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?