Specimens, early 21st-century.

The dharma of the windmill is monotonous.

Reënter the Style You're Sick Of

My dreams are Lubitsch films

exist -- here we go -- appreciating in value
discourse running late -- this is my youngest

scouring moment favoring the objective.
Sun up Fra Angelico,

girl, you're a mess, tooth
I'm going to kill you

shall I mark you and another thing
in cartons? The former layers

highly varied patches. Chroma
cities guessing the wrong

hand through fog sorting hat dot,
a congeries of texture. Kid

in the instant triples his worth.

News from London translates into there's no turning back from more of the same. I feel sorry for us, for the people of the UK, for speakers of English everywhere, as well as for the language whose grimness-bearing semantics will be further enriched.

After Hess, I propose an apology-to-Stephanie contest. So far, Hess wins.

I have an appetite for writing that picks up from Gertrude Stein. Her nature is "to express things ... as they are when one sees them without remembering having looked at them" and then to chew the scenery, committed as she must be to formal blocking in stagecraft, maintaining an indomitable temperament. Climax evaporates, a textual refuge where the natural draws our attention as an ironic condition, a peripheral attraction. (I've said this before.) Writing that points to what this means. To be objective and lack will.

An incident unveiled as ambition.

Thinking more decentrally about Nicole Brossard.

A driven writer like Brossard distinguishes herself taming the other and the other-directedness that she (writer) and he (reader) share.

The signature concern is a reader's experience. It's peculiarly nepotistic, however, that so many writers simultaneously figure out reader expectations, whether through prosody, flashy enjambment, polyvalanced metaphor, whack-job disjunction, or through super-flexed process- or, better, project-wise composition that wholly affords reader, critic, cherry-picked categories to grasp the project and ambient prosody within multiple, extra-literary contexts, politics, cultural construction, performance theory, and the like.

A writer's guess as to what the reader craves is a byproduct of turning herself into a reader. One writer rarely reads alone, and that's part of the saga of simultaneity. She and others pick up similar texts, comparable projects, snowballs start flying. When a writer thinks in public about what she's reading, she's taken aim and will be likely aimed at in turn. This is the yarn of opinion acclimatization, and it's hardly superfluous.

But snowballing is tedious, like any other festivity. "I want this evening to be special for both of us," a salutary howl that might characterize one friend's read (reinforcement) of another. Counter: "I hope your prostate flares up."

If this persists, the modicum of argument may emerge, as relevant to the present as a manual for Lotus 1-2-3.

I don't want festivity so much as a writer's investigation into her own iconoclasm. It would be abetting deeper juxtaposition to confront approaches to writing that bracket a readership's amusement, and explore the alarm and vacuity the writer has previously not known. How does she know? How does she improvise? What is improvisation on improvisation? What timing(s) is(are) required? How does she account for a received notion like 'being in the present'? What is present?

Just getting to the May-June PP Newsletter, sporting both tragedy and comedy masks in the last issue edited by Marcella Durand. Outstreched pieces, Kim Lyons on Ruth Altmann, Alan Davies on Brenda Iijima, Joe Elliot on Merry Fortune, Ange Mlinko on James Schuyler's letters, among the pleasures. Reviewing John Ashbery, Macgregor Card fixes half-humorously on Ashbery's connection with Caspar David Friedrich, and in Card's last parargraph he heats up over Friedrich's birthplace, Griefswald, which he translates as grief's wood. Card closes with a pratfall: "Care for a dance [in grief's wood]? 'Would I?' says Caspar. 'Wood eye?' says John." Comedy's opposing forces seem to have taken over elsewhere, tho. Michael Gottlieb on Ted Greenwald strikes an ars longa vita brevis theme that bounces around other pieces, as well. Gottlieb sees a need to pay attention to poets of a generation pushing 60 that includes Greenwald and himself. (The PP does this, right?) There's a most serious weary-seeming short poem by 62-year-old Ron Padgett made from cliches. It appears at the end of a q&a with Edmund Berrigan. Padgett admits in his interview he's "wary of doing the 'Ron Padgett thing.'" That means: "Not being mercurial and witty." Ok, Nicole Brossard, appears to say, and picks up this idea and runs with it, unparodically, questioning "if we lie when a typing mistake occurs and we choose the 'mistake' in order to produce a better effect." Her line of questioning is based on original intent, undefined. Her thought is contradicted by Evelyn Reilly's review of Brossard's Intimate Journal in which Reilly regards Brossard's "approach to writing" as "cognitive-improv... at the root of Brossard's insistence on being a writer 'of the present.' Which present?

Ovaries. City of lights!

Oh, what the heck. A slapstick zombie.

Beau idéal. Cumming. The fragrance!

Concision in the detailing of method is a catamaran of process.

This is how the morning began.

Wake up from images of classicism and rapid transit. It felt like a high school reunion, men with liver spots. Stacy Doris and a couple of younger guys with portfolios of collaged material, mostly text. That's the destination.

Getting there you wait in long lines for a trolley. Japanese are hardly speaking. I turned to a companion and asked if he was interested in how poetry's put together. It felt unwise.

Sweeping reductions were next. Romulus and Remus. Appetite and style, these are core elements of classicism and romanticism too. Appetite includes style but style directs taste and other pretences of appetite, vocabulary, 'learning,' degrees of influence. A she-wolf looks after style.

Some things are pure style. Syntax.

Boink.

The dudes with Doris reluctantly gave up their texts. One worshipped the other in the name of Quirinus. It seems unlikely any part of this legend is true. Almost certainly it is a copy.

A meta linguistic sequin.

Some bloggers are opening notebooks of drafts, compiling impressive archives of work. Recent example: last three entries from James Cook.

Jonathan's review templates earn the June Ern Malley Didn't Mean It But It's Amazingly Brilliant Anyway Award. Reading his formulae is like getting high on prescription pcb's while sweet-talking James McAuley (Geoffrey Hill?) and Harold Stewart (Jeremy Prynne??) to unhook the toeropes.

Dumbly You Blink

The aspen glitters in the wind what's your problem?
What's going on? Hose you off
Yeah, well, and that delights us
The leaf flutters, turning total crackpot

Thinks you know everything because that motion
In the heat of summer, one of those days
Protects its cells from drying out. Won this round but
Likewise the leaf if I weren't such a nice person

I could sit here all day
Gotta be kidding the gene pool,
Unbelievable, a wobbly stem. Kiss
My ass and the tree danced, jerk.

Do I have the name right?
Sorry, wrong guy. Can you hear me?
No, the tree capitalized showing us a thing
Or two, no, there are limits to saying

When there's a buzz, have a seat --
Love can't change what's wrong
If there's time only for one
You must be at least this

Taste of your own medicine in language
Fuck what the tree did.
Think you know everything,
Dance with me, calling my lawyer

If it happens again doing something
The door opens and you appear
Not quite as it turns out
Next to the image and the aspen in the wind.

Summer achieved. jack kimball your HOUNDS notes pretty much smackdown the whole *review uproar* -- doing. thanks for spending time with the silly little thing...

-- Alli

Hounds
Alli Warren
self-published 2005

A narrow, stodgy and often ostentatiously learned, pedestrian, callow youth with an unpromising future, not a voracious reader of fine literature, a painter without pictures, a radical without followers, a bloviater on par with the windiest, incapable of getting to the point, one who's cacography was really a mess, actually the other bloggers were beginning to gibe at him, you know, a devotee of just one model of probity, his thoughts a jumble of anecdotes, non sequiturs, and opinion, stymied by his roommates' sleeping habits ("That's why I'm awful"), his theorizing an enigma pointing to an impractical scheme for critical improvement ("I have love / in my stomach"), seemingly founder of a new sect claiming its way leads to prose utopia, guided by his bias toward the indefeasible correctness of his own ideas about poetry, a raddled oldster in spirit ("First the damp / and rocky areas must go"), an inestimable adjuvant poisoner of young minds, a Babbit like his forefathers, working only to keep his fellow bloggers down, the value of his ideas negatively affected by their propinquity to "South Dakota," "fuckhead and lacks" and rank monody, rooted to the superlative for prope and thus conveyor of a strong sense of distaff bizarre, former lover of Michael York, myrmidon of laconic types, jackleg poet who bribed council members, the one whose work is described as ear candy, phantasm and troglodyte in character, lacking cachet, ineluctably subtragic ("Garden party vegetable cock"), one who glommed from teenagers ("yanked from them / hills a premonition"), lightheaded, sans bona fides, a practitioner of syncretic forms of mind control, found on a dark November night haring in a rented car through the New England countryside ("trunk full of fiddles"), given to apophasis, wasteful project manager, one whose froth was like another room in a clement imagination, not his, his was a quixotic indecourous embarrassment raising hackles among locals ("vapid immortality"), his letters to the editor referring to 'the sorry state of publishing,' one whose Panglossian ("indolent / citizens should give thanks") habit of looking at the world was troublesome and excessive, a flummoxer, one whose dark clothing and tight bun gave him a melange of zany comedy and self-importance, awkward, incongruous, overblown, incapable of a simple, cognizable act ("helping others get off"), small beer, petulant on the sofa, suer of polluters inspissating legal logjams, lachrymose versifier, nonsalient, beguiler of none, violent in speech, defiler of lit cliques, one who committed verbicide daily, persistently mollycoddled, footless demeaner of post-language, the least puissant rocker on earth, a banana for brains.

On reading four lines from Hounds: "My lover was a new machine / and headless / so I only had / a bit to chop."

(a) Talk shows with no host.

(b) Heliports amid the wash of copters.

(c) Prep courses for perfect comebacks to a reporter's squirtgun.

What are poetry blogs?

It cuts all ways, nah? Anti-literary prequalifications for the ideal, a-poetic reviewer levels the field for the charismatically unqualified. Come, observer-non-participant, speak your way to a soothing, open-ended, ill-fated status quo.

Let's see, who said it better?

I paid for this mic and I'm going to speak.

Critical standards are for essentialists.

Which is to say, keep gabbing.

I agree, that first question, immediately below, sounds aggressive. Let's reconsider it along lines of the reviewer limiting discussion to what he knows, minus all the secret procedures that make his own work 'of the best.' Not to stay solipsistic, I expect a critic to surpass her knowledge as she wipes brains (hers and her readers) clean with the poetry under scrutiny. To expect and get less from critics can still be interesting but never a full "responding to what is in front of them," as Drew puts it, today.

It would also be comforting to finish a review (as either its writer or reader) with a sense that the critic does not hold an unspoken pact with (a) the poet; (b) the poet's adversaries; (c) el diablo.

Siesta time.

Review questions for Friday.

How to estimate value(s) of the critic who praises only work she feels is inferior to her own? A kind of intrepid strategy (is that cartoon thinking??) to keep the discussion down at her level?

In the blogosphere a positive name drop is as good as laying down a line of thought about a poet or a poetry. True or half-true?

Lists of things. How 'argumentative'??

Parallels between the rockets Hoerman and De Deo? (This one is for avid blog readers.)

Selp-published is cool. This week in any case. Mine is the third mention today of Alli Warren's Hounds. It's worth privatizing a set of thoughts to, and ripe for review. True or of course?

What space is there between being mean and lap-dogging? Expound, please.

We orient to the ethereal. I see 20
years of paper. What's this about?
Percentages shift the ease,
Flower guy balling police. Spazmat's
connected d*Face. Managing triumph
begins at Carnegie.

Beyond very pure violence, we
grew up watching celestas wax dim
shopping bodies, comic biker mags
& both water contemporaries dangling
      & centerfolding every shadow, apart
from what's divvied up

Following stars on stage to bend swagger & call
in options sustaining the force field bed
            O underground
20 official records collapse like a situation
we had with the meretricious
            secret belief in blurring.

So you can't repair the vivid astro.
Ask why we find this grueling & meaningful.
We love it how duty calls. A nonesuch scenario.
For now nothing claims these days
& the season & its welkin of interruptions,
aren't we? I mean in the highest sense.

Moving to the state of whopper values.

Jordan, your Tim Davis review reference is provocative! If Friends of The Poet Not Worshipedly Reviewed, Inc. write, call, etc. to speak against a critic or his editor, that's an exercise in cultural Soprano-ship?

Just the fact that there's a tenet of game theory in play may be a huge step toward insight.

As one might guess, I strive for positive mosaics when speed reading colleague poets, but that strategy alone is wearying. And (to use your term) kickass prose composition, complete with thesis, counterthesis, and so on, can't be counted on, either. At least half the hack spin-offs I read are expositorily clean attempting to argue a point -- admittedly, that point is often reducible to ax-grinding, enforcement of collegiality or enmity. Fabulous prose, sure, mosaic (a pile of impressions, citations??), but let's raise the bar. To resonate with the poetry is such an ugly phrase, only a practiced musician, thespian or poet can get away with it. To figure out how you think about others' poetry as you write about it is fairly stupid, except when you deploy invention techniques that are hallmarks of classical composition. To merge poetry and prose is against all the rules, and may be another procedural breakthrough, especially for those who have been disciplined to follow directions and not get caught. Simple to say, but the review should be as interesting as the reviewed, without getting in the way.

A jumbled response to the state of criticism. Alaska?

Hawaii?

I'll admit a degree from Capella U. sounds attractive.

Late coming to Chris Vitello's reports on Carrboro. Scroll to 5/26 & 5/23.

Corrective: Sasha Frerre-Jones is referenced with he. Not part of the body politic of NYC, I've never seen much less met the male poet much less the music critic. So the most immediate post for 6/9, below, has been touched up. The points natch remain. Like her.

The Hat 6
Jordan Davis and Chris Edgar, Editors
Spring 2005

New Yorker music critic Sasha Frerre-Jones syncopates as he senses Jack White of White Stripes may be "weighted" with "mysterious information" warbling into "jumpy" highs, voices "a noisy future and a long-gone American past," yet "never overstays his welcome" delivering "the kind of pain that country song writers spend years trying to perfect." The poet Frerre-Jones heightens that sense of inexplicable intensity with a deeper tendency to syncope, almost conversationally: "We have to leave, so jobs are off," "words are silver and creeped," "perhaps, indeed, crazy," "heft rounds itself up." And he adds this long, great breath, "I was plenty half-settled when you got up in the bunk and started ooching. The fuck." Frerre-Jones's nine poems are among the obvious surprises in The Hat 6. Rachel Loden is another as she makes it plausible for women to call up male beauty "like historians." Meanwhile Ange Mlinko maintains "a pugilist insistence on quiet" inserted into a "shambles" of talking woodwinds (under water), names of flowers (needled), earache (panached), and pillows (hiding sunscreen). Frerre-Jones, Loden, Mlinko, and others in 6 demonstrate that the surfaces of language require information from the jumpy future or mysterious past to represent an otherwise now, something one merely text production-crazed might overlook. In three lines -- not to overstay her welcome, remember -- Jeni Olin waves in an ubiquitous, pain-killer Ave Maria and heartsick but stimulated Jew -- o pilot -- floating across "The Gillete sky." Olin images her poetry out of abandoned personae decimating capitalism or whatever, a cool woman's prodigious, felt cadence. Another sonic boost comes from Jennifer Knox: "I love to masturbate, especially / After a poem of mine's accepted in / A literary magazine. Shit --" This sounds less syncopated than "wicked creepy" Frerre-Jones, and less perfect-punched than Olin, but Knox has got the mystic, suburban drawl down to a pity-pat: "I've been thinking I should / tip the Domino's kid more than a buck on 14. Should I?" That's "crazy good," Frerre-Jones says, more urbanely. Michael Scharf keeps going crazy good, too, in "Contract Law," seizing the givens and extracting services from "the other side." And the sweet ear of Nada Gordon's 'rhymes' "elephants, and so on" with "OUD or BANJO." As Alli Warren "crosses surfaces" with "a submarine, a fundraising fishfry," I realize this is heaven, and there are a few more surprises than can be outlined in this space, and therefore there are many more kudos due editors Jordan Davis and Chris Edgar for all the great information in 6.

Tony Towle's Memoir (2001) is a genuine sleeper. There are more sales and more buzz about it in 2005 than last year, than the year before last, and so on. It compares favorably with more recent bios that, all together, recall, instructively, how we truly behave.

I'm not claiming credit for noting this (credit goes here), but life is good for the mammalian subspecies pen shopper.

Rosa Parks's eccentricity
makes it easy to underestimate
Norman Mailer.

Here's where we work
it's not fun it's work.
As I was saying, lanterns were swaying.

Haiku

You totally screwed up.
If we were Love Boat
you'd be Julie.

Back in bed, she lay huddled with her knees pulled up inside her nightdress. 10 million pieces!

Still lugging their filigreed train, the arts of Japan's exploding subculture. Just kidding.

I brought a salami to the butcher's = Russel Crowe stars with Renee Zellweger as his faithful wife.

Time to whisper back to Nick Piombino and Mark Young for liking May 31. Thanks.

En[T]ry

Talking Chimp was the featured beast in the movie "Barfly."

Six-inch plush Talking Chimp screams when you squeeze him, an "Animal Talker.".

The talking chimp wrote the interlude for a solo record player.

Cinematic artifice can be stifling, especially when it seems a talking chimp in itself.

Talking Chimp is the one creative writers turn to for information, advice and how to pronounce a few words, mama, papa, cup and up, by the use of positive reinforcements.

Congressman, you need a talking chimp.

Talking chimp does all his [her] own stunts.

What is talking Chimp to you?

Here, meet the Talking Chimp Advisory Board, the [creative] think tank that is helping us on our journey to simplicity.

What if we stow the talking chimp for five seconds.

Upon his release Talking Chimp left the country and went to Oxford.

Talking Chimp competes with aliens who take the most menial jobs.

The old man Ekornes introduced himself as a talking chimp.

Somewhere out there there's a flowering space unhurried in its gathering of the first talking chimp.

A lot of the jihad commanders were talking Chimp.

Still lugging his filigreed train, Talking Chimp emerges with his cell phones.

We've been taking a little harder look at talking Chimp.

Unexpectedly, Talking Chimp took me home to meet his family.

Talking Chimp has been with a lot of gentle creatures wearing jeans and racing through the woods, building paranoia.

If you get close enough to Talking Chimp's cage, he'll throw dirt, food -- anything he can find -- while his companion, Tarzania [Ekornes], makes loud sounds that resemble what some call a "raspberry."

Talking Chimp is a sloppy signer.

It's special working with Talking Chimp because he's so smart.

Talking Chimp is reading Tsvetayeva's essay, "Art in the Light of Consciousness."

Talking Chimp can improve erections for guys.

Due to the proliferation of comment spam, Talking Chimp had to close comments on this entry.

I watched a video of a talking chimp, but he only produced vowel sounds from his larynx implant device.

Talking Chimp thought you'd be pleased.

"Let's not do this, let's not make hurting each other impossible to resist," the [T]alking [C]himp said, unable to stop himself.

The next morning [a t]alking [c]himp walked up the shortcut through the garden on his [her] way back from buying hair dye.

A truffle and goat-cheese pizza, for all its ambition, felt contrived next to a [the] talking chimp.

The Talking Mallard Dog Toys sound as good as they look, they can speak for themselves, and they sound so authentic you and your pet will think they're Talking Chimp.

The tale of Talking Chimp is the story of the planets cooling slowly after ages of rain and the seas bearing memory.

Talking Chimp endangers the ecosystem.

I have been an on-and-off listener to this list for several years... this is my first contribution... I found a link to an article about scientists saying they now have trained a talking chimp and I was wondering if anyone's been following the story, and what are your takes on it?

I think I'm having talking Chimp stress disorder.

Spa services await you in[, T]alking Chimp.[!]

Vampire Talking Dog Toys are as good as they look and sound so authentic you and your pet will think they're real, and with each squeeze you can watch the plush, colorful toys come to life talking Chimp.

I'm shopping my talking chimp around.

We are only a step away from the electronic avant-garde of Talking Chimp.

Talking Chimp makes it look easy.

Tyler the Turkey says "Gobble, gobble, gobble, I'm talking Chimp now!"

Talking Chimp spent almost 40 years teaching at Bryn Mawr.

On doit apprendre le code de HTML pour les accents français. Quoi qu'il arrive, accueillez à bord!

When I started writing things were looser. I had another side; I was a hunter as well as hunter-gatherer. I was constantly revising. It says here that the journal is a superb apparatus that can change any entry into a transmutation of genre by filtering it through the alembic of aesthetic properties, so long as the writer is arbiter and guardian of sideway as well as progressive depth. Entry begins. Freestanding opposition.

Apart from you, my favorite piece stands on the beach near you. My gaze is deflected like in a photograph based on a prophetic painting. Our inter-endowment seems modern.

When I walk into the war room and check out the latest maneuvers (my writing) I couldn't ask for a better curtain going up. The checklist is a few percentages from being there. I will go lightly on density. And the pace should vary.

Time's winged chariot takes precedence, though, because clearly it is revered, chair emerita of the board. I speak now in a voice that rarely rises above a loud mumble and threatens to sink into inaudibility. Still there is that one question about reception. And the idea that I can give myself a vacation from a heavier role.

Over the summer construction advances. Inevitably constructivist and supremacist impulses are joined. I am always balancing art-historical concerns with the sexual depravities of my adored objects. Challenging the hodgepodge. I like small and large together. Also, stately is very exciting.

A poem with fewer pictures looks better. You may have expected more.

In reply to a line of reasoning that Nick develops in response to Jonathan's Question 5, Is "total absorption in poetry" benign? How about "poetry as a way of life"? -- (a) I think the distinction drawn between ceaseless v. sporadic comp. practice is not altogether apparent. (b) Nor do I find a poet's involvement in publishing, editing, teaching, critical writing or blogging that disconnected from poetry writing or, to use Jonathan's term, disconnected from poetry as a way of life.

(a) With the qualified contemporary exception of Peter Ganick, whom I've known at times to compose more than a book-length text a day, day after day -- and Nick cites Peter as a counterexample to the 'ceaseless' category because of Peter's sideline career as a publisher! -- I don't know anyone who doesn't fall into the 'sporadic' category; I don't think there are poets who just write, publish "without cease," give readings, and "never do anything else." Are there?

The conventional divide from which Nick derives his categories, I think, centers on the craftsperson's pattern of daily or regulated practice and composition v. the sometimes-dubbed romantic strategy to write when inspired. That is an empirical distinction that still might not be useful in determining what is meant by "total absorption in poetry" or by "poetry as a way of life." Inspiration, for instance, is a sign of absorption, and I might argue that one could live to force it through regular practice or to 'wait for it,' seemingly triggering inspiration through secondary and tertiary means, such as hypnosis or tantric sex.

(b) I rather see a poet defining her life within poetry, making poetry a part of her life, however she practices it -- that is, her life and poetry. As undergraduates, Nick and I had similar reactions to poetry professors, it appears. I couldn't imagine at that time a less promising pathway to poetry than teaching it -- the craft -- or teaching around it -- the literature. Perhaps that is why I chose linguistics when I decided on graduate work, close to it but not the Tradition per se. I am less repelled by teaching poetry today. Studying with Samuel French Morse, not a poet but an enthusiast for poetry, and John Ashbery, a fabulously benign teacher, influenced me. There are nonetheless a ridiculous million other ways to live to write, and I am biased toward the freaks who explore a few of them.

We built that puppet.

Indigo Bunting
Bernadette Mayer
Zasterle 2004

Indigo Bunting is a perfect-bound brief for incident against purpose occasioning just about everything, including poetry, especially the poetry of conflated pleasures and spite. Mayer's facts speak up for broth and other food stuffs, for drink, for love, and for the making of love, of broth and of poems; other facts touch on or marshal parabolically against external forces that constrain ("Is Bernadette consigned to ostracism because / Bernadette makes writing with pen in public..."), against Newsday, against war, against Bush. The more intriguing parts to Mayer's liking are also parabolic -- that is, they swerve toward and then away from decipherable narratives -- and the affect is at once self-indulgent, spidery-seductive and didactic. In a poem titled "Maple Syrup Sonnet #?" of triple-sonnet length Mayer lineates "i dreamed if i wrote prose paragraphs / and from each a poem / i could teach / everybody to write poetry." The poem spreads over six additional stanzas of serial subject matter, hay fields and poems, with italicized lead-ins, such as "questionable poem," "better poem," etc. The argument-for-praxis summed up in the final stanza: "new poem: / THE FIELDS were filled / with rectangles random as poems / now not" -- an experience alfresco and demonstration that one can write to go on, or as she suggests in libertine bursts in her final poem, "Sonnet to John Fisk": one can write and live for a "besotted" and "different world" where "everything spun," and where one can "open the bottle of thought."

Whom, among poets you most admire, do you understand least? What is hindering a greater understanding of this poet? This is among 10 questions posed by Jonathan Mayhew; has to be one of the more provocative jumping off points for depth research into a writer's practice. E. Pound I would answer, for me. Am hindered (obstructed, a better term) by his ugly, ugly beliefs, in fact. How could so science-y a poet, so acquisitive a collector of the practice get his world view botched as far, as far down as Pound did? His eyes have been punched out, but three or four generations later, at least, I am still blind-sided by his deeds. The Cantos to right, crazies to the left, Yahwehs split down the middle, all the way down.

Boston. Sweaters in May.

Sweaters in late May.

How to Make Love
Hugh Desmond
Self-published 2005

The Wasp Karma Sutra, 32 meticulous though vaguely wooly sonnets explore performative methods for 'unpacking' the doubleness of a sex-haunted society and its (our??) possible duplicity as mirrored in the open, heartless marketplace -- isn't it fascinatingly sardonic that some of the most popular lounges nowadays are in the Meatpacking District? -- and then reflected, neo-innocent-wise, in the faults and so-called virtues of finding a perfect soul. 'Soul, I like that but where can I time-share it,' Desmond almost argues. "Devotion, patience, tenderness -- no more / Could human heart desire..." Let's face it, Desmond seems to straddle the fence, here, mass- and even niche-media are steamy on occasion, but they have taken their toll, their pound of communitarian flesh, as it were, with respect to uncritical moral fidelity in love. Nonetheless, the rhetorical pendulum could be swinging the other way, Desmond avers, and implies, perhaps self-consciously, the politics-of-gender paradigm may be shifting toward male gallantry, as well. Now, in a central suite of madly-rhymed sonnets in the middle of the text, a half way gesture, for sure, Desmond is suggesting, I count more than once, it's hip (his word) for the man to wipe someone's bottom during the love act. Despite a rudderless albeit pervasive lay Marxism inflecting discourse in our corridors of power, according to Desmond, rebellion is afoot in the hyper-speech used by guys in the bedroom when the television is on. (Desmond is at his most intimate here.) One thus perceives the hairline fractures among urban elites -- it's an esteem-subconscious thing, in their body language, nearly -- when it comes, for example, to languaging on and over sex-mongering 24-hour cable, and that's only a start. "TV is old and death is everywhere / I'll turn the cable off, fuck despair / Let's begin again..." That "again" is hot. I'm not sure how likeable it is, but Desmond blows off twin volcanoes, sincerity and insincerity, craftily working in an expose of the actual discourse of cable. "Hi boys, have you been looked after?" Registers fluctuate, influences ranging wide, from Philip Larkin to John Berryman, are flubbed, even god is reduced to a logo for goo -- Desmond resists everything! These poems add up to a colossal thumbs-down on wickedness -- I guess it is ours, it seems. Kyrie, Des! Again I note that doubleness, marked by agonizing ambiguity and foul (self-) critique in Desmond's sweetest lines: "Happy the youth that finds her / or him whose heart is all elision / ...the hottest collision..." etc.

Business book publishing ethos (can / should poetry be far behind?): ...it's a huge boon to work with authors whose platforms entail media appearances; speaking to large audiences of potential / likely readers; and, best of all, selling lots of nonreturnable books to locked-in affinity groups or major bulk customers. Read more Ron Hogan here.

Saline
Kimberly Lyons
Instance Press, 2005

I'm comforted, confirmed in the prognostics for artifice, that Kim Lyons's plain as Jane reference in "Soap" to The Crystal Book is bogus. The encyclopedic catalog at my local library (Hollis, Harvard) hasn't got it. But the prognosis looks promising. Once I enter the title digitally in the subject data field, I find a number of mis-adventures as alternatives, including (1) Crystal, David, The Stories of English; (3) Consort of Musicke, the world of English ayres and madrigals [sound recording]; (5) Wonder, Stevie, Talking Book [sound recording]; and (8) Shakespeare, William, A Midsummer Night's Dream: Texts and Contexts. To prove each option is somehow germane to Saline would require stretches of space in a longer review -- (1) story of English, "shadows of Greek postures"; (3) English ayre, "the gradual of / Eleanor of Brittany, 14th century"; Stevie Wonder, "People are realized only partially" -- but if I stick with (8), I find the continuous present right here in the short poem "Soap," the sort of predictive, time-travel-y mischief I prize: "I was looking for you / or more correctly, your words... // pulled from the stacks: 'a new poem' by Wm. Shakespeare / huh?" I'm enveloped now by a poem that anticipates my biblio-search! (Huh, indeed.) Granted, Lyons cuts through the travel mystery, admits her crystal book doesn't exist, yet "absence of it yields / to...arrival." We're instructed that arriving is a way of 'contending,' "looking around... / I imagine the words / are looking for me also." Lyons practices a Platonic epistemology via 21st-century metaphysics in which one's arrival at words is hard-wired self-inquiry "inherently without prestige," enamored of the magic "round room" in dailiness, like reading a book backwards, routine conceit that "disperses...a grid of light" where there is "presence between / nothings." Tangled, convoluted, "I hate this Sunday consciousness," Lyons offers "a violet empyrean's contraption of radiant circles" made round and plausible within the "background in the colorlessness" and seeming limitless as "the universe cavorts thus."

Sat May 14 02:37:53 2005 job oportunities
Wed May 11 11:17:19 2005 pantaloonsdefinition
Wed May 11 11:04:32 2005 pantaloonsdefinition
Wed May 11 01:11:11 2005 kumin
Tue May 10 11:42:45 2005 gildzen
Mon May 09 20:47:35 2005 "and there was a spot of orange above the bone that bore a wing"
Wed May 04 05:01:29 2005 gary sullivan
Sat Apr 30 08:29:03 2005 im sorry
Fri Apr 29 05:01:35 2005 A book is like an open door
Mon Apr 25 10:11:06 2005 adrienne rich
Fri Apr 22 10:56:10 2005 (thinking for berky) AND (thinking for berky)
Fri Apr 22 10:44:00 2005 thinking for berky
Fri Apr 22 10:39:15 2005 (thinking for berky) AND (thinking for berky)
Fri Apr 22 10:39:13 2005 thinking for berky
Fri Apr 22 10:33:06 2005 (thinking for berky) AND (thinking for berky)
Fri Apr 22 10:32:40 2005 thinking for berky
Thu Apr 21 14:09:11 2005 Adrienne Rich
Thu Apr 14 16:12:41 2005 pantaloons
Thu Apr 14 16:12:35 2005 pantaloons
Thu Apr 14 07:48:08 2005 seamus
Wed Apr 13 22:01:19 2005 print campagins
Mon Apr 11 05:44:25 2005 for love
Sun Apr 10 20:36:29 2005 Rachel Levitsky
Sat Apr 09 21:20:29 2005 bangalore
Sat Apr 09 21:20:02 2005 bangalore showrooms

Spring Reading



Eureka Slough
Joseph Massey
Effing 2005

Everyday materials, front yard, porch, across the street. Levitating sills, cracks in the clouds, splinters of fuchsia, "twig -- gravel" chained to "highway's / wild flower," studded "lit amber," modulated "against the garage," lifting a banana, you're dizzied and wanted "...above snails..."



Shiny No. 13
Michael Friedman, Editor
2005

House organ of American poetry's Ecole Normale Superieure. Shiny percolates with lived specificity, that is, content, the sine qua non of first-rank intelligence, self-consciously succinct -- "We are each perturbed // and hope to say so / first or best" (Rae Armantrout) -- or at the brink of exhaustion by example -- "...I walked even farther than usual, in variously heavily layered loops, down past the old concrete-block Ice Plant and over the hill, around the bend to the rattly trestle bridge over Whetstone Creek at the southwest edge of the village, then cut back a long-abandoned railroad track, now commandeered by multifora rose and blackberry lashes" (Merrill Gilfillan). Three poems from Ron Padgett in memory of Kenneth Koch, another kind of lived specificity, as are dense travel notations from Alan Bernheimer and autobiographical snippets from Barbara Henning. We also find strong pieces from a long list of witers / editors who favor concrete information in work they publish and in their own poetry, Geoffrey Young, Rod Smith, Chris Edgar, Michael Gizzi, Leslie Scalapino, Jordan Davis, Lewis Warsh. Photographer Andrew Brucker exposes human figures that are models of experience, ready to move on. When it comes to empirical tour de force, Gilfillan details a "knowable world, almost tribal in intimacy and scale." Yet Bernadette Mayer steals the zine with specificities of her tireless, only half-knowable amalgam, always serious, playful, moving and moving on: "i caught a bird which made a ball / & thought daughter of it. / but that's all they said."

After Pessoa

Too many ideas inside --
You know -- I can't -- when I think
Who is thinking, maybe I'd,
It's just me locked in place
Where things think on their own

You know -- maybe it's more than me,
Things, myself, lots of me's
And what or not, I'm me too
And could give a shit about them
Because when I speak you go out

Stirring some ideas
About what I feel
I think I feel, ladies!
You're telling me nothing; you
Mean nothing to us queers.

I wrote the software to create the illusion. I'm ready to talk.

I'm good here. I love a page-turner.

I blog on occasion. Doctor, I can hardly breathe.

I'm a film critic for the magazines Lady Oyster and Inheritance. Maybe it's just nerves or maybe I feel spent.

Sometimes I html. I'm patently cranky as fuck.

I'm a poet, essayist and translator. Sorry I snapped.

Poets are doll-faces who deserve free passes from a metaphoric house of parliament. This is because poets glow with immanence that is visually arresting, 'higher' than politics. To be precise, parliament would be below, its approbation however floats up to greet and validate successful poets. "Here's your vagina. You're free to go, Tina." You see, a part of a poet's sexual drive is attached to wordsmithing and preoccupied with getting it 'right'; that's what I mean. One word building and built up by another -- if this persists within a formal round thing like a poem, then this is accomplishment that warrants unrestrained empathy, followed by a cohort-nurturing q and a. A little is missing nonetheless in the progression to expand spheres of a word's influence among the wordsmiths. For, in a preemptive society that has moved beyond benefits and features, what does it signify to understand something like a word? Consider why there are situations in which poets might be thought or known to understand something, but act too cool to acknowledge what they know or even to use a substitute like hi. Or take this example. Sublimating Dollhouse Miniatures. Thinly veneered, oddly-attired star-gazers, each shines with a certainty as to its existential presence, a perfectly detailed reproduction of passion, integrity, power, and warming debate.

I can't think of a more putrid example of faked-out little-ivy poetry than this: "we've tumbled into an elite world, full of country homes and 'men downstairs who think / that gin's a breakfast drink.'"

Close enough. Done. (Wharfside.)

I admit I'm pitching a guest appearance in Rum, Sodomy & the Lash.

The Arousal

I'm a little I guess confused
I thought you might understand I mean
I'm surprised, do you know
what I'm saying? I guess so
not exactly. Walk

The dead -- what they did is
reprehensible, tho they added so...
you're busy, sorry. The
substitutes are locked in a closet. They
have something to say too. All

About museum restaurants
and cook-dating. They'll... you'll
learn a lot all at once. Absolute
power over the last half-century.
Doctors and scientists working together

Swinging ultimately for the fences --
the job's changed tremendously --
they fly the Atlantic in this context
and really only this context:
There's a thin column between hey & ahem --

The world yearns for freedom,
bless them,
I don't think I'd call it Trampoland, because
if so the light drug's effective, I
mean, sluggish jellyfish with blond hair.

Within a week I lost a pound
and my parties
became scaled fantasies,
thinner still kodo,
familiar toepath of scents. I'm saying

No one makes us bullet-point anything
if current trends counter
what can be done? Didn't they tell you
the important part's the worst
tones and soft muscularity,

Resources and adaptability,
a two-persons' kid cigar
can be fun, proof
students' brains are being
stolen, after which

They wander back home muttering "TV,
TV," a mildly eccentric suburbia
waiting for their next payday
of awe-inspiring relaxation. &? You hoped
we might talk?

Spider Paradigm

Dodge ball is under
A cloud, an anti-
Stress badge
Sleep my night

As night an around
Without in sleep
A dream of pure
Nothing is innocent.

You end softly
The way I see it
The thing's
It's not you it's me

I don't want to
Shave again of course
We're moving you down
A door

Or it's obvious and personal
Earning this feeling was
This the bathroom?
It is now.

8 Haikus

Today Math was difficult. Period 3 I learned Thai.
At lunch
Time I ate fried gunk. We got better at the time (Mr. Brown times
Us) ...
When I ate lunch Mrs. Brown twisted and rolled herself
Around my
Notes...
A speed of 875 revolutions per second results in wriggling panic as
I pushed my fingers in and out ...

I had a bad earache for a while with my friends.
... And after the movie we ate lunch.
I had a good head of bolts going
At Burger King. And then
We played "No one loves me like you" -- then
We did
Phonics ...
Then the bell rang to go home. I was in a hurry and
Did
Not wait for anyone

(Even the Students United with NASA Becoming Enthusiastic
About
Math and
Science) ...

After the demonstration we ate lunch, then
I did a
Wake-up and
Ate breakfast and read country sheet music,
Then did
Chores...I 409'd the appliances and

... Ate lunch
On the boat and
Ate so much I got sick. Say it loud,
Can't we cut to the scary part?

We
Played Sorry in the lounge
Then we came in to have something.
We ate tuna and
Cookies. Then we went back outside.
Then we went back to class and
Did
Math. We are studying bone thugs.

... Boy, has math
Gotten me crazy. We went for lunch
And put 6 heads under water
... I ate 9 fries ...
That's math. Then I did
My homework which was to study for a spelling bee.

... Then we ate lunch. After lunch
Mrs. Brown taught us about binary numbers and
The mind.
I love math wiping the flesh
And solving problems. Then we interviewed Mr. Brown ...

... His haiku
Idea was a stiff wood of art: long, full, with a slight
Vocal member of the Illinois cultural
Studies group carrying a sawed-off
Shotgun. On the other hand,
Mrs. Brown feels he should continue the Christian song lyrics.

The bride has landed.

She fell silent.
I wrote it all down.

John Latta on Saline, this way.

We were swimming naked, a word I often use to characterize my work. I wasn't looking when I came out of my lap and grabbed another guy. I felt something strange but familiar.

Savagery of the week.

Bring it on, our green man mutters as he falls to thinking. It would be better, he wrote, if we filed out total copies. His cubicle adorned with tassels, starving animals and a biblical instrument. His shade of sage, a "genetic trespass." J'aurai passe ma vie sous une pluie de lettres, / ayant parfois cherche refuge dans l'amour, the alien added in suicidal cursive, imagining simple clouds will be needed to discourage others, girding himself for the darn moments. Yes, I'll marry you. Of course nothing is that simple. His books are prepared, blood-flecked brown, a vantage point inside a camouflage, the basic lining of their markdown. Flecks of many shades of green, too, these are most important. Green is vital, do you hear? Blunderbuss poised, I was so ugly when I was born the doctor slapped my mother.

Basically no one wants to mean-mugg Orlando. I got housed by Kari. She's a Monet for sure. The closer I looked everywhere there were the gray hairs a belligerent bolter gave her. That one touch, tho, and I toasted. I was totemically wrenched in our Shasta of styling. Her come-on, sweet, dope, raucous. We went cocked and then like a superstar I got bunked and keyed. We were money, I.T.Z.'d. Acing eyes crushed. Our wrists shammered with bar scars, following the bliss, tight but faded in the walk of shame, marinating until early a.m. Yeah, Kari's thick and I was on the slab. Moofed, perved, I got to be her swervy Larry and it felt awesome, actually. I guess I was creeping on Orlando, some Brad, but Kari was my style project and I became hype in the buttah life. Firing up the sun was flapjacked, really sick. It was hollatight and badical. I'm still bouncing, Herb. Feeling decent. Obese. Gotta Audi.

You know, some of Jordan's photos are startling. Take a look at the one for Ap 22.

Like many an Oprah's book club selection or a typical Best Picture nominee, blogging about poets and poetry affirms the enormous appeal of the middlebrow, that special spark that immolates the back brain when high ambition tips its hat to lowly public relations, when whiffs of refinement link arms with accessibility and expedience, when stream-of-consciousness consorts with reputation building. If Gertrude Stein took Bubba Ezra as an illicit amour, and then blogged about it, the precocious, spirited, deformed love child might look and read like Jack Kimball's blog, which he's incoherently named pantaloons or, more monomaniacal, b.l.o.g., for short.

Kimball tries to present his opinions without airs yet fails, his standards exacting but his everpresent sense of play none too generous; he allows the indulgence of different sensibilities and moods ranging from petty to lethal, letting readers take from him what they want, be it wholesale generalization as pure and clean as anything likely to swim in the direction of cheap, unearned consensus, or raw, downright personal bias done up in cheekier fashions. He has the flexibility of a yogi master, the balance of a Romanian gymnast. And he cinches the verdict by constantly stirring his familiar rattles, formalism and antiformalism, back into the prosodic swim.

With Art in America, a pre-legendary collection of his critical essays camouflaged as avant poems, and vice-versa, Kimball quickly developed a teeny reputation for slight-of-hand with exposition and argument, for knowing how to coddle and exalt a single observation or parochial perspective into a worldview. But just three weeks after the poems-essays were published, it was disclosed by no less a middle-Earth scholar than Gerrit Lansing that nearly every sentence in Art in America had been lifted from other sources, leaving Kimball's hard-won reputation quite adrift outside a close circle of appropriationists and thieves. But not for long. Kimball has now resurfaced with his own pantaloons, also known as b.l.o.g., the initials standing for Big Loud Opinions Guaranteed, suggesting a sturdy and resilient ego, which is to a poet writing about other poets what lungs are to an opera singer. But for all Kimball's finesse and instantly brisk readership, his blog first seemed like a layover. Didn't Kimball belong on the main stage of the poem-as-critique biz? As pantaloons demonstrates, he does. Although the blog shares with his collected essays-poems an emphasis on consuming the flesh of opponents and a mix-and-match line-up of topics that separates that flesh from any possible redemption, critically speaking, Kimball's blog has shown itself as an even better forum for recycling other people's ideas. The main reason is Kimball's discernibly greater passion for das gestohlene Leben, the life that is appropriated.

You need not venture all that far to happen upon a ribbing of non-avant style comparably distinct to Kimball's. But you would be harder pressed to encounter a meaner characterization of that style as exquisitely, delicately and expertly put down as the full-throttle pan at pantaloons. Kimball gets his ideas from others, but what is unique in his treatment is that he refuses to restrain an innate mean streak, a salt encrustment as thick, enveloping and showy as a floor-length skunk. Always the flamboyant, compulsive rebel, Kimball writes almost daily for his blog, and it is now apparent he's been refining new techniques to round out his gripe-fest cum plagiarism. Frequently he jump-starts criticism of so-called neo-antiformalism, a developing topic, by misquoting from a text under discussion or piling on a heap of completely apocryphal line-breaks and subtexts which he then assigns to the writer he's maligning. He does these things, we are told, because he finds the process relaxing.

The way Kimball switches topics is also relaxing, to some. Once every few days, Kimball shows a lovelier and airier side, rising above his customary whine and pose, dispersing all the noise and letting in light. To get there, he often turns back the clock and recalls a favorable encounter with a nearly-famous writer he tried to suck face with, enforcing the impression that you're being taken on an elevator ride that sharpens your anticipation for something uplifting.

Kimball's readers appear spellbound by his irresistible, clever manner, a melding of sophistication and sass. At once superficially elegant and easygoing, by turns adventurous and safe, Kimball's pantaloons is the equivalent of a poetic page-turner or a mass-market movie helmed by an auteur who's gotten fat around the middle. You can feel serious about it even as you, like Kimball, relax into it and let yourself go.

Repulsive trope of the week, human catnip.

My luggage did this to me.

Tom and Sloan survived bloody combat. Can your network carry it all?

I'm curious about sex and would like to make this best of seven.

I need something to keep people away, or as Peter's friend Antonia likes to tell me in her high-floor park-side unit on Central Park West (bought with the proceeds of her divorce), there comes a point when you find yourself with a waxwork hologram of yourself seen through your partner's eyes. Like in the country on any ochre afternoon, still and hot, dry leaves stirring infrequently with rattling pods of what we call ex-lover's eyes.

Rath met John on a visit to London. As is sometimes the way with men of opposed natures, they got along very well.

And there was a spot of orange above the bone that bore a wing.

Hold on, Danni's old college friend Stephen, a jazz guitarist in the free-improv scene has been living with Julian, a fabric designer. Now they want to make things "official." When they go outside to smoke don't let them back in.

Phil and Jamie are professors who wrote a history on reunification. Jamie chastises himself bitterly for his inability to stay faithful.

Unlike Deanna, Rebecca is comfortable with the idea of French-style family arrangements.

The firestorm in Taylor's eyes intensified Carl's sense that he was losing her to Harriet.

Yes, I thought I was immortal, but what I really want is to write children's books.

I'm self-published.

What should I attach shame to today? Mud-wrestle on tv holding up a copy of my new book? Slender, Dark-eyed Dates.

Sometimes I go over to the monitor and see what I'm doing, and it's not what I intended.

Most people in the crowd stick to the 'Take a Stand for Marriage' logo.

I dreamed in e-mail last night. It was about sex again, and revenge.

Gabe Gudding should blog more. His entries this week are at once astute, ungeneralized and forthcoming on a personal level. His blog link, if you need it, to the right.

I looked just like decidedly attractive gay porn star Jeremy Penn, and was running up and down a spiral staircase on an ocean liner parked in New York Harbor, preparing to detonate a powerful nuclear device. Yuri is rich. (This from Ap 13.)

Introducing the cult of the squish factor.

That's it.

Today's best rejection: I'm sorry my week's already filled up.

At her reading at Demolicious in Cambridge a couple of weeks ago Nada handed me a copy of Gary's Elsewhere Vol. 1, his Nippon comic & phrase collection, honeymoon edition. Since there was an open mic before Nada took over, I got powerfully inspired and stood up to read Gary's piece front-to-back to a shimmering, giggly audience. I read it within horizontal bands, that is, speaking the text from the top blocks left page to right, then middle blocks and bottom blocks, left to right page. Was that why everyone was giggling? Nope, Gary's text 'works' no matter how you read it -- as good ideograms are supposed to. The audience was simply wrapping its brains around the clown antics, and loving it. My eyes had the added vantage of bouncing off Gary's prescient cartoons as my tongue spoke the riddles and runes! It was total corneal-to-labial coordination, baba. So even tho I'm late with this report and seem like an also-fan, I am beaming among the first to perform Elsewhere. Ahem.

In an entirely different direction, a couple of correspondents have asked me about the Coolidge T'ang piece (Ap 12, below). I mashed up fractions of pp 74-78 in "Odes of Roba" with random lines from "The Eclipse of the Moon" by Lu T'ung. It's more "serious" than I had intended, but in merging disparities you don't always get what's expected. I'm doing more Coolidge T'ang, but won't post results here, largely because everything keeps 'fluctuating' in ways that continue to surprise me. I guess I'd like to keep it all under wraps and unfinished, at least for now.

Christ I hate paying taxes. This thought is throbbing in my brain as I take pen to forms, signing off another year. A simple equation comes up now; I don't know why; this has nothing to do with taxes. Friends don't hurt friends. Or if that's Pollyanna-esque or absolute, friends don't keep hurting friends. This formulation is an element of my crap-detector decades in the making, still being refined. Taxing.

Coolidge on Tang

The fifth year of the Bland Hotel
The cyclic dreams now locked
A season when the handle & its innerwall
Rivers push the pitch-tube in the Yellow Bell.

He androgynates, tries --
I fear the Heavens, just like him,
Are the essence of primal Yang. Am

A thousand trees, recover from the covers
Like wondering about the cold
Air tensed us instead in great meds,
A sleep not followed by great things.

There is another ancient tale
As the trees number my nails,
Flames like long rainbows

Floating up from the Dragon King's
Emission, the telling of each other,
Piano strings, precise and going no-
                           where
Suddenly buried in the cold

We canter the blame thing
Crimson scales and fiery birds stinging,
A tornado on a stool stems back, comes to.

40 stories of carbon fiber. Spray-on Gore-Tex. Embroidered shoulder joints. Extreme textiles. I feel an extreme koan coming on.

Can't resist Gary's T'ang poems (Ap 11) that proceed from Jonathan's play list.

Comparing Notley's blood orange to O'Hara's tangerine, Chad Davidson writes of playfulness-plus in Waltzing Matilda: "Hidden in playfulness, though, are the nodes of anxiety and, at times, darkness that are perhaps out of the range of O'Hara's lunch poems."

Full review at Verse.

Creep

Being short's a start.

Tall guys are better pick-ups and sex commandos or scoundrels, while shrimps are more naturally creepy. Shorter is better being a creep.

Yet let's not talk about being but making. Making yourself uma pessoa creepy.

Choose a target and stick it right in there. Panning for gold, prancing assembler? Get it right, you can skip marriage and head straight for divorce and settlement. Shower comic amounts of attention on target until she's an object of affection. Even creepier! turn yourself into a fake queer and target a real lesbian or gay guy. How effortless is that?

The best sex is not straight. A woman who keeps a guy gets it. I've known plenty of women who deal their men into a gay poker match.

And I've hung around gay porn stars -- half of them play kind of fake -- and the cutest keep doing what are called triple flips. They work guys over for a living, lock heads with a steady lady after work, and fool around on the side! It's like the world outdoors, in offices and non-porno places where average adults interact, because after a time everything shows you where it hurts as if you're suavely fucking it on the side. Or maybe it's just you.

Ok. Stop paying 99 cents per song. The kicker is buckets of attention, as noted. And peer pressure, evolved. You should be shameless in this stratagem. Hold your lady or gay mark tight. Kiss him in public. Lick his boots in front of friends so he thinks you don't care. Make him feel amused and warm.

I'm going to put in here, relax, all my exes.

If you're self-conscious o sonneteer o apocryphal offense-taker o empurpled former stud you can't be a successful creep.

Attend to target's humiliation. Crush his every little feeling. Mid-phone-call as you're piling it on, cry or scream or both, and hang up. This will be a great first date, because he'll like you before he notices how good-looking you are.

Profit from his embarrassment, but eschew connoisseurship. Continue reading turbulent ferry. Cut and wear magazines. Tear shreds of feeling to barhop about the Castro. Emphasize after the fact your sexual ephemera.

Repeat (to yourself) 'he's not much to me.' When you date, go at things rationally, delicately shuffle, and look at things, down low and separately. Stay good to go.

Breakup sex, the movie is huge.

I never said that. Mid-sentence.

Just released.



Writing, speech and shouting -- a first book of poetry from David Larsen!



A kind of stoner Virgil leading you through the craziness. -- A. Berrigan

Order now and save five bucks.

Your Thoreau is about many things floating in a powder of birdcalls.
For a fantastic finish you win the Hugo Boss Prize.
You're no depository of high-mindedness, Peewee.
You are complicated but your website is radically simple.
Where the rubber hit you should take a fresh look.
Hermit, you're a trick left out in the rain.
You recall profound formality taking shape from afar, quelling fear.
Half a day went by and still you resurface.
You are unattainable.
You are hypersensitive to chaos, a thing to uphold.

Jack is playing his role (that of a bad actor) perfectly... Recognition at last!

More expressions of love for Creeley at the Buffalo Archives, link below, April 1, from Ruth Lepson, Nick Piombino, Tom Savage, Charles Alexander, others. An extraordinary passing. Pivotal might be the word.

Very exciting reissue of Set 1 edited by Lansing in the sixties, available from Strong. 2 to follow.

Memories and fond words for Creeley at the Buffalo Archives from Tom Beckett, Stephen Vincent, Michael Magee, Hank Lazer, Joel Lewis, Mairead Byrne, Chris Stroffolino, Brenda Coultas, Chris Murray, Aldon Nielsen, Peter Quartermain, among others.