Four pieces from Behind the State Capitol or Cincinnati Pike.



John Wieners marqueed.

��Lisa Jarnot is urging poets to apply powers of "positive visualization" to counter political attacks against Ammiel Alcalay and, by association, Anne Waldman, Joe Safdie, Amiri Baraka, perhaps you. Read what she has to say, and take care. It's a call deserving a response.

This is not only the most recent marquee, it's by far my favorite. Color, font, text, marquee pretty. See.



Ron Padgett marqueed.

I've been wasting time for the past week and a half doodling with marquees. It's been a goof assignment that I'm surprised keeps me thinking critically. I've found recent work by others to be waiting, hungry for the marquee treatment, Hannah Weiner's for instance. It's fabulous (code for outright queer) to see her gremlins re-invoked, whistling across the screen, both in the html form I've linked to (March 7, below) and more surprising in the blogspot 'text' boxes that I used earlier to 'preview' the full-throttle form. After I entered the 'up' and 'down' direction commands for Hannah's marquee in the blogspot box, though, I found the "top" pixel measurement had to be adjusted (increased 100 px or more!) for each subsequent post to get the original marquee fonts to 'stay' in their 'proper' place (all these half-quotes are fabulous? -- and, by the way, does this make any sense?). Before adjustments, once I posted after Hannah's marquee, the marquee started floating over the screen, intersecting with the later blogged text material -- this sort of floating is the right idea, maybe, for Hannah and for blogging. (It would not take much effort to convert a blogspot template into a hell-fire of buzzing, bumping texts.) Still, the better place to float is in, and with, a text designed or redesigned to behave that way. By marqueeing, I've learned a lot very quickly about the force of Ryu Murakami's short declarative bursts of self-indictment: I got famous; I got fat; etc. (link March 2, below). In marqueeing just a small chunk of Lissa Wolsak's Pen Chants (link March 8, below), I get the corporeal oppositions of political anxiety at the lexical level: warmth; breastlessness; ant song; omni-range. Other texts are just fun to do. Yesterday John Latta reprinted on his blog "First Drift" by Ron Padgett, and I couldn't resist marqueeing that! Link above.

Later this week I'll finish marqueeing four poems from Behind the State Capitol by John Wieners. That should rid me for now of all spooks of the floating-over-the-screen variety.

Lissa Wolsak marqueed.

Paraphrasing Nina Simone's Ragman -- love lost oooooooooooooooooooo what's that worth?

I'm no longer responsible for what I say or do in Alli's dreams. Yellow-highlight that.

Hannah Weiner marqueed.

"K is for Pantaloons..." Correct! Thanks Jonathan!

There's nobody else who'll get me worked up about wearing another woman's panties. Mikarrhea, I'm your Pere David's deer, quick, throw something at me!

...

Ouch. O thank you.

Oh, and Geof Huth, too, who wrote me after my first crack at the marquee, 2/26, noticing my lift of his terrific perforation, "Many visual poets do not yet fully understand what they're doing, do not yet understand what they can do and how their poems can mean."

Whole lot of thanks going round. This from Jukka-Pekka Kervinen whom I thanked a couple of days ago for the inspiration and start-up code for doing my marquees:

Dear Jack, Thank you, too !!! Wonderful (marquee) pieces in Pantaloons, have really enjoyed them !

And thanks to Mark Young as well for liking them.

Time to get serious. Not that this is Pantaloons, Inc. or anything. Waiter approaches four ladies at lunch looking good in hats. "Is anything ok?"

Promethean winnowing?

It's not an A list, is it?

Three marquees: Fairfield Porter, Ryu Murakami, Stacy Doris.

ex-girlfriends



hermeneutics
        another winter




scientific ferment

          thick rivers



outright
curios





pursuing l'amour

        2 colonies

Party, party, party.

Ryu Murakami marqueed.

thanks to
Jukka-Pekka Kervinen
Fairfield Porter marqueed.