My screamiest teacher said it’s something no one coughs
so I made a chatter movie and filled the land-
scape w/ witty organists, treating the script
like a mixer of delirium layered between thruway
flies through the air, boom, poop, balling

postcards suspended from outspinning and
then pulled back in shots of isotope-as-suburb w/ agile
minds besotted almost, overconfident / overconstrained
by the rhythms of the ponies and gnats drowning in wet

cement poured by provocateurs that rotate the back
frames, tipping them in vast politico-riptides, imploring

anamnesis, addiction-resonant w/ their inner lives off
screen as eco-environmentalists carrying bobcats
into an icebox that.

Photograph untitled. Permafrost time-tested,
reduced. Sex come of age. A big pleasure long-
stood. Helium released. Populations drenched.
A circus loved or moaned. Sour cabbage

not eaten. Canoe returned. Genocidal maniacs
rested on the shady beach. Freehand fabricated.
Volatility weighed. Clumpy workhorse walked.
Plastic repatriated. Vibrato banshee-d.

Poison multi-tracked. The honey gatherers
misgrouped. The knack gotten, flipped. Brunch
taken at night. Brain-body experienced.
Exercises enlarged. Whiner designated.

Cookie looked for. Ears pinned back.
Your face written and scratched on.

Cynical realism burrowed, laid waste.
Marine animals entered. A reputation had.

Debunking agitated, reproached. Ride given.
Dogsleds seen, covered up. Havoc reeked.
Acrylic fiber overgrazed. A pig’s mouth
pierced. News performed, disappeared.

A tongue tied and mailed. Sherbet dolloped.
Ruthless tolerated. Flow boiled, hardboiled.
Counterpanes unelevated. Divination closured,
improved. The oasis filled with swill. So-

journers hung. Tableau sponged, spackled,
burst. Mangrove gripped in saliva. Anything
kicked, chug-chugged, immersed. Swimming
synchronized. The bellicose slunk back.

How can damaged goods be flight
risk saying “exactly” in a torso vice
that’s gone full circle. (I had no idea
about the fall-off.) Later

I gained because of despair,
getting close I saw I was a schmeer
of pie & I could do this — tight
fingers wrapped around Lalique

— bar lights, team eyes drinking
undressing snails for Jacobeans
to monetize on the surface
(a game for the uncanny-chic)

crayoning hearts & smiley faces
inspired by knee jerks & police.

What’s a shrinking phase
was mistaken for authentic or, worse,
aristocratic — the neck you’re stick with
soaked in a Mars invasion.

Thrown in reverse it’s behavioral economics
without hotshots to read the hoax.
Triangles & throats, emotionally wounded,
won’t wait. I’ll be right down.

Fumy quotations in the surf.
How did these happen? To revolt
is justified musical collision
playing at a junk ballad.

A shopping spree is a migratory pattern.
It gets disrupted but never lets up.

Alfred Starr Hamilton has been on poets' short lists for the balcony edge for 40 or more years, but he's undergoing "rediscovery." A stack of Hamilton's letters to the Montclair police is "the year’s least likely literary find." The letter excerpted in The Times reads like poetry. Anyway, for counters of endurable fame, it's another 15 minutes.

I have nothing to say about the poetry marathon three weeks ago. I showed up as the second to read and fled the scene after. So what do we know? In retrospect, we think it odd to organize or, rather, quasi-randomly assign eight-minute slots to so many loosely-to-totally unaligned characters who happen to live in Boston or New York (or, for a few, places between). The minutes I witnessed felt remote-controlled according to old-timey socialist customs. Remote in that I’ve never been on welfare but something redeeming was to emerge from the make-it-snappy, invisible sentiment.

But there were highlights for me. One is being handed Gold Star by Brendan Lorber whose everything is not invisible. The first poem begins, “I want to shine what do you do?”

It's instructive to be exact.

Voices in our heads are paranormal. They talk the talk about our bodies to the co-op wrapped in steam.

That said, the very time we get off the phone, the fog enclosure switches back. I don’t think like that. Don’t believe that, impetuously. That never happened.

I can’t tell you don’t care, I’m a weeping cherry on the inside.

Outside, a panel membrane floats me into the past, desiring change. I have something better to do than pump out to your grasp. A life with submerged artifacts takes traveling and feels like a party. I’m going to lose you if it kills me. I’m a co-founder.

How far is it to the casino, I'd like to know. It’s curtains for the prom fitting. The toys are asleep. Injecting their blood is just crazy but I was dwindling down the drain and would have gone off schedule.

I’m from costive stock. Count the lottery tickets.

Social progress is in a pickle, a horrible mess. It wins all the half-eaten take-out on the table. 40% of obdurate voters like you and me. And how long can you live folding, unused, perpetually minimalist verging on chance and circumstance? Who isn’t in one?

[Edit, from below] There's a mood taking a fall, whitening, configuring the take, “We found lovers wasting time, though redeemed by euphoria, swollen pinpoints in a story about takeoffs. We miss the good looking small-town drummers chanting in time or as John Waters writes, the upper-lower class women from a dark place on a hillside, covering the globe with their comic pedigree. The problem is, did they ever smoke pot? They're stress-busting purveyors of desolating surfeit, solar decathlons with nothing inside, turning their smiles up. Cue the highlights why space and time exist at all, made of wriggling strings. Speaking of the pure land, we have none. We swim in it.”

A technician of snappy flotsam writes, “I found my two lovers wasting time. I miss the small-town drummer, time, and as John Waters states, his upper-lower class woman in a dark place on a hillside, covering the globe with her comic pedigree. The problem is, did she ever smoke pot? She’s a stress-busting purveyor of desolating moods, a solar decathlon with nothing inside, turning her smile up. Cue the highlights why space and time exist at all, made of tiny wriggling strings. Speaking of pot, I have none. I swim in it.”

I have been 12 years old for a very long time.

Before I kill, yoga is fantastic.

The parabola intersects the World Trade Center that was. What’s mainstream? Gestures are precise. Bright eyes, sparkling motions, a huge lollipop.

Climbing down the outside there’s a new mainstream-underground that merits a visitor’s gaze — we — some of us — avoid it.

It’s hard to be objective, yet pressure is mounting. Mm-hmm. A big tone of political realignment is authentic now, at this hour of the hyper-ruffled whose mantra is too proud to admit the squalor juxtaposed by the obscene milieu. So let’s start with the rectangular coordinates, understand pleasures of the neck, chest, and eyes. That’s the first half.

Poetry culture is a quad divided.

We never come across it.

First authorized Flarf Anthology©.

I believe I can see into the future.
There is a civilizing process to space
entered into by spotting it first. It’s
a clear new world where character
offers liberation, supports you
from underneath. You
can go right in. They have an
open table. Everything is for sale.

The no-fantasies plan has 30 subscribers.
After ecstasy it’s taster’s choice,
A most civilized dichotomy, a long crème
De la crème boosting performance.

Music filters out at the crack of dawn
All the airports are just fine.
Day to day breathe utterances. We’re going
To be here as long as it takes.

Six weeks running, bankrolled by Bravo and producer Sarah Jessica Parker, art judges, art contestants, art lovers, everyone deserves this and maybe more. For six hours on air, now, with the exception of the Geico commercial narrator, there is no humane element, not even a fleeting, life-is-possibly-good moment on Work of Art. The collective, unachieved hauteur flaunts its wrinkly dogs as in a poetry marathon with trembling readers who walk up to the dais rustling dark pages stretched into transparent mop fiber and rolled back into overly prefixed, scavenged opacity again, from the inside out.

I’m brusque. It’s urgent.

Back again. (Best of 3.)

On the other hand.

Try some.

A good warrior lends me generations of love.

So I’m in debt. It’s everyone’s creepy fault. Even a tremor of you.

We’re going around in concepts. There’s a big, strange pulling apart shmooshing the semiotics of escape. So lets bring things together, kilt wearer. Look me in the eye. Or when my story gets told you’ll be on the wrong end of it. Prepare to turn earth-nasty.

I’m just commenting. Your touch reaches a point at which time management is unleashed. But there’s something else fantastic, piquant, against the grain, a piece of karate with top notes.

NY-Boston poets, mostly, are putting on a Boston Marathon this Friday, 7:00 p.m.-10:00 p.m.; Saturday, 12 noon-10:00 p.m.; Sunday, 12 noon-5:00 p.m. Friday it's at Pierre Menard Gallery, 10 Arrow St., Harvard Sq.; Saturday and Sunday at Outpost 186, 186 1/2 Hampshire St., Inman Sq. Everyone gets eight minutes. Friday I'll go second. I'll read "Poem with Hannah," starting at 7:08 or so.

Because always I thought was possible

a quaff-off voice kept us happy.

My partner and a friend came home with a guy

they met at a bar. I was asleep but joined them

while I got my feet clean in flavors

and the balcony’s floor, so it happened again.

Can’t see a broken bottle on the street and not pick it

I really wanted to lose consciousness, can I ever?

Let me in, I loaned it, I think.

Once there was vitality in diffusion and a crutch like levitation. Levitation got modulated. Modulated is like coming out to play, sampling the masked hostility and indecisiveness of our environment and backing it up with inexact beats and multiplying sounds from what we were doing before the procedural took hold.

Crimson scaffolding hovered in the interim, instantly recognized as identity. Identity and hardened m.o.’s, identical then evaporated. We invented from silences, lies, and feral senses of the cornered in a soulless piano season. We were/are resigned and re-acclimated to generations of processed shock of the simple, the safe-zone simple, where infectious pop is authenticated, highlighting weak spots.

Wherein a smirk presses on — mass culture destroyed, life-changing sex.

The movie in which I am about to speak is modulated. I carry cash and deal with the cops but I’m no killer. Lack instinct. A musty dynamics. More than musty it’s foul.

Movies are a visual medium. The first word is without words. How can it be effortless if I tell you what I’m doing? A friendly warning, pal, you’re too self-conscious.

Show us your papers, fly!

Just in case we are impressionable enough still to think a particular subgroup of hardened poets alone-together owns outrage and satire by mining the internet, meme-ist and culture columnist Rob Walker’s piece on the ROFL (rolling on the floor laughing) net phenomenon, “When Funny Goes Viral,” fills us in on the lovely sophomoric impulses that are ubiquitous in English-language culture, among others. Walker sees ROFL belonging to a slew of us of college-age and a generation older or (gee) older, even “marketers” (aka conceptualists), and that’s “because it turns out that some people are taking the pop-material dimension of ROFL seriously by building businesses around it.” (Businesses include Cheez Doodles and art careers.) Anyway, other than the easy-come-&-go notoriety the Web offers its ‘users,’ there’s a meta-scrim of awareness in the collective irony and humor, awareness that the perpetrators of processes and procedures toward the premise “everything is worth making fun of, nothing should be taken seriously” are missing something, that is, missing bits of themselves and the facticity of their own agency. (Huh?) Walker captures the length and unrestrained reefer madness of the ROLF zeitgeist:

Sometimes the pointless-seeming jokes that spring from the Web seem to be calling a bluff and showing a truth: This is what egalitarian cultural production really looks like, this is what having unbounded spaces really entails, this is what anybody-can-be-famous means, this is how the hunger for “moar” gets sated, this is what’s burbling in the hive mind’s id. But the real point is that to pretend otherwise isn’t denying the Internet — it’s denying reality. In some cases, then, maybe the payoff of ROFL isn’t just the pleasure of laughter, though that surely happens. Trickster expression, intentional or otherwise, doesn’t propose a solution but jolts you to confront some question that you might prefer to have avoided. Like what, exactly, am I laughing at?

Ourselves, among others.

[4] Even without puppy Scorpio
is in my knee, cheeky, exotic —

ease is the law,
an audible ink

I’m moving to the top
shelf, blue and tan of course I’ll

stuff in cameo-
passive, lengthy

plastic hard to handle — plaaastic —
an overcooked ear, Madonna or a rose

onrush of thickened weather on my face.
At some point I had to approach the pile;

well I can’t help that
hound below the sound

the purple aggressive, the double sink;
nice I saw

deeper on the other side
puppies after puppy.

[Poem with Hannah] Halloween restores my faith.

Clouds're in slacks by the apparatus (touching my two elbows behind my back) for undressing gravity. It gets to be a habit they can’t keep up. But the police are still baffled. They go on a breather

Escalating disappearances

where any guess takes gravity outside the house aesthetic smoking clouds.

To put it together, the yews wear hand-me-downs making what’s inside disappear with our bed in it the last day we ate. Together and beyond

then they subside again, turning bright green.

It's spooky rhyme but it wasn’t my first

choice; the machine flunked me —


uncontrolled,

I have a shoulder blade to reign

undisciplined, conspicuous, out-fed;

it’s hard to sew on a fate puppet

glittering of sneeze; (overhead comments)

the biding row-fill taken an octave

in effect yelled red stipends.

Spent the weekend in Austin deeply depressed. I was charmed at first and then lulled into dissonance gazing at sheer limestone foothills with humid vistas and can-do vegetation softening a bustling politico academic subtopia awash in petrodollars. The petrodollar, we know, is the currency feckless leaders proffer, enlisting youth to leave home to fight terrorism abroad while depleting national coffers Stateside. Our leaders in turn subject to industrial paymasters who pay no taxes and now lecture via GOP talking points against big federal deficits. But I digress.

Lulled I was by Austin’s nexus of fifty-thousand students, more than half on summer break, musicians and their fans by the tens of thousands, and thousands of IT developers — big numbers hard at work to “keep Austin weird,” that is, earnestly within the program, tilling a patch of Bush Country where humanism has a chance. But, to digress further, Texas is a tightrope for gamblers and winners who can quickly lose perspective, people too big for their britches grandma, the poet, used to say. I see the Lone Star as a spigot of petro-capitalism that gushes one way. And in another way Austin is a minor concession (release valve) in a much larger, darker stratagem. There's no escape. All the parts of Texas I flew over swarm with recent and new development and corporate-homespun-right-wing prosperity drawn from the hugest government co-option imaginable (no taxes for big oil, remember). Our leaders stay on top of the gush and have nowhere else to go, keeping watch and making weird war in the Mid-East to counter terror and protect petroleum resources. This is not the Bushes’ fault, alone; it’s been dogma for more than a few decades; and it continues.

Still thinking too broadly of oil, terror, entrapment, and what’s genuinely weird this morning, I was rifling through Bernadette Mayer’s 1998 Another Smashed Pinecone, a late acquisition I got from Lewis Warsh last month in NY, and found Mayer's prophetic focus on the World Trade Center weird enough, a fiery gloss on geopolitics. It’s in four pages of free verse titled “Leaders Are Hanging in Outlines from the Clotheslines.” I'll snip pieces together, starting with the first stanza, and close with the last two.

I’m hungry, I’m at the top of
the World Trade Center towers
on the “roof” of one of them
something anything has gotten me here
and now I’m supposed to get down
by climbing down the outside of the building
its sheer cliffs and so it’s fear
that makes me remain here

[…] I dreamed I wished the leaders
were hung in outlines
from the clotheslines

[…] & power of being a mother only leads
to the top of the World Trade Center towers
as far as I can see
which is very scary
since there’s no doubt
there’s not even a fire escape
& though we all deal
like gamblers with
things like elevators
everybody still knows it’s safer
to be on the ground floors
where you can see more
though in a city the light
might be cut off

I don’t wanna walk the tightrope
between the twin towers ever
I’d get too scared of falling over
& then down & then to die immediately

I don’t even look out from
the 17th story windows
of my lover’s parents’ apartment in manhattan
it makes me feel like I wanna
see what it feels like to fly
right outta there

[…] The clotheslines were a way
where I grew up
at least for the women who
observed them in the daytime
to keep people in some perspective
& always remember
that a person is a person
with male or female prerogatives & habits
living in a world that requires
this constant laundering
mostly of everyone’s underthings
laughably

& oh those giant shirts
that flew in the air —
what was the matter with the men
never home
who must’ve worn them!

The mind, it’s been overstated, is a beautiful tool of late capitalism (the unwitting cause).

An idea occurring. A glimmer of prolific aroma.

Capitalism stands at the curb, grilled in place, waiting, eyes unblinking.

Hey we all have the same goals, forgery the game. (Or one could seek documentation, semblance, something.)

From now on the mind is Switzerland, ok? Two eyes belong to everyone, leave now.

Capitalism thus gives up the dude ranch, akin to the rustic factory, a way west to prey on the orderly. This is the high line the slug runs out on, leaving us a little dizzy.

I was wondering what the ... ho, the slug race is going digital.

The mind just kind of sits there. It wants to be best friends. It’s saved us some burgers.

Brightness gushes out, but collisions of treasure take a fall; signage is on the lam. Living ballet is euphoria-through-vintage-process and comprises my critique. What happened? Diagramming conditions of spatial jitters and others’ sentences, I am anonymous either way. Thank you, cohorts, for yer cartoons and commissioned videos shrieking with what I keep buried. Your scrabble gives in to wander offshoot. Spiraling ramps. My vows grump over their integrity. Up to here only fragments of Camus are activated on my planet of problems. Staying home illustrates the fall.

I drive a Steinbeck but dream of a Camus.

It sounds like you know the feeling but you’re not getting it. I hate myself for hurting you but D was the one.

The guys ad lib macho challenges on their way to the forest. How did they get in there? (You want to read my mind, enjoy.)

I miss you doesn’t change anything. I want you to be happy but on time for signing the release pledge, availing yourself of patterned backgrounds that look like recorded versions of cunning and mirrored parsimony canceling out a hiked love triangle set amidst fetishes.

Our alienation has been popularly accepted. For effect sprigs are picking up and the driftwood is epigrammatic, the upside unrelated, pale, immaculate. I’ll cut D off like magnets. Marry me.

I’m not about to let you starve.

(Shifting back to friends mode...)

One thought after the Fourth. The great good arts reproduce like bigger and better weather. As my shiny hot buttons have it, if poetry were as fresh and vital as banjo music or savant idiocy, there would be more brilliantly disinterested players and many more but only passing rivalries (not the ones etched in stone and tended by stone masons); smarter code-ists would rule the roosts; Christian Bök would have cuter friends.

In descending order of indefensibility...

(a) Poetics is democracy.

Evasion in poetics, just as with prose, foregrounds style, motive, subjects for close attention.

(b) Paying attention is the field call to haunting the future. And the future notices who attends. But it does not impinge on the field. (See below.)

(c) Friendship is a job (like sloganeering) and, more elevated, craft (sign). To illustrate, job is to craft as field praxis to theory or astronomically kicking a sign. Don’t get me wrong I think free speech is cool and I’m for it and against impingement unless it hurts a friend. What’s it? There’s no work-around to the observer influencing the observed except later, much later.

Alarms aplenty. Time for shorthand reaction to today’s Times piece, “The Third Depression,” from Paul Krugman and Sunday Times op-eds by Maureen Dowd and Nicholas Kristof, spilling over with second-tier hysteria: Cell phones as beacons of radiation and rad drivers of world conflict. In contrast, and also on Sunday, Frank Rich’s anti-hysteria and its discontents, another sort of alarm, that is, the no-drama of Obama’s dithering (research breaks in a crisis?) complemented by Obama observers’ ill attention that makes for the wrong spot checks (where is his anger? his emotion?) and an overall nowhere-to-go-so-forget-it perception of governance, in other words a vacuum (reminiscent of Carter-era malaise, without the cardigan).

Maureen Dowd builds a column, if not a case, spies hypothetical radiation in today’s droids and iphones, and looking forward, speculates, “nobody knew how dangerous it was to hold your phone right next to your head and chat away for hours.” iOS 4 leaking into my cranium — I’m hoping that’s not the case, loosely imagined first — while second, Nicholas Kristof explores the regrettable insight that technologies like telephony and its digital produce are sourced from ‘blood’ and ‘conflict minerals,’ tantalum and other rare materials controlled by juntas and gangs: “Electronics manufacturers have tried to hush all this up. They want you to look at a gadget and think ‘sleek,’ not ‘blood.’” Supply chains held up by “sadistic gunmen,” there’s an app for that.

Third, Frank Rich in “36 Hours that Shook Washington” goes for blood and conflict in governance, itemizing shortcomings to Afghanistan policies and presidential oversight. There’s a fossilized dithering to Obama and his deferential manner of governing that’s ignored by those who should know better, so slo- and even no-motion are reinforced and attenuated in a vacuum, allowing for admin spokesmen (like counterparts in previous admins) to cherry-pick stats to imply progress. Nobody (among the chattering classes) has cared that much about Afghanistan before McChrystal unraveled in Rolling Stone; nobody followed up on the admin’s misstatements about Afghan army and police quotas, for instance, such as those from Rahm Emanuel cited by Rich, because as Rich views it, “absolutely no one was paying attention.” There it goes again, that famous American attention span.

Today, Nobel laureate Paul Krugman sounds the loudest alarm, depression due to the resurgence of “the old time religion” in Europe and North America, namely making money hard to borrow, again, and balancing budgets not just in the U.S. but throughout the industrialized world, “imposing suffering on other people...unemployed workers, many of whom will go jobless for years, and some of whom will never work again.” Krugman’s is one of the first credible uses of the term ‘depression’ in op-eds to describe what’s been depicted in the news as an economic downturn or a dip followed by a jobless or legless recovery (possibly bringing on, to cite another journalistic euphemism, a ‘double-dip’). Fears of deflation, first, and depression, second, lead to injurious policies, like Ireland’s “savage” reduction in public spending and — here’s the kicker — with unintended, negative impact on international markets. Governmental austerity in Greece and Ireland is consumed as a symptom of the system sinking further. Krugman sees world traders and investors jumping ship.

No question, high-level dithering or slow poisoning by radiation is a blip on the screen of our collective attention disorder in the U.S. When the word depression enters the world’s conversation, however, nothing else will obsess us; our attention will have no where else to go.

On Poetics Michael Gottlieb remembers Peter Seaton:

One book, two books, three, maybe there were four, and then he was gone. He threw himself out of our world, not - at first - going altogether all that far. Off to Coliseum Books in Midtown Manhattan - where he worked for years and where quite apparently he made another life for himself; and made another life with a life partner who we also knew, at least for awhile. But then what happened?

He reappeared a few years later, read again at the Ear and was just as powerful as ever and it was as if he'd never left - which was a little troubling in a way because, and I'm guessing I'm not the only one who thought so - enough years had gone by that it wasn't unreasonable to expect that things, he, his work, might be a bit different, but no. It was all the same.

Then he was gone, again. Read more.

These stats may be an aberration, yet deaths of relatively young poets are mounting this spring-summer. I am deeply saddened to hear of Peter Seaton’s passing. R.I.P.

To vocalize what’s sunk in, don’t worry or pierce your ears further, just because of me.

To repeat, I'm a plaintiff in the recent case against glamour. I'm being taken down. Something about my discrimination in music, which is chopped inside the box and unclarified, like lazy conversations over intellect v. emotion. That's another thing. I'm told nobody's talking to me. It's extremely funny, I've been sending out the lamest smiley faces, embracing the wrong diseases. I feel like Mrs. Meaty uninvited to the Worry Dance, revalidating my fears.

Maybe I'm just mis-digesting facts. Before heading to the gas chamber, an architectural classic, it's going to be 85 and sunny, after all. Oppressed, rejected, sure, I'm in there, but personality disorder is a binding element of hip dinner party kerfuffles and drooling, perverted dalliance. The miracle is, as the assemblies grow ragged, rock stars vibrate and pair off playing "Heck and Whatever."

In choosing what rubs me wrong or why I don’t want to be seen with you or an ode, can I eat something?

I chose ode and it’s an ode to summer, just getting to you. As marriages go it’s not all bad. I owe my bros an apology. (Not you.) My better half too. It’s just an exchange. Excuse me.

Summer!

Bromance trumps marriage. The proof is in the national interview. The house is packed. Gaining weight I preside over this commitment of ours. It’s beautiful to us. Like osso buco. There’s a term in physics or biology for attrition of affects, eyesore.

Everything I or should I say we sign on to is on second thought. Thanks for editing our books. Our first books. That’s how we met. Effortless, breezy we cut things up and got to you, second, after the firsts. We feel great. There’s a term in central Sicily for talking about Wanda in the Middle. We-are-so-tubby selling this coin. Vote us to preside over the exchange, some part of it, before we are stabbed into the back of the room.

It’s only a joke I didn’t have enough rising to the top after I screwed you. (Not Wanda.) You, just like family you’re the problem. You’re a failure. You alienate everyone you recommend for UC. I feel great.

Everything I sign on to is effortless I mean it excuse me I don’t know what kind of fan base you have but for ten years I didn’t have enough, look, it’s my turn it’s only a joke I am totally committed to it.

There’s nothing wrong with commitment. I am totally committed. In a national interview, if I have to boot you and others out, even the better half, I’m committed. They get it. You’re the problem.

It’s no big deal trashing you. “You’re just like family.” The week you recommended me for UC, I cut you up with this. You moved overseas because you’re a failure. That’s how we met.

I owe you an apology. After I screwed you and let you go I rose to the top. I am ashamed.

On second thought, I feel great. Everything I sign on to is effortless and I’ve got a breezy fan base. They get it. You alienate everyone and your writing rubs me wrong. You’re off the list.

I owe you an apology. After I screwed you I rose to the top. I am so ashamed.

A countrified psychedelic might write, “I’m not language. So why recoil when Dan Chiasson offers, ‘If only [language] poetry had been better’?

“Yes and no. I’m turning semi-pro. Our experience teaches me a lot about not so much. A last stand as a queer polylinguist, my resumé translated into a dozen wild and wacky languages: All over the placeless Planet of the Aggressives I’m ready to launch what I’ll give back. I’m a little amused. No bones about it, I have arrived with a harrowing shrug from a dreamy song-based dance, and it is stunning. Salon attendees sing my phrases, ‘wither the mess,’ ‘smell the husks among the i-badgered.’ You call, I answer paradigmatically. It’s what makes my lyrical indigence special. I’m free of the past. I build you up when you start again to pursue discovery. All I add is cold.”

I want a career created just for us. Noodles in aluminum. Nothing organic. Two blank arms. I dislike ___ing about it. But it’s ok, you go ahead. I’m girdled ... oh, shoot, I’m trying to make music for the people, the little guy. I know, I know, it doesn’t add up. Let me know if I’m too plotting-and-pacing for you. Getting it right is a responsibility for us quietly irrelevant types. Music and its doorstep to story-telling congeal to you. Congeal and concede. But there’s a state flower (ladybug) with fewer policy goals. I’m totally on its side. It comes with the job (mouse movement) in fact. This takes (took) place in a large room filled with noodles steaming still as traffic noise can pierce the thick ground floor to mother’s small mole. And it takes both ears. Takes as in requires.

Reading Delmore Schwartz gives me head.

Two highlights from June. I can make you happy when you pay me.
I'll do my drugs in the bathroom. You'll never know.

I’m a big baby. That’s b for balanced, red-and gold baroque, tart, measured and vulnerable steering gizmos, exploring the dilemmas of my duality. I’m the same baobab in the harness of the founding circle but worse. I’ve lost my drool, a rough double, double, no toil, all trouble. Offensive-enjoyable lowering the genome, relining the stitches to glaciers, the watchwords hence.

Scrounging but equipped, I’m putting in a bigger, more intimate brain and body. If I have Barbie I have to have Ken in my hotspot, the Lots-’o-Huggin Ken headlining in safari prints and short shorts. Then a second sequel for taking summer breaks not like a computer, a dolly doll on her tip toes churning in rose patterns and dance.

I live in the swansdown of DNA. Soon I’ll be comically dead — that’s married to a duplicate database — a seamless reiteration of Mr Picklepants with a flat floppy build that determines the forest and wilderness and my behavior and movement, charming, polished, emotionally shot with depth as a thespian-rapper rounding off contrasting demands of elaborately flimsy seriality and sequence.

Clenching-tight, I’m on a distorted guilt trip that begets a higher indie profile, the size of a blood cell, shafted by the viability of conquering death with abundance.

Gottlieb and Timmons this Sunday, 4:00 @ Unnameable Books, 600 Vanderbilt Avenue, Brooklyn. Free. Read more.

Holy mackerel.

Define something painted more; degrades arfs after sunset: it’s
smears, sanguinary as solvents or dissolvent making lock up
toxic Danish for sleep, a stream of thought dislodged as propellers
molesting a din for decades of fear or accounted to explaining
there exists an interchange with a mug net to cheek authority’s
familiar rasp off tie-backs lodging the unqualified breeze in part
belief and energy; (2)

Define a language with no kids, stolen, seeming

handlebarred fish at war, bird properties degrading
quite none like an innate masking
shaken to a grin brink quart-like oops.

A poem is a picture. There’s a Shrek glass of water over here where — you were sleeping — I read madras pea coats, some kitten crescendos and ball shrugs (waffles), etc. What is seen annoys the fuck out of the robot deposited by blood. Drown me out, speed bag, eavesdropper, slipshod potty compiler. Drown and kiss the cleft. No questions, now. Stink into blahs of scenery. Sleep I say. Self-funded and auto-toned, we’ve already won.

This smooch packs a lot of predation, rose shui, soccer crap. And so

I met a needing apparition with firepower to prelude my ideas, descending in scale,

Easy-to-wool. It’s with a heavy appetite I held her for conniving to carpet silence.

Honesty we used to say or almost say is the best practice for platform control and thumb fitness. Recursions set in. They go back. Soon we relaxed our balance to parry reviews of something or perhaps two small things that once were clear enough, but not now. We went into this. We went over the accord, for instance. The 20-60 split seems marvelous for the evils of the present. Funny, I may call upon your balloon or coupon wrinkled into an octagon. The music pickles. I dreamt with you.

Big hearts unsuss southpaw disproportionality.

Temptation orders the jigger mnemonics of the bummershoot.

Thieves are beside themselves devoted to their next palooka.

Butterflies have rabbit ears.

Smelling morals jazzes a decimal of pablum.

Logging a spigot startles the system.

Muscle worship (zero-to-zero) between infant births used to stick to three dimensions, like hydrangea in labor (staging nightmares). We chose our parents. Then came a fair day and fourth magnitude cloaking hybrid terrorists. What were proportioned over time became harmless, weather-beaten from kitty pestilence and verbal pitchforks. Surely what was past was swinging but stopped somewhere to empty the horizon. We got used to the beat.

That’s the short link to Stony Overlook where I’m a lingoist and a vibrator. (Like my sisters in the collective I dislike anamnesis.)

Key is I borrowed broken toys for hours at a time and got to oscillate with many a stamen. I’m guilty as Sinn. So here’s what I admit: the liver meets the brain halfway, slanting the blurred promise we had or we don’t know in the aftermath of the hiatus, dying down.

Into the inversion children cast their farts, smiling of threads.

A rainbow comes pouring into my window, I am electrified.
Songs burst from my breast, all my crying stops, mistory fills
the air.
I look for my shues under my bed.
A fat colored woman becomes my mother.
I have no false teeth yet. Suddenly ten children sit on my lap.
I grow a beard in one day.
I drink a hole bottle of wine with my eyes shut.
I draw on paper and I feel I am two again. I want everybody to
talk to me.
I empty the garbage on the tabol.
I invite thousands of bottles into my room, June bugs I call them.
I use the typewritter as my pillow.
A spoon becomes a fork before my eyes.
Bums give all their money to me.
All I need is a mirror for the rest of my life.
My frist five years I lived in chicken coups with not enough
bacon.
My mother showed her witch face in the night and told stories of
blue beards.
My dreams lifted me right out of my bed.
I dreamt I jumped into the nozzle of a gun to fight it out with a
bullet.
I met Kafka and he jumped over a building to get away from me.
My body turned into sugar, poured into tea I found the meaning
of life
All I needed was ink to be a black boy.
I walk on the street looking for eyes that will caress my face.
I sang in the elevators believing I was going to heaven.
I got off at the 86th floor, walked down the corridor looking for
fresh butts.
My comes turns into a silver dollar on the bed.
I look out the window and see nobody, I go down to the street,
look up at my window and see nobody.
So I talk to the fire hydrant, asking "Do you have bigger tears
then I do?"
Nobody around, I piss anywhere.
My Gabriel horns, my Gabriel horns: unfold the cheerfulies,
my gay jubilation.

— Peter Orlovsky
("First Poem," Nov. 24th, 1957, Paris)

R.I.P., Peter Orlovsky.
R.I.P., Louise Bourgeois.

Leslie Scalapino, R.I.P.

I know where I am going
gawky, rattling my cage.

I know where the caged bird sings.
I shop in Brooklyn.

Shy of seduction
I worry about the family.

Like Clint Eastwood I was shifty.
Once. What was that all about?

It’s 2020. Dada has won. Suddenly. There’s no Wall Street Journal. And it’s hot. A life listening to rock is the seed performance indicator for pot growers and for me and my casual nonacademic friends who fall back from confrontation. We like seeding before dressing. The dubby-drop is the wow a welled, ironic smile equates back when we had everything going for us near the Baby Dust Charter School, exposing every last Wiki ovulation date in our calendars. (Damien’s or Chucky’s seeds grow into a tree if you swallow Kali’s mist. Chucky’s a hot regular. Damien is a bottom sprouter who skips his seed walkthroughs sometimes.)

We’ve wound up in a Rhoda Maxwell clomid forum, no income but we don’t need cash when we got a one-pound seed popping out. That’s our praxis. I’m writing from that position. I am writing from the feminized Chias (with my regrets) who take up dork-asms and get demolished, loosely. Flamed sunrays secure their bikini resins then cross the floor of the wading pool. It’s a gluey sperm-friendly cervical mucus hue, like an old bag of maple seeds. Tomorrow we’ll find new ones, and a new rock that picks this up.

A tree in the wind.
How is it lit?

Tall with liquid arms;
another is hit and run.

They’re parts of the chad deity.
That’s what led you child rearing

to a showdown at the riverbed,
immersive. Impulsive.

It’s back to work.
Show’s over. You go ahead.

City center aria, a dwindling
sea brook, the best toadstools,

supreme Styrofoam
in pursuit of what follows.

Mind and body.
I was hoarse for a week.

Here’s an idea. Addiction is improvement over quasi-production of enormous chagrin. I think that’s the script and structure for the loss of a teardrop. We’re milquetoasts inside. Yet for all appearances nothing lurid is due at signing. Luscious hills, gleaming grains. The American Songbook has motors for this. Bukowski’s fall is a hissable warning, gone monochrome in uglified loveliness besieged by entertainment.

Have we ever done anything but tamper with the weather? Oh, who knows? You seem so fake-excited in the sprayed periphery, staying in balance inside a soft radical vapor of anathemic bigness. Is that the word?

Mid or large, our body fat is worth $60,000 a gallon. Nukers take responsibility. It feels like a palate cleansing (to them). Your hair is beautiful now, so much for redemptive infinity, you and your public are blotto-dreamy.

Embarrassment can be interesting; never vice-versa. Bog shoes come to mind. Filing oddly abstract word strings in my back pouch. G’day. Or a sobering up between courses. Between jewelry making and language learning. I failed at both so turned to landscape arch- and tin-work, keeping the breakers honest by the faltering dunes, bogs and cliff houses of cards. The surf came up and made everything a heavenly mess. The mechanics are all there. Scales, secrets, s.v.o. As for the shoes, people look at me funny. No arch support for me, thanks.

Alan Davies and I will be handing out Faux | Other titles at the small press book fair organized by the Segue Foundation 6-8 PM today, Thursday, at Zieher Smith Gallery, 516 W 20th, NYC. We'll be sharing a table with Segue / Roof.

(My mood is in erasure.) I’m an agitator but Neil Young on Skype is agitator in chief. (Elated I am.) Red, green, blue, that’s how things worked out. His comfort food backed up. Jonathan Demme, cool as a Boise-minute, I can see you! (Now.) “Dude,” he says, “I can see you.” There’s struggle to housesit too much information. (Eden. Foliage. Strangers.) Whoah, way too much, and beyond, they just crack me up; my head is cleared. (Have to go.) On. Up.

All attempts to grow God are disproportionate. [A misreading, not deliberate]

I’m on lockdown. New beliefs and old factoids, nothing much, attitudes struck, days in spirals, an undulating façade. I see endless tunnels, gadgets and lightning that interconnect the music while I wait. My fingers board the apologetic apparatus, some of it; it’s thumping on the screen. No room for unprecedented speaking of which feelings out of the world meetings within reach.

Don’t argue with the shipment.

Glee outshines pizza.

keep me out / of mind — Anselm Berrigan

Last call to save with the prepublication deal for Faux | Other titles.

Trace Peterson's account of the Tendencies event last Thursday is a good draft of what went down. In the q&a that followed Stacy's, CA's and my brief papers, I know a few of my claims for the influence of science on expository prose are fundamentally noncontroversial among historians of English composition, both its development and pedagogy. At crucial junctures the authorities who have lasting influence on rules of grammar and exposition have been scientists, best typified by the the Royal Society founded in the 17th century, charted by the crown, devoted to disciplining English prose to convey scientific methods and findings. I don't hate English as CA may have gathered from my truncated comments; I am ambivalent toward the science-y aspects of good prose style — brevity, for example. I follow the rules in my expository practice, but I can't say I subscribe to them without feeling these now-ingrained stylistics pulling me away from more discursive, more digressive, more potentially productive inchoate forms of thinking and writing in prose.

Poetry of course is another matter. A jumbo alternative.

Here’s the intro to a piece, parts of which I’ve rehearsed here, titled “Repeat after Me.” I’ll read this, along with CA Conrad and Stacy Szymaszek, for the Tendencies Series, curated by Tim Peterson, 6:30 this Thursday at CUNY Graduate Center 9100 (Skylight Room), 365 Fifth Ave., Manhattan.

A regular moment can become romantic. Gods v. Medusas. I drive my gods, dudes mostly, off a bridge on purpose. As a comedian I’m kind of open to prohibitive structuration. Take two texts, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Gertrude Stein.

    If they were not pigeons what were they... If they were not pigeons on the grass alas what were
    they. He had heard of a third and he asked about it... (from Four Saints in Three Acts, Gertrude
    Stein)

Gertrude Stein is ours — she’s in my pocket and she’s mine over time. My wild Cricket.

The figurative is splitting at the seams. (I don’t know who you think they are.) I’ve been pretty well behaved as a gay. But but. My erections taught me swears. I let this sink in. Today thanks to Eve I put it together.

In a dialog on love I enact Eve and read Gertrude-Cricket. I am almost an outlaw. Social formations and roadkill are on the menu.

A life is charged for care.

Before the night is through I want to look at what Cricket said as lingo and allegory.

Forget verse. Cricket says we are physicists to inner antecedents, the deadpan Medusas. Medusa One is not about sex or figuration. She’s a nihilist in and out of societies and their formations. Do you work for a living? What a waste of time. As a stand-up I say everything is urgent. We have to reassign all the workers inside us. Cricket will forgive us in the future.

    It is understood by this time that everything is the same except composition and time,
    composition and the time of the composition and the time in the composition...

    No one thinks these things when they are making when they are creating what is the
    composition, naturally no one thinks, that is no one formulates until what is to be formulated
    has been made.

    Composition is not there, it is going to be there and we are here. This is some time ago for us
    naturally. (from “Composition as Explanation,” G.S.)

The allegory goes to Cricket’s houses, lingo, cheapskate punks, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Notebook open, wallet shut. An Everly Brothers disc is still playing but it multiplied like a crisis in its own category. Irony-sincerity voted best....

Roadkill is on the menu.

I am physicist to an inner antecedent, deadpan Medusa. My chaps are reeling. Drowsiness may be my great escape or I may walk off, allergic to the set. Either way I laid the animals of the world. The power of the carcass. Lemme go. Your face, the trains I ride, it's all good. (Ugly directions.) The front salt is a kind of equipage inherent in spice squads, the blaze enchanted by the stars. (Coffee head.) Any outrageous claim here that hits it out of the park? The Mastics are breathing. Contemporary argyle.

In the mid 1970s Alan Davies edited 40 issues of A Hundred Posters. Among those whose work appeared were Ginsberg, Wieners, Eigner, Weiner. The importance of the authors published makes this CD reissue a solid indication of poetic directions for the present & future.

Initially a spoof of John Ashbery's book-length poem "Flow Chart," my Post~Twyla: Reset re-emphasizes daybook metonymy, lexical captures, & graphical meta-commentary to upset the "flow." Cantatas for experimental instruments, jubilant disparities. Alan Davies calls P~T "unremittingly Burroughs-in-bed."

The New Old Paint is Susie Timmons's second poetry collection. Alice Notley noted in her first collection Timmons's "naked" train of thought & her "wit." The same applies here, fully resourceful, totally unexpected, "Hello, I am your American flag / I know; hard to believe, / a talking flag."

Jennifer Moxley on Memoir and Essay: "A bright young poet arrives penniless in a resplendently decaying New York where he finds a group of like-minded writers. They join ranks and set out to challenge the establishment. [Michael] Gottlieb makes this old story new with crisp prose and thoughtful personal details."

Pre-order here before publication, $13.00 each (rather than 16.00) or a full set of 4 for 45.00 (limited offer).

announcing...






Faux | Other releases (at special prepublication rates). A limited offer.

Hustling all the time, awesome! But let’s pare it down. New York, like Antwerp, is filled with air. And staying casual definitely has legs. The inscrutable commercial lupus-vector coursing through the pop concept. There’s nothing like it, a memoir that’s more a self-memoir in wide release, an everyman (remember that fool??) happy as in somehow scraping by. Timeless like leg warmers. (But this is July.) Both Antwerp and New York, which back then was like Antwerp now, were sprinkled with men unwound and found to be children, their affection not unexpected, hungover, yapping at the top of a lintel of plankton. (How did that get in there? Publicartscape, a biodatum to add to the authenticity of personal double insider points.) I’m coming back to New York in the early 80s.

Art is theft all right. As I said I’m a novice enthusiast. Ever since I was bullied when I was a kid I became a circuit bear. (Didn’t know I was in the running, a total surprise.) A memoir is like one shoulder hitched higher, naming names but allegorizing what happens before we finish the painting of the sky. O boring even as we pass one another I intuit a little space and eat multimillion-dollar cheeseburgers.

(The above interlude both wanted.)

Froggie had a big smile. When I teased him or cuddled him, his four appendages went wiggly. He’s silly, a smile across his whole face, black button eyes on top of his head — all smile and eyes in front, green in the back. When I held him he was a jumble of cuddles and inertia. His legs flopped around until I stopped.

That was the way.

As I was saying, my memoir(s) could begin around 2000, celebrating a gaping yawn in praxis (goodwill and dynamics). This is our yawn, college-bred, localized — concentrated in 5 or 6 cities with exurbs, getaways and summer haunts — long in the making, one I’ve been party to. Party is one word. It felt so good to close down a wide sector of the critical imagination, ethos, and move nowhere collectively, a function of a huge leftist irony-software & aggregation corp. The year two-thousand in brief is an egg-hatching moment, kairos, and from then I can move forward and back to connect the times with the ideas and people that encompass my naïve expertise.

I break down and cry.

My problems, based on an unremitting infancy, began decades before 2000. When I first came to New York, for instance, my agenda was oversimplified, to practice poetry and make love to poets. I slept with killers. I started a long poem of denial. Two or three poems, and I grabbed as much sex as I could but didn’t and couldn’t and so I fell in love with two or three ex-poets and found their dearth qualitatively posthuman, and that’s why I am alive today but tomorrow I die thinking about those I forgot to lose.

Just reward, Rae.

The good Rae.

You could say my memoir kicks off where Memoir and Essay ends, dreamy-alert Manhattan, old and renewed before 2008, a bulimic bulking up on soaring rents and the zeitgeist of downsizing. There are swelling cadres of unnerved writers like me (I’m not in Manhattan but at that moment I’m thinking of moving back), writers who are breaking with theory, desperate to stay on some young end of organizing things. I’d start with the last decade of the 20th century, technically the first decade of the 21st, the unpronounceable 2000s. It’s a throwback era (and of course in 2010 it’s still got a hold on me) (and us?). As I switch speech patterns from two-thousand-and nine to twenty-ten, there’s hope twitted in the streamlined names of years (hope here is only a symptom for a stopgap in decline). It’s a depression, nonetheless, a time when we settle for throwbacks, economically and esthetically. So I’d start with the ethical and epistemological disorder that emerges from the blind side in large out-of-control events.

For the first time a round of Faux books, due earlier this year, will be late but not too late. Michael Gottlieb’s, for instance, Memoir and Essay arrives in a couple of weeks, just in time for looking back at what his cohort, chronologically my cohort, has been up to, foundation-wise. (X-wise was once and briefly slixter’s usage, ’k?) Esthetic foundations back then, the 60s through 80s — to arbitrate a wide span that intersects with other key time divisions, postwar architectonics, say, the broad-shouldered non-hip late 70s / early 80s, shared trauma post-May 4, 1970, etc.) — are symptoms of tightening and slackening moves in poetics. (Those same moves are very much still simulcast. That’s why they’re so engaging.) Michael’s almost folksy narrative operates as an emphatically socio-demographic basis for orienting us to time and places back when Brooks Brothers was a register rather than a brand; a last time neighborhoods and the accents they foster mattered beyond kitschy nostalgia purposes; who is working and what is done for work were paramount to writing and to mundane choices, like the building where you live. For sure, earning a living feeds text even today, but the working-to-work scales are, simply put, different now — in Michael’s New York you certainly didn’t need a $million in prospective earnings or from others’ resources to prop you up.

[I’m cutting off here but will be back, still in a memoir mode.]

Blogging is not dead. It’s back where it started.

I agree with Alli Warren tho: blogging by poets is fun to read, like shoe polish.

We need to be done with Arman Karzai, say all the media, time to dislike each aspect of his unctuous weather vane of presiding over the few square meters of Afghanistan he breathes into, commandeering a chamber of opium. His tailor is a dressmaker. We’ll send him back his dreams in a hiatus-shaped containment vehicle labeled pine box.

In amateur land there’s nothing like a push-pull full press. Except in teams.

Back to poetry, back to told what to polish and following how others do it, ex-bloggers are falling in like girl scouts taking on the regalia (cozy affects & stretched limits) of the classic Black Rock, headquarters for impressive market-share analysts, sweet haters and subscriber-entrepreneurs for e-lists and twit-chains’ thinking huge. Huge and floating, a beautiful menace from outer space. A girly homecoming.

Don’t sweat it there’s nothing too forbidden that can’t be magnified in poetry. (Ok, maybe not Karzai.) But if you accept Black Rock analysts’ frames of reference you’re in, and may be invited to fake your next orgasm. A teardrop of powerade.

Back to poetry, in my next life I affiliate with Butler U.

...cross-pollination of English and psychology is providing a revitalizing lift. Try this new skimmer inferring I’ll assume you suspected I know you know I know. It’s in the literature. Now even empiricists can map it. I’m in sympathy and shrinking, too, while my hair pops by a couple of mental states in the monks’ apothecary — ah ha there are great and pure benefits sponsored by broad-shouldered believers grasping for governance! Wouldn’t you know they’re in an infinite series catching the gossip. (Or from another angle they are the series, dead and history.) (You know.)

It’s been a while since they’ve grabbed a bite. I suspect their budgets have been cut with style. But nothing is forgotten, since distraction matters for the next table/angle. You who.

All our mistakes stand at attention but warded, show-offs.

There are centers of wishing beyond closed doors. Being pavement I started listening. When I spoke of rubber, sex and violence I can’t know I said I saw snakes sliver through rifts that never were, denying a problem no one asked about.

We need dialog about clockwork and stagecraft and we need it now more than ever.

I don’t like Mondays, Tuesdays or Wednesdays. C'mon, there’s no spike in sadism but some surprises. So I want more trashy muscle behind the push. I’m a paragon of ballet. My batteries are charged (that’s the feeling). I’m wearing molasses on track pants sewn of micro-fiber. And I’m about to walk the spiral stairway and more! Ladytron is carrying this note of irony to bounce back to my pals.