Posted October 31, Bill Knott exercises w/ Ashbery, and the result is not frantic. A careful, delimited discussion, and apt, as well, since Knott chose a short poem that opens "Takeitapart."

A wall of calm is put up, under which pillow talk can begin. Thus an authentic kindergarten, language, dance, charades, gets raised here and quest is forcibly asserted. It shapes who we are, the last phase of withdrawal from a deadlock in eerie nuance for a future attribute, pond stones having shown us their breasts. Tomorrow's cultural obligations transmit to each the small abstraction and pathetic complacency of her or his own ad hoc Oedipus, gooey homegrown beetle juice that reaches its goal! Dad is a doormat. Proof.

Working against deadline we accelerate our personalities, ordering a gloss over aluminum to realize something, anything like stardom. We have advanced a few feet. It's a look back over our lives the morning after the actual sublime. A lunatic fan rushes in or could rush in, a dentist, to remove our tongues. It seems pleasing since so sensible a creature understood us.

Congratulations, 6th city, from the 24th. Last year things didn't go the way we wanted in the playoffs. But they never gave up. They kept fighting and kept fighting, and today they're the world champions. Phillies Word Series Winners! An opera, albeit a comic one, smothered in delays, days of rain and Obama's ad sweep, might have been more heralded, and more harrowing, had Philadelphia slaughtered the BoSox rather than the caving Rays.

Watching saver Brad Lidge fall to his knees, throw his arms up in the air, then drop them, a starving apparition zoned down beside me. She stayed progressive in her assessment, he's scratching himself you know where. And why not? Lidge was home free. He was running to create wealth. And a dreamworld of adagios. It comes down to unfinished music and happy mediums (like except for me). Would she still be doing this if the sky hadn't cleared bringing cathartic release with fingers for claws? Yes, the sky has piano hands and yes! piano fingers — keep an eye on those two — clawing their way to the top. In other words the question is, harmony or being? I'll admit I've been suffering for decades from the hidden concord in trauma from a prior sexuality set to Mozart. Having his child, Mrs. Mozart is stuck here, fixated now, her eyes welled with decorative esthetics, the kind recognized in opera.

I got into e-mail trouble. And so to bed. You know, Napoleon slumbered through wish fulfillment. Chong, as well. Particular universality principles won't apply when you're sleeping over, in another world. In another universe, I mean. Love thy inhuman neighbors. Love their children, Imaginary, Fatso-holic, L'il Morbid. Ghost writing their ideology is pure authorship, a reduced antithesis to a fake screen name and false distance. We're all redistributionists, psychologically, living librettos, not killing machines. In the soprano dawn, through October, nothing's not indexed to playing with cats and growing tulips. Politics is anger, gizmos, useless bruising rhetoric. And money is gross, always. We cross the road tonight. Join the revolution of ex-rich kids slicing up symbols for our very first film with an opening caption dedicated to echoes of the Ramones covering Cole Porter. Whatever they call you girls.

Skinheads target poodleheads because of a themeless pudding for tonal platitude. We are free — still — to say what they think, but their recipes, or ours, are hardly unadulterated, perfused with empathetic spices and accents from leftist modernism. The century-old middle ground is where we live and continue playing on vulgar innuendoes to be kind, as you undress to force a smile, fully emancipating the other to feel obliged to receive you generously.

You could put both of you or all three in a position of bourgeois indignation, otherwise.

Her beautiful red hair, his gainsaying oomph, we're cruising at altitudes of theorem, and most of the quack probabilities are undistinguished until you return their excrement wrapped in see-through plastic. Where does the political economy have you put it? The scandalous terrain is grotty, propped-up constructs, eco-conscious, dirt colored. Is taking on something without wanting to substance or junk? "Sorry, not tonight..."

The invention of worship is over. So over. The topic is civility. Trees in place, defiantly miscellaneous, thanks to Leitkultur, the treeway on a berm of civil-democratic toepaths with permissions reformed as disruptive presumptions built from a hedge belief in headwinds within and, as it were, without the unions. Civility can scar inhabitants but also lets us act like participants in marking time as though subscribers to the regulatory plutocracy. I know so little about the state and so much less, so here are the details. It was a place to ... what's this put up or shut up? It began with the airlines. Nice houses were somewhere. Let's remake this old classic with coffered ceilings into a dollhouse. When prices hurry down, everything will be felicitously stuccoed, ultimatums rephrased, and moral aspiration will again become footloose and empirically uncontestable as Seven Bagatelles.

A reminder, something I don't do often: but this is worth it. The Faux Chaps party this Friday, 6:30, at Jimmy's No. 43, 43 E. 7th (b. 2nd & 3rd Ave, nearer 2nd), NYC. Readers are Jeni "Truck" Olin, Stacy Szymaszek, Alan Davies, CAConrad, Brenda Iijima, moi-même. No cover. Organic foodstuffs. Good cheer.

Yeah, blandness is part of the problem. You impart numeric dicta slathered with near-imperatives for rationales. Freaked-out sublime — the immensity of your category rewards formalism and processes, mediocre-to-cool — unable to distinguish between dissimilarity slanted toward the news in poetics and semi-autistic subdivisions. Everything you say seems brute-accented. Love, Mom.

Emily Lloyd, aka elloyd74 on Twitter, is among the most visually-webby of poetics bloggers. Au courantly so. Here are two "ecards" of her own design and, between them, two pickups from A2591 and Bookninja, all of which I uploaded from her poesy galore —

Absent 3 looks all there.

Yeah, sir! James Cromwell as H. W. Richard Dreyfus as a peptic Cheney. "...creeps around...sneers," Manohla Dargis says in Friday's Times. What else can Dreyfus do, playing the sneering creep of our era? But it's the women who are going to drive me to Oliver Stone's newest fib / fable W. A "tightly smiling" Thandie Newton as Condoleeza frinking Rice and, and — four paws up! — Ellen Burstyn as Barbara. Are you holding me spellbound, Ellen Burstyn? What a weekend. Tony Towle and I read at Zinc on Sunday, and Ellen Burstyn as Barbara at a theater near you. Now.

Here's a gloss like small-group strings' accompaniment to Assisi School in the post, below.

I'm not claiming a particualr status for Boston. Far from it. I've filed for divorce from the quaintness that Boston has something going for it vis à vis poetry. To the contrary, institutional forces indifferent to poetics bear down on artists. You can't live and work here and not have, broadly speaking, academia, biomedicine, classical music, and funds management seep into your conversations. Speaking socio-strategically, most professions outrank esthetic practices, excepting classical music. Watching only a handful of poets negotiate these pressures is hardly a picnic. Something like public defensiveness if not a sense of inferiority fucks up the intensity of the writerly experience and the comity among writers. John Wieners had traveled but came back to the hermitage to wrestle with this conundrum directly in his work and in his life about Boston. Frank O'Hara, whom I did not watch personally, grew up around here and got his bachelor's locally and then fled to happier ground to exercise what he knew as his gifts of intelligence and feelings in front of people who would find him important and necessary to their lives.

What marks both poets as central exemplars of the Assisi School is their battle with warmth (or, better, kinds of empathy) and calculation. That is the battle of the moment living around here, and more and more living most anywhere. In postcapitalist, professionalized strata, how does the poet find combustible matter, a knowledge base and emotional understanding to come out with an esthetics and a life adequate for others to peruse and enjoy.

Only two years dead, Clare of Assisi was canonized. Saint Clare had an inside track based as she and Francis were in the tree- and shrub-lined exurbs of Perugia, north of San Vitale. This may not surprise you, where I'm headed.

Without fog, there's still Boston, my Assisi, but it wouldn't be beautiful. Helicopters would not be burden-sharing, or stay solid and in-waiting for the radiance to take hold like emulsion.

A smirk, where do you come from? Not now. Boston is this place, the glow is not ours. To donor offspring ownership is sweet. The fourth wall grimaces as nonthreatening nonpersonalities play the margins. Here alone smart youth can drink martinis and not change the world.

But I can't promise tomorrow, either; the glow rather than the town needs me as a fashion czar. You crazy bastard.

All we did was tie up our golf ball fluid.

Activity-oriented=adaptable=outgoing

— keepsakes sifted, carefully drawing blood and red horizontal dings called the crawl

EVEN IF WE ASSUME THE BOWL GOT BRUISED

Henry James was like everyone else among ten free trades off of beer. And I have beer.

You hate this city, admit it — I for sure abhor inhabiting its pleasure to float up from 19th century authenticity, the college town as social lab, its social advertising, a meta-parody leaning out of
 story life and stoic defense of deformed drapery blowing over grandpa's armchair and blueprints. It's ad hoc as showcase, national calculated effortlessness, nothing political. The cheesy symphonic repertoire 
can play on, separate and intensify things I'm going to skip.

Allegory prevails in a climate when stress and oppression predominate. Like the last 100 years. Then, how white Wallace Stevens — not from physical Boston but he went to school here — finds it easy to enter darkness in voices of color, never finding ways to distance himself from it, from them. Second, Stevensesque or Stevensian John Ashbery, another non-native Bostonian who went to Harvard, shows how you distance self from distancing self for perpetual cartouche and slap-party disquiet. Central to all this it's the smacked sick love puppy that keeps yelping through the poems and life-allegories of Worcester's Frank O'Hara, Cambridge's Eileen Myles, and blushing Ted Berrigan, who came from Providence, which is almost here, to call up a sad-happy trio of voices lent to us. Assisi School voices that I keep reading.

This gets me to the allegory of enormous warmth, the thing I'm missing the most. Eileen typifies it. Magnifies it. She loves us, including many she disdains. (In comparison, I squeeze disdain out of those I love. How awkward!) Who else radiates puppy warmth. Boston's John Wieners, except he doesn't love himself enough. Edwin Denby, not from here but having the glow, recursively. We need to feed on O'Hara to go back to how loving Denby's poetry is. After that, I think it's parts of us — or you — that share the burn in the glow. But Eileen is unsurpassed.

FAUX CHAPS PARTY
Friday, Oct. 24
6:30

Jimmy's No. 43
43 E. 7th St. (b. 2nd & 3rd Ave.)
NYC

Celebrating the publication of six new books.

The Pill Book — Jeni "Truck" Olin
Orizaba — Stacy Szymaszek
Odes — Alan Davies
Pathologies — Jack Kimball
(Soma)tic Midge — CAConrad
Subsistence Equipment — Brenda Iijima

Short readings by the authors.

No cover. Organic snacks.
Cheap drinks. Book deals.

Spam from Prada and Ryan's Pharmacy. Hobart Natalie, Anatoly Percy, and King Gadi. Rowena, Kermit, Mosso's, and Jozef Jill. Keisha Jeffers (Robinson's great grandchild), Clarance Raymona, Hans Jacky, Leticia Lundy, John-David Ira, Bjorne Cameron (David's other), et al.

Knowing we live forever like offspring of Saxon brutes
He thought about SciFi from the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties
Fighting the relative fight to endure
All of his life as if he were a mercurial quantum
As if meeting death half-way hapless (though deceitful)
The kind of greenish pallor you'd desired

He thought about SciFi from the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties
As the clay-toned physique turns from the window
Fighting before we understood the beloved's desires
His coat with the fired bullet, effluvia
All of his life as if he were a mercurial quantum
Temporal as this shitty two-room with its simultaneity

As the clay-toned physique turns from the window
A bright light credited to chimera in a purified labyrinth
At the end of the greatest fluorescent tube
The kind of greenish pallor you'd desired
Fighting the relative fight to endure
A silver psycho-mist hung along the streets

A bright light credited to chimera in a purified labyrinth
The luminous tints of reversed decisions or rotating surf
The kind of greenish pallor you'd desired
All of his life as if he were a mercurial quantum
A chestnut vendor stood holding out to her
His coat with the fired bullet in it, effluvia

Temporal as this shitty two-room with its simultaneity
To grow another heart in different tempi
At the end of the greatest fluorescent tube
As the clay-toned physique turns from the window
A silver psycho-mist hung along the streets
Fighting before we understood the beloved's desires

To grow another heart in different tempi
A chestnut vendor stood holding out to her
The kind of greenish pallor you'd desired
He thought about SciFi from the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties
All of his life as if he were a mercurial quantum
Going hippie to make a connection

A chestnut vendor stood holding out to her
A silver psycho-mist hung along the streets
As if meeting death half-way hapless (though deceitful)
Knowing we live forever like offspring of Saxon brutes
Going hippie to make a connection
The luminous tints of reversed decisions or rotating surf.