It's a pleasure, a belated and weird pleasure, that Al Franken has been declared winner of his Senate seat on what should be the eve of his six month freshman anniversary.

There's a messed-up embedment of sly, failed masculinity translated from when realpolitik kicks in during one's youth with hyacinths: Capital martyrdom: Historical subjectivity smothered by permanent gender discomfort, male or female. The sight of Bruce Willis loosens some stitches. Willis, Stallone, William Hurt. Also Steven Seagal is a huge, nominal failure. We're waiting for their last movie, the one about Seagal paying Willis, Stallone and Hurt off (they pretend to be his protection team) so heroes four can whomp Lilia the Easter Cretaceous Bunny.

Four and half months of March-April...love it!

So it's apparent I've written most of a short essay this month on pantaloons. Like a poem, for me, a prose piece happens in stages and different sequences. I'd say by now the argument of the essay is laid out. Paragraphs 1; 2; 3 & 4; 5 & ff (to be edited); ante-penultimate; penultimate; last paragraph (I think it will be one paragraph) to come. Will finish soon.

Before cymbals rang and the first song reached the human ear, and long before verse was parsed, there were snores of ancestors and their coughs and grunts thundering in caves. Back then the body taught itself speech with shrieks and groans to signal pain, humming to sign comprehension and varietals of cognition. Cuddling together in dampened corners, our predecessors, given time, gave up other sounds moving their tongues and lips, expanding somatic-sonic repertoires into an output of contrivances to express feelings, humming first, lilting, orating, poeticizing, then, most abstract, writing stuff down, occasioning poetics. But only in the last hundred years or so, and regarding poetics, only in a fraction of recent years, did we learn, finally, to collect human emotions and temper individual will to instrumental gains in order to live within the ad agency. The ethos of clients and us first. Teamwork. Our people are what make us great. Our underground. Cave One.

Moreover. Or less. Let's see. How about a new brand? Save the world in one minute. Brief history of the ad agency as business model, and its impact on XXIst century poetics (first decade). Subtopics: Intramurals among principals and creatives (who are which? not always the same? etc.); growth marked by add-on strategic functions, media specialists, pr, brand mentoring, marketing research; evolution of adjunct strategists into stakeholders as the agency takes on more accounts -- curators, publishers, department heads as major accounts; readers, bloggers, and other friends-of-the-agency as secondary (but highly influential) clients; WPP Group as prototype of theory-conscious, esthetically-informed, globalized commercial collective; fish eating fish -- the parallels (//) concept-search swallows language, flarf, oulipo (flattery through affiliation -- a.k.a., cross-selling) // WPP eats Ogilvy, Grey, Young & Rubicam); actionable insights and data-based advice enable the agency to speak its clients' mind.

Switching personnel faster than Steinbrenner in his heyday, harriet perks up: Camille T. Dungy, Martin Earl, Annie Finch, Eileen Myles.

Frankly, until this weekend I thought Twitter and tweeting were ridiculous. Language reduced to bullets. Bullets of the moment to a supposed audience waiting to be shot with what? Hey, I'm walking south on Greenwich going to my favorite dairy restaurant. Eh, I just hopped on the elevator on four headed to the 12th.

But two bullets about tweeting this weekend have shifted my views. Protestors in Tehran succeeded through Twitter S.O.S. messages in exposing international media, especially CNN, in lackluster and spotty coverage of the Iranian election aftermath. May the protests and tweeting lead to something productive.

Meanwhile, poetics students at Penn are registering an increase in Twitter traffic featuring Joe Brainard's invention prompt "I remember." Brainard, ahead of his time, again. Brainard's topos, I remember, appeals to an American mindset. I'd describe that mindset as production-geared and prosaic at base, that is, atheoretical, factual, and inclined toward visuals and visual language cut out of everyday experience as empirical evidence: "I remember one of the very few times I ever got in trouble at school. I got caught doing drawings all over my hand with a ball point pen in music class." That mindset is a lasting form of protest, too.

I got married on my day off. Once. I don't know what to say. I have all the coverage I need. My gaze is met.

With or without roadside assistance you have to maintain respect for subsequent generations — no matter how they look or do.

Things are serpentine. All those tattoos halfway up the arm, over the shoulder. Like last year's t-fashion, with filigree computer-generated designs, tiny at the navel, flowering asymmetrically in a burst of excess around the neck. My goodness, glad that's done. Still, it's serpentine. The poetry scenes have converged on Chambers Street Station. (The MTA has assigned Chambers to poets. Can't say why, except it's a short sprint to so much.) Hey, it's crowded with groups, subgroups, couples. More of everyone. There was a spot, once, where poets could hold forth, shout out their conceptualisms. But now, thanks to PDAs and piled-up agendas, everyone's here and shouting, almost at once. Only a handful of still-discernible subgroups are taking time to listen (to one another). Shouts slither to the ceiling and up the stairwells. I wonder what the affect is at street level, on the roads out of town?

Down here we let this happen.

Still not having opened the book, I'll sign off on my perusal of Conceptualisms acknowledging its (perhaps) strongest argument, one that comes inside the phoneme s. By professing potential for more than one theoretical construct to conceptual text production, Venessa Place and Rob Fitterman strike down a narrower campaign that allows for conceptualism v. an everything- or anything-else. Conceptualisms introduces innumerable ideas behind (perhaps) competing spectra of conceptual approaches. The short order, then, is that s blows a hole through regulation of or authority for conceptual poem making. There is a plurality of conceptualisms, as the s demonstrates. Like good conceptualists, the authors of Conceptualisms make it easy; the gist of their commentary is texted instantly, phonemically. There are conceptualisms, there are flarfs, pieces of many practical approximations within poetics that have yet to be categorized with precision.

Pop in here favorable assertions concerning Venessa Place and Rob Fitterman, Notes on Conceptualisms collaborators. Rob is long-committed to re-schooling poetics, understanding better the divides as well as the confluences among various practices, especially those that have impacted NYC Downtown. His varieties of Metropolis attest to his quickened allegorizing of appropriation, establishing the bloodlines that connect him to praxes that could be called language-y, process-generated, and historicist. I've followed Rob periodically over four years, and I find him a poet of now, closely listening to the public surround of glossolalia, a poetics exemplary of late narrative and, if you will, of an imported thematics buffoonishly accessorized with all the bells and whistles of open thievery, as he attests, "I like subjectivity; it just doesn't have to be my own." Vanessa Place listens closely to everything, as well. Back in December I said her La Medusa "bubbles up from the most bugged bedroom imaginable" or, to paraphrase, her texts appropriate the audible and the imaginable and just beyond, more centered on sensual impressions, recording them, and making them. I can think of a half dozen women of her cohort who, like Venessa, freely borrow and re-order what they think they see and hear. But Venessa covers more ground, makes more conquests (according to my score card) through her stylistic leasehold on truncated discourse. Her poetry keeps dangling a nexus that is never quite there. Poets and readers keep grabbing for it, but all there is was a zapping sound, which altogether resonated as a lyrical whiff of repeated and perpetual coitus interruptus, a party trick that you may know requires cooperation on the part of both whiffers, poet and reader (or collaborator). Vanessa is one of the high-heeled poets, usually women, in my experience, who drive other poets, readers, et al wild with zap and fear of domination. It's that zap we crave.

Hey, Friday! Time to lay some cards on the table. The stoopid Stoopid Cards. The ones that count.

Human agency is last week, last century. Today it's simpler.

Simple is good. Easy is better. Stoopid is simple, easy, and nonchalant to the nth. Treeless intimacy in the Wild Forest.

First there's google poems. That's good, creates buzz but takes some stitching time. That's work. Busy busy. A tactical improvement is to have ideas for discourse projects and keep concentrating on ideas, subordinate the text, forget it. With respect to which all the manual labor is alleged — I'll say I keyboarded a text even tho sweat equity is invested in/by someone else doing it, scanning it, whatever, then for another idea looking around for some new guy to press a few keys so an algorithm does mostly everything. Simple. Easy product. Like Warhol 2009.

The nonchalant part is offhand and genius — stoopid genius; call your product a nonproduct, a failure; just walk away from it.

Next, sweet talk a senile critic or two into New Stoopid Relevance, hand them the S Cards. Mastery is toxicity. Text is schlock. Failure is ironic.

Then a book like Conceptualisms can emerge. Buzzing and busy. If a poetics critique can talk about texts we never read I guess I am qualified to talk about Conceptualisms. It seems awesome and timely. It's a collab, among other things, and singles out items in the authors' knowledge fields, taking real care not to be comprehensive. That's so cool. It seems a little language-y however in that its critique side is so tenuous, given its noncomprehensive constraints, it will strike a reader, say this reader (if I do 'read' it), as more of a meta-trope that weirdly competes with its topic(s). I think that's one thing that's language-y. (I like language-y, btw.) Whereas a so-called stoopid critical maneuver would be more pointed in the direction of generating meta-ideas about nonmastery and projects that fail. (And that could be great and cool.) But who knows, maybe Conceptualisms does meta-idea generation too. I'll have to read up more on the web. Anon.

There's a new heart beating around here, and nationally! It's a regimented elite-ish poetics sector within the sensational and expanding social networking of American culture. Yes! Making poems is blazingly cool when you can follow corporate models and even cooler when you can boil down ideas to templates, epithets, and simple adjectives. As Verizon Wireless states, "When people work well together, it shows." Maybe that's inappropriate. Or it's conceptual. (But not both, 'cause this would overload the Lego framework.)

More.

The tightropes Ron Silliman traverses today in his reading of Conceptualisms are super collidal. I think his survey is commendable for a start. More soon.

Ripped off the sports page, queasy does it.

Everything is hard:
How to tie a tie,
How I met your mother,
How to kiss,
How to get pregnant,
How stuff works,
How to make money,
How to
for How long,
How much,
How to lose weight,
How to cook a turkey,
How to make a website;
1980s, 1990s.

— Rodrigo Toscano