Dana Ward
The Bad Days Will End
Invisible Pressing
[Self-published pdf] 2005

I empathize mightily with postlanguage gloom and distemper, taking as they do their pyromania from a world turned completely against nongovernmental gothic and the pitiable flame, much less the forwarding motion, of an individual's non-neurotic decadence. Dana Ward knows pre-ash-to-ash is built into the embodied species, the ones with "the / softness of arms, though insipid / in this light's unseemly contentment." We "brothers from whom love was kept / in a terrible family," with ashtrays for chests, children and honeybees and all charred animals, burning along with the sun and its morsels of "overflowed" light, we're all, well, "I can not walk with you ... the base of your house is on fire." In 21 fairly brief poems, off-rhymed, ripe for scansion, Ward recovers the peregrine conceits that parcel the blame to the sender, "our reckoning...threshing / in flamboyant slowness"; "a two-throated song"; "decorous unity, blind"; "simple tranquility, call it a town so to leave it." I'm not aware of another poet now who substantiates his discontent and call-and-response to the canonical likes of Rimbaud and Nerval: "It hurts in this way like the premium bookings, the reading we get on our knees, the first reading I'm losing my flowers all over the place." Ward shows that, "eclipsing the impusle," kissing an oligarch brings you down, "even the hand-basket seems to agree." Of course, there is always the distress of affection, for "there is no distinction in hating oppression & loving you." I despair of my future without The Bad Days Will End. I think you can get yours by e-ing Dana Ward, editor at cypresspoetry.com.

Eeksy-Peeksy has been restructuring the blogging deficit (see Malcom Davidson, right).

Nick News Network is back (see Nov. 6), reporting on Drew and Alan's read at BPC. Cited texts. And there's a CD?

Stalwarts of the Demolicious series found their sea legs Sunday, crossed Central Square, and reopened at the chiller-than-thou Enormous Room. (Drift upstairs from the hard-scrabble sidewalk to something pulsing in the Amsterdam-Morroccan lounge like a Luomo-Tessio Moonbotica remix ...) This is one of those art canteens you know about in advance, since its only I.D. is an emotionally detached red elephant on a glass paneled door, beside Central Kitchen. Upstairs, another red elephant, all emotions, center stage, Michael Basinski brought the new series to pre-melt, putting on his "one work reading" that felt part hoe-down, part revivalist, or totally missionary, improv style. Basinski's mission is more a blanket permission to rig up and sacrifice sound and visual materials of great variety, spinning and propelling them in a wildly errant tease. Basinski started by his calling out "saloooms" for about five minutes, followed by his noting black dots on a page, "let's call them horses," he urged, "horses be inside my head." Basinski's improv pushed the horses into twisting Greek sounds like the kyrie, first, then a latinate litany that segued to a "water and wine" sermon in which he cracked up: "I am the genitals of the angel of July...clicking the head of a tiny chicken."

Basinski demonstrated intriguingly irrational techniques. Making "music" by reading syllables of numbers in any order. Shifting vowels in words, simple phrases. Communion with the audience by eliciting words with x's, and chanting back the resulting list. Reading fragments from a Buffalo pennysaver as iambic verse. Each shtick evinced a central tenet, "all forms are equal and have equal opportunity to enter the poem." Accomplished multi-media-ist, performer and teacher of poets, Basinski proves he's also a jester for good, ad libbing his way into prehensile transluscence in which poetry is a life at play.

For Jean

For Thomas

Organizing principle: Curate readings where people invited look like you.

Jimmy goes for Seth.

Kasey asks this guy.

Ron S invites Dr. John.

Brenda phones Lindsay.

Xtina rings Willow Alyson Hannigan.

Nada leans on Kate.

Nada and Lee Ann fight over this one.

Not to get morbid, if there were e-mail in heaven, Rodrigo Toscano could channel Danny.

Gabe Gudding would no doubt host the Donald.

Drew might try Wally.

Moi-meme, I'm inviting Kate II.

It's not necessary you say nothing.

Larissa MacFarquhar's profile of John Ashbery in this week's New Yorker gets almost nothing right. It's homicidally dismal. MacFarquhar boxes Ashbery within sociometrics, writing him off as a long-term near-loser having taken his lumps on the winding path to obscure notoriety.

Ashbery's folk were failures for generations, belligerent father, mom who drank, kid brother who died young. A neighbor (who?) in the family's farming village paid (why?) to send Ashbery to Deerfield Academy, putting him on a slicker track, but so slick that a classmate stole his poems, publishing them in Poetry (how was that resolved?). MacFarquhar has little to say about the Harvard nexus or Auden, and nothing about Some Trees. So we skip to Ashbery on a Fullbright in France "to improve his French." This was the time, according to MacFarquhar, Ashbery "ended up" composing "fractured, dissonant poems that went into his second book."

Moving from chronology, I find it unnerving to read this quotation attributed to Ashbery: "I've always felt conflicted about my sexuality, feeling that I shouldn't be homosexual, that I should try to change." Then I read he went into psychoanalysis after college "with this goal in mind," MacFarquhar offers unironically, but money ran out. That's such a dear excuse for perpetual conflict. By the way, Ashbery's always been hard up (no mention of contracts, stipends, the MacArthur, etc.), so like most poets, other than Billy Collins (growing hungry you forget), Ashbery has been working a tedious day job forever, it seems, writing reviews when he was younger and later, and even today, college teaching.

MacFarquhar completely loses it when she claims Ashbery is more "interested in the making of poetry...than the poetry itself." This is followed by the profiler staking out a witness position as Ashbery composes before her the first two stanzas of the poem "Ignorance of the Law Is No Excuse." Before she reprints these stanzas, she pens: "He begins to type."

There is no news in this piece about how Ashbery writes. MacFarquhar relates the affect of John Cage's chance procedures in helping Ashbery during a dry period decades ago: "the idea of composing by chance made [Ashbery] think about writing in a completely different way." That way is characterized by Ashbery, cited by MacFarquhar, as "managed chance." But how this term and the processes it entails become poetry is unspecified. Confusedly, MacFarquhar drops further discussion of Cagean technique for dreary tautology, asserting Ashbery "likes the idea of words coming out of his unconscious but he isn't a purist about it." Likes the idea? Purist? MacFarquhar shows a gift for airy, bourgeois atmospherics as she attempts to analyze recursive processes Ashbery might commit to on weekends, shuttling between his apartment in Chelsea and his homestead in Hudson, NY: "At some point he stops bothering to read over what he's written already before starting to write again...so it might be five or six days since he last worked on it." She adds, reassuringly, "He has a sense that everything will cohere somehow, though." How many triggering devices are missing here? "At some point"? "bothering to read"? "what's written before" -- what and how far back is that what? "somehow"? And doesn't the time lapse deserve examination; doesn't it play into the dynamics of managed chance?

This profile is an NPR-like exposure for Ashbery, and I suppose it doesn't matter. I'm disappointed nonetheless that MacFarquhar tells the story of the not quite virtuous poet as performing seal, an Episcopalian who may not believe in god, a manager of chance who jumps up from his recliner to type out unrevised stanzas that conclude, "We were lost just by standing..."

For Xtina

Two lines that changed my eating habits.

Teary eyed. Correct.

Sometimes it's actually that: oral.

O Xtina.

J Corey notes Dark Brandon's "manic dialogism." Together with Dan Chiasson's Natural History, it forms a "mini-constellation, a snapshot of the limitations of the various dichotomies and trigonometries of the poetic field that are currently on offer." There are hyperlinks to what's meant by dichotomies and trigonometries, here.

Telling the Future Off
Stephanie Young
Tougher Disguises 2005

Stephanie-Youngism (SY) as a poetics conspiracy did not seem plausible before Telling the Future Off. Sure, trial-sizes of Young's persuasion have appeared in influential magazines, and I've heard that her brief readings in California and know firsthand that the one she gave at Segue last year were triumphs. From this slender evidence I had pieced together an impression that she was a charm freak, really good at negotiating varieties of fun, the fun of shame, of political puzzlement, of standards against pretension, of others' feckless assaults on civility. Yet with this debut collection the totalizing, under-the-skin reach of Young's subterfuge is patent. Her merriment encompasses stratagems for controlling how poetry now and in future can "grow her hair," "dream in the forehead" and "have this opportunity [...t]o more coyly move / within the doors 'of your heart,' & go / unnoticed."

SY is disarmingly overt, 'sauntering' in its dodgy "sleep rhythms" (as if that granted it special license!), bluntly self denigrating (that's the source of its strength!), whispering it "cannot distinguish left from right," yet right here on Page 69 (...) it pronounces in italics: Of course I've come to read your trousers. This opens a second section of the poem titled "I Use My Fantasies & I Solve My Problems..." There's a subtitle that goes on for another nine words, but you'll agree, I think, the title says it all. This section of the poem continues with a sort of discussion on a "troubled family," "pussy" and "the words 'pussy' and Juice Extractor," various kinds of "juice," indeed, including "fresh pussy juice," a 'talking bracelet' and, o Jesus, "marzipan." The bracelet and marzipan appear in all six sections of the poem, along with a no-doubt fake quotation from "a Sharon Olds poem" [sic] that makes an appearance in the last section. Totalizing, I repeat.

You'd probably be as upset as I am with the prospects of SY's potential sway over poetics if you felt it was calling you a "vegetable fritter." (Check first line of the aggressive "Retaliatory Dream Affair.") You'd likely sense something integral to your self respect slipping away "[h]aving to be your own detective at Walgreens." ("Today I Trust My Perceptions" huh!) And how would you react if while "laughing behind our fingers," you, loyal reader, were toyed with like a shih tzu or son of? Before Telling the Future Off I could not imagine verse that admits to pimping "a cute dog" not to affect but "to get away / from whatever may happen"? This is sly. This whole set of texts is sly. "What a mess!" Young writes. It's more than a heap of slyness and mess, SY's invention makes me complicit, doggie-style, with its pet-acquisition design, forcing me to wipe my eyes many times, tears of mirth, tears of wretchedness (my own) -- "Look at that dog!" This is the most lethal debut in poetry since the first imprint of Puppies for Dummies. Still, I feel cared for and obedient. I love my boss.

Dubai is a little nuts. (After Watteau.) All right, scram.

I'm not sure I want to bring a poem into this crazy, messed-up world.

The Duplications

Shampoo

MiPoesias

personnagesobscurs.com

By now it's obvious. Alli and Lrsn are one.

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

Rosa Parks R.I.P.

Self Charm
Samuel Greenberg
Katalanché Press 2005

In four pages of introductory matter we learn a lot about Samuel Greenberg from his editors Michael Carr and Michael Smith. A) A Lower East Side poet for his last five years, born in Vienna, educated through seventh grade, Greenberg wrote over 600 poems, including 92 Sonnets of Apology, while battling tuberculosis that took his life in 1917 at age 23. B) None of his poems was published in his lifetime, but a selected-poems was printed in 1939 by New Directions and another in 1947 by Henry Holt. C) Had Hart Crane not stolen numerous lines from him, we might never have heard of Greenberg.

The joy in Greenberg's mostly unpunctuated sonnets and short poems is bound to their semantic vigor: an unstoppable current of common, archaic and new words, misspelled and mis-written words, unmarked by interchangeable personae, theoretical design, or other stylistic distancing. Something less than a precursor to high-modernism, the work still bears the genius of Joycean compression and Lawrencesque lust swiftly reinventing its vistas. "The summit where I sat flowed a tide / Below a hill, that of pure green water / Filled the lowly place refresHing air." Greenberg eyeballs interiorly, as well, exercising an adolescent's freedom in diction. The poem "Self" lets the imagery simply rip through the language. "O art thou not Vikeings / Rarious toke, that sailed by their 'Bellished quay / Who gave thee, quantity --" Chopped-off words, like replicating cells, (Rarious, 'Bellished) seem weirdly warranted by the otherwise mystical "quantity" [of self]. And has bateau ivre been better matched in English than by Rarious toke? Word clumps deserving attention from new thieves: "loves committance / The great awe of aeoleans Blur"; "innocent weak dimed speck like / Stains, called eyes": "tentacles serene / Melancholy robe"; "to sober / Elertness to combine"; "adrift cacoone / that spun efflugence."

Nine of the two dozen poems here have never been published, but that's a banal distinction. Since Greenberg's poetry has been out of print for many decades, Self Charm is news. For more info and to order, write katalanchepress at gmail.com.

Last night Anselm Berrigan and Tom Raworth read at MIT's Stata Center, Boston's newest academic seat of corporate architectural fetishism. There is good Gehry and the implosively bad, and this place bears heavy marks of whimsically conservative oversight rendering a utilitarian structure housing computer labs and lecture halls an overly estheticized convenience mall. (The Stasis Center?) Fortunately, the evening's poetry and song surpassed their surroundings, solemn and light vocals far removed from instrumental purpose.

Anselm Berrigan writes and reads with a willed "strand of disaffection," moving within contemporary habits. His currency cuts at least two ways. He is at once anachronistically a court lyricist during an era without a court but needing one, a lyricist both in tone and in meaning ("a thing better felt than sung"), acknowledging, for example, deep impressions from poets that came before him, Robin Blaser, Jim Brodey ("he was around a lot"), Lorenzo Thomas, and of course his father (both Lorenzo Thomas and Ted Berrigan died on July 4, years apart). Anselm Berrigan also values the primary, salient work in poetry, looking, looking a few or many steps ahead, looking 'normal but in fact a whack-job,' looking for 'the you and the you you you with.' He read mostly uncollected work, including a long poem, "Free Cell," that poses the half-question and fully ironic proposition, "Why, for the torrential / stink comes near such certitude staving off concision." The poem addresses the will of looking "for / reassurance in the threat of meaning" and the diseased look of the will, "televised image / faking consensus... It's a shame I have to be sick / to surround myself with thought in practice."

At least half of Tom Raworth's fast reading was given over to the freshly minted The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan. Mixing in what he called ad libs (whose?), Raworth made Ted Berrigan sound a living force, "talking on the phone, with various rubber stamps hung," prepped for technical analysis: "the presence is surrounded by the ring of ings"; "my shadow is thrown on air"; "damn neutrinos." Reading from several pages of an unpublished manuscript, Raworth continued with his own science, "is thought calculus?" he asks, or "a network of cracks...life traffic aimed at brains." Not one to stick to abstracts exclusively, he threw the sharpest curve of the night, referring to "my folding chair" as a "return to sculpture."
Raworth's reasoning was impeccably made-up, arson and murder seen as "economies." In a prolonged, deflated narrative Raworth seems no less than Beckettian finding human emotions the "gatekeepers disrupted by stress... confections from the firebox... a menace without epiphanies."

My more purgative material goes over well.
Tad, do you take drugs. Ted?
Good, so what's the problem.

There's a movie I'll make to get your attention, a mixture of strategies for good sportsmanship, biological and chemical weaponry, and other areas of frequency dependence that poetics can take care of.

But a poetics of reciprocal alteriority raises another core possiblity of a repressed evolution in poetry fabrication, a pre-poetics. For, as writers began to avoid the congested highway of Lacanian selection, new historicism, queer theory, and the like, others opted for a less traveled route, until the new one (post-cooperative) was no longer less traveled, so many chose the first one after all, up to the point where congestion built up there as well. Poets distributed themselves in a ratio between the two roads. The same thing can happen in praxis where it is called The Tennis Court Oath.

What makes certain letters of the alphabet in a blogroll so hot? Have you got favorites, C, for example? Others are truly quarrelsome or captive or earnest, like my own letter K, for Kwirky? (See! (Only partly.)) Others are incredibly yin and yang, G, M, S for starters. And then there's B! (The bubbles.) Finally, the hard-to category, somewhat mysterious Y, sui generis W, beauteous P, and A, and M -- can't forget them.

Nice to see David Larsen's The Thorn tops Steve Evans's Attention Span List for 2005. (Each year I mean to contribute to the poll, but... !) Congrats, David.

That infected turkey you slobbered over,
It has some amazing lines. Blurbing it, I imagine
Someday you'll get a whole poem down. Har, har.

Back off be nice I can't help it
You know what?
I raise a finger in your direction.

Four hours of exquisite sex
The familiar kodo toepath of scents.
Is that what you want, Mr. Potato Face?

Poems that don't feel like lexical inhibitions in a petri dish? Try Shapiro and Towle's at The Duplications.

Micah Ballard debates politico, makes a (green) party of it, according to Chris S.

There was a peculiar confluence of antipathies at the Downcity reading Tuesday in Providence featuring Kasey Silem Mohammad and Kent Johnson. How surprising is that? Maybe similarities in gamesmanship are already apparent to series co-curator Mike Magee, since in his capacity as Combo Books editor, he has published two collections so far, A Thousand Devils, a volume of poems by Mohammad that in its first stanza signals a "bravura falsetto," and Also, with My Throat, I Shall Swallow Ten Thousand Swords, pieces I would loosely categorize as prose by a brave someone, work and authorship described via subtitle and other front matter in the text as a compilation of Araki Yasusada's letters by one Tosa Motokiyu, edited by Kent Johnson and one Javier Alvarez, but copyrighted by one Kent Johnson. A bravura of veils, in other words, minus the falsetto.

Mohammad read first, rolling out adjectives and noun phrases that appeal to us girls who cut our eye teeth in the 1980s, "stupid exorcist," "goofy," "spooky," and "boo," cartoon-lean, melancholy-balloon vocabulary mostly from Deer Head Nation and A Thousand Devils. Mohammad read newer material as well, with humorously fake plain titles, "Personal Poem" and tricked-out ones, "Why I Am Not a Forest Ranger." (When Mohammad read this title, I turned to Forrest Gander who was sitting beside me. He seemed as surprised as I was, since at first we both heard Ranger as Gander. And by the way, Gander might be equally as persuasive a word choice for the title.) Mohammad's pieces all together, new and vintage, carry on in their appeal to "alternative girls" by way of a deliberately muddled hilarity ("creationism's ... third nipple"; "food is Scottish"). His last few minutes were transmuted to more purposeful comedy, if not ripened disgust, by way of many repetitions of key phrases "threw up" and "vomit." These words have been experimented with on the flarf list, I'm told, and it appears Mohammad finds their overrepetition one way to move from easy laughs to the more deep seated guffaws that prompt belly- and heart-aches.

Kent Johnson read from texts all over the map of genres. He opened with two contrasting exercises -- first, an intentionally unhumorous translation (co-authored with Forrest Gander) from verse by the Bolivian poet Jaime Saenz: "the night is the body already in you"; second, a single page from the more ambiguously comedic Also, with My Throat...: "I am sorry for this language, which is rags...I wish grammar is a doorway to God." One senses in this 'letter' when the persona speaks of language and grammar she is pursuing an argument incubated for decades, one filled with slippery entendre, signing off, "What are you doing? // I am sincere." Johnson read unpublished work, including an epigram to David Shapiro and other pieces that took in recent events in New Orleans ("I hope you're ok") and science ("fractal ironies"). In a final piece, the title poem from Lyric Poetry after Auschwitz, the grim ventriloquist that inhabits many of Johnson's clowning personae emerged as American interrogators of Iraqis submitting to lyrical descriptions of torture. These were excesses in harlequinade, but in aggregate they conveyed a disgust that even though overwrought, was on a similarly sloping-downward plane with Mohammad's. Suddenly funny without the sting of terror seems stagy. Johnson's humor is more inset with generic spoofery than Mohammad's stand-up, but both poets came together as proportioned satirists making for a solid poetic dual.

Small presses come, blaze and then vaporize. It's a parcel of astro-biology that a few blaze more brightly, longer. Among the people who carry on into remarkable currency are Geoffrey Young, Douglas Messerli, Steve Clay, Lyn Hejinian, Rod Smith, Brenda Iijima, Allan Kornblum, Larry Fagin, Leslie Scalapino, James Sherry, Ed Foster, the Waldrops, teams at Chax, Krupskaya, Wesleyan, Subpress, and quite a few I haven't mentioned, because rather than tax my short-term memory, I need to move on to my main point. Let's add others to that blazing currency category and not forget to include one more from the West Coast. His Tougher Disguises has distinguished itself in a short run, having published Chris Stroffolino, Kasey Mohammad, Peter Gizzi, Clark Coolidge et al., and now it's Stephanie Young's first book Telling the Future Off that's turning showerheads. I can't wait to write about this heatstroke of a debut, "crude / basic ... something important," but that's another post. For now, Hooray and High Praise to publisher James Meetze radiating somewhere in deepest California.

Public venues for readings in and around Boston are an endangered species. A few Red Line stops from downtown and the backside of Beacon Hill, The Middle East lounge in Central Square, Cambridge had hosted gatherings for Stone Soup for years, the Soup a venerable institution for Btown slammers, performers, so-called street poets and their fans, but recently that's all come to a crushing halt. The Middle East will host no more poetry. Just this week, another Central Square venue, the Green Street Grille shut its doors, with no warning, on Demolicious, the last monthly series in the Boston area that typically featured an open mic as well as a spotlight on accomplished out-of-town readers. (Jackson Mac Low, for instance, gave his last joint reading with Anne Tardos at Demolicious about a year ago.)

With the shut-down as backdrop, poet John Mercuri Dooley, co-curator for Demolicious, invited locals to convene at his East Cambridge house Sunday to talk over next steps for the series and to read poetry. A next step, it seems, will be to canvas other bars and galleries in Cambridge for a new home beginning again in November.

Those gathered for reading and discussion of poetry included Michael Carr, Christina Strong, Irene Koronas and about a dozen area writers in all. A few read their own pieces; one of the more elaborate by artist and writer Jenny Lawton Grass whose poems wrap around long Photoshop scrolls designed to carry enormous visual and textual detail. Moses Sekajja, an Ugandan now studying at U. Mass., read from a manuscript that will be published by Pressed Wafer later this year. Work by two nonlocal poets was discussed as well, pieces by Rob Fitterman and Joan Retallack who had both been invited to read for Demolicious, but now must be rescheduled due to the shut-down. Mercuri Dooley read a selection from Fitterman's Metropolis XXX that helped shift the conversation that preceded. Questions had been thrown out by Boston writer Lisa Vaas, also co-curator of Demolicious, concerning differences between prose and poetry, and whether any 'poem' today could more generically be reclassified as prose. Fitterman is helpful in this regard in that his project turns the question around. That is, Fitterman often appropriates the blandest prose -- memo-speak, marketing jargon, polisci suburban pastiche -- and kicks it up a few lyrical notches. The poem "IX. The Hermes Effect" was one example, with lines such as these: "don't set up a vigilante eco-militant gloomsite just because / your neighbor has // don't multi-purpose mosquito netting // don't expect any new results with the gentle cycle // my other car is...stolen." The consensus: it may be hard for the literal-minded to accept this progression as lyric, but it's certainly not prose.

In a tribute to the other missing guest reader, Irene Koronas gave us her own appropriation of Retallack's text from the collection Memnoir, in which Retallack offers poems built on childhood and cultural "memories," mixing up patches of prose and verse with film noir dialog. Koronas's four-stanza poem proceeds by repeating in the original order every four-letter word used by Retallack. Koronas's last stanza:

Here that same from happ luck draw from next
Some song fill, they line fall into ruin this that only
Dust that wall into then this time read pull your fold
Tear you're here tear. Blue part you're your bend into
Make your take you're your hand into

I like reading the first iteration of "Tear" in the second-last line as a verb (rhymes with fare) and the second iteration as a noun meaning lachrymal secretion (rhymes with fear). That's a personal preference. Koronas's poem meets its borrowed text (which in turn was compiled through bowerings) more than halfway, if not as an equal, in the chaos-ordering business of making sense(s). And Koronas's poem seemed an appropriate fillip to the previous controversy regarding prose v. poetry, clearly illustrating that some text takes sense so far it doesn't stand a chance as prose. Ergo, poetry!

Killer tomatoes. The placebo in having you
Included with the survey
-- That's exactly what they want.

Jane Dark aka Joshua, 9/28, flies to find leisure's victory over play. Pursuit of a better better.

75 Mailer-Daemon messages overnight. One says, When you get a Mailer-Daemon@whatevercompany.com message in your inbox, the server at that company is informing you that it is returning your message because of some failure. The "to" e-mail address may no longer be valid, or there may be a problem routing the message to the appropriate mail server. Your domain name may be on a blacklist, and the server is refusing all incoming messages from it.

Chances are also good that you never sent the message in the first place. Your e-mail address could have easily been copied by a worm from someone else's address book and used as a "from" address without your knowledge.

Just in case I didn't know. Thanks, worm.

Combing through memos there's a world of disputes,
Churlish puffins and other problems to shatter the continuity
Of exploding over lunch; of course I mean exploring.

Every day new universes come into existence.
I like my toast with cream cheese and ketchup,
Because my car has been eaten by wolverines.

Ironic naturalists, Lisa Jarnot and Carl Martin, read at Tazza, Providence two nights ago. I don't think they perform together often and, yeah, this had to be their first time. What might strike some as a non-pairing played brilliantly to a café lit from the outside by new Beaux Arts lamps in a still half-empty arts district, and largely filled inside with arts majors feeding on the real thing.

Lisa Jarnot, who read second, started her set with a poem she said was suitable for the surroundings, and that got the audience's attention, which she never lost: the poem happens in a "sad" restaurant, with "sad" people holding "sad" menus and gazing through "sad" windows looking out at the "sad" street. Jarnot read her singable pieces uninflectedly, a dissonance that plays to mock solemnity ("tell me, poem") and tuneful reproach ("jerks of god"). Most of her poems were from Ring of Fire and Black Dog Songs, golden oldies that evoke nature's critters, "facilitator you, chinchilla, foodstuffs for the food chain..." piling on the gloomy nexus to an original state of consciousness, "the snow upon the human engine as it waits to be the snow ... unloved." The melancholy is speeded up and swervy, however, when Jarnot rubs up against a counterforce, an Anglo-American idealism -- one that I would trace to Carlyle, Hopkins, Thoreau, Santayana and Barfield, among others. This twist in the direction of abstract possibility is the rock layer, if you will, of her post-Auden, post-Dylan seduction, one that combines perceivable, iconic realities (snow, chinchillas) with imagined structure, "form untouched, unshouldered by the night."

Carl Martin, who released two collections, Your Stations, Girls and Genii over Salzburg, in the 90s, read from an unpublished manuscript that captures the "narcosis of moss," a self-fessing-up to years spent analyzing the terrains and mindscapes of the South. Based in Winston-Salem, Martin defines himself as an imagist first ("Dior jellyfish") and then a narrator; I find him an urbane Southern critic of American culture ("As the adverse account shoos flies / There are still remnants if the dynastic fan"), tart fabulist ("Golf balls are tinder in the muzzle of art") and committed practitioner of synesthesia ("be like the river chirping its brown side"). His most mind-altered and therefore most amusing piece, titled "The Prescription Drug Challenge," starts: "It was while popping members of the 'triptan' family / That I began dreaming of the South African killer bee." Here we find Martin ranking himself among the only half-successful essence-searchers, his fellow countrymen, for he knows, he says, "deep in the knobby, long distance knees of the soul" he and they can't pull it off, can't "spread all the pollen that I would like to spread." The poem and his reading concluded with mad pleas, "excise from the brain: the flesh, the hubbub..." because the contest (read: the art of composition??) is "blinding" yet "never as numbing as we would like." Instructional for the majors and me.

For Lisa Jarnot

Who will you be when our hands caress
lives of the past or linger on oranges, apples of snow,
terrific snow it is, the casinos, the snow, the lack of snow --
a blackjack of planes and volumes of ourselves
in the polished hardness of gaming from which we now
resign, in grace (3 cherries). To peachy fog.

Oldest life, oldest touch in the darkest town
(someone's quoting lyrics) buckets of reds, of other colors
to towns of red streets, carnival streets
streets of wine in bottles, women and men in town
shards of streets of seers, in towns of air.
(That was Orion whale watching.) To fillers, with pears.

I win by surrendering my hand -- fingerprints of a life --
humming to your touch making landfall, and I
toast anyone else holding the perfect suit
in focus, carnival glass, red goblets letting the workday
slide away. Afterward, I leave home and go to college
and get involved lying there facing the sky. I win, I win.

Joyelle McSweeney reviews Dark Brandon in the Fall issue of Rain Taxi. Notes "unhinged" syntax and formal variety, "rife with gorgeous divergence...canny and uncanny." Huh? Anyway, she likes it. To order.

I don't mind if I look worn or beaten up. I'm wearing
The national costume, swaggering in stretch poplin, in a trance.
I must guard against overenthusiasm.

Ghosts? Zombies? No, it's just the winged eggs
Saying surrender the galaxy or we'll cream your planet.
Sorry.

Note: Not sure I agree that collective memory
Has a "bloodstream," but it is 'inflecting,'
As poets say, and infected too.

It depends on the religion as well as the family, not to mention the poetry.

If you grew up in a family that practices a religion, and while you were still a kid if you lived in a community of diverse sects, you may recall some degree of ease hanging with your own 'pastor,' 'minister,' 'rabbi,' 'roshi,' and also how different you felt (e.g., reserved) when in the presence of their counterparts from other faiths. That sense of creedal difference begins to explain the origins of disrespect among poets and, more particularly, between schools and generations. If you grew up faithless, perhaps you have less to lose (because you are less likely to conflate sectarianism with output) and find it noncontroversial crossing thresholds.

Just a blog note.

Blog note:
In networking, as in prostitution,
There is no time for fascination.

Momentum.

Does the hair actually grow?

I'm myself on national television.

Sheer ambrosia.

Is it ever going to stop?

I was so grounded before I went on. It's intoxicating

a) the show ended

and b) c) d) being cool with it.

Writing and editing. The baby plays a larger role, so much efficiency.

Gas isn't the only fuel getting more expensive. My pr efforts are feeling the brunt

and merchandise -- I can't

but I'm looking for a creative way to split.

Recent passion's broken. You've heard.

I'm beginning to remember fuel utilization. A natural midwest

twang, old dishes, the house and the proportion that goes up the chimney

when you stay home and read lists and blogs and others' pr

on the potential in a higher price, and say things like

I would like to try growing mountain laurel but I admire my ambition,

not in the achievement, and that was a good response erased from the comments

where strength still lies and keeps us from falling further, the lower

unknown, jealousy of something, someone more violent, more efficient.

My failures show up in obvious places. It's a gradual casualization. All the majors give me the short end of the lounge. I speak English but work in Taiwanese, but yeah. I write about machines with gears that look like flip-flops. Cord organizers you can pull into natural history.

Sometimes I'm called the father of the acrylic poem.

I write on to make baggier canopies for airplanes. What appear to be frame shifts, that's like writing in 3-D. Better when I did 40 tissue poems (floorage samples) and wastepaper sestinas for Sinatra -- you know Nancy -- we liked bending rules and exaggerating everything.

I'm not afraid now even tho I employ other women who bring rotating responsibilities for child care, dizzy with blinds open, filled with weird utopian desires.

Call me one very overdue workshop assignment.

I once had a brilliant optimism. Promise of a good life. Poetry came along. I meant -- why not, let's try it. Then the coordinator wrote down something. After that I snapped.

That's the kind I am. I wake up with a face of a poet lost in my dream. Or a formula. Or lines. I dream about poetry. Sometimes in poetry. It's like a business. I could teach a course on sleeping practices, call it Meeting Renovation Deadlines. My department head would rename it Pathways, tho.

Due respect to many digitally satirical affiliates (please consider the parenthesis as from an empathizer and sometime user if not a shoulder-packing bud), woke up this morning with a formulation. Flarf = poetry on steroids. Say it isn't happening. Please.

Also, I've been forgetting (till now) to mention Julian Spahr's likening LRSN's narrative to Lisa Jarnot's terrorism poems. Template for a review?

Characteristically enigmatic reading by A. Bramhall on LRSN's The Thorn. Set, point, match! Perfecta.

Eckhart Cars
Peter Jaeger
Salt 2004

Peter Jaeger has his focus on language procedures, a busywork crossed with British country vocabulary and a hybrid back-to-modernism. A native of Canada now teaching in London, before this Salt edition he had a half dozen chaps published in the U.S. and Canada, among them, a farm-bred adaptation of language-y word clumping, Sub-Twang Mustard, and a semi-ironic tribute-in-passing to the Anglophone's seminal modernist Ezra Pound, Jaeger titling his study of the Toronto Research Group (namely a review of the writings and collaborations of Steve McCaffery and bpNicholl) ABC of Reading TRG.

With Eckhart Cars Jaeger crafts a handbook of invention drills and some extraordinary verse. First, drills. The poem "Narrow" operates on a central idea, the surface narrative is more capacious when verb objects are omitted. It begins: "Those who steer across or drive over spend every. Even while I was getting and applying, I was already full. Finally I sold." The prose piece "Martyrologies" is sustained for eight-plus pages on the passive voice dealing in death, with frequent mentions of "tied," "chained," "burnt," "beheaded," "tortured," and the like. The arcane and repetitive circumlocution is witty, especially when (wink) self-referential: "Her acts consist chiefly of a catalogue of the tortures which she miraculously survived, until she was thrown to wild beasts." I'm less fond of Jaeger's humor when he turns to rusty or even fustian diction and sentiment, "hacking out / songs -- // what we do / with roots." A poem like "So They Say" attempts a late-modernist, priggish diffidence in the form of bitter humoresque, yet it's hard to imagine even Wallace Stevens allowing "fountains lull me / into privacy."

Two notable poems are abecedarian exercises gone well. Linked phrases in "Sitting" run through the a's, b's, c's and so on, but the phrases, again, often point to the composition (wink, wink): "altering her mind amid the loud distractions / of a felted brain -- such splendour // and what it does." Lines continue to offer quaint homespun goods chopped mid-phrase: "Ere we are aware of / oat-brown bread that sent us // lies, like a wheel of warmth / because they come from depth." The poem's brilliance rolls on, however, with extra (seeming) narrative punch through alliteration, stanzas beginning "before," "breaks," "cheerfulness," "counting," "in demurest," "as you doze." (Like Jaeger, one could seemingly compose a new poem following just the alphabet words.) The much longer poem "A Black Tooth in Front," which ends the book, is more insistently abecedarian over nearly 40 pages. The alliteration here leads to frequent word recurrence, and the resultant echoing seems necessary and very British outdoorsy: "...budding trees, built / a bridge, buried among trees / burning soil, burns like one / dilated sun, burnt down / to a finger joint, burrow in the earth / bursting sun, busy human..."

The title poem opens the collection. It is multidirectional in its worldly overview of (and oblique commentary on) the admixtures of North American and British English cultures that typify the other pieces that follow. In this poem Jaeger speaks without a country, without an acquired dialect, speaking of and to an unknown "Thing" in "the future perfect" where "even you -- you even count." In twelve sonnet-like stanzas, the poem drops us off into a nowhere encircled by unlimited human scale and peril, "higher thought / thought about flight...but / if you drop away you're lost" at that point where "all the details leave us stumped" as the "dust is coming...a parachute / unfurling" over "military water." It is a poem that asks the essential modernist-and-beyond questions, who are we and what are we becoming, "who can cast a pearl, / and who from in this territory stems?" The poem slips away, but one feels elided, not lost, a participant in the "hugeness" that may be hovering "to make / our senses mind our minds."

From Publishers Weekly re: Dark Brandon by Brandon Downing.

Nothing in Downing's The Shirt Weapon (2002), which offered a highly accomplished, thornily insouciant verse, prepares one for this glossy black book, which purrs and reflects like a highly polished Mercedes that may or may not have machine guns in the trunk. It's dark, all right, and buff: "his disc breasts/ Taped down, like the King of Heaven's," the speaker doesn't so much articulate as outtalk the "pious shadow of a stocky planet's soliloquy." He does so by drawing on the major medium of representation of the last 100 years; jokingly categorized as "Poetry/Cinema Studies," the book in fact invents a new kind of ekphrasis for the moving image. Of the 50 or so poems, about half are titled after movies and utilize a combination of first person and quotation that seems to speak simultaneously to and from the films, putting the reader, uncomfortably, on-screen and in the chair all at once. The result, over the course of the book, is a brilliant self-portrait in a convex display. It's hard to quote quickly, but suffice to say that there is no other book quite like this one, "a handprint puddle leading to my blissfully angry remains."

Economics results in a wall of tiny frowny faces. Timelines are essential for marking those responsible for their dereliction. Note in April 2001 a budgetary goal is established for privatizing FEMA. In 2003 FEMA is relieved of its planning functions for preparedness, and is downgraded to a subagency for responding to crises. 2004 and 2005 see budgets slashed for the Army Corps of Engineers, grants are denied, as are 'pre-disaster mitigation' funding requests. From August 29, 2005 onwards the details are appalling. On September 1, four days after Katrina strikes, both DHS Secretary and FEMA Director blame victims. Frowny faces chatter. DHS budget critique here.

Home on the Range
Tenney Nathanson
O Books 2005

A string of cantos is never a snuggle up in your recliner read. Tenney Nathanson's Home on the Range puts you to work. Clear a subpath at your writing space, detective (and, have you got something like a light box for tracing words?), fire up your laptop (set it on Kafka texts online), and get ready to dust off some craven favorites from the bookshelves, Blue Cliff Record, The Wild Boys, Das Kapital (vol. 3). Nathanson has set down multitudes of clues in 108 verse renditions tethered to "intertexts," a brainy selection of sources from Great Books of Zen, canonized and contemporary fiction, some poems (Frost, Whitman, Gertrude Stein, Michael Davidson), even social science-as-literature, along with wild cards, at least one book on superstrings, one volume of the Norton Anthology of American Lit., etc. What he's done with these is, I think, to take whirlwind chances.

The cantos are numbered 1-108, and in an index at the end of the book each verse is keyed to a given intertext or in one case keyed to two intertexts, a diet plan and a collection of aphorisms. The relationship of a verse to its intertext is negotiable, vaporous. Canto 51 begins, "iron, in the arc, beyond the middle / searched windward, broke open to sand sloshed by waves, beautiful salty / brine dead urchins your hand..." This is keyed to Walter Benjamin's The Arcades Project, and as these three lines suggest, lexicon from the key text evaporates fairly early into an asyntactic atmosphere of misted vocabularies, some here from Benjamin's side of the cloud making machinery, little doubt, but others stirred in from other scenes, as the verse goes on, referencing "priapic genital flowers" and an "attitude looking fake." Canto 107, one that is obviously toward the end of the string, purportedly connects to Ford Maddox Ford's The Good Soldier, and here the first-person narrator is summing up things that are experienced personally: "I thought it would be different, more reflective and melodramatic...could have picked some other restaurant, book, sky, cohort, / place, and -- uh, uh. / air. intimacy is not very fond of body. fellow I asked her could he really…" A paradox of commentary, it seems, on what else might have happened in Home on the Range, commentary scored within a continuing opus of loosely fitted utterances and near-hesitations that want to cohere intimately but also need to let you know they are found, but not necessarily 'fond of their body.' The affect here is of a multiplex of textual and practiced airs strung together by whirlwinds, as noted, of plucked phrases that reward, among other things, a reader's retracing items to some sources. Hence, my suggestion for research requiring the equivalent of a lexical light box, as it were, for the tracing, alongside open books and perhaps a digital search engine to hunt down particulars.

One light box I've switched on is Koun Yamada's Gateless Gate, an intertext for Canto 14. I recognize some of Yamada's lexical items, as in the opening lines to 14: "To go against the stream we must become a child, an old man. I've heard / rumors he's alone in that mountain." Specific phrases and clauses are harder to pinpoint (if one has not committed the text to memory), but I'm secure in the belief Nathanson's concatenations are new, a child goes against the stream, and it's rumored he's alone in "that mountain," which mountain? More of interest, in just two lines Nathanson duplicates Yamada's inconsistencies of logic that underpin deeper paradoxes as distinctive features traceable to this and other Zen sources, which together comprise a dominant influence in Home on the Range. Canto 14 ends with a helpful reference to Hyakyjo, a Tang Buddhist teacher (Chinese name, Pai-Chang). This is helpful because Gateless Gate reminds us that Hyakyjo is an early rule giver in the monastic orders, one of his more sweeping rules, 'the law of cause and effect cannot be obscured.' Nathanson's cantos thoroughly obscure this point by revealing and mixing up their origins, thereby making everything clearer. It's the kind of clarity of chance-taking that is fulfilled when readers join in. Nathanson urges, "as long as you understand come back to life again / and laughing but also everything are nothing." Again in Canto 14, we can relish samples of non-Yamada vocabulary (car, photograph) as Nathanson winds up.

...like look: dirt, rock, car, the photograph of your daughter in the gold hat
ourselves from the sufferings to all this that we find
I think you will be able to recognize       I'm busy in the kitchen! Perhaps
                  Hyakyjo smiled.

This is great. Info and graphics about Christina Strong's new title from Portable, here.

Double great. Connect to Brenda Iijima's Philly Sound archive from the above link, or you can do it here.

Catastrophe is a term reserved for the horror and peril that surround millions. New Orleans is a swollen wedge of it "as morning's silver / line breaks... Irrefutable / awakening..." (from Kim Lyons's "Fat Tuesday").

A poet's prose should be harmless like an armchair.

Sunny New England. There I was. I'm a swinger through air cast opposite animated gray on white patterned with lime. I don't really enjoy the frenzy of all this spunky talk. I like riding horses, shooting pool, stripes, florals, candy-colored Converse.

My new pal Heath is upstairs tasting some tomatoes. The DNA he's introducing comes from two sources, the greeting squad whoever and a fluid point of view.

(Rain, your holiness.)

My agent is a double. From the simulacra the chimeras are as distinguishable as global nomads. No pieties held. Oh, here's one from last night. Don't sign it.

I speak with self-knowledge, house guest, a word like fresh dragon, but awkward dealing with the edge of your seat.

Nada, please be well. That please is an atheist's prayer. Have had bouts of eye and eye lid trouble, myself, now fully recovered. From that I suggest the obvious. Do the safe, predictable things, use the medicines, draw the curtains, slow it down. The first opthamologist? forget him, stick with his partner. These practitioners are mechanics, and if you get one who is puzzling -- puzzling out loud! -- you need someone else who can synthesize the data faster. Pragmatics. Again!

An emanation is a spectre brought up a peg. Just to clear things up.

I've moved.

Here's the outline. A few strings were pulled to get me in this new place with marble inlays I would never have chosen on my own. They're just givens with the place, the island, along with the house boy. He's mine for the interim or he can be swapped if I want. He's fine as is, but enough about that. I'm here.

This is where I live and work, and I like what I do. I'm a bit but an integral bit of the new Vegas. Not everyone who visits wants to cash out on slots or floor shows, though the blockbuster right now is Tutankhamen and the Golden Age of the Phallus. They don't even want gratuitous sex all the time. Sex and violence here fall in the red light category, like when a live, naked female gets in the midst of intercourse with someone who could be a boss, only to be interrupted by her mother, his boss, so mom and the girl go at it and the guy gets ripped open. This passes as a talking point for sailors in black leather in the I Hate Perfume Gallery. Another instance has a nearly naked woman and a man in a genius gee-string coupling in an elevator, fully aware of the security cameras under and above them. It's lame until she pulls out his teeth and syringes his gums.

What I do is in a new, white light category. It's talk and insults, no touching with hands and very little sex with drugs, and because of this, a mostly young male clientele ditches the mask and cloak, and comes to me for help achieving a competitive smile, that maxillary edge you own only if you go a little overboard.

I've got a thought altering maintenance regime that hits where it counts, mentalist landscape.

Sounds too simple? Affluent effeminate guys get to a point where they think they're not deep enough: "I only want to lie on my back and read a book." That's where I step in. I get boys to want to read and write. These guys have to have something that's been missing, they need to think of new ways to "energize." So an increasing number, some with royal pedigrees, are turning up at my clinic. I do a lot of different 'next big things' -- from Naropa 101 stuff, like the architectonics of abusive power talking; to master level customized reconceptualization, similar to what goes down at Brown; to wholesale W. S. Merwin memory-as-cartography; to male phrenome moderation (recolonizing Whitman and Rousseau); to island-wide seminars on intellect retriggering and re-altering that I run with Camille Paglia. Or, sometimes it's my house boy. Look, I said this is white light.

One client I've especially affected has a roundish face, green eyes and a slender but blunt nose that hardens his otherwise unrecognizable features. He identifies with the sadness of phantoms. "When I read about them I keep wiping tears from my neck, but I didn't know I could write like them before I met you." After that, Paglia snuggled nearer and asked him, "Can I shit next to you on the ride over?" The client's bodyguard who also has green eyes looked puzzled and pleased, whispering to me, "I think he's getting his energy back."

Missing Nick. Last post cites Paul Auster's blankness. It's a two-week-old event that laid down the it-seems-as rule, as though its reproduction pulverized the aura of Nickness.

Like journalism, this starts with a point. I believe in my mistakes.

It's not what you bring. It's what you take away.

Every relationship has ups and downs. I'm a writer with leg stress and now I want everything, everything but him.

A third party is hovering and ideas just bubble like impulsive action figures.

I've been in the center of a pregnancy riddle, so I'm confessing now I'm with child.

Yeah, and then a thank you.

Making love with him was a mistake, and a health threat!

The cosmos has some real trouble keeping secrets.

I was extremely interested when others told me of their own pregnancy experiences.

I had wanted to try for a baby.

After that they called each other constantly on the phone. This points out the danger of inappropriate friendships in an atmosphere-filled marriage.

Next, I was spotted in a mini-mart buying Reese's.

The deal was unsealed in e-mail:

Our separation is not the result of any speculation reported by the tabloid media. This decision is the result of much thoughtful consideration.

Yeah. He was contaminated and it was downhill all the ice-rocket way, irreconcilable differences classified in ambivalence as urbanistas put it. We'd been together since being set up for an NEA panel, "a farce on a blind date." Some others attended, so it felt a little "arranged" for a comic literary debut, a Mormon humoresque, that's what it read like.

So I began stocking up on junk food and writing at work to protect myself from emotional infidelity. I'm a writer.

We became co-owners. I felt fear, mistrust, doubt and insecurity. When his own parents split up, it's hard to delude yourself.

Thanks, prisoner, for letting me sleep in.

Reality read us like old ruins and sludge. Our compatibility rating was shipped to a low-level waste dump. He's a talker and I'm a slouch. The red monkey designs for him; I'm wearing Edwin jeans.

Waking up with lobster and champagne in a swarm of grunts, a honeymoon suite in customer relations.

We loved working together.

Appearing quite close, slogging through output, air puff pies, peche glaze, sprinkled with puppy chow. That's why we happily remain committed and caring friends.

Underutilized Species
Poems by Cook, County, Crane, Doud, Lansing, Pruitt, Strong
James Cook, Editor
(Self-published for New Arts Festival, Gloucester, MA)
2005

Last Friday in Gloucester mostly local writers gathered for a poetry marathon that included Gerrit Lansing, Patricia Pruitt, Sara Stozer (reading work by the late Linda Crane), James Cook, Patrick Doud, Christina Strong and Mike County. The event was scheduled for a pierside as part of the New Arts Festival, but because of rain, it was moved to the Universalist Unitarian Church. This is a serene edifice of severe, Cromwellian design, which stands tall at the center of a half-block green and, as it sometimes happens in New England, towers over the cottage-like Episcopal chapel, its neighbor on the left.

Lansing started his reading at dusk. A milky aquamarine shone through opened doors, one at street level to the right of the reader, another on the second story, left of center, above. The visual then was of the poet in black at the chancel proscenium foregrounding a barren whitewashed nave lit by failing shore light from two doors, above and right.

Perhaps in tribute to the occasion, Lansing introduced what seems from a number of the readers a communal and fairly nostalgic analysis of Gloucester-as-myth and things-Massachusetts for allegorically figured poetry. Lansing's is a straightforward memory of the city and the Atlantic surround, "the pattern we are hung up on." In the poem "Blue Decrepit Town" Lansing notes impressions from decades ago when, as "a heartland boy," as he puts it, he first visited Gloucester while a Harvard undergrad. Lansing's impressions here do not advance beyond scene setting notations, "nervous, / thinking of sex, / thinking of the ocean..." capped with iconic elements that push the narrative into tall tale-telling, "a golden lion...grabbed by the throat of the mind...as song flickers."

By the time Patricia Pruitt stood up, only minutes after Lansing began, the street level door turned onyx, while the second story door shrank inside dark, saline blues, leftovers from sunset. Under the asymmetrical light-fall Pruitt (who, like Christina Strong, is not from Gloucester) read other pieces than her poem in Underutilized Species, including one she said was "recently untitled" (or at least that is how I heard her describe it). Her published poem, "The Good Old Days," merges tributes to James Schuyler and bay stater Fanny Howe, along with more mytho-reminiscing, "remembered looking into...a microscope, a telescope / And the third eye all at once." For a change of pace, Patrick Doud read multithemed segments from a single manuscript called "Bomb." Doud wrestles with autumnal tones streaked with a North Shore sobriety -- "life reuniting with the whole. // The whole, which is death?" -- sometimes mixing springy dayglows -- "the policeman in the sky"; "me and the zombies of May." A sustained sequence of allegorical events and off-rhyme (phlox / Rock; prickery / Desperately) bare a poetics that is more buttoned down than the title "Bomb" implies, but the venture, which reexamines the occult and other orthodoxies against "the pink // brightness of brain," appears more ambitious and more of a piece than a ten-minute selection might reveal.

Sara Stozer read poetry by Linda Crane, a deceased Gloucester poet who labored under the influence of Charles Olson and seashore imagery. I found it hard to follow these simple lyrics as other than denatured and derivative, given the subtitle, "in dogtown there is a constant spring" and lines such as, "the bird's head opens spilling / milkweed like our blood." In welcomed, hard boiled contrast, Mike County sketches patches of things kept at arms' length that turn out to be real nature poems, including one in memory, possibly, of that milkweed-headed bird, titled "Robin": "Said to be a species...a trick / a deck of pinstripes shuffled... // Say the robin doesn't return? // Wonderful. I'll shell out the money / for wood to burn memory."

James Cook gave a surprising performance tailored to be site-specific, reading from a manuscript he calls "Sugar Cane." I'm told he read these pieces concerning a "faceless" dictatorship for which "all men are servants," partly as "a knee to the groin" of New Arts Festival organizers, protesting the $20 entrance fee for the night's reading ($10 for 'poets'). In a natural, unforced timbre, not straining, de-modulated or otherwise separated from his text, Cook argued to several points -- he subtitles his piece in Underutilized Species "an argument concerning liberation." The "all brown" guard who is "inside and outside ... sits. apart. he sits apart and looks out" on the cane workers and sugar fields within the painting and inside a "dialogue," both painting and dialogue "fixed as in a book. a page you turn." Although the city and state are unnamed, layers of observed-observer complicity and servitude duly registered.

Just giving name to somewhere in poetry, while necessary at times, is a tad reductionist; that's what Christina Strong seems to be saying in response to the Festival and to herself. That perplexing gamin of Black Mountain-by-the-Sea (i.e., Gloucester) seemed awakened and fully alert as Strong read poems about poetry and against the sociopolitical stranglehold of the "narrow as we say conservative." Her poems fell atonally like wee bricks of Somerville sensimilla (a rare species of milkweed) spinning pollen over the fertile runnels and dark pews of Universalist Unitarian. Hers were the only poems off narrative, but they made perfect 'sense' if by making sense we mean they are more than a little tormented as they comment on the moment, on limits of poetry, even while coincidentally picking up others' themes: "...wander beach and all these / fucking pictures, question of pay out or cash inn / name place       zombie all the time." Her poem in Underutilized Species, "mr super stupid head," speaks as a primer on what to hate in strivers' composition, "catalogue group / or specify trickster... // relaxed that this justifies that... / or hem tone to be as that just / throw up or puke the etymology of / pathos." I just had to laugh. In Cromwell's church.

Where Shall I Wander
John Ashbery
Ecco 2005

Like jewelry that inspires online dating, there's always been a dauntless, what-the-h excellence to John Ashbery. It's in the language. Were one's camp bent to flaunt a capacity for twisting lexical items into shimmering bagatelles, one might generate apparently purposeless, American-sounding contexts for Latinate neologisms "susurrate," perhaps, "asperging," "septuor." Or one could try balancing archly-poetic apparatus atop prosaic stumpers like chthonic, tilth, ormolu, portcullis, and others.

A sign of more twistiness from Ashbery is his selection of poems, dropping indifferent leitmotifs in the midst of Where Shall I Wander that contrast with stronger, more aesthetically inscrutable (and therefore more deeply amusing) works in the beginning and closing sections. These pieces intricately meander, as if exercising five -- or what the h -- ten fingers, throwing away end lines, for instance, "sunflowers over and out, / ashes on the clapboard credenza" and "with God's help and that of the fuchsia, the / orange, and the dahlia." A poem such as "The Red Easel," smack in the middle of the book, appears to break a rule of Ashbery's in that it's easily paraphrased: 'Your style is passé and unserious, but -- chicks! pullets! -- watch out! "those swags...of the wrong period" fit in, sort of, and they may not be so fowl.' A barnyard screech ("the plaint / of hens pierces dusk like a screen door") gives notice that even midway filler from Ashbery is more hilarious, livelier, crazier than most meistershaft from other poets, living or otherwise.

The poem "Ignorance of the Law Is No Excuse" leads off. It warns us of spiders and then famine, and all the neighbors who've disappeared; ultimately it mourns meritocracy in the chill. The poem also, predictably, queries, "Hadn't we known it all before?" The question and not merely the sobering figures in the poem that prompt it are now-familiar outgrowths of a "skid-row, slapdash style." That "slapdash" echoes an "average violin" from the lead poem, "Street Musicians," twenty-five years earlier, or the repetition of "sometimes," twenty years earlier, "we think of him sometimes" from another first poem, "At North Farm," which concludes, "Is it enough ... // Sometimes and always, with mixed feelings?" Relax and thus beware. Affirmative retraction of falsehood within artifice is once again, in "Ignorance of the Law Is No Excuse," "the bottom-most step. There you can grieve and breathe."

This role for poetry as "scrambled then resurrected" intervention (to borrow from the title poem, the last in the collection) seems ample incentive reinforcing wordplay and compositional strategies decades in the formulation, now in full force. I could still ask, Why not have the poet elder bust heads, finally breaking with poise? "It is understood that this is now the past, sixty, sixty-four years ago," but it would be only a "clobbered effect," and not a "fully aware" clobber at that, simply to chow, chug, burp and merely mean it: "In the end the jazz reaches will effort it out. Darn it." Or, a more assiduously brusque put-down: "contingency is all the rage here." I'm OK with Ashbery's findings on limits -- "there are none that can placate us" -- clearly part of the contractual fine print in "figure-ground dilemmas." Speaking of the buffest limit, he knows "the season backed up" and the other, sooner or later, mutates into a snowman "headed for warmer climes." I'm more than OK, though, with Ashbery's waiting for the right guest to show up, finally, any way, and with his attendant, goofed-with nostalgia-in-advance for what the guest might do to set fire to the proceedings, and, you know, I feel a frisson of enthusiasm for what comes next: but "would you do it differently?" Remember me, Ashbery pleads mixedly, "Make it stick." No, forget that, no memorial, please, as it just "fumbles its own branching hee-haw." I paraphrase, yet Ashbery is calling us, as it were, as it is, to trace all winged events back to our favorite position in the home -- home, one of those "nutty concepts," he says, it says -- why, it's right here in the kitchen -- of all places -- the hearth where whole generations once got skewered and braised fare to "'bounce' with the ages" in light, airy inattention achieving this splurge of one, this one coupling, "forever." The title poem and the book end -- necessarily unpleasantly, instructively -- on this "forever." "Was that you sermonizing? Go right ahead, be my guest."

A part of what blogging does is let you note what's of passing interest that could be more than of passing importance, to you, maybe to others. E.g., I'm instructed by Alice Notley this morning, writing about O'Hara in the first essay of Coming After, re-alerting us to the significance of his last poems, which I still resist, and whose voice is "anonymous and communal (in the bad sense) in its exploitation of verbal mediocrity." Notley sees O'Hara influenced by the "deadly flat diction" (the first generation of such pervasiveness) from television, thus O'Hara's influenced by sounds of the heinous sort, offering up "warnings." Also in the first essay, on an earlier poem of O'Hara's, Notley avers, "the Buddha fucking well ought to think at this point in history," a rousing supposition on her part about what O'Hara meant by ending "Image of the Buddha Preaching" this way: "...hopeful of a new delay in terror / I don't think" -- timely of O'Hara and Notley.

I note, and this seems of little importance, since I'm saying this with some sense of self-parody, the Great Painter of 8/11, below, is a composite of nonmutual attractions. He is, no latitude, no doubt at all, self-devouring. Moving on in no order, I see Yuri Hospodar continues to live drug-free in ways that are unguarded, uncooked. He's vacationing in Queensland for crissake. And thanks to Gary for a positive read on Tim's and my sleight of hand on Tues. A name I haven't but might run across, Nathaniel Tan. Here's what Aaron Kunin suggests, "never put on your / blindfold (unfold and / study but do not // put it on)."

I decided to blow off breakfast at Jordan's. Tim and I had given this last-minute reading on the Bowery the night before, and I was ready for a different caliber of experience. The no-thing I needed was another huddle with a fab-five wordsmith.

Great Painter had been working all Tuesday and into the night (that's why he blew off my reading). He was spraying a last round of soft vellum pellets (hydrothermal collagen buffered in magnesium carbonate) across what may have added up to forty or fifty paint boards lined against a single wall and part of the floor next to it. I stumbled into the warehouse and looked around before Painter decided to acknowledge me. "Hey, Frosty." Painter's boards were filled to their edges with intricate, cleanly rendered crosshatches over pastel word clumps that seem like busy but cool, almost ambient absence of thought. The vellum changed that impression a bit. A busy, cool thoughtlessness that's slimed, maybe.

Great Painter's is a huge, chai-shade of a space, all the more impressive in that it's Nolita, not Brooklyn. It was 9:30 am, and Painter was wide awake like me. I brought him a tall white mocha quad shot from Palacinka, along with final galleys of Tan's review in Art Forum.

Now gray-beard Tan is no friend of artistry that's not connected to the minimalist-to-rock music scene downtown. (That's why his last piece, on Joseph Deumer, was such a slog.) But this time Tan is breaking the mold, calling Painter "a celebrator of extemporaneity, with a look of the city in which rehearsal space is outrageously expensive and difficult to come by." Painter found this insulting, though, and after reading it, threw his mocha quad at the boards. I'm glad I wasn't crawling on the floor when he did. I could have been!

Back, a while back, when I'd been seriously interested in seeing new things as a lifestyle, Painter had been my trainer. He had been the first man to read poetry to me. And I admit, I had loved every gorgeous second of it, and every hour. I needed a man to be strong, insistent even blinded to others' views, like Kent von Plunk, say; I don't understand it, but that newly awakened need in me was one of the motives for my final 'break' with the ordinary literary scene, aka Flatland Convention, a realization that I can't really write straight stuff anymore, stuff that merely tickles the vast audience of perverse bloggers in the Flyover into incoherence. I'm more hetero than even I like to think, yet guy-to-guy poetry rough-housing is attractive, an overwhelming thing that possesses me and takes me over, but in the long run I can't do it forever, I guess. I'm going to continue to write, but this imitating of any of the crooked, sociopathic second-order parodists has got to come to an end. This is why I came to Painter's, to reason with him, to tell him.

There was one thing Painter had wanted me to try one last time, to imitate von Plunk's style and even his substance, what's left of it, and even though in my heart I had wanted it -- wanted it badly -- I had decided this morning not to give either of us the satisfaction. What am I doing here? The question brought a smile to my lips; the last time I'd gone in search of Painter I'd unwittingly ended up under his chain-of-command and was quite pleasantly talked to by him as he read imitation haiku to me. But no, I said, "Painter, you're an artist for goodness sake, not a sputtering poet. Stop paying shit tribute to all that. Quit it."

He smiled and soon after that he threw me out, with a lovely pat on my hiney.

I rule for a higher authority, like John Roberts.

Just when summer seemed to take over... holding you in its hot Hesperides.

Tim Peterson and me [sic] will read some collab stuff

this Tues. 6pm

Bowery Poetry Club

308 Bowery, a foot off First Street
between Houston & Bleecker
across the street from CBGBs --
take the F train to Second Ave, or 6 train to Bleecker.

Sample:

Notes to Chagall

"Floating violins and shit" says Marlene Chalk-Outline,
Central director of Oculus Cooperation

If you paint the flowers correctly
The flowers. Several crayons acted mind-numbingly cute

Several blocks away, a mythic character
Awakes in concrete, and decently you pull away, feeling

Look, a flying cow. Unable to establish deep feeling
Corners fold into something you can grok with lunch

Just then, a baker acted like panic sweeping
Up after art history.

There's real worms in this chocolate bar,
Mmmm I'd like to put my Hamilton in.

When Master arrives I curse the mealymouthed misfits.
Her favorite hatbox is in surgery. Aisle five.

Meanwhile, you reawake very much the case. A case of voice
Over matte finish. Hubbubs of grammar. I meet a boy.

His thinking had a shot of morphine, something
We need to split a panino, watching, feeling

Lurid potpourri in the windowbox explode --
Your own violence frightens you hailing a cab

Now the young ambivalent floats back into the vile
God -- the doctor pauses, we don't have a choice

When he awakes in a cocoon of dead ants, the pain!
We are going to have to amputate them.

The human body is a hit. The bolt of cloth catches him from
The right like a vase of bursts from his throat

I obtained some plastic car crash charts at that altitude.
Was covered with shiny black hair. A player

Over half a million works attributed
When in Rome, her studio has a pointy head.

-- Nannette N'est

Sample another.

"Camp Messianism, or, the Hopes of Poetry in Late-Late Capitalism"
Christopher Nealon
American Literature 76, No. 3 (September) 2004

[First paragraph deleted because J.C.'s d/l of the month is not to be publicized. Let's just say it pertains to what follows.]

Nealon's is compelling academic analysis of the most current sort, intelligently weaving (intelligently designing??) Frankfurt School precepts, queer theory, postcolonial studies, feminism, etc. to sharpen our view of a now-perceivable fissure between language and post-language. The former is characterized as a formalist, abstract, technique-conscious poetry of non-closure, with movement (of many sorts) as its ultimate goal and ongoing promise. Post-language is seen as more a poetry of waiting within, rather than movement away from, a totalizing capitalism, nonetheless a polemical poetry that fluctuates between abstract and concretion, fluctuating so unceasingly in the case of Rod Smith's The Good House that Nealon marks this as exemplary of post-language engaged in a process of observing itself as matter -- that is, as part of the problem -- a "second-order allegory that performs and figures the vicissitudes of materiality -- its dissatisfaction with itself as material."

I'm stimulated by Nealon's concern with the "impasse" in literary studies and routine, "self-insufficient" critical reading that has "sacrificed the critical potential of appreciation and advocacy in favor of what has become a rote 'problematization,'" admitting only a text's subversiveness as a quality to admire. Nealon choses his admired texts carefully, focusing on early poems from Joshua Clover, Lisa Robertson's Debbie: An Epic and Kevin Davies's Comp., as well as Smith's The Good House. Thus equipped, Nealon observes the rapaciousness of contemporary poetic practice, one that would have and eat the material world. His essay is a singular accomplishment, stylishly argued, telling us something totally new.

Brandon on Brandon.

Time-out for a demonstration in lift and shift. My post responds to a guest on ___, 8/1.

I will refer to X, Y, Z.

Jest for the record, homey, when you lift text by X and decide what X means by re-categorizing X's aesthetic statement as a "moral decree," you're illogical. It's a trick from the demagoguery tool kit, the one that playwrights, political operatives, comparison-advertising copy writers, and other practitioners in Theater of the Absurd turn to when they need to make something up. The category shift allows for homey's argument to creep along an extremely narrow lofty-seeming toe path landscaped with an implicit passive voice:

But it soon becomes clear that the real (though unnamed) target of X's cry of "Enough" is not the moral arrogance of the Bush administration, but the "righteous monologue" of Y...

Clear to homey?

Those who have been following the discussion in "innovative" poetic circles...should be able to see that X intends his statement, in part, as a response to Z's talk of a few weeks back...

The voice changes into a conditional pronouncement: if you could grasp what homey posits, then X's intention would be what homey says it is, at least "in part."

The deployment of this logic is not only bullying, it is bull.

You must be exhaustive in your Karl Rove gray.

Think you're the only one with a thesaurus folding the page?

Saw you from across the party, lumpen spittle of unending distress.

Got my satellite tag on. Comely, the fears of hapless jubilo.

You be a woman I'll be a man. The simple complex dance of entire atonement --

Your hiney is special, a real handful! Magisterium of the lily,

No touching of the hair or face...inurer of scars and speechelessness

You sex panther. Timeless healer. Laborer of the word!

Jazz flute's always been a passion of mine.

Speaking of collaboration and my pal Kent Johnson. Just received a copy of his Lyric Poetry after Auschwitz, sent me by Scott Pierce. Thanks, Scott.

I got this in my regular mail after posting my poem to Gary, with comments on collaboration and KJ, below. So coincidence. So,

Included among the book's "eleven submissions to the war" is one collaboration I worked on with KJ and, last time he and I talked, was set to appear in the final issue of Skanky Possum. That's not happened, and I guess with Kent's publishing the piece it's not going to. So,

Why in any decent vector of friendship and cooperation would Kent not ask my ok to have our collaboration included in his book? Failing a request, why not a pro forma heads-up from Kent that it would appear?

It's baffling.

Also, while I'm at it: I find KJ's diatribe against Charles Bernstein in the afterword of Lyric Poetry after Auschwitz absurdly reasoned and bullying. It's offensive. I condemn it.

Gary Sullivan opened his comp process to the public, inviting comment focused particularly on the editing of his 'fakebook' of poetry. Responses to his invitation will be part of Gary's compilation process in gathering material. There is the additional enticement of Gary's possibly including some commentary from others within the fakebook, a socializing gesture which in a way reminds me of Kent Johnson's recent solicitation of over thirty poets to write 'blurbs' for a manuscript and concatenating these into an ironic preface of jokeful abandon and mild praise.

The externalizing of collaborative procedures is very much now, in both these instances, and returning to Gary for the moment, I'd like to contribute something I call To a Fakebook.

Your poetry is so preliminary
I reserve comment

Don't get above wrong
There's below to talk about

I remember those breasts

Geometry that respects the brain,
Fred Astaire kind of shit.

Somebody feel like a piggyback
We just drove all the way

From Michigan? Saul Bellow proves
Uncreatured narcosis aggregates

Drifting toward our lives
Classizing the senses

Just before you shave. I'm

Sitting on your blanket. I'm
Over you now. I'm half-awake

Falling asleep in its presence.
It's deeper than that really.

Occupied
Carol Mirakove
Kelsey St. Press 2004

We infrequently see war chronicles migrating to literature. Moreover, political ire is hardly the most promising surface motive for sustaining the language and procedures of contemporary poetry. At once crowd pleasing and momentarily cathartic as it is to trash social scientists in today's Washington, in particular, the ones in charge of torture and murder, topical rant over time virtually never enjoys the staying power of a good read, much less of a good book of poems. Carol Mirakove's first book-length collection breaks precedent by piling on one outrage after another (there are plenty to choose), deploying plain semantics to make a poetry that deplores constitutional debasement through which politicos are "cooking the books to a crisp...no checks. no balance." a poetry that is foundational and daring by idealizing democracy in its lack of practice and emphasizing the poet's role in it as "living in public is a full time job."

Occupied is divided into three sections, Afghanistan, Iraq, and New Order, reportage that reorders events and consequences with utmost post-language efficiency: "I spotted / 'unimaginable'      children, who looked to be / 'deeds'       the age of twelve / like a catnap.       locked up." The Iraq section shifts tempos, speeding along via juxtaposition in the poem self-knowingly titled "I remember" -- "unleashing     waiting     chemicals or be invaded" -- and slowing down to a crawl of full stops to ponder the nearly obvious -- "Chile, deadened by apathy by two decades of dictatorship. AUGUSTO / PINOCHET. what will happen to us. has happened. is. active." Mirakove reserves the last section, New Order, for a mélange of more personal cum public furies in which compassion is mocked as so much "pixie dust"; the writer's role is reduced to "denial," "long-winded change :: conceit of moral mudflaps // if your culture is broke :: extrapolate"; and a collective complicity is decried in consumerist terms, "the boy died because / filthy shelf-life keeps us from the files."

The 'light hand' of Mirakove's lyricism 'of the moment,' evident in an earlier, pre-Iraqi Freedom chap book, temporary tattoos, takes on graver times of intense turmoil and disagreement about the sources of evil planet-wide. The resonant patterns of sampled phrases for the chap book concerning pets, e-commerce, fantasy love life, and other workaday discourse re-emerge here in black garb: "I am so deeply ashamed to be at work today." There is far less fusion of daydream as fact. War does that to you. In Mirakove's case, war occasions reconditioned response -- "journalists asked 1,200 U.S. citizens how many Iraqis were among the 9/11 hijackers & only 17% answered correctly: ZERO" -- as well as application of "CPR to our blackened memory." Through her writing on warfare, Mirakove maintains her allegiances to poetic practices that are largely epistemological in that they can "make tonight another day" when (which?) "american women married" even though "i am a monster…i can contribute & bemoan. my options dotted lines. they call it 'cell damage,' / or learning as i go."

I would rather have your fingers in my mouth than "find my own voice."

-- Jeff Dersken

Lick and lick for extra milk...

-- Sianne Ngai

The point is to go to the bailes and dance like mad.

-- Sasha Frere-Jones

Another 90+ degree day here in Boston -- in fact, it was so hot I went down to hear John Wieners read just to be near a cold streak;

it's so steamy I walked up to a boy selling lemonade and just got the lemonade;

foetry 'poets' walking down the sidewalk spontaneously burst into flames;

so hot Harold Bloom was keeping cool by putting frozen meat patties under his arms;

he needed a spatula to remove his shirt;

I was sweating like Ted Hughes watching an episode of "Cheaters";

such a scorcher today Nick Piombino was linking for a Klondike Bar;

the editors of The Best American Poetry took their hands out of their pockets to fan themselves;

it was so hot some deconstructionists committed suicide because they knew it's cooler in hell.

Funny talkers, John Denver, gopher wars, much more in the yuriverse.

Brother Murphy is bouncing.

I can't afford to compose a new poem, because still I am translated Crockodile. Akuh is my teacher but he's now with me. I had never seen with person who lied. Much fun. You know what? It's searing in Korea. It's nice I have a pile of maps from Akuh sitting in the cafeteria. Really. The bookshelves are lined up and nearly bare. Send bank routing number and please. And account info.

I am so overwheled I have to excuse myself. I do not consent.

The current paucity of flamboyant yet impressionable personalities among poets, on one hand, is a hallmark of the so-called silver age we Americans appear to be slipping and stumbling goofily into. I prefer, Moses said, that the fast-speaking and acid-addicted dwellers of mag scenes of the 70s and well into the 80s (it was all such a bullet train, for a while) are lightening up and toning down their inner ruddy imps, in love with their integrity, enjoining others against acquisition of capital and real estate. (I say good riddance to the old guys even though I'm one. I suppose. And, sure, I miss open markets in fresh sex and poetic influence. But it's still out there if you look for it. I get mine on the internet.)

After Loy, after Creeley, after Ashbery, after Helen Adam for goodness sake, among today's attention getters, what passes for poetry-outrage forces one down on one's knees begging it to please stop just for an hour, a couple of minutes, for a second, just stop, stop it. Stop and read back to what's not negotiable. That is, begging it if one noticed. This is not the age of taking note or notice, more a time for being noticed, woof, or being definitively noted. And it's a time for coveted linkage to, rather than taking notice of, others who are linked too, co-equality, I believe, of information circuitry and control-C that's cool. Hey, there are genuine breakthroughs in performance and text but far less of the dialogic mind swap among practitioners that leads to love and betrayal. Less personism to invest.

On the other hand, there is no personality, so why beat anyone up? We can read back but never go back to reconstruct the innocent-seeming turrets and loggias, the ones built on foreign capital, say, overlooking the exciting first days of liberating Presbyterianism. Or the balconies in New York, after Harvard, filling with oratorios based on love letters About our sexual habits in the early 1950s. It wasn't that these stories weren't true, Only that a different kind of work Of the imagination had grown up around them, taller Than the redwoods, and not Wanting to embarrass them, effaced itself To the extent that a colossus could, and so you looked And saw nothing, but suddenly felt better Without wondering why.

Effacing personality for a colossus. That's really cool.

Personality organized around the principle "a different kind of work of the imagination." Quality surreal?

If I were foolish, I would describe our "age," for quality assurance and training purposes, as the one just before the death of death. We are approaching New Venice. So far, our 'reports' and poetry are about the food and beaches. Lovely but. The cross-hatching which allowed our ancestors to exchange certain genetic traits for others...has just about run out of steam, and has left us wondering, once more, what there is about this plush solitude that makes us think we will ever get out, or even want to. It's nice to finally be able to put a face to the humiliating nickname.

1-800-Flowers
Robert Fitterman
porci con le ali 2005

Despairing of dead-ended self-regard, "the self-valuable word" embedded in instrumental discourse, Bob Perlman ("Words Detached from the Old Song and Dance") points to sources, mapping, among other things, Quintillian's rhetoric, noting key components, meaning, clarity and tasteful adornment or decoration.

Meaning and clarity are no problem for Robert Fitterman: "weeds we may not always / have emptied this meaning for / a top-growth peel-back of another."

When it comes to adornment, which involves making sense of / sense in any alteration of literal expression (via figures, montage or other prosodic devices), Fitterman is a decorator's decorator.

With 1-800-Flowers, Fitterman smartly "updates" sources for Louis Zukofsky's last completed poem 80 Flowers, a construct that "takes to new extremes of density Zukofsky's methods of composition by quotation, transliteration, and compression" (Mark Scroggins, Louis Zukofsky and the Poetry of Knowledge). Fitterman's update is one that details and in ways deconstructs these extremes by establishing compositional processes and more specifically an inventory of strategies as its topics and meta-topics; it seems less concentrated on first-order phenomena than the original, absorbing and commenting on more variations in sampled material, as well as imposing a socio-historical import to "the montage of borrowed texts." In this regard, Fitterman is correct, I think, inferring a "complex" and "compassionate emotion" on the part of Zukofsky. Fitterman's evidence for this turns at once general -- citing Zukofsky's "love of language his / consciousness of word combinations" -- and then returns as a wildly particular conflation of fate, the personal and the botanical, offering that Zukofsky compiles text and thus, like Walter Benjamin, "whims earth copulating with / itself ... bunkered ... [a] cloistered...monastery like refuge / every lawn gets winter kill / I'm an ex-chemical-fertilizer junkie go / Ask Fran... // Sometimes I feel like my / lawn is calling the shots."

Fitterman decorates with inventory of similarly conflated devices, writing in two sections "About" and "Through" Zukofsky's work. He frames Zukofsky's text as "constrictive verse" that gets "driven" by inventory, while his own lyric comprises mixed inventories within a discourse hybrid, an essay in verse, substantiation of Fitterman's exemplary reading, that is, his generatively engaging Zukofsky, as Ron Sillman observes (ronsillman.blogspot.com [7/11/05]). More splendid, Fitterman fulfills the half-audible invitation within Zukofsky's poetry and poetics, joining the firm Zukofsky & Son whose décor ethos is "precise information... thinking with the things as they exist" inside a recontextualized (if not continuous) present in which Fitterman fixes "new meanings of word against word" (Prepositions).

The update follows the formal constraints of 80 Flowers. Each page of 1-800-Flowers presents a single 8-line verse, each line limited to, yet overflowing with, 5 words (against words), new meanings for Fitterman's wider range of quotidian intersections, frequently represented with visual acuity. The verse "Toll Free" shows "mechanicalism in / the high fog ... now you can turn off / the sprinkler free lions in / the mist." Also from the second section "Through," the verse "1-800-End-Edit" begins, "Rains grammar private floral varieties," a ricochet of sorts from a poem in the first section "About" that asks how methodology "add[s] up meaning the sum of the montage."

Thinking through and about 1-800-Flowers I feel some of the pleasures for a reader-writer -- Fitterman -- who focuses on another's -- Zukofsky's -- vision, which on the page is usually unrequited, propositional. The surprise is the collaboration comes off as altogether foreseeable, both their poetries feeding and spreading into one another like a lawn "calling the shots."

L'eau d'Issey

There's a flu in thu brain hunting for life

thu

laid-back nurturer = stressed-out bitch

iBook G5 = Rave MP

deep purple = moody blues

thud

serotonin orbiting Gilese 876

itching time, no she doesn't

Ireland has 8 first languages

Jamaica 6 bloods and platelets

where do you speak?

fruitfully aggressive = fruitlessly submissive

medical tests fall thud

thu night before it's a health food

solitary = promiscuous

absorbs heat Cornish

limsups, epsilons and a role in proof

thu way puffy cumulus form

bigger webs impeding flows

of our planet's kith

had your booster scattered light

still a mix of all these colors

which isn't thu whole story

thud mayor woke up at 4

to drink champagne with his wife

just 2 of thu counted

social / faithful

I was like you sold my book!

yeah, but it was mine

binge eaters tech serve

feeling toxic? I think disappointed

= too strong.

A failure on all parts. Got no itch to bed a woman who strokes my cheek and writes about it as ballistic foreplay. The love-war para-metaphor hurts, kills, so don't read or be read into its smaller but smarter reinstatements. Hey, breadwinner, we're breathing in moonlight.

By Poetics I mean the List.

Hardly the first intimation of this, but the question is, has Poetics been reduced to a lonely hearts message board?

Captions for photo, below.

(a) Hermitage and freedom combine, so humane-hold-em hideaways work!

(b) The hashish of space.

(c) Focusing on accountability!

(d) Governing these days sweet Jesus is like exposing all your skeletons to gain a hilltop on seamless mannerism, or maybe it's sort of more like modifying your memories in an oblique self-interrogation where you can share your conventions and broker a plan!

(e) The Darwinian environment is a robust lifestyle of illuminating the other day when you were reading a pile of old emails that do not become a solid thing -- just impossible! -- like cutting into the same birthday cake twice and seeing blood drizzle out.