First cousins twice removed, Frank O'Hara french-kissed Edwin Denby on multiple evenings but they had only one daughter, immaculately conceived! Her name is "Black Swallowtail," also the title of this poem.
Muddy, clinging electrons
why do jets linger over Easter
and eagle cloths
wink in twilight.
Smoking is hungry
green jacket is transition.
Out of my white binding braids
the blue cichlid and the orange cichlid
are brothers and Borough Hall
their ancestral home.
Return to repair damage the winter wrought
of salt on gums and warlocks on spit.
Charisma says one boy to the other
and boots of asskicking.
The earth evades our personal aviator.
Relays the itchy green fibers of April.
The transparent green
and blue Eastern Swallowtail
decorates a scarf all the way to Delancey Street
to the Village, to Queens.
-- Kim Lyons
5/21/08
Poem Stripped of Artifice
Mark Lamoureux
New School Chapbook Series 2008
If it is a trap, why are we going?
Here is the first section in Mark Lamoureux's chapbook-length poem.
The telescope wobbles & collapsesIt's important to read above as centered, narrowly justified text, left and right, with double spaces between the lines, since the poem maintains this alignment in similarly 'fissured,' single columns through nine of its 11 sections. The poem is then punctured by and endures the blank of the paper it's printed on, adhering almost to the end to a marking time formation that implies a stationary position -- I remain in that spot -- but with steady knee and foot movement parallel to the ground, total control. The discipline will fall to pieces, as will Mark's specificity via poetic sleight -- landstrider, mantis-light. The discourse unravels around family members in a kind of process-conscious memoryscape: "I stole a / Legg's egg from my grandmother's / dresser ... How does it feel, my / wasting your time like this?" This from Section VI where there are a few more specifics, "I didn't / know there were pantyhose inside." But by Section XI the egg explodes as the columns give way to two-page-wide lines of prose, single-spaced. The sky seems truly split and the language heads for the South Pole.
On its 3rd leg, a landstrider felled.
A fissure mars the plate of its eye
& likewise the sky splits, another
fissure from which issues a mantis-
light. Get over it, my father says.
He is disappearing ahead of me, into
darkness. I remain in that spot:
lover's lane, clouds of breath, weak
little stars, unaided eyes.
Feeling is considered to be subjective & intuitive, "warm."We find Mark in fairly airy, confessional, self-lecturing depression -- depression is his term, as are "heart death," anhedonia, Hell, and a few other place-holders that convey personal torment. The work concludes on a harrowing turn of events and idiom that may not be everyone's idea of a great time. It's not ironic. Not synthetic. It's upsetting. It's an antidote to Get over it.
The organ that produces sentience has been objectively identified as the brain.
5/20/08
5/19/08
5/14/08
Chris Martin
American Music
Copper Canyon 2007
It is rare for a first book of poetry to make a bold play for the center, straddling the divide between conventional, unattenuated sense-making v. text-making sorted out of brainier experiment. Chris Martin's experiment is restrained, highly structured yet formally unobtrusive, much like composition for well-mannered chamber exercises, unrhymed tercets in short pieces of no more than two and a half pages, each poem winding down to a single-line coda. Programmatic, then, but light on its feet, American Music carries out its smart, dexterous research by means of what Chris or perhaps his persona suggests is plagiarism, finding support from scores of sources named in poems and at the back of the book. "I drove 4,000 miles to realize all / My ideas were still in Ohio." I don't believe him, anymore than I believe the pieces are "jokes." Thanking others for ideas, borrowing a noun or two, keeping the form transparent, calling the result a trifle, in this regard, Chris sets the bar low, rightly, for artifice to mushroom. Better to take on an immense range of here and now, including daring parts like sentiment and tepidity. Who but someone with a big flat-panel brain can lead us out of the trope "The crisp blue winter sky" into an alarming meta-video:
And you assimilate it, allow itThat's a lot of blue, a color and a feeling he plays like an instrument -- "…hernia / Throbbing, my dream // Of an ex-girlfriend pixilated / Into the synaptic void..." -- to deal in the obvious and back up the almost ordinary -- "There's even a girl in the window / Teaching herself sign language / And laughing unself-consciously..." This is almost ordinary in that saying things this plain this concretely is unnervingly apolitical, nonminimalist, and promethean: "you / Being I, here, the uncalloused / Observer of daily, nay // Momently phenomena..." Chris holds out his hand which is uncalloused as well, but shaking, holding it "Out to the various people I am / Thinking to love." American Music maneuvers away thus from prevailing urban poetics, a one-volume victory streak.
To manufacture in the peripheral
Coloring that inquires
Eye to work to ear -- bluebird, bluebell
Bellbottom, and so
On, unraveling, a sea of cyborgs
Proliferating endlessly only
To end up jump
Cutting as one man lusts...
5/10/08
The John Ashbery in Facebook is a Dartmouth alum and has no friends. This seems unfair. (He bears a striking resemblance to ...)
5/9/08
There's a single young male who sends me all my spam. His voice is unified squeaky. The vocabulary under his command is familiar. Often he conveys a sense of urgency. This seems superfluous. It puts me off. I like to hold my promiscuity close. Won't spend money on a teen stranger, even if the item or his service is on sale. Won't click through to his website as he requests. I don't like the prospect of disappointment. Or misconstruing my own motives. I'll stick to the background, keep a distance. Given my frequent refusals, the guy keeps coming back trying to break down my defenses. No way, how ribald, I think I'm Fellini.
5/8/08
5/6/08
5/5/08
Robert Downey, Jr. showed up Sunday at Boston Garden for the seventh game in the Celtics-Hawks far from predictable playoffs. He's still got this dreamy but only partially puffed-up face and big, dopey, sweltering eyes flashing fiery darts that tell you how often and how profoundly he's been distracted just getting through the last forty-eight hours to make it here. This far.
We talked over our Stoli Vanil minutes after the game, which the Celtics won, thanks. He was in Boston to catch the last of the series, and it's surely coincidental that his megahit Iron Man debuted nationally this weekend as well. He's been in Waimea Canyon on Kauai for months filming with Jack Black and Ben Stiller (who was to join us after the game, but something came up). Iron Man is very old news for Downey. Production was last year. When you watch him soar through the stratosphere again and again in Iron Man you get that impression in spades. "Am I Tony? I'm not Tony. I've got to be Tony again!" he blurted after only a sniff of his drink, which otherwise he did not touch. I didn't drink, either, absorbed as I was in his old "moment" as Tony. That's Tony Slate, the Iron Man. Downey's held up remarkably since I knew him back at Presidio Hill School on the west coast. His publicized bouts of inebriation, let's call it, and perp walks to rehab notwithstanding, he's entering a new, next phase. "I'm not a kid anymore externally," he admitted, as if this were a segment in an ongoing campaign to get himself cacooned inside a safe, no-death place. Had I the thread bundles and draglines, I'd have kept him here.
It's hard to salvage U.S. expressionism bent on domesticating homespun technology run amuck. All the rampage of Iron Man is contained in field explosives, a Malibu cliff housing the cooler of two labs, a block or two of Afghanistan rebuilt within LA city limits, parched hills we've seen before. Tony's other lab, a cave in fake Afghanistan, and all the glowy alchemy shining on his genius cheekbones are traceable to as far back as Bride of Frankenstein. Come to think of it, Tony's pout, tilt of head, and sulky profile conjure Elsa Lanchester's dual outlines of Mary Shelley and the Bride. While Tony's rasp dredges up Noel Coward, the after party. That far.
Iron Man's story is demagnetized, clad in desolate sarcasms just like Tony. The problem with armed robots turns into a familiar intra-corporate battle of wits, in which the good and the bad have half a point. The U.S. military stands on hold until lawyers and the press show up. The U.S. government is reforming itself somewhere in Arizona, maybe. Not messing with Gwyneth Paltrow, Downey's action requires we imbibe and merge with his pure, open, and larger character outside his merely bringing animation-to-life, that is, his art and his body, his figure and his celebrity, our viewing and his performance. In contrast, when he twists the head off Jeff Bridges, Downey gives us a synthetic notoriety of chintz and winsomeness stomping and cavorting giantlike across our own timidity. Moral? Even his neck muscles have learned to shrug. You see a great veteran starting to combust.
We talked over our Stoli Vanil minutes after the game, which the Celtics won, thanks. He was in Boston to catch the last of the series, and it's surely coincidental that his megahit Iron Man debuted nationally this weekend as well. He's been in Waimea Canyon on Kauai for months filming with Jack Black and Ben Stiller (who was to join us after the game, but something came up). Iron Man is very old news for Downey. Production was last year. When you watch him soar through the stratosphere again and again in Iron Man you get that impression in spades. "Am I Tony? I'm not Tony. I've got to be Tony again!" he blurted after only a sniff of his drink, which otherwise he did not touch. I didn't drink, either, absorbed as I was in his old "moment" as Tony. That's Tony Slate, the Iron Man. Downey's held up remarkably since I knew him back at Presidio Hill School on the west coast. His publicized bouts of inebriation, let's call it, and perp walks to rehab notwithstanding, he's entering a new, next phase. "I'm not a kid anymore externally," he admitted, as if this were a segment in an ongoing campaign to get himself cacooned inside a safe, no-death place. Had I the thread bundles and draglines, I'd have kept him here.
It's hard to salvage U.S. expressionism bent on domesticating homespun technology run amuck. All the rampage of Iron Man is contained in field explosives, a Malibu cliff housing the cooler of two labs, a block or two of Afghanistan rebuilt within LA city limits, parched hills we've seen before. Tony's other lab, a cave in fake Afghanistan, and all the glowy alchemy shining on his genius cheekbones are traceable to as far back as Bride of Frankenstein. Come to think of it, Tony's pout, tilt of head, and sulky profile conjure Elsa Lanchester's dual outlines of Mary Shelley and the Bride. While Tony's rasp dredges up Noel Coward, the after party. That far.
Iron Man's story is demagnetized, clad in desolate sarcasms just like Tony. The problem with armed robots turns into a familiar intra-corporate battle of wits, in which the good and the bad have half a point. The U.S. military stands on hold until lawyers and the press show up. The U.S. government is reforming itself somewhere in Arizona, maybe. Not messing with Gwyneth Paltrow, Downey's action requires we imbibe and merge with his pure, open, and larger character outside his merely bringing animation-to-life, that is, his art and his body, his figure and his celebrity, our viewing and his performance. In contrast, when he twists the head off Jeff Bridges, Downey gives us a synthetic notoriety of chintz and winsomeness stomping and cavorting giantlike across our own timidity. Moral? Even his neck muscles have learned to shrug. You see a great veteran starting to combust.
5/3/08
5/2/08
5/1/08
4/30/08
Here's a tablespoon of cod liver. Post-melanoma, John McCain aims to end tax incentives encouraging businesses' subsidizing health insurance for employees, and shift toward tax credits for individuals to purchase coverage. He'll have to back off this floater, as he had to retreat from his crazed idea of a 100-year occupation of Iraq, but meantime it's comforting to see he wants to lose this election almost as much as Obama and Clinton. A cold tease, McCain wants to dissuade corporations from looking after their workers. In other words, he'd eviscerate one of the few American institutions, job-based insurance, that bears faint resemblance to social democracy. The ex-hostage would turn the whole enterprise over to market forces, as if this were the United States of Darwin. The (potential) consumer would determine her course of action. Find your own, sicko. It's cod liver and payback. Mr. Nasty wants you to suffer just as he suffered.
4/29/08
With regard to the Supreme Court's upholding Indiana's Voter ID Law, a piece of legislation passed by Republicans exclusively, the ruling finds no evidence of either voter fraud, the apparent motive for the law, or a burden placed on voters by the law. Untouched by anecdotes about those eligible refused ballots, the Court majority allowed lack of "concrete" data documenting burden to trump a complete lack of data showing any fraud. One consequence of Justice Stephens's majority finding of no "evidence of the burden imposed on voters who now lack photo identification" is that it will take a decade or longer to compile proof. That would add up to many hundreds or more impeded in exercising or denied their rights to vote. Within the next ten years, in addition to seven states that now require photo id's, other states will enact similar restrictions -- that also seems certain now. To rescind voter id laws, a question for the immediate term is who will take on the responsibility to amass evidence of burden. A longer term question, one for not only historians and legal scholars but also US senators who pass on new justices, is when will the analytical narrative on the antipopulist and indeed recidivist bias of the Court enter public discourse so that bodies politic can concentrate on reversing the occupation of the Third Branch by judges given to partisanship and callous reasoning. The majority opinions were signed by men who, in this case, prefer to protect a process against the specter of fraud than guarantee citizens their constitutional rights for clear access to that process.
4/28/08
My boss sucks.
That's because she wants to. She has to. Some job titles are, as the expression goes, anathemas. Disquiet raising the roof. Boss, leader, principal, chair, honcho, prexy, director, master chef, officer in charge, head of the shift. What does it take to earn and maintain these titles? Ideology. Casting spells. Constantly interviewing every employee, member, affiliate, colleague, collaborator, associate sans souci. Even an emperor-operator-intellectual wearing that bandolier of inclusiveness and inviting debate can and likely will carve you down to size -- as electric pink Mao and his gang did, achieving greater equity for their rule.
The long reach.
I'm antitheocratic, not an Episcopalian. I'm prejudiced and unqualified then to pronounce the Church of England a running joke, founded though on the whim of a killer monarch whose adrenal surge happened to resonate with and gave temporal staying power to new theories of moral force vis a vis the pope's. That power is inchoate doctrinally but it effected empire, linguistic hegemony, and facts-on-the-ground style that in back-formation lend pragmatic weight to authority. The pope is another anathema, along with the caliph, the chief rabbi, and the lesser sergeant at arms, the lieutenant general, the vice admiral, the sub-provost, and, o springtime, der Führer. Lower-ranked authorities regularly take on the conflation chores of cult dictators. The New York Times reports an ex-Baptist soldier in Iraq was threatened by US military officers because of his professed atheism. He is one of 5,500 in the service who have complained about such discrimination. These incidents most often reflect bias toward Christian evangelical views held by the chains of command.
I'm my own boss.
People believe in miracles. I'm kidding. I have no boss. I work for myself. There are bosses out there. Still, it's the bosses inside, the psycho-analogs, that register: nonverbal monitors of sensory and motor operations standing up to see the wall unit, hearing you read, tasting brie, walking home in idle suspense, smelling something, falling asleep; talky administrators of social filters meddling closer to the verbal core, editing prose, keeping everything tidy; above them, less of an allover presence, one or more crisis managers of sorts, perhaps figments of what Freudians describe as superego mostly whizzing silently on automatic, now and then shaking a finger up in the brain and mumbling something half-received and half-worked-out for the moment -- be warned when she fakes her climax and wants you to put it in writing. The tribal warlords above superego are fleeting, hard to perceive, even though fossilized -- in a way -- in entabulature thrown down to us as iconic, historical features of a heritage we never asked for and cannot live without, a wide collection of human good and awful stuff like the signing of the Magna Carta and the slaughter of the Saracens. Point is I can't get rid of the entabulature and at times it tries to boss me. No, but seriously, I'm going to have to eat it, and it pops back up (or in), the amazing wait while I figure out the plumage of something hitherto never thought of.
That's because she wants to. She has to. Some job titles are, as the expression goes, anathemas. Disquiet raising the roof. Boss, leader, principal, chair, honcho, prexy, director, master chef, officer in charge, head of the shift. What does it take to earn and maintain these titles? Ideology. Casting spells. Constantly interviewing every employee, member, affiliate, colleague, collaborator, associate sans souci. Even an emperor-operator-intellectual wearing that bandolier of inclusiveness and inviting debate can and likely will carve you down to size -- as electric pink Mao and his gang did, achieving greater equity for their rule.
The long reach.
I'm antitheocratic, not an Episcopalian. I'm prejudiced and unqualified then to pronounce the Church of England a running joke, founded though on the whim of a killer monarch whose adrenal surge happened to resonate with and gave temporal staying power to new theories of moral force vis a vis the pope's. That power is inchoate doctrinally but it effected empire, linguistic hegemony, and facts-on-the-ground style that in back-formation lend pragmatic weight to authority. The pope is another anathema, along with the caliph, the chief rabbi, and the lesser sergeant at arms, the lieutenant general, the vice admiral, the sub-provost, and, o springtime, der Führer. Lower-ranked authorities regularly take on the conflation chores of cult dictators. The New York Times reports an ex-Baptist soldier in Iraq was threatened by US military officers because of his professed atheism. He is one of 5,500 in the service who have complained about such discrimination. These incidents most often reflect bias toward Christian evangelical views held by the chains of command.
I'm my own boss.
People believe in miracles. I'm kidding. I have no boss. I work for myself. There are bosses out there. Still, it's the bosses inside, the psycho-analogs, that register: nonverbal monitors of sensory and motor operations standing up to see the wall unit, hearing you read, tasting brie, walking home in idle suspense, smelling something, falling asleep; talky administrators of social filters meddling closer to the verbal core, editing prose, keeping everything tidy; above them, less of an allover presence, one or more crisis managers of sorts, perhaps figments of what Freudians describe as superego mostly whizzing silently on automatic, now and then shaking a finger up in the brain and mumbling something half-received and half-worked-out for the moment -- be warned when she fakes her climax and wants you to put it in writing. The tribal warlords above superego are fleeting, hard to perceive, even though fossilized -- in a way -- in entabulature thrown down to us as iconic, historical features of a heritage we never asked for and cannot live without, a wide collection of human good and awful stuff like the signing of the Magna Carta and the slaughter of the Saracens. Point is I can't get rid of the entabulature and at times it tries to boss me. No, but seriously, I'm going to have to eat it, and it pops back up (or in), the amazing wait while I figure out the plumage of something hitherto never thought of.
4/25/08
You're right. Humiliate to me in my mouth. Begin with the mother tongue on iTunes, write down all our emotions from the Renaissance with pedophiles. In sex I love: will obey. (Not only on the runway but also in the crate.) The last things you need are actual notes. A lack of complexity makes us swarm around like a misogyny compound. I'm in 12 parts. You're American take home food. A thick gnome in a Brahmsy nightmare tends to center and cultured individuals. Everyone is polygamous these days. Now I want it slower, thinly constituted, and you're wearing the compound!
4/23/08
A word like trounced appears. Mindless. Lost. These candidates, Obama included, play by old rules, the usual half-naked speeches. Obama for the first time looks defeated. All three are wrong, now. Their guts show in the wrong places. What's stranger, not wearing a flag pin or talking about it? Unless Obama comes up with a theory of everything in his brain, he'll disappear into the plutocracy. I feel badly beaten by Pennsylvania, Ohio, California, and Massachusetts, to name a few tax bases. The process this time looks unprecedentedly dumb.
4/18/08
4/17/08
Sometimes a new reader comes here for the right reason. All comers are welcome, needless to say, even a near-miss equipped with emotionally restorative ideas that pop out of a wild web search. I especially appreciate getting linked to exotica and data as uplifting as "Tits, Ass and Hanna," "miss shari029," "HighHeelsMousy," and "Kristy Blue ... footjob." These results, from a recent submission to a Czech search engine for NYLONS BALLOONS SEX, seem resonant with my "rainwear fetish," which I almost forgot I had.
4/16/08
Amazon inhabits a low-lying area. It and its print production unit BookSurge are now riding roughshod over the POD industry by intimating that they will cut off small- and medium-scale publishers that use nonaffiliates for printing books. In other words, Amazon aims to commandeer the pipeline from production to sales. As is fairly obvious by assessing other creative industries, films, television, music, if small press book marketing integrates with manufacturing, the ivory tower, aka editorial -- that is, a good chunk of creative taste-making / decision-making -- stands ready to fall under the control of entrepreneurial influence, such as that of Amazon Web Services, AWS, Inc.
The obvious has been in place for some time now. As a small press publisher I found it hugely unprofitable to partner with Amazon two or three years ago. After forwarding dozens of copies of several titles and 'selling' all of them, I wound up owing Amazon money because of commissions and registration fees. I was asked to pay for Amazon's profiting from my labor and production. That's a foretaste of the lowlife of the small press publisher of the future who for 'prestige' or for some other rationalized motive chooses (or is coerced) to print and market with AWS.
The obvious has been in place for some time now. As a small press publisher I found it hugely unprofitable to partner with Amazon two or three years ago. After forwarding dozens of copies of several titles and 'selling' all of them, I wound up owing Amazon money because of commissions and registration fees. I was asked to pay for Amazon's profiting from my labor and production. That's a foretaste of the lowlife of the small press publisher of the future who for 'prestige' or for some other rationalized motive chooses (or is coerced) to print and market with AWS.
Hey why can't Obama just come out and say it. We're all Pennsylvanians -- we're bitter and free! Come on out, Obama, give us your suit-as-silhouette (Get Smart, the revival); hang it off your boney shoulders; hold your chin up, debate like the Lower Ninth, smack grandma (Rocky) back to her Crown Royal; touch us in the cling spot, Obama, god and guns have their place but we all have a say, not just the bosses, the clergy, the senators, the generals -- do this for the poor, the rural, the numerous khaki-colored middle, the urban could-be hipsters -- shine my good man.
4/15/08
The strategy has been wait and see. Keep watch and wait until there's a mistake to pounce on. So. I'm losing it. If Clinton wins her nomination hectoring and hacking Obama, plying media tactics ripped out of Lee Atwater (Carl Rove's Ur-guru), the vote is kaput. Kerflooey. Kerplunk. Gonna pack up and exercise that lease option under a rock in Vallon Pont d'Arc.
4/9/08
It makes no difference what I believe. My soul is a hypothesis. A fish out of water surfing the interstate to destroy itself. I begged it to learn to swim, to stick with a sublime subject or object, to rally for more than the brass urn holding a spray of flowers, silently grinning under god. The living remains what I want to see, but there's nothing new rolling across the hill away from the rest stop, just an overwhelming offense of briquettes in the grill, each pheromone created to make a foreboding sensation, a direction to step up and out, keeping one foot in the academic and creative media left wing, the other in the fish's gut...
4/8/08
Last days for the Faux Chaps pre-publication offer. Tremendous response so far. Order today if you're inclined, and save a few.
4/3/08
April 3
Giving pedicures is fun.
Brown hair is replacing blonde, according to a flier. It's sweeping the nation.
Dozens of spoofers or are they just trifles?
Aw, my guest room is the office.
You forgot which side.
Also a sweep, tattooed lads, heavy ink from either coast. They look seriously under-schooled, still, you would like to think, innocuous. Dumb and innocent, USA's best, the future! There's a tattoo for that pulpiness, sure. Promote your event.
And what was that all about? Years of talk and no improvement. All new moves, new, exuberant, an event planner who became a poet. Clinically proven.
Teacher, there's no one to sell to any more. More. This is a professional sport. Advanced techniques for victory, ready to go, a nabob of vocabulary.
Oh, look at this.
Wal-Mart carries vibrating skins now, battery powered. It's in the ring around the tip. They're from a respected source, old man, Trojan.
Attraction is ignited by deep compatibility.
I'm not a prose-poet, this is reportage, dude.
Giving pedicures is fun.
Brown hair is replacing blonde, according to a flier. It's sweeping the nation.
Dozens of spoofers or are they just trifles?
Aw, my guest room is the office.
You forgot which side.
Also a sweep, tattooed lads, heavy ink from either coast. They look seriously under-schooled, still, you would like to think, innocuous. Dumb and innocent, USA's best, the future! There's a tattoo for that pulpiness, sure. Promote your event.
And what was that all about? Years of talk and no improvement. All new moves, new, exuberant, an event planner who became a poet. Clinically proven.
Teacher, there's no one to sell to any more. More. This is a professional sport. Advanced techniques for victory, ready to go, a nabob of vocabulary.
Oh, look at this.
Wal-Mart carries vibrating skins now, battery powered. It's in the ring around the tip. They're from a respected source, old man, Trojan.
Attraction is ignited by deep compatibility.
I'm not a prose-poet, this is reportage, dude.
4/2/08
Draftsman Rene means Elliott, not Mark, Spitzer, but you can't blame a 65-year-old ex-rich kid for mixing the swimmers up. Besides, that's gold paint fleck in his eyes.
Thank you, thank you, Geof Huth for your better hearing and much better computer audio. I cranked up my Mac G4, and still could not decipher a lot of what Joe Dunn was saying, as noted March 31. Geof reports that Joe is reading Robert Creeley's "Desultory Days" from Later. Here's what Geof discovered, from what he wrote me in an e-mail yesterday:
But what I liked most is when he stops to exclaim that Creeley is rhyming. Creeley used rhyme in weird inconstant ways, but he sure rhymed plenty, especially for a poet of his era (ours).Geof touches on a couple of endearing qualities to Joe's performance. Joe reads "Desultory Days," something he's had to have read and reread many times, as if reading 'for the first time.' This is not surprising to Joe's friends. Joe needed to be astonished by a piece of work, had to be overtaken by it as though he had never seen or heard anything like it before. Insight was key, and Joe could bring out something new in what he read, even if it were poetry he already knew and admired. The video I've linked to is proof of this, even if Joe's words are not clear to the computer-impaired. Secondly, Joe, the pedagogue, was nonstop. Consider in the context of a public event where readers are expected to feature their own work, Joe choose poetry by someone far more famous. Further, Joe is compelled to interrupt his reading to underscore feats of prosody, attempting positions of both the interpreter and cheerleader. Geof, I think, knows something about these dual roles.
A few weirdnesses with the reading. It's as if he's[that is, Joe is] reading it for the first time. He reads "yon" as "you," and "reneges" as "rennigays," and skips words here and there, including an entire stanza.
But what I liked most is when he stops to exclaim that Creeley is rhyming. Creeley used rhyme in weird inconstant ways, but he sure rhymed plenty, especially for a poet of his era (ours).Geof touches on a couple of endearing qualities to Joe's performance. Joe reads "Desultory Days," something he's had to have read and reread many times, as if reading 'for the first time.' This is not surprising to Joe's friends. Joe needed to be astonished by a piece of work, had to be overtaken by it as though he had never seen or heard anything like it before. Insight was key, and Joe could bring out something new in what he read, even if it were poetry he already knew and admired. The video I've linked to is proof of this, even if Joe's words are not clear to the computer-impaired. Secondly, Joe, the pedagogue, was nonstop. Consider in the context of a public event where readers are expected to feature their own work, Joe choose poetry by someone far more famous. Further, Joe is compelled to interrupt his reading to underscore feats of prosody, attempting positions of both the interpreter and cheerleader. Geof, I think, knows something about these dual roles.
4/1/08
Jonathan Mayhew writes more about conscientious translation than most anything else, but this -- If the floor is more or less fixed, the ceiling is infinite -- measures the spectrum of his scruples. A short post with many quotables, including this about a mediocre approximation: all you're really doing is protecting yourself against the translation police, ensuring that nobody will find a howler.
Three more samples from Faux Chaps (special offer expires soon) --
I cannot stress enough how much this mechanistic world, as it becomes more and more efficient, resulting in ever increasing brutality, has required me to FIND MY BODY to FIND MY PLANET in order to find my poetry. If I am an extension of this world then I am an extension of garbage, shit, pesticides, bombed and smoldering cities, microchips, cyber, astral and biological pollution, BUT ALSO the beauty of a patch of unspoiled sand, all that croaks from the mud, talons on the cliff that take rock and silt so seriously flying over the spectacle for a closer examination is nothing short of necessary. The most idle looking pebble will suddenly match any hunger, any rage. Suddenly, and will be realized at no other speed than suddenly.
-- CAConrad, (Soma)tic Midge
~~~
Lacing My Skates
When I turned around and saw him, that was it. I knew as soon as I looked, that is the man I’m going to spend the rest of my life with. Burgundy cashmere V-neck. Silver watch by... I wasn’t sure, and if you’re new to this, you might be worried about h.i.v. and the smell, too, because that’s what a pure toy has to do. Worry. Sniff all over. My balls sway when I let them, flavored with cholesterol.
-- Jack Kimball, Pathologies
~~~
This gets better the product gets better
Thick pink slabs of pork and loads of butter
Opinionated, loaded, smart foolhardy and
Stereoscopic project facility
Hollyhock bolt the sky still holds vituperrious
Haven not dog, Martin Luther King Junior or lawn
Sister is tuberous not morose monkey fingers
Promotion of vision civic duty, a documentary
To instill fright in the most steely taller bubbly
Make amends with insects because they watch our
Every move
I feed them and they need no cloth we reside
Who’d be foolish enough to give up
Loving women as a storm impales a gaze
This form will become norm predation ease
Relapse irk ooze substantiate
Delicate tower of flesh
Harvest diskette docket wild unsubstantiated desire
To be
Shall we want to fuck
Kindly move these Christmas cacti
-- Brenda Iijima, Subsistence Equipment
I cannot stress enough how much this mechanistic world, as it becomes more and more efficient, resulting in ever increasing brutality, has required me to FIND MY BODY to FIND MY PLANET in order to find my poetry. If I am an extension of this world then I am an extension of garbage, shit, pesticides, bombed and smoldering cities, microchips, cyber, astral and biological pollution, BUT ALSO the beauty of a patch of unspoiled sand, all that croaks from the mud, talons on the cliff that take rock and silt so seriously flying over the spectacle for a closer examination is nothing short of necessary. The most idle looking pebble will suddenly match any hunger, any rage. Suddenly, and will be realized at no other speed than suddenly.
-- CAConrad, (Soma)tic Midge
~~~
Lacing My Skates
When I turned around and saw him, that was it. I knew as soon as I looked, that is the man I’m going to spend the rest of my life with. Burgundy cashmere V-neck. Silver watch by... I wasn’t sure, and if you’re new to this, you might be worried about h.i.v. and the smell, too, because that’s what a pure toy has to do. Worry. Sniff all over. My balls sway when I let them, flavored with cholesterol.
-- Jack Kimball, Pathologies
~~~
This gets better the product gets better
Thick pink slabs of pork and loads of butter
Opinionated, loaded, smart foolhardy and
Stereoscopic project facility
Hollyhock bolt the sky still holds vituperrious
Haven not dog, Martin Luther King Junior or lawn
Sister is tuberous not morose monkey fingers
Promotion of vision civic duty, a documentary
To instill fright in the most steely taller bubbly
Make amends with insects because they watch our
Every move
I feed them and they need no cloth we reside
Who’d be foolish enough to give up
Loving women as a storm impales a gaze
This form will become norm predation ease
Relapse irk ooze substantiate
Delicate tower of flesh
Harvest diskette docket wild unsubstantiated desire
To be
Shall we want to fuck
Kindly move these Christmas cacti
-- Brenda Iijima, Subsistence Equipment
3/31/08
Over the weekend a freespeaker I haven't met who operates under the name of Unclescam sent me a link to a 20-year-old video of Joe Dunn, the late pappi to a few Boston poets who were lucky enough to take part in his Monday night poetry parties on Beacon Hill. Tenor Joe and his contralto wife Rose hosted these gatherings as learning / entertainment events. I've written about Joe and Rose for Jacket, pointing to Joe's "reading and enthusing over the privileged texts." A good amount of the poetry Joe chose -- crinkled-up pages and notes composed by Olson, Creeley, Spicer, and others -- was unpublished. In this direct way, Joe was responsible for transmitting sacred data, if you will, to a small posse of young Bostonians ready to receive it. There's another function beyond transmission to Joe's teaching, and this old video captures it even as you concede the impression is marred by poor audio and a fuzzy gloss. Joe's incantation here of a poem either to or by Robert Creeley conveys Joe's swept-up enthrallment, a thoroughly earned ardor with text, perhaps a bit too 'private' for large-public consumption, but utterly mesmerizing and broodingly pedagogic in more intimate confines of a poet's apartment or -- now -- YouTubed from the bat cave straight to a poet's computer screen. There are more Btown videos from Unclescam. Here's Joe Dunn. And there's a follow-up, April 2, thanks to Geof Huth's input.
3/28/08
Three samples from Faux Chaps --
VIAGRA
Everybody needs to know it's the Year of the Rat.
Like the Gestapo, I have an agent at every house
Except Soft Skull, Penguin, & Random House.
I expire on the tiny punk heart
Of the Crab Nebula.
Fill me up with Premium,
I'm a thoroughbred —
My bladder is strong.
So if you see me fighting a tiger,
Go & help the tiger!
-- Jeni Olin, The Pill Book
~~~
My interest in Hart Crane began as purely physical. I saw a picture of him when I was a young boy that gave my confused desires a focus. He was wearing a Marseilles sailor suit, leaning against a tree in Mexico with a dark-eyed woman named Peggy Cowley. None of this mattered at the time. It was his hair, which was cropped close on the sides and combed up in front. I acquired this hairstyle slowly, each cut coming closer to resemblance. In my mind, something forbidden was happening. When I asked my mother to buy me striped shirts from the mall, she seemed pleased that I was showing any interest in fashion. Not knowing what else to do, I copied what I liked about him. It is remarkable that a Hart Crane biography ever made it to our little public library. Voyager was being discharged and sold for a dime. Its 831 pages, including the index, was written by a man named John Unterecker and published by Liveright, the same press that issued the trade edition of Crane’s magnum opus The Bridge. A previous reader had underlined a sentence on page 656, "Then in front of Orizaba everything suddenly begins to change. " Hart Crane had originally written this on a postcard.
-- Stacy Szymaszek, Orizaba: A Voyage with Hart Crane
~~~
Slooping down the long slope toward sloops
And finding uncanny reward in no reward
Nor in that either (neither), as we escape into
The timbrest of slad October airs, as a sweater
Becomes itself only when of no longer use
Or the bickering flux (flugs) matriculates us
Past what we weren’t going to be anyway
Not out here, not past where we never got
And hadn’t wanted to be, or to get anyway
We only know that the theater was invented
For tyrants and that we’re in it and to have
Us in it, and that all kinds of slag fluds muck up...
-- Alan Davies, Odes
VIAGRA
Everybody needs to know it's the Year of the Rat.
Like the Gestapo, I have an agent at every house
Except Soft Skull, Penguin, & Random House.
I expire on the tiny punk heart
Of the Crab Nebula.
Fill me up with Premium,
I'm a thoroughbred —
My bladder is strong.
So if you see me fighting a tiger,
Go & help the tiger!
-- Jeni Olin, The Pill Book
~~~
My interest in Hart Crane began as purely physical. I saw a picture of him when I was a young boy that gave my confused desires a focus. He was wearing a Marseilles sailor suit, leaning against a tree in Mexico with a dark-eyed woman named Peggy Cowley. None of this mattered at the time. It was his hair, which was cropped close on the sides and combed up in front. I acquired this hairstyle slowly, each cut coming closer to resemblance. In my mind, something forbidden was happening. When I asked my mother to buy me striped shirts from the mall, she seemed pleased that I was showing any interest in fashion. Not knowing what else to do, I copied what I liked about him. It is remarkable that a Hart Crane biography ever made it to our little public library. Voyager was being discharged and sold for a dime. Its 831 pages, including the index, was written by a man named John Unterecker and published by Liveright, the same press that issued the trade edition of Crane’s magnum opus The Bridge. A previous reader had underlined a sentence on page 656, "Then in front of Orizaba everything suddenly begins to change. " Hart Crane had originally written this on a postcard.
-- Stacy Szymaszek, Orizaba: A Voyage with Hart Crane
~~~
Slooping down the long slope toward sloops
And finding uncanny reward in no reward
Nor in that either (neither), as we escape into
The timbrest of slad October airs, as a sweater
Becomes itself only when of no longer use
Or the bickering flux (flugs) matriculates us
Past what we weren’t going to be anyway
Not out here, not past where we never got
And hadn’t wanted to be, or to get anyway
We only know that the theater was invented
For tyrants and that we’re in it and to have
Us in it, and that all kinds of slag fluds muck up...
-- Alan Davies, Odes
3/27/08
Faux Chaps forthcoming. The Pill Book by Jeni Olin, Orizaba: A Voyage with Hart Crane by Stacy Szymaszek, Odes by Alan Davies, Pathologies by Jack Kimball, (Soma)tic Midge by CAConrad, Subsistence Equipment by Brenda Iijima. Some pretty good deals pre-publication: all 6 for $40 or any 2 for $20. Details here.
3/24/08
3/19/08
3/18/08
Speaking of the cultural moment, the contest before poetry groups (there are no schools today) is both to amplify their message and mute opposition. The muting part is by far the easier task, and it is what prevents them from becoming 'schools.' For as the term implies, a school maintains a social-intellectual posture that not merely speaks but amplifies the moment. Contest is a rough framework, around which we can begin to pick in's and out's, flawed as in narrowed, slighted, restricted on either side.
3/13/08
Frozen randomly:
rolex glow "falito cadat" Renglish147...
Today 6:50 AM
Full sexy songs Angelina Jolie "garry khanh" -cfarin@abdl...
Today 6:48 AM
Penis Enla... "clinton abraham" dhxhs@ad...
Today 6:48 AM
Penis Products Revie... "kermie feliks" jrobv@opto...
Today 6:46 AM
come now - "henri virginio" c-n-a111@...
Today 7:43 AM
Double your Closet "gunner johnson" dudxz@ade...
Today 8:58 AM
Unreal things to go... "Carolina Wilkes" stewart0...
Today 8:25 AM
Re: Voted no.1 male supple... "Dai sprout" Dai-hattujai@...
Today 8:22 AM
Your Degree shipped ... "Jamal Contreras" Devoncha...
Today 10:03 AM
erotic ucn km w Moms a... cortesherzog3797@yahoo.co.uk
Today 8:19 AM
Join the most refined and reli... ..."hayward fergus" kcutebirt...
Today 8:12 AM
rolex glow "falito cadat" Renglish147...
Today 6:50 AM
Full sexy songs Angelina Jolie "garry khanh" -cfarin@abdl...
Today 6:48 AM
Penis Enla... "clinton abraham" dhxhs@ad...
Today 6:48 AM
Penis Products Revie... "kermie feliks" jrobv@opto...
Today 6:46 AM
come now - "henri virginio" c-n-a111@...
Today 7:43 AM
Double your Closet "gunner johnson" dudxz@ade...
Today 8:58 AM
Unreal things to go... "Carolina Wilkes" stewart0...
Today 8:25 AM
Re: Voted no.1 male supple... "Dai sprout" Dai-hattujai@...
Today 8:22 AM
Your Degree shipped ... "Jamal Contreras" Devoncha...
Today 10:03 AM
erotic ucn km w Moms a... cortesherzog3797@yahoo.co.uk
Today 8:19 AM
Join the most refined and reli... ..."hayward fergus" kcutebirt...
Today 8:12 AM
Brian Kim Stefans
Kluge: A Meditation and Other Works
Roof 2007
Hold on.
DC, New York, especially Boston, and in-between, these are bad places to drive on the Alpha Coast. It's not just 95, all the interstates function as proving grounds for the Art of I'm Growing Up & Get Out Of My Way, asphalt cram schools for learning the ropes of geek aggression -- Lend me to your leader. Driving of course is natural as coming of age; we train to accelerate into and out of lines of the unimportant, to sprint ahead of German muscle, to cut off the meek. Moreover, the hell of Alpha road protocol stretches well beyond the highways, spilling into every urban rotary ("numero uno infintesimal"), every street and avenue with a dedicated lane ("which needs no syntax"), every 4-way stop, since for gamesmen the lessons learned on interstates apply wherever, whenever ("1 2 buckle my shoe / 3 4 buckle my shoe"). The sweetest of the geeks take their lessons to heart and join a special breed apart. Hoody, fucked-up demeanor and default dalliance with convention will get us to our destinations faster and more pumped. Something about / the "human couplet" / keeps me over and under. It's a military formula, zennish almost, common enough to striving rock as well as poetry composition.
Take the global parkway. Keep score.
Perpetually over, under, and on a roll ("Meow, meow, meow, meow. Meow, meow..."), spinning off backdrops ("'Noo lyin deef tae daith...'"), one reads Brian Kim Stefans and gets carsick in a cab twisting through Jersey, say, or NYC. Driver's racing to show you movement. The third word in the poem "Whistler" is notably Britanic, a slow-down verb: "The globe shags the land / of light's / discrete / damaging." But the poem's overall speed says so much about American innovation abroad, about representational art, anti-academic overachievement, and remnants of sentiment. "What an / extremity verge," that old hipster Whistler, Stefans says. He ends the assay, "'He really viled out.'"
Stefans's title poem from the book is attractive online (http://arras.net/kluge) where the future of gaming, albeit fraught with imperatives, is more apparent.
The rules are simple: read the poem (a novella, really, or a prose poem with characters) as cleanly as possible, and with as much MEANING of a story-like nature collected (like twigs in a basket) by when you are done. YOU keep score. To get to the next "page" sequentially, scrape the text, knocking down letters efficiently so that the incoming letters arrive at a clean page -- if not, what will result is a messy palimpsest of already read letters/words and new letters -- a gene pool of neologisms, non-sequiturs and concrete poems [...]Hey, twig -- I'm paraphrasing -- brand this text if you can. Everything is "simple" (for a "post-human") and if you don't "get it" you'll be so terribly, metaphorically sorry. You keep score, watch it, it's fun!
Nonetheless.
Right?
3/11/08
Laynie Browne
Daily Sonnets
Counterpath Press 2007
Laynie Browne lets us in. We're welcomed into the everyday practice of composition surrounded by a household of children who come leaping and bouncing with language and insights for the poems. Browne listens voraciously to what's happening and writes it down in her 14-line experiments, collages and collaborations, as she calls them. She also picks up some smart reading and takes that into the poems as well. She didn't have to, but in her notes she gives us the details of making the poems. "This poem was written while listening to Kit Robinson read at Moe's..." Or "This sonnet is collaged from Tolstoy's War and Peace." For two "After-Shower" sonnets Browne tells us she was inspired by Bernadette Mayer. In addition to listening and collaging, she fills us in on chance procedures using available tools, the dictionary, mistranslation, and homophonic translation, among others. But as is often the case in these matters, the more Browne overhears, borrows, adapts, or translates, the more her own voices and practices are evinced, fabricating on innumerable cylinders, as in the sonnet "Pre-Election Lunar Eclipse," a title worth contemplating as it gets swallowed by these first lines:
Darkening acclaim of oblongI count seven, eight, or more ideas merged as though effortlessly and out of necessity. That is what Daily Sonnets lets us in on the most, the refinement of continuing process as necessity, a real how-to.
Ecru, pertaining to edelweiss
The past participle of most rapturous
Radar or sonar, economical
Currents at variants with the light […]
3/7/08
Carter Ratcliff
Arrivederci Modernismo
Libellum 2007
If you want to start a list of poets who are living, significant, and still-belatedly influential (neglectorinos), put Carter Ratcliff at the top. More, there aren't a lot of us after NY Generation One who have sustained conversations with painters / artists but again Ratcliff would be at the top of this list. Loosely associated with Generation Two / Three, like many in the cohort (Godfrey, Towle, Timmons, Greenwald, others) Ratcliff moves in nonpoetry, nonacademic circles that keep his name off many lips. Erupting with poststructural play, Arrivederci Modernismo, first published in 1974, is central to practice in 2008, imparting epic-length proof of how verse feeds and feeds off art production, fashion, and caprice, one of only a few lyric demos of the interdisciplinary passing of domains and strictures.
Arrivederci, foam-born, proportionate, and unapportionable ... arrivederci, method, and you, too, aleatory method. There were so many good-byes right from the very start [...]The voice is continuous, discursive; the understanding is meta-particulate and anti-reductionist, except for ardor's sake.
So much has suddenly become too late and that seemed to put the future so near, so disruptively near. Our future was so nearly too soon. I loved the way you reduced it to manageable proportions, to admiration, to a swirl of modernist periods, each one timelessly ordained. [And] I loved your feather-boa period and the way you reduced it to your plucked-eyebrow period [...]
I loved the good-bye we arranged for bathos, and I wondered then, bathetically, if love was ever the point. Not to ask that purifying question as I'm doing now, but to live it -- that's as close as I ever got to your elegance, your circularity.Rounding the circularity in his three-part Note (or afterword) to the poem, Ratcliff asks us, "So what is the point?" His answer is surprisingly directive. "The point is to lead one, in the course of one's reading, to an idea of oneself. Who am I, who must I be, to be responding this way?" Picture 35 years ago a heavy-breathing researcher-of-the-self making song out of postmodernist propositions and other art theory, and you begin to imagine why Ratcliff's poetry is material now and why its influence continues to expand.
3/5/08
Right off, I'm not sure, but isn't what happened last night the triumph of contexts over expressiveness and ideas? I don't see my job as one that foregrounds the pragmatics of appealing to mob prejudice (biases of the undereducated and old people). In terms of dramaturgy, tho, Hillary is cool if second-rate. Since her opponent speaks to voters' better instincts and ambitions, the immediate 'solution' is to downgrade his thought to highfaluting fodder for language analysis, in which calls for action become mere speech acts. All Hillary's opponent does is talk, all he's got is speeches. Meantime, she steals the talk, writes over it, calls it her own, with an attitude. Reminds me of slapping any bunch of cool stuff together. Very Hillary. Commonplace.
3/3/08
I'm missing readings left and right. Amiri Baraka was in Roxbury last week. Philly poets read on Ave. A over the weekend, but as I wrote to CA, business business intervenes, also preventing me from hearing and supporting Jim Behrle and Elizabeth Reddin who were at Plough and the Stars on Saturday, as well as Johanna Drucker and Jarrod Fowler who showed up at Demolicious on Sunday. I feel like a jerk. I'm so sorry.
2/29/08
End of the first trial at Poetry, Inc. Harriet is losing other contractees. Can't contracts be renewed? No more poetry-first contributors to bring down the house? Bring it down in the sense of wily propositions or the will to stand up for something. What's left to argue? We'll just have to see if KJ can still find a few motes of bad theory or careerism to shake his hairy fist at, you know, through the comment boxes.
2/27/08
A write-up that's better than sitting through the movie, with a well-chosen snippet of dialog that concludes:
Gas Station Proprietor: Alright. Heads then.
[Chigurh removes his hand, revealing the coin is indeed heads]
Anton Chigurh: Well done.
2/25/08
Tan Lin
ambience is a novel with a logo
Katalanché 2007
It's vital to read material that is not inherently appealing to keep your game up and running. Likewise to write it. As a poet-novelist, you might think it profitable to string sentences together like paste rubies and artificial pearls that are deliberately mismatched, almost passé. Each sentence would shine in gloom as the ends won't quite match up with the beginnings, each sparkle dulled into a thought containing falsehood but contextualized by the faintly plausible, as if draped over a bowl of fish hooks, a near accident or an accident-in-the-making. You might desire to push a personal datum into the narrative, your opinion on having sex as linear or the death of a family member, for instance, so that it achieves the same (but no higher) level of emotional force as boilerplate taken from a corporate manual or website. This produces a scrubbed textual surface, sobriety typical of social-democratic utterance, open to interpretation as Euro-ambience. The arbitrated décor of your short text can then be looked after in "poet-novelist" ways (as this is a sketch toward a novel you are attempting), and the ways that Tan Lin deploys include weighting the bottom of many pages with semi-extraneous footnotes -- beginning with number 31 (presumably footnotes 1-30 were fully extraneous) -- as well as dropping in random elements -- mostly fuzzy photos but also variations in font, lists, and a couple of equations. Humor is allowed; it should be twisty and self-referencing. "One can never stop a clock from ticking, even in a novel." Humor justifies the enterprise but it is only one facet of the supraordinate design. Process description, Chinese-American ethnicity, John Cage, touring Germany, attending Carleton, "a face derived by software," all these are material fit to be twisted, falsified, or erased, as Lin fictionalizes with what he sees as ambient, again self-referencing "a condition of transitory structures, lounge architecture, and books with photos in them."
2/21/08
Rochelle Ratner
Leads: a journal
Otoliths 2007
Born in America, Rochelle Ratner grew up with a trace of separation in her voice. In Leads Ratner follows her accent to the U.K. to listen to and then document her vocal connection to an English grandmother. The journal's title both plays on a place name, the grandmother's birthplace, and broadly categorizes a set of the granddaughter's research procedures for assembling her text: "I copied from books and records I'd found in the Leeds library. I began writing down what people said." Closer to the bull's eye, Ratner is surprised in her research to confront further separation, finding "other peoples' words more powerful than my own." Merging her own compositions and poems, however, with direct lifts of others' voices, she hands us a contemporary palimpsest of her family history and, more generous, of her poetics. Bookish entries from official minutes and reports of the XIXth century bump up against present day communications with nagging relatives and Ratner's notes on her everyday encounters visiting a tavern, shopping in an open market, buying film. Data feed one another as they accumulate. On page 76 Ratner reports, "I'm following the same path the immigrants did. I stand on a street corner and shout that my family was originally from Vilna, Poland..." On the next page she supplies a chronology, "The Jews of Vilna: 1320-1944," an exercise in mild understatement -- "...1527 Jews banished / 1573 Jews return..." -- and gross understatement -- "1916-18 Community impoverished during German occupation / 1941-44 Community impoverished during second German occupation." Phone calls, postcards, interviews, bureaucratic write-ups, the mix of registers matters, as intimated in the title for the entry on page 96, "Mr. Schiffer Gives the Details of His Life, Everything Important." This is a book of process, measured devotion, leads.
2/20/08
David Buuck
Paranoia Agent
OMG 2007
The afterword to Paranoia Agent describes these dozen short pieces as transcriptions of English language dubs for a Japanese anime series, and in particular, transcriptions of the coming attractions to animation we don't see. Or, if you will, these are afterwords to precedents that are also invisible. David Buuck's pieces are in sum superimposed narratives that give glimpses of things and events that are set or good to go but never happen, ethereal flashes of unkept promises as in this diagnostic embellishment.
The interpretation of the unfolding dream here precedes the dream itself, which is how the paranoiac method tends to thus inscribe the conditions for experiencing our coming attractions.If paranoiac doesn't do it, by the time you reach inscribe you know Buuck is holding up a three-sided mirror, better to show off the utterly playful relevance of his project to the layering of poetry production, reception, and (...ahem) reaction. Each piece is titled "Prophetic Vision," again a seeming literal transcription from the English dubbing. Each starts "To begin --" and each but the last piece concludes "And then --" It's a neat, rule-governed framing for the chaotic, "defeated wild boars," a unicorn guided by doves, a "hoodwinked" beast that beckons, a Holy Warrior accompanied by a zebra, and, most pleasant, impossible phrasing: "It's a ocean of clusteramaridisis / Welcome, Master Detective / Here's warm hospitality / And then --" (Amarid, discoverer of magic crystals, is a fantasy of American novelist David Coe's.) I take Paranoia Agent as a figurative reflection made of available analogues, pixel impressions, and creative immanence, a media quest and landscape that by my logic can also be classified as a nature poem. To find your own turn to video, as Buuck has, to wallow in nature's conspicuous outreach, rabbits, horseflies, "dished meatballs," the "sun's cherry blossom," and the occasional sage "somewhere between intuition and science." Like any excellent quest Paranoia Agent goes inside the framework and forward and backward in time to replicate anomalous dynamism and "the karma of the people...first cries of the newly born shoes of / gold...an illusion."
2/19/08
Stan Apps
God's Livestock Policy
Les Figues Press 2008
How's this for metapysics. We're all god's "imitations of exemplary lives," democrats, puppies. We're being taken for a walk in the new world. Space for Noah and Jack the Ripper. And time to sing. You might ask, who's the god? Who is Stan Apps? The new world has been waiting for unsarcastic satire, and here it comes, all at once the latest writhing mass of Stan's numerous, wide-eyed visions -- God's Livestock Policy a fourth book in 12 months, a tenner (scale 1-10) in which he unponderously reintroduces Christ, Buddha, and "a hundred secrets" that circulate in chirpy lyric fanaticism, "an antidote / to roleplay desperation," and he isn't kidding. Heaven, he (fairly) insists, "already exists...and maybe someday can be convinced or lured or lied to, in order to convince it to come lie down here, where we are, like a bear rug..." We learn there is a good chance of our going halves on the rug with some unshaven gigolo. So heaven and the new world (that is, "the one world, the heaven") are divided into "God's split personality" imagining he's something else, like the devil. No wonder, "Religions without bloodstains make no sense." The fervor on exhibition in God's Livestock Policy is both self calibrating and terrifyingly ecstatic: "I was born," Stan says, as
a form of crystalline leather encrusted with strategic Christ, a strategic Christ dressed up in astrological fairy-dust that colored the open veins a hummingbird-happy silver...More than one or a trinity, god fills in quantum entities on a not-fully-occupied terrain, on "pause." This is space and time Stan aims to lay claim to and protect as his own, since "When you think of God, your head fills up with the stickiest most human love-notes and ambitions to kill people and build things on their land." We are Buddha's messed-up puppies then in an unimmaculate system ("God never bothers to wash His hands") in which human dissonance is not perversity but a bit of big physics spurred into metaphysics, killing, and stealing -- it's all "OK," Stan explains, because "our almighty has it in Him and can handle it...infinite space [where] human exhaust can diffuse and diffuse and diffuse..." It's all in the mind, body, soul, and god in the way of Stan's thinking, "an unhealed tragedy." He isn't kidding.
Mike Magee's introduction complements the send-up.
2/11/08
Cloverfield
Trash. Art-school trash -- fake trash, overstimulated, fed too much unearned unexpectedness via hand-held cam artistry. Movies within a movie. New York takes a beating and justice is meted out for the overseas (especially Japanese) cult market. Splicy paeans to every Dracula, countless Godzillas, and to dozens of our worst sci fi horrors, Mothra, Jurassic Park, Night of the Living Dead (original and remake), Arachnaphobia, The Crazies, Shawn of the Dead, Aliens II, War of the Worlds (original and remake), Them! etc. Richie Rich protagonists with brainless sex lives you'll never care about. Dumb computer graphics. The skull of the Statue of Liberty shrunken to the size of three SUVs, hurled east, lands on Spring Street blocking heroic passage. Oh, the apocalypse ignites downtown, so this is foremost a cheap 9/11 rehash. Combustion and dust fill canyons between skyscrapers. The players take shelter in a convenience store, then race down to the subway, running with the rats. Asinine language (you can't call it dialog). Ugly apartments. Life-draining clothes. Absolute rubbish. Highly recommended.
Trash. Art-school trash -- fake trash, overstimulated, fed too much unearned unexpectedness via hand-held cam artistry. Movies within a movie. New York takes a beating and justice is meted out for the overseas (especially Japanese) cult market. Splicy paeans to every Dracula, countless Godzillas, and to dozens of our worst sci fi horrors, Mothra, Jurassic Park, Night of the Living Dead (original and remake), Arachnaphobia, The Crazies, Shawn of the Dead, Aliens II, War of the Worlds (original and remake), Them! etc. Richie Rich protagonists with brainless sex lives you'll never care about. Dumb computer graphics. The skull of the Statue of Liberty shrunken to the size of three SUVs, hurled east, lands on Spring Street blocking heroic passage. Oh, the apocalypse ignites downtown, so this is foremost a cheap 9/11 rehash. Combustion and dust fill canyons between skyscrapers. The players take shelter in a convenience store, then race down to the subway, running with the rats. Asinine language (you can't call it dialog). Ugly apartments. Life-draining clothes. Absolute rubbish. Highly recommended.
2/7/08
A film maker doing a documentary on poet Cathal Ó Searcaigh shamefully hands over her work to 'authorities.'
Winter Journey
Tony Towle
Hanging Loose 2008
Tony Towle's "studio" is the home dugout during the National League Championship Series. Tonight's game, the final one, is being played under water as we gather inside to figure out the signs or signals that are related, often, to subject-object positions. We're deciding what we collectively can do with them, representatively.
They are showing excerpts fromThe Three Stooges
during the extended rain delay, because apparently
the complexities of one complete episode
from these devious masters of understatement
might be too opaque, too "character-driven"
to hold the cutting-edge attention span
of today's discerning audience.
There has to be tense interchange between senior imagination and what is really out there, right? And what are signaled, what are represented, get screwed down or thumb-nailed into very graceful, praeternatural, tongue-hanging movement.
Around me was my "family" -- two children, actors, in front on the right, and a woman I didn't recognize, gathered together for the purpose of the tableau, and a young man a little way off who was supposed to be my brother, and who moved himself a few steps further to the left as I examined the picture, to improve the overall composition.
The battle throughout the Series and metaphorically -- meta-literally, almost! -- in Tony's composition is joined over shifts in representation, its forms, its treatments, its "clinically depressed stuffed leopard," its "ribbons of asphalt," its "imploding into cosmic isolation." Or not. It is one of the key battles. If you get this one right, you have a worldview and the world thinks you're with it, and you win the Series. For he writes, "open your eyes ... is the message." A delicate analysis from the dugout, a hovering, an allusion v. something you can't quite put up on the web and get the affect, the hidden doubt.
Cactus poachers work quickly
and we cactuses know it;
keeping our spines
sticking straight out all night ...
As with most brilliant gaming there are elements of the confessional and attendant scandals that should keep you happy. That is, is happy a goal, photoshopper?
Like the sun, I endured a turbulent childhood
and became allergic to interstellar dust
while contending with encircling debris
that would have made any entity dizzy, hot ...
Hot, dizzy, it all comes down to earth, thirsting for blood in the Series and winning. That's happy.
The Pathfinder has again come to the section
in the narrow cliffside road where it must drive over
the colossal letters of its own name, arranged backward ...
How ironic a ride, we have to say. Too "bizarre" a plight, not unlike the loner poet's doom due one who gleefully refuses others.
But of course we don't really want to know these people
and since "socializing is networking to no purpose"
we abandon the arrangement and look up
against a backdrop of expectant taupe and reticent gray
to see that an eighty-ton locomotive can float on air ...
Then, there's this joyous taunt from "The Great Game," as Tony calls it.
Death means you keep going, only now
you're a zombie.
So the Series never ends. "Continue snorkeling," Tony urges and so "advised Sneaky." Tony is excessively clear as he is wily, winning, waiting. And he's competitive to a -- not exactly a fault but, say -- gestalt ("a chance assonance / that would not occur again").
Several decades ago I observed to someone or other
in an impromptu discussion about poetic authenticity
that you could write "I am sailing down the Rhine"
and not be sailing down the Rhine, for example,
and he said: I'm not so sure about that --
so I gave up. As it happens,
I am at present sailing down the Rhine ...
2/5/08
I can't make up my minds. Glug.
I smile back at both these Yoshi Oshi teasers by Bill Keckler, yet I can distinguish between them and I have a preference for one over the other. A teeny preference. As they say in Missouri, driving to the polls in the sleet, brava. They're both good. It's not so interesting to give voice to controversy here about these spine-stinging graphics or pause even for a sec to focus on their magically über-Japaneseque élan (it's so obvious, neh?) or force a resolution as to which packs a nastier punch to my psyche just to declare today's winner of the gold aorta. No, the dilemma is deeper. I can't decide whether Bill Keckler is a veiled, smoking, standup artist who writes sass-to-your-ass poems (notably rehabbing discourse to seduce) or if he is a mountain-to-coast deity working the new forms -- search engines, comment boxes, scanners, blogs, and poems. Either way, he's a splash oceanic.
I smile back at both these Yoshi Oshi teasers by Bill Keckler, yet I can distinguish between them and I have a preference for one over the other. A teeny preference. As they say in Missouri, driving to the polls in the sleet, brava. They're both good. It's not so interesting to give voice to controversy here about these spine-stinging graphics or pause even for a sec to focus on their magically über-Japaneseque élan (it's so obvious, neh?) or force a resolution as to which packs a nastier punch to my psyche just to declare today's winner of the gold aorta. No, the dilemma is deeper. I can't decide whether Bill Keckler is a veiled, smoking, standup artist who writes sass-to-your-ass poems (notably rehabbing discourse to seduce) or if he is a mountain-to-coast deity working the new forms -- search engines, comment boxes, scanners, blogs, and poems. Either way, he's a splash oceanic.
2/4/08
Peter Inman & Tina Darragh
Feb 3, Demolicious, Central Square
Peter Inman shared mostly unpublished work, new, short, dissonant pieces "where jazz wears off" and "the song form" gets "broken." Triadic nominals -- improv-like or even fake-improv-like (Steven Bernstein and Evan Lurie, for example, serving up slim portions of Ornette Coleman) -- spin on chains of juxtapositions that remind me of early Clark Coolidge. Triadic? Try a few clumps, "thumb midge nouns," "small Gillette letters," "echelon hairnet vellums," "squeak light stripes," "potato of where." If you're open to new propositions, great thought balloons, one after another, Peter is your musician. His thinking reflects personality expressed not through personae but within subtler contexts, dedications to close friends who are poets, legible reference to boyhood geography, places like Amagansett, Montauk, a shoreline "made out of periods." And frankly I admire any musician with healthy fetishes. One of Peter's comes up in his repetition of nylon and nylons. Two of the most freaky are "iceberg nylon" and "museum nylons," balloons that take me on a roundtrip from generic chill to some dream scene of iconic sluttiness. Or is this my dissonance?
Tina Darragh read her performance text "Opposable Dumbs," a gathering of ideas and attitudes concerned with animal rights, among other things. The work is fundamentally unsettling, reopening wounds that had been healing fairly well for most leftists. Rights of a fetus, for instance. Feminine beauty is problematic. Just for a second -- maybe she doesn't believe it? -- Tina asserts that idealization of beauty or at least some forms of it reinforce patriarchy. She shows other troublesome linkages, such as restrictions on the sounds of lament to preserve property rights. The text is a complaint for the voiceless (animals, including Terry Schiavo) as well as for suppressed human voices; the conundrum circles conflicts between the two.
These are hasty impressions from notes that I hope I can supplement by citing Tina's work later. Once I have some text in hand, I plan to say more about Peter's poetry as well.
Feb 3, Demolicious, Central Square
Peter Inman shared mostly unpublished work, new, short, dissonant pieces "where jazz wears off" and "the song form" gets "broken." Triadic nominals -- improv-like or even fake-improv-like (Steven Bernstein and Evan Lurie, for example, serving up slim portions of Ornette Coleman) -- spin on chains of juxtapositions that remind me of early Clark Coolidge. Triadic? Try a few clumps, "thumb midge nouns," "small Gillette letters," "echelon hairnet vellums," "squeak light stripes," "potato of where." If you're open to new propositions, great thought balloons, one after another, Peter is your musician. His thinking reflects personality expressed not through personae but within subtler contexts, dedications to close friends who are poets, legible reference to boyhood geography, places like Amagansett, Montauk, a shoreline "made out of periods." And frankly I admire any musician with healthy fetishes. One of Peter's comes up in his repetition of nylon and nylons. Two of the most freaky are "iceberg nylon" and "museum nylons," balloons that take me on a roundtrip from generic chill to some dream scene of iconic sluttiness. Or is this my dissonance?
Tina Darragh read her performance text "Opposable Dumbs," a gathering of ideas and attitudes concerned with animal rights, among other things. The work is fundamentally unsettling, reopening wounds that had been healing fairly well for most leftists. Rights of a fetus, for instance. Feminine beauty is problematic. Just for a second -- maybe she doesn't believe it? -- Tina asserts that idealization of beauty or at least some forms of it reinforce patriarchy. She shows other troublesome linkages, such as restrictions on the sounds of lament to preserve property rights. The text is a complaint for the voiceless (animals, including Terry Schiavo) as well as for suppressed human voices; the conundrum circles conflicts between the two.
These are hasty impressions from notes that I hope I can supplement by citing Tina's work later. Once I have some text in hand, I plan to say more about Peter's poetry as well.
2/1/08
The one is not over here. Its inexistence is left over. Doors are opening as rations. Atheism is the main event. Secrets of satire want to float free to find a mathematics of situation (music) and structured white sky, multiplicities (an ear for sex). The contextual effect (procedure) becomes more fearless (less indiscernible) when innocence, dance, and acrobacy partner, crossing boundaries of codes of conduct. The glue is a score.
A hobby becomes the color of dreams, addiction. Late afternoon to another.
I notice your underwear, a domination marked with jealousy. They pill. Yeah, that's funny, take one of mine. A shrine of axioms supposes its completion. Polyps in the general sense, honing everything to their surface.
You like a variety of togethers, missing your skin. Have you the next?
A hobby becomes the color of dreams, addiction. Late afternoon to another.
I notice your underwear, a domination marked with jealousy. They pill. Yeah, that's funny, take one of mine. A shrine of axioms supposes its completion. Polyps in the general sense, honing everything to their surface.
You like a variety of togethers, missing your skin. Have you the next?
1/31/08
I can't find Jim Behrle's latest blog location, but if I could, maybe I'd see him spoofing these guys.
1/25/08
1/23/08
The usurpation of poets' names, urls, where or in which basket are we heading? Stacy Szymaszek lost her space to a hacker, same for the old Cooper blog, & there's limetree.ksilem.com, noted last week, & what's this, jimbehrle.com? There's the opposite example of Vanishing Point, posted to once, a piece called "We are up and running," heheheh, but whose comment boxes were invaded by a spammer id'd as Alex. There are others ready for the swiping, Heathens, Bachelardette, Super Deluxe, Katied, such great names w/o a calling, like Vanishing Point. Seems nobody's going to steal them. Not even Alex.
1/18/08
There's a narrative of excuses
-- it's ludicrous, dangerous, a job
In bench science to see if maybe
In January looking out of evergreens the lake
The water of heat the same season effect
Being told the air to summer, proper
And persistent the others, others tapping light
The water still steadily the mild sweet obvious
Shadow and water more quickly were not
At this point, why bother?
-- it's ludicrous, dangerous, a job
In bench science to see if maybe
In January looking out of evergreens the lake
The water of heat the same season effect
Being told the air to summer, proper
And persistent the others, others tapping light
The water still steadily the mild sweet obvious
Shadow and water more quickly were not
At this point, why bother?
Hey, you know what. Humanity has nothing to do w/ astronauts and charts, not to mention the virtues of daily practice and seduction. Tautologically every photo is blended w/ humankind... but what's next, god, Canada, and the for-profit orphanage down the street? That would be cool if you think it so. Cool for you. Make it so, astronaut.
1/14/08
1/11/08
Stuff to stay clear of to keep your blog from turning into e-waste. Maxing out on obits. YouTube filler that's hard to download, unanalyzed, authored by someone else. Snaps of infants & pets. Reminiscences that do nothing other than establish a posteriori authority based on memory. Hiatus, the verb.
1/7/08
1/4/08
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