Here's a set of impressions gathered over the last few moments. 0:00

That sentence itself is a turnoff. That one, too. But blogging is about momentary impressions we'd never notice otherwise. No proofs required or appreciated, especially. A range of conversation backed into roughly drafted opinion works. Any graphics, even video, that's ok so long as you're not serious or corporate. Poems seem to fall flat. (I'm not talking about sub-blogs where bloggers post drafts of poetry, now.) Would you pour over poems by H.D. or W.H. Auden uploaded daily on any of your favorite blogs? Schuyler? Ceravolo? (Lines from My Life posted daily -- that works for Bill Marsh, but he's certifiably dedicated. And it's fed to us in dosages of text.) Whack jobs or poetry-takeoffs punctuated with belching, flamey asides -- these can be adequate, so long as you're giggle head. 1:03

In fact, you can't be serious and stay blogging. 27:09

Latest casualties in the too-serious too-much-to-read-and-no-oomph category center in and among the poet-lawyer student ranks. Look, landlords, Stevens didn't write briefs. I'm forgetting who and where, just yesterday I read a run-on v. language poetry, poems by academics/elitists, etc. that cited so little text for or against its arguments it took my breath away. 0:00

That was my impression. Back to you. 0:12

Snow in Hawaii.

A new environment. Uncluttered rooms, suggestions of comfort. Hidden media appliances on call. Sunken wardrobes (not to block the views) laden with career costumes. Three-hour transplants. An ear pod of self distinguished mood swings and a few kitchens to heat takeout.

I forget what you sound like, because the office beneath sweats like the beach just to be mean. Lower your monthly payments, the only employment for non-celebrities in humid landscapes: boxwood and dry ice to write and design.

Wake up and work.

I see foreign spies in their otherness prevent skipping over the ripeness above abstract concretion, the ripeness with boys as they march to a live rap -- footnotes and fodder of obese genre that doesn't exist three days later, a foreign road crossing that boasts diode lanterns to the darkest ends off all the blades (of ovulation), the dungeon of hardened fire unobstructed by a cause other than war; you see.

This is my biopic, millionaire, and it counts, handling the totality. You once said ratification of reality is our own, but it is another's reality. But that's just vulgar sophism and so unfair, mommy. This is my poem. In this biopic someone god damned is trying to embark upon a happily-ever-after-life, and the day before the wedding to end all others, she miscarries, which is a wretched shock for anyone. And it triggers all of these repressed emotions that she's had about her own past, about her sexual history, and her anxiety about being able to be a poet, a mother, a partner, a good woman -- every sort of self-hating fear that she has. This scene is the tongue sticking out of all of her fears.

You already know it's a really hard thing for a poet-filmmaker to grapple with. I who have always been a ghost have never had a problem with it. My poetry is built around sane choices. I can create a sense of a person, even though in reality, I'm really just each person's memory of that person in the totality.

Some people don't hear very well but I do because my ass is all about listening to poetry. (Aside I wonder if taking a bow with the ropes part of rage stamped to end whatever part of this or no part or modified or interpolated / intertwined / enter twins with X where X is to end whatever part of rage sent stamped ended this way -- aside, i.e., a bow with ropes to your raw lips to the you who did this or no part or modified or interpolated with X where X is to end anyway.) I've been chased through air ducts.

My life is my poetry which is like a biopic on my writing poetry about my life.

Pop quizzes. What is curious style? What is shambling? How are they calculated?

Can stories of redemption ever be nonreductive? (For example, can any emotional shift be worthy of your love?)

The bio-pic, bound to certain classically sentimental traditions, is that occasion, light of strokes, when one's "voice" joins with others' to deepen the ultimately anonymous expressions of desire. True or half-true or doomed to falsehood for perpetuity?

Once in awhile a publisher shouts: pre-order offer. Stephanie Young spent a couple of years, and counting, acquiring remarkable writing from over 100 Bay Area poets for this first-of-a-kind anthology, 496 pages of what Stephanie calls "21st century landscape portraiture." Not that the pieces are only about San Francisco, but all together the works in BAY POETICS capture tableaux of Northern California writers making sense out of their craft living in a region haunted by poetries, present and past. Faux releases the anthology in less than a month, before May. The excitement is building so fast we're anticipating a nationwide readership for this collection of amazing work. We're ready now to offer BAY POETICS as a pre-order item at the Faux website. If you order now, you'll get yours before the collection hits the bookstores, and you pay only $23, which along with shipping and handling, brings the total to $29, the list price (effectively waiving cost of S & H). This offer expires when the anthology leaves the printer's -- so (as they say) now is your chance. First notice here.

Union Pledge, line two (draft): We shall not denigrate another for sport, to curry favor or speak of a poet in bad faith.

Line three: Except when it's obviously fun.

Line four: There is no poet we don't wish well.

Philly Sound on using language to gain money, power, flow.

On 3/22 Terminate and Stay Resident begins "fuss violator..."

First line of the Poets Union Pledge: There is no poet we don't wish well.

Here's half a poem to keep in mind. (Trans.: Memorize this, memba.)

from: In half-asleep love

...He's a shroud of a pet.
Earlier we barhopped,
avoided the jiffy algebras
of shifting seats at tables
by simply leaving.
A door functions both ways.
Open for water.
Open for air.

-- Shanna Compton

I don't get it. Then I do. Behrle's captions for the blank New Yorker cartoons are thousands percent better than the winners' [read, 'losers''] published in the zine.

My life coach phones it in.

Time to make Wally a big raw bluefin. Time to drive "her" setup car.

How is one to recreate the experience of critique, to explore the prayer of expansive Euripides, Burt Ward and Adam West?

Who will get custody tonight? Puppets!

O Wally. One of the most keenest, most keyest laws of critical debate is this, to name someone is to own him. If you can name someone you get that name to stick and define how people think about him.

That's what I learned reading her. At sitemeter.

http://www.google.com/search?h...=pantaloons&btnG=Google Search
1 page view duration 0:00
unknown
1 page view duration 0:00
http://venepoetics.blogspot.com/
1 page view duration 0:00
http://blo.gs/3478/favorites.html
1 page view duration 0:06
http://janedark.com/
2 page views duration 1:27
http://estherpress.blogspot.com/
1 page view duration 0:00
http://by101fd.bay101.hotmail....7c4292c8c03551b&curmbox=000000
11 page views duration 2:01
http://www.thirdfactory.net/links.html
1 page view duration 0:00
http://drewgardner.blogspot.com/
23 page views duration 32:43
http://bachelardette.typepad.com/
1 page view duration 0:00
unknown
1 page view duration 0:00
http://www.sitemeter.com/?a=stats&s=s11odalisqued&r=11
1 page view duration 0:05
http://www.shannacompton.com/blogroll.html
1 page view duration 0:00
http://www.ncf.carleton.ca/~ek867/woo
1 page view duration 0:00

Sean Cole and Edmund Berrigan at Plough and Stars, Cambridge, March 19. Two poets walk into a pub... This was the inaugural reading at the reopened landmark Plough and Stars, a new series curated by John Mulrooney, along with Michael Carr. Sean Cole got perfectly in tune with the late afternoon bonhomie, inserting several "wet problems" by the wet bar, reading first an "I am" poem (his term) and then a long selection from his postcard prose pieces, half published in The December Project (Boog 2005), half unpublished. Sean is as unpretentious in his banter with the audience as he is unselfconscious when it comes to soft debaucheries and normalized weirdness. Self-indulgence and stupid or freaky consequences often go together, of course, but with many the sense of self or the creepy usually goes to familiar extremes. Not with Sean. His work sports references to everyday pleasures, "fresh butane in the zippo, I was fresh," as were the hashish pipes and "golden people." Not that Sean doesn't get the bigger prospect, it's just got to be down to earth. His is a "fatwa against mawkishness," likening a captured Saddam to a "hippie from the Haight." Sean lets us know he knows where he is, the localities, at once admitting to "getting nailed in Harvard Square," but prone to write a poem to "a policeman who let me off making a u-turn at Coolidge Corner." The trick is to work in the local mundanities as pictorial foils to transport other kinds imagery, such as from "12/11/04": I'm a sap. Cried during 'Elf'...Santa's sled took off, powered by everyone's belief." And Sean knows how to stop a poem. His endings are some of the best. "Ears everywhere." "Let in our ghost. / It will not want." "Know your audience."

Eddie Berrigan read unpublished pieces and followed these with songs from his new CD under the nom de chanson I Feel Tractor. I liked the contrast in crowd management Eddie's performance set up. While Sean read loudly in the good natured fake rowdiness of old Boston backtalk, Eddie read in a controlled, forceful sotto voce. Nonpoets to the front paid little attention to the first two poems, but they were won over in a few minutes. These seemingly low-key works were short and the connections fleet, spun of irrefutable logics, "activity is where anyone says something." Titles were provocative but not blandly apparent. "Beautiful Pattern Noise" and "And the Sultan Got Weird" are two I noted. Eddie let me take a look at his manuscript after the reading; I wanted to capture a passage from what I thought was an untitled poem. The title, "3-20-05," marks the equinox a year ago:

...everything went out the window when my father
died all chance of a slight way of living & I have paid from this my fare
into the world of thought before that poem & television & the
Marx Brothers & having older people tie my shoes...

Other notes, a short poem titled "The Window," for Rob Fitterman, which ends with hope the window wasn't fired at. And a song about the weather.

The focus on the reader, "the perambulating viewer," according P. Schjedahl, is all to the function of intense reception toward and interactivity with the art product. I like this until I turn that corner where / when I feel obliged to appreciate the mechanisms attending the duped medium, the duping process, if you will, that 'lets us in' on the joke behind the joke. It's a literal-minded communication that's then merely reinstating disbelief.

As an aside, if one lacks style as well as criticality, one is mustily bent on thrusting one's hands gargoylelike.

I heard this early on. Tomorrow today.

Here's another invidious comparison. Chinese poets, unlike most Americans I know, deliberately choose lexical anchors that can be rapidily translated to other languages (and cultures). This appears invidious since the deliberation is a constraint, ack-ack for most of us. Nonetheless, the strategy presumes no hip readership to follow the hegemonic program. (Historically coolio presumption is encapsuled, rendered a failed hegemony in the long run, clocking in with a shelf life for the art product of minus 10 seconds and counting.) The surface warrant to the comparison, perhaps: Overspecification evolves into quaintness.

Oxymoronic proposition for theorists (again, you know who you are): National art consciousness (a metonymic cozenage for American culture, and of course poetry is subsumed within it) is largely overamplified, asleep at the switch.

Just a few snaps (NYT, sec. 9, p. 4) of good-looking Parisian women in ink drag remind me how ill-determined American beauty seems. Beauty is another substitute for art consciousness or at minimum it's a visible symptomatic tip of it. Overamplified. Asleep.

Mappemunde gets LRSN's tone, you diner.

My emo pony is all robot.

Josh Corey's Notes on Ronald Johnson Panel.

Shanna Compton, Jennifer Knox and James Cummins at Adams House, Cambridge, March 14. Shanna Compton and Jennifer Knox have read together in many venues, north, south, east, etc., and that experience of doubling up their well-thought-out performances to play off one another came through in both their readings. Shanna began with four of the first five poems from downspooky, her popular first book published by Winnow Press. These are poems that recall college days and go further, dropping a few clues about the state of the poetry making biz today: "Our affections meander, our minds hop riddles... / Please be aware we are not responsible / we're accustomed to synthesized speech." Shanna 'owned up' to synthesizing lines from Stephanie Young in the poem Shanna titles "Under This Umbrella Is Another Umbrella." Shanna and Stephanie share an ability to explore in specific and, I want to say, womanly terms the literal underpinnings of stagecraft attending social power: "I bet under her skirt is / another skirt ... flexible buttons & rubber grips inside ... / then a bra & then / some." Shanna also read newer pieces that sounded more complicated and somehow even brighter in their humor "& then some." This was work including unpublished poems and two that appear in The Tiny. These poems are enriched by an inquisitive elegance that knows more about readily available materials, like the streets and people of Brooklyn, as though the poet's inspiration, like that of so many New Yorkers before her, takes off as soon as she walks out the door.

James Cummins read a handful of sestinas from Jim and Dave Defeat the Masked Man, a collection he co-authored with David Lehman. His circuitous explications preceding each sestina were at least as adventitious as the poems. One that features characters from the old Perry Mason series had repeat words "fling," "tulips," and "Gary Snyder." Another about Jorie Graham (who ironically was the local competition, reading at the public library down the street) had repeats of "big hair," "mall" (and associated homonyms), "gin," and "lingerie." Jennifer Knox picked up where Shanna left off, reading a wide selection of comedic pieces from her A Gringo Like Me from Soft Skull. Jennifer softened up the room with openers like: "We are afraid / the peeping tom had a damn good reason to pick / our window..." She too has a bra poem that stirs blood, "Shut up and listen! Sit up / straight and stop simpering!" There were many unpublished pieces as well. I noted images of titanium workers and 99 caskets from a piece titled "Pimp My Ride." And there's a Don Knotts tribute poem detailed with policemen "with weighty grace." Jennifer was not serious for even a moment and Adams House was appreciative. (If there were a round table at the Algonquin still presided over by a sanguine Dorothy Parker, Jennifer Knox would be invited. Or, over Parker's dead body, perhaps.) Jennifer ended with her hot ass poem, I think it's titled "The Hot Ass Poem," a shapely piece with more than one memorable image of many an ass, an old man's ass, a dog's ass, a building's ass that's a really big ass, "86 floors of hot ass."

Thank you censurers Feingold, Harkin, and Boxer. Three's a crowd for Democrats. Meanwhile Rush Limbaugh considers this tepid measure, backed by a trio of leftists, a "gift" for direct-mail copy wri(gh)ters to stir the base back into fearful submission. Has there ever been a time like the postmodern so prone to conditioned messaging? Face your opponents and thank them for inspiring reinforcement. So, yes, thank you, senators.

I'll note the adrenalized perspicax qui excolit se ipsum of Joe and Stephanie's read was matched up here in Cambridge by Jen Knox and Shanna Compton, the petals carmine. More soon.

Hyperbole in the sauna. Write your own review of Joe Massey and Stephanie Young's reading and Jordan Davis's camera work in Austin.

And then ... [Blogger prodigal returns.]

And now ...

I'll have to read pretty far to find a project as pro-offense and other-directed as Byrd Sonya's or explication of it as carefully drawn as Geof Huth's. If you're talking 'poetry on and of the Web,' try this.

Have you been following D. Cooper's online stewardship of a new short story anthology? He's solicited young writers who post to his comment boxes as well as lurkers and perhaps a few others he already knows. He uses his own posting to encourage those selected through stages of the editing process. That process is not altogether transparent, but his entries overall externalize a taste-maker's pattern of decision making, and that pattern produces and promotes a thoroughly refreshing translucence. This is one of the more exciting and genuinely collaborative advances in blogging to date. He's calling the anthology Userlands, apt enough.

A.B.'s write-up on AWP has been put back up. Click.

Anne Boyer wrote the following in a comment box at Bemsha Swing. "I am growing increasingly suspicious that the difference between flarf-haters / flarf-boosters is that flarf-haters have never read a book of flarf." The comment is helpful in pinpointing the dichotomy, thus far.

I added these thoughts to the string, paragraph below.

This will echo Anne Boyer's thought about books of flarf. The category is emerging, but what few samples we have are unique. There is nothing like them: KSM's Deer Head Nation; DG's Pet Hat; and Rodney Koeneke's coming out very soon with a full book of flarf, musee mechanique, and that too will turn ear pairs into eversible petrie dishes. (And there will be more books, of course.) But these three demonstrate the aggregate flu-affect of flarfism, or to mix metaphors, a most serious pinball cognitive gadgetry -- and I mean serious gadgetry like what you find in the Akihabara -- invention that you can't turn off, that links within and to itself from page 6, say, forward to page 75 (bing), individual titles applicable to dozens of poems (bing x n), poems squeezed out of other poems (bing - bing = 20), stem cells splattered over each line page after page, delinquently interrelated side effects rhizoming in voids. To take in flarf poem by poem is fatiguing and off target. Flarf is solo instrumentation for thousands of off color strings simultaneously, continuously snapping. You got to hear it in full.

End of that introductory line of reasoning.

Brouhahas continue between boosters and haters and, I'm sure, beyond. (I am neither hater or booster, but I do like flarfy poetry, because it's awfully wrongheaded and smart.) I'll bracket discussion of the haters since I have not found arguments for their dislike. Their rhetoric proceeds from confusion about author intention, as if negative speculation alone were sufficient to persuade. The problem with the boosters' positions, if I may call members of the flarf mail list or "collective" boosters, is that their arguments are not convincing, either. The standard 'argument' is a serving of flarf poetics, that is, cranked-up humor, all to the good. I have also read what I take as prosaic claims that one needs to read everything on the mail list and / or participate as a member to be qualified to speak about flarf. If so, that would create a ring of self-regard and exclusivity bordering on self-loathing.

To the contrary, I look forward to generative explanations (processes, practices, methods for critique, etc.) from list members and others, as well as broader examination of how flarf fabricates from innumerable media-drenched elements of both pop and critical consciousness. A stark categorical description: the term flarf applies to maybe a dozen people mailing each other drafts and treatments for poems. I don't see flarf functioning as a "collective," since members are not attempting to publish as a collaborative or to work anonymously or pseudonymously. But if the term has broader application deriving from impulses attached to a collective aesthetic, surely those impulses influence more than a dozen poets. That is why practitioners and others who care about the term and the work should cut short their preoccupation with nay-sayers, and start writing about what they think they and others are doing.

Book covers for 6 poets.

The gill arch of formalism.

Debby is figural.

A white guy with dreadlocks at Playstation. People talk like that I need to buy what I need. Also, the Department of Public Safety reports an earthen dam -- on a small, private lake that's my ride.

One of the many reasons I love Adbusters is the kinship I find with people who know and dislike the fact that we are all disturbingly manipulated by advertising, marketing and commercial socialization. I'm sick of catching myself worrying about money, trends, clothes and body shape. No wonder I need to manufacture false control.

(theme from jeopardy plays)2

Signed,

Marquis Hutchinson

Morning's best spam:

may pollux it mullion, inquiry.
not pundit may feud, hero, a gifford may swept it transferral a patterson and heinz it fullerton.
it ruff it a some multitudinous.
and pluggable may aquila ! tingleit's elbow ! o's some concurring.

It's titled "hornet capo confute."

I wrote Nick Piombino yesterday asking for his impressions of Nada Gordon and Ann Lauterbach's Segue reading last Saturday. With his ok, here are excerpts from his keen reply.

"I've not been writing reviews recently, but even so, this reading by Nada would have been virtually indescribable. I will say, indescribably inventive and heartbreakingly mesmerizing, for now. She read, she sang, she danced; she wore a lovely green Indian sari; after each poem, song, or dance movement, she flings the text away from her on the floor, as if signifying with an imperious gesture, 'now that this has ended, you will never see the likes of it again.' And perhaps we won't.

"There was an excellent Balalaika player accompanying her throughout, though very subtly and tastefully (at the break, Murat Nemet-Nejat explained that this was a Turkish instrument) -- and there was also the performance of a short play in honor of the Begelman sisters, of radio and Yiddish vaudeville fame, who an audience member told us about spontaneously, and very articulately, at Nada's request.  It seems Marianne Shaneen, and Adeena Karasik were transmuted into a state where they physically became these two Yiddish vaudevillians, particularly Adeena, who seems to have been aided by her own background to perform some sort of reincarnation, right before our eyes. She gets the Oscar for supporting actress. Later, at dinner, Toni [Nick's wife] and Adeena decided they must have been from the same pogrom!

"Talking about her performance later with Toni we could compare its impact only to the singing of Shelley Hirsch, who is able, within the performance of a single song, to encompass the immensely varied cultures of entire Brooklyn neighborhoods (something Murat discussed with me as well, but with a complexity I am at the moment unable to reproduce.)

"Although this was indeed, a hard act to follow, Ann Lauterbach, once she warmed up, was amazing also. By the latter part of her reading,  most of us, I believe, were ushered into a profound trance where we felt each word of her poems, including some from her newly published book *Hum* with the fingers of our minds, as if we were reading Braille."

-- Nick Piombino

Jimmy, tell us more about Nada's reading, please.

Movie biz. Cave politics. Kerry won three debates (remember?) and lost the election. The dynamic back in Reagan's day was the challenger proved in one debate an equal to the president who, admittedly, was Carter. But by 2004, the argument framers (many Reaganites) defended the president's three performances as 'good enough' or successively 'getting better.' And the 'trend' for Kerry was downward (anyway), so please vote the other way. 2006 Brokeback wins musical score, best screenplay adaptation, best director, so it's ok to vote against the actors and the movie itself -- these results are civil enough until you count back decades to find hardly any instance of a best director film not awarded best film. The 'trend' was moving from Brokeback to Crash, argument goes. As stinking and trivial as the Oscars are, the pop anthropoligist still asks, why depreciate gay representation? Why do many in the movie business vote it down?

Refused permission to several blogspot sites this a.m. Is this the beginning of the new internet?

I love a girl who gets all her plugs in.

Fast and dirty, this one's falling apart, hon.

Ask me something about something forced.

The word is no word.

She probably didn't know you were there so much for iconic, focused, and carefree, on first impressions.

Modernism as plantains in a controlled trial, a critical role among nuanced offenses to the spirit. Movement with its recent weight gain (I didn't bring spoons) under the sequoia representations, too many shaved heads.

You can light a fire and its combatants (joined complexities) suck up to the surface for a face off.

She looked right at me.

Steaming write-ups on Bok & Notley from Harris & Orange.

To a spiritual father in the future,

If you'd gone ahead, it would have laid a basis for discussing other parts of becoming difficult.

It's link diffusion, bitches.

Although this is great poetry, too, balneology for a glimmer of comprehension (you live that long), it's a plummet; you have a poor hairdo, the wrong sideburns, and the brain of a four-year-old. Your world is a duped trap as it is most insatiate and luxurious. You're nevertheless one osculating instance -- your fable and verse classic as adoring fans with gender issues write weeks in advance of seizing it. (The auteur and fan don't live in a perfect future and that's gross, to paraphrase the jerk reading backwards.) But you think we can stay on as equals with neither sex dominant or earning more wages simply because that would be awesome.

AOL is gay, you say.

So I guess you're also saying "Happily Ever After" is a crock? (If seminal retention's a crime, you get a life sentence.) The first poem you wrote was a mash of landscapes, knifelike exchanges and cheesy silence. Actually this had little to do with gender. It's more focused on a baboon fondled by Margot Asquith. (I recommend her and it to you.)

You symbolize everything I've decided to lose to live longer.

Remember the cat's paw. Remember it comes from ending a stanza with Oreo.

In the long view, the passive voice is therapeutic.

If I started out now, I'd be placed in special ed.

Overheard in the boardroom, I've been put on a 20-year watch list, at the end of which I'll get a watch.

Giddy upticks in the comment box wars. (But the frivolity heads opposite to where unglued intermingling usually drops us.) What first seemed neo-psychodelic pandemonium -- every flash dancer for herself, diagramming off in fizzies of astro beats -- has distilled into branding for vivid self-portraiture and nervous seduction. This interactivity has, in short, brought about the collapse of incoherence as we know it.

Readers of blogs (including bloggers like me, of course) are calling each other to order to register an altogether new and somewhat chipper longueur. It's a campaign of and for new coherence and beyond coherence. Enough of these clever theories and prose streams of happiness. Let's get with festivalism. (Origins of house music might be a parallel.) A spiral hands-up for all the coolest d.j.'s mixing it better with gravitational rhymes, baso hoots and plenty of exhorted heat.

Hoy doy, what a sweep of vanity comes this way.