Saturday, April 30, 2005
The bride has landed.
posted byJack 6:19 PM
Thursday, April 28, 2005
She fell silent.
I wrote it all down.
posted byJack 1:27 PM
John Latta on Saline, this way.
posted byJack 10:50 AM
We were swimming naked, a word I often use to characterize my work. I wasn't looking when I came out of my lap and grabbed another guy. I felt something strange but familiar.
posted byJack 7:27 AM
Savagery of the week.
posted byJack 5:54 AM
Tuesday, April 26, 2005
Bring it on, our green man mutters as he falls to thinking. It would be better, he wrote, if we filed out total copies. His cubicle adorned with tassels, starving animals and a biblical instrument. His shade of sage, a "genetic trespass." J'aurai passe ma vie sous une pluie de lettres, / ayant parfois cherche refuge dans l'amour, the alien added in suicidal cursive, imagining simple clouds will be needed to discourage others, girding himself for the darn moments. Yes, I'll marry you. Of course nothing is that simple. His books are prepared, blood-flecked brown, a vantage point inside a camouflage, the basic lining of their markdown. Flecks of many shades of green, too, these are most important. Green is vital, do you hear? Blunderbuss poised, I was so ugly when I was born the doctor slapped my mother.
posted byJack 10:51 AM
Sunday, April 24, 2005
Basically no one wants to mean-mugg Orlando. I got housed by Kari. She's a Monet for sure. The closer I looked everywhere there were the gray hairs a belligerent bolter gave her. That one touch, tho, and I toasted. I was totemically wrenched in our Shasta of styling. Her come-on, sweet, dope, raucous. We went cocked and then like a superstar I got bunked and keyed. We were money, I.T.Z.'d. Acing eyes crushed. Our wrists shammered with bar scars, following the bliss, tight but faded in the walk of shame, marinating until early a.m. Yeah, Kari's thick and I was on the slab. Moofed, perved, I got to be her swervy Larry and it felt awesome, actually. I guess I was creeping on Orlando, some Brad, but Kari was my style project and I became hype in the buttah life. Firing up the sun was flapjacked, really sick. It was hollatight and badical. I'm still bouncing, Herb. Feeling decent. Obese. Gotta Audi.
posted byJack 9:34 AM
Friday, April 22, 2005
You know, some of Jordan's photos are startling. Take a look at the one for Ap 22.
posted byJack 5:06 PM
Like many an Oprah's book club selection or a typical Best Picture nominee, blogging about poets and poetry affirms the enormous appeal of the middlebrow, that special spark that immolates the back brain when high ambition tips its hat to lowly public relations, when whiffs of refinement link arms with accessibility and expedience, when stream-of-consciousness consorts with reputation building. If Gertrude Stein took Bubba Ezra as an illicit amour, and then blogged about it, the precocious, spirited, deformed love child might look and read like Jack Kimball's blog, which he's incoherently named pantaloons or, more monomaniacal, b.l.o.g., for short.
Kimball tries to present his opinions without airs yet fails, his standards exacting but his everpresent sense of play none too generous; he allows the indulgence of different sensibilities and moods ranging from petty to lethal, letting readers take from him what they want, be it wholesale generalization as pure and clean as anything likely to swim in the direction of cheap, unearned consensus, or raw, downright personal bias done up in cheekier fashions. He has the flexibility of a yogi master, the balance of a Romanian gymnast. And he cinches the verdict by constantly stirring his familiar rattles, formalism and antiformalism, back into the prosodic swim.
With Art in America, a pre-legendary collection of his critical essays camouflaged as avant poems, and vice-versa, Kimball quickly developed a teeny reputation for slight-of-hand with exposition and argument, for knowing how to coddle and exalt a single observation or parochial perspective into a worldview. But just three weeks after the poems-essays were published, it was disclosed by no less a middle-Earth scholar than Gerrit Lansing that nearly every sentence in Art in America had been lifted from other sources, leaving Kimball's hard-won reputation quite adrift outside a close circle of appropriationists and thieves. But not for long. Kimball has now resurfaced with his own pantaloons, also known as b.l.o.g., the initials standing for Big Loud Opinions Guaranteed, suggesting a sturdy and resilient ego, which is to a poet writing about other poets what lungs are to an opera singer. But for all Kimball's finesse and instantly brisk readership, his blog first seemed like a layover. Didn't Kimball belong on the main stage of the poem-as-critique biz? As pantaloons demonstrates, he does. Although the blog shares with his collected essays-poems an emphasis on consuming the flesh of opponents and a mix-and-match line-up of topics that separates that flesh from any possible redemption, critically speaking, Kimball's blog has shown itself as an even better forum for recycling other people's ideas. The main reason is Kimball's discernibly greater passion for das gestohlene Leben, the life that is appropriated.
You need not venture all that far to happen upon a ribbing of non-avant style comparably distinct to Kimball's. But you would be harder pressed to encounter a meaner characterization of that style as exquisitely, delicately and expertly put down as the full-throttle pan at pantaloons. Kimball gets his ideas from others, but what is unique in his treatment is that he refuses to restrain an innate mean streak, a salt encrustment as thick, enveloping and showy as a floor-length skunk. Always the flamboyant, compulsive rebel, Kimball writes almost daily for his blog, and it is now apparent he's been refining new techniques to round out his gripe-fest cum plagiarism. Frequently he jump-starts criticism of so-called neo-antiformalism, a developing topic, by misquoting from a text under discussion or piling on a heap of completely apocryphal line-breaks and subtexts which he then assigns to the writer he's maligning. He does these things, we are told, because he finds the process relaxing.
The way Kimball switches topics is also relaxing, to some. Once every few days, Kimball shows a lovelier and airier side, rising above his customary whine and pose, dispersing all the noise and letting in light. To get there, he often turns back the clock and recalls a favorable encounter with a nearly-famous writer he tried to suck face with, enforcing the impression that you're being taken on an elevator ride that sharpens your anticipation for something uplifting.
Kimball's readers appear spellbound by his irresistible, clever manner, a melding of sophistication and sass. At once superficially elegant and easygoing, by turns adventurous and safe, Kimball's pantaloons is the equivalent of a poetic page-turner or a mass-market movie helmed by an auteur who's gotten fat around the middle. You can feel serious about it even as you, like Kimball, relax into it and let yourself go.
posted byJack 1:41 PM
Thursday, April 21, 2005
Repulsive trope of the week, human catnip.
posted byJack 1:09 PM
Tuesday, April 19, 2005
posted byJack 1:21 PM
Monday, April 18, 2005
My luggage did this to me.
posted byJack 8:09 AM
Friday, April 15, 2005
Tom and Sloan survived bloody combat. Can your network carry it all?
I'm curious about sex and would like to make this best of seven.
I need something to keep people away, or as Peter's friend Antonia likes to tell me in her high-floor park-side unit on Central Park West (bought with the proceeds of her divorce), there comes a point when you find yourself with a waxwork hologram of yourself seen through your partner's eyes. Like in the country on any ochre afternoon, still and hot, dry leaves stirring infrequently with rattling pods of what we call ex-lover's eyes.
Rath met John on a visit to London. As is sometimes the way with men of opposed natures, they got along very well.
And there was a spot of orange above the bone that bore a wing.
Hold on, Danni's old college friend Stephen, a jazz guitarist in the free-improv scene has been living with Julian, a fabric designer. Now they want to make things "official." When they go outside to smoke don't let them back in.
Phil and Jamie are professors who wrote a history on reunification. Jamie chastises himself bitterly for his inability to stay faithful.
Unlike Deanna, Rebecca is comfortable with the idea of French-style family arrangements.
The firestorm in Taylor's eyes intensified Carl's sense that he was losing her to Harriet.
Yes, I thought I was immortal, but what I really want is to write children's books.
I'm self-published.
What should I attach shame to today? Mud-wrestle on tv holding up a copy of my new book? Slender, Dark-eyed Dates.
Sometimes I go over to the monitor and see what I'm doing, and it's not what I intended.
Most people in the crowd stick to the 'Take a Stand for Marriage' logo.
I dreamed in e-mail last night. It was about sex again, and revenge.
posted byJack 10:05 AM
Thursday, April 14, 2005
Gabe Gudding should blog more. His entries this week are at once astute, ungeneralized and forthcoming on a personal level. His blog link, if you need it, to the right.
posted byJack 1:27 PM
I looked just like decidedly attractive gay porn star Jeremy Penn, and was running up and down a spiral staircase on an ocean liner parked in New York Harbor, preparing to detonate a powerful nuclear device. Yuri is rich. (This from Ap 13.)
posted byJack 1:14 PM
Introducing the cult of the squish factor.
That's it.
posted byJack 12:59 PM
Today's best rejection: I'm sorry my week's already filled up.
posted byJack 8:30 AM
At her reading at Demolicious in Cambridge a couple of weeks ago Nada handed me a copy of Gary's Elsewhere Vol. 1, his Nippon comic & phrase collection, honeymoon edition. Since there was an open mic before Nada took over, I got powerfully inspired and stood up to read Gary's piece front-to-back to a shimmering, giggly audience. I read it within horizontal bands, that is, speaking the text from the top blocks left page to right, then middle blocks and bottom blocks, left to right page. Was that why everyone was giggling? Nope, Gary's text 'works' no matter how you read it -- as good ideograms are supposed to. The audience was simply wrapping its brains around the clown antics, and loving it. My eyes had the added vantage of bouncing off Gary's prescient cartoons as my tongue spoke the riddles and runes! It was total corneal-to-labial coordination, baba. So even tho I'm late with this report and seem like an also-fan, I am beaming among the first to perform Elsewhere. Ahem.
In an entirely different direction, a couple of correspondents have asked me about the Coolidge T'ang piece (Ap 12, below). I mashed up fractions of pp 74-78 in "Odes of Roba" with random lines from "The Eclipse of the Moon" by Lu T'ung. It's more "serious" than I had intended, but in merging disparities you don't always get what's expected. I'm doing more Coolidge T'ang, but won't post results here, largely because everything keeps 'fluctuating' in ways that continue to surprise me. I guess I'd like to keep it all under wraps and unfinished, at least for now.
posted byJack 8:03 AM
Wednesday, April 13, 2005
Christ I hate paying taxes. This thought is throbbing in my brain as I take pen to forms, signing off another year. A simple equation comes up now; I don't know why; this has nothing to do with taxes. Friends don't hurt friends. Or if that's Pollyanna-esque or absolute, friends don't keep hurting friends. This formulation is an element of my crap-detector decades in the making, still being refined. Taxing.
posted byJack 9:05 AM
Tuesday, April 12, 2005
Coolidge on Tang
The fifth year of the Bland Hotel
The cyclic dreams now locked
A season when the handle & its innerwall
Rivers push the pitch-tube in the Yellow Bell.
He androgynates, tries --
I fear the Heavens, just like him,
Are the essence of primal Yang. Am
A thousand trees, recover from the covers
Like wondering about the cold
Air tensed us instead in great meds,
A sleep not followed by great things.
There is another ancient tale
As the trees number my nails,
Flames like long rainbows
Floating up from the Dragon King's
Emission, the telling of each other,
Piano strings, precise and going no-
where
Suddenly buried in the cold
We canter the blame thing
Crimson scales and fiery birds stinging,
A tornado on a stool stems back, comes to.
posted byJack 8:53 AM
40 stories of carbon fiber. Spray-on Gore-Tex. Embroidered shoulder joints. Extreme textiles. I feel an extreme koan coming on.
posted byJack 7:46 AM
Monday, April 11, 2005
Can't resist Gary's T'ang poems (Ap 11) that proceed from Jonathan's play list.
posted byJack 4:30 PM
Comparing Notley's blood orange to O'Hara's tangerine, Chad Davidson writes of playfulness-plus in Waltzing Matilda: "Hidden in playfulness, though, are the nodes of anxiety and, at times, darkness that are perhaps out of the range of O'Hara's lunch poems."
Full review at Verse.
posted byJack 10:31 AM
Creep
Being short's a start.
Tall guys are better pick-ups and sex commandos or scoundrels, while shrimps are more naturally creepy. Shorter is better being a creep.
Yet let's not talk about being but making. Making yourself uma pessoa creepy.
Choose a target and stick it right in there. Panning for gold, prancing assembler? Get it right, you can skip marriage and head straight for divorce and settlement. Shower comic amounts of attention on target until she's an object of affection. Even creepier! turn yourself into a fake queer and target a real lesbian or gay guy. How effortless is that?
The best sex is not straight. A woman who keeps a guy gets it. I've known plenty of women who deal their men into a gay poker match.
And I've hung around gay porn stars -- half of them play kind of fake -- and the cutest keep doing what are called triple flips. They work guys over for a living, lock heads with a steady lady after work, and fool around on the side! It's like the world outdoors, in offices and non-porno places where average adults interact, because after a time everything shows you where it hurts as if you're suavely fucking it on the side. Or maybe it's just you.
Ok. Stop paying 99 cents per song. The kicker is buckets of attention, as noted. And peer pressure, evolved. You should be shameless in this stratagem. Hold your lady or gay mark tight. Kiss him in public. Lick his boots in front of friends so he thinks you don't care. Make him feel amused and warm.
I'm going to put in here, relax, all my exes.
If you're self-conscious o sonneteer o apocryphal offense-taker o empurpled former stud you can't be a successful creep.
Attend to target's humiliation. Crush his every little feeling. Mid-phone-call as you're piling it on, cry or scream or both, and hang up. This will be a great first date, because he'll like you before he notices how good-looking you are.
Profit from his embarrassment, but eschew connoisseurship. Continue reading turbulent ferry. Cut and wear magazines. Tear shreds of feeling to barhop about the Castro. Emphasize after the fact your sexual ephemera.
Repeat (to yourself) 'he's not much to me.' When you date, go at things rationally, delicately shuffle, and look at things, down low and separately. Stay good to go.
Breakup sex, the movie is huge.
I never said that. Mid-sentence.
posted byJack 7:52 AM
Thursday, April 07, 2005
Just released.
Writing, speech and shouting -- a first book of poetry from David Larsen!
A kind of stoner Virgil leading you through the craziness. -- A. Berrigan
Order now and save five bucks.
posted byJack 3:29 PM
Tuesday, April 05, 2005
Your Thoreau is about many things floating in a powder of birdcalls.
For a fantastic finish you win the Hugo Boss Prize.
You're no depository of high-mindedness, Peewee.
You are complicated but your website is radically simple.
Where the rubber hit you should take a fresh look.
Hermit, you're a trick left out in the rain.
You recall profound formality taking shape from afar, quelling fear.
Half a day went by and still you resurface.
You are unattainable.
You are hypersensitive to chaos, a thing to uphold.
posted byJack 8:56 AM
Saturday, April 02, 2005
Jack is playing his role (that of a bad actor) perfectly... Recognition at last!
posted byJack 10:38 AM
More expressions of love for Creeley at the Buffalo Archives, link below, April 1, from Ruth Lepson, Nick Piombino, Tom Savage, Charles Alexander, others. An extraordinary passing. Pivotal might be the word.
posted byJack 10:27 AM
Very exciting reissue of Set 1 edited by Lansing in the sixties, available from Strong. 2 to follow.
posted byJack 8:09 AM
Friday, April 01, 2005
Memories and fond words for Creeley at the Buffalo Archives from Tom Beckett, Stephen Vincent, Michael Magee, Hank Lazer, Joel Lewis, Mairead Byrne, Chris Stroffolino, Brenda Coultas, Chris Murray, Aldon Nielsen, Peter Quartermain, among others.
posted byJack 7:05 AM
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