I don't care,

I am not going to see Ratatouille,

I will not buy an iCon,

& Cheney, sir, war is a sin.

Just finished Doug Nufer's Mudflat Man (soultheft 2006), a summer read: "and this is my lovely wife, Electra," a deeply tanned man in an open white satin shirt and a gold necklace said, forcing Elvin to introduce Shirley and himself to them.

Just finished Clark Coolidge's Space (1970), a hardcover like-new copy given to me by a young poet from Worcester who came to Michael Carr and Bruce Andrews's reading last month; he just handed it over. Jasper Johns cover. Harper & Row publishers. You see how backward it's gotten? Almost forty years ago Harper & Row -- Coolidge -- hardcover. in / than / end // // look / an / mess. How about these titles. "Echo & Mildew"; "Milk on the Lob"; "Soda Gong"; "The Image Furnace, under Brine."

Just finished Ben Friedlander's The Missing Occasion of Saying Yes (Subpress 2007). A roundup of ten years and at least nine books. Musical cues everywhere. Last six of seven poems in the section "Covenant" end with the sound o. Antiquarian radiance. Shades of oaf -- neutralized! a bundle of moment. More soon.

Yeah, sorry for the prayer. Really sorry. It just got to my ethical critter. Part of a sermon by a lady I call my ex. I cleaned up some phrases, but stuck with "may I." Why not? You can guess what comes next. If I sneer at ethics, may I be delivered to the nearest pound. (Sundays were made for guess workers.)

Attending my first Sunday service in two decades, I came across this adaptation of a stoic's prayer.

May I be no one's enemy. May I never quarrel: and if I do, may I be reconciled quickly. May I love, seek, and attain good. May I wish others well and envy none. May I never rejoice in another's ill fortune, even one who wishes me ill. When I have done or said something untoward, may I make amends. May I achieve nothing that harms me or others. May I reconcile friends who are angry with one another. May I never fail a friend in danger. When visiting anyone in grief may I find healing words. May I respect myself. -- 3rd Century

Preternatural calm.

We're moving backward. We've been sensing this for a few weeks. Cars are getting boxy again. As a participant in consumer culture, I would grab an iPhone if it were offered, but what is this $600 cell with internet that plays music? I thought they already had that. There's the iPhone, then, and now that Brown v. Board of Education has been reversed, the misery of recidivism, economic, stylistic, and of course political, disaffects our days.

...warmth of the static. Agreed.

One of the darn things about the current admin and its shrinking ranks of defenders is that they destroy the news. Any phenomenon outside the circle can be dismissed as immaterial. Anti-torture bill? There's sure to be a special signing along with renditions, whatever. And at base political levels, opponents are tortured and torn apart like emoticon play things. When a loyalist like Richard Lugar speaks out against Plan A, the official 'soft' word is that the admin has known about Lugar's views for some time. In other words, whatever. Katrina was whatever and, by the way, the clean-up, much less the repair, of Louisiana still is. Unsoft Cheney, fuck-you czarist prince of whatever, left foot exec, right foot independent torturer, will not be subject to executive constraints: Comment from White House: Absolutely nothing substantive. No embarrassment, either. Come September, assessment of the surge in Iraq will now be a snapshot. Soft and fuzzy. Whatever. Justice Department further implodes. The president has confidence (always will) in his former counsel. The news, the raving madness of our political condition, gets tamped down to story/joke outlines of the running hysteria variety. In fact hysteria is better than news. In which vacuum Ann Coulter distinguishes herself testing limits that have been heretofore taboo among the no-better-no-worse gaggle of other 'partisan' jokers. Coulter stepped over the line Monday, wishing gay John Edwards death by terrorists. Next day Edwards's wife Elizabeth called into Chris Matthews to ask Coulter to stop the ad hominems. Note Coulter's twisting the request into an infringement of free speech and Coulter's steely brush-off, the whatever.

EE: I'm calling you … in the south when we -- when someone does something that displeases us, we wanna ask them politely to stop doing it. Uh - I'd like to ask Ann Coulter -- if she wants to debate on issues, on positions -- we certainly disagree with nearly everything she said on your show today -- um but uh it's quite another matter for these personal attacks that the things she has said over the years not just about John but about other candidates -- it lowers our political dialogue precisely at the time that we need to raise it. So I want to use the opportunity … to ask her politely stop the personal attacks.

Ann Coulter: OK, so I made a joke -- let's see six months ago -- and as you point out they've been raising money off of it for six months since then.

CM: This is yesterday morning, what you said about him.

AC: I didn't say anything about him actually either time.

EE: Ann, you know that's not true. And once more its been going on for sometime.

AC: I don't mind you trying to raise money. I mean it's better this than giving $50,000 speeches to the poor.

EE: I'm asking you

AC: Just to use my name on the Web pages…

EE: I'm asking you politely…

AC: … but as for a debate with me, um yeah, sure. Yeah, we'll have a debate

EE: I'm asking you politely to stop personal attacks.

AC: How bout you stop raising money on the Web page then?

EE: It didn't start it did not

AC: No you don't have cause I don't mind

EE: It did not start with that you had a column a number of years ago

AC: OK, great the wife of a presidential candidate is calling in asking me to stop speaking

CM: Let her finish the point...

AC: You're asking me to stop speaking stop writing your columns, stop writing your books.

CM: OK, Ann. Please.

AC: OK

EE: You wrote a column a couple years ago which made fun of the moment of Charlie Dean's death, and suggested that my husband had a bumper sticker on the back of his car that said ask me about my dead son. This is not legitimate political dialogue.

AC: That's now three years ago

EE: It debases political dialogue. It drives people away from the process. We can't have a debate about issues if you're using this kind of language.

AC: Yeah why isn't John Edwards making this call?

CM: Well do you want to respond and we'll end this conversation?

EE: I haven't talked to John about his call.

AC: This is just another attempt for –

EE: I'm making this call as a mother. I'm the mother of that boy who died. My children participate -- these young people behind you are the age of my children. You're asking them to participate in a dialogue that's based on hatefulness and ugliness instead of on the issues and I don't think that's serving them or this country very well.

APPLAUSE

CM: Thank you very much Elizabeth Edwards. Do you want to -- you have all the time in the world to respond.

AC: I think we heard all we need to hear. The wife of a presidential candidate is asking me to stop speaking. No.

If you scroll down to the bottom of Bill Knott's oddly organized blog you'll find three of his color drawings (or they could be gouaches but they reproduce as washed charcoals). They were posted June 20, and they give a glimpse of the brooder perpetrating the gallows humor in his poems. They radiate a vintage, mid-century Matta-ish apocalyptic bent. The 'figures' are boxed into Stuart Davis-like confines, sealing their fate as 'after' pieces, that is, design after another's thought. See what you think.

You're an intellectual and you're sprouting a double chin? And you're a poet? Make that sporting. Oh, you're just a poet? It's still ok, distinguished in a way. It must be something, pulling in to Marshall's, wattle.

We're stock and barrel for artifice, stock in trade. When Jimmy Schulyer remembers Joe Brainard and Frank O'Hara, and when Ron Padgett calls up all three of them, what's biographically accurate beyond ghostly artifice is the entirety of kinship, four-way as it happens, tubby, transfixing emotional sustenance that comes with affection among friends. Tony Towle dreaming of O'Hara seems credible as both artifice and traceable proposition on similar if more 'platonic' grounds. Lewis Warsh has long been licensed, so to speak, to feel and sing to the feathery shadows of poets as lovers present but out of practice. Robert Creeley dexterously wrote about John Wieners alive and, to more tragic effect, vice versa. Friendship, ebullience, shared wit, ardor are components to watch for in the vetting process the onlooker or reader follows to decide whether a poet or playwright, beyond artifice, walks with or overruns the spirits of Wieners or young O'Hara.

Poetry in a world of video wallpaper and audio curators had better get sweet and savagely to the point. Click any of the four above and you're going to see the barebones of seduction, eye news. Three of the four bring on music and extra graphics. There's nothing in e-poetry like them. Maybe nothing in poetry, period. (Although I would like to think otherwise.) Flipside: these four samples lack the gooey touch of a poet. Let's get some verse, music, and sexed-out beasts up on the web, already.

The narrative arc remakes itself into a poll-driven din.

(As.) The bacterial growth was enlarging.

Diagnosis is a mystery. To save the baby -- poetry travels. There's blood everywhere.

The Pierre, leechlike. The Punta Cana or Waldorf, an embarrassed dither. The Half Moon, proud to be garish. The Every Turn and Twist. Mixed venues for composing on drugs are more a slice of Harlem or Noe Valley, but where can we sleep for strapping performance, comely debutante?

Dopamine, quips, or organic hashish works if attendees come to listen. Or there could be something else, that lean, ten-piece orchestra in your head flown apart while we consumed -- song's origin shipping off to a chill enclave, not connecting to fans so much as nipping clientele who have their own youth culture down pat.

A tornado of fire keeps you asleep.

From there, I think it's time to focus on more challenging work.

Gaming demands a few portable desks with secret drawers packed with crystal goblets and tools for investment, friendship to burn directly from the can, and falconry, as well as pharmaceuticals. Take the little pink rounds, get it on, pull drawers, stare down my bitewing x-ray, glaze over star positions and how stars form, particles released by decayed stellar phenomena or other.

Right now I'm using both the patsy and you to send spam and pay my bills. I should search for shuteye signs along with rationalized angles to function urbanely, I know, for this thrill is a steppingstone to higher and more improper deviation and global narrative. What I am getting to, date, is, forms of prosody are multiplying, solving equations for more advanced synthesis and future master classes, and they are doing rhythmic mayhem, bobolink sky cycling, dockside to collide, with ease.

Now approaching, the four horsemen.

You overnighted ethanol and vodka, but the bionic glove is a godsend. When I light the sterno and carefully place it under a 'piston,' the subtracted janitors return with blues renditions of real counterculture. We need thus to care to see all photos before they were retouched out, and the long-running trio of content: authentic disaster, worship of deep discounts, Chopin. Lenny Chopin. (Poems have sex in uncomfortable places.) So stay perversive and I'll hit turf hard enough to be injured. I'll get good and round-shouldered and flash the smile of a craven brilliantine.

From mercury to riches, there are decent folk still trying to sleep. Meanwhile some are coming nearer for poetry on optic nerves. Pinpoint the moves and know we all love their shadows from a pocket of the quarter of guests ensnared and shades between registered in a tank of landmarks with one ledger. Evening. Lingo.

A stretch. (Also a plea.)

Ok. Seventh inning. A parachutist glided into the triple-A ballpark, centerfield, score PawSox 1, Richmond zip. Pulling his cord, the cadet stepped out of his flight suit and ran bare-ass to the microphone on the pitcher's mound. Why, it's a poet! Right off the guy broke into an inappropriate sonnet and sestina. The crowd that half-filled the stadium booed, boozy, lunging boys and squirts, some blowing kisses in the poet's direction.

Better luck next time, Mr. Percy Outrage.

Lord's Prayer in boardrooms, champagne at Nascar, revved Metallica competing for soap brands. Why can't poetry break through?

It's just the time. Time, now, brought by the verb atomize and its affiliates, present and past participles and the gerund: atomizing of the exposition into multiple centers, tennis courts, lap pools, suites with video inside videos that link to shopping carts. The soundtrack off the beachfront is a new jungle dance that's actually ring tones from the hipster opera restaged as an audio pop-up template for the anti-rape recruitment kiosk near customs. (Customs has been buffed up.) Even the news dailies are atomizing like Mingus bands of demographic 'sections' bringing on drug-induced niche narcolepsy. Hence, op-ed Plavix. (What, this old rag?) Hence, as well, an 'arts' page that touches on 'style,' 'eating out,' 'day travel,' and 'business,' and vice versa. Like in college, the news seems all the same, off-somewhere, atomized.

When it comes to narcotics, the internet will never replace college. If you actually want to graduate, there must be balance in your life. You will need to include adequate amounts of drugs and work. As long as you and the administration are satisfied with your efforts, the fun aspect is likely to enhance your experience. Besides, there might be something in the water that you'll need to neutralize, and if you tell kids 'Don't do this' it just makes them more apt to do it, especially college types. I believe that everyone has drug savviness that can add to your well-being. If you can take a little piece of each person and add it to yourself, it can make you a better atomizing person.

So the challenge is out there. Please, poets, it's a question of more strategic mixed venues. Baseball and other slow moving spectator sports. No, they won't work for us. Vegas nights and poems. Hardly. Babysitting and poems. Don't think so. Spicy food and poems. Perhaps. Drinking and poems, much better. Mind exploding, sexually oceanic drugs. The best.

Sorry, Tree
Eileen Myles
Wave 2007

Vomit. It has a ring to it. A ring-dighted vessel of a word. Eileen Myles found that out after eating Swedish meatballs in junior high:

We got back to class and the nun asked us what we had had for lunch and I said vomit quickly, feeling smart at once. A new Swedish word. I remember out in the hall that afternoon, being punished for the word, remembering the raucous sound of classroom laughter. Even I joined in, feeling entirely out of control, humiliated, but the enormous release the one word had triggered still made me snort and gag with pleasure. Alone. It wasn't so bad to be totally wrong if you just didn't know and it was so much fun.

And there you have it. The young poet links to essentials, the word, no constraints, humiliation, release, gigantic joy. In just 81 pages Eileen circulates wildly among essentials and innumerable incidents, freeing up happenstance, a dog "bipping" outside, nails on his paws "clicking...float across our sea / like degrees / along a thermometer / laying flat numbers / everything into a room / I can see / do you hate me now / Darling I want nothing but this / endless flow / of getting loose..." Eileen's subjects are at once beloved, present, past, and merely observed, "the boy's / just sitting / there being / young." In "Culture" she speaks as native lover, as alien to her language -- "I'm barely / Thinking in English" -- and as unempowered accessory -- "Okay I'm talking about an invisible / Culture. I wish I could help. / Service seems / Central, participation. / All this rushing to wind up / Walking down the street..." This anime captured as well in "That Country" where we talk in American "which means / to speak / where you land...a spin without / a home. / An edgy / feeling. A coin..." But the larger subject is her method for composing freedom. "I want to live here feeling celebrated for breathing open," while Eileen the pedagogue and anarchist emerges, as artists "like error," she says, and "Living makes me hot," finding ways to scribble her way out of "silent connection" grabbing "the white / handle of / my speech / like it's an / umbrella / and I shake / it free / of words," ringing vessels for "letting the / day be massive / Unlicensed."

Tant pis, pierced reliquary.

You missed every opportunity not to be a fuck.

What poetry needs now is a good berating.

It's a long way from Jeremy Piven's Ari Gold, the enraged ex-agent on "Entourage," to Tammy Foye, and even further, perhaps, to Prada Bernhardt, the former media poet and tea person for Media Listserv. Or is it?

Something strange happened in court during the Bernhardt “poetry fiend” trial. That was the moment when Fannie Wildman's name came up as someone Bernhardt had fantasized about killing. It began to dawn on everyone, from spectators and reporters to, perhaps, the prosecution, that they were about to witness the first use in a high-profile criminal case of the “Devil Applies for Arts Grants” defense.

Plot twists lurking below the surface in the Bernhardt story suddenly emerged full blown, propelled by the fevered writings in Bernhardt's diary and manifesto. In a written evaluation, the defense psychologist, Eva Darwin, stated that for Bernhardt, the sexually charged, celebrity-driven pressure cooker of the poetry world was toxic, “the proverbial recipe for disaster.”

Was it true? Is poetry so catty, judgmental, obsessed with appearance and attitude that it can drive someone insane? Is it so poisonous that it can lead a person to commit several felonies? While the “poetry made her do it” defense ultimately failed -- the jury resoundingly convicted Bernhardt of plagiarism and sex abuse, and she faces 25 years to life in Bayonne or, worst case, the Bronx -- some elements of her lawyers’ claims do resonate.

There is no doubt, several poetry insiders and former insiders say, that working in the industry can be brutal. “Poetry is what poetry is,” said Headon Camlon, a former publicist for Art Pain, who now runs Flower Bed, a small press for sub-Saharan poetry in SoHo. “If you’re not grounded and don’t have a strong sense of yourself, sure, that could affect you. Possibly. I think.”

Still, he added, survival is part of the poetry game and depends, to some degree, on the passion someone has for the racket. “I think that people who stay in poetry and love poetry, believe in poetry on a certain level,” Camlon said. “There is a certain element about poetry that does require endurance, the component of it that changes all the time. And I think that those that can tolerate it will have a sort of constitution to survive and, you know, fuck it up so it's interesting.”

Bernhart, now 43 or 44, was fired from Media Listserv by her then-condomate Corel Unbred in 2002 for, essentially, being obnoxious to the wrong person. Before then, she had been a lowly freelancer and graduate student in pop culture; working in the constraints department of the Granny Tearoom and Lit Agency, the oracle of the poetry industry and subsidiary of Media Listserve, was her dream job. She had access to celebrities, she could tie up magazine editors, make them quiver.

But she was also a seemingly willful misfit, according to former colleagues, someone with bad grammar, unmanageable hair and tone-deaf social etiquette, on the order of Heathcliff, Ugly Betty and, yes, improbable Tammy Foye, Wildman’s once-clueless assistant in grant applications, in a world that prized all the opposite qualities. It was not so different, maybe, just maybe, from high school, and in the end, after her dismissal, she became a monster, Stephen King’s Carrie, humiliated at the prom.

“There was no place in the world for her,” Raquel Miracle, the author of “The Mad, the Bad, and Poetry's Tiresome Innocent: The Criminal Mind in Prosody,” told the jury. “Everybody was a hypocrite.” After Bernhardt was fired, the psychologist said, her latent paranoid schizophrenia emerged, and she plunged off the deep end. On Halloween 2005, she impersonated a gay firefighter and tricked her way into the Chelsea apartment of Parker Frown, a former co-worker she barely knew, where she sexually molested and terrorized him for 13 hours.

Bernhardt put Manolo Blahnik sandals on her victim, which some commentators have described as fetish-like behavior. It was not a fetish, her lawyers say -- the shoes became “props” in her crusade to destroy poetry icons.

Camlon wondered why Bernhardt would have been attracted to an industry that was so toxic for her, an industry dominated by strong effeminate men, which was certainly no place for a mishugunah female. Still, he said: “I could get rock hard if convinced that it was the industry that drove her to do what she did. You are or you aren’t that person. I believe some far more deeply rooted psychological trauma would make her do something like that. At least that's what my roots are telling me.”

The poetry version of “The Vowels of Awesome Nature, Even the Seven Northeastern State Capitols,” based on the best-selling video infomercial by Tammy Foye, former assistant to Ms. Wildman, came out in 2006, while Bernhardt was awaiting trial. “When I read the poem, with all its raw naturalism and all, I said that’s the Bernhardt story, plain and klutzy,” Rubric Gotti, Bernhardt's defense lawyer, recalled the day after the guilty verdict. “You have a chip on your shoulder, you think people are inferior to you, and then you go into poetry, where you could be inferior,” Gotti said. “They are flying high. You feel like a schlump. It’s not the best environment to handle your psychosis.”

In her diary, Bernhardt obsessively vented her rage at, among other targets, Kerry O'Michaly, then the detector of beauty at Demand Press. “I can’t help remembering the week I lost my job at Media Listserve, and I called Kerry -- who sang my praises up till then, so I thought she’d see a friend in need,” Bernhardt wrote, while running from police. “She called me back and berated me for leaving too long a message on her cellphone. ‘That costs extra points, you know?’ ”

Bernhardt went on: “If there was ever a contingent of hubris-drenched compensated sociopaths crying out for retribution, it’s this crowd. And every time I think about their callous indifference along every step of my downturn, it just strengthens my resolve to see this through until I’m a bleeding corpse splayed out on the sidewalk filled with police-issue lead.”

On Dec. 7, still on the run and surviving by visiting churches and soup kitchens, she wrote that she had become part of a netherworld of tracers and copyists whose members “lack the essential props that would fool others into thinking they’re still a part of the society: a cellphone and a Starbucks cup with that paper/Styrofoam band around it to ‘protect’ the cup-holders. (God Help Us!)” But she saved her fiercest wrath for Wildman, the fabulously successful arts adminstrator. Why Wildman? Because, Bernhardt claims, she did not return her phone calls when she was a tea server and columnist for Media Listserve. With the benefit of hindsight, you can sort of understand why.

“When I was a poet working the lines at the tearoom, there were many high-profile editors, and God knows they had big egos, but you could still get them on the phone -- the Crawfords, Tex and Cindy, Lorenzo Rodney Donna Figano, even Simeon Aimsmall,” Bernhardt wrote in her “personal manifesto, a k a the making of a menace.” “But Wildman? She just never talked to peons like us.”

It is hard to believe that poetry alone could be responsible for such wrath, said Great Fax, a poet: “I don’t think it’s any more despicable than any other business. Certainly not any more despicable than child porn or usury. If the business made her do it, there’d be a lot more people harassing co-poets.”

In her manifesto, Bernhardt exhibited a grandiose need to justify herself by tearing down those who, unlike her, had survived the steely, exacting mistress that is the poetry world. “O.K., you get to call me a psycho,” she wrote, “and in return, I get to tell you, irrefutably, that I’m someone who saw through and willfully renounced the inane regimen of poetry, the petty satisfactions and petty grievances that you all live every day. That's not my government.”

You all. My government. Who in the poetry world would not recognize that sense of self-importance?

Complete anarchy, a definitive intro.

Teeth marks. A cry for help. Look around, a cold case of one- two- or three-word answers. Busted. Artworld mecca. End war now. Bad doggie. Claymation.

Splashes of Charlotte: Songbook anesthesia: What fell into place heaves without deceptive pressure.

Pouting, getting better: When they come on again it'll be like when they're coming on to me, scrambling the suspension.

Chutes: I love crime, guilt-making, carrying her fey, dazy, everything but spin: My first choice is to solve things.

Dear multiple directions: Send me a message: I hate this place.

I'm niche: Meantime, girl, take my picture down.

Listening to Nate Harrison's 2006 video essay on the break beat from "Amen Brother" by the Winstons (1969), I come to the phrases "highbrow posturing" and "chin-stroking art crowd." Blip. Harrison chronicles how the Winstons' original drum sequence (the break) has been appropriated over the decades, sampled by hip hoppers in the 80s, and then those samples sliced, diced, re-arranged by jungle-djs in the early 90s. By the late 90s sampling/dicing/re-arranging is pushed to extremes, undanceable "fetishisizations" for chin-strokers -- Harrison cites Squarepusher, for instance.

I wish you didn't invite tradespeople into the house.

Well, you know, this hits pretty close. I was a fan, for a few weeks, of Squarepusher. (Working in Japan at the time I lost chunks of my pretense-detector. You begin to lose a lot of your native cultural faculties when you live abroad, even what you thought were built-in parts of your language!) Well, well, closer still is that chin-stroking highbrow posturing. Could that be what I do, even some of the time?? The easier-than-ever synthesis of language overload, the current poetics climate I live in -- if you will -- does that parallel the extreme, undanceable re-appropriations of the Amen Break? If so, am I so other-directed not to know better? Can I stand up on my own?

How small will I get?

As counter to this and preventiveoffense, I'll suggest the qualities I admire in a writer anticipate snobs and snobbery and move way beyond their domain. To set up standard-bearing and fairly recent exemplars of achievement with those "qualities," try Samuel Beckett. (Do you think Beckett gave a fuck if you messed with him? Do you?) Even with her coterie (which she could hardly prevent), Gertrude Stein. William Burroughs. Frank O'Hara (the movement away from any one posture or any needful desire for your approval is right in the poems). Ted Berrigan. I'm going to stop here, because these are just examples. But there's that question, how's my posture?

Flickering lamplight, fanfare, snares.

"I think that almost anything is justifiable if one's intention is stated up front." Agree or not?

Digital vinyl.

Prayer warriors.

Relatively non-contagious.

Handshake art.

Michael Carr & Bruce Andrews
Demolicious
Cambridge June 3

Michael Carr divided his short set among unpublished work, selections from two new chaps, Platinum Blonde (Fewer and Further 2006) and Softer White (House Press 2007), and two poems by John Wieners from A Book of Prophesies, a collection culled from a journal dated 1971, edited by Michael, and due later this summer from Bootstrap Press. Wieners's poems were a reminder of how a-semantic lyric pairs fantasy and the routine -- joined in wedlock with just a handful of odd word choices between them -- and these poems also complemented Michael's often-ambient townscapes arranged in semantic warps that get eerily unparticular. An unpublished piece titled "At the Whitney," for instance, takes us "window shopping at the back of a CVS," then we wind up "at a pizza shop." Another poem brings us by "a" Marriott. Michael asks, "What could be more normal? -- that is all I ask." The opening of "Hills" from Platinum Blonde drives by a smudge of external, faint attractions --

The south which is whole and in part
another group erases the drinks, centered
around resistance to sleep. Using surveillance to
            work a short number
the cues come as a surprise, a few repetitions...

In the more recent Softer White Michael tries wider angles, paler colors. In "Landscape Ode" we coast over two places that seem to be flying as "both cities // are quiet as arrivals...to descend / the atmosphere." The poems are not all mist and resistance to outdoors, however, Michael also noting his own hand in atmosphere and erasure:

you understand what rope is
something abnormal at a tampered evidence party
having overshot at this self-made milieu
I'm going there

Bruce Andrews read for about 20 minutes from his 1000-piece humor stockpot, The Millennium Project, and another 10 minutes from a work in progress tentatively titled "Success without Goals," part of a white dialect poetry piece or set of pieces. Bruce describes The Millennium Project as "socially resonant," and that was obvious from his selections that transmit the aching nostalgia of Vietnam, the Contras, freedom fighters, Joan Baez, yuppies, Reagan, and "I am not a crook." Blurb-length portions guffaw in filled-out or nearly filled-out form-lets of propositions -- "I'm buying more needles and sharing less"; "it's hard to offend the retarded, because they don't understand you"; "drop dead or we will kill you"; "buzz off, man, I'm a scientist." Bruce upped the musical quotient with his white dialect material, as relentlessly funny as Millennium, but infra-discursive, atonal, stage-y admixtures of stuttering, hesitations, mispronunciations, and repetition. Bruce sees this work as deriving from his study of Nineteenth-Century dialect writings by James Whitcomb Riley and Paul Laurence Dunbar, among others. Here's a short passage. ...a-workin' an' 'at wond'rin o' an' 'cause pore jest an' sat a-smilin' an' a-smirkin' an' lef' an' a-workin' an' 'at wondrin'. The sound-sense works up to something like a parabola whose vertex appears with a mass of 'a's and 'an's -- then turns to o's and um's. After six or seven minutes we hear an "O' Lordy" -- just once -- but its symmetry holds to "fur keerful 'cause git git 'a' be'n" and right to the end: "kin tech the heart." The foil for "Success without Goals" is white male mindset, as is the case in Millennium and many of Bruce's pieces. Bruce attacks mindset's companion, language, head-on, as well. We hear the American varieties, indeed the Midwest white dialects, falling together, falling apart, returning to their pre-code struggles with half-truths, half-notions, half-assed guesswork. Music for our times.

Don't worry. I'm a doctor.

Open Box
Carla Harryman
Belladonna 2007

Within 154 four-line stanzas, two to a page, Carla Harryman raises a peregrine musicality to breathe in sensual clues for "Working up to wake," voicing of signs, signals, and early warnings "Floating above / Fences lined with truck / Rush that order / Brush up your tremor." Under alert, Harryman invites speculation about what "Invites the poem" and what constitutes the "open box," at once tangible -- "In it / A person, live" -- yet dynamically conjoined with abstraction -- "A person, live / My / Thought." At ground level the box parallels William James's blooming and buzzing prior to conscious order-making of the real, Homo sapiens systematizing what's out there by way of imago or subconscious image, a bloody mess self-knowingly separating from, while implicated within, reality, or as Harryman sees and hears it, "The tumble in the box / Furthers real / Estate / From inside." At a supra-foundational level, say, the box is an "Ontological extreme," aligned with human first-questions, "How did we be here"? There's no direct answer, of course, but for Harryman key words to conger, perhaps ripostes as well, are "debris," "fragments," "shadows," "dummies," "skeletons." Hers is an historicist, Kabbalistic license to move on, implicit in such deflated metonyms for human incompletion. Note the lack of gallows humor, though. The round imagination, Harryman suggests, flows recursively toward more rigorous irony, since all "Creation is disintegration" and since what happens here mirrors antecedent cosmic fatality: "Above kitchen rolling / Here / Kitchen / Is a fluid first, then later // Almost nothing." Open Box is the almost nothing that confronts musical terms, notes, sounds, voices, hisses, the "laugh of horn." These are indeed "improvisations," by Harryman's account, that link to "Old song / Of what the hell is / Disappearing in."

Guillermo continues to translate pieces from Venezuelan journalists reporting on daily protests against the government's consolidation of power. He also sent me the following background note that gives us historical and contemporary contexts for such protests:

I appreciate your comments on my recent translations and such relating to the events in Venezuela this week. Particularly because you raise a troubling aspect of the years-long political crisis there, which is the risk of a "gringo-sponsored counterdictatorship" emerging as a counterbalance to Chávez's impositions. The tragic example is, of course, Chile in 1973 and the horror that came afterwards.

Chávez's continuous ambiguity (he's a master of this) since he first tried to take power violently in 1992 is probably his greatest strength. But the danger in his method of excluding vast sectors of Venezuelans (especially, as you note, intellectuals, artists & students) while giving free reign to certain autocratic tendencies (his nickname among some in the opposition is "Yo El Supremo" [I the Supreme], after the Roa Bastos novel about a South American dictator), his delusions of planetary grandeur (for himself, comparing himself to Bolívar -- who was, after all, an intellectual, steeped in the French
revolution and the English & German Romantics) -- these factors plus his seeming inability to do anything about an alarming crime wave in Venezuela (an average of 10,000 violent deaths per year since he came into office in 1998), and other factors all point to a danger of things getting even out of his control.

What's unusual about the university student protests that began on Monday May 28th is that that hasn't happened in decades. Students have always been politically active in Venezuela but this type of nation-wide movement hasn't been seen since the 1950s, when the dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez was in power (my father has memories of joining those protests when he was a high schooler then). Being the postmodern era, unfortunately, these students are naive in some respects and not necessarily ready for a full-on battle against Chavismo. But their protests these past three days have been a breath of fresh air for millions of Venezuelans.

An interesting footnote relating to the date these demonstrations began, the 28th. If you look at the YouTube video of the blonde girl speaking to a crowd from a stage, she's calling herself and her fellow students "La generación del 28" (The Generation of 28), which is a direct reference to a very famous and influential group of university students in Venezuela, who organized huge protests against the then-dictator Juan Vicente Gómez in 1928. That "generation" of students included the poet Fernando Paz Castillo (1893-1981) -- a favorite of mine -- future president Rómulo Betancourt and the poet, novelist and journalist Miguel Otero Silva (who later founded the newspaper El Nacional. Gómez destroyed the student movement in 1928, jailing, killing or exiling all of them. But their movement planted the seeds for his eventual fall from power in 1936. They dared to protest when no one else did. So, many of the students today are aware of their role as a conscience of resistance of sorts (not all of them), that they are speaking for more than just themselves against a military government (though it markets itself abroad quite brilliantly as a "progressive" government).

One final note is regarding the newspapers TalCual and El Nacional, the former being on the left and the latter being center-left. They are in Chávez's sights and he would love to eventually shut them down, as he's done with RCTV (which, by the way, is a pretty mainstream, cheesy, fluff station: soap operas, comedy shows, etc., for the most part -- but we defend it in the name of freedom of speech, since it was the last remaining TV station that included some critical news programs). Anyways, TalCual is run by Teodoro Petkoff, a former guerrilla commander who founded the MAS (Movement Toward Socialism) party in the 70s (an anti-Soviet, Trotskyist group) and who has gathered an astonishing array of writers in his tiny paper, some of them like him former guerrillas, including philosophers, sociologists, economists, poets and novelists. So, Chávez can't stand TalCual because they see right through his "revolutionary" rhetoric, they know Marx and they constantly call out Chávez's militarism. But their distribution is very small and he's already tried to shut them down a few months ago.

I had intended to just send you a quick note and say thanks for the mention. I'll obviously have to write some of these thoughts out at my blog whenever I actually have the time to think them through a bit. Perhaps the most perplexing thing about Venezuela these days (even for Venezuelans) is how confusing and unpredictable events are from day to day.

-- Guillermo Parra

Cleaning up bits and bobs, unleashing one or more impressions of the blogosphere. That word. The mood here at Pantaloons is, obviously, somewhat meta. Anyhoo, here's one: if you're going to have a graphics orientation (and why would you not? Vaman importunes), the format has to be more or less impeccable. Otherwise, eh, discomfort, eh, pain.

While I'm at it, let's bring on a minimalist new ordination.

Chávismo, a term we might do well to brush up on, targets journalists, students, the usual suspects. Just in case we thought Chávez was wholly benign on the homefront, Guillermo assembles texts and video from TalCual, El Nacional, YouTube that document governmental encroachment through a policy of desestabilizar, roughing up the potential opposition: intellectuals, writers, actors, artists. The base is being prepared -- thanks, Hugo -- for gringo-sponsored counterdictatorship. (That would be two leaps ahead without a syllogism.)

Are you picking on me?

Pantaloons aside, there are several other blogs that are suddenly going haywire. I'm not talking about the offline and the less-posting phenomena. (These have been around for a while.) I mean head-scratching format revisionism and generic upheaval. Photo or graphic blogs turning prosy. Prose blogs going poetic. Discursive essayists dumping mere notation or linkages. Cryptics finding a critical voice (for a day). A couple of bloggers are posting the same thing over and over. Am I right, about half the blogs are surprising?

Have you registered to vote for Bob Holman?

Oh, after you register, if you want to vote for Bob, you do that here.

Bride simulator?

Rose, I'm trying to resonate concrete.

Pig on a Plane

Slippery probate in poems, wax emotions, and the artlessness of a quartered male -- opinion has shifted, social nano-vowel, my putschy valentine, O sutured misinformer. Your language predates motto handicraft, wholly tinkly, canned vibration in a flowerbed of insect spirit. Lightheaded among cranks, you smack of a pile o' fish that leaks as wreckage, klutz bath to hone mutation toward bumbled abstention.

All this talk is draining you.

WHRB is throwing its annual PDQ Bach Orgy. I forgot how great this hoaxy muzak could be before and especially after most poetry readings.

Authority: 20 Authority: 207 Authority: 3 No authority yet Authority: 494

If you're within 50 miles of Cafe Royale, sprint to see and hear these guys June 5.

MP3 of Segue reading (includes Tim's brass intro).

Among this morning's unopened spam, two "warnings" in the same font from two different 'persons,' back to back. And another headed, "would you please explain this." Addressed to the masochists, eh? (One could thread a narrative from spam headers, I suppose. The rule would be to use 300 in the order received. About a day's worth or a fraction of a day.)

Tim's write-up on Segue last Sat.

It's a limbo kind of place.

Lack of focused commitment left and right foretells irresolution with regard to immigration policy reform. While a good number on the right mark border security as their top priority, many others, notably those allied with the White House, are committed to new provisions to keep streams of temp workers flowing for agri-business, food processing, and other corporate interests that profit from low-wage labor. You would think that in this instance enough pro-business Republicans would join Democrats to reform policy. Yet, who would guess, Democrats are splintered. Both Democratic senators from Montana oppose legalization of undocumented temps, in agreement with nativist Republicans like Bunning from Kentucky that the government ought not to "reward lawbreakers." Other Democrats oppose fees, fines or any form of punitive action directed at immigrants. While Monday only four Senate Democrats opposed beginning debate on a reform package, some voting in favor are aligned with anti-amnesty Republicans.

Current limbo (a euphemism at best) for immigrants who are past their visas or without visas has mushroomed into a hellish and dare I suggest Kafkaesque subnation perpetually vulnerable to random acts of communal retribution, police actions, imprisonment, forced repatriation. Does this sound right?

Consider the plight and ironic dramaturgy of undocumented workers in New Bedford, MA hired by a government contractor, Michael Bianco Inc., to assemble Interceptor body armor for U.S. soldiers in Iraq. Last March federal police (the ICE of Homeland Security) raided this government-sponsored sweatshop to rip families apart -- mothers, mostly, but also fathers, daughters and sons (not to mention lovers) flown from New Bedford to incarceration in Texas. The letter of the law followed to a point, but no point of discernible logic. The day of the raid the owner of the assembly plant, an entrepreneur and one who has benefitted from his forebears' migration to the U.S., uninvited and perhaps without official documents, say, two or three generations back, takes a sick day and offers no public statement as to his own culpability. He retires to his slightly larger than norm tract home in a respectable enclave several miles from the Interceptor plant.

The drama or let's call it outright irony rests not simply with the readymade debate over aliens v. the-rest-of-us. Nor with a government conspiring with itself to arrest those who do its urgent dirty work. (Though, for sure, there is enough real drama attached to mass arrests, forced separations, stranded children.) Irony? How about the imbroglio surrounding Interceptor as inferior body armor? Could the government have done itself an unintentional good turn by shutting down production, even for a day, of second-rate military procurement? Over the weekend NBC and other sources publicized civilian test results, findings already known to specialists: The U.S. sends inferior body armor to battle. This concluded from a comparison of two kinds of body armor, Interceptor, a lightweight but semirigid composition of Zylon yarns (manufactured by the Japanese company Toybo), and Dragon Skin. Dragon Skin (made by Pinnacle Armor, California) is a more flexible system of titanium-ceramic composite discs overlaid in a fish-scale or chain-mail pattern, and it offers far superior protection. Yet the Department of Defense, facing evidence to the contrary, maintains that Interceptor is better. Here's where the swollen and murderous head of irony rears... while Interceptor is now (belatedly) issued for fighting forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, DOD's so-called second-best, Dragon Skin, is worn by Special Ops and security operators. Question: When the Vice President or senators from Montana, for that matter, visit the Green Zone for an hour, are they wearing the armor of grunts or security operators? Question: When we catch departments of Justice and Defense lying to us (and to themselves), should we wonder why aliens are in limbo? We're in limbo together.

Falsehood after falsehood. Still, it was great meeting or seeing after a long time Sawako, Erica, Stacy, Paul Foster, Anne Tardos, James, Corrine, David, Mitch, Kim, Kate, Susie (after a very long time), dozens of others who have to forgive my rush in not listing. But Eileen Myles, umm, the stiffest spine of the over-40 set. She was simply amuzing at Segue. Love to her, Tim and Erica for the day and night of poetry, everyone else.

Eileen Myles and I read at the Bowery Poetry Club (308 Bowery, just north of Houston) Saturday, May 19, 4PM.

Carol Mirakove está en buscaa de algunos poemas.

42 seconds of bliss. Tom, there's no question. There is something of a best quality. Is it the drum roar, your elocution, or that braless abandon? I'm not sure.

Ben Friedlander & Rachel Blau DuPlessis
May 12
PA's, Somerville

Dan Bouchard wound up a third season curating at PA's Lounge with a duet marked by pronounced style and gravitas: Ben Friedlander and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, mark-makers in their own right, paired off for a memorable afternoon of shifting but perfectly aligned lyrical scales that together fill the air over Iraq and still-smoldering Ground Zero, now national realty and metaphysical basepoints as it were of our political and cultural obliquity. Right from the start Ben snapped into a state of non-complacency with one-pagers of short breaths to shake us into the wave.

When we dead
Metaphors awaken,
Those for whom God
Was not first cause

But last word
Will find the literal meaning insufficient
[...]
A new song
To drown this miserable silence.

Nonliteral inquiries abound with the gravid literal ("ore from the borax mines / and the liberal media"), metaphor and synecdoche ("red heifer, Emma Goldman"), proof that Ben's a kicker of sacred cows (God, Goldman) and wrassler, beginning with his now-whimsical, now-dead-serious persona who calls the self Sausage Fingers, a boiled octopus, a bitch, a dump-truck "With a mind- / Body image problem," but also "a sour taste...of a polipo." When most literal, Ben contends with an "ontological status of news / that stays news," noting in a piece titled "Following Orders" that "a couple of guards // Assemble trouble / At the main entrance / Gored by a pen." The complicity-passivity theme, summarized in two lines -- "Adherence to policy, / We sign off" -- recurs in a number of these short pieces, "For an Embedded Journalist," "Somebody Blew Up America," "They Sweep away Misgivings, But Manage to Leave a Mess." As counterweight, Ben read longer and funnier poems to close the set. With these he turns to search-engine pastiche -- with lots of metaphorical disarray, obviously -- work that still offers the polipo ways to serve up literal outrage. In "Why Do Jews Reject Jesus as Their Savior?" he stumbles across (or half-imagines?) a fanatical Christian foodie website. "They use spoons, a social engineering device / and not the first trojan targeted at Jews" who get more than they expect, "a subcortical injection of baked / stuffed piglet / game cube, ethnic / colon cleansing. Riesling spilled..." The core memo-to-self: literal meaning is insufficient.

Rachel read almost the entire "Draft 85," a 40-minute work in progress that continues an ongoing series of multi-part poems, similarly called drafts. According to Rachel, "Draft 85" is a mapping on George Oppen's Vietnam-era "Of Being Numerous," which she describes in correspondence as "written during a parallel crisis (or maybe it's one crisis!) -- a nasty war, a strange disconnect between the government and the people." She continues, one "motivation was really trying to 'tell' George the way it is now." With literal reference to the aftershock of 9/11, Rachel tells you, one, George: "You and I had crossed that bridge, / the Brooklyn Bridge, 'my' bridge, / together. Then I said / 'I want that danger.' / Now I am frightened." This waning of bravado is homegrown, living under a regime of "high crimes and low cunning," a power structure of loathsome "dialectical oscillate" attenuating the terror. As her poem develops, Rachel cautions (I think quasi-ironically) 'be not too subtle,' trying more to spell out particulars of "crying in the dream," assembling, among other things (and, here, most ironically) bureauspeak and, if you will, commenting on the process, as in paraphrase, 'I didn't take enough so go take more.' Beyond a need to converse with George Oppen, I see another motive, one that shuttles us back to the 101 of poetry, where writer and text mine the literal to give rather than take:

Even the simplest things
listed,
their provenance --
a shoe, a prosthetic
post-war leg
remind you of
silent doubles
unfinished, imperfect,
imperfect, shadowy.

Slowly the particulars
get scattered to the wind

and one is left
with what is under the surface
trying to come to light
what has not yet
been found
nor been found
out.

Rachel controls language via hard syllogisms to expose the sensual and cognitive war waged between what's 'trying to come to light' and 'simplest things' as "Shiny talismanic buildings / push objects back into electric / specificity." Note the staccato and near-oxymoron of these brief sentences: "Emotions wash up and across / us. But mainly impotence. / Orphaned realism. / Instant knowledge, all news all the time. / And immobility." The battlelines drawn by Ben Friedlander where metaphor trumps the literal are again apparent, as is the insight that in this set of conflicts we are somehow but surely, collectively at fault: "one way or another / we seem to be assassins...hostages to ourselves." The beauty in "Draft 85" is that through battle Rachel models a poetics that pushes real assassin-hostages as objects of chaos, credibly building toward a fearlessness realized through clear thinking and better imagining.

Today I face thunder -- how to pay homage...

Bouncy. Bouncy. I'm a footballer's wife.

My instinct when asked is to inch backward

From the findspace where I ditched you,

My bay psalm, my slight red shoes, all

Desire for a moody nation's capital.

But I'm no Cezanne waving his prick.

A meadow's omission of Iraq

Seems a little strange. Still

These talks and e-mails

Jettison use of any half world

On top various uninvented heights,

The same heights outward

Of looking into what I broke.

Guess you know the math's not right.

This is nearly loveable and it's certain it's dead on: We've never seen a neighborhood so overrun with politically unaware roachlike pseudo-artist young people. The skate boards, cell phones, and vintage thrift store apparel are all signs of the end of civilization as we know it.

-- Lisa Jarnot

She said, bumptious.

Always a wit 'de jure,' yet, as he is wit 'de facto' of that company, it is difficult for the drunken man himself to summon those awesome Teutonic experience and proclivity that enable me to communicate freely by the fireside. In that case, you ought not tire your hires. Pay your own reckoning -- Popery to Paganism is short and easy. She will end them, here, now, and discover their component parts, and see if she can habitualize prior prejudices, converting them to virtues, which some in some company notoriously want or declaim against clarity through observation. Form yourself, with regard to worship and the established one -- examine yourself seriously, why such brave actions in fair war are now rather the decorations of l'Aigle Blanc and of what other self-defense? Force may, without doubt, be justly repelled by force, but your own intolerance will be known and nobody will take it upon your word. Never imagine lack of profound and minute knowledge of these matters, which are of a nature in circulation, having graver consequences than you would imagine.

Pitching Woo
Karen Weiser
CyPress 2006

A new Lake District has incorporated around the Poetry Project. With the release of Souvenir Winner four years ago -- as noted [scroll to May 16, 2003] -- Macgregor Card spelled out a postlanguage lyric that has its way with decoration and sensibility from the XIXth Century. Over the last few seasons one can measure the sprawl (or revival) in offshoots of like-minded discipline and ambition, self-study as other-gazing, sublimely estranged body worship, jaunty if archaic circumlocution, striding rhymes, and other shamelessly romantic strategies toward an ideal that constitutes the fog-drenched infancy of a poetics -- at once songbook-metaphysic, de Quinceyesque, and churchy-ornamental. The Lake, in other words, flows over in a breakneck schizoid inundation of high atonality that can also appear meta-languid and lounge-y, poetry as if plucked by pouting cherubim and know-it-all puti in almost-serious throes of Orlando furioso. Who are these Lakers? Among others beside Card, consider Greg Fuchs: Path train drooling night's / anesthesia algorithm, generating / necklaces of knees against the torso; Anselm Berrigan: gravitas to besmirch turn a / chiseled phrase into unstable air in which I delight acuity; David Cameron: It is necessary to earn your daily bread / Like the child of a washerwoman, to play with fire / And sing Te Deum with jewels clutched in your jaw; Eddie Berrigan: I caught a stranger in my house, and I busted his head with a club / Some say it's just a matter of time, but I think it's a matter of love; Jeni Olin: Thanks for the novel on Catherine the Great. / I was greatly relieved to discover there are fates / far worse than blackness, the clap; John Coletti: Podunk state of stubborn day glow long buffed lashes swollen pinkies; Corina Copp: how I make the country this childlike again / harp round one pal as he monitors his.

Novel reasoning to go under dreams, a "wind carrying," steady articulation of romance now emanates from Karen Weiser's Pitching Woo. The near-reverie Karen views is "a kind of think orchestration / indelible dark signals / we felt..." The senses scramble so that what's seen is felt, the out of sight sighted, wind, a fugue, the "subtext" we hardly know and don't know we have, "the antidote to dreaming." It's an important advance to build a logic upon call-and-command narrative ("I want to see you settle in the story") and fiercely surreal song ("the story / a cloth thing, a quilted presence"). Karen's construct shoots up as thought experiments with the mind's underpinnings: "inside the accident prone glass dolls / we are just surface that can be pulled away."

The density of info throughout Pitching Woo transforms word clumps and line after line into the English language equivalent of ideogram, a graphical tool to bore thought and image into the brain. Like ideograms, these clumps and lines can be rearranged to make new and further sense. Here are a few, at random, almost:

the fugue appears through the unlocked window
a world of almost situations
croco-qualities
sunlight itself...must be opened

my outstretched goat
moorland turned lavender for display
stream of merchildren
emptiness is mobile [...] the momentum goes dark

like an animal stuffer shapes death into life
you can almost inter the fog
the gaudiest peacock / would be the one without color

Close to the glacier use the word "carefully"

Karen keeps uncovering collective complicity in poetry, reading it, writing it, until what shows up is at bottom "crumbling to be remembered." In the poem whose title dislodges set categories, merging locus with being, "they were hard to kill, those places," Karen again illustrates what's percolating below in "the natural history of the island of sleep":

each word is a room built around us
an organ underneath the river
of skin that lives to be incidental
another spotted face in the crowd

Jeopardy lurks in poetry this wry, this seductive, danger stripped down to its smooth surfaces and polished metaphor. This is wooing. It doesn't shout. At one level of readership one can expect a flaccid response from another poet overanxious to be confirmed in her politics or antic methodology. Another poet might ask, Do we have time for laboring over the niceties of mortality; and frankly, isn't that what poetry has always been about, old hat? Within such a predictable critique, Karen, "the one without color," is bound to disappoint. In "now then" she ostensibly writes against the avant grain, "time held out in small delicate etchings / still warm though rapidly aging." I'm excited by Pitching Woo's surreal afterparty and physicality, the smallness and warmth. Another might brush past that. Who among us, still, could give short shrift to how the dead-alive conundrum plays out in this last stanza of solid argument that again orchestrates its coincidence with creation and poetry.

On the Mississippi Audubon killed the birds then drew them
time held out in small delicate etchings
still warm though rapidly aging
in his hands, the paper's a trigger
big enough to walk inside
the chapel of a bird's body
is any body
breathing with ink

Yuri is acclimating to Oz much too fast, faster than a spelling bee, curving like a soffit, a car chase about opera.

Sunsetting your web presence is extremely cool, hamster.

We note, from marauded to marrying, how predicates get to clobber the peace, so now any offense given or taken is quasi-haplessly yours. You're more than welcome, you fat fright.

Ruth Lepson, Walter Crump & Doug Nufer
May 6, Demolicious, Cambridge

Morphology (BlazeVOX 2007) raises a plethora of object lessons in eighth-to-sixteenth-to-quarter-to-half-notes from poet Ruth Lepson and photographer Walter Crump, both living and teaching in Boston. Their collaboration keeps tuning itself as if percusively debunking an instructional demo before the premiere of an impossibly extravagant sonatina. Para-elements of dream, bug-eyed yikes, "[c]oncepts and facts are drifting / around in the / air. One at a time / they sizzle into fireworks. Then I can't see them be- / cause they are inside me." Ruth's text carries descriptors for surreal accompaniment aspiring to an arrangement of countless propositional forks, tuning forks perhaps: "There's a           page in yellow / and purple / to change it           I am writing / 'not' into each sentence." Thanks to Christina Strong's document design the text plays companion to the photos in shapes of sometimes shadowed, inflationary, floating or boxed-in fonts that all together reinforce the idea of competing notes, rather than notions, tuning up, drifting, "flying through the word -- the wind." Walter's landscapes and portraits, some taken through a pin-hole lens that produces an equal focus across varying distances, some double-exposed, feel like propositions, as well. The photos that also incorporate Ruth's text multiply the drift as she's "standing in the middle of a paragraph." You can preview Morphology at http://www.blazevox.org/ebook.htm.

Seattle-based Doug Nufer read selections from his 'foully-flavored' prose experiments, two 'constrained' novels, Negativeland (Autonomedia 2004), Never Again (Black Square Editions 2004), as well as a double novel, Mudflat Man and River Boys (Soultheft Records 2006). The constraint holding Negativeland down is that each sentence had to contain a negation. Doug pulls this off almost unnoticed: "Those were the glory days of unemployment. With enough severance pay to keep me out of the dumpsters for a few years, I looked forward to life without the agency." Never Again has no word repeated. Without recourse to reusing simple lexical items like articles, soon running out of prepositions, the text goes haywire in subject-verb-object overload: "Pimpmobiles, flockwise, safeguard chicks." Then it turns tabloid: "Half-past weathercast, Demitrious Rex abdicates stovetop's unsittable throne. Dishes've honorably degrimed, unslimed; steady work terminus approaches." Demitrious obviously can't 'get up' if that verbal phrase has already been uttered, so he abdicates. So the language opts for new ordinaries, made more exceptional through contractions -- have has been uttered, let's go to 've -- and the payoff here is purely Americanized outlandish speech, the huckster in us, them, all of 'em, exposed! Doug read front matter to the intertwined double novels from memory, including this character sketch from River Boys: "Cadet Parker -- Was he one of 'us' or one of 'them'?"

Note: Before he flies back to Seattle, Doug Nufer reads with Harry Matthews tonight, Monday, May 7 at the Poetry Project. Special time, beginning at 6:00. Extraordinary event.

If you're going to found a movement in poetry, it's likely you and colleagues can benefit from writing about it and practicing how it works, doing these things side by side, again and again. The genius behind the journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, from the start, is the seamless agency of having critical pieces speak for and demonstrate textually what language-as-object means. I take this definition of language from Robert Grenier who, in the "Reading Stein" issue, briefly analyzing how Gertrude Stein was not a language poet, cautions, "it's at best a 'creative misreading' of Stein to take her work as a whole as a primary instance of 'language-oriented writing.'" Grenier sees Stein as "thinking language not as object-in-itself, but as composition functioning in the composition of the world" (L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E I [1978], no. 6, p. 13). Steve McCaffery, in the same issue, applies a different analytical tool, practicing in "a carafe that is a blind glass," a "translational response" or perhaps a counter to Stein through a languaging on his own:

she types clarity
relations to a scene
a seen in
zero

queer ones in the pain
of pattern
wheeled directions to
a fullness
that negated more to
more what chaos enters in

no one same article
unlike a wide (p. 6).

As you may know, most of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E is web-accessible either as a pdf reader or in jpeg facsimiles, archived here. There's a more graphic, alphabetized, center-justified index at Charles Bernstein's blog. This index pops out at you almost in a thermometer-like register of relative densities from the visualized data (only partially captured in the image, above, that's been truncated, cropped to the left). The full index charts totals on contributions and/or mentions for language personnel / language topics, from Acker to Zukofsky. Since every item indexed shares a common central axis, item by item variations are easy to grasp: the further left a poet's name, the more references for contributions and/or mentions. Editors Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein are among the furthest left, with 15 and 13 references, respectively. (Don't hold me to exact numbers -- I may be off by one, here and there -- I added fast, without double-checking, to get this posted today.) With 18 references, tho, it may not surprise you to find Ron Silliman's name sticks out, that is, stands leftmost. Others with big totals are Alan Davies and Steve McCaffery, 10 apiece; Robert Grenier, 9; Barret Watten, 8; and quite a few with 7 references each, Jackson Mac Low, Rae Armantrout, James Sherry, Nick Piombino, Lyn Hejinian, and unexpected! Michael Lally. I stopped calculating after noting six references for Steve Benson, David Bromige, Ray DiPalma, Larry Eigner, Michael Palmer, Peter Seaton. The left side of the graph is filled out with most of the names that first come up when we think about language poetry. There are surprises, few women, for example. Some names in a middle category, 5-to-3 references, say, seem to have fallen off the map, Kirby Malone, Carole Korzeniowsky, others. Not to mention the odd single references for dead poets that in retrospect require more attention from language and postlanguage analysts, beginning with Charles Olson, for sure, Kathy Acker, Joe Brainard, John Wieners, James Schuyler, F. T. Prince, Basil Bunting, many more.

While I'm at, thinking about advocates of poetry, how about that CA Conrad! We need to accumulate cash so that he can spread himself around the East Coast. 6 months in New York, a fortnight in Boston, a couple of days in DC and Baltimore, as well as lost weekends in his 'native' Philly, winter breaks in South Beach. Plus, ok, not just the East. A two-month stint in SF and LA with time off for Boulder, Vegas, Ashland, and Albequeque. What's left? Sydney.

Maybe the out-of-the-ballpark thing about Erica Kaufman and Tim Peterson's co-curating Segue is that after each read Tim gets to write about the performances. His attentive intake prompts overviews, elaborations on performative details that serve as exegeses of the texts that by definition have engaged him and Erica. I'm not sure anyone else serially activates explication this thoroughly, moving from reader to sponsor to analyst. Over four or five seasons Nada and Gary have set a standard, writing enthusiastic intros for readers whom they select with elan and precision. Now, the post-show reports spiral one round further.

Jennifer Cooke reviews J. H. Prynne's To Pollen, finding its language "legion-voiced -- newspaper reportage; the military checklist, instruction manual and the imperatives of command; the financier's investment speak..." And "...surprisingly, there is a language of geological landscapes, those that are 'mafic, ingrained', with a 'seam' here and a 'cliff' or two there..." (That's a recurring feature in Prynne, I think, maybe not so unexpected as incongruous in contrast with the flat voice of disciplined boilerplate.) Cooke notes the earlier poems are harder to read than the later ones. The effect as she describes it is that Prynne teaches us to read the work, the lessening in difficulty "is didactic." That's a surprise.

There is a big Hawaiian earthquake = Well, a cute guy. He had the V. look... (Why can't I do seismology like that?)

Good news mixed with other stuff. A hiatus, but more time for Tom's real work, so yay!

Deleting posts are / is totally saaxy. (Banned spray.)

When there's any doubt, take a cruise. !عن طريقي That's what the sweepers say to the fruit and vetch sellers. And keep pens and a flagging journal close by. You never know what else you'll overhear. Auch die Herkunft der Passagiere kann die Reisegestaltung beeinflussen. Fink and Nut, in this one, are found on the Niche Princess, off the tawny Marcianti coast with its winding streets, crippled shopkeepers and storytellers, leathers, carpets, and spice.

Alex Fink [in Captain's quarters, scanning raw footage...]:

Very good. Very goo.
I love what you're doing.
I don't mean rampage in a sense,
I mean actually knocking the chanters
off, throwing knives, wrecking them
from the inside, slicing things up!

Crackers Nut [addressing no one in particular]:

I was just kidding.

Alex:

I used to belong to the Bootstrap Boys
Choir and I'm a fan of Phil Whalen.

Crackers [adjusting his cam]:

To sell the product.
That's why we pay you.

Alex [turning to Crackers]:

I'm... I don't want to be unshaven
and without makeup --

Crackers [to Alex]:

I could make you ... Vogue (Italy),
Observational, Dazed & Confused
Virgin Journal Keeping, and I could
make you look cute too, I...

Alex:

Will we be having prominent wine
commencing with dinner?

Crackers:

I think we could try it one
more time, and this time...

Alex:

I'm not asking for special
treatment, just for a chance.
I've got to get on this show.

Crackers [big smile]:

You'll have to text me more
of your photos and eventually
come during a taping...

Alex [returns smile]:

I don't know. I word directly.

Crackers:

Maybe try one without your shirt.

Alex:

Sure.

Speaking of Cho (it's taken a week for me to begin to think about him), Tao Lin in an unironic mood offers a few countervailing predicates. (Post dated 4/22.)

Here's a quick and dirty set of building blocks toward a theory of today's hip poetics. It comes from a phone call Sunday and after a dream last night that parodied tantric visualization. (During the phone call we brought up a few writers who are Buddhists, triggering the parody, I believe. This theory, tho, has only tangential relevance to that if even that.)

1) Poetry 2007 attracts less than its fair share of full-deck brilliance. "If Shakespeare were alive today..." not only might he stay way over on the theatrical side, hire interns to flesh out treatments for his direction and production, for example, but also while he was growing up he'd have surveyed and perhaps gone for an altogether more inventive domain, neuroscience, biotechnology, physics, venture capital, law, even.

2) Bulge in college population produces more poet geeks (but fewer geniuses) competing more.

3) Poetry is so under-rewarded in postindustrial circles of power, many players, especially the Marxists, can't or refuse to overcome their self-loathing. Supposition: some opt for poetry like a 'safety school' because we see it's for losers like us.

4) Many practitioners turn to an adjacent enterprise, rock music, to model our esthetics and behavior. Do what thou wilt becomes the central and incessant motive for the inner cretin and sociopath pooping our parties.

5) More of the less intelligent, self-hating, equipped with magical thinking = the Sid Vicious franchise. (The mold is stale, marketable, easy to copy, cf Seung-hui Cho.)

6) A semi-gifted poet's task, therefore, is on the one hand to pursue more nuanced variations on the franchise that seem like merely stylistic and protective measures responding to immediate cultural expectations and peer demands, while on the other hand amassing a portfolio of goals and actions, i.e., texts, that support her election as participant in a socio-historical continuum of human value.

You need a pet passport, joiner.

The storefront stayed sedate through fog. The soup had large lumps of pork in it. A man's cheek, ear, and forehead are evident, along with intense chocolate, bayberry, and my new Porsche. Joan happened, wearing his Joan Bennett in a sea green and lemon yellow patterned dress and Tech hat. (She had come straight from the Canadian inspection agency.) We had skipped pilates and just threw garlic and onion in at the beginning of the lush cross between custard and the patented formula micro-injects from the lip gloss fairy.

I then removed us to a paper towel, leaving everything else in the 'pan,' a luscious, smooth, noiseless bonding that smells like 25 years ago when mom and dad planted their feet in flora-wax titanium.

(Cracks should be bridged with glass fiber.)

No Buddha ice sculptures, no yakusa tattoos. Just buttermilk and melty bears.

Classes cancelled due to massacre.

Non-poets' S.O.P. now available for poets, too! Never explain. Never say sorry.

Also, never spell out f-u-c-k u-p-s. No one cares!

Never admit you were wronged.

Never eat dinner and dessert from the same dumpster (except when it's a dinner party).

Never mention God, handhelds, or faked emotion.

Never pay income taxes again.

Never feel sorry for a diva who has her brains and eats them.

Never disagree with inferiors. Never.

Never accuse sperm donors of throwing their cake out with the bathwater.

Never point out that relevant questions about meaning what is not said or saying what is not meant are begged.

Poet, never forward your resume to a date.

Hey, never say, "Are you going to make my connection?"

Robust, atmospheric report on Keston Sutherland and Andrea Brady's reading Friday. (Family birthday kept me away, so nice to be clued in, I say.)

iv.

The elder Kelly has lowered his learned voice. In the newest texts, Lapis (Black Sparrow/Godine 2005), Shame/Scham, prose collaboration with Birgit Kempker (McPherson 2005), and May Day (Parsifal 2006), we find more commonplace info or, rather, erudition placed in common areas. Orgasm, a "great tree / grows up through the core / the animal." Sleep, a less fantastic palimpsest of hieroglyphs, more "like a Chinese dictionary." As though not unaware of the observer-über-observed, neo-imperial burnish to facets of cultural anthropology, and thus as though inquiring of his colleagues-in-ethnopoetics, he lets go control of knowledge as he demands: "losing / your colonies after a war / no more Togo no more Kamerun / I mean where are my legs / to stand..." In his e-mail collaboration with Birgit Kempker, he questions what knowledge constitutes while speaking to his collaborator and to himself more humbly, "I am ashamed of knowing so little. Not even all the words of my own language, let alone yours or anyone else's. Let alone..." the telltale fillip "...god's language." Why this? "I think that god must be the same as language." Kelly feels shame but posits the sentiment indirectly -- that raw, god-language deal is fitted outside like a protective measure, a heavy plate of bloodied armor draped over a cuddly, amorphous animal core.

Dans quelle galère me suis-je embarqué? That language deal falls through in Kelly; for language keeps re-inventing alternative uses: "As if war made language and language / makes war ever after / and Heraclitus [sic] was right / to say if he did say that Homer / was a fool..." -- "10. War," Threads (First Intensity 2006). Homer. War. Language. For Kelly it's mannerist production, an efflorescence, a rag, if not that Shakespearean rag Eliot would still require. The efflorescence has been repeated; it is by now familiar. I'm reminded of stumbling for the first time into Cid Corman's aparto-office in Kyoto, finding the sick, bent, proud figure in the midst of writing his daily minimum of 15 koans, trees, rivers, a man, another, a woman, nearly the same poem, again and again. Production from elders categorically effects poignancy. But the news-in-the-poem part, what about that? "Push a little harder .. with multi-colored fissures that widen when you walk," cautions Kenward Elmslie, age 78 as he sings "Sneaky Pete" for one of the last times, and who writes 'woozily' in one new direction, as though this is always the last time. "What's happened to the poem as poem?" he chants. "I'm moving back to town -- back where the poems go home."

Blogger (lightning) strikes again. [To the tune of.] Odalisqued, Anne Boyer's blog, one of a handful that temporarily sported a Blogspot-generated "by invitation" page, has been chiuso for good, Anne says. Not good news. But Blogspot gave Anne few choices while she was dumping her archives back to a computer under her control. Have a great reading at New Yipes, and thanks for Odalisqued, which was a blast, Anne.

Whew. Blog by invitation. That's pre-Raphaelite.

iii.

My hesitations toward the Kelly of 1993 and earlier derive from his high-minded, highly-registered (academically-sanctioned) efflorescence, for sure. Through language training and dedication to anthropological study, Kelly may have earned his bona fides to insert cuneiforms, to address Isis, to play at shamanism, but to do so in contemporary verse narrative without a hint of esthetic dissonance or mild, much less fervid, syncopation prepares the way for savage counter-satire. (In contrast, years earlier multivalent Pound, an obvious model for Kelly, knew to interrupt his quasi-scholarly arrays (and rants) with asides that pulled in all sorts of other language registers -- cf "Ode Pour l"Election de Son Sepulchre.") I admire Kelly's motive -- if by motive I mean an implicit, albeit far-fetched, ambition toward esthetic synchronicity that connects postmodernism to tokens and artifacts of antiquity. Yet what prompts the signature writings by Kelly published over the decades -- Lunes (1964) through Runes (1999), say -- could be reduced to a turn-of-last-century cause celebre in the contexts of modernist experiments by Pound, and more patently those by Stein, Zukofsky, and other empiricists of language-as-material (language poets and post-language writers, among others), not to mention the hugely ironic, self-referential exploits of the New York Schools.

ii.

Robert Kelly has published over 60 books. In 1965 at age 30 Kelly secured a place in modern American poetics as co-editor of the groundbreaking A Controversy of Poets, the quarrelsome anthology that drew a still-relevant divide between formalists and an emerging generation of experimentalists influenced by Pound, Williams, and Olson. Kelly's choices for the anthology are by and large experimentalists whose influences can be traced to Black Mountain and the San Francisco Renaissance. His own poetry for decades confirmed his allegiance to such influences, as well as his scholarly engagement with ethnopoetics and, along with Jerome Rothenberg, development of so-called deep-image verse, often heroic in tone and long or sequential in form. Kelly's interests in crosscultural poetics and the deep image play out a proto-symbolist notion of natural and imaginative correspondences, in which the function of language and, by extension, of poetry is "the discovery of relation."

Kelly's ascribing omnipotence to language as the chief instrument of discovery, a fine inflation in itself, accompanies persistent flourishes in his thinking regarding purported universals that can result in overstatement. Note this late midcareer poetics "Sermon" from 1993:

You do not have to think very long or hard to learn that all mysteries are ensconced in language and extractable from language, and that obedience to the intricacies of language in turn reveals the exact astro-dynamic efflorescent energy of place and circumstance we nickname Truth. The con-juncture. The lock. The habit the heart wears in the market, the song it hums in the bathroom, the text encoded in its midnight snores. Language is astrology indoors, it is the moon in the bed-room and the sun in your pocket...

Etc. I, for one, recoil at the thought of "astro-dynamic efflorescent energy." It appears to be part of a belief system that may not be necessary to reference to express the simple, perhaps truistic, construct that provisional clues to our grand questions (all mysteries) are found through language, whose deployment often requires, if you will, self-examination -- a self that is language -- that some would label truth-seeking.

i.

As a rule a poet's status does not shift dramatically after she reaches middle age. It's not unusual for a poet to rest on her laurels [sennet] from middle age on, having secured circles of friends, readers, ideally, leaving to fate and the marketplace whether her fame expands. Poets we regard as accomplished and potentially famous receive MacArthurs, move into professorships, marry well or prominently. Accomplished or not, anyone can more readily feel heat fade when the 'young poet' epithet no longer applies; aging saps exuberance as one in two artcore bands implies. If she writes for long enough, a poet sees that know-how fills in for the mistakes, fortunes, and experience of youth. The formal threat for the experimentalist, however, is that sort of substitution could lead to repeating herself. At the moment or stage, let's call it, when she has gained a modicum of control over method, subject matter, style points, these things predominate -- and as a consequence she may start to duplicate what she knows. The discoverer becomes more the one who executes a plan.

(An extreme form of planning ahead is mannerism, a non-contemporary way to fill up the free channel of poetry for life.)

The aging poet examines her motives for writing less. (This is a general impression.) Unless she surrounds herself with working editors and scrupulous impresarios, a poet can lose touch with her more perfect angel, the one who questions why this, why now. A pragmatism sets in. The experienced writer can do it over and over. Why not? Why not now?

Production proves something, maybe everything. Published production is proof for friends, the masses, everyone.

It strikes us that the poet blogosphere (a word I can use only sneeringly) has been vacated, outright abandoned by a few majors, a chiuso here, a horrible, terrible meanie there, less practicing all around.

That noted, I'm about to put down some complications concerning older poets. These have re-emerged after listening to Robert Kelly last weekend, a poet who has indeed evolved from his Black Sparrow days, coming into a much plainer speech, wearing his learning less awesomely, filling in as a genuine senior spokesman for the death of language.

I say these are complications, because I'm not settled with the results. Kelly evolves but does not speak for me, but -- and here is one of the complications -- he's trying to break through numerous conventions to speak to me. Why do I resist? And why and how does he speak a dead language if that is what he says it is and what it is?

I feel like putting down a reading report that is more than a summary of first impressions, because Kelly has moved me to think much more deliberately about his limitations and my own. And I am not convinced that he had no intention of doing this. That is, offering his poety, such as it is, as a sample of what is wrong with us, our language, and oh yeah our blogging.

This will take a while.

Jen Coleman's clip of Elmslie's "Sneaky Pete" performed at Segue April 7.

Identity damsel (retina heads).

Harvard with mirrors.

Dick adjustments.

Same-sex insiders sleeping on the railroad tracks.

Your father is growing over.

'Which is a way of drawing...' near:

Night protogé.

Casbah brother.

Shrimp phallus.

Marshmallow mace.

Jacksonville, Gaza.

Hubristic feng shui.

Icy hot flaming chill. Traces of a lifetime's struggles...

I cock my weapon and train it. Lighten up, Jean!

2007, the era of the battery-powered light bulb.

Headers are supposed to mean something. Jeez.

Watching a film titled No Data.

Opposites

either
etcher

baby
optative

fish
barb

Ludovician
dispositive

a hell of a
the free channel

leftover
throwback.

The Continental Review looks well-timed, a new video zine for poetry and reviews. More info, including a trailer, here.

Allen Bramhall & Alan Davies, Demolicious, Cambridge, April 1
Christina Strong & John Coletti, Plough and Stars, Cambridge, April 1

Grace is the word. On Sunday Allen Bramhall (from Bedford, MA), Alan Davies, Christina Strong, and John Coletti (all three living in NYC) graced Boston by a) floating into a couple of boozy-gallery-artsy-bar venues along a stretch of Central Square from Prospect (halfway to Inman Square) to Mass. Ave. (two blocks from Harvard Yard); b) reading up a storm of recent works that, all together, evince that their poetry, while bearing four unique signatures, partakes of obvious, communal, somewhat off-putting contexts by means of ironic and otherwise self-conscious moves toward narrative. Midafternoon at Out of the Blue Gallery Allen Bramhall chose samples of numerous storylines, most of which give no hybrid impressions of a tale to be conveyed and consumed, but behave more like a lateral unfurling of the composition process that in turn waves shreds of story and itself, side by side, in air. One poem, "Our Trip to Clinton, Massachusetts," begins, "please, we went in duo, shaded aptly, with guards of uttering green ceding to yellow, red, orange and aplomb. distance sapped a mention of memory from disparate landmarks..." With generalized markers, distance, for instance, or green to yellow, I think what come up are suggestions of travel with little purpose (the opposite of Elizabeth Bishop, say, who tags her landscapes with items in exaggerated focus, which we take in as important and also come to love). That lack of purpose is indeed purposeful if Allen is to come closer and more quickly to the sublimity of one with the surround: "do we see speed as affordable or just the vaguest point in the landscape? never to be controlled by that bossed function of separation." The bossed function, alas, is human cognition that needs to separate to survive. Sorry, Allen, Allen seems to say as he writes himself as his "dad" -- "little does the dad realize that two little eyes / follow him down the dark where he spent / the rest of his life / producing surreal main characters..." Allen's characters include Fu Manchu, a series, and Brockton, a city he says he's never seen, also a series. There's a narrative after larger game outside the characters and lines of experiment -- of course. Toward the end of his set he read this little gem:

I have made a list of
things you can do
that will tell me that
you love me

I call it
a strategy
so you won't
lose hope

Alan Davies followed, reading his Book 5 (Katalanché Press 2007) and Book 6 in manuscript. The two works are formally at odds, but parts of a much larger work in progress. Book 5 comprises 38 pages of short, mostly four-line verses, two to a page:

Through the
shadows
through the
light

Comfort
trust
solace
& fun

If that sounds uncharacteristically giddy, it is. Counter that with "There's nothing // up there // To / love / to be / loved." Fair to say Alan is working the cloud gamut, but bringing it down to a familiar if paratactical landline, "dreamingly / left / waiting." The Book 6 manuscript was compiled "working live," Alan says, referring to an electrician's tinkering without turning off the juice. The pieces have longer lines but are also brief notations toward a story. (I'm guessing fewer than a dozen lines per page.) You sense particular addressées here, mostly women who leave the narrator perplexed: "her name is my arm ... this moment is a nickel." Again the fun and comfort of nothing are everything, "being, being nothing...not much of nothing." That Alan smuggles emoticons into the void tells us how much not nothing matters, "sundered lounge wear"; "yearning for you...my dry dick aches...shadows...I make them for you." That nothing. It feels as though Alan's larger opus (ongoing) will take off from there, nowhere, and all else.

A few hours later Christina Strong took charge at Plough and the Stars. She picked recent poems that are a little more streamlined than previous work in their abrasive, almost rat-tat-tat target practice, wiping out a lot of marks: "stand-up commies"; "TV dinners at the breaking point"; "bitch-ouch." I'm also glad she read a big selection from her self-published Anti-Star Vol. 1 (Openmouth.org). (I rehearsed my first reactions earlier -- scroll to January 15, 7:05 AM.) These are recent pieces, too -- and are they ever pumped as they choke the grizzlies: "is beast source spot / You'll know how to do things, but don't know: How wounded. / Its own forum, ride on the boat Orbello -- the marriage should be…" Christina doesn't tell us for which rocks marriage is headed until another few lines, oh, it's "farce glue." Titles tell you she's living today, "There is soda that mimics other sodas"; "P funct"; "That's the sad thing about you." You get the same canceled-gala feel that Alan Davies suggests, but Christina takes irony to bed: "I think full experience / Is best served by ideas of victory... / Fanatical. Worms. On fence. Forget."

Then there's John Coletti, who has perhaps fallen in love more than once, perhaps with a poet like Christina, and who tells us his "both knees curl back" because it's "tough when you get there ... tough when you go." John came up with new work as well as pieces from Physical Kind (Portable / boku 2005). His are stories of "Fresh melt rubber burns," "rice choking," "Sears cologne," "Bambi's hula," "cars racing by." In other words his narrative concerns how puckered the texts get after decades of Red Bull parties "Out to nowhere" flowing with "dyslexicon hype." John whisks you off the streets (repackaged youth), takes you far away from beautiful women and gorgeous foodstuffs, and drops you into his forehead: "The fix is on burlesque fade / Pumping a quart of aquiline collarbone / Into your bloodstream rhythms..." He's sized up this "Quiet violence" and it's lacking because of fouled up language and cheesy outputs: "Stiff little sentences / Gathered neatly by adjectives / Stitched onto motel-grade terrycloth." That's Allen Bramhall sans distance, Alan Davies with no cumulus of hope. Ok. I'm sure John does love Christina (he said he liked her work!) but their pair-off was deliriously, glamorously a rave to no one, nothing. So the storyline continued from Allen, Alan, Christina, to toward the end of "A New Round of Touché" in which John tells us the time, how late it is, the

Season without you
With without being you
Worth every penny of
Let people down therapy

Naturally I disagree. I wasn't let down in the least. A fair day, a great afternoon and early evening of poetry. Followed by sleet.

Gore Vidal's Caligula...

My Hands Are Bananas...

Allen Bramhall, John Coletti, Xtina Strong, Alan Davies...

read here Sunday. Reports coming next.