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!)

At every year's end I find myself plunging into lists, asking questions. What falls over the ditch? What's rotted so ready to lay it down? Fractious midwinter makes room for true snowfall. My greatest wish is to down flakes lost in their way like raisinettes with botulism, spinning machines gone iridescent while sketchy hacking out the details. O drum machines! Music in no order.

Yoga is so popular it's what it is everywhere, even in the bedroom. It's funny that such devastating existentialism is served at a fancy party.

In this one Nancy appears as an ashtray and the cowboys are spying on some other cowboys. Practice makes perfect.

Sometimes a partner can be deliberately and aggravatingly passive-aggressive. I'm kidding. I'm being sarcastic.

In making love, as in all things, "airy" is a terrible consistency for meatballs.

A friend reports they're reading dog waste at MLA.

In her mind you walked out on her blog.

Are you slapable? Am I? Hope so.

For To
Skip Fox
BlazeVOX 2008

I'm certain Skip Fox awaits the "mindful shimmer" of everyone's attention, dizzy but watchfully unbewildered; still, he's exacting, gee, golly...well, he must be pissed as he sits at his computer dashing off cris de coeur that do whatever the opposite is to rambling:

At what rate do you think, head down against the wind to weather it, whatever it is, from what notion of yourself (what box?) does it pour forth, from whence does it call, amid what welter, panties balled in confusion, or as a person sits, usually in a chair, to engage the light, luminous, the activity of ideas which dance about the room, around the table, books and that upon which you are sitting, I mean thinking, what do you think?

This is the first sentence, a "human mechanism," of about five in a piece titled "That's what I think at any rate." Except for Michael Gizzi, also unbewildered yet a big maybe when it comes to anger, there hasn't been a monologuist as fired up as Fox since Charles Bukowski whose own diction now and then needed a 5,000-mile testosterone check-up, come to think of it, just like Fox's.

Eat what You Fuck. Sticka for
a. cannibals
b. cattle ranchers
c. post-feminists
d. ADM

Fox won't let go of "vaguely accidental" thought, his own or that of others floated off in a "commonsense drift." Fox practices mixology, "Just took out the garbage. Talked to the horse and myself of premises, knots, and coordinates. We have testimony from Bernadette Mayer how much can happen even on the shortest day of the year." Mixed up sentences like these almost point to first-order conceptualism, before the schtick (and the Mayer reference is inarguably another pointer), but also a conceptualism broken into by particulate and self-deprecating humor, as "he was over-sensitive and stupid, not as rare as you might think or maybe you know all about this and only I am in the dark trying hard to recognize what we have in common, the personal." Fox goes on trying hard and succeeding in this mostly prose-poem "clarified as light" way, "having no blind spots only everywhere instead just light pouring thru..." well, not really, because he's always spinning around, interrupting: "Imagine a pear. A pert pair. That's my cracker." The blinking lights go on for 273 pages, "writhing in paroxysms of loathing," so it's a fairly large stigma and accomplishment, "due to ocular-brain-concurrence-function design." The moral is a life of design, "as fate designs, [ending] in something (arrive!), but disappears into a wisp." Further, we don't know "how our joints are packed into time," and our sensory apparatus, sight especially, keeps overcompensating, making nearly everyone's "horizon seem to rise as it recedes into the distance." Thus we're tricked at the get-go, by design or "[b]aited zero" or fate or "[l]eaky gusset of dawn ... It's coming soon. Relax." The trick leads one to further compensation, to drink or to poetry or to all three! as one is "drawn to stumble forth to the distraction of his being, a drunken gyroscope." No longer tricked.

More belatedness. I thank Don Share and Tom Beckett for their good words about pantaloons, even as I come across these words of mine that function, for now, as a statement of purpose —

Just because we attribute work to personality doesn't mean I'm not a brute with a hammer in my hand. My nailing us together takes a moment of your life.

Whatever takes substance and breadth, I'm not doing it!

Yeah. I know it's a little late for yule sentiment. So let's call it belated. It's a bitching image w/ text. Topnotch.

dbqb's write-ups for my webby xmases operate from that brainchild formula that converts one holiday into 12 to prop us up through the New Year. This is Geof's fifth response, making my Season's Greetings this year, like the others, a two-man show.

I hope the Bernsteins find comfort knowing that so many care deeply for them on the loss of their daughter Emma. This is one of those rare times when words seem useless. Memories, however, can save us. I knew Emma only from reading her enthusiastic travel notes and bright research ideas, which she posted on the Web. I had looked forward to her promising future as a substantial presence in the community of poets. I will remember her as a young poet, and I am sure that Emma will live a long time in many other people's memories.

Season's Greetings.

Advice for the would be romanitic (sic): Just try to be simultaneous.

Romantic or romanticist?