…you must go on, who knows we beat ... I got to light, out for “Yes” I, to think so barred — brush in extreme fatigue, his soul swooned as I am thinking of aurochs and angels, "Just a moment, Ah!" Before reaching the fin... I went back in, the sun on the old broken-down-river-pier watching over oh I don’t hate it panting ... cold air the iron, New England dark I — don’t I don’t! I — don’t hate it! I ... don’t hate it! "I — feel proud and satisfied — returned to life in your rocking-chair by your window dreaming, destroying the world as, it is now in spite of these deficiencies the wishes the hopes the confidence the predictions the nightmare of real things the fallen wonder of the plague bacillus that never disappears for this is not what I dreamed of "Like... a... dog!” he said — it was as if the shame of it must outlive — sorry I forgot to.. give you the mayonnaise — for everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish for a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate yes they will trample me underfoot the numbers marching one two three four hundred million five hundred six reducing me to specks of voiceless dust Oedipa settled back to await the crying — I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering away a lone a last a love too thought out — everything we need that is not food or love is here. Questions?

Rae Armantrout redefines dark: "not reflecting, // not amenable / to suggestion." This is a good place to start and wind up as far as The Dark Knight goes. It forages into eh ... a fun criminal zeitgeist, the bludgeoned American psyche, these traumatized doomful days before the Olympics? Late Heath Ledger plays a distracted, trany Robin to Christian Bale's sociopath Bruce. They deserve one another. Robin as Joker makes up his mind on the run, no reflection, please, he's scary. Bruce has picked up an unmentionable malaise and wants to give in. Neither speaks well. Ledger keeps shifting registers, often in the same breath. Bale tries purse lip breathing and does voiceovers, masked or not, as if cheating at charades. The plot — oh, you know, Ledger hangs on, Bale loses everything. Again, again. If The Dark Knight were a quatrain it would rhyme A A A A. The story unfolds as a finger painting of cynical implosions, villainizing or knocking off characters, bringing them back to the fold, panic buttons not pushed close to midnight, a batmobile jetting over waste trucks while the D.A.'s getaway stopped inncohesively midchase. Under all the chaos the world is round with angst, according to Ledger. Chaos is the familiar chaser The Dark Knight pours. Live your fears, there's no escape, it's sick and selfish but they're yours. Bromides seem potable given the ethics and the certitude of the moment, as Michael Caine, Bruce's butler, serves up the too prescient motive: "Some men just want to watch the world burn." Rascally rabbit. Some men like us are convinced it's out there and it's dark.

BK goes for a format revamp.

BB's self report, not bad at all. Kind of a flaneur. I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath, and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.

Why in the same week would Jilly Dybka and Bill Keckler kill their blogs? Just to rhyme?

Thanks I'm exhausted.

It's Christmas in July, proverbially.

Speaking of Obama — he's on my mind — I'm scratching my chin wondering how he can blow a 17 point advantage in Wisconsin. It can't be McCain's grumpy charm: "Mr. Obama rather lose the war to win the election. Heeheh." Every pundit points to this election as a 'referendum on Obama,' so here I am pulling at my goatee. What is it about Obama that could produce a massive swing to and fro? This elite shit is craven. He's smarter. You got a problem? Is average resentment of intelligence the problem? Heads up, Obama beats McCain along 100 different dimensions as they say at e-harmony. Maybe it's time for a little nastiness flung McCain's way. This would take off some of O's above-it-all burnish. Nail McCain on his schlong-long list of inconsistencies, mythological economics, unbuff body, even. Sure, put together some town-hall meetings between the old man and the new man, but have a free-throw at the end of each. Have a very visible medical emergency / chemo squad by the door equipped with pace makers, atropine. Heeheh. Obama has to hammer and keep it up, working the streets and sports events of Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Mr. New Man, Colorado, Montana, North Carolina, and Nevada would be nice, but the dems should own the Great Lakes. Winning them is everything. Obama needs a veep that tops the polls in Dearborn and Toledo. Everything else will follow, including the advantage, which is still going Obama's way. But the fight must be joined.

It's been raining for two days. A great excuse to stay where I am and write. And then in less than an hour, at 1:30 on the east coast, watch Obama give his speech by the Victory Column. Wish he would put something down in German but they say he won't. Either way it will be "Seeing... forgetting the name of the thing one sees."

Uh huh yup.

(Just wanted to say it.)

Her name is Timeshare. Mine too.

Michael Nicoloff and Alli Warren read at Moe's — audio dips in, out, so crank it up for some 'penis swift-boating' poems.

Galatea Resurrects Number 10 reaches critical mass. Sounds like a play on words but I mean to convey how a significant swath of current practice has been examined, exposed if not stripped-down. Several reviewers go out on a limb. Different limbs.

I've had a geo-focus (geo as in geographical) when thinking about anthologies. A few years ago along with collaborators I made a few stabs at this on the web — Canada, Tokyo, Boston, & "LA | NY" — and two years ago Faux Press released Bay Poetics, a project that started as a web anthology and got changed into a perfect-bound collection of over a 100 San Francisco Bay Area poets. I'm not sure websites are better archives than books, but were I doing another geo-focused anthology, I'd make sure the web was one medium for publishing some work. The web's flexibility and low cost are by now core assumptions, set in consciousness. With print on demand there's opportunity for both book and web components — a publisher just needs to get herself prepared for managing the disequilibrium between the cheap, lithe medium and the still-sizeable upfront investments required for any sort of book publishing, even print on demand.

Here are three more loci I'd like to see for new web-POD anthologies. Brooklyn. Megalopolis South, a collection of poetry from writers based anywhere from Philadelphia south to DC, co-edited by CAConrad and Rod Smith. LA or at least the sectors that matter to The Bureau, edited by them. (For now, The Bureau is and are an anthology in progress.)

Beyond my geo-bias, two other anthologies that might look good on the web: First would be Flarf Plus, much more than comment box policed outrage, Jacket featurettes, and YouTube snips, time for a collectivized, moveable, interactive text that unzips its fly (the list archives), and goes down on the unicorn 'live' with ongoing posts (so we can see and talk over the inappropriate on the fly). Second would be Bruce Andrews's Anthology, what I might call Bruce Andrews's Postlanguage Anthology although he might never agree to the term postlanguage. This already exists in miniature as half of New Yipes Reader Number 5 (2006), a collection of mostly one-pagers from over fifty friends and colleagues, parenthetically categorized by Andrews as "mostly younger, mostly writers." The list is impressive, including Gregg Biglieri — "I still carry a torture for you"; Ernesto Livon-Grossman — "Which poetics are available now when exorcising-digesting decades of violence in order to make visible the symbolic and reorganize the real in everyday life? What is missing? Until when? And why?"; Camille Martin — "i keep feeling like the big hurricane is coming. the one that's going to plow up the mississippi, create a huge storm surge, and wipe this city off the face of the earth..." [written three months before Katrina]; Julie Patton — "non-chalet / carpentry 'chops' door locks into / section 8 flash card..."

Saturday Afternoon Fetish Fair
forest hills black t shirt and jeans
Red Audi Rt 3 North-Duxbury
Handsome Cyclist along the River (Dracut)
Green Striped Shirt at Rocca
we ran into each other at the top of the stairs (Paradise)
Ricky w/ lip piercings at Knowfat Grill
white t shirt, shorts, cross tattoo on left arm
white sneakers (blue line airport)
cute asian guy with reddish mohawk citychase
The Blarney red polo
Stop & Shop PICK UP TRUCK, stony brook
blonde in the Eliot Hotel
smiled at me on the pec fly (bu, fitrec)
nantasket beach cruising grounds Today/Lost E-mail Address
Friday Lesbian Night (Pure)
you poured my coffee (bu bookstore)
guy with tats and nose ring outside MIT Stata Center
Red Line - Pink Triangle (Park Street)
man in maroon Silverado at Mobil
asian guy tread mill atlantis cambridge
I know it's a long shot - horn pond woburn
hey justin we met in ogunquit!
Lake Quannapowitt Runners
Fitcorp Prudential (Boston) white shirt, glasses
Walking up Moody Street (Waltham)
Smiled at you yesterday HVD Sqr
Cheesecake Factory - Sexy Waiter (Chestnut Hill)
Erik/Eric at Fritz (where are you)

From the weekend desk. This is much more like it.

KJ to JK

That's funny, I don't think I ever did realize our initials mirrored like that, old collaborator...

But just to say, since you don't have a comments box where I can say it under the post — that last melange you wrote about The Cedar is fabulously clever and funny. Which adjectives you always have been, I guess.

And I'm not saying that just to be nice or nostalgic!

If you know how to fix busted motors in Black and Decker push lawnmowers, drop me a line. And that's not a trope for you to pull out of context and use against me.

— Kent

~~

Lawnmowers are on our list of disposable, quickly replaceable consumer goods. Buy a new one. Or hire a "light and winged" adolescent to do it all.

I'm feeling spa-ready about something consensual. Ring it up. It's a dream stem that supports another towel-plumping dream, oh, decades away, in the past, future? em, better, it's more fully realized over my cyber-dream phone-fax-video hookup... matrices of tweezered bond textures, excellently-preserved Royal portable ink ribbons (this must be in the past) — I'm pretty sure that's Frank O sunning himself at an outdoor table at the Cedar! — the very sidewalk joint that gave Sigo his first name — and, kata! that funny five-footer with the implausible, geisha-giggle of a nickname (the one that loosely translates as 'beginner's permit'), no wait, how can Motokiyu [sic] be a waiter at the gaijin Cedar?! The squirt must have needed the dollars to wire back to his parents' penthouse in Shibuya. The lean years. No, wait, here's a tall thin character in tweed, smiling, he's on his way to Frank's table, everything sun splashed. Why, it's that old reprobate Kenneth Koch, a youth here, waving a sheet of 8.5 x 11 inch paper watermarked "Eagle A Acceptance." This is going somewhere. From my bedroom cum spa perch in the Lincoln State I'm pretty sure I've got most of the answers or some pretty nifty lacunae on the way to answering this dream question, for now. Why did Kenneth offer his Eagle sheet to .. yikes, there is a poem typed on the paper! Can't read the words but that font's Royal. Kenneth is handing his poem to Motokiyo but Motokiyo politely insists the Cedar is cash-only. Thus off pops one opportunity to prove the true authorship of the poem that I can't make out from my faraway perspective. Spritz me, please. It's all slipping away as dreams and blog entries do. More soon.

— Sammy Bowles

It's taken me most of the day to recoup from the shock, the absolute stun gun of finding both Kent Johnson summarizing paragraphs in a 1958 letter from Frank O'Hara to Hal Fondren alongside John Latta's sparkling endorsement of Jeni Olin's new chap. (Full disclosure: Latta likes the poetry, not the price of the book nor its kenning.) With regard to Kent, his items, along with equivocal commentary about variations in paper stock and typewriters (I guess the kenning is unremarkable) lay a foundation for more of his "lacunae" (still to come) concerning the true author of "A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island," as Kent promised July 15, below. A twofer, then: Jeni viewed by John Latta and Kent seeing multitudes, at Isola di Rifiuti, July 17.

A country road. A tree.

— Samuel Beckett

Best stage direction of the week, next week, the week after that.

butterfly slain here [...]

Best entry in a comment box this week.

From an era precluding existence [koraizaemon] of language, we of the homo clan sapiens have sought to fulfill and give back only a trillionth beauty [think-speak] in thanks to quail, plums, hegemony, life, and perspective, as they manifest in the scrawl of unbridled consciousness. As participant in the cabinet ministry of communicative spirit I devote myself to grappling with enunciation and form. There is no form without the flicker of expression, no expression without a gloom hollow where love and the dogs [土佐] of water sports (rain) define our milieu. Creepy, yes, and sensitive to beauty [seasons on a string], the end to our gated world takes root throughout the summer [blurtit] like mute and unexpected glass tea buds (pellets) flowering [pulled] from within.

— Javier Alvarez

Drive me out of here. Kent's in denial, claiming I suggested he's bugged here, there, huh? This will stop. Note, though, how Kent skirts the entirety of his disastrous Q. & A., returning to other obsessions of the moment, Frank O'Hara and lacunae regarding the attribution of O'Hara's poem "A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island," lacunae that are 'really-existing' — yeah, they exist because you make them exist, Kent.

Jack,

Really, that does seem like bad-bad blog etiquette: to say that I had "talked" to you (suggesting I am bugged by your comments there?), when we haven't communicated in quite some time...

I mean, that's fine, but I'm a bit surprised. There is nothing in my comments on the O'Hara poem that is untrue, after all. I'm simply putting some really-existing lacunae out there for consideration. Why is that worthy of a little lie from you, in return? It just seems so petty.

I'm writing a follow-up as we speak, actually, which is based on some new archival materials I have received. Please write me back as soon as you can to clarify [sic].

— Kent

As two parties move through a process, their feelings fluctuate. Kent Johnson and I had been about to discuss my handing over some of the writing here to him and others that are inclined to flesh out a sort of pantaloons ethos. Yesterday's experiment, however, was an affrighted start, and I apologize for the lapse in taste. A line has been crossed. Argot thrown down as 'arguments,' mere eddies of suggestion. After his uncalibrated Q. & A., I'd rather not hear further on how Kent feels.

— Jerri Chodorow

Q. As a new career poet just finished my second semester (superfluous wreck) in a highly prestigious program at ____ College, I was actually delighted (seasoned), at first, to be like selected to participate in a Spring semester joint seminar this Spring on collaborative stuff emphasizing green energy (a freshening prosperity). The two profs for the sessions, which seemed like they were going to be overwhelming and work-stressful, alternated one week to the next, one different from the other, a doctor of forensic accounting, another a recent ____ grad herself specializing in aroma upkeep and (irascible decline) consultancy on the world wide web on the side. Spring seemed like it was going to be blazing, thanks to the seminar as a current course on hot style and substance when it comes to drifts in attention (stitching a pratfall). We covered a multitude of apparent trendoids, group opposition research, what to do when a team player collapses (soft foyer), denuding essentially various climates of opinion to gain higher bafflement, exploiting a collective consideration of remarks, any remarks (deep fashion), and scoring strategies toward like mega-halo effects (champagne of rebuttal) with each of them. A large portion of our grades for the course I took at a major art school is (are?) based upon group projects, basically. One person on my team has taken an egregious free ride (draining sap) on the hard work of the rest of us, however (o fleur de cull). We already turned in our final poems which we wrote to each other in two all-nighters and then ran through a British spell checker for a single esthetic (borough-ed), so telling the professors (rigging the marsh) about this would have no practical purpose, but it might teach this guy a lesson. Rat him out?

A. Rat away not, not right away, not to teach the guy a lesson — that’s not your job — not to give the ones who handed out the assignment a true account of how it was accomplished, and not to pour it on one by one or as a mannered ensemble, humble-like, thick as flattery, but later. Much later — when everything appears to have calmed down balefully as in marriage — fasten together a controversy! Something velvet (you earned and own it) that staggers. It is misleading for now but not Fascist to list this student — and he's male, of course — does he still have hair? — among those who did not a lick of groupwork if he did not, not that your teachers could imagine or forestall, or at least respond to, such problems only if he or she knows about them, but better to fit them into the syllabus next time. Better to integrate the grasping applications. That is, to make some sense on the dolor of adventurism.

Whose name went on the poems, I wonder. Maybe you should put only his name. Your profs might get it. (Demurers to the lever. Honest mistakes.)

Had you spoken to your teachers when the problem first emerged (vexed progress calling the chops), there may have been a contingency button to click. I consulted a professor in an MFA program who said, “The ground rules for dealing with free riders are sometimes explicitly laid out — e.g., the free rider may be fired by a majority of key members who hold the real power.”

There is another possibility. Poets must sometimes cope with teams comprising workers and drones, the productive and the parasitic, the quick and the dead. (Tribunish.) This assignment, which has a touch of imperial Rome about it, may have been conceived in part to teach you as much about vanquishing multi-headed grumbling inferiority at the margins. (Imposters can't keep up with the collective.) When it comes to the credit, be firm about apportionment. Take it, keep the outside out where it is. That professor I spoke to concurred, saying, “One of the explicit benefits of working in groups is that it forces poets to confront these and other human flow issues.”

— Kent Johnson

Protest like the old days (scroll to July 10 & ff).

Another from Autoportraits, a burn down.

I'm stuck on you. Uplifted and dropped, as if by a faulty mechanism.

I'll live in the ruin. I'll take the leftovers. I'll pick the trash.

Now that you have shown your icy heart, I see you more clearly, and I want you even more...

-- Anne Tardos

This guy is taking the blog format into a personal, splendidly ur-poetic "quiet place to stay," to cite Kevin Killian in Autoportraits.

I can't be overdrawn, I still have some checks.

Untitled

i

I've always been there waiting for the rush
updrafts don't even have, the time of today
our mouths kill, the date hammered on bread
and cheese and no sooner had we primped
than we are dopey in the bed

ii

My friend is smoking, "I'm
wind blown," he says turning
this way and like when we sit down
before the mirror "or I'm crazy
about our necks brought up to succeed."

   could be
Life is good.

Untitled

Text from a subscriber who won't consider
the enormity of it as hooded fucks
run back to check out cost averages
but the jug's unlocked, to no product hewn.

It's such nice work, the jug
and its schema proliferating a fable
between acts of kindness, themes
of incitements or is it just empty?

I'm still not finished, she says.
We call it theoretical kindness
since there's no one else speaking.
The jug she's texting to's not audible –

he's just a backstory anyway
sulking in some idea of a room
with a hygienic view forward, a word
that cannot be considered in words.

We're heading toward what we signed up for. You and I no longer inhabit a multi-class meritocracy, because just as Americans have always claimed, class doesn't matter. And everybody knows merit can be harnessed, pooled, and counted. You're either in the Archives or Out. Ideas are machines called conceptual. Show up and salute. Peter Schjeldahl writes in response to the numbing significance of a Jeff Koons, "intelligence is obsolete in a world where things are either blazingly obvious or pitch dark."

Like most allegories, with Autoimmunity there are others inside and enough representational devices in the crosshairs to indict rule-governed mechanics bearing political abstraction and discontinuity as off-point, irresolute, wan. The book-length poem captures the proto-narco-coup-ness of the epoch we populate in its ready conflation of opinion with law. Most of the poem takes form in short verses that recall and respond to the language and ideas introduced in these first three prose-like stanzas.

A director shoots a political film under the junta. He disguises it as a retelling of the Oresteia, keeps even the actors in the dark. He moves them from village to village as traveling players who can never complete a performance of the pastoral where shepherd abandons courtship of shepherdess. Each staging is fatally interrupted by air raids, arrests, the shooting of collaborators onstage. The show turns into slapstick. Speech is expelled from the theater by theatricality.

From November 2000 to June 2002 I left the country to detoxify my body, crossing the border from New York State into Ontario for weekly naturopathic treatments. Sometimes my trips coincided with American holidays like the Fourth of July, or days of national importance like Election Day 2000 and Timothy McVeigh's execution. After September 11th, all the days were theatrical.

My illness could not be cured at home. Across from what was now called the homeland, I played myself as a traveling show

-- Eleni Stecopoulos

Here's another kind of pondering. You're invited to participate in a prélude non mesuré or if you will a read-along that takes you for an aleatory jaunt. In Punks every page is filled with two columns of text of recognizably similar length; every double page filled with four columns! So smack in the middle of the poem which is also the middle of the book if you read along the top line of four columns (which is my best first choice) it goes: many economists expect         have got this reflex         sir you paint a fake         my body busted... Let's try the second lines from columns 1 through 4: me and Poland to relish         to get in an oven         picture of Venezuela         into Foot Locker... It's a left-foot, right-brain jaunt. Reading each column discretely is exhilarating, too. Here are a few lines from the first column, from the same midpoint in the poem.

many economists expect
me and Poland to relish
the personal bust-up
of the leisure class
I am what I bulge
it makes me indifferent
the sublet version
of a Libyan peso
staging a face-in...

-- Michael Nicoloff

Everyone, it's purported, waits for Kevin Killian to send up his fashionista impressions of Orono as he did four years ago. Meantime, Rodney's posts fill in lots of blanks and get the temperaments down so we can ponder what got done to whom through asides, flaccid or shined.