Tan Lin’s ambience is a novel with a logo.



It’s amusing to read from sobering, antic design. Likewise to write it, at least for you and Lin. As a poet who rolls with deadpan offshoots of good taste and judgment, you might string sentences together like paste rubies and artificial pearls deliberately mismatched. Each sentence would shine in meh as the wily ends of ideas do not match up with new beginnings. Beginnings are lit up jewels of propositions before each gets dulled into falsehood yet contextualized by the faintly plausible, as if draped over a bowl of fish hooks, an incident in the making. You and surely Lin might throw a personal datum in, offer the bowl an opinion (not yours, clearly) around sex as a gross linear process or, similarly, around the death of family, so personal mentions achieve the same (but no higher) level of emotional force as boilerplate for FAQs or photos. This produces scrubbed sober reportage typical of social democratic atmospherics. The arbitrated décor of your short text can then be looked after in “poet-novelist” ways (as this is a mock up toward an after hours bildungsroman you are attempting). Tan Lin’s ways include weighting the bottom of many pages with partially extraneous footnotes — beginning with number 31 (footnotes 1-30 are fully extraneous, in prequel?) — as well as mediating random elements, mostly fuzzy snapshots but also font variations, lists, and a couple of equations. Humor is allowed; here it’s twisty self referencing. “One can never stop a clock from ticking, even in a novel.” Humor justifies the enterprise but it is only one facet of shifts in planar and tonal assessment. Process description, Chinese American ethnicity, John Cage, touring Germany, attending Carleton, “a face derived by software,” all these are data sets fit to be twisted, falsified or erased, as Lin fictionalizes with what he sees as temporary accesses to info, again self referencing “a condition of transitory structures, lounge architecture, and books with photos in them.”

Gas, food, lodging. You’re on your own.
A soulful lab mix, appliance and beast.
It’s not nice to win over 90,000 grammars, all those associative halos.
This book is a conference. Believe nothing I say.

Architecturally, you’re my business.

“I heard talent & beauty, money come by their own right; by your putting them to rest they take ‘full effect’ with no attachment to addictive capital, arresting.” Is this documentary or did I make it up?

—“when you remember Lacan read Lacan from the start, after him, seems mathematical to think about transmissions favorably, tho programmers have a fiercely vandal like impression of judgment under uncertainty.”

So this is an edit. “That’s as close as I have to lush, less certain a pulse.”

It’s what it reads over the entrance. To put it together, anonymity makes what’s inside disappear with our bed in it.

A poem fires up photoshop.

A poem is a picture — I read madras pea
Coats — kittens hitting crescendos annoying the robots.

Drown me out, speed bags. Drown and kiss the cleft, sanguinary as dissolvents
Making lock up toxic.

What a night. No problem
The dreamboat approach never grows stale.
You just don’t keep it.


Erasing the mnemonics and

Ordinary specificity that was normal, believable then, that



Waking hay feverish, stuffed up spit

Standing far off across

Your altering my whole outlook!

To float in Buddhist undercurrents from work by a mature avantist is not much of a surprise. We know Leslie Scalapino as a bona fide avantist, and demeanor of a calming, enlightened refusal has likely rubbed off during her and our intake of an illusory simultaneity in the social imagination. Or don’t know. (Also refusal.)

In Dahlia’s Iris Scalapino mines Tibetan lore from Treasure Discoveries (detective stories about current obstacles set up in a prior life) to write film noir novella within a set of lifetimes that, for me, achieve moments (movements) of past and future in present time. Like Dogen’s view of mortality, the story engages death before it may not have happened, requiring scenes and coincidental backdrops be replayed, special terms like “waves” to recur as they do at sea (“repetition… of events will make a crack, will crack realism”), personnel to be shifted and some fired so when they come to work anyway, they may achieve a seeming bliss (“the boy is a crushed rose on the cement”) amid the nonwilled state (“the high waves of grass flickering in color where one will be…”). The novella could read as even tempered theoretical interchange of matrices connecting, for instance, Gertrude Stein’s continuous present to Walter Benjamin’s nostalgia for the now defunct interiority of an observer-as-flaneur, and apposite Kathy Acker’s absolute present as pain emptied through plagiarism.

Or Dahlia’s Iris could be experienced as a brainy refusal disguised as festive appropriation where story lines from some favored movies (“Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” “Blade Runner”) are researched and repurposed to trick us into seeing the transience of visual evidence. The exchanges here across time and hills and twisting planes in narrative and metanarrative demonstrate why “inside the muffled trussed adult in the swaddling clothes grows mean as institutional behavior… Speaking at all is understood only as anger.”

Mind and body, affection are vicarious before conforming to a belief system to get forgotten.


Atom = the first turning of heads in which a detail is effective in several ways at once.



Clockwise = second head turning, two or more meanings re-solved into one.



Counterclockwise = third turn, in which there are two unconnected meanings.



A pulse of light of the right duration = fourth turning, alternative meanings clarifying a writer’s state of confusion.



Superposition = fifth, lucky confusion: the author is discovering her idea in the act of writing. 



A row of 10 = sixth, contradictory or irrelevantly sweet new shade, the reader is forced to invent interpretations. 



Measure = seventh, unbending contradiction, full, official division in your mind.

Corgi spinning inside washing machine, a foxy
Spaniel hung from gallows w/ tea lights
Irish Setter hitting on her erogenous zones
Collie pushed into express mailbox

Pit Bull sits tangled in tree w/ leash & hushed kites
Afgahn afloat clutching pierced inner tube
Great Dane dithering around vinyl dollhouse
Boxer cleaning teeth changes mood, wooly

Pointer sniffing explosives in farmers’ market
Shih Tzu knocked out on putting green
Schnauzer w/ bobbing head in fish tank

Weinmaraner sprawled on ice slab, bored
Greyhound hurling on seesaw, feeling ok

Poodle wearing tight jeans in oyster bar.

A stupid friend writes, assurance from dharma augments & extends our altercations to qualify absence :

if

working against deadline we accelerate these limits, ok

your mind has a point, & I see it

& were we mannerists, we’d describe every line I skip as just before the death of death, approaching Absence from This.

This so far reserves commentary. Info-taining visuals advance by themselves, lovely distractions, filming the steepest mountains slimed or recalling breathless riveting motions in our self interrogation commuting to work where we can share high fives & broker a plan! But then: The cross-hatching that allowed ancestors to exchange some traits for any others... has just about run out of steam, & has left us wondering, once more what there is about this plush solitude that makes us think we will ever get out, or even want to.

That turns a wall of calm over to science for good, greed, forgiveness & clumps of renaissance & their round robin prototypes that sell it to the visual cortex, motivated by small sums of justice; the sums of justice are small, crammed with moral emotions & pillow talk, luxuries that bind, ushering in more non urgencies of grueling yet quickened ambiance over entropy.

It was a sober intro

A branch could be a sentence generally. There’s urgency in ideas et cetera.

I live in a debt growing compound and how


Her face = sandstorm.

Big hick crazy quilts the sun building



Marshaled over branch property wings!

bubbles spot blue


A level over! Is the ‘new black’ of terraforming

not enough? — suggesting you send some?



I put my finger on: Not really, she said out

ahead of how I was supposed to know.



I’m addicted to ideas.

This was the first time.



Coda

The afterword to David Buuck’s Paranoia Agent describes these dozen pieces as transcriptions of English language dubs for a Japanese anime series, and in particular, transcriptions of coming attractions to animation we never see. Or these are afterwords to precedents that are also invisible. Buuck’s pieces are summary narratives superimposed on glimpses of things and events that are set or good to go but never happen, ethereal flashes of unkept promises as in this diagnostic embellishment:

The interpretation of the unfolding dream [...] precedes the dream itself, which is how the paranoiac method tends to thus inscribe the conditions for experiencing our coming attractions.

If paranoiac doesn’t do it, when you reach thus inscribe you know Buuck is holding up a three sided mirror, better to show off the utterly playful relevance of his project to the layering in poem production, reception, and (...aha) reaction. Each piece titled “Prophetic Vision,” again a seeming literal transcription from English dubbing. Each starts “To begin —” and each but the last concludes “And then —” It’s a neat, rule governed framing for the chaotic, “defeated wild boars,” a unicorn guided by doves, a “hoodwinked” beast that beckons a Holy Warrior accompanied by a zebra, and, most pleasant, impossible phrasing: “It’s a ocean of clusteramaridisis / Welcome, Master Detective / Here’s warm hospitality / And then —” Impossible origins, too: Buuck’s character Amarid, discoverer of magic crystals, is from a fantasy of American novelist David Coe's. I take Paranoia Agent as a figurative reflection made of available analogues, impressions, and creative immanence, a media quest and landscape that by my logic can also be classified as nature poetry. To find your own, turn to promised vision / video, as Buuck has, to wallow in nature’s conspicuous outreach, rabbits, horseflies, “dished meatballs,” the “sun’s cherry blossom,” and the occasional sage “somewhere between intuition and science.” Like any excellent quest Paranoia Agent establishes enormous opportunity for dark to neutral interpretations, movements inside the framework and forward and back in time to replicate anomalous dynamism and “the karma of the people...first cries of the newly born shoes of / gold...an illusion.”

A few years ago poet and critic Peter Schjeldahl extolled Yale Art School dean Tony Smith’s directorship of the Venice Biennale, finding Smith the “most anti-academic of academics.” The pedagogic basis of such a claim, according to Schjeldahl, is that in his teaching Smith opposes “rationalist theoretical tendencies in criticism,” preferring to dwell on “the artist’s initiative and the viewer’s intuition.” Some see this as old beret by design. One friend complains that intuition and initiative are unmeasurable abstractions. Another sees the atheoretical posture a classic New York School standoff, a kind of defensive elitism to circumvent the vulgarity of a priori affects and process analysis. First, while I’ll turn to theory to perfect a technical argument, I confess strong advocacy for analyzing a composer’s “initiative” when by the term we mean to understand her idiosyncratic absorption of influences, including theoretical constructs, of course, along with distinctive features of her practice. Second, I especially appreciate Schjeldahl’s pointing out intuition as the key exchange element between artist and viewer, poet and listener / reader. Elusive as it is, intuition becomes the sine qua non for influential reading and reader response. In this regard, contrasts of plans and chance become quanta of exchange between writer and reader. According to classic reader response theory, expectations funded by a reader’s experiences contribute to an initial schema for intake. The plan is set in place. The composition, if poetry, changes everything if the reader is ready for chance. The text operates as a dimension for irreversible transport, influencing the future, giving chance agency position for change.

I have lost my nonfaith.

*

Now where are they?

Officials had had enough of fish. (It might be better being one big tetra instead of one little one.) Next day Ed took a job in the cafeteria. Growing up fish evolve. It’s a measure of the increasing clout of fish that this soundtrack strikes you like a fin. This is a soundtrack! aspects of which covered debts dropping glassy eyeballs in fake vomit.

The sky above the moon’s new phase is the longer shorter hue of an echelon’s ideology. Hmmm. Dividing vendettas wherever. Your feet never come back.

_______________________________

A mood, and it follows, my mood will be influenced by scatterings of texts, most unreadable. More numerous and more frequent are atextual sources read only as prompts to become new text, new ontological components for thinking, composing, as well as subprocesses that are harder to isolate and observe as they flood into memory. Add ambient sounds and humidity as you walk along the surface, any pain, faculties for balance, direction, visual points, tastes and smells, motions and textures you touch or see or hear, sensual data some call them. Feelings are naturally unreadable sources. Both kinds. Feelings that are rooted from cardinal positions for about a century within the sonics of Yeats and cohorts, moods that stretch outward into the deepest suppositions of daydream, prize stars, parrots. Or wiry empirical feelings that comprise enmeshments within a readymade mood structure parallel for a while, now, to Pound’s poetics, male confusion multiplied by female homesickness, the Chilean flamingo, appliance hint: a lifeboat with a hot plate.

Life with Mr Grape is bad — and familiar — cheap shit in a paper sack.
Hostess Wheel Clacker, Bike Spinner & fake License Plate.

Admit you miss smoking. 
You miss the first drag.

He imagines you wearing his credentials.
Homonyms cleave. Language is tired.

Have you read, teens get ten percent of their daily 
calories from soda & smoking. That’s how 

They become bilingual.
Yuy.
The smoke takes you & him in its stride.

Your hair’s on the brink.
Your eyes fill with manpower.

Stop waving that grape drink.

Despairing of dead ended self regard, “the self-valuable word” embedded in instrumental discourse, Bob Perlman maps, among other things, Quintilian’s rhetoric, noting key components, meaning, clarity and tasteful adornment or decoration (“Words Detached from the Old Song and Dance”).


Meaning and clarity are no problem for Rob Fitterman: “weeds we may not always / have emptied this meaning for / a top-growth peel-back of another.”


When it comes to weeding and adornment in poetry, which involve making sense of / sense in any alteration of literal expression (via figures and other prosodic devices), Fitterman is a master horticulturalist. With 1-800-Flowers, Fitterman smartly “updates” sources for Louis Zukofsky’s last completed poem, 80 Flowers, a construct that “takes to new extremes of density Zukofsky’s methods of composition by quotation, transliteration, and compression” (Mark Scroggins, Louis Zukofsky and the Poetry of Knowledge). Fitterman’s update is one that details as it examines extremes by establishing compositional process and, more specific, an inventory of strategies as its topics and metamorphosis; it seems less concentrated on first order phenomena than on the original text, absorbing it and commenting on more variations in sampled material, as well as imposing a sociohistorical import to “the montage of borrowed texts.” Fitterman is inferring a “complex” and “compassionate emotion” on the part of Zukofsky. Fitterman’s evidence turns at once general — citing Zukofsky’s “love of language his / consciousness of word combinations” — and then the evidence turns into a wildly particular conflation of fate, the personal and botanical, offering that Zukofsky compiles text and thus, like Walter Benjamin, “whims earth copulating with / itself ... bunkered ... [a] cloistered...monastery like refuge / every lawn gets winter kill / I’m an ex-chemical-fertilizer junkie go / Ask Fran... // Sometimes I feel like my / lawn is calling the shots.” 



Fitterman replenishes the grounds with inventory of similarly conflated devices, writing in two sections “About” and “Through” Zukofsky’s work. Fitterman frames Zukofsky’s as “constrictive verse” that indeed gets “driven” by inventory, while Fitterman’s own lyric comprises mixed inventories within a discourse hybrid, an essay in verse, substantiation of his exemplary reading, that is, his generatively engaging Zukofsky, as Ron Sillman observes (ronsillman.blogspot.com [7/11/05]). More splendid, Fitterman fulfills the half audible invitation within Zukofsky’s poetry and poetics, joining Zukofsky & Son Inc whose décor ethos is “precise information... thinking with the things as they exist” inside a recontextualized (if not continuous) present in which Fitterman fixes “new meanings of word against word” (Prepositions).



Fitterman’s update follows the formal constraints of 80 Flowers. Each page of 1-800-Flowers presents a single 8-line verse, each line limited to, yet overflowing with, 5 words, new meanings for Fitterman’s wider range of quotidian intersections, frequently represented with visual acuity: “Toll Free” shows “mechanicalism in / the high fog ... now you can turn off / the sprinkler free lions in / the mist.” Also in the section titled “Through,” the verse “1-800-End-Edit” declares “Rains grammar private floral varieties,” a ricochet of sorts from a poem in the earlier section “About” that asks how methodology “add[s] up meaning the sum of the montage.” 



Thinking through and about 1-800-Flowers I feel some of the pleasures afforded a privileged reader writer — Fitterman — who focuses on another’s — Zukofsky’s — vision, which on the page is usually unrequited, propositional. The surprise is Fitterman’s collaboration comes off as altogether foreseeable, both poetries feeding and spreading into one another like a lawn “calling the shots.”

In descending order of indefensibility... 



(a) Poetics is democracy.



Evasion in poetics, just as some prose, foregrounds style, motive, subjects for close attention. 



(b) Friendship is a job (like writing) and, more elevated, craft (signing). To illustrate, job is to craft as field praxis to theory that’s kicking a sign when it’s astronomically down. Don’t get me wrong I think free speech is nominal. I’m for it and against impingement unless it hurts a friend (that’s down). What’s it? There’s no workaround to the observer influencing the observed except later, much later.

A writer’s guess as to what readers crave is a byproduct of becoming a reader. One writer rarely reads alone, and that’s part of the saga of collectivity and simultaneity. She and others pick up similar texts, comparable projects, snowballs start flying. When a writer thinks in public about what she’s reading, she’s taking aim and will be aimed at in turn. This is one yarn of opinion acclimatization, hardly superfluous.

The signature concern is a reader’s experience. It’s peculiarly nepotistic, another point, that so many writers simultaneously figure out readers’ expectations within multiple, extra literary contexts, politics, nonprofit cultural construction, corporate performance theory and the like.

Thinking more decentrally about Nicole Brossard:

 A driven writer like Brossard distinguishes herself taming her otherness and the other directedness that she (writer) and he (reader) share.

You don’t want her festivity so much as your investigation into her iconoclasm. It would be abetting deeper juxtaposition to bracket one’s amusement just to explore the alarm and vacuity anyone else had previously not known. How does she know? How does she improvise? What is improvisation on improvisation? What timing(s) is(are) required? How do you account for a received notion “being in the present”? Even better.

Are they saying the same thing? Chögyam Trungpa teaches First thought best thought; George Balanchine, Don’t think do. Both mean and don’t mean it. Put extremely, the meaning / meaningless problem buries itself in application: a first thought in Trungpa’s belief is already broken in two; thinking (or not thinking), even (or especially) when it’s “first,” impedes being (and incidents not attached to being); while Balanchine wants physical movement to function over and above mental representation, yet one thinks on the way up to execution. Both statements — first thought, don’t think — are similar examples of intuitive layers in which meaning deploys no meaning slaying the butterfly native to these parts, reflection of opposite outcomes.

The jungle is quiet... too quiet. (Theseus)

Where was I? Reading is different for writers. 



For poets, reading is poetry, prepoetry, or at minimum, 従って, original potential. As John Ashbery has said often in a number of ways, “poetry dissolves in / brilliant moisture and reads us / to us.” It’s snowing heavily as I cut and paste Ashbery’s three lines. It’s timely for me to face the brilliant moisture idea. This is unmitigated happenstance, like a majority of what I read. Circumstance or not, writers, not just poets, skew toward reading that prompts wordy consideration and response. Poets appear to go out begging for it, finding relief in processing text, principally but certainly not only poetry. We’re not addicted to reading because we’re feeding off catharsis or anything like it. That’s what normal readers do. We’re not normal. I am not compelled to read to feel emotion or have ideas, primarily. I read to do something with emotions and ideas. We look them over, kick their tires, test ride them. Who among close readers of Ashbery has not taken him for a ride and been piqued? When we feel this way we can figure the time / emoticon game out, just a little. The hold it now frolic that Ashbery creates with registers is one way. In “El Dorado,” he plays with loose, dim witted utterance, with “‘No rest for the weary’,” which he puts in quotes to annoy his reader, a poet, more; “I disagree / with you completely but couldn’t be prouder / and fonder”; followed up by “So drink up. Feel good for two.” For the fun of it he’s talking down to one of his most cherished categories of reader, a poet, acknowledging the troublesome and timely antagonism between the writing and the being read, a live act passing on as it addresses, writes the other, the live act in reading, the future, both merged continuously. More obvious, we find a symptom of time shifting as Ashbery reaches (up, across, down?) for a choice of word that spins his reader’s head, because, well, when the curious yet killer word comes along you feel it... because you’re thinking ‘what a cool choice,’ and now you’re immersed (sic) with what you’re reading and with the writer as you both had to have speculated, as if together, on the word, on how, and on why it came to be such a good choice. So reading and writing about reading suggest rewards.