You start along these lines,

There are West Coast pullovers

& a Heimlich shoulder blade, non personality
Well in back, favoring sleek objectives.

You’re wearing a scent of rosemary.

I’ve always been there waiting for the rush
Updrafts don’t even have, the time today
Our mouths can kill;

Your friend is smoking, “I’m
Wind blown,” he says turning
This way when we sit down
Before the mirror.

To want as well as have nothing
I shouldn’t ask did I live like that fly on the wall?

Surface depth. You shouldn’t expect me at all.
Self restraint & perverse incentives, an unknown future’s cart before
Facing great green bruising air with less but more to live for.. scruples-less!

New teachers turn up with stratagems, even newer phenomena
To run over, any & all mayhem will be unannounced (achieved)
Or they won’t be since we talk thru flexible models &

Already what you say takes us off the jet trail! quelling fear of pain.
You never can tell. I won’t.

On the border of Marblehead, ornamental shrubs sometimes have presidents’ names or others’, Dukes of Zoroaster, Forex, a snort of a nice hint and of a finite nature exuding foundational values like a panderer. Just get by the comic bits; a shrub is a lone entity in a world dominated by luxury blooms.

In order to take on a galactic stare,
Occasional intoxicants
Every 10 yrs
                            A decade goes and still you are unattainable!

Say you’ll be back. A blast of cold air
Stoked by an airfare invasion.

Que faut-il? Des cris de règle de la majorité enfilées sur les zones communes /
Je possède le haut. Je me maquille à casser des histoires — One admits one’s a Nike athlete in a relaxed conservatory for work.. Le dernier d’un type dessous du pair, un type sur un voyage loin du soleil.
Pour se baigner = dormir comme le blé. I’m the last below par sort this far from letting one happen faster = to sleep like wheat. Après un certain temps: Ces crocs sont à la porte. Que-c’est un marin du prototype au bateau? After a while: Claws? What claws? What is proto-sailing? On est devenu complètement libéré des pronoms en début de l’adolescence, c'est annulée, tout le monde, c'est libéré
à long terme, affalé bien sous un tartan, juste aller dans les coulisses où ils ont mis sur le maquillage. Comme y un retour. You’re freed of pronouns in preadolescence, long voided, you’re longterm freed slumped under a tartan. Go back to Makeup. Donc on a adoré l'école primaire de plus que son père.
Plus tard, à Whole Foods, quelqu'un agitait. On respirait bas, au même rythme en agitant les bras. You liked primary grades more than your dad. Later, at Whole Foods, someone waved, breathing down, arms apace.
Panes of sunlight,
how many hours are we talking?

I smell a rat. We’re still in the meta space.

And your name came up on my tooth. Breathtaking anxiety, refusal to arbitrate glamour, okay... we’re done. In a footloose world like back in college both bodies are loaded on symbolism. Go ahead, chat up anyone here. But the next stage trolling pillagers is fickle. And then it begins, an ellipse comes over us / as our love and money go down together.

Yup, we know gobs of cash and living well, poof. I’m just curious having compulsively misplaced most of life’s grotesqueries, does a rescinded narrative / meta space take in how and where stories get produced or which claims long ago transcend time continua inside the moves we are the circuitry to?

Mimesis. Don’t hold it in. Talk to your proctors.

On a human ~ ant landscape, god is the ant.
Drink to one’s health & bicameral madness
As sugar consumption skyrockets. O Canada

Retour lorsque nous sommes sur notre propre,
comme le seul barde de notre époque, il l’a dit, un visage

.. ébullition triste tout ensemble.
Pas très joli mais il est en version imprimée et autour

Un retour à romance jusqu’au tas. Rythmes environ envie, la fugue-sonate
avec humeurs de tous les temps qui sont truquées

A une pratique complète au sein d’une trêve ou une question énorme.. où
les saisons d’automne, aux printemps, tous solitaires, sont en mutation dans l’obscurité.

— absolument personne — personne ne reste à la maison
on est ralenti, à fournir le rythme —

Un prélude à chanter seul
dans le cadre de la colère d’origine afin de confondre tout.



Back when we’re on our own
as our only bard put it, a face

Boiling sad together.
Not pretty but there in print & around

A back to romance pile up. Rhythms about envy, fugue-sonata
moods for all time rigged

To a full practice in one truce or august matter; lone
autumns & springs mutating in dark

Chez nobody who’s stayed home,
slowed down to furnish the pace,

Prelude to singing along alone
as part of the original anger to confuse.

Thursday.
Outdoors a muted roll call gathers around brightened archways,
A hazard to paper aircraft taking off.

Any ambience, keep that inside. Beyond
Today’s protocols for self promotion could not be ‘more serious’ someways.

It’s been remarkable to gauge how sneering, vaporous personalities — a loose term — proceed un-
Amusingly or even uncivilly in gunshot salvos. Seems a rehearsed practice, um.

By salvo I refer you to the first three or four minutes of killer monotone in talk, in writing.
So much slobber at the start, discourse, along with oomph, runs dry, needs ice
Cream. The aridity leaves me pock-marked (although my cheeks aren’t).

Attempting authenticity in insoluble speech, they fall asleep after only five minutes
Spent on the defensive. Such brilliant dislocations a\were expected, the angels.

In our sight there are dark and unknown predicates fixated on following procedure
But in their case procedure to see into a protracted surfeit of time, a luscious, soilless bond.

Mind and body worship is vicarious before conforming to a belief system.


Life changing sex.
That would be the solid thump in no progress.

Hoarse for a week.

I lost my nonfaith in the underground

Poodle topping Chihuahua w/ fresh scar,

Dalmatian tied down on futon w/ starlet —
Maybe I deserve my extramarital wealth.


Like nobody I play a Fender at night.

Shih Tzu in barrel w/ red pork rinds, sick

Pomeranian necklaced w/ black cord —

Please Frank,
Please forgive this, except my foolishness.

A worker loves riding in your convertible and holding you
Even though you can’t concentrate. We’re in a place, well
A place we’ve never been before. Your convertible.

What’s
Wrong w/ me? May I introduce you? Whom
You reading these days? I love food and
Haven’t had any for a while.

*

Ten lines to go. One thought waded out above your welcome

Working against deadline, ordered to bring you along
Forcibly, surrounded by eerie patrimony for future attributes.

To each her or his own ad hoc Oedipus, pouring gooey home brewed beer and beet juice
That reaches its goal! Dad is a doormat.
Dad as in genetics.                                 QED.

*

Except it depends — an authentic adult language, dance, charades, mores are raised.
Bullets and lists shape the last phase of withdrawal, possibly supplying you
A look back over who we are after the actual sublime prequels to shorts un-filmed.

The current event is to remain forgotten.

*

Many of us never see criticism as blues exercise for glosses over parts

How’s it going? It

Sees you’re a victim of fair use doctrine —
what rage plays at, no surprise in seeming a long time

Putting up a wall of calm pillow talk..

This is where you have to go get more.

Your relapse, 1st, is capacious, breathtaking... we’re done.

There’s a beginning and there’s an end, don’t fix it. Try to look better — second —

As an alien I ask how can we sleep better, stay loose and not get to 3rd.

Let’s play a game. Frankly, Scary Movie was a date movie, distinctive thought
Out on display like a private / public bond, say Klee / Ibsen.

You’re wearing a headset, OK
And this is what I didn’t want, as my animator picks up battery fluid



— torchbearing shadows —



Animators are like that.





I thought about shying away from sharing his room, but that could leave a negative impression
— whatever with a bible, I pledged him a wholly hidden idiom of renderings, spotlighting what’s
Missing!



The cracks should be bridged with glass fiber.



The view outside, pears and Fuji oak, null passages in fog, moos of approval.

I then bring us over to the rubber towel, leaving everything to chance.

I’ve been dating Mittens while I go thru assembly
given in to take you out, shake you tamed. Dart

I’d like to restate the rules for a stretch w/in a finger painting
where we get dressed for the weekend.

A place w/ quarks & rare minerals that take on alien colors & properties
of icons produced by classical forms in a nonprofit love nest
heated on sea plankton.

The jet gate opens to the drawing room,
once a factory made of the outdoors where snow & sunlight
close their distance. The old new & new strung out on sectionals,
an untapped kennel of oblique, puckish Swiss..

Just like other Europeans playing the stunt of delays between workplace & dogma,
anything everyone can live by w/out being
sequestered or brutally charged by objects :
so by these shortcomings we’ll softball in harmony
around some parts of sky & parts of parts.

Poems to Work On: The Collected Poems of Jim Dine
Cuneiform, Victoria TX


It’s a good time to be braced by new poetry; it’s much like spring. This spring we have Poems to Work On: The Collected Poems of Jim Dine, open flights and linguistic enactments (“up your ass faithfully”) from the late 1960s and early 70s (over 100 pages) as well as pieces from 1994 forward (over 130 pages). The poet, a.k.a. prolific artist, shows us he’s making ‘work’ out of available materials and experiences mediated through painter's methods. Here, in a brief piece, “My Poetry Biography,” Dine summarizes an approach, often writing “first on long sheets of paper tacked to the wall,” sheets as long as nine feet. He composes in crayon or charcoal, and paints over words with pigmented shellac or he literally slices letters off with a box cutter for stapling or gluing elsewhere. Most writers can recognize these procedures, erasure, substitution, etc. Yet the choreography and graphic scale of Dine’s methods imply an unprecedented level of immediacy: Poems to Work On interacts with itself and its readers — Dine exposes elements of doing the work and of openly figuring it out.

“Jane,” an early poem from the late 60s, starts “The shower is on hard / and I’m soaping up like mad,” establishing first the tangibles, putting up a physics in motion, in situ. He does this again and again in early poems as with “A Short Biography”:

I was born in Cincinnati
with the usual wrangle from
me about finding a tit
to keep my mouth quiet —

But also in the first 100 or so poems we join the ‘pop’ artist literally going about his artwork, talking shop so to speak:

making a long painting using all sorts of painting
techniques I’m making a long painting using all sorts of painting
techniques paint staining with all kinds of plastic paint washy oil...

Not fantastically “in electric moccasins,” Dine proclaims, “I wish only art for my sons / nothing less than / all kinds of words / and landscape.” I’m fairly sure we can resource battery-inspired mocs from the 1970s, so nothing is far-fetched here. In these first poems the painter and poet are one in the landscape; in the poem “Wind Marks” one sees “Violent wind” as a “dream,” yet also “I got your head smell // All over my nose.”

The later poems entail robust visual emotion and formal experiment (landscape and words). In a section of more recent work, “About Her for You,” there are shorter pieces alongside bigger poems, 3-pages or longer. Some later formats were adopted for inclusion in digital graphics, polaroids, gelatin prints, and so forth. More striking, perhaps, so many of the later poems aggregate lived experience, call-outs addressed to departed friends, Robert Creeley and Kenneth Koch, among others, as well as many variations to Diana Michener, poet, artist and collaborator with Dine. The rhetoric is crisp, frontal, performative: “BLAND NOTES / TO THE DANCER / KISS ME / THRU GAUZE…” In writing words and rearranging them on walls, the poet’s sounds and moves emanate from a visual imagination physically working out: “FAIRY ISLE / Your name — / clear / Lily of the Valley / HOLY GHOST. / BRING the bright / red paint / to your mouth.” So many of Dine’s poems are charged, however, with enactment of limits to sound, sight and something other.

ONLY THIN
SQUARES OF COLOR
IN THIS BEAUTIFUL PLACE
A METAPHOR
THAT DOESN’T DESCRIBE

ALCOHOLISM

Squares of color that glow only so far, but alive and surging with surprises you may find antic and addictive: “I half holler fuck you — / William Carlos Williams.” On second thought, “I start running / backwards...” Limits to artistic practice are always with us but here’s Dine at work (inviting us to join in), stepping beyond those limits,

fittings on galvanized pipe are put together making nothing real
but a selection of pipe fittings put together...

His point paraphrases text from one of four lithographs in Poems to Work On, “I visualized / a miracle — appearing anywhere.” Dine is deliberate, never to lessen what provokes, compressing visuals with a comedian’s ease in “Gide Lines to Paris”:

A man’s face turns to soft rubber
He twists it
To look like his wife

— Light comedy, slapstick to self-disparaging turns, “My nose goes vibrating down the street.” A friend of the poet tells me the B in the next title refers to one of the George Bushes. Thinking more of the New Yorkiness of the sentiments, I guessed more parochially what follow vibrating more achingly, more indignantly when performed to an empty stage by an ex of Balanchine’s —

GEORGE B. POEM

BASTARD —
Bastard, Bastard
like
PRIVILEGED Boy
              dark
‘EXECUTIONER’ —
BASTARD

That’s an entire poem, an entire theater of vacant, beautiful anger.

Included with the collection are indexes of titles, dates of composition, as well as lithographs and endpapers by the poet. The verse here, hundreds of grown-up toys, diagrammed scenarios — ‘all sorts...all over’ — new poems that go for broke and will stay new. Just a few artists operate with the sense that poet Vincent Katz picks up from Dine, “a sense that poetry matters.” Katz edited Poems to Work On and offers a helpful foreword to Dine’s chronology and “offhand calculation.”

Jim Dine’s poetry is calculation en plein air, a show of what has been done to self-empower and self-amaze:

INNOCENCE
THAT’S WHAT I LIKE!
I GO TO SEE SOMEONE —
THE NEXT THING I KNOW
I’M SCARED —
INTO MY FACE [...]

Fleeting, not ugly square / gets jobs done. This is how it is as an experience, downgrading the other ambiguities you may still enjoy. Good eyes, quick, every inch hidden in flouncing money. Inside, he’s shooting for rhino décor. Sobered. Nothing’s happened and it’s hours later, the old quayside, mostly mixed, dudes in sweats and black tees with blue spots of success. The hunt hath wings. The goblet exchange began, crested, and vanished like permissions administering guard times, the right thing to do, close to the beach.

Capital v jihad. (Kit Robinson)