Reviewspeak.

Lifted word clumps from Michiko Kakutani. Build your own review around them!

roiling anger
coyly toyed with
sardonic humor
telling detail
oddly generic

cartoon nihilist
mannered parody
to capture a real moment in time
neither heightened or odd enough
and shockingly

a monster of arrogance, vulgarity & contempt
lugubrious & heavy-handed
thoroughly predictable
hopelessly clichéd
narrative gimmick

uncanny prescience
potent & unnerving
dead-on dialogue
electric detail
a vivid fever chart

I mean I need a new way to be policed.

What a guy like me needs now is to be booked by Tokyo's women-only police force.

Designs and tunes. Try squeee & framina at snarg.

Everyone's favorite oenologist-poet, Eileen Tabios has been reading and citing a lot of classics, a whole bunch of Arab fellows, for ex., along with John Yau and Jordan Davis. She drinks up varietals. She's also sayin nice things a-bout Jordan's Million Poems Journal. Way.

New bloggin from Mairead Byrne.

Unsupported assertions. Is that what I like about the new Beats?

Let's see, if you posit X and then elaborate on X + extensions, a, b, etc., that would be metaphysical, strategically. A kind of (mentalist) landscape, formally.

A metaphysical landscapist new Beat? Maggie Zurawski. Why can't I get her chicken dance out of my head? Here:

this where

this where
I the fighter poem
put chicken feet
in this the dream
where the trees are noise
this where the trees become noise
I the fighter poem
eat the bank
the trees are noise
where this I the fighter poem say,
the prize is the chicken the tree the noise
this is where
the tree shatters the bank
with its chicken feet and its
chicken dance

Read this alongside cable videophone of US infantry pushing today across the Euphrates in a sand storm. Z writes, "the trees are noise / where this I the fighter poem say, / the prize is the chicken..." I woke up at 6:00 EST and turned to CNN where the videophone showed bushes and trees stuck to a dust-thick orange color, pressed on the air like silkscreens dunk in acrid smoke. The reporter pulled out his little mic, popping it out the window of the Hummer -- eh, the trees made noise! Snipers on "chicken feet" doing their "chicken dance."

That line "eat the bank" is formidable, a warning.

I thought the language of the Top Secret post, below, of pest-hole interest. The deliberately bad grammar ("Though...but..."; "ariable efforts...") coupled with fine euphemism ("modalities"; "perceived possibility") go to the heart of the scam. Maybe this should be scrambled into a capitalist poem (though, I think, it's already kinda a poem of capitalist dementia).

Top Secret.

This just received at "infolist@fauxpress".


Africa Development Bank (ADB),
Cotonou, Benin Republic


First, I must solicit your confidence in this transaction; this is by virtue of its nature as being utterly "CONFIDENTIAL AND TOP SECRET". Though I know that a transaction of this magnitude will make any one apprehensive and worried, but I am assuring you that all will be well at the end of the day. We have decided to contact you due to the urgency of this transaction, as we have been reliable informed of your discreteness and ability in transaction of this nature. Let me start first, introducing myself properly to you.I am Mr. Kondjo Foffi, a director with Africa Development Bank (ADB), Cotonou, Benin Republic. I came to know of your private search for a reliable and reputable person to handle this confidential transaction that involves the transfer of a huge sum of money to a foreign account requiring maximum confidence.

THE PROPOSITION:
A foreigner, Late Engineer. Martins Nunez, an oil merchant/contractor. Until his death in a ghastly air crash, with his entire family, banked with us here at ADB, and had a closing balance at the end of September 2002 worth USD 22.9 million. (Twenty two million, Nine hundred thousand United State Dollars) which the bank now expects a next-of–kin to claim as beneficiary. ariable efforts are being made by ADB to get in touch with any of the creeks or relatives but there has been no success. It is because of this perceived possibility of not being able to locate any of late Nunez’s next-of-kin. The management under the influence of our chairman and member of the board of directors has made an arrangement for the fund to be declared ‘UNCLAIMABLE’ and subsequently be turned to the reserve account of the bank. In order to avert this negative development, some of my trusted colleagues and I now seek your permission to have you stand as the next-of-kin to the late Nunez so that the fund USD22.9m would be released and paid into your account as the beneficiary next-of-kin. All documents and proof to enable you get this fund will be carefully worked out.We have secured from the probate an order of mandamus to locate any of the deceased beneficiaries.

May I assured you that this Transaction is 100% risk-free, as we have taken care of all necessary modalities to ensure a hitch-free transaction. To this effect my colleagues and I have agreed to compensate you with 25% of the total sum US$22.9m for your kind assistance i.e. provision of a nominated foreign account to accommodate the fund for us. Please, you have been advised to keep "top secret" as we are still in service and intend to retire from service after we conclude this deal with you. I will be monitoring the whole  situation here in this bank until you confirm the money in your account and ask me to come down to your country for subsequent sharing of the fund according to percentages previously indicated. All other necessary vital information will be sent to you when I hear from you. I look forward to receive your mail for now. Please reply to foffi_07@juno.com

Yours faithfully
Kondjo Foffi.

Spring!: billions of highly intelligent beings with high degrees of morphic freedom play with all their features and tune them freely in any direction.

A friend to poetry and coolmeister of the craft, Alan Davies needs work in the NYC area. Alan has taken on a variety of jobs, ranging from corporate sales to providing care for the infirm. He is meticulous and a whiz in handling details. His situation calls for immediate attention. If you have any information on a likely line of employment for Alan, full- or part-time, and / or a house-sitting situation, you could call his friend Brenda Iijima. If you don't have her number, email me and I can help put you in touch with her or Alan.

Comping for this blog reintroduces, to me, the miracle of reversals in narrative logic. When you read this, it appears prior to what prompts it. Each entry above 'previews' its precursor below. Boy!

This is going to look like one heck of a generalization. Most of us are listening for our openings. The me subtext offends me. Ha!

But this interests me only so far. More curious, for me, is why we approach poetry primarily in terms -- and only a few terms at that -- of understanding it. As though propositions and semantics were key to poetry's necessities.

David is a poet who is looking to 'follow' poetry. By follow, I guess we'd agree he's trying to understand it. Today he's trying to understand mine. This interests me.

A new blog from David Cameron, devoted mostly to good places to get pizza.

I grieve for a winter in peace.

I should get this down now before I think it's so obvious I forget! Two readings coming this week of particular interest to me, and I hope to you if you're in Manhattan.

1) BOOK PARTY for new Faux Press releases. Monday, the 17th, 7:00 P.M. Jordan Davis ~~ MILLION POEMS JOURNAL; Nada Gordon ~~ V. IMP.; & Alice Notley ~~ WALTZING MATILDA. Teachers & Writers, 5 Union Square West, 7th Floor. Refreshments. FREE.

2) Wednesday, March 19, 8:00 P.M. Lee Ann Brown & me. The Poetry Project, St. Mark's Church, 2nd Ave & 10th St.

I want to write quick entries on a few books I've been eyeballing. No time until after next week. But here are some of the titles. Culture, Daniel Davidson. Sunflower, Jack Collum & Lyn Hejinian. Cage Dances, David Hess. Nelson & the Huruburu Bird, Mairead Byrne. Love Poems, Rene Ricard. Propinquity, Jen Coleman.

Hey James. Let's sit down soon and talk over the differences between a banana and a post.

Ok. They're actually old guys. There's just one young guy and he's not that terrific, but he reminds me of how Gary Sullivan might have turned out if he had put himself behind the wheel of a Putzmeister.

Here's a booklet, love, all about my mechydronic Putzmeister. Includes pix of some cute German guys.

It's mechydronic, my love.

Whatsthat? Klick, bitte.

Driving into Bosston this noon I found myself following a Putzmeister.

The Six Conditions.

Let us be plain: There is something inherently retarded about America. The six conditions, which some analysts said seem unlikely to be met by Mr. Hussein, include a demand that the Iraqi leader appear on television to make a public declaration that he has been concealing weapons of mass destruction but has now made a "strategic decision" to disarm. By contrast, there is something very “can do” about dung designed in part to persuade wavering members of the Security Council to support a second resolution, also insist that Baghdad destroy "forthwith" remaining stocks of anthrax and permit 30 Iraqi scientists to travel to Cyprus for interviews by United Nations weapons instructors. The poetry of warfare -- warfare of/in/with words -- extends as far back in the history of Indo-European languages as the Vedic texts and as far forward as the present day. Mr. Blair said it was essential to send "the strongest possible signal out to Saddam Hussein that he has now to disarm or face the consequences." Poetry, it too is often an arena of argument and disgust, just as more often it pretends to be an arena of praise and reverence. There has long been something inherently combative about it, if not in the poetry itself, than in its paratexts, its apologias and reviews. The six conditions, which Mr. Blair termed "benchmarks," also included a demand that Iraq produce a contentious "drone" aircraft for inspection or prove that it had been destroyed. And so it is some poetry has long been about contest, argument, war, insult, shaming. The six conditions, which Mr. Blair termed "benchmarks," also included a demand that Iraq produce a contentious "drone" aircraft for inspection or prove that it had been destroyed. Poetry as "face off," as sparring, skirmish, metrical furor, often male-on-male conflict, verbal sport, written combat, careful shouting, goes way back—all the way back in Indo-European literature to the Vedic texts. The six conditions, which some analysts said seemed unlikely to be met by Mr. Hussein, included a demand that the Iraqi leader appear on television to make a public declaration that he has been concealing weapons of mass destruction but has now made a "strategic decision" to disarm. Some of western literature’s most energetic moments are contained within the genre sub-class of invective, face-off and slamming. The conditions, designed in part to persuade wavering members of the Security Council to support a second resolution, also insisted that Baghdad destroy "forthwith" remaining stocks of anthrax and permit 30 Iraqi scientists to travel to Cyprus for interviews by United Nations weapons instructors: Gaius Vallerius Catullus, Martial, great bits of Julius Caesar, Romeo and Juliet, and Much Ado About Nothing, “The Battle of Maldon,” where Saxon and Viking insult each other across the Blackwater river, the middle English poem, “The Owl and the Nightingale,” the flyting verses of the great Skalds of Old Norse, such as those in Egil’s Saga and Droplaugarsona Saga, as well as those within the Scots tradition, particularly the “Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy” and the “Flyting of Montgomerie and Polmart,” and the insult poems of the Irish tradition. Mr. Blair said it was essential to send "the strongest possible signal out to Saddam Hussein that he has now to disarm or face the consequences."

Gabe's Defense.

This just in from Gudding.  

Hi Jack: that's exactly what you done to me: you "hi jack"ed my driving log in order to illustrate what a tin ear i have but i told you that it's not "poetry" it's a logbook of my travel.

okay there's that concern. my second concern is this:

when quoting a passage of music, the ideas of pitch, key, tonality are all tweaked once context and scale are removed via the act of quoting. To understand the "key" in which the logbook is pitched, you have to see/hear the prolog and understand its architecture.

the third concern is that you kinda seem to be implying it's, like, a bad thing to push the bounds of acceptable tonality, pitch. if part of the writer's "job" & the artist's raison is to push the bounds of what is acceptable and utterable in a culture, why then I'M ALL FOR INAPPROPRIATE PITCH, WONKY EAR, AND YOU'RE VERY BALD Jack.

Was great seeing you last night at the reading.

-- Gabe

Point 3) That's really very good, "you kinda seem to be implying it's, like, a bad thing to push the bounds of acceptable tonality, pitch." Really good in this sense. You complete my impression of ignorance-as-banner by overlooking my counterexamples of atonality, Sondheim, among others, and Weiner. You are the whiner, Gabe. Oh pardonnez. You're the only one winning here. Principally because you're hot for employing writers, giving them a "job," and what a stupendously original brief, "push the bounds of what is acceptable and utterable." May I save this for future workouts I mean workshops? Point 2) And, surely, we'll have to have more prologs before we can understand the pitch of your 'architecture' (Pisalike?) in order to deploy your texts as the bad examples they invariably turn into. Point 1) In yesterday's blog entry I categorized your text as notation, quoted your title 'notebook,' addressed your recording mileage to mark travel time, situated the text in a 'limbo' of nonprose / nonpoetry, and characterized it as a work-in-progress, but you are so right to insist that what I cited from you is not poetry. This is an extremely important insight. One that you make often, I imagine. After meeting you last night I understand why the word "beak" appears so often in your um not-poetry. I recommend you start doing the comb-over with your grease-releasing hair, combing it forward to draw attention away from your monteith of a schnoz. The comb-over would also cover your sesame seed eyes and curled forehead. Loved your reading.

Silly color.

One more exquisite thing. Gabe Gudding and his wife Mairead Byrne are reading in Cambridge tonight. I have to go and give them, Gabe particularly, my best ear.

David Hess writes:

Reading your most recent bloggin -- I really do want to know what perfect pitch means in poetry -- who uses it and when and where -- did O'Hara have it, in every line, in all his poems? I think Ashbery has it more (but O'Hara outdoes him with rhythm). I don't know if Kenneth Koch has it. Barbara Guest has some weird perfect pitch that isn't line-based....

To you, what does perfect pitch mean in poetry?

Just trying to unnerstand what you're saying.

Again, I'd say the langpos were anti-perfect pitch mostly -- going more for dissonance, noise, arhythmia -- but maybe these aren't opposed.

Is there a great poet who didn't have it? I'm thinking maybe Whitman. Olson strikes me as very dissonant but also has a strong sense of the line.

-- David Hess

I'm getting into the toasty end of the Jacuzzi here. I'm much more comfortable thinking about pitch applied to conversation, for example, or to prose. To expect perfect pitch in poetry is virtually to shut down atonality altogether, as I said, below. David asks, "Is there a great poet who didn't have it?" I mentioned Hannah Weiner. She's totally great. Here's another one, Alan Sondheim. He's going after so much sound, layers of it, one would not want to evaluate his works on the basis of mere harmonics, tone control, nice words. I see a common, wild craft between Alan and Hannah, have argued to that point, and would assert here that while they know a good deal about their respective musics, they can sound terrible. This is because they are not attempting to strike the right keys.

There are other kinds of projects whose surfaces feel as wooly as Sondheim's or Weiner's, but whose messaging is unclear, partly because they lack tonic consciousness -- that is, they are neither atonal nor in key. Here is a thoroughly unfair example from Gabriel Gudding's "rhode island notebook, 2.26.03-3.2.03" posted today to Imitation Poetics. (The numbered references, such as "203.7 M" indicate miles traveled by car):


We hunted the eagle again b/c it was
trying to eat our meat bees, preying
upon our herd and hive of important
and beefy apians. Awful eagle. 203.7 M
sky almost featureless grey. Anthony Creek
“I was born on July 6th, which makes me
a cancer.” Nancy Reagan. “Big Blue
River” 212.7 M. Let us burn a
hospital just like an American President might
Let’s burn down that nursing home
just like an CEO would. Let’s get in the way
of the Antiques & charge a toll at the
entrance to modernity.

This is just a snippet of a much longer text, but it could be useful to examine this briefly, because it is available as a kind of work-in-progress, straightforward notation -- somewhere in a limbo of nonprose and nonpoetry. I think I get Gabe's depiction of drivetime-as-pastiche. I like his associations from visual cues ("Antiques," "toll") and perhaps audio / radio cues ("'I was born on July 6th, which makes me a cancer.' Nancy Reagan."), as well. What I don't get are the words, "our herd and hive," for example, "sky almost featureless grey," "Let us burn," "entrance to modernity." I don't get these choices as words, because they can be easily replaced here and, to my ear, should be.

Hey, let's hear from the musicologist! What is perfect pitch? Bare bones definition: The ability to identify and sing any note by name. Gauging pitch, then, would not be that helpful in contrasting it with loudness or dissonance, but a criterion for understanding the affect of loudness, dissonance, etc. Cough. Contrast perfect pitch with relative pitch: recognition of a note as being a certain degree of the scale or at a certain interval above or below another note. Notice the fudge phrases "certain degree" and "certain interval." Cough cough. In poetry, we apply pitch to word-choice, among other things. My idol who has perfect pitch can't choose any old nearly-ok words, just the right ones that register. And this is the case especially when she's nervy and dissonant. If the words only approximate restlessness, impartiality, or surprise, say, they fall like rents in the Flatiron Building. Ex: In prose, contrast the editorials of the New York Times with the Boston Globe. In poetry, consider Ron Padgett v. many imitators.

Atonality is another matter. I'm not so interested in whether Bruce Andrews, Hannah Weiner or Brian Kim Steffans has relative or perfect pitch. Weiner doesn't and who cares? Andrews and BKS both do and don't. Works by all three are off-on-off the tonal scale, obligating their readers to take a hike.


But if you're like me, still in anguish about perfection, good news. It can be acquired!

Higgins Replies.

In response to my notes of a few days ago, Mary Rising Higgins writes in a corrective if encouraging vein.

Thank you for posting your high energy, insightful responses to )locus TIDES((. The phrase "retired primary school teacher who takes up old-timey free verse," gave me slight pause. Continuing was a privilege, however.

This was my first opportunity to follow a reader constructing meaning in the poem, and you share your process with an absolutely open generosity. When you hit "consider certain conditions to separate you from pain" you might have let go, at that point, into personal active reading the work is built toward. By turning the word "causal" into "casual," you take the poem fully into meaning you bring. Another metaconversation, if you will, is created from the energy of just those words juxtaposed on the page.

If the poems intend anything other than to be written, it is to engage you, "dear reader," in some rather democratic process of creating meaning. Perhaps you'll be willing to return, as one must if the work succeeds, to construct further / other possibilities.

Anyone who'll be reading )locus TIDES(( needs to check out what you have to say, so I'm sending people I know. Thanks again for such good words.

Best wishes,

-- Mary Rising Higgins

PS. Your "whoa-boy" reference makes me laugh, and from that point I realize the amazing gift your response becomes!

I'm about as embarrassed about my proneness to dyslexic gaffe (causal / casual) as any grade school kid, and I am grateful to Mary Rising Higgins for allowing this as "meaning you bring." Invitation to proactive reader response is a wholesale quality of )locus TIDES(( that I hadn't touched on in my previous notes, but yes! the metaconversation I did speak of is exciting to me, because the poetry is arrayed formally and syntactically to demand a reader be drawn in and mix it up. And I did just that, I guess. I want to add, with just a touch of anxiety, that the little I wrote about the 'casual' could stand as-is or could be slightly reworked to stand. (In the meantime, could you fill in, please, a few ponderous syllogisms addressing the seeming redundancy of 'causal starts' as evidence of 'quick conflicts'?)

My misprision, though, along with Higgins's call to construct possibilities, triggers a wish list for future readings of her other works. I look forward to reuniting with her inner voices in conflict (or not), discovering more of what I characterize as confounding self-revelation, and, particularly, learning how Higgins continues to combine her 'starts' with the struggles they incite. Such:

flawed idiom tumult asserting need or want
forerunner cutouts
stand at any freeway entrance to ask

Rain Taxi is planning reviews of Edwin's PLEASE and Jordan's Million Poems Journal. Yay!

For example, Anselm Berrigan's note to Nada this fine a.m. has perfect pitch.

Lots of loud voices right now. Notice? How many have perfect pitch?

& just in case I think I'm backsliding into some elitist or privatized stance, I remind myself the term means something in musicology and among performers and, by extension, should mean something vis a vis loudnesses of any voice.

They say perfect pitch is a genetic quality, but if you're not so gifted, you can work on it. Working on it might be genetically linked, too.

The name of that movie, from yesterday: "Bomb."

President holds primetime news conference tonight. Dow down 101.

Name this movie.

Though a fictionalization, ___________ deals with the gritty realism of human conflict as Lt. Waters travels to war-torn central Africa to rescue Dr. Lena Kendricks (Monica Bellucci), a U.S. citizen who runs a mission in the countryside. But when Lt. Waters arrives Dr. Kendricks refuses to abandon the refugees under her care. She implores Waters to escort them on a dangerous trek through the dense jungle to the nearby border. During the journey the S.E.A.L.s find themselves the unwitting guardians of a man sought by the rebel militia. This further endangers their already hazardous mission, but all the while strengthening Waters' resolve to protect Lena and the refugees, and to deliver them safely across the border.

Mmmm. Register now.

Looming huarache?

Inside nearly every blogger is the word "horny."

What follows the adjective looming? _________

"molt"!

-- Gary S.

I can't remember when eastern Massachusetts has had snowcover for almost three months (and running... snowing now). My garden is uniformly tended -- this sounds obnoxiously domestic, but it's blooming with a gray light.

What follows the adjective looming? _________

Love is back after four days of Carnaval. Muito Bem!

I don't think there are that many more occult practices for the New Beats to discover. It follows that the New Beats either will have to invent some wholesale or will need to discover new things that may not be so occult but exceptionally cool. I mean cool beyond technology. Or do I?

Would the Beats of our time have to admire people of other disciplines? I mean, be obsessed with these 'other' people. Would they be travelling a lot in pursuit of others and 'experience'?

First we had "aphrodicracy" and now "internality." Such theorizing widens my bloodlines, Narcississa.

One surefire New Beat has written recently, "WRITING IS THE EXERCISE OF AUTONOMY." Yeah. Sure. Please step back in line.

This just in from Circulars.

After questioning teens in 12 different countries, Melvin DeFleur, a communications professor at Boston University, discovered that American entertainment was brewing a "culture of hate" among the youth of other countries. DeFleur surveyed 1,313 people ranging in from age 14 to 19. The study, "The Next Generation's Image of Americans: Attitudes and Beliefs by Teenagers in 12 Countries" was conducted in late 2002.

DeFleur, who thinks the war on terror needs to be fought on many fronts, said its time to change Hollywood's mind about the images it's producing. "If a teenager in Saudi Arabia sees an episode of The Sopranos, they are going to enjoy it, but the images of Americans being lewd and lawless will become imbedded in them," he said.

No more lawless images, please.

The New Beats would not need to be individualists, much less rugged ones. But they would have to write out of control. Often.

The main thing is to tell a story. It is almost very important.

-- Frank O'Hara

Only a hundred poems a week?

I'll recharacterize the laugh-y as a submoment more than a subgroup. It's a moment, a recursive moment, actually, in my own composition. And darn it all, it's a set of moments, as far as I can tell, in a whole lot of people whose work I love and devour. Who would be in on the list of new Beats? We're not talking compo-quality here, but comp as it projects life-choices and intentionality, to bring up that thread for a sec.

One segmentation I would red-line for attention in further discussion of avants or of the New York School is a subgroup adopting a stylistic or strategy, if you prefer, for the laugh-y, Saturday Night Live 'positioning' of texts and performances. I'm surfing on slippery cellophane ramen here, because I know many of the people writing and performing these texts are so craft-proven and good. But as a collective, laugh-y stuff, by itself, is mannerism, the targeting (pretentious texts and interstate commerce?) for the performative is predictable, and when the 'material' is soft, it's as see-through as my noodles. Just three years ago, it's been over-reported, the brightest quasi-literary talent at the Ivies headed directly to Hollywood to write up new yuck-fest treatments and pilots. As a kind of backwash / complement to this migration, we have new, mainly East Coast verse comedians by the zine-load. The more current trend for talent wanting to make big bucks, meanwhile, is reality-based pilots and scripting for independent films. What would reality-based poetry sound like? A list-serv? Scripting for independents = the 'new' Beats?

This one is for readers of the Project Newsletter (not just Nada & Gary). If I'm taking in Gail Scott's piece (p 15) correctly, Barrett Watten argues that the avant garde is recursive breakdown, "not ... Baudelaire, Manet, or Dada in a teleological series." This sounds overarching, rather globalular rhetoric to my ears. We probably need analytical tools, in English, to capture the demise of the avant garde, but so far I haven't been convinced that the avants are not still out there, and out there in ways that cannot be summarized as recursive, reflexive and so forth. Meanwhile, in French, the task seems much easier. 'There has been no new poetry since Mallarme,' a Parisian friend (and serious publisher of French academic avants in cultural studies) tells me. Ok, he's a cynic and doesn't know poetry. But it strikes me as much more plausible that those French poets with avant strivings have been stuck on the very mobius Watten points to. Watten's insight, even, with Baudelaire, Manet, etc., seems to derive from French despair.

Nada, the folks at SPD need a lot more of your books. It's become a textbook or something. I'll take care of this, just letting you know.

Mary Rising Higgins.

Mary Rising Higgins is a retired primary school teacher who takes up old-timey free verse, mostly in the forms of neoclassically-eviscerated lines, long and short, and occasional prose-like paragraphs. Page 22 in her new book )locus TIDES(( begins:

[centered toward right margin]

topaz bird
momentaneous
here centers bend
extremes live from
speech box talismans
take a turn salt in the wound contrapose

[flush left margin]

consider certain conditions to separate you from pain
casual starting lines arrived in

[centered mid-page]

one among many quick build conflicts […]

We're in the middle of a 10-page poem titled "dripstone / model." This selection captures a scrupulosity of tone ("topaz bird", "wound contrapose") I might otherwise find repellant were there no offsetting force directing me to hold off judgment. With regard to diction, I can't say I admire her poetic "talisman," flirtation with cliché ("salt in the wound") or neologisms like "momentaneous." What keeps me reading is Higgins's metaconversation with the processing of these "casual starting lines" and "quick build conflicts." More, when I reread "here centers bend / extremes live," I begin to see this as notation from an intelligence making innumerable domestic 'starts,' dressing 'wounds,' etc. Six pages earlier, the poem opens: "light snow fall morning white and all / then counter with pepper to balance the heavily salted meat…" This is a recipe, of course, write what you see and think you see, spice with conflict, and talk about the seeing and seasoning.

Although the recipe seems limited, the question is, tasty? I find Higgins improves from page to page. For example, a too-literal knickknack reference, "a small dragon handled cup" (p 24) gets recycled as "heaven's brush dragon" (p 64), and then repurposed in this whoa-boy sentence: "Rag deep dragons transpire to catch shoulder perimeter outcomes" (p 91). In her second poem, "to measure," Higgins inserts a prose block subtitled ")APPROACH(" that starts: "Flyby visuals mandate. Direction of travel views differ through a part expected reflects from." This is a better-than-ok representation of partially obscured vision in motion. I enjoy contrasting this word-mobile with another from her final poem: "getting from here to there by / ghetto frame card cliche rifts." The second mobile moves with less fracture, but with more awareness of process ("cliche rifts") and self-critique ("ghetto frame card").

Higgins's ghetto is the Arizona desert. Such a place directs one's attention to sky, leaf, insects, and a number of bird species. It also provides space and vistas for the self-paring-down that seems very much a prerequisite to clearer thinking. In a prose block subtitled ")PERSPECTIVE(" Higgins discloses her own space and vista for making verse:

Up from technoshadow's metal fatigue. Attract shield. Somewhere around liaison stalk closer pares. Where it leads until it looks like a first-time point of light summit-fanned. It could follow even finer structures. Leonid starwound fountain. Coincidental plainsong departure. How you form and step out from inner speech. […]

I read Higgins with the feeling that she updates urges toward tonal perfection found in modernist poetry, not unlike a hermetic Marianne Moore, say. But there are elements of deeper if more confounding self-revelation coupled with egocentric language ("Leonid starwound fountain") that mark Higgins as our contemporary. Her "inner speech" is sometimes at the extremity of self-consciousness, often polyvalent, reminiscent in two ways, then, of Hannah Weiner:

[…] string scree-e-e-e-e how vigilance interferes the series of yelps a singing and we are prepared though not by messengers bigger and bigger pictures digest constructs of dreaming that way in mean verdance and you should be this way's dream photo not modernist the way you expect it […]

Higgins's muses seem mostly female. She includes six pages of "Notes" at the end of )locus TIDES(( that cite snippets of text borrowed from mostly women poets, Kathleen Fraser, Karen Mac Cormack, Sheila Murphy, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Susan Gervitz, Alice Notley, Kristin Prevallet, Julie Patton, and Elaine Equi among the more familiar names, as well as women poets from Arizona and a number of European countries. The text sampling reinforces the impression that Higgins is conversing with her own poetry in this sense by picking up distinctly feminine if not feminist pieces as "starting lines" to build her many kinds of "conflict."

I've said that I spot progress or improvement from page to page. I need to qualify this by restating what should be obvious, how satisfying many of the first and middle sections of )locus TIDES(( are. Still, her last page of poetry, another prose block, wildly confirms a deepening self-conciousness or progress, if you will: "Learning curve push skews through apple the orange transliterates. During that historic walk to the ATM dragging your plank of dark light, at whiplash collar check off the goal applies one time." I can't find a briefer example of Higgins's awareness of self-struggle -- dark light stands in as her 'conflict' in writing important-sounding poetry vs. the 'casual start' implicit in such a quotidian reference as the ATM. Indeed, her sense of struggle is summed up as a 'learning curve' that allows her to evoke not only the literal orange but also the skew(er)ed, transliterated apple. More fundamental, that struggle is also apparent in her realization that the goal for her is to capture this one event that happens only this "one time."

)locus TIDES((, Mary Rising Higgins. 2002. Potes & Poets Press. 14.00 ISBN 1-893541-78-9

Creeps3.

Enough?

Creeps2.

Mr. President. Did you and your lady friend…

I never had sex…

With all due respect, sir, we have an affidavit…

I never had sex with tha…

Plus testimony from Secret Service agents…

I never had sex with that…wo…

If I can just play this video here…

I never had sex with that…woma…

We have samples of DNA, sir, showing the semen here is…

Depends on what your definition of is is…

Creeps.

Creeps. Isn't that the gray-is-the-new-black media arts?

Unfinished Account.

I'm concentrating on getting my poem playlist tidy for a reading coming up in a couple of weeks. So I've entered a self-protective phase, maybe something similar to what Jordan has been writing the last few days: "Mounting anxiety about self-disclosure..." fur example. Easy to post poems when they have no place to go, but am holding back right now to protect a connection to anything I wind up reading in front of people a little later on. Hey, that doesn't make much sense.

Well, if I'm going to keep on entertaining myself (and that is always a goal for me in writing) I need to find out what these poems are about, formally. It's a little too close to the reading to work this out under the semi-public lamplight of a blog. That's my connection to Jordan's anxiety, I suppose, although I think Jordan is more preoccupied with personhood-striptease, whereas I can't even get that internal about my anxiety. I'm protecting procedure at this point. Procedure is such an obvious component to content, I feel, I want, in the end, to insert all sorts of 'evidence' of how I get to say the little I assert in a given piece. Like: I continue phoning my seven mistresses and keep the conversations going, not knowing which phrases I overhear will be inserted into my play within. But the insertions are after the phone calls, solitary events (I believe), sorting data, messing it up if that's ok, etc. (No, that part of the process is not entirely solitary, either, but I digress.) I have to lose the mistresses' phone numbers at odd points (like now), just to get closer to feeling solitary & to keep them and me interested, no?

Payphone = blog?

Maybe I can let a poem go I'll never read in public.

In relation to the poem Habermas I want quick execution shhhhhesh.
Need but, shhh. That's execution. Need never bothered me.

In relation to the poem Habermas I want to hear what others say,
but the last two lines are shiny architecture of matter.

Rawls poems me. And o, etc., etc.

That's truly bathetic. The poem has nothing (much) to do with current biases of mine. Like so many others, I'm fixated on the war, loss of democratic principles and governance procedures -- that word again, only this time writ extremely large. The snippet above carries stark references to the last liberal prime number among us, John Rawls, but how inarticulate and superficial to use him in this way. I'm conflicted whether to go into criteria for justice, question how these may apply to our historical moment (that phrase seems appropriate now). Perhaps these few lines are directions -- self-directions?? -- to confront Rawls poetically? Could this be amusing? More soon.

Daddyo.

I've been asked by my French publisher to put together a new collected works, which I'm calling Daddyo (in French). I'm not a podium-kicking type, so I was a little put off singled out this way, thinking at first this has to be lame trickery from Kent Johnson or even Señor Hess, finally reasoning, however, I've done this to moi-même.

Warm-up.

Proposed Titles for Daddyo

Une 18ème Lettre de Siècle
1951
2 Poésies de l'Ohara Monogatari
3 Poésies Au sujet de Kenneth Koch
3 Requiems Pour Un Jeune Oncle
Vent de 34 Milles
3ème EL d'Avenue
Un Avortement
Au sujet de Courbet
Adieu Au Normand, À la Fève Jour À Joan et Au Jean-Paul
Aventures Dans La Vie
Après Wyatt
l'Après-midi
Encore, John Keats, Ou Le Poteau du Basilic
Agression
Un avion sifflent (après Heine)
Aix-en-Provence
Tout Ce Gaz
Alma
Américain
Anacrostic
Animaux
Variations d'Ann Arbor
Réponse À Voznesensky et À Evtushenko
l'Anthologie de Jours Isolés
Inquiétude
Appoggiaturas
La Saison d'Abricot
l'Arborétum
Les Argonautes
Comme prévu
Cendres Samedi Après-midi
Chez Joan
À la Librairie de la Danse de Kamin
Au Fond de la Décharge Il Y a Sorte d'Ome de Bugle
Au Vieil Endroit
Aubade
Aus Einem Avril
Autobiographia Literaria
Avenue Maria
Avenue A
Baareld
Ballade
Ballade Numéro 4
Barbizon
Les Baigneurs
Salle de bains
Partie de Plage
Bière Pour Le Petit déjeuner
Berdie
Burnoose de la Facture
l'École de la Facture de New York
Biographia Letteraria
Biotherm (pour facture Berkson)
Le Théâtre de Camp d'Oiseau
Birdie
Blocs
Territoire Bleu
Les Alésages
Boston
Frères
Cambridge
Un Appareil-photo
Cantate
Capitaine Bada
Capitaines Courageux
Causerie d'A.f.
Un Chardin Nécessitant Le Nettoyage
Cheyenne
Chez Jane
Chicago
Une Légende Chinoise
Choses Passageres
Carte de Noël Pour honorer Hartigan
Un Hiver de Ville
Les Nuages Vont Doucement
Le Clown
Clytemnestra
Cohasset
Colloque Sentimental
Variations Commerciales
Concert Champetre
Cornkind
Le Critique
Colline de Corneille
Danses Avant Le Mur
Jour et nuit En 1952
Madame Died de Jour
Cher Jap
La mort
Derange Sur Un Pont de L'adour
Dialogues
Dido
Digression Sur Le Nombre L, 1948
Dolce Colloquio
Rêve de Berlin
Dérives D'une Chose Qui Affichent Berkson Noté
Boire
Le Batteur
Jours Ducaux
Mondrian Tôt
Dès l'abord Dimanche
Fleuve Est
Pâques
La Main d'Edwin
Élégie (enthousiaste et en jours perdus d'excédent d'anguish)
Élégie (eau salée. Et Visages Mourant)
Facture d'Embarassing
Approche Ennemie d'Avions
Essai Sur Le Modèle
F. (missive et promenade) I. #53
F.m.i. 6/25/61
F.o.i.
F.y.i. (prix de Beaute)
F.y.i. (la brasserie va au lac)
Échecs de Ressort
Fantaisie (sur les vers russes) pour Alfred Leslie
Imagination
Loin du DES Lilas et La Rue Pergolese de Porte
Peinture Préférée Dans La Métropolitaine
Février
Torse femelle
Premières Danses
Cinq Poésies
Jour de Drapeau
Sonore Affectueux
Pour Un Dauphin
Pour Bob Rauschenberg
Pour David Schubert
Pour La Grace, Après Une Partie
Pour Le Doyen de James
Pour Janice et Kenneth Au Voyage
Pour Poulenc
Pendant La Nouvelle Année Chinoise et Pour La Facture Berkson
Quatre Petites Élégies 1. Écrit Dans Le Sable À l'Île de l'Eau
Quatre Petites Élégies 2. Peu d'élégie
Quatre Petites Élégies 3. Doyen d'Orbite, 30 septembre 1955
Quatre Petites Élégies 4. Une Cérémonie Pour Un de Mes Morts
Funnies
Galanta
Gamin
Se lever en avant de quelqu'un (le soleil)
Glazunoviana, Ou Jour Commémoratif
Gli Amanti
Midi de Bon Vendredi
Au revoir À la Grande Île Principale Impeccable
Central Grand
Le Frelon Vert
Gregory Corso : Essence
Haine
Avoir Un Coke Avec Vous
Ici À New York Nous Avons Beaucoup d'Ennui Avec
Heremaphrodite
Hieronymus Bosch
Une Colline
Variations Historiques
Un Hommage
Hommage À Andre Gide
Hommage Au Cap Mootch de Pasternak
Hommage À Rrose Selavy
Homosexualité
Hôtel Particulier
Hôtel Transylvanie
Chambre
Comment Les Roses Deviennent Noires
Comment Y arriver
Le Chasseur
Klaxons de Chasse
J'aime La Manière Qu'elle Disparaît
Une Image de Leda
Image du Bouddha Prêchant
En faveur de Son Temps
Dans L'Hôpital
Dans La Mémoire de Mes Sentiments ; À la Grace Hartigan
Dans Les Films
Intérieur (avec Jane)
Invincibility
Il Semble Loin Parti et Doux Maintenant
Le Jade Madonna
Jane À Douze
Jane Éveillé
Se baigner de Jane
Je Voudrais Voir
La Veste de Joe
Anniversaire de Bouton de John
Joseph Cornell
Jove
Katy
Kitville
La Par de L'amour Avait Passe
Larry
La Configuration du Roman des Associations
Pousser des feuilles Par La Floride
Le Liban
Légende
Étiquettes Jaunes de Les
Les Luths
Sortons
Une Lettre Au Lapin
Liebeslied
La Vie Sur Terre
La Lumière Avance Par Elle-même
La Lumière Appuie
Comme
Lignes Pendant Certains Morceaux de Musique
Lignes Pour Les Biscuits de Fortune
Lignes À un Ami Enfoncé
Lignes Tout en Lisant l'Image de Coleridge
Lignes Écrites Dans Une Jeunesse Crue
Lisztiana
Lisztiana, Beaucoup Plus tard
Peu d'élégie Pour Antonio Machado
Journal intime de Voyage
Locarno
Louise
Amour
Amour (être perdu)
l'Amoureux
l'Heure de Déjeuner
Macaronis
Madrid
Madrigal Pour Un Chat Mort Appelé Julia
Manifeste
Âne de Mary Desti
Jeudi saint Samedi
Mayakovsky
Méditations En cas d'urgence
Petit déjeuner Mélancolique
Melmoth Le Wanderer
Mémoire de Sergei O
Mémoires de Facture
Poésie Métaphysique
Une Guitare Mexicaine
Cimetière Militaire
Un Soldat Moderne
Matin
La Mère du Drame Allemand
S'élever de Montagne
Mozart Chemisier
Mme Bertha Burger
Le MUSE Considéré En tant qu'Amoureux de Démon
Musique
Muy Bien
Mon Coeur
Ma Chaleur
Naphte
Nouvelles Particules du Soleil
Newsboy
Le Prochain Oiseau Vers l'Australie
Pensées de Nuit Dans Le Village de Greenwich
Nocturne
Une Note À Harold Fondren
Une Note À John Ashbery
Maintenant que Je Suis À Madrid et Peux Penser
Octobre
Heure Octobre 26 1952 De 10:30
Ode (une idée de justice peut être précieuse)
Ode (à Joseph Lesueur) sur la flèche ce Flieth par Day
Ode Sur La Causalité
Ode Sur La Convoitise
Ode Sur Necrophilia
Ode Le Jour de Saint Cecilia
Ode À la Joie
Ode à Michael Goldberg ('naissance de s et d'autres naissances)
Ode À Tanaquil Leclercq
Ode À Willem de Kooning
Ode : Salut Aux Poèts Français de Nègre
Le Vieux Machiniste
Jardin Olive
Sur Un Anniversaire de Kenneth
Sur Une Montagne
Sur Un Pasage En Watt de Beckett et Au sujet de Geo. Montgomery
Sur Regarder La La Grande Jatte, Le Tsar Pleuré À nouveau
Sur l'Anniversaire de Rachmaninoff
Sur l'Anniversaire #158 De Rachmaninoff
Sur l'Anniversaire #161 De Rachmaninoff
Sur l'anniversaire de Rachmaninoff (Windows bleu, les dessus de toit bleus)
Sur l'anniversaire de Rachmaninoff (je suis si heureux que des fleuves de Larry)
Sur l'anniversaire de Rachmaninoff (vite ! Une Dernière Poésie Avant que J'aille)
Sur Brithday de Rachmannoff et Au sujet d'Arshile Gorki
Le Jour de Saint Adalgisa
Sur Voir Washington des Fleuves de Larry Croiser Le Delaware
Sur Le Chemin Au San Remo
l'Opéra
Oranges : 12 Pastorals
Péché Original
Donner sur Le Fleuve
Crainte de Panique
Un Dialogue Pastoral
Un Dialogue Pastoral
Port de Perle
Poésie Personnelle
Prose d'En de Petit Poeme
Les Pipes de la Casserole
Pistachier Au Chateau Noir
Endroits Pour Le Salvador d'Oscar
Une Pensée Plaisante de Whitehead
Poésie
Poésie
Poésie
Poésie
Poésie (aux Chinamen de nuit sautez)
Poésie Au Dessus de l'Échelon
Poésie (toute la soudain tout le monde)
Poésie (tous les miroirs dans le monde)
Poésie (bien que je suis une demi-heure)
Poésie (et demain matin à 8 heures à Springfield)
Poésie (en tant que vous agenouillement)
Poésie (dee Dum, Dee Dum, Dum Dum, Dee Da)
Poésie (un dieu ! Amour ! Le soleil ! Toutes les Chères et Singulières Choses !)
Poésie (la haine est seulement une de beaucoup de réponses)
Poésie (il peut se reposer. Il L'a béni et L'a blessé)
Poésie (il l'a aperçue à l'heure actuelle du rappel)
Poésie (je ne suis pas sûr il y a un traitement)
Poésie (je ne connais pas pendant que j'obtiens Wha


Finally, for Señor Hess.

Blog Chatter.

Just picked up on a couple talked-past ideas.

Foaming hull. (For bloggers in need of formatting and reconstruction.)

Oy Señor Hess. Not to put ya in foaming hull, but you're a much, much better blog writer than formal essayist. That piece on Watten (and Reznikoff??) is a slew of text-lifts from a galaxy that is not ours. Are you really not in Vegas?

Let's start a collection and send our favorite crank blogger to Cornell?

Inspiration or daily penance? The minute I decided there was no poem in it, I stopped blogging right then. It was December 2000 or maybe January 03, something strangely warming about the sorbet, I lost my place in that new Player Registry and messed up on so many art world sales I had to find other work.

Here, Ok?

Nada, love, let's have your own wrap on your reading last nite.

Two Views of Brandenburg Gate.

War Poem from Another County.

Kent Johnson sends this "at O hour minus a few ticks."

Baghdad


Oh, little crown of iron forged to likeness of imam's face,
what are you doing in this circle of flaming inspectors and bakers?

And little burnt dinner all set to be eaten
(and crispy girl all dressed with scarf for school),
what are you doing near this shovel for dung-digging,
hissing like ice-cubes in ruins of little museum?

And little shell of bank on which flakes of assets fall,
can't I still withdraw my bonds for baby?

Good night moon.
Good night socks and good night cuckoo clocks.

Good night little bedpans and a trough where once there was an inn
(urn of dashed pride),
what are you doing beside little wheelbarrow
beside some fried chickens?

And you, ridiculous wheels spinning on mailman's truck,
truck with ashes of letter from crispy girl all dressed with scarf for school,
why do you seem like American experimental poets going nowhere
on little exercise bikes?

Good night barbells and ballet dancer's shoes
under plastered ceilings of Saddam Music Hall.

Good night bladder of Helen Vendler and a jar from Tennessee.
(though what are these doing here in Baghdad?)

Good night blackened ibis and some keys.
Good night, good night.

(And little mosque popped open like a can, which same as factory of
flypaper has blown outward, covering the shape of man with it (with
mosque): He stumbles up Martyr's Promenade. What does it matter
who is speaking, he murmurs and mutters, head a little bit on fire.
Good night to you too.)

Good night moon.
Good night poor people who shall inherit the moon.

Good night first editions of Das Kapital, Novum Organum,
The Symbolic Affinities between Poetry Blogs and Oil Wells,
and the Koran.

Good night nobody.

Good night Mr. Kent, good night, for now you must
soon wake up and rub your eyes and know that you are dead.

-- Kent Johnson

That Honest Shed.

He's surer
Insured
In all thermo matters,
Refills an election beast-

Shill running this street,
Which hams, "goo. Do buy!
Isn't HUD that honest shed now?"
The hated tune's an outer cray-

Fish, slick in foam. To him, horror
Is often hearsay.
Best sup and play hung mien,
As sins uncon the Bengali,

Alles Freundes. Shaved gin
Fronts as treat, canned or cobbed.
He shorts his, qualifies
In this, sighs, or falls off.

A War Poem.

Dreamlike class struggle is no one's financing walk into shear. Proportion turns over desire for no government so this is some level from the front door version, the edge to common sight in slow arrest at the dawn of a new jury. Boardrooms fill with the Nixo-Beat where the flowers are. The egg whites in a spare, bubby zeal to wipe out traitors more, not properly issued to commentary, altering the best snooze clinic in a suppo-pow.

The accidental has flight school wipe. Coordinates everywhere, and or, the squirm of it, the advent, set alone too. Ax it. There isn't even an "it's rippled!" where similar buzzing length and breadth end describing the bed turned down if you're awake to spar in fusing speakers like where the writ is in use to put on my car keys. It's not that stages of violence pine for brilliant shape, grief of a ceiling failing its semblance. Prime shots clear the air enough by comparison. A question knows form is neither.

Entelechy.

It's February, lots of snow. We're on our way out of this place after a short film in which Jacques Derrida says the eyes never age. Even as I resist it, I draw closer to the 17th century scroll occupied by three Heian lords, unadorned fabric staked to the ground as their backdrop, a blend of tarp and a silk threadbare enough to tie up the breeze. In the middle of the film Jacques recalls his mama crying, "You have a pain in your mother." A covariant on how a thin fabric constitutes the eyes' hold over the place and over the physical moment depicted in the scroll. Before this or maybe after, Janet goes into the ladies room as I watch the ice coating steps to the garden outside the cafeteria. That courtyard, one of a pair, was more striking when it was inaccessible from the coffee area. I remember it emptier than today, emptier in its conservative, Olmsted taste, not just empty in feeling, even with more snow and the ivy along one wall opposite me more indistinguishable then, the trees fuller, weaker somehow than they are now. Perhaps younger trees were inserted? But I take in this courtyard as it is and hold it as Janet comes back and we ride the escalator somewhere else.

Storms.

the States United storms into
into States the storms United
United storms into the States
into the United States storms
States the into United storms
States into United the storms
United States the storms into
States United storms the into
storms the into States United
storms United into States the
into United the storms States
into storms States the United
States United into the storms
the United storms States into
the United States into storms
storms the into States United
into States United storms the
the States storms into United
the storms United into States
into United the States storms
States into the United storms
States storms United into the
storms the into United States
United the States into storms

US Makes a Case for War.

Parasomnia as Speech.

Dreamlike class struggle is not sure discourse products remain action.

A new clip starts. Another force writes the edge of dippers in slag. In the end government theory grows up on a farm in Minnesota, goes on chomping pork, trusts no governing.

Rants on the ear rule speakers' aims symbolically, sometimes, like when jurors read jurors' obligations where the writ is the observance and therefore recourse to the great narratives prescribing the observance.

Mother Nature is the focus. One afternoon while napping I read this confusional book. We were at the dawn of a golden age of reader response, Chip writes, the entire room filled with wine.

It's not that oblique. Beat the egg whites in a separate bowl. My conspicuous, shabby desire is to wipe out the parts already hit. Clean up what's not there, not properly inside possums of unknowing you already did what I bellowed for.

Anyway, the best snooze clinic in a supporting role has a steady girl now. She has flight school whipped. We have downtown everywhere. Coordinates everywhere, and apt to lapse into vibrancy for the squirm of it, the adventure, the five-hour walk from the B2 exit. There isn't even a front door. We're in this world. It's rippled where similar destruction and hope befall dharmic arousal, the length and breadth of mourning it away.

Owning a tavern for a while posits a second love describing the points of its chief, unimmaculate obligation. So this is different for us. I'm awake at some level, and put on my shirt, go to my purse and get my car keys.

Intangibles?

Gary Sullivan posts a few points about New York poets, difficulties in defining who is and who is not in the School. It's at his blog, titled "Dreams of Interpretation."

I have a couple of questions.

Simple one first. Based on their respective phone prefixes, how would one exclude Torres and Phipps from the NY School? Are there formal or extra-textual criteria that might help determine one or the other's membership in the category? -- "...taking the CDs into account--Peter Ganick, Wanda Phipps, and Edwin Torres--complicates the notion of Faux as a New York School press." I'm thinking Faux is for extremists within the contemporary imperial mode, that is, extremists in -- choose three -- (a) pollstering; (b) hardhat empressement; (c) foxy discourse; (d) multiparous prevision. But that's obvious, so let me move on, for exemplification, to a very imperial figure of American language, Harry Mathews, Paris-based. He's NY by virtue of education, friendships, intangibles like these. He would be in my anthology of NY poets, I think, while, admittedly, Peter Ganick would not. However, Ganick would be included in a poetry anthology of the American Empire because of (a-d) above.

Are the poets Gary lists from Ron Silliman's 'attempt to contextualize,' as Gary puts it, post-NY-School? 'Post-NY' is a polyembryonic term, but it already sounds exhausted, following the overuse in decades of postmodern and, more dreadful, the misfortunes of September 2001. Then, within Gary's yet-to-be-nailed-down list of poets, it seems we have a complication parallel to Ganick / Mathews if we include Jonathan Mayhew, who lives in Kansas, and Kasey Silem Mohammad, who's probably poolside in Santa Cruz as I write this. Regardless of residence, are the poet's intangibles, such as intent or, if you prefer, intentionality, that which determine her connection to NY (or whatever the center / metaphor), which, in turn, figures in the poets' commonality?

Lunch Poem.

Lethal-to-pale people locking
pockets sauntering indoors
with the scent of Labrador tea

thirty years, until she was seventeen
her supine neck, pale chest, and
looking thru his eyes, big dark eyes

& she hadn't thought of this – music in
a nut might kill the President and a chain
to the spoken way of thinking

squirrels and she could escape
suggesting to the reader how he
wrote romantic things in letters

to you.

Polity.

Dick Morris is a political pollster and strategist who has worked mostly for Republican causes though, infamously, he also strayed over to the other side to advise Bill Clinton. I remember his ten minutes of public humiliation and Clinton's disappointment when one of Morris's prostitutes snitched to a tabloid that Morris let her eavesdrop on his phone conversations with the White House. Soon after Morris jumped back over the velvet roping to join the fun at Heritage Foundation or another such paymaster, writing his exposé of the Clintons, circulating on various Fox shout matches, and so forth. Morris has no problem working for the folks who, as some speculate, directed the media coverage of his extramarital affair in order to (a) embarrass Clinton and (b) get Morris back.

I caught snippets of Morris on Fox Tuesday, before The State of the Union, brawling with Dee Dee Myers, Clinton's first press secretary. Morris was losing air time to Myers, and he wasn't happy. His final gotcha in response to points about the economy and tax cuts was an intimidating rant that went something like this. 'You know where you Democrats go wrong about class warfare. You don't understand when you ask Americans if they are in the top one percent of income, 19 percent say yes, and another 20 percent think they will be some day. And [chuckle] only half of them vote!'

Back in early September the ABC website cited his prescient strategy for Republican victory:

Polls show that only one issue works in Bush's favor: terrorism. On the environmental, global warming, prescription drug plans for the elderly, the right of HMO patients to sue in court, campaign-finance reform, corporate oversight and every other major public question, Americans back the approaches preferred by the Democrats…

Normally, this matrix of issues would foretell disaster for Bush and his party.

But the 2002 elections are unlike any in 40 years. They will come right after a national period of mourning and renewed dread grips the nation in the searing emotional aftermath of the first anniversary of its baptism into the brave new world …

As evidence mounts of Iraqi development of nuclear weapons, chemical and biological warheads, and missile delivery systems, the logic of attack will become irrefutable and the understanding of the need for invasion will grip the American psyche. Talk of whether Bush will go to war and wag the dog before Election Day misses the point. He doesn't need to wag the dog. He just needs to talk about wagging it to make the impact to keep control of Congress.

I would want to view Morris and his data analysis as a fraction of the political dynamic now in control. At gut, the facts are evidence of conspiratorial polity, rule by appeal to maintaining ignorance and indifference of the governed.

Chimp Slick.

Apache
and snow crash.

I cut the rest of it off
a curtain, with a curtain-rod staff.

Having it, have hobbled
away to be a dropper

And the you I've leapt with
that's a meristem

Dreamy subsisting
into an nth meme.

Your arms are apace. Milk
wort is wicked horny.

I like their kids
more than their parents.

More Revision Ideas.

It's pretty obvious now that this entry, below, is unfinished. The last sentence, "Join today," hardly pans out, especially following the sloganeering-is-back idea. How can a slogan satisfy the qualifier "we suspect"?? Either scores of badly-formed slogans in neat lines or a single thick paragraph, maybe. Or tangents, many pages of them.

I started this poem Sunday while reading Bruce Andrews's
The Millennium Project.

I gathered less than half a percent of Bruce's lexicon and started to think about each word: orbit, kick-boxer, seraphim, unsnap, and others I didn't find a use for. I superimposed a few strands of generic discourse: "Contemplation extends X" (revised to "Leadership demands XX") or "X is back" and many other clausal strands that disappeared in the recursive processes of revising, merging, editing. Sexes were on my brain, too, so the words took on 'characters.' I tried to clean this up but wanted to leave enough 'intent' to keep me happy after. This is an extremely limited procedure, so I am glad I'm coming to terms 'framing' it almost literally as gloss manufacturing and depicting a war poster. The gloss is about the only part of this entry that is noteworthy.

The tone in my entry, which might be appropriate for war time, is just a little bit mocking, but it isn't entertaining in the way Ron Silliman concludes Ashbery's "ultimate Ashberyesque nightmare" goes. Last Sunday Silliman wrote that Ashbery seems doomed to entertain academic "monsters" as his "work consistently parodies ... sometimes (as in Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror) with a viciousness that makes you question just why Ashbery puts so much energy into mocking a poetics he so evidently despises, as if somehow he believes (fears) that the realm of the Howards & Hollanders, of the Blooms & Vendlers, were all that was the case." It's never clear, I believe, what level of visciousness to ascribe to Ashbery, and never clear what Ashbery despises (or adores, for that matter) because, as Silliman notes earlier in his Sunday blog, the "Ashberyan technique" is one where "sentence after sentence undercuts what has just gone before." (Silliman's point about Ashbery's attention to matters attended to by Bloom and Vendler, on the other hand, is spot-on, and I hope he analyzes this further.) In any event, the tone of my entry, below, is mockingly sincere. It's about all I can say at the moment to differentiate it from failure.

Revision 2

I'm changing the title of the entry below to "War Poster."

Revision [addiction].

Winter War

Warrior politics aside, outlaws and heroes are broken up by the arcades and doorways where snowfall gets established. Daybreak already stands tall, but this totally fine one is unsnapping the white clasps to their white headbands.

White on white.

Outlaws see seraphic white.

Heroes appear in sunglasses and loiter with intent in the doorways.

Something similar to breakage of sheet glass and clay affixes to the blockhead text, programming and slipping under the format and jitters. They maintain the snowflakes continue boasting of their oscillation lists. It's getting light now. The newest and most anxious look down and see a blade of sedge whistle, handcuffing a tiny load of snow. Every word two hundred examples slip off, slip out easily in a slender gust or on inland waters. Others stay addicted to waving on the bay shore pointed inland.

Solid, kick-boxing leadership demands panoptic properties extend their slim, blood-pull orbit toward all rustles and rustlers. Most go ballistic, scamper, but stay. Sloganeering is back, we suspect. Join today.

Winter War.

Warrior politics aside, outlaws and heroes are broken up by the arcades and doorways where snowfall gets established. Daybreak already stands tall, but this impossibly fine one is unsnapping the white clasps to their white headbands.

White on white.

Outlaws see it as seraphic white.

Heroes appear in sunglasses and loiter with intent in the doorways.

Something similar to panoptic breakage of sheet glass and clay affixes inside the brute text, programming and slipping under the format and jitters. They maintain the snowflakes continue boasting of their oscillation lists. It's getting light now. The most anxious look down and see a blade of sedge whistle, handcuffing a tiny load of snow. Every word two hundred examples slip off, slip out easily in a slender gust or on inland waters. The others stay put like reservists on the bay shore pointing inland.

Solid, kick-boxing leadership demands a redundant ethos. Contemplation of insulating properties extends its slim, blood-pull orbit toward all rustles and rustlers. Most go ballistic, and scamper away, but stay. Sloganeering is back, we suspect. Never far off.

Opera.

The phone bill at the storehouse
Was raised by several head of horse.

Bright and eager, and grateful,
Vegan Clint forms his youthful

Language and some slight sexuality
On site as noted by a third party.

Victoria of the unusual white corridors
Suggests that Niccolo start twice.

Your cremaster…this is so cool, monsieur…
You're still trembling from our

Pinch-off, a short chopper ride
Over the bank and trade.

To foil smugglers we'll go long.
Please. Rate this song!

A snug suite shapes through the evening
Impesté, a Covered Bridge Centennial bourn in

Another throwing dirt on her head
Not far from the main road.

The one with the dirt is doing a robot
At gunpoint. Perhaps she got

The advantage.

[4]

I forget I know jacks about Bozo Brain
I forget the homeless were our friends' friends
I forget being left out would be the best stunt.
Love spit love Augen Blick and the media pouring

Zodiacs break and snow slopes
A-lists and grand theft I forget.
I forget Graham Masterton and Hamlet in a nutshell
I forget Souhait is powered by coke

I forget our trek to the caucus.
I forget Thai spas sap my G force
I forget when you were here last
I forget ticklers suggest torchbearing shadows.

I forget last night the animator the goalie's face
I forget battery fluid and our seven-night stay
I forget umbrage derives from grumpy distortion
Fond pleas fractured time I forget and morbidity

Gothic non-being loneliness and Goethe's juvenilia
I forget wielding a knife in Kips Bay.
I forget man-killers residing in jail
I forget your infancy Malthus festivals in the wood.

I forget command centers for negotiation
Structures lined with mosaics
Corelli and my life on a cattle ranch.
I forget Sal's pizza and the gospel and trick or treat.

I forget we both were wearing black sweaters
I forget functioning ghost towns tire tracks
Havana interiors and Tonka trucks.
I forget you picked up the check.

Blog Collectives.

As for blog scenes, bimbo prolixity and theory's tasks, I concur with both Heriberto's and Nada's opposing positions. And I follow Drew's giddiness to oscillation. These scenes are evident, each a sort of Geist d'elan but, man, so? What I've said splitting fits of the gauge one plays so one's body loses its lungs -- that's old hair.

My new blog entry tossing the previous into the scalp and having its moment... what I've just said? -- is it limited to well mannered teasing or ridicule? Department is trying to hush this up, that's our common bond....whirly sounds, rain, the axer, and out. The axer prefers to remain and regard death as no accidental. Condemned without a trump, tall, spiny, cylindrical: Voice.

Eat the marsh bird of what you and I have just heard..

The collective is called a hunted whorl where oratory flaunts one ethos to the rank connectivity of faith.

More Everwood [3]

I forget Linksys Phonex and the paths less traveled
Norman conquests tame assuming received credits
Blubeard's blood church blessings and E & J cognac I forget
Spreading germs and a day-care center across from the North Tower.

I forget The Invasion of the Body Snatchers
I forget ping pong and every buddy story there was
I forget the benefits of superstition
I forget my ineptitude at crime

I forget down east young blades need your help
I forget how together we can save a life
I forget to donate my blood
I forget my thigh, the one on the lift

I forget disaster victims
I forget the home borough for sophisticated post-punk
I forget Bobby Bland and Cody Chestnut
I forget jerk chicken and hearts of palm.

I forget pleasurable forms of house arrest
Meaningful looks from doormen and co-workers
Dour charm and functional pastries I forget
Deco fabric soda and habeas corpus

I forget Sheikh Saud Al-Thani protector of the endangered
I forget impeccable accounting
I forget when I had nothing more to give
I forget the guy who got in on the ground floor.

I forget farmers' markets and puppy love
I forget disquisitions against evils perpetrated
I forget a few deserve the best and many card tricks
I forget gracious living, dining and learning at famous universities.

I forget the moonscape and public baths
I forget Milk Duds and roe pickled with cloves
I forget the Shroud of Turin
I forget the man standing there.

More Everwood

I forget how your toeprints are all over this
I forget this is so you
I forget your own fantasma gagetry
I forget my thigh, the one on the lift

I forget farewells
I forget the nether handle makes the rounds wholly hidden
I forget triumphs that cradle the face sorrow brought to sex
I forget flexible spite

I forget the lights are shuddering because all identities are a swarm
I forget misapplied figures, images, parables
I forget hysteria, finishing schools, passe partout
I forget earning a living in a word.

I forget the honeysuckle wound down the knoll wall
I forget the medium requested looting prestige
I forget being nervous!
I forget my first poem.

I forget jabbering additionally with Apidae divas.
I forget the gastropod nation
I forget being lit up by nimbus!
I forget my leftist French brain.

I forget storylines garrotted across beakward aeons
I forget the payment of current debts.
I forget I'm technically adept and again I stay fallible
I forget this is so you.

Watching Everwood

I forget his name
I forget which band he played in
I forget how his breath got lost
I forget why

I forget skimming by
I forget the milky I forget the spill
I forget the mute the now the shifts
I forget me at the store

I forget MoMA
I forget shifts have a genealogy
I forget different periods of shifts
I forget the changing contexts of straw men.

I forget good instincts
I forget huge lengths and desperation
I forget being pregnant
I forget circling the rink.

I forget an empirical relationship
I forget the '90s new breed
I forget loaded terms with "process"
I forget "mottled taxonomy" was once a verb

I forget clients who hire and fire
I forget being in the wrong place
I forget complaints and sworn declarations
I forget frilly and glib.

I forget historicism I forget strokes, renderings, gestures, etc.
I forget fantasies of William Blake
I forget a duo's interests breaking the high-low
I forget being neutered to intimate claustrophobia.

I forget begging for curatorial inquiry
I forget acknowledged commodities with assigned values
I forget the Kennedys I forget the Dead Kennedys and video pastiche
I forget ephemerality I forget narrative.

I forget closure and irresolution
I forget resolution and institutional need
I forget rejection of reference
I forget his namecard and name.

-- More soon.

Propositions.

1) Martie Maguire nee Seidel writes, "Today dear Sappho I will sing beautifully and make you."
2) What a Dixie Chick, the imitator, represents is actions.
3) A big Yeah, that's you babe is a big bore.
4) Literature is Ezra Pound charged with meaning.
5) Miles: Man, why do you play long?
John: To get you all in.

The Rivers.

The rivers would fra the dark fieldglasses.

The "be red" interested me. I see I lost it in a dying glassful
by 16mm, the polluted film, and would be interested in dying myself
by the rivers fra red seen in the dark field. The rivers would
fra the dark fieldglasses. Against their will.

They claw at the hanged boys shriek smell of shit turning back
to his supposed back. Rites for tincture and / 'n
view of certain edgework of digtital corporeality -- bitter bark,
tearing of paper, written, or the attitude of sleep, and

A full 16mm film somewhere between

Thank you. With obvious p her body, his cock with a shining d to
languish d conference (and a Grand bore)
regarding some personal opinions and its influence on the
shining d's influence on the visual you
to
languish

re art and blog and their influence on hankies.
You. Thank 16mm you shining with somewhere.

H H 3 If You Plan to Itemize.

Thanks, Brian, for the link to Google's Poem Patterns robot. Here's one result.

Pantoum

H H 3 If you plan to itemize or claim adjustments
On your 2002 tax return: - If you plan to itemize
Again you let your mind wander to his childhood
Purchasing a Property. (This worksheet will let you make

On your 2002 tax return: - If you plan to itemize
We have omitted some entries
Purchasing a Property. (This worksheet will let you make
Adjustments to income and reduce your creepy_things

We have omitted some entries
FOR SPEED WORKSHEET * check table footnotes for
Adjustments to income and reduce your creepy_things
- no of oh on or ox pi re so to up us we ye lap

FOR SPEED WORKSHEET * check table footnotes for
Me? Let it down slowly.
- no of oh on or ox pi re so to up us we ye lap
To nestle into Natalya's feathers again

Me? Let it down slowly.
(Add Lines 1a, 1b, 2d and 3-6). Adjustments
To nestle into Natalya's feathers again
Slow. Rat poison only kills rats.

(Add Lines 1a, 1b, 2d and 3-6). Adjustments
- Case No.: . . . on back) (1) $ . . .2) $ .
Slow. Rat poison only kills rats.
During the accounting period of the worksheet.

- Case No.: . . . on back) (1) $ . . .2) $ .
(Line 2 Combined and Schedule), 0.00. 5. (Expenses
During the accounting period of the worksheet.
-- Preparing a Ten-Column Worksheet Named

(Line 2 Combined and Schedule), 0.00. 5. (Expenses
Above if you used the Deductions and Adjustments
-- Preparing a Ten-Column Worksheet Named
Need: Worksheet 2-1. Case Farm Balance Sheets. - level 25\

Above if you used the Deductions and Adjustments
The new Job Creation Depreciation.
Need: Worksheet 2-1. Case Farm Balance Sheets. - level 25\
Foreign Tax Credit - Leone leper Leroy letch

The new Job Creation Depreciation.
The certifying officer or manager.
Foreign Tax Credit - Leone leper Leroy letch
By the back door Yeah, you might fall in love

The certifying officer or manager.
Possible evidence presented in setting an amount
By the back door Yeah, you might fall in love,
With Worksheet to Figure Your Withholding

Possible evidence presented in setting an amount
Again you let your mind wander to his childhood,
With Worksheet to Figure Your Withholding
H H 3 If you plan to itemize or claim adjustments.

Aidan Thompson Reviews Frosted.

Turned to a new (to me) e-journal called Sidereality and found this on Frosted. It's not a book review, really, but a parsing of a single poem, with general comments to open and close. It's focused observation for as far as it goes, and it's flattering. Anyway.


Book Review of Jack Kimball's frosted

------------------------

Aidan Thompson

Jack Kimball. frosted. Potes & Poets Press (http://www.potespoets.org/). 2001. ISBN: 1-893541-64-9. $11.95

Jack Kimball's frosted is a book of poems that deliriously defies classification. The poems range in form from metered verse to prose to numerous variations on free form. One might find consistency in the coolness of Kimball's precise word choice, yet the playfulness in his use of sound and double meanings create warmth, undermining the cold, exact phrasing. The poems in frosted leave me with the sensation of walking in deep snow, where each step is questionable. It is a little disconcerting not knowing if I'm about to step on an icy log or sink to my waist in a gully, but the jaunt is refreshingly exhilarating.

Take, for example, "The Actuary" on page 23:


Midnight sun, midnight sun crosses the land
starting the wind.

I see two clouds remind me
what I do.

Both jump up on buried stems
in the way of trucks and fumes

the reservoir mixes from black to red.
Wild cows are silent.

Over the ice it's rotten to kick me
for it is you.

Black cows.
Red cows.

Clouds
in my argyles.

On a surface reading, disruption and inconsistency are most apparent. What does an actuary, a person who calculates insurance risks, have to do with midnight sun, clouds, and cows? What do midnight sun, clouds, and cows have to do with each other? But on a close reading, some of the sontant and semantic sportiveness begins to take shape.

Phonetically the "The Actuary" is divided in half. The first three couplets have a distinct lyrical, song-like quality with the slant rhymes, "land"/"wind" at the end of lines 1 and 2 and "stems"/"fumes" at the end of lines 5 and 6, as well as the internal rhyme, "two"/"do" in lines 3 and 4. The nasals create a melodic backdrop, connecting lines 1-6 ("midnight," "sun," " land," "wind," "remind me," "jump," "on," "in," "stems," "fumes"). The abundant use of "s" in lines 1-3 (total of eight) diminishes in lines 4 and 5, but repeat, coda-like, at the end of the third couplet.

A dramatic shift occurs in couplets 4-7. The rhyming and melodic backdrop abruptly conclude, and except for the "s" sound in "cows," "clouds," and "argyles," the first and second halves of the poem do not share similar sound patterns. There is also a shift in tone; the repetition of "midnight sun" in the first line mimics a song of praise, while lines 7 and 8, " the reservoir mixes from black to red./Wild cows are silent," mimic an observant, almost scientific tone. Again Kimball disrupts consistency, divesting the reader of any ground to stand on. It may be that Kimball is making fun of the oxymoronic notion of the actuary calculating risk. How can risk, something based on chance and fate, be measured and predicted? As readers we get a physical sensation of unpredictability as Kimball sets up patterns of style, sound, and tone only to pull the expected out from under us, leaving us toying with questions. Since the idiom, head in the clouds, refers to being fanciful, impractical -- functioning as if in a dream, then perhaps the last two lines, "clouds/in my argyles" or clouds in my socks, suggests traveling playfully without practical objectives through unstable terrain, mocking the actuary who gauges and quantifies in an effort to concretize what is fundamentally mercurial and uncertain.

Read frosted, you'll have off-the-cuff fun.

Wieners.

I just sent this piece to John Tranter for his section on Wieners in Jacket 21.


John and the Four Dunn(e)s

John Wieners was a friend for seconds at a time. When I first met him in 1974 I liked him for his sexual as well as poetic glamour. A couple of his teeth were knocked out and his face was worn but it oozed more than enough hauteur to attract closer inspection. He was (and is) the coolest gay poet, that is almost to say, the heaviest rocker-predator who, despite pathologies, could not be obscured.

Like today, though, Boston in the 70s was a center for trial runs, rehab and obscurity, and John did what he could to keep it that way. For stretches John appeared friendless, while still attracting a circle of local caretakers and fans, as well as infrequent visitors from out of town. Gerard Malanga and Rene Ricard, two fans of his who were to go on to document and propagate John-the-legend for a younger generation, had left Boston by the mid 70s. By 1974, well after Asylum Poems and Nerves, John had taken up what became his permanent bachelorhood on Joy Street, Beacon Hill.

Bostonian and then West Coast publisher Joe Dunn had by this time moved back from San Francisco, along with his wife Rose Dunn and their young daughters. They reinstituted their Monday poetry soirees in their flat off Hancock Street, a block over from John's. As the center of all verse, John stopped by on Mondays, occasionally, as a silent or sotto voce presence, while Joe held court reading and enthusing over the privileged texts, works of Charles Olson, Jack Spicer, Robin Blaser, Joanne Kyger, Steve Jonas, Robert Creeley, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, Robert Duncan, and of course John's work. In a troubadourish disarray of pressed flowers, dirty diapers and worn Tarot decks, Joe and Rose ran their wine-drenched evenings as research confabs where regulars were urged to bring work by contemporary poets we were reading at the moment and, if inspired, one or two pieces of our own. The program here, as I recollect it, was Orality reified as The Field in which compositional mechanics like meta-reference, meter, symbol and other units of analysis are subsumed, as oral utterance succeeds most, after all, when the processed parts appear both of minor import and improvised. Sometimes a confab member sought analysis. I remember one needy poet who requested that John underline sections of her youthful manuscript that he found interesting. He dutifully returned her pages the next week with single letters of words, such as the 'e' in 'the,' undermarked by red dots.

The first few seconds I felt close to John were in late spring 1976. I had arranged to meet John and Alan Davies at Harvard Gardens, a blue collar bar on Cambridge Street, near Joe and Rose's and John's place. Alan, known then as a Boston poet by way of Canada, was editing Occulist Witnesses from temporary digs in Dorchester. Alan had been in the area a few years, having attended Robert Creeley's poetry class at Harvard Summer School in 1972, and having subsequently hand-published John's remarkable treatise on and for young poets, "The Lanterns along the Wall," which John wrote especially for that class. I had previously mentioned to Alan that I was putting together a new poetry mimeo, Shell Magazine, and I wanted desperately to have new work by John in the first issue. Alan agreed to meet, but he thought I shouldn't ask John for poems. Only a few months earlier Good Gay Poets had brought out Behind the State Capitol to what John felt was negligible critical attention. The poop was that John was burned (or burned out) and had stopped writing. (John released few poems and no books over the following decade.) When John showed up at Harvard Gardens, he seemed distracted, and more alarming, to me, he came empty-handed. We proceeded as was custom, however, sitting at the table and drinking just a bit, and the chatter eventually led to my big ambition. I have no clear memory of how I asked him for poems, of particular words I used, but I remember John's eyes meeting mine in a linkup of what felt like trade. Poet meets another of his publishers. John pulled several crumpled pieces of paper from his sweater pockets, and handed them over. To paraphrase Frank O'Hara's depiction of Wieners's poetry debut twenty years earlier, as a publisher I felt launched. Among the six poems from John in that first issue of Shell are several that are gathered near the end of Cultural Affairs in Boston: "Twenty Years," "I don't have a thought in my head," "night, that last month of the last" and "Upon Central Ave And Milton by Irene Dunne."

I have a couple of other friendly encounters with John to go over, but as a local myself I'd like to digress briefly to bring up a couple of regional-cultural points to demonstrate how I navigate through John's Central Avenue and John's Milton and, for that matter, John's Irene Dunne. John is often characterized as a poet of the working class and even of the poor. John's mental illnesses and his Marxist postulations reinforce this view. However, John's upbringing, family demographics, etc. complicate the assumption that he was born impoverished. While Central Avenue literally parallels Eliot Street where John lived – not as terribly swank as the estates around Milton Academy, say, or those on Adams Street, where George H. W. Bush was born – John's growing up in Milton, even on the dreary side of town among bread-winning folks straddling Dorchester and Saint Gregory's parish, qualifies him much less as a poet of the poor, more as a bard of the bona fide lower middle class. Further, John goes on to graduate from Boston College, second-tier, yet hardly a poor boy's school. Middlebrow status is a fate worth fictionalizing, and the sociological norm, I believe, is to fabricate upward – that is, to aim oneself a step or two higher, as in the upper middle or upper class. John's downmarket strategy, his emphatic embrace of popular glamour to foreground and contrast with mundane circumstance, shares a similar Catholic aesthetic and indiscriminate ambiguity to that of the younger Andy Warhol or the Eileen Myles of full-punk mode. Each in her way communes, semi-aristocratically, between the brazen piety of an unextraordinary Catholic background and the ironic halo effect of secular fame. This is much higher ground than the Academy. John's lofty communings are voicings with Irene Dunne, Barbara Stanwyck, Billie Holiday, Jackie Kennedy, et al., the lights seen wafting over the red brick, sans ivy, of his neighborhood church, Saint Gregory's.

I visited John in his "rooms" a few times. On my first visit I came with my boyfriend Don / Dawn, who changed his name to Angel for the occasion. I reintroduced myself to John, "I'm Jack." Then, "This is Angel." John was aurally amused and we three were off on some skyline banter. John showed us around the mostly empty but hardly austere chambers, palely accented with little stacks of movie zines and collages in progress, not a book of poetry in sight. I confirm Raymond Foye's anecdote in Cultural Affairs about a big bowl filled with aspirin "for the guests." This is precisely what John said to Angel and me when I pointed to it on a table off the center of a side room. Back in the late 70s and early 80s, though, the bowl was not chinoiserie, as Foye reports, but clear crystal, exposing the heavy pallor of hundreds of white pills. Angel, who died of AIDS in the 90s, had brought fat joints of terrific marijuana, but unlike in Foye's interview, John smoked very little, even as Angel and I kept puffing. John's rooms must have filled with smoke, an image I now conflate with a Jonathan Borofsky wordplay mural, one in which characters with wings are duped into thinking themselves "guests," get "gassed," and then get transformed into "ghosts." Before we left John that day, Angel handed John an unlit joint, which John received graciously, tucking it into a hole in his kitchen wall "for a rainy day."

I race now to the year 1999. John's life is almost over. I'm living in Japan, and after several years of more schooling and career shifts, I take up poetry publishing again, only now it's even cheaper than mimeo. I'm e-publishing at a site I establish as theeastvillage.com. During the summer of that year I vacation in Boston, and I arrange to meet John with the help of his last caregiver, Jim Dunn, no connection to Joe, Rose, or Irene. My problem here is that I ingest rancid peanut butter hours before meeting time, and am forced to cancel – cancel – what would have been my last face-to-face with John. My purpose, like the first time, is to charm John into giving up a poem or two for the website. Before our meeting Jim, like Alan that first time, is sure John won't do it. After my no-show, Jim and I think John, too, won't buy my excuse, and before we all three might calm down and reschedule I'm forced back onto a Northwest flight to my teaching job in Japan.

There is a final, friendly encounter here, nonetheless, so bear with me. Back in Japan I keep bugging Jim with phone calls and e-mails. I insist that if there are poems in John's possession and if John is willing to let one of them go, John's universe of readers will be perpetually grateful, and so forth. Jim tells me yes, maybe, no, and communications between us go on to fray. Jim still types up a poem of John's titled "Egg Nog," but Jim's not sure it's even a poem since it's written on the back of a shopping list, and I had better check with John directly, Jim says. I call John that night, dawn in Japan, and read him back his poem:

The quality of mercy

is not strained

It lieth along the center road

It falleth from the nude sky

as gentle earth rained


over green pastures He maketh
it to abide by Misted Q lanes

whosoever can tell what kiss
brings forward HIS peace

The quality of mercy is not strained
It falleth from the gentle earth like heaven.

In Japan it's starting to rain as John whispers, "This sounds a lot like me. Please use it."

Quick Set-Up.

How to Hold Orphan

Tune or whim, a tone over these parts.

Inch-heap pigalles, dense forts
Worn on if soldiers snooze, also fit to spit
Utter slap to loco-grove. Vet to her toes
The bra wreathes, a propos for a while, then picnics,
Worn.

The candies belong out. Pie our asking.
Winces everywhere the go-go's old, literally
Don no twofer tax as proration if to-Earth
Middies, oft numb, call in on block lettering

Poof! or more patchwork forms a holy daze.
On the collar off hellhole amber sled
A total mishmash of harem stories.
No soap is his scourge, a Santa ewe.

Products stew its sulfur muse.
This routine innately knows the cute ting. Like, enough
If told, the sad ram-soft one nests.
Whining ovations to form into four tunes fronting height where,

In odd hearse drums
Arse wasted, listing, ill as mischief
Lapels your Ural nose as engineered,
A revisable lien there bore the ache, held rites.

The sold summits. Teach-ins win to ur-bats!
Wetter our creed, it's ennui egged all long.
Dimwits know us here, hare and Runny Hinge.
If fasting kin for twin snows last,

To rearm into temple ash (throng drams).
You end (ire, eme) ember.
Bandits smell, lest the posse shun – oh, air – roar as knees.

We theme-car the shun words,

Twist notes so my thing indents tickle.

Happy 03.

Abstruse, babe, you bet.
-- for Peter

The cockpit of a custom blimp.
Well not here here. Upper Falls.
Brookline is across the street.
Cypress as says a desirable your chance
or running over beer bottles
to twice much table to
together read stages engraving war.
Than.

For us by us.
Indicative. I had to get tickets.
These, us, this million dollars made
fitting in a brown ounce.