Thursday, May 29, 2003
Winners gesture, side crumbles
Dark face us doubts pleasant things
Little terrified ages harbor in.
posted byJack 1:31 PM
Fawning v. welfare.
posted byJack 12:26 PM
I just want it to be neat and clean.
posted byJack 8:43 AM
It's inflatable.
posted byJack 8:23 AM
Wednesday, May 28, 2003
Om Namo Bhagavate Beshajeya Guru Bedurya Prabha Rajaya Tathagataya Arahate Samayak Sam Buddhaya Tadyataya Arahate Samayak Sam Buddhaya Tadyatha Om Beshajey Beshajeya Maha Beshajeya Beshajeya Rajaya Samungate Savaha
posted byJack 10:27 AM
Tuesday, May 27, 2003
These are ...
posted byJack 10:11 AM
Cartoon propositions.
posted byJack 10:11 AM
Launch party: Cocktail buzz after the cloth puppet tutorial. Self-mocking jokes about the torture they were about to put some string pulling loser through.
posted byJack 9:39 AM
No, the next two lines are worse:
thread wrapped tightly around our fingers until it bit the flesh
and the Rue de Lille unravelled.
-- R. Warren
posted byJack 9:12 AM
Worst two lines in poetry today:
We met in a torn design
which we tore further, pulling the tall warp
-- R. Warren
posted byJack 9:10 AM
Her hieratic daily habits.
posted byJack 9:05 AM
Guys back East I connect to. Others I may soon. Homies here where it hurts, hey, but it's a gig. Holding my kleenix, I check these out, off, & on. And these, Jesus, anyone could forget these.
posted byJack 9:04 AM
Drops Yiddish into every other sentence.
posted byJack 8:58 AM
Synopsis for "The Importance of Being Earnest Reloaded": My fuck runs off with the guy who stole my identity.
posted byJack 8:51 AM
Drops Yiddish to remain successful.
posted byJack 8:13 AM
Chicken needle soup.
posted byJack 8:12 AM
Having my French Period.
posted byJack 8:10 AM
The modest canon.
posted byJack 8:07 AM
Chemically mute.
posted byJack 8:07 AM
Thursday, May 22, 2003
Thinking beyond the page. A move in the wrong direction?
How many poets' lives and words evolve into a teaching about how to live and write. I'm satisfied that there are scores of living writers in American English whose command of craft, theoretical constructs, pedagogy, aesthetic schema and ethical principles are instructive. But it's the work and life connect that makes someone a teacher.
Again, thinking like this, am I moving in the wrong direction?
Among dead poets, why do certain names immediately come to mind, and others not?
posted byJack 10:08 AM
Tuesday, May 20, 2003
Drew, you probably know that when you're from out of town and you have only a half day to go to a museum, and you need to choose between "Manet/Velázquez" and "Matisse Picasso" you'll wind up at "Mathew Barney." That was how we planned it, but Brenda and I got to M/V before Barney, and so exhausted by the curatorial stagecraft of that, we couldn't step foot, as they say, into another room, much less another museum.
I think the M/V has been put up on an overextended conceit of Baroque fecundity, and the marketeering Saarland at the exhibit exit of Manet floral striped shawls is just enough to convince me the viewers, not the paintings, have been installed in a product placement snooker-fest. But a few of the too-many paintings are worth looking at extensively and thinking about. Zurbarán's "Saint Francis in Meditation" is about the most non-Anglo-Saxon painting ever – so it's automatically spellbinding; Velázquez's "El Primo" (aka "The Dwarf") demonstrates the royal figurine quality of the species; all of the El Grecos are trapdoors leading to extremely painful places.
Manet's "The Balcony" has all that stunning teal framing the four-headed human beastie (plus doggie) looking out and past the viewer. The bourgeoise to the right, with the tilted bonnet is recognizable to anyone who's spent time in Japan. She is the neo-prototype for the empress: eyes down, nearly crossed, implosively expressionless.
posted byJack 8:27 AM
Cheap macaw and pheasant.
posted byJack 3:55 AM
Buy the time you read this.
posted byJack 3:54 AM
I have this horrible higher mammal.
posted byJack 3:53 AM
Silence after Herebito at the Pristine Center.
posted byJack 3:45 AM
Nail this.
posted byJack 3:44 AM
Goofs paid to white out.
posted byJack 3:44 AM
Honey.
posted byJack 3:43 AM
Monday, May 19, 2003
Eileen interrupts my rewriting Bukowski with this.
You crack me up this morning! Thanks!
Oh...and I account for 40% of your daily readership due to repeats....
No, no, thank you. But I'm not talking day counts. 10 in toto. I know it's a reach --
posted byJack 8:56 AM
Write me again when you lose your dayjob. Let's see how. All your cultural capital is wealth you acquire over time. Mailing by day, even while you work! A book, a friend, a listserv. It's fair trade in all the nice meanings of the term. Then, ok, thus, there's legacy. Are you a legacy. A good question. This you steal, snatch, or otherwise purloin. No mincing, incremental acquisition here. You're a winner but you have to take it all.
posted byJack 8:34 AM
Really exciting waiting for folks' blogsites to load. Waiting for counters, waiting for site meters, and most favorite, waiting for invisible gifs.
posted byJack 8:21 AM
Somewhere between now and June 31, the Pantaloons blogsite will have received its 10th visitor! I don't know how to account for the tremendous build up in numbers, unless I take into account the massive increase in 'hits' the poetics blog community all together has experienced over these last few months, along with, of course, the increase in publicizing same, which may have some relevance as well. It's gratifying, in any event, to be part this freeloading system of meta-analysis, and I am grateful to my 10th reader whoever you are even if you're a repeat. XXX000
posted byJack 7:58 AM
Friday, May 16, 2003
Macgregor Card under the Influence
"Monumental" is a pretty silly descriptor for us hobos inhabiting a time whose aesthetics are pitched somewhere between contextual intimacies and resistances to interpretive networks. For poets bent on humor, the monumental is a kind of pernicious ambiguity either to get off on or to be tactically evaded. Macgregor Card tries something comedically different in Souvenir Winner, a collection of nine short verses ("verses" is the word) that carry on about "mother," "Pauline," and other family relations among immortal lonely hearts out there where "teeth soak of their own accord" and "fluency is the chart of an architect / eyeballing space, and the chart, a poet's diplom'."
Card dedicates Souvenir Winner, tellingly and slavishly, to Alexander Scriabin and Achilles Rizzoli. Scriabin is felt throughout the screwy grammar shifts, as well as compressed harmonics and tonal splinters that distinguish archaic, antic mergers of "footman," "Christ," and "a porpoise in a pretty tune." Yet Rizzoli is the principal lonesome fogy and recurring motif for Card's ultimately upbeat romp through space. Rizzoli, an architectural draftsman who lived in mid-20th-century San Francisco, is revered today for enormous Beaux Arts renderings of Kathedrals, huge symbolic portraits, and other large-scale pieces crammed with odd poetry, anagrams and fake quotations often translated into his own secret code. As a bona fide 'outsider' monumentalist, Rizzoli is the architect of choice, for Card, to chart with. Or on.
There are parallels in Card's reworking Rizzoli to John Ashbery's Girls on the Run, a storybook about small fry in verse linked loosely to Henry Darger, another outsider and monumentalist who authored an illustrated novel of over 15,000 pages, The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. But Ashbery's and Card's strategies for adaptation go separate ways. Ashbery's sleazily descriptive and much longer chronicle draws on Darger as "only a jump-off point," Forrest Gander suggests, whereas Card's diminutive lyrics substitute fruitful accidents and nonsequiturs for cohesive story telling. In attempting to complement Rizzoli's visual spectacles, Card's is the more exfoliated poetry, revitalizing a belated Beaux Arts consciousness that Rizzoli himself describes as one "hermetically sealed spherical inalienable maze of light and sound seeing imagery expand in every direction."
Some people that are sick are not people.
They are hereditary balls of light
This begins the poem "VIII" in Souvenir Winner, a twenty-line schizophrenic paean to oracular irony where a distinction among metaphor and simile, cause and effect, eye and I, object and subject vaporizes into "the souvenir / of flung windows." To illustrate, we begin again, instructed that some of the sick are not people, but "balls of light" as the poem continues:
like the tallest man in the world
must be lonely looking
no one in the eye all the time.
I couldn't seem to move, Pauline,
the famous men from stars to tears …
'The tall guy, one of those lonely stars, is a fire ball I can't move, make him come sob down here, that is, nor can I see nor move myself or you, Pauline, I feel sick.' To accede to this logic is to be possessed of an oceanic albeit menacing enchantment that, in my case, wakens long-sublimated attributes of a once-content childhood, one given to perfecting a petulant naiveté, and one resonant, I suspect, with the affects of Rizzoli's life and work on Card.
The impression that Rizzoli serves as a running motif is reinforced by the inclusion of three of his designs, as well as swatches of quotes from his prose, slogans and working titles. Still, Card upends the initial impact of a one-on-one appropriation or collaborative transaction. In epigraphs, text annotations, and especially his "Notes" that follow the nine poems, Card discloses how he supplements Rizzoli by lifting text or ideas from a range of better known sources, including the New Testament, Lord Byron and John D. Rockerfeller, Jr., and by inserting fragments from a number of inscriptions on public buildings in New York. Not all these borrowings are straightforward, though. In the ninth and final poem, Card miscues the reception for the opening four lines by referencing a biblical passage in italics just below and to the right of line four. The passage is Paul's Romans, Chapter 12, Verses 3-8. In the King James version it begins, "For even as we have many members in one body…so we the many are one body in Christ, and each one members of one another …" Here are the opening lines to Card's poem:
My roof is done like a faun into tears.
Never seen despite all its rich article.
A fairy wand in a court of law, twittering, faultless,
Mute, staked as a mare to a formal lawn.
Card rocks the sweeping, representational register of the referenced text (we, members, one body, Christ) into utter reversals of Paulist dogma: fugitive simile and Gnostic incongruity (roof like a faun, never seen, fairy wand), through which glints of representation shine, but only briefly, like waning metonyms both "twittering" and "faultless."
Card exposes a baseline ambition later in the poem:
Tell the good old lowering eyes – broad feet
toward the door – I'm a poet, showdog
rightly termed dreamer, skaters on blockheads,
scented peers. "I have only one plate of soup."
Card bludgeons Paul's certainties (sitting targets, admittedly): "we have many members" is taken down several notches by "I'm a poet, showdog;" "one body" melts into "one plate of soup." For the showdog, inferential exactitude is an on- (rightly termed dreamer) or off- (scent of pears??) affair. As for his reference to the biblical passage, Card tells me in conversation that the intent is to have Paul's Romans "echo" within his poem, without direct quotation.
The good question to pose at this point is, why bother to take on Paul, Romans, and such? My hunch is – and it's a fairly sure bet – the voices in Card's head made him do it. Churchy texts and artifacts by Rizzoli motivate Card's lyric, as in Card's direct citations of Rizzoli at the end of "V. Yield to Total Elation":
We are almost tempted to call him sweetheart.
The light that made Jesus speak through a sonnet.
If Rizzoli plays with matches, Card yells 'fire' and catches some hell.
… I'm a poet, showdog
rightly termed dreamer, skaters on blockheads,
scented peers. "I have only one plate of soup."
How much will you need? "A cupful of tears."
Echoes? Card calls out the name Paul or Pauline over a dozen times in these nine poems, and refers to Rome or Romans six times. For good measure (and ghostly after-affects), the passage from Romans referenced in the final poem is ascribed historically to Paul. While Paul's text has been in effect erased, key lexical items are distributed throughout the nine poems – God, Christ, love, grace – as well as close paraphrases: Paul's admonition, "not minding high things, but yielding to the lowly," is mirrored by Card in "a debt / of honor paid for in plain fact, humility;" Card's "My arm's an idler's rod inveighed against genius" can be traced back to Paul's "Do not be wise within yourselves."
Echoes happen within architectural plans that afford vast interior space to exceed normal acoustical barriers. Cathedrals come to mind, certainly to Rizzoli's mind. Card has examined Rizzoli's drawings and writings on Kathedrals at length, and then in his "Notes" Card gives evidence of his search for inspiration in other Beaux Arts structures, such as banks and post offices in New York and Brooklyn. An impression I have is of a poet so on the verge of elaborated ceremony he plunges into it physically and over time, a process-under-the-influence that might appear to some as extraordinary or even excessive.
I love mourning on Earth,
decorating my fortune wheel.
Card's immersion is reflected in his formalist textual structures, as well. A quick scan of the nine poems reveals colonnade-like symmetries: even-numbered poems (the mossy shades between columns?) are numbered but otherwise left untitled and each ends with a 5- or 6-line epigram; odd-numbered poems (the columns?) are numbered and titled after coinages by Rizzoli, and each odd-numbered poem consists of three stanzas, whose middle part can contain any even number of lines from 10 to 20, but whose beginnings and endings are always four lines. For example:
Earth is light, but mother weighs less
on the surface of my poems than on mars.
Her habitat's the top-drawer aurora
the sorrowful bell tunes are built in.
Souvenir Winner is grandstanding about itself as poetry, mysterium profundum, and ostentatious paradox rhymed with a vocabulary of romance, dreamy totality and unfashionable gods. Its Beaux Arts pedigree requires nothing less. In aftermath, its fire ball wit blazes, even when doused with hope.
So wrest the dough of toll from me.
A lot is sad, but the habitat's a fine place to be.
We'll intuit a city-intimate ray – you and me
and the other ones …
__________
Souvenir Winner, Macgregor Card, 2002, Hophophop Press. kawhop@aol.com
posted byJack 6:40 AM
Thursday, May 15, 2003
Here's another snippet on Card's Souvenir Winner, a serial poem based in part on Achilles Rizzoli.
____
The impression that Rizzoli serves as a running motif is reinforced by the inclusion of three of his designs, as well as swatches of quotes from his prose, slogans and working titles. Card, though, upends the initial impact of a one-on-one appropriation or collaborative transaction. In epigraphs, text annotations, and especially in his "Notes" that follow the nine poems, Card discloses how he supplements Rizzoli by lifting text or ideas from a range of better known sources, including the New Testament, Lord Byron and John D. Rockerfeller, Jr., and by inserting fragments from a number of inscriptions on public buildings in New York. But not all these borrowings are straightforward. In the ninth and final poem, Card miscues the reception for the opening four lines by referencing a biblical passage in italics just below and to the right of line four. The passage is Paul's Romans, Chapter 12, Verses 3-8. In the King James version it begins, "For even as we have many members in one body…so we the many are one body in Christ, and each one members of one another …" Here are the opening lines to Card's poem:
My roof is done like a faun into tears.
Never seen despite all its rich article.
A fairy wand in a court of law, twittering, faultless,
Mute, staked as a mare to a formal lawn.
Card rocks the sweeping, representational register of the referenced text (we, members, one body, Christ) into utter reversals of Paulist dogma: fugitive simile and Gnostic incongruity (roof like a faun, never seen, fairy wand), through which glints of representation shine, but only briefly, like waning metonyms both "twittering" and "faultless."
Card exposes a baseline ambition later in the poem:
Tell the good old lowering eyes – broad feet
toward the door – I'm a poet, showdog
rightly termed dreamer, skaters on blockheads,
scented peers. "I have only one plate of soup."
Card bludgeons Paul's certainties (sitting targets, admittedly): "we have many members" is taken down several notches by "I'm a poet, showdog;" "one body" melts into "one plate of soup." For the showdog, inferential exactitude is an on- (rightly termed dreamer) or off- (scent of pears??) affair. As for the reference to the biblical passage, Card tells me in conversation that his intent is to have Paul's Romans "echo" within his poem, without direct quotation.
posted byJack 10:13 AM
Not knowing the difference between density and distance.
Going the density.
There you go.
posted byJack 7:20 AM
Wednesday, May 14, 2003
I'm working on a piece about Macgregor Card's Souvenir Winner, as I mentioned a few days ago. I'd say I'm about two-thirds into it, but in advance of finishing this, I'm putting down here a difference I see in Card's text, which pivots around an 'outsider,' Achilles Rizzoli, versus Girls on the Run. I'm not arguing this point about Ashbery in my review, but I'm wondering out loud here if Ashbery's ongoing commitment to disciplined irony, parody, and outright spoofing hasn't been upstaged. Anyway, another snippet:
___
There are parallels in Card's reworking Rizzoli to John Ashbery's Girls on the Run, a storybook about small fry in verse linked loosely to Henry Darger, another outsider and monumentalist who authored an illustrated novel of over 15,000 pages, The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. But Ashbery's and Card's strategies for adaptation go separate ways. Ashbery's sleazily descriptive and much longer chronicle draws on Darger as "only a jump-off point," Forrest Gander asserts, whereas Card's diminutive lyrics substitute fruitful accidents and nonsequiturs for cohesive story telling. In attempting to complement Rizzoli's visual spectacles, Card's is the more exfoliated poetry, revitalizing a belated Beaux Arts consciousness that Rizzoli himself describes as one "hermetically sealed spherical inalienable maze of light and sound seeing imagery expand in every direction.”
Some people that are sick are not people.
They are hereditary balls of light
This begins Poem VIII in Souvenir Winner, a twenty-line schizophrenic paean to oracular confusion where a distinction among metaphor and simile, cause and effect, eye and I, object and subject vaporizes into "the souvenir / of flung windows." To illustrate, we begin again, instructed that some of the sick are not people, but "balls of light" as the poem continues:
like the tallest man in the world
must be lonely looking
no one in the eye all the time.
I couldn't seem to move, Pauline,
the famous men from stars to tears …
'The tall guy, one of those lonely stars, is a fire ball I can't move, make him come sob down here, that is, nor can I see nor move myself or you, Pauline, I feel sick.' To accede to this logic is to be possessed of an oceanic albeit menacing enchantment that, in my case, wakens long-sublimated attributes of childhood, one given to perfecting a petulant naiveté, and one resonant, I suspect, with the affects of Rizzoli's life and work on Card.
posted byJack 7:22 AM
Saturday, May 10, 2003
toast in the ocean like skin wearing pajamas
posted byJack 3:31 PM
Friday, May 09, 2003
My Panker
It ranks among the most beautiful goods in Holstein.
My Panker is distant, a Kleinod from Episode Nine, only three km from the country Futterkamp.
The ropery managed.
Borders and shading sharpening a Trakenerzucht also still over 1500 hectars agricultural surface're worked over.
Howe'er you find the horses on Panker only. (The machines are accommodated on property Schmoel, which attained sad celebrity by the last witch burn.)
Beside Panker observation tower, from which one can see in good weather the far over Baltic Sea to Denmark, the forestry house Hessen Stone lies.
In former times a Forester got to the Aufbesserung with its sailors a Schankrecht. From that Forester's grip with sailors Hessen Stone grew.
Today one can eat excellently and jazz friends here come also.
posted byJack 10:41 AM
Thursday, May 08, 2003
posted byJack 2:27 PM
One who participates in a marabou
especially a marabou poet
roves and raids or pillages
for tomcat.
posted byJack 2:09 PM
Someone who blogs needs a clear, very strong liquor distilled from sorghum.
posted byJack 2:00 PM
toast in the ocean like children wearing pajamas
posted byJack 1:54 PM
My favorite. Hypercritical ragout. Howdidyouknow?
posted byJack 1:47 PM
Not having 'the hang of "getting" it' makes sense, too.
posted byJack 1:41 PM
Poem blogs make so much sense if you want them. Just like italics. Or O'Doul's.
Decillion, I hate this bossing O'Doul's site.
Italics, meanwhile, where could O'Hara go without them?
posted byJack 1:14 PM
I've been working on this for a couple of hours, and would like to let it go for today. 'This' is the first two paragraphs about Macgregor Card's new(ish) chapbook.
"Monumental" is a pretty silly descriptor for us hobos inhabiting a time whose aesthetics are pitched somewhere between contextual intimacies and resistances to interpretive networks. For poets bent on humor, the monumental is a kind of pernicious ambiguity either to get off on or to be tactically evaded. Macgregor Card tries something comedically different in Souvenir Winner, a collection of nine short verses ("verses" is the word) that neologize family relations among immortal lonely hearts out there where "teeth soak of their own accord" and "fluency is the chart of an architect / eyeballing space, and the chart, a poet's diplom'."
Card dedicates Souvenir Winner, tellingly and slavishly, to Alexander Scriabin and Achilles Rizzoli. Scriabin is felt in perpetual grammar shifts, as well as compressed harmonics and tonal splinters that distinguish the archaic, antic mergers of "footman," "Christ," and "a porpoise in a pretty tune." Yet Rizzoli is the principal fogy and recurring motif for Card's romp through ghostly space. Rizzoli, an architectural draftsman who lived in mid-20th-century San Francisco, is revered today for spectacular Beaux Arts renderings of Kathredals, huge symbolic portraits, and other large-scale pieces crammed with the oddest poetry, hermetic anagrams and fake quotations often translated into his own secret code. As a bona fide monumentalist, Rizzoli is the architect of choice, for Card, to chart with. Or on.
posted byJack 12:54 PM
Wednesday, May 07, 2003
Long jump.
posted byJack 10:52 AM
Tuesday, May 06, 2003
Jimmy and anyone else wanting to take a look at some of Andrea Brady's work: TEV 1 & 5; Jacket 3 & 9.
posted byJack 6:50 AM
I'll rip off my bow tie for the statsperson who authors the first biomatrix or cluster analysis of the unneat affects attached to real estate costs in poets' big decisions -- a) who to sleep with, b) who to live with, c) jobs, and how all these influence text.
posted byJack 6:24 AM
Friday, May 02, 2003
Addressing the French
The French didn't invent hyper-cronyism in a lyric, they just got away with it tons sooner, breathing suspicion into oblivion, onto mirrors. In what NFL-friends call rotary squib kicks – occasions when the ball is booted so close to the ground you can't field it – Mitch Highfill's been fabricating a few pieces 'addressing the French poets.' Mitch's project is ongoing, and so far I've seen only "Poem for Daumal, " "Poem for Cendrars," ones for Eluard, Char, Desnos, and Breton. These don't sound French, they sound usefully critical in and of an American language that doesn't quite stabilize all that untranslatable, old-European excess. Here's the concluding stanza of the Breton poem.
I am more finished than an episode
of Mr. Ed. Show me a shot
I can’t make. Show me the imprint
of my hand, sharp enough
to shave with. They told me you
were sleeping in doorways
and I believed them.
The language sounds critical, because of Mitch's exaggerated abbreviation and fake-confrontational imperatives, raising a pre-climactic of doubt re the addressed poet's power ("Show me") or lexical authenticity ("Show me" a sharpened "imprint"). In other poems Mitch deadpans his way through universal, that is, French, poetic tropes, light, fire, water, oblivion, mirrors, froth. He also piles these figures beside stacks of Americanisms, buicks, Washington Square Park, Smith Street, Velcro (is that American? Mitch refers to it "as alien technology"??), the Marx Bros. and, of course, Mr. Ed. The intersection of Daumal and Washington Square Park is tragic in its absurdly extravagant appropriateness, underscoring how speedily the universal can be pulled down to "our" level.
The poems are useful as well in their repartee (delayed) with the still-foreign surreality of illuminism. The piece for Desnos begins by evoking a "Poetry delirious and lucid" that notwithstanding persistently parodic or copybook attempts from Ashbery, Lauterbach, Padgett, Yau, Schultz, et al., looks as if it's almost impossible to achieve in American English without overhead projectors or cracking jokes, save Wieners, Ceravolo and O'Hara. In these early numbers Mitch Highfill is still on the jokey side. But Mitch's sustained interest in directly confronting the French, the terseness of his juxtaposing American 'reality' with their tropical ancien regime, and, most interesting, whiffs of self-critique ("I am more finished than an episode / of Mr. Ed") could add up to something other than parody, tipping the project in another direction.
posted byJack 8:30 AM
Thursday, May 01, 2003
Emerging as the most lucent diarist, Katie D. Try Mmm, breakfast!
posted byJack 6:30 AM
Pupil caviar. That cat is on the fast track.
posted byJack 6:28 AM
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