At a petting zoo among the Inuit, terrorists forced a glass yardstick down a seal's throat; her four flippers kept moving, but her bearded wrinkled middle was now see-through, dwarfing her nose and forehead. The ruler was forced to navel level in a vortex construction like an exploding garage. Question is, can they still bind the seal's remaining tusk to a kayak paddle?

Why, of course! The colossal twist from the blades overhead it's possible to see some peaks of the seal's ass!

Japanese markets for seals have collapsed anyhow. (They're disappeared in the scrimmage of heated rot from fish the nets bring up, sarin fumes, ferrous water, a spoon of soothsaying, sinking marinas, and description.)

Terrorists sing, A hundred thousand or billions, under the blade they'll all behave similarly!

There's a new virus coming on. Wrong links = buzz. Not just wrong links, but way way off, Ehud Olmert = Yusaku Matsuda.

Black Rain star Yusaku Matsuda got his Yakuza part by passing an American audition; whereas Ehud Olmert is the 12th Israeli Prime Minister and probably the most competent politician of them all.

The best I quit of the week. It's Yuri's [dated July 24].

Drained from the start. Woke up to tedious and depressing outtakes of Israeli and Lebanese suffering, women, mostly, pleading for an end to bombings, maiming, absolute kills. How can we American poets complain about lack of respect and readership; I feel trivial looking on in media-inebriation that desensitizes us to misery, rationalizes, and segments human suffering that, this time, is openly calibrated to continue and escalate until a viral guerrilla movement is martyred, a strategy sanctioned by governments that are no less culpable in their counterterror than their hooded adversaries. I've been unable to speak all morning, now posting early in the afternoon in the east (whatever blogger post-time, below), prompted at last by the insulting intransigence of our flubbing representatives: The rude spectacle of our Stanford-educated Secretary of State refusing to negotiate or even come face to face with people who could help bring this conflict to a close, her intoning that any ceasefire must bring with it a "new Middle East," and that "we shall prevail," a statement of desire and hypothesized victory, a totally inadequate response to other women's pleas for delivery from pain and death.

Thesis statement. This is just to say.

How about enact. (Remember smellevision?)

Critical apparatus would acknowledge breadth of procedures (how many follow them or take steps like them or steps to differentiate them, where, when) and attempt to gauge degrees of persuasion, to boot. Anything less is sketchy. And suspect.

~~

Note to the over-30s nobody trusts. You're horrible TV. Anyone could have told you that.

More congratulations, happy hiatus.

Is it a sign of submerged alligators a) when a blog of mostly poetry goes prose; or b) vice versa; or c) when Silliman appropriates Behrle; or d) a mote of coincidence.

~~

Gluon, please.

~~

Brother Tom?

~~

Belated happy returns, another Tom.

~~

Meantime, via Kevin Elliott, Silliman and Behrle are both cool with this from Ghetto Gold.

Steal, copy, desseminate, and post in the widest possible method. That is your "Copyright" if you understand anything about wealth you will understand what it is I am "authorizing" you to do, and that is creating environments, moving space. A movement is about immanence and the particular qualia I am refering to is purpose, the sheer ubiquity of purpose. This is all men, not one.

~~

"Here I am crying in front of the school, sort of like [my] poem." That's Aaron Kunin in interview with Kate Greenstreet (link at right). Also a recent interview with Brenda Coultas.

Source to feeder, source to feeder, why quilt?

Drafted and fleshed out here, now a pdf: Hocus Fracas: Attitude in Process -- boilerplate theorems, oak oak!

The Hocus Fracas School recognizes 75 percent of us women don't know how to use gadgets.

Shootouts in leaflets. To within wound. At least 75 percent of us hang back at the studio.

For all those naysayers, the loner views his stray victim, the waif, perhaps not as an ally, but as an element that he doesn't want to -- he doesn't want to miss an opportunity.

The rock lyric, theeeen, roots for something. Pull up your plugs, Alvino, let's get crazy. My head or yours?

This is only attitude and I'm not adopting it for any more than the baseline it is.

I started with a secret advalorem, Fo Chu, my Goth video vignette artist who's otherwise indistinguishable from other scientists. I recommend blending in with nonpoets off and on. Not Fo though; he's seething in women's dreams which are always tempting but flamey, a human hose of illuminated octane, radiant short-sleeve, and white thong. My heart is smoking. This is what life on the salsa-and-elephants circuit is like. Poems, paintings, I govern people so they sit down and select Fo and me.

Don't snort here. Don't buy Harry Potter books. Don't think of elephants and binding. Don't give up giving. We don't so don't link to us. Sex position don't watch it, don't listen, don't back down, don't desecrate democracy or the plot summaries, Yeti don't talk, Putin don't panic, don't regulate, don't shoot Rubyinside, don't bomb or make us mad, don't forget! Don't tell mama cabaret and wall-mart. Don't take that job changing loan fraud to anoint the sick. Come feed and soil, eat i.d., aim high, the drums squeak through drummers impregnating kill don't capture with civilization. The sky squeaks with common sense aiding me driven into their pockets, growing new words in Afghan body parts. Bell's Law. Travel tip: don't make "I'm a terrorist!" your cellphone ringtone.

It's been Kevin K's day at Cooper's and, oh yes, Cooper's. Keep it up.

In essence every rock lyric has it right. Lasting obstruction is a sure bet your process and process reception are not going your way, rather the way of lovers and colleagues, or of sworn animae and a conflicted self.

Process blockage in effect prompts tactical reanalysis. (The moral arguments can get gnarly.) The vantage you enjoy leads to something or someone opposite, blocking the view, requiring accommodation to or redefining the frosh fraternity, a new status quo. Coin tossers regard this as perpetual and cyclical, rendering fluid obstructions as occasions of conflict, which means "not to love" (according to Wilhem and Baynes). But conflict is not merely evil if it sharpens ethical and esthetic focus on love, self-regard, and collegiality, as well as the potential utility of enemies. In another formulation, to find your process vantage and stay there is at best schtick a la Kenneth Pitchford. That's a purgatory annulled.

Vantage is an eel, once contained by advantage. Or vice versa. A waif or stray can't think of achieving advantage without perches (with a view) to look into and through her material for linkage with social and historical production. As the world starts spinning, John Wieners writes Boston into his bohemia (Nerves); during his mid-career Horatian stage Kenneth Koch Romanizes his playbook in the New York School ("Fate," "The Problem of Anxiety"). So the waif stakes a vantage but never forgets it will slip away. No what if.

Every seat is allegorically filled by fans anticipating The Curse of the Black Pearl -- every seat but the one just in front of you. As the megaplex darkens, a 6 x 4 gobbles it up. Here are your process choices. 1) Be stubborn and sit your ground. (A mainstream solution if you ask me.) 2) Negotiate with the obstacle -- swap seats, request he take off his cap -- but surely you aren't relishing this, the process, even if you get your way. (This option proceeds from the mistaken notion that obstructors are reasonable people and will listen to your needs.) 3) Relinquish your seat and stand peevishly at the back of the cinema for a new vantage. (Passive aggressive, rather common.) And here's what we avants will do. Leave immediately. We wasted $9, got the "crowd" feel, smell the trivia now, and write. (If you need more details, return later. It's only $9.)

Nothing without anger, muttered sotto voce, is an operative axiom behind the Hocus Fracas School, a writing brand I wholly admire, ranging from William Burroughs to I-don't-know, Alli Warren, Carol Mirakove, beyond. To let yourself whisper through fracas calls for aplomb, an achievement requiring practice and a vantage with overview. Poets, as if we didn't know, are rung up as waifs and strays, but a few lucky ones, Jack Kerouac, Brenda Coultas, are orphaned to an alien ethnicity, completely busted, out of place, in the wrong skin. Yet each with her own comedic intersection untangles the snarls of alien presence. If they nearly die for the gravy, they'll show you the wound, text imitating proverbial fury.

And after the shoot out, back to the studio, prayer.

Suing ten John Does of the government. I have to say, Valerie, that's class action.

Solitude, confidences, we learned times in the day, the plays and the jungle of language.

I lost my mom when I was 15, and even now I get seething under fireballs of mercury-based preservatives screaming this is a crime. My sister grew up spastic. I can't give you a timeline.

Their intelligence and accident accomplished what isn't in sequence.

There were shame and not a little vial of irony, of course, when another Muslim was taunted, blowing the Cup As the World Turns. Nonetheless, I'm holding on to informal, human-scale, secure algorithms. My life's an open book, for one. An act of god in a string. I think all these big cataclysms were absolutely timely.

Both mother and sister are sluts. Why not try them in the comfort of your own home.

Sure, I can help but I've got to get vaccinated first.

One's psychic theme is clearer when it is new in the life. Wind instructs the slivered ocean to calm nothing. Then did they behave as one. I've been raised from seed, a first-person nasturtium diarist. In one entry about boiling over I'll be sweet soon since my vaccine interacts with other meds making me less anxious hauling a lame elephant into the mud, barking his confidences out of penetrating squalor.

What brings this on? It costs a fortune to be uninvolved.

Laughter itself has become a literary conceit. A point to develop, I suppose.

Update in the occasional series, Best Spam Ever, this one labeled "PCF" from Beatrice Lancaster at the nonexistent 0451.com. Verbatim:

"You probably mean stalkers!"

Jonathan stayed and worked with the new birds coming in, who were all "Could you be a little more specific, doctor?" while they rested on the beach after a session of folded-wing snap rolls.

For Jim Brodey

Where are the Walkmen where are the Rapture
The twilight singers to exalt reductive sensibility?

Your forehead is broad your cheekbones are high like Tom Hanks's IQ,
drawing attention to his eyes. I'm in a restaurant
with my acting coach. We're trying to define quality in demeanor,
coming off poor cousins, sleepworking all the while it's swing.

Hanks you're pretty sure is a Stanislavski boy, rooster, and a desperate
bastard of the beat. I discovered this merlot in a chance meeting
at an all-night party among the Bohemians. Still destitute I made
forays into shoplifting, transfixing our love into a relative from Kuwait.

We could mourn in and out of this outline for a seating. Comedic
teammates. On warmer nights we went to Reunion Lake for the cow
workshops. Too much essentialism, rage, and eternal recurrence. We
worried maybe the naturalists are set up

In former drug enforcement warehouses. How many beeches change
above their moods? Air's straw hijacked while the pawnshops let us
escape the dance scene. Bad boogie double crosses swing. Dancing
as with endings takes skill, man, the brain requires an outline.

With regard to déjà vu and poesie, two thoughts. First is a general condition. I have a family resemblance / remembrance problem with some poets I encounter. There are poets who affect me in ways I will never let them in on or admit to, but those ways are tied up with off-the-page emotions that I see or project into an encounter, and, notable (notable on a paranoid scale, that is), I get it they are reading me in similar ways. What I've just outlined is not déjà vu but my conjecture is these affects draw from a pool of experiences first lived within a family and through childhood.

I'm talking to a great poet, maybe for the first or second time. I've read her work. I've heard her read. I know some of her affinities, some of the poets she hangs with, her background, her stuff. None of this is quite déjà vu. It seems rational that with a little prep you can achieve more intimacy with someone you're just trying to know. If you want. And, of course, you're helped by the other, the other's writing, I mean, since poetry is one splendid medium for self-introductions of a stagy, framed sort. No, what I am about to say is ...I want to put here and it's not entirely rational ...there is almost a blushing waif type, but certainly a range of collective empathy (psychosis?) with a potentially or partially vulnerable manner that, together with your own empathy and vulnerability, will put you both way beyond resemblances / remembrances; you're talking fast and can't help rolling your eyes in the same, forward direction, even before you have an intention. Wham! This happens a lot, and because I don't let it happen to me often with non-poets, I've privileged the condition, even though it's a problem when a person of bad faith, say someone like me who's done this a lot and has the 'moves' down, misapplies the moves and the language for motives beyond the immediate speech act.

Second is a more specific instance. When I U-hauled it from Waban, Massachusetts to a first-floor flat, site unseen, in the so-called poets' building on E. 12th, a while back now, I recognized the blocks of 12th from 2nd Ave. to Ave. A, even though I had never gone near them before, and could hardly gather how vital they would be in advance of my move, seeing them, walking them. The neighborhood, with its pockets of sunshine and surprising greenery, and the building were altogether familiar in some leaping-generations way; surely I had been here as a Jewish immigrant or perhaps as a visitor many decades earlier. My first night in the building everything was in place as though I had decamped for some time. Tub in the kitchen finessed, a foyer walled in bookcases, a studio workroom off that with files of graphics and drafts, a large emptied bedroom with floor-to-ceiling windows made huger because they hung without curtains off walls with a century of peeling paints, perfect as-is accented by a futon, a sprig of pine, one or two books (no more) in-process. I knew the poets, but a few were famous, many pre-famous, so that's not a shock. It was all familiar backdrop in a new surround of déjà vu.

Visceral poetics. I'm sure there is such a thing, although my own in-body experiences fall under a broader rubric, somatic poetics. First reading H.D. (in high school) set my fingers tingling (not my spine, tho). Reading Donne and breaking down how conceits interlocked parts of the argument fired something up in my brain that I experienced physically, but I don't remember where, precisely. (Again, this was high school. I bet it was pixification from all the brainwork and maybe the attendant headaches. I was more involved with Keats before college, but his poetry was dreamy concretion, to me, and I don't think I "felt" his words so much as "saw" them. At this point, embarrassing to admit, I wanted to be an amalgam of Keats and Donne. Girl, was I anxious.) First time I felt a poem through my skin was maybe a quarter century ago, listening to Kenward Elmslie read for the first time. Boom boom up and down the limbic whatnot. I still feel it, faintly, reading him, Ceravolo, late-middle O'Hara, Li Ho, Sei Shonagen, Stein, Coolidge, others. The usual.

In the battle of poetry's ultimate smiley face, it's not just who smiled first that counts, but also wherever and however. Frown-inducing accusations have been flying in a dispute -- between a loose network of random singletons and duos representing traditional (some would say 'old old-hat') friendships between or among poets and well-organized poetry communities (detractors call them 'thought-camp fellowships') with any number of members ('imprisoned') -- over the literary rights to the ubiquitously laughter-prompting gizmos and symbols for happiness in poetry.

Giggle-Mart, world's largest producer of hilarious poems, and loudest voice from the poet-community side, says all of literature's sneering apparatus has long been incorporated within a genuinely group-regulated ethos for the manufacture of comedy and verse, while SmileyWorld, the legal entity representing writers who are not members of a community, responds that "rugged individualists in many languages and not a few cultures wherever" first laid claim to the apparatus millennia ago, adding that the globally established business of individual friends finding happiness in poetry stands at risk.

"A prehistoric man probably invented all those smiley devices in some cave, but Giggle-Mart certainly was the first to promote them aesthetically online and on the same page, so to speak, as a postmodern trademark to admire, fume at, and envy," said Thomas Basboll, 63, a Danish poet and language auditor who has signed on as a spokesperson for poet communities worldwide. "When it comes to aesthetic prestige, the first scandal and subsequent, successful promotion are what count."

Unlike most countries in Europe and Asia, however, the United States operates under a system in which poetry scandals are so rampant, one or two, even the first one or two in a thematic string, bear less weight than being the first to excel in poetic forms that supercede scandal and exploitation. This would give precedent to the individualists and befrienders, those like Lisa Robertson, 22, who prefer pals, rejecting conformist organizations outright, because she has "noticed the extreme difficulty in separating out external compulsion from the experience of desire [...] Nothing was left but the smell of nightherbs crushed in passing."

Basboll counters Robertson with his own allegorical parallel: "I read Nabokov's Despair. The last chapter notes some of the earlier working titles of the narrator's manuscript, including 'A Friendly Likeness,' all of which are abandoned as the enormity of his error dawns on him. We may live in the era of timeless globalization, but the smiling apparatus and promotion are still rooted in temporality." Mr. Basboll concludes, "an apparatus invented in one caveman era has almost no aesthetic relevance in another."

Video surveys of recent protests.

Grades (mine) by the numbers (weighted toward student activism), anti-Iraq war, F; peace in Darfur, C+; immigrants' rights, B+.

For Joanne Kyger

I've checked the historical data on height, they're disgusting. Sometime I'll learn everything, everyone wants to know how tall, how long, and what the artists are doing -- So So Def -- James Baldwin -- I'm just saying I need to work on my own war-is-imperative. The new sequence, here and gone, is never trickle, never move out. At seven o'clock I leave for school. I'm wearing khakis and a red T-shirt and my new backpack is stuffed with graphs. I want more than anonymous sex. There's no music emanating from the garden-facing rooms. They must be so sick of themselves! I've been reading Cliff Notes for Le Morte d'Arthur, which I finished in one night with the help of two pitchers of martinis. Also reading Mina Loy who abandoned three kids in Italy to take up egg crate sculpting in New York. Top that Cari, Jemi, what's-your-name. Mina-mou... which is Greek in homage. I'll have what she's having, realizing her dream performance in "Fidelio." That's how I found myself, without a helmet, clinging to Mina's love handles as we pushed out into rush-hour traffic. Herod's palace resembles a school on the edge of a garden in Wellesley Hills. Mina and I have been married for three months, we're in bed, she wants to have sex, but I don't because she hasn't brushed her teeth yet. Well, I say, studying the history of human height is hopeless. This one graph took me nine minutes.

Curlin'

Yuck now, as Racine -- somber, lyin last, abs out & at it (how sand dollars in bets won raffles), his (our) risk factor tivo'd dope -- meant a Near East reappointment of ahem, trend followers: Vapor, roar, dust, Racine should clock out real soon & only then will I know how long he stings in the balance. That's a big cable you got there, sayin that, Racine paraglides into the fish fry hammered with pointy bows, his & he, bee invader. Chillin humbug! I'm pressin in, then, in whose hog (got any?) party, miss? Neat pose. I killed his English teacher, so natural I'm chillin, unravelin optic vests (hoard with toucans...) at the Castle Bow-Wow. There! At the cattle slop off on Rod's way. Warmth, disease. Come, mercurial pets in filch. Come, thumb plover. Listen, paps, Sean Francisco dares to drive us pals (coulda been a long grin) & that fiend Lenten barhop off the moored dunes. Wassup? Some dusk manager nods or decks. Party stamen, less us! Repro Zen tenured I'm bodily brunched, your cable guy.