Over the weekend a freespeaker I haven't met who operates under the name of Unclescam sent me a link to a 20-year-old video of Joe Dunn, the late pappi to a few Boston poets who were lucky enough to take part in his Monday night poetry parties on Beacon Hill. Tenor Joe and his contralto wife Rose hosted these gatherings as learning / entertainment events. I've written about Joe and Rose for Jacket, pointing to Joe's "reading and enthusing over the privileged texts." A good amount of the poetry Joe chose -- crinkled-up pages and notes composed by Olson, Creeley, Spicer, and others -- was unpublished. In this direct way, Joe was responsible for transmitting sacred data, if you will, to a small posse of young Bostonians ready to receive it. There's another function beyond transmission to Joe's teaching, and this old video captures it even as you concede the impression is marred by poor audio and a fuzzy gloss. Joe's incantation here of a poem either to or by Robert Creeley conveys Joe's swept-up enthrallment, a thoroughly earned ardor with text, perhaps a bit too 'private' for large-public consumption, but utterly mesmerizing and broodingly pedagogic in more intimate confines of a poet's apartment or -- now -- YouTubed from the bat cave straight to a poet's computer screen. There are more Btown videos from Unclescam. Here's Joe Dunn. And there's a follow-up, April 2, thanks to Geof Huth's input.

Three samples from Faux Chaps --

VIAGRA

Everybody needs to know it's the Year of the Rat.
Like the Gestapo, I have an agent at every house
Except Soft Skull, Penguin, & Random House.
I expire on the tiny punk heart
Of the Crab Nebula.
Fill me up with Premium,
I'm a thoroughbred —
My bladder is strong.
So if you see me fighting a tiger,
Go & help the tiger!

-- Jeni Olin, The Pill Book

~~~

My interest in Hart Crane began as purely physical. I saw a picture of him when I was a young boy that gave my confused desires a focus. He was wearing a Marseilles sailor suit, leaning against a tree in Mexico with a dark-eyed woman named Peggy Cowley. None of this mattered at the time. It was his hair, which was cropped close on the sides and combed up in front. I acquired this hairstyle slowly, each cut coming closer to resemblance. In my mind, something forbidden was happening. When I asked my mother to buy me striped shirts from the mall, she seemed pleased that I was showing any interest in fashion. Not knowing what else to do, I copied what I liked about him. It is remarkable that a Hart Crane biography ever made it to our little public library. Voyager was being discharged and sold for a dime. Its 831 pages, including the index, was written by a man named John Unterecker and published by Liveright, the same press that issued the trade edition of Crane’s magnum opus The Bridge. A previous reader had underlined a sentence on page 656, "Then in front of Orizaba everything suddenly begins to change. " Hart Crane had originally written this on a postcard.

-- Stacy Szymaszek, Orizaba: A Voyage with Hart Crane

~~~

Slooping down the long slope toward sloops

And finding uncanny reward in no reward

Nor in that either (neither), as we escape into

The timbrest of slad October airs, as a sweater

Becomes itself only when of no longer use

Or the bickering flux (flugs) matriculates us

Past what we weren’t going to be anyway

Not out here, not past where we never got

And hadn’t wanted to be, or to get anyway

We only know that the theater was invented

For tyrants and that we’re in it and to have

Us in it, and that all kinds of slag fluds muck up...

-- Alan Davies, Odes

Faux Chaps forthcoming. The Pill Book by Jeni Olin, Orizaba: A Voyage with Hart Crane by Stacy Szymaszek, Odes by Alan Davies, Pathologies by Jack Kimball, (Soma)tic Midge by CAConrad, Subsistence Equipment by Brenda Iijima. Some pretty good deals pre-publication: all 6 for $40 or any 2 for $20. Details here.

Am I out on a budding limb here? Stores shut. Highways empty. Downtown hardly in motion. Churches stacked with shoppers -- what were they giving away?

People took Easter more seriously this year?

Arthur C. Clarke remembered with affection.

Speaking of the cultural moment, the contest before poetry groups (there are no schools today) is both to amplify their message and mute opposition. The muting part is by far the easier task, and it is what prevents them from becoming 'schools.' For as the term implies, a school maintains a social-intellectual posture that not merely speaks but amplifies the moment. Contest is a rough framework, around which we can begin to pick in's and out's, flawed as in narrowed, slighted, restricted on either side.

Frozen randomly:

rolex glow "falito cadat" Renglish147...
Today 6:50 AM

Full sexy songs Angelina Jolie "garry khanh" -cfarin@abdl...
Today 6:48 AM

Penis Enla... "clinton abraham" dhxhs@ad...
Today 6:48 AM

Penis Products Revie... "kermie feliks" jrobv@opto...
Today 6:46 AM

come now - "henri virginio" c-n-a111@...
Today 7:43 AM

Double your Closet "gunner johnson" dudxz@ade...
Today 8:58 AM

Unreal things to go... "Carolina Wilkes" stewart0...
Today 8:25 AM

Re: Voted no.1 male supple... "Dai sprout" Dai-hattujai@...
Today 8:22 AM

Your Degree shipped ... "Jamal Contreras" Devoncha...
Today 10:03 AM

erotic ucn km w Moms a... cortesherzog3797@yahoo.co.uk
Today 8:19 AM

Join the most refined and reli... ..."hayward fergus" kcutebirt...
Today 8:12 AM

Brian Kim Stefans
Kluge: A Meditation and Other Works
Roof 2007

Hold on.

DC, New York, especially Boston, and in-between, these are bad places to drive on the Alpha Coast. It's not just 95, all the interstates function as proving grounds for the Art of I'm Growing Up & Get Out Of My Way, asphalt cram schools for learning the ropes of geek aggression -- Lend me to your leader. Driving of course is natural as coming of age; we train to accelerate into and out of lines of the unimportant, to sprint ahead of German muscle, to cut off the meek. Moreover, the hell of Alpha road protocol stretches well beyond the highways, spilling into every urban rotary ("numero uno infintesimal"), every street and avenue with a dedicated lane ("which needs no syntax"), every 4-way stop, since for gamesmen the lessons learned on interstates apply wherever, whenever ("1 2 buckle my shoe / 3 4 buckle my shoe"). The sweetest of the geeks take their lessons to heart and join a special breed apart. Hoody, fucked-up demeanor and default dalliance with convention will get us to our destinations faster and more pumped. Something about / the "human couplet" / keeps me over and under. It's a military formula, zennish almost, common enough to striving rock as well as poetry composition.

Take the global parkway. Keep score.

Perpetually over, under, and on a roll ("Meow, meow, meow, meow. Meow, meow..."), spinning off backdrops ("'Noo lyin deef tae daith...'"), one reads Brian Kim Stefans and gets carsick in a cab twisting through Jersey, say, or NYC. Driver's racing to show you movement. The third word in the poem "Whistler" is notably Britanic, a slow-down verb: "The globe shags the land / of light's / discrete / damaging." But the poem's overall speed says so much about American innovation abroad, about representational art, anti-academic overachievement, and remnants of sentiment. "What an / extremity verge," that old hipster Whistler, Stefans says. He ends the assay, "'He really viled out.'"

Stefans's title poem from the book is attractive online (http://arras.net/kluge) where the future of gaming, albeit fraught with imperatives, is more apparent.

The rules are simple: read the poem (a novella, really, or a prose poem with characters) as cleanly as possible, and with as much MEANING of a story-like nature collected (like twigs in a basket) by when you are done. YOU keep score. To get to the next "page" sequentially, scrape the text, knocking down letters efficiently so that the incoming letters arrive at a clean page -- if not, what will result is a messy palimpsest of already read letters/words and new letters -- a gene pool of neologisms, non-sequiturs and concrete poems [...]

Hey, twig -- I'm paraphrasing -- brand this text if you can. Everything is "simple" (for a "post-human") and if you don't "get it" you'll be so terribly, metaphorically sorry. You keep score, watch it, it's fun!

Nonetheless.

Right?

Laynie Browne
Daily Sonnets
Counterpath Press 2007

Laynie Browne lets us in. We're welcomed into the everyday practice of composition surrounded by a household of children who come leaping and bouncing with language and insights for the poems. Browne listens voraciously to what's happening and writes it down in her 14-line experiments, collages and collaborations, as she calls them. She also picks up some smart reading and takes that into the poems as well. She didn't have to, but in her notes she gives us the details of making the poems. "This poem was written while listening to Kit Robinson read at Moe's..." Or "This sonnet is collaged from Tolstoy's War and Peace." For two "After-Shower" sonnets Browne tells us she was inspired by Bernadette Mayer. In addition to listening and collaging, she fills us in on chance procedures using available tools, the dictionary, mistranslation, and homophonic translation, among others. But as is often the case in these matters, the more Browne overhears, borrows, adapts, or translates, the more her own voices and practices are evinced, fabricating on innumerable cylinders, as in the sonnet "Pre-Election Lunar Eclipse," a title worth contemplating as it gets swallowed by these first lines:

Darkening acclaim of oblong
Ecru, pertaining to edelweiss
The past participle of most rapturous
Radar or sonar, economical
Currents at variants with the light […]

I count seven, eight, or more ideas merged as though effortlessly and out of necessity. That is what Daily Sonnets lets us in on the most, the refinement of continuing process as necessity, a real how-to.

Carter Ratcliff
Arrivederci Modernismo
Libellum 2007

If you want to start a list of poets who are living, significant, and still-belatedly influential (neglectorinos), put Carter Ratcliff at the top. More, there aren't a lot of us after NY Generation One who have sustained conversations with painters / artists but again Ratcliff would be at the top of this list. Loosely associated with Generation Two / Three, like many in the cohort (Godfrey, Towle, Timmons, Greenwald, others) Ratcliff moves in nonpoetry, nonacademic circles that keep his name off many lips. Erupting with poststructural play, Arrivederci Modernismo, first published in 1974, is central to practice in 2008, imparting epic-length proof of how verse feeds and feeds off art production, fashion, and caprice, one of only a few lyric demos of the interdisciplinary passing of domains and strictures.

Arrivederci, foam-born, proportionate, and unapportionable ... arrivederci, method, and you, too, aleatory method. There were so many good-byes right from the very start [...]
So much has suddenly become too late and that seemed to put the future so near, so disruptively near. Our future was so nearly too soon. I loved the way you reduced it to manageable proportions, to admiration, to a swirl of modernist periods, each one timelessly ordained. [And] I loved your feather-boa period and the way you reduced it to your plucked-eyebrow period [...]

The voice is continuous, discursive; the understanding is meta-particulate and anti-reductionist, except for ardor's sake.

I loved the good-bye we arranged for bathos, and I wondered then, bathetically, if love was ever the point. Not to ask that purifying question as I'm doing now, but to live it -- that's as close as I ever got to your elegance, your circularity.

Rounding the circularity in his three-part Note (or afterword) to the poem, Ratcliff asks us, "So what is the point?" His answer is surprisingly directive. "The point is to lead one, in the course of one's reading, to an idea of oneself. Who am I, who must I be, to be responding this way?" Picture 35 years ago a heavy-breathing researcher-of-the-self making song out of postmodernist propositions and other art theory, and you begin to imagine why Ratcliff's poetry is material now and why its influence continues to expand.

Another thing I don't know, John Latta and Barrett Watten seem to make fair conversants even if Latta does the choreography, modeling their mutuality as useful.

Right off, I'm not sure, but isn't what happened last night the triumph of contexts over expressiveness and ideas? I don't see my job as one that foregrounds the pragmatics of appealing to mob prejudice (biases of the undereducated and old people). In terms of dramaturgy, tho, Hillary is cool if second-rate. Since her opponent speaks to voters' better instincts and ambitions, the immediate 'solution' is to downgrade his thought to highfaluting fodder for language analysis, in which calls for action become mere speech acts. All Hillary's opponent does is talk, all he's got is speeches. Meantime, she steals the talk, writes over it, calls it her own, with an attitude. Reminds me of slapping any bunch of cool stuff together. Very Hillary. Commonplace.

I don't see anyone for very long, Mr. Gittes. It's difficult for me.

I'm missing readings left and right. Amiri Baraka was in Roxbury last week. Philly poets read on Ave. A over the weekend, but as I wrote to CA, business business intervenes, also preventing me from hearing and supporting Jim Behrle and Elizabeth Reddin who were at Plough and the Stars on Saturday, as well as Johanna Drucker and Jarrod Fowler who showed up at Demolicious on Sunday. I feel like a jerk. I'm so sorry.