Hey, Friday! Time to lay some cards on the table. The stoopid Stoopid Cards. The ones that count.

Human agency is last week, last century. Today it's simpler.

Simple is good. Easy is better. Stoopid is simple, easy, and nonchalant to the nth. Treeless intimacy in the Wild Forest.

First there's google poems. That's good, creates buzz but takes some stitching time. That's work. Busy busy. A tactical improvement is to have ideas for discourse projects and keep concentrating on ideas, subordinate the text, forget it. With respect to which all the manual labor is alleged — I'll say I keyboarded a text even tho sweat equity is invested in/by someone else doing it, scanning it, whatever, then for another idea looking around for some new guy to press a few keys so an algorithm does mostly everything. Simple. Easy product. Like Warhol 2009.

The nonchalant part is offhand and genius — stoopid genius; call your product a nonproduct, a failure; just walk away from it.

Next, sweet talk a senile critic or two into New Stoopid Relevance, hand them the S Cards. Mastery is toxicity. Text is schlock. Failure is ironic.

Then a book like Conceptualisms can emerge. Buzzing and busy. If a poetics critique can talk about texts we never read I guess I am qualified to talk about Conceptualisms. It seems awesome and timely. It's a collab, among other things, and singles out items in the authors' knowledge fields, taking real care not to be comprehensive. That's so cool. It seems a little language-y however in that its critique side is so tenuous, given its noncomprehensive constraints, it will strike a reader, say this reader (if I do 'read' it), as more of a meta-trope that weirdly competes with its topic(s). I think that's one thing that's language-y. (I like language-y, btw.) Whereas a so-called stoopid critical maneuver would be more pointed in the direction of generating meta-ideas about nonmastery and projects that fail. (And that could be great and cool.) But who knows, maybe Conceptualisms does meta-idea generation too. I'll have to read up more on the web. Anon.

There's a new heart beating around here, and nationally! It's a regimented elite-ish poetics sector within the sensational and expanding social networking of American culture. Yes! Making poems is blazingly cool when you can follow corporate models and even cooler when you can boil down ideas to templates, epithets, and simple adjectives. As Verizon Wireless states, "When people work well together, it shows." Maybe that's inappropriate. Or it's conceptual. (But not both, 'cause this would overload the Lego framework.)

More.

The tightropes Ron Silliman traverses today in his reading of Conceptualisms are super collidal. I think his survey is commendable for a start. More soon.

Ripped off the sports page, queasy does it.

Everything is hard:
How to tie a tie,
How I met your mother,
How to kiss,
How to get pregnant,
How stuff works,
How to make money,
How to
for How long,
How much,
How to lose weight,
How to cook a turkey,
How to make a website;
1980s, 1990s.

— Rodrigo Toscano

Wired for Spotasaurus. You'd like to part of this minority. It looks so good. Any requests? Hurting construction arrives with a basic message. Imprisonment will come to liberate us. And we'll always do it for less. When life gives us lemons hallucinations may occur within an opaque regime to restore the mutated. Didn't I see your character more rounded, forced more to join the death march? That was a still apostrophized. Then came the filching of imitation in existence, slightly crafted like a soup.

Mortgage your bank accounts. No sleep for renters of a stall. Ref. lack of.

In the journalistic and blogospheric sense May 4 is a long time ago. But this date stands as when a threshold was crossed with the publication of "Treatment," a seventeen-line composition that marks high achievement deploying a severe economy of means, argument, conceit, repetition. This is a poem's job. This is a poem's poem. Although Ange Mlinko would abhor the essentialisizing comparison, her "Treatment" is on scale with fine short pieces by John Ashbery (of almost any period!) in its sweeeping intake of landscape, social realities, microscopic accuracies, and perhaps most important, palatable distances. What's missing is the mannerist wink-wink. A nice deletion. Superb work, merging insights from "all its."

Terrifying. Ruth Padell and Derek Walcott cancel each other out of the Oxford chair in poetry. Padell, who held the post for 10 days, resigned yesterday after admitting she covertly diminished Walcott's candidacy for the Oxford chair by sending reporters e-mails about allegations of Walcott's numerous acts of sexual harassment. Thank goodness no backbiting like this takes place Stateside! America's poets are much better behaved. No nastiness. No insinuation, no innuendo, no whispering at the back of the room. Our poets praise their publishers unqualifiedly. And the feelings are mutual. Curators of readings respect their responsibility, choose performers strictly on the merits. Agendas, if there are any, are stunningly unhidden. Open houses. Fabulously engineered parties. Welcoming e-lists. No poisonous e-mails are tolerated in the lower forty-eight. From New York to San Francisco, from Bard to UCLA, one never wades through a bricolage of truths, half-truths, and lies to distinguish the good guys from the less good. Power and position mean nothing. Why, we're all mostly good guys! That's what it means to succeed in poetry today. Utter lack of combat and spoiled attitudes. Pleasure, deep pleasure in another's achievements. This is what an educated community of poets and its public deserves. Joy. Solidarity.

The translator means anything. Whole sequences juxtapose pajamas with alienation. Water flows among us like a heated rug. Deprecation: It's bad for the economy, a friend writes. Zinc down, cosmos down, President Denzer. A cloaked woman with a purr in her voice encourages terrorists, the maelstrom of youth. A piece of purity inches away. Tomorrow the network will be sunk, purple gallinule in tow as twin attachés spar twice achieving a handsome apotheosis to etch the "pink hawthorns," como eso. We give not a flying fuck. Like I said in other whoofs, inundated with liberty from the camphor compartments, back to places we ragged to moral efficacy, like hems to derails. Still, the festival curator’s a raspy, borough voice in a tanktop calling for contingent inscriptions, cryptogrammic to mis-arrange arcades countervailing seepage along the tide flats of Brigand Inc. As he votes veep still dresses left, holing up in precision of observation and details slightly askew.

Sorry, winner, "precision of observation" and "details...slightly askew" are discourse samples coughed up (like leather bracelets) to veil mild opprobrium.

Stiffen my nasturtiums. Buddha on facebook.

A good number of readers here regularly go to Dennis Cooper's blog too, but a couple of recent treatments at DC's are severally concept-avowing so I'll just say, check them out. First, there's today's post by Alan Horn on Amazon's project involving "statistically improbable phrases" or SIPs. The post/essay illustrates again how the manipulator of digital code can create contradictory forces resulting in a spectacular gamut of text generation that opens up (mine) fields for expediting poetics into more encompassing detail.

Second, don't pass up Kevin Killian's Jack Spicer 101 w/ comments that number 85, so far.

Feast or beast?

(a) Hydroxycut;

(b) Dereck Walcott;

(c) Cheerios.

It's time for sibyls to inflate their physiques, focusing on feeling good on television. Our first vice, spindly. There's nothing linear going on. I want to do something very pure and disgusting, eking it out, measuring it by their one rare smile by one and hints of merciless discipline. I thought so! See, a vocal hollow. I need everything at the bank to get to the nail salon. I'm a self-challenging entrepreneur. I wear the biggest suspenders yet I'm a foil coming back for more off-guardedness from Hugh, my wife. Her bubbies are so blood-filled all through Starbucks they never leave the table. A pair of gory stories with flashbacks. You can hear them crashing. She's a Jeep Victory accident I keep dating to kill the sordidness of being nourished. Stopless wiretapping has surprising thematic depth sometimes. Unfortunately disrespect can feel like eavesdropping. Everyday voice is a loop of operatic passion restraining everything else, like with Hugh. Or more like getting to be made up and automatically turning up for a goodbye pageant, moving through an infancy stage, adolescence — no further — then a kind of death with ironic rebirth as the winner! Hugh was with me right up to the sibyls. I was saying.

Basically: tops the list of incoming freshman fudge words, as we know.

He basically authorized it.

— Dick Cheney, in response to Bob Shieffer's question this morning whether George W. Bush understood details of enhanced interrogation techniques deemed legal by the Department of Justice.

When I was asked about why Robin had another poem after The Moth Poem is over ... He's had for some time a suspicion that all of these poems — the poems he hasn't written and the poems that he read and some other things which may be included — are part of a large book called The Holy Forest. But I think his holy forest is rather different from the Grail forest, where you simply meet odd beasts and odd maidens and knights that get mad at you for some reason, or as Percival says, people either tell me to do something, which I do or don't do because I get angry. That's the kind of forest that I'm talking about. It's probably the silva oscura of Dante more than anything else, which is also known as the human condition.

— Jack Spicer

Marking the end of suspicion, Robin Blaser, RIP.

Thus the universe is gerbils-friendly. Fess up. Insert turgid search data. Biggies. Smalls. I'll-show-you Samson as a genre youth with the power of oxygen then all-things-unsettling, notorious, and crust colors (from grabbing an acoustic guitar too long, too much) so hell feels warmer. Toss and go. A few nights later over breakfast Outrage Bridge is ground in. Wood ants with infectious moods fly to Paris or Dalila, a ham amassing narrative. Rumble with me, slabs. Discover your psychic legacy, putt our kingdom on the map, dash neediness and flatten all sponge-festering symmetry into a gargantuan pizza. Tortured pizza.

Ok. I hear voices in the kitchen. My thoughts freeze in total makeover as we recede, putting it mockingly, without being egotistical. Search data. Search date. I could reduce the service charge for flirting with you in an ascot as a hired driller. (We let the elders dictate everything.) Voices. Parcels smeared on the arc for a female anchor shorn of hair. My mawkish arrogant diva-opportunist. Marriage is looking good, a mistake but "not a lasting one." Meow.

I won $8100!

For craftspeople and strategists of poetry to move out of its pamphleteering halfway house, events such as last week's Segue gathering (sketched by Tim Peterson in assertive detail) need to take precedence. Imagine the recursive appropriateness and bitter timing of having a young architect demonstrate that poetry's "relationship to the larger culture" is that of a cattle egret to a cow. The Segue reading (which I did not attend) featured architects Robert Kocik, Benjamin Aranda, and Vito Acconci. What these three prove is that multiple domains and merged disciplines constitute a genuinely collectivist impulse that contributes to their individual ingenuity. Acconci has long been wordsmithing as we know from his early conceptualist performances. He knows how to do architecture, according to Tim, "through words." (Are there contemporary poets who know how or make the effort to write through chemical biology or physical therapy?) Kocik has developed a schematic engaging words for the Prosody Building, a design tailored for poets. (Quick, let's get a laureate to write Kocik verse to live in!) Aranda has the most adventurous approach, I think. Tim summarizes Aranda as exploring

various ways in which a building can be built from language using scripts to generate self-perpetuating forms which have analogies to the way nanotechnology works. Aranda's discussion captured a fascinating dynamic between building and dismantling, as when he noted that "in architecture, and perhaps also in poetry, you need to break things down and decompose them into their finite parts in order to build them up again." This analytic activity is related to the analogy of sand piles and the way in which they can model what he calls "aggregate assemblies," noting with a slightly anthropomorphizing delight that "the parts themselves know how to reproduce or grow into larger structures."

Sounds familiar.

Tom Clark is overworking the blogs, holding down his own site and another curated for Vanitas. He sent me links that react to or resonate with my note on smart phone texting (Monday, below) and here they are. A "brief punch," as it were, "no, I don't care what you say / Said the champion"; "Hope" (noting the "Valley and Wind Gap" that encapsulate the texting experience; and "TC: Sadly X (A Text)," which says it all (for one): "text is variously / a life, but the purpose / of an individual / is single." There you go.

Question for today (and if you have an answer or a reaction reach me at the e-mail address to the right): Are there small presses working with the Kindle format? Wouldn't it be kindly of Amazon if they were to cut a deal for the little folk? I have no qualms thinking about books set up for digital distribution and reading. I object to Amazon's fee system that is unquestionably stacked against the independent small press. Boo hoo.