Barack Obama's cheesy gift giving is now a set pattern. Obama handed over DVDs, remainders, to Gordon Brown on Brown's first sit-down with Obama after the inaugural. Today Obama slipped an iPod loaded with show tunes inside Her Majesty's purse on his first visit to Buckingham Palace. Are the Obamas completely in the camp of the pop entertainment industry, regifting prizes they've aquired on their to the White House? Regifting. Can you imagine our peppy, intelligent president stooping this low? I can. He's just about re-legitimated such a strategy — how do I get rid of this pile of stuff? oh, give some of it over to dignitaries! — Brown and the Queen top the regifting list. Next, what will Nicolas Sarkozy get? Something with dead batteries, I bet.

As for the conficker virus, so-called, it seems Windows computers without updated os software are most in danger. The conficker plan is to take over infected computers on April 1 and effect hacker commands that, among other things, could use the infected computers to spam or otherwise assault others. An IT-savvy colleague suggests Windows users change the date on their computers today, and keep operating with the 'wrong' date until after April 1. That way your computer bypasses the April Fool's kick-off. Could it be that simple?

The "placeholder" strategy has taken hold in poetics blogging. Placeholding, as in keeping a hand in by dropping off readymades like lists for readings, links to other places, an occasional note, this dash or that. Whahappn'd? Like so much else mooning around the artist herd mentality, off-handedness is the avant chic to attain, thus the notion of not taking one's blog too seriously has won out for the moment. It's no biggie in itself, yet reflects larger things that go mostly under the radar. Off-handedness in general produces a writer's culture that doesn't amass or allow a show of enthusiasm except for extreme pets. Skip readings except those by people you really like or may need. Let the free unread books pile up to impress your friends who pick them up to check out the publisher, the dedications, first lines, last lines. Publishers matter for as long as they hold out on you. As for blogging, sitemeter counts are down, comment boxes don't overflow; we all have to survive this period of hell in hand basket and what better way than to display palpable indifference to poets and their blogs outside your spheres of influence. Why did I get started on this? I became a poet out of necessity at a point when others were doing this too. Couldn't help myself. Was that a 'period' condition or a default? This also is a topic sentence.

Walk it off.

Is there anything more sincere than Anne Boyer's "We are all content"?

Least enticing meme of the week: Which Anglican theologian are you?

This is unqualifiedly hard-on great. The Coop just keeps on re-vitalizing the blog medium, keeps giving.

When I look more closely, the event at the Whitney noted parenthetically yesterday is a poetry reading, not a panel. Better, maybe, but chitchat could get heated.

Have been obsessing about archives for a few days (3/17, e.g.). A history making. Thinking about how archives do it and how they behave gives me a headache. It's a pulsating, labyrinthine brain banger — comes on out of nowhere, like catching a cold from Jorge Luis Borges holed up in a library of all libraries (one of a million, or more!) sneezing dust blowing over a book of all books you grab off the list of all lists (updated perpetually). The first thing to think about, for me, is how archival matters tie up with the lore of book making, a skill tethered to history and to a factuality some see nearly as fraught and consecrated, if you will, as authorship. I don't see that at all, but I respect the fragility of material conveyance that a book represents, text that's written down and offered to others to pour over. Amazing! hermeneutics has been with the species for millennia, and the transactional exchange, writer to reader, is constant —

writer / copyist / plagiarist / assemblist / et al. = A;

reader = B;

the written down text (and by extension the archive of texts) = "to" as in A to B.

The next things to think about archives will branch in all directions, according to the conventions of labyrinths in three dimensions, books flying off [sic] to do as they please (they must). Hold on. Books or parts of books can fly in the sense that they get lodged in people's cortexes (that's a belief of mine) and when two or more do this, they get above the physical labyrinth (i.e., their materiality) establishing a matrix of ideas or, you know, thinking. So this leads to jumps in an argument, funneling through or bracketing what is pressing now, cross-referencing massive data that are picked at and stored in human neurons. I think I can say human neurons (here). I prefer to return to Borges, whose Library of Babel and other ideas about books anticipate or at least approximate the internet, and to an American poet as wild as Borges, Hannah Weiner. She strikes me as someone who has walked inside of texts, having famously seen texts pop up on walls and go sprawling over a plethora of material objects, including her forehead. Weiner was only a few minutes ahead of Jenny Holzer's rather tame text projections that have popularized the notion that the written word animates materiality. We are impressed with the quantification if not the scope of Holzer's illustrations of book making, much in the way we are impressed by Kenneth Goldsmith's Day, in which he retypes September 1, 2000 as archived by The New York Times. Goldsmith (who on April 17 will convene a panel of conceptualist poets, among others, in conjunction with Holzer's exhibit at the Whitney Museum) is obviously aboard a vehicle of a sort, a step above the hedgerow of three-dimensional archiving, doing things to texts that enliven the exchange, A to B.

This week's least tentative assessment of a film venture: Everyone Involved With This Project Needs To Die Soon And Painfully.

Multi-inappropriates. This one is nasty and, so far, unfunny, unbrilliant.

Last week Nicholas Hughes, son of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, hung himself. His mother committed suicide years earlier as did his stepmother who also killed her daughter, Nicholas's half-sister. At some point, let's call it a point of wicked dramaturgy or of awesome extremity for monolog, the daimon rushes to center stage dressed in black-on-black rags, stares directly at her numbed audience, and condemns Ted Hughes to countless reincarnations for eternity.

O Spring

Nothing concentrates the mind like a life sentence. Exquisite lingo is not in danger, though, even as Elmo was stripped of exaggerated status and worth. That's if I hit what I feel in the morning. It's different from the evening and you hit back.

Hi cute girl in black hat that works here.

I still think you and your poetry are amazing, crazy fancy, and headed for greatness. Not the jealous, zipper-broke, deglamorized chip of scrub your dangly acquaintances say you are. It's not their fault. You have that itch. Garish tulip brocaded with energy. You are man-y crisp, a color too orange for anything that can happen if you try to pretend you care. It's not simple but very fluid how you kill fidelity like mine. I'm a fan.

This week's most lavish speculation about poet and amateur anthropologist Clayton Eshleman comes from a museum department chairwoman with a very un-gendered Bostonian name, Elliot Bostwick Davis. Thinking out loud about Eshleman's request to examine her department's Mayan artifacts not on public display, she supposes the best, "After all, who knows, he may be the next John Keats." Yes, if Keats had worked out more on the poetry-is-applied-dabbling-raised-to-revelation side of things. Shake or date? Your call.

This depiction of the role of language in evolutionary niche construction couldn't be crunchier.

As language progressed, it took on a life of its own, incorporating more arbitrariness, more complexity, more displacement. An endlessly recursive, autocatalytic system, it became the breakaway mechanism of our evolution. Its feedback made us smarter.

— Ange Mlinko, in her inaugural essay for "The Short of It," her new column in the online version of The Nation.

Irrepressible high jinks tinged with chagrin? (AKA, American Party Animus? Wht-ev?) If that's your brand of poetry, supplement it with boner-phone antics that go further into schizoid gloss than drooping words over the screen (like these). I'm talking unparalleled über-flarf pouring out of iPhone OS 3.0, with over an hour of application previews yesterday at Apple's Software Developers Kit Conference (click "Watch the presentation"). Minutes 51:00 to 57:00 are a case in point. Lanky Chris Plummer plays with his Touch Pets Schnauzer "Scruff" who's out on a date with "Mittens." The results of the encounter and Scruff's conquest are IM'd into the Touch Pets Social Network for all of Chris's pals with pets to chuckle over. Arf, arf. Then Chris breaks off to play Live Fire, "a multiplayer first-person shooter." Chris's avatar aims to kill a pal's avatar with the help of another pal who's been 'push-notified' to join the bloodbath through the Live Fire global server. Chris along with his helper spread their power across the touchscreen. Fade out on pixels of human serum flying upward like Snickers.

Alan Davies and I are preparing a selection of poetics publications that represent one end of what I'll characterize as the ambition spectrum. Over the next few months we will release a series of works that are fairly huge, works that give ample evidence of sizeable production or an opus.

In our process, large production shows up in a couple of ways. One is that the opus will arrive in its entirety, such as the re-release of all forty issues of A Hundred Posters, a monthly hand-typed newsletter Alan edited in the late 1970s, featuring seminal texts from writers advancing alternatives to confessional and / or formalist poetries prevalent at that time. Many pieces in Posters engaged with the first stages of Language methodology, others moved in different directions, but all together, these combined texts capture a richly experimental and volatile history of writers developing multiples of strategies and stylistics, as well as radically conceived contents for American poetics.

Again, an opus will often show up as part of the greater, whole ambition. Central chapters from Michael Gottlieb's memoir-in-progress are an example of this. Michael's personal history coincidentally reviews many of the times and personnel associated with Posters and like publications during the 1970s and 1980s when the New York School was becoming slightly more self-conscious, entering a second generation.

Alan Davies is a prolific poet in his own right and his sponsorship of others' work is well-documented — countless magazines, pamphlets, and books, often imprinted under the aegis Other Publications. Alan and I will soon publish Michael's memoir, along with A Hundred Posters and additional larger works under a new name, combining Alan's imprint and Faux Press. Our combined efforts will be Faux / Other. I'll be detailing plans for more releases here. I think what Alan and I are undertaking could be immensely valuable to more than a handful of writers and readers, and that's why I also would like to hear from you if you have a proposal (or just an idea) about specific larger works that might feel at home under the Faux / Other aegis (you can reach me at the e-mail address, jk at fauxpress.com).

I'll be back with an outline of publishing initiatives at the opposite end of the ambition spectrum — Faux Press administering tiny injections of poetry, nuggets of psychotropic brilliance, killer widgets, the small get. I'll do this soon.

Agreed, and worth a look-through.

A writer, even a poet, will develop a broad-mindedness toward most any version of family, even when family centers on other writers. All of this is implicit in the simplest rejoinder to the dullest gossip.

Yes, I do get swept up like anyone in the bitterness of poetry. Luckily, there is the sweet-bitterness of love and one's family and poetry itself.

— David Shapiro (in an interview w/ Kent Johnson)

Finally it's front page news. The Feds' claim of "zero tolerance" for mortgage fraud will have to overcome their bad batting average: "the government’s odds of winning drop when they go after Wall Street executives." We'll see, we'll have to see.

There's a mother cruise ship that's not exactly losing its bearings, but off on a perpetual champagne and powdered hydrochloride junket. It's a market gawker's delight, since the vessel is overbooked with coked-up yet stiffened-upper-lip financiers who don't bother to keep their fingers crossed, because they don't have to (and, anyway, they can't feel their fingers). They're set on a course and certain of getting away with all the cash extracted from trading stocks, futures, and derivatives over the past few years. They know no one in government or in the landlocked court of public opinion is going to pay attention long enough to bring them, most of them, to justice. A single day with a 4%-plus uptick in the market, yesterday, and you are confirmed in the idea these inebriated moguls are right. Yesterday, public wailers and blatherers, starting with Ben Bernanke, announced a turnaround, an end to the recession by year's end, and a much better 2010. I guess the wailers and blatherers will let Barack Obama return, for a few hours, to plan for the longer range future. As recently as Monday former GE chief Jack Welch and über-investor Warren Buffett were declaiming, separately, that Obama is spread too thin. Better that Obama have only one message at a time, that he should drop mention of improving public education and providing universal health care, that he focus solely on economic recovery. To add punch to his warning, nervy Welch blamed the downturn entirely on Obama, insisting that when Obama campaigned in the fall the market was several hundred points higher, the economic recession had not yet been declared. After years of deregulation, tax cuts, and war — it's all due to Obama and his lack of focus! Welch is not even a politician, just a retired magnate screaming the plutocrats' theme songs to seem more important than his big shot riches. Who's shouting about traders and accomplices who poured their brew of fraudulent practices over every nook and into every coarse channel, sabotaging the entire credit and loan infrastructure? Who? It won't be Welch or Buffett or Bernanke, since they are each part of the loosely convened governance now committed to hiding the rotten bodies, the losers and casualties in the explicit war between rulers and the ruled. That governance comprises republican and democratic politicians, including Obama, constituents in a bipartisan compact to bury our losses, to make the so-called hard choices, to carry on as if our land and the sea under its domain and all the ships at sea comprised a grander, more encompassing metaphor to uplift late capitalism into some promise of a middle way, as if the proverbial middle were fixable and pointed to the common wealth.

This is abnormally exciting, a special section focused on Tony Towle, including new poetry, title story from Dennis Cooper's new book Ugly Man due in May, poems from Eileen Myles, Elaine Equi, Noelle Kocot, Sharon Mesmer, others, hands-on design — overall configuration plumbed from the itinerant unconscious: Agricultural Reader #3. Let's say Michel Foucault and Samantha Stephens woke from twin erotic dreams and did something with epistemes.

We're smitten.

High finance is off limits to the lit temperament — an intellectual encumbrance that's in force at most everyone's peril, except (or maybe especially) when backed up by a tophat dad, player husband, or hoodie boyfriend. V.P. Wallace Stevens was surely an exception, maybe the only notable one. Even retired, land-rich souls like Richard Wilbur or Donald Hall are watching their shrinking 401k's wondering with the rest of us, what the fuck. I'm not so much concerned with Wilbur and Hall as those less privileged and much less well-informed like me. I'm talking scary shit flung at us by financial markets. And we still don't know what it is. It's not an it, a defined, containable, short-lived phenomenon. Maybe we can do better to conceive of this as an excrement flow in a broad array of propulsion stages, all headed our way. Our own very nonprivate Sluiceville now in progress.

Toxic instruments is one term of many to reference the triggering device to the crises revving up. Toxicity, though, is a pale metaphor, pale and misleading as it implies there's potential for a curative antitoxin to bring the gray sick guys back. Base-to-core-inhabiting pathologies are afflicting the markets, not just ours but internationally. They are unlike any others in history, and no cures are in sight. Take the now infamous CDS, a credit default swap or derivative contract between so-called counterparties, one betting on failure of a given investment (such as a residential mortgage) or instrument (a bundle of mortgages) completely separate from the contract, another betting the other way. This investment / wager is highly abstract in that it is not supported by capital or a reality represented by capital (such as real estate); it is determined by the fractional movements toward the outcome of the wager itself. The guarantee that at least one of the parties will lose the bet is just one problem. Counter-counterparties enter the game, as well, with hedged wagers on the widening or shrinking possibilities that one counterparty (one side of the CDS contract) will fail.

The CDS, in short, is a slice of an opinion on an internationalized instrument (a bundle of U.S. mortgages or loans) and the CDS can be further sliced / hedged downward. But if you look up, you find other problems. The mortgagors you bet on may default. And mortgagees' assumptions may be based on felonious actions somewhere in the pipeline from loan application to commitment. Until recently many mortgages were issued that were beyond people's means. Some borrowed too much money for property that was overvalued. Others were snookered into no- or low-money down mortgages with teaser starter payments that ballooned into usurious interest rates. These are the easy targets for CNBC's Rick Santelli, his 'losers' who ought not to be bailed out of their bad indebtedness. What are murkier and harder to narrate on cable or in a court of law are the many counts of systematic felony yet to be prosecuted concerning the packaging of these mortgages into third-party investments. Sizable fractions of mortgage-based instruments are fictional products, high-commissioned temptations and occasions of corruption and collusion involving stolen identities (to shore up bona fides in credit applications), dishonest appraisals (values given to deficient or nonexistent properties), malfeasance at major credit rating agencies (AAA ratings on highly speculative instruments), legal misdoings (natch), etc. One problem with banking then is the foundational corruption of the mortgage and credit business. Good lending has been smooshed with high-risk and outright fraudulent loans to manufacture enormously profitable sales packs, which get promoted as sound investment instruments and further divided into credit swaps and hedged bets, everything radiated with lethal dosages of fiction as fact.

Three products top the gay list from Wal-Mart, after I went shopping off Bill Keckler's hot search pages: 1) Space Saver Cabinet Espresso: hey, this shiny new beverage revitalizes an exhausted food service category (and it's really sex-laden, as in "Meet you at 3 we'll knock down a Cabinet, Evil One..."); 2) Smoked Wranglers: coarse, frank (some editing here, ok?); and 3) Michael Strahan Autographed Sack Celebration: the webpage copy reads, "It's a recurring nightmare." The runner-up is Taylor Swift Carpet Ready: copy reads, "Transforming two-in-one gown..." I'm a little less sure about that one and the next: I don't remember the product but the copy got me thinking, "Cool-climate roll-up exposes mesh for better air circulation and creates a head rest." Let's invent this!

I'm building on Ron's list of 20-40 (really 40) women whose poetry has been influential (i.e., influential for him), since there are scores more that have impact on me. So along with at least half (20 or so) of the 40 Ron catalogs, I'll add the following mostly contemporary poets, including some extras off his list but mentioned by Ron in his follow-up paragraph. I'm missing more than I name here; however these are among the poets I'm thinking of now. They entertain me. Some have crawled into my brain to mess around. Dodie Bellamy, Louise Bogan, Anne Boyer, Nicole Brossard, Tina Celona, Emily Clark, Allison Cobb, Norma Cole, Jen Coleman, Shanna Compton, Brenda Coultas, Corina Copp, Katie Degentesh, Stacy Doris, Marcella Durand, kari edwards, Betsy Fagin, Joanna Furhman, Kate Greenstreet, Nada Gordon, Barbara Henning, Mary Rising Higgins, Brenda Iijima, Erica Kaufman, Jennifer Knox, Wendy Kramer, Joanne Kyger, Susan Landers, Dorothea Lasky, Katy Lederer, Denise Levertov, Rachel Levitsky, Mina Loy, Kim Lyons, Sharon Mesmer, Carol Mirakove, Ange Mlinko, Marianne Moore, Jennifer Moxley, Eileen Myles, Sawako Nakayasu, Sianne Ngai, Alice Notley, Jeni Olin, Sylvia Plath, Kristin Prevallet, Laurie Price, Barbara Jane Reyes, Laura Riding, Lisa Robertson, Martha Ronk, Sappho, Jen Scappettone, Susan Schultz, Sei Shonagon, Prageeta Sharma, Stevie Smith, Juliana Spahr, Susanne Stein, Christina Strong, Stacy Szymaszek, Anne Tardos, Sara Teasdale, Susie Timmons, Sara Veglahn, Jean Vengua, Rosemarie Waldrop, Alli Warren, Jo Ann Wasserman, Africa Wayne, Karen Weiser, Stephanie Young, Maggie Zurawski.

Now, with regard to that swipe yesterday about nuts in poetry, I admit I don't know any. So I really am jerking around and there's no excuse. Bottom line, if I knew of a nut or two, you know, real dash-off, me-first freaks, I'd ask them how their work can be differentiated from that of more celebrated nuts in public discourse, such as Ann Coulter or Rush Limbaugh, both of whom wear their heavy armor like cultural warriors, saying (thus doing) awful, disconcerting, wildly unsuitable things, lancing opponents as footloose treasonous fiends or middling enemies of a dimensionality that they, Coulter & Limbaugh, make up on the fly. The making-up part unaccountably shifts (it's improvised!) with each utterance and that's what puts C & L in a league that adjoins poetry (which, after all, is accountable to none); the confrontation-mockery-and-kill-agenda underneath and very much attached to their making-up is what commits them to the nut house, dancing to a pathology that's as close to postlanguage improv as you want to get in politics, "Barack the Magic Negro."

The ratio of nuts on the street to nuts in poetry is 1-1.
It wasn't always melee like this. Men came in uniforms,
Women with children. We traveled from Camp
Friendly to the enemy, blowing their nodes.
Free extrapolation was a wholesome signal
To obese teenagers. Dead Americans were then
The frontier in the stimulus spurring restless
Science. Make-up artists never dabbled, they
Plunged. Beneath it all a tall singer with a sparse
Brown beard could not break his musical direction.
We never took advantage of soldiers who were
The very definition of starving radicals. Today
All torture does poorly so college kids get caged
In fraud, pegged at low points in one-sided polls
That kick the ball down the road in a recession
Once allegations against them were without merit.
Pell Grants aim again at A.T.M.s pushing shyness
Aside, with half still unsure of their performance.

College=Army (of debt). I was only kidding.

Pakistan is the new sentence.

O Oregon!

Like most everyone else, I suspect, John Latta has close friends and detractors. I'm neither, just a reader who follows for two days (last Wednesday and Thursday) his sudden music and insights (which he calls "spelunking," among other things) on Clark Coolidge and Bernadette Mayer's The Cave. It's a relief there's "no shilly-shallying."

[Continuing from yesterday...] Confronting another text directly is one desire, whether it's subliminal or you're consciously in pursuit. Prepositions are helpful when you write what you read through indirection, or when you write beside your reading, under it, over it. Fold the zine or close the book or turn down the screen and compose (from) the ghost image of another text. Wait a day or longer and write after it.

Reading and responding to reading are the bed and bedroom to a writer's sociability. Then, there is the life that leads into and out of the room. Somehow, your social life and writing combine, exciting truths and falsehoods in a dramatic spiel. Over thirty years ago while a Columbia undergraduate Brad Gooch wrote, "I want to get older with you / but not sleep with you yet," a half-sexy and fairly sensible proposition for a poem and for a young poet whose life and writing have since taken him to the drama and mastery of literary biography, notably City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O'Hara and, published two weeks ago, Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor. An irreproachable biographer with a poet's gift for ephemera is a splendid model of the writer living out of his writing, pilfering from others' lives, for sure, but stealing devotionally. In Gooch's case the writer is devoted to whiz kids, choosing functional geniuses for sleeping partners — a graceful stratagem to live and age expressively.

Where was I? Reading is different for writers.

For poets, reading is poetry, pre-poetry, or at minimum its それゆえ, original potential. As John Ashbery has said often in a number of ways, and most recently in "Uptick" (published in Poetry this month), "poetry dissolves in / brilliant moisture and reads us / to us." It's snowing heavily as I cut and paste Ashbery's three lines. It's timely for me to face the brilliant moisture idea. This is unmitigated happenstance, like a majority of what I read. Circumstance or not, writers, not just poets, skew toward reading that prompts wordy consideration and response. Poets appear to go out begging for it, finding relief in processing text, principally but certainly not only poetry. We're not addicted to reading because we're feeding off catharsis or anything like it. That's what normal readers do. We're not normal. We're not compelled to read to feel emotion or have ideas, primarily. We read to do something with emotion and ideas. We look them over, kick their tires, test ride them. Who among close readers of Ashbery's has not taken him for a ride and been piqued? When we feel this way we can figure the time-emoticon game out, just a little. The hold-it-now frolic that Ashbery creates with registers is one way. In another of this month's four poems in Poetry, "El Dorado," he plays with loose, dim-witted utterance, with "'No rest for the weary'," which he puts in quotes to annoy his reader, a poet, more; then "I disagree / with you completely but couldn't be prouder / and fonder"; followed up by "So drink up. Feel good for two." For the fun of it he's talking down to one of his most cherished categories of reader, a poet, acknowledging the troublesome and timely antagonism between the writing and the being read, a live act passing on as it addresses, writes the other, the live act in reading, the future, both merged continuously. More obvious, we find a symptom of time shifting as Ashbery reaches (up, across, down?) for a choice of word that spins his reader's head, because, well, when the curious-yet-killer word comes along you feel it... because you're thinking 'what a cool choice,' and now you're more immersed (state-of-the-art term) with what you're reading and with the writer as you both had to have speculated, as if together, on the word, on how, and on why it came to be such a good choice. I'd say in this month's four short pieces there are three poems with three amusing choices (about the right ratio, I think): dovetail (the verb), subfusc, arroyo. In a fourth poem I find a patch of syntax that enforces the semantemes bubbling overtime, "Then up and pipes the major..." So reading and writing about reading suggest rewards.

Pretty good riff on the joy of Obamaesthetics.

I'm going to write about sociability within poetry and another way to be social not practiced much among writers of poems, but it's going to take time to get to it. Intellectuals — a subset among poets — or maybe vice versa? — act out large portions of their sociability through reading. My reading includes daily newspapers like the print version of The NY Times. This is beginning to take on qualities of habit in a rarefied, overly precious routine, made rarer with Pulitzer-garnering dailies falling by the planeload. Handheld freedoms, newspapers, are not to be sniffed at, just yet. How many of them, for instance, will we have a few years from now? Shuffling between the print and online Times puts me midway between the ancien régime and ingénues; with every dual read feeling more like a mix of allegiances to, on one hand, a lost generation of angry Kennedys pouring over text, coverage, substance and, on the other, a blamelessly jovial crew of Web readers perusing the design and larkiness of niche features and disaster updates. Today I'm going more for niches, liking Holland Cotter's review of the German entertainer / artist Martin Kippenberger. Born in 1953 a little ahead of his time, or maybe not, a meta-ironic humorist and recombine appropriationist who often turned on himself as a target and who died at age 44 in 1997. A party type from the beginning, Kippenberger, per Cotter, is "the juiced-up guy who made scintillating speeches, picked stupid fights and periodically dropped his pants." Kippenberger's self-portraits have a big range: before age 30, according to Cotter, Kippenberger is "a matinee idol lounging on a discarded sofa beside a Manhattan street"; by his mid-thirties, "he’s a paunchy, pugnacious middle-aged Picasso in boxer shorts. And from this point on the line between self-depiction and self-debasement blurs." A few years later Kippenberger was doing self-portraits of a dead man. And you have to love Kippenberger's outdoing, out-insulting Rauschenberg's erasure of a De Kooning — Kippenberger "bought a small gray 1972 monochrome painting by Gerhard Richter, fitted it with metal legs and turned it into a coffee table, which became by default a sculpture and original Kippenberger." Anyway, the phrase that stands out in Cotter's first paragraph describing Kippenberger's rise through the ranks is "compulsive sociability." This is the descriptor lost on so much of poetry and many writers. What are our distinctive compulsions today? We still read a great deal (at least I think we do) and we talk a lot about what we read, as well as about our sampling movies and art we see, music sometimes, sometimes politics, usually in chatty clumps of yes / no, affinity / repulsion, that sort of consumerist give-and-take. So there is enthusiastic discourse about reading, which is primary, and movies, music, art viewing, perhaps politics, etc., a little more guarded chat about other poets (strategic gossip), and other topics branching out to our lives and careers, subjects that are, I believe, carefully monitored, usually reserved for the right moment among particular friends or acquaintances. I'm not finding many Kippenbergers among us, then, guys that get out of the studio, so to speak, and forget themselves or, you know, pick a fight, drop their pants. Writers' gatherings are constrained by work-and-wages mores that our forbearers disdained. That is, if your mom is Gertrude Stein and your dad is Frank O'Hara like mine. How nearly gratuitous and cursory to indulge in a challenged habit reading the newspaper, especially reading it in hand, and be reminded of the compulsively social, The Other Way that still makes news.

If you own a copyright, you are "in the settlement" between Google and two sub-classes, authors and publishers. That's one of the points in a legal statement sent out by Rust Consulting, Inc. as part of "Court-Ordered Information" [sic] for authors and publishers about the Google Search Settlement. The legalese doesn't get clearer, but it is online. If you can figure enough of it out and you object to something, May 5 is the first of several key deadlines. Signed, Big Brother.

I was waking up this morning after Obama's joint session speech. He's still talking but he's whittled it all down to bitchspeak. In a crisis we pull together like molecules of programmable matter, flexible, sticky balls of sadness.

An uneasy read.

I solemnly swear I have no idea where Thomas Basbøll is heading, but in three short posts, so far, he's initiated a critical appreciation of textual flarf, and it's terrific appreciation. No matter the partisan tic or extra-textual motive, I just jump around feeling real good whenever a poet takes on matters at hand like language, stylistics, prosody, and so forth. Writing today about variations in delivery afforded by Sharon Mesmer's work, Basbøll observes, "I have found the image of [inaugural bard] Elizabeth Alexander's 'poet's voice' reading... through a PA system aimed at the Washington monument useful..."

When does stagecraft snap apart? By what measure does asymmetry become askew? President Obama is true top dog. When he takes the podium and staffers stand in the back — the rearguard in fact — that's asymmetry we have come to the occasion, either in person or on tv, to see and expect. When Eric Kantor or John McCain must rise and bob his neck skyward to respond to Barack Obama's question, "any thoughts?" — that's askew. The audience is beneath the President. All due respect to President Obama, it looks cracked.

Hey, why not?

I can't stop reading this groovy stuff.

It seems I forgot how to mean
something. Let's go camping.

-- from "dccclxxxv"

And why would I?

Avant-bourgeoisie. Taking offense is tragic and bullying. And stupid. Well, not 100%. But one thing David Orr got mostly right on poets in coterie: ...we begin to think of real criticism as being "mean" rather than as evidence of poetry's health; we stop assuming that poems should be interesting to other people and begin thinking of them as being obliged only to interest our friends... If this smarts or even if it barely tingles, I am advised. Maybe it's your turn, since several times now I have heard and read the m-word in discourse about another poet's criticism. The word mean and words to that affect, like judgmental. Criticism that's judgmental! Ew. To put it only slightly exaggeratedly, anything less than a tummy rub (i.e., prostrated flattery) will not attain or regain approval of the offended? The m-word and its like are used ungeneratively to wipe out the message / messenger and stop discussion. The core strategy is to shrink the discourse field and the heads that are off putting: The atmosphere or the group is thus rendered more charmingly bourgeois for fun and influence. How shrunken is one's head? I see a new line of criticism that demonstrates how we (or some) turn making discourse about discourse into a kind of friends and family plan.

I'm unsated by both the stimulus and an early response concerning what will be topic du jour for many a jour, greatness in poetry. David Orr in this week's NY Times Sunday Book Review rifles through an established litany of nearly-contemporary candidates for greatness, and, save one, leaves them all dangling, Frank O'Hara, Robert Lowell — even Elizabeth Bishop, who is "great with an asterisk," more a contender because, according to Orr's citing of J. D. McClatchy, she has earned "influence...in the literary culture." Bishop is typecast, nonetheless, by Orr with that telltale asterisk that's keyed to the minors, one who too frequently writes about "tiny objects." May I be among the first to crown Orr a size queen? No wonder Orr finds John Ashbery's big opus exceptional if lacking consistency in its high-in-irony greatness. Half-admiring, Orr prescribes tough love for the giant. I'm not kidding.

When we lose sight of greatness, we cease being hard on ourselves and on one another; we begin to think of real criticism as being "mean" rather than as evidence of poetry's health...we stop making demands on the few artists capable of practicing the art at its highest levels. Instead, we cling to the ground in those artists' shadows — John Ashbery's is enormous at this point — and talk about how rich the darkness is and how lovely it is to be a mushroom. This doesn't help anyone. What we should be doing is asking why a poet as gifted as Ashbery has written so many poems that are boring or repetitive (or both), because such questions will allow us to better understand the poems he has written that are moving and funny and beautiful. Such questions might even allow other poets — especially younger poets — to find their own ways of writing poems that are moving and funny and beautiful.

This is a lazy overreach, a gloved lunge toward Ashbery's cheekbone that misses. Point one, an unargued declaration of boredom refracts through the speaker, beholder of the experiment. Another point, directed to Orr's semi-mitigating queries to help others "find their own ways," is the requirement to revisit Ashbery's cohort, O'Hara (rather than hang him up) in order to comprehend how one so close to Ashbery's influence was emboldened to write very different poetry, achieving work as "moving...funny...beautiful" as Ashbery's, or more so, according to a growing consensus of writers living today. (We know who we are.)

Orr's essay is in tatters. While he finds Ashbery's style of irony a singular achievement, Orr operates from a base for greatness that's extremely mainline, stepping backward from Ashbery or anything "moving" or "funny":

Generally speaking, though, the style we have in mind tends to be grand, sober, sweeping — unapologetically authoritative and often overtly rhetorical. It's less likely to involve words like "canary" and "sniffle" and "widget" and more likely to involve words like "nation" and "soul" and "language."

Orr argues in short for a once-prevailing climate of hegemony, three parts old shoe, one part sociological a la Pierre Bourdieu:

Greatness isn't simply a matter of potentially confusing concepts; it's also a practical question about who gets to decide what about whom. Our assumptions about poetic greatness are therefore linked to the reputation-making structures of the poetry world — and changes in those structures can have peculiar effects on our thinking.

In Orr's hands, greatness is authority, both sternly unapologetic and open for business, a brokerage in reputations.

In quick response, Justin Taylor raises objections regarding Orr's dopey old-shoeness but finds not a few points to agree with, such as Orr's easy generalizations about the lack of ambition in contemporary practice. Taylor's most controversial concession to Orr is acceding to the biz, buzz, power wielding part of authority as if this were greatness: "It's not Ashbery's style you want to aspire to — that's been done, and now done and done – it's his status." Taylor follows this with a stagy script about establishing a goal "to become a lion — let the next guy see you sitting there, and turn tail for fear of his life." I'm beginning to think hunter-gatherers like Taylor, Orr, and me are the last ones who need to pipe up about authority or authority-greatness. The topic deserves more voices, especially those ready to tear down gender-marked constructions, such as "to decide what about whom" and "turn tail."

It's only a snippet, but Keith Waldrop shows up at Nomadics, today. It's the finale of Waldrop's reading at The Project last night. (This is what I call timely blogging.)

Take love, find money.

Friends have helped with a few more tropes. Am I nervous? Traits leader. Before-&-after boutique. Brotherly daughters. Fuck knee. Multidimensional acceptance. Here's a favorite, fashion wife swap.

Tropes from today's blogs restaged as pro-ironic after-avant party ambience. Um:

Think back to Kerameikos. For three nights, we'd eat magnificently.

Eight hundred and sixty-nine, eight hundred and sixty-one, eight hundred and sixty-seven. I wanted to get a good viniyoga tape ever since the early 70s when, as a boy, I suffered a lower back injury in France, when I was pushed out of a slowly moving bus by some schoolmates.

In shifting night mist, a tattered poster. It begins — But should I use quotation marks when I reproduce parts of it? Can it really be “quoted” in any meaningful sense? Existence precedes essence.

I will lead you only to your border.

My rooms are full of helium.

Victor squashed under a train.

Wack Bizz.

Ok. I can see the xtranormal meme has taken over my life and those of some favorite bloggers. Time — before others catch up! — to go for beautiful and haunting. I'm letting loose my lost epic Wendy, full of feeling. (I just found it under a fleshy presence.)

Morose office.

Couldn't wait. Keckler was here first, but now Faint Canto 1 (Sunken garden).

To Pine Corridor.

Some feelings return.

Terpsicore is ascetic, improvisatory, sherbet hued, Erato, a voice of suspicion and many hisses, Clio, a commanding note tumbling as rumors circulate, Melpomeme, all blues and mistaken early on, every beat ridden like a whale gainsaying oomph. An echo of flame, ailing Calliope still makes love in public (the flying public) and requires a stop-start pattern of marriage songs, blizzard, and dance.

The lines break up around Clio's supplicant remains. Polyhymnia I admit was arrested after the bombing of atomic plants, and there was loss of memory preventing her escape to the heliport. She was handcuffed, taken into custody under the Baker Act. If meaningless imagery had been more vulnerable it may not have mattered she created havoc in the lobby area, knocking over chairs and a table, ripping an Our Lady of Hope poster off the wall.

Did Euterpe get paid for that?

No, no one pays for Euterpe's "assemble of pomposity." Her comment has been removed.

My point is... Paul Muldoon and crew exact dignity in rebuttal... they sound like my mother Thalia. Or Urania. She and.

We the vicitmized (the ephebes in corresponding clouds) tried to remind Polyhymnia rules protect everyone but she believed in conspiracy. Theater in this deep mirror. A light snow performing buthoh. She called the FIB & they sent a helicopter to the rescue, but the others wouldn't let her get to the rooftop heliport, which does not exist.

The official lines end here and feeling becomes something else.

New trope of the hour, Gail Collins says for 2009 old is in. Citing recent precedents, Mickey Rourke, Robert Plant, and the amazingly cuddly sleepy-eyed 70-year-old Sussex Spaniel, Stump, winner of the Westminster Kennel Club best of show, Collins has a point. Best example, Hank Aaron pulled out of the freezer like a ham, the nation's homerun straight arrow again since younger contenders after Aaron have been over-enhanced. So, hurrah for these rebounded granddads and hoarse retreads from yesteryear ... except in poetry as in pornagraphy it's still going the other way. Face it. The younger the better. (Surgeon General's Warning: Ethical and esthetic boundaries pertain.)

This hardly means the demise of writers past 40. Writers age differently. And they never grow old on the page if they know how. The same rules have applied since the beginning. We have to write and keep writing like 13-year-olds (or even younger if you're after a demographic that takes everything in intuitively), that's all. Some of the most senior and even the dead among us show how it's done. Zukofsky is young but he seems adult compared to Elmslie, Stein, Cerravolo. Bishop is naïve enough and brilliant about it, but I'll first take Notley, Spicer (who can seem too grown-up, too, so maybe cohorts and precursors like O'Hara, Schubert...), Ashbery. Ashbery! Can you approach a medium-length or longer poem by John Ashbery and not expect to be whacked by his teenage brain? Other avants, language and after-language ppl, processuals-conceptualists of every stripe, all of us have never written so goofily, so adolescently as Ashbery in "Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape." You know, I don't want to limit my argument to tokens of essentialism, but ageism needs its detractors fully equipped. A black-toothed icon like "Farm Implements" brings poetry down to its screeching youth, a time and place it should never relinquish.

Journalism trope of the hour, technology's fingerprints.

Real off center. Requires teethmarks.

Valentine's this year is shaping up. It's cool to get a bear-gram and an armed robot mini from Hater 1 and Hater 2! Leechvideo sent over a short list of Birdwalk clips that show they're influenced by hands-on literary studies. That's cool too. And coolest, this pre-owned fuzzy pajama top from Goodwill that a tongue-in-cheek friend fed-exed me this morning. Thanks, guys.

No plan is perfect. I have nothing to add to that. Did anyone else hear about the woman who led police on a low-speed chase while driving a U-Haul?

You usually find just awesome service from an old lady. So don't piss off seniors! This time she refused to go along with the rules. She still hasn't figured out why she's restricted to a world without suffering that can't exist.

It is sad we are now separated.

A friend who leaves for a long journey cannot be created nor is she destroyed as soon as the word "GAL-IXY" jumps out.

It's even sadder to think in a while this becomes irrelevant. The Navbar is real and terrifying. Nonconformity of the whole brought to a boil makes crazies!

And does the festival in the run off trample on our rights in other ways? We gather to answer this question and simply the idea of autumn that a boy plays with a flag, a Palestinian boy plays with a Hamas flag. This is why wormholes reject us though there are add-ons with incursive bludgeons as to how a wormhole is merely less sensitive to oblivion.

Bad futures are constantly replaced by hopeful updates. Here's one about poetics opening itself to new mergers of practical and technical knowledge. Dale Smith writes, "And by the new I mean new perspective — not necessarily form. That make-it-new thing is not just located within a formalist machinery, but in a living body of thought and practice that we, as poets, engage in."

Now that everyone has spoken — from fans and foes of irony at [lime tree] to speculators in between at Possum Ego — everyone, that is, who has had something to add, theoretically, and has made her case via blog posts and/or filling up comment boxes with regard to running for class president of poetry, disaster-era semiotics, and other near-anarchic aspects of hesitation and uncertainty in verse — maybe we can turn to concrete reportage? Please, more porridge on the following.

The Trade Books with Fine Art Covers exhibit of over two dozen designs at the Poetry Center Library now through March 7.

Cannot Exist reading, Jan. 29, at Bowery PC.

Boyer and Strickland reading, Feb. 4, at the Project.

Goldsmith & Torres reading, Feb 7, at Bowery.

Just asking.

Pulsing is the new blink.

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Am confused. Just having to capture the logic of America's recovery and reinvestment saga will do this to you. Barack Obama sponsors a stimulus that will take up to $900 billion or so, a big plan; he gets House democrats to draft it and they do, without republicans, but as a gesture to once-and-future (they hope) kissing cousins the dems toss in $300 billion in tax cuts; Obama pours tea and coffee for John Boehner ("o my god") and John McCain ("country first") to massage them coming onboard yet, thank you, they exit fleeing in the other direction; something's going awry for days after as Obama watches opinion polls slip for his plan while he's forced to defend nominees under fire for past-due taxes ... just as opponents find their voice defining the plan as pork; meantime, to bring a new level of crossed purposes into view, yesterday Senate compromisers, 'centrist' democrat Ben Nelson and 'moderate' republican Susan Collins, try their hands at stripping funds from the plan for state and local governments, education, Amtrak, cutting the plan by $100 billion; Obama flies Air Force One for 30 minutes last night to Williamsburg, VA to campaign among partisans (House democrats who have already approved the plan), but this is more a public relations initiative to appeal to the broader base of American voters, no doubt seeding new misgivings among moderates and centrists in Congress, making compromise all the more elusive; the jobless rate rises today to 7.6%. The jump in unemployment will bring democrats and maybe a couple of republicans back to the stark reality of economic collapse, according to the journalistic script, and Obama will have his stimulus with or without bipartisan support. We'll see. If so, the debate then moves to whether this has been (a) truly a bipartisan outreach on Obama's part and (b) whether bipartisanship is worth the effort. That self-involved debate colors our politics for days or weeks and distracts us from preparing for new havoc in international banking and commerce, much higher unemployment here, new US financial rules (negotiated with China), more stimulus talk, less healthcare reform talk, incremental (and minimum) green energy investments, government securitizing mortgages to benefit the system (mortgage lenders), republican gains in 2010. Am confused.

Here are 8 random things about me and how I hide my bad taste in anime music videos. These are tricks I recommend with an iPod or any personal videoplayer.

1. Smoothbore ambush. When listening to The Wiggles, I pocket my instrument and walk briskly around the office or living room so the sound isn't restricted to one area and everyone else gets a piece but doesn't know where it came from. You have to be careful when you do this. Don't stop until the full playlist, including Kill You by Dethklok, has been expelled from your pants.

2. Focused fly-by. I scout out an area in the office or my housing situation before firing up Taarna and Sammy Hagar. I walk around and check for other anime addicts. If there are any, I leave and come back again after lunch.

3. Courtesy flush. I run to the nearest bathroom and flush the toilet once Lupin the Third starts. This reduces the amount of airtime the video has to stink up the office or apartment.

4. Walk around in denial, banter. This works when you're "alone-together" (housemates or colleagues out of sight, in the wings). The instant I select favorite I also begin talking to myself; I try walking from the sofa or chair, to a nearby window, then to a doorway checking if anyone is coming in; and I repeat the cycle while Steal Princess, Rogue's Whip keeps playing. This can be a calamitous strategy if a Demon Puff shows up and tries to bust me. It's best then to pretend Steal Princess does not exist.

5. The Demon Puff. If someone at home or at work doesn't realize I'm in my own space and tries to force the door open while Petting College Girls is fast forwarding, I remain where I am until the Demon Puff leaves. This is one of the most shocking and vulnerable moments when watching personal anime where others lurk. If you stick to your guns and stay put, however, Demon Puff will get the message, and you will avoid uncomfortable eye contact.

6. No big deal. You're in a very public place, an elevator or hallway, for example. You accidentally press the arrow for Mighty Ravendark and several loud notes slip out at a machine gun pace. Don't panic. Turn the horned almighty down or off and remain where you are until everyone else exits. This way you'll spare everyone the awkwardness of what just happened.

7. Cough cough. A phony cough alerts all new entrants into my area that I'm watching Persona 4. This can be used to cover-up The Murders, Transfer Student, Rainy Midnight, and Yellow World.

8. Work those toes. A subtle toe-tap can be used to signal potential Demon Puffs that you are occupied. This will remove all doubt who's in the shadow of the Darkthrone.

Brain damage is in the eyes. Brain trust damage, too. You can spot the bounce in his retinas when Barack Obama screws up and he's forced to deflect our attention. In retrospect, hadn't it been clear to transition executives, the real screwballs, a criterion for the New Ethics in Government would be to pay taxes? A sprawl of voices in my head congratulates our leftist colleagues on The NY Times editorial board for tackling this huge moral hazard, issuing marching orders to Tom Daschle. It's not every day (we don't think) we'll have the chance to see the liberal media, under the guise of objectivity, do the heavy lifting for big pharma and the investor class. As the story line shifts incrementally from hope to doubt, capitalists and their playthings, the media, including The Times, are out to inflict further damage and bring Obama down a notch. Limo service and chauffeur taxes aside, we were told Daschle was uniquely qualified to steer health care reform through Congress. This no longer applies. Submit a caption: Obama screwed up, a cartoon pattern that is beginning to hold in public reception to his recovery-stimulus package now under repair in the Senate. Meanwhile, Obama asserts that this is not a time for profits and big bonuses. In turn, the same government-subsidized forces of hypocrisy that feign outrage at Daschle's $140,000 tax snafu are pissing in their Snuggies over Obama's order to limit bailed-out bankers to $500,000 salaries. Cable news loudmouths, like Jim Cramer, who earn high incomes at the behest of capitalists demur. For sure, Obama's salary cap is nothing substantive, another deflection. It's an overtly populist appeal from Obama, symbolic medicine to go along with more bounce in the retina to unscrew the damage.

A good number. Come to think of it, among the poets I love, for real, a good number of them are ex-Catholics and/or dyed in the wool Buddhists. Same with those I love at a distance, like Ryan Trecartin (see below), George Romero, and John Waters. (I don't know if Cindy Sherman is or ever was a practicing anything; her opus is Buddhistic.) The hysteria in all their works has religion, a matter of faith that fades away or dies. Once there was something out there (childhood?) swelling up around these guys, and in early sexual encounters it got intense, surged, and took off, causing more illogic and internal hysteria to pour up but mostly plunge, embarrassing and yet it's a rocking house party, like losing both death and life, dropping your pants, breaking water gushing down on your legs and heels and further down under the ground. In those terms, there are the visual poets I've mentioned, singling out Ryan Trecartin however for special mention, because he has poetry, he just wants to stylize your head for his online, to match his vision — here's another clip, labeled I-Be Area (Pasta Locker to JAmie's Area), to back this up further.

In addition to the visual poetry of filmmakers and photograhers, there is a textual poetry of hysteria brought on by religious fervor cum death. It could be, come to think of it, this is the only strain of genuine American romance. Obviously, I'm not talking about a soiled grab bag category like American sublime. I'm thinking about a Lost Sublime That's Dead to the Touch. Maybe, alternatively, The Fucked Pioneer. It might start with Emily Dickinson, just as American sublime does, but it takes us subterraneously to darker, greener, more wholesale hells and chat rooms we like to think of as ours, now.

Poets George Romero, Cindy Sherman, John Waters — each to the utmost of her paradigm, concepts, pep, and atomized abilities has come up with visual info that's more compelling than data we poets capture, re-capture, and/or write down as text. (Double dare: prove me wrong.) Add to the visual poets list video artisan Ryan Trecartin, featured in the Sunday Times Arts & Leisure. He pulls off the splintered equivalent of tribal truth-telling in this short clip from I-Be Area. There's nothing in poetry today that comes close, nothing that can declare and convey, I'm not allowed to play because of my past...uncontrollable forces. Yes. What can I do? I know how I feel now...I am waking up. I'm on your side. I am temporary.

Chuck in 3-D. You're off the island.

Two-faced Janus has exited with a sneer pointed in the direction of bright persons of certain merit and acquired outlook, cut-and-pasters, textual connectivists, and other dedicated tech practitioners of The Craft. Irate avantists had to persevere for up to an hour Saturday without recourse to Google as their usual, trusty search engine / comp bot / wing man broke down this morning, issuing bogus safety alerts and dead hyperlinks to hungry appropriation artists, e-poets in need of stump words, and anyone else looking for a fast fix of text off the web. "I don't know how I can take a risk right now without Google," said Emile Durkheim while the search engine went offline, "I have that sinking feeling going from plagiarized distortion to distorted plagiarism. You know, plagiarism in quotes." Durkheim, an e-list updater and, along with his life partner W. S. F. Pickering, author of innumerable pamphlets, t-shirts, and graphic hand towels developed from mining the internet, is prominent among a growing number of arts bookers and administrators dependent on internet tools not only to communicate but also to be. Tension lifted by Saturday afternoon once Google pulled strings and re-fired tubes giving new hope to the discourse-starved aggragated in all quarters and sectors on the planet where WiFi and everything coming through it are person-given rights of artistic personhood.

I'm marking the update, along with the comment box and links to four additional posts by Gabe Gudding, as archival material in the mon-Bourdieu-outdiscourses-you ______. (The blank requires your filling in a noun phrase, such as translational kerfluffle.) All together, the update contributes to the debate about everything phoned in in poetics. As does this from Anne Boyer.

Paid to be friendly.
At the center an oculus. The I.
Moving forward.

I admire Katie Degentesh's The Anger Scale for it's serious humoresque, not entirely self-knowing. Much of the wit submerged in cunning queasiness, vapors of unbalanced tones and transparent methods, it finds a ratio of constitutive disharmonies, method and tone sticking out unobsequiously to enfold showmanship within an immediate and addictive bearing on the present. V. Joshua Adams captures impressions like these and raises only a small measure of doubt about their utility in Chicago Review.

Worth a mention. Segue Reading w/ Eileen Myles, Rodrigo Toscano, Christina Strong, Laura Sims, Lawrence Griffin, Rick Burkhardt, Thom Donovan, others. Launch of Cannot Exist #4. The notice reads, in part, that the zine, edited by Andy Gricevich, is "devoted to overlap between politics, philosophy, and poetry." Who doesn't need overlap?

Bowery Poetry Club
Sat., Jan. 31, 4 to 6, 308 Bowery

Internet Aliens

Ballet's focus keeps an eye out
Watching us spin like sentience
Stuck in the happy medium

Sweetness itself catching everything
To give cause to baby Mozart
Squawking about cognition in opera

Who's moved parts from minor projects
Observing very little community,
Clumsifying long hours of letting be

Freezing hands into claws, which
Is why he should reserve dissonance
To guard shapes of light and volumes

Nested within a keyboard to determine
The performance.

The Washington Post will kill its Sunday book pull-out in a couple of weeks. Further proof of the diminution of print media. Artless reduction for figure and ground, newspapers and books.

To recap. The gotcha moments. Banter about an e-list, some of whose members lay claim to procedures and attitudes that thousands* already got. The commonplace as ribald proprietorship. Steps one, two, three, four, five.

*Gabe Gudding suggests the range is dozens. Gabe may be right if we were to stipulate procedures in sets or as an ensemble to describe a process, but the broader point is web-mining is a discernible practice for a number of poets, not just a few on an e-list or two; using the internet to cull vocabulary, shift tonal registers, elaborate and emend text has been a widely adapted process feature for a number of years. As for attitudes, there is no critical evidence that argues for anything new or exclusive in this regard.

George Schneeman, RIP.

Are they saying the same thing? Chögyam Trungpa intones First thought, best thought; George Balanchine, Don't think, just do. Both mean and don't mean what they say in specific contexts. The meaning / no-meaning problem buries itself in applications: a first thought in Trungpa's belief system is already problematic in that thinking (or not-thinking), even when it's "first," impedes being (and other incidents not attached to being); while Balanchine wants physical movement to function over, far above mental representation of movement, but one thinks on the way up to execution. Both statements — first thought, don't think — are fine examples of the layers in which meaning deploys non-meaning and, of course, simultaneous perception of opposite outcomes.

George Perle, RIP.

Dream within limits. What do we do here at pantaloons? We tease out opinions on how language gets done in poetics, poetry, politics, other redeeming or nutty enterprises. We ply language for several affects. We're not so interested in dreams. But once in a while we can't help ourselves, like this morning when we woke from a flash within a dream of such gruesome practicality we were distressed. I was, somehow, in search of tortured performance glamour, visiting a nice sports-transition store. No deeper pretext or prelude. I am in this nice, really dark place. The lights were out. But there I was casually shopping along with other guys. The shop was like Under Armor where mannequins, staff, and customers match up wearing comfortable, form-fitting shirts and sweats and sometimes jackets pulled a quarter inch back, almost off their collarbone, not to flex but to suggest upper body development. In other words, there are steadfast figures and outlines but nothing shows. The men have eyes and the mannequins don't move. That kind of carefully lunatic store. What am I doing here in this economy? That was what I was thinking as I picked out five pairs of socks. A pointillist grey pair, two pair in enlarged, graduated chocolate pixels, and a couple of pairs in black, one with a hint of a blacker digital plaid overlay. Everything was going to blend with my other clothes. (So what was the point, acquistion-wise?) The total came to under $200. Dreamers can translate the effects of geopolitical transparency into overlapping layers of desire, textured fantasy, aimless expectation. We call this shopping.

Recent film notes.

Burn after Reading

The Day the Earth Stood Still

Milk

Quantum of Solace

Rachel Getting Married

Slumdog Millionaire

Twilight

Wall-e

You cannot outlast us. That's the sound bite. Obama's been reading intelligence briefs and signals to us, sternly, there's more mayhem to come. He's not frightening us, he's stating the position clearly. Terrorists are out there and we have them surrounded, we win no matter, no apologies for what we are or how we live. A male dare packed into somber oratory about reclamation and the journey. At the moment we thought he might soar, Obama chose to tamp down the language. Emphasis on work, government that works. Responsibility. Common dangers. Swill and blood stains in the snow. George Washington crossing the Delaware for Christ's sake. Icy currents for four years.

~~

Competing egos from Harvard Law. Chief Justice Roberts overstepping bounds, Are you ready...senator? Roberts was not gracious, interrupting Obama when he began the oath at a point where Roberts had paused, forcing Obama to start over. Roberts twisting the word order of the middle part, misplacing the adverb faithfully, administering the oath without the text, a fabulously flawed performance.

~~

Senators Byrd and Kennedy, dueling invalids.

~~

A review stand that emptied well before the middle of the inaugural parade. Obama, his wife, and Biden stood alone. On television you could read the names of the guests that fled the cold. Signs on chair backs for "The Joint Chiefs" were prominent.

--

Beyond discussion: inaugural poem, Rick Warren's Christian invocation, Joseph Lowery's racy benediction, John Williams's schmaltzy "Air and Simple Gifts" (though it was good to hear the players, particularly Anthony McGill).

Improbable hat, Aretha.

The incision continues in this vein.

Look, I like several aspects (I think they're aspects) of what's being assailed here, but I'm roped in by what's absorbingly expressed: "Everyone on the internet is feeding the same machine." Here's this week's most direct argument for collectivity, maybe the winner in the direct argument category for all of January. Our time and our functioning within it, we should remember, no matter how adaptively understated or how closely observed, are imaginary. Shamans, dead-end kids re-inscribed as dead-enders? I don't know, maybe that's my crowd. I'm filled up with nervously charged prosaism. Hard-drinking, thrice-kissed.

Sexual dynamism. It's a quarterback problem.

My takes on 13 guys raising temps at Joe Brainard's Pyjamas: 1. Seth Green… cute when he cries, yet sorry, no. 2. Daniel Bedingfield. He's only good looking. "I don't want to run away." Really! 3. Seth MacFarlane, ok, the beefcake pattern has been set. Prosperous Midwestern beauty, granted. Nice dialect. 4. Jake Shears. Now you're talking. "I've been playing games since I was five." Ta Dah! 5. Annie Lennox. Her website's latest news is dated 10.03.08. No further comment. 6. Mika. Ok for a virgin. 7. Darren Hayes. Of course. Back to midcountry. Slutty voice. 8. Jamiroquai, much better. Mad scientist type. 9. John Mayer. Right now his singing goes nowhere. Can he learn how to swing inside? Doubt it. I'd like to shave his head and feed him gluten. 10. Lloyd Cole, the missing New York Doll! Bless her. 11. Neil Tennant. Something for seniors. I get it. He's beautiful. 12. Giovanni Ribisi, the best! a scientologist, even! 13. James Van der Beek looks like a model. Head with no moving parts.

The wind corridor — blithe!

A disheartening bone yard of axioms supposes its completion. Angels get stopped and adjust like the pumpkin marsh turned shrine–y meadow. I give up to appease you.

Disenvowled chapter e (selections) by Christian Bök — inspired by (but not copied from, exactly) Cecil Touchon's procedures outlined at dbqp. Link below. (Very nice.)

Very nice.

The 1970s appear to be within reach, jeans with a slight flare, mustaches, medicinal marijuana. It's a parlor trick we pull off collectively. The 2000s, that's the decade we're about to exit, attach readily to the 20th century. That's because this persists as the unpronounceable, unprecedented decade that wills to fold itself into other time (and let's admit it, the sooner it folds the better for our future). For the moment, the 2000s belong to the past century, the still-tangible, once-thought-progressive hegemony of information-based, meritocratic multiculturalism, advanced by science and the languages of science, programming and English. As for our connection to the past and timelines moving forward, however, it's absurd that the 1980s and 1990s seem within walking distance. They aren't. Within hours the first January of the twenties, starting with 2020, will be closer than January 1998, and the farther back we walk, the colder the blast. The 1970s are several long hikes up and around then down a K2 heap, a product of stylistic and political shifts over four decades, tectonic shifts.

In Milk Sean Penn wears all his decades well. He plays gay community organizer Harvey Milk at age 40 in 1970 moving forward, leaping into prominence toward the end of his life before he is gunned down in his late 40s. The film welcomes us to queer consciousness 101, and it takes us back to the era when gay men and women invented their communities by organizing them, investing livelihoods and their lives to stroll a few city blocks of the Castro alone or together as they are. (Or as they were, few or no gym rats among the boys, women who needed to butt heads with male counterparts just to get cranking, politically.) Director Gus Van Sant produces both a biopic shaped around a singular rebel and a starkly entertaining exposé of communal forces, blending archival film and newsreels with theatrical representation of Milk, younger comrades in arms, and numerous adversaries. It's chilling to view kinescopes of Anita Bryant in her prime declaring her Christian love for gays. Bryant's parallel to our own Rick Warren comes to mind. Similarly shocking, Milk is shown fighting and prevailing against Proposition 6, a California ballot initiative to root out homosexuals in public education, sponsored by national anti-gay forces. Had Milk only lived to present day, he may have made a difference battling last year's Proposition 8 repealing homosexual marriage, funded by Latter-day Saints. Reconsidering Milk today prompts reevaluation of how un-fecklessly and how far from a neutral distance we have come in affording homosexuals rights and respect. After 15 years of one form of such neutrality, only now with the new Obama administration is there the prospect of dismantling official military policy that enforces silence on homosexuals in service, so reevaluation of where we stand is much more than an exercise or academic ideal. Even today when an accomplished straight poet snickers at the idea of seeming gay, we as a community seem unknowingly stuck in the past, in bed with our own adversaries, ourselves. As artifact, Milk brings what has long since passed closer to our time. It's a deception that registers for something more attractive soon.

Dear Barack Obama:

There's a speech watch. It's been building over a few months, as you know, and with one week to go before your inaugural oration it's now calculable. I can't remember when so many — a multitude — will be hanging on rhetoric.

It will be exciting if you keep it short. That's the first order, as it were. And let's hope specifics are kept in tow. A pile-up of details would muddy the occasion. Rather than reach for punch lines, design one or two views into the future, frameworks we might call them. That will be splendid. We're expecting memorable lines, sound-bites that are supposed to be remembered but may not go over. So, keep these to a minimum, please. Or it may be adventurous if you don't even try. Grant us a communitarian and jaw-dropping glimpse of tomorrow to celebrate history. Our place in it. That's all, for now.

Slumdog Millionaire employs three actors apiece to tell the life stories — childhood, adolescence, young adulthood — of three Muslims who grew up in the slums of modern Mumbai. The tale is a convoluted but whole account bubbling up in flashbacks and contemporary frames featuring brutal interrogation, childhood endangerment, and a quiz show, everything gurgling, pulsing exhaustively to a hustle-and-smooch climax — liberty and happiness — in the closing credits. British actor Dev Patel, of Indian descent, plays the post-adolescent Jamal, the hardened but unwavering protagonist who has escaped the megaslum to work as tea-server in a Mumbai boiler room (where phone bashers pitch family plans to housewives in the UK). Jamal winds up, improbably, as a magnetic game show contestant, a huge favorite of the masses watching the Indian TV version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? It's providential for Jamal all the questions he's asked on the way to winning his fortune happen to connect to his hard life experiences. It's a narrative gimmick that good writing and directing can begin to bring off. British screenwriter Simon Beaufoy, who gave us The Full Monty, re-invents the breakneck pace and violence of the Maharashtra underclass and underworld, along with the faster rhythms of young people who struggle to be winners today, running away from all that. English-Irish director Danny Boyle (28 Days Later, The Beach, Trainspotting) charges his mostly youthful, mostly Indian cast with the humane task of showing restraint in a world with no holds barred, creating an ensemble of players whose emotions and physicality seem to smolder as the story almost goes up in flames. Thank goodness Jamal winds up with Latika, his boyhood love played by the Mangalorean model and TV personality Freida Pinto. More thanks to Boyle's decision to gather these two and the rest of the cast for the film equivalent of a curtain call during credits at the end. Out of their characters, they swagger. Dev Patel, a Taekwondo world champion, and Freida Pinto, an Indian fashion icon, embrace, romp, and trance-freeze over "Jai Ho," a song by A. R. Rahman I translate as "Hell, yeah." Opening lyrics I truncate and adapt here from a literal English translation: "Hell, yeah, I walked on fire and got you. I've lost my life. Hell, yeah."

Slumdog Millionaire was nominated for and last night won all four categories at the Golden Globe Awards, best original score, best screenplay, best director, and best picture (drama).

My girlfriend is ticked.

She's an irate Democrat. And I can empathize with her and Paul Krugman's disdain for the type of stimulus measures Barack Obama outlined yesterday in his speech at George Mason University. It's fair to say, with respect to shifting to the center / center-right, all the signals are flashing olive green — that's flashing for undue, indeed, untoward caution — and that's olive for the color of the branches he's piling up on the GOP side of the aisle. Republicans can never resist a tax cut, and roughly $300 billion of Obama's $600-800 billion stimulus will come as credits to taxpayers and to businesses for new hires. The rest of the stimulus will go for promoting broadband expansion, digital medical record keeping, shovel-ready public works, and quick-fix green initiatives such as new insulation for public buildings. Does that sound like dramatic action? "Obama's plan is nowhere near big enough to fill [the] 'output gap,'" Krugman writes in today's NY Times. (The output gap, according to Krugman, is the difference between national production capacity and what is actually sold.) In other words, what Obama proposes, dealing still in generalities, covers too little ground to move more goods, promote more services, and ameliorate dire economic challenges like 7.2% unemployment hurtling down on us. Most of what Obama wants is familiar turf, tax giveaways, already-proposed public works. Tepid ground, we might say, from the perspective of most unemployed and imaginatively anemic in comparison to more leftwing initiatives once at the top of Obama's wish list, universal health care and green energy R & D, initiatives that will advance both short- and long-term social wellbeing.

To achieve the illusion of bipartisan support for what might be described as stopgap spending writ large, Obama dangles billions of dollars in tax cuts to triangulate a few recent converts to budgetary discipline (read, Republicans) to join his side, but he risks losing more than a few of us who prefer his holding up the wish list now, proposing the big, expensive ideas while public approval is on his side, even if results prove partisan. Democrats can do this if Obama will let them.

Girlfriend and I are holding tight.

Don't know. Find this week's meme, embarrassment, spooky. Anything can be recouped and mined, surely. But isn't it a little belated for chilling anthems and a textual movement motivated by shame, awkwardness, discomfiture, popping zits? Oh, zits. I'm spooked by the half-heartedness and the half-thought-outness.

Jamie Reid praises Billy Little, archivist, publisher, friend of poets, poet.

It's a sign of anarchy when Senate Intelligence Committee higher-ups Dianne Feinstein and Jay Rockefeller are summarily reduced in stature by Obama staffers coordinating with junior senators while commentators, such as Rachel Maddow, wield authoritative arguments to support a turnaround at CIA. Never camera shy, Feinstein breathlessly questioned the skills set and lack of Agency experience of director-designate Leon Panetta, once the first word of his likely nomination filtered up from Ron Wyden, a lower ranked member of the Intelligence Committee that Feinstein chairs. With Obama publicly advancing his choice for CIA, firmly defending Panetta in face of criticism, Feinstein backed off her remarks within hours. This case of loose mouth is an embarrassment, since Feinstein's questions about Panetta are posed in the context of her having acceded to current antiterror protocols like severe interrogation methods and rendition. Obama seems to mean it when it comes to upending CIA's pat bureaucracy that looks soft-politico at Langley and roughhouse at the margins (everywhere else). Almost as promising, he seems ready to swat down competing agendas that don't measure up to his forms of anarchy.

Flipping sides, Feinstein's backing of Roland Burris as the appointed senator from Illinois moves her perception game forward, moaning, feisty and, in this instance, correct. Or mostly. She also chairs the Senate Rules Committee and according to her reading there's nothing on the books that would prevent Burris from assuming his seat in the Senate. The only hang-up might be how the Illinois Supreme Court rules with regard to the state secretary's endorsement. The moving parts of the Burris controversy are in Illinois, then, oro forensis. Speaking of the politics here, I'd think Feinstein is ahead of others, a quick rebound from her Panetta blunder.

Back to the perception game, Rachel Maddow is fast becoming the go-to rhetorician to explain and expand on Obama's anarchism. I just love that she's taken possession of the Republican catchphrase elections have consequences in answer to mumblings from right and center. During the presidential election cycle no sensible Republican would submit to her blistering Q & A style. This prompted her to deal nearly exclusively with lefties, first as she guest-hosted on a range of MSNBC shows, and then after she landed her own cable program late in the campaign. Along the way she must have won the trust of Obama's communication staff as she seems often the first and the most eloquent, the most specific re-teller or, ok, spinner of new policies for change. The one-sided conversations during the campaign, enforced by the GOP blackballing her on-air efforts, have worked in her favor, as she has honed lines of argument to an essential brevity that persuades, because her language reflects intelligence staving off cant, engaging with steely particularity.

First there was Barbar. Cretin, evil colonialist, when he donned whiteface, it was time for ridicule and games (l'art populaire). Barbar was distinguished not so much by showmanship as by his underhanded chic (bisexualité que la position de repli). What a big schnazz he had. Then there are the pre-endowed toys of Teletubbies, the BBC's reach-out to the world of rainbows and inflamed proclivities. I fear for any straight child within their fun-house grasp, cuddly, flamboyant balls of sorry-ass perversion.

Now there's Wall-E, a fuming sulfuric potion (confused identity, ambiguous purpose, sex change) poured over robotic operations, mis-tagged as kid's entertainment. The film's original song "Out There" says it out loud, meow! I'm feeling beautiful. Wall-E is a richly empathetic banged-up throwback, a trash compactor (could be from the Jetsons) roving over a de-peopled planet heaped in refuse, stranded in his/its blue-collar routine for 700 years, picking up tossed brassieres and make-up, listening to show tunes (hint, wink), the last employee on Earth. He/it runs from Microsoft Vista. From outer space enters Macintosh Eve, a legless streamlined dedicated gadget floating like a Swedish teardrop over waste. I'm calling it Eve, but name and gender are up for grabs. Wall-E calls it variously Steve, Reeve, Irv. Doesn't matter, Wall-E forces love that dares not speak its name onto it/her/him. Once Wall-E and Eve lift off from Earth, conventions in animation take over. Human beings have repaired to a spaceship that's nearly spotless, The Axiom, and like us they have become fairly relaxed shopaholics, only they're dealing with consequences after seven-plus centuries strapped into Ikea recliners, sipping tall blue colas, suffering bone loss. Little and midsize robots race around and cause panics (if they can). Airlock disposals and other inane contraptions on the big shiny mother ship are controlled by one more throwback, evil Hal. Though it's Hal after the bailout this time and its giant red glow and kinematics module are housed in a flimsy steering wheel. And it's a good thing, too, because when Wall-E and Eve assist the ship's captain (homo sapiens) snapping the wheel off, Hal dies. Humans can now return to their filth-ridden streets back on Earth while Wall-E and Eve run off to live their private desires. Evil. Pure evil.

Looking out, looking on — that's one dynamic that recovery from addiction deals in, a gluttonous, panoptic magnetism that woozily succumbs to cinematic overlapping. The centerfold of Rachel Getting Married is Anne Hathaway as Kym Buchman, sister of the bride. Hathaway emerges from the black-and-white credits self-absorbed, formidably at arm's length yet more darkly shadowed than anyone else in the first key minutes of the film, decamping from nine months of rehab in NYC, looking out from her father's suburban wagon as they speed toward Stamford in a blanched gauze of grays, greens, and doused flames of color. One pit stop for diet Pepsi later — Hathaway refused a diet Coke packed for the commute — the father-expeditor-of-good-feelings played by Bill Irwin (aka Mr. Noodle on Sesame Street) and the needy junkie step onto the wedding set, their mid-19th-century family home, for a weekend of multiple rooms and grounds for looking on as Kym, Rachel, and others' lives take hold. Rosemarie DeWitt as Rachel reclaims her father's attention — she's the one getting married, after all — and calls Hathaway down for ruining their past and making light of or fabricating the details to deflect criticism. DeWitt will have none of Hathaway's making 'amends,' and Hathaway cries back, "Who do I have to be now?" Hathaway's question plays out more terrifyingly the closer we come to the wedding and through the ensuing reception and party. DeWitt and Hathaway manage both to kill the music (an aggravating mélange of garage, Brazilian drums, and post-bop performed on screen well before and long after nuptials) and to see and behold the impasse they construct between them, punctuated by their mother's automatic flinches and retreat. The mother, played by Debra Winger, has remarried and arrives late and is among the first to exit the proceedings. It's a radical quality that puts the film viewer in Winger's shoes, arriving late to the de-synthesized catastrophe and needing to leave or at least to look away.

Getting back to dead binaries for the moment, I add Anne Boyer to the short list of bloggers reposing ideas around the six-inch-deep cavity of a vanguard of poets in opposition to them. Over the last two days Anne's method has been to mine sources. Reader, critic and, more infinitely refined, poet, she commences three brief references (three, so far) with Peter Burger's perception of an unresolved collusion between forces of an esthetic binary; then she cites Donald Sutherland's sanguine description of a fortuitous "animating force" in poetics to repurpose "stranded ideas" (ideas, as in concepts) "for another continuum (lyric subjectivity)... a perpetual 'fresh event.'" By round three, Anne turns to Gertrude Stein's song that notes "the little birds are audacious... [even as] they were not able to delight / In which they do." Anne's third reference comes across almost as a suggestion that Burger's skepticism and, more obvious, Sutherland's sanguinity are half-decisions that introduce new problems only a fresh event of poetry, such as Stein's, can demonstrate.

Fearing contact after fucking I found a penknife buried to the hilt in my ribs. The perverted part was how I occupied your emotional life, a joyrider's joyrider. The guardian part made this a better world with a whole splash of blood on my undershirt. It's for you.

~~

There's the sizzle of homeless autosuggestion in sex, climbing in the mist. I'm pointing to the blight of the neighborhood and placing bets, because I bring humor to this relationship, zipping up, looking wild in the frieze. The snow is still on the branches. Why does everything get attended to like a pageant? Why are birds wearing outfits that pay tribute to Neil Diamond?

~~

Before sex I thought about the white fragrance, watching my breath. Let's try it again without the comma it's always been. The whereness on the tip of the tongue. The perfunctory receding of the plane. Inside voices take two bites and want out, taking no steps at all, like freakouts testifying for tangled weaves of standard-bearers.

Binaries are dead. Long live binaries. If poetics-in-progress toward transparency in dissidence is what you think the first of January was invented for, you could do lots worse than Johnannes Göransson and Seth Abramson who both disturb the smooth functioning of The Avant v. The Other. Frankly, discussions like these call out for a Linnaeus sort or sorts, readers and critics equipped to reorganize and redefine the prevailing ditheism into its innumerable and underreported strands. New taxonomies could play a big part in poetics soon. A guess, we'll need a couple of saber-rattling anthologies to kick things off. (And the battle could be joined overnight on the Web!)