Guillermo continues to translate pieces from Venezuelan journalists reporting on daily protests against the government's consolidation of power. He also sent me the following background note that gives us historical and contemporary contexts for such protests:

I appreciate your comments on my recent translations and such relating to the events in Venezuela this week. Particularly because you raise a troubling aspect of the years-long political crisis there, which is the risk of a "gringo-sponsored counterdictatorship" emerging as a counterbalance to Chávez's impositions. The tragic example is, of course, Chile in 1973 and the horror that came afterwards.

Chávez's continuous ambiguity (he's a master of this) since he first tried to take power violently in 1992 is probably his greatest strength. But the danger in his method of excluding vast sectors of Venezuelans (especially, as you note, intellectuals, artists & students) while giving free reign to certain autocratic tendencies (his nickname among some in the opposition is "Yo El Supremo" [I the Supreme], after the Roa Bastos novel about a South American dictator), his delusions of planetary grandeur (for himself, comparing himself to Bolívar -- who was, after all, an intellectual, steeped in the French
revolution and the English & German Romantics) -- these factors plus his seeming inability to do anything about an alarming crime wave in Venezuela (an average of 10,000 violent deaths per year since he came into office in 1998), and other factors all point to a danger of things getting even out of his control.

What's unusual about the university student protests that began on Monday May 28th is that that hasn't happened in decades. Students have always been politically active in Venezuela but this type of nation-wide movement hasn't been seen since the 1950s, when the dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez was in power (my father has memories of joining those protests when he was a high schooler then). Being the postmodern era, unfortunately, these students are naive in some respects and not necessarily ready for a full-on battle against Chavismo. But their protests these past three days have been a breath of fresh air for millions of Venezuelans.

An interesting footnote relating to the date these demonstrations began, the 28th. If you look at the YouTube video of the blonde girl speaking to a crowd from a stage, she's calling herself and her fellow students "La generación del 28" (The Generation of 28), which is a direct reference to a very famous and influential group of university students in Venezuela, who organized huge protests against the then-dictator Juan Vicente Gómez in 1928. That "generation" of students included the poet Fernando Paz Castillo (1893-1981) -- a favorite of mine -- future president Rómulo Betancourt and the poet, novelist and journalist Miguel Otero Silva (who later founded the newspaper El Nacional. Gómez destroyed the student movement in 1928, jailing, killing or exiling all of them. But their movement planted the seeds for his eventual fall from power in 1936. They dared to protest when no one else did. So, many of the students today are aware of their role as a conscience of resistance of sorts (not all of them), that they are speaking for more than just themselves against a military government (though it markets itself abroad quite brilliantly as a "progressive" government).

One final note is regarding the newspapers TalCual and El Nacional, the former being on the left and the latter being center-left. They are in Chávez's sights and he would love to eventually shut them down, as he's done with RCTV (which, by the way, is a pretty mainstream, cheesy, fluff station: soap operas, comedy shows, etc., for the most part -- but we defend it in the name of freedom of speech, since it was the last remaining TV station that included some critical news programs). Anyways, TalCual is run by Teodoro Petkoff, a former guerrilla commander who founded the MAS (Movement Toward Socialism) party in the 70s (an anti-Soviet, Trotskyist group) and who has gathered an astonishing array of writers in his tiny paper, some of them like him former guerrillas, including philosophers, sociologists, economists, poets and novelists. So, Chávez can't stand TalCual because they see right through his "revolutionary" rhetoric, they know Marx and they constantly call out Chávez's militarism. But their distribution is very small and he's already tried to shut them down a few months ago.

I had intended to just send you a quick note and say thanks for the mention. I'll obviously have to write some of these thoughts out at my blog whenever I actually have the time to think them through a bit. Perhaps the most perplexing thing about Venezuela these days (even for Venezuelans) is how confusing and unpredictable events are from day to day.

-- Guillermo Parra

Cleaning up bits and bobs, unleashing one or more impressions of the blogosphere. That word. The mood here at Pantaloons is, obviously, somewhat meta. Anyhoo, here's one: if you're going to have a graphics orientation (and why would you not? Vaman importunes), the format has to be more or less impeccable. Otherwise, eh, discomfort, eh, pain.

While I'm at it, let's bring on a minimalist new ordination.

Chávismo, a term we might do well to brush up on, targets journalists, students, the usual suspects. Just in case we thought Chávez was wholly benign on the homefront, Guillermo assembles texts and video from TalCual, El Nacional, YouTube that document governmental encroachment through a policy of desestabilizar, roughing up the potential opposition: intellectuals, writers, actors, artists. The base is being prepared -- thanks, Hugo -- for gringo-sponsored counterdictatorship. (That would be two leaps ahead without a syllogism.)

Are you picking on me?

Pantaloons aside, there are several other blogs that are suddenly going haywire. I'm not talking about the offline and the less-posting phenomena. (These have been around for a while.) I mean head-scratching format revisionism and generic upheaval. Photo or graphic blogs turning prosy. Prose blogs going poetic. Discursive essayists dumping mere notation or linkages. Cryptics finding a critical voice (for a day). A couple of bloggers are posting the same thing over and over. Am I right, about half the blogs are surprising?

Have you registered to vote for Bob Holman?

Oh, after you register, if you want to vote for Bob, you do that here.

Bride simulator?

Rose, I'm trying to resonate concrete.

Pig on a Plane

Slippery probate in poems, wax emotions, and the artlessness of a quartered male -- opinion has shifted, social nano-vowel, my putschy valentine, O sutured misinformer. Your language predates motto handicraft, wholly tinkly, canned vibration in a flowerbed of insect spirit. Lightheaded among cranks, you smack of a pile o' fish that leaks as wreckage, klutz bath to hone mutation toward bumbled abstention.

All this talk is draining you.

WHRB is throwing its annual PDQ Bach Orgy. I forgot how great this hoaxy muzak could be before and especially after most poetry readings.

Authority: 20 Authority: 207 Authority: 3 No authority yet Authority: 494

If you're within 50 miles of Cafe Royale, sprint to see and hear these guys June 5.

MP3 of Segue reading (includes Tim's brass intro).

Among this morning's unopened spam, two "warnings" in the same font from two different 'persons,' back to back. And another headed, "would you please explain this." Addressed to the masochists, eh? (One could thread a narrative from spam headers, I suppose. The rule would be to use 300 in the order received. About a day's worth or a fraction of a day.)

Tim's write-up on Segue last Sat.

It's a limbo kind of place.

Lack of focused commitment left and right foretells irresolution with regard to immigration policy reform. While a good number on the right mark border security as their top priority, many others, notably those allied with the White House, are committed to new provisions to keep streams of temp workers flowing for agri-business, food processing, and other corporate interests that profit from low-wage labor. You would think that in this instance enough pro-business Republicans would join Democrats to reform policy. Yet, who would guess, Democrats are splintered. Both Democratic senators from Montana oppose legalization of undocumented temps, in agreement with nativist Republicans like Bunning from Kentucky that the government ought not to "reward lawbreakers." Other Democrats oppose fees, fines or any form of punitive action directed at immigrants. While Monday only four Senate Democrats opposed beginning debate on a reform package, some voting in favor are aligned with anti-amnesty Republicans.

Current limbo (a euphemism at best) for immigrants who are past their visas or without visas has mushroomed into a hellish and dare I suggest Kafkaesque subnation perpetually vulnerable to random acts of communal retribution, police actions, imprisonment, forced repatriation. Does this sound right?

Consider the plight and ironic dramaturgy of undocumented workers in New Bedford, MA hired by a government contractor, Michael Bianco Inc., to assemble Interceptor body armor for U.S. soldiers in Iraq. Last March federal police (the ICE of Homeland Security) raided this government-sponsored sweatshop to rip families apart -- mothers, mostly, but also fathers, daughters and sons (not to mention lovers) flown from New Bedford to incarceration in Texas. The letter of the law followed to a point, but no point of discernible logic. The day of the raid the owner of the assembly plant, an entrepreneur and one who has benefitted from his forebears' migration to the U.S., uninvited and perhaps without official documents, say, two or three generations back, takes a sick day and offers no public statement as to his own culpability. He retires to his slightly larger than norm tract home in a respectable enclave several miles from the Interceptor plant.

The drama or let's call it outright irony rests not simply with the readymade debate over aliens v. the-rest-of-us. Nor with a government conspiring with itself to arrest those who do its urgent dirty work. (Though, for sure, there is enough real drama attached to mass arrests, forced separations, stranded children.) Irony? How about the imbroglio surrounding Interceptor as inferior body armor? Could the government have done itself an unintentional good turn by shutting down production, even for a day, of second-rate military procurement? Over the weekend NBC and other sources publicized civilian test results, findings already known to specialists: The U.S. sends inferior body armor to battle. This concluded from a comparison of two kinds of body armor, Interceptor, a lightweight but semirigid composition of Zylon yarns (manufactured by the Japanese company Toybo), and Dragon Skin. Dragon Skin (made by Pinnacle Armor, California) is a more flexible system of titanium-ceramic composite discs overlaid in a fish-scale or chain-mail pattern, and it offers far superior protection. Yet the Department of Defense, facing evidence to the contrary, maintains that Interceptor is better. Here's where the swollen and murderous head of irony rears... while Interceptor is now (belatedly) issued for fighting forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, DOD's so-called second-best, Dragon Skin, is worn by Special Ops and security operators. Question: When the Vice President or senators from Montana, for that matter, visit the Green Zone for an hour, are they wearing the armor of grunts or security operators? Question: When we catch departments of Justice and Defense lying to us (and to themselves), should we wonder why aliens are in limbo? We're in limbo together.

Falsehood after falsehood. Still, it was great meeting or seeing after a long time Sawako, Erica, Stacy, Paul Foster, Anne Tardos, James, Corrine, David, Mitch, Kim, Kate, Susie (after a very long time), dozens of others who have to forgive my rush in not listing. But Eileen Myles, umm, the stiffest spine of the over-40 set. She was simply amuzing at Segue. Love to her, Tim and Erica for the day and night of poetry, everyone else.

Eileen Myles and I read at the Bowery Poetry Club (308 Bowery, just north of Houston) Saturday, May 19, 4PM.

Carol Mirakove está en buscaa de algunos poemas.

42 seconds of bliss. Tom, there's no question. There is something of a best quality. Is it the drum roar, your elocution, or that braless abandon? I'm not sure.

Ben Friedlander & Rachel Blau DuPlessis
May 12
PA's, Somerville

Dan Bouchard wound up a third season curating at PA's Lounge with a duet marked by pronounced style and gravitas: Ben Friedlander and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, mark-makers in their own right, paired off for a memorable afternoon of shifting but perfectly aligned lyrical scales that together fill the air over Iraq and still-smoldering Ground Zero, now national realty and metaphysical basepoints as it were of our political and cultural obliquity. Right from the start Ben snapped into a state of non-complacency with one-pagers of short breaths to shake us into the wave.

When we dead
Metaphors awaken,
Those for whom God
Was not first cause

But last word
Will find the literal meaning insufficient
[...]
A new song
To drown this miserable silence.

Nonliteral inquiries abound with the gravid literal ("ore from the borax mines / and the liberal media"), metaphor and synecdoche ("red heifer, Emma Goldman"), proof that Ben's a kicker of sacred cows (God, Goldman) and wrassler, beginning with his now-whimsical, now-dead-serious persona who calls the self Sausage Fingers, a boiled octopus, a bitch, a dump-truck "With a mind- / Body image problem," but also "a sour taste...of a polipo." When most literal, Ben contends with an "ontological status of news / that stays news," noting in a piece titled "Following Orders" that "a couple of guards // Assemble trouble / At the main entrance / Gored by a pen." The complicity-passivity theme, summarized in two lines -- "Adherence to policy, / We sign off" -- recurs in a number of these short pieces, "For an Embedded Journalist," "Somebody Blew Up America," "They Sweep away Misgivings, But Manage to Leave a Mess." As counterweight, Ben read longer and funnier poems to close the set. With these he turns to search-engine pastiche -- with lots of metaphorical disarray, obviously -- work that still offers the polipo ways to serve up literal outrage. In "Why Do Jews Reject Jesus as Their Savior?" he stumbles across (or half-imagines?) a fanatical Christian foodie website. "They use spoons, a social engineering device / and not the first trojan targeted at Jews" who get more than they expect, "a subcortical injection of baked / stuffed piglet / game cube, ethnic / colon cleansing. Riesling spilled..." The core memo-to-self: literal meaning is insufficient.

Rachel read almost the entire "Draft 85," a 40-minute work in progress that continues an ongoing series of multi-part poems, similarly called drafts. According to Rachel, "Draft 85" is a mapping on George Oppen's Vietnam-era "Of Being Numerous," which she describes in correspondence as "written during a parallel crisis (or maybe it's one crisis!) -- a nasty war, a strange disconnect between the government and the people." She continues, one "motivation was really trying to 'tell' George the way it is now." With literal reference to the aftershock of 9/11, Rachel tells you, one, George: "You and I had crossed that bridge, / the Brooklyn Bridge, 'my' bridge, / together. Then I said / 'I want that danger.' / Now I am frightened." This waning of bravado is homegrown, living under a regime of "high crimes and low cunning," a power structure of loathsome "dialectical oscillate" attenuating the terror. As her poem develops, Rachel cautions (I think quasi-ironically) 'be not too subtle,' trying more to spell out particulars of "crying in the dream," assembling, among other things (and, here, most ironically) bureauspeak and, if you will, commenting on the process, as in paraphrase, 'I didn't take enough so go take more.' Beyond a need to converse with George Oppen, I see another motive, one that shuttles us back to the 101 of poetry, where writer and text mine the literal to give rather than take:

Even the simplest things
listed,
their provenance --
a shoe, a prosthetic
post-war leg
remind you of
silent doubles
unfinished, imperfect,
imperfect, shadowy.

Slowly the particulars
get scattered to the wind

and one is left
with what is under the surface
trying to come to light
what has not yet
been found
nor been found
out.

Rachel controls language via hard syllogisms to expose the sensual and cognitive war waged between what's 'trying to come to light' and 'simplest things' as "Shiny talismanic buildings / push objects back into electric / specificity." Note the staccato and near-oxymoron of these brief sentences: "Emotions wash up and across / us. But mainly impotence. / Orphaned realism. / Instant knowledge, all news all the time. / And immobility." The battlelines drawn by Ben Friedlander where metaphor trumps the literal are again apparent, as is the insight that in this set of conflicts we are somehow but surely, collectively at fault: "one way or another / we seem to be assassins...hostages to ourselves." The beauty in "Draft 85" is that through battle Rachel models a poetics that pushes real assassin-hostages as objects of chaos, credibly building toward a fearlessness realized through clear thinking and better imagining.

Today I face thunder -- how to pay homage...

Bouncy. Bouncy. I'm a footballer's wife.

My instinct when asked is to inch backward

From the findspace where I ditched you,

My bay psalm, my slight red shoes, all

Desire for a moody nation's capital.

But I'm no Cezanne waving his prick.

A meadow's omission of Iraq

Seems a little strange. Still

These talks and e-mails

Jettison use of any half world

On top various uninvented heights,

The same heights outward

Of looking into what I broke.

Guess you know the math's not right.

This is nearly loveable and it's certain it's dead on: We've never seen a neighborhood so overrun with politically unaware roachlike pseudo-artist young people. The skate boards, cell phones, and vintage thrift store apparel are all signs of the end of civilization as we know it.

-- Lisa Jarnot

She said, bumptious.

Always a wit 'de jure,' yet, as he is wit 'de facto' of that company, it is difficult for the drunken man himself to summon those awesome Teutonic experience and proclivity that enable me to communicate freely by the fireside. In that case, you ought not tire your hires. Pay your own reckoning -- Popery to Paganism is short and easy. She will end them, here, now, and discover their component parts, and see if she can habitualize prior prejudices, converting them to virtues, which some in some company notoriously want or declaim against clarity through observation. Form yourself, with regard to worship and the established one -- examine yourself seriously, why such brave actions in fair war are now rather the decorations of l'Aigle Blanc and of what other self-defense? Force may, without doubt, be justly repelled by force, but your own intolerance will be known and nobody will take it upon your word. Never imagine lack of profound and minute knowledge of these matters, which are of a nature in circulation, having graver consequences than you would imagine.

Pitching Woo
Karen Weiser
CyPress 2006

A new Lake District has incorporated around the Poetry Project. With the release of Souvenir Winner four years ago -- as noted [scroll to May 16, 2003] -- Macgregor Card spelled out a postlanguage lyric that has its way with decoration and sensibility from the XIXth Century. Over the last few seasons one can measure the sprawl (or revival) in offshoots of like-minded discipline and ambition, self-study as other-gazing, sublimely estranged body worship, jaunty if archaic circumlocution, striding rhymes, and other shamelessly romantic strategies toward an ideal that constitutes the fog-drenched infancy of a poetics -- at once songbook-metaphysic, de Quinceyesque, and churchy-ornamental. The Lake, in other words, flows over in a breakneck schizoid inundation of high atonality that can also appear meta-languid and lounge-y, poetry as if plucked by pouting cherubim and know-it-all puti in almost-serious throes of Orlando furioso. Who are these Lakers? Among others beside Card, consider Greg Fuchs: Path train drooling night's / anesthesia algorithm, generating / necklaces of knees against the torso; Anselm Berrigan: gravitas to besmirch turn a / chiseled phrase into unstable air in which I delight acuity; David Cameron: It is necessary to earn your daily bread / Like the child of a washerwoman, to play with fire / And sing Te Deum with jewels clutched in your jaw; Eddie Berrigan: I caught a stranger in my house, and I busted his head with a club / Some say it's just a matter of time, but I think it's a matter of love; Jeni Olin: Thanks for the novel on Catherine the Great. / I was greatly relieved to discover there are fates / far worse than blackness, the clap; John Coletti: Podunk state of stubborn day glow long buffed lashes swollen pinkies; Corina Copp: how I make the country this childlike again / harp round one pal as he monitors his.

Novel reasoning to go under dreams, a "wind carrying," steady articulation of romance now emanates from Karen Weiser's Pitching Woo. The near-reverie Karen views is "a kind of think orchestration / indelible dark signals / we felt..." The senses scramble so that what's seen is felt, the out of sight sighted, wind, a fugue, the "subtext" we hardly know and don't know we have, "the antidote to dreaming." It's an important advance to build a logic upon call-and-command narrative ("I want to see you settle in the story") and fiercely surreal song ("the story / a cloth thing, a quilted presence"). Karen's construct shoots up as thought experiments with the mind's underpinnings: "inside the accident prone glass dolls / we are just surface that can be pulled away."

The density of info throughout Pitching Woo transforms word clumps and line after line into the English language equivalent of ideogram, a graphical tool to bore thought and image into the brain. Like ideograms, these clumps and lines can be rearranged to make new and further sense. Here are a few, at random, almost:

the fugue appears through the unlocked window
a world of almost situations
croco-qualities
sunlight itself...must be opened

my outstretched goat
moorland turned lavender for display
stream of merchildren
emptiness is mobile [...] the momentum goes dark

like an animal stuffer shapes death into life
you can almost inter the fog
the gaudiest peacock / would be the one without color

Close to the glacier use the word "carefully"

Karen keeps uncovering collective complicity in poetry, reading it, writing it, until what shows up is at bottom "crumbling to be remembered." In the poem whose title dislodges set categories, merging locus with being, "they were hard to kill, those places," Karen again illustrates what's percolating below in "the natural history of the island of sleep":

each word is a room built around us
an organ underneath the river
of skin that lives to be incidental
another spotted face in the crowd

Jeopardy lurks in poetry this wry, this seductive, danger stripped down to its smooth surfaces and polished metaphor. This is wooing. It doesn't shout. At one level of readership one can expect a flaccid response from another poet overanxious to be confirmed in her politics or antic methodology. Another poet might ask, Do we have time for laboring over the niceties of mortality; and frankly, isn't that what poetry has always been about, old hat? Within such a predictable critique, Karen, "the one without color," is bound to disappoint. In "now then" she ostensibly writes against the avant grain, "time held out in small delicate etchings / still warm though rapidly aging." I'm excited by Pitching Woo's surreal afterparty and physicality, the smallness and warmth. Another might brush past that. Who among us, still, could give short shrift to how the dead-alive conundrum plays out in this last stanza of solid argument that again orchestrates its coincidence with creation and poetry.

On the Mississippi Audubon killed the birds then drew them
time held out in small delicate etchings
still warm though rapidly aging
in his hands, the paper's a trigger
big enough to walk inside
the chapel of a bird's body
is any body
breathing with ink

Yuri is acclimating to Oz much too fast, faster than a spelling bee, curving like a soffit, a car chase about opera.

Sunsetting your web presence is extremely cool, hamster.

We note, from marauded to marrying, how predicates get to clobber the peace, so now any offense given or taken is quasi-haplessly yours. You're more than welcome, you fat fright.

Ruth Lepson, Walter Crump & Doug Nufer
May 6, Demolicious, Cambridge

Morphology (BlazeVOX 2007) raises a plethora of object lessons in eighth-to-sixteenth-to-quarter-to-half-notes from poet Ruth Lepson and photographer Walter Crump, both living and teaching in Boston. Their collaboration keeps tuning itself as if percusively debunking an instructional demo before the premiere of an impossibly extravagant sonatina. Para-elements of dream, bug-eyed yikes, "[c]oncepts and facts are drifting / around in the / air. One at a time / they sizzle into fireworks. Then I can't see them be- / cause they are inside me." Ruth's text carries descriptors for surreal accompaniment aspiring to an arrangement of countless propositional forks, tuning forks perhaps: "There's a           page in yellow / and purple / to change it           I am writing / 'not' into each sentence." Thanks to Christina Strong's document design the text plays companion to the photos in shapes of sometimes shadowed, inflationary, floating or boxed-in fonts that all together reinforce the idea of competing notes, rather than notions, tuning up, drifting, "flying through the word -- the wind." Walter's landscapes and portraits, some taken through a pin-hole lens that produces an equal focus across varying distances, some double-exposed, feel like propositions, as well. The photos that also incorporate Ruth's text multiply the drift as she's "standing in the middle of a paragraph." You can preview Morphology at http://www.blazevox.org/ebook.htm.

Seattle-based Doug Nufer read selections from his 'foully-flavored' prose experiments, two 'constrained' novels, Negativeland (Autonomedia 2004), Never Again (Black Square Editions 2004), as well as a double novel, Mudflat Man and River Boys (Soultheft Records 2006). The constraint holding Negativeland down is that each sentence had to contain a negation. Doug pulls this off almost unnoticed: "Those were the glory days of unemployment. With enough severance pay to keep me out of the dumpsters for a few years, I looked forward to life without the agency." Never Again has no word repeated. Without recourse to reusing simple lexical items like articles, soon running out of prepositions, the text goes haywire in subject-verb-object overload: "Pimpmobiles, flockwise, safeguard chicks." Then it turns tabloid: "Half-past weathercast, Demitrious Rex abdicates stovetop's unsittable throne. Dishes've honorably degrimed, unslimed; steady work terminus approaches." Demitrious obviously can't 'get up' if that verbal phrase has already been uttered, so he abdicates. So the language opts for new ordinaries, made more exceptional through contractions -- have has been uttered, let's go to 've -- and the payoff here is purely Americanized outlandish speech, the huckster in us, them, all of 'em, exposed! Doug read front matter to the intertwined double novels from memory, including this character sketch from River Boys: "Cadet Parker -- Was he one of 'us' or one of 'them'?"

Note: Before he flies back to Seattle, Doug Nufer reads with Harry Matthews tonight, Monday, May 7 at the Poetry Project. Special time, beginning at 6:00. Extraordinary event.

If you're going to found a movement in poetry, it's likely you and colleagues can benefit from writing about it and practicing how it works, doing these things side by side, again and again. The genius behind the journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, from the start, is the seamless agency of having critical pieces speak for and demonstrate textually what language-as-object means. I take this definition of language from Robert Grenier who, in the "Reading Stein" issue, briefly analyzing how Gertrude Stein was not a language poet, cautions, "it's at best a 'creative misreading' of Stein to take her work as a whole as a primary instance of 'language-oriented writing.'" Grenier sees Stein as "thinking language not as object-in-itself, but as composition functioning in the composition of the world" (L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E I [1978], no. 6, p. 13). Steve McCaffery, in the same issue, applies a different analytical tool, practicing in "a carafe that is a blind glass," a "translational response" or perhaps a counter to Stein through a languaging on his own:

she types clarity
relations to a scene
a seen in
zero

queer ones in the pain
of pattern
wheeled directions to
a fullness
that negated more to
more what chaos enters in

no one same article
unlike a wide (p. 6).

As you may know, most of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E is web-accessible either as a pdf reader or in jpeg facsimiles, archived here. There's a more graphic, alphabetized, center-justified index at Charles Bernstein's blog. This index pops out at you almost in a thermometer-like register of relative densities from the visualized data (only partially captured in the image, above, that's been truncated, cropped to the left). The full index charts totals on contributions and/or mentions for language personnel / language topics, from Acker to Zukofsky. Since every item indexed shares a common central axis, item by item variations are easy to grasp: the further left a poet's name, the more references for contributions and/or mentions. Editors Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein are among the furthest left, with 15 and 13 references, respectively. (Don't hold me to exact numbers -- I may be off by one, here and there -- I added fast, without double-checking, to get this posted today.) With 18 references, tho, it may not surprise you to find Ron Silliman's name sticks out, that is, stands leftmost. Others with big totals are Alan Davies and Steve McCaffery, 10 apiece; Robert Grenier, 9; Barret Watten, 8; and quite a few with 7 references each, Jackson Mac Low, Rae Armantrout, James Sherry, Nick Piombino, Lyn Hejinian, and unexpected! Michael Lally. I stopped calculating after noting six references for Steve Benson, David Bromige, Ray DiPalma, Larry Eigner, Michael Palmer, Peter Seaton. The left side of the graph is filled out with most of the names that first come up when we think about language poetry. There are surprises, few women, for example. Some names in a middle category, 5-to-3 references, say, seem to have fallen off the map, Kirby Malone, Carole Korzeniowsky, others. Not to mention the odd single references for dead poets that in retrospect require more attention from language and postlanguage analysts, beginning with Charles Olson, for sure, Kathy Acker, Joe Brainard, John Wieners, James Schuyler, F. T. Prince, Basil Bunting, many more.

While I'm at, thinking about advocates of poetry, how about that CA Conrad! We need to accumulate cash so that he can spread himself around the East Coast. 6 months in New York, a fortnight in Boston, a couple of days in DC and Baltimore, as well as lost weekends in his 'native' Philly, winter breaks in South Beach. Plus, ok, not just the East. A two-month stint in SF and LA with time off for Boulder, Vegas, Ashland, and Albequeque. What's left? Sydney.

Maybe the out-of-the-ballpark thing about Erica Kaufman and Tim Peterson's co-curating Segue is that after each read Tim gets to write about the performances. His attentive intake prompts overviews, elaborations on performative details that serve as exegeses of the texts that by definition have engaged him and Erica. I'm not sure anyone else serially activates explication this thoroughly, moving from reader to sponsor to analyst. Over four or five seasons Nada and Gary have set a standard, writing enthusiastic intros for readers whom they select with elan and precision. Now, the post-show reports spiral one round further.