Is this the dark side of poetry speaking? A concatenation of puzzling results from an alphabet soup of twitter messages and blog experiments has led a growing number of poets and analysts to suspect that they are getting signals from a shadowy totality of dark poetics. They cite a curious aggregation of upward spirals in web traffic, digitized "clouds" of free utilities floating through hyperspace, along with other tech-aided compositional adaptations to create busy work, to make it "work," and to combat chronic writer's block. These results suggest a dark totality or entirety that makes up at least a quarter of all text creation but has eluded direct detection until now.

Maybe.

"Darkness can be brokered like any morbid trend you can see through and drive off a board game. I'm afraid it's all over between us bright kids and the dark siders," said Virgil Mark, head of text assembly at W. W. Norton, publishers of, among others dying for attention, Adrian Roche, a big boob and longstanding opponent of any easy way out of writer's block. "I can look up more words than probably a toaster," Mark added as if to punctuate his tendency to mutter and hostility to going-with-the-flow. "Au contraire," as the song is sung, "Nobody really knows how many adaptations and adapters could be put to work, or what's really going on," Noel Shark and Oishi Kana chimed together, iambically, in frantic pantameter mockery. Shark and Oishi have joined to form an a cappella duet for text-generation and analysis at the University of Upper Michigan.

Analysts of all persuasions caution in any case that there could still be a relatively simple übertextual explanation for the recent explosion of dark observations. Surely, like popping kernels of poems in a puffy brown bag, the nature of this dark poetics is one of the burning issues arts managers are currently dancing around with or in. Identifying the source or sources of this darkness would point the way to a deeper understanding of the laws of graduate study and the workshop impulse to compose poem after poem, many not making a whit of sense. And of course there is the Holy Grail among literary sentimentalists (those who love their boys or girls in a skirt or kilt) to fulfill the Frost-Zukofskian dream of a unified clock to punch for poetics, and have it all go up in sparks.

The last few weeks have seen a blizzard of papers trying to explain all these dark sightings in terms of things like "minimal dark gender-driven counterinterventions" or "exciting dark post-human disproportion," or "hidden pitfalls in dark performative understatement," and "the dark valley of statistical tempests and tarnished ancestry," as well as to suggest how to look for concentrated darkness in text accelerators like the Large Head-on Google Collider. "It could be deliriously exciting, an incredibly cool story," said Lesley Randy-St. Hamed of the Institute for Advanced Textuality in North Cranberry, N.J., who has been churning out papers with students s/he supervises. "Anomalies in the SPD homepage tell you what to look for in the collider."

A team of analysts working on one of the experiments reported in the journal Naturalist Or Structuralist / Poetry for Nonquitters that a text density detector onboard a balloon flying around a laptop in Bryant Park had recorded an excess number of high-energy text erasures and their opposites, error message appropriations, sailing through hyperspace. Text density, they conceded, could have been created by a previously undiscovered poetics algorithm, the magnetized spinning remnant of a unitary creative output, blasting nearby hyperspace with metaphoric force. But, they say, a better and more enticing explanation for the excess is that texts are being spit out of rhetorical fireballs created by dark poetics theorems colliding and annihilating one another over the web.

"We cannot disprove that the signal could come from a singlteon object, such as an imprisoned poet playing on her keyboard. We also cannot eliminate a dark poetics annihilation explanation based upon current data," said John P. Waffle of Lafayette Community University, Chair of the Andrei Codrescu Worst Case Study Team, adding, "Whichever way it goes, for us it is exciting. I mean, it's so close to antipathies."

Our treasure is sunk. We were amazed, once, at all the money. We thought it ours, Oyster Harbor, Burningseed Farms, Eelfleet Grove, our entwined enclaves no more. The McMansion shuttered, now, a career punctured, a sullen lifestyle deferred, Twilight: eight years of deepening malevolence and road rage at dusk, living and hand-wringing with W., and here's where we lose sight of a bowl of irony and riches and a lighter time, reduced to an audience with our mirrored essence, the chilled gimmick of our inner teenage vegetarian vampirism. Well, half-vegetarian — we drink only the discounted blood of nonhumans for the moment, ha ha, since we've gone through a lot of money, and since the lovers among us still hanker to appear manly and acceptable to a widening, treasured demographic, prurient moms and their frenzied daughters, and we don't want to seem too harsh, except when holding them out of reach from the other vampires. And while everyone can stumble, and a few sink now and then into reduced circumstances, the failure to consummate a redeeming relationship is not a problem. Repeat, deferment is business, and there's a sequel. We'll keep the sweetest children for now, that is, we'll keep the best of what life offers, the youngest females, unperched, close to our pulse, and poke them tenderly like endangered kittens. And — sure — there's still the itch — we can't sublimate — for cougar flesh, dog fluids, and more infusions of cash. Savings and loans that paid for all this look more and more ghoulish under the froth of the new rules, the new austerity in mirrors. But terrific news, it won't add up in the end.

Alan Davies, appreciated.

Poetics archivist Erika Staiti has amassed in pdf format a month of e-list posts and blog entries about Issue 1 (the 3,785-page anthology compiled by text generator Erika, no relation, assisted by Stephen McLaughlin, Gregory Laynor, and Vladimir Zykov). Staiti calls this collection Issue 2 / BPL, introduced in html at her site saidwhatwesaid.com/. If you want to access the Issue 2 part (blog material) and if the code to the pdf link has not yet been corrected, change the capital "I" of Issue in the address- / tool-bar to lower case, issue.

There's an Ocean's 13. Released last year. I didn't remember until last weekend when I caught ten minutes in the middle, on Showtime. The heist is heists spread out like dozens of gloved hands arranged in a meanwhile of dialog and repetitive motion, many of the same crew as 12 and 11, just less group thinking so fewer people get hurt, less to do. I'm guessing. If I have more consciousness to dispose of, I'll catch the beginning or the end, and be more qualified to speak.

Just so you know, we've been holding our tongues here at the pantaloons politics cubicle. All two minds of us. (We of two minds...) On one hand (switching metaphors), we'd like to keep cutting Barrack Obama his due of slack, on the other, we haven't kicked the Rahm Emanuel Deliberation Flu. For a week we've suffered a relapse of public vetting-of/kvetching-over Hillary Clinton. Why didn't the ethics/probity section of the Transition Team find out what it needs about Bill and lay down its operational procedures for Bill's future travels and fundraising in advance of leaking that Hillary has been tapped for secretary of state? Yes, the negotiations were given away thanks to two Secret Service contingents converging when Obama and Clinton met in Chicago last week. Reporters follow such convergence, we observe, biting our tongues. The scold goes on, important as it is, get this process stuff out of the way before the sit down. Now Eric Holder's name has been leaked as Obama's attorney general, contingent, again, on a final round of background checks. Leaking names with conditionals is mid-size corporate. We'd like to get out of these clothes, stop commuting down the same mile of numbered highway, because it's tedious in ways that gearing up to run an empire is not.

It's just a matter of exposure. He and you. There is no way to see that I'm not there for you on the surface...heck, it's inexhaustible. I so love a rain interchanged like paperwork for sex. All you need is lines in the shirt and there it goes, painful physically, underexposed, muffled, wearing a fat suit in a splat within an hour-long set of splats. Countersinking. And what I want is screams at the top of thoughts, gobs of them that head off in it-ain't-kind pursuit till my eyes melt in sorrow and core circuitry, closer to Bob. No, keep repeating shit and I imagine your face everywhere, almost measurable, rubbed with a rabbit's foot as you fork over a jacuzzi of techniques and more party organizers to kill the world for me or a civilian equivalent plucked from a crowd of browsers in ways that have worked before, and before that, because you want us to unfold in an original manner, walk on the beach, and manifest a force of habit. So we can stay and be the best and spread the plan wearing pumps and a day's growth of beard making it new wherever... And owing to your interest we can constitute a date. Of a sort. A sort that works only when you move your tongue technically — the satchel comes undone and we're fucking around — you're very cute, nice middle long blonde hair covered by a shroud that frays and unspools, and it's great we can get others to pay for it but eventually you know Bob says we can't be serious so we lose. A Nair of mayhem. Discreet to a porpoise. It's funny that way.

In fact, if I see him again I'll ask him if I can Nair his balls.

There's nothing Ian Fleming-ish about the new James Bond. At first sight he doesn't look or feel Oxbridge or University College or particularly British, for that matter. Squint and Daniel Craig passes for the early release of Vladimir Putin, Russia's black belt of state. At rest, Craig comes across informally stiff but moves like a killing triathlete, tough northern Euro, Slavic, Nordic, possibly Norman, so by a long stretch, British or Irish, of average height, lower middle class. (I like Craig playing to his hoodie phenotype, a brainy middle manager amidst a London cocaine syndicate in Layer Cake, a crazed son of an Irish-American mobster in Road to Perdition.) When Craig crossed over first to play Agent 007 in Casino Royale, I paid no attention to how substantially different in stature he is from previous Bonds. This is the 21st century iteration, after all, chillier, yet vulnerable to the core as Craig in Casino falls hard for another M16 operative Vesper Lynd (played by Ursula Andress), a double agent who betrays Bond before she commits suicide to save him. The new Bond film, Quantum of Solace, allows Craig to settle scores related to that loss and betrayal, noticeably showcasing his lithe, martial physicality versus a fresh, much more ironic and suave adversary, Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric). Greene is a Francophone meanie who plots to take over the world's natural resources, regime by regime, coup by coup. Ian Fleming's problem set, then, is familiar; M16 saves the planet from continental turpitude; but the magnets are reversed, textures rubbed raw. The Quantum Bond never sweet-talks his women, never outthinks his villains, except when he stays alive to waste them. Craig's cleverness is endurance, bleeding and sweating, cheek and brow gunked up heroically through chase after hellish chase (whose chutes-and-ladders causalities and hand-held cinematography, all together, start to show). A good amount of the action goes south to Bolivia, replicating a couple of luxury rooms in La Paz as well as slums, a sinkhole, and desert, the antipodes of the classic pool sides, chalets, and baccarat tables of many 007 films. This new enterprise seems to have gone to a less sane, grittier south, so to speak, with M16 cutting Bond loose, seeming to side with Greene for a few crucial moments near the end. The amorality extracted in struggle over finite resources will do that to governments, even the British one. Two minor characters, CIA types, sold out to Greene an hour earlier, of course. In perhaps the only true twist out of Fleming, M16 regains its moral superiority to the Americans by bringing Bond back into the fold, double-crossing Greene. It's quite all right. He's French.

Up next, books that go under rewrite as you read them, that flip genres overnight, that change your mind while you sleep.

Lexapro, Effexor. Whatever antidepressants are stockpiled at Treasury it's clear that Henry Paulson Jr. is as ungainly and opaque today as he has been throughout the financial meltdown. I'm amazed TV jocks and comedians have yet to pick up on his weirdly Princetonian-Frankenstein furrowed demeanor, overarching the podium, spitting out the vaguest and least comforting platitudes as he dips into our till, this is no silver bullet. And this is no James Rubin. Treasurer Rubin, if you think back to the Clinton administration, specialized in translating investment bank speak into well-formulated assertions and alternatives for politicians and an alert public to weigh, pro or con. But now we're fighting off Paulson Seasonal Affective Syndrome, finding ourselves lurching forward and back just like the Treasury. As taxpayers we're all cavalier and clueless as to which mammoth institutional mouths to stuff with billions and more billions from the federal bailout pantry/ATM, the one with our very names on it. Meanwhile, between dosages of Effexor and Lexapro, let's chew over the nutty prospect of American Express converting itself into a bank so it can get some. Some of ours. Why not me, why not me?? you may ask. If you're feeling agitated, see if this works. I propose the government issue paperwork immediately to facilitate an individual or, at least, an individual taxpayer to change herself into a bank. As banks we would be able to line up at Paulson's pantry/ATM and get some, too. Some of ours.

Favelas in this country are de-centralized failures fading into abstractions. An odd parallelism, I think, to our social administration that should have eliminated poverty decades ago. There are, first, the small town and rural poor, totally dispersed, spread all over, particularly Appalachia, out of earshot, and out of sight of the supernumerary chattering classes. Second, housing projects are also out of sight in most big cities, thrown up in the margins on underpoliced transitional blocks of once-industrial or proto-working-class sectors, places where The New York Times will never be delivered to your door. Being poor has been turned into a set of excoriating, dismissive metaphors for peripheral topics in the financial news, usually a wee fraction of our media intake. This has shifted a bit, given the numbing but no less pornographic sensation of mounting foreclosures (Where do these ex-homeowners go? This could be me!) and failing investment banks (Where do these ex-billionaires go? This could be me!). Beyond the folks like me there are the nonborderline poor, many who have never stepped into a bank, never had the means to apply for a mortgage on a place they might one day own. The catastrophe that was New Orleans after Katrina made a few of these poor visible. For a few days.

Expert social administration. It's been a while. On the heels of the failed Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson Jr. changing the rules of his own bailout plan, announcing today that he was backing away from buying mortgage assets in favor of a second round of capital injections into financial institutions, the question is, Have we had much administration lately of communal rights and access, much less expert administration? I want to cut off the lavish entitlements granted by legislators and their administrators to credit and securities markets, not just the billions in bailout cash, but the phoned-it-in usury bylaws underpinning ballooning mortgages, fees and late payments, student loan interest, pay day loans, along with a pile of loopholes favoring institutions and countless wily intangibles like derivatives. Charging interest beyond legal limits... has an antique, pull-at-your-heart, subterranean ring to it, since our administrators have set in law new, higher limits far beyond what had been allowed historically. Current legislation enshrines tautologies that materialized as visual commonplaces in New Orleans after Katrina: the victims act guilty, wait in line, play by the rules, get fucked. Louisiana and especially the lower delta were formerly purple hold-outs. With the exodus, dispersion, and ultimate de-centralizing of blacks and of the poor, Louisiana now joins the sprawl of poor dotting Appalachia as the southern tip of the only predominantly red country left. This has been administrated.

News. Genuine news.

Plantation. To wield a conceptual brush is to terrorize, even if your motivating injunctions steer clear of violence or unregulated emotion. Terror here is a poetry's swift, certain, nontrivial insertion through a hole and/or through the self-negation in certitude and flatulent controversy, such as with Basho's disproving that human sound cannot transform animal to mineral, or with Duchamp's counter-ploy to the proposition that men's room accoutrement belong in their dimly illuminated place.

Controversy, like injunction, comes to us frequently or commonly as back-formation, a provisional ethos after the conceptual stroke. We were constrained by the profound assumption, for example, that a play requires the tone and the stage be set in many more than five words. We were tacitly sure of this, marginalized more until we read Beckett's new direction: A country road. A tree.

The opposite formation also obtains. A conceptualist can enter the game with exhaustive desire to alter something semantically or take it into something else. Name a thing and you give birth, rename it and you bestow to it an ecology of resonance and history.

The first sexual union to be called marriage was and is a conceptual stroke. George Romero still fills a corner of rural PA with puns and the seeds of social rebellion, which he dubs The Night of the Living Dead, subsequently inflecting perpetual, if unintended, disappointment upon Republican presidential campaigns. Kenneth Goldsmith names his splendid e-archive of avant achievements Ubuweb, fully adjoining samples of mostly 20th-century texts, visuals, video and sound files to the legend and goodwill of Ubu Roi, Dadaist Alfred Jarry's masterpiece of appropriation. (Jarry's are samplings, as well, pioneering compilations of Shakespeare and 19th-century Polish burlesque.) Moving on, if one renames the e-archive "Plantation," one aggregates to the conscious plane the dual status of Goldsmith's property — both a techno-field of borrowed resources, i.e., conceptual specimens, and a material field of those holdings. The renaming conceit carries on while monthly curators re-till the leasehold, hired as cognitive guest workers to mediate the fruits into micro-combinations of artifacts sorted by taste. Plantation is just one random attribute, one name for extensive project-use, a geography of others' properties with unlimited prospect. Our collective history is replete with these extremities. For half a millennium the two continents of the New World have carried the first name of a Florentian cartographer, attributed as though by accident as among the first to compile legends and maps of others' land.

A country road. A tree.

— Samuel Beckett



What's conceptual? Search for a way without mixing with the dead, yet removed from the living, Seneca's words relieved of the temporary futility of having to explain further. The conceptual is a stroke that works, or ought to result, from an injunction. Make the frog water — Basho. Proceed (a) as if to reify the urinal then (b) kill (a) — Duchamp. Colorize shifts in national passion — as above.

Nobody's a bystander, innocent, or other. If your search leads to emphasizing process you will foreground conditional practice, merging so-called cognitive work with artifact production. Practice is split into two likely domains, one where cognition will mediate (plan and organize) forms for production, and the other where temporary protocols are set up and enforced to achieve automated materials and assemblies.

There is no guarantee, however, that processual emphasis will yield a conceptual aritfact. A critical analysis will turn to the first order or injunction (or desiratum) as a key element in a ratio between what is conceived and how.

Transition, Day Three. President-elect Obama's first news conference did not meet the gold standard.

(a) ...we have to mount a international effort...

(b) ...President Bush graciously invited Michelle and I to meet with him and...

(c) ...I want to move with all deliberate haste...

(d) ...In terms of speaking to former presidents, I have spoken to all of them that are living. Obviously, President Clinton. I didn't want to get into a Nancy Reagan thing about, you know, doing any séances.

We're watching and listening to Obama, because he is an alluring figure in speech, and because we need to.

Nearly perfect as a campaigner, Obama has not yet taken on the mantle of presidential rhetor. These faux pas signal not everything is secure. Surely, (a) and (c) are oddities, unexpected slips of the tongue. Haste is not wrong, outright, but connotations of rashness and overeagerness have to be avoided. (The phrase Obama wants would be deliberate speed.) The (b) construction is anxious hypercorrection. *Michelle and me were invited...Michelle and I.* Educated native speakers of English master the rules governing use of the objective case by puberty, and we apply these rules if we are serious about being (perceived as) in command.

The set of phrases under (d) is off-putting. In written form the utterance is syntactically conventional even if semantically obtuse. The video transcript fills in what's happening while Obama reviews a thought in process, awkwardly formed, that is, all of them that are living. As he continues, more slowly enunciating Obviously, President Clinton... we imagine Obama is thinking recursively, speaking internally to himself, under his oral speech — what the aitch am I putting out there? — having recognized the redundancy of that are living. At this point, right after the long, slower stretch Obviously, President Clinton... Obama might have gone in a different direction. He could have laughed off his earlier phrase that are living. He might have ignored his redundancy altogether, or brilliantly tied together his contact with living presidents with his reading dead ones like Lincoln. Resorting to Nancy Reagan and séances was amusing but also embarrassing. (Obama had to call Mrs. Reagan after the news conference to apologize. It would be instructive to have that transcript!)

Another thing. The stagecraft was déjà vu, hokey. A dozen or so financial wizards, all but Robert Reich towering over squat Rahm Emanuel who stood in the foreground, akimbo and a bit jittery, to Obama's left, Joe Biden in the foreground to the right, with a big apple pie grin. The silhouette affected was that of a heathen menorah whose candles were lit at random, creating an asymmetry of waxed pillars and stumps.

On the other hand, Obama's first q. & a. as president-elect outshone anything that George W. has put on for the last eight years. Substantively, Obama was measured, cautious. But let's hold him to the gold standard, which, as recorded by modern media, is purely Democrat: FDR, JFK, Bill Clinton — three presidents who were never tongue tied and who knew how to put on a show. (There's also the chrome plate standard of Ronald Reagan who showed very well but said awful things, almost continuously.) To look forward to a president who communicates forcibly will make the coming months less gruesome, perhaps a clearer trajectory from the bottom, now, to the irresistible obscenities of a more prosperous and smarter future.

This comes just in time to usher in Obamaesthetics.

ON: Contemporary Practice

Taylor Brady ON Yedda Morrison
Brandon Brown ON Dana Ward
Jason Christie ON Michael deBeye
CAConrad & Brenda Iijima ON CA Conrad & Brenda Iijima
Michael Cross ON Thom Donovan
Thom Donovan ON Brenda Iijima
Eli Drabman ON Michael Cross
Alan Gilbert ON DJ/Rupture
Rob Halpern ON Taylor Brady
Jen Hofer & Sawako Nakayasu ON Jen Hofer & Sawako Nakayasu
Andrew Levy ON Arakawa and Gins
Edric Mesmer ON Lauren Shufran and/or Mark Dickinson
Tenney Nathanson ON Beverly Dahlen
Richard Owens ON Dale Smith
Tim Peterson ON kari edwards
Andrew Rippeon ON C.J. Martin
Kyle Schlesigner ON Emily McVarish
Jonathan Skinner ON Julie Patton
Dale Smith ON Hoa Nguyen
Alli Warren & Suzanne Stein ON Alli Warren & Suzanne Stein
Katie Yates ON Belle Gironda

Ignorance unmasked but we missed it. After the fact we learn McCain's ad team conceived of, and then nixed, another celeb slapdown. This was one more pseudo-concept to intimate how McCain's opponent is both lightweight and racially threatening, a split-screen affair w/ the president-elect shaking stuff in a parkland off the campaign trail and Ellen DeGeneres going for it back in the studio. But the team saw something else — the highest denomination of counterideology?? — which even they couldn't handle. The ad was shot down, because the sight of a black man dancing with a lesbian was deemed too provocative.

Transition, Day One. Unimpressive first step. Leaking or semi-announcing Rahm Emanuel as likely chief of staff before he's finished 'thinking it over.' Next step less impressive. Letting Emanuel semi-deliberate in front of cameras. Doesn't speak forcefully, doesn't portend excellence. And excellence is the new decoder buzz, right? Anyway, go to the next line.

Best line. There is absolutely no diva in me. Just think what it would mean to have Sarah Palin to pay attention to for four years. An organized spectacle of vacuum-packed salmon and boiled eggs, without a predicate.

Sobering.

Burp.

Hoooooooooray...

I'm not ok with a 67-year-old poodle handler from Marconi Park passing judgment on Obama's socialist policies. Put this in the heard-enough-propaganda-to-be-dangerous category. And why haven't the Obama people counterpunched w/ videos of McCain back in 2000 explaining how higher taxation of the wealthy is fair? Why, in other words, have the O's let McCain climb back using the stale graduated tax-and-spend argument? Finally, in my last vent over the campaign before 11/4, have you noticed over the weekend various republican factions, including the most hateful Dick Morris, put out their respective versions of the Reverend Wright attack? Incredibly, this morning there are democratic pundits still giving McCain credit for taking the high road, not playing the race card. Make that, not playing it until the nth hour in the battlegrounds PA, OH, IN. The national polls are encouraging, but they reflect Obama's lopsided pluralities in the Northeast and California. That reputed ground game of the O's just better be primed. I'm looking 8:30 PM or so on Tueday to VA and Philadelphia vote counts for some relief. (Meanwhile, I'll be steaming.) If the O's exit Phillie 500,000+ they will probably get PA. And if McCain loses VA, that will just about clinch it.

You stole my nose. Someone did. Curious where it went.

Short pieces (first appearing here as drafts) on Carter Ratcliff, Laynie Browne, Brian Kim Stefans, in Talisman 36/37.

Overheard outside the sembutsujo, Go frickin meditate before I slash you.

Posted October 31, Bill Knott exercises w/ Ashbery, and the result is not frantic. A careful, delimited discussion, and apt, as well, since Knott chose a short poem that opens "Takeitapart."

A wall of calm is put up, under which pillow talk can begin. Thus an authentic kindergarten, language, dance, charades, gets raised here and quest is forcibly asserted. It shapes who we are, the last phase of withdrawal from a deadlock in eerie nuance for a future attribute, pond stones having shown us their breasts. Tomorrow's cultural obligations transmit to each the small abstraction and pathetic complacency of her or his own ad hoc Oedipus, gooey homegrown beetle juice that reaches its goal! Dad is a doormat. Proof.

Working against deadline we accelerate our personalities, ordering a gloss over aluminum to realize something, anything like stardom. We have advanced a few feet. It's a look back over our lives the morning after the actual sublime. A lunatic fan rushes in or could rush in, a dentist, to remove our tongues. It seems pleasing since so sensible a creature understood us.

Congratulations, 6th city, from the 24th. Last year things didn't go the way we wanted in the playoffs. But they never gave up. They kept fighting and kept fighting, and today they're the world champions. Phillies Word Series Winners! An opera, albeit a comic one, smothered in delays, days of rain and Obama's ad sweep, might have been more heralded, and more harrowing, had Philadelphia slaughtered the BoSox rather than the caving Rays.

Watching saver Brad Lidge fall to his knees, throw his arms up in the air, then drop them, a starving apparition zoned down beside me. She stayed progressive in her assessment, he's scratching himself you know where. And why not? Lidge was home free. He was running to create wealth. And a dreamworld of adagios. It comes down to unfinished music and happy mediums (like except for me). Would she still be doing this if the sky hadn't cleared bringing cathartic release with fingers for claws? Yes, the sky has piano hands and yes! piano fingers — keep an eye on those two — clawing their way to the top. In other words the question is, harmony or being? I'll admit I've been suffering for decades from the hidden concord in trauma from a prior sexuality set to Mozart. Having his child, Mrs. Mozart is stuck here, fixated now, her eyes welled with decorative esthetics, the kind recognized in opera.

I got into e-mail trouble. And so to bed. You know, Napoleon slumbered through wish fulfillment. Chong, as well. Particular universality principles won't apply when you're sleeping over, in another world. In another universe, I mean. Love thy inhuman neighbors. Love their children, Imaginary, Fatso-holic, L'il Morbid. Ghost writing their ideology is pure authorship, a reduced antithesis to a fake screen name and false distance. We're all redistributionists, psychologically, living librettos, not killing machines. In the soprano dawn, through October, nothing's not indexed to playing with cats and growing tulips. Politics is anger, gizmos, useless bruising rhetoric. And money is gross, always. We cross the road tonight. Join the revolution of ex-rich kids slicing up symbols for our very first film with an opening caption dedicated to echoes of the Ramones covering Cole Porter. Whatever they call you girls.

Skinheads target poodleheads because of a themeless pudding for tonal platitude. We are free — still — to say what they think, but their recipes, or ours, are hardly unadulterated, perfused with empathetic spices and accents from leftist modernism. The century-old middle ground is where we live and continue playing on vulgar innuendoes to be kind, as you undress to force a smile, fully emancipating the other to feel obliged to receive you generously.

You could put both of you or all three in a position of bourgeois indignation, otherwise.

Her beautiful red hair, his gainsaying oomph, we're cruising at altitudes of theorem, and most of the quack probabilities are undistinguished until you return their excrement wrapped in see-through plastic. Where does the political economy have you put it? The scandalous terrain is grotty, propped-up constructs, eco-conscious, dirt colored. Is taking on something without wanting to substance or junk? "Sorry, not tonight..."

The invention of worship is over. So over. The topic is civility. Trees in place, defiantly miscellaneous, thanks to Leitkultur, the treeway on a berm of civil-democratic toepaths with permissions reformed as disruptive presumptions built from a hedge belief in headwinds within and, as it were, without the unions. Civility can scar inhabitants but also lets us act like participants in marking time as though subscribers to the regulatory plutocracy. I know so little about the state and so much less, so here are the details. It was a place to ... what's this put up or shut up? It began with the airlines. Nice houses were somewhere. Let's remake this old classic with coffered ceilings into a dollhouse. When prices hurry down, everything will be felicitously stuccoed, ultimatums rephrased, and moral aspiration will again become footloose and empirically uncontestable as Seven Bagatelles.

A reminder, something I don't do often: but this is worth it. The Faux Chaps party this Friday, 6:30, at Jimmy's No. 43, 43 E. 7th (b. 2nd & 3rd Ave, nearer 2nd), NYC. Readers are Jeni "Truck" Olin, Stacy Szymaszek, Alan Davies, CAConrad, Brenda Iijima, moi-même. No cover. Organic foodstuffs. Good cheer.

Yeah, blandness is part of the problem. You impart numeric dicta slathered with near-imperatives for rationales. Freaked-out sublime — the immensity of your category rewards formalism and processes, mediocre-to-cool — unable to distinguish between dissimilarity slanted toward the news in poetics and semi-autistic subdivisions. Everything you say seems brute-accented. Love, Mom.

Emily Lloyd, aka elloyd74 on Twitter, is among the most visually-webby of poetics bloggers. Au courantly so. Here are two "ecards" of her own design and, between them, two pickups from A2591 and Bookninja, all of which I uploaded from her poesy galore —

Absent 3 looks all there.

Yeah, sir! James Cromwell as H. W. Richard Dreyfus as a peptic Cheney. "...creeps around...sneers," Manohla Dargis says in Friday's Times. What else can Dreyfus do, playing the sneering creep of our era? But it's the women who are going to drive me to Oliver Stone's newest fib / fable W. A "tightly smiling" Thandie Newton as Condoleeza frinking Rice and, and — four paws up! — Ellen Burstyn as Barbara. Are you holding me spellbound, Ellen Burstyn? What a weekend. Tony Towle and I read at Zinc on Sunday, and Ellen Burstyn as Barbara at a theater near you. Now.

Here's a gloss like small-group strings' accompaniment to Assisi School in the post, below.

I'm not claiming a particualr status for Boston. Far from it. I've filed for divorce from the quaintness that Boston has something going for it vis à vis poetry. To the contrary, institutional forces indifferent to poetics bear down on artists. You can't live and work here and not have, broadly speaking, academia, biomedicine, classical music, and funds management seep into your conversations. Speaking socio-strategically, most professions outrank esthetic practices, excepting classical music. Watching only a handful of poets negotiate these pressures is hardly a picnic. Something like public defensiveness if not a sense of inferiority fucks up the intensity of the writerly experience and the comity among writers. John Wieners had traveled but came back to the hermitage to wrestle with this conundrum directly in his work and in his life about Boston. Frank O'Hara, whom I did not watch personally, grew up around here and got his bachelor's locally and then fled to happier ground to exercise what he knew as his gifts of intelligence and feelings in front of people who would find him important and necessary to their lives.

What marks both poets as central exemplars of the Assisi School is their battle with warmth (or, better, kinds of empathy) and calculation. That is the battle of the moment living around here, and more and more living most anywhere. In postcapitalist, professionalized strata, how does the poet find combustible matter, a knowledge base and emotional understanding to come out with an esthetics and a life adequate for others to peruse and enjoy.

Only two years dead, Clare of Assisi was canonized. Saint Clare had an inside track based as she and Francis were in the tree- and shrub-lined exurbs of Perugia, north of San Vitale. This may not surprise you, where I'm headed.

Without fog, there's still Boston, my Assisi, but it wouldn't be beautiful. Helicopters would not be burden-sharing, or stay solid and in-waiting for the radiance to take hold like emulsion.

A smirk, where do you come from? Not now. Boston is this place, the glow is not ours. To donor offspring ownership is sweet. The fourth wall grimaces as nonthreatening nonpersonalities play the margins. Here alone smart youth can drink martinis and not change the world.

But I can't promise tomorrow, either; the glow rather than the town needs me as a fashion czar. You crazy bastard.

All we did was tie up our golf ball fluid.

Activity-oriented=adaptable=outgoing

— keepsakes sifted, carefully drawing blood and red horizontal dings called the crawl

EVEN IF WE ASSUME THE BOWL GOT BRUISED

Henry James was like everyone else among ten free trades off of beer. And I have beer.

You hate this city, admit it — I for sure abhor inhabiting its pleasure to float up from 19th century authenticity, the college town as social lab, its social advertising, a meta-parody leaning out of
 story life and stoic defense of deformed drapery blowing over grandpa's armchair and blueprints. It's ad hoc as showcase, national calculated effortlessness, nothing political. The cheesy symphonic repertoire 
can play on, separate and intensify things I'm going to skip.

Allegory prevails in a climate when stress and oppression predominate. Like the last 100 years. Then, how white Wallace Stevens — not from physical Boston but he went to school here — finds it easy to enter darkness in voices of color, never finding ways to distance himself from it, from them. Second, Stevensesque or Stevensian John Ashbery, another non-native Bostonian who went to Harvard, shows how you distance self from distancing self for perpetual cartouche and slap-party disquiet. Central to all this it's the smacked sick love puppy that keeps yelping through the poems and life-allegories of Worcester's Frank O'Hara, Cambridge's Eileen Myles, and blushing Ted Berrigan, who came from Providence, which is almost here, to call up a sad-happy trio of voices lent to us. Assisi School voices that I keep reading.

This gets me to the allegory of enormous warmth, the thing I'm missing the most. Eileen typifies it. Magnifies it. She loves us, including many she disdains. (In comparison, I squeeze disdain out of those I love. How awkward!) Who else radiates puppy warmth. Boston's John Wieners, except he doesn't love himself enough. Edwin Denby, not from here but having the glow, recursively. We need to feed on O'Hara to go back to how loving Denby's poetry is. After that, I think it's parts of us — or you — that share the burn in the glow. But Eileen is unsurpassed.

FAUX CHAPS PARTY
Friday, Oct. 24
6:30

Jimmy's No. 43
43 E. 7th St. (b. 2nd & 3rd Ave.)
NYC

Celebrating the publication of six new books.

The Pill Book — Jeni "Truck" Olin
Orizaba — Stacy Szymaszek
Odes — Alan Davies
Pathologies — Jack Kimball
(Soma)tic Midge — CAConrad
Subsistence Equipment — Brenda Iijima

Short readings by the authors.

No cover. Organic snacks.
Cheap drinks. Book deals.

Spam from Prada and Ryan's Pharmacy. Hobart Natalie, Anatoly Percy, and King Gadi. Rowena, Kermit, Mosso's, and Jozef Jill. Keisha Jeffers (Robinson's great grandchild), Clarance Raymona, Hans Jacky, Leticia Lundy, John-David Ira, Bjorne Cameron (David's other), et al.

Knowing we live forever like offspring of Saxon brutes
He thought about SciFi from the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties
Fighting the relative fight to endure
All of his life as if he were a mercurial quantum
As if meeting death half-way hapless (though deceitful)
The kind of greenish pallor you'd desired

He thought about SciFi from the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties
As the clay-toned physique turns from the window
Fighting before we understood the beloved's desires
His coat with the fired bullet, effluvia
All of his life as if he were a mercurial quantum
Temporal as this shitty two-room with its simultaneity

As the clay-toned physique turns from the window
A bright light credited to chimera in a purified labyrinth
At the end of the greatest fluorescent tube
The kind of greenish pallor you'd desired
Fighting the relative fight to endure
A silver psycho-mist hung along the streets

A bright light credited to chimera in a purified labyrinth
The luminous tints of reversed decisions or rotating surf
The kind of greenish pallor you'd desired
All of his life as if he were a mercurial quantum
A chestnut vendor stood holding out to her
His coat with the fired bullet in it, effluvia

Temporal as this shitty two-room with its simultaneity
To grow another heart in different tempi
At the end of the greatest fluorescent tube
As the clay-toned physique turns from the window
A silver psycho-mist hung along the streets
Fighting before we understood the beloved's desires

To grow another heart in different tempi
A chestnut vendor stood holding out to her
The kind of greenish pallor you'd desired
He thought about SciFi from the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties
All of his life as if he were a mercurial quantum
Going hippie to make a connection

A chestnut vendor stood holding out to her
A silver psycho-mist hung along the streets
As if meeting death half-way hapless (though deceitful)
Knowing we live forever like offspring of Saxon brutes
Going hippie to make a connection
The luminous tints of reversed decisions or rotating surf.

Part 2 [Part 1 here]

Kim Lyons
Pierre Menard Gallery, Cambridge
Sept. 28

Kim Lyons was the third reader at Pierre Menard last week, following Geoff Olsen and Jess Mynes. Kim read unpublished pieces as well as poems in Photothérapique (Katalaché & Portable Presses 2008). Kim's work twists soluble lengths of her neighborhoods, Brooklyn and downtown, transmuting "combustion / ripped from cosmic / calm into unease" within a space-time inventory of uninhibited, sonorous propositions. She feels "bodegas / look fascinating in the wired telepathy," and we incredulously grant she has the chops to throw more our way. On a visit "to the aqua ventilators" she pours out the "salt concealed in the ventricles," to "compel the shadows to fill / in the sequential jolts, which are transactions / binding adulation." Her wintry deal throws in "lustrous geometries" with the jolts and something else "like a diaphanous / shovel plunging into the drifts of mauve," throwing her voice, in other words, and keeping it up as "the residue of a body / a stick crashing through thin ice / then hangs as a transparence."

"Cement is the color of thinking," Kim argues, but this is conceptual punning merely to make sensible detail concrete, a pun of this sort one of her empurpled tricks with mirrors "tucked in […] black silk" inside her boîte à outils. Oh, thérapique. Kim is so New York, she's free to pen "dawn comes in a ballerina skirt," dispatch it directly to Breton and Soupault in the same breath, then climb into a stretch limo for a drive by the Seine, and, most violet, break down and finally admit her mirror and, perhaps, her "wallet with an odor of earwax" are "made in France." Kim is on a fully elaborated tear via which she revisits any topic in bursts of expository precision. Well, yes, thinking is like cement, but it's also "Chalky and molecular" on an inclined plane where, to fulfill the syllogism, Kim intuits "thoughts are the wedge." The fluid argumentative force of the prose translations beneath the verse in The Penguin Book of French Poetry: 1820-1950 has seeded the New York School, according to poet Larry Fagin, publisher of first-, second- and third-generations. The tradition, if you will, requires deployment and advancement of similar exposition in the now, today, a particular place, a particular time. In the poem titled "DNA" Kim spots a waiter at 4:00 a.m. who serves her almond milk in a scallop shell, brings it "to my lips to drink / but I can't figure out his face." We can see what the poet cannot see, "I can't figure out his face or / fix on his ultimate cohesion." With ultimate cohesion Kim moves us from the physical to physics and the psychological, and what we need next is the why: "because a woman inside a bathroom lit by a candle / says the middle son is between male and female." Every detail is in the now moving forward, the candle, the woman lit by the candle, the fact that the waiter is a middle son; nothing is ornamental. The poem concludes in no sense elegiacally, but partakes of the force behind elegy and behind argument through which questioning or thinking, the wedge, indeed changes everything on visible and invisible planes. The mother of the middle son is still in the bathroom.

She puts her finger to her mouth
she's formless also as though the
DNA is a letter
such a messenger as this delivers
is he then an angel, this waiter with a silver tray,
or an attendant to something else, a project
a scheme larger than death?

One could hardly care about a feeble tertiary borrowing. Pepper and vanilla icing, a freezing outdoor terrace, no cake.

~~

Then again — I'm hooked on figurative exposition. Maybe, inspired by Issue 1's stockpile, the vowelmovers are striking out for this, the rockiest and most forlorn of isles — parody of parody — to portray frontally self-effacing dwarf complexities and transgressive contradictions of melancholic ambition.

~~

Tape both of my hands together. And grease-pencil trompe l'oeil on my forehead. Please.

This work dialogs with others.

X subverts expectations.

Y understands perfectionism is in error.

To appropriate is to provoke.

The ephemeral triumphs.

A parody pays homage to its subject. Pass the white gloves.

Y gestures toward emptiness, embraces it.

Z's funky penumbra is influenced by street-life needlepoint and other class resentments.

These poems sound like New York, laced with the foam of the Frankfurt School and science fiction.

Z uses his communication with friends on the internet. Inky musculature evokes nighttime.

Y's pornographic turns are cheesy but rush us back into space. Oceans and deserts.

The piece is layered with political and gender-specific overtones. Big, tall, slim, erect.

We can feel X's mind move. Like a wheelbarrow reveling in bubbly rain, uncanniest on Halloween.

Value is contingent. Nudes mean more when their heads are chopped.

Meaning is garbled when it's least derivative. There's nothing like sex in inner cities.

Z questions conventions, boundaries, and syntax. Z exits. Yay.

Y's is a dissonance born of necessity, the poetry reflecting the gritty highly-trafficked back alleys of seduction and violence. Oooo she's discovered her voice.

It's impossible to separate the performance from the text; both are adolescent in the good sense. Ring, bitch.

X's deadpan is signature postmodern self-reflection unsettling socio-economic truisms. Ultra blurry and anamorphic.

The signs point to abstraction. Dad knew best.

Discursive meditation on a rhetorical bombshell: She's so like Bush.

First, happy to report the skin grafts and mind melds are now complete, and it can now be predicted John McCain, who is not really the John McCain we knew, will blow tonight's town hall, too cantankerous because he can't help himself, because he is not himself.

Another thing. As we roll into the intrepid stages of the shit-throwing countdown to test values-voters' faith in conditioned response, McCain-Palin are showing their head game colors, the dark scrum-infused hues of Atwater-Rove. This is not news, but that's what's left in the campaigner-trumps-elite-terrorist arsenal. This is that third term Bush I, Barbara, Bush II and maybe even Laura were shooting for, only it's Cheney-Bush, the folk mavericks reversed. These guys are not the least bit modulated by original thought beyond slogans, reform, country, attack, and, yes, my friends, contrary to what you've been told Cheney has decided to seek the presidency after all. He's disguised himself, via the body snatcher method, as a more heroic deliberator, the neo John McCain with a fresh, richer distaff heiress (who auditioned for and almost got a part in Stepford Wives); betcha Bush II, trans-gendered now as Palin, is glad to go along, full of the running mate and offspring's talented wink and made-up-entitled pride and standing next to a rather dashing separatist-rightwing Alaskan dude wildcatter of a partner with whom to plot vengeance and take up drink. Again.

Issue 1: If your name is included, it's a zero sum. You are not in the um anthology. Your name is. And what, master, is a name? Or in a name? Let's turn to Issue 1's three researchers and two editors. Here's what I've culled from 30 minutes of The Google.

1) Vladimir Zykov (researcher) is a freelance programmer and web designer (username: "tmurakami" @ getafreelancer.com). Among his biodata, we learn he's been involved in

The Semantic GrowBag Project at L3S Research Center of the University of Hannover, Germany, [which] uses the keywords provided in metadata annotations of digital objects collections to automatically create light-weight topic categorization systems. Using such emergent semantics enables an alternative way to filter large result sets according to the objects' content without the need to manually classify all objects with respect to a pre-specified vocabulary.

2) Stephen McLaughlin (researcher and co-editor), UPenn-affiliated, based now in Rotterdam, operates a Phillie language and sound archive @ arsonism.org; he posts wry poetic parodies @ rakedepot.blogspot.com; and he blogs @ arsonisnoway.livejournal.com (among his entries there, his notes to "indiefucks" are appealing). You can find McLaughlin's clarification related to his project cited in Kenneth Goldsmith's harriet entry (10/5). Here's a section.

I started a collection of poet names. Once I had around 1500, I asked my friend Jim Carpenter to send me a batch of 5,000 poems composed by Erika T. Carter, his ludicrously advanced poetry generation software. These poems aren't simply random cutups of randomly selected texts. As you can see by reading them, they each have a thematic & stylistic unity unparalleled (so far as I know) in the field of algorithmic poetry generation. As numerous commenters [sic] have noted, it's difficult to tell whether some of these things were written by man or machine. Surprisingly, many of the poems in the magazine are actually 'good.' Sort of.

3) Gregory Laynor (researcher) has left fewer techie crumbs on the G-trail, so far, but I like his nonplussed reading of Wallace Stevens @ http://www.forgodot.com/theideaoforderatkeywest/ideaoforder_10.mp3 — [Ok, Gregory Laynor just informed me in an email that he has taken down the Stevens sound file (which I thought was a challenging and deft interpretation of Stevens), but Gregory suggests another set of files in which he performs Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans @ http://www.ubu.com/sound/stein-moa.html].

4) Jim Carpenter (co-editor) teaches programming and software design at the Wharton School. As McLaughlin notes, Carpenter invented Erica T. Carter, an innovative set of algorithms for poem generation. Carpenter quotes Charles Bukowski for inspiration: "poetry is still the biggest snob-racket in the Arts with little poet groups battling for power." Ahem. At the Erica T. Carter website (http://etc.wharton.upenn.edu:8080/Etc3beta/About.jsp) Carpenter explains his purpose, at first, was "to learn whether machine-generated poems could compete in the marketplace with the poems of blooded authors. (They can.)" His research aim "has evolved into an aesthetic proposition: That the MACHINE is a legitimate methodology for artistic expression."

Issue 1 is a bona fide collective prosthetic arifact. The project as it were is code. It has a sense of humor and reflects hunger for easy profit — similar in these respects to a good fraction of art products reared within the late capitalist fold.

I anticipate a critical continuum in response to Issue 1 along these (postDeluezian) lines: ha-haa-drivel / drivel-aah-ah.

I'm coming to see the need for a dude balance between index and representation.

We'll presume you are savoring or will soon savor Kevin Killian on Orono 2008 over at Belladodie (that's dodie-bellamy.blogspot.com). As of today he's up to Part 7. He's making the good guys familiar.

~~

And today, 10/2, Dennis Cooper (denniscooper-theweaklings.blogspot.com) has a roundup on John Ashbery. Links to objects and material even poetry bloodhounds will find unusual and useful.

Geoffrey Olsen, Jess Mynes, Kim Lyons
Pierre Menard Gallery, Cambridge
Sept. 28

It's safe to come outdoors. If the heavy, emphatic, indoor chill attending textuality since language and even postlanguage has gotten under the skin, Geoffrey Olsen, Jess Mynes, and Kim Lyons show how to take it outside.

Geoffrey Olsen read his End Notebook (Petrichord Books 2008) and from the start you feel sensory alternatives to standalone bricolage and discontinuity. His book and his reading lift off by replaying Philip Whalen's Vietnam War era "The War," a heated notebook piece itself in which "instant / weird language" is rendered as vulnerable "forest growth, death around / the ocean." Geoffrey's poetry takes in damaged goods of the city and the underground, "the red dumpster," "a subway singer begging...occupying two distinct realities." These up-and-down distinctions of Geoffrey's materialize from the lyric impulse as it is interrupted by and in turn interrupts the susceptibilities of "flippancy as defense." His is an urban postlanguage devouring itself within "Pulchritude / diastole / amend amid glaze / heart       break. a choice." Other choices and distinctions for Geoffrey return to Whalen (whose influence is palpable), a phenomenal world of growth trumping (and trumpeting) death, since as Geoffrey notes, chagrin can be "held under" at least for the moment, while vines clamber "against the wall apartment." And so goes the exterior city where the running of the subway appositely parallels a "branch in the wind."

Jess Mynes sports the same team letters as Geoffrey's, beginning If and When (Katalanché 2008) with natural environment-infused epigraphs from three mid-century influences, Joseph Ceravolo, Richard Caddel, and Louis Zukofsky. Jess homes in on rural Massachusetts, mosquitoes, forsythia, "a gate left open," skies with things falling that should fall, "ice everywhere," tulips, puckers, the "spindly necked / stagger of ferns." So the outdoors is absolute fodder, but Jess wants more. He joins a tradition. He weaves in more and more poetry champs, James Schuyler, Basil Bunting, Christopher Rizzo, Aaron Tieger, as if Jess were socializing as well as living purely empirically, hosting a set of word-dizzy fellows of the wood given to measurement of "a bee's bumble" or the "mauled petal inverted / circles as in / a radar whirr." More remarkable, Jess also takes the tradition all the way to in, his insides, transforming the outdoors into bodily reflections, a "shape / I carry." Jess asserts, "no tree exists by inertia," and precedes this with an imagined torpor emerging from his senses:

I have your moan upon my
skin the whole
ghost of it

A more apparent instance of Jess's internal reflection of nature comes within his first poem, anatomically titled, "tibia fibula femur." Here Jess wisely demarks his limits as a chartist, partly blindsided by what he's plotting, partly in sight of and inspired by the receptive state that's prerequisite for more:

if my direction is
only holding the
map and for the
single chance to run
there is just a phenomena
of bleeding trees

my o let me be still

            there this thing recovers me

[Part 2 here.]

It's pajamas? pyjamas? I never wear them. I'm too busy entertaining acrobats, evoking various moods, you know, all of them, whatever is in front of me. Alaska is no backwater. We got media for enhanced abandonment pressing new specimens. This is my longwinded prelim for saying how frinking it is to have this back blogging.

One, everyone, hey man you're zeeeeriously crazy if you miss Godfrey & Weiser Wednesday, October 1, 8:00pm, St. Marks Church in The Bowery. (I'm a fan.)

Kyle's buckets of rain have gone away. Someone has cut the grass, the greeny, wettish smell is everywhere. Hay. Optimism.

Remember to slam the parentheses behind you
) bang and ) bang and ) ) double bang
(to be on the safe side).

— James Schuyler

The Demolicious series winds down October 5. This is the latest in the pile-up of farewells to Boston/Cambridge poetry readings. It's a big city, and of course poets show up at other places, but for now it's down to the congruence of three, Harvard, MIT, and the Pierre Menard Gallery (where the Demolicious gallows humor party takes off, 10 Arrow St., Harvard Sq., starting at 3:00).

~~

Kim Lyons, Jess Mynes, and Geof Olsen read last Sunday, also at Pierre Menard. Report to follow.

Part 2 [Part 1 here]

Turk suggested ...

... Corduroy meth? Wanda snaps into her nonmeditative swagger, I'd prefer you wait on the 16th if you're going to bring him up.

The reset button still works. Only an hour ago two counties away — Turk's '55 Thunderbird powered over a familiar, pristinely self-sustained bridge exiting horse country in the rain. He's dumping Huntley in the rearview, a blur of the town, erased footholds in luxury, speeding elsewhere.

To Echo Press. What, it's 1:02, and here's Turk Foxbridge, another keeper of the proofs, but haywire-English-y and more seasoned than even his moody, postdoctoral toil suggests. Zoubok and Wanda see him now through the clerestory of the elevator that's floating up to her office, the entire 17th floor of the Flatiron. Sauntering in without an appointment, pressing a bulldog valise of seashells, feathers, idées fixes. Absorbed showing his thinking process.

Wand, dizzy dress, R U ok?

Pavel and I are punching through straws and colorless spheres...

Amazing, so simple...

Fuck, the most cinched at the waist of the trio, Wanda interrupts Turk while Zoubok falls into a collaged kitten mural of plastic joined by static hanging in back.

This book is a fake, an obvious microparadigm of inflatable logic kept on life support by nothing more than crumbs and fan-blown air. Especially the reactive troubadour bits, like 'rectangles of blackface' — sure, they're great, but with Pavel's name on it, the opus is a whiskey trough filled with cuticle pairings from the bottom of the mountain.

Left flattened, Zoubok struggles to formulate a humanist message, Turk billows smoke: No, fake is not right. No. That's componentially wrong. This is Pavel's desiderio a performative allegory for variations on insensate figuration and ellipsis...

I've got e-lists to purge, guys, and anthologies to disgorge. Look, unless you're hot this moment to put a genuine boy, a boy's boy, on the cover, the forged initials stay.

These pols are creeps. 24/7 coils of psycho-ephemeral crinkled creeps.

Durable goods down. Jobless claims soar. Tattoos gain more visibility.

DC's flips the spotlight on Kevin Killian's new Action Kylie. Like every other post there it's encyclopedic. Vids, blurbs, excerpts, everything you need to get (re)excited by the topic at hand. It's like getting tattooed with visceral consequence.

My little nephew in the Persian Gulf says

War is a disaster, my heart is beating faster

Slick in a white uniform, his head shaved, the top of his head a white ball[...]

Flip over here and scroll to 9/25; as usual it keeps cranking — if you follow up with the comment box entries 9/25 and after, you'll extract disturbing ideas, chance disjunction, scrappy, BoHo-enhanced discussion and controversy.

A few pieces felt jaundiced. Complicity and resistance pushed further into a formless clot of mist. That Wanda had perfected this base of abstraction freed her to make things up.

The almost youngest panelist is held in high regard, even ten years later. She's an international character, now, a keeper of the coveted formulae to the MacArthurs. She's taken a shortcut, a dull passage into scholarship and multiple sex partners. She wakes up around noon to find herself daydreaming about, of all things, trade publishing and its discontents, except it isn't involuntary in fact and she's in charge.

She asks a minion, How many children can I have? We can package four right now.

This is her first attempt at working in three dimensions.

It's 1:00. Pavel Zoubok, the last Ashberian, walks into her office. She greets him, We didn't know you wrote this when we selected it. We're holding to our agreement, and we'll print it but under the alias with the forged initials.

Why?

Because that's how you sent it in.

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.