Caution extracted from D Cooper's experience, back up the blog -- source pages as well as text. Something to do between games this Thursday.

~~

Mr. Chapbook is a woman. Thanks for asking.

~~

(If you call a poetess Boy, is that condescending.

I didn't think so.)

Dennis Cooper reports that his old blog address has been hacked. His new address is http://denniscooper-theweaklings.blogspot.com/. Given blogspot's lack of response, it's a surprise Dennis sticks with them. Anywho, there you go, webbie.

Please understand the following turn of logic as you approach 2007. This blog was not made available to you from pantaloons.blogspot.com. You received access to this blog because you are a reader of Pantaloons.

Needed now: poets with a dot.com2 mentality.

The combined net worth of the poet avant community won't pay for a single broken or chipped Richard Tuttle. You wonder why we have to cover our throats?

And by the way Mr. Chapbook (Boy), you're fucking welcome.

Not that that's nasty. I don't think anyone is nasty.

In an era when most use the blind cc to spam their friends and enemies, BKS flouts her seeming-A list, posting to poetics, say. She is so exotic, yeah!

What exactly is a beautiful reading? Good pronunciation? Perfect make-up?

Beautiful reading.

Kate Greenstreet
November 11, Lily Pad, Inman Sq.

Joe Elliot
November 18, P.A.'s, Union Sq.

My notes on last week's readings are piling up. Brief summaries, then, with apologies to readers I've missed.

A week ago Kate Greenstreet read un-giddy, neo-minimalist poems, detailing a spun-out self-preservation that takes in familial and domestic details and re-radiates them far and wide: "trash just blew across the kitchen floor...nobody's been so happy." There's a time-lost-moving-on quality, at once unfond and plain-spoken -- "to eat alone in truck stops" and "Hardly cry at all." The sense of roads not taken as well as "disappearing to control content" permeates her highly ambitious blues project, her persona "being one of three or four people we might have been." In the sequence titled "Great Women of Science" from her recently released case sensitive, within one paragraph Kate's enabled a set of sparse images to stretch the blues into half a generation of untold notes to exile:

I was nervous, but nobody looked at me twice. And by the time I'd pulled up to number fifteen, and got my mother's good suitcase and the rest of my tunafish sandwiches in on the bed, I felt pretty good. I locked the door, both locks, and unwrapped another sandwich. And drank a glass of water from the tap, with a toast to my escape.

Kate's tropes are devastating realia, mother's good suitcase, sandwiches on the bed, both locks. Or, from the same sequence, time, a universal impingement, again weighs in with this less imagistic, toughened narrative:

"There are places that we go -- to keep from going somewhere else. Well, partly, we've been waiting our whole lives --"
There were millions.
There were all those years.

There's constant movement, then, searching for the hard particular. As with her graphic art, Kate realizes the easily visualized are nothing much in themselves; even "bones / are unremarkable." It's what's not seen right off, like a self at a truck stop, that "isn't quite right." She admits, "Things got complicated." Then cites another's language, "'It's hidden / in the ordinary.'" There's a lot of partially hidden citation in case sensitive. Lest we assume Kate is processing only a "lived" experience, check footnotes to "Great Women of Science." Her seemingly-self-involved accounts call up and answer quotations from Loraine Niedecker and co-minimalist Agnes Martin. The artist can indeed disappear "to control content," controlling self and any impulse toward regret for the greater science of movement in poetry.

I don't know that many New York avants who keep track of their Yankee heritage. John Godfrey knows where he comes from, but it hardly enters his poetry. There's Coolidge, but he's not much of a New Yorker, and he too works off and away from the stalwart pedigree (if that's the term). Joe Elliot is one Yankee unmistakably crazy about lineages of things. For the poem "What We Know About the Iceman" Joe inserts known data about a 25- to 40-year-old male who "died around two hundred / generations ago." The slender data get truncated as Joe repeats himself so that previous lines get reduced to "generations ago / ago / go / o." That funnel sound includes everyone, I think, as Joe is no snob. "If you can't arrange your own birth / then SUSpend disbelief ANd just BE a bEing..." he incants in "For a Granary Opening." Poems in Opposable Thumb take up the primary and risky, all-encompassing business of hoping something happens: "this something doesn't happen yet / the perpetual tension of this / anticipation provides that indefinite stability / the system needs to grow..." Joe's clear exposition here, especially in a key term, "indefinite stability," operates as his gloss on hope, more typical of the New York School variety, that is, hope and attentiveness that characterize a slew of poets, from James Schuyler looking out his window to John Ashbery getting drenched by every "sexual moment." Consider the brassy piece titled "Rehearsing for Shows I Know Won't Open," where Joe asks, "Is the admission of a ploy a ploy?" Like Schuyler, perhaps, but in this case also like O'Hara, Denby, his skill is so light a touch, a bantam weight's, he taps you on the cheek for a knockout, as he continues:

Unable to move on to a new thought
I simply repeat the one I just had

Unable to move on to a new thought
I simply repeat the

and 'the' becomes a trellis for circumstance
and votive red pumps
and rainwater in a tin can in the backyard of an ordinary house for sale...

Red pumps, rainwater, the backyard. As I said, Joe is no snob.

Web civics sinks. A porn board has stolen access to D. Cooper's blogspot address. Call the blogger police.

Fanny Howe
November 9, BU

Fanny Howe is one poet associated with Boston who winds up on most everyone's list of likeable, accomplished practitioners. Published by mainstays such as UC and Greywolf, Fanny could be mistaken as a parcel of official verse, along with Dana Gioia, for example, and Robert Bly (Greywolf) while others place her within an academically-sanctioned, emerging post-language movement with Joshua Clover and, perhaps, Juliana Spahr (UC). There's little doubt her language takes pleasure from slants of narrative pointed at travels and human character, memories of family and landscapes, often partly recouped or resolved by observation that is also a question in search of conditions before family, before culture, even -- or, vice versa, inquiry that evolves as a sighting of something more basic than what's conventionally observed. In a semi-abstract sequence from On the Ground (Greywolf 2004), Fanny sees "Inside this egg the walls are lacquered blue..." Here are the next four lines:

Creamy tones of windowsill
and slat. Dawn from hell on up

I hear a rooster deny, deny, deny
or is it Man

The "egg" is broken open for interpretation. Would this be Fanny's pre-cultural condition exposed? Or womankind's? Or, indeed, that of "Man"? I'm a bit up in the air over how domesticated the interior appears, and Fanny seems unconvinced, too (Dawn from hell on up); still the rooster-Man conundrum (deny, deny, deny) is facile, and it raises questions. Let's finish the sequence:

Lies smell in every detail
as the light increases in this shell

Maybe the end of the world happened long ago
A whirl as quick as Judas breaking his neck
and every sound is an echo

Maybe the language here does not rise to the proposed semi-abstraction, defining what Fanny observes as lies "in every detail," mere echoes of apocalypse and treachery. The narrative in pursuit of a pre-Biblical condition carries a stiff object lesson, but it's one that is partly self-canceling (Lies) and because of this, it's unresolved, perhaps necessarily.

Fanny chose poems from On the Ground for the largely undergraduate audience at BU's College of Basic Studies. The poems gambol on "living in mouth and eye [but] part of the world is earlier than this." She's halfway out there, as it were, but like the rest of us she's half-worshipper within a cultural system, but no doubt more respectful than most, wanting "to return all words back to prayers they once were." Fanny read a number of unpublished pieces as well, many travel notes about Ireland, "tar black roofs...faces made of brick." She describes these as reflections of the itinerant life (hers?) without memory (a compositional trick). In one piece she looked over a patch of monastic countryside and found more than greenery, "I saw a beautiful place to live ... we [the monks and she] argued on behalf of sex -- nowhere is better than the road to a bog -- flanked by monks, my fear of men recedes." That last bit is an uncharacteristic turn to self-consciousness or, better, a more self-exposed quest for the pre-culture within.

Del Ray Cross & Jim Behrle
November 11, Poetry Center, Suffolk University

May this duo read every other month, say, for the rest of the decade -- they'll never run out of fresh poetry, never fail to leave me needy for more. The beasts. Del Ray Cross picked poems from the beginning and middle sections of his Lub Luffly, one of two books launched by Pressed Wafer at the reading. Del claims, "my poetry doesn't understand the heart," a wee lie, which he continues, "it requires an understanding of the heart," not only a lie but also a fabulous, tangential instant of special pleading. Here's another tangent. In the poem "7 sins" envy is addressed as a vessel pulling away: "i watch it go // i was in love with the water / that brought that ship to me." It's a mariner's way to spin yarns and make up names for the "words we // don't use," to traverse the ocean of sexual attraction cheating on and lying about the one(s) who got away. When the whole apparatus ships off, it's really sticky, the universal disappearing act that Del locks foreheads with in "7 sins," most remarkably in the section subtitled "lust."

somebody got between
you and me. a handsome face
with a handsome body.
we glued ourselves to
the face and body. and
then we squeezed
until it was just us again.

Del read dozens of poems about love's mounting continuum between ungainly and supreme, one that mentions Kevin Killian, briefly mixing "business with pleasure," poet's job, number one, telling tiny lies that are true. That's what Del is up to in Lub Luffly, "I hack in order to park / on an instant," and adds, elsewhere, "I tell many stories...little ears of ink settle upon each tissue of flimflam / until there's a whole book of em."

Thank whomever, clap for them, Jim Behrle has welshed on a pledge to publish no book in his lifetime. He must have been mad. Or shaken up by inferred expectations of the poetry clans ("Owls whoop...ready to catch our late show's curtains"). He's gotten over it, obviously, even as he maintains mistrust of blurbing, a careerist institution, for him, as the back cover to She's My Best Friend is a blank, except for the lone, unshaven stick figure, Jim's vaguely S & M self-caricature demanding, "Aw yeah! Blurb 'this'!" Did I just write vaguely S & M?

guess tonite you left the club because
everything you want is wrong
that's the fist you're feeling
now that I'm famous

Those are nearly tentative closing lines to "New Outgoing Message." On cue, the next, "To My Valentine for SM" opens, "I want what everyone wants. The prongs of the vise..." Jim ("who chokes you like / you like it") is the persona, ok? So let me breathe a little to collect myself. Jim is doing things poets of the happy sort have been doing for -- oh, decades and decades -- clubbing, feeling sick and giddy inside, not having what he's having, hating what's desired hurts, loving it too, tasting fame, feeling slightly boozy (with, thank you, no booze), and so forth. He's doing this in what? I'm citing only six or seven lines. All his poems fill with such rouse and a life, one that's unafraid on occasion to acknowledge spirits, the ones "who laugh at / us for being alive." Hey, they're "shrieking or whatever," though "we've never been this happy," Jim says, in his final poem on Saturday, "ruckus served all day."

Ange Mlinko & Dan Bouchard
November 12, Plough and Stars

Ange Mlinko read mostly from unpublished material and the news is, the poems are visually loopier ("candle flame herniated"), meta-denser ("dreaming continually behind the scenes"), more consensually entwined ("jasmine overpowers journalism") than those in last year's Starred Wire. Her outreach, phenomenologically a triumph, takes in ranges of things tangible or almost so, from particle physics (yeah!) to baby bottoms, along with other, darker stuff, "dappled zinc," fishbowl offices, and "something called the jewelry district." She's not beyond flashing her feminist internationale streak in a series of three poems to chums of Peggy Guggenheim (each with New York, Paris, and surrealist connections), poet Mina Loy; novelist and painter Leonora Carrington, amour to Max Ernst; artist Jacqueline Lamba, Andre Breton's second wife. The scarier work captures that exurban arsenal amassing north and west (make that south and east, in California) of most intelligent cities in whose reflections glass box conference rooms sidle up to blueberry fields, places you can still pick your own, a flank of globalism, as it were, the heavily protected "peninsula of the peninsula" where data get poured over under a "glaucous sky...near Peekskill" and where "rich kids [are] selling back their books." Anti-Julliette new title: "Teenage Royalty." Big laugh line: "lilacs, schnauz for schnauz."

It's been two years since Dan Bouchard has read anywhere, and even longer here in his own city. He chose poems from The Filaments, new from Zasterle. Dan's sense of place -- pirates' coves of Massachusetts -- and attendant history -- including, in this manuscript, that of Pawtucket, RI -- is one distinctive feature to the work, and makes it feel very New England-y. His commitment to flora and flying things, however, is as marked as that of a landscapist off anywhere who's touched by a Chinese tradition in which human animals are only one of many luminous parts: "the paraphernalia that surround pigeons cast shadows that make people look small." The paraphernalia are the "light and no light" that equal "length" in tether grasses; also they are "a pair of voices [whose] tune is like a sieve or ice cutter." At one point Dan asks, "Am I the poet?" -- a way to keep the tune in check as the voice notes goldfinch, a clam shack sign, "bright dogwood stems along walls," and in "Pawtucket" searching for the place a great grandmother once lived, "justice and virtue are worth a look." In the same vein, Dan observes, "the president said 'Bring it on.' Did he say 'Bring it on?' Yes he did and on it came. The pirate game."

Ten poets read here over the weekend. Yesterday I took notes on Ange Mlinko and Dan Bouchard at the Plough and Stars. Saturday I got to three readings. 1) Adam Clay, Kate Greenstreet, Matt Henriksen, and Jess Mynes at the Lily Pad performance space in Inman Square. Earlier, 2) a book signing and readings by Jimmy Behrle and Del Ray Cross at Suffolk University's new poetry library. And earlier Saturday 3) Peter Gizzi and Rosmarie Waldrop at P.A.'s in Somerville. Just a few days ago Clayton Eshleman read at MIT and Lyn Hejinian at Harvard, reported below. I also have notes on Fanny Howe's reading Thursday at BU. I'll be getting to some or all of these within the next few days, beginning in reverse order, I think, with Ange and Dan's reading. So, more soon.

Clayton Eshleman
November 9, MIT

It's been Clayton Eshleman week in Boston; he's given three public readings, one on his translating Cesar Vellejo, among other things. (His complete translations of Vallejo will be released next week by UC Press in a bilingual edition.) I caught up with Eshleman last night at MIT where he read from his 2003 Wesleyan Press hybrid, Juniper Fuse. Over the last few years, it's safe to conclude, Wesleyan has shown a penchant for releasing poet-project books, that is, poetry and poetics that not only focus on a thematic but also spell out the writer's procedures and 'life investment' in the work. Prose, part personal narrative, part historical and theoretical speculation, verse and verse-prose combinations, heavily captioned drawings, color plates -- Juniper Fuse is a humdinger of the type. By the time his research for Juniper Fuse was completed, Eshleman, along with his wife Caryl, had made more than two dozen sojourns over as many summers to the Upper Paleolithic caves in southwestern France. His obsession is charged with the aim to return to "origins of image-making...the early days of soul-making." These caves are flooded with images, some dating to over 30,000 years ago. I found Eshleman's opening thoughts about what's inside the caves extremely informative, as any foundational statements would be to one uneducated in specialist domains such as Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon aesthetics. I have to say Eshleman sustained my curiosity throughout even while downsizing the role of poetry. Process explanation is Eshleman's forte. Try this passage about visual intake affected by crawling on hands and knees and squirming to move into and through the caves:

if one were to film one's posture through this entire process [...] it might look like a St-Vitus dance of the stages in the life of man, birth channel expulsion to old age, but without chronological order, a jumble of exaggerated and strained positions that correspondingly increase the image pressure in one's mind --

Conversely, the poems are often as high-sounding as the last stanza from "Cemeteries of Paradise":

Packed with perpetuity's
negation, with swaying wordflora,
the alpha veil still refuses to unravel.

There is something of an alpha veil about the poetics here. If I can concoct a meaning for alpha veil, it might refer to a self-engaging, world-builder impulse, a throwback to the XIXth century, one which indeed resulted in great expansions in natural and applied sciences. To accomplish tasks, a self-study will often rush on while she or he continues speaking to himself, recognizing "wordflora" is a make-it-do term for cave drawings and glyphs, maybe, not stopping to examine fully or further explore the semantic mobius strip entwined in "negation" that is "packed" inside a filigree of veil. Eshleman's material, stones impregnated with horse heads and vulvae, clay bison with cracked torsos, images of Gods with bird-beaked stanchions, these are fascinating, soulful topoi that await even more project work and poetry.

Lyn Hejinian
November 8, Sackler Museum, Harvard

Lyn Hejinian says she finds it hard to write nonsequitur. I believe her, though in one sense Hejinian has been composing nonsequitur, seemingly with ease, from the first published diaries.

I was reading several books at once, usually three.
If faster, then more.
The typewriter at night was classical.

This snippet from My Life -- which Hejinian did not read last night -- indicates, in another sense, we're leaping ahead in a narrative flow, moving cohesively from reading to the typewriter, musing about the very instruments that occasion writing, desiring more. In the first of three long works that Hejinian read, a piece titled notably "The Unfollowed," she attempts, as explained in her preliminary remarks, a series of elegies "built of nonsequitur to refute death as a logical outcome." The premise strikes me as wishful or mock-naïve. Yet, Hejinian's tactic of deploying nonsequitur is more in doubt, as the result is more leaping narrative following its peculiar logic, surely, while hardly inexplicable or nonverifiable or unexpected. Here are some run-on notes from the first minutes, with a few patches missing, transcribed as fast as I could capture them.

...fog rolls in... someone follows me... the visible is rough... all kinds of words here... November 8, what kind of beginning is that? ... another kind of sphinx trick... up go the shades tonight... the sun is too coherent...

"The Unfollowed" is a work in progress, long enough to allow itself a little funk, rhyming at times (jam / ham; chairs / stairs), off-sounding in the obvious ("the here and now is always current, or is it?"). Hejinian also read from Slowly (Tuumba 2002), a "protest poem" that might encourage one to stop rushing and "regard the dark...finding unapologetically what painters have known for years." This work is more perambulatory, less personal account than urban desire, a walk-through with skyscrapers "outskirting" and, somehow, "intangible as futility." Bleaker moments suggest more unfulfilled desire, in which every inch is "premonition," just "look up cascade, see failure." Hejinian's third work was a selection from another project in progress loosely based on Scheherazade. One again feels force distributed between unscientific nonsequitur (dreams are internal criticism) and comprehensible narrative metaphor (every dinner table is a bridge). The persona here, the I, takes on a few other jobs, those of pilot, voyager, emergency technician, merchant's wife, sailor, "a poignant catalyst." Hejinian declares "I am self-taught shred" toward the end of her reading. That covers it, except for her closing lines, the night's most memorable, finding herself at the crossroads of "a great forest. I have just one memory of it, but I want two."

It was always a long shot, but Harold Ford, Jr. will be the most missed Democrat in Washington. He acts a little wild. He lost to an extremely mean-spirited self-made mogul. Mean wins over wild in Tennessee. The mogul's photo appeared in national media a few days ago, shot below the mogul's waist, at brogan shoe / pant cuff level, mullet-coiffed tow truck assembly workers, all white, looking up, really pleased their good mean millionaire was whipping the democrat's ass. Of course the workers could have been just checking him out. Who knows? they were standing at the mogul's shoe level. Sir. Like a Philip Guston cartoon.

Annoying, repetitive, illegal Republican robot calls disguised as Democrats dialing for votes.

Rodney Koeneke & David Trinidad
November 6, Tazza, Providence

Rodney Koeneke read almost exclusively from Musee Mechanique, half the time reciting sans text. This is verse shorn from detritus of search engines (Rodney's descriptor, one many disavow, "Google sculpture"). Delivering poems like pizza from memory sets up haunting tricks of spectacular dissonance. It's one thing to take bodily possession of word combinations that are "out there" in the public domain (a web page, say), that cohere by sheer happenstance (search data on the page) and will of the poet (reassembling the data). It's entirely a new feat of criminal merchandizing, though, to come off possessed of those word combinations -- that is, to invest a lyric inevitability and mechanized order in happenstance through corporal memorization. The affect is bug-eyed insincerity that demands to be taken in and fed until it implodes.

Our bags have several uses:
The Auto Club float (decorated entirely by Auto
Club members); carnation smoke that trails the plane; Kaffir lilies
with oblong tongues.

The purposes of corrupted innocence are many, of course, but Rodney's link to a) unhingedness thanks to what's happened to our belief systems since 9/11 -- suggested by Rodney in his brief intro -- and just maybe b) a much-needed poke in the eyes of ideologues who've forgotten to check their serious baggage at lyric's door. There are other purposeful subtexts, we know, because Rodney told us. Poems in the series titled "On the Clamways" toy with Clark Coolidge but are really concerned with sex and advertising, just like Coolidge! In addition, I'm sure Rodney wants to reinforce bad taste and spoil the eating experience. I spilt my Tazza panino when he read "Pizza Kitty." Wouldn't you? "'What turns you on, Pizza Kitty? / Mommy does not like to get kitty kisses... // 'Kitty, come down!' Pizza / all over our bodies."

David Trinidad goes to memories to tell us how it's doing today. One of several pink poems recycles 60s lipsticks. Polar bear pink, pussy willow pink, daredevil pink, Jupiter pink, E. S. pink, snuggle pink, helpless pink. Today for David, as for most poets, is the writing presence; more, David includes memories as emphatic, forward-moving parts of a dynamic technology of the now. In a poem that mentions regret, the persona loses the boy, but "drove home and put him in a poem...later it rained. I know from the poem." Memory, then, the writing presence, fellow poets and, yes, Poetry are primary data, with elegies for Tim Dlugos, James Schuyler (with a "popsicle blue sky"), a memorial for Loraine Niedeker and another piece for living poet and friend Elaine Equi (about a doll memorial!). David's last piece excerpted three sections published in Combo 14/15 from the 20-part "A Poem Under the Influence." It's poetry about composing itself, its constraints, its repetitions, its initial design as a 20-day project taking up to two years to pull together its human connectedness to "pink threads": "Poem / which became, some time ago, as much about what I can't fit in / as can. All those / memories..." Memories and feelings, hard to express credibly, so more memories first of the famous, the Dali Lama and Sylvia Plath, and then they "drive in a circle" to recall a Bob, a Henry, an Ed, "another old friend who died during the / writing of this / poem." When feelings emerge they go to essentials: "What's the point of all that intense / foreplay if it / doesn't lead / to acute core-reaching fucking?" This is a question reflecting on a sexual encounter, but could easily apply to the poet inquiring after his own presence-as-foreplay that requires total E. S. pink daredevil helplessness to move forward writing the now.

James Cook & Ric Royer
November 5, Demolicious, Cambridge

James Cook read his "projections" for The New Cartographers series, now in pamphlet form, first appearing this summer at the New Arts Festival in Gloucester where James is based. His piece, titled "Cartoglossographia," has two sections similarly subtitled in graeco-cognates: cartopedegraphia and cartoglossolalia. Charles Olson's self-as-teacher influence is obvious, James's beginning with snips from The Maximus Poems, an epic that derives from Olson's formula "about a person and a place." James calls his piece "a draft," and I think that's accurate. I find open stretches in the draft exposition, which after the Olson citation, asks "Where the hell am I?" but marches on in the fourth sentence, "Walk the boundary of your town." If some self or person will be examined here, we'll benefit from knowing how and why he or she shifts from I to you. Admittedly, several paragraphs or stanzas in, James declares, "I am not on the map. I exist but marginally." Then, "You are here. I am not." This insistence on only "you" is contradicted again and again by I-headed propositions -- I swam; I am eager; I have mapped, etc. So the person part of Olson's formula is up for grabs. The place part (Where the hell am I?) is clearer if many times more abstract (on the surface) than Olson's (or James's) Dogtown. It's a word map that unfolds as it merges physical and political attributes (the tree by the foodstand; the coastline for the taking) with appropriation (from William Blake, Italo Calvino, Fanny Howe, others). I especially like it when James plays along with citation. Jorge Luis Borges's "abominable" mirrors with copulation are countered by James's "The menu is not the food." Even better, after citing Robert Duncan three times James is reminded of Dunkin Donuts, a Gloucester mainstay if there ever was one.

Ric Royer organizes Baltimore's Transmodern Performance Festival and works with the Performance Thanatology Research Society. A University of Buffalo grad, Ric combined or, better, doubled performative and linguistic acumens for hilarious theater of the eat-your-reflection variety. The set-up goes like this. Dressed normally, almost blandly, Ric takes to the podium as expected, doesn't even trip over a gaggle of computer and projector wires, speaks at a super conversational level on his interest in a Doubles Museum out of Calgary for goodness sakes. He introduces through narrative Museum curator Dr. Armand and his vain pal Jill. They seem to miss opportunities to get closer to one another, Ric relates. He's about three minutes into this "intro," lifting up exhibit pieces, Q-tips, Doublemint gum, a two-headed nickel, and so forth, and one realizes one is trapped, "helpless," looking at the "face of one's face reflecting as if translating" one's body "contorted" by (drum rolls, please) secrets revealed -- one is co-equal, co-blown away with the performer, "twins, one more like the other." It's a downlow deadpan tongue in one's cheek. Get it out of there! Don't get any closer than the black-and-white slides (for that archival feel). Turn down the lighting -- there's a glowing Macbook from which Ric could read occasionally, but the monolog is extemporaneous, mostly, breaking into a growl at one point, arms overhead: "If you throw up your own hands it means you have eaten them," Ric said. It was great.

Late October U.S. internal audits of military caches scheduled for delivery to Iraqi armed forces disclose large numbers of weapons are missing; the numbers are in the 1,000s, possibly 100,000s.

A week ago Muqtada al-Sadr succeeded in breaking up U.S. checkpoints around Sadr City where an American service man is thought to be held hostage.

House Majority Leader John Boehner this week cites generals on the ground for failures in Iraq.

Detailed instructions for building a nuclear bomb were taken down from a U.S. government website a few days ago.

"What are you smoking?" Tony Snow responds to a reporter's question whether timing of Hussein's verdict and death sentence were coordinated by the White House.

ABC News reports the polls are now tightening.

Ok. YouTube not needed. Visit Fox's O'Reilly Index, click on Bruce Andrews's pic -- you'll get a pop-up with another Bruce Andrews's pic on the far left (nudge, nudge). Click and hold on a minute or two; the wait is pure tedium, there's a commercial up front, but the clip finally engages. Bruce holds up, but I wish he threw a curse and hiss in O'Reilly's direction half as much as O'Reilly interrupts. Why pretend you know what goes on in a class you never attended, Mr. O'Reilly? Your final solution for critical thinking is to offer two views? Yes or no, Mr. O'Reilly? Speakin of two, wassup with Haggard and you, huh, huh?

Bruce is a video star.

How does Sharon Mesmer's blog link turn into "laundry room ideas"? Who's doing this?

~~

And how does Erica Kaufman's lead to "how2"?? How?

~~

While we're at it, netty, could some good guy kindly re-do the Fox clip of Bruce Andrews and put it on YouTube so we can all see it?

Andrei Codrescu
November 2, BU School of Management

Paul Violi is the only poet I know who went to BU (undergrad), the only BU grad I know, period. This is odd, given that the megaplex literally hovers down the street. I taught there for a couple of years before Harvard. At the time, president John Silber's iron will in evidence, the place felt spooky. (It still does.) (Echo effect.) Turns out my teaching went all right, and the collegiality there was no more ironic or unsympathetic or vapid than at MIT, Harvard, or the two national universities where I taught in Japan. I just disliked the mall cleavage. Or too many still-adolescent guys, with no features, who couldn't stand out even if they wanted to -- they didn't. It feels like a crowded prep school that mom, along with dad, who owns a dealership or something, ships you off to to get processed so you can compete better. The School of Management intensifies that feeling. Shiny, expensive 595 Commonwealth Avenue might stand tall across from a Goodyear plant. Lobby-wise, pablum-hued marble floors reflect lovey's panties and the social democracy statues, watered down from models in Terry Gilliam's "Brazil."

I go on about megaplex atmospherics, because they affect Andrei Codrescu deeply, I'd guess. He read, or maybe I should say he showed up, in a fourth floor meeting room of some paneled veneer sort. This is a newer big-bucks building, remember, but the carpet was glazed with soda and foodstuffs -- maybe that's why they chose an Orlando hotel pattern? to mask what buildings and maintenance miss? Let me get to the ugly parts. Suited audience. At least one gum chewer. Late arrivals, with briefcases, walked into the middle of the reading, prancing from the back to the front, scouting out the 'best' seats. (Future management types.) An audio-visual bitch (I'm sure she's a very important A-lister in another life) opened and re-opened a door, up front next to Codrescu, to adjust knobs at the lectern as Codrescu was reading. Oh, what? both times she's holding a conversation with someone invisible on the other side of the door.

Codrescu claimed to like it. "It's nice to be interrupted twice." Then, he was interrupted often by his discursive preludes to and commentary on a handful of poems. His NPR stints notwithstanding, he's not filled in the Big Personality, not this evening, but he ad-libbed a half-amusing tale of the Romanian American "convert to the old faith of poetry," whose "vocabulary is smaller than my feelings." Based in New Orleans, Codrescu finds his city "the most spiritually interesting," even before Katrina (cheap rents), but now more so: "Poetry is doing well there -- no health care, psychological devastation," etc. Certainly his earlier poems deliver on his standard of "poetic terrorism," but Codrescu lets time and his academic work turn down his heat. Last night he argued that a poet's only geography is Greyhound, but notably he was rushing to make a flight back to teach in New Orleans. Still, Codrescu remains an acute self-critic and poetry observer, mentioning he heard Alice Notley read last week in New Orleans. "She is America's most interesting poet now," he said.

Alice Notley
October 21, MIT

Alice Notley read from two books released in 2006, Grave of Light and Alma, or The Dead Woman. This was her first Boston showing in 24 years, speeding through a bounty of poems as if to make up lost time, but not so; she had a lot to convey in her brief hour of perpetual experimentation. Her reading communicated more than an appetite for experiment and something else necessary but rare in poetics, trance. Beginning and concluding with pieces from Grave of Light, her new and selected, Notley sung in constructs spanning beyond three decades, remarking that when looking at poems of the 70s and 80s she discovers "a person I don't recognize anymore. I find that interesting." Lack of self-recognition is conditioned by living pragmatism that compels diminution of enculturated forms of thought and language, such as self-regard and short-term memory, in favor of more aestheticized idioms. The larger, hipper impression, I believe, is that the Notley who read to us last week is as unlikely to remember the person writing from the day or night previous as the person who wrote decades earlier. More like Dante tuning up through Whitman, but also like Dickinson, Wieners, and several New York poet-colleagues, Notley in her selected poems is pointed relentlessly against simple self-satisfaction and minor stance: "I am the people," Notley proclaims, and we need to stay alert, "That's how you get to be yourself thinking of Frank O'Hara." (If her logic escapes you, just try.) When Notley read from Alma, or The Dead Woman, the trance state was cinched. Clinched. The texts are as dark, twisty, and encrypted as any Inferno in American English. This isn't fair, no snippet will do it, after all, but taste all her moves in just these six lines.

we were all this is
they were that too.

the spy instantly freaks. what does that mean? what can those words mean? Carmen says but i never have to know i only sing.

we were all this is
they were that too

The passage cited is from a page titled "The Spy Appears." We are welcomed as text-conscious spooks (what does that mean?) within a labyrinth where Carmen is, among other entities, a song. Alma (a spy's spy, always there though unnamed, often) is a god, a junkie, a dead child, so many things. What gives? The texts are about researched fear and what chirps beyond terror. Other titles might help. "The Coming War"; "Negative Space"; "They Are All Dead Today"; "The Dead Are Not Happy." The first few lines of the poem "Terror," may also help. Notley read this to great affect:

as fate i don't feel it but i do the research Moira says. terror is allowed in. and then, the fate shape is made. as if you must feel it for it to be your fate.
i, i have none now -- terror, except at being here at night sometimes. or is it at what has happened to me.

Until I heard Notely enact her new poetry I had not uderstood why I am unglued, had not recognized my own need for a language and method for understanding, as I had not yet confronted a credible personal account -- no, a personal insertion -- within a globe full of tedious badness, full of the now. These poems and Notley's performance of them are miles over the top. It's been more than a week now. I have not recovered.

Non-Saxon Europe is widely preached against. Christ demoted the Netherlands and Belgium for their cultural lag. Or perhaps we could say they were pieces of nonsense, their cities negated, their verbs rounded off randomly. Rain there was so blatantly filled to the brim with nonsense that it spread everywhere completely negating its purpose, drops on the edge of interpretation, competing, dancing at the edge of the Flemish world, starlight, a pre-interpreted departure from what is present in the original experience of beings in being.

[I should add here that I am being serious.]

Bharati becomes something about our demise -- Bharati as a mobile phone service subscriber, unnoticeably an ulterior motive fashioned into a user profile. My own motives aren't the least bit ulterior, redirected from fragmentary and lost sources (rain).

[Spot had just turned 'about' from a trip to Thunder Bay with Lance. Spot discovers and contacts Keesha and me. These should work for most men with Lance problems, says the expert panel co-chairman ... So which fox drug is best? The expert won't say. Barb? Spot?]

Why make so much of fragmentary blue in here and there a bird, or butterfly?

A surrogate image is corroding on the field, its emptied refraction dancing on the taillight of aural preclusion of experience for syntactical beings (in a sentence).

The cliffside depends on weather, on the power grid, on the rust fabric of walls about to be torn down, on the danger of falling cornices (they did).

[The first Keesha, a 13-yr-old, accidentally applied an enema containing lye. But she also had Donald Sutherland's bio on her. Does or did he mention lutefisk -- fish jellied in lye? Not sure.]

Rain is widely construed as inaudible tendencies toward plundering of contexts in relation to the body's asymmetry and neuropsychology.

Rain can only be descrewed during dry spells. Fever, ague, intemperance, railroad spine, neurasthenia, all emerge otherwise, the flu, the common cold, silenced.

How do I threaten a referent on the Could page? I'm writing this for one reason only, so the receiver will sound an alarm (an annunciator light).

Duly of course sounded.

[Rain, dew lied, scored, so undid. Common rail favor tampers with the road pine. They flew. The co-old. Lanced.]

John Ashbery
October 27, Houghton Library, Harvard

The occasion for John Ashbery's reading was a daylong centennial commemoration of William Empson's birth. Four panelists preceded Ashbery with a variety of brief arguments loosely if not hastily gathered around sound bites: Susan Wolfson finds Empson prefers "strong" women; vis a vis Empson's homosexuality, Stephen Burt sees pervasive self-censorship; William Cain proposes Empson's "hard" rhetorical achievement often outshines the analyzed text; Christopher Ricks designates Empson's conversational style as key to the prose. Most Americans (although not necessarily most of the commemoration audience) might bristle at Ricks's very British assertion that class, particularly expressed through mannered speech, is still a more decent organizing principle than money or celebrity. Ricks played several audiotapes of Empson in conversation and in performance, highlighting similarities, suggesting in effect that Empson always spoke accomplished prose.

Ashbery began puzzling over why he would be reading at the commemoration, admitting though to his undergraduate interest in British poets of the 1930s, including Empson, W. H. Auden, F. T. Prince, Clere Parsons, among others. When he read Empson's villanelle "Aubade" and then his own "Ignorance of the Law Is No Excuse," the link was established. The flat declarative descriptors from "Aubade" -- "Hours before dawn we were woken by the quake. / My house was on a cliff." -- sound so Ashberian, especially when spoken by Ashbery, that the segue to "Ignorance..." is immaculately smooth -- "We were warned about spiders, and the occasional famine. / We drove downtown to see our neighbors." Working within the English expository tradition, Ashbery pushes narrative over the cliff, as it were, but the illusion of his 'sense-making' relies heavily on concatenating descriptive clumps of parse-able prose that may seem no more, no less than listening to the hum of wires, the bee's hymn, only then to reach near the close of "Ignorance..." "the bottom-most step. There you can grieve and breathe, / rinse your possessions ..." Ashbery chose several poems from his new collection, A Worldly Country, delivering us from the usual, anticipating a next life "under the big top," pointing to "the buttered roofs," "dandelion breath," "the backward weave of the waves." In the poem "Anticipated Stranger," Ashbery goes at it with the creator herself.

Oh well, less said the better, they all say.
I'll post this at the desk.

God will find the pattern and break it.

Thank Tom Orange for Reading Bay Poetics.

~~

Yup, blogspot is turning angry and unpredictable as if we need one more Halloween persona.

Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems 1970-2005
Alice Notley
Wesleyan 2006

Prelims. Thirty-five years of chronologically sequenced poems by Alice Notley, a fraction of previously published pieces from collections have been "dismantled" to create a new order of reading. "The book now tells its own story," Notley says.

The story is a case study in how The Tradition advances. While most poets labor within a survival-plus comfort zone made possible through professional and / or academic subsidy, Notley's story, as most of us know, is more tied to survival, at least in the beginning and middle parts. And many early poems connect particulars of making do, of writing on an orange crate for a desk, to the more material subject of making love, made germane by way of faithful practice and again through everyday fact-checking of particulars.

I must love the glassine eye
caves being minor matters violent-
ly velvet
[...]
the rent
is extensive tho space for a whole heart
marriage has a bold blind face

Before she turned 30 Notley's strong hand is evident, fearless "dailiness" that's going places "to radiate light of the broil / when the blood is vintage we'll / chat over coffee holding hands and foil- / ing flirt the stately music..." Starting in 1970 the short poems and longer ones that appear to me as compilations of shorter pieces give way by the late 70s to more formal exercises, short and long, some quite modestly titled, "Sonnet," "After Tsang Chih," "Poem," etc., others quasi-fabulously conceived, "When I Was Alive," "Jack Would Speak through the Imperfect Medium of Alice." The Tsang Chih piece is remarkable as an instance of Notley's independent turn with Tradition. Rather than deliver translation or versions of the Han poet's conversing with Heaven that disappears when he wakes, Notley re-situates disappearance as real motion and promise, bringing us to her childhood California foothills in the desert where as a young woman whom "boys wouldn't touch...because I was too quote / Smart," she watches as truck drivers come and go, waving "On their way through town, on the way to my World."

Themes struck; heads in all directions. By the second decade, the 1980s, dailiness intensifies ("My husband is mad at me & the heat is off...") and it pushes on toward more fabulous destinations ("Electrical appliances can be repaired via nipple, / Christmas tinsel & same old angel. You can't / Do yourself right by yourself."). New York is there, more as abandon within its School of Poets, husband Ted, loving influences, O'Hara, for one, and the expanding "amiable cosmic rambles" from Alice the voodoo fabricator talking to and through her self: "I see little difference between you & your husband...Of course you said it, you either said it outright or said it in his imagination, but either way you were saying it. Do you think you own yourself?" And this look-no-hands knowledge that sometimes accumulates with love and death: "I can't think of that," she writes in a short poem titled "Love," (dated July 28, 1984) and wisely adds, "I will not fasten it." In "Poem" (dated 4/5/84) that immediately precedes "Love," stepping as if up the ladder from knowledge to a guarded ("I was waiting for it") spiritual desire -- such desire certainly a component of Tradition -- Notley glimpses another but not-so-minor cave "through a heightened // tear," a place saturated in azure like her apartment or like twilight that "gods live in" who "cared for Ted and were there for me / too and in life even now."

Grave of Light documents Notley's previously unpublished notations (appearing toward the end of the collection) that "i have no / recollection of who i was" and that "all of my poems will be long." That said, those more familiar with later published pieces in Mysteries of Small Houses from Penguin and Alma, Or the Dead Woman from Granary can trace these hugely productive vocal experiments to their bases and first iterations in works of the 70s through the 80s, as the opus all together tells a long story of survival and desire beyond the self. The story is enriched from re-readings and re-connections across time-frames. A poem titled "Mid-80's," published in 1998, invites retrospection, acknowledging "I'm not on a mission / I'm not local... though I'm / local to my condition." No mission, yet the condition, the self is looked upon, judged as "torn out" with "no self in the 80's," the music "pure / But secret." Self comes on as poetry of no locality conditioned in no time: "Is there a present? never." How do we get to this never? In a companion poem, "Sept 17 / Aug 29, '88," also published in 1998, Notley puzzles over a brother's therapy to free himself from too confining a self-knowledge, too "concentrated, personal," and she almost tells us: "He must get free of / this self now, but I don't know how he will; / yet escape's fated, written already (we all know it and / don't know it)." I read "escape's fated, written already" as continuation of reliance in writing practice whose blind face is a book, parts of which are seen and can see.

Corrupt research; chin implants; G.O.P. optimism; NY Post sports coverage; top 40 on XM; religion in science; wrong turns in fast lanes; poppy trade; bogus chenin blanc; undergraduate debt; John Kerry; past peak foliage; nuclear proliferation; frozen sushi; apeshit war strategy; boudoir restraint; petroleum dollars; blogging because it's there; conservatives pouting; straight male power couples; the courts; hideous poems.

Make it cool curricula; hideous poems. Ratty chain coffee; hideous poems. Bloated officials; hideous poems. Sixty-year-old folkies; hideous poems. Retread software; hideous poems. Pedigreed art; hideous poems. Untaxed elites; hideous poems. Safe sex; hideous poems. Relaxed midcentury décor; hideous poems. Red-lined school districts; hideous poems. Open-neck business attire; hideous poems. Pre-election gas price declines; hideous poems. Democracy in dance; hideous poems. Satire of the informed; hideous poems. Entertainment business models; hideous poems. Losing the Muslim street; hideous poems. Drugged athletes; hideous poems. Montana homeland defense initiatives; hideous poems. Kean dynasty; hideous poems. Ever higher heels; hideous poems. Bankrolled genocide; hideous poems. Fact into fiction; hideous poems. Patti Smith at the Met; hideous poems. I heart anything; hideous poems.

  Through a bin
vintage clothes
             cool the
  eleven dollars
     a race you'd
     stuff anyway

I'm doing an accordion fold, not a poem, but a documentary incarnation about officialdom in sensibility. The plot concerns a guy named Ethan who meets a younger guy named David with a vinyl sleeve in his rear. However I believe that I'm past the middle and nearing the end of this self destructive cycle; I want to experience irony as homesickness without inebriation, long division, complex facticity that lets the wounds tear open and heal slowly for urban equipment in the future, enduring pain and disappointment and failure, climbing uphill and sliding back down just before turning 17, biting down, gritting my teeth, growing up a little, suffering a little moving in with my parents because they like me... I just don't worry: the American desert is measured in landscapes ripe with pressure, zithers, droughts. I'm just using this as a springboard to bring my intentions to a mystical place in my real work fixed with a rational theme of imprecise turmoil, everything recycled. As a new definition of the donkey show we witness destruction of the blues pub and scaffolding, disintegrating like runic practices flung out as interiors silhouetted in acrylic behind a projection of glass as it screens the "official" book. It's my best work, a tight 100 pages so far of narrative casually parading as self-help boilerplate and polyphonic leitmotifs. It's a balance in Godzillian scale, reflecting what happens when icecaps melt, raising sea levels. Just hope I have the backbone. My greatest fear is going deeper into my inner trippy, conceptual junk -- I'd be dragging a palm frond around at four a.m. That would kill my parents.

       The Nazis did
proportion of peo-
    trustworthy, de-
     the impression
  used to mobilize

Unprotected Texts
Tom Beckett
Meritage Press 2006

It's them. Tom Beckett lost and found it. "Are you my body?" he asks. How long has he been up there? Yeah. There isn't a two-page spread in Unprotected Texts that doesn't satisfy my frenzy to stomp on iconography for future benefit. At random, I turn to page 158, a nine-liner, numbered 24 in a series titled "Wittgenstein Improvisations," invoking dreams (an iconic natch), a "spectre" that holds potential as a "figure," "an intuition / about your voice." Ok, where's the future? Page 159, nine more lines, numbered 25 in the series:

When
I first
embraced the picture

I
was invaded
by a blank

(unrevealed
template of
what was coming).

A blanched meadow, the finish line in a future that's nowhere from which you race off, again, asserts ("invaded") that it is and is not here ("un" is both a reversal of its revelation and its intensifier) -- dream, intuition, and voice are recovered within blank tableaux, templated latency dedicated to what is be- or, fabulously, not be- "coming."

Messing with icons. Calling texts sex. These are the highest jinx. Unprotected Texts brushes off 28 years of poetry and looks forward to be incidental. The collection cranks up two dozen zombie poems, pleasures further with long sets of "leitmotifs," "speech balloons," and other "templates." There's a nine-page poem of 100 questions, "Are we awake?" for example. "Are you my body?" The last poem is numbered 27 in the "Wittgenstein Improvisations."

No
word, no
thing, no one

exempt,
ever. I
must not trouble

them.
They just
must be left.

They are left, a mess of them and it.

Three cans a day. Make sure you read the can.

Further evidence department: further evidence Orwell left out the slapstick of degraded public discourse and governance. North Korea testing a nuclear bomb spun, in cloudy shades, as good news for the GOP. Now our attention is presumed to focus on international relations and national defense, in which Republicans excel. Orwell got a number of things right, but never figured on-message tyranny with a funny bone.

~~

Also. Do you have that sinking feeling yet? Mine is starting to kick in. The party of power waits for the news to clear so that we can go back to the killing rhetoric of values, we're the best. Hastert admits to standing as a last line of protection against the ignominy of a bi-partisan House holding Itself and the Executive accountable, depicting the Foley scandal as Soros's October surprise. Whassup, Den Dog, did Foley trump your tricks? Thirty days is an eternity in politics, chuckles Jim Baker, ha ha. I'm expecting evangelical appeals, gay sweeps, terrorist round-ups, Qeda kills, peninsula blockades. Don't think any stops will not be pulled.

~~

O Cubism. It's back.

I've gone werewolf. It's all true.

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Brenda Iijima & Mark Pawlak
October 1, Demolicious

Mark Pawlak, co-editor of bullet-proof Hanging Loose, scientist, and long-ago protégé of Denise Levertov when he studied poetry at MIT, brought along the current Hanging Loose 89, which handsomely reproduces HL One (dating back to 1966 when Mark was in high school). Issue One overflows with snappy, smart mid-century New York poems from Robert Hershorn (one of HL's first co-editors, still on duty!), Jack Collum, Jack Anderson, and Denise Levertov, among others. Mark read poems from a collection of his short poems and journal notes in Official Versions. The pieces model many mid-century techniques, part of our inheritance handed down by the New York School and Black Mountain experimentalists like Levertov committed to poetry from the occasion, direct observation and specific experience. Mark meanders on a mountain trail in Maine, offering glimpses of his childhood in Buffalo, then segues to an empurpled send-up of wedding announcements from the style section of the Sunday New York Times. Journalese-inspired verses to the late poet Ron Schreiber, "Elephants Find Love," pick up on female trouble among penguins at the New York Aquarium, lesbian monkeys in Kyoto, along with other news briefs on entrapped animals, complementing Brenda Iijima's themes.

Brenda read from a broad-minded manuscript she calls "Remembering Animals," a huge opus that shoots down tendencies of our species to separate from our own kingdom with other beasts. The sections she read were one "phase" subtitled "rabbit lesson," although there were a lot of fleet creatures besides rabbits, including made-up ones like meat pumpkins ("they grow in dim light"). Geopolitics that informs our separation from nature's critters (and from one another) is felt as one of the long bones of "Remembering Animals," with "language degenerated into rules" for democrats -- "pursuit to kill," "shoot to kill," and "don't talk without permission." The "jane goodall yell" masks and contaminated modularities Brenda puts on infect one with cross-species anxieties that are wildly unprarphraseable, so here's a taste of all that from a section titled "Humanimal, Furry":

craniumum turf at the conference we were bonded
indigo           bloodletters you little rabbit so polyester
soft
to want to be an animal
to want to be stuffed
cute and puffy [...]
dog

~~

Next, Gerrit Lansing & Kevin Davies at P.A.'s September 30.

Is It the King?
Farid Matuk
Effing 2006

I've always been fond of edges in a question. I live on an arterial road.

Am throttled by a complete lack of vanity, Moors.

Our eyes feel congested, oh I blew our noses and throats. Our ears I think the earth was looking...as far as the road.

I live on an arterial road.

I hear springs ease / as a man leaves the body.

I omitted of his car if I hear anything.

Farid Matuk starts Out of a tin-cold. Me? I've cleared a parking space, the clearing, say, in front of my cream shaded Spanish bungee port out in the edges. A clearing An owl call / helps the night / cleave Bee Creek, and what pitched grandeur that "cleave" brings let loose, a good lose, Between extended / branches (changing light) / cold sun-up, a good case / is made for the here-there / and now-there recapturing the outdoors.

Inside I read two- or three-word lines in "Orange County Knows How to Party," and the more variably lineated "But, Richard [Pryor], Will You Show Me an Ethic of Freedom?" and there's nothing to discredit, to disbelieve. Then "Early Notes": Four a.m. you stand at the foot of my bed...branching of some intention and I realize he's not getting some or any -- we have to not fight it! you inch across the stuccoed / ceiling, etc. Losses, but losses that don't count, and dying and most everyone dying / is happy for spring.

The edges now-here are not vain, not striving, dispossessed, I only care that you love my country. Therefore there's retrieval of losses that do count, Velcro (easy), Impala, (harder), Charles Olson (the hammer), a country of train pucks / between the nodes of another century's economy. And what else is left, what will we put in the arc / for the new country?

You shame me, Matuk to Olson saying, Matuk explains, the poem is in the alley way / where it's always been.

I've booked an I prefer the good life package. I should be writing this down.

I'm seated in my studio, dressed in ashram goth.

Government dotted with it's a joke mirrored hot pants.

What is googling for but to effect command of stuff we're uncertain or we don't want to get that serious about? An eyeblush of material seems a desperate measure, and it is, in reckless hands, but for a type of pedagogue like me there's depth to surface and undespairing perceptions (like reading a dab) of what won't be contained. If you're the type, you can pick a curatorial spot in the vicinity of information and be seen as well as seem on top (of it). Breathing life, we sell hundreds of these, o Swami, is a slanter's tool of poetry (and it knows it).

Corn song, 2003.

Squabbles add up. When you're collating the wrong voices, that's all people see.

The preceding contains embryos for whom I take two interfaith classes a day.

Here's today's birth winner. Dreams Capri Riviera Cancun imperial Tulum Ticonderoga pencil.

Staples erasers don't work.

Subtitle: If you feel like sex, be sure to wake me up.

In way under 15 minutes, Alan DeNiro reviews LRSN's The Thorn for Rain Taxi, just out. The poems are "shadows of omens... sacral... comic..." lying "at the intersection of these two terribles...notably unattractive...exciting extreme alarm." Lordiee. Could this be what Warhol meant by no bad pr?

Behind in my reading, including blogs, so this idea, "form as a search for the endless opportunity to write," appears, from Monday, like last year in blog time (or it used to be...the jet pace has been de-accelerating across the typepads and blogspots of late), merging the enterprise of airport management (more insignts from Kevin Killian) and explosions of green things in Maine (sighted by Ange Mlinko) -- and where does this unfold? Excuses to write -- sounds like reasons to be cheerful.

There's something else. Two, no, make that three respected figures intimating a groundswell of anonymity swallowing up poetry as we knew it. Okay, this is my conclusion, but C. A. Conrad in his recent interview at Exchange Values reasons there are no famous poets because of the ballooning numbers of poets overall. And this is so. Laura Moriarty in her piece at A Tonalist (I got to this yesterday -- see three posts, below) agrees with Kevin Killian's notion of bards at work in "a common project," which is also depicted, a little more colorfully, as a "fragmented ferment," stunning enough a parallel to the ballooning numbers idea, I think, to drag everything into my groundswell. (Why is the ferment in fragments? Because so innumberable are the poets who have signed on, we tell them apart only when we study one at time, finding commonalities.) I'm not arguing a point, just seeing it. Wasn't the last renaissance prompted by gangs of anonyms?

What's the worst that could happen? Daily feedings of permeable discourse and lite overdrafts are no longer confined to the blogosphere; The Times takes up the spoofy challenge of reporting what should have happened on Project Runway after the final four contestants showed their collections:

"Jeffrey," I imagined Mr. Kors saying to the contestant with the long neck. "It's rock 'n' roll. It's hard-edged. It's you..."

"I'm really disappointed in Michael," Ms. Garcia said. "He said he was inspired by a woman on the hunt to find out who she is, a seductress."

“With pink satin jumpshorts?” Mr. Kors asked.

She said. And he said. And from what sticks between the lines, Eric Wilson signals that Uli, along with Jeffrey and Michael, makes the final three, and that Jeffrey wins.

[But... that scrap bandaging her left shin?]

Here's one for the books on S. Coleridge, A. Berrigan, and "ontological" E. coli. Authored by Dale Smith.

Laura Moriarty notes "darkly connotative...textual units" as a contemporary feature and distinguishes between units that are talky and defensively layered to the gills v. ones that are swept up in "old Modernism." The distinction is persuasively drawn from two specimens out of Michael Scharf's Telemachiad. The old-modern idea holds formally in a monological stone (first-person puffing out short, diophoretic breaths), but downplays Scharf's arch trebles throughout, a lesson, for me, in vocal style trumping close to everything else.

Thanks to DIY and Tributary for enthusiams in re: Post~Twyla, both picking up on some kind of "big idea" that "changes," to cite Allen, Shanna highlighting narcoleptic process. Tom finds Derrida endearing while hung over on me?? -- how would I object?

Something I said to Tom Beckett last week was no more than a little nosh in the wind, a trail snack predicate: Poetry is in a state of self-loathing. But if you believe in the totalizing, dystopian malaise of late capitalism, it's not far off the trail. Poetry's tradition was once handed down to us handsomely as one of sui generis prestige, aesthetic prowess, ardor. Not so today. Try squeezing ardor and prowess into a career that breaks six figures. American poets, as a category, still trend toward the privileged and happy few who manage their lives with little lasting interference from bosses, debt collectors, spouses from hell. Still, most career options in and around poetry are second- and third-tier in comparison to law, medicine, media; the list goes on. Academic pursuits seem more central to poets than ever. The dynamic used to be that critics and researchers sought out avants. Now it's interactivity, with not a few seeing themselves as avants also doing research, teaching, hunting down similar folk in or around academic work (through conferencing, blogs, etc.). This seems a logical outgrowth of increasing numbers trained as low-paid professionals in poetry. What's a poetry professional? Maybe it's a humorist in the flux of self-irony and career doubt, pissing over poetry. The output is huge, not just the spoofs we have come to expect from Ashberians and post Ashberians, language poets, flarfists, et al., but boatloads of others that might be typed as The Best Americans chosen almost haphazardly for their composing ironic plain speech (e.g., fuck you poems), chosen by the likes of, yes, Lehman and Collins; but we don't pin the blame on these two exclusively; there are literally hundreds of other poetry-for-dumbies practitioners to float in their places. The affect of our blurred Age of Satire at one level of analysis is that poetry can't be serious. Or, as a misreading of Ashbery, what proceeds can't be embarrassed if it a) stays crafty and b) tries not to be serious. The problem with many poems in BAP 2006 is that they are well enough constructed for an analyst to gloat over how off-hand the occasion and yet what a brain stretch it takes to achieve it. It's a doctrine and syndrome, perhaps, Little J. A. in a Prospect of Followers Chewing Diminished Expectations.

As you may know, I grew up in a football family.

Food is information.

I do the Showtime Beyond graphics. Autumn leaves floating above protoplasm. Oh that's so awesome. Doggie style. (The cool mom.) No I don't.

You're not alone anymore. P.O.S. Paul Kersey to Jack Kimball, what the sweet eff...

If John Giorno got religion, really tried to get it, or really really tried to let you think he got it, it would be horrendous. Horrendous and ugly.

It's never a fucking party. -- Jeffrey, Project Runway

Poet and friend Tom Beckett interviews me at his popular site Exchange Values. I enjoyed talking with Tom, and learned maybe a little too much trying to answer his questions. So my head is exploding, but I'm really grateful. Thanks again, Tom.

I'll be the first to agree each poem from BAP 2006 that Behrle has pooed over deserves it. His baloon commentary is too spot on, as it whir. But this constant trouncing of bears and leprechauns has got to stop. These little ones are a whole race of elves. And bears are among my deepest sex fantasies. What can you be thinking, Behrle?

Slumming within The Wall Street Journal: This catalog from Dan Golden of specialized "contexts" and processes for admitting mediocre candidates, offspring of investor and celebrity classes, pisses me off. The blatancy of Brown and Duke's "systemized pursuit" of rich kids belies lack of embarrassment in building endowments through plundering ranks of the second-rate. Someone should do a series like The Wire on greedy arrivistes in elite admissions, advisory boards, and university officers, beginning with presidents.

The lead in to the article: "How Lowering the Bar Helps Colleges Prosper: Duke and Brown transformed themselves and bolstered their reputations by targeting the children of the rich and famous." Bolstered reputations lowering the bar. The new Tin Age standard.

Access here (you need to subscribe, free for two weeks).

Also a free podcast (no subscription).

Oh, it's you. Persona non barter.

So, Buddha tells me you're a baby.

Ten gallons of gray, please.

It's powerful to give names to feelings. Circumstance. Community. Switcheroo.

Poetic proposition: I have to destroy his world to get back to mine.

For half the cost, if that matters, rather than splurging on BAP 2006, try Talisman 32-33 (2006). Essays on occasions of the wild side, the retro-est poems evah, and classic memoir of Ted Berrigan amiably penned by Joel Lewis. Lewis's Jersey (offshore) stance vis a vis downtown maintained, persists; but Berrigan and the Berrigans were his family; he's been touched.

Today the Polar Bear in the Blog Tunnel Trophy goes to scrappy, potentially eponymous Isabella Argento (link at right under the A's) for less than a week of begging, magnetic, flip-awesome-avatar dramaturgy, and exemplary social realism. It gives me a freeze block of pleasure to hand out I.A.'s award on the centennial of Our Polar Bear trademark. This is a sanguine coincidence I'm ontologically solid with, witch.

Reading Jean Cocteau, watching General Hospital. As translated by Richard Howard, Cocteau complains of Auden's translation of Knights of the Round Table:

A poet is posthumous -- dead -- stone dead. He can do absolutely nothing about the way in which his works circulate in the world. Better to be unknown than betrayed. Unknown and betrayed, that is a poet's fate.

I better watch it, Inner-Tweety blurts. I could turn this into a deadpan watch over Boston, a terrific place to practice the dark art, but blogworthy, nah.

Post~Twyla: A postlanguage verse-critique in 250 parts.

Sent Twyla pdf's three days before factory approval. Mark the changes.

Lose half the italics; Buddha-Mr. Gray, now a love note; Casanova shifts to Scooter.

The ad above my hotmail inbox reads, "Get more sleep. Work closer to Boston."

There's another slant to male deadpan that I brought up earlier, and I offer it here as a corrective to my bad, dumb, ill-etched attempts to tie the sentiment and affect to a conventional political spectrum. Deadpan is merely conditioning in both its range of intentionality and agency and its lexical tactics. The partisan schema, situated from right of ur to far right, is subsumed by take-downs, targets stuffed with inflammables, straw (text), clustered pellets (biodata), etc., whose immolation compels male gut pleasure. The instant take-out. You can't have deadpan without it.

Granted, on a more personal note, I can try sweet talk, seeming to have an apolitical, even a liberal, esthetic agenda to cry-baby my way into the hearts of voyeurs.

But then I blow it by teaching someone to hate what I hate.

We come to these tables late but not too late: http://galatearesurrection3.blogspot.com/ -- & -- http://dusie.org/ -- kudos, Eileen Tabios & Susana Gardner, respectively!

What a mess.

Dang varmit, I'm taking this bait. A fine blogger laid down the prop last week of hetero-male sentimentality. Or other wording to the same affect. (I don't have time anymore to fact-check. This is blogging.)

I really, spookily don't know where to begin, Hud -- how about either end of deadpan?

Over to the left, Bill Knott hoots and rails against Charles Molesworth, fuck-stopper Charles Molesworth! among others at Poetry, fetus-killing Poetry! Seems Poetry has ignored Knott's poems for 33 years and ruined his reading career. Knott tears into Christian Wiman, Daryl Hine, names I'd like to put to rest, but now thanks to this, they and their empurpled specters circulate freely, again. Then Knott links and lashes Gluck, Lehman, Silliman. It's routine kvetch done with some economy, noirish bravado, complete with fillip, "If only mouthwash could talk."

To the far right, the latest incarnation of mutton-chopped Yosemite Sam, bully who couldn't shoot straight, and whose principal contribution to fun in poetics was to say something stupid and keep saying it: Kent Johnson. Yosemite was thrust mouth-first into celluloid mid-20th century by American cartoonists intoxicated by Austro-Prussian blunderbuss. Male doggedness, you might say. Similar influence breeds Stateside contemporaneously. You find it in military culture, in political discourse, and in a kind of counter-poetics as practiced by, among others, Kent (whom I like enough to call him on it). I've decided to intake his recent Lucipo posts as hangdog chow. [Here's a link to August archives. Read from midway down, starting with his "Notes on the Sexualities of Poetry."] The kid is hilarious. What other conclusion can I draw from Kent's self-inflicted taxonomy that offers gayness and beastiality as categorical tags for 'post-avant poetry.' Rick Santorum should know about this. (He probably already does.) When Kent intones that homosexuality is "downright fashionable" I'm waiting for the other foot to drop, the right one he keeps shooting.

Tone poems, eda, heart sutras
put me in the mood for head-on.

A higher state of alert operators are standing
by. You get locked out, we'll open your door.

Yearning in an academic setting,
widow, you're a correlation.

It's so pathetic
you could take a sabbatical.

Aren't you from the makers of local cable
your hair latticed, bed wetter celebrity spokesperson?

At the intersection of 32nd Street and Park Avenue in Manhattan, a Poetry House branch sits on the northeast corner. A branch of the Poetry Project is across the street. A Boog City discount center stands over the southwest side. And taking up the fourth corner spot: the new bargain outlet for Newyorkpoet.blogspot has unexpectedly shut its doors, not more than a short sprint from its sister operation, the upscale Greatestlivingpoet.blogspot spa and service center up the block.

Too many poetry branches? Maybe.

Big outfits in poetry have been on a branch building binge in the last few years, trying to grab and hold onto customers. But this recent push may be nearing its final frontier. Poetry readership growth is expected to slow, and some data suggest that poetics organizations and bloggers are stealing customers from each other rather than enlarging the overall size of the market. Higher interest in graphic novels and new Internet-only viz poetry portals have led some consumers to move their readership 'investments' into products offering higher entertainment yields. And prices for poetry real estate and online venues have been soaring nationwide, especially in New York.

“I just think the building frenzy in branch poetry is probably nearing its peak,” said Crag Hill, Scorecard.typepad’s chairman and chief executive, who is credited with igniting the poetry branch building boom in Manhattan, starting in 2001. “Maybe I am dreaming, but I think we are going to look back at this period and say this is the top.”

Tony Tost, Unquietgrave.blogspot's chairman and chief executive, said, “We think there is some saturation, but that is typical for poetry readership where there is a herd instinct.” But even though it may seem as if there is a branch on every corner, poetry industry executives argue that most major American cities are still open to more poetry. In metropolitan areas like Fort Greene, Bolinas, Boulder and Ithaca, the amount of money that retail poetry firms are taking in is significantly outpacing the number of new branches being built.

The rush into poetry real estate and virtual space reflects a fundamental shift by the industry. A decade ago, most big poetry companies were shedding their branches, not building more. They steered their customers away from rhyming lines and encouraged them to use copying machines, the post office, and braille message services both to read and write poetry, which were less expensive to operate than stores or websites. Today, there has been a serious change of heart. Poetry companies view their branches as gold mines, not costs. Their addicted customers can generate a steady stream of fee income. And once a single poet hooks his or her customers, the company can sign customers up for new products, spurring overall sales. All the while, branches can collect millions of free comments in cheap "dialog boxes" that can be set up either in real space at retail poetry emporiums or online in virtual spaces, such as poets' MySpace pages and blogs.

The upshot is that big poetry firms are treating their branches, the real ones and the ones online, more like traditional retail outlets than ever before. The pioneering Jism.blogspot’s New York regional manager is a former bookstore executive who talks about his “distribution network.” Jism, the founding corporation which has changed its name many times, from Kickthepodium to Americasbestpoet, and most recently to Newyorkpoet and then to Greatestlivingpoet, promotes its evening and weekend hours for updated postings and reader response, referring to its branches as "stores." And across the industry, there is greater focus on branding, reader/customer service and placing more products like tequila mugs and stretch t-shirts.

And in what may be one of the industry’s telltale signs, Jism's success riding the retail wave has made it poised to overtake Obey Corp., the corporate entity behind such bloggers as Ronsilliman.blogspot and many, many blog followers. Obey's coast-to-coast network of 5,700 hits per hour towers currently over the 894 Jism hits nationwide. But maybe not for long, given Jism's explosive growth plan in comment box outreach.

The New York metropolitan area, the country’s wealthiest market, has in many ways been emblematic of the national resurgence in retail poetry. Five years ago, a retail poetry branch in New York City was an endangered species; many were closing or moving from corner storefronts to cheaper locations on second floors of bus depots or homeless shelters. Today, it is hard to miss one if you stroll down any street where MBAs and MFAs rub shoulders.

The figures tell the story of a rapid buildup of branches that may be difficult to sustain in New York. The data suggest that instead of attracting totally new customers, the big poetry interests are hoping to take readers and money away from one another -- a pattern consistent with the cluster of poetry branches at some corner locations and high-traffic spots. “It seems like we are over-branched, but in Manhattan you have a bunch of relatively affluent people stacked on top of each other into the sky,” said Jane Dark, a frequent spokesperson for Janedark.com’s retail and marketing poetry practice.

“We are behind and understrengthed in our home market, the frickin U. S. of A.,” said John Ashbunny, the head of Jism’s North American retail operations, as he noted plans to build a total of 100 comment box inserts per hour nationwide by the end of this week.

Controlling and indecisive. No wonder your ex-es are zooper glib.

Project Runway, a creative process reality shtick, well known to poetics blog readers, is a third of the way through Season 3. Last week we witnessed the school yard drama of Keith getting his comeuppance, booted off because he 'broke rules' and was tattled on. (And PR is nothing less than serious about its internecine gossip cum integrity. Mechanics of decision making are behind the scenes, but like Diebold, PR remains officially honest.) We accept then the demise of PR's cutest male and undoubtedly most sophisticated operator of all three seasons. He seemed to throw out designs that impressed judges even while baring their teeth, but no matter, he is gone. Note, most of the remaining males do not deserve to and won't last, and I sense from the preview edits, most of them will be off the show in the coming weeks. In the end, I'd like to see a threeway among Uli, Alison, and Laura (but Laura displays some of Keith's hauteur, an arrogance that comes with a sort of maturity, and she is not half the designer that Keith is, so she may not make it). Best of the men: Robert and Kayne, the tattler.

Another big Q. and A. and pronouncement for you, Condoleezza...

winner of this month's Gangsta Gold Insouciance Award.

I know. I mean, what a magical week.

Your area is interpretive search for a road map to wholeness?

It's hard for me to take credit. I'm a floater of "cynicism" in relation to whatever topic I adopt.

The whole thing just snowballed.

Well, you're certainly the woman of the hour. Congratulations to you.

It all makes for a storybook ending to a rather tumultuous summer vacation...

a vacation in which oligarchy not only imitated restraint through liberty, it toppled it.

August or these last few summer weeks are the birth season of half of the living avants and so half the blog roll, which itself keeps moving, new sites for Murphy, Behrle, and Vengua at right. A massive happy birthday, all. (I'm in a gracias a la vida que me a dado tanto mood.)

It's noteworthy that Murph has a new, plainer, and I would guess less constrictive soutane.

Ant bully. There's always one.

The coding is simple, fear-y one.
A cauldron of rage and love that's not great.
But if it involves me it's great.

I forget what I vocalize, because the office sweats
      like the beach to be mean.
Just to be mean. Lower your monthly payments,
      the only employment for non-celebrities.
Burp through the microphone, hurl, and stare back.

Can you tell a genuine replica of what's going on
      around your neck?
Call it heads.
We beat the point spread.