I'm not even halfway thru my every-few-days review of the blogroll, right, and I find too much to contradict any first or sophist impression that either poets or the subset of poets blogging has gone to sleep. (Some of us need a rest, and we take it; others -- new bloggers or previously snoozing -- pick up "the void." Nothing newsworthy there.) Here are a few items. Music and clickable-to samples preoccupy some bloggers for the last few days or longer. Unexpectedly, Bill Knott picks up on a long list of mashes featuring poets and rockers or crooners from previous decades. One he highlights, his own poetry topping Connie Francis. (Knott objects to the masher's mispelling of Francis's last name, a deflection of sorts from drawing attention to himself.) Other music picks from Charles Jensen and Sasha Frere-Jones, part of his ongoing project. Crag Hill sponsors Dan Waber's ideas for publishing, as does Geof Huth. Waber recommends, among other inventions, a close-reading exercise, and points to Charles Alexander's analysis of Elizabeth Bishop posted to Poetics last April. (More details at Crag Hill's blog.) Anne Boyer proposes difficult ways to publish as a kind of "community service." (What is community? Oh, never mind...) I like this approach she cites from Linh Dinh: "Bad, bumbling English is always a happenin' planet, stretching your horizon, dude, don't confabulate me." There's Bill Marsh's My Life Project, a line a day from Lyn Hejinian that's been stretching blog parameters for appropriation for years and onward, now, into 2007. But before you and I depart 2006, catch Joshua Clover's read of Keith Waldrop's Charles Baudelaire in a review for this Sunday's Times, Dec. 31, one of our last days in Republican warp, accessible on the NYTimes site or on the The Page, right. Best wishes for days and planets ahead.

Picks for the New Year.

Iced Prado

Branchville fever gets noticed,
crashed hills too,
geology chars categorically
so dollhouse, a jostling clothesline

& growls to Democrat heredity
flatter the bird gourmets,
wishing helpmates to outstrip
haven beef once in Berra.

Kankakee herself cursing some
madden tenses, the hermit bowline
necking with insurmountable Ampex,
bodybuilder of copious achievement.

Marriage notice: You're in a restaurant and suddenly the lights go on. So? As it happens, I do have news. Last week, Ali and I got married. Minds work better concentrating on a smaller area.

Geof Huth extends my Xmas graphic into an argument at dbqp. His ideas about the cut-up stipulate a non-parochial aesthetic. Always a good thing.

For James Brown

Americans are living longer. You see yourself among them and then you can't.

Parking spaces have a word with you. Children are the future. Keep them distracted, I'll snoop around.

Every atmosphere has five parts. Calculate the new payment. Wait for the forthcoming. Eel heads and fish heads. This is for you.

That hurt. Oh, thank you. I don't deserve friends like you.

Literally or latterly I wish it were that simple. The orphaned often become scene-makers or martial artists, music critics or teachers. The last stage of brain fever is nothing if not ambiguous; today you'll enjoy experimenting in pastels working for the atmosphere up in the tree. (They always loved you in Canada.) Feckless and now liberal, that man with a verge leaves faint, barely perceivable marks wherever with ropes, pulleys, shadows, whatever.

Post-cogency, you still into that? What's so strong about sadness, the real overhead? The sky of ice prays to you for what party in sleep?

I'm so sorry this happened.

Merry Xmas (thanks to Jim Andrews and Ron Padgett)

The swami burst in upon the headmaster. What do you want? I'm not a mind reader.

Erotic with a strong social conscience. Lantern jaw. Not a jaw, but a chin that extends fuzzy almost as a lantern to the flab of the neckline. Right. A weak chin. No jaw. A double chin. No character but a dark, cerebral dog.

In addition to his wife, Mr. Hoyle, there's his pursuit of very naughty men and others. Johnny designed himself as colorful, simply drawn, dark, cerebral, doglike. So he did have character, despite his fanciful, perfidious mien and no jaw.

"I used to be a pussy man, a short-lived comedy of means," remarked Johnny. "I miss talking to her late at night." His voice was scratchy. "There's more shit I got to do now."

Switching beard dyes, Johnny sat in the gray waiting for all the colors to fold in. The occasion seemed sado-obvious and frustrated his pursuit of seven statuettes. "The others, a number of them," he explained. "I was never a good artist," said Johnny. "But I have some super friends," pointing to his toy tie-ins with bright muscle shirts and go-bots. When it's really late he said he likes to play the KISS adaptation of Charlotte's Web. "There are those times when you need to cry," he said.

In addition to his wife, Mr. Hoyle, Johnny now has a long penis (hued darker to cover his lack of a chin) yet the new look was deemed incompatible with his ex's gift for trying. "Puss got the bots," gushed Johnny. "Last year sometime." He added, "I'd never do another interview without my underwear."

Right. Time to relink to this macbre tableau. I can't think of much else that would be more ghoulish than getting stuck on applause, except for the unexpected death of a poet that occasioned my de-linking a few weeks ago. This relink is like death to the beat of bobbing heads and weary hands. Right.

On screen you move like a fart.

Derek Fenner & Jeni Olin
December 10, Plough and Stars
Cambridge

Colleagues from Naropa several summers ago, Derek Fenner and Jeni Olin are wildly ironic and crazily paired as readers (crazily, in the good sense). Both are conscious of the 'lateness' to writing verse now, that is, the bulging backpack of influences one bears as a contemporary poet. Derek pulls out pop culture stoppers and pays tribute to a heck of a lot of poets from two or three generations back. My Favorite Color is Red (Bootstrap Press 2006) has a Naropa School appetite, as in "One Hundred People You Should Know," many of these brief pieces addressed to beat-influenced artists who emerged mid-century past, Amiri Baraka, Stan Brakhage, Tom Waitts, et al. (There are pieces addressing similarly influenced younger poets, as well, including Cedar Sigo and Jeni Olin.) In his reading Derek emphasized his pop side with several 'odes' to Katie Couric. These were stuffed with laugh-y half-lies, "staring at Katie I hit the pause button," "think about her bangs," "your name is ... perfume," etc. The funniest is titled "How Is Katie Couric In the Sack?":

That's like asking a man, hours before sunrise, what it will look like.

Jeni knows she reads to entertain. She's also reading for raw life, the "tuna redness of morning" that "the piss-soaked sun burns." Overflowing with experience, Jeni observes and inquires, "you are two with nature," with "variations, brilliance ... what have you got in your hearts?" With Blue Collar Holiday (Hanging Loose 2005) Jeni conducts far-ranging, surrealist dissections on American iconography and detritus. The inherent decadence feels manageable, contained within familiar methods and objects under the poet's thumb. But in new poems that she calls "Antidepressant Sonnets" Jeni puts her persona on the spot, one whose brain looks squishy but stays hard "like soaked coral." This is a babe committed to "no absolute except in renunciation." When the wrong peacock waddles by, she's a real refusenik, "Stars block my path to you." The poems are dedicated in their titles to new and some unsung drugs, Ambien, Strattera, Wellbutrin. Jeni's persona is tough on pharmaceuticals and on herself, but steers clear of boo-hoos.

I have "a stupid little heart" sticky & heavy like rice
& about as candid as a Masonic lodge.

Self-deprecation opens the way for elaborate imagery ("your penis ... looks like a sun-burnt / baby's arm & smells of chlorine") and tension-resolving humor ("Champagne flash & I am the bastion of pluralism"). But the babe's espoused style carries the weight, and make no mistake, this persona is no news anchor.

Zero abortions, zero dependents & financially secure
in a kind of quasi-Geisha way. I splurge on sushi & weed.

Shampoo editor, left, hosed down in Boston.

How Tom Raworth puts the X in Xmas.

Bill Knott follows through on his self-publishing kick. Two chaps online: Casablank and the Mall-tique Falcon & Harvest and Other Mostly New Poems.

I found chic articles to contradict Kaluli's lament.
I've got a huge curtain rod. "It's equivalent
to marriage."

Bernstein on Blaser: "...commitment to a space of in-between [...] refuses the abstract binary logic of contradiction in favor of a generative 'polar logic' of nonidentity and disjunction. This could be described as the ethical basis of Blaser’s aesthetics."

Ah, Thanksgiving. Tickets were
available.

Clip picks recap.

I feel those with coffee. It’s all so goddam.

I fight AIDS by buying things?

Thesis question (or thought experiment if that feels more soothing). Poets as shameful as the Republicans. Possible?

~~

That itch to get away with it. Paradise.

~~

Citizen of a nation is a weird job.

Samuel Johnson at the Strand.

What Would Geof Huth Do?

[Note: Chant and characters by Geof Huth, compiled last July, a respite for December 2006.]

Hefty reasoning if not heated debate between Swoonrocket and 1-Year Plan. The three-step goes, 1; 2; 3.

Mike County & Douglas Rothschild
Dec. 2, P.A.'s, Union Sq.

Mike County is relaxed, moved back to Boston suburbia, looking out at "the darker literate city next door," finding its occupants with "secrets in signage...matching shirts"; these include college boys, a retarded cop, a teacher "waiting for take-home," and numerous "daughters from one side of the blood." The splotchy matchiness is in the brooding eyes, of course, a painterly way to harmonize what are common lines, scratches, or at most fragments (if not figments) of what's there: "we need an immediate term for core...to go public without vision" and "without meaning to meaning." And like everyone else Mike seems penned in by the great anger of the hour; incited, he'll "take a war to poke your eyes out [because] I am the war"; more relaxed, he's munificent and ironic "because I'm writing this, it looks like I'm concerned." Choosing mostly recent material, Mike hit all the bluesy notes, including high ones, "toe to toe with the weather...I believe in the virility of air...new ways to please."

Maybe it was and is the weather. It's December, after all. Douglas Rothschild darkened up too, but mediating any one emotion with fast and fake-grouchy counter-motion, you know, "something half-baked -- though there is no whole baked." Teetertottering in "Driving on the Highway," composed on the Mass. Pike speeding from his new base in Albany to his reading in Somerville, that is, "written in the car on the way over," Douglas opines, "the sky is blue" and several beats later, "periwinkle." That far-out and balanced approach is exhibited in "Barking Up the Wrong Tree" as he asks, "Who are we to say which tree is right and which tree is wrong?" The landscapes feel localized in motion, Great Lakes effect snow in Albany, for example, where the cold "suffuses everything with glare...the day's street -- o memorization!" In "Washington Boulevard," dedicated to himself, Douglas's persona is out for blood or crash data or some fender bender, while cell-phoning it in, again motoring, this time "directly into LA...hypnotized by the red car." The call is almost incident-free except for a big surprise: "perhaps...this is a tape loop...trapped in our bubbles, language...perhaps this is the accident."

What Would Arroyo Chamisa Do?

What Would Jack Spicer Do?

R.I.P. kari.

There are so many entry points to Alan Sondheim's work -- it's great to see a new (to me) quarter of enthusiasm from Nick Bredie. Nick quotes Alan: "i make work as soon as i think of it. i read as fast as i can. i watch news and practice music while i read. i know if i slow up i'll die..." For an oeuvre that stretches for 30+ years and includes -- a guess -- hundreds of thousands of pages, this is as direct and unpretentious a declaration of method as you'll get from Alan. His work screams methodologies, and that's why so many poets go through phases of adoring Alan. I'm always amused when I come across someone who has shifted from that initial enthusiasm to something more contained, as if one has tossed out the decoder apparatus, and moved on to more serious, more aesthetic craft. Fact is, as I think some lit historians will see it, through his daily practices and his loose, on-again-off-again associations with language poetry, performative arts, and cybertheory, Alan is a big seed for whole categories of contemporary processes and procedures. Terms like inappropriate, outlaw, resistant, unpoetic, web-appropriated, inauthentic, and the like -- critical jargon I see as the equivalent of cliché -- find primary psychic expression in Alan's seriously child-to-adolescentlike work -- so seriously infantile, then, and so individually demonstrative of art-historical protocols, it is altogether beyond critical snap decision-making, much less consensus. Stack Alan up against his younger 'neo-dadaist' contemporaries, though, and enjoy his arguments popping with metric and febrile permutations. This is what the historians will do. Might as well get cracking.

Just found out about two reviews of Post~Twyla by Allen Bramhall and Jesse Crockett, both at Eileen Tabios's Galatea Resurrects. Thanks, guys.