Never Mind the Beasts

One week from today

gonna take an airplane . . . I’m a going (to my second) home.

From Greensboro to Boston to Dublin for a few days. Tour the Guinness factory. Walk around St. Stephen’s Green and think of Joyce. Then a train to Portadown to see my family. Maybe look up my biological Dad in Lurgan (not expecting much haven’t seen him since I was six). A day at Portrush (a beach). Maybe some burial mounds.

Then an airplane to England (Stony Stratford) to visit more relatives and maybe check out some bookstores at Cambridge, take in a Liverpool football match, lots of pubs and steak and kidney pies.

Here’s a website with some good modern day pics of my hometown:

Portadown

Ruth Dickey, a friend and fellow poet, moved to Seattle recently to help run this program called New Futures.

Good things happening. Check it out : New Futures

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

the bell is known

in all cultures – but not known

when invented

mission bells

sing from strange halls

during the recession of 1890 mission halls overflowed

with harmonic convergence

bargain bells buy now

easy cheap & quick

bells at rock bottom

big bells

now one click

away

the woman would use her only coins to ring the chapel bells

in the community the bells made many friends

the sleigh the jingle the call of worship the sink of the warship

the woman used coins

to cover the eyes

of those who died

the bells of St. Vitas and the bells of ain’t thinking

the bells of bare bulbs and the bells of spare ribs

bells announce bells pronounce bells on coat (coaxed)

bells in buttocks (spoon in the mouth)

bells calculate divide delay

bells for sickness slithering the throat

crack of the knees eternal utter

garnish with parsley combine with egg

evaporate and try not to ride

the way a swamp operates

there was of course no chance

of ringing it in such wise as to break it

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

child in mine

tell tale tit

pattern in conflict:

of the mouth

of the playpen

children knit

at both ends

of the world.

canary on the cable. no ark for flood. liquid filling into liquid:

gymglossa hasp

poseurs erphoby

anhima cashmerette

swept the floors. found apple.

took back the walls. beside me.

afraid of heights. of the light.

leaking through the window

either or. suddenly frog. lucid and pubescent. fleshed out.

false hopes. of the green. of the fruit.

in looking. what’s seen. by who bore it.

we knew now only how could be god.

in how getting the bells we slipped into eros. swanstretched on the ground. bore it outstretched. as a debt for the saying. bells my babies. we knew now

only how could be god.

a grate against the door. is not the floor. a grate is not a gate. the door is not a floor.

to scratch words. in the dark. whilst other activities tap the window. to think from moving. floating. in-begging. two logs iced to the ground. parks by the motorways. bodies under trees. cream tart on the sidewalk. melting into the cracks.

strung out on words. devoid. a circuit of trees outstands us. Day dawn gloam. the power to keep. the power powdered on in the morning. shadow of hermes. orchestra of burnished earth. talk swollen and ringing.

a cockatrice is a serpent rooster dragon a corruption of crocodile the serpent star breaks off its arms as a means of defense

the morning star is a fallen star

the more common interpretation of Heraclitus holds

the universe

as not

a container

for information

any more

than a rose garden is

something there is that doesn’t love a horse

flower

bee

and

berry

something there is that doesn’t but must

tawny

pause

something there is

that lacks a purpose

shamboozled

our hands

grow thick

if you wash your hair every day

your scalp tingles

your head clears

your hair comes alive

while inked in meditation

you gave me the slip

inner thigh all mine

heart my hellium

Patrick is discussing some great issues of power/poetry and more specifically next years festival over at his newly created Carrboro blog spot. Check it out. Join the discussion:

<a href="http://carrboropoetry.blogspot.com/&quot;

>Carrboro Poetry

I used to feel compelled to start and finish one book before starting another. Now I feel compelled to juggle many books (and ideas and languages) at once.

Still, there is the residual guilt.

Finish what you start.

Finish every last morsel on your plate.

You can’t leave the table till you finish.

Even if it gets cold.

Fuck that.

I want it hot! hot! hot!

So I juggle.

I am learning to live with my juggling.

For the last three weeks this is my juggling routine:

I read 3 poems from Ronald Johnson’s Ark, 3 poems from William Bronk’s Selected, 3 poems from Rosmarie Waldrop’s Blindsight, 3 poems from Maurice Scully’s Livelihood.

In between the readings (or during, time can be frozen) I jot down words in my small notebook.

Then I reconstruct them and add them into my long poem Campanology.

Every 3 days (or so) I re-read and re-order Campanology (try to find connective tissue).

mainly it’s:

Read/Juggle

Re-arrange

read/juggle

re-arrange

read/juggle

re-arrange

Any other jugglers out there?

Head over to Aaron McCollough’s blog and listen to his songs. I love Via Positivia and Fire’s on the Phone. I also like Big Star Cover. Song for Puckheads is my favourite so far. Two great voices.

ALL THE SONGS ARE GREAT. Fab lyrics.

After waking up with a little angst (a hole in my stomach) it’s nice to listen to some great music. Reminds me somewhat of Neutral Milk Hotel.

HEAD OVER THERE:

LISTEN, BE HAPPY

There’s a hot spanking new mag out of Greensboro called Backwards City Review. Comics, poetry, fiction, non-fiction.

The first issue should be available soon.

I’ve had a sneak peak (in pdf form). It’s very very good!

Check out the table of contents for the first issue:

EDITOR’S NOTE

COMICS

Tom Chalkley   Heat Wave Verso

Peter S. Conrad   What’s in a Name

Jim Rugg   The Stoned Ape Theory

FICTION

Michael Parker   Results for Novice Males

Alix Ohlin   Local News

Cory Doctorow   Excerpt from Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town

Adam Berlin   Speeding Away

NONFICTION

Stephen Kuusisto   Alfred Whitehead Is Alive and Well in Corpus Christi, Texas

POETRY

Joyelle McSweeney   Architectural Digest,  The Great White Fleet

Ander Monson   Me v. January, Circumstantial

Karri Harrison Paul   Eviction

Greg Williamson   Sex  22   Sex  23

Marcus Slease   If You’ve Got Something to Say, Then Say It

Paul Guest   Poem in Which I Seek Consolation in the Etymology of a Word, Victoria’s Secret

John Latta   Umbrage,  Gadabout

Tony Tost   from Complex Sleep

Erica Bernheim   How to Create Your Own Amnesia, Summer Crookneck

Sarah Manguso   What Prayer Is

Kristin Hall   DIY Foot Washing, The Flight Area

Arielle Greenberg   Membrane, On a Return to Being a Polemic against Light Verse  

K. Silem Mohammad   They Call My Car Illegal,  Demerol Chillout

Johannes Goransson   from Secured against Hares

Kent Johnson   Poetry Blogs in Zurich

Gabriel Gudding   Policy, Religion

CONTRIBUTOR NOTES

ENVOI Kurt Vonnegut   Where Do You Get Your Ideas From?

GET IT WHILE IT’S HOT:

BACKWARDS CITY REVIEW

poets in demand

Just ordered maurice Scully’s Livelihood from Wild Honey and Rosmarie Waldrop’s Blindsight from New Directions.

I am really excited to read some more Maurice Scully.

check out some of his poems:

here

and

here

I am excited to be in Ireland in a few weeks. Also going to England for a few days. Hope to catch the Liverpool vs. West Brom game on Boxing Day.

Liverpool, o how I’ve missed ’em. My hero growing up was Ian Rush.

Today they play Arsenal. It’s going to be a tough game. Liverpool has lost their best strikers due to injuries. They lost to Monaco earlier in the week (with a controversial handball in the penalty box).

They really need to win today’s game.

I just hope I can pick up the broadcast on the internet.

Come on REDS!

Broken glass everywhere

People pissing on the stairs, you know they just don’t care

I can’t take the smell, I can’t take the noise

Got no money to move out, I guess I got no choice

Rats in the front room, roaches in the back

Junkie’s in the alley with a baseball bat

I tried to get away, but I couldn’t get far

Cause the man with the tow-truck repossessed my car

Don’t push me, cause I’m close to the edge

I’m trying not to loose my head

It’s like a jungle sometimes, it makes me wonder

How I keep from going under

Standing on the front stoop, hangin’ out the window

Watching all the cars go by, roaring as the breezes blow

Crazy lady, livin’ in a bag

Eating out of garbage piles, used to be a fag-hag

Search and test a tango, skips the life and then go

To search a prince to see the last of senses

Down at the peepshow, watching all the creeps

So she can tell the stories to the girls back home

She went to the city and got so so so ditty

She had to get a pimp, she couldn’t make it on her own

Don’t push me, cause I’m close to the edge

I’m trying not to loose my head

It’s like a jungle sometimes, it makes me wonder

How I keep from going under

My brother’s doing fast on my mother’s T.V.

Says she watches to much, is just not healthy

All my children in the daytime, Dallas at night

Can’t even see the game or the Sugar Ray fight

Bill collectors they ring my phone

And scare my wife when I’m not home

Got a bum education, double-digit inflation

Can’t take the train to the job, there’s a strike at the station

Me on King Kong standin’ on my back

Can’t stop to turn around, broke my sacroiliac

Midrange, migrained, cancered membrane

Sometimes I think I’m going insane, I swear I might hijack a plane!

Don’t push me, cause I’m close to the edge

I’m trying not to loose my head

It’s like a jungle sometimes, it makes me wonder

How I keep from going under

My son said daddy I don’t wanna go to school

Cause the teacher’s a jerk, he must think I’m a fool

And all the kids smoke reefer, I think it’d be cheaper

If I just got a job, learned to be a street sweeper

I dance to the beat, shuffle my feet

Wear a shirt and tie and run with the creeps

Cause it’s all about money, ain’t a damn thing funny

You got to have a con in this land of milk and honey

They push that girl in front of a train

Took her to a doctor, sowed the arm on again

Stabbed that man, right in his heart

Gave him a transplant for a brand new start

I can’t walk through the park, cause it’s crazy after the dark

Keep my hand on the gun, cause they got me on the run

I feel like an outlaw, broke my last fast jaw

Hear them say you want some more, livin’ on a seasaw

Don’t push me, cause I’m close to the edge

I’m trying not to loose my head

It’s like a jungle sometimes, it makes me wonder

How I keep from going under

A child was born, wih no state of mind

Blind to the ways of mankind

Got a smile on you with these burning tooth

Cause only god knows what you go through

You grow in the ghetto, living second rate

And your eyes will sing a song of deep hate

The places you play and where you stay

Looks like one great big alley way

You’ll admire all the numberbook takers

Dogpitchers, pushers and the big money makers

Driving big cars, spending twenties and tens

And you wanna grow up to be just like them

Smuygglers, scrambles, burglars, gamblers

Pickpockets, peddlers and even pan-handlers

You say I’m cool, I’m no fool

But then you wind up dropping out of highschool

Now you’re unemployed, all null ‘n’ void

Walking around like you’re pretty boy Floyd

Turned stickup kid, look what you done did

Got send up for a eight year bid

Now your man hood is took and you’re a Maytag

Spend the next two years as an undercover fag

Being used and abused, and served like hell

Till one day you was find hung dead in a cell

It was plain to see that your life was lost

You was cold and your body swung back and forth

But now your eyes sing the sad sad song

Of how you lived so fast and died so young

Don’t push me, cause I’m close to the edge

I’m trying not to loose my head

It’s like a jungle sometimes, it makes me wonder

How I keep from going under

Just finished Turbulence by Pierre Joris and I am charged. Fully charged. I search and search for the right book at the right time and this is it.

The movement (architectonics) of the book is dead-on.

First, clouds and the weather, a little groundwork

Second, Canto Diurno # 1 (my fav is Noon re:Sobin’s work)

Third, Lemur Mornings

This book answers the nagging question of difficulty and audience (sort of).

For me, this is perfect balance of critical/theoretical and lyrical.

In other words, this is what I’ve been looking for.

In talking to Tost a while back, he mentioned he found it difficult to blog about current books because the energy used in writing poems might be sucked out by writing critically about it on his blog.

I sort of feel the same way.

Anytime I get pumped about a book, I only blog about it in general terms. It’s not that I can’t explicate/break-down/look closely/be more specific.

I suppose I want to let the influences leak-in in an intuitive fashion (I’ll sort out the specifics later).

So when I get excited about John Taggart, Pierre Joris, or Joseph Donahue. I can only say I am excited. I don’t want to break it all down and examine it too closely (at least at the moment).

Anyone else feel the same way?

In other words, I need turbulence before critical transformations.

I’ve never read anything else by Joris. I am wondering if there are any more Canto Diurno’s?

Anyone out there read anything by Pierre Joris they can recommend?

In the meantime, I’ve William Bronk’s Selected Poems on my desk. Don’t know what to expect from William Bronk (except I keep hearing his work has connections to gnostic philosophy).

The right work at the right time!

The well-made book interests me so much more than the well-made poem!

I suppose that might explain my general dislike for using anthologies to teach literature.

I am much more interested in a few whole collections than lots of little poems thrown together.

FIGURES 1

A figure of feeling is not a single tree a set of lines an occasion of words.

A figure of feeling is a system of roots, a bloodline, re-invented events.

And we know now the clay as first begotten the irrational how(l) of language.

And now in-knowing needs be more musical.

Less naming.

Less lingering.

More spinning.

A figure “of” feeling is also a figure “for” feeling.

A figure “is” rather than a figure “as.”

Life not a storehouse of living but a burning a charing a using-up.

_________________________________________________________________

Duncan:

“Bells ring in other worlds I cannot see.”

“Back of the genital throne the spincter awakens and moves the dream.”

“They are the members of a wake behind speech.”

_________________________________________________________________

For example: beyond the blind lid of night is the blind lid of night.

To take the elf of the self (es spricht für sich selbst) or hands on hips

we can see how acts are interpreted by other acts.

To act “as if” is no different than to act.

Therefore: to speak while dreaming is both an act and an event (der Personenkreis).

And where three or more words are gathered an event is sure to follow.

The interconnections of blogs. I was just surfing a little and found

Josh and Jordan

are both talking about audience (as well as Silliman). Josh and Jordan are both very articulate. Their responses full of passion. I especially found Josh’s argument for friends and lovers convincing. And Elvis. Yes, I don’t want to be Elvis.

The transference of energy (Olsonian) interests me in this blog sphere.

Poetry builds. The 20th century avant garde built some crazy shit.

I do like the word innovative poetry over avant-garde or post-avant.

Now poetry writing out of the avant garde traditions no longer needs to define itself against the institution(s) of poetry.

(as Mark Wallace and others have pointed out)

The audience for innovative/avant poetry is quite close to the audience for mainstream. So, neither need rely on defining their respective in terms of what it is not.

Or, to think it through on personal terms. Teaching Poems for the Millenium for my intro to poetry class does not require previous reading of say the Norton anthology of poetry.

Silliman’s post about audience today was very interesting. I’ve noticed the same thing.

A lot more people laughed when I read to a mix of poets and non-poets at a coffee shop than when I’ve read to a room full of MFA poets.

The funeral audience versus the party audience.

Education as the sometimes enemy of poetry.

Legit versus legitimacy.

Bugs Bunny as the hippest of the hip versus the poet priest presiding over a funeral.

do you know the difference between a camel and a child? A lion and a camel?

CLICK HERE FOR ANSWER

I’ve been trying to figure out how one could make a contemporary argument for art as an end in itself (not a cultural production). As in Kant’s notion of personhood.

Perhaps the doing of art as an end in itself?

Finally got around to reading Carl Martin’s _Genii Over Saltzburg_. Terrific book. I was really taken back by the elegant surrealism. I felt like I was reading some strange combination of Charles Simic and John Ashberry. I also had to stop a few times to look up words I’d never encountered.

This looking up of words brought back some of the issues while I was working on my MA. The idea of “home grown” good ‘ole American poetry. Terms such as “clever” and “academic poetry” were sometimes used to describe so-called Language Writing or poetry that enacted philosophy. Ideas about audience were also often discussed.

If poetry has a limited audience why limit it even more to academics by writing poetry (or contructing a poetics) that requires a background knowledge of Postmodern theory (linguistic and political theories etc.)

The critique of “high diction” had some anti-intellectualism built in (as is typical of American culture as in G.B.) but I also feel some sympathy or conflict with the idea of “anti-elitism.”

So what is the space between “anti-elitism” and “anti-intellectual?” For a while I thought about layers. An accessible surface with many layers underneath (but this might play into the game of “find the hidden meaning” or “find the nugget of wisdom.”)

So me education already sets me apart. Makes me elitist to some extent. But what exactly does elitism mean?

Is it possible to seperate political elitism from other kinds of elitism? If so, how can we reconcile the idea of everything being already political?

This is a continual conflict. I often pick up books of poetry by highly educated poets and enjoy them without fully knowing the theories or poetics that inform them. But I don’t know. I am also a university teacher and poet.

So does the type of diction used by a poetry limit their audience? Does this limiting of audience amount to a kind of incest and consequent deformity of perspective?

I just picked up Ben Friedlander’s _Simulcast_ , Jed Rasula’s _Syncopations_ , and Stephen Ratcliffe’s _Listening to Reading_ from the UNCG library. I am excited to read them even if I don’t “understand” all of them.

But I also wrote an MA thesis, after reading a lot of literary theory, bogged down with theory buzzwords and what felt later like pretencious diction.

I suppose I do like my poetry all ways. Whether the immediacy of the Beats and NY School poets or the more enacted philosophy of Leslie Scalapino or someone in-between those poles like Ron Silliman.

But, again, are we all in an incestous relationships? Will our children and their children end up looking weak and pale (i.e. the royal family)?

If you haven’t already seen this, take a look. Horrific.

Falluja

GOEST, by Cole Swensen, Alice James Books, 63 pp., $13.95

“Cole Swensen leads readers through history as she explores the subject of light, both natural and man-made. The poems in “Goest” travel back and forth through time – from the present-day United States to the streets of Paris in the 1500s and Rome in 50 BC. A highly intellectual poet, she traces the development of incandescents and the events they set in motion. She also writes, with meticulous care, about the color white and, more briefly, about mirrors, whose reflected images become another form of illumination. Her subject matter is often fascinating, and the language – spare and highly visual – seems to mimic flashes of light. “The Invention of Streetlights” is a good example of the poet’s approach and tone: “noctes illustratas/ (the night has houses)/ and the shadow of the fabulous/ broken into handfuls – these/ can be placed at regular intervals,/ candles/ walking down streets at times eclipsed by trees.” Long lines sometimes slow the narratives and make the work seem denser than it is. More disappointing, however, is the lack of clarity and directness in the book’s third section. After following Swensen through many landscapes, the reader longs for a more personal or emotional approach. That payoff doesn’t come, leaving one to feel that opportunities for enlightenment have been missed.”

I am wondering what the reviewer means by a “more personal or emotional approach” and the word “payoff.”

More so the word “payoff.” What does it mean to have a payoff. A reward. A cookie for attending sunday school.

Also, lack of clarity and directness.

It’s so strange how a lot of poetry reviews still use such a limited criteria. Isn’t it possible to take a book of poetry and “evaluate” it on its own terms, what it’s attempting to do (rather than what you want it to do).

To me, it’s like saying “_____ abstract art does not contain a human form and therefore lacks emotion and clarity.”

What art critic could get away with that?

Why is the overall conception of poetry so 19th century?

<a href="http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/1116/p17s02-bogn.html&quot;

>reviews of the poetry finalists for the NBA

Been reading coductors of Chaos for a while (an anthology of outsider/experimental poetry from the U.K.).

I am really digging Chris Cheek. His poem “Stranger” got the engine roaring tonight. It’s not reproducable in parts. it’s the total effect of its music.

Also finished Leonard Schwartz’s The Tower of Diverse Shores. Amazing book. Especially the last poem “The New Babel” “about” 9/11 and the world trade center towers. For me, it’s political and elegiac and encyclopedic and spiritual. An amazing weave.

“If architecture is frozen music, then these melted smoking shards / are its melodies, its incandescent burial grounds– Babel become / what begs you to sing it.”

and

“Babel was Mesopotamia, its era’s only superpower: redound of / Gilgamesh, modern day Iraq.”

and

“Babel is Baghdad, Babel is Belgrade, Babels our backyard, a World / that incessantly trades names with itself.”

For some reason I keep trying to Peter Gizzi’s _Some Values of Landscape and Weather and cannot get into it. Maybe one day. I won’t trade it yet.

For the last couple of weeks our cat iris is been in and out of the vet/hospital. Earlier this week she underwent exploratory surgery and they diagnosed her with a severe case of Irritable Bowel Disease. The vet wants to start her on chemo and steriods on Monday.

In the meantime we’ve got to watch her carefully. She’s been getting fevers and throwing up constantly and not taking shits. Both Tiffany and I have been getting little sleep. Any sound of the purging and we’re up trying to figure out whether or not to bring Iris into the hospital (she’s having a hard time keeping anything down and keeps getting dehydrated).

It’s horrible to think of life in terms of $ and emotional stress. We love our cat. But we’re already well over a thousand dollars into this (which we don’t really have) and there could be a lot of side effects with the chemo and steriods. She is also at high risk for the IRD developing into cancer.

It’s so hard to know when to draw the line.

check out the new poem from Joe Donahue over at the verse blog

<a href="http://versemag.blogspot.com/2004/08/new-joseph-donahue-poem.html&quot;

>Joseph Donahue Poem

Good time reading at Solaris last night. Angie Decola took the photos below. A guy videotaped the reading and is sending the readers a free DVD of the night (he is a local fella that lives off taping and selling readings and other events on DVD).

best part of the night: Ezra’s interactive lecture on the etymology of the word world(s). Robots make me happy.

Community is good.

Taught my intro to lit class Marxist theory today. Felt good to relate it to the contemporary political situation(s) in the States.

From: Judith Barrington

Date: 2004/11/10 Wed PM 08:35:38 CST

To: WOM-PO@LISTSERV.MUOHIO.EDU

Subject: POL: THIS SEEMS VERY IMPORTANT: Will Kerry Un-conceed?

Please forward to all who have specifics on vote fraud. The

send-to address below is John Kerry’s brother at his law firm. Kerry will

unconcede if there is solid evidence of fraud. We need first hand sufferers

so please get this info to them!!

FORWARD TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW

EMAIL FROM DC LAWYER CYNTHIA BUTLER

I am angry and getting emails and recrimination from people wondering why

KERRY just caved and is not fighting this before the final count in Ohio,

before any of the fraud was challenged, before New Mexico and Iowa even

came in.

There is widespread feeling that he did not lose the election and that it

was taken from him.

There is enough here to warrant investigation and enough to challenge the

results. It’s coming from all corners.

I understand that he has until the official count certification in Ohio to

Un Concede which is several days from now.

Anyone who thinks that he should unconcede should give reasons why –

whatever they noticed, particularly in Red Republican Governed States using

electronic machines- and send them directly to Cameron KERRY, John Kerry’s

brother at his law firm at the address CKerry@Mintz.com

They should inform us if they were not allowed to vote provisionally (for

whatever reason- they lost forms, ran out of forms, etc.) I personally

witnessed a number of things as I reported in Texas with the DCCC.

(Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee)

If you know anyone in particular in Ohio who tried to vote and was turned

away at the polls please get their information and notify the campaign.

They should be notified if they experienced lines longer than four

hours -particularly elderly or infirm people (we call that torture when they

do it to political prisoners). They should be notified if people were told

as has been reported that due to too many people showing up in African

American precincts, particularly in Ohio where there were too few booths

(some only had two or three for the entire precinct) and told because of

heavy turn out they could vote on Wednesday. If the numbers of these sorts

of incidents creates a percentage margin that exceeds the margin of

victory- Un Concession has to be made to challenge the count.

If people wanted to and tried to vote and were prevented or actively

discouraged from doing so, that is a Civil Rights matter and must be dealt

with in terms of the ultimate count.

Please pass along this to your listservs so that we may make Democracy

Work in America. We are not a country where he who cheats best wins.

Cynthia L. Butler

BUTLER LAW FIRM, P.C.

1717 K St. NW, Suite 600

Washington, DC 20036

http://www.johnkerry.com/index.html

I stumbled on a book of Beverly Dahlen’s _A Reading 1-7_.

So far, I am really enjoying it. I just finished reading Leslie Scalapino’s:

1) Way

2) How Phenomena Appear to Unfold

3) New Time.

I’ve also listened to the Kenning cd of Scalapino reading Way quite a few times. For some reason I hear Scalapino’s voice when I am reading Dahlen. The sentence constructions feel similar. The “how” of it (meaning the syntax etc.).

I realize Scalapino is swimming through Buddhist philosophy and Dahlen seems to swim through (among many things) feminist psychoanalysis, but I wonder why their sentence structures and my reading (overlaying) of voice connects them as intimates?

I don’t get the same sense of similarity in “voice” with Susan Howe or Bernadette Mayer.

I don’t know enough (I never do) to know if there are some philosophical connections (and epistemological methods) that Scalapino and Dahlen hold in common?

I am also wondering how to select what to read. I read bits of theory, but cannot sustain a full blown reading project of say Jameson or Marx. I read bits at a time. I keep coming back to poetry (most times the critical lyric). Don’t know why my mind cannot sustain long periods of theory/philosophy any more.

Sometimes I worry I don’t have enough grounding in continental philosophy to write “good” poems (Derrida etc.)

On the one hand: “You don’t need theory to write poetry”

On the other hand: “The critical and creative are not opposites.”

The two hands don’t cancel each other out. But I wonder if getting my philosophy “second-hand” via poetics is the same as getting it closer to “first-hand” via texts written by full-fledged philosophers?

In other words, is there a fundamental difference between “using” the philosophy of Wittgenstein and reading the philosophy of Wittgenstein?

If you “use” a philosophy is it possible to misappropriate it? If so, how can we know when we are misappropriating the language/ideas of a philosopher if language creates ideas as much (or more) than ideas are translated into language?

In other words, is misappropriating different (ethically) than mistranslating? If translating is more than a one to one correspondence (i.e. context) are all misappropriations also a mistranslation?

I do like the word Way. I travel from the bottom of the Y up to the forked path. I do this many times a day. Contrary to the pseudo wisdom of Mr. Frost. I hate FROST!

If anyone is free and lives near Greensboro, I am reading with two excellent poets (Don Ezra Cruz and Rhett) at Solaris (a restaurant/night club in downtown Greensboro) at 9PM Wed Nov. 10th. I guess a band is going to play after our reading. Don’t how late I’ll stay though.

Also, one of students turned in Lisa Jarnot’s Ring of Fire to Ed McKays used bookstore in Greensboro. Good price. Interesting student notes on the relationship between text and image and Dick Cheney in “Dumb Duke Death.” Too bad they didn’t keep the book. The essays on Lisa Jarnot’s _Ring of Fire_ were the best of the semester.

“And cast down me wretched / sinner unto thee I am / slightly different from / a corpse at a funeral / in that I am less made up / but made up worse.”

“The spaces between the aura / and the jolt are shorter / like some epileptic thunderstorm / waiting for the eye.”

(from Philip Jenks’ _on the Cave You Live in_)

<a href="http://www.culturalsociety.org/cave.html&quot;

>Review of On the Cave You Live In

Another Review

<a href="http://www.kdu.com/images/hidriv.jpg&quot;

>a nice cave

It’s hard to even begin today.

My friend Gerry helped me to feel a little better if only to express my own shock, disbelief, horror, and fear:

LONG ROAD

had to get my mind off the big countdown. Worked for a few hours on Campanology. Refound my pace. I’ve felt for about a month (after trying it out on an audience) something was amiss. More than amiss. Way off for my satisfaction.

I realized it was very abstract. I mean I am all for abstract, but there must be levels of abstraction. I just finished Zero Star Hotel by Anselm Berrigan. That’s the amount (or degree) of abstraction I dig.

Rather than say, Jorie Graham or Ann Lauterbach’s degree of eliptical abstraction.

So I reworked the first 20 pages and refound the umph. If it sounds too NY schooly ah well. I gotta have the roar.

And now, back to the nailbitting. This is one election I wish I could vote in. I pay taxes and when I was younger I could have been drafted. I can die for America but as an alien I can’t vote. Strange.

Many of you’all may have already read this over at Possum Pouch, but in case you haven’t:

Freedom is on the March

by Eliot Weinberger

Among the things the second term of the Bush junta will bring is the New Freedom Initiative. This is a proposal, barely reported in the press, to give all Americans- beginning with school children- a standardized test for mental illness. Those who flunk the test will be issued medication, and those who do not want to take their medication will be urged to have it implanted under their skin. Needless to say, the New Freedom commission, appointed by the President, is composed almost entirely of executives, lawyers, and lobbyists for pharmaceutical corporations.

The question is: Will anyone pass the test? Half of America is clearly deranged, and it has driven the other half mad.

The President openly declares that God speaks through him. The Republicans are making television advertisements featuring the actor who played Jesus in Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ,” while sending out pamphlets that warn that if Kerry is elected he will ban the Bible. Catholic bishops have decreed that voting for Kerry is a sin (mortal or venial?) that must be confessed before one can take communion. The one piece of scientific research actively promoted by the government is investigating whether having others pray for you can cure cancer. (The National Institute of Health has explained that this is “imperative” because

poor people have limited access to normal health care.) At the official gift shop in Grand Canyon National Park, they sell a book that states that this so-called natural wonder sprang fully formed in the six days of Creation. We already know that the current United States government does not believe in global warming or the hazards of pollution; now we know it doesn’t believe in erosion either.

The polls are evidence that the country is suffering a collective head injury. On any given issue– the economy, the war in Iraq, health care– the majority perceive that the situation is bad and the President has handled it badly. Yet these same people, in these same polls, also say they’ll be voting for Bush. Like a battered wife– realizing yet denying what is happening, still making excuses for their man– the voters are ruled by fear and intimidation and the threat of worse to come. They’ve been beaten up by the phantom of terrorism.

Every few weeks we’re bludgeoned by warnings that terrorists may strike in a matter of days. Incited by the Department of Homeland Security, millions have bought duct tape and plastic sheeting to protect their homes from biological and chemical attack, and have amassed caches of canned food and bottled water. To ensure that everyone everywhere stays afraid, 10,000 FBI agents have been sent to small towns to talk to local police chiefs about what they can do to fight terrorism. After the massacre at Beslan, school principals received letters from the Department of Education instructing them to beware of strangers.The Vice President intones that if Kerry is elected, terrorists will be exploding nuclear bombs in the cities. (And, to anticipate all possibilities, also warns that terrorists may set off bombs before the election to influence the vote. . . but we’re not going to let them tell Americans who to vote for, are we?)

Fear has infected even the most common transactions of daily life. It is not only visitors to the US who are treated as criminals, with fingerprints and photographs and retinal scans. Anyone entering any anonymous office building must now go through security clearances worthy of an audience with Donald Rumsfeld. At the airports, fear of flying has been replaced by fear of checking-in. Nearly every day there are stories of people arrested or detained for innocuous activities, like snapping a photo of a friend in the subway or wearing an antiwar button while shopping in the mall. Worst of all, the whole country has acquiesced to the myth of terrorist omnipotence. Even those who laugh at the color-coded Alerts and other excesses of the anti-terror apparatus do not question the need for the apparatus itself. The Department of Homeland Security, after all, was a Democratic proposal first rejected by Bush.

Common sense has retreated to the monasteries of a few websites. It is considered delusional to suggest that international terrorism is nothing more than a criminal activity performed by a handful of people, that Al-Qaeda and similar groups are the Weather Underground, the Brigato Rosso, the Baader-Meinhof Gang, with more sophisticated techniques and more powerful weapons, operating in the age of hysterical 24-hour television news. They are not an army. They are not waging a war. They are tiny groups perpetrating isolated acts of violence.

There’s no question they are dangerous individuals, but- without demeaning the indelible trauma of 9/11 or the Madrid bombings- the danger they pose must be seen with some kind of dispassionate perspective. A terrorist attack is a rare and sudden disaster, the man-made equivalent of an earthquake or flood. More people die in the U.S. every year from choking on food than died in the Twin Towers. About 35,000 die annually from gunshot wounds. (While Bush lifts the ban on assault weapons, and both Bush and Kerry promote gun ownership, a captured al-Qaeda manual recommends traveling to the U.S. to buy weapons.) About 45,000 die in car crashes– while the Bush administration lowers automobile safety standards to increase the profits of the auto industry, major donors to his campaign. Millions, of course, die from diseases, and one can only imagine if the billions spent on useless elephantine bureaucracies like the Department of Homeland Security had gone to hospitals and research. If the goal were genuinely to protect lives, fighting terrorism would be a serious matter for police and intelligence agencies, and a small project of a nation’s well-being.

Compare, for a moment, Spain. After the Madrid bombings, the police, in a few days, arrested those responsible. (After 9/11, the U.S. rounded up more than 5,000 people- many of whom still in jail and not a single one of whom has been proven to have any connection to any form of terrorist activity.) They did not carpet-bomb Morocco. They are quietly increasing police surveillance without Terror Alert national panics and with little or no interruption of daily life. And, geographically, demographically, and historically (the fundamentalist dream of recuperating al-Andalus), there is a much greater possibility of another terrorist attack in Spain than in the U.S.

But of course the current “war on terrorism” is not about saving lives at all; it’s about keeping power in the hands of a tiny cell of ideologues. In the manner of all totalitarian societies, the Bush junta, with a happily compliant mass media, has wildly exaggerated the power of the Enemy. This has allowed them to wage a war in Iraq they began planning long before 9/11 and to plot further invasions, to suspend Constitutional rights and disdain international law, to enrich their friends and ignore the opinions of most of the world. Many Americans who dislike Bush will still vote for him in November because the marketing campaign has made him appear the resolute “wartime” Commander-in-Chief who will keep the nation “safe.” It has become futile to try to argue that this war on terror doesn’t exist,

that the actual war in Iraq has nothing to do with the safety of Americans at home, and that abroad it has killed or maimed more Americans than 9/11. It remains to be seen what price the country, and the world, will pay for this fantasy.

An unnamed “senior adviser” to Bush recently told the journalist Ron Suskind that people like Suskind were members of “what we call the reality-based community”: those who “believe that solutions emerge from [the] judicious study of discernible reality.” However, he explained, “That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality… we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors, and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

This may well be the clearest expression yet of the Bush Doctrine. To become enraged by particulars– the daily slaughter in Iraq, the prison torture, the worst economy since the Great Depression, the banana republic tricks and slanders of the electoral campaign– is to miss the point. We are no longer in “discernible reality.” In the second term, the only choice will be to line up for your medication and enjoy the New Freedom. As Bush now says in every speech, “freedom is

on the march.”

[23 October 2004]

—————————————————————————-

Copyright c. 2004 Eliot Weinberger. This may circulate freely on the

internet; for print publication please write: unreal@att.net.

Eliot Weinberger’s chronicles of the Bush Era are collected in “9/12,”

published by Prickly Paradigm/Univ. of Chicago Press.

Just finished Angelus Bell by Edward Foster and it reminded me in some ways of Daniel Zimmerman’s Post-Avant with its formal density.

I was really drawn into Angelus Bell by the reflexive gestures and overarching themes and links from poem to poem (aloneness, sound, eyes, and dry landscapes). It makes me realize how new formalism (Dana Gioia etc.) miss the boat. Perhaps innovative/avant poetry has always included formal elements (I mean inherited forms: meter, rhyme etc.) So a return to “form” is not really a return to anything but conservative politics. it seems mighty coincidental New Formalism popped up in the 80’s Regan years, and the academy promoted traditional notions of formalism in the 1950’s.

hm . . .

Anyway, the turn towards (rather than return to) inherited form is interesting. Foster’s book was also humerous. The humor undercuts the formal diction.

It is interesting to note the use of formal diction and inhertited form in some recent books (Moxley, Foster, Zimmerman). The “Poetic” “artificial” diction as opposed to the “natural” “confessional” “quotidian.”

Also just started Anselm Berrigan’s Zero Star Hotel. Love the opening play in the book.

Just watched a new release DVD called How to Draw a Bunny. It’s a documentary on the pop artist Ray Jonhson.

Really fascinating and eerie. for some reason I can’t get the visual of two Ray Johnson performance piecesout of my head:

1) running around a room in various ways with a chalkboard on wheels

2) conducting a reading which consisted of beating a box with his belt

A lot of the commentators talked about how everything Ray did/touched etc. was a work of art. His highly organized death was also a “work of art.”

This movie really got me excited about the possibilites of art. Also read Alice Notley’s Margaret & Dusty and currently reading Edward Foster’s The Angelus Bell.

I really really loved Alice Notley’s Margaret & Dusty. A total experience reading the book from beginning to end in one session. Really liked “As you Like It.”

Also finsihed Jarnot’s Some Other Kind of Mission. I actually liked it better than Ring of Fire. Haven’t read Black Dog Songs yet.

Alice Notley and Ray Johnson get me fired up about the everlasting possibilites of the “NY School.” I was worried that too many of us younger poets were creating a period style out of the “NY school” in tone (glib, funny, etc.) But I think Frank O’Hara, Alice Notley, Kenward Elmslie, Ted berrigan, Lisa Jarnot (and so on) show variety and vitality in their of the cuff charged wit. Maybe now I can go back to loving what I really love. That rush of words. That street vernacular. That ice old pepsi.

From Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913):

Wit \Wit\, v. t. & i. [inf. (To) Wit; pres. sing. Wot; pl.

Wite; imp. Wist(e); p. p. Wist; p. pr. & vb. n.

Wit(t)ing. See the Note below.] [OE. witen, pres. ich wot,

wat, I know (wot), imp. wiste, AS. witan, pres. w[=a]t, imp.

wiste, wisse; akin to OFries. wita, OS. witan, D. weten, G.

wissen, OHG. wizzan, Icel. vita, Sw. veta, Dan. vide, Goth.

witan to observe, wait I know, Russ. vidiete to see, L.

videre, Gr. ?, Skr. vid to know, learn; cf. Skr. vid to find.

????. Cf. History, Idea, Idol, -oid, Twit, Veda,

Vision, Wise, a. & n., Wot.]

To know; to learn. “I wot and wist alway.” –Chaucer.

I fell in love with Frank O’Hara a while back. Combine O’Hara with Silliman and Stein and Bunting and Joyce what do you get?

I love the lineage recipes. Always off. But also somewhat on.

How to Draw A Bunny

Another great reading on Saturday. Ken Rumble really brings the heat to town. Tony Tost read some great prose poems. Dense in the sense of including various lives (reading life, dreaming life, love life etc.). Maximalist. funny. Profound. I especially loved the Complex Sleep series (in the tradition of Duncan’s Strucure of Rime series). Tony also read a very moving poem about Kim Sun-il. I say about, but that’s not all the way accurate. it was informed by the last days of Kim Sun-il (emotionally). Tony has a real mix in the new ms. really taking some leaps and risks.

Aaron McCollough had a presence. Assured. Funny. Comfortable at the mike. Slow, well executed. He read from Double Venus, his upcoming book Little Ease, and some new poems. He read “Democrack Pistols” and asked us what the word play? No one got it. But when he explained a large ah ha resounded in the audience .

Democrack Pistols= demoncratic vistas

The new poems included a Vernacular poem series. Love poems dedicated to his wife I believe.

This man can conceit!

After the DC reading at the Internationalist book store, we moved to Todd and Laura’s house for the Blue Door Series. Randall Williams performed and read. Great props. The first poem, “Star City” (if I remember the title correctly) rocked the house. Tiffany’s fav poem of the night. Second was performance piece complete with different functions/descriptions/sizes/ categories of water, a body scanner, an upside down chair.

It was great to hang out and chat with Clayton Couch (he traveled four hours from Columbia, SC for the event).

Needless to say, a serious feast all around!

Ken Rumble knows how to bring those who feed the multitides!

Aaron, Tony, Randall got my engine really running (thank god I was chugging for quite a while there)

I only managed a few pics from the night (I was too enraptured and forgot about my camera). They are below this post.

three cheers for Ken’s DC reading series and Todd and Laura’s blue door series!

Feeling the Draft

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: October 19, 2004

Columnist Page: Paul Krugman

Forum: Discuss This Column

E-mail: krugman@nytimes.com

TIMES NEWS TRACKER

Topics

Alerts

United States Armament and Defense

Military Personnel

Those who are worrying about a revived draft are in the same position as those who worried about a return to budget deficits four years ago, when President Bush began pushing through his program of tax cuts. Back then he insisted that he wouldn’t drive the budget into deficit – but those who looked at the facts strongly suspected otherwise. Now he insists that he won’t revive the draft. But the facts suggest that he will.

There were two reasons some of us never believed Mr. Bush’s budget promises. First, his claims that his tax cuts were affordable rested on patently unrealistic budget projections. Second, his broader policy goals, including the partial privatization of Social Security – which is clearly on his agenda for a second term – would involve large costs that were not included even in those unrealistic projections. This led to the justified suspicion that his election-year promises notwithstanding, Mr. Bush would preside over a return to budget deficits.

It’s exactly the same when it comes to the draft. Mr. Bush’s claim that we don’t need any expansion in our military is patently unrealistic; it ignores the severe stress our Army is already under. And the experience in Iraq shows that pursuing his broader foreign policy doctrine – the “Bush doctrine” of pre-emptive war – would require much larger military forces than we now have.

This leads to the justified suspicion that after the election, Mr. Bush will seek a large expansion in our military, quite possibly through a return of the draft.

Mr. Bush’s assurances that this won’t happen are based on a denial of reality. Last week, the Republican National Committee sent an angry, threatening letter to Rock the Vote, an organization that has been using the draft issue to mobilize young voters. “This urban myth regarding a draft has been thoroughly debunked,” the letter declared, and quoted Mr. Bush: “We don’t need the draft. Look, the all-volunteer Army is working.”

In fact, the all-volunteer Army is under severe stress. A study commissioned by Donald Rumsfeld arrived at the same conclusion as every independent study: the U.S. has “inadequate total numbers” of troops to sustain operations at the current pace. In Iraq, the lack of sufficient soldiers to protect supply convoys, let alone pacify the country, is the root cause of incidents like the case of the reservists who refused to go on what they described as a “suicide mission.”

Commanders in Iraq have asked for more troops (ignore the administration’s denials) – but there are no more troops to send. The manpower shortage is so severe that training units like the famous Black Horse Regiment, which specializes in teaching other units the ways of battle, are being sent into combat. As the military expert Phillip Carter says, “This is like eating your seed corn.”

Anyway, do we even have an all-volunteer Army at this point? Thousands of reservists and National Guard members are no longer serving voluntarily: they have been kept in the military past their agreed terms of enlistment by “stop loss” orders.

The administration’s strategy of denial in the face of these realities was illustrated by a revealing moment during the second presidential debate. After Senator John Kerry described the stop-loss policy as a “backdoor draft,” Charles Gibson, the moderator, tried to get a follow-up response from President Bush: “And with reservists being held on duty –”

At that point Mr. Bush cut Mr. Gibson off and changed the subject from the plight of the reservists to the honor of our Polish allies, ending what he obviously viewed as a dangerous line of questioning.

And during the third debate, Mr. Bush tried to minimize the issue, saying that the reservists being sent to Iraq “didn’t view their service as a backdoor draft. They viewed their service as an opportunity to serve their country.” In that case, why are they being forced, rather than asked, to continue that service?

The reality is that the Iraq war, which was intended to demonstrate the feasibility of the Bush doctrine, has pushed the U.S. military beyond its limits. Yet there is no sign that Mr. Bush has been chastened. By all accounts, in a second term the architects of that doctrine, like Paul Wolfowitz, would be promoted, not replaced. The only way this makes sense is if Mr. Bush is prepared to seek a much larger Army – and that means reviving the draft.

I am not sure why there is sometimes so much build up before writing. It’s usually when I am revising/restructuring. The intial writing phases are no pressure/no problem. But getting the structure! There’s some anxiety.

And the perrenial questions. Mostly: why do/make this thing called poetry? Is this making doing anyone or anything any “good?” How is writing “good” poetry better than writing “bad” poetry? What effect (if any) does bad poetry have on the world?

Sometimes I feel loaded down with too much intellect. I believe in the intellect. I love the intellect. But sometimes philosophy is a rock in my stomach.

I feel best when the rush happens (as romantic as that is). When the giant swells of sounds invade and bits of philosophy emerge.

I need ferocious. I need ferocious humbling. Violence. Rough strife. Not neglect of the intellect, but a good whipping.

Madness to expel the ego. Not madness as ego as personality as genuis.

I need the lion over the camel.

My lion keeps going into hiding.

Courage.

check it out:

Ezra Pound

I am amazed, blown away. Peter O’Leary’s _Watchfulness_ has changed my landscape. Really fired me up to keep moving with my book length poem Campanology.

king Midas Gold, man of light (gnostic light), transfigured light

A few of many lines:

“is it always a few who reach the edge of the world, where its mirror- / image begins”

“so XPC is the name of the Lord; of man; of man of light invoked.”

“The poet stands in umbrage of invisible fire”

“My solitude and its simulacrum”

“Light is ore/ abhored/ hoar.”

‘Was Kiev the kernel/ of the seed of New Byzantium?”

“Virga aurea facta est.”

A few of many exciting new words:

ephphatha, ‘ethpatah, affeta, effata, adapirire, XPC, emplenishes, girandoles, Areopagite, tychonic, primum mobile, Tinntinnabular, Aikaterina

people:

Louis Sullivan

Favourite section:

Midas

I got lost in the bookstore yesterday reading through books on Eastern Orthodox Christianity.

Also reading through the Rig Veda, Heather Fuller’s _Dovecote_, and The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book.

I am really impressed with Spuyten Duyvil press.

Grab a copy of Watchfulness:

watchfulness

Been reading a lot of Nathaniel Mackey and Leslie Scalapino lately. In _How Phenomena Appear to Unfold_ Scalapino writes,

“The writing is a mode, not a system.”

So mode versus system.

When I think system, I think systematic reasoning (and the postmodern critique of such).

When I think mode, I think frame.

But I am wondering about form as a system versus form as a mode.

As in: lyric mode versus lyric system.

How does a lyric system differ from a lyric mode?

Mode as in movement; system as in static?

System as hypotactic; mode as paratactic?

Mode \Mode\, n. [L. modus a measure, due or proper measure,

bound, manner, form; akin to E. mete: cf. F. mode. See

Mete, and cf. Commodious, Mood in grammar, Modus.]

1. Manner of doing or being; method; form; fashion; custom;

way; style; as, the mode of speaking; the mode of

dressing.

System \Sys”tem\, n. [L. systema, Gr. ?, fr. ? to place

together; sy`n with + ? to place: cf. F. syst[`e]me. See

Stand.]

1. An assemblage of objects arranged in regular

subordination, or after some distinct method, usually

logical or scientific; a complete whole of objects related

by some common law, principle, or end; a complete

exhibition of essential principles or facts, arranged in a

rational dependence or connection; a regular union of

principles or parts forming one entire thing; as, a system

of philosophy; a system of government; a system of

divinity; a system of botany or chemistry; a military

system; the solar system.

So a system is larger than a mode. A mode is a way; a system is a totalizing structure?

poetry as a mode of thinking; poetry as a canon/system?

I realize this is fast and loose.

I am also wondering about an event. As in: language event. Or: I drove to the store.

If all events are not linguistic, then how can we distinguish a linguistic from a non-linguistic event?

Body (olympic event) mind (exam at 8AM)

In the event of inclement weather, the theme park will close!

What is the mode of an event?

What is the system of an event?

After an amazing first festival, the city of Carrboro has decided NOT to allow another festival next year. Where did the funds go? Another national/international festival?

Patrick Heron received this reply:

Patrick:

I wanted to answer your recent question to Sean Sunkel, Special Events Supervisor about having another Poetry Festival sometime in May 2005.  Unfortunately funds were not approved in this year’s budget to accommodate a Poetry Festival. 

Anita Jones-McNair

Recreation and Parks Director

Town of Carrboro, NC

(919)918-7381

Visit us on the web at http://www.townofcarrboro.org/rp

Our mission

To enrich the leisure needs and quality of life for citizens by

providing accessible facilities, creative and diverse recreation opportunities and a safe public park system

Draft is a really interesting word. As in:

rough.

As in:

cold wind down the hallway.

I think Evie is right.

A draft might wake more people up.

I handed out this information to my students in class yesterday. Most of them were surprised. Especially the female students.

Not sure if Kerry is all for this or not.

POSSIBLE MANDATORY DRAFT for boys and girls (ages 18-26) starting June 15, 2005

There is pending legislation in the house and senate (companion bills: S89

and HR 163) which will time the program’s initiation so the draft can

begin as early as spring, 2005, just after the 2004 presidential election.

The Administration is quietly trying to get these bills passed now, while

the public’s attention is on the elections, so our action on this is

needed immediately.  Details and links follow.

This plan, among other things, eliminates higher education as a shelter

and includes women in the draft.  Also, crossing into Canada has already

been made very difficult.

This legislation is called HR 163 and can be found in detail at this website

http://thomas.loc.gov/t

Just enter in “HR 163” and click search and will bring up the bill for

you

to read.  It is less than two pages long.

If this bill passes, it will include all men and ALL WOMEN from ages 18 –

26 in a draft for military action.  In addition, college will no longer

be an Option for avoiding the draft and they will be signing an agreement

with the Canada which will no longer permit anyone attempting to dodge the

draft to stay within it’s borders.

This bill also includes the extension of military service for all those

That are currently active.

If you go to the select service web site and read their 2004 FYI Goals you

will see that the reasoning for this is to increase the size of the

military in case of terrorism.  This is a critical piece of legislation,

this will effect our undergraduates, our children and our grandchildren.

Please take the time to write your congressman and let them know how you

Feel about this legislation.

http://www.house.gov    http://www.senate.gov

Please also write to your representatives and ask them why they aren’t

telling their constituents about these bills and write to newspapers and

other media outlets to ask them why they’re not covering this important

story.

The draft $28 million has been added to the 2004 selective service system

Budget to prepare for a military draft that could start as early as June

15, 2005. Selective service must report to Bush on March 31, 2005 that the

system, which has lain dormant for decades, is ready for activation.

Please see http://www.sss.gov/perfplan_fy2004.html to view the Selective Service

System annual performance plan, fiscal year 2004.

The Pentagon has quietly begun a public campaign to fill all 10,350 draft

Board positions and 11,070 appeals board slots nationwide.  Though this is

an unpopular election year topic, military experts and influential members

of congress are suggesting that if Rumsfeld’s prediction of a “long, hard

slog” in Iraq and Afghanistan (and permanent state of war on terrorism)

proves accurate, the U.S. may have no choice but to draft.

http://www.hslda.org/legislation/national/2003/s89/default.asp entitled the

Universal National service Act of 2003, “to provide for the common defense

by requiring that all young persons (age 18-26) in the United States,

including women, perform a period of military service or a period of

civilian service in furtherance of the national defense and homeland

security, and for other purposes.” These active bills currently sit in the

committee on armed services.

Dodging the draft will be more difficult than those from the Vietnam era.

College and Canada will not be options.  In December, 200 1, Canada and

the U.S.

signed a “smart border declaration,” which could be used to keep

would-be

draft

dodgers in.

Signed by Canada’s minister of foreign affairs, John Manley, and U.S.

Homeland Security director, Tom Ridge, the declaration involves a 30 point

plan which implements, among other things, a “pre-clearance agreement”

of

people entering and departing each country.

Reforms aimed at making the draft more equitable along gender and class

Lines also eliminates higher education as a shelter.  Underclassmen would

only

be able to postpone service until the end of their current semester.

Seniors would have until the end of the academic year.

What to do: Tell your friends, Contact your legislators and ask them to

Oppose these bills

Just type “congress” into the aol search engine and input your zip

code. A

list of your reps will pop up with a way to email them directly.  We can’t

just sit and pretend that by ignoring it, it will go away.  We must voice

our Concerns and create the world we want to live in for our children and

grandchildren.

I am wondering whether or not to buy the new Interpol?

Am also wondering about jobs for next year. Contract runs out.

Jobs jobs jobs. Agh.

Gotta watch some Godard. Also gotta figure out how to pronounce French words.

Took German in high school and college. Wish I knew four or five languages fluently. I wish I knew Latin inside and out. I wish I knew Adorno. I wish I knew Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche better than I do.

I wish I wish. And there’s only so much time. Emotion and intellect not seperated but our culture thinks so. Anti-intellectualism is strong. Emotional intelligence is not considered.

Sometimes I feel anti-intellectual. Systems building upon systems. Complexity upon complexity and for what?

Other times I am excited to get lost in systems.

In high school, Rancho High School North Las Vegas, I would go to the library every Saturday and “read” for 6 or 7 hours. A stack of books on science, philosophy, math. I did not retain the meanings. I just liked the feel of the words in my mind/mouth.

I once had a friend named David who had a mechanical pencil. He was top of the class in the I.B. programme. The way he clicked that mechanical pencil made me want one. There is something about fetish and intelligence. Not sure what it is yet.

Bald intellects increase my desire to get rid of hair.

I feel like I imprison myself with words upon words until I just wanna bust out. Words like bricks and I am a little slidebar hitting the ball to break out. For every broken wall there’s another one behind it.

War is horrible. redirect that energy. Not a choice between holding hands, singing cum by yah and slaughter. In between those worlds there’s plenty of room for aggression. Denying aggression is not the answer.

Is anyone sick of sounding intelligent?

Is anyone else sick of not sounding intelligent?

I am going to teach a film class in the spring. It’s exciting putting together the syllabus. Going to use Monaco’s How to Read a Film and a selection of articles from Film Quarterly. Still thinking through film selections. It’s interesting to think about the words film, cinema, and movie.

Film: art

cinema: stage/world

movie: propaganda/consummed w/out critical thought

all three seem to need reflection/analysis. For some reason I really enjoyed watching Eyes Wide Shut. A lot of people I have spoken with think it is Kubrick’s worst film. An embarrasement.

I am really excited to watch some Brekhage when it arrives. I would like to use his films in class. May also use Juliet of the Spirits (Fellini), The Birds or Vertigo, Blade Runner.

I took a film theory class in graduate school, so hopefully some of the discourse will return to me.

It’s a rainy day in North Carolina. Another storm coming through. The darkness outside usually means sluggish students in my morning classes. I am feeling a tad sluggish myself.

Well, off I go. Rainy walk to school. I wish I still had my wellingtons. I miss my wellingtons.

Get Yourself a Pair

In constructing my disruptive narrative of influences, I’ve come full circle. I really came to poetry after leaving the comfortable world of a fundamentlist religion. After the leaving, I studied a lot of world mythology, philosophy of religion, and eastern mysticism. I also got really excited about Joyce and thought I would go to graduate school and specialize in British and Irish Modernism. A professor named Michael Wutz, who knows shitload about Modernism and has passion up the kazulah, became a second father and mentor to me.

I entered graduate school and gravitated toward poets from the L=A=G=U=A=G=E movement. But, other than the basic understanding of the gap between a signifier and signified, I came to these poets with little theoretical background. I felt pulled toward them emotionally before I began to investigate their poetics. I saw the various strategies they employed as somehow spiritually based (which I found out later was not the intention of the more Marxist leaning poets). I read them for the experience of language. I then tried to imitate their various strategies and my MA dissertation was a performance with some muscians playing various world instruments.

By the end of the MA I was bogged down with theory. I felt like that Swift horse of reason. My poems were very abstract, cloaked, and I had very little awareness of why I was using disruptive strategies. So I went on to a traditional MFA programme and learned how to write the clear, conversational lyric. I sold all of my theory books. I felt like I was finally re-finding me emotions which I distrusted due to the manipulations of Mormonism. As a missionary we would show a sad movie, make people cry, and tell them it was the Holy Ghost telling them to get baptized. Needless to say, after the doubt hit full throttle, I distrusted almost all of my emotions and tried to become as much of a Spock as possible.

I went home to Ireland for the first time in 12 years after leaving the Mormon church and began to hear voices. Things began to take off. (I know the old voices joke. I am fully aware of where the voices come from. No ghosts around me. At least, not in a literal sense).

Now, I am refinding my original impulse. No so much back to theory (although bits and pieces are informing my poetics), but writing as a visionary practice. I want the experience of language above all else. I want a mass of language experiences (Olson, Joyce).

Not only do I find myself standing inside a circle, but I think I’ve written this narrative about myself about 200 times. Each time with a slight variation. I am sure there’s a post very similar to this one in the archives.

So I am re-ignited. The old accents are talking to me. My memories, my life (thank god for Lyn Hejinian) is not off-limits in my poetry. But I don’t have to write a nice clear narrative poem in order to use my life. What the hell does it mean to say: MY LIFE?

So, I traded in some textbooks. Got store credit. ordered some books and moves.Tonight I picked up:

1) Watchfulness by Peter O’Leary

2) Pastorelles by John Taggart

3) The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book

On the way in the mail:

1) By Brekhage (criterion collection)

2) The collected Basil Bunting

3) Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake

4) Whatsaid Serif and School of Udhra by Nathaniel Mackey

I’ve got to finalize the books for my intro to poetry and second semester composition classes. The composition class is theme-based and I am doing it on art films (hence the Brekhage). I think I’ll also do a little third wave, a little Fellinni.

The intro to poetry class is a little more difficult. I’ve already put in orders for:

1) Tony Tost’s Invisible Bride

2) Harryette Mullen’s Sleeping with the Dictionary

3) Nathaniel Mackey’s Whatsaid Serif

4) Lisa Jarnot’s Ring of Fire.

There are some more individual collections I would like to do (like Jon Thompson’s The Book of the Floating World and Joseph Donahue’s Incidental Eclipse), but I also want to include a little anthology to establish a base. I want to keep the price of the textbooks reasonable for the students. So I may have to just stop at four individual collections. I am trying to decide between two anthologies:

1) Poems for the Millenium Volume One

2) Technicians of the Sacred (an anthology of world poetry edited by Jerome Rothenberg as well)

I am excited to watch Brekhage when he arrives. I only know Brekhage through some poets/artists whose opinions of art I highly admire (Tost, Vatiello, Donahue are a few).

finished Burger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde last night. I’ve been pondering the non-organic versus organic (language as artifact). Burger says,

“The organic work intends the impression of wholeness. To the extent its individual elements have significance only as they relate to the whole . . . in the avant-gardiste work, on the other hand, the individual elements have a much higher degree of autonomy and can therefore also be read and interpreted individually or in groups without its being necessary to grasp the work as a whole.”

and

“The organic work of art seeks to make unrecognizable the fact that it has been made. The opposite holds true for the avant-gardiste work; it proclaims itself an artifacial construct, an artifact. To this extent, montage may be considered the fundamental principle of avant-gardiste art.”

I can see these practices of the historical avant-garde being played out in contemporary poetry. LIke any attempt to define, there’s always holes. But I wonder if Frank O Hara would be considered as part of the move toward artifice in the historical avant-garde? I did this I did that seems to cover up the artifice. Although, a lot of his poems highlight their artifice a lot more. Ah ha. But the more organic work gets anthologized.

Maybe, that’s part of the frustration of teaching anthologies. quick nibbles. An emphasis on the organic. A move away from language as constructed, as an artifact.

A lot of my students, despite a lot of information on process, continue to feel the need to create a story of self-expression for every poem. It’s very very difficult for them to move beyond the idea of art as natural self-expression. They liked “The Day Lady Died” because they could see it as an expression of Frank O’Hara’s feelings.

I think an attempt to connect poetry to the concerns of other art forms might be helpful next semester. Maybe Poems for the Millennium is a good idea for context, ground. Then I can have them read various contemporary collections of poetry.

More coffee . . . waking up at 5:30 am makes all this typing feel dream-like. I’ll have to look at this again later to see if it makes any sense.

I just ordered the complete Basil Bunting. I’ve only read/heard a little of Briggflatts. I am excited to sit down with him.

Also ordered Watchfulness by Peter O’Leary and John Taggart’s Pastorelles.

It’s nice to get this perk with teaching. Books from large publishers (norton, penguin etc.) which I can trade for store credit.

I am hoping to turn in two more Penguins and get enough store credit to get the criterion Stan Brakhage.

Just got The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book in the mail yesterday.

I am almost finished with Peter Burger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde. Two points have stuck in my mind:

“the neo-avant-garde institutionalizes the avant-garde as art and thus negates genuinely avant garde intentions.”

“It is the status of their products, not the consciousness artists have of their activities, that defines the social effect of works.”

A while back I pondered the idea of the avant garde relying on a knowledge of traditional/canonical literature (you have to be familiar with what the avant garde is reacting to in order to understand their various projects). Burger argues the avant garde is now a tradition largely autonomous from mainstream art. In other words, an alternate canon? An alternative tradition?

Science as an institution cannot really be as fundamentalist as religion as an institution because it allows for self-critique, scientific method etc. (this is very debatable of course)

Avant garde institutions allow for more cannibalism than more mainstream practices.

The cross-overs may often be surface level cross-overs (i.e. a personal “style”)?

These are all questions. Not thesis statements.

The a Desert City Readng Series kicked off again this past Saturday. James Brasfield and Joe Donahue read. Joe read some hot new poems. Lots and lots of voices. My spine always reacts to Joe’s poems. Mystery, awe etc. Everything moves (mind as body etc.) Real energy transference. His new chapbook, In This Paradise, from Carolina Wren Press was available at the reading. I am really looking forward to reading it.

James Brasfield also read. He introduced his poems wel. Really set the mood. Very friendly. Made me want to take a look at Joseph Broksky.

Starting this season, after each DC reading, Lucipo members Todd and Laura are hosting The Blue Door after reading reception. As part of the reception a poet reads for 15 min and another art is also presented. I think there will be outside screenings of Super 8 films etc. This past Saturday I read from a long poem in progress (“Campanology”) and local visual artist Ethan Smith displayed his paintings. A little Munsch. A little aliens. A little torture/ S&M.

We also celebrated Joe Donahue’s 50th B-day. Sang. Ate cake. Drank Champagne. Every time I get together with the Lucipo folks, it’s flushing. And boy do I need flushing. I also get full (but not clogged) at these events. I re-remember why poetry matters (in the doing, in the making) to me.

Also on Saturday, Backwards City mag had a book sale to raise money for publication costs etc. A good selection. Picked up Infinite Jest, Moby Dick, an Einstein book.

At the Desert City reading I picked uo Joseph Donahue’s In This Paradise and Heather Fuller’s Dovecote.

Now, I’ve got to decide how to teach Barbie/gender today in my English 101 class.

More coffee . . .

Strange connections. The conversation over at Tony’s blog really picked up with the issue of responsibility. Over at Smartish Place (http://www.smartishpace.com/home/poetsqa/graham_answers.html) I asked Jorie Graham a question about influence and responsibility (after reading Tost’s piece in Typo about the mongrols).

Here’s the question and the answer:

marcus slease, N. Ireland: How do you feel about younger poets who mix “avant Guarde” and “Mainstream” techniques? (The mongrols as some call them). Do you feel this is irresponsible? Should younger poets show more awareness of context, history etc.?

Jorie Graham: In the long view, these techniques are the various voices of one body, of a people, in a language, in a moment of history. They have come out of political or theoretical thinking, yes, but they have been transmuted through persons, temperaments, talents, experiences. In the end it is the voice you hear–the style is the personhood–even if it wants to eschew personhood. That is what moves, persuades. That is, too, what makes a young poet want to be influenced by this poet rather than that. Even to take stylistic devices from this poet rather than that. You don’t find a poet reading a theoretical text that provides the underpinning for a poetry and saying, aha, yes, I want to write to fit that theory. But you do find poets hearing or reading a body of work and thinking, damn I’d like to try that–it sounds so good, it can DO so much, I love the ground it opens in my sense of what’s possible in a poem. Of course all poets need as much awareness of context as possible–but lord knows not just poetic or philosophical or theoretical context. As for whether it’s responsible? Influence is influence–it’s a contagion–it’s a form of love–stop it and you stop the flow of future poetry. A hundred years from now these differences will be footnotes, it will all look much more alike then it now seems. Or so I think.

So the footnotes of history. response ability. canons. influence. my head is buzzing like a mad man.

If you haven’t checked it out already, click on over to Tony Tost’s blog. A very interesting, provocative conversation happening. Process and product, canons, cult of the author, art that aspires for the eternal . . .

So far, 26 comments. Movin on up to Silliman scale responses.

I am still thinking through a lot of issues raised in the comments. I am really dwelling on the concept of quality and canonization.

Is quality a condition of context? Are some contexts more “eternal” than others? (for example Hamlet)

1) Purpose

2) production

3) Reception

In which of those three is quality most likely to be located?

It seems to me the assertion that certain literary texts change the English language forever needs further inquiry.

Hip hop changed/changes the English language, right? But hip hop is a fad whereas Hamlet is eternal?

I am also not sure I understand why an artifact that lasts for all time requires quality? It seems very few artifacts that last beyond their initial reception are quality cream (a lot of sour rancid cream disguised as fresh cream).

Sure, I want order. I want to narrow down the overwhelming amount of poetry. I want a community. We need some common texts in order to have a conversation. But this is all real time. Now. Canon indicates a reaching for eternity (the word, the good book). What’s the matter with living and writing now. Dying later.

Sure look up works as historical artifacts. hang em on the musuem. Maybe even consider how they impacted a given culture. But to say there’s something there that requires canonizing?

These reactions of mine are shaky. I am not set on these positions of canonization. Maybe secretly, deep down, I do want canonization. I am not free of ego!

Canonization \Can`on*i*za”tion\, n. [F. canonisation.]

1. (R. C. Ch.) The final process or decree (following

beatifacation) by which the name of a deceased person is

placed in the catalogue (canon) of saints and commended to

perpetual veneration and invocation.

Canonization of saints was not known to the

Christian church titl toward the middle of the tenth

century. –Hoock.

2. The state of being canonized or sainted.

Anyway, check out the conversation:

<a href="http://unquietgrave.blogspot.com/2004/09/from-ron-sillimans-wild-form-wcw.html#comments&quot;

>Get Down on IT

The memory of last Saturday feels foggy, eerie. Did it really happen?

Lots of glazed donuts (one dollar each). The Krispy Creme poetry tent was a wierd revival type setting.

Galway Kinnell read next tent to Maya Angelou (the official poet of Krispy Creme)? I was most excited to see his new G4 titanium powerbook. He wasn’t sure how to use it. He had some assistance from a beautiful woman with long blond hair and a muscle man who runs some writing programme in Prague (they were both poets from the audience). The muscleman scrolled and the beautiful woman held the titanium G4 Powerbook.

Check out the pics taken by my friend Ezra (the very Ezra of Backwards City):

GALWAY HAS A MAC

Richard jackson also read. He’s created/creating a bridge between Slovenian and American poetry.

all sorts of stuff is leaking into my long poem. Such as Mormon doctrine and early mysticism (the mysticism was quickly abandoned for corporation/institutional reasons). But Joseph Smith’s spectacles amaze me.

I am still working on this part of the long poem. It’s just “factual info.” The lines will be off with blogger, but here it is:

Mormonism has one of the highest conversion rates of any religion in the world

at age of 14 Joseph Smith was confused and wanted truth about the best chruch he prayed in the woods (insert eerie music) he prayed and he prayed gripped the grass

saw God and Jesus or an angel then god or god then an angel (accounts are muddied) (this is a confusing fact) told him he would restore the best one and was soon thereafter lead to gold plates (no one could see it cause they might steal it!)

soon thereafter peering through magic glasses into his hat Joseph Smith was given some aids (Urim and Thummim which looked like clear rocks) a common occurrence of the time was a person that had a “seer” or “peepstone”, and would come up with information by placing it in a hat and looking at it (much as crystal ball is used today)

A little while back a few Lucipo folks (Tony and Ken perhaps?) mentioned how quite a few younger poets are attempting long poems.

I’ve been dipping and out of Olson’s The Maximus Poems and the sheer maximalist quality (energy transference) makes me dizzy. I am working on a long poem called Campanology ( which is The art of ringing bells, or a treatise on the art). I am trying to move in and out of bells (bells as a form of structure/time, bells as a form of clarity, bells in religious ceremony) and meld it with bits of spiritual autobiography.

I having a real problem bringing it all together. It feels like it’s just spiraling out of control. Every time I go into it and try to add a bit more clarity, a bit more intention, my hand is too heavy and it clunks (sinks). But as it is now it’s a little too far at sea.

It doesn’t seem to have two legs to stand on. A falcon without a falconess.

I suppose the tug may work itself out or I may have to abandon the project for now and work on something else.

I do want to try some prose poems.

A few times semi long poems (6 pages or so) worked when I wrote seperate poems then combined them and connected them into one poem.

Perhaps I could try that approach for this long bell poem.

Anyone else have snags along the way to writing the long poem?

We started discussing poetry section in my intro to literature class. I am using individual collections for all the genres, but for poetry I am using an anthology (Allen’s New American Poetry) and we will read Lisa jarnot’s Ring of Fire in a few weeks.

Class participation was really quite good today. The students responded well to Duncan’s “An Owl is Only a Bird of Poetry” and “My Mother would be a Falconress.” I just read an essay by Peter O’Leary called “American Poetry and Gnosticism” (it’s in the book _The World in Time and Space_ edited by Joseph Donahue and Edward Foster). It was great timing. We ended up talking about poetry and gnosticism a little. We talked a lot about the mystical tradition(s) and poetry. They seemed to get the idea of gaps via comparing poetry and newspaper writing and the non-rational versus the irrational. Most of the students got the hang of close reading and finding patterns in the text (recurring images, lines, sounds, ideas). “An Owl is Only a Bird of Poetry” worked really after reading “My Mother would be a Falconress.” The students found links between the two poems (in particular, language as a grounding and a flight). At the end of class we hit on Poetry as pure sound and as experience. They are reading Jack kerouac and Jackson Mac Low for Thursday with an oral presentation by two students on American Zen Buddhism.

I have taught a number of into to lit and intro to poetry classes with the assumption that “postmodern’ “experimental” texts were for more advanced students. But the idea of difficulty and advanced needs serious examination. Most of the students over the years had a lot harder time discussing and connecting with more mainstream poetics.

However, I do realize some background, some context is very helpful in introducing these poets (some mainstream poets may not need any background/context to understand their uses of language).

I do wish the revised version of The New American Poetry retained its groupings (black mountain school, beat etc.) Despite the potential straightjacket of groupings, I think they offer a lot of insight into obsessions etc.

I made myself bald and I am a new babe! Bald feels good in this humidity.

The World in Time and Space

Just traded in a collected Milosz and a collected Wright (I like them both but don’t love ’em) for:

1) The geography of the imagination (essays by Guy Davenport)

2) Theater of the Avant-Garde (1890-1950. Has essays and plays arranged by movements. Expressionism, surrealism etc.)

Right now, I am finally reading _The Descent of Alette_. So far it’s really interesting. I’ve never read any Alice Notley before.

sometimes a little alcohol (or little a lot) helps moisten my mind. Had a good time at a part last night at one of the editors of the new journal Backwards City (see links to the right).

In particular, Gerry Canavanand I talked about death, existentialism, consciousness, time. It was a good talk. Helped clear out some mental space to move around in.

I’ve decided to 5 contemporary books of poetry in my intro to poetry class in the spring. I think I am going to create a blog for the class to allow for informal discussion and supplemental readings.

I’m still trying to decide on the 5 books. Four of the five possible books:

1) Jeff Clark, The Little Door Slides Back

2) Tony Tost, Invisible Bride

3) Lisa Jarnot, Ring of Fire

4) Peter Gizzi, Some Values of Landscape and Weather

I feel confident of choice # 2 and choice # 3. I do want some diversity of books. I think Tost and Jarnot’s books are distinct enough. But I am not sure about the others yet.

Any suggestions of three books of contemporary poetry I might use? By contemporary I simply mean in print and published in the last five years or so.

If any of yous have suggestions, I would love a nice list.

Finally got the ariel. My head is all squirm.

It feels good to rework some of the abstractions (i.e. my head banging against a padded cell) in the second MS.

I realized after the reading yesterday my antiabsorption killed off my absorption.

Now they are on speaking terms.

The transmissions return.

Good times last night at the open eye reading ( a series run by Mr. Tony Tost). A real mix. Chris Vitiello read from Nouns Swarm a Verb and Evie Shockley read a powerful poem (“A Thousand Words”) about torture. The repitition of torture and the mix of humor were powerful. Both were perfect timing for the Republican natonal convention. “We can/cannot win the war on terror.”

Some good whim as well. I did a fun little colaboration with Tim Botta and ken Rumble. We each read random lines constructed before the reading. Ken’s nouns were R-Z, mine were J-R, and Tim got A-J. We each read a line back and forth. A few times something happened. A few times the whim may have been too much whim. Patrick Herron read some nice offensive poems of Lester the puppet. Tony Tost read some an amazing long poem from his new manuscript. Maximalist spirtualist rigorous.

I am still digesting the word swarms (I will never digest the word swarms).

it’s interesting to read new poems (or bits of poems) in public and hear other types of poems. It makes me excited to rework some poems.

I did manage to have a dream. A recurring dream. I think this is the 10th time I’ve had this dream (or a variation thereof). I am taken to prison for some crime. I am not told what the crime is. They won’t let me talk. So I try to escape. Run run run all the while wondering the nature of my crime.

So many prison dreams. I am sure last night’s dream was sparked by Evie Shockley’s poem “A Thousand Words.”

Overall, I did not sleep more than a few hours last night. Constant voices in my head. Constant splitting of words. Rubbing words. Naughty words (Lester’s words).

The police in different accents.

tasty

I have some recent poems in the latest issue of Diagram. The second poem “Multitide and Miracle” is actually in my current MS

Diagram

Just got a poem accepted by Forklift, Ohio. It’s strange. My last three acceptances have been for poem I cut from my MS (Columbia Poetry Review, Conduit, and now Forklift, Ohio).

I’ve decided to reinsert the poems accepted by those journals. Perhaps I get too carried away with new projects and think the old projects are no longer valid.

Forklift, Ohio

I am teaching two sections of intro to poetry in the spring. I’ve taught with a lot of the Norton/Vendler/Gioia anthologies (etc.) in the past and I am very tired of them.

I was thinking of just using five books of contemporary poetry. It is a general education class. They don’t need to know the canon (if anyone does). It’s not really a survey class. There’s usually about 40 students per section and most are just trying to get their lit credit out of the way.

One problem I’ve had with using individual collections of stories or poems is getting the books on time. Since the books are almost always published by a small press, it seems to take over half of the semester for 80 copies of each book to show up at the bookstore.

An anthology is certainly a lot easier. There’s never a problem with ordering. The university bookstore seems to have a very fast pipeline to college textbook companies. Within days there’s hundreds of copies.

The Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry or a world poetry anthology might be worth a look.

I’ve got to find it interesting.

I can’t teach something I don’t feel

It just doesn’t

work (or I don’t work,

as in function,

in every sense of the word).

So there is American surrealism of the deep image and pastoral variety

(perhaps Matthew Rohrer is a good example of this tendency although he sometimes moves away from deep image and the pastoral to some kind cyber erotics.)

There is also the surrealism of Eastern Europe with its folklorish qualities (Simic etc.)

And French surrealism seems a little heavier on the intellect than say latin American surrealism.

So American imagism meets say Latin American surrealism and becomes deep image? (I realize this history is very simplistic and watered down)

What I am interested in exploring is the interaction of textual poetics and surrealism (or neosurrealism).

If I remember correctly I think Watten denounced surrealism (and perhaps other poets of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E school).

So when (or in who) did textual poetics meet surrealism? I haven’t read enough Yau to know if his poetics involve both, but from little I have read it seems possible.

John Ashberry has elements of both, but I guess I am wondering about new meetings, recent meetings, say meetings in the last ten years?

Also, cyborgs and surrealism and textual poetics. I know it’s happening.

If I thought, it it’s already happening. Somewhere. Since I haven’t read enough to have an original thought in my head.

I am deeply attracted to the political possibilities of surrealism (both its negative and positive poles) and its pleasure functions (not just Freud/Jung).

Context. Does a surrealist commercial have context? Say the baby growing in the womb which turns out to a full grown man and the commercial ends with a nice nugget (the closing lines, the key, the epiphany)

“Life comes at you fast.”

It’s funny, it’s wit, it stands out, sticks out. It’s memorable.

Images are becoming more and more of a storage device than text.

Spectacle.

I suppose I have a real emotional attachment to surrealism (it grabbed me first when I “came” to poetry)

Or did poetry come to me?

Anyway. One complaint I hear still today about surrealism (perhaps going back to the French symbolists) is private images. The same complaint is launched against L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetics (and all experimental poetics since most of these same people lump it all together) in terms of private language.

So when (or rather how) does an image become public?

And when does language move from private to public?

And while I am at, what the hell is private and public?

I am teaching Jesus’ Son in my intro to lit class and the students often want to know if such and such really happened. The narrator is not reliable, but he is very aware. Oftentimes lucid via drugs. Other times he thinks he is lucid and is just fucked up.

The surrealist moments of the stories reveal the psychology of the narrator and the “agonistic embrace” of reality and desire.

As a strategy, surrealism has been adopted full on by the capitalist machine. It is an excellent marketing strategy. It went mainstream in the sitcom world with Ally McBeal (perhaps before?)

Ally McBeal was hailed as a “breakthrough” form of narrative because it showed what a “female pyschology” and enacted it on the screen. I only watched a few episodes, but there was a wierd male lawyer who had a fascination with flushing and stuttered. Ally McBeal carried around a theme song in her head. She was empowered.

Surrealism as special effects is also an interesting adaptation. The dream sequence is now as common as _________.

quirky funniness and elements of surrealism are also hallmarks of a lot of NY School poetry (insert generation).

From Matthew Rohrer to James Tate to Russel Edson. I was initially attracted to surrealism (and I still am to some degree), but I am wondering if there is a difference between surrealism as marketing technique versus surrealism as poetry technique. Is surrealism in American poetry implicated in the surrealism of American advertising?

I see the “let’s be strange to be strange” connected to the “look at me I am a quirky genius.”

The other for the sake of the other might be a different thing, however.

The strange as exoticism (sometimes surrealism) or the strange as psychology ( as in that’d deep man).

If the surface is the meaning then how can a surreal image “plumb the depths” of consciousness?

Surrealism in Eastern european poetry is very common. Tomaz Salamun’s use of surrealism is different than ___________.

Then again, the real is surreal. The terms are interchangable. Just look at Chris Vatiello’s recent posts about American Desolation (Costco is made surreal, perceived surreal, is surreal, is real?)

Anyway, the surreal is hip, cool.

How can we take it back?

hm.

I am in awe. I just sat down and read Combo Winter/Spring 2004 from start to finish and I honestly loved every god damn poem (and interview and letter).

I have never enjoyed reading a literary journal so much. The feel of the magazine (simple, exact, crisp). The quality of the poetry, HOLY SHIT!

There’s nothing to highlight.

It’s all so excellent.

I must subscribe soon.

If you haven’t read Combo I highly highly recommend getting your hands on a copy.

some poems I wrote about two years ago are in the current issue of Spork.

Spork Mag

Inspired by the comments of Ken Rumble, I just re-read My Life and read Chris Vitiello’s Nouns Swarm A Verb. It was a very interesting experience to read those two books back to back.

I found Nouns Swarm A Verb much more “self-contained” than My Life. What I mean is the gestures (language) are often more intense IN themselves in _Nouns Swarm A Verb_. The “indefinite continuation of the poem” includes words that do intense “repetition, recombination, and permutation.”

I feel like I am bumping around in an freight train or an overhead bin. Bin=to be. Bin equals a storage. Bin equals . . . well anyway. Whereas, in My Life, I must be riding a ship.

Density in different ways. The word swarm and the word body.

Hejinian’s “I lapse, hypnotized by the flux and reflux of the waves”

and

Vitiello’s “Causality is discovered to be an analogy of allegory.”

Nouns Swarm a verb is a “real” war book. A mispro(noun)cement. The stories of dolls(dollars) and eyes. It is unrelenting. It is a much much more intense swarming than Jorie Graham’s attempt to Swarm. While reading Nouns Swarm a Verb, I felt communication vital and elusive. I realized the limitations of like. As in: “the words were like a draft of shadows.” I questioned the tricks of language only to realize I leave one trick for another. But perhaps multi-tricks enable seeing a little more really. I go back. I rethink.

Yes, I am a train in Nouns Swarm a Verb, but the train isn’t really self-contained. That’s just another trick of language.

Nouns Swarm A Verb avoids the disease of analysis but begs for it.

WhOOOO. Did I channel a blurb in that last sentence?

A blurb is sketchy because it contains catch phrases. How many catch phrases are above? Let’s see, there’s no (sit u ate) there’s no hm…

A blurb needs a dollar and I am not fishing for dollars so the above can’t be a blurb. Maybe blurbs and blogs are from the same kingdom.

I’ll have to google that.

Blurbs and blogs and burgs and burps.

Yes U2 currently sucks. In the past they might not have sucked.

I think there is a difference between sucks and sucked.

It’s sad when something that didn’t suck now sucks.

If something sucked and still sucks it is neither sad nor tragic.

Brittany Spears sucks and still sucks so to say Brittany Spears sucks is like saying English is a language.

is the future more important than the present? If something sucks now does it suck foreever?

The future is death; the present is life.

I don’t care if I suck when I am dead because I am dead.

I just don’t want to suck now.

So many strange dreams. An orgy last night. I was ordered to do certain things. I was also ordered to try the new and improved Mormon filter (for Camels only). The filter left a strong minty residue.

Then I had to run through the snow barefoot in Bountiful Utah in search of a secret house with a blue mini van (there are many houses with blue minivans this was not an easy task).

I did not find the secret house but I did find an old cramped missionary apartment (from my missionary days in Boise, Idaho). A few of girl characters showed up at the missionary pad and we smoked via the new and improved minty fresh Mormon filter.

Then I had to complete a series of sexual tasks I won’t go into (I am a little embarrased). I will say one involved the famous pour grape juice down the crack of your missionary companion (only this time it was a tall gymnist since I went to sleep after watching some olympics), catch in glass, and drink for a free large pizza (this event did happen).

So, orgy, “hero” journey, Mormon filters.

Now, I am off to teach with all this dream residue. Today I’m teaching how to read closely via some poems of Lisa Jarnot, Allen Ginsberg, Lew Welch, and Ted Berrigan. A interesting (and good) way to end the week.

a collective blog featuring some of the folks of Lucipo poetics is linked to the right.

I’ve been reading about Bean News in the Chicago Review. Sounded like an interesting project. A newspaper run mostly by poets. A group blog could certainly function in a similar fashion to Bean News. Hodge podge (I need to research that term).

Just printed out _Edge_ by Bruce Andrews and _Extremities_ by Rae Armantrout. Looking forward to reading them.

Returned a collected James Galvin to Barnes and Nobles and ordered _Clean and Well Lit_ by Tom Raworth and _word Group_ by Marjorie Welish. A nice trade.

I am still concerned about the conversion narrative (from school of quietude to avant garde). The problem is the narrative is too simplistic. But knowing where you’re coming from doesn’t have to be a bad thing does it? I am really enjoying the latest Chicago Review. The letters between Dorn and Jones (Baraka) are really fascinating. Shows how poets are in the times (not aiming for some religious eternal). The cuban missile crisis and Fidel and race.

I feel an affinity for the unaccomdating poetics of the historical avant garde. I also feel a little concerned about the watering down of the avant garde (I am not a purist though). I also feel excited by Mark Wallace’s idea of multiplicty of forms. A re-evaluation of the past etc.

Anyway. off to teach for the second day. it’s difficult to let go of summer.

Chicago Review has some interesting letters between Ed Dorn and Tom Raworth and Dorn and Olson in 1961.

So far they are really interesting.

Raworth is really funny. I did not realize he had such a complex family background. He says his mother was Irish “from a Dublin family of anti-British bomb throwers” and his father was from “a poor London family.” Raworth left school at sixteen. from what I can gather he is largely self-educated.

This latest issue also has some critical essays on Dorn. Jennifer Dunbar Dorn chronicles Dorn in the 80’s.

Lisa Jarnot reviews Tom Clark’s biography of Dorn.

Also some good poems by Chris Stroffolino, Peter Riley, Mark McMorris, and Christy Garren. An interview with Eleni Sikelianos.

Chicago Review is a good mag for solid contextuality and historical breadth.

Just got the latest issue of Chicago Review from my mailbox. It’s a special issue on Ed Dorn. I am really excited to read it. I love Chicago Review

Chicago Review

The reading took place at Todd and Laura Sandvik’s home. They are amazing hosts. Always great food, liquid, sound, art.

I borrowed Chao Manhattan from Todd. Looking forward to watching it later today.

Passed around a little notebook and asked some fellow Lucipo poets to create a quick list of artists to check out.

The list:

1) Henry Darger

2) Stan Brakhage (Criterion collection)

3)Bunuel (obscure object of desire and discrete charm of the bourgeosie)

4) Marjorie Welish (‘The Windows Flew Open”)

5) Emmanuel Hocquerd “Theory of Tables”

Chris Vitiello read a fascinating play that felt like a cross betwee Beckett, Watten, and a David Cronenberg. Lots of poeple with holes and slime. A little bit Happy days a little bit eXistenZ. It takes place in a parking lot. He also projected a poem about words, meanings, ghosts on an led screen and read a poem that interrogated, crossed, and sometimes followed the projection on the screen.

Serge Falcoz Vigne (a visitor from Paris) read some poems from his collection Rue Mademoiselle Germain and some new poems written while visiting the US this week. He is the proprieter of a Parisian cafe and writes a new poem every month (ongoing for the last 10 years) and places the poem with the customers bill. Wax sealed. He read everything in French with very little translation by his girlfriend Samantha. It was interesting to hear poetry in a language I did not speak or read. Sound translation whipped around my head.

Pics above of the fan night

Read an essay by Marjorie Perloff last night called “After language Poetry: Innovation and its Theoretical Discontents.” It’s a really interesting essay.

She begins by talking about the semantic history of innovation. Innovation as sedition and treason esp. in 14th and 15th century. She then gives a short but good background on the innovations and theories of language writings. She mentions how Bruce Andrews called referentiality the misguided “search for the pot at the end of the rainbow, the commodity or ideology that brings fulfillment.”

So the very crude version goes a little something like this:

modernists react against the romantics

plain spoken lyric workshop mode reacts against the impersonal modernists

language poetics reacts against plain spoken lyric workshop mode with theory based heavily in Marxism.

So the the signifed as a commodity I can see. But can’t the signifier also become a commodity? A fetish?

Newness and innovation are vital to capitalism. Associative logic is certainly employed very nicely to market products.

So the plain spoken Sundance movies and the David Lynch surrealism exist side by side. Does one negate the other?

Then again, I find myself wondering about variety. The presentation of variety in Fence magazine versus the presentation of variety in say, Hambone.

I like a lot of the poems in Fence. They pick some good stuff. But for some reason (maybe Steve Evans has gotten to me) I find the eclectic mix disconcerting. Why?

Does Fence and Fence books employ newness and innovation in a similar way to say Downy? Does Fence make newness a commodity in and of itself?

Is it merely eclectic?

Chicago review is a “well-respected university lit journal” with a history of publishing innovative writing. It feels a lot different than Fence. I am not sure why after a year or two of reading fence I am more drawn to Combo, Hambone, Chicago Review. Some of the same poets publish in both Hambone and Fence.

Does presentation and production of art make a difference in meaning? Will I get something different out of reading a Kasey Mohammad poem in Fence versus reading the same poem in Hambone? If I am honest with myself, I would say yes. I think I might come away with a slightly different reading.

So what does all this mean? Is Fence evil?

I think the editors have the best of intentions. I don’t think they are making big bucks off Fence.

Anyway, this is an old debate, but I am still bothered by it.

I do believe in small productions networking with other small productions.

Cells over sales.

The bottom line does not have to lessen the quality of a given art, but it often does.

U2 sucks!