2/23/07
Another reader writes.
I'm afraid I don't follow what you are trying to say about America and all its poets of varying persuasions. (Get it right, Jack, variety, a lot of terrific writers is a good thing, but not for a miniscule elite that you don't belong to anyway.) I know that you were just adding commentary to the (tedious) discussion ongoing about the avant garde, whether there is one, or many of them, Jack, but when you drag in the old codes like "refinement" and "guardians and arbiters" it's pretty clear whose side you are actually on, landlord. It's just that any of your claims of innocence have always bugged me for that reason. I mean, yes, it was the old timers like Hugh Kenner and Robert Lowell and the whole science = progress = "I hate speech" act that was practically an article of faith among the beats-to-language poets, and the idea of being used for EEEVILL wasn't on anyone's radar screen, but come on, a poetry elite seems like such an obvious next step. Anyway, I honestly wonder if the possibility crossed your mind at all that your writing about fast lanes in poetry could be used to justify oppression. I don't see how it couldn't have either but, who knows?
I'm afraid I don't follow what you are trying to say about America and all its poets of varying persuasions. (Get it right, Jack, variety, a lot of terrific writers is a good thing, but not for a miniscule elite that you don't belong to anyway.) I know that you were just adding commentary to the (tedious) discussion ongoing about the avant garde, whether there is one, or many of them, Jack, but when you drag in the old codes like "refinement" and "guardians and arbiters" it's pretty clear whose side you are actually on, landlord. It's just that any of your claims of innocence have always bugged me for that reason. I mean, yes, it was the old timers like Hugh Kenner and Robert Lowell and the whole science = progress = "I hate speech" act that was practically an article of faith among the beats-to-language poets, and the idea of being used for EEEVILL wasn't on anyone's radar screen, but come on, a poetry elite seems like such an obvious next step. Anyway, I honestly wonder if the possibility crossed your mind at all that your writing about fast lanes in poetry could be used to justify oppression. I don't see how it couldn't have either but, who knows?
2/22/07
In avant poetry nobody drives in the slow lane, colloquially called the lane of the lame. So it’s somewhat of a mystery why the chic-prone avant poetics industry, one of the primary engines of the culture economy, continues to putter along year after year doing 50 while counterparts in France, Eastern Europe and even the UK go whizzing past.
Nowadays more aspirant than exemplar when it comes to patrician elegance, in terms of volume of production, U.S. poetics remains a force, one illustration of this being the sheer scope of poets' numbers here. No fewer than 1,200 so-called poet's web sites are noted in the rolls of the most definitive bloggers. Yet to be honest, there are no more than a handful of blogs that anyone cares about or that the ever-expanding posse of international poetics press and poetry readers is eager to visit or peruse, much less read.
Among the handful of most important online sites, at this point there is Diane Middlebrook's acclaimed Pangrimmeron, based in distant Denmark. Some say Middlebrook's lack of proximity to the American elite of poetry hardly limits her ability to generate the prerequisite line of abstruse, philosophy-laden questions and observations addressing American verse that readers expect from top-tier poetics blogging. There is Molly Peacock's aptly-monikered Blind Poetics, which, unblinkered, monitors bacchanalian verse occasions nationwide, with a special emphasis on the piped-in and pumped-up from California wine country. There is Pack Bringley. There is Lance Phillips. (That neither Bringley nor Phillips has posted for months does not lessen readership one whit.)
Truth be known, American elites are as ambivalent about blogging as they are about national identity. Beginning last year, Chris Funkhouser made even clearer the shakiness of his allegiance to what’s termed the American poetics system when he packed up his electro-poetics ethos and started restaging it in southeast Asia.
What happened? Poets like Siri Hustvedt, Ray DiPalma, and Weldon Kees, whose brands are now global behemoths, once also dominated the aesthetic side of the poetry business. Why does the U.S. seem like it was run off the road? "American poetry has a big, big problem, which is that everyone has lost his nervy edge, there is no residual pretense, only constant change,” said Ted Kooser, the perpetrator of Poetry National, a respected but largely commercial enterprise that is, in typical un-avant fashion, commemorating its 21st anniversary this year. “Designwise, factorywise, in terms of the bureaucracy, we’re behind.”
It is not just, as many suggest, that the U.S., long renowned for its rebels, its misfits and its high aesthetic standards, has lost large hunks of its poetry market to Europe. Plenty of people here will tell you that the Euro-avant experiment has not necessarily worked out. Cheap foreign copies of American poetics are fine, but not fine enough, apparently, to satisfy the trained eyes and ears of readers spoiled by the access they’ve always had to the best poetry around.
You don’t hear the word used explicitly, but the quality missing from poetry here now is what a few of us refer to as refinement. This is not a small detail in a country historically defined almost entirely by its poetry culture. What has replaced it in part is imported tackiness and vulgarity of which America once claimed the dominant market share. American pop culture at this point is largely vapid and formless. What is Paris Hilton but a cloud of pastel neo-Euro ectoplasm, its molecules barely sticky enough to hold form? So too American poetry-pop culture produces its own manifestations, one being the careers of the poets Robert Pinsky and Wanda Phipps, who are incredibly talented composers of astonishingly avant verse in their own enormously respective ways, but whose status as media deities owes less to their poetry skills than to their genius for tapping into a youth culture just as dumb as ever.
It was the filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock (himself a naturalized American) who first pronounced doom on America’s aesthetic and moral standards based on the decadence he saw emanating from the boob tube. But that was eons before the country’s biggest porn star, Scooter Libby, became a snack foods huckster featured in commercials for Peter Pan peanut butter whose tag line uses a double entrendre that is slang for salmonella and a part of the president's anatomy. Like most eggheads of the period, Hitchcock decried the vulgarization of culture by the ubiquitous new medium. Yet in Hitchcock’s day, the U.S. could still be said to have a vital literary, artistic and cinematic scene to counter the television’s evil rays. Even applied parodic forms like villanelles and sestinas then embodied an image of the U.S. as a holdout of refined, if ironic, tradition and Americans as warm-hearted guardians and arbiters of patrician ways.
That this fantasy has not altogether faded can be seen in the poetics press obsession with C. A. Conrad, reprobate grandson of Joseph Conrad, the former novelist in chief. Despite repeated goth metal binges, stints in gambler's rehab, his overdose on grunge in the apartment of a middle-aged transvestite, Conrad is invariably seen as a paragon of elegance. Mostly this is because he spouts his grandfather's prose and wears his grandmother’s clothes. There is a particularly old-American (and dare we add blue-blooded) message in the fact that, no matter what kind of antics Conrad gets up to, his inherited hand-me-downs possess the magical power to restore him to moral rectitude.
Nowadays more aspirant than exemplar when it comes to patrician elegance, in terms of volume of production, U.S. poetics remains a force, one illustration of this being the sheer scope of poets' numbers here. No fewer than 1,200 so-called poet's web sites are noted in the rolls of the most definitive bloggers. Yet to be honest, there are no more than a handful of blogs that anyone cares about or that the ever-expanding posse of international poetics press and poetry readers is eager to visit or peruse, much less read.
Among the handful of most important online sites, at this point there is Diane Middlebrook's acclaimed Pangrimmeron, based in distant Denmark. Some say Middlebrook's lack of proximity to the American elite of poetry hardly limits her ability to generate the prerequisite line of abstruse, philosophy-laden questions and observations addressing American verse that readers expect from top-tier poetics blogging. There is Molly Peacock's aptly-monikered Blind Poetics, which, unblinkered, monitors bacchanalian verse occasions nationwide, with a special emphasis on the piped-in and pumped-up from California wine country. There is Pack Bringley. There is Lance Phillips. (That neither Bringley nor Phillips has posted for months does not lessen readership one whit.)
Truth be known, American elites are as ambivalent about blogging as they are about national identity. Beginning last year, Chris Funkhouser made even clearer the shakiness of his allegiance to what’s termed the American poetics system when he packed up his electro-poetics ethos and started restaging it in southeast Asia.
What happened? Poets like Siri Hustvedt, Ray DiPalma, and Weldon Kees, whose brands are now global behemoths, once also dominated the aesthetic side of the poetry business. Why does the U.S. seem like it was run off the road? "American poetry has a big, big problem, which is that everyone has lost his nervy edge, there is no residual pretense, only constant change,” said Ted Kooser, the perpetrator of Poetry National, a respected but largely commercial enterprise that is, in typical un-avant fashion, commemorating its 21st anniversary this year. “Designwise, factorywise, in terms of the bureaucracy, we’re behind.”
It is not just, as many suggest, that the U.S., long renowned for its rebels, its misfits and its high aesthetic standards, has lost large hunks of its poetry market to Europe. Plenty of people here will tell you that the Euro-avant experiment has not necessarily worked out. Cheap foreign copies of American poetics are fine, but not fine enough, apparently, to satisfy the trained eyes and ears of readers spoiled by the access they’ve always had to the best poetry around.
You don’t hear the word used explicitly, but the quality missing from poetry here now is what a few of us refer to as refinement. This is not a small detail in a country historically defined almost entirely by its poetry culture. What has replaced it in part is imported tackiness and vulgarity of which America once claimed the dominant market share. American pop culture at this point is largely vapid and formless. What is Paris Hilton but a cloud of pastel neo-Euro ectoplasm, its molecules barely sticky enough to hold form? So too American poetry-pop culture produces its own manifestations, one being the careers of the poets Robert Pinsky and Wanda Phipps, who are incredibly talented composers of astonishingly avant verse in their own enormously respective ways, but whose status as media deities owes less to their poetry skills than to their genius for tapping into a youth culture just as dumb as ever.
It was the filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock (himself a naturalized American) who first pronounced doom on America’s aesthetic and moral standards based on the decadence he saw emanating from the boob tube. But that was eons before the country’s biggest porn star, Scooter Libby, became a snack foods huckster featured in commercials for Peter Pan peanut butter whose tag line uses a double entrendre that is slang for salmonella and a part of the president's anatomy. Like most eggheads of the period, Hitchcock decried the vulgarization of culture by the ubiquitous new medium. Yet in Hitchcock’s day, the U.S. could still be said to have a vital literary, artistic and cinematic scene to counter the television’s evil rays. Even applied parodic forms like villanelles and sestinas then embodied an image of the U.S. as a holdout of refined, if ironic, tradition and Americans as warm-hearted guardians and arbiters of patrician ways.
That this fantasy has not altogether faded can be seen in the poetics press obsession with C. A. Conrad, reprobate grandson of Joseph Conrad, the former novelist in chief. Despite repeated goth metal binges, stints in gambler's rehab, his overdose on grunge in the apartment of a middle-aged transvestite, Conrad is invariably seen as a paragon of elegance. Mostly this is because he spouts his grandfather's prose and wears his grandmother’s clothes. There is a particularly old-American (and dare we add blue-blooded) message in the fact that, no matter what kind of antics Conrad gets up to, his inherited hand-me-downs possess the magical power to restore him to moral rectitude.
Beautiful Enemies: Friendship and Postwar American Poetry by Andrew Epstein. Newest must-read, 5 stars from Kevin Killian. (Scroll down three or four entries to find the review of Epstein.) KK's summary and citations are exhilarant.
2/21/07
When good things happen around poets, pix everywhere... Philly's on the rebound! Baltimore's Mardi Gras Views 1 and 2. Oakland's Vanitas.
2/20/07
"And when you learn to draw, remind yourself..."
The brain is said to resemble Gary Norris. It's
an interesting esthetic, not be fatal -- Gary or
a bone out of line is nothing. Really really
bad movies remind me of political allegiance
to the ice ants a-swarming when I learnt dark.
Seth's millionth collaboration was then initiated.
I heart negative phrases like "Repetition worries"
and note too I am Metropoli. And if over
liver failure of the irrational gamma ways
carry places in the heart, everything could unravel
as unprotected woods bout with louder projects.
The magic marker in June 2007 hill figures / naked
waiters like ours that's staged livestock in ideas
after winning best actress off the teacher-y ocean /
a chickee surrounding these things --
'cause Seth is from out of town, design wise, cradled
amongst fans of Steve Reich. My heart condoms him.
Weldon by Beckett tho is different, not about "Honk
if u heard this before I feed it to lunch 'cause
I'm pretty sure we're running out of constellations."
The brain is said to resemble Gary Norris. It's
an interesting esthetic, not be fatal -- Gary or
a bone out of line is nothing. Really really
bad movies remind me of political allegiance
to the ice ants a-swarming when I learnt dark.
Seth's millionth collaboration was then initiated.
I heart negative phrases like "Repetition worries"
and note too I am Metropoli. And if over
liver failure of the irrational gamma ways
carry places in the heart, everything could unravel
as unprotected woods bout with louder projects.
The magic marker in June 2007 hill figures / naked
waiters like ours that's staged livestock in ideas
after winning best actress off the teacher-y ocean /
a chickee surrounding these things --
'cause Seth is from out of town, design wise, cradled
amongst fans of Steve Reich. My heart condoms him.
Weldon by Beckett tho is different, not about "Honk
if u heard this before I feed it to lunch 'cause
I'm pretty sure we're running out of constellations."
2/19/07
A lot more seriously off key than expected, but worth the wait, Part I. (Next time, sit up front, Jimmy.)
2/18/07
2/17/07
2/16/07
2/15/07
This note from a reader.
Dear Pantaloons,
I'm certain, and I'm pretty sure you are too, an art guy's and, most of all, a poetry guy's lack of historicity are as offensive as proceeding as if one were a god-thankyou-god pioneer in anything belies a self-serving ignorance, a flaw too broadly smeared over time, over one's esthetic not to be fatal.
That's fatal, not funny. You are not funny. So, next? Set up new rules? Do what you do and call it comedy? Write a poem -- hahahahaah. Take a sick day. What ay ay ay ay hooooo-ooot! Sip tea, fuck that's fuck hilarious, ow, watch it, you're hurling hot liquid ho!
I find it disgusting you live this way.
Putin, who has been called the greatest television emcee and joker of the century, clearly agrees with you. Brezhnev, Pinochet, should I continue?
Two stories dominate my consciousness. Men like you receive adoring attention in the magazines and online. You've been writing for 18 years in an era of poetic stagnation and intellectual abuses. And yet guys like you've never been more in vogue. Secondly, you know this is about you and that's why it isn't talked about. Before you can do anything about it you'll need to know more and everything that can happen. Until then, watch it.
Dear Pantaloons,
I'm certain, and I'm pretty sure you are too, an art guy's and, most of all, a poetry guy's lack of historicity are as offensive as proceeding as if one were a god-thankyou-god pioneer in anything belies a self-serving ignorance, a flaw too broadly smeared over time, over one's esthetic not to be fatal.
That's fatal, not funny. You are not funny. So, next? Set up new rules? Do what you do and call it comedy? Write a poem -- hahahahaah. Take a sick day. What ay ay ay ay hooooo-ooot! Sip tea, fuck that's fuck hilarious, ow, watch it, you're hurling hot liquid ho!
I find it disgusting you live this way.
Putin, who has been called the greatest television emcee and joker of the century, clearly agrees with you. Brezhnev, Pinochet, should I continue?
Two stories dominate my consciousness. Men like you receive adoring attention in the magazines and online. You've been writing for 18 years in an era of poetic stagnation and intellectual abuses. And yet guys like you've never been more in vogue. Secondly, you know this is about you and that's why it isn't talked about. Before you can do anything about it you'll need to know more and everything that can happen. Until then, watch it.
2/14/07
Shanna Compton, Katie Degentesh, Sampson Starkweather, Jen Tynes
Feb. 10, Lily Pad, Inman Sq.
Features of the So-and-So Reading Series: four readers form a kind of ensemble-marathon-ette and they are usually way under middle-aged and from out of town, distinctive features of cohort info-gathering by Cambridge-based Chris Tonelli, Series curator. Four at once, nearly, Chris and his audience at the newly-neat Lily Pad pick up a lot of fast and useful data from unjaded practitioners of The Art. That these data from four unique smiths moosh together over the course of a Saturday evening is nothing but the byproduct of a) the wind-down of everyone's enormously busy work week, b) readers' hard road to Cambridge (inevitably part of most self-intros), and (in my case) heady affects from a pop or two preshow. This time, happily, things were unmooshed. I came out of this So-and-So invigorated and impressed that the Poetics Labs are ablaze with fertile initiatives, thanks to what Shanna Compton, Katie Degentesh, Sampson Starkweather, and Jen Tynes do.
Shanna led with unpublished pieces about body worship and mind control, poetry that makes me stop fidgeting, sit straighter, better to take in false clues to an alter-ego, "thank you, ice in the glass." Shanna in real life is neither frosty nor needy as the one-eyed beastie chirping, "I'm really a nice guy, once you creep me out...there are never any good women Satanists." A number of falsehoods proceed from corporal reappraisal, culling or otherwise adapting a Victorian primer for and about girls' [stet] "special physiology" [stet]. Shanna's titles inch toward perdition: "The young lady must"; "Pride in having small feet." "On speaking for oneself" headlines "the book's briefest chapter." Lie after lie, Shanna is copping a special touch and feel, her bad-girl, smacked-down nose in the air with "a vigorous strength in her natural waist."
It's tuneful and instructive to hear Katie read from The Anger Scale insofar as her interpretation skews collage and pranksterism to more newly thoughtful areas (the center of a group hug) juxtaposing a type of protorobotic lyricism, "a canine spirit," with "long division" over randomly sterilized surfaces, giving up, as if by chance, such venial rhymes as cosy [stet] and spermaceti or bosom and bomb. Read aloud, the poems carry deadpan to literal bounds, that is, land's end to concise, unpretty, yet decorative indeterminacy as in the final couplet of "At Times I Have Fits of Laughing and Crying That I Cannot Control":
many nasty falls I've taken into the futureKatie's tones and flavors are not simply whacky (speak to God about the vibrator) or comedic (masturbation...and the vulgarity of walking). They ring and taste of a potable future that's shaken up even though it's been around awhile:
are to be ascribed to Susan
And I can't tell what is serious and what isn't.This reading was my first chance to catch up with Sampson Starkweather. He's coined a portmanteau to describe his versions of César Vallejo and of Max Jacob, among others: transcontemporation. He read a set of these confrontations, as it were, which are often stunning. He begins one adaptation from Vallejo's Trilce, "The computer travels inward, / feminine, without the luxury of salt..." Sampson's intent is not only to update (computer) but also outspin (travels inward) the original. His adaptations of Max Jacob's prose strike a balance, I believe, between observable and fantastic, "a canoe full of burning grass." Also,
Is it supposed to be funny? It is incoherent.
Animals are feeding on their little ones...
When the book opens, you can hear oars rowing, geese flying by, people pointing fingers at the sky. The pages are made of paper, naturally, and everyone knows paper comes from trees; each tree was a persona from a Fernando Pessoa poem.Jen Tynes came up from Providence to read from her subtly filmic collaboration with Erika Howsare, The Ohio System. Jen describes these as integrated entities whose individual parts can no longer be attributed to one collaborator over the other. They sound and read as quirky cinema of naturalistic and anatomical views: "The inside of the brain is said to resemble a tree"; "Having twisted its head back, the story continued." These pieces also show recent changes we should have spotted earlier but waited till now to see, "You have an arm that fits an outlet"; "A bleary new way to shape a sentence." One cinematographer's trick that is extremely successful is mixing angles -- close-ups panning to long shots dissolving to miniature panoramas:
Dear pelvis, there are some Indians stuck in your hair.The collaboration was initiated as a quasi landscape to the Ohio River, but it's less conventional than al fresco sketch work, and more intimate than mutual portraiture, animated with a plain language that's staged for surprise, "livestock in the fridge"; "gigging the bastards." I'm inclined to agree that Jen's and Erika Howsare's methods are systematic, if we count on their focusing on the tangibles, the almost-solids and ongoing interruptions of nature as the bases for filming (if not capturing) perpetual flow.
You are required, in case of emergency, to bronze yourself and then fall in glass.
And if over the years I gathered "all the things that you sent downstream"
would it account for the drain? I imagine all the places we could place a net.
It's the Ohio system of ending things with a pause or hold for safety. I have in
my tool shack a neglected system of pulleys, a hair that is systematically wild.
2/12/07
Montage from photos by Stacy Szymaszek and Erica Kaufman of, around Queering Language Launch, BPC, February 10.
2/10/07
Driving home from the gym, by chance I caught only the last two minutes of poet and NPR producer Sean Cole's piece for Valentine's. (I never listen to Weekend America but I was driving a rental and the radio was tuned to WBUR.) Moving on, I heard several NY accents that I almost recognized and two others that I knew right away, Jim Behrle and Wanda Phipps. Wanda read a few lines about dogs and boys, "I want a kennel of men." The Weekend America site has audio of Jim's, along with poems from Franz Wright and Beth Woodcome yet, snarly bitch gawd, nothing of Wanda's. Hey, why not? Here's the audio site.
2/9/07
Anonymous writes,
I'm too busy to remember how this started, but it's brilliant when a cheesy trick wins the day, one of my pseudo-cat-poo downloadables -- to which I can pen my name, say -- earnest readers and others to follow, cite, link to it -- it winds me up for a little linking, myself, to tripe by some student or irresolute editor stuck in snow, so I look lost like everyone else even though I'm controlling things at my end, and it doesn't seem that messianic because I'm playing at idiocy for the savants.
I'm too busy to remember how this started, but it's brilliant when a cheesy trick wins the day, one of my pseudo-cat-poo downloadables -- to which I can pen my name, say -- earnest readers and others to follow, cite, link to it -- it winds me up for a little linking, myself, to tripe by some student or irresolute editor stuck in snow, so I look lost like everyone else even though I'm controlling things at my end, and it doesn't seem that messianic because I'm playing at idiocy for the savants.
2/8/07
In one other notable event touched by C.A. Conrad, we have this audio memorial to kari edwards. (Audio along with photo stills from a memorial reading January 27 sponsored by Narrow House, Baltimore.)
2/7/07
Today's update on Frank Sherlock from C.A. Conrad is half-encouraging. Frank has left the hospital, but he is still frail, and he returns to an underheated apartment (amidst the longest cold span of the winter on the East Coast). If you want to help, mail a money order or check made out to Matthew McGoldrick, 1504 Morris Street, Philadelphia PA 19145.
2/6/07
2/5/07
2/2/07
Living around here I guess I feel the onus ... how about that Aqua Teen hoax!
Boston is a cartoon town. Sure, Harvard, MIT, Tufts, Wellesley -- who am I leaving out? -- a prominent symphony bankrolled by descendants of the China trade (opium). Good hospitals, forays into biotechnology. Some notable archtecture, pre-XXth Century. A physical link to the sea, like scores of other cities. A fifteen-minute drive from downtown to the exurbs, like Philly or DC or Montgomery et al. Yes, a liberal tradition that's more and more the preserve of deeply conservative forces. The Mayor of Boston, untrained in aesthetics, takes on architectural arbitrage, critiquing Harvard's new graduate student residence largely because it isn't dressed entirely in red brick; instructing the Diller + Scofidio firm to redesign ICA windows into standard, transparent "sweeping views" of the harbor; suggesting on a whim that the tower at 111 Huntington Avenue sport a dome, better to call attention to the visual havoc of all Prudential Center structures that darken XIXth Century townhouses huddled below.
And there's his honor yesterday on cue, darkly scowling into the cameras, "An apology is not good enough,'' Menino said, "I want them to pay,'' outraged that two dim-witted hired hands (their supporters call them art students!) planted Turner Broadcasting circuit boards promoting teen hunger under Beantown bridges and at famed crossroads by the Charles. These two employees of Interference Marketing think they are still on the job, apparently, have not yet apologized. They are a cheerless embarrasment as is the mayor. Turner executives say, quite apologetically, they will pay for police costs, etc. So where does this put Boston now? The news cycle shifts to fresh atrocities, more fake humor. Boston is left to its cartoon cold.
2/1/07
The Poetry Project Newsletter -- just a gloomy arc jet engine of new search and despair. How can Berrigan and Lorber turn on the same dime? On one hand we have Anselm's discreet "I'm leaving by my own choice...been a solid pleasure..." Ok, hands up, fingers uncrossed, repeat that. While -- on the other hand -- whirling Brendan unloads cultural perçus: "Poetry doesn't merely guarantee zero scratch & tiny fame -- it guarantees even less as time passes. Poets are most successful in the moment before they first identify as one." Before! And zero scratch -- zut, now he tells me. And, oh, oy, now he's got me: "Snapped in the gnashing bear-trap of nostalgia for their own lost youth on one side & desire for a great seat in the lineup of future history, poets become paralyzed, desperate & sheer poison." (Can hardly stay afloat flailing in my vat of absinthe.) Time for a few women to move back in. Where's Stevie Smith now?
1/31/07
Katie Degentesh
The Anger Scale
Combo 2006
Thanks to The Anger Scale there are a dozen new as gumbo descriptors to add to the poetics lexicon.
Ex credo hyperatoxicity: The Bible is as dry as dust / With antiseptic and sterile towels draped around it...
Winter shun shine: she's already "I go back to your place..."
(Paris) Hiltonesque: a certain level of "twitch factor" / which is in fact welcoming AND / trivial...
Anticipatory heteronormative anxiety: Long-term fungal infection / Tingling down his arm...
Missing antlers: the largest fish is sorting pebbles, shoving at them with / doors, windows, cars, traffic lights, bridges, etc., / anything his precious webbing / would stick to in this rain.
Bucking the current: Over-masturbating since a young age / the new grips made it easier...
Adjacent-nominals intrepidness: riddled with pomphylix / like Binkie my budgie. // My "Fucknoids" hurt like a mofo...
Preposterous culinary apologia: No one felt they had the right to have her committed / while baking cookies...
Merger talkathon: It started with being attacked by a large male pigeon...
Plaudit grubbing: O my soul, I have given thee everything / But I note that my hands do not warm back up inside you.
Petrified by blood stains: If you saw Blade Runner, then you had a glimpse / Of the life of every man of God / The day-to-day variation of teeth / But you still probably wouldn't get to do all the things you wish you could.
Developing export capacity: It worked! My bike was set free!
The Anger Scale
Combo 2006
Thanks to The Anger Scale there are a dozen new as gumbo descriptors to add to the poetics lexicon.
Ex credo hyperatoxicity: The Bible is as dry as dust / With antiseptic and sterile towels draped around it...
Winter shun shine: she's already "I go back to your place..."
(Paris) Hiltonesque: a certain level of "twitch factor" / which is in fact welcoming AND / trivial...
Anticipatory heteronormative anxiety: Long-term fungal infection / Tingling down his arm...
Missing antlers: the largest fish is sorting pebbles, shoving at them with / doors, windows, cars, traffic lights, bridges, etc., / anything his precious webbing / would stick to in this rain.
Bucking the current: Over-masturbating since a young age / the new grips made it easier...
Adjacent-nominals intrepidness: riddled with pomphylix / like Binkie my budgie. // My "Fucknoids" hurt like a mofo...
Preposterous culinary apologia: No one felt they had the right to have her committed / while baking cookies...
Merger talkathon: It started with being attacked by a large male pigeon...
Plaudit grubbing: O my soul, I have given thee everything / But I note that my hands do not warm back up inside you.
Petrified by blood stains: If you saw Blade Runner, then you had a glimpse / Of the life of every man of God / The day-to-day variation of teeth / But you still probably wouldn't get to do all the things you wish you could.
Developing export capacity: It worked! My bike was set free!
1/30/07
Television has ceased to exist. It's two decades into the present. There is no other operative story. An engineer and a woman, stark exteriors and flatlands. Internaltionale Isvestia translates itself into digital nourishment and beverage. (On the side.)
Central to the present is channeling Kathy Acker and composing poetry that's published in engineering journals. Isvestia and these journals. There is no other press, much less a small one.
Central to the present is channeling Kathy Acker and composing poetry that's published in engineering journals. Isvestia and these journals. There is no other press, much less a small one.
In Memoriam to Identity
The un-will is a brilliant psycho logo-ist grounded in common culture.
Falsettos remain outside the motherhead of polarity's failure
& parenthetical judgment. The male pop group fails to mushroom.
I liked you guys more before I met you, Goliath. Duchamps. Sinatra.
Now I'm discovering ignored wisdom on human terms.
1/29/07
Wired (or some such). Sunday's Demolicious teams two comedic egos. Silly Gary Sullivan and sillier Sean Cole. Gary's blown off his last few gigs in Boston (circumstances), so he's urgently recalled and we're waiting, already giggling. Sean is Boston-based but fun and um explosive -- a forbidden preview of his reeling tradework in the almost-released Queering Language, here. Sunday, 2/4, Out of the Blue, Prospect St., Central Square, 2:00 pm.
1/26/07
1/24/07
One history of modern poetry takes place through interplays and changing social arrangements among practitioners who "call" for attention and cultural authorities attempting to shape institutional "response."
Today there's a countertrend, many coolly conservative arts commentators, poets as well as academics, academics as poets, consensus makers -- so many and so many hybrid variations it's hard to tease them apart from the practitioner-sort that are callers, first, and genuinely leftist (deep in their heads).
Fair game to set up conservative v. leftist?
There's need for a new way to narrate consensus as influenza. First to check out, I suppose, is the one, ones put off by a term such as leftist. No one smart thinks in polarities? Sure thing, director sir, grants mistress.
Concentricities are traps. The big tent jerk off. The academic avant. Ashbery as everyone's touchstone, for instance.
Less as more, concentrally, if you find the late Stanley Kunitz, Dana Goia, Billy Collins appealing (in the least) you're not alone, but hellbent. There are sound arguments to compare them (deep in their heads) with Elizabeth Bishop, Walter Benjamin, Samuel Beckett. There are sounder arguments to separate them by acres of tiers.
Why lean on old farts, anyway? How convincing is it to read someone sucking up to what's been established?
Today there's a countertrend, many coolly conservative arts commentators, poets as well as academics, academics as poets, consensus makers -- so many and so many hybrid variations it's hard to tease them apart from the practitioner-sort that are callers, first, and genuinely leftist (deep in their heads).
Fair game to set up conservative v. leftist?
There's need for a new way to narrate consensus as influenza. First to check out, I suppose, is the one, ones put off by a term such as leftist. No one smart thinks in polarities? Sure thing, director sir, grants mistress.
Concentricities are traps. The big tent jerk off. The academic avant. Ashbery as everyone's touchstone, for instance.
Less as more, concentrally, if you find the late Stanley Kunitz, Dana Goia, Billy Collins appealing (in the least) you're not alone, but hellbent. There are sound arguments to compare them (deep in their heads) with Elizabeth Bishop, Walter Benjamin, Samuel Beckett. There are sounder arguments to separate them by acres of tiers.
Why lean on old farts, anyway? How convincing is it to read someone sucking up to what's been established?
1/23/07
Tim Peterson
Since I Moved In
Chax 2007
Poor philosopher. Lewis Mumford. Captaina, your blandishments assure me u R assembled for the little muskrat (finger extended) and all the others in this unusually junto form as they pique. Call me ridiculous, but the Rose of Sharon fisted right back after the clock says / the idea of sleep will cause... what, childnoid? There's glow in Tim Peterson's argumentation. A reddish cloak? No, a huge spanking pink cashmere sweater. If the lyric is in the plural, some provincial pizza entrepreneur asks, do I press the buttons or take it in the hand or, messier -- in the first poem of 15 pages, "Trans Figures," wage a bout of "voice"? -- not finding voice, but voice craving to turn itself into a body. Yearning qua pathology takes on the status of gold, since Tim forgoes pizza on a private boat (a ghost script) pirating desire in a supreme state of careergirl drool. (That's why there's a clown in the bed.) The sentence (the class I call sentence) is requisitioned to feel the spray and cure the sea floor of foam, catching its breath. These contradictions to be aimed at in a parcel. Verbs twinge in the center and the vast middle ground with all the undecideds be damned. It's a microphone bare and boned corset style, shiny like a teakettle. The shine is the glow radiating out of a whole school from fruits.
Perhaps we need to take this seriously, feel the heated slap of the high, black cape breeze amidst the epidemic. Tim's lyricism is germ-spurred. Dark, slut, camphor, / duct tape summer. Higher still and sick I am -- I was inside the / nose that took in that ancient odor's nomenclature. I am, finally, most freaked by his view of what big words mean, ones that sounded good...swayed to that sheen, all the glitter that awaits everyone in the perpetuity of the beyond: I move / through space with shopping bags...
On the other hand, Tim's title poem is absolutist in its punk-rattle no vote against forces of interconnective light, and, tougher to stomach, conspicuously social-democrat in its spirit-weapon approach to satirical, concatenated, macaronic narrative.
One also can't help but try to shake off that old-humanist, lab-animal-overboard feeling that Tim would rather drink imported beer (come home from bars / exclaiming just a little too roughly) than keep composing journal and verse at this self-erasing, funny valentine pace. This is a poetry of jaded domesticity, then, brought on by now-documented, windup proclivities toward substance abuse (hairnets, St. Joseph's aspirin) and all those attendant occasions for occulted confession (People stampede just / to be the first in line…) Moreover, something like universal oversight (a vending machine) is achieved, making Since I Moved In all the more tediously oozing of nature. Overdosing on fascination with the skinhead boy, Tim keeps sticking himself with his own pert middle finger, an often-hidden side of nature, potentially life-changing, albeit network-threatening. I mean watch it, childnoid, when one asks,
Since I Moved In
Chax 2007
Poor philosopher. Lewis Mumford. Captaina, your blandishments assure me u R assembled for the little muskrat (finger extended) and all the others in this unusually junto form as they pique. Call me ridiculous, but the Rose of Sharon fisted right back after the clock says / the idea of sleep will cause... what, childnoid? There's glow in Tim Peterson's argumentation. A reddish cloak? No, a huge spanking pink cashmere sweater. If the lyric is in the plural, some provincial pizza entrepreneur asks, do I press the buttons or take it in the hand or, messier -- in the first poem of 15 pages, "Trans Figures," wage a bout of "voice"? -- not finding voice, but voice craving to turn itself into a body. Yearning qua pathology takes on the status of gold, since Tim forgoes pizza on a private boat (a ghost script) pirating desire in a supreme state of careergirl drool. (That's why there's a clown in the bed.) The sentence (the class I call sentence) is requisitioned to feel the spray and cure the sea floor of foam, catching its breath. These contradictions to be aimed at in a parcel. Verbs twinge in the center and the vast middle ground with all the undecideds be damned. It's a microphone bare and boned corset style, shiny like a teakettle. The shine is the glow radiating out of a whole school from fruits.
Perhaps we need to take this seriously, feel the heated slap of the high, black cape breeze amidst the epidemic. Tim's lyricism is germ-spurred. Dark, slut, camphor, / duct tape summer. Higher still and sick I am -- I was inside the / nose that took in that ancient odor's nomenclature. I am, finally, most freaked by his view of what big words mean, ones that sounded good...swayed to that sheen, all the glitter that awaits everyone in the perpetuity of the beyond: I move / through space with shopping bags...
On the other hand, Tim's title poem is absolutist in its punk-rattle no vote against forces of interconnective light, and, tougher to stomach, conspicuously social-democrat in its spirit-weapon approach to satirical, concatenated, macaronic narrative.
...ate Popsicles in winter at the pharmacyOne gets it that the elements are strung together out of desperation and a deeply ingrained will to power like technology?
were phrases "second pair of eyes," "proactive,"
"on top of things," "move forward..."
Screws up where you get to moveYou see, yeah.
twist and the other up-to-the-minute dances. Gee...
One also can't help but try to shake off that old-humanist, lab-animal-overboard feeling that Tim would rather drink imported beer (come home from bars / exclaiming just a little too roughly) than keep composing journal and verse at this self-erasing, funny valentine pace. This is a poetry of jaded domesticity, then, brought on by now-documented, windup proclivities toward substance abuse (hairnets, St. Joseph's aspirin) and all those attendant occasions for occulted confession (People stampede just / to be the first in line…) Moreover, something like universal oversight (a vending machine) is achieved, making Since I Moved In all the more tediously oozing of nature. Overdosing on fascination with the skinhead boy, Tim keeps sticking himself with his own pert middle finger, an often-hidden side of nature, potentially life-changing, albeit network-threatening. I mean watch it, childnoid, when one asks,
Doesn't
it look like we could not be torn apart
unless someone took a saw and lopped off
my reasons for waiting...
1/19/07
1/18/07
Farewell my Pelf. Anne Bradstreet gets off her duff to do YouTube. 'Bout time, witch. (Thanks to http://hor.de/.)
1/17/07
You already know this bias fluttering around in the filtered daylight -- New England curmudgeons, we love'em, their feats of polity, veiled courtships! Bill Knott raises the question of whether poets should go political, "even the most mallarmean of us." The political is difficult, he says, "I want to hide from it, too. I'm frightened of it. It crucializes me." He points out that 100% of Adrienne Rich's contributors to BAP were blackballed by Harold Bloom from his Best of the Best American Poetry. In this instance I just don't know how Knott can question David Lehman's getting "burned" by Rich's politics while faulting Lehman's choice this year of Heather McHugh (whom Knott admires), further questioning, "why didn't Lehman choose as this year's editor someone like C.K. Williams or Sharon Olds, poets who have evinced a belief in poetry with an overt social and political agenda?" So, the question has been raised. But the response feels circular, barcoded in contradiction. Also, is it up to Lehman alone? And could the burning be triangulated? Maybe Bloom burned Lehman, after all. Maybe Knott should declare his love for Olds and be done with it. It being BAP.
1/16/07
Michael Carr imitates condo scansion.
Passing the test leads to an appointment (folding into nervousness).
The micropoetry of property transfers has yet to be contained. It was the extremity of them.
Decades after there's blood on this coming down, standing tall, fiercely refined --
The south which is whole ... in part ...Rights of women to fear codicils create Romanism scrubbed into the Chinese frame, the jeeps, the prequel, the low-end. Who the fuck?
the document cleared. I got informed
my pronunciation was wrong.
Passing the test leads to an appointment (folding into nervousness).
The micropoetry of property transfers has yet to be contained. It was the extremity of them.
Decades after there's blood on this coming down, standing tall, fiercely refined --
my lung is notOh, tell us a little more about your miserable ontology affecting checks, balances, and the mantra logjams -- stall for the archival laying on of bland -- question being (gosh a permissive overturn), How did worldviews crumble into environmentality to pantomime the inference undercutting American literacy, you aspish psycho? That's what Michael's Platinum Blonde (Fewer & Further Press 2006) sings like, in paraphrase. Or if you need textual backup:
good.
this is the prequel, disrupting the...don't talk / about rough sketches. And so forth.
announcement gives it a makeover effect
external panels
creating a layer more enormous
and low. We had to ventilate the inoperative
woman, the flower
man must be so sad...
1/15/07
How did Auden begin? Green song of oursevles...
From Iraq to Hiroshima, graphic measures of comedic obliteration.
When a golden boy loses faith, what loss. Faith in what? Loss of faith in naiveté's marketing plan.?
The funny guy was so shaken he dedicated his life to corpses.
Enjoys hearing from his adoring borrowers. Takes time to organize, understand, and manage his tools and compensation.
Darfur's survival amid the disaster of horrifc luxury.
A war-shadowed no man in an increasingly phase-y pluralism. Anime simple McPherson.
This has been a productive dialogue far from the meeting that's more than a coup. Good, for a good people.
(for Kurt Manners)
From Iraq to Hiroshima, graphic measures of comedic obliteration.
When a golden boy loses faith, what loss. Faith in what? Loss of faith in naiveté's marketing plan.?
The funny guy was so shaken he dedicated his life to corpses.
Enjoys hearing from his adoring borrowers. Takes time to organize, understand, and manage his tools and compensation.
Darfur's survival amid the disaster of horrifc luxury.
A war-shadowed no man in an increasingly phase-y pluralism. Anime simple McPherson.
This has been a productive dialogue far from the meeting that's more than a coup. Good, for a good people.
(for Kurt Manners)
Oh, that battle between the sexes? The rich won.
Makes you run out and become a feminist all over again. Except feminist converts (and especially the reconverts) have runny noses. "I can't live without my glasses," Xtina writes.
To combat our most basic ideas about slavery, her first line in her first poem -- I'm talking about Xtina Strong's Anti-Star from Openmouth.org -- the poem is titled "That's the sad thing about you" -- crackles:
Try this title: "For every pig, there will be Saturday." So much bitterness, so much grime. Lines Two and Three are these.
Oh, and Xtina signs off a poem titled "Postcard" with this.
Got to run, nose.
Makes you run out and become a feminist all over again. Except feminist converts (and especially the reconverts) have runny noses. "I can't live without my glasses," Xtina writes.
To combat our most basic ideas about slavery, her first line in her first poem -- I'm talking about Xtina Strong's Anti-Star from Openmouth.org -- the poem is titled "That's the sad thing about you" -- crackles:
People are perfect: jerks. LorainneI love it when poetry digs in and flails.
Try this title: "For every pig, there will be Saturday." So much bitterness, so much grime. Lines Two and Three are these.
TALKING TO A THERAPIST COULD WORSEN YOUR CHANCESThat about covers it. (It is that emotional core between personal and professional spaces.) (I'd like to speak that in the semi-questioning tone popular with Level B undergraduates, so it might read on screen or on paper like this -- It is that emotional core between personal and professional spaces.?)
Leak is
Oh, and Xtina signs off a poem titled "Postcard" with this.
Best,Becoming free is a moving and intimate narrative.
Your scarf et arms
Got to run, nose.
1/12/07
To him who has more will be given. -- The Matthew Effect
~~
What is good? Drawing on the insights of gentlemen, it doesn't feel like a diet.
~~
C. A. Conrad has a poem, an "Aria" he calls it, for Kevin Killian and Dodie Bellamy that quotes Magdelena Zurawski saying
Xtina Strong, meantime, has a new poem titled "I an a cliché." That's a sic sister.
~~
What is good? Drawing on the insights of gentlemen, it doesn't feel like a diet.
~~
C. A. Conrad has a poem, an "Aria" he calls it, for Kevin Killian and Dodie Bellamy that quotes Magdelena Zurawski saying
to say i'm~~
financially
secure means
i'm okay
being poor
Xtina Strong, meantime, has a new poem titled "I an a cliché." That's a sic sister.
1/9/07
Gerrit Lansing & C. A. Conrad
Jan. 7, Demolicious, Cambridge
If heroes don't perish, it's comedy, right? Gerrit Lansing takes up the heroic and comic, again without the acrid foretaste of self-defeat, sarcasm, or hedged bets. He twists impressions of friends, fellow poets, resorting to oxymoron, reversing order and received logic, speaking to "downs and ups" of John Wieners, noting how "faults" are "fruits," remembering unkingly Steve Jonas as "socially available yet without a horse," filled with "jovial rage." Gerrit shows some of that same rage, choosing a few unpublished pieces but more from A February Sheaf and The Heavenly Tree Grows Downward to chant jovially to other boys, the late David Rattray, the living Tom Meyer. Thoughts of poets are metonyms, for the art of pursuing poetry is Gerrit's main business. He's dealing in bold, community-wide revoicing that's knocked down for now as "entropy in city glare," but also audible off in the distance as a "rebirth of the American republic [that] is not awaited... but... redoubting." Gerrit's allegiance is to "pondering process values" in the present order, the "black waters," a lived experiment that is "vaguely political" but also "godly" and "uncanny," everyday pursuit, then, turning in one's bed, compost-building, throwing rocks at the waves, dailiness, in other words, perhaps more aptly grounded as homely "husbandry ... what it takes to make the world splash in your hands."
Another non-tragedian, C. A. Conrad came to Boston to throw in his own values, just a splash, reading almost exclusively from manuscript pages and two rare chapbooks. He led with "Frank" poems, not O'Hara ventriloquisms, but dialogic pieces involving a comedian who consorts with rockers. Frank asks, "'Would you sign my book, Mr. Poe?' 'Why, certainly,' answered Frank in a different voice." The double flip follows from a thesis, "part of the dream is to accept your waking life as part of the dream." The conceit lets C. A. slip into those cosmic panties made of soaked bungee cords that most of us cravingly save up for -- it's just that Frank already put them on, and he's shredding them, adding "milk to the instant cowboy mix." Part of the wonder of C. A.'s reading was a set in stream-of-consciousness, poetry hand-scrawled for blank pages at the end of Deviant Propulsion, each piece a thank-you outpouring to an individual purchaser. This work is so top-of-mind and trashy, convincingly so, that I won't comment, except for a personal aside: if I had had a mother, as C. A. claims to have, living down the road from a sign that reads "Grave Covers and Mixed Nuts," I too would find waking life a trance state. I don't dream this fully, at present, and another strand in C. A.'s poetry touches on a reason why, addressing our president with very little guile: "...i'm sure you need a good massage maybe we could go to the creek and paint secret mud symbols on our naked bodies..." Finally, a poem with a massage for Bush, pure comedy, no lives lost.
Jan. 7, Demolicious, Cambridge
If heroes don't perish, it's comedy, right? Gerrit Lansing takes up the heroic and comic, again without the acrid foretaste of self-defeat, sarcasm, or hedged bets. He twists impressions of friends, fellow poets, resorting to oxymoron, reversing order and received logic, speaking to "downs and ups" of John Wieners, noting how "faults" are "fruits," remembering unkingly Steve Jonas as "socially available yet without a horse," filled with "jovial rage." Gerrit shows some of that same rage, choosing a few unpublished pieces but more from A February Sheaf and The Heavenly Tree Grows Downward to chant jovially to other boys, the late David Rattray, the living Tom Meyer. Thoughts of poets are metonyms, for the art of pursuing poetry is Gerrit's main business. He's dealing in bold, community-wide revoicing that's knocked down for now as "entropy in city glare," but also audible off in the distance as a "rebirth of the American republic [that] is not awaited... but... redoubting." Gerrit's allegiance is to "pondering process values" in the present order, the "black waters," a lived experiment that is "vaguely political" but also "godly" and "uncanny," everyday pursuit, then, turning in one's bed, compost-building, throwing rocks at the waves, dailiness, in other words, perhaps more aptly grounded as homely "husbandry ... what it takes to make the world splash in your hands."
Another non-tragedian, C. A. Conrad came to Boston to throw in his own values, just a splash, reading almost exclusively from manuscript pages and two rare chapbooks. He led with "Frank" poems, not O'Hara ventriloquisms, but dialogic pieces involving a comedian who consorts with rockers. Frank asks, "'Would you sign my book, Mr. Poe?' 'Why, certainly,' answered Frank in a different voice." The double flip follows from a thesis, "part of the dream is to accept your waking life as part of the dream." The conceit lets C. A. slip into those cosmic panties made of soaked bungee cords that most of us cravingly save up for -- it's just that Frank already put them on, and he's shredding them, adding "milk to the instant cowboy mix." Part of the wonder of C. A.'s reading was a set in stream-of-consciousness, poetry hand-scrawled for blank pages at the end of Deviant Propulsion, each piece a thank-you outpouring to an individual purchaser. This work is so top-of-mind and trashy, convincingly so, that I won't comment, except for a personal aside: if I had had a mother, as C. A. claims to have, living down the road from a sign that reads "Grave Covers and Mixed Nuts," I too would find waking life a trance state. I don't dream this fully, at present, and another strand in C. A.'s poetry touches on a reason why, addressing our president with very little guile: "...i'm sure you need a good massage maybe we could go to the creek and paint secret mud symbols on our naked bodies..." Finally, a poem with a massage for Bush, pure comedy, no lives lost.
1/8/07
The most important thing is making sure you have a definite diagnosis of powder dependency from your doctor. As for using euphemisms, well, I think it's just polite to say 'powder' instead of 'poo,' because people don't really want those images conjured up in their minds. Besides, we who work in the powder industry reap substantial tax benefits! However, poo based network marketing can be as daunting to the beginner as to the more experienced in anti-drug crusades, especially when considering the size and powder of the heartland. Dropping powder is a strange business for the son of a polonium user.
So I'm replying here. What about that asswipe's inability to clean up the mess? While we're at it: Looks like poo-effect methane chills live science. If this were a baseball team, poo'd bat in the number fourteen slot.
First a tooth falls out, then your tongue wags, won't stop: Shit. When did powder start leaving spears?
So I'm replying here. What about that asswipe's inability to clean up the mess? While we're at it: Looks like poo-effect methane chills live science. If this were a baseball team, poo'd bat in the number fourteen slot.
First a tooth falls out, then your tongue wags, won't stop: Shit. When did powder start leaving spears?
1/5/07
~~
Tagged by Rodney, but not clear with what? Little known things? I don't keep little known things. That's 1.
2. I've been a vegetarian for 20 years and still feel lighter, faster on my hands and feet.
3. Every day, virtually, I fluctuate between needing esthetic recreation and realizing I've got it, and well, it's rather repulsive. The Post today has a recipe for cannoli garnished with cannabis. Can't be all that bad.
4. My brand of feminism is stuck in cultural autobiography, Susan Suleiman, for instance.
5. My next place will have a greenhouse.
~~
Who next? Ange Mlinko, come back come back! Thomas Basboll, leftest fielder of theorems. Yuri Hospodar, leftist. Lisa Jarnot, 'cause we really, really want to know. Steve Evans, ditto.
1/4/07
On a couple of fingers I can count the successful team players in poetry. I'm stretching definitions for success and players and team. Metaphors for publishing two or more together often create confusion or false impressions of cohesiveness, teamwork. Objectivists, for example. The language poets formed a league of individuals, some of whom subscribed to poststructualism translated into American idioms. (Subscription itself does not put you on a team.) The New York School(s) would be neighbors, a few of whom messed (mess) with one another as neighbors do. I don't know of any member of the first or second New York generation who admits to the authenticity of the term school, much less the notion that a school is a kind of team. Teams can be fun to watch, winning or losing, but they are antithetical to singleton output or authorship. A gross irony that I'm sure is to be unpacked about contemporary practice: while intensely anonymous, algorithm-driven technologies prompt the (con)formation of subgroups to experiment with and subvert the apparatus, the apparatus burns on, more often foregrounded, while a human agent fiddles; yet, or more, a genuine group behavior, the now-global impulse to spit out crazed data, is markedly overdetermined textually by the one in the group who would own the production (or reduction), the one who puts her name on it.
1/3/07
If there is language poetry, surely there is queering language poetry. Rather than out the writer or smell her fragrant 'content,' look at the flexing pornografia in unsayable tracts set for game as well as unmatched as game against dull, told, and wrong.
Queering language stands idle and still divides; it attracts hunters.
How? How can language maim and be hunted and stay queering, ardent? In its heart of hearts the language can't say it's pleased. Unmatched, yet never alone, queering spans language. She makes no sound -- queer, she stands by the door, in the background (the foreground in language), in moonlight, in boycott, looking nearly the same. Poetry then gets addicted to this difference, piled, aloof in fallen heaps, bad language and moods washed away. Queering per se makes language wander; no surrogates remain.
Can you forgive queering language poetry for its wasted life?
Queering has its faithful footmen, its Matisses, its perception machines. It pulls you in. Queering in the world (the figure doesn't figure) is only language, Brazilian girls celebrating their speech overlapping human bunraku. This six-year-old offering his sister for sex.
Pizzazz corroded in language, the queering of rogues, of the human presence felt as a fleck crushed into the hat worn too well by language; the pioneering minimalist queering of vignette supported by a partner, the prodigy queering in the title role, the ring of truth and style, the forceful tenor casting his sex, also his disaster, in language.
Mini-skyscrapers of queering simulate the future of language's extra glass houses and ubiquitous reflections, moony and slack and overemphatic with action wizards, stunning, cocky men, coincident, shadow-drenched women, and elongated others eating the flesh off language. Visitors in queering, loose lips and weekends of treasure, discussion marathons, radiant voices, the hundreds-odd queer heads of state. Their lips don't just sink language, they put dents in the tallest poetry, testing the limits for height.
After a while language insists we are queering it. No, it's not trying to make you queer. It really wants to sleep with you.
Queering language stands idle and still divides; it attracts hunters.
How? How can language maim and be hunted and stay queering, ardent? In its heart of hearts the language can't say it's pleased. Unmatched, yet never alone, queering spans language. She makes no sound -- queer, she stands by the door, in the background (the foreground in language), in moonlight, in boycott, looking nearly the same. Poetry then gets addicted to this difference, piled, aloof in fallen heaps, bad language and moods washed away. Queering per se makes language wander; no surrogates remain.
Can you forgive queering language poetry for its wasted life?
Queering has its faithful footmen, its Matisses, its perception machines. It pulls you in. Queering in the world (the figure doesn't figure) is only language, Brazilian girls celebrating their speech overlapping human bunraku. This six-year-old offering his sister for sex.
Pizzazz corroded in language, the queering of rogues, of the human presence felt as a fleck crushed into the hat worn too well by language; the pioneering minimalist queering of vignette supported by a partner, the prodigy queering in the title role, the ring of truth and style, the forceful tenor casting his sex, also his disaster, in language.
Mini-skyscrapers of queering simulate the future of language's extra glass houses and ubiquitous reflections, moony and slack and overemphatic with action wizards, stunning, cocky men, coincident, shadow-drenched women, and elongated others eating the flesh off language. Visitors in queering, loose lips and weekends of treasure, discussion marathons, radiant voices, the hundreds-odd queer heads of state. Their lips don't just sink language, they put dents in the tallest poetry, testing the limits for height.
After a while language insists we are queering it. No, it's not trying to make you queer. It really wants to sleep with you.
12/30/06
I'm not even halfway thru my every-few-days review of the blogroll, right, and I find too much to contradict any first or sophist impression that either poets or the subset of poets blogging has gone to sleep. (Some of us need a rest, and we take it; others -- new bloggers or previously snoozing -- pick up "the void." Nothing newsworthy there.) Here are a few items. Music and clickable-to samples preoccupy some bloggers for the last few days or longer. Unexpectedly, Bill Knott picks up on a long list of mashes featuring poets and rockers or crooners from previous decades. One he highlights, his own poetry topping Connie Francis. (Knott objects to the masher's mispelling of Francis's last name, a deflection of sorts from drawing attention to himself.) Other music picks from Charles Jensen and Sasha Frere-Jones, part of his ongoing project. Crag Hill sponsors Dan Waber's ideas for publishing, as does Geof Huth. Waber recommends, among other inventions, a close-reading exercise, and points to Charles Alexander's analysis of Elizabeth Bishop posted to Poetics last April. (More details at Crag Hill's blog.) Anne Boyer proposes difficult ways to publish as a kind of "community service." (What is community? Oh, never mind...) I like this approach she cites from Linh Dinh: "Bad, bumbling English is always a happenin' planet, stretching your horizon, dude, don't confabulate me." There's Bill Marsh's My Life Project, a line a day from Lyn Hejinian that's been stretching blog parameters for appropriation for years and onward, now, into 2007. But before you and I depart 2006, catch Joshua Clover's read of Keith Waldrop's Charles Baudelaire in a review for this Sunday's Times, Dec. 31, one of our last days in Republican warp, accessible on the NYTimes site or on the The Page, right. Best wishes for days and planets ahead.
12/27/06
Iced Prado
Branchville fever gets noticed,
crashed hills too,
geology chars categorically
so dollhouse, a jostling clothesline
& growls to Democrat heredity
flatter the bird gourmets,
wishing helpmates to outstrip
haven beef once in Berra.
Kankakee herself cursing some
madden tenses, the hermit bowline
necking with insurmountable Ampex,
bodybuilder of copious achievement.
Branchville fever gets noticed,
crashed hills too,
geology chars categorically
so dollhouse, a jostling clothesline
& growls to Democrat heredity
flatter the bird gourmets,
wishing helpmates to outstrip
haven beef once in Berra.
Kankakee herself cursing some
madden tenses, the hermit bowline
necking with insurmountable Ampex,
bodybuilder of copious achievement.
12/26/06
Marriage notice: You're in a restaurant and suddenly the lights go on. So? As it happens, I do have news. Last week, Ali and I got married. Minds work better concentrating on a smaller area.
Geof Huth extends my Xmas graphic into an argument at dbqp. His ideas about the cut-up stipulate a non-parochial aesthetic. Always a good thing.
12/25/06
For James Brown
Americans are living longer. You see yourself among them and then you can't.
Parking spaces have a word with you. Children are the future. Keep them distracted, I'll snoop around.
Every atmosphere has five parts. Calculate the new payment. Wait for the forthcoming. Eel heads and fish heads. This is for you.
That hurt. Oh, thank you. I don't deserve friends like you.
Literally or latterly I wish it were that simple. The orphaned often become scene-makers or martial artists, music critics or teachers. The last stage of brain fever is nothing if not ambiguous; today you'll enjoy experimenting in pastels working for the atmosphere up in the tree. (They always loved you in Canada.) Feckless and now liberal, that man with a verge leaves faint, barely perceivable marks wherever with ropes, pulleys, shadows, whatever.
Post-cogency, you still into that? What's so strong about sadness, the real overhead? The sky of ice prays to you for what party in sleep?
I'm so sorry this happened.
Americans are living longer. You see yourself among them and then you can't.
Parking spaces have a word with you. Children are the future. Keep them distracted, I'll snoop around.
Every atmosphere has five parts. Calculate the new payment. Wait for the forthcoming. Eel heads and fish heads. This is for you.
That hurt. Oh, thank you. I don't deserve friends like you.
Literally or latterly I wish it were that simple. The orphaned often become scene-makers or martial artists, music critics or teachers. The last stage of brain fever is nothing if not ambiguous; today you'll enjoy experimenting in pastels working for the atmosphere up in the tree. (They always loved you in Canada.) Feckless and now liberal, that man with a verge leaves faint, barely perceivable marks wherever with ropes, pulleys, shadows, whatever.
Post-cogency, you still into that? What's so strong about sadness, the real overhead? The sky of ice prays to you for what party in sleep?
I'm so sorry this happened.
12/20/06
12/19/06
Erotic with a strong social conscience. Lantern jaw. Not a jaw, but a chin that extends fuzzy almost as a lantern to the flab of the neckline. Right. A weak chin. No jaw. A double chin. No character but a dark, cerebral dog.
In addition to his wife, Mr. Hoyle, there's his pursuit of very naughty men and others. Johnny designed himself as colorful, simply drawn, dark, cerebral, doglike. So he did have character, despite his fanciful, perfidious mien and no jaw.
"I used to be a pussy man, a short-lived comedy of means," remarked Johnny. "I miss talking to her late at night." His voice was scratchy. "There's more shit I got to do now."
Switching beard dyes, Johnny sat in the gray waiting for all the colors to fold in. The occasion seemed sado-obvious and frustrated his pursuit of seven statuettes. "The others, a number of them," he explained. "I was never a good artist," said Johnny. "But I have some super friends," pointing to his toy tie-ins with bright muscle shirts and go-bots. When it's really late he said he likes to play the KISS adaptation of Charlotte's Web. "There are those times when you need to cry," he said.
In addition to his wife, Mr. Hoyle, Johnny now has a long penis (hued darker to cover his lack of a chin) yet the new look was deemed incompatible with his ex's gift for trying. "Puss got the bots," gushed Johnny. "Last year sometime." He added, "I'd never do another interview without my underwear."
In addition to his wife, Mr. Hoyle, there's his pursuit of very naughty men and others. Johnny designed himself as colorful, simply drawn, dark, cerebral, doglike. So he did have character, despite his fanciful, perfidious mien and no jaw.
"I used to be a pussy man, a short-lived comedy of means," remarked Johnny. "I miss talking to her late at night." His voice was scratchy. "There's more shit I got to do now."
Switching beard dyes, Johnny sat in the gray waiting for all the colors to fold in. The occasion seemed sado-obvious and frustrated his pursuit of seven statuettes. "The others, a number of them," he explained. "I was never a good artist," said Johnny. "But I have some super friends," pointing to his toy tie-ins with bright muscle shirts and go-bots. When it's really late he said he likes to play the KISS adaptation of Charlotte's Web. "There are those times when you need to cry," he said.
In addition to his wife, Mr. Hoyle, Johnny now has a long penis (hued darker to cover his lack of a chin) yet the new look was deemed incompatible with his ex's gift for trying. "Puss got the bots," gushed Johnny. "Last year sometime." He added, "I'd never do another interview without my underwear."
12/18/06
Right. Time to relink to this macbre tableau. I can't think of much else that would be more ghoulish than getting stuck on applause, except for the unexpected death of a poet that occasioned my de-linking a few weeks ago. This relink is like death to the beat of bobbing heads and weary hands. Right.
12/14/06
Derek Fenner & Jeni Olin
December 10, Plough and Stars
Cambridge
Colleagues from Naropa several summers ago, Derek Fenner and Jeni Olin are wildly ironic and crazily paired as readers (crazily, in the good sense). Both are conscious of the 'lateness' to writing verse now, that is, the bulging backpack of influences one bears as a contemporary poet. Derek pulls out pop culture stoppers and pays tribute to a heck of a lot of poets from two or three generations back. My Favorite Color is Red (Bootstrap Press 2006) has a Naropa School appetite, as in "One Hundred People You Should Know," many of these brief pieces addressed to beat-influenced artists who emerged mid-century past, Amiri Baraka, Stan Brakhage, Tom Waitts, et al. (There are pieces addressing similarly influenced younger poets, as well, including Cedar Sigo and Jeni Olin.) In his reading Derek emphasized his pop side with several 'odes' to Katie Couric. These were stuffed with laugh-y half-lies, "staring at Katie I hit the pause button," "think about her bangs," "your name is ... perfume," etc. The funniest is titled "How Is Katie Couric In the Sack?":
Jeni knows she reads to entertain. She's also reading for raw life, the "tuna redness of morning" that "the piss-soaked sun burns." Overflowing with experience, Jeni observes and inquires, "you are two with nature," with "variations, brilliance ... what have you got in your hearts?" With Blue Collar Holiday (Hanging Loose 2005) Jeni conducts far-ranging, surrealist dissections on American iconography and detritus. The inherent decadence feels manageable, contained within familiar methods and objects under the poet's thumb. But in new poems that she calls "Antidepressant Sonnets" Jeni puts her persona on the spot, one whose brain looks squishy but stays hard "like soaked coral." This is a babe committed to "no absolute except in renunciation." When the wrong peacock waddles by, she's a real refusenik, "Stars block my path to you." The poems are dedicated in their titles to new and some unsung drugs, Ambien, Strattera, Wellbutrin. Jeni's persona is tough on pharmaceuticals and on herself, but steers clear of boo-hoos.
December 10, Plough and Stars
Cambridge
Colleagues from Naropa several summers ago, Derek Fenner and Jeni Olin are wildly ironic and crazily paired as readers (crazily, in the good sense). Both are conscious of the 'lateness' to writing verse now, that is, the bulging backpack of influences one bears as a contemporary poet. Derek pulls out pop culture stoppers and pays tribute to a heck of a lot of poets from two or three generations back. My Favorite Color is Red (Bootstrap Press 2006) has a Naropa School appetite, as in "One Hundred People You Should Know," many of these brief pieces addressed to beat-influenced artists who emerged mid-century past, Amiri Baraka, Stan Brakhage, Tom Waitts, et al. (There are pieces addressing similarly influenced younger poets, as well, including Cedar Sigo and Jeni Olin.) In his reading Derek emphasized his pop side with several 'odes' to Katie Couric. These were stuffed with laugh-y half-lies, "staring at Katie I hit the pause button," "think about her bangs," "your name is ... perfume," etc. The funniest is titled "How Is Katie Couric In the Sack?":That's like asking a man, hours before sunrise, what it will look like.
Jeni knows she reads to entertain. She's also reading for raw life, the "tuna redness of morning" that "the piss-soaked sun burns." Overflowing with experience, Jeni observes and inquires, "you are two with nature," with "variations, brilliance ... what have you got in your hearts?" With Blue Collar Holiday (Hanging Loose 2005) Jeni conducts far-ranging, surrealist dissections on American iconography and detritus. The inherent decadence feels manageable, contained within familiar methods and objects under the poet's thumb. But in new poems that she calls "Antidepressant Sonnets" Jeni puts her persona on the spot, one whose brain looks squishy but stays hard "like soaked coral." This is a babe committed to "no absolute except in renunciation." When the wrong peacock waddles by, she's a real refusenik, "Stars block my path to you." The poems are dedicated in their titles to new and some unsung drugs, Ambien, Strattera, Wellbutrin. Jeni's persona is tough on pharmaceuticals and on herself, but steers clear of boo-hoos.I have "a stupid little heart" sticky & heavy like riceSelf-deprecation opens the way for elaborate imagery ("your penis ... looks like a sun-burnt / baby's arm & smells of chlorine") and tension-resolving humor ("Champagne flash & I am the bastion of pluralism"). But the babe's espoused style carries the weight, and make no mistake, this persona is no news anchor.
& about as candid as a Masonic lodge.
Zero abortions, zero dependents & financially secure
in a kind of quasi-Geisha way. I splurge on sushi & weed.
12/13/06
12/12/06
Bill Knott follows through on his self-publishing kick. Two chaps online: Casablank and the Mall-tique Falcon & Harvest and Other Mostly New Poems.
12/11/06
Bernstein on Blaser: "...commitment to a space of in-between [...] refuses the abstract binary logic of contradiction in favor of a generative 'polar logic' of nonidentity and disjunction. This could be described as the ethical basis of Blaser’s aesthetics."
12/9/06
12/8/06
What Would Geof Huth Do?
[Note: Chant and characters by Geof Huth, compiled last July, a respite for December 2006.]
12/7/06
Mike County & Douglas Rothschild
Dec. 2, P.A.'s, Union Sq.
Mike County is relaxed, moved back to Boston suburbia, looking out at "the darker literate city next door," finding its occupants with "secrets in signage...matching shirts"; these include college boys, a retarded cop, a teacher "waiting for take-home," and numerous "daughters from one side of the blood." The splotchy matchiness is in the brooding eyes, of course, a painterly way to harmonize what are common lines, scratches, or at most fragments (if not figments) of what's there: "we need an immediate term for core...to go public without vision" and "without meaning to meaning." And like everyone else Mike seems penned in by the great anger of the hour; incited, he'll "take a war to poke your eyes out [because] I am the war"; more relaxed, he's munificent and ironic "because I'm writing this, it looks like I'm concerned." Choosing mostly recent material, Mike hit all the bluesy notes, including high ones, "toe to toe with the weather...I believe in the virility of air...new ways to please."
Maybe it was and is the weather. It's December, after all. Douglas Rothschild darkened up too, but mediating any one emotion with fast and fake-grouchy counter-motion, you know, "something half-baked -- though there is no whole baked." Teetertottering in "Driving on the Highway," composed on the Mass. Pike speeding from his new base in Albany to his reading in Somerville, that is, "written in the car on the way over," Douglas opines, "the sky is blue" and several beats later, "periwinkle." That far-out and balanced approach is exhibited in "Barking Up the Wrong Tree" as he asks, "Who are we to say which tree is right and which tree is wrong?" The landscapes feel localized in motion, Great Lakes effect snow in Albany, for example, where the cold "suffuses everything with glare...the day's street -- o memorization!" In "Washington Boulevard," dedicated to himself, Douglas's persona is out for blood or crash data or some fender bender, while cell-phoning it in, again motoring, this time "directly into LA...hypnotized by the red car." The call is almost incident-free except for a big surprise: "perhaps...this is a tape loop...trapped in our bubbles, language...perhaps this is the accident."
Dec. 2, P.A.'s, Union Sq.
Mike County is relaxed, moved back to Boston suburbia, looking out at "the darker literate city next door," finding its occupants with "secrets in signage...matching shirts"; these include college boys, a retarded cop, a teacher "waiting for take-home," and numerous "daughters from one side of the blood." The splotchy matchiness is in the brooding eyes, of course, a painterly way to harmonize what are common lines, scratches, or at most fragments (if not figments) of what's there: "we need an immediate term for core...to go public without vision" and "without meaning to meaning." And like everyone else Mike seems penned in by the great anger of the hour; incited, he'll "take a war to poke your eyes out [because] I am the war"; more relaxed, he's munificent and ironic "because I'm writing this, it looks like I'm concerned." Choosing mostly recent material, Mike hit all the bluesy notes, including high ones, "toe to toe with the weather...I believe in the virility of air...new ways to please."
Maybe it was and is the weather. It's December, after all. Douglas Rothschild darkened up too, but mediating any one emotion with fast and fake-grouchy counter-motion, you know, "something half-baked -- though there is no whole baked." Teetertottering in "Driving on the Highway," composed on the Mass. Pike speeding from his new base in Albany to his reading in Somerville, that is, "written in the car on the way over," Douglas opines, "the sky is blue" and several beats later, "periwinkle." That far-out and balanced approach is exhibited in "Barking Up the Wrong Tree" as he asks, "Who are we to say which tree is right and which tree is wrong?" The landscapes feel localized in motion, Great Lakes effect snow in Albany, for example, where the cold "suffuses everything with glare...the day's street -- o memorization!" In "Washington Boulevard," dedicated to himself, Douglas's persona is out for blood or crash data or some fender bender, while cell-phoning it in, again motoring, this time "directly into LA...hypnotized by the red car." The call is almost incident-free except for a big surprise: "perhaps...this is a tape loop...trapped in our bubbles, language...perhaps this is the accident."
12/6/06
12/5/06
12/2/06
There are so many entry points to Alan Sondheim's work -- it's great to see a new (to me) quarter of enthusiasm from Nick Bredie. Nick quotes Alan: "i make work as soon as i think of it. i read as fast as i can. i watch news and practice music while i read. i know if i slow up i'll die..." For an oeuvre that stretches for 30+ years and includes -- a guess -- hundreds of thousands of pages, this is as direct and unpretentious a declaration of method as you'll get from Alan. His work screams methodologies, and that's why so many poets go through phases of adoring Alan. I'm always amused when I come across someone who has shifted from that initial enthusiasm to something more contained, as if one has tossed out the decoder apparatus, and moved on to more serious, more aesthetic craft. Fact is, as I think some lit historians will see it, through his daily practices and his loose, on-again-off-again associations with language poetry, performative arts, and cybertheory, Alan is a big seed for whole categories of contemporary processes and procedures. Terms like inappropriate, outlaw, resistant, unpoetic, web-appropriated, inauthentic, and the like -- critical jargon I see as the equivalent of cliché -- find primary psychic expression in Alan's seriously child-to-adolescentlike work -- so seriously infantile, then, and so individually demonstrative of art-historical protocols, it is altogether beyond critical snap decision-making, much less consensus. Stack Alan up against his younger 'neo-dadaist' contemporaries, though, and enjoy his arguments popping with metric and febrile permutations. This is what the historians will do. Might as well get cracking.
12/1/06
Just found out about two reviews of Post~Twyla by Allen Bramhall and Jesse Crockett, both at Eileen Tabios's Galatea Resurrects. Thanks, guys.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)