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.