7/24/07
A day filled with desire and joy. I'm rearranging bookcases, loosening their ties to the alphabet. This morning I placed two books by Doug Nufer in the Pound section. Crazed color swirls down the Nufer spines, flashing off the thicker, more solemn backs of the Pounds. I'm not free of the alphabet yet, because the p section is close enough to the n of Nufer. My next move (I'm going to get help pulling books down and reordering them) is to color-sort the works, fuchsias, whites, lemons, aquas, grays -- maybe bands of grays and then blacks, since there are so many of them. When I do this, maybe in a couple of months, starting with pinks and reds, the spine to Dodie Bellamy's Cunt-Ups will line up with Joe Ceravolo's The Green Lake Is Awake, along with several endpapers of John Ashbery's, The Tennis Court Oath, Flow Chart, Three Plays. Other reddish-to-pinks: Kathy Acker's Pussycat Fever, Brenda Bordofsky's The Female Skeleton Makes Her Debut, as well as Past Tense by Jean Cocteau and All Ears by Dennis Cooper. Spines to Dennis's Frisk and Try will slip into the gold section, as will C. F. MacIntyre's translation, Stéphane Mallarmé Selected Poems and Pierre Reverdy: Poète d'aujourd'hui by Jean Rousselot and Michel Manoll. Novel and renewed associations beckon. Brenda Iijima's backend, Around Sea, wiggling in its half-gold, half-orchidness, a toss-up.
7/23/07
Had I only thought a little more, a little harder I could have scooped the best name in the blog biz and, then, I could have blurted this out, let's give a warm fucking lies welcome to...
Would never have guessed I'd be praising a conservative who cried when Richard Nixon resigned and who worked for the Pentagon as an intelligence officer at the Guantanamo tribunals for six months. Yet Stephen Abraham emerges as a patriot who, based on his experience as a member of the military's legal team, authored a crucial affidavit that analyzes quality of arguments. Abraham notes convictions built on accusations without details or documented evidence. Abraham's affidavit seems to have helped set a precedent. "The detainees' lawyers filed his seven-page affidavit in court on June 22," according to The New York Times. The affidavit "was sharply critical of the hearings and the evidence they used, saying 'what purported to be specific statements of fact lacked even the most fundamental earmarks of objectively credible evidence.' On June 29, the Supreme Court announced that it would hear the detainees' case." The Court in effect reverses its earlier decision not to review the case, a rare change of heart.
It's bracing to witness the railroad thrown off track, especially when the issue at hand comes down to poor language and weak argument, crystalized here as a matter for orders of freedom.
It's bracing to witness the railroad thrown off track, especially when the issue at hand comes down to poor language and weak argument, crystalized here as a matter for orders of freedom.
7/20/07
I 'grew up' thinking to approach fashion, much less style, and still less esthetics, based on a given decade was nonrigorous, arbitrary. What kind of organizing principle is a run of ten years? Well, now that we're racing toward the latter part of the nameless decade -- the oughts?? -- I'm not sure. Like its namelessness, this decade is vaporous as no other. The breathy dim emitted by open pockets half-as-full, thanks to the shrinking iPod. (Dieter, watch your iPhone contract until it's slung around your wrist telling you how much more to take off.) Sure, cars are buff, but how about a new Hummer that's much less of a big deal, and German and Japanese automakers have hybrid SUVs that look and function like li'l limos puffing less air. And there's the smallish Prius as well as the mini Cooper.
Color, though, is the greeny vapor I fix on. How olive shifts to vetiver or chartreuse, fading hunter to aroma basilicum, dark lawn to minted ice, yellow sage to citrus spritzes, and multiples of khaki to translucent shades of tea sprigs in Kyushu spring.
Color, though, is the greeny vapor I fix on. How olive shifts to vetiver or chartreuse, fading hunter to aroma basilicum, dark lawn to minted ice, yellow sage to citrus spritzes, and multiples of khaki to translucent shades of tea sprigs in Kyushu spring.
7/19/07
7/18/07
7/17/07
Wouldn't it be great if you could poke a small opening in the body, front to back, crisp and round like a three-hole punch. Tag and tie you. Piercing for good. It can't be a frequently moving part, to start. Not hands or feet. Not the eyes. Perhaps a hollowing-out aimed at the gluteus medius that skirts your sacrum and pelvic girdle, popping from the adductor longus, topside, avoiding your long bone altogether. Might hurt down there, though. To play it safe, the shoulder goes first. Smack between the infra- and supra-spinatus near the top in back, down and out your latissimus dorsi. The right one, not the left (over your heart). Facing you, if the hole slants down back to front, yow! we'll have to look up to see through you. You know, for real.
7/16/07
Exurban landscape architectonics. Pre-wrap parties. The Yale Club. I’ve often wondered how far we can stretch American branding of self-absorption. Michael Friedman’s Martial Dawn (Turtle Point 2006) goes on a short rocket ride to Mars and its two moons, where films get reshot while Russian sex slaves (cosmonauts) preen on Knoll white leather chairs. Tomorrow, today. Movie directors rule the planets, actors consume the background, bar restrooms serve for cultural exchange. Widgets of spiritual nihilism: “Their lives seemed complete, but if Julia had learned anything from her studies in Tibetan Buddhism, she knew they were also completely empty.” That’s page 5. Where do we go? Photosynthesis slows down, but it’s handled off page as an accounting problem; inflatable dolls are bandied; and it’s comforting still to find uncool males enraged by happiness and success. Pleasant name drops, Naropa, Hans Hoffman, Marvin Gaye. I did say American. An unfocused brilliance that's determined, that is, fated to watch others have a field day.
7/13/07
It's easy to take logic, smarts, and well-mannered discourse for granted. And tho the combine is rarer in the domain / minefield of poetry, there are a few who practice along these lines daily. Tom Beckett's blog is a touchstone for me, as Tom is a frequent blogger whose writing across poetry and prose models is bright, civil, always noteworthy (as in I take notes) and it often surprises me with other tricks and perçus I can admire or envy, depending on my mood. In short, Tom is one of the good guys, and yesterday 7/12, he approached another, Allen Bramhall, in a preview of "poetics excess" in Allen's exciting two-ton Days Poem. "A gentle surrealist attitude floods the tone," Tom says.
7/12/07
Finally, a disinterested observer, poets are "imbued with their own intractability." -- Ange Mlinko, at Harriet.
Hey guys, Lanny, Henry, Anne, and Kasey are off on new tracks, maybe separate tracks in this ghosty roundtable on folk lineage (or something like that), that slippery term I brought up a couple of days ago. Maybe I don't know dill about folk art, still I know something about incompetence firsthand, and it strikes me (stop, please) that the role for most poets in the American democracy of mass and now niche media is to speak up, make mistakes, and be ignored, because in a land of equality and freedom, unlike England, say, everyone jabbers and maybe only your bed buddy listens between outbursts of joy. In that bedroom, then, the American poet looks, to me, like a semi-reclining stick figure pulling her own, whittling away at something new and improved, you know, and if she's lucky, scratching or tapping notes off that mad street person overheard, outside or on TV, frothing just a bit or, alternatively, lifting language from her buddy nodding off in bliss. The eccentric caricature I have in mind is an isolated voice within a remote crowd of voices. What I attempted with the now-debated term folk lineage was to suggest that this communal yet self-imposed eccentricity is a conditional norm for an American poet to find herself in. Another part of what I meant to imply (but only now I'm saying it) is that group behaviors among poets -- look, poets have to have fun! -- force us to rethink the value and potentials of that solitary stick figure as a poet model. And, finally in backformation, of sorts, I'll go way out here and suggest until we figure new values and potentials, the facticity of the singleton, the crank, the misfit, the folksy innovator is very much in our blood, raising expectations that she still show up and tell us off.
7/11/07
There are a couple of problems with Gary's forms of disagreement that I think bring this set of posts to a close. One problem is the rush to miss / dismiss the contrast I attempt between folk temperament and collective procedure. Gary addresses the folk art idea as pedestrian and finds the contrastive proposition concerning other-directed practice moot, since MFAs, for example, did not exist in Stein's time. A more receptive (and less anxious) reader would acknowledge that indeed one distinctive feature of our current era is that technological entities, such as applied arts graduate study, e-lists, etc. expand options for group poetic practice, but they also set up analytical challenges with regard to the monad, in the neo-Platonic sense of the term: where is the individual? how does the individual get expressed? to what end? and so forth. These are not sophomoric or middlebrow questions.
Neither of my italicized terms -- folk temperament and collective procedure -- is particularly bulletproof -- what does "folk" mean, for instance? If you're ready to receive a broad notion of "folk art" applicable to individual production, you'll recognize -- quite unlike so-called cultural, regional, or ethnic folk art -- the term denotes nontraditional, eccentric expression that can be innovative. Choose your web sites cleverly, and you can come up with other descriptors, brut, unschooled, naïve. But the core or prototypical meanings of individual "folk" production (and even the looser term "folksy") pertain to Stein throughout her writing, commonplaces interests, gardening, food, her observing what's in front of her al fresco.
I'll take Gary at his word that Stein's example matters to him. I figured as much when I linked to "Gertrude Stein and the Natural World" previously. In that short essay I do argue (these blog entries are sketches, after all) that Stein is a naturalist, an empiricist, a scientist with regard to what she sees and what she makes from her lines of vision. A notion to keep in mind is that her 'cultural data' come first, not from other writers, but from her detailed lab work at Radcliffe with William James, coiner of the phrase "stream of consciousness." Rather than a cubist, mark Stein as experimentalist in the field. At my peril, I guess, I cite more than a dozen passages from Stein and even more than that number from other readers. It's feeble scholarship but substitutes, now, for mere assertion and opinion.
The phone is ringing.
Neither of my italicized terms -- folk temperament and collective procedure -- is particularly bulletproof -- what does "folk" mean, for instance? If you're ready to receive a broad notion of "folk art" applicable to individual production, you'll recognize -- quite unlike so-called cultural, regional, or ethnic folk art -- the term denotes nontraditional, eccentric expression that can be innovative. Choose your web sites cleverly, and you can come up with other descriptors, brut, unschooled, naïve. But the core or prototypical meanings of individual "folk" production (and even the looser term "folksy") pertain to Stein throughout her writing, commonplaces interests, gardening, food, her observing what's in front of her al fresco.
...to cut our hair and not want blue eyes and to be reasonable and obedient. To obey and not split hairs. [Ha!] ...we get up and say we are awake today. By this we mean that we are up early and we are up late... (Geography & Plays)Now you can agree to see these passages as valid evidence of Stein's potential connection to folk lineage or you can hurriedly choose to split other, finer hairs. But there's nothing fine in complaining that I rely "almost entirely on the sum-effect of the writing." It smacks of some walrus disease when the "baffled" complainer cites not a word from Stein, but unloads survey-course underlined keywords to delimit her work as that of a cubist, a linguistic fine art genius, while attaching these to bad expository usage, "well-worn cliché," "general-consensus," to point to two. (Sorry.)
It was a great pleasure I cut all the box hedges and we have a great many and I cleared the paths... (Wars I Have Seen)
Rhubarb is susan not susan not seat in bunch toys not wild and laughable not in little places... (Geography & Plays)
Tiny dish of delicious which
Is my wife and all.
And a perfect ball. (Bee Time Vine)
kiss me kiss me ... I'll let you kiss me sticky... (Painted Lace and Other Pieces)
All the plays a garden. Little screen. Not collected and spacious not all so old. And more places have the behold it. The best example is mustard. A little thing. (Geography & Plays)
I'll take Gary at his word that Stein's example matters to him. I figured as much when I linked to "Gertrude Stein and the Natural World" previously. In that short essay I do argue (these blog entries are sketches, after all) that Stein is a naturalist, an empiricist, a scientist with regard to what she sees and what she makes from her lines of vision. A notion to keep in mind is that her 'cultural data' come first, not from other writers, but from her detailed lab work at Radcliffe with William James, coiner of the phrase "stream of consciousness." Rather than a cubist, mark Stein as experimentalist in the field. At my peril, I guess, I cite more than a dozen passages from Stein and even more than that number from other readers. It's feeble scholarship but substitutes, now, for mere assertion and opinion.
The phone is ringing.
More from the Elsewhere comment box.
Gary asks a second time for a list of folk artists / poets. He seeks to "clarify," but one aim of mine is less instrumental, to come up with writing samples to show folk artistry developing in contexts of a writer's life and aesthetic behavior that's more perplexing than one's desire for paraphrase or clarity, and more enticing. I offered lines from Joe Ceravolo as one sample, and I'll look at another, below. And as I asserted yesterday, Gary's first stab at a line-up is a suitable point of departure, for me. (I'm not in the tree-making business, just yet, and it's likely that personnel for the job of tree-hugging or tree-dwelling shift, reader to reader. So? I accept your candidates, Gary. So?) If "everyone in 20th century poetry I read" is a misfit, then perhaps Gary and I borrow from the same writers. Although I'll stipulate that when I say "misfit," I am not suggesting so much one's obvious disconnect from 'mainstream life,' more one's deliberative (although not always thoroughgoing) break with mainstream sub-branches, also known as -- to borrow a phrase -- others' (and more to the point, other poets') cultural data. The gist of my last two entries is to posit that there is a palpably independent temperament to American poetry that wills solitary vision, a distinctive feature of folk art practice, I think, and one that contrasts sharply with recent other-directed practices that come off as corporate / institutional (MFA credentialing, e.g.) or, more generically, culturally-determined group behavior.
Gary, I'm picking up not only your disagreement and your readiness to quibble over whether this temperament is critically germane, but also your outright resistance to historical and biographical contexts. One ought not argue that social interaction precludes singleton artistry. To illustrate, turn to another of your candidates. There are uncontroversial facts -- Stein befriended Picasso, possessed important modernist paintings, and succeeded as a writer -- that contributed mightily to her attraction and that of her 'salon,' resulting in one's ability, as outsider, to formulate coarsely superficial reductions, such as she is "*the* avant-gardist [sic] to see in Paris." Do these facts render Stein's life, her behavior, or the writing any more defensive vis a vis her evolving into her unique folksy temperament, or make her opus any less outrageous as a singleton's effort to surpass conventional perception and representation to pioneer in something never thought of before?
Anyway.
Gary asks a second time for a list of folk artists / poets. He seeks to "clarify," but one aim of mine is less instrumental, to come up with writing samples to show folk artistry developing in contexts of a writer's life and aesthetic behavior that's more perplexing than one's desire for paraphrase or clarity, and more enticing. I offered lines from Joe Ceravolo as one sample, and I'll look at another, below. And as I asserted yesterday, Gary's first stab at a line-up is a suitable point of departure, for me. (I'm not in the tree-making business, just yet, and it's likely that personnel for the job of tree-hugging or tree-dwelling shift, reader to reader. So? I accept your candidates, Gary. So?) If "everyone in 20th century poetry I read" is a misfit, then perhaps Gary and I borrow from the same writers. Although I'll stipulate that when I say "misfit," I am not suggesting so much one's obvious disconnect from 'mainstream life,' more one's deliberative (although not always thoroughgoing) break with mainstream sub-branches, also known as -- to borrow a phrase -- others' (and more to the point, other poets') cultural data. The gist of my last two entries is to posit that there is a palpably independent temperament to American poetry that wills solitary vision, a distinctive feature of folk art practice, I think, and one that contrasts sharply with recent other-directed practices that come off as corporate / institutional (MFA credentialing, e.g.) or, more generically, culturally-determined group behavior.
Gary, I'm picking up not only your disagreement and your readiness to quibble over whether this temperament is critically germane, but also your outright resistance to historical and biographical contexts. One ought not argue that social interaction precludes singleton artistry. To illustrate, turn to another of your candidates. There are uncontroversial facts -- Stein befriended Picasso, possessed important modernist paintings, and succeeded as a writer -- that contributed mightily to her attraction and that of her 'salon,' resulting in one's ability, as outsider, to formulate coarsely superficial reductions, such as she is "*the* avant-gardist [sic] to see in Paris." Do these facts render Stein's life, her behavior, or the writing any more defensive vis a vis her evolving into her unique folksy temperament, or make her opus any less outrageous as a singleton's effort to surpass conventional perception and representation to pioneer in something never thought of before?
Should they may be they might if they delightAs I pointed out earlier, these lines constitute a meta-conceptualization of representation, fluctuations of mind not only in the process of perceiving but also making something "(f)or which they might delight" as Stein puts it. Stein offers that persons and personhood can make a virtue out of necessity to see "if they delight / In why they must see." Stein, empiricist and outlier, for the first time in American English instructs us in the tantalizing rudiments of the contemplative life of delight in looking as well as seeing, and of pleasurable inquiry into the "why" of seeing.
In why they must see it be there not only necessarily
But which they might in which they might
For which they might delight if they look there
And they see there that they look there
To see it be there which it is if it is
Which may be where where it is
If they do not occasion it to be different
From what it is.
(Stanza XV in the notebook manuscript of Stanzas in Meditation [cited in Ulla Dydo, 1990])
Anyway.
7/10/07
Gary writes at Elsewhere:
[Tried posting this to Elsewhere directly -- hasn't gone through yet.]
Read the Humor discussion at Jacket. A bit long, but interesting. Jack poo-poos it. Then, today, this, also from Pantaloons: "Yet if we list the giants of the art, starting with Dickinson and Whitman, the American lineage has largely involved singletons, cranks / misfits, and outliers to institutional or even peer influences."Nice gibe, Gary, save your resuscitating clichés like garret, staving off culture, and pure product. Not my mode of thinking, at present. You question whether a slew of candidates fit into the folk artist category, "Stein? Pound? Williams? Olson? Creeley? Ginsberg? O'Hara? Mac Low? Coolidge? Baraka? Berrigan? Notley? Mayer? Bernstein?" (I already mentioned Williams, in passing.) You admit Pound was a crank, right? That's an understatement. His influence and will to influence went beyond folk art status, but he hardly needed or sought others' confirmation, nearly dying alone, I'm sure you know, of wicked self-assurance, a crank's crank and a misfit. Stein, you may remember, was an exile. She also lived openly -- some say flamboyantly -- with her female love before the descriptor lesbian came into common use. Misfit. Olson trained at Harvard GSAS but couldn't go though with it, couldn't cut it with formal academics (until Black Mountain, which of course was not formal). Institutional outlier. He in fact helped invent an alternative to the institution that was so sui generis it could not be sustained, much less replicated. If you're looking for "purer," or more absolute examples of original behavior and folk art from outliers and misfits, consider at least half your candidates. And if you're serious about the telephone connecting us, garret to garret, robbing us of the chance to be loners, I'll put you on hold, thinking you are exceptionally humorous.
Really? Stein? Pound? Williams? Olson? Creeley? Ginsberg? O'Hara? Mac Low? Coolidge? Baraka? Berrigan? Notley? Mayer? Bernstein?
Pound was definitely a crank, but hardly a loner--in some ways he practically invented our sense of what a "poetry community" might be. We can nit-pick about who is or is not a "giant" above, but even Jack would have to admit more than a couple of them. Not all are without their cranky moments, but these aren't people who spent their lives barricaded in garretts, nor staving off then-recent cultural data from their friends & others.
Who are the giant American loners of the 20th century? Is Stevens still a giant? Was Marianne Moore ever one?
Was Ceravolo--setting aside whether or not he was a giant--himself a loner, some "pure product" (e.g., folk artist) of America? I could be wrong, but I don't think anyone without a telephone ever won the Frank O'Hara award.
Curious now to see Jack's Sephirotic Tree.
[Tried posting this to Elsewhere directly -- hasn't gone through yet.]
TV news, studies show women look to scrawny guys for long term, muscles for lovin. That's the standard in gay hoods, no study required.
By the way, how can you tell when your block is turning straight? When scrawny males steering strollers are wearing last year's pedal pushers and Gavia tops.
~~
American poetry, the really good stock, is folk art. You might not get that from recent practice organizing the craft, MFAs, procedural and process groups, and the like.
Yet if we list giants of the art, starting with Dickinson and Whitman, the American lineage has largely involved singletons, cranks / misfits, and outliers to institutional or even peer influences. Some see these independent operators as amateurs, technological rookies. Consider convention-follower and technologist Helen Vendler, her maintaining academic disdain for and excluding William Carlos Williams from Part of Nature, Part of Us: Modern American Poets decades after his death, or more than a century after Dickinson's death Vendler's put down of the Complete Poems as "bedside reading." Notoriously wrongheaded assessements like Vendler's notwithstanding, masters of the independent streak, folk tradition, upend such misguided convention and over time keep the art vibrant.
Three generations (or so) after Joe Ceravolo, younger poets like CA Conrad and Joe Massey get fired up, understandably, by 64 pages of entirely original poetry in Ceravolo's Fits of Dawn. Published 42 years ago, the diction is iridescently contemporary. While an epigragh from Carl Jung strikes me as wedded to mid-20th century concerns for the psycho-spiritual (in its place, one might now turn to a more socio-eco analyst like Baudrillard), Ceravolo whips cant into impossibly acceptable 21st century rave --
By the way, how can you tell when your block is turning straight? When scrawny males steering strollers are wearing last year's pedal pushers and Gavia tops.
~~
American poetry, the really good stock, is folk art. You might not get that from recent practice organizing the craft, MFAs, procedural and process groups, and the like.
Yet if we list giants of the art, starting with Dickinson and Whitman, the American lineage has largely involved singletons, cranks / misfits, and outliers to institutional or even peer influences. Some see these independent operators as amateurs, technological rookies. Consider convention-follower and technologist Helen Vendler, her maintaining academic disdain for and excluding William Carlos Williams from Part of Nature, Part of Us: Modern American Poets decades after his death, or more than a century after Dickinson's death Vendler's put down of the Complete Poems as "bedside reading." Notoriously wrongheaded assessements like Vendler's notwithstanding, masters of the independent streak, folk tradition, upend such misguided convention and over time keep the art vibrant.
Three generations (or so) after Joe Ceravolo, younger poets like CA Conrad and Joe Massey get fired up, understandably, by 64 pages of entirely original poetry in Ceravolo's Fits of Dawn. Published 42 years ago, the diction is iridescently contemporary. While an epigragh from Carl Jung strikes me as wedded to mid-20th century concerns for the psycho-spiritual (in its place, one might now turn to a more socio-eco analyst like Baudrillard), Ceravolo whips cant into impossibly acceptable 21st century rave --
SorrowNo paraphrase required or plausible (maybe in another generation??), but a tempo so ready for mp3 download I want to shake. And the producer, Ceravolo, sweated these lines in a Jersey suburb, a civil engineer married to a sweetheart, living like a salaried bourgeois (an unconventional masque for a poet), a few exits from Columbia U, pal of Ted Berrigan (his publisher!) and others in the East Village, but -- you know -- independent from them. And maybe more than a step up and ahead of most. First recipient of the Frank O'Hara award. A big hiatus in critical attention after his early death. Guess what? Doesn't matter much. The stock is rising.
rejavelin pend Y? man
con anima mammal rest take
coating poking quicking
Beyond you jar unself
aroma ex almul chad rugyrebel sex... (Part I, page 9)
7/9/07
Cartoon ideas.
A character walks around thinking: Ok, the flying boulder missed me (got someone else). Now I'm doomed. [I know this guy.]
Another character says: "I'm straight with gay tendencies." [He's for real!]
A comic panel: The sky's all blue above the round, open bar. Bags of different colors pulled over their heads, unfunny writers theorize about humourous poetry.
A character walks around thinking: Ok, the flying boulder missed me (got someone else). Now I'm doomed. [I know this guy.]
Another character says: "I'm straight with gay tendencies." [He's for real!]
A comic panel: The sky's all blue above the round, open bar. Bags of different colors pulled over their heads, unfunny writers theorize about humourous poetry.
7/4/07
Fitting enough, George W. Bush commutes Scooter Libby's jail term two days before July 4; the announcement comes during the longest nonnews cycle of summer, wishful tactics on the part of Bush's operatives to smother opposition to the decision amid invidiously patriotic footage of sputtering fireworks and tearful waves from home to troops in battle. The timing is cynical but trivial. Granting clemency to a perjurer who obstructed special prosecution regarding treason invites further scrutiny. If Congress does its job, the battle will be joined, even though the targeted are seasoned. The lesson for upper echelons after Nixon is to wipe away evidence, no tapes, no semen stains, no testimony from a witness-perpetrator let out of the brig. But the high crimes intimated by the cover-up should be solved.
7/3/07
Noted in passing, comment box contributions are often drafts of essays (that is, tries) that return to the overfamiliar, with which you are -- and it's now documented -- obsessed, vexed. Your contributions convey the limited, happy-to-be-piping tonality of having been composed long before the comment box showed, text mechanisms as if sprung into action after a long sleep in a hard drive, munition-in-waiting. A final essay (that is, your full argument) is tough, possibly, but pitiable. To a misguided enthusiast.
Gee. Can't know for sure until it happens. Möglicherweise it would be fun to send poems to a lite zine and have the authority figure, the lite housemaster, the garden of verse gatekeeper, add on phrases and delete or switch words to improve my poems. I've always wanted a secret collaborator. Sounds truly underground.
Another in the just finished category, Adam DeGraff's All This Will Become Dust in Just 3 Minutes (We Have a Fax Machine 2003). Here's a line, "You knocked me off my toes!" DeGraff is definitely lonesome, slapping his readers around, playing with tenses and festering blurps from the penis, and the like. The poetry sounds out and means physcial contact. And it's graphically physical, too, thanks to LRSN, unacknowledged but it's an easy guess -- pupil-massaging half-moon optics on the jacket and a tilted, handscripted index starting, scrupulously, with "1. Title Page." End page thanks Mary Burger for donating cover stock. So it's also a collective, in the West Coast sense of the word, a project team. Wobbling on, I note efforts to tap one's inner urchin, buffoonisms, and conflation of wunderkind with manly lust for opposites:
Another in the just finished category, Adam DeGraff's All This Will Become Dust in Just 3 Minutes (We Have a Fax Machine 2003). Here's a line, "You knocked me off my toes!" DeGraff is definitely lonesome, slapping his readers around, playing with tenses and festering blurps from the penis, and the like. The poetry sounds out and means physcial contact. And it's graphically physical, too, thanks to LRSN, unacknowledged but it's an easy guess -- pupil-massaging half-moon optics on the jacket and a tilted, handscripted index starting, scrupulously, with "1. Title Page." End page thanks Mary Burger for donating cover stock. So it's also a collective, in the West Coast sense of the word, a project team. Wobbling on, I note efforts to tap one's inner urchin, buffoonisms, and conflation of wunderkind with manly lust for opposites:
...I hate tricksMe too, I think or thought. If I were editing a lite zine, maybe I'd drop the word "Butter," leaving more room for the reader's imagination to spread at room temperature. But I'm not, and you know, this persona sort of grows up on me. "Let me tell you / this," DeGraff inserts deeply, "someone in / some future time / will think of us."
So this is from before I was four
Whatever kind of affection from you
Yoo hoo! You got some
Butter Mrs. worth
I was always so
Heartbreakingly close
7/2/07
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.
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.
7/1/07
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
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
6/29/07
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.
6/28/07
6/27/07
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.
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.
6/26/07
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.
6/24/07
6/22/07
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.
6/21/07
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.
6/19/07
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.
(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.
6/18/07
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.
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.
6/14/07
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."
6/13/07
6/12/07
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?
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?
6/9/07
6/8/07
6/7/07
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.
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.
6/5/07
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 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.
6/4/07
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 --
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 partIn 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:
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...
you understand what rope isBruce 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.
something abnormal at a tampered evidence party
having overshot at this self-made milieu
I'm going there
6/1/07
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."
5/31/07
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
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
5/30/07
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.
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.)
5/29/07
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.
Oh, after you register, if you want to vote for Bob, you do that here.
5/27/07
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.
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.
5/25/07
5/24/07
5/23/07
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.)
5/22/07
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.
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.
5/21/07
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.
5/18/07
5/17/07
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.
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:
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 deadNonliteral 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.
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.
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 thingsRachel 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.
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.
5/16/07
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.
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.
5/15/07
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
-- Lisa Jarnot
5/11/07
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.
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.
5/10/07
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 windowKaren 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":
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"
each word is a room built around usJeopardy 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.
an organ underneath the river
of skin that lives to be incidental
another spotted face in the crowd
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
5/8/07
5/7/07
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.
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, 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.
5/4/07
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 clarityAs 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.
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).
5/3/07
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.
5/2/07
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.
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