Pleasure is to ethics as the Yellow Sea is to Taoism.

Yves Saint Laurent and Bo Diddley died on the same day. Yves first.

Some queer poets are from the other side. Of course. Ezra Pound, Ted Berrigan, Robert Creeley, Alice Notley, Clark Coolidge, Hannah Wiener, Joseph Ceravolo. Ceravolo in particular illustrates how precipitous queering can get through simple discourse. First three lines of “Warmth”:

There’s nothing to love in this
rice Spring.
Collected something warm like friends.

There are ten more similarly short, literally breathtaking lines. If I were to find a point to the poem, it plays back some of the wrenching of amorous assault. Continuing:

Sail glooms are none.
Your desire
rests like sailors in
their bunks. Have beaten you, lips.
Supply me
man made keeping.
Supply it flowing out;
are brute bullets in your back
because there is
in this rice Spring.

Sense of utter loss — but not confusion — underlies the twisted (Have beaten) and dropped topic headers (Collected something, are brute). Hyper yang references (sailors, bunks, bullets) are scooped up from one segment of the sensate scale, but are motivated more by an ambivert male persona than sexual proclivity. Although severely abbreviated, Ceravolo is insisting one follow his reasoning (Supply it flowing out). That insistence is enforced by the repetition at the end, “in this rice Spring.” I’d have to choose from a number of “death trying to see and breathe” scenarios to start explaining “rice,” but I’ll leave it to an impression: Peering down one finds a bowl of warm(ed over) rice, a bleak, humdrum triggering of grief, regrets. What’s queering here is Ceravolo’s proceeding via conflation of physical acts, audacious desire (Supply me), and irreversible spectacle (because there is in this rice Spring).

Spectacle, bold desire, physicality. Three things one ought not to do without. When we find them in others, we know we are getting close to the ethos we require.

I, we meet in Niseko, north of the town offices
first on drenched tho
slackened



shaking the tidal vapor thru no shadow weighed, no



more than ten or less, seconds off the slopes



meeting above steps coincided with the light



clipped to the final base blast patching the thaw



— spirals discharge, wind heats the ground and trees open.

Before reaching a Bodhisattva high water
Communewide, Kung-Fu’s math disappears like factions of perplexity —
You’re asking a lot.

Spring or colder rain has a libido viewable within either construction
From a cabin for paired centrists, a flight down,

A perimeter of memory foam and asphalt whilst metamorphoses are active.
In plain verse we round this off in latinate stencils for amnesia’s fixed width.
You were fucking great, shaken tame.

First noticed that word about a popular T shirt
I don’t remember — it was a while ago
(Ian banks a novel transition..)
A term hurled in frustration
I saw this used on Beckett

Derives from gnana, wisdom
Applies to Sermon on the Mount
The body knows ‘before’ the brain

This is not true of Walter Gropius
Holy Albert Hirschman, is he circular!
More influential among Northern Lights
Emily Dickinson, central bankers

Saw it on a menu
And G Hill, notorious, Hill had known
Stinker Strange-Paget, Blaise Pascal
And Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, so
US Vogue reported in conversation
On a boat about lyrics,
Wise at once.

[define gnomic]

The males in our family prompt a discussion that imparts nonsensical bewildering repetition of imprudence. They started long ago to induce “flipping surroundings.” Interdisciplinary terms are regulated for better and worse around an almost empty campground that remembers nothing of the nearly transparent sensory esotericists.

Bags and bags of stolen ideas prolong their standing in infinite battle with consciousness.

Athens is the cradle of alpha reality
Hip, cool, ordered smooth, unruffled for the taking.
The light darkens. I hate Greece.

It’s official, we’re its colony.
Yah, #36, all time subservience.
(It’s not easy being special.)

As a classicist I plead guilty
Yaa, all the time.
Orthodox or not, Greek flames decline in pyres,

Dante’s paranoia seething with keen
Fidelity to Hera, also a 36 trying to
— we’re too relaxed to fritter time finding verb and object headers!

We’re forgiven for everything.
Let’s encounter, at my signal, elbows down.

The Buffalo of paradise could be Pasadena.

I died of Viagra and became a robot.

I just wrote this [The first Keesha, 14-yrs-old, accidentally applied an enema containing sea bream. But she also had Donald Sutherland’s bio on her, on her mind that is. Does or did he mention lutefisk — fish jellied in lye? Not sure.]


Back when thunder and precip were construed as tendencies plundering contexts of human asymmetry and sports psychology. There will be a new panel.

May View Ln backs up to the 210.



No more than that can be threatened during the annunciator’s silence in the sleep aisle. Fever, ague, intemperance, railroad spine, neurasthenia, the flu, the common cold, all would be otherwise, alarming.

Chit chat next.

The galvanizing process overall turns our survival into a sketch that kills where you emerge, enhancing your final four value.

An abstract, glass-red attitude is buried below stem cells of laughter.

Ah blizzard.

Together, thou definest entire affability arcs, unspoken though a form in many forms of slippery zoning disputes.

Body snatching, a second point, is why thou and I (I and thou?) shall join the others, since our lives are directionless throughout Middlesex County.

Good night, wallet.

And [...there is no outside [...] only what’s already here [what I breathe] inside, which is continually immature, impulsive...] [and]

I see the wind smudging a porch.

I’m scared. Good night to expose an accident or two that don’t matter, made tactical as we circumvent a few exchange elements; we’re remaking spatial morality into chance agency, no vision, no dash, no longer having to know.

Vocal frontiers of English have been hovering, octaves away, in some of the same places today as they have for five centuries. Many are play and composition sites involving varieties of overlapping postures and musical expressions for intelligible English that in poetic media may entail voicing new speech from old. The poet’s advantage on this end of the half millennium that surrounds modern English is twofold, the massive accretion to the lexicon and the lexicon’s long, full gallop toward unmarkedness. Lexical unmardedness addresses the pragmatic point that trivially inflected verbs and nouns and mostly uninflected adjectives carry the weight in English language behavior. Minimal inflection seems to complement a proclivity, as it were, for surface compression and syntactical streamlining in English — in a pinch we can switch a word function from adjective to noun to verb (e.g., ‘prompt’) — to prompt thinking onward. Poets of our era have been known to volley with streamlining and compression, John Wieners, Clark Coolidge, and more recently, Brandon Brown, Ange Mlinko, to name four. In Rhyme Scheme Benjamin Friedlander takes on the playful frontier as bona fide streamliner, but he forgoes any advantage of a contemporary lexicon, striking an historicist’s pose, mining exclusively urtexts from the other end of the half millennium, W Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Friedlander’s procedure is splendid and at first it seems so simple one could readily overlook the judgment and hard work that pull it off. Friedlander takes in sequence rhyming end words from all the lines of all 154 Sonnets and rewrites them as titles and verses for 59 new poems, varying in length from one to five stanzas each. (The final poem titled “Love” has no stanzas.) Since Friedlander is adopting words that are pre-radiated with Italian rhyme, the texts rock internally with metaphysician outbursts, stoned rumbles and ‘lovely’ booms, yet in rethinking how the sonic elements relate one against another, how lines break, for instance, Friedlander makes news from what come across as novel, tuneful lexical arrays. “...Win committed never, fitted fever, / True better, anew greater content / Spent now”; “Dates (shines) / Dimmed (declines) / Untrimmed / Fade.” Thanks to that urge in English toward compression and lexical flexibility, verb phrases, one example, easily triangulate by merging with their own multifacetedness, assuming status as noun and adjective phrases as well; meanings are rushed along, even when there are indeterminate particulars (“Latch- / Part”): “Bred dead mind about blind / Out, heart. Latch- / Part catch sight: creature, / night feature.” Friedlander’s meta-trope is nothing less than a repurposed semantic register derived from Shakespeare. Key to this accomplishment is how in Rhyme Scheme Friedlander merges and divides items from one sonnet to the next. End words from Sonnets II through VI make up the text of the second poem, titled “Brow” (there are three poems with that title). The poem ‘inherits’ vocabulary — albeit atomisticly — from the accumulated shifts in tone and argument spanning “When forty winters besiege thy brow” to “Look in thy glass, and tell the face thou viewest” to “Unthrifty loveliness, why dost thou spend” to “Then let not winter’s ragged hand deface.” Friedlander’s poem begins, “Field now held lies days” — a smarting paraphrase, I would suggest, a prelude to elegy that characterizes the prevailing tone in early Sonnets. “Brow” continues in its second stanza: “Old, cold, thou viewest another, / Renewest mother, / Womb husbandry, tomb posterity: / Thee.” We are in the lyrical zone or poet’s frontier, if you will, of evolving English music as the poem concludes, “sweet / Deface-distilled place, self-killed.”

You’re the matter at hand within isomorphic rotations from greens perpetual to earth, each green shorn against the others in wicked speed reflecting the drive home as it is, advancing toward convenience stops and arbitrary stretches we don’t care about.

Cucumber is still a little wiped. So is Cucumber-2, finally. Cucumber-3 is frowning, ready to be seen, and because it’s unexpected she has her hands up in the air, making eyeglasses with her fingers, meaning

There’s an Ivy component to bebop.

Oh my gosh — I just remembered I can fly.

Well, most of these “pieces” are literal, based on trying to sit down [starting to sing] “Baby, you’re still the matter.”

An air of inevitability around advanced codes shattered. Shattered seemed inauthentic in the first mustache sense. I am more than sex. You’re holding me, the middle of the throat..

I kiss the air. This.

And it’s not clear we’ll answer or respond to what we think until my spinal column heats up, thinking of you.

In East Cambridge Borodin is persuasive beside a confection of labs
uh I see I mean this is how it sounds

boarding the T — Is it in memory or fear
the new governor becomes a hypothetical of passivity
putting you first, smaller democrat than the original?

Aggressive governance heals more, less
if citizens get to pay for things,

Boat a memo, winter commuting like Derek Blur.

Steering is good, home town
wellbeing in windows : there’s a legacy voiceover.

Even dry elements seem an honor
for the tourist guide exclaiming, Nothing Iss Losht.

& there is the acclivity of computer sleet & snowflake maidens
preparing for war to make it happen!

Unlike your new book haiku-ing to Delmore Schwartz repeatedly gives me head.
We or most of us have a destiny, after all. But it’s after hours
To vocalize what’s sunk in, I can’t worry or pierce my ears further.

*

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 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, much less 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.

*

Your new book

... you use braille graphics or crossed out checks payable to topics. Spinoza noted long ago sorcery and spiritual drama attract circus talent, theatrical and textual. Spinning ponies could fill in those spots. Wild priests and magicians once spun like them but later they got less focused, chasing butterflies that proliferate. On small hills, cute and cuter butterflies have butterflies, why?

Your new book ...
I guess this is unprincipled. A concentrate lacking design



squeezed across the floor of the roofed passage to the back,
I prefer you didn’t invite tradespeople over to the house.

It makes no difference what we believe. The soul is a hypodermic
Out of water surfing coastal states to destroy its wiggly self.
We begged it rally for more than parabolic grinning under gods.

That was the 1st whack job enjambment.
A private / public bond like Klee / Ibsen.

Since the 1920s unknown futures present newer phenomena.
Your every utterance is on the jet trail, quelling fear of pain
As a decade goes by and still you are unattainable —

Say you’ll be back. You never can tell.
Poverty is all right, but fuck extreme poverty.

As we grow up in your backyard befouling young hearts
And minds, collating all the splinters into a pile, resetting
A fire by ourselves (in my blanc head)

As we consider more relax words and in a kind of pax,
A pastoral, “How do I love you and everything,
And expect no help to achieve dayment-ready,
Set?”

I like it, unlikely there’s more and less.
And some things you need to repeat.
(I forget now what you sound like.)

I’m filming in a way that’s hard to manage. I lost my nonfaith
assuming a sawhorse and then a ladder.

Let me hold you in the dark... It’s a future thought

as your body keeps moving, clouds part, the aerodrome rushes to litmus introspection,
snug, sotted with the urge to fit nothing in.

                                                            Slapdash.

That’s how being with you works in sleep. Aside: We have a pleasant
sencha. It strengthened your attention

that night as my nature to move forward.
See the pigeon? It’s a true albino. Incandescent.

I was thinking it’s hard for us to get foreign sports equipment or a new app
without indices of suspicion and objurgating.

If you agree I’m happiest procrastinating. Then ladders mesh to go nowhere

between you and expulsion, the hold is close. Sawhorse dissolved.