It is what it isn’t.

Poem for Matvei Yankelevich
was written on an early computer,
he thought it's written on the first computer
even before the
word computer or word processor was adopted for
that which Matvei was writing on to respond
to the poem,

which was not actually a poem but
a thought experiment that took place
first in the mind of its writer,
slapping Helen over the internet
that hasn’t been thought of much less
invented yet.

The computer without a name (so far)
the one that may be the first or for
sure a prototype
metallic patchwork soldered
with tubes and distinguished by
a green glow above in its porthole,
not a porthole actually but there was
no easy word to come up with for
screen back in the day,

still the computer was up
and running like men on deck or a fox force
and the process figures it out,
tries many ways of using the alphabet
rather than numbers to fill the porthole
with letters and many idea plants.

Last Saturday at the Boston Poetry Marathon I spoke briefly about three poets with local roots, Billy Barnum, the late Donald Quatrale, and Rene Ricard. I called all three Boston Flashes: agitated, pleasurable, radiant fairies, “distinguishable by having no dominance over poetics except a poetics en passant...distracted. Here but not here. Flashes.” Etc.

I’ll write a little bit about Quatrale and Barnum later, while I start here where my talk finished, Rene Ricard. Since my interest with Ricard was to read four poems from Rene Ricard 1979-1980 (DIA, 1979), my intro remarks are minimal.

Rene Ricard is too famous to catalog. (Not really. There’s just no time to contextualize his big biodata.) From Acushnet, MA Ricard came to Boston as a teenager and fell in with John Wieners, then moved to New York. The self-inflicted sobriquet “a living legend” is deserved, rising and falling, an optimum star in Andy Warhol’s Kitchen and Chelsea Girls, Artforum critic and New York Times op-ed essayist, East Side artist, New York poet. But he came back to Boston often to spend time with Wieners, and it was Wieners who showed Ricard when to write about love. (As aftermath.)

I read four poems: “HEY LOUIE WHERE YOU BEEN?” “‘I’m Going Now, Okay?’” “A Boy and His Dog,” and an untitled piece that starts with the word “Love:” in the left margin and continues as indented free verse:

I did the homework but flunked
the exam.       The light lays on the bed.
I lay on the bed.       I get under the covers.
Light lays on the blanket.       I get
no sleep. Light lays heavily on me.
Things are not always deeply felt.
Meanings bubble up before
sleep and, fairy gifts, vanish at the
grasp, like finding money in the
street in a dream or being re-
united in a dream and
seeing you was like finding
money in the street.       Then seeing you
again like fairy gifts that vanish
at the grasp.       Five o’clock in the morning.
The street.       The luncheonette.
Now I stay away from the bad
neighborhoods where I lived.
The bad blocks of the heart.
Things are no longer deeply felt
as I ascend the grand staircase
of indifference.       Discarded party favors
lay on the floor below.
They were my feelings.
I have a headache.
All these feelings like the remains
of an orgy in the morning light
cigarettes in half-empty glasses
The afternoon.       The light.
The bed. The tearing away.       The heart.
The leg falls asleep and goes numb.

Clad to the hilt in gray-to-black cashmere, we aren’t discussing our real business at table. Taciturnity in such morbid surroundings is statutory. “Mm,” the dolt says. He was staring at my clogs, wondering how much they cost.

Let’s rewrite “Biotherm.”

In this chapter I fear the sarcasm.
Sex is a sardonic comfort with a sober edge. My Bologna,
you’re leaking a take-off economy against your highlighted blush.

Smoke circles your face. Homonyms assimilate.
Admit it, you miss smoking. You miss Joe Camel.
He imagines you wearing undergarments in his reflection.

You miss the first drag. The smoke takes you in its stride.
Your eyes inside are all red. Bologna.
I’ve just noticed you haven’t said anything.

Man, she is weird.
So I urge the tobacco board (I’m bad at focusing)...
...so much crap in my head, your under-the-tongue spray

Can never bite. Except at night. There are newer urgencies
when management would feel desperate
so exposed it’d feign ignorance, aimlessly...

Then struck the lightning rod emits a light and after that a chemical substance that recuses itself for a second and returns as cognitive coloration that’s small matter.

An ephemeral sign of intention or “gesture,” like the hushed, hard-edged dolt in mysticism, can only resemble or be in the manner of -esque, Stevensesque, hardly ever belong to, be part of Stevensian.

We had stumbled upon a larger issue. “Think about it,” I’m laughing again. “Some of those dolts were hot.” I learned enough to give you capsule updates. And there was something else: I wanted to share Biotherm with you.

For exploring hooks stick to the sentence.

Taking out the trash is understood as extra
sensory anger, sometimes a polite form of the hole-
in-the-universe, with a beaker installed & promising

Storyline prototypes, battle scars, vanity, thrills, fish, sky
dogs, paint, & intercourse in conditions that surround our desire
to adapt a range of compliments for insurgents to bind heartache.

Staring in the mirror, that’s how to hang names that don’t balance until you think away the best part:

Time’s up. I have to guide this crone back to her tapestry, a big girl with a visual cortex attending what’s neat in the future, and she finds me attractive! I don’t know when I slept, referring to that earlier point she and I worked out together. There were dimensions an hour ago enabling two events in a plot we’re party to. Tenebrae, we said. Let’s return to these olfactory sketches, in which the cosmos is unexplained, parts one and two. Incandescent, then, our ardor comes back to choke the first hook, a rocket sidelined by a braided chord worn as a necklace, a burning space distinguished by the interval contained.