that a poem is science fiction or it is not.

It was nice to meet you and your idea.

Process. Tease near-misses out of what process could mean. Stipulate minutes and subroutines to withhold and then expose your meanings like beans in flower without frontiers. Don't talk with your mouth full. Process, in other words, phrases of process. Discuss the cut-off points where process will meet and obeisantly turns into habits that muddle on, neither wifely caricature nor whore. Talk about process components and the stiff, gnomic atmospheres to bring accoutrements to terms for process, and definitions of all this. Take care, and take your time, since to criticize another's process is effrontery she'll remember, but off the mark, much like disapproving a pianist's shoes. You can do this, feel free, but don't expect to be asked back to her kitten-infested suite. Likewise, avoid rejecting her criticism, keep the smart bomb under wraps, knock the moment down with glances, nods, and inspire small talk while keeping everything under surveillance. You look great together!

An appalling, transgressive feat. Governor and chief of staff echo against the blur of ramshackle politics. (Threatening, thus compelling sympathy toward Tribune Co., no less. See below.)

Sooner rather than later we're probably going to wonder what to read for daily news since the number of reliable, inarguably uncompromised print sources is shrinking. Twenty-five years ago one of two international newspapers of record in English, The Times of London, was folded into the News Corp., militant enforcer of oligarchy masquerading as a media holding company, headed by Rupert Murdoch. Two years ago, the premier U.S. financial paper, The Wall Street Journal, was similarly annexed by News Corp. Independent but stranded, for now, the other English-language world newspaper of record, The New York Times is said to top Murdoch's list of next must-do acquisitions. Meantime, The New York Times Corp. is weighing options such as mortgaging new headquarters in Manhattan to shore up finances as circulation and advertising revenues continue to spiral down. Like News Corp., if on a smaller, less provocative scale, The New York Times Corp. has been amassing other U.S. news properties in the southeast, California, and New England, and the results for readers are hardly benign. Once a second-tier national paper along with The Chicago Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The Los Angeles Times, a few others — The Boston Globe has shifted focus more to regional rather than national coverage, and operates fewer bureaus with fewer reporters to compete with its owner of 15 years, The New York Times. There have been parallel downshifts in staff and coverage in most second-tier newspapers. Yesterday, the Tribune Co., holding company of both The Chicago Tribune and The Los Angeles Times filed for bankruptcy. This is bad news for newspaper readers everywhere. News blogging and cable broadcasting supplement and in some cases complement newspaper publication. But without a contest among first- and second-tier newspapers, that is, with print news manufactured by only a handful of holding companies, the essential documentation of our daily contents (our material satisfaction and discontents) turns radically deterministic.

It's not the most wonderful time of the year, btw. That would be six to seven months from now.

ready to marry
      the chopped
            off head

— CA Conrad

~~

A fear is haunting (whatever remains of) the contemporary Left: the fear of directly confronting state power. Those who still insist on fighting state power, let alone directly taking it over, are immediately accused of being stuck in the "old paradigm": the task today is to resist state power by withdrawing from its scope, subtracting oneself from it, creating new spaces outside its control.

— Savoj Žižek

For those, you, perhaps, and I, who are not up on how the divide can be played, today, Deeana Fong's pre-read video is exemplary. Divide? One part social mainstream, one part cool as nimble-existence-in-hell, although most of that cool is staging. (That's what Ron S. suggests, I think, in enforcing the divide between the avant and social mainstream — there is a poetry that's trail mix, so rhetorically vacuum sealed and narratively palatable anyone with a few years of advanced English in high school or better can crack it open and have some.) Fong's tv staging? Let's do it right here by the Bustelo in this I-could-care-about-food galley. The gestalt is to look urbanely offhand and sound normal. (You decide about the boyfriend's audible glee, clapping, etc. in the background.) The exposition, all around, is let's-not-make-this-elevated-or-fussy, but gawd let's get it done non-vulnerably. There's plenty of staging in the writing, too, where it's countable. A third of the way, when Fong says "Tell me about it," it's kinda clear that jumps in tone are deployed to signify irony and distance about, you know, every day for every one on the planet. When she says "You're much smarter than I am," Fong means at least a dozen things, socially. Sorry, "Let us celebrate with a vegan pot roast" is too domestic-witchy-much for me to swallow. And it's not St. Mark's Street. Just "the things I feel for you day in and day out" drives me crazy. Batwing crazy. (You decide. That will make things much clearer.)

Ted Greenwald
3
Cuneiform 2008

Here are the bizarre details, page 25, second stanza (of two).

Is it Peggy or Sue
I think I love you
Looking worldlessness
Remind me what's your name

Four lines capture the crucial goings-on in Ted Greenwald's 29th collection of poems: the pleasant complacency of clichéd language is upended, in this case in the deliberate problematizing of early rock 'n roll iconography, splitting chaste Peggy Sue in two; there is the shameless rhyming of Sue with the next line also ripped from the r 'n r songbook as is the last line; and there's the masterfully silly Line 3 that spins our entire cultural orientation on its heels, forcing speculation that the unstably-named Peggy, Sue or, in fact, Peggy Sue is not only worldless but looking into and out of the eerie, pathetic State of The Worldless. Welcome back.

And if you think page 25 is a lucky pick, turn to page 27, second stanza (of two).

Going to make a difference
Greens, cooling off
Projectile confidence
With birdsong

The first line is again boilerplate, a bloated participial (or gerundive) phrase uttered millions of times an hour; the second line, culinary description or acute art speak — either way greens are consonant with the brash birdsong in the fourth line. Once more, that odd Line 3 rips the 'scene' open, pitching its payload our way. It's not always so obvious that the third line re-orders each stanza, but frequently this is what happens, supporting one interpretation of the title 3. More satisfying is Ron Padgett's idea, blurbing that 3 "takes the mind in at least three different directions simultaneously..."

Another basis for the title is that the collection has three parts. Poems cited above are from "Going Into School That Day," pieces whose lengths alternate between eight lines on right pages and 14 lines on left pages, and which borrow "words of self-described redemption spoken by the late Salvador Agron," as Greenwald explains on his copyright page. (Agron was a gang member who killed two teenagers in Hell's Kitchen.) The two following sections contain pieces of parallel discourse strategy in different formats, "Anyway" with six-line verses, "Dawn On" with poems of 27 lines each. The language in the later sections is as watchful ("Looking") of the everyday and as defiantly juxtaposed as that in the first section. Here are opening lines to the first poem in "Dawn On."

Dawn on
As, iffy
Be so kind, looks on
The clear light     Friendlies
Embody the money, short for
Inscribe on to forever iris inside clasp
Suggestions unhinge putting something on if
Embody the body all on about
Suggestions unhinge iris inside clasp...

The longer pieces in "Dawn On" allow Greenwald to problematize a sweep of communally mediated ironies, such as "clear light     Friendlies," and pivotal thought experiments engaging repetitions in language and implosions in meaning as with the shifts in the verbs embody, unhinge. This first poem continues such repetitions, doing it blithely, "bubble," "happily," "light," "live," and this: "Love most about muse excuse / Come across, bait and switch ... Come across muse excuse..." These experiments are not over and may never get resolved, a State of The Worldless that Greenwald nevertheless kisses if not marries, since it's all of a projectile, a "fussball bubble / Nod happily feet many language." The invite is out there, according to Greenwald, "The clear light looks on..."

Angela Genusa, who blogs at Fiddling While Rome Burns, has a hardnosed response to my consuming wares of the APA (see the next post below). She writes —

Take into consideration that these statistics also include alcohol abuse. And that "psychiatric disorders" are now as commonly diagnosed as the common cold.

The APA is merely a PAC looking after of its own interests and those of its stockholders, namely Big Pharma.

Time for a two-way nomenklatura. First, I admit taking a drink now and then is sickness, so the shrinks have precision on their side. My catching a cold often is a part of it if not the whole problem. Booze, immodium, there's a song I never liked so I suspend its instrumentality. And it's hard not to trust a profession that's less self-interested than the humanists who invented Trojans and pharmaceuticals to put them on with, other than shrinks, that is. What most of us refuse to dance to is the (...cold sweat) fact that only by delving deeply into our populist cynicism will we redeem the bacchanalia of self-destruction. Deeply on the surface, that is.

The surge at home. Most poetry appears tame when you consider: Almost half of college-aged individuals had a psychiatric disorder in the past year. From Archives of General Psychiatry, Dec. 2008.

Vanessa Place
La Medusa
University of Alabama 2008

Antifreeze in the desert. Also in the dessert. Vanessa Place's La Medusa bubbles up from the most bugged bedroom imaginable, offering itself "sopped and blotted" to "no palms, though there's still Gypsys," to "no giddyup," to no "misappelled Felicia, clasping her troubled and ample bosom," to no fault in the least, hey "Puta" — this is a "change up" novel smacked with vipers, "motherfuckin Ice Man." How or why didn't we know LA language, our language, would shrink William Burroughs to one of those diamondback bargain seekers snaking around Best Buy, trampling security to save on a flat screen, angling and protesting mightily "to cheat the Fates" alongside "German oder Korean women whose accents were thick and odd as almond paste who tried to catch us shoplifting but never could." If you have designs on a big poetics narrative, now, you'll need outsized characters porting tv's like sacks of manure, packing a Tarot deck, full medical care, and holding their pets close like "almost-purple boas" that bring their own island memories for the drugged legend parts "well-gauzed in twilight and sea mist most of the time, which kept the Gorgons hidden from passersby 'til it was too late for them." A "constant feeding" of androgyny fortifies the muscular constrictors and their big sisters. Astonishing, a saxophone, ice cream, and sex-as-a-commodity figure prominently. When it comes down to cases, it's a simple story, "Prima was proud of her snakes..."