Motherfucker curls are back. (Meredith Monk)

Something to break up your bureaucratic planning today.

The poor make me sick. (Robert Zoellick)

We need a clearer message. (Joe Torre)

It's not valiant to second-guess another's choice of blurbs, except in the case of an unambiguously forced, unflattering run-on, with at least one stylistic snag. (Emily Dickinson)

The jungle is quiet... too quiet. (Theseus)

You get a bit sceptical, if not Machiavellian, sifting through media imprints of late capitalism, impressions capitalists and propagandists offer as distractions, reinforce as ideals, and charge us to take in. There are, for example, the incontroversial carry-on luxuries in The Devil Wears Prada -- and I don't mean dowdy and unglamorous office fashions; I mean, more, gallons of Starbucks, the glowy sheen from iMacs, the work-till-you-drop tone of leisure that tops off almost every sentence of dialog and typifies a patois acquired by most of us in the arts (writ large) on the East Coast. No matter on which side of the desk you stand at work (or at home), you see and hear the minor clashes in the film and are reassured. Ohmygod, that's so much like X and me! Then, as through a long lens, you glimpse a bit more than a normal capitalist might intend in The Bourne Ultimatum. The film's most strenuous demo of surveillance takes place, tellingly, in and around Waterloo Station. It shows ground-level a-v apparatus required to watch over capital's prey, cell signals and camera feeds everywhere. Everywhere is the City, London, but as we know, only a relative handful of quadrants Stateside are so well equipped. (Americans have the skies covered, and as assassination movies demonstrate, once your cell is on, they can lock on you for the long view.) Not the point, yet Ultimatum shows how helter-skelter US capacities are an ad hoc patchwork of technologies. It also unpacks the narrative staleness to targeting, tech-surveillance, and counter-surveillance. Mr. Bourne fell to earth from the late Cold War, it seems. What would be the point, then? I think capital is forcing me to submit to its fast, unstoppable pursuit of greater protective capacities against terrorists out there, the ones that get around the apparatus in slow-moving, sometimes-meticulous, low-tech gambits. Experiencing the film prompts the question, of course, if there are no nation states to fight, and if real enemies operate under the radar, so to speak, what are we protecting? Our national will to patrol Iraq and Afghanistan, lands of oil and opium?

My style is no style. (Louise Brooks)

Counterfeiting is more profitable than narcotics, and your partners don't kill you. (Alli Warren)

Grandeur is a luxurious quest and metaphysical evil. (Tommie Shelby)

I'm not a model, I just look like one. (Helen Vendler)

I put a recalled toy in my mouth. (Eric Dolphy)

If you're stagnant, you're dead. (Walter Benjamin)

We're the only nation that flies into hurricanes. (D.A. Levy)

Anne Boyer gets it exactly. Spam subject headers have gone apeshit. Here are favorites from today.

cuboidal
inchest removed waffie
etemelet
mailbody
leucic hodgdon sproat interpretation
nepohnaa
focerete
slight paolucci mobby secretion
negligence distracts purposing
overnight drudged moria
unimbowered
selfimage cairnheaded
downsized wooldrying
counselor affidation
hazell illuminance photosalt
battle selfcreating tachylite cotinga
interforce rondure
forget remembering

And during this interlude for CA appreciation, have you caught his "bucket of sex" commentary on Coulter? Takes one to see one.

Worthy cause. (Let's eat CA for Thanksgiving!)

Just beginning to see need for a blanket authority or, maybe, a foundation to issue antinomian licenses. What sort? some nondemocratic institution that constitutes only one of a set to which no parliamentarian voice matters, no second thoughts or heuristics, and in which nothing un-elfin or hurtful stays put or belongs, holding itself to the highest doctrine of multiple shots, like Todd's Miniature Golf.

Here's another bright spot, internet search engine optimization experts.

That bright spot on the game horizon, killer tennis.

Recidivism update: beware the return to fashion of a) pop Freudian analysis (pun included), b) France as a world power, c) Boston sports megalomania.

~~

(All three are somehow connected.)

Hearts skip a beat, that's another symptom. A dark and grizzly foreboding about one roll of the die, porridge scooped from Victorian tureens, illogical outcomes, the return of something fatal like sentiment.

~~

Mommy, you have six sides for six numbers. If I spread you out I get to be 30.

To October

Summer holds spring!
Who am I?
No time to sit --
here, us; ripening,
the structures exceed
outwardness & come
back the F.B.I. agents.

You are going
with this ex
-honey spread by portraits
& events
(you were in
the shot...

glowing on the floor,
a seaside material)
bearing topography financed
with ads.

Since several women
pretend to be backups
the newsroom just got into
a driver card

~~

working with pentagrams.

~~

So fashion this fall is tense
& intricately wrought, like captions.

Thank you.

& that's your gaze,
so prominent Luda can't
concentrate?

The sentence's one constant is
a computer lies naked on my chest.
I was always thinking outside
the braid, having
dibs on sheen, veteran & pretty
on the brink of spittle

infarction, two porkpies, rumpus,
Oct. gardens circling plants, animals,
people's applied spoonerisms,
aspects vanished in air

conquering the Ammonites. My
memory of the moment more
lost than in wonder,
Neptune at the Argo's shadow

-- my moon drawing near
to its desire, a hill that's not
a hill, a gaze upon the sun
that's not a stair.

The Poetry Foundation (PF) is avant poetry's Bay of Abukir. But thanks to the group blog Harriet, link to the right, PF has suddenly, demonstrably embraced snappy, exciting poet practitioners, Kenneth Goldsmith, whose posts have been showing up there for a while, and newcomers Ange Mlinko, Stephen Burt, Christian Bök, others. Bök's series on "Writing and Failure" (as of 9/23 he's up to Part 6) stokes colleagues and readers, mostly other poets, evidenced by questions, quips, and counters in comment boxes, first stabs toward a rousing debate as, for example, in his Part 2. These developments from PF bring to mind how the blog genre over time -- like other composition forms -- exposes talent. Back about six years ago when blogging seemed suspiciously dynamic and first became popularized, the question was, Why are good poets so engaging as bloggers? Answer: Writing. By now blog sensationalism has worn down to generic expectations, What are you saying? How able-bodied are you saying it? Demands of the genre are fast-paced and open-ended, leaving space for poets -- plenty of space even at PF.

E-monitoring is pervasive, mirroring exponentially our wildest ambitions to blur what's real and yield authority. Spam arrives with sender names or addresses nearly identical to those of my e-correspondents. Every week I get hundreds of unsolicited messages from fauxpress sent out by mechanical fiat, unconnected to me. Sometimes spam subject headers mimic my own subjects in e-mail and even on my blog. Now ad entities that go by humorous monikers like Pudding Media and Skype offer free online phone calls with a catch. They'll be listening closely to your conversation so that they can fill your screen while you're on the phone with targeted ads tailored to your call's content. Pizza, porn, used books, anarchist fund raising, no, let's talk about what a guy from Pudding Media claims from early testing, the content on the screen, that is, the fucking ad, can determine conversations. "The conversation was actually changing based on what was on the screen. Our ability to influence the conversation was remarkable."

The barbershop is dark now, and grim. I'm one of a kind in the next frontier, the immune system spinning out of my body, since there's no new force in our republic. Last time I fell in with some ruffians from security. Bonded by hair dye, silver and glossy black, they sported art-world skinny tie clips, preening as if they were being videographed anabolically. My liftoff from the barber's chair an injurious leitmotif that riot police cordoned off, saving my toiletries in time, sweating in crates of light like architecture.

New whipping post, Paul Muldoon @ The New Yorker.

I was born with a Euro-face. After success as a child, I interpreted my looks, two layers of sleep relief. Shady aftermath interscope. Budding relationships are fun; a well-thumbed fetcher is not. We want a space made up of excellence in the air between unruly manes and confabs with editors. And call my bookie. We'll keep our moth-hole sweaters as foils to new visual identities.

It occurs to me, now, after doing six or seven of them, that though informed by current comp practices, these little baroque paragraphs I've posted this week, translations and whatnot, assign personality to the foreground, resulting in a nonlanguage atmosphere.

~~

This occurs, true enough, but it's the wrong impression.

Maybe I deserve my extramarital wealth. Meanwhile in the Pavilion of Woe, I deceive my friends with daily durations and visit depths. And I have millions of them. Like Joe Orton in the underground I play my Fender a few times a night. Alien favors percolate just about anywhere if you diet and exercise. Ask Judy and Cuddles and the sluts turning the hand knob that drives the sex gear. Metonic cycle in Motel Six.

Home based employment opportun... "bank randall" long@tirol....
***SPAM***Im sure There have b... "Alden Barnard" frankolea@...
***SPAM***Confirm Your Informa... "Citizens Bank" corporates...
***SPAM*** "Lars" Lars@hotmail.com...
***SPAM*** "Theobold" Theobold@afreei...
No Subject "Samson" Samson@aol.com...
***SPAM*** "Ethan" Ethan@yahoo.com...
No Subject "Coleman" Coleman@alloymai...
No Subject "Marcus" Marcus@alloymail....
***SPAM*** "Ethen" Ethen@address.com&...
No Subject "Quillan" Quillan@cybergrr...
***SPAM*** "Keith" Keith@gmail.com...
No Subject "Emmanuel" Emmanuel@addres...
erotauqe "Yevgeney Leuty" Leuty@pol...
***SPAM***aer-drac "anjli Laky" anjli.Laky@RS...
***SPAM***ritaudin "ayse Ngo" Ngo@recherche-m...
enerlei "Petter Neto" Petter154@at...
Dear Jack...

Admirable misprison: "The image is easy. / So is the device. // You just glance at it. / You push the button."

Look, with regard to inner peace, my friends and I are headed in another direction, already, so opinions like mine can't make things any worse: Could there be an occasion less auspicious (or more redundant) than a Buddhist festival in Nashville? Like bringing flarf to Vegas.

Another: The people at Boeing work together around the world so that you can just get it. A global, sideways officialdom with the ultra powerful and, now, smear campaigners, married with children, partners, and an extended network of reputable contacts. If it's free we'll make it a stunt. Charge your sausage and have a fiesta. Then flop degradingly. Go on. Ask your financial professional. Life jackets dipped in E-Coli.

Retranslation: Acupuncturists need to kick a mutt around, in their fucking minds, fact checker, and yes, I'm a nutritionist as well. I might want to brush up on the bunny. I wasn't sure, and if you're new to this, you might be worried about taste and smell, too, because that's what a pure toy has to do. My balls sway when I let them, flavored with cholesterol. Film powered by Spike.

Translation: Because I'm a fag for recidivists and a bottom, I noticed his boots on the ground. I wasn't sure but I kept checking him out, since I had nothing better to do. His bells sway in the style of George Clinton, fool. Crystal from Bulgari.

When I turned around and saw him, that was it. I knew as soon as I looked, that's the man I'm going to spend the rest of my life with. Burgundy cashmere V-neck. Silver watch by Tag Heuer.

We talk about what they say in the commercials.

Final edits of this week's pieces, below, available in pdf: Shared Regalia: Chapbooks from Mlinko, Barber, and Beckett -- choose top item from a short list of selected essays from the last 10 years.

A counterminimalist design ethos eggs on Steps: A Notebook by Tom Beckett. It's one in a set of Tiny Books from Meritage Press. Publisher Eileen Tabios accompanies her poet as graphic alter ego, supplies drawings and indeed handwrites his text, a duo then stepping onto their small stage in shared regalia to participate in what I might describe unsneeringly as an intense art dealership. The poems come inside a little page-turner, tiny even in chap terms, a 1.5-inch square thumbnail sketchbook with a cover jacket in multicolored (Navajo? Tibetan?) fabric. The poems come forward, sideways, and upside down in one or two words per line, mostly three lines or fewer to the page. They address the ambiguities of their being composed, seeming parenthetical, always germane, or as one page smack in the middle of the text inveighs: "In / the moment / (be right there)." The poems constitute a bisexuality of suave quotations, sketches, and facts on writing, both as text and process, positing that writing verse is like composing a music made of temporary flaws ("smudged work of Arias") or like writing on a blackboard, "Looking / at blackboards / how many Ways?" Skepticism -- "Advancement / is a kind / of ____" -- abounds. If poetry is prayer, to paraphrase, prayer is programming in thought that's overexposed and torn. To get beyond the conundrum of prayer, programming, etc., the dealers work on each other and together. Tom's Eileen accommodates the torn thought idea on a ripped page and settles prayer down with a vapor of slants, blank lines, and empty boxes that enforce a silence. Eileen's Tom returns, though, with a new quiet-breaker, "A / poetry of questions / (one answer)." To clarify, he qualifies, "When / I was / a young man." Next page, "When / I was / a little girl."

In Non Eligible Respondent Stefani Barber slips out of research to fall into a lover's embrace to "effect communion" via phone and observation, listening to and noting what is not said in an open-air journalese, observing the observed, psychically body-snatching, in other words, yet still "in love with the day, hoping for a callback." Hoping, again, a brawny feminist topos repeatedly infused with the trenchant and the impersonal, "female informant, hesitant at same point as before." Here's research that finds playboy candidates in their usual fucked states, as in this neat anomaly, "male informant, before I can explain study he is convinced of being respondent...likes Bob Marley, but no drugs allowed." Looking at what's there -- "the only one way of knowing" -- is foregrounded in the first and last sections of an 18-page compendium of diary prose, lists, and verse that's free enough to "speak lower register." There are pioneer, Robinson Jeffers-like glimpses of "the wind from the porch," beach, sea, scored with more urgent and more sense-driven "memory that hangs above" the stark "filth of saturation / driving the spiral." Middle sections, time-dated entries identified as "from non eligible respondent," carry off the narrative conceit of contextualizing data compiled -- "she is a moon child"; "he has a low voice" -- as well as the vital extra data that posterize the bolt of emotion from the compiler caught in the mirror of her own game: "a table by the window, watching people as if something more than glass separates."

With regard to production values, the poetry in Non Eligible Respondent plays prominently against the no-nonsense, xeroxical, stapled white page. The chapbook's cover is a deep teal 'standard' stock, unmarked, save a tiny stamped Taxt logo on the back. The format couldn't be more neominimalist, nor more collegial toward the text, an 'effect of communion.'

The Children's Museum
Ange Mlinko
Prefontaine Press 2007

Non Eligible Respondent
Stefani Barber
Taxt 2006

Steps: A Notebook
Tom Beckett
Meritage 2007

With small press publishing resorting more and more to the pumped-up, slick-on-the-cheap formulae of print on demand, chapbooks look more important than ever as basic frames for a writer's work and process. Brief text enveloped by a distinguishable production style is somehow tastier, more inviting as a preserve between poet and publisher, often turned out with an experimental, homemade touch. The production features to Ange Mlinko's The Children's Museum are a shocker of nondigital rusticity, handstiched, off-white Butcher paper, handstamped cover, type appearing to be handset in Méridien for the poems and Agincourt for titles, both fonts retro-crafted a few decades ago, according to the back legend, Méridien considered "sharp, graceful, arresting, and sensuous." For starter copy on the eight poems enclosed, we could begin there. The title poem is caught up in "just river-silvering," "odor of silt," and "pressurized...disequilibrium." Toddler in tow, the poet is as if "convalescing ... perusing the countryside," which is "like going to Paris...a beeline to Versailles or St. Cloud," but also a "first phase in New York," and, as well, "pointing in different directions" in her backyard as recognizable as the "charm of tennis prose … in which legs of chairs / suspended in the tangle" in order to grace "a sentence that wraps / its back in a negative embrace." Arresting, yes, but the sentence never comes to a full stop, "looking for a mnemonic," rhyming air with air, Grenada with timber, fledged with hedge. A sharpness and an intimacy told through language taking itself unseriously -- "(Orange, schmorange / pigeons, eons)"; then again, language goes on to question itself -- "The word 'empty' mistaken for 'tempting'" or to "mistake the word 'evidence' for 'violence'." Everything goes into the day and the life of the peruser and silverer and it adds up to more than sensuality, a "Jamming vocabularies like blueberries," a "hoping...with more myopia than yoga that my contortions / ... get ... closer to the source text."

More soon.

Coming soon.

The Children's Museum
Ange Mlinko
Prefontaine Press 2007

Non Eligible Respondent
Stefani Barber
Taxt 2006

Steps: A Notebook
Tom Beckett
Meritage 2007

(Low interest loan.) Yes I can. I'm so Beach Boys...

To call Peter Pan on the carpet.

I am a swinger and songwriter.

Worth mulling over.

You can speak in a normal voice, and I will understand you.

From the start there was a nagging problem
learning new technologies,
I'm sorry, truly
is one thing, some kind of feat &nsp; &nsp; &nsp; &nsp;     that doesn't
is another

As soon as my feet    &nsp; &nsp; &nsp; &nsp; &nsp; &nsp; &nsp; &nsp; &nsp; &nsp; &nsp; &nsp; &nsp; &nsp; &nsp; &nsp;      hit the stage
kicked down, glasses smashed, insides painted black.
I thought the exterior was &nsp; &nsp; &nsp; &nsp; &nsp; &nsp; &nsp; &nsp;     swimmer's
dark eyes &nsp; &nsp; &nsp; &nsp;    a mop of red &nsp; &nsp; &nsp; &nsp;     hair pulled back.

Down fades and can be told &nsp; &nsp; &nsp; &nsp;    in
   &nsp; &nsp; &nsp; &nsp; &nsp; &nsp; &nsp; &nsp; &nsp; &nsp; &nsp; &nsp; &nsp; &nsp; &nsp; &nsp; a good nose for boys
held tacitly, unaccountable in spandex &nsp; &nsp; &nsp; &nsp; &nsp; &nsp; &nsp; &nsp;     twisted,
animated natures, sinking down.

This looks inner resting. Monday, September 10, Pierogi 2000, 177 N 9 St, Brooklyn (doors open 6:45): Short readings/screening: Jasper Bernes, Brandon Downing, Jeffrey Jullich & the launch of in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni, introduced by Joshua Clover and Michael Scharf. (Boys night out.)

I remember when a poem was a machine.

Hey, machine. I love your work.

Those who should lend support fail to. Some conspire not to.

A different morality. Get used to it or go home.

I'd like to lighten what's complex by replacing poetry with glass and silence, a kind of stripping down to the ashen stem cells of relatively unspeaking. I'm a busybody but not an impossible mime that pedals on some obscure brand of bike. Hail, love, I'm in hell with you. I still try to stay positive in the free zone, swallowing hard. I'm definitely into art. The problem with engineered simplicity, both as an affectation and requirement, is you have to give aclinic lines to what annoys other people, and what others think passive-aggressive. Internal "gears" relegate the nauseous effects to personal advantage, which you waive anyway, as if / as though privileged opposition were some huge treasure for anyone else with a computer. This is my own Satangate segment. I know you see this. Why drive to your new place where they cook something for you, spend time at what could be your last lunch, pour coke over the glass table, because you won't live to feel the buzz, watching the clock in whiteface?

Quatre Options translated from "12 French prostitutes' terms"

Nice, nice hello from a passive, bronzed, pulsating 1m81, 69 kilogr, and under your condition I'm sure we'll be well on. Seeking that soulmate who has the means for giving me pleasure and if so, I'll recip without limits. I open up in Esperanto and am thus ready for your proposed fantasms! I'm dreaming of kissing you down there since I am a pro without pouring it on too much (ok I'm pretty terrific at it, maybe better than pretty, even). Make me your protégé of the hour, purrrr!

~~

Body pawn, beefy convex bottom, enduring. Into experiment, good presentation, conversation, trés available and mobile, open to your whims... I cannot receive and plan only on bets, tho. Can you describe yourself? A photograph? What research are you waiting for? In what corner? Hit me up. I am, in my briefs, a young beardless pushover with a fresh core for you, señor. Kissing upon agreement. I'm looking for just about anyone who's rather active or somewhat passive wanting benefit from me. I am plûtot studly, sympathetic, and cultivated. I love simple folk, those who are into the cool moment. I like sex but it's -- you guys! -- relational. I aspire that this small promo help you love my personal quirks and hot points, too. Hesitate not!

~~

Whoa -- please -- take my foot!!!

Youth here, I have provisions for spending a good time when we'll play a little more...

Make a toy out of my ball. I adore that!!! SM, no.

~~

Hi. Everything seems toweled or wrapped up in a caftan, to me, but am available. I'm a surfer of 21 years, and I measure 1m77, 60 kg, black eyes, brown-to-blond hair, whate'er ..... I am your beach bum and servant and as you can see am no longer toweled (if I were you would not have discovered this profile, dude). I am yours, slut, bud, at your slurpy service as you wish. Also, you can see my tariffs (1000 flowers, 24h) and my coordinates, body defined, buzzed hair. Come to me for more precision. Business is everything! I'll be there to accompany you at like a dinner, an exit from the theatre or for -- wink, wink...

New Beckett.

Simiculated Laureate

I am not gay, and I have never been gay.

R.I.P. Mary Rising Higgins.

This links to our brief conversation, Feb. 28 and March 9, 2003 (appearing in reverse order, blogspot-style).

Alberto Gonzales has lived the American dream.

I need a volume exec.

mtvU Poet Laureate

New uses are innovations. Topless rubberneck.

Overwriting Text by the Laureate

Listen, I'm a poet. Everything about holding capital is a fantasy racket, for me, and abstraction like a pas de deux coming apart, our working on pieces of tracing paper in a ballet factory.

Coffers of the deep.

'I'm home,' I say to the ATM in the lobby, take the cash, push a button to the roof to sit on a barstool overlooking the time is money plaza level. At this hour the brasseries are closed long and hard. Can we turn to steel? One hears a fire represented in the distance where metal breaks, but not the cries for help, just songs of victory rebuilding the world, growing deeper, duller at the sight of children going in this direction, leaping out of windows with startling humility, with their hair on fire.

Diving into Jesse Crockett's http://listenlight.net I discover there will be a "full equinox" this September 23. Sounds pleasurabe. Maybe we need to start counting down, only 30 days till the full equinox! [Learned of this from http://www.turntablebluelight.com/ -- one of Jesse's outlinks.]

~~

Hey duh. Make that "fall equinox." Stop counting. Nothing big will happen, just the usual minvan swirvage unto death. What would a full equinox bring to the table, anyway, better sex?

Mexican French

Bees and hayfever have nasal accents. IMs from cocoa keep us buds afloat. As if small moss, winging it. There's nothing less to break a nose. You add part of Radio WADO. A world of yo, bitch lights, photon torpedoes.

British blogger Chris Goode proposes a collaboration:

I want to make an imaginary video piece. This will take the form of a multiple-authored text which reads as a script / storyboard / synopsis for a video that will never be realized --

Further details in the right panel at DC's.

Earlier, blogger.com was directing me to a page with this message, bX-pumzzs. A sort of incantation for scattering sperm.

Your comfort is a business.

Simply put.

War over there, peace at home.

I like the color green very much. Especially its movement within trapezoids. I'm a 38-year-old male Capricorn located in overview of the coast where pointless attitudes are silenced. To stay fallible, I have interests: unique investments, investors, ironic poems and their poets (natch), C.E.O.s on motorbikes, lawyer-gardeners and harvesters of weed, covert behaviorists in politics and technology, counselors who hire and fire while preparing foods with vino invocators, humane conditions.

Hooded, I show you techniques made of my personality and franchisees that issue. Granted, issue is a verb tied to numbing esthetics, the franchise a kind of spiritual waterboarding that will never cease. Each incrimination on the green feels like an unhinged event, the early backstory lowering disputants of the human cry cast up, their mail sorted by workers, vibrating at street level, positioning their decisions on a chain as absolute freedom re-hires the one people handling pit managers who created lackey overflow. One people. Nearly impossible. Perfect!

Many investors will pledge boundless love. This is a famous university.

As the genealogies of specialists fill up, thickening stripes across the knolls, research parks, used cars, and internet, a lull in motives occurs in physical evidence, everyone's leverage sturdy but preheated as so many honey bees are dying faster and more so they need not raise a voice, the warmer air stranded to let them pass.

I'm the underdog here, not equipped to understand what matters. I'm emotionally maligned, an amalgam like channels of normality, sleep, hope, nimbus-wet telepathy that bears repeating.

You be the C.E.O. I'm stuck in the office.

Amusement & poetry.

I remember [Joe Ceravolo] reading at a Wm. carlos Williams festival in rutherford. Daniel Halpern had the audience in stitches laughing at his numerous references to suburban lawn care products. Joe followed and actually read each of his poems twice "so you can better understand them" he said -- he could have read each 10 times as the audience seemed totally tuned out.

-- Joel Lewis, Poetics, Aug. 18

Fingernail swizzle. Tough. Pix for reply.

We're tired of dead fantasia, planet loss, Appalachian sputtering, dull satire. Also, time draining portrayed as company oozed of amiable outwitted foes.

I'll wait then 'til after the christening and take on the mad stunt driver, as I find much that is interesting about unzipping in wet opium, in a series of mind battles, slippery, with ill-defined possible noise. The flabbergasted good mutt takes what you're wearing on the floor, open to anyone like.

Data swirls around Simpson Brook (a
Evidence-based rivalries
St-amping feet reverberating t* hr u
Th e l a c** e *y hy st er ia

Reaching out a trembling hand, Jesus, I had to laugh:
T h.i's g_e*m is re-ally m ova_ble!!
T,h,i-s o+n*e is reall+y profitab*le,!!! (a

Come on, sir knave, have done
H.a+v+e y*o-u b,e e,n wa, tching t_h-i s f,o r t+h*e
L'a.s t w,e e,k-? (a

Rationalist native
H*a-s a j-o, b A-
To do

T_a+k.e a l_o.o k :
Are u fit for t he s ce n* ar i+o?
Re*cent rele a,ses ge_nera'ting g*rowing un res*t in A,
Sou*n=d o r*ie –nt *ed,landfill.

If you read only one post today, make it this one.

The vulnerable and maligned ones were not held enough as children like a moonscape of beaks. Ever notice? Certainly I wasn't. Now I have to make excuses for friends of mine buried below their own animation without male heirs. They're wearing synthetics, and only half familiar, and just too intense, writing over in a beam from plundering the transport of their ambience. It's their fault. Simple stuff picking up a pen.

Is there anything left to lie about?

Thanks for not mentioning me.

When three or more pray in exile, the spectacle is miniaturized.

There's the hugest irony in Ashbery saying we're directionless, below. And the exaggeration is, among other things, self-mockery. But his resistance to gangs is, you know, ongoing, because whatever else gangs do for you, they always, irretrievably let down their cool.

Nude Middlebrow Descending a Staircase: We feel in America that we have to join something, that our lives are directionless unless we are a part of a group, a clan... -- John Ashbery [cited by Epstein and by Latta]

R.I.P., Elizabeth Murray.

B.K.S. reflects (posted 8/10) on digital artist Jeremy Blake who committed suicide last month.

Bombs is not enough.

Having read En poésie comme en musique, il s’agit de savoir bien placer les fausses notes... here, I found this immediately following, Comment, a felicitous bilingual invitation both to dialogue and answer the perpetually reigning question, how so?

Nobody's asked me but Ron's paragraphs over the last few days on Ashbery, focused on Three Poems, are some of the best blogging of the year.

And the last quality is the poet will mention his own name, her own name, in the last stanza.

I knew Hafez put his name in every ghazal, but I didn't know that this was a prerequisite of the form.

Rumi does it (in his ghazals), too. This was a poetry that wasn't published, you see. It was memorized. So the only way you could tell who had written it is by the name at the end. So that's just enforced on them so to speak, by the situation. -- Robert Bucholtz & Robert Bly, American Statesman

What kind of animals are we? What dolts, this Hafez and that Rumi? Bucholtz and Bly? I think putting their name in a little beast, even if it has fur along with fangs and eats dirt and sludge, be it a ghazal, a pet, or whatever, and making it remember must be a sacrilege and a desparkler. It's driving me nuts. Something flows through my body. The chairs start to talk. Even if a poet has a foreign sounding name related to a violinist that doesn't excuse the nonintegrity. Opening and closing its mouth again and again is abuse and a disgusting scene, especially forcing the ghazal to speak names 'enforced at the end' in the ground. Even ghazals just like kittens have abandoned dreams. I was wondering what damage comes next. A mouse and turtles or a beautiful leaping ghazal don't have intelligence to save them, 'so to speak,' smooth-talked into submission, nose down in the mud and sexual collapse. Bly has no opinion, generically wild. His thinking like his name is flat, functional, a 'situation,' a journey to easy fast sex. Quaint and all but Bly is digging himself a deeper hole into a row of translucence flushed downhill, shaming the rest of the force for good in poetry.

Looks as though a piece of old technology could rescue poets afflicted by the new. Experience has shown that even a few short discussions with a verse professional can help a problem poet, one who suffers from web overload, obsessing over one's or another's blog comment boxes, for instance, or subscribing and submitting posts to too many e-lists. But sometimes poets who could benefit from talking to professionals are unable to come in or reluctant to do so.

Maybe they do not have to, says a new study that found that counseling by the handy old telephone could be effective in curbing addiction to the blazing web.

In a study that might shed light on how to resolve difficulties with monopolizing comment boxes at poetics blogs, researchers suggest phone counseling could be good for web addicts and poets who are "hard-to-reach," literally and figuratively. "You know, if a poet feels isolated living in California or New York or some such off-the-beaten lyrical path, all he had before were those cold-blooded e-lists and comment boxes. Could be all he needs now is to pick up the phone and bawl like a chihuahua pup to a verse professional," said Tom Raworth, one of the control executives and authors of the study. Phone counseling also uses fewer resources than face-to-face meetings.

“Telephone counseling for poetic problems,” Raworth writes, “could help overcome barriers that often hinder access to conventional verse treatment such as stigma, transportation, caesura and scheduling conflicts.”

The researchers screened poets in waiting rooms at 18 Boulder, CO clinics and contacted those who appeared to have a possible poetry problem. "Boulder is another one of those fallen-off places all across the globe where it's a pleasure to take pictures with your phone cam, but there are no readings, and poets feel awful lonesome," Raworth said. In all, the team worked with almost ten poets, half of whom were given just pamphlets about how to write better and the remainder receiving counseling.

The program seemed to work better for men, especially poets holed up in man caves, than for women who were primary care givers in households earning less than $5,000. The men reported an overall decline in web addiction of 17 percent, the women one percent.

The researchers said they were surprised at how readily many poets agreed to the counseling, which involved trading cable modems for dial-up and speaking to counselors without recourse to delete buttons.

We know time is precious. Colors fade. More so now. Who has the freedom to flag something down and read about it? Not to mention how long it takes to scratch out a review. So, I've noted a trend among readers and writers in the review biz, and I'm jumping in. The definitive one-liner, deployed in conversational discourse, mostly to praise.

No one writes like Y -- he's wonderful.

A miracle.

This book is awesome, period.

I connect with Z, she's a god.

I'm totally cool with X; she's great; she's a lyrical polygamist.

Endless variations of these, along with a hands-on option.

I couldn't put X down, my palms are sweaty, that's how brilliant he is.

My fingertips tingle just thinking of Z's stone on a rope.

Both my hands are shaking; hiss after hiss, my entire being pulsates reading Y; I envy Y for fucking me up.

I ran out of fingers (and thumbs!) rating this volume ... it's a 10-er.

Numbers are good shorthand for thinking. Just be sure they add up to ten.

In my humble opinion I basically rate "Patriarchy" very favorable, 10.

Off the scale, 10 or more (if I could heh).

Like Arabella, ten isn't high enough.

No lacunae needed, Z's asyntacity sets an extreme standard atop its chaffron and crinet, maximally tall, looking down over her sprawling, immersive, dark and smoky project-for-good, 10.

Once a year when there's a 13th moon you can go negative.

Before Y began to write she should have showered.

X shows the relationship between trucks and garbage.

Maniacal with a hidden agenda and a bouquet, not exactly fresh, of synthetic nothings, still, I'm impressed by Z's weight loss.

It's hard to peg Rilke's poetry -- somewhere between a 2 and 3.

Been a while since a royal put herself in the same league as poets. Her highness, clairvoyant and psychotherapist Martha Louise, princess of Norway, reads others' feelings and claims familiarity with cherubim, and for £6,000 she will train you to do the same. She talks to angels, connecting on a “deeper level with animals" and "forces that surround us."

I just thought I don't know what I thought.

Comments at a number of blogs are particularly productive. For sustained poetics discussion, this recent set at R.S.'s stands out.

Hobbit, pack it up.

If you still need it, unassailable evidence this morning of how media and hysteria join at the hip in our sudden collective fear of bridges. And the conditioned wailing about infrastructure. Three days ago you could have scoured hundreds of newspapers and channels and never found the word.

I have a sentence for everything. This is a transition.

With the descendent of Simics designated laureate, the fed's conspiracy is plain as The New Yorker's taste for poetry. First a fun guy. Next a sad sack. After that a fun sad sack. All the time leveraging the white guy factor. We're going to have a woman appointed once or twice in a decade; they'll throw in a person of color or two, bless them. But it will be guys most of the way, fun, sad sack, fun sad sack, down.

I have a great deal of compassion for canticles and what we have done to them.

My car gives me the crabs.

A few weeks ago poet and critic Peter Schjeldahl extolled Yale Art School dean Tony Smith's directorship of the Venice Biennale, finding Smith the "most anti-academic of academics." The pedagogic basis of such a claim, according to Schjeldahl, is that in his teaching Smith opposes "rationalist theoretical tendencies in criticism," preferring to dwell on "the artist's initiative and the viewer's intuition." Some friends of mine see this as old-beret mumbo-jumbo. One complains that intuition and initiative are unmeasurable abstractions. Another sees the atheoretical posture a classic New York School stand-off, a kind of defensive elitism to circumvent the vulgarity of a priori affects and process analysis. First, while I'll turn to theory to perfect a technical argument, I confess strong advocacy for analyzing an artist's, a poet's "initiative" when by the term we mean to understand her idiosyncratic absorption of influences, including theoretical constructs, of course, along with distinctive features of her practice. Second, I especially appreciate Schjeldahl's pinpointing intuition as the key exchange element between artist and viewer, poet and listener / reader. Evasive as it is, intuition becomes the sine qua non for influential reading, much less reader response. In this regard, contrasts of planning and chance become quanta of exchange between writer and reader. According to classic reader response theory, expectations funded by a reader's experiences contribute to an initial schema for intake. The plan is set in place. The text, if poetry, changes everything if the reader is ready for chance. The text operates as a spatial dimension for irreversible transport, influencing future planning, giving chance agency position for change.