Latest polls trend to Obama in Florida and Virginia, even as the race is closer in dem must-win Great Lakes states that are still in the Obama column. Tightening. Tight. It's enough to reinvigorate earnest leftists to keep up the good fight, at least through Friday's debate. Questions: Why did Obama agree to switch the subject of the first debate from the economy to national security and foreign policy, areas thought to be McCain's strong cards? Will he and McCain deconstruct every question into a security tirade on the Wall St. meltdown? Will the rules of the debate allow them to? Open questions, for me, but key ones, especially since the alleged winner of the first debate goes on to be seen as the victor, overall, of the debate process. Not that that honor did much for Kerry in 2004. Then, maybe Kerry won, if we can trust the data complied over some time, now, by BradBlog and uncountedthemovie.com/blog. (Remember the exit polls showing Kerry's lead in Ohio four years ago? The disparity between the poll counts and the official vote was statistically incredible, something like a 1 in 10,000 probability.) Both Bradblog and uncountedthemovie/blog track current initiatives by leftists to counter rightwing systems analysts and hackers trying to tweak the electronic vote counts to benefit republicans. In a tight national vote, countering rightwing voter suppression and manipulation of tallies is the most important grassroots work of this cycle. As in other recent elections, while at least margins of the vote counts are subject to fraud, we will base our decision on vital atmospherics gushing out of debate substance and technique, the economy, and other catastrophes.

Finally, for a leftist slant on Paulson and Co. to restoke skepticism about the one-solution to the financial markets crisis, you might like the frequent updates at housingpanic, a site I learned about reading Linh Dinh's Detainees.

Best wishes to Douglas Messerli for a speedy and full recovery.

Postcard (Voices/World Flag/Theory) 4 for Larissa MacFarquhar

Postcard (Voices/Disinheritance/Ocean Flowers) 3 for Nancy Rubins

I know democratic wordsmiths and political journalists have other fish to fry 'n stir into their bouillabaisse of money melt on Wall St. and Main St. I hope, though, some are preparing a discourse analysis of how republican candidates are wholesale re-speaking ideas, vocabulary, and idiosyncratic phrases from Bush II. There have been flashes of this evidenced on YouTube, but a reasoned exposé could prove extremely useful. I've already squawked about dems' underplaying McCain repeating Bush II's convention speech. In addition, there's the now-ultra-relevant head-turner, the now-reformed-and-discarded Bush II phrase, "the fundamentals are sound," uttered by MCain at least 16 times on the campaign trail. About a week ago we heard Palin's response to Charles Gibson's crucial question concerning her readiness for the v.p. slot and her ready acceptance of McCain's offer to become his candidate. She used variations of the stalwart phrase did not blink many times in reply to that and other questions. Up until the last year or so Bush II himself had used that phrase repeatedly, often with reference to staring down terrorists. (Even before she went national, Palin was behaving like Bush, using private e-mail for government business, setting up roadblocks to bi-partisan investigations into questionable practices by her administration.) Key to any exposé, most of the strategic support staff for Palin are ex-Bushies, Tucker Eskew, Tracey Schmitt, several others. Simply put, one could assert Palin cops others' playlists, says what others dictate. The salient points about McCain and Palin's lack of independent thinking, coupled with her ahistoric protection from unscripted reporters' queries and their continually exaggerating on the stump (energy innovators, outsiders, etc.), could be the basis for a partisan invective, something like this: If it looks, walks, and talks like a Bush, it's Bush III.

I'm no collector so I'm not versed in postcard art or theory. As for theory, I hear it's packed with shrill ideology, multivalent intelligence, ultra-experimental conversation. Both objects below came silently attached to an e-mail today and they felt good in a marginal-figures-in-a-dominant-culture way. I call them Postcard (Voices/Allegory/Crisis of Faith) 1 for Kutlug Ataman and Postcard (Voices/Push-Pull/Serenade) 2 for Zac Posen, respectively.

Frankly,

so many scurrilous appeals start this way: Frankly,

if Barrack Obama doesn't find his voice and take over the discussion about the mal-adjusting economy,

if he doesn't grow a pair as Amy Poehler put it (altho she was talking about the media calling out McCain...),

I'm going to sharp-border myself and become an oddball.

Burn after Reading makes do without a head or heart. Joel and Ethan Coen figured out, movies ago, their first task as writers and directors is to keep the eye busy. In Burn they parade celebrities Tilda Swinton, Brad Pitt, John Malkovich, George Clooney, along with familiar faces, Frances McDormand, Richard Jenkins, and Elizabeth Marvel. These folks are washed out collision cases. Outdoors the D.C. light ages Clooney, Malkovich, and Pitt about ten years apiece. Their phenotypes convey the wild emptiness of the District without Pity, and it's a patchy humoresque for a few minutes. Right off, worker drone Malkovich is fired by his fake-polite bosses at ...? CIA, I suppose. When he gets home we see how people with taste and no power live in Georgetown. Next, we stumble across Swinton, Malkovich's wife, sidled with Clooney who, as the last man standing, goes to bed with all the women. Burn is about screwing without screwball. Death floats from bedroom to sidewalk. Clooney kills Pitt, a Billy Budd-like naïf, one of two male leads who doesn't get laid. The other, Richard Jenkins, is hacked to death by Malkovich. In a nod to plot compression and symmetry, Malkovich is sliced up into an irreversible coma by a fed, offscreen. No time for any wink, wink, epiphany, except for the two operatives back at the agency who watch over the fornication and clean up after the kills. They narrate traffic and attendant statistics. What was Malkovich's clearance level, one asks. "Three." "OK then..." a turn of phrase accompanied with one eyebrow slightly arched. 'Pointless to worry' would be one paraphrase. That would be my conclusion.

While we're at it, financials-wise, Lihn Dinh reminds us what a catastrophic loss to anti-predatory forces has been Eliot Spitzer's disappearance. Back in February Spitzer wrote, "...the Bush administration [has] looked the other way and [done] nothing to protect American homeowners. In fact, the government chose instead to align itself with the banks that were victimizing consumers." Going in, the banks' appetites are facilitated by the right wing, and it's the same for the slow, painful flush job, going out. Spitzer again: "Not only did the Bush administration do nothing to protect consumers, it embarked on an aggressive and unprecedented campaign to prevent states from protecting their residents from the very problems to which the federal government was turning a blind eye."

Several dealers, stoic defenders of market flux, wielders of pointy-headed instruments, are speeding into the anomaly that has been the NYC-still-the-good-times bubble.

A dark day. (One of a number.) We have wanted and want too much; we look everything into and through the eye of our collective addictions to wanting. Here's a moment to look into and through AIG, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch — they're only today's losers, but they mark an occasion — time to tie their collapse and other malfunctions in our politics and economy (Evil brings so much more "to the table") to our poetry. Into and through what is "in us" ourselves.

[...] in America poetry’s pulsing truth reverberates with the irony of our images to placate our need to despair and revolt against the outer forms of evil instead of embracing the Bad Thing extant in us causing this to go down, ultimately, as a resource war—looking for oil, water, rest—all it takes to make life easy at the expense of all others. But without our conscious or unconscious senses of entitlement and righteousness, there’s nowhere for any of us to hide. This is what we’ll learn as the banks fail and oil dries up and we have to re-orient life to other methods of getting by.

— Dale Smith, 9/14

Both democrats and republicans, in particular, have succeeded in converting presidential politics into a vote on who has the better campaign backed up the biggest, most brazen falsehoods. The best campaigner, the formula stipulates, is destined to be leader since political control is a perpetual campaign. The good-cop-bad-cop republican ticket is our latest sample. By contemporary standards it's not only above-board but widely expected that an inexperienced candidate turn ingenuousness into a positive. Not a good old boy, she's a reformer. And if she snarls, so much the better. Given power, a feisty female who makes herself 'average' is a terrifyingly bad cop. When her old boy partner faces the media-elite women of The View and is told he's lying about Obama's record, McCain needs only to insist he's not. And that's it. He's the good cop. For additional oomph Cindy McCain walks out in Oscar de la Renta to make her reinforcement cameo on The View. How many houses has Cindy got? That's not part of the campaign, snaps Cindy. She's a bad cop too. Strong. Forceful. Sticks to her guns. TV news analysts fill us in on the meta-levels of such processes — the horse-raciness, the perception game (so-called), demographics, strategies, tactics and execution — and they fill gaps, foreclosed-on neighborhood-wide gaps, in their first-order reporting, using and re-using loops of video material produced by competing entities from both campaigns. Issues are effectively snowed over by trivia and ruses that only huge capital can sustain. Just as gas and oil consortia attempt to calm us with deceptive portrayals of their token initiatives toward cleaner energy, democrats and, I emphasize, republicans continue to perjure themselves during this every-fourth-year trial for democracy, telling stories and pulling off tricks about what politics is doing to the American economy and to our freedoms.

Blogger Robert Baird points to James Fallows's scrutiny of Sarah Palin's first interview, part one. Fallows notes her unfamiliarity with foreign policy and, worse, lack of interest and, worse still, lack of curiosity. (This actually does sound like Bush III.) Fallows's argument at TheAtlantic.com is a rapid swirl of what matters first about her candidacy and second, as Fallows puts it, "about the person who put her in this untenable role."

Kissing a wall. Not hiding her sexuality. Silhouette on Walnut —

book list = subjective state

tribal identity or trance

the underground = finding America

career trajectory or cast figure

abnormal grace or poetics = what's this? Imagine the movement of a classical dancer's silhouette crossing Walnut St. Compare it to that of any pedestrian who is not a dancer. A poet acquires some form of correspondence to the dancer, a verbal equivalence to her process repertoire.

There's another form of repetition I don't do here. I don't talk about my dreams. Or if I do, it's dealt with subtextually, not like this. Last night both republican candidates came to my place for dinner and a sleepover. Sleeping over was awkward because my guest bed wouldn't accommodate McCain's expanding girth, much less the two of them, but I'm getting ahead of myself. John and Sarah — we're on a first-name basis now — rang my bell and came in unannounced. They were fabulously foreign, not talking directly to me much; mostly, they shouted to each other lifting fringe-accented lines from their stump speeches. So it was an acoustic nightmare with visuals that popped. Sarah was dressed from nose to toe in tangerine raw silk rope that kept her immobile and a little less talkative than expected. John's a riot in umber and maroon brocade. He insisted on fixing dinner himself, something goulash-y with chicken parts, which I passed on since I'm vegan. At some point mid-meal I was hiding under the sink in my own house chewing celery. John never got the goulash right because every five minutes or so his neck inflated another shirt size, 16, 16 ½, 17, counting. His upper torso got so filled up that we scrubbed the overnight and I called the EMTs. After, Sarah slipped out of her top ropes to dial operator assistance. She was like a kid with a hamster, cool, distant, and fleeting, to me, asking the operator to connect her to some number she pronounced slowly in a Slavic language she hadn't mastered. Winding up, she forgot the last digits, which in English are six, six. (Those years living next to the Russians have rubbed off, but not entirely.) Sirens, ambulance flashes of bright red, kisses all around, and out they wheeled as briskly as they came in. All evening they acted as if they were on Fox, and everyone stayed in character. I wore the lipstick.

Pretty, fine. John Latta's reading and (scroll to 9/9) appreciation of The Golden Age of Paraphernalia by Kevin Davies.

Antecedents and indebtedness toward them could be handled better if influences of egotism, fashion, clique formation, and friends-enemies were lessened or eliminated. That's asking for several parcels of human experience to disappear or to be disappeared. And, odd thing, for each poet and her cohort these defining matters of personalities, preferences, biases, etc. do vaporize in time. The whole being of Charles Olson dies, biases and all, and a few of his living descendants, equipped with their new rules, re-arrange the family tree, cutting him off entirely. Others put him far out on a sprig of a limb, hanging precariously. Some have other ideas. Poetics with its winners and losers is a humanist game, after all, subject to emotional habits. What will matter, in time, is how to find and/or place each poet phylogentically. A poet will be classified based on her evolutionary (if you will) adaptation that is passed on to descendants. The field for evolution is as it has been the work and all the other work around it and after it. The work in our time includes more than one poet's composition, but each poet's words make everything she does her composition, her part of the work.

It's silly season. And it's serious. Every four years I turn entirely partisan and root for the left wing. I'll get back to poetry, but here are today's two cents on the state of the presidential race.

If the dems are counting on Sarah Palin imploding soon, they should flesh out Plans B and C even sooner. I can't imagine she won't flub it here and there, but she'll have a full contingent of explainers and counter-deriders to come to her defense. This is the big time for all the stakes. Republicans are guarding their much-improved prospects with everything in their arsenal, scores or more of talking heads on cable, along with cut-and-paste videosmiths, rascally trouble-makers, et al. on the phones, online, and in the field to shake up the opposition. Besides, Palin is wily and glamorously superficial, just what a leftie intuitively rejects or recoils from while summoning a logical, intellectual defense to explain why. If Palin makes mistakes, chances are leftist critics won't get their points across to Palin's newly-found, so-called soft followers. Not if the criticism only sticks to substance. As noted Saturday, George Lakoff prescribes reasoned argument in the form of symbolic and emotional appeals. When will that happen?

And what if Palin slides by, still stands or even scores points after her one debate? Plans B and C need to be in force in advance.

The blackbox term Plans B and C covers the following. Plan B would be a coherent and much simplified list of promises the dems can make to voters, focused almost entirely on kitchen-table concerns. Health care, fair taxes, and social security are foregrounded, tied to other key worries, the mortgage crisis, energy, jobs, education costs. Plan B would the basis for day-to-day, every day communication by the candidates on the stump and reflected in all media. Plan C would be background noise for cable shock, viral media, and buzz (in its many permutations). The C plan filters the best of the poop on McCain and Palin and hammers away at comparisons that both support Plan B, especially tax data, and generate other emotional appeals as gossip and facts dictate. One rallying cry to Plan C, something people could shout out and mean it: No More of the Same.

Timing is today, this minute. Why, I have to ask, is the production team of the Daily Show better at opposition research than the Obama-Biden people? Last Friday, for example, Jon Stewart ran a segment showing that not one or two but several (as in many, many) lines in John McCain's acceptance speech have been plagiarized verbatim from Bush II's acceptance speech eight years earlier! What a fantastic opportunity and stupefyingly convincing exposition for proving emotionally and symbolically that four more years of Bush is a reality. Palin and McCain have said stupid things over the last few years, but the stupidity keeps flowing. The Obama-Biden campaign needs to work this.

Finally, both Obama and Biden have to regain their sense of humor and start smiling again. I remember only a couple of weeks ago when McCain was calling Obama a traitor and smiling as he said it. He looked awful then, but after a few weeks of rehearsal his smile is coming across as quasi-authentic. Biden, don't get outsmarted and outsmiled by these bit players. Obama, smile politely, deeply, keep it epic.

John McCain has Aspen and Bal Harbour written all over his bulging face but fuck — Yeah, it's the hour for pantomime and rumpus and jive — field-dress the beast, mama, feed it to us along with som pulled pork and Cindy Lou's lizard. Got som poetry to go around it, to.

...Welcome to Chinchilla Villa Bing-bong. I'll have two tokens, pliz. Permeate me. Derby duster dingle autumn tea passed about as if Shakespeare were present. Vagrant tremens flock El Niño to Tarzana, then carpet down to Mexico in a cartoon drawn by sticks. Newsboys ready to kick the talking cure start penning in wavelengths. "Are drills old saws?" Homer Ludens traces a star back to his nursery.

— Michael Gizzi

Rrrrr.

I hate repeating myself. Semantic duplication is such a weak technique that so often turns into bullying or coercion to compel an audience's passive agreement and conditioned response. It makes your case, your cause, easy to grasp and familiar. Yes, yes, bring it on, Pavlov, Sir, I see what you mean. Make your point a few times and it seems like reasoning or normal talk. It's an old trick politicians, scammers, and seasoned writers adopt to set an agenda for the half-attentive. That said, I'll commit to the causes of irony repeating myself for political purposes. Like last week, Sarah Palin's inability to talk to us directly and answer our questions, now 10 days after her intro, insults our democratic traditions. Palin reads from scripted notes exclusively. This say-nothing-else tactic practiced day after day constitutes a series of insults, and her implicit lack of will to speak freely is now chronic. Public scrutiny in the form of fielding questions is a conventional and necessary means for assessing any candidate's mettle. Her refusal to submit to regular, uncensored examination by national reporters is more than a cynical application of a beauty-queen visual strategy; it is an outrage. Most ironic, it's time now in her second week to denounce Palin's repetitive scriptedness as dumb, the redolent gestalt of a spikey, funky dummy. It is intensely un-American.

Amy King notes George Lakoff's analysis of how the dems' language fails to measure up to the affective appeal of republican discourse. Lakoff asserts, "What Democrats have shied away from is a frontal attack on radical conservatism itself as an un-American and harmful ideology... Democrats, being Democrats, will mostly talk about the realities nonstop without paying attention to the dimensions of values and symbolism." Lakoff spells it out, looking for "cultural narratives" and "metaphors" to stir emotions in the heart and head. What's crucial now, in other words: Better writing.

84,000 jobs lost, unemployment at 6.1%. That should bring a halt to identity politics.

You can tell it's not prose when you fiddle with it for more than a day, fiddle with it all the way down.

A thoroughly justified call to action. Women first.

I'm "into" some kind of military opera. I have henchmen, dogma, and doily sculptures from needle-felted wool. There are two ambient music cartels: Doggone moosebirds and the dwarf striking the damnatory broguery goodies with all his power. Slangy melinite.

The de rigueur for now is far fetchedness. Let's consider stuff. Penology outranks the vanadic.

The practice of Zen is nothing at all, only sustained focus and innovation. I won't do it, no thanks.

Just piano and voice. I'll grieve later on, turning to useless glyphs inscribed into interior dialog dropped over auto glass and hoods of vans blurting out the dogtrack.

All right, I should add even as the comfort level is raised here and there, I don't know anything about microspores and heavy pollen. Queen Neptune, a steamy guitarist said, 'write something about me,' so evidently I did.

Any poem by Charles Simic is an invite to scratch over it. So much work!

He writes, f'r instance, "Every worm is a martyr, / Every sparrow subject to injustice..." Can't you feel substitutions coming on?
Every woman, p'rhaps? Every loud tick. Every this-is-so-cool.

Every woman is a loud tick
Every graveyard moos like a doggy.

Isn't this how Google started?

Thanks, Charles.

I wasn't planning to write today but I changed plans. If I were Ron Padgett or my wiseass self I might have said I changed planes. On cue, Ron will navigate a new visual plane, adjust what can be seen for a line or two, then veer off with dashes added (or multiplied) to another illustration made humane and of searing words although his specialty is everyday words that are always humane-seeming and amazing in how they fit together just this once on this page in this poem. He'll change planes a lot, losing his footing on the flat oily tarp, perplexed, take it outside a Rubik of a different color denatured by the octagonal gloom of hearing his thoughts erase similes, not needing traditional structures but throwing daylight out there between them to achieve a halo of wit with dimensionality for us to salivate over anyway, a blend of mesmerizing suspense and long-buried libido that reminds one one is reading poetry while famished, fasting, scrunched up in what feels like coach on a bi-plane skywriting. We're not amused, perhaps, to discover the plane is a midsize corporate jet piloted by a professional fathead who's not pretending — he's really, nuclear-related mean, misplacing his mom's name in the space of what he had for breakfast and the sky. I don't know, it's hard to see it. That's because this's my illustration. Not Ron's.

Under most circumstances unmarried-teen pregnancy is very low on my list of engaging political topics. If a woman chooses to stay pregnant, money should be provided to help if she needs it; a woman in turn should be offered appropriate incentives, if needed, for continuing her education and establishing a household which can and in many instances will ideally include the father. The woman chooses a) to continue her pregnancy; b) to keep the baby after giving birth; c) to receive educational incentives; d) to marry or to live with the father unmarried or not to live with the father. There are matters concerning how long and how far the commonwealth's concern extends for the mother and the child, and these can be legislated locally and at the state level. That's about as far I take it politically.

It's extraordinarily galling, on the other hand, for the nation to be presented a virtual unknown as one of only two likely next vice presidents and then learn three days later the unknown's unmarried 17-year-old daughter is five months pregnant. Sarah Palin's daughter will enjoy the support of her large family, and she will access resources many women her age will never enjoy. The options I outline are not the same ones Palin would propose. But I am only guessing — I don't know!

Technically, Sarah Palin's strict evangelicalism, her unquestioned belief that abstinence is the only appropriate form of sex education, even her daughter's difficulty do not factor into the underlying dilemma. They merely underscore how narrow-seeming and blanked-out Palin's base of understanding and experience remains for her potential public. Four days and counting, she has not submitted to a national press conference, and she has not spoken in any form other than a scripted self-introduction. We are told by partisans that she is among the most dynamic of young conservatives. No arguments have been made. She is a reformer, the political mantra intones, but there are few details. She is more experienced than Barrack Obama. What a fabulous lie. If she expects to get away from public scrutiny by giving a tearjerker re-intro at the convention this week and then hopping on the campaign bus to repeat the same stump speech for the next few weeks, she deserves to be rejected. Palin might not want to speak up on her daughter's behalf this moment, but talking about how she squares her daughter's situation with her own morality and politics would be ethically responsible. And her speaking out now ought to provide an opening for more questions about what she is doing / where she thinks she's going with the rest of us.

Vanitas 3
Popular Song
Vincent Katz, Editor
2008

Looks will kill. Ask Brian De Palma, Luis Buñuel, John Sayles, Claude Chabrol, filmic murderers who high-style it with the unsavory to waste blandness with a light touch and mean more. It's almost the end of the first decade of the 21st century, and there haven't been a whole lot of Chabrols, Buñuels, Sayleses, or De Palmas among poets. Not many have or get time to live and hang with painters, media artists, and conceptualists, so very little of the swelling innovation in graphic arts, much less its potential synergy for poetry, rubs off firsthand to enforce among poets distinctive methods and manners of looking and being seen. Vincent Katz is clearly an exception.

Growing up in a family of accomplished, generous, highly respected artists who have long supported their peers, Vincent comes to his wide-ranging esthetics naturally, expressing a poet's and editor's style as unforced and uninflected as a mother tongue. His editing for Vanitas, now up to its third issue, appears annually. As editor Vincent shows the mannered results of a seemingly effortless year of collecting work that comes to his attention directly, not secondhand, from writers and artists of older and younger generations. He fans controversy by inviting poets to mix it up writing on less familiar topics than literature, for example, and often, like a curator, he turns over big spaces to artists so they can display graphics as well as work from their journals and notes. Issue 3, subtitled Popular Song, yields a slew of poets taking on the Beatles and other musical themes; a poem by pop artist Jim Dine along with his writing about the rock scene in London of the 1960s; cover, writing, and a good number of different art pieces by photographer and sign-maker Jack Pierson. Sign-making, rock, and poetry. It's a luxuriant, sly merging of ideas, a light subvening of hardcore theoretical divisions, something we've come to expect from Vincent. (In Issue 2 he put together poems and art from 'far out west' alongside pieces implicated with poli-science or 'anarchisms,' as he put it.)

Impeccable style, unbesmirched taste, these uppercase ideals need more than good looks. Everything has to come together to inhabit what we used to call a state of grace. It's perhaps more temporal zone today than state, a point of irradiation in which elements of surprise and thunderous joy mount. You can find irradiation of this sort throughout Issue 3. I'll highlight two in closing. First is a theme-meshing piece "Great Clubs I Have Danced At" by Darinka Novitovic Chase, artist / hostess of a downtown demimonde. This is autobiographical evocation of glamorous clubbing through the ages, short notes on Area, The Pyramid, Club Metro, and this place: "7th grade, in the girls bathroom teasing my hair, the transistor radio we snuck into school propped up on the mirror ledge. Aretha sings 'I Say A Little Prayer...'" Second, I'm registering libertarian over the abbreviated funkiness of "Fireflies," a poem by conceptual artist Alix Lambert. I finish here with all six of her remarkably bliss-strewn lines.

I can't stop thinking about tying fireflies into my hair.
One firefly for each strand of hair.
A blinking halo of tiny yellow lights
that lifts me right off the ground,
all the way to another planet,
where I would battle aliens.

How can you not love Facebook? Within one minute I joined three groups: Irish Poetry, GLBT Writers and Readers, and The Macabre Edgar Allen Poe. Hot darn.

Gumption 'n warmth. Agnew, Quayle, Palin. Got it.

The harvest mouse — getting fatter imbibing syrah, nibbling on camembert, and writing about it — in 21st century diseased poetic circles looks something like this: You think your every move is being filmed for a reality dating show, starring you, and that everyone in your life is an actor or a phony. Or you think you are part of a group under intense surveillance by a competing posse of poetry spies, whom you refer to as “them,” and “they” wiretap your plastic living room furniture and sex prosthetics.

Those thoughts are from case studies of what neutral onlookers (housemates who ran out on the rent, ex-girlfriends who have obtained restraining orders, and other poets) who peer into the intersection of mental illness, verse, and society are calling, respectively, Truman Show Syndrome and Internet delusion; both offer a window, through madness, into the modern world of letters and launch parties.

If you have delusions of grandeur in this century, you are probably not Napoleon, but you may be Truman Capote or Tallalulah Bankhead or, more probable, Truman Burbank. The Truman Show delusion, or Truman Show Syndrome, has drawn attention in recent months as writers and literary critics identify a small but growing number of verse makers who describe their lives as mirroring that of the main character in the 1998 film “The Truman Show.” Truman Burbank leads a mundane existence as a naturalist, conceptual poet, and FDA agent in the suburbs, starting from the time he was in the womb, while being filmed for a documentary television show that he cannot escape. Everyone is in on it, including his wife and publisher, both played by the same actor, and no one will believe Truman when he discovers clues that his life is being chronicled all the time by cameras.

With Internet delusion, poets typically incorporate the Internet into their processing of paranoid thoughts, including a fear that the Web is somehow monitoring or controlling their lives, or being used to plagiarize their dreams and transmit unflattering Facebook photographs or other personal information. The delusions are fueling a chicken-and-egg debate in critical theory: Are these merely modern examples of classic parataxis fed by the current grab-what-u-can processual landscape, or is there something about media like reality television and the Internet that can push writers over the sanity line?

“Most likely these people would be delusional anyway,” said Dr. Fede Moi, a violinist, poet, and psychiatrist at Bellevue Hospital Center in New York, who said she saw fifty-five patients at the hospital from 2002 to 2007 with Truman Show delusion. Dr. Moi is eating better herself, having come up with the term “Truman Show delusion.” Still the prognosis is not utterly nightmarish — "this pushes some marginal writers over the threshold; the environment tips them over the edge; and then they write better,” said Dr. Moi. “And if culture can make people crazy, then we need them to write about it.” Q.E.D.

One way of looking at the delusions and hallucinations of the culturally degraded like poets is that they represent extreme cases of what passes as brisk, cheery normality in the general population, those of us who are merely neurotic. Poets with no holds can take common fears — like identity theft because of information transmitted on the Internet, or the loss of privacy because of the prevalence of security cameras to fight crime — and magnify them, make them their very own to juice up really cool drafts.

“There is the old saying that just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean there’s no poet after you,” said Dr. Ruse Westvale, chairman of the Department of Psycholinguistics and Alterity at Christopher Columbus College Annex. The prevailing view in critical slippage is that a delusion is just a transfinite number, psychosis is sticking someone you really can't stop hating with a sharp metallic instrument, and the faded scenery in the background is, incidentally, in need of a complete makeover. Fear, a sense of persecution and grandiosity are static features of delusional writing, many academics say. “Cultural influences don’t tell us anything fundamental about delusion,” Dr. Westvale added. “We can look at the influence of television, computer games, rock ’n’ roll, but these things don’t tell us about new forms of being a writer and going mental.”

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Aerial Performance and Poetic Methodology defines a poem, considered still to be little understood, as, essentially, a false belief that is not grounded in reality and that is held with absolute conviction despite proof to the contrary. The manual lists a caveat that a belief is not delusional if it is something widely accepted by other members of a poet’s culture or subculture — for example, faith in a canon, a collection of the best books or, simply, good works in literature. But some poets ask on whose authority, frag?

Some experts studying conditions like Truman Show Syndrome and other culture-bound delusions, which are specific to a time like now or place like California, are questioning the premise that culture is only incidental to psychosis, even as a growing body of evidence has pointed to eating abnormalities and other lifestyle causes for illnesses like copy-and-paste writing or overdependence on spam and purloined email.

Psychiatrists have studied delusions such as the belief that one's creative flow is covered in sand, and which has been documented at dunes in North Beach and Mendocino but would be unlikely to occur in, say, a condominium tower in Fairweather Cape, AK. Another study found a delusion occurring only in quite unusually urbane places scrunched inside resort atomospherics like Boulder, CO and a few other rural enclaves, in which visiting scholars missing their pets and starved for the new and sensational in avant lit will read anything canine and offbeat — like Kirk Lazarus's new book about a singing robot bitten by dogs — and they actually believe they have become pregnant with puppies. What nuts!

Dr. Tugg Stiller of Naropa Community Adult Learning Center, who is writing an illustrated book about Truman Show delusion, said that three of five patients he saw recently with the condition specifically mentioned Lazarus's verse. "It's a barking read," Stiller observed. He said what distinguishes this delusion from most others is that it involves the patient’s entire reality, and everything normal like owning a dog is transfixed by the unreal like human-canine pregnancy. Other delusions are typically narrowly focused — there is a microchip in my boyfriend's brain, aliens abducted my body parts but left the rest of me here, I’ve been to Mars and it's disgusting — and in those, things that are not real become real. One of Dr. Stiller’s patients told him, “My family and everyone I knew were actors in a script, a hoity-toity charade with cunning little puppies whose entire purpose is to make me the focus of the world’s attention.”

You lost me at should. Courage is an art. I hope you're happy. I used to believe all the grossular and pine boxes that hold sex would open up to the horizon of a former life, a life stocked with the coloration of air as in a Shakespearean drawing room augmented with coarse bouquet. From the valley inside Elizabethans, say, we would see there were lots of tulle and offline making of amends. Superangels strummed harps to sound an alert bigger than dressing for the weekend with some breathy, lithe, spooky edge. There's a flare for what noses should be, a full deck of historical fantasy. Then a larger conduit was needed going for the stretch and preen in the premonition, the one I had about nomads and grace, moans of a snake figuring out straight white room and board that transforms the way I text, hands free, with a glance.

There's a big sonic payoff over at DC's this morning: 10 tunes that are also expository arguments from Guy Blackman, "Mortified," for instance, and "Stay on the Beat" collect impressions of Tokyo menages a trois and their aftermath.

The dems' convention this week is too exciting. I'd like to tune it out but no. It's back to the coliseum to boo the bad Bloods as they take the Crabs and Rickets down, kabuki-like. For the last three months Obama, the Crab in charge, couldn't manage Hillary and Bill, you know, sweet talk them, make them a promise or two, ask them for advice, and now there can be only tepid endorsements and half-embraces, a small chorus of Hillary delegates wailing into video cams, and if the Bloods' (i.e., McCain's) plan holds, maybe a few faces sliced along the way, a big momma of a mess.

At one level, Obama is to blame. It's his responsibility to keep things spotless. At another level it's clear Hillary and Bill, especially Bill, won't behave. Then, it's especially Hillary, too. They have never put self-interest second, and now you can feel their appetites all whetted as pollsters remind us that McCain appeals to 30% of Hillary voters. (A significant fraction of those working-class white men and women crossed over from the Bloods to vote for her in the first place — a tedious point in fact.)

Meantime, on the larger stage, after two or three false starts, ad mavens for the Bloods have at last dug up the most devastating choreographed assault from the primary, the video in which Hillary plays yamauba, craven mountain witch, claiming she and McCain have experience to be president while Obama has a speech he gave in 2002. That's an extraordinary indictment of her fellow player and gang member and a sucker endorsement for the Bloods, a knockout punch to all Hillary and Bill will say, irrespective of how they behave. And that's the sad outcome. Her disloyalty half-excuses Obama's failure to kiss and make up. There is no defense for Hillary's support of McCain, not even her self-interest. Hillary is dead as any Crab or Ricket caught at knifepoint by the Bloods.

"If all you do is seduce and conquer you loose a lot of blood," observes Puffy. In a completely different vein, the line-up for the Second Annual Poetry and Music Weekend looks fine.

On its self-imposed deadline Friday to withdraw its forces from Georgia, Russia insisted that it was sticking to its timetable but there were continuing reports that Russian forces were still digging in...On Thursday, the commander of the Russian ground forces, Gen. Vladimir Boldyrev, said that it would take at least 10 days for the troops and equipment to be withdrawn “in columns in the established order.” This translates into abbreviated speech as still.

OMFG, it's Clinton.

Johnbr responds to notes on collective, below, with updates on some fascinating projects he's undertaking with others. He's open to additional collaborators:

Speaking of collective enterprises, one going on at Zeitgeist Spam right now (and eventually in book/dvd form — there is a committed publisher) is called 1000 Views of "Girl Singing". I hereby invite you to join the festivities. Here's the invitation. It's the same as I've sent the other participants. [Here is a pdf of] the poem to be used as a starting point — or not, if you come up with another way to play:

I have a new project in progress. I'm going to take a poem by Eileen Tabios (I have her blessings) that is "after" a poem by Jose Garcia Villa and run about 100,000,000 (plus or minus) changes on it, using methods developed by a number of appropriation/transformation artists.

Some transformations/translations will require others to join in the project for a collaboration or two, e.g. one of Nichols' transformations requires getting people more or less unfamiliar with the poem to read it once and then try to write it. I've already received some marvelous contributions, audio, video, visual, as well as textual (if you are interested, I can send you the names of those who are participating). In fact, this has turned into an anthology rather than a JBR project w/a few contributions.

I'd love it if you too would be willing to play. [To contact Johnbr, e-mail: J at johnbr.com]

If you are willing, here are some possibilities, as copied from bp Nichol's Translating Translating Apollinaire: A Preliminary Report:

1. memory translation: reader retention. (Each reader is shown the poem without prior warning or instruction [we'll have to ignore that bit] and asked to read thru it once. The poem is then taken away and the reader asked to write down what he or she remembers. No other instructions are given.)

2. homolinguistic translation. [Note: no explanation is given of what a homolinguistic translation might be. So I will use Charles Bernstein's: "Homolinguistic translation: Take a poem (someone else's, then your own) and translate it 'English to English' by substituting word for word, phrase for phrase, line for line, or "free" translation as response to each phrase or sentence. Or translate the poem into another literary style or a different diction, for example into a slang or vernacular. Do several different types of homolinguistic translation of a single source poem." Bernstein adds "Chaining: try this with a group, sending the poem on for "translation" from person to another until you get back to the first author." Feel free to chain w/anyone of your choice — in any fashion — or not, it's all up to you.]

And here are my own instructions: please do anything else you fancy doing to/with it, and please include some sort of explanation of the "procedure" employed [Note: anything you want to count as a procedure counts as a procedure]. I'm also asking for translations into any and all languages (construe language as you wish).

And I'm also asking for contributions that "play telephone" with the text(s) contributed so far. In other words, feel free to "translate"/"interpret"/riff off of? etc etc any of the other contributions in any way you wish.

Everyone who contributes to these projects will be credited, Johnbr adds, and the plan according to his publisher is that everyone will get a copy of the final product in book/dvd form. There you go!

It should be uncontroversial that a decade or longer of media innovation and art making require the literary or esthetic term collective apply to a more encompassing and better-thought-out conceptual construct than a group.

This is so even if it's a cluster of the like-minded or, even, a kibbutz of substantial, like-minded collaborators or practitioners with shared processes. The term collective applies, more specifically, to such groups who, additionally, aim for nonhierarchical, collegial micro- and macro-views of their action as a group and as individuals. A common outcome for and distinctive feature of art collectives is that product authorship is either unassigned, that is, it is rendered anonymous, or signed under the name of the group.

Blurred identity is a singular esthetic legacy of the term collective, one that we receive largely by way of our understanding of how the materials of medieval plays and music were assembled, edited, and emended by lines of long-obscured and frequently anonymous sorts, many working out of guilds and in disciplined work areas of the similarly unnamed.

Production through retrieval and the add-on ethos are other features of medieval collectivism. It's not unironic in the least that internet data assembly enables our return to those kinds of collective production and ethos -- I'm using collective as a trope descriptive of communal agitation in the Durkheimian metaphorical sense of group consciousness. The work we produce right now is parallel along incalculable dimensions to the industry of the guildmeisters and servants of previous times. And if most of the work present day is still authored, squinting forward we can imagine that the mushrooming of art production (including poetry) over a relatively short time will totalize authorship into line items within extraneous data fields (with a few exceptions, of course). The important data are part of the Collective, capital c.

Ok, my point is not at all directed to any of my earlier enablers and colleagues, per se. They as members of any group of two or more are free to designate themselves a collective, small c, if they have the urge. But none of us now, group or singleton, is making products from media all alone. Chances are what you (or we or I) do is matched or surpassed by others out of your reach.

Disparate data assembly and grandiose and novel media mining are commonplace for artists and writers because new and improved procedures and products are in the air. A ten-year-old can program your phone to display box scores and blast Baroque chamber pieces while you I.M. your florist. Multiplicities are coming on. What can you do to them? Instrumental composer Nico Muhly surfs YouTube to cap off music he's modeling after Bach and Purcell: "There's a way to search for interesting things on YouTube, and then there's a way to search for uninteresting things. You put in search terms like 'My daughter's yard,' 'My friend's restaurant.'" In this respect Muhly differs from poet Sharon Mesmer, say, only in his formal application and modulation of searches.

Music atmospheres by Muhly and a good deal of contemporary music and poetry, for sure, come off more and more as products of the Durkheim Collective. With regards to poetry, there's a terrific initiative identified as Zeitgeist Spam, authored by "johnbr," a marker of a well-mannered semi-anonymity, apropos of the work. Johnbr lifts other poets' artifacts on the net and elsewhere and recrafts them. On July 25 johnbr composed a "transformation View of 'Girl Singing'" along with these notes about procedure:

I took the nouns in Alan Baker's "Girl Singing" in order, matched each with a proper name beginning with the same letter as the noun (e.g. life/Philip Lamantia) found in the index to the SPD Fall 08 catalog (exceptions: the 2nd "girl", which I matched not only to (the wrong, i.e. the not-SPD) Emily Galvin, but also to Gérard Genette), through "game", at which point (bored with the choices in SPD – same letters, over and over …), I switched to the index of The Columbia History of Twentieth-Century French Thought (ed. Lawrence D Kritzman); googled the resultant noun-and-name sets, took what I wanted. This is now known as the HTADL/SCACIEO transformation, after the title of its first manifestation, though the HTADL/SCACIEO transformation is slightly modified here, as I allowed myself the luxury of extracting texts from the "digital objects" linked to, not just the Google results screen.

It's a lone guy's toe-dip into the "zeitgeist," as he (or she?) puts it, scooping up "the luxury of extracting texts" by others. It's a new view in fact and a transformation through ad-libbed procedure practiced by one anonymous sort in the blazingly omnipresent Collective.

Money grabber: You get locked out, we'll open your door
... from the makers of Head-on.

I'd like to request Michael Phelps lose "I have no idea."

Always on the lookout for the words of the moment. From Drastic Measures, An Anachronism written, according to Ben, "in the margins" of a prophecy by Anna Laetitia Barbauld (1743-1825), Eighteen Hundred and Eleven. Looksee:

Still waters
    Run deeper into debt.
Ships of state
    Sail out of their depth

The bridge trembles
    Under traffic,
Like an adolescent boy
    Jiggling his leg.

Light dies
    Under duress. A fire
Rising in the east
    Now struggles in the west.

Poetic justice
    Reigns supreme. We elect our rulers,
Not our betters, who judge us then
    With drastic measures [...]

— Benjamin Friedlander

Word of a Newer New Deal. It's invigorating.

Suspension of liberties, financial slaughter, a day in the life of. The rain keeps coming, returning favors to the riverside.

A drop falls from a drop.
The bridge looks into space, at itself.
It looks at its high white cheekbones, the
porcelain curve of the water below. Danger
so comical they cannot help jumping into it,
Eustace and James.

Two wayfarers and their
assignation. The way they say, "private," when
they are caught in the act. Where is the body
below. A close shave. Leap, lap, lapse, leper,
personae, personal, peril, plummet. Put out to sea.

— Elizabeth Robinson

Dumb white chicks dig Barrack Obama.

Republicans have no doubt read tracts along the lines of Drew Gardner's Petroleum Hat (2005) and picked up on the comedic-killer catchphrase stratagem for getting partisans to laugh while turning fence sitters into partisans. Babysit some "pet peeves," and everyone guffaws — as Drew observes with of course more than a grain or two of salt, "women are an anti-civilizing force." Partisanship exploited for poetry is one thing, but the latest ad for John McCain offers up, salt-free, young white "fans" of Obama who, in essence, sissify Obama's appeal, swooning over him, loving his eyes — they're "dreamy." The nonfigurative race cards are now in play full force, as they were in 2006 when Rep. Harold Ford, D-Tennessee, lost to Bob Corker, the only new republican elected to the Senate that year. Corker's most talked-about campaign video brought forward an über-white seductress who appeared to self-immolate over the prospect of sleeping with Ford who is handsome and black. You may remember the slithery, anti-civil taunt, "Harold, call me."

It's mid August and the republican campaign of ridicule has already evolved from Obama's celebrity to home in on his dreaminess and sex appeal. This is a calculated shift to make him at once diminutive and potentially threatening. And more explicit race baiting is to come. Hillary and Bill Clinton's earlier propositions that Obama does not appeal to the white working class have been absorbed, and the core message is now ready to be refined and reintroduced by McCain and operatives in trivializing, pet-peeve ways. It's a down-home stay-on-message party-on campaign engineered by plutocrats Rick Davis and Karl Rove. The message will be rancid yet anyone can dig it, the catchphrase of the week or of the day to stir prejudice, something we can laugh at.

Superangelic on the horizon of today-was-so-o-o-wrong.

Teams of entertainers carry parasites that effect a ruckus. Also affect.

Our president does a Neville Chamberlain, attending a church of state in Beijing, and lingering there for three and half fruitless days after Russia invades Georgia, a now smoldering sovereign nation and our ally. What signal does this send to the international community. Drip, drip. Our pathetic, angst-ridden washing of hands, lavabo, opting for the inverse of waterboarding, passivity in the face of Russian aggression. Too much else is at stake to stand up to principles. We put our faith in god.

Pfffft. Am pushing, pulling my cheek and jowl together like I always do first thing after the overnight meltdown. I dream plenty. Sure do. In the latest, nurses and interns, the usual ones, poured some rubber and cloudy goo into my forehead. This time I saw faces but could barely make them out, maybe Manchurian. Then they changed into jocks made of leggo and acted out my biography. It swooshed by like a great train heist, and I was lying there just having a little fun, messing around a little bit. Can't remember the rest. The craziest one is when they put in a new tube to fix the timing. That helped me get my smile closer to my sneer face when I talk energy. Drill here and drill now. That's from a dream too.

— John Sidney McCain III

I can't keep up with news cycles. It's too much for a standard bearer. Every day all day a new insult. Bayh. Telegenic, yeah, crossed over but what a bantam weight. Kaine. One more community goody goody with no experience. That's a twofer? Sebelius. Sounds like a high church curse. Pretty egregious of the other side to float another woman out there. Anyway, I've been conferring with my supporters and for their sake we'll take this to the convention. Time for more of my name up in lights. Greek theater. Catharsis, that's it. You know, in spite of what's happened whenever there's a floor battle at a major party convention in the last two decades, you know, in spite of they're losing in the general election, it's worth getting this stigma of my nearly pulling it off out of our systems, you know, I'm just working the system, setting the record straight. Bring the wonky other side down to Main Street. Everyone gets it. I'd do anything for my supporters. And you bet they have to see this will make the democrats stronger for November. 2012.

— Hill

The White House was an aphrodisiac. Still sleep over in DC thanks to Hill. I know H would be an asset this November and an even better commander in chief. She's the most qualified not to ask or tell of any name you can throw out there, because she's seen how it's prepped, cooked, compromised, done. When you face utter irrelevance triangulation still works. John knows this, so does H — after those caucuses that shouldn't have counted as much as the raw vote in battlegrounds where only Hill's name was on the ballot. (I still have my issues.) And Congress, that place is such a mess of pulled pork and pickles it takes a tough strategist to get things the way you know they have to be at the moment. H would make a great campaigner and veep. Obama — we call him Mr. Green — needs a strong gun now that John who I have to admire has taken up H's primary themes. And she was right! Look how he's wimped out on offshore drilling and tire gauges. Hill could stop the fairy tale from blowing up if he wanted her too. Man, for that matter I could stop the bleeding just by being less ambiguous but I'm sick of acting the unaggrieved fall guy. No matter who's the victor, I'll be perceived as having lost, so I'll save everyone time. Count me out. I'm the most undervalued loser in this race. Like in 2000 after me no one wins.

— B.

Used to be a democrat, it worked for a while, still was burdened with the bickering and weakness in defense and foreign policy mandated by effetes and elites. Tortured, felt kicked inside by their cowardice in Iraq. You can't set a timeline with Al Quaeda hanging on to precious pipelines. Not with these gas prices. That's playing giveaway, something the Berkeley-Beltway crowd know all too well. Twisted, maybe, but I accede to their domestic agenda, but when the gutsy forehead wrenching issues come up I reach out to practical sports-loving folks and patriots who support the surge, know the surge has worked wonders along with the cash payoffs to sheiks. These are my good friends who believe in their souls the US military, the cream of our youth, has to keep dying for peace and democracy in the region and globally as well. Afghanistan's hold of 93% of worldwide heroin is also a thing we have to take up. I would just hate to think what this country would look like if control over our two biggest commodities, foreign oil and narcotics, were to slip into the hands of terrorists. Yrs,

— Jo

Tax breaks for the wealthiest keep the economy humming — good times or lean, it's high season. So that's fierce. But we're just tapped out from social security. It's an outrage. Why should old people who were never smart enough to invest their own money get to steal from the younger generation? That's the rest of us. Come to think of it, the really younger generation needs school vouchers. That would give kids more choices and make schools more competitive. Why should I or my parents pay for schools where students are dropping out anyway? And lots of these 'inner' cities are a waste, too. Katrina proved that. Did we really need the Lower Ninth? I think we could have new places outside cities that are built by the people who are lazy and don't have jobs and then they can live there and keep them clean. So we'll send all the illegals back where they came from. Finally, why not call a moratorium on bad federal regulations, like on toxins and stuff. That would be very cool.

— P.H.

It's too late for a nervous breakdown.

…you must go on, who knows we beat ... I got to light, out for “Yes” I, to think so barred — brush in extreme fatigue, his soul swooned as I am thinking of aurochs and angels, "Just a moment, Ah!" Before reaching the fin... I went back in, the sun on the old broken-down-river-pier watching over oh I don’t hate it panting ... cold air the iron, New England dark I — don’t I don’t! I — don’t hate it! I ... don’t hate it! "I — feel proud and satisfied — returned to life in your rocking-chair by your window dreaming, destroying the world as, it is now in spite of these deficiencies the wishes the hopes the confidence the predictions the nightmare of real things the fallen wonder of the plague bacillus that never disappears for this is not what I dreamed of "Like... a... dog!” he said — it was as if the shame of it must outlive — sorry I forgot to.. give you the mayonnaise — for everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish for a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate yes they will trample me underfoot the numbers marching one two three four hundred million five hundred six reducing me to specks of voiceless dust Oedipa settled back to await the crying — I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering away a lone a last a love too thought out — everything we need that is not food or love is here. Questions?

Rae Armantrout redefines dark: "not reflecting, // not amenable / to suggestion." This is a good place to start and wind up as far as The Dark Knight goes. It forages into eh ... a fun criminal zeitgeist, the bludgeoned American psyche, these traumatized doomful days before the Olympics? Late Heath Ledger plays a distracted, trany Robin to Christian Bale's sociopath Bruce. They deserve one another. Robin as Joker makes up his mind on the run, no reflection, please, he's scary. Bruce has picked up an unmentionable malaise and wants to give in. Neither speaks well. Ledger keeps shifting registers, often in the same breath. Bale tries purse lip breathing and does voiceovers, masked or not, as if cheating at charades. The plot — oh, you know, Ledger hangs on, Bale loses everything. Again, again. If The Dark Knight were a quatrain it would rhyme A A A A. The story unfolds as a finger painting of cynical implosions, villainizing or knocking off characters, bringing them back to the fold, panic buttons not pushed close to midnight, a batmobile jetting over waste trucks while the D.A.'s getaway stopped inncohesively midchase. Under all the chaos the world is round with angst, according to Ledger. Chaos is the familiar chaser The Dark Knight pours. Live your fears, there's no escape, it's sick and selfish but they're yours. Bromides seem potable given the ethics and the certitude of the moment, as Michael Caine, Bruce's butler, serves up the too prescient motive: "Some men just want to watch the world burn." Rascally rabbit. Some men like us are convinced it's out there and it's dark.

BK goes for a format revamp.

BB's self report, not bad at all. Kind of a flaneur. I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath, and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.

Why in the same week would Jilly Dybka and Bill Keckler kill their blogs? Just to rhyme?

Thanks I'm exhausted.

It's Christmas in July, proverbially.

Speaking of Obama — he's on my mind — I'm scratching my chin wondering how he can blow a 17 point advantage in Wisconsin. It can't be McCain's grumpy charm: "Mr. Obama rather lose the war to win the election. Heeheh." Every pundit points to this election as a 'referendum on Obama,' so here I am pulling at my goatee. What is it about Obama that could produce a massive swing to and fro? This elite shit is craven. He's smarter. You got a problem? Is average resentment of intelligence the problem? Heads up, Obama beats McCain along 100 different dimensions as they say at e-harmony. Maybe it's time for a little nastiness flung McCain's way. This would take off some of O's above-it-all burnish. Nail McCain on his schlong-long list of inconsistencies, mythological economics, unbuff body, even. Sure, put together some town-hall meetings between the old man and the new man, but have a free-throw at the end of each. Have a very visible medical emergency / chemo squad by the door equipped with pace makers, atropine. Heeheh. Obama has to hammer and keep it up, working the streets and sports events of Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Mr. New Man, Colorado, Montana, North Carolina, and Nevada would be nice, but the dems should own the Great Lakes. Winning them is everything. Obama needs a veep that tops the polls in Dearborn and Toledo. Everything else will follow, including the advantage, which is still going Obama's way. But the fight must be joined.

It's been raining for two days. A great excuse to stay where I am and write. And then in less than an hour, at 1:30 on the east coast, watch Obama give his speech by the Victory Column. Wish he would put something down in German but they say he won't. Either way it will be "Seeing... forgetting the name of the thing one sees."

Uh huh yup.

(Just wanted to say it.)

Her name is Timeshare. Mine too.

Michael Nicoloff and Alli Warren read at Moe's — audio dips in, out, so crank it up for some 'penis swift-boating' poems.

Galatea Resurrects Number 10 reaches critical mass. Sounds like a play on words but I mean to convey how a significant swath of current practice has been examined, exposed if not stripped-down. Several reviewers go out on a limb. Different limbs.

I've had a geo-focus (geo as in geographical) when thinking about anthologies. A few years ago along with collaborators I made a few stabs at this on the web — Canada, Tokyo, Boston, & "LA | NY" — and two years ago Faux Press released Bay Poetics, a project that started as a web anthology and got changed into a perfect-bound collection of over a 100 San Francisco Bay Area poets. I'm not sure websites are better archives than books, but were I doing another geo-focused anthology, I'd make sure the web was one medium for publishing some work. The web's flexibility and low cost are by now core assumptions, set in consciousness. With print on demand there's opportunity for both book and web components — a publisher just needs to get herself prepared for managing the disequilibrium between the cheap, lithe medium and the still-sizeable upfront investments required for any sort of book publishing, even print on demand.

Here are three more loci I'd like to see for new web-POD anthologies. Brooklyn. Megalopolis South, a collection of poetry from writers based anywhere from Philadelphia south to DC, co-edited by CAConrad and Rod Smith. LA or at least the sectors that matter to The Bureau, edited by them. (For now, The Bureau is and are an anthology in progress.)

Beyond my geo-bias, two other anthologies that might look good on the web: First would be Flarf Plus, much more than comment box policed outrage, Jacket featurettes, and YouTube snips, time for a collectivized, moveable, interactive text that unzips its fly (the list archives), and goes down on the unicorn 'live' with ongoing posts (so we can see and talk over the inappropriate on the fly). Second would be Bruce Andrews's Anthology, what I might call Bruce Andrews's Postlanguage Anthology although he might never agree to the term postlanguage. This already exists in miniature as half of New Yipes Reader Number 5 (2006), a collection of mostly one-pagers from over fifty friends and colleagues, parenthetically categorized by Andrews as "mostly younger, mostly writers." The list is impressive, including Gregg Biglieri — "I still carry a torture for you"; Ernesto Livon-Grossman — "Which poetics are available now when exorcising-digesting decades of violence in order to make visible the symbolic and reorganize the real in everyday life? What is missing? Until when? And why?"; Camille Martin — "i keep feeling like the big hurricane is coming. the one that's going to plow up the mississippi, create a huge storm surge, and wipe this city off the face of the earth..." [written three months before Katrina]; Julie Patton — "non-chalet / carpentry 'chops' door locks into / section 8 flash card..."

Saturday Afternoon Fetish Fair
forest hills black t shirt and jeans
Red Audi Rt 3 North-Duxbury
Handsome Cyclist along the River (Dracut)
Green Striped Shirt at Rocca
we ran into each other at the top of the stairs (Paradise)
Ricky w/ lip piercings at Knowfat Grill
white t shirt, shorts, cross tattoo on left arm
white sneakers (blue line airport)
cute asian guy with reddish mohawk citychase
The Blarney red polo
Stop & Shop PICK UP TRUCK, stony brook
blonde in the Eliot Hotel
smiled at me on the pec fly (bu, fitrec)
nantasket beach cruising grounds Today/Lost E-mail Address
Friday Lesbian Night (Pure)
you poured my coffee (bu bookstore)
guy with tats and nose ring outside MIT Stata Center
Red Line - Pink Triangle (Park Street)
man in maroon Silverado at Mobil
asian guy tread mill atlantis cambridge
I know it's a long shot - horn pond woburn
hey justin we met in ogunquit!
Lake Quannapowitt Runners
Fitcorp Prudential (Boston) white shirt, glasses
Walking up Moody Street (Waltham)
Smiled at you yesterday HVD Sqr
Cheesecake Factory - Sexy Waiter (Chestnut Hill)
Erik/Eric at Fritz (where are you)

From the weekend desk. This is much more like it.

KJ to JK

That's funny, I don't think I ever did realize our initials mirrored like that, old collaborator...

But just to say, since you don't have a comments box where I can say it under the post — that last melange you wrote about The Cedar is fabulously clever and funny. Which adjectives you always have been, I guess.

And I'm not saying that just to be nice or nostalgic!

If you know how to fix busted motors in Black and Decker push lawnmowers, drop me a line. And that's not a trope for you to pull out of context and use against me.

— Kent

~~

Lawnmowers are on our list of disposable, quickly replaceable consumer goods. Buy a new one. Or hire a "light and winged" adolescent to do it all.

I'm feeling spa-ready about something consensual. Ring it up. It's a dream stem that supports another towel-plumping dream, oh, decades away, in the past, future? em, better, it's more fully realized over my cyber-dream phone-fax-video hookup... matrices of tweezered bond textures, excellently-preserved Royal portable ink ribbons (this must be in the past) — I'm pretty sure that's Frank O sunning himself at an outdoor table at the Cedar! — the very sidewalk joint that gave Sigo his first name — and, kata! that funny five-footer with the implausible, geisha-giggle of a nickname (the one that loosely translates as 'beginner's permit'), no wait, how can Motokiyu [sic] be a waiter at the gaijin Cedar?! The squirt must have needed the dollars to wire back to his parents' penthouse in Shibuya. The lean years. No, wait, here's a tall thin character in tweed, smiling, he's on his way to Frank's table, everything sun splashed. Why, it's that old reprobate Kenneth Koch, a youth here, waving a sheet of 8.5 x 11 inch paper watermarked "Eagle A Acceptance." This is going somewhere. From my bedroom cum spa perch in the Lincoln State I'm pretty sure I've got most of the answers or some pretty nifty lacunae on the way to answering this dream question, for now. Why did Kenneth offer his Eagle sheet to .. yikes, there is a poem typed on the paper! Can't read the words but that font's Royal. Kenneth is handing his poem to Motokiyo but Motokiyo politely insists the Cedar is cash-only. Thus off pops one opportunity to prove the true authorship of the poem that I can't make out from my faraway perspective. Spritz me, please. It's all slipping away as dreams and blog entries do. More soon.

— Sammy Bowles

It's taken me most of the day to recoup from the shock, the absolute stun gun of finding both Kent Johnson summarizing paragraphs in a 1958 letter from Frank O'Hara to Hal Fondren alongside John Latta's sparkling endorsement of Jeni Olin's new chap. (Full disclosure: Latta likes the poetry, not the price of the book nor its kenning.) With regard to Kent, his items, along with equivocal commentary about variations in paper stock and typewriters (I guess the kenning is unremarkable) lay a foundation for more of his "lacunae" (still to come) concerning the true author of "A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island," as Kent promised July 15, below. A twofer, then: Jeni viewed by John Latta and Kent seeing multitudes, at Isola di Rifiuti, July 17.

A country road. A tree.

— Samuel Beckett

Best stage direction of the week, next week, the week after that.

butterfly slain here [...]

Best entry in a comment box this week.

From an era precluding existence [koraizaemon] of language, we of the homo clan sapiens have sought to fulfill and give back only a trillionth beauty [think-speak] in thanks to quail, plums, hegemony, life, and perspective, as they manifest in the scrawl of unbridled consciousness. As participant in the cabinet ministry of communicative spirit I devote myself to grappling with enunciation and form. There is no form without the flicker of expression, no expression without a gloom hollow where love and the dogs [土佐] of water sports (rain) define our milieu. Creepy, yes, and sensitive to beauty [seasons on a string], the end to our gated world takes root throughout the summer [blurtit] like mute and unexpected glass tea buds (pellets) flowering [pulled] from within.

— Javier Alvarez

Drive me out of here. Kent's in denial, claiming I suggested he's bugged here, there, huh? This will stop. Note, though, how Kent skirts the entirety of his disastrous Q. & A., returning to other obsessions of the moment, Frank O'Hara and lacunae regarding the attribution of O'Hara's poem "A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island," lacunae that are 'really-existing' — yeah, they exist because you make them exist, Kent.

Jack,

Really, that does seem like bad-bad blog etiquette: to say that I had "talked" to you (suggesting I am bugged by your comments there?), when we haven't communicated in quite some time...

I mean, that's fine, but I'm a bit surprised. There is nothing in my comments on the O'Hara poem that is untrue, after all. I'm simply putting some really-existing lacunae out there for consideration. Why is that worthy of a little lie from you, in return? It just seems so petty.

I'm writing a follow-up as we speak, actually, which is based on some new archival materials I have received. Please write me back as soon as you can to clarify [sic].

— Kent

As two parties move through a process, their feelings fluctuate. Kent Johnson and I had been about to discuss my handing over some of the writing here to him and others that are inclined to flesh out a sort of pantaloons ethos. Yesterday's experiment, however, was an affrighted start, and I apologize for the lapse in taste. A line has been crossed. Argot thrown down as 'arguments,' mere eddies of suggestion. After his uncalibrated Q. & A., I'd rather not hear further on how Kent feels.

— Jerri Chodorow

Q. As a new career poet just finished my second semester (superfluous wreck) in a highly prestigious program at ____ College, I was actually delighted (seasoned), at first, to be like selected to participate in a Spring semester joint seminar this Spring on collaborative stuff emphasizing green energy (a freshening prosperity). The two profs for the sessions, which seemed like they were going to be overwhelming and work-stressful, alternated one week to the next, one different from the other, a doctor of forensic accounting, another a recent ____ grad herself specializing in aroma upkeep and (irascible decline) consultancy on the world wide web on the side. Spring seemed like it was going to be blazing, thanks to the seminar as a current course on hot style and substance when it comes to drifts in attention (stitching a pratfall). We covered a multitude of apparent trendoids, group opposition research, what to do when a team player collapses (soft foyer), denuding essentially various climates of opinion to gain higher bafflement, exploiting a collective consideration of remarks, any remarks (deep fashion), and scoring strategies toward like mega-halo effects (champagne of rebuttal) with each of them. A large portion of our grades for the course I took at a major art school is (are?) based upon group projects, basically. One person on my team has taken an egregious free ride (draining sap) on the hard work of the rest of us, however (o fleur de cull). We already turned in our final poems which we wrote to each other in two all-nighters and then ran through a British spell checker for a single esthetic (borough-ed), so telling the professors (rigging the marsh) about this would have no practical purpose, but it might teach this guy a lesson. Rat him out?

A. Rat away not, not right away, not to teach the guy a lesson — that’s not your job — not to give the ones who handed out the assignment a true account of how it was accomplished, and not to pour it on one by one or as a mannered ensemble, humble-like, thick as flattery, but later. Much later — when everything appears to have calmed down balefully as in marriage — fasten together a controversy! Something velvet (you earned and own it) that staggers. It is misleading for now but not Fascist to list this student — and he's male, of course — does he still have hair? — among those who did not a lick of groupwork if he did not, not that your teachers could imagine or forestall, or at least respond to, such problems only if he or she knows about them, but better to fit them into the syllabus next time. Better to integrate the grasping applications. That is, to make some sense on the dolor of adventurism.

Whose name went on the poems, I wonder. Maybe you should put only his name. Your profs might get it. (Demurers to the lever. Honest mistakes.)

Had you spoken to your teachers when the problem first emerged (vexed progress calling the chops), there may have been a contingency button to click. I consulted a professor in an MFA program who said, “The ground rules for dealing with free riders are sometimes explicitly laid out — e.g., the free rider may be fired by a majority of key members who hold the real power.”

There is another possibility. Poets must sometimes cope with teams comprising workers and drones, the productive and the parasitic, the quick and the dead. (Tribunish.) This assignment, which has a touch of imperial Rome about it, may have been conceived in part to teach you as much about vanquishing multi-headed grumbling inferiority at the margins. (Imposters can't keep up with the collective.) When it comes to the credit, be firm about apportionment. Take it, keep the outside out where it is. That professor I spoke to concurred, saying, “One of the explicit benefits of working in groups is that it forces poets to confront these and other human flow issues.”

— Kent Johnson

Protest like the old days (scroll to July 10 & ff).

Another from Autoportraits, a burn down.

I'm stuck on you. Uplifted and dropped, as if by a faulty mechanism.

I'll live in the ruin. I'll take the leftovers. I'll pick the trash.

Now that you have shown your icy heart, I see you more clearly, and I want you even more...

-- Anne Tardos

This guy is taking the blog format into a personal, splendidly ur-poetic "quiet place to stay," to cite Kevin Killian in Autoportraits.

I can't be overdrawn, I still have some checks.

Untitled

i

I've always been there waiting for the rush
updrafts don't even have, the time of today
our mouths kill, the date hammered on bread
and cheese and no sooner had we primped
than we are dopey in the bed

ii

My friend is smoking, "I'm
wind blown," he says turning
this way and like when we sit down
before the mirror "or I'm crazy
about our necks brought up to succeed."

   could be
Life is good.

Untitled

Text from a subscriber who won't consider
the enormity of it as hooded fucks
run back to check out cost averages
but the jug's unlocked, to no product hewn.

It's such nice work, the jug
and its schema proliferating a fable
between acts of kindness, themes
of incitements or is it just empty?

I'm still not finished, she says.
We call it theoretical kindness
since there's no one else speaking.
The jug she's texting to's not audible –

he's just a backstory anyway
sulking in some idea of a room
with a hygienic view forward, a word
that cannot be considered in words.

We're heading toward what we signed up for. You and I no longer inhabit a multi-class meritocracy, because just as Americans have always claimed, class doesn't matter. And everybody knows merit can be harnessed, pooled, and counted. You're either in the Archives or Out. Ideas are machines called conceptual. Show up and salute. Peter Schjeldahl writes in response to the numbing significance of a Jeff Koons, "intelligence is obsolete in a world where things are either blazingly obvious or pitch dark."

Like most allegories, with Autoimmunity there are others inside and enough representational devices in the crosshairs to indict rule-governed mechanics bearing political abstraction and discontinuity as off-point, irresolute, wan. The book-length poem captures the proto-narco-coup-ness of the epoch we populate in its ready conflation of opinion with law. Most of the poem takes form in short verses that recall and respond to the language and ideas introduced in these first three prose-like stanzas.

A director shoots a political film under the junta. He disguises it as a retelling of the Oresteia, keeps even the actors in the dark. He moves them from village to village as traveling players who can never complete a performance of the pastoral where shepherd abandons courtship of shepherdess. Each staging is fatally interrupted by air raids, arrests, the shooting of collaborators onstage. The show turns into slapstick. Speech is expelled from the theater by theatricality.

From November 2000 to June 2002 I left the country to detoxify my body, crossing the border from New York State into Ontario for weekly naturopathic treatments. Sometimes my trips coincided with American holidays like the Fourth of July, or days of national importance like Election Day 2000 and Timothy McVeigh's execution. After September 11th, all the days were theatrical.

My illness could not be cured at home. Across from what was now called the homeland, I played myself as a traveling show

-- Eleni Stecopoulos

Here's another kind of pondering. You're invited to participate in a prélude non mesuré or if you will a read-along that takes you for an aleatory jaunt. In Punks every page is filled with two columns of text of recognizably similar length; every double page filled with four columns! So smack in the middle of the poem which is also the middle of the book if you read along the top line of four columns (which is my best first choice) it goes: many economists expect         have got this reflex         sir you paint a fake         my body busted... Let's try the second lines from columns 1 through 4: me and Poland to relish         to get in an oven         picture of Venezuela         into Foot Locker... It's a left-foot, right-brain jaunt. Reading each column discretely is exhilarating, too. Here are a few lines from the first column, from the same midpoint in the poem.

many economists expect
me and Poland to relish
the personal bust-up
of the leisure class
I am what I bulge
it makes me indifferent
the sublet version
of a Libyan peso
staging a face-in...

-- Michael Nicoloff

Everyone, it's purported, waits for Kevin Killian to send up his fashionista impressions of Orono as he did four years ago. Meantime, Rodney's posts fill in lots of blanks and get the temperaments down so we can ponder what got done to whom through asides, flaccid or shined.

A few of us, let's admit it, are incredulous when it comes to postlanguage. What the heck is it? It's first of all an historical, that is, chronological fact. Something something that follows the first language generation, some hyper criticism of now that may sound tonal for a moment, that may open into al fresco narrative if it wants to, because the visual is back -- what a relief! -- at least bits of a hungry, peek-aboo lyricism, then, among other options amid political downtime masking horror. One key is that there are options for urgency ("calling out to you," almost personae-driven) to compete with a self-reflexive linguistics ("the invasive assertions crowding in..."), both unfolding measuredly within a list of grievances (even as the calling is drowned by discursive officialese -- "giving onto. Making free with"). And get this, because this is also key; postlanguage is often best practiced by language poets, as with this text published in The Likes of Us last year; it takes us from the start to halfway through the poem "Where Once It Was Deemed An Advantage To Know So Many Words," a title so layered with critique, we can absorb it all in a single swoop.

seeing how the tables have turned

that terrible foreknowledge sinking into the west

Those vasty deeps calling out to you

the imperial aloofness of the overpass, the flyover, the dress-rehearsal,
the four-in-hand, the signature cowlick

NO FOOD USE -- FOR DISPLAY PURPOSES ONLY

a top-down command profligacy

the alike. The superb, canny sloth flecked with benign rancor

prompting for any sign. As in, "I wonder what the poorer rabbits are
doing this season?"

A gorgon demonstrating motion furniture. A giantess astride the
Bowery

nameless and unshod, the invasive assertions crowding in upon us just
before the return-date

the wayward surgical appliance stumping across the access road

giving onto. Making free with. What was once afoot, and bruited

Gas. Food. Lodging

shriven and rent, all-too-knowable, that low mittel-european scent like
a serge [...]

-- Michael Gottlieb

Stupidity after stupidity. William Logan assess Frank O'Hara's new Selected Poems with warped, arthritic insight cum generosity of a crippled censor. "O'Hara's wonderful poems are all too easily drowned out by the vivifying mediocrity of the rest," Logan chirps. Or this: O'Hara sounds like Wallace Stevens "at the soda fountain." Funny, I thought the Wallace Stevens of Key West bathed in soda. Guess it depends which meds you're drinking. For the new selected, editor Mark Ford, inventor of a nervy, revisionist NY anthology, the nastily truncated The New York Poets, inserts "a small sheaf of the poet’s rambling prose statements and reminiscences, some of which sound more like Ernie Kovacs or Lenny Bruce than the author of these insouciantly unserious poems," Logan, continues -- most vivifying – then adding parenthetically "O'Hara loathed academic hauteur, though he needn't have sounded so oafish about it." Needn't he have? Insouciant but loathing hauteur? Oafish, Kovacs, soda fountain -- how far down will the censor dig to mine cadavers for metaphor? Other life support for O'Hara: grindingly self-conscious; sounds like Ezra Pound on happy pills; O’Hara treated contemporary art with far more deliberation than he treated poetry; [i]t's hard to care about a lot of O’Hara’s poems. Boo.

A rooming house. Inside, every room is named canonically after a poetics. Defence of Ryme, Habits of Empire, Preface to Sordello, Being and Event, Chicken in the Field, Prepositions, Camera Lucida, and so forth. Collecting rent every week is like rereading each critique. The kitchen is Untitled.

Untitled

Last night or in the last few nights anyone dream of waste treatment? Dropped off in a maze around some toxic water's edge. Preemptively let go in sulfurous smoke without a mask. 'Normal' folks with misleading directions for the way out. Taking the wrong bus. Passengers forcing down black powder, part of a 'test.' Told to get treatment and report back. Any of this sound familiar, send me an e, address top right. Thanks.

Sometimes Pound can be put to good use.

The Age demanded you-know-what
And what-have-you, a kind of
Weeping in laughter, and laughter
In weeping, not, anyhow,

The dance of the mind about the word,
Not (oh, brother)
Talking rats, the "moron," --
No. This is not what we require.

At last the "age demanded" the laughter
Of a machine, applause,
A machine hard-on, not (my god!) a sigh,
A gasp left in the throat.

-- Aaron Kunin

Rodney's 1970s conference look-backs (6/23, 20-17) are great, and more to come. Also, Philip Metres, 6/21, 19.

My 1970s Syllabus, Week One


An Anthology of New York Poets, w/ a couplet handwritten by David Shapiro, first edition, $45.50

Own Your Own Body, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, inscribed "with love," $220.00

Maya Angelou's Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas, signed in large cursive, "Joy! Maya Angelou," $400.00

Hand imprints from 24 beats, The Poet's Hand Book, inscribed w/ mantras by Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, others, $6500.00


Hard cover, A Serious Morning, signed by Andrei Codrescu, $100.00

Gregory Corso's Ankh, no. 13 in the Pheonix Octavo Series, $120.00

Peter Inman, What Happens Next, one of 100, $113.05


Summits Move with the Tide, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, 50 pages, $95.00

Michael Mcclure's Grabbing of the Fairy, signed, $29.95

John Wieners's Invitation, three poems, signed first edition, $122.50

Larry Rivers and Kenneth Koch, Diana Latin Goddess of the Moon, no. 8 of 19 copies inscribed by Rivers, four artist's proofs hinged in three dimensions, $14,000.00

Untitled

Every poem with a title is conceptual.