Avoiding attrition tools. And anyplace named Meadow Central.

Also, dyscalculia.

Avoiding Vegas, hindsight bias, rose-flavored gum.

PhillySound, link right, has a sweet, off-hand interview that gets serious somewhere in the middle -- CAConrad q's Eileen Myles; then Joseph Massey "calls up" Philip Lamantia!

Knowing what you do, how could you?

Maybe this question only applies to queers and auto-erotics, still I think it's essential. Seeing yourself as you are now, would you pick yourself up? Another question, what would you say?

If I put a question mark after feeling genreless, it becomes a pick-up line.

What is it about nether?

Feeling genreless.

2 Years Later

A blind texture pours over adverbs, rocks
Is that all you're having for dinner?
Eating edge to make it up for more
As you advance through security
The shadow is busy.

You -- early to bed and early to rise?
Wolf is a chump, the sunset forms a light
Puff since everywhere turned up's circular
I trust you on military issues. One apiece.
A pause, a very young street, theme-wise

(my Denmark) gotta make it to Empire?
I thought you and I were soul mates?

Technology has not yet produced an effortless way to learn poetry or poetic language, but it can lend a hand. Advancements in multimedia and the growth of the Internet have led to an assortment of poetry tools that can complement or enable studying poetry and poetic composition on your own schedule.

Software options offer a variety of technological features and instructional materials, and can range from straightforward drill-oriented tools to interactive programs with speech recognition and 750 hours of learning. Online offerings can range from free self-tutoring Web sites to live virtual classrooms with poetry instructors for groups or individual instruction from poetic tutors accessible through search corporations like google.com and drewgardner.org. The options also have different philosophies behind their teaching methods, enabling users to choose a delivery mode best suited to their style of learning. Some choices can be expensive, though, so understanding what a program promises to teach and the features it offers can be worth some initial research.

A program called Christina Rosetti Stone (www.rosettistone.com), from Lord Yaweh Rules Electronics (LYRE), based in Mt. Olympus, WV, offers study software that uses a motherese-immersion technique. The program strives to replicate the way Ozark moms sing to their children to aid them in learning native hymns and blues; all of the instruction is in richly soothing poetry language, and nothing written or spoken is translated down to urban street English. To emulate this childhood learning process, the program displays a series of photographs combined with audio and text. For example, at the beginning of the first lesson, the user is presented with four dog-related photographs along with the text and spoken words of "Song," which starts out:

When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head,
Nor shady cypress tree

Since in this case only two of the four photographs are right, the user must select one, either of a dog casket or a dog brushing against a cypress tree, to get to the next screen.

As you advance through the screens, each displaying four photographs from which to choose the correct response, the materials become more complex, building on what was previously learned. By the final screen of Lesson 1, you are asked to choose the correct photo for phrases like "I shall not hear the nightingale / Sing on, as if in pain," or a boy in an airplane. A critical element in the Christina Rosetti Stone approach is deductive reasoning. Through an intentional juxtaposition of the photographs that encourages you to discern the correct response, often through a process of elimination, you are developing deductive reasoning skills that can be transferred to real life poetic situations, according to the company, enabling you to think and write reassuring lyrics on your feet.

"For us, that skill, the skill of learning about learning how to learn poetry, is probably the most important thing we do, because ultimately it is the skill you need when you learn finally to get away from the computer," said David M. Hess, director of training and marketing for LYRE. For example, while you may not understand every word when you hear someone speaking the poem you are learning, Hess said, you can start with what you do know, then add clues from gay facial expressions, lewd body gestures and your poetic and contextual surroundings. "You begin to deduce the meaning, and can even start to paraphrase, if you catch my drift," Hess added. "Since you are doing that at every screen on the Christina Rosetti Stone, it is a skill we feel is crucial to develop and reinforce as you move along into deeper matter."

The Christina Rosetti Stone has other features and is available in American English, Australian, British and, incredibly, Irish English, as well as 28 lesser languages, from Arabic to Welsh, and runs on PCs and Macs. Prices vary depending upon the cultural level of a particular language. Online versions are available on a celebrity or sub-celebrity sign-in basis.

LanguageNow!, software from Transparent Language (barrettwatten.edu), based in South East Detroit, MI, takes a different approach. The program's objectives are to provide fast access to obscure but just-so reference materials and to make learning ongoing and theoretical. "You learn a poetics, or frankly anything, by having frequent successful experiences in that," said Ray DiPalma, a vice president and general manager at Transparent Language. "We provide all the hip references right on the screen: Kafka never heard it either, but it sounded like this. And when you come to a three-syllable word you don't know, you can just look down and see the one-syllable translation of it."

In one of its main features, the program plays video with poetics-speaking actors playing out scenes in the "textual" language, often comically, while at the bottom of the screen the dialogue is displayed in the 'serious' poetics language and in 13th arrondisement French and Frankfurt German dialects from which it derives. This is useful for the uninitiated; you can pause on a seemingly prolix passage to explore its opaque and meta meanings and hear it pronounced by practiced speakers of poetics in English. You can also pause on entire sentences and replay them to translate each long word or to listen to it in the original poetics languages as many times as you need to understand the non-hegemonic concepts being taught.

In one lesson in the advanced LanguageNow! software, for example, the characters in the video, Herb Marcuse and Ted Adorno, are traveling through Italy to gather information to publish a travel guide spoof in language-y poetics. At times they encounter others who think Herb and Ted may speak too obscurely, that is, too fast for the unitiatiated to understand; having the option to pause over those sentences, to break them down word by word, is useful. There are also ways to practice speaking language poems. Using a microphone, you can play the parts of the Herb and Ted characters in the video, then replay your lines to hear how you sound. The program has asyntactical reference materials and includes quizzes about identity and meaning in the context of domination by modern mass communications, as well as game-theory games, like a crowded metropolis of immigrants, exiles and refugees; fill-in-the-blank subject-object model essays; and a scrambled critique of Husserl's subject functioning as a sort of replacement for essences. LanguageNow! is available for 16 levels of initiation.

Tell Me More, a program from Alli's Log (alliwarren.net), based in Buzzard's Bay, MA, takes another approach. The premium version of the software ($1950) includes three CD-ROMs with instructional dream material, a duckhat headset with a "beak" microphone and 750 hours of intensely hypnotic instruction. The program uses sleep recognition as a central teaching tool. For example, in one section the user listens to questions and must fall into a coma to continue. There is also a poetry pronunciation section. You can practice speaking poetry sentences and compare the results against actual speakers in your dreams, and the program highlights mispronounced words, encouraging you to use them in your own poems! And in a section of phonetic exercises, the program demonstrates how to mispronounce sounds by using 3-D animations of slips of the tongue and pelvic movements and analyzes your pronunciation.

Another program, called Instant Results in About 10 Minutes, from Descriptors Entertainment (de-script-ent.uk.com), based in East Rentourbridge, Oxfordshire, UK, offers many quality levels of British poetry and several types of programs. Options are available for children as well. Instant KidSpeak Auden ($30) offers lessons in manifesto and occasional verse. JumpStart Larkin ($18), from Prynne Adventures (prynnejumpslarkin.com), is a cheaper British option for children ready to advance from high chair to high table.

Web sites with free lessons are plentiful. A free site offered by Benjamin Friedlander, an assistant professor at University of Maine, Orono, (www.umaine.edu/~free&freaky/exercises) has interactive lessons for modern poetry that include audio, video and finger exercises. Many of the lessons provide immediate feedback, Professor Friedlander said, which is one advantage technology has over textbooks or instruction in a classroom. A list of free and commercial online resources is at ilovefeedback.com.

For online instruction with teachers, Jimmy Behrle, Inc., the original crush-list company, offers a distance-learning option for young women, mostly, called Jimmy Berhle's Virtual Crushroom (www.berhlewhoelse.us/online). The teaching method is the same as in Behrle's conventional blogging classes, an immersion technique that lionizes as it pans its students who are remade into humiliating but huggable cartoon characters. Users can learn in small worship groups or have individual "etching" lessons with a Berhle instructor. The online instruction employs Web conferencing software from Streetwise; a student speaks and listens through a computer of her choice, writes on a shared whiteboard and can record the lessons (through a Squawkbox add-on). Videoconferencing is not a part of the program (neither the teacher nor the other students are visible), so you can dress casual. The cost for the group classes is $799 for 10 sessions (15 minutes each). For individual instruction the cost is $1,975 for 18 sessions (9 minutes each).

Sifting through such an array of poetry-learning tools can seem daunting. One rule of thumb, according to Jessamine Cooke-Plagwitz, assistant professor of Germanic Pop Culture at Northern Illinois State Community College Extension Online, is to look for options that cover the four main poetry-learning modes: plagiarizing, speaking, writing and reading. "Most of them do not work on all four areas," said Professor Cooke-Plagwitz, who is working on a book about technology-enhanced poetry theft and learning. "But the best ones do." Professor Cooke-Plagwitz also says programs that include video of real poets stealing from cohorts carry an added benefit. "You can read a lot just by the way a person moves their hands, or their fake innocent expressions," she said. "There is a lot more comprehension that can go on if you can actually see somebody stealing and then speaking your target poetics or poem."

There's reason to pity the nearly perfect. They have so many ways to falter. In thrall to their own legend, they might well overreach, trading glory for folly, or they might simply coast, converting acclaim into idle narcissism. They might allow self-assurance to bleed into arrogance and let down their guard against error.

These are a few of the traps that the editors of An Anthology of New York Poets and the poets they selected have long faced -- and avoided -- for more than three decades, now. The anthology earned critical acclaim from Stephen Koch in The New York Times less than a month after it was published in 1970 and has never slipped from its high ranking, maintaining its superior critical rating longer than any other anthologized collection. The runners-up, In the American Tree, published in 1986 and An Anthology of New (American) Poets, published in 1998 are relative newcomers in comparison. None of its peers have built legends so large and sturdy.

All of its peers can learn from its example. An Anthology of New York Poets has aged with astonishing grace, more Deneuve than Dunaway, the work it contains doing what it must to remain youthful without ever making an elastic fool of itself, staying true to its identity while, as all great poetry does, adapting to changing times. Now as before, it is a high church of reverently prepared prosody and sarcasm. But more than ever, global currents appear to have informed and influenced what emerges from its "urbane" and / or "ironic" texts that can no longer be succinctly described as simply "New York."

Consider one of the "worldly appetizers" engagingly titled "ly" offered by Aram Saroyan, in its entirety: "ly ly / ly ly." This is somewhat of a "progressive tasting," according to one of the anthology's close readers and critics Larry Fagin, "like fluke ceviches that turns into a cosmic headache!" Reading the poem from left to right, first up is "ly" that has been marinated, as it were, in its own line. Next, "ly," "ly" and "ly" are thrown into the mix: "think of the bracing Mediterranean and the hardy vocatives of thin-waisted boys fishing as if their lives depended on it," Fagin said in a recent telephone interview. After "ly" comes another poem consisting of one word, "aren't." "Now isn't that cool?" Fagin pondered. "And it has nothing to do with Hannah Arndt." David Shapiro and Ron Padgett, the anthology co-editors, could not be reached for confirmation.

The flavors of Euro-surrealism have beguiled a number of the anthology's contributors, including Dick Gallup. "For a while the mantra for this anthology was that any poem that mentions fish is a star," Fagin said in our telephone conversation. That's why we take note on Page 486 when Gallup writes, disarmingly: "A green lobster is saying its prayers." Fagin adds, "Today we are a little less wiped out about the color of the lobster, but, look, the religious reference is as spell-binding in 2005 as it was back in the 70s." I agree with Fagin a little but not a lot, and therein lies both the secret to the anthology's continued success and the reason I regularly field complaints from friends who find their experiences reading through it a tad disappointing.

Because of the anthology's legend they expect a riot of flourishes, an explosion of fireworks. Nothing less than being made to levitate above the bedside table will do. An Anthology of New York Poets does not work that way. Sure, it musters bits of incidental theater: in keeping with its uptown background it serves many offerings with a final, fancy application of deft craft and in-your-face insouciance. But it eschews high drama, both in the range of poets selected, and in the actual texts, many of which are paradigms of subtlety. Only with careful attention do you register and revel in the anthology's grace notes: a veiled first-person narrative from Kenward Elmslie titled "Shirley Temple Surrounded by Lions," a poem whose stanzas are all precisely the same size and each perfectly equidistant from the others; or John Ashbery's audaciously English version of the French poem "Le livre est sur la table," with its vaguely bitter, peppery, mintlike hints.

You can absent-mindedly polish off page after page of barely pronounceable text in An Anthology of New York Poets and still know that you are reading something good. Or you can pause, ponder and realize that you are reading something with an exquisite balance of theoretical structure, ingenious tropes, and vocal flavors. The ornate clumps of Harry Mathews's "Comatas," which starts, "In the snowy yard a baroque thermometer..." sit atop simple, alternative pleasures from Tom Veitch who manages to rhyme "pain" with "rain." Ed Sanders memorable lines, "Soft-man / is OUTIS, no-one," which appear rather orange in tone and slightly acidic, are actually green, compositionally, and vaguely unctuous. The full appeal of Sanders's work reveals itself only upon close scrutiny. This way An Anthology of New York Poets is a resource for people who really focus on the poetry.

The language of these poems, as I view it, is divided into three categories with regard to text rewrites -- almost raw, barely retouched and lightly reworked -- which underscore New York poets' sustained belief in the sacredness of first-thought-best-thought. The late Edwin Denby's gift for straightforward first-thought declaration is exemplary: "The cat I live with is an animal..." strikes me as primal utterance but layered with a darkness I might want to characterize as tart, overall. Similarly, the undetermined first associations of a talent like Clark Coolidge ("...'Gosh!', hyphen / ledge it glow harm...") constitute sophisticated wordplays without being pretentious; this is first thought or perhaps lightly reworked text operating within multifaceted vectors, of course, but not unduly fanciful.

"This is what poetry only wishes it could be," says Sheila Murphy, not included in this anthology, a younger poet based in Arizona. For sure, you may encounter compositions in An Anthology of New York Poets with less ostentatious complexity than you expect, but you will never doubt that the poetry is of the highest quality and has received the utmost care, Murphy feels.

I think some poems soar on the luxuriousness of their linguistic stratagems. John Perreault's cleverly 'framed' poem, "Talk," initiates a parole-like hiphop of observation that is pretty hard to turn off: "So I was saying to you / yesterday," the poem begins. It goes on to report, "Your lap, however / disappears when you stand up." Later: "Today I am the tomorrow / of your longitude." Language like this is almost criminally opulent. Other poems by other poets excel because everyone included in the anthology knows how to write very, very well. An Anthology of New York Poets may be the most vital compilation of mature work ever. Consider this advice from another of its best pieces, "Easy to Grow" by John Giorno: "Where winters / are severe / start plants / indoors." Another, lesser talent would be tempted to go heavier. But Giorno holds the effect in check, doing justice to the adjective "tantalizing."

Epitomizing a certain kind of class, An Anthology of New York Poets amounts to a summation of poetic genius equivalent of, well, old, old money, so secure in its station that it need not strut, so practiced in its posture that it never slouches. And yet it somehow avoids stodginess and complacency, a minor miracle that, for us readers of verse, is a major necessity.

Another take on the Downing ~ Benson reading from Drew.

Christina's coming home!

Quick, dumb -- regisphilbinlike.



for Chris Sullivan.

Chris Sullivan writes to let us know he's moved his blog to http://dohc.blogspot.com -- also this:

Hello Jack, I''m chainey country suction cup forehead buttoned to a 27 inch TV screen and forced to watch reality and game shows, so now I have to ask -- for you too write about snow -- reghisphilbinlike for the One T- Gigabyte Storage Unit (screen equivalent = surface area of Luna) What is so "snowiest" in the tradition of contemporary poetry it is often brought to picnics to keep beer cold? Thanks,

-- Chris

As for the snowiest question, maybe I'll have a response soon. Chris keeps alloying the oddest text and graphic elements for blogging, an amalgamator!

Rebuilding the future.

-- sign, Mass. Pike

Admittedly, reprinting a piece by Kent Johnson on one's blog borders on the generic, still his correspondence with Campus Watch is splendid propaganda and self-promotion, exemplary in both regards! What do you think?

Dear Campus Watch,

I have recently read the diatribe on the poet and activist Ammiel Alcalay, published in the American Thinker on March 4.

I am not writing this letter to argue politics with you, for that would be silly, wouldn't it? I am writing, rather, to ask that you add me to the list of American poets you are putting under surveillance. Allow me to briefly list some of my credentials, as I think you will agree I deserve to be given a file in the archives of your organization.

I was one of the poets published in Sam Hammill's "Poets Against the War" anthology. My poem, which was widely distributed before its anthology publication, including by the openly Marxist journal "Monthly Review," is titled Baghdad, and it is loosely based on the children's book "Goodnight Moon."

Days went by... Then, the torture scandal at Abu Ghraib prison happened, and I published a poem titled "Lyric Poetry After Auschwitz, Or: Get the Hood Back On." This poem may be of particular interest to you, since (in addition to the fact that it is accompanied by photographs and the music of Dean Martin) Ammiel Alcalay himself saw fit to send it abroad for possible translation into Arabic. I don't know if it has been translated yet, but the English version is available here, where it has received thousands of visits since its appearance : http://www.blazevox.org/kent.htm

Further, this poem is now the title poem of a collection of mine that is soon to appear. This book will contain numerous pieces by me (not everyone would judge it poetry!), all of which have some relation to the war in Iraq. The cover of this book will be, I think, somewhat original: The infamous shot of the American soldier holding the leash which is clipped to the neck of the prone prisoner shall be surrounded by pictures of daffodils among which shall be little Cupids shooting their arrows inward, toward the picture.

But the most important thing I wanted to say about the forthcoming book is this: I intend to announce in the book that all author royalties from the sale of the collection are to be donated to Campus Watch. I wish to do this (and I hope you will accept the gesture) because I strongly believe your proto-fascist activities are an excellent stimulant to the defense of American values, like civil liberties and other stuff.

Also, I should tell you that I correspond with Joseph Safdie, one of the "leftist" poets mentioned in the American Thinker article! He and I almost co-edited a book of recipes and favorite dinner anecdotes by poets. Alas, this book idea fell through, though I now can't quite remember why. But someone else should certainly do it, as it is a wonderful idea. Oh, and I should also say that in the 1980's I worked as a literacy teacher in Nicaragua on two different occasions. This was when the Sandinista's were in power. Though I'm more or less a social democrat now, I was *really* radical back then. From our village, we could hear the Contra mortars going off almost every night. Some of my friends died. Then I came back and founded the Milwaukee Central America Solidarity chapter, which went on to do all sorts of protest activities. One event we organized was called "Who's Watching You in 1984?" and hundreds of people attended, including numerous FBI agents. Not to get too sentimental, but it was at this event that I met my future wife.

So, these would be some reasons you might wish to accept my request to be inducted into your files. I will be sure to send you a copy of the forthcoming book, which, again, shall go to support the activities of your organization.

Sincerely,

-- Kent Johnson

In a week filled with questions out of nowhere, this is the least prosaic: "Is Pluto a planet or is it just a little ball of uninteresting and perhaps smelly ice very far away from us?"

Look, these cris de coeur can get out of hand. That's why I admire Josh Corey's letter (March 9) to Campus Watch and American Thinker, outlining exact bases for his irritation vis a vis the cases "against" Ammiel Alcalay. Corey asserts that he himself is of the same "type" as Alcalay, one who would take up "the encouragement of anarchy. Not in the chaotic and violent sense ... but in the original Greek sense of 'no rulers.'" Corey concludes, "if you're making an enemies list of anarchists, poets, peaceniks, and intellectuals, I'd be glad if you'd add me to it. It is a roll of infinite honor."

Worth waiting a day for Gary's reading report (March 11) on Brandon and Steve's bitchin' night at the Project Wed, which I missed. I first met Steve Benson only a few months ago, and, after reading Gary's summary, I'm surer in my take on Steve as a figure's figure in poetry, that is, a person who matters in the moment you see him, talk to him, in the moment he listens to you. Brandon Downing of course is of the moment, the wisest guy I know.

Four pieces from Behind the State Capitol or Cincinnati Pike.



John Wieners marqueed.

��Lisa Jarnot is urging poets to apply powers of "positive visualization" to counter political attacks against Ammiel Alcalay and, by association, Anne Waldman, Joe Safdie, Amiri Baraka, perhaps you. Read what she has to say, and take care. It's a call deserving a response.

This is not only the most recent marquee, it's by far my favorite. Color, font, text, marquee pretty. See.



Ron Padgett marqueed.

I've been wasting time for the past week and a half doodling with marquees. It's been a goof assignment that I'm surprised keeps me thinking critically. I've found recent work by others to be waiting, hungry for the marquee treatment, Hannah Weiner's for instance. It's fabulous (code for outright queer) to see her gremlins re-invoked, whistling across the screen, both in the html form I've linked to (March 7, below) and more surprising in the blogspot 'text' boxes that I used earlier to 'preview' the full-throttle form. After I entered the 'up' and 'down' direction commands for Hannah's marquee in the blogspot box, though, I found the "top" pixel measurement had to be adjusted (increased 100 px or more!) for each subsequent post to get the original marquee fonts to 'stay' in their 'proper' place (all these half-quotes are fabulous? -- and, by the way, does this make any sense?). Before adjustments, once I posted after Hannah's marquee, the marquee started floating over the screen, intersecting with the later blogged text material -- this sort of floating is the right idea, maybe, for Hannah and for blogging. (It would not take much effort to convert a blogspot template into a hell-fire of buzzing, bumping texts.) Still, the better place to float is in, and with, a text designed or redesigned to behave that way. By marqueeing, I've learned a lot very quickly about the force of Ryu Murakami's short declarative bursts of self-indictment: I got famous; I got fat; etc. (link March 2, below). In marqueeing just a small chunk of Lissa Wolsak's Pen Chants (link March 8, below), I get the corporeal oppositions of political anxiety at the lexical level: warmth; breastlessness; ant song; omni-range. Other texts are just fun to do. Yesterday John Latta reprinted on his blog "First Drift" by Ron Padgett, and I couldn't resist marqueeing that! Link above.

Later this week I'll finish marqueeing four poems from Behind the State Capitol by John Wieners. That should rid me for now of all spooks of the floating-over-the-screen variety.

Lissa Wolsak marqueed.

Paraphrasing Nina Simone's Ragman -- love lost oooooooooooooooooooo what's that worth?

I'm no longer responsible for what I say or do in Alli's dreams. Yellow-highlight that.

Hannah Weiner marqueed.

"K is for Pantaloons..." Correct! Thanks Jonathan!

There's nobody else who'll get me worked up about wearing another woman's panties. Mikarrhea, I'm your Pere David's deer, quick, throw something at me!

...

Ouch. O thank you.

Oh, and Geof Huth, too, who wrote me after my first crack at the marquee, 2/26, noticing my lift of his terrific perforation, "Many visual poets do not yet fully understand what they're doing, do not yet understand what they can do and how their poems can mean."

Whole lot of thanks going round. This from Jukka-Pekka Kervinen whom I thanked a couple of days ago for the inspiration and start-up code for doing my marquees:

Dear Jack, Thank you, too !!! Wonderful (marquee) pieces in Pantaloons, have really enjoyed them !

And thanks to Mark Young as well for liking them.

Time to get serious. Not that this is Pantaloons, Inc. or anything. Waiter approaches four ladies at lunch looking good in hats. "Is anything ok?"

Promethean winnowing?

It's not an A list, is it?

Three marquees: Fairfield Porter, Ryu Murakami, Stacy Doris.

ex-girlfriends



hermeneutics
        another winter




scientific ferment

          thick rivers



outright
curios





pursuing l'amour

        2 colonies

Party, party, party.

Ryu Murakami marqueed.

thanks to
Jukka-Pekka Kervinen
Fairfield Porter marqueed.

A review of Ashbery's Selected Prose, parts drafted first here, at Verse.

a name for something proves nothing. Right
James Schuyler marqueed.

It couldn't be simpler.

Congealed pizza never tastes just right.

Recite the lines ... Let them die down

You know what? I hadn't thought much about it. Until you brought the subject up.


~~ *#****# *####*

It couldn't be more connected by "and" and "and."



I'm sorry I mentioned it. It was meant as a lacy red missle, but it just goes to show you.

The thrum of hummingbirds, indeed.



Embellished imagery's a subfunction of contemporary diaspora aesthetics. At least that's my guess, o wild diva of the underbrush.


I'm thinking of the radiant subtelty of a pig.


Gray braids of familiar noise.

Psychic veil.

John Lurie is the Keenau Reeeves of hip haberdashery.





Recite the lines
let them die down
and into the ruins

I thought about going undercover.


Geof Huth says, "Many visual poets do not yet fully understand what they're doing, do not yet understand what they can do and how their poems can mean." I've been adding a few strings.


My wake shines, now it is growing dark.


The days of the marquee are numbered.

I write for money. It's in my blood.
What's wrong with a billion for two
circulating on a branch, feathery
and hollow-boned under another?
Keynes says somewhere no one ever
writes the real story for free. You've
got to be sculpture to understand.

The real story is staring at money.
You can't count the coin fast enough --
seized by the global network of a lifetime
on tropical C-notes without whose woven
mass, chocolate and auburn, everything's
charm-free illuminating patterns entered
by a shower of gold coins.

And this was the hottest,
hot and cool, small video screens
of mist over water, a balloon floating
in a swimming pool, views down
hallways of stairs cut apart and fronted
with music waking in hazy-brightness
without memory of how you got there.

Buddy Trial

Don't think of it as conspiracy. The sun in the square
Winter afternoons. An antidepressant did it.
Angling over the apartments so the light bisects --
Why not make a documentary of it? The northern row
Of dark houses diagonal the grand house, the guy

Next door wants to know if you took the rubber duck
That was suddenly -- Carl, no! and a chill equipoise
In a bitter year; it would be helpful if the first words
Out of your mouth weren't "J'accuse." It's been weeks
Harshly formal by day, brusque in their authority.

And these lights here let you know when the camera
Is obsolete. At the beginning of evening they'd go a blue
-- I'm in the sandwich generation lit from top to bottom
Mommy and dad and their friends pretending
They don't have horrible lives now.

William Buckley Yeats

The listless player in the field is the health insurers.
How can those terrified fingers push
Her attitude on the law? "You know what? When the laws
Are unjust, I really don't care." But feel the strange heart
Beating where it is?

Those who believe in the market welcome maneuvers
A shudder in the loins engenders
A special odium at large, a sudden blow: the great wings
Beating still that bring to mind the temper of dissenters.
What are the rules in a free society?

Once more the storm is howling, and half hid
The current figures hold, the rupture deepened,
My child sleeps on. There is no obstacle
But a seesaw between the two happens frequently
Out of the murderous innocence of the sea.

Turning an intellectual hatred is the worst;
That he would be killed, followed quickly by the execution,
Had the special effect. Considering that, all hatred
Driven hence, the soul recovers innocence,
The most copious source of this.

Surely some revelation at hand
Surely it is piquant the man we tried to kill
Flaunts judicial extravagances while all about
A vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Cries of victors' justice spring forth.

Thirst for symbolic vindication will continue unslaked.
News, rants, activism and other things come round at last
The darkness drops again; but now I know
The work can vividly be described the head of a man;
The ceremony of innocence drowned;

A broad search suggests the scope of festering animosity;
A crazy salad with their meat. Vexed to nightmare
It may help to recall beheadings were conventional
Whereby the Horn of Plenty is undone, and everywhere
I will not write, ever, a formal autobiography.

Not bad: Burred vlision.

The blogs are sinking: please remain calm.

Clark Coolidge may be the most powerful poet on either coast. But not even he considers the majority of his work first-rate.

"I know a lot of what I've written is not 'A' work," he said recently over lunch. "But my role was different. I wanted to raise the level of everyday poetry as much as I could."

Such self-effacing charm is typical of Coolidge, and it has helped him land some of the most coveted publication deals in the U.S. Gracious and conservatively dressed, he moves comfortably in the upper levels of poetry society. And his willingness to compromise -- buttressed by well-honed political skills -- has long made him a favorite of publishers, who tend to see financial interests and creative vision as incompatible.

But Coolidge is no longer content to be the pet poet of the mainstream world: he now longs for the kind of critical recognition that has so far eluded him. Increasingly, in seeking it he has begun to position himself as a worthy rival to the more daring poets from whom he once sought to distance himself.

This desire could be seen as a function of age. At 63, Coolidge has left his mark on a wide range of important projects -- from Robes of Oba published by the powerhouse The Figures to the stylish French publication by Foundation Royaumont of Le texte des billets (cristals) -- but he has yet to create the kind of poetry that inspires awe or has lasting meaning.

His sudden conversion may also be viewed as a professional necessity. In recent years, he has had to watch as more conceptually challenging poets like Emmanuel Moses, John Peck and Marilyn Hacker have risen to the top of their profession without sacrificing their creative visions. It's not just art-crazed poet-tasters that are seeking them out; mainstream readers and, more important, ordinary publishers -- the kind of "clients" who have traditionally been Coolidge's bread and butter -- have come to realize that these poets can shore up the bottom line by increasing a project's value and easing it through often tricky aesthetic territory.

The paradox is that Coolidge's change of heart coincides with the most politically fraught project of his career, the rewriting -- some would say the reweaving -- of his earlier work Own Face within the frame of a much less sanguine piece of his titled Bomb. The new project is tentatively titled Freedom as Thought, which despite revisions is looking more and more second-rate. Its twisted syntactical form capped by a network of cabalistic images is clumsily conceived, and there is no reason to expect it to improve.

Instead of boosting Coolidge's reputation, the project underlines the difficulty he faces trying to polish it. Aside from tapping fresh, creative resources, he has to challenge his own mindset, which is more about pleasing clients than about executing worthy poetry for them.

Poetry is the art of balancing values: spiritual, aesthetic, public, private. It always involves compromise, and few poets would deny that the client's desires take precedence. But the best poets understand that they also have an obligation to the public, no matter which publisher is paying their bills. That often means investing time in educating clients rather than simply acceding to their desires.

In a way, Coolidge may be a prisoner of his past. He has always operated on the assumption that satisfying a client's needs trumps creativity. After years of loyal service, his clients expect him to bend when it serves their purposes.

"There are moments when I feel I can't be part of this, and I want to walk away," he said recently over a still steaming tarte aux pommes. "I envy Marilyn's ability to do that," he said of Ms. Hacker. "I know she's walked away when she knows the battle's lost. But I can't do that. I can't do that to my clients."

Museum quality: (well-) coordinated marbles.

Ever notice how close bling is to billing: shorts, briefs, nothing.

Blogging this morning adds a lens and a riddle: just kidding.

Um, let's see: living imitates video programming: lit as sport and entertainment: prose tourney previews where poetry / blog pop contests are heading? "The process is arbitrary," it says.

Factor in, please, strategists and their victims, the realities of war.

Snow shoe manufacturers fear talent drain.

To create a modern atmosphere: you may not glance at the groom in a businesslike fashion.

Defining terms: extraordinary rendition, hyperbolic parabola, Cushing-Malloy.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude: 7,500 counts of aesthetic abuse by authority figures.

German Lieder: autumn, melancholy, gambling, porn.

The Sentence

During the break we reached an agreement.
The sun feeling this, shears. An organizing
effort, the wall loves it in buildings,
loves the window and the square forest floor

It looks out of. Jasmine, a friend, her scent,
an idea can be a sentence. Urgency in ideas
repairs them at night. Where are we
poet -- what part of your readership reddens

As little redwoods crop up in thickets
how can rope and harness keep the climbing
trees a secret about the rare canopy, secretive
against the order, as my head says we

Can reorder from the arborist supply
as the meaning stresses the sentence,
brings in personal demons to work
noticing us making an unruly descent

Worked down through the eucalyptus, saying
we saw you dragging branches of philosophy
-- fetch and roll over were not enough --
this time it will be, that will be all?

Most good poets will acknowledge that despite the attention they receive as individuals, their poetry is a collaborative effort, the work of teams of anonymous assistants and un-cited sources. It was true for Robert Creeley when he was at Naropa, relying on the youthful Clayton Eschelman and acolytes Joan Houlihan and Petula Clark, and it is true today for David Larsen, whose recent work reflects a mature person's curiosity about the florid poetics of Robinson Jeffers and, going back further, and farther afield, Parisian Fabre d'Olivet.

Jeffers, whose pre-beat, pre-surrealist poetry from midcentry broke ranks with Paris fashion, is about as hot as a person can get today, a maverick in death. And d'Olivet, whose Paris debut in the spring of 1893 is still remembered for his pronouncements on poetic production, affecting the first surrealists, is ripe for a revival. D'Olivet, a prodigious philologist, contradicted the classical-academic etymology of the words "poetry" and "poet" as, respectively, "making" and "maker," thereby superseding the tame consciousness exuding from connotations of the dictionary and literary "definition" persisting to this day even among alleged "avants."

If you have read Jeffers or d'Olivet or if you have spent even a few days at Naropa, it is unlikely that you possess the patience or interest to repeat yourself. And anyway, if you did, it would make you the Elvis of poetry. Larsen is Elvis. As it is, his poems in the upcoming Hot Sphinxes bear little relation to one another except in their fascination with childlike proportions and old-school cool in metaphysical trimmings. Indeed, to see apple-cheeked prosody in a loose-fitting rhyme, flowery metaphors with black tights and patent-leather shoes, as it were, is to imagine the poetry-receptors in one's brain as constituting a giant dollhouse, with the bespectacled, persistently bemused Mr. Larsen peering over the open roof.

Though, to be fair, more could not be expected, as it does Larsen credit that he listens to his predecessors, Philip Lamantia, Mahmud Kianush, Sohrab Sepehri, among many others, along with the indomitable Jeffers and d'Olivet, and gives himself and his assistants, Alli Warren and Michael Snider, free rein to explore novel poetic shapes and hip new scansion schemes. You can never tell what might come of such explorations. Larsen also appreciates, in the same way that George Steinbrenner does, that play equals creativity. And if there is any message to be gathered from Larsen's tinkling poetry covered in joie d'esprit, that is it.

Apart from two titled pieces at the beginning and two more at the end, the collection of untitled poems in Hot Sphinxes shows a lot of imagination without that dreaded word "whimsy." A panting and screeching enjambement, with broad bands of black humour, feels just great, a style like creamy oatmeal that Larsen has put back into vogue. In one poem, a loose narrative about alligators in helmets, the deep asymmetry seems a bit off until your realize this is the least awkward feature here or in many of Larsen's short pieces, each, admittedly, sporting "squiggles" of extraneous stuff like assonance and imagery. All together, though, the romantic-naïve gestures here "work," making a fresh connection to modern life.

Shroud of Paramecium

Four guests gather at the Glass House of Ancestry. The characters Akira and Charlene have been tranquilized, the term 'double helix' eclipsed and quarantined like a pair of white ponies pulling a cart with a tiered wedding cake in front of the gravel-voiced bureaucrats Bouvard and Pecuchet who supervise the proscenium. Pecuchet takes the dj position. There is no deadness in "Merging Color and the Sentence," the tune released as a taut, upbeat mix piped over a basket of laundry.

The song ends. At last, scraps of nothing toot in silence. Somewhat of a departure though resembling what came down earlier, the quiet gets martyred to an object or, worse, an idea.

Akira: "Climax -- that's most serious complication but not focus of our body (or movement), Char?"

Charlene: "Hey, artist..."

The history of caring about chalk-numbered players distorts the real drama. A whole equation is misleading. Akira is in. A tiny sign in a flowerless flowerbed named Huge Blast.

Charlene: "I had trouble finding it."

Akira: "Rub it in."

Bouvard, to Pecuchet: "How far?"

Pecuchet: "A mile on the left. There's two big gateposts."

Bouvard, to the audience: "The quartet of us flies for about 15 minutes and sets down at a tiny airfield. My play is about money. And defining the trajectory of something warming up our fingers, arms and lungs. That something could be sun-soaked, and it's starting to fade. The truth is no one can verify the number. We settlers are becoming isolated."

Pecuchet: "I'm attempting to describe manners without specifying characters or their behavior. I can see Akira maturing right in front of me (or, you know, on the stage), breaking out of his hormonal shell, tapping his inner adolescent for real human sustenance, gaining his sea legs so to speak, finding his true voice as an idol under Charlene's tutelage. And where are Bouvard and me? Where, like, are the dustbins that pose reductive dichotomies? I'm sinking now. It's a kitschy porcelain nude feeling. But then would I fraternize with guys who worship at a hamster ampitheatre? (Yes.) For like the Shroud of Paramecium the characters known as Bouvard and Pecuchet exist not only between individuals but also within."

Akira: "My gracious, this is wonderful."

Pecuchet: "Bouvard and I used to swim at home! When exercise is a pleasure, I guess, fitness is easy."

Bouvard: "I'm thrown into an absolute -- take a wild guess. The words are two holes appearing for cake duty with such speed they reflect the world as it is, and images I don't care about. It looks like a very intense little place in… Oh, grow up! Who dealt this mess?"

From the rafters birds appear, the lights dim.

Pecuchet, to the audience: "Such dumb terns give literature a hand, the fishes around a hollow brook."

Bouvard, to Charlene: "I live not far from their butts trying to walk uphill."

Special forces arrive to cheers and applause.

Charlene, pointing to Akira: "He expects to get out of this."

Akira: "The island is better without you."

Charlene, to Bouvard but still pointing to Akira: "He holds me so close his nipples stand up. This is how he votes."

Akira: "I voted against you."

Charlene: "He's checking out women again. He had to have. For, against, he hasn't a clue."

Bouvard: "Not one word not purloined. Yay. For example."

Pecuchet, to the audience: "Are we hardwired for savage in-fighting? I am. I was born sporting a wormhole to kill for courage, holding a voodoo rattle. I call it my Britanicus and pang. It's so pure it allows the whole spectrum of color to enter and exit my sidekick without interruption."

The lights are turned up.

Bouvard: "Are we in Rome or Amsterdam? They are coming toward us..."

Bouvard points to Akira and Charlene, walking his way.

Pecuchet: "Two figures with arms entwined, and there is a sense they are floating just above the street, a mustache color or toxic gloom? The circus lineup, stubbed at random."

Special forces move to block Akira and Charlene, and close in on the two bureaucrats.

Bouvard: "The globe should be taken seriously."

Pecuchet: "Death by oeuvre."

Bouvard: "They say the sketch is in peril."

Sorry to turn back to this, but everything we the assembled can sense about our careless and ill-mannered pageant Americana, our flame-throwing mindsets, our imprecise rhetorics, our foods and drugs will be typed Bush II.2. Two point two, for short. Bad chill.

I don't care, it's time for more stuff you can't take apart. Or take it apart and get gunk on your umph, wedge.

The best housemate ad, I'm moving, brain.

Ok. I bounce for Susan Sargent.

A note of light, Audenesque deceit at free space comix. A course.

So far Josh Corey is without fault, with Jennifer Moxley and Kevin Davies.

End of January. People are funny-looking, I'm just noticing. Winter's gone, blood is flowing into my fingers and feet. The rooibus's working! I'm alone inside the world of poetry.

The hollow in here is mixed up like something weird happening in the ocean.

Flamenco in transition.

Faith and consequences.

A violet mist. There's an almost unnoticeable difference. Then a tunnel bid on the final deal spices up overlapping metaphors and symbols, adding to the richness. And a blackout for no apparent reason transforms spring rain into holy food.

A song, a love, a life doesn't have a name or shape, lost young men left behind in their rooms like seawater.

More on Padgett's Joe. I like that the chronology (or what I thought was chronology) gives room two-thirds through to un-labored meditations on facials, on Joe's reaching the age of 51, on his doubts at age 37 about being "the person I always thought I was." I say un-labored but that is the soothing affect of Padgett's not-simply-plain style. I like the large off-moments Padgett allows, spaces in which he has nothing in particular to give up about Joe's whereabouts, much less what Joe was doing or thinking. Also, there's Padgett's ability to 'not go there' (Joe's sex life, for example, his giving up oil painting, etc.) without our feeling we're missing something. Then, here are last words of Joe's spoken by his brother, "It might have been: 'I'm so lost,' but I'm not sure," which I'm imagining as, "I'm so lost, but I'm not sure."

Talk about growing with your subject, Ron Padgett's Joe. Prose gets denser by the life. The focus tightens. Gladder.

The exit polls: Sadness from the pharmacy, definance (infectious) and chimp-brain nobility.

(3)

I began my day theorizing about several oversized paintings of the newly constructed neighborhoods of northern Paris. I thought of myself as a painter, as a realist and then a symbolist reworking stills of the adolescent Jeanne Moreau in "Helen at the Scaean Gate." I was clueless as to my purpose so I moved on, considering E. B. White's birdlike monoplane that took flight at early dawn on August 14, 1901 near Bridgeport.

I was having problems visualizing open (off) and closed (on) critique poetics. A thought experiment I initiated goes like this. The switch in a critique was like a drawbridge or myth. When the bridge or myth is open (to let a large gunboat go under it), traffic cannot pass over the bridge or myth. This is similar to when a critique is open or off. The electric current of reader approval (vehicles on the bridge and / or in the myth) cannot move through the critique (go across the bridge / myth). When the drawbridge (myth) was closed, the cars are able to pass. This is similar to when a critique is closed or "on." The electric current of public approval is able to pass over the critique smoothly.

Non-linear progress, implicit co-branding of public domain text, strings (upon strings) of surprise, skilled narrative downgraded to parish bulletins, appropriation and re-assembly lead on these issues, I think this will be my idea, to take it "on." And therefore, I have to prove there's a problem and lay out the coverage. Or cover. Now, to the specificity of which we'll find out, you'll find out with time. Poets, if not critics, have been catching up with politicians, other comedians, that's one part of it. Every sentence now is in media res. Cover? In "Was That a Real Poem or Did You Just Make It Up Yourself?" Robert Creeley observes, "As a poet, at this moment [1974]...I am angered, contemptuous, impatient, and possibly even cynical concerning the situation of our lives in this 'national' place. Language has, publicly, become such an instrument of coercion, persuasion, and deceit." Sure, though keep in mind that that, along with this very sentence, is a set of ad hoc thematic pointers. Text retrieval can be less difficult if we acknowledge and arbitrate some of our convictions.

In the process there is no right or wrong. An orange enters the essay. Gustave Flaubert did not have a computer, and the word 'hysteria' does not occur in the text of Madame Bovary. For his time, how informed he seems in connection with that emergent domain of psychopathology. But now every sentence can be re-assembled into a poem, I think this will be found out. This will be an administration-driven idea. When one who is called to poetry takes to the web, she will tear self apart to entertain and persuade with authenticity and a lack thereof, due to the "logic" that produces the basic hysterias revealed. For example, backstabbing is when you join a team game, and attack your teammates. A Spice Girls reunion looks thankfully off the menu, though, as Mel B is to write a tell-all bitchfest book of poems dishing the dirt on Geri Halliwell and Victoria Beckham. She's determined to tell the world all about what really went on...before and after. Mel sees poetry as a cathartic process. An analogy between poetry and football then would be ridiculous, since there are virtually no similarities -- the poet might be considered the coach, but there is no crushing offense or disloyal defense, no Monday morning quarterbacks -- there is a set script while a football game never goes according to plan.

This is the middle section where Jorge Borges is transported to the introduction setting 'character' to the interfacing, the story of myth in your own words. Form is the script.

The crisis is now. Form is not an object but an activity, an explosion, a channeling, a non-hegemonic pulsating -- and thanks to substitution Allen Ginsberg haunts this. One of his poems originally appeared on subsubpoetics and was written by replacing every 'a' with a 4, every 'e' with a 3, every 'i' with a 1, every 'o' with a 0, every 'g' with a 9, and some other textual substitutions as well. This poem is perhaps more sincere than the other content, perhaps more mundane and commonplace, but all such things should have a home in Sudbury.

The origin of critique or orange as a fruit can be broken into segments and reassembled, to draw an analogy to the way words bind together to produce a stanza, and stanzas bind within a poem. The appropriated segments can be divided into equal divisions to establish a movement with hush money and political emphasis, professional subordination and equine coordination like when Pablo Picasso makes linear patterns of Thomas Gainsborough's painterly drapery to create an ending with an origin. The orange pieces can be reassembled into a harmonious whole or something more secular like a poem about a young French woman and a daemonic carrot that reflects distortion and disharmony as compositional forces. Or you could draw the name of a myth out of a hat. That's the Chinese character for the web.

(2)

Working within a system of gratuitous recklessness, I've tried my hand at mash-up, another cyber-assisted pastiche procedure that, wittingly or not, operates as a type of critique poetics. Mash-up is a term that comes from bootleggers' remixing prospectively incompatible music tracks, The Rascals v. ambient v. hip-hop v. Frank Sinatra, etc. Blending (cobbling?) two or more poets together mash-up style prompts a critical intelligence to review how disparate entities mesh and disconnect. Case in point, last week I posted a set of results, "Seamus Gluck." Here's how it happened. It was easy and fast. As critic maudit and poet pauvre, I turned to a pop house organ of official verse culture, the most recent issue of The New Yorker at that time (January 17), and found two poems, one by Louise Gluck, another by Seamus Heaney. With minimum artifice, changing verb tenses here and there, snipping one or two redundancies, tricking out a few line breaks particularly at the end, I otherwise followed a simple procedure: copy each poem line by line into a remix, odd line to Gluck, even line to Heaney, that is, "my" first line is Gluck's first line, second line is Heaney's first line, third line is Gluck's second line, and so on. (Since Gluck's poem is a little longer than Heaney's I varied line breaks in my last stanzas, pressing final lines from Gluck's poem into my couplet as coda.)

The two poems come together nuptially, as it were. Line 2 in "Seamus Gluck" kicks off "When they..."; Line 3, "When you..."; Line 4, "We lived with them..."; Line 5, "Because you were living…"; Line 7 (from Gluck) speaks of somewhere else; Line 8 (reflective of Heaney's fondness for thickets of physical description) seems to detail this 'somewhere,' "molded verge half skirting, half stockade." Gluck and Heaney, as it happens, are exercising their memories back "When," a scene for each that leads each to outline atmospherics from the past from which they both must retrieve themselves. What seems wicked and compositionally too-convenient for me in the process of fabricating "Seamus Gluck" is that both Gluck and Heaney discursively extricate themselves (their personae) at just about the same point in their respective narratives: Line 28 in "Seamus Gluck" reads, "You realize afterward" (Gluck); while Line 29 continues, "And afterwards rust thistles" (Heaney, of course).

I am not freaked by these results. I'm confirmed in my sense that, evidenced by this latest 'happenstance' of finding work from Gluck and Heaney, New Yorker poetry editors support discursive formulae of the tempus fugit workshop variety, and more, the poetry tastemakers, unlike their counterparts editing fiction, are not the least uncomfortable with verse outfitted with pat closures bow-wrapped with little life supports as object lessons. Heaney's lesson, though integrated within taut descriptive propositions, is as familiar as the blackguard's wain of chestnuts: Here is that 'somewhere' mankind reminisces vaguely as from a past space and past time, space and time like "Dante's wood," "bleached in sun," and now "darkened," but here with us now, "pervasive" in "silence," "deadlit," "languid" as the "sky." Gluck's lesson is false at all levels of my mash-up and analysis, especially when Gluck writes, "You realize afterward / not that the image is false / but the relation is false." The assertion "the image is [not] false" would be closer to a truth if there were an image. We get no closer to imagery in Gluck's poem than the thought that "you" participate in the "stillness" and "immensity" of stars. I digest this as pre-school science, not imagery. Gluck also claims, "You've stopped being here in the world... // a place where human life has no meaning," but this isn't an image, either; it's an opinion, unverifiable. My argument against the claim "the relation is false" requires replay of Gluck's last stanza: "You see again how far away / each thing is from every other thing." In compiling "Seamus Gluck," I find that Gluck's abbreviated code (each thing, every other thing) functions as an idiotically perfect foil to Heaney's geo-botanical elaboration. Thing (afterward) clings to thing (afterwards) in a super-thingy amalgam. Since both Gluck and Heaney operate within similar narrative frames ("that bulwark," "a creature"), working out of parallel formulae ("There is a moment," "When they'd been block-built"), the relation between them is overt, not "far away," and certainly not far out.

I admit this treatment of Gluck and Heaney is easy, just as my mash-up of their two poems is easy. Or was. I'd like to dispense with "Seamus Gluck," and take for granted that points enumerated, above, are evident from reading my poem, without exposition. That is: To get back to the grander topic, speed in amassing complexity and ease of combining are evidently two features of computer-assisted appropriation and re-assembly; with regard to critique poetics, an ideal, which I'll continue to hold as achievable, inappropriate (opposite of appropriate, the verb?) and quick, is to let the poem-object argue through its rush of complexity so that it may begin to liberate-destroy unfabulous lyricism (of the purloined source material) that's framed within a past, a convention (or, better, a convention-set). Rushing along.

Why are we doing these things? I'm sure it has something to do with technologies invading our immune systems. Rationales aside, the news is some poets are doing things that require brighter modes of comprehensiveness. I mentioned that Mohammad's Deer Head Nation expands the field for poem-making (and I should add critique), not because there are lovely neoteric poems to read, but because the book of these poems discloses a wackiness that seems, to me, comprehensive, that is, of a piece of a nascent approach to work. Almost similarly, were one now to rush to print an anthology of mash-ups it might already be too late -- unless the selections were comprehensive, critical in original ways and replete with variatons of comic attitudes. To contradict what I've just said about exposition, perhaps mash-ups with short prose passages above or beneath them would do the trick, as -- much as the short, brilliantly detailed prose pieces that accompany Matsuo Basho's hilarious haiku, many things past brought to mind, the snowfall.

Bridal bootcamp. Not responsible for side effects.

Critique Poetics (1)

Poetry comp is reeling with cyber-fed appropriation and re-assembly. One reason for this is a communal need to break the mold, to work ironically within a neo-tradition of surprise as necessity. From last century the French surrealists and then a range of postwar poets, starting with John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara and Jack Spicer, for three examples, demonstrate how fascinating it is to substitute, that is, to paste in, the unexpected phrase in order to compress and even undermine narration and to trigger the displaced, unsettling emotion or charmingly unwarranted idea.

Methods for substitution include straightforward word shifts within a given word-processed text -- intra-textual cuts and pastes, say -- as well as extra-textual processing of found passages, especially digitized texts, and hybrid processing of churned-out products from web-crawling and search-engines, often intermixed with other kinds of writing, found or 'authored.' Computer-assisted cuts and pastes from simple word-processing are rarely scrutinized as such, today, for they have become over some time quite an ordinary means, the sine qua non for effecting, to use Tom Stoppard's term, the miracle of compression. More recent methods of substituting whole passages of digitally purloined material nicely disrupt received notions of intra- v. extra-text, found v. authored. Meantime, to employ terms like 'authored' or 'intra-text' is to risk not paying enough attention to the larger point that cut-and-paste pastiche has evolved into a staple, generative methodology for disruption.

Poem-objects of the last decade or so continue, thank goodness, to foul up methods and standards. One direction that looks promising is genre-swapping, appropriating and incorporating large chunks of critical discourse into verse, Juliana Spahr's Spiderwasp or Literary Criticism, for example, or vice versa, Charles Bernstein's A Poetics, which sings tunefully about "official verse culture," among other meta-critical things, in verse-like stanzas. A thoroughgoing, book-length exemplar of critique poetics, let's call it, is K. Silem Mohammad's Deer Head Nation, a collection of more than 50 ludic pastiches that stare down any reader's conceptions about genre or about the divide between poetry and meta-poetry. There are ample, facile word substitutes: "I hate it when people stick a flag on their car / that had the total IQ of monkey"; there's a "Dear Head Suite" of more than 20 poems nominally addressing 'surprising' topics such as "11:04 pm Feeling Evil" and "The Internet Makes You Stupid," each topic elaborated by long lists of Google-derived non-sequiturs like these for "Home Decor": "...millennium clock / ...hand chair, wasp room / ...personal refrigerator"; and then there are pieces that address poetic topics per se, which for reasons of space I'll indicate by way of their titles: "Objectiwe: A Poeics," "La Belle Deer Tattoo Sans Merci," "Wallace Stevens," "Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)," and so forth. In fabricating a poetics that enacts ludicrous juxtapositions, Mohammad creates a recklessness as critique, a credible counter to conventional constraints upon lyrical form and discourse, one that both enlivens what we may call subject matter and hugely expands the potential for poem-making.

[More soon]

Seamus Gluck

There is a moment after you move your eyes away
When they'd been block-built crisscross and four-squared
When you forget where you are

We lived with them and breathed pure creosote
Because you were living it seems
Until they were laid and landscaped in a curb

Somewhere else in the silence of the night sky
A molded verge half skirting, half stockade
You've stopped being here in the world

Soon fringed with hardy ground cover and grass
You're in a different place
But as that bulwark bleached in sun and rain

A place where human life has no meaning
Our gravel darkened and a tarry pus
You're not a creature in a body

Imagined yet pervasive, reeked and ran
You exist as the stars exist
Like the breathing, bleeding bad in Dante's wood

Participating in the stillness, their immensity
Unsettling, bearing forward to the garden
Then you're in the world again

What I couldn't hear in the forties when I lay
At night on a cold hill
Listening for what might come down the line

Taking the telescope apart
Each deadlit, boarded languid clanking wagon
You realize afterward

And afterwards rust thistles
Not that the image is false
Silence, sky

But the relation is false
You see how far away each is from every other thing.

From Basboll's Transparency III: "The thing to pay attention to here is the way [Nabokov's] crystogram uses body parts (a hand, a mouth) and gesticulations (shaking, thrusting) as preconditions (a priori conditions) for the solidity and soullessness of things (a matchbox, a cigarette)." This seems a fruitful way to approach an analysis of narrative and, perhaps, poetry. Follow through to the other two posts on transparency and "The Rain-sparkling Crystogram."

Not a friend, a consort. Sorry.

Where do you keep your pet coupons?

Bob D. Thomas

A poem is a naked person, the force
that through the green fuse drives the flower.
Some people say that I am a poet.

A hero is someone who drives my green age;
who understands the responsibility that comes
with the roots of trees.

The fallen blood shall calm her sores.
I have dined with kings
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose

I've been offered wings.
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
And I've never been too impressed.

Lorenzo Thomas Dylan

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days,
Waiting for the day, arms weakened,
After the birth of the simple light
Not exactly somewhere, but a certain place.

Now I know old age is cruel, now
As I was young 'n easy under apple boughs
There is a hazard in the morning sun,
The night above the dingle starry

It brings fears I never knew
In the sun that is young once only,
The birth of a regret all Americans are losing
I was huntsman and herdsman, the cows

With the fear of being alone, I was
Young 'n easy in the mercy of his means
Still, in the world going nowhere
Or the blossoming of a sorrow --

Their minds are going crazy
Though I sang in my chains like the sea
So well behaved and mild, shyly, patiently
I should hear him fly with the high fields.

You may finally sort everything out, figs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass
These passions make your life last longer.
The cock on his shoulder: it was all shining!

Time let me play and be the sky gathered again
This happy corner, sucking up hard-boiled eggs
The tunes from the chimneys, it was air
A thirty percent chance this day will pass.

I need a degree in ad exchange.

Is this a spray or cat or poo? [pg bk]
Then spake, to whom thro' the garbage [pg bk]
But don't waste good mascara! [pg bk]
Seize the fey! [pg bk] [pg bk]

I fear fiber is never glad, my blossom dead [pg bk]
Too courteous, are you a circus? [pg bk]
The cruel give us confidence. [pg bk]
Dex wooden leg plus spaz. [pg bk] [pg bk]

Spin doctors' talk had pierced our Father [pg bk]
-- There you go -- huh? [pg bk]
House by house, blocked by gravity, do you span [pg bk]
To silence the unenvying nightingales?

My friend ran away with the guy
who stole my identity. I'm trying
to look at it from my point of view.

The soul resumes its teachings. Can-
dles out, pie for the asking, grace
to be white boats opposing innocence.

That was the funniest poem, the sexiest too. I don't remember laughing so much. Ever. And I can't recall being as excited as I am now.

There you go.

I got the idea from going to church.

Everyone needs a secret life. You're still a little off.

A cheer for the emotional piano, check out the 9 comments or so for the full lyric.

Now you're catching on.

Gary Snyder

In steep gorge glacier-slick rattlesnake country
Ashbery looks at me like I'm the most pathetic excuse for a human being.
I pull out your blouse, warm my cold hands on your breasts.

Through slide-aspen and talus, to the east end,
I feel this rush like I'm gearing up for one of those "print" versus "web" discussions.

I know you personally,
The Daughter is the Great Mother
Who, with her father/brother Matter as her lover --

I don't want to flatter you.
How well articulated! How neat!
"Meat" means "You don't touch me."

"Unanswering machine." [Laughter.]
When creeks are full the poems flow,
What about corporate sponsorship?

To my amazement, Ashbery's quite interested to hear about it.
We'll lean on the wall against each other, stew simmering on the fire.

I recognize Brendan Lorber and Karen Weiser, and again I feel enraged.
Quail chicks freeze underfoot, color of stone --
It makes sense to me that Ashbery is there with his wife and daughter

As the Cat swung back the arch piss-firs falling
I'm now sitting talking to him, to John Ashbery.
Matter makes it with his mother

Because it suddenly becomes apparent that if I tell him
Exactly at midnight from a ship about the blue ones
-- A delivers remarks in a staccato tenor --

Rabbit tracks, deer tracks, what do we know,
I'm wandering around looking for Nada
These poems, people, lost ponies

Deer trails slide under freeways slip into cities.
This is actually quite a beautiful city, and I've
Slept. Right. Right. Yeah. The manuscripts.

Eyes pop out. Disappointed I can't think of its name.
Crystal and sediment linked hot all change, in thoughts.
"Yeah," he says

I look up through the Guggenheim's spiraling
Lay down these words before your mind like rocks
Of peanuts as they fuck.

True or false: All important works of art
Go ants and pebbles, a writer applies,
The cows get thin, the milk tastes funny.

I just happened to bring along a list
A big rock weatherd funny, old tree trunks turned stone,
I lift my cup and flowers sleep

Night rain flicking the maples.
I no longer know where I am.

I met A in a coffee place on Broadway
Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall
I'm living in my studio

Yes! of course it is!
I saw Phil Whalen with a load of groceries.

The others stood and looked
-- Their child is Matter.

Right. Ah, no.
I was simply not offered enough money.
Kyoto born in spring song

Meat & blood & hair & fatty tissue
All the hills trying to throw
Nike and Phillip Morris sponsored the show.

Let's get back to the truck
Earth (mortality)
You laugh and shudder peeling garlic by the hot iron stove.

My guest today is Kristoff.
Gives birth to the Mind.
Now I'm really frustrated.

Two flesh persons changing
Bong. Water.

Just the Thing: Selected Letters of James Schuyler
William Corbett, Editor
Turtle Point Press 2004

Reasons to love these letters (for starters). James Schuyler, we learn, relished scanning the real estate adverts in English Country Living. His signatures to John Ashbery, including Cynthia Westcott, (Mrs) Birdsey Youngs, Theodore Besterman [Voltaire biographer], The Supremes. To Fairfield Porter: "I can't work up any strong feeling about Connecticut; it's very bushy." In his letter to Ron Padgett regarding Schuyler's selections for An Anthology of NY..., for a salutation, Schuyler writes, "Dear Dr. Molnar: Is it harmful to eat frost that gathers in the refrigerator?" Then later: "I hope, by the way, you aren't going to bear down too hard on The New York School (or use that term). It sounds, uh, insular, and somehow isn't altogether true." Correspondence that revolves around cuisine! "The desserts sound formidable"! Schuyler taking in On the Waterfront, Flesh, Cage aux Folles, The Wages of Fear, The Fireman's Ball, Les Biches. He loved Roman flower stands. Salutation to John Ashbery: "Dear Beany Bacon Dip." The solace of knowing some of Schuyler's reading matter: a Benedictine tome on herbs, also The Victorian Fern Craze, A Gardener's Book of Plant Names, Intellectual Life in Gay Colonial New England, A Reader's Handbook to Proust, all kinds of mysteries and comix, including Steel Penis Farming. Lewis Warsh has the same birthday as Schuyler, Nov. 9. Salutation to Tom Carey: "Dear Boychick." Schuyler ate cucumber sandwiches. He watched Hill Street Blues. Generosity proffered to David Trinidad: Schuyler advised Trinidad to contact his French translator, "send 1 copy of book, with brief card or note, 'sent at suggestion of JS ... (don't ask questions, do it)"; ditto to Howard Moss at The New Yorker. In a boilerplate solicitation letter for Broadway co-signed by Charles North: "so send your best poem." We read that Eileen Myles wore leather at the preview of the Alex Katz retrospective (1986) at the Whitney. Though Nest of Ninnies "bombed" commercially, Ashbery and Schuyler, we're told, "made a surprising amount of money out of it." In a letter to Trevor Winkfield: "...they don't seem to allow women to prostitute themselves in Venice, just men. I think it's a way of honoring Lord Byron." Last line in last published letter, a PS: "I thought of offering to trade apartments, but decided I'd best stick with my perilous elevators --"

Trendnote, David Cameron.

Trendnote, bingo wrinkle Florida.

Guy Davenport, R.I.P.

Please, James Wagner. Don't stop.

Trendnote, snow.

Trendnote, hippie luxury (reworked).

Trendnote, proliferation of digi-pix on the blogs.

I can't recall a turn to the new year that holds so little to be hopeful of. I say this despite upswings for me and my concerns. Pantaloons, Inc. has been ushered into the Merry Fortune 500 as a must-get cultural namedrop. (Maybe I should initiate invitation-only cheese-tastings and start hauling my maus-weight around the fiefdom.) My investments are going according to plan. Thanks. And the publishing end is "marble like cheese," too. Faux Press will be releasing a set of books featuring witty, wry, even celebratory poetry, some accompanied by original graphics that are horrifyingly timely as well as supportive of the texts they converse with. Two or possibly three lines of writing, for me, are proceeding without interruption, and case in point, I'll be reading new poetry (that's one of the lines) next Sunday, the 9th at the Zinc, 90 W. Houston St., corner of LaGuardia Pl., along with Mairead Byrne, starting at 7:00 pm. (In deference to Mairead, I'm planning to downplay my Irish and feminine sides.)

Still constraints and catastrophe from the outside, the things we can't do much about at a "personal" level, loom larger than they should. I left a Thai lover on Phuket four years ago. He's fine, but many friends did not survive, and his design business is in ruins. The fair conceit of Thailand as a possible future seems less imminent, for sure. The lovely lands I've visited or almost-visited, Malaysia, Indonesia, Myanmar, India, Sri Lanka are truly in shreds. Had I even half the resources required, I would take off for several months of helping and healing that would lead directly to self-repair.

(I would like to hold this as a possible direction, for me, still.)

American politics seems more and more an impure source for storytelling. So much of value is from elsewhere or better done elsewhere; beside science we only have our power of language and legend-making to recommend us.