It seemed artificially important
The screech was spherical.

A seagull.
No one’s there.

I missed it.

Favorite singers reradiate the calmative afterlife.

Learned consensus becomes early performance; both adolescent in a good sense, the deep pitch shows up invisibly,
unspeakably, as libido constitutes a knowledge module, glistening aimlessly.

We’ll need smarter drywall too, to excite fern and bacteria growing all around people we touch, their yield blowing in news of perpetual unitary joy...

Your voice becomes a pick-up knife.

And your silence is vaporous, tinctures or tints, halfway hapless;
and in an impartial sense it came to be Bohemians are yesterday’s Horatians.

John Wieners, I use your toothbrush to wipe my beard.

Selon le texte français, nous sommes de vrais amis et j’adore tout sur vous. Le fait est
: on est passé par la merde, juste à dire cela..        Avez-vous réduit les effectifs? Pouvez-vous?
kari edwards: .. « l’empoisonnement au mercure / abandonné —
le prix de la porte pour des quais de port / et toutes bien intentionnées,
des maisons de piste. » Dans « Echelon hairnet » par P Inman .. il y a photos minuscules cloués
dans un seul accord, en proie aux avertissements de rouge-marée,
chaud, le vertige; l’environnement calme, assoiffé,
personnalités dédoublées incapacitantes! personnalités de la plage du nord-est,
calibrées principalement par une technologie comme un chahut.. à la sensibilisation où « tout le jazz se dissipe. »



Do you downsize? Can you?
kari edwards: “...mercury poisoning / abandoned
to loading docks door prize / all well meaning
track homes.” P Inman’s Echelon hairnet thumb-nailed
into one agreement beset by red-tide warnings,
hot, dizzy, the environment calms down, thirsting,
incapacitating northeast beach personalities, split,
calibrated mostly by a ruckus-like technology / outreach
where “all the jazz wears off.”

Brain damage is in the eyes.

Cri d’un entraîneur de pomme de terre!

Dans le cas de cette pomme de terre, même si on trouve des tranches de moi au cours de vos opus,

sacrément tout sans blague c’est

(a) impressionnant! Le patineur est soi-disant sur une échelle pour « blather » ou des étoiles, peu importe ..
(b) mais lâchement, je ne suis presque gêné, je ne me soucie guère la façon dont le poète est formulée, est parlé comme un outil pour juxtaposition, parataxe, tintement ..
(z) .. encore pourrions-nous sauter quelques couches, ainsi en quelques secondes ou pas, prêt ou pas, allions-nous patiner?



Cry of a coach potato!

In the case of this potato, to find slices of me over your opus,

is

(a) awesome, it’s soi-disant on a blather scale for
(b) I’m hardly embarrassed, hardly concerned how the poet is framed a tool of parataxis.. juxtaposition.. tinnitus ..
(z) still.. let’s skip a few layers, ready?

We agree a proposal is science or not.

Amazing to meet you as well as your idea.



Amazing to touch your funky penumbra, feel influenced by needlepoint and other class resentments.



I was pleased we communicated thru inky musculature evoking nighttime.



Soiled oceans rewild deserts.



Yet all your props are value contingent.

Tease near misses out of what both account numbers mean. Stipulate minutes and routines to
withhold and then spill meanings like the beans of process they are. Discuss cut-off points where procedures
turn into habits (fewer fictional components in less stiff, larger gnomic atmospheres
bringing accoutrements to fade-to-white, and definitions of all this). Take care, and take your time;

likewise, inspire small talk between you

while keeping everything under surveillance. You look good together.

What’s left outside is left, traces with no bones, unbranded.

We were wondering about the invention of the planets, sympathizing
With a numbers guru also the director — one of them.
Often that’s a normal if baritone and determinative section to sing.

Pigeons pattern heaven where detachment is cut back. Swimming
To there uproots the light series, exalted and then stiffened into sympathetic parody..

Reminding us of not a few contingencies we picked up from a tray
Of bright boomerangs that tantalize in the feasible, wanting nothing and showing
What go around and come around, left to their own desires and systems.

Some of these species are both dead and alive. Chew on that, Hobbes.

I give up to appease you.

Text sections like acts of omission are presorted,

Now section where are we un, um? If that’s everything, we’ll switch to average cute guys punching as it were my clock. And minutes after a comedia collects. These were the zaniest jokes, the baldest. I don’t remember laughing much. You too? Ever. And I can’t recall being as irreplaceable as you are now.

Total ThankYou Member.

Breezeway
John Ashbery
Ecco, New York


In Breezeway John Ashbery slices up a modernist illustration through and thru (“Gimme a break / No I don’t feel used”). He makes it look easy to look easy.

Also deeply comedic. Let’s call some “gaga experiments” a crown of ruses. When you conclude Whatever... in 2015 you may not be kidding but we’ll take note of the use-by date. Other satirical belatedness: OMG; The past / loves you, baby; Gold Dust; neat-o; Howdy-Doody; Do I wake or sleep.

Almost a dozen poems end in parentheses or ellipses! it seems.

The letters b-r-e-e-z-e appear on nearly every page, frequently in that order.

Lassitude — don’t worry about it (“I used to sing a song”) —


Results from programmed abundance (“I’ve done five of that”). That’s it.
A headache means at least a dozen things, socially (“Throw the book at him”).

John demonstrates a freak’s mastery of techniques that cut into what you might imagine he contains. For five lines he throws ‘whatever’ our way, Mr Coffee Nerves / Help me with this / the price of eggs / Etc... Then in a central quatrain from “The Price of Eggs”:

Who was that plant from?
She, somewhat evaporated... Would I laugh?
You are not to be concerned about fish.
Extreme ants polished our definition.

“The Price of Eggs” is almost a sonnet in breadth and length (and if the penultimate and antepenultimate lines were indented, it’s a sonnet). In the stanza cited we get a glimpse or more a flicker of “She [who] somewhat evaporated,” renamed a “fish” polished off by eusocial insects. We learn she was caught up in a “hooded phase, a second ago” and “may have broken loose” — but that’s all we get. We hope she made it to another side of her future or past, either way cut into, here, by five more lines that seem deliberately down low among the treatises / work / dandies, a princess, / buggers / dry goods sold. Dry goods. Our narrator is playful as nettles. Besides, he’s always letting us in on the whole fabulous joke. My favorite title: “Gravy for the Prisoners.” Favorite consecutive titles: “Homeschooled” and “The Sponge of Sleep”; runners-up: “The Undefinable Journey” and “The Pie District.”

Reading Breezeway as embedded satire about the wars, also as antidote to the ‘why read when you can sum it up in a sentence’ calculus. 
You know what I think is speaking?

An absorbed being looks at currents past and present, reflects, has a fever and does everything for humor.

Breezeway shows the poet, “finally he wrote the day,” sneaking in one or two notes of the gallows persuasion. More, the no-shortcuts stance is maintained as are not a few denominations of humor — being of many persuasions is how we go on alert, writing the day and choosing “by dint of occupying it.”

I enjoyed it when the vertex saw you off. Later we got dressed for golf, and congregated in the face with peers.

There were balls of steam suspended in bacteria over our hands, discouraging others. (A boiling kettle contained prescriptions, I reason.) Better now if we didn't digress but file out a shade apart to trail the copycats.

New pressures involve a break with bodyguards. The penis is everlovin elastic.

Heaven is in the heart with its egg drop of credos and documents, from which large scale dull instruments are tossed.

The face is the vantage point inside a very powerful camouflage (instructing us to use it).

Swimming Home
Vincent Katz
Nightboat, New York


To be always in the present
Even when that present is dying

Pragmatic sounding, sobering, almost a religious idea or if it’s just a statement, it’s a statement about statement.

Can we call this observable practice?

..we’re not going too fast —
.. All I care for now is poetry

..There is no other way
You must walk across the bridge and take a right

Once you take care into practice, everything you write sticks to the provision, lending it “ballast.” Lines, above, snipped from “Barge,” a central poem of 19 parts placed in the middle of Vincent Katz’s Swimming Home. “Barge” tosses around eventful interruptions, “a bunch of turkey buzzards overhead,” “A wind whipping rain seasonal..” as well as compressed argument, “Roots equal leaves in sky,” “Bitter and poor, in the sense of not having enough.” There is deadeye polemic in five parts of “Barge” referencing Americans’ and others’ lethal geopolitics around Israelis and Palestinians waging a “low-intensity civil war.” To be present, you take in the best and the worst.

“Barge” is joined by many other poems observing water and the shore, “The Dive,” “A Quick Dip,” “The Sea,” “The Garden by the Sea,” as well as the 10-page title piece that offers prose impressions of Oslo, a swimmer thinking his way through currents of muscle movement and sensation parallel to motions and acts remembered or anticipated. Bicycling uphill “Esther was in front, and Oslo could see her back shifting from side to side as she increased her effort, and he suddenly imagined her thighs.. the exercise they must be undertaking to propel her..”

Every poem in Swimming Home takes on poetry. Statement is what matters,

Poetry can’t mean that much, everyone asleep
Another year, another weight of looking and thinking
About everyone, and then there is just music

The last part of “Barge” goes on “But what I mean most of all / Is stop — // Morning sun through poplars..” The poems here stop, start to observe, ‘not too fast,’ awake to the sun and all that is present, “simple things the world / voices, different tones.” You get inside the observation that stays with you now, jetting off, “Spending time, and passing it, inside or out, / One or another, yet able to be with all of it, / Separate, but somehow both or all at once.”

Swimming Home collects over a hundred pages of poems in three sections of short pieces, first, multiple-part poems, second, and a third set of pieces, some titled as exercises, that openly flirt with slipping from presence but stay with it, staying with what can and cannot be said,

Definitions, where pool ends, where edge of border ends,
path of rocks around trees planted in border,
furniture, chairs and table around.

And

they’re off —

and since they are impacted by harrowed tomograms

50% off.

*

What happened, you look so radiant?

*

Ways women around Marie Antoinette were modern: Oh, many. They were early risers. They dressed not merely for success, for career survival. They avoided work that was intellectually focused. They peered back and soaked up the landscape. They were gossips. Bless them.

You’re welcome, April. Plugged, tall, slim,
Aggrieving.

We’re in public space, an elevator or the hallway. We think
Mining data has a bigger future than trigonometry, many floors

To appropriate then evoke recipes we can tinker on.

Life wheels. We borrow the ephemeral Triumphs while April questions conventions, boundaries, and syntax. April exits. Yay.