He expects to get out of this.
10/31/03
10/30/03
10/28/03
Inside the tea pavilion, are we hardwired to eat? I am. I was born sporting a wormhole to kill the curse of the babe. I'm cheating wearing my spider web cap for courage holding a voodoo rattle. I call it my Britanicus sidekick and fender pang. It's so pure it allows the whole spectrum of color to enter and exit without interruption. Bad girls use something like it to smash animals on the manor. Here it's different, I'm not sure what the colors are, are they popping enough? Babe? Cross cousin? My nail-biting Yoplait? I'm staying central, the man who never forgets a pretty face, adapting to a life of headstrong fielders, curves and sinkers, and weightless powder finish. Not going out.
10/24/03
Sunset Colors
Revise exiles' free time, a lie
metro estate ushers habits or
snorts in a net all wheel drive
In the shadows of Hopi's highest peak
baby it's cold
be due get a move
affix the cause by Dinesen
The docks are so out to play
Tibetan for first blood
frontier work fitting a Tum for depressors
That sof' breakers move as diners
eat then hit the road
for roan effects, tow and last-line:
Japanese beyond the assets.
Revise exiles' free time, a lie
metro estate ushers habits or
snorts in a net all wheel drive
In the shadows of Hopi's highest peak
baby it's cold
be due get a move
affix the cause by Dinesen
The docks are so out to play
Tibetan for first blood
frontier work fitting a Tum for depressors
That sof' breakers move as diners
eat then hit the road
for roan effects, tow and last-line:
Japanese beyond the assets.
10/23/03
Oh, another link. Here's to John Latta for a string of posts that keep firing. Manages to talk about K.J. in ways that result in no tedium. Inserts Tom Clark's name maintaining (on a first read) neutrality. Understands the 80s & 90s!
The link today is to Nick who argues that writers need to assume responsibility for supporting one another's work, one initiative to counter national trauma. I am sure he is right, even though the beast he speaks of resides in many 'pockets' of our culture, politics, as Nick points out, but also all the arts (not just poetry) and sciences (not just poetry). Can we beat this disease without resorting to spirituality? My Japanese doctors pray this is so.
10/22/03
For Alan Davies
The most dangerous gift shop is the torrent
in her path, teacher says. Leo was dismissive
of Gertrude's writing. Without the sweet sous-prefect
she may not have got barbed.
Hunting is the lather of swing.
Remember thoughts?
What if it doesn't work. Then what?
Go with what makes me angry. A time and place of my choosing.
A story, plum, wouldn't you rather a sedative?
Exhale the rhythms – nobody talks like this –
my cowpoke aim – off-rhyme? –
fear is no wife to the llama's rant
when I think of the yet undreamed-of
loopholes in a topic –
Yours in occupied France, apple plum,
carpet steak, calm seen, same old
same old
Coffee cup steam tropic
white mounted to clear
ice pink with blue cream
& yellow cone paid in full.
I trained at my mother's barbecues.
Perfunctory filling in that goes Maxine
at the edges. Galleries now feel
more like lofts with a learning curve.
Black and Negro is a distraction, the choice
to write raped as made sport of is just wrong.
A dozen two-frame houses of pine frames clad
wasn't on the list but I'll add it.
Act gathered.
The most dangerous gift shop is the torrent
in her path, teacher says. Leo was dismissive
of Gertrude's writing. Without the sweet sous-prefect
she may not have got barbed.
Hunting is the lather of swing.
Remember thoughts?
What if it doesn't work. Then what?
Go with what makes me angry. A time and place of my choosing.
A story, plum, wouldn't you rather a sedative?
Exhale the rhythms – nobody talks like this –
my cowpoke aim – off-rhyme? –
fear is no wife to the llama's rant
when I think of the yet undreamed-of
loopholes in a topic –
Yours in occupied France, apple plum,
carpet steak, calm seen, same old
same old
Coffee cup steam tropic
white mounted to clear
ice pink with blue cream
& yellow cone paid in full.
I trained at my mother's barbecues.
Perfunctory filling in that goes Maxine
at the edges. Galleries now feel
more like lofts with a learning curve.
Black and Negro is a distraction, the choice
to write raped as made sport of is just wrong.
A dozen two-frame houses of pine frames clad
wasn't on the list but I'll add it.
Act gathered.
10/21/03
Around these parts, prominent cultural constituents are organized around glamour. The bases for glamour that matter to me are beauty and prodigious talent. There is also capital which filters through these bases and by itself constitutes another basis for glamour or, more, the outing of glamour, power.
Talent and beauty enjoy definable powers in their own right, but it's difficult to conceive of these properties as taking anything like their 'full effect' without addictive capital. Without the fiduciary and public relations apparatus attached to a Lakers contract, one alternative for a glamour-bent Kobe Bryant after high school might have been to move to New York to take up dance or modeling. Or, more generic, he may have gone to a not-so-great college to become a teacher, journalist or salesman. But 'all the pieces came together' for Bryant in and right after high school, and now he's a super athlete whose talents are in the public domain and in many aspects glamorously so.
Bryant's life up to now is a template for what our culture offers people of talent and beauty. An enabling first step toward the top glamour-laden rungs is to sign up with a culturally powerful institution. If your abilities are in team sports, this is a no-brainer. But the team/institution analogy applies to innumerable intellectual and commercial enterprises. For artists, writers, and musicians, associations with teachers and contemporaries, as well as affiliations with schools and traditions, matter a lot.
The more capital that enters the team/institution identity(ies), the more latitude you have to fuck things up. For every one of the exquisite Flowers by Andy Warhol we have dozens of Seahorses and Diamond Dust Shoes. Only two or three minutes out of 60 make Queer Eye worth it. And, let me see now. Hasn't there been an understanding for 40 years – no matter the Administration in DC – drugs are ok for rockers who sell product.
That addictive latitude our culture affords the glamorous shrinks to Valkyrie-like torment – virtually overnight – when a question of common decency has to be raised. $140 million for a policeman of the Stock Exchange, oh, really? The author of Rush Lumbaugh's Afghanistan Strategy Page takes it up the ass to get more prescription drugs. Jesus, I can't begin to imagine that.
My point about Kobe Bryant is not to suggest that mighty do fall. He hasn't fallen yet, and I believe (in an old-fashioned civics-class way) he is innocent until proven otherwise. My point is that the prescribed alternative to the glamour we hook into with the likes of Kobe Bryant, Andy Warhol, and Carson Kressley is another brand of fanatacism that's even more addictive, and with no known cure. Religion.
Talent and beauty enjoy definable powers in their own right, but it's difficult to conceive of these properties as taking anything like their 'full effect' without addictive capital. Without the fiduciary and public relations apparatus attached to a Lakers contract, one alternative for a glamour-bent Kobe Bryant after high school might have been to move to New York to take up dance or modeling. Or, more generic, he may have gone to a not-so-great college to become a teacher, journalist or salesman. But 'all the pieces came together' for Bryant in and right after high school, and now he's a super athlete whose talents are in the public domain and in many aspects glamorously so.
Bryant's life up to now is a template for what our culture offers people of talent and beauty. An enabling first step toward the top glamour-laden rungs is to sign up with a culturally powerful institution. If your abilities are in team sports, this is a no-brainer. But the team/institution analogy applies to innumerable intellectual and commercial enterprises. For artists, writers, and musicians, associations with teachers and contemporaries, as well as affiliations with schools and traditions, matter a lot.
The more capital that enters the team/institution identity(ies), the more latitude you have to fuck things up. For every one of the exquisite Flowers by Andy Warhol we have dozens of Seahorses and Diamond Dust Shoes. Only two or three minutes out of 60 make Queer Eye worth it. And, let me see now. Hasn't there been an understanding for 40 years – no matter the Administration in DC – drugs are ok for rockers who sell product.
That addictive latitude our culture affords the glamorous shrinks to Valkyrie-like torment – virtually overnight – when a question of common decency has to be raised. $140 million for a policeman of the Stock Exchange, oh, really? The author of Rush Lumbaugh's Afghanistan Strategy Page takes it up the ass to get more prescription drugs. Jesus, I can't begin to imagine that.
My point about Kobe Bryant is not to suggest that mighty do fall. He hasn't fallen yet, and I believe (in an old-fashioned civics-class way) he is innocent until proven otherwise. My point is that the prescribed alternative to the glamour we hook into with the likes of Kobe Bryant, Andy Warhol, and Carson Kressley is another brand of fanatacism that's even more addictive, and with no known cure. Religion.
10/20/03
Best blog commitment to purely expository prose, nominations:
Ron Silliman
Bill Marsh's SDPD
Eileen Tabios
B K Stefans
David Cameron
Best blast after blast blog, nominations:
Carl Annarummo
Jimmy Behrle
Chicky Chickston
Nada Gordon
David Hess
Best seemingly usual unusual blog, nominations:
Craig Hill
Christina Strong
Peter Culley
Chris Lott
Joe London
Ron Silliman
Bill Marsh's SDPD
Eileen Tabios
B K Stefans
David Cameron
Best blast after blast blog, nominations:
Carl Annarummo
Jimmy Behrle
Chicky Chickston
Nada Gordon
David Hess
Best seemingly usual unusual blog, nominations:
Craig Hill
Christina Strong
Peter Culley
Chris Lott
Joe London
Read with Tim Peterson at Wordsworth Sunday. Tim chose selections from his YoYoLabs chap, "Cumulus," long lines of unscary propositions maneuvered by the oddly justified choice of verb (past partciples, often): "souped-up sand dunes," e.g. The reading started at the tail of The Head of the Charles, and transport/parking looked unpromising. Still there was a good turnout, Joel Sloman, Christina Strong, Michael Franco, Ruth Lepson, a dozen or more others. Surprised to find George Stanley hanging around in Cambridge. He found hints of Neruda in both Tim's and my pieces. He read back specific parts to prove his case. Thanks, Jimmy, for this and all the other readings. You're making fall a tolerable season again in Beantown.
10/17/03
10/16/03
Only a few of the original blogger faithful are up to the task these days. An impression is forming that a few others are burning out. Not as many and far briefer posts, bigger spaces between posts. Indeed, a collective malaise swooping down as from the north country via Labrador.
The impression is poet-blog-wide. For bloggers who usually write in prose, for the poesie bloggers, even for those somewhere in-between. Maybe it's the playoffs, combined with tedious midsemester chores, autumn temps, the wind!
Of course, we have the serious precedents of some popular bloggers signing off. And others pulling back from their earlier, gabbier postings. An indication of what I'm intimating is the dimunition today of cross-post chatter, linkages to others, etc. Simultaneous, though, the number of poet bloggers has climbed into the hundreds. That might be contributing to the snob end of the malaise in that the cachet attached to a small tally of poets blogging has worn off.
Boo hoo, we'll have to get used to the cacophony. Blogging if not poetry is democratic.
The impression is poet-blog-wide. For bloggers who usually write in prose, for the poesie bloggers, even for those somewhere in-between. Maybe it's the playoffs, combined with tedious midsemester chores, autumn temps, the wind!
Of course, we have the serious precedents of some popular bloggers signing off. And others pulling back from their earlier, gabbier postings. An indication of what I'm intimating is the dimunition today of cross-post chatter, linkages to others, etc. Simultaneous, though, the number of poet bloggers has climbed into the hundreds. That might be contributing to the snob end of the malaise in that the cachet attached to a small tally of poets blogging has worn off.
Boo hoo, we'll have to get used to the cacophony. Blogging if not poetry is democratic.
10/15/03
Reading
Did Frank have an affair with any of the straight and nominally straight painters who used to come by? Hard to say, he was awfully discreet...
I met Rasputina on the street
a chop of a vegetable, she
barely julienned...
(go pope go pope)
Un jour, je me trouvai sur la plate-forme d'un autobus violet.
Danzig is the Wallace Stevens of evil
Did Frank have an affair with any of the straight and nominally straight painters who used to come by? Hard to say, he was awfully discreet...
I met Rasputina on the street
a chop of a vegetable, she
barely julienned...
(go pope go pope)
Un jour, je me trouvai sur la plate-forme d'un autobus violet.
Danzig is the Wallace Stevens of evil
10/14/03
10/13/03
10/10/03
For Cedar Sigo
Straights gotta realize Swedes ramble
like Dutch later, shiny
child of smoke, you know how
good mi Carlo keeps up with the pool?
float over your nozzle to query
a correspondent's thoughtlessness
Getting to point throws me into absolute
-- take a wild guess. Hint: evil
stars are shivers carved in dirt
reflecting the world as it is
with images you don't care about
Not much jitters, your heart is rapped
anytime in the creation
the blame for passive groans
fired up to affirm fajita in snatches
opera and shush.
Straights gotta realize Swedes ramble
like Dutch later, shiny
child of smoke, you know how
good mi Carlo keeps up with the pool?
float over your nozzle to query
a correspondent's thoughtlessness
Getting to point throws me into absolute
-- take a wild guess. Hint: evil
stars are shivers carved in dirt
reflecting the world as it is
with images you don't care about
Not much jitters, your heart is rapped
anytime in the creation
the blame for passive groans
fired up to affirm fajita in snatches
opera and shush.
10/2/03
10/1/03
Zeitgeist. The shit's in the air, and it's more than me and global capital and Karl Rove.
Mean, mean Jeff Jullich, for one, whipping out his high-school scansion plan to beat detractors of faint sentiment and derivative prosody. Old King Bill Knott quick to defend Sharon Olds's accessible anti-poem. What's that, an Eliotonian twitch? But the worst, the worst is Nate Dorward's espousal of jazz & poetry! "I'm quite fond of Steve Swallow's settings of Creeley." That phrasing so swings it belongs at an education summit among wives of ex-soviets.
Mean, mean Jeff Jullich, for one, whipping out his high-school scansion plan to beat detractors of faint sentiment and derivative prosody. Old King Bill Knott quick to defend Sharon Olds's accessible anti-poem. What's that, an Eliotonian twitch? But the worst, the worst is Nate Dorward's espousal of jazz & poetry! "I'm quite fond of Steve Swallow's settings of Creeley." That phrasing so swings it belongs at an education summit among wives of ex-soviets.
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