Enjoying.

Arguably the saddest three capitalized letters in a group, ABD.

Objectivists, beats, language, unoriginal geniuses, et al., the further you go out in time the descriptors for these moves or movements peel away. These are people who hang for a zine, a conference, careers. They're social verbs, nominalized. (Beats more so, and less.)

Some of this has turned a corner, hit the window, earning 90,000 or more. Ninety thousand grammars.

Vicarious Orono treats (cont'd.) --

Access to abstracts and a few papers at Thoughtmesh.

Jasper Berne's double entry, 6/17, on Bernadette Mayer and a Debriefing.

Photo sets at Tom Orange's FB page.

Triple Canopy is more than a new poetry site. It looks and sounds new, argumentative, smoky.

Having blown the chance to hear great papers and performances, and missing all the people at Orono over the last week, I'm reading Tony Brinkley's "Lyotard's Cage" and regretting most I wasn't there to intake its big store of insights firsthand, aurally. The paper begins:

"From the moment we set a stage and speak here," Lyotard said at Cerisy in 1972, "we are within representation and within theology. The walls of this castle [the conferences at Cerisy were held in a chateau] are the walls of the museum—that is, the setting aside of feelings and the extraterritorial privilege granted to concepts, the setting in reserve of intensities, their quiescence, their presentation in a staged-setting." The setting (Cerisy) to which Lyotard was referring was a conference, Nietzsche aujourd'hui, at which some of the more remarkable of 1970s readings of Nietzsche were offered (Derrida's reading of the feminine in Nietzsche, for example, which Irigaray would later re-enact in response; Deleuze's presentation of Nietzsche's nomadic thought ). And in that setting, though not at first but in conclusion, Lyotard offered Cage, Cage's Silence, within the "walls of the museum."

That "setting aside of feelings and the extraterritorial privilege granted to concepts..." coupled with the notion of attending to the stage (e.g., attending a conference) as being "within theology" serves up a healthy portion of antidote to any facile redefintion of the conceptual as quintessentially the production of artifacts to arrive at a done deal, a topping off or closing down, indeed, of the concept. Here's my book of reframed X. QED. That's it for X, conceptually. "It is imprudent to win," Brinkley's Lyotard observes. Again, the qualifier "extraterritorial" speaks to an associative halo effect that the terms concept, conceptual enjoy. (No wonder you want to grab for them.) The nonnihilistic rub is conceptualization is not game ending but generative in its affect, rendering artifacts into ideas, nonartifacts! Here is more of Brinkley's translation of Lytoard's Nietzche and then Lyotard.

Lyotard begins with an aphorism from Nietzsche, from Human, All Too Human, in which "it is always a renewed surprise for the writer to find that his book continues to live a life of its own as soon as it has abandoned him... [H]e might not even understand it anymore" but the book "seeks out its readers, kindles life, inspires joy and dread, engenders new works, becomes the soul of certain projects." And "if we now consider that all human action, and not just a book, in some way eventually determines other actions, resolutions, or thoughts, that everything is indissolubly linked to what will happen, we recognize that there exists a true immortality, that of movement... [A] free thought, very powerful, fully grown into its own, will bear witness that somewhere there is an ardor of sentiment extraordinarily magnified." "It is a matter of metamorphosis," Lyotard writes. "Intensive reading is the product of new and different intensities" where "the book itself, as non-book ... is simply metamorphic form ... by no means a negative loss ... [I]nsofar as it is incessant process, infinite, always displaced, decentered, shifted, the metamorphosis acts affirmatively," as Eternal Return.

The language hits a conference-going register, theological as Lyotard would have it. The argument is plainly empirical. A concept moves, "not 'innovative' ... but something unheard of," changing impulsively. Tony Brinkley's paper is here -- choose a) "discourse," b) "Lyotard's Cage."

Dear June,

I went to your reading dreaming of cutting out. I thought I went and cried. I need a new computer, just remembered. Heart shape culinary holding your tongue on the verge of resisting control, thanks to notes of civet and benzoin. Sexuality itself, pumped up to stroll the gardens' lost, slightly compact surfaces, rejoined with silver chains of seltzer formed of mercury selenide, spent in strings of carefully modulated banality.

You're Robert Duncan "rendered true." You're he, mazer, did I tell you like geometry I take up.

I long for Provincetown of the eyes. Fidgety, atwitching, acquainted with men's affairs, a gas ringed, a dun hill adopted to sever the head from the vines. "In each house he has a different name," a polygamist's modality, Oberon all about the child I was.

Far as I can tell Anne Boyer is first up on Orono, 6/16. Clark Coolidge is the best dressed, she says.

More nominees for authored-conceptual poetry. Chris Funkhouser. Jack Spicer. David Melnick. Sawako Nakayasu. Larry Eigner. Sappho. Peter Inman. Robert Grenier. Blaise Cendrars. Barbara Baracks. Sianne Ngai. John Coletti. Alli Warren. Lydia Davis. William Bronk. Anselm Berrigan. Tina Darragh. David Cameron. David Bromige. Eddie Berrigan. Aaron Kunin. John Donne. Francis Ponge. Joe Elliot. Steve Benson. Kathy Acker. Gertrude Stein. Michael Scharf. Thomas de Quincey. Karen Weiser. Suzanne Stein. Marcella Durand. Alan Sondheim. Doug Nufer. Yves Bonnefoy. Eileen Myles. Brenda Bordofsky. Emily Dickinson. Wendy Kramer. Stéphane Mallarmé. Tom Clark. Michael Scholnick. Del Ray Cross. S. T. Coleridge. Jennifer Moxley. William Shakespeare. Dodie Bellamy. Douglas Rothschild. Rod Smith. Rodrigo Toscano. Carol Mirakove. Jen Scappetone. Robert Fitterman. Kurt Schwitters. Juliana Spahr. Jeremy Prynne. Geof Huth. Katie Degentesh. Jerome Rothenberg. Brandon Brown. Lytle Shaw. David Buuck. David Larsen. Stacy Doris. Peter Seaton. Brendan Lorber. Bill Bisset. Joe Brainard. Susan Howe. Laura Elrick. bp Nichol. Keith Abbot. Richard Kostelanetz. Ben Friedlander. David Antin. Steve Hamilton. Kevin Davies. Jackson Mac Low. Brent Cunnigham. Alice Notley. Steve Malmude. Drew Gardner. kari edwards. Ted Berrigan. John Keats. Chris Nealon. Antonin Artaud. Macgregor Card. Jean Cocteau. Alexander Pope. David Schubert. Among others mentioned, below, 6/5, 6/10, 6/11.

Best free-verse critique in a comment box this week (1st post by Nicholas Manning).

Getting some miles in, taking them on board. Yes.

A soulful lab mix of appliance and beast, user-taxed, jumbles slabs of pork tortilla, melon and sausage sorbet on a woodenesque platter, putting me in mind of a future photo realism, a live feed from the network, the Fed network. Yes.

Am I . . . postracial? Yes.

$ or €? Yes.

I want all the trees shaken.

It's unnerving trying to come up with good examples of authored-conceptual poetics.

If we value novelty in conceptual artifact production, Christian Bök, Kenneth Goldsmith, and colleagues outperform most writers composing poems. They do this by adopting procedures that downsize personality, rejecting as Bök puts it "the lyrical mandate of self-conscious self-assertion," favoring plagiarism, falsification, data management and, per Goldsmith, other "extreme" processes.

Yesterday, for starters, I suggested a strain of New York School poetry, gabby, sometimes persona-driven work that speaks, often wryly, expressively, to (and, egad, through) itself about poetry, art, all sorts of aesthetic thought and composition. Irony notwithstanding, this strain of poetry cannot be viewed as unself-conscious. Further, when we compare work of this strain with pieces by Bök, Goldsmith, et al., the monitor swivels and dims. It's that lopsided. The meta-texting New York poets write about their ideas; the processual poets enact them.

I'd like, then, to offer just two or three more examples of work that seems suggestive of an authored-conceptual temperament, work that might stand up better for contrasting with the processual poetry featured last week in Tucson. As I suggested 6/5, Bernadette Mayer's list of writing experiments operates as a long conceptual piece. In this regard, the list parallels texts by Lawrence Weiner, Sol LeWitt, among others, in that it constitutes a set of instructions toward artifact production. For instance:

Take an idea, anything that interests you, or an object, then spend a few days looking and noticing, perhaps making notes on what comes up about that idea, or, try to create a situation or surrounding where everything that happens is in relation.

This, as well:

Structure a poem or prose writing according to city streets, miles, walks, drives. For example: Take a fourteen-block walk, writing one line per block to create a sonnet; choose a city street familiar to you, walk it, make notes and use them to create a work; take a long walk with a group of writers, observe, make notes and create works, then compare them; take a long walk or drive-write one line or sentence per mile. Variations on this.

It's not farfetched to see any number of younger poets taking on these ideas, Kristin Prevallet in Scratch Sides finds interest in 'looking and focusing' on snapshots and found texts, creating "The Catalogue of Lost Glimpses," a "faux-ethnographic text." Brenda Coultas's language proceeds from lived praxis evinced by "The Bowery Project," subtitled "An Experiment in Public Character" in which a narrator / researcher enacts a new life, walking already-familiar streets until they surround her entirely with their detritus, picking up discards like a dripping wet t-shirt, "seeing garbage with new eyes."

Finally, for a sustained enactment of authored concepts tinged with not a little irony and falsification, I appreciate this suggestion, from Robert Baird (in correspondence): for "an example of non-process oriented conceptual art, I think you need look no further than Araki Yasusada, who (which?) performs another kind of operation (certainly not apotheosis, but not quite destruction) on the author-function. It's obviously tricky to call that 'authored conceptual poetics,' but I think it's along the lines of what you mean..."

This just in, smut kitchenware.

Robert Baird writes in reply to my 6/5 post.

I think there's something to your argument that much of what gets described as conceptual is better described in terms of process, but I do think that one can talk about the former without talking about the latter. I actually think that KG's post about his own talk at Arizona gets right to the point when he says, "Conceptual writing is good only when the idea is good; often, the idea is much more interesting than the resultant texts." For me, the simplest way to say what "conceptual art/poetry" might mean is to say that the idea itself is the art. This stands in vigorous contrast to traditional conceptions of art, which nearly uniformly qualify art as requiring a medium, which means qualifying it as something material (or, in the case of language, symbolically material). My little pseudo-definition here obviously doesn't perfectly fit the way that Conceptual Art was used historically in art criticism, but that's a fight for another day.

Yes. Sign me up! ideation as the controlling agent to most any construct of / for the conceptual is uncontroversial. We can follow Baird, Kenneth Goldsmith, and Sol LeWitt who said it first in his numbered "Sentences on Conceptual Art," most succinctly in Number 10: "Ideas can be works of art." The greater issue and the reason I posted in the first place is that conceptual poetics, like most neologisms, is an elusive category. The Tucson conference covered a few but not all types of the new (? new-ish?) poetics, as Goldsmith has suggested in recent comments at harriet and Lime Tree. On the other hand, he still equates "uncreative" with "conceptual," a predicate for concentrating on process and procedure. Goldsmith would argue, I believe, that (c) framing boring or uncreative (b) processes within critical exposition is another element to the poetics, while the (un)original (a) idea behind the frame and the process makes the apparatus conceptual. Yes, the (a) idea of retyping or scanning a daily newspaper as poetic text, (b) doing it, and (c) calling it poetry, for example. I see these elements (a, b, c) as clear invention, common to other poetries, conceptual or not. Like any other writer, Goldsmith searches for topoi and forms to put them in. Shall I compare passion to a summer day and put it in a sonnet? Goldsmith asks, shall I transcribe weather reports to outwit commonplace representation of day and season?

These (a, b, c) comprise a processual fixation on invention, certainly a parcel of conceptualization. But where are alternative, unprocess-y or non-automaton methods for doing conceptual poetry? We can begin to think about alternatives by considering conceptual art practices. Some say only the tipping point of invention, (a), is necessary for a purely conceptual piece. Joseph Mosconi (in his commentary on Charles Alexander's post, "conceptual artists' books?") offers Lawrence Weiner and, more extreme, Marcel Broodthaers as conceptualists whose artifacts were often in the form of texts rather than physical executions of ideas. Barbara Henning (also in response to Alexander's post) suggests that Miranda Maher is another case of a practitioner who made (and altered) books of ideas.

An artist turns to a writer's tools, words and books; to what does a poet turn for capturing points of invention (a)? How would a purely authored conceptual poetry come about? The poet would have to start speaking about speech and what prompts her to do so. Last week when I took up the notion of meta-texting as one type of an authored conceptual poetics, I hastily put together an incomplete list of mostly New York School writers, hardly accidental. The meta-conversation among New York poets and artists has been longstanding. Key works from at least the first three generations of New York School poets are saturated with self-reflexive art production. Here are the first two stanzas of a piece from Tony Towle composed in the era when conceptualists LeWitt, Weiner, John Baldessari, others first put their ideas down on paper. The poem is not so ironically titled "Works on Paper."

Columns and pilasters, in general

spread over much of the composition,

then periodically erased, by sweeping reforms,

and when I climbed to the first of the pinnacles of recognition,

the highest tower I had so far caused to be made,

there was all that I could see, and the rest, which I could not

Towle's piece is a good place to begin thinking more broadly about authored conceptual poetics. (The full text is available here.) Towle and other practitioners of an ironically-conceived poetry overrely on metaphor, metonymy, and the like to outwit commonplace representation in nutty yet extremely efficient ways. Compared with privileged texts in Tucson, Towle's is a poetry that is as informed by art / lit conjectures, such as the woeful fatigue that's settled upon the author-function. Since it was written in the 70s there's no cutting edge technology, just the centrality of off-handedness "bringing out another bottle at the height of my popularity,
 / but intending to mention it to break the tragicomic composition // made wholly one or the other
 / by forgetting what I would say." Towle's meta-texting reaches in a few directions simultaneously, "all that I could see, and the rest, which I could not." It's not an idea, but ideas. One hundred stanzas of ideas. One after another, one superceding another, rapidly. For those who can quell a bias toward the non-expressive, it's a good read as well as good ideas -- some things to think about.

What is a replica poem and how is it different from the real ones? A replica poem is made similar to that of the real ones, except, at a much lower emotional cost and less time, too. 
A real Robin Blaser or Anne Waldman can go up to hundreds of hours and that adds up to dollars, but you can get a replica similar to that one,
 for only a few minutes if you know how. This allows the normal everyday poem writer to be able to look and feel classy, 
without having to actually spend such ridiculous amounts of time or thinking on it.

This seems right for an air-conditioned afternoon.

          ...in this land of lonely aliens
          shall I put away my care

none of it bears my baby
        when she tried

no facial features
or distinguishing marks
        on the ocean

-- Buck Downs

Q: If I make up a text about a text that's spoken on a tortoise shell on a tortoise shell, that is, if I write on or about the shell of a living tortoise supporting a woofer, am I a conceptualist?

A: Maybe. Sketches to follow.

There is a definitional flaw with the Kenneth Goldsmith-Marjorie Perloff experiment in theorizing: their retrieving the superordinate term conceptual to promote an array of processual poetries -- a categorical overreach. Little doubt the term conceptual evokes, first, audacious gesture, readymades from Marcel Duchamp, legendary erasure of a drawing by Willem De Kooning by young Robert Rauschenberg, or more recent, Damien Hirst's sharks suspended in formaldehyde. Hirst, Rauchenberg, Duchamp -- I imagine both Goldsmith and Perloff enjoy associating with these types of daring and achievement. Second, and more parallel to the Goldsmith-Perloff experiment, conceptual is a descriptor of New York-based art projects of the late 60s and early 70s, with linkages by broad association to Sol LeWitt, Lawrence Weiner, John Baldessari, et al. I think this is the primary linkage intended. Indeed, Sol LeWitt comes closest to the Goldsmith-Perloff processual paradigm, having famously uttered, "idea becomes a machine that makes the art." This is only one construct from that era, however. Lawrence Weiner, in contrast, describes conceptual art as thought conveyance through which texts, written instructions, for example, substitute for or obviate artifact. With this formula we have text that proposes vignettes and procedures for imagining artifacts such as poetry, which results in an Occam's razor-like approach to conceptualization, a lean and potentially cool treatment or abstract, a metatext, in any event. Around the time LeWitt, Weiner, and Baldessari first practiced, poets were meta-texting with varying coolness, Bernadette Mayer, Clark Coolidge, John Ashbery, Aram Saroyan, Ray DiPalma, Jennifer Bartlett, Ted Berrigan, Bruce Andrews, Jamie MacInnis, Ron Padgett, Larry Fagin, Jim Brodey, and others, their poems built in part on compressed vignettes and linguistic what-ifs, propositions about (and within) propositions, each an idea "that makes the art."

The reasoning to follow needs to address Mayer's Studying Hunger, her list of writing experiments as well as Charles Bernstein's adaptations, additional samples from Coolidge, Ashbery, and others building their ideas toward ideas. We need to make the more specific case for their having maintained the so-called author-function versus shifting that function via mechanics and other maneuvers of process (transcriptions of radio broadcasts, e.g.). In sum, it's necessary to distinguish between at least two kinds of temperament for conceptual poetics, one authored, if you will, and one processed. For sure, there are numerous examples of text production that conflates these temperaments. Also, with regard to the novelty of contemporary process constraints on practice, fiddling with authorship, authority, and originality underpins the impassive gaming and automaton features common to earlier process-oriented text experimentation by John Cage, the Oulipo poets, others who are precursors to the Goldsmith-Perloff paradigm. Robert Baird argues in the comment section under Goldsmith's entry at harriet (5/30) that in effect the salience to today's unoriginal (or uncreative or boring) processual poetry centers not so much on the power of its ideas or concepts as on its distillation of author-function:

Goldsmith's originality lies not in destroying the author-function but in raising it to its purely formal apotheosis: he's demonstrated that the most radical refinement of the author-function so far is the author who doesn't have to write. And allow me to repeat: securing that apotheosis is an achievement, it is an act of genius, but it is both of these things because it's original.

Why not, simply, a processual poetics? One problem in conferring the broader term conceptual poetics to process-oriented production emerges within the presumption that a regulated methodology is essential to conceptualization, and by extension, such methodology achieves a higher scale of reasoning and mental prowess than other kinds of text, evident in Craig Dworkin's rhetorical questions from the Introduction to his "Anthology of Conceptual Writing," published on Goldsmith's Ubuweb:

...what would a non-expressive poetry look like? A poetry of intellect rather than emotion? One in which the substitutions at the heart of metaphor and image were replaced by the direct presentation of language itself, with "spontaneous overflow" supplanted by meticulous procedure and exhaustively logical process?

These descriptors point to a subset of conceptual poetry, but not the whole set.

A colonel-general. What a night. No problem
Erasing the storied narrative and
The ordinary stuff that was normal, believable

Then that,

Waking up, hay-feverish, stuffed-up spirit
Standing far off across
Yours, just dreaming it up

In the very era or epoch of arctic night, vision
Making -- it will never move or transform
Even a mote so that something goes away

Not even the mote as subject, nothing
To keep from you forever
Nothing, seen forever.

Twisted I am, torn putting together reflections on Marjorie Perloff's downgrade of language poetry and, my good woman, reducing her own analytical field of concentration to "period style." I don't have her paper as a primary source so I'm referencing Kenneth Goldsmith's summation / advert of 5/30 at harriet. Until I have more from Perloff, I'll register my resistance to the new war cry, unoriginal genius, through which Goldsmith and Perloff finalize their merger. She seizes the term as a title for her new book, he teaches workshops deploying uncreative as a rubric. At minimum this intergenerational combine demonstrates how it's done -- hammer out a procedural, formalist bias into a theme, roll it into a conference (to which you invite celebrities you come to bury), devise ad hoc teaching methods, publicize papers and then a book around the package. Deal.

Bo Diddley, R.I.P.

Protection, no outreach. Thanks.

I could begin with holy shit! But what I will say is nobody illustrates the foreboding and the inexorable foolishness to sublimity better than Ron Padgett. From "The Alpinist."

From up here I can see both my head
and my body and the river between
and when the river stops flowing
I will find myself next to a hut in the Alps
with cows and flowers but without words

But that's for later

Yves Saint Laurent, R.I.P.

My wives had a fear of falling. Decreed: return kids to their polygamous campground.

Nobody has shown that a poem is comparable to a nuclear weapon.

Today's daft moral takes place within a jewel colored perfectible. I would strike the legend mirror-like fragment shimmer dissembling. Keep the title, "The Milk Rally."

Burbling across the Atlantic, abundant, compulsive bricolage, redemptive and busy with slivers of disruption, the rousing start of "Beauty."

It's the new absurdity, supervisory unatone in urbane color as black iterary
seepage, Via Addolorata soldered to the sell. Something like ground
pianos of afar buzzing stars your itinerant field
remarks with uncounted annotations in the rain remembrance. You knew when
you felt as buses arrive: with every death of a pope. That part of poverty. Every death

in asterisks...

-- Jennifer Scappettone

Referencing my last post, below, I hear from Karen Weiser that the title of Erica Svec's show, "Same Enemy Rainbow" (also the title of the painting on the right), comes from a poem by John Coletti. Good to know!

   

"Watson and the Shark" and "Same Enemy Rainbow" by Erica Svec. Visual opinions whose surprise is there's no punch line. Svec's not trying to be funny, just sure. Contemporary to a no-fault. (Thanks to a post by Karen Weiser on Facebook that led me to Svec's gallery website.)

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

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 & collapses
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.

It'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.

Feeling is considered to be subjective & intuitive, "warm."
The organ that produces sentience has been objectively identified as the brain.

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.

Well, face it, I had given up on sincerity, and then --

Artificial sunlight lets us see the frailties in the packaging more clearly than we would have otherwise. As a white light, as a striking from a distance and alighting--COMMUNITY--I see all things when I only see you.

-- Sueyeun Juliette Lee

Gluey pears, keelless refuser. Posing comes natural.

What happened to your skin, Mr. Lin, it looks so radiant?

Format interruption -- a good turn.

This morning, filtered through the clock radio:

A Kremlin of lips. A Cyrillic vowel.
A Workers' harmony. A song might leak

out when silence is the acoustic remedy,
but how can we escape by foot an occupation of wings?

-- Anne Boyer

But I don't have a clock radio.

Money grabber: Fruit-flavored Drāno.

This means I can pay alimony in two states.

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 it
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...

That'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.

The John Ashbery in Facebook is a Dartmouth alum and has no friends. This seems unfair. (He bears a striking resemblance to ...)

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.

No joke. I sneezed just before I read --

I have not stopped
Sneezing, though I did pause
In writing this poem

To hunt down a fearsome
Silverfish, which undulatingly flew
Across the keys ...

-- Chris Martin

Hold on, I'm going to put you on "dialog enhancer mode."

They bear shame but who are they?

Ways women around Marie Antoinette were modern: Oh, so many. They were early risers. They dressed not merely for success, survival. They avoided work that was intellectually focused. They peered back and soaked up the landscape. They were gossips, bless them.

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.

Money grabber: A video collection with every Harvey Keitel film. "You could have a gun, you could be going to get a gun, or you could just be, in essence, fronting." Call it Harvey Fully Loaded.

How did I miss a million of these? They're totally untrite, compelling.

Money grabber: Bespoke medical smocks with discreet baseball insignias hand-stitched on the left lapel. Sold exclusively at places where med students shop. In Boston, the insignia would be the red B -- available at the Harvard Medical Coop and Brooks Brothers.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

Books ship Tuesday.

Another poet in need: Tom Clark.

If you regularly check out Michael Scharf's blog you can pick up good habits like Tracie Morris.

To live in anachrony.

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.

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.

All my spam is luxury.

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.

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.

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...

Last days for the Faux Chaps pre-publication offer. Tremendous response so far. Order today if you're inclined, and save a few.

...and your praise... was not entirely true, it turns out.

-- Dennis Cooper

Beautiful.

That is not what kind of emerged.

-- Ambassador Ryan Crocker

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.

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:

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Am I out on a budding limb here? Stores shut. Highways empty. Downtown hardly in motion. Churches stacked with shoppers -- what were they giving away?

People took Easter more seriously this year?

Arthur C. Clarke remembered with affection.

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.

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

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?

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 oblong
Ecru, pertaining to edelweiss
The past participle of most rapturous
Radar or sonar, economical
Currents at variants with the light […]

I 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.

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 [...]
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 [...]

The voice is continuous, discursive; the understanding is meta-particulate and anti-reductionist, except for ardor's sake.

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.

Another thing I don't know, John Latta and Barrett Watten seem to make fair conversants even if Latta does the choreography, modeling their mutuality as useful.

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.

I don't see anyone for very long, Mr. Gittes. It's difficult for me.

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.