the planet on the table

New Things on the Internet

2011-01-21T23:37:00.000-08:00

Check out the new issue of Sixth Finch.

& the new Sun's Skeleton site.

10 Poems

2010-12-01T10:04:00.000-08:00

The following is from a project for David Rivard's poetry workshop--to pick 10 favorite poems. These are mine for the moment.

Picking favorites is difficult for me. When I go out to a restaurant I almost always order something new. When I smoked cigarettes, I never “had a brand.” And in my bag at any moment there are at least three or four books I am currently reading. I like variety. I like things when they’re new. And, like many of our generation, I have a sporadic and easily distracted attention span. Still, as much as it goes against these personal tendencies, there is much to be said in defense of favoritism. Our relationship to literature should perhaps never be monogamous, but it is good to settle down for a while and really get to know someone in those deeper levels of affection, trust, and understanding. While they may be thrilling, not everything can, or should be, a one-night-stand. So for me, with so many favorites, I had to narrow my scope in assembling this collection and, in the end, I picked the moment. These are recent favorites, chosen not for nostalgic or developmentally indicative reasons—that would be another group altogether—but for what has been wowing and wooing me in my readings of poetry over the past six or so months. These are poems from the books still stacked and piled on my desk as I write this. While, in the long scope of things, this is perhaps not the best or most telling way to compile my ten favorite poems, it is at least one way of doing it. And I can only hope that you enjoy reading these as much as I do.

LONG AND SLUGGISH LINES

Wallace Stevens

It makes so little difference, at so much more

Than seventy, where one looks, one has been there before.

Wood-smoke rises through trees, is caught in an upper flow

Of air and whirled away. But it has been often so.

The trees have a look as if they bore sad names

And kept saying over and over one same, same thing,

In a kind of uproar, because an opposite, a contradiction,

Has enraged them and made them want to talk it down.

What opposite? Could it be that yellow patch, the side

Of a house, that makes one think the house is laughing;

Or these―escent—issant pre-personae: first fly,

A comic infanta among the tragic drapings,

Babyishness of forsythia, a snatch of belief,

The spook and makings of the nude magnolia?

...Wanderer, this is the pre-history of February.

The life of the poem in the mind has not yet begun.

You were not born yet when the trees were crystal

Nor are you now, in this wakefulness inside a sleep.

Now I will begin by contradicting myself. I do have some obsessions in poetry, and one of them is Wallace Stevens. Choosing which poem of his to include in this collection was no easy task. Most of my favorites lay in Stevens’ longer, sprawling poems: “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction,” “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” “Credences of Summer,” “The Rock.” None of these, I felt, would be appropriate for this project. They would dominate, not only in length, but in sheer scope and ambition over the other poems, unless, of course, I began choosing great long poems from each poet, and then...well, you can see how that snowball would start rolling. So, I finally settled on the later poem “Long and Sluggish Lines.” Contrary to how many feel and contrary to what I seek in most other poets, I am drawn toward the last pages of Stevens’ Collected Poems for the restful, arcane, and austere beauty that those poems inhabit. He seems very much, in reaching at the end of his life, to have come home in these poems—to have come home, not only from the tropicali lushness of Harmonium back to the New England grey skies of Hartford, but to have returned from the epistemological voyages of the imagination that mark almost every poem heretofore in his career. While some say it is all old hat for him at this point, that he could write these poems in his sleep, I agree, and that is what I love about them. They are feel effortless and, in being so, resonate as the poems coming from a unique and truly collected “sense of the world,” as Stevens liked to put it. Also, as in this poem, from the precipice of old age they look out on death and see a wonderful infancy, in which “you [are] not born yet…/...in this wakefulness inside a sleep.”

WET CASEMENTS

John Ashbery

When Eduard Raban, coming along the passage, walked into the open
doorway, he saw that it was raining. It was not raining much.

Kafka, Wedding Preparations in the Country

The conception is interesting: to see, as though reflected

In streaming windowpanes, the look of others through

Their own eyes. A digest of their correct impressions of

Their self-analytical attitudes overlaid by your

Ghostly transparent face. You in Falbalas

Of some distant but not too distant era, the cosmetics,

The shoes perfectly pointed, drifting (how long you

Have been drifting; how long I have too for that matter)

Like a bottle-imp toward a surface which can never be approached,

Never pierced through into the timeless energy of a present

Which would have its own opinions on these matters,

Are an epistemological snapshot of the processes

That first mentioned our name at some crowded cocktail

Party long ago, and someone (not the person addressed)

Overheard it and carried that name around in his wallet

For years as the wallet crumbled and bills slid in

And out of it. I want that information very much today,

Can't have it, and this makes me angry.

I shall use my anger to build a bridge like that

Of Avignon, on which people may dance for the feeling

Of dancing on a bridge. I shall at least see my complete face

Reflected not in the water but in the worn stone floor of my bridge.

I shall keep to myself.

I shall not repeat others' comments about me.

John Ashbery is, admittedly, my other obsession. Another difficult choice, I picked “Wet Casements” from his almost mid-career collection Houseboat Days. Following in the shadow of his runaway hit Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, “Wet Casements” addresses the anxieties of public life with both remarkable sensitivity and typical Ashbery evasiveness. Through the complex syntax and roaming meta-discourse of the poem’s bulk, identity is passed around like currency at a cocktail party, eventually to disintegrate in some fourth-party’s wallet. What really makes this poem, however, is the startling, and somewhat childish, assertiveness that Ashbery comes back into the poem with: “I want that information very much today,/ Can’t have it, and this makes me angry.” Following this, we witness the wonderful transformation of this anger into a bridge “on which people may dance for the feeling/ Of dancing on a bridge”—a beautifully constructive use of negative energy, if I may say so. This sudden, yet bizarrely inevitable turn this poem takes is one of the things I love most about Ashbery. His poems, at their best, make you feel like you are lost somehow in the familiar streets of your hometown, seeing things for yet another first time.

from MAYAKOVSKY

Frank O'Hara

Now I am quietly waiting for

the catastrophe of my personality

to seem beautiful again,

and interesting, and modern.

The country is grey and

brown and white in trees,

snows and skies of laughter

always diminishing, less funny

not just darker, not just grey.

It may be the coldest day of

the year, what does he think of

that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,

perhaps I am myself again.

I am not ashamed to say that I was introduced to this poem by the TV show Mad Men. It is a terrific show. If I remember correctly, it is at the end of the second or third season when the main character reads the last section of Frank O’Hara’s “Mayakovsky” as some montage is summing things up in the background. I felt stupid I had never read this poem before, that I had not read more of O’Hara in general, so immediately after the show was over, I tracked down the poem and it gave me shivers all over again. I include here only the fourth section of the poem partially because this was the section I had had this reaction to and partially because I like the fourth section significantly more than the rest of the poem. Additionally, as the notes to the Collected Poems describes, James Schuyler actually assembled this poem from four loose poems O’Hara had lying around and titled it, upon O’Hara’s insistence that he should name it, “Mayakovsky” because O’Hara had been reading him lately. Interestingly, of the four sections, the first three had been written over the summer, while the last had been written in February. To me, this justifies orphaning this section of the poem from the whole as it seems it was an orphan to begin with. The solemn and stark repetition of phrases make this the most wintry poem I can think of. So delicately, we hear the personality softly crack as when crossing a frozen pond we reach the other bank and hope, “perhaps I am myself again.”

THE GREAT LONELINESS

Mary Ruefle

By March the hay bales were ripped open

exposed in the fields

like bloated gray mice

who died in December.

I came upon them at dusk

and their attar lifted my spine

until I felt like turning over an old leaf.

So I walked on, a walking pitchfork.

From every maple hung a bucket or two

collecting blood to be distributed across America

so people could rise from their breakfast

healthy, hoping to make a go of it again.

Now this is a riddled explanation

but I am a historian of pagan means

and must walk five miles a day

to cover the period I will call

The Great Loneliness

and the name will stick so successfully

that for years afterwards children will complain

at meals and on sunny days and in the autumn and at Easter

that their parents are unnecessarily mute

and their parents will look down harshly

upon the plates and beach towels and leaves and bunnies

and say you don't know what you are talking about

you never lived through The Great Loneliness

and if you had you would never speak.

And the children will turn away

and consider the words, or lack of them,

and how one possible explanation

might be that inside our bodies

skeletons grow at an increasingly secretive rate,

though they never mention it,

even amongst themselves.

Mary Ruefle’s poems just put me in awe of their human strangeness. They are “strange” in the way Victor Shklovsky uses the word in his language, ostranenie: “as perception becomes habitual, it becomes automatic,” he writes “and art exists that one may recover the sensation of life...of things as they are perceived and not as they are known.” For me, Ruefle’s poem “The Great Loneliness” truly invigorates the complex feeling of cross-generational isolation that exists within families and within societies as a whole. The poem is almost allegorical in this way; I feel a sincere connection to this strange and wonderful little scene. I wonder, in reading her poems, if she likes the films of David Lynch.

FROM AN ISLAND

James Tate

Fogged in all day, the long, low horns announcing

the passing of another ghostship.

But we see nothing. It's as if a curtain had been dropped.

Go back into yourself, it says. None of this matters

to you anymore. All that drama, color, movement―

you can live without it. It was an illusion,

a tease, a lie. There is nothing out here but smoke

from the rubble that was everything,

everything you wanted, everything you thought

you needed. Ships passing, forget it.

Children bathing, there's no such thing.

Let go, your island is a mote of dust.

But the horns of the ghostship say, remember us,

we remember you.

Because I could not decide between an old Tate or a new Tate poem—the difference, I my mind, is pretty significant—I chose one that seems to fall perfectly in the middle. This short poem “From an Island,” comes from his 1994 collection A Worshipful Company of Fletchers. If pressed to give two reasons why Tate is one of my favorites, my two reasons would be for Imagination and for Humor. When I stumbled upon Tate (through his more recent work), he gave me exactly what I was seriously lacking in my poetry: a real-life funny bone. I was stunned, am stunned, at how loose and goofy he can be, yet still tether it all to the most existential elements of living in this century. In its quasi-solemnity and forlorn tone, “From an Island” is a somewhat atypical poem for Tate; still, I like it. It reminds me of the nocturne paintings by James Abbot McNeill Whistler, which I similarly love. It takes pleasure in the veiled mystery of things, of the darkness, and its unseen. The sound of the ghostship’s horns seem to transcend the doubt that racks the poem, assuring the reader of not only the imagination’s existence but the existence of hope in a fog-haunted world.

from The Dream Songs

John Berryman

Huffy Henry hid the day,

unappeasable Henry sulked.

I see his point,―a trying to put things over.

It was the thought that they thought

they could do it made Henry wicked & away.

But he should have come out and talked.

All the world like a woolen lover

once did seem on Henry's side.

Then came a departure.

Thereafter nothing fell out as it might or ought.

I don't see how Henry, pried

open for all the world to see, survived.

What he has now to say is a long

wonder the world can bear & be.

Once in a sycamore I was glad

all at the top, and I sang.

Hard on the land wears the strong sea

and empty grows every bed.

Even though it is an obvious and heavily anthologized one, Berryman’s Dream Song #1 continues to blow my socks off every time I reread it. Perhaps what I love most about it is its perfectly wrought syntax. The first time I read it, I remember being completely amazed that a poet could do (had done, like 50 years ago) what Berryman does with a sentence. It was a new way of thinking about language for me, and still it reminds me of the dexterity of poetry. So much has been said about this poem, I don’t feel the need to add anything more. Just feel how pounding and oppressive the inversions of the final two lines are: “Hard on the land wears the strong sea/ and empty grows every bed.”

AGLOW

Matthew Zapruder

Hello everyone, hello you. Here we are under this sky.

Where were you Tuesday? I was at the El Rancho Motel

in Gallup. Someone in one of the nameless rooms

was dying, slowly the ambulance came, just another step

towards the end. An older couple asked me

to capture them with a camera, gladly I rose and did

and then back to my chair. I thought of Paul Celan,

one of those poets everything happened to

strangely as it happens to everyone. In German

he wrote he rose three pain inches above the floor,

I don't understand but I understand. Did writing

in German make him a little part of whoever

set in motion the chain of people talking who pushed

his parents under the blue grasses of the Ukraine?

No. My name is Ukrainian and Ukrainians killed everyone

but six people with my name. Do you understand

me now? It hurts to be part of the chain and feel rusty

and also a tiny squeak now part of what makes

everything go. People talk a lot, the more they do

the less I remember in one of my rooms someone

is always dying. It doesn't spoil my time is what

spoils my time. No one can know what they've missed,

least of all my father who was building a beautiful boat

from a catalogue and might still be. Sometimes I feel him

pushing a little bit on my lower back with a palm

made of ghost orchids and literal wind. Today

I'm holding onto holding onto what Neko Case called

that teenage feeling. She means one thing, I mean another,

I mean to say that just like when I was thirteen

it has been a hidden pleasure but mostly an awful pain

talking to you with a voice that pretends to be shy

and actually is, always in search of the question

that might make you ask me one in return.

In talking about poetry lately, I have found myself referencing the line from Zapruder’s poem in which he says “I don’t understand but I understand.” For me, this explains so much about, and so simply, the position of the reader in the most profound encounters with poetry. To straddle that fence, to hum in the discordance of that realm between knowledge and mystery, control and the uncontrollable, is to feel one of the true wonders of existence: that you are here, you don’t know why, and that’s cool. Stevens wrote constantly about this—the harmony of opposites—most often marking the Imagination and Reality as the two primary poles. While Zapruder gets at this from a much different angle than Stevens, I feel like they’re aiming for the same target, “in search of the question that might make you ask me one in return.”

WHAT AN UNDERTAKER DOES TO HIS FAMILY AT NIGHT

Heather Christle

What an undertaker does to his family at night

cannot be spoken of in man's paraphasic tongue.

For that we need actual metal. Steel signs

arranged by giants. We expect them any minute.

We can hear them sighing and soiling

themselves behind the great mountain.

Compared to the undertaker they lack a career.

Most of the world gets embroidered in the end.

We know that. It's a fact we carry around

like a small sack of seeds with a hole.

Most of our lives got forgotten. It's an assignment,

a motherhood that can't be avoided. I'm not Catholic.

Episcopalian poets control the future from 1953.

Which is the reason for houses. When I'm born

the whole world's born with me. And time

contained in a button. My first trip to the moon,

then my last. I almost stayed there, but then

I remembered Earth's need for new rocks.

I tugged the string and came sputtering back into air.

I have never attended a baseball game, but I understood

it is the only place on this continent where I could

finally stop lying and sleep. I apologize to everyone.

Darling offspring, terrible in Butte, I don't believe in you.

If you're under a sheet, you're a ghost. If you're under

my feet, you're a plant in a poem by an Episcopalian poet.

During the first wireless era, department stores moved

information from one area to another in canisters

shot through pneumatic tubes. That is how I travel.

There are times I'd like to be perfect, i.e. digital.

Other times my knees and elbows are brass and

Catholic poets from 1910 are polishing me. Years ago

at parties we tried to touch people for as long as we could.

Strangers. Once we stood on their couch to sing

the national anthem. My favorite kind of singing

is choral, but I don't believe in harmony. When we all

sing the same notes, we wake a newborn monster.

In line with what I’ve been saying above, Heather Christle’s poem is quite simply a poem that I love and do not know exactly how or why. Like many of her poems from the collection The Difficult Farm, it’s a poem of leap-frogging non-sequiturs that miraculously holds together. She travels effortlessly from the moon to a baseball game, from a couch at a party to sleeping monsters of songs. It is a real feat how much ground she covers in her poems and the strange worlds she opens while doing so. As crazy as they are, I trust her insights and I just simply love being part of her voyage.

[ETERNITY IS...]

Tomaž Šalamun

Eternity is

cruel and crystal.

It ruins

everything alive.

It replaces people and

loves and does not

open

the well. With a hand

you dust a glass

you do not

break it. Let every

love

die as

a man does. Death

protects us.

There are so many Tomaz Šalamun poems I would have liked to include here, but this rather short and recent one has really stuck with me much like a pleasant splinter over the past few months. I remember exactly where I was when I first read it and where I read it again. The first time I was on bus coming from New York City to Boston, still in the outer-boroughs stuck in traffic in Queens. I doge-eared the untitled page. The second time was in New Hampshire, at Wagon Hill in Madbury/ Durham looking out on the Pisqataqua Bay on an unseasonable day in October that, by normal standards, was perhaps too cold to be sitting by the water and reading. There, I decided to commit it this one to memory. Arguably, this is one of Šalamun’s more “idea” driven pieces—though, I could be wrong in making this judgement—and, philosophically, this notion of Death as a sheepdog protector against the cruelty of Eternity is greatly comforting to me. As small as it is, it feels like a huge poem to me. The closed door of the well, the disembodied hand dusting a glass and not breaking it, all loom huge between the physical polarities of the poem: eternity and death. And how charged with humanity that image of dusting is! The hand caring for the glass, crystal like eternity, like a fragile pet, as we all do with our secret assumptions of our own immortality. That Salamun is speaking against such hubris, arguing for death as our protector, is what makes this poem so insightful, and one I could read over and over.

10.

NO ENCORES. NO AUTOGRAPHS.

John Gallaher

When I was little, and could float,

I made up my mind to touch everything

on the way. Here I go and

Yes into the red leaves, the winter logic.

Waving seemed so sad

when I was mild, and could hear

the sounds of the house

growing into the hill. The eternal workings

of the going-to-be,

while out to the left

there's a hole in the overcast. A little hole.

It may be growing,

it may be shrinking. Hard to tell.

Either way, it comes back now

without meaning.

It comes back as people I knew once,

fading in and out of buildings and trees

in a north wind,

while, full of spider webs, the porch

glistens in dew and first light.

A foggy translucence covers the world.

You can go out and read the argument

in the grass.

Just take off your shoes.

You can call yourself a pilgrim,

noting the texture of matter.

You can go from here to here.

John Gallaher is perhaps my favorite currently lesser-known poet (or perhaps he is better known than I think he is; in either case, he should be). His poems seem alive to me in the ways Ashbery and Stevens’ seem alive—“poem[s] of the act of the mind”—though without the intellectual clutter. Also, they are very suburban poems and, having grown up in a suburbia myself, this interests me deeply. “No Encores. No Autographs” is taken from his 2007 collection The Little Book of Guesses and, to me, seems like a fitting poem to end with. Having gone “from here to here,” Gallaher’s poem is very much about touching everything and how that everything can exist between that infinitely acute distance of the moment. It is about living in the “Unified Field,” as David Lynch likes to use the term, and there is a truly poetic acceptance of all things—from tract-housing developments to shopping plazas—in Gallaher’s work that is neither pardoning nor ironic. It is about living where we live in the time in which we live and opening our eyes to it; it’s about standing here in wonder.

Poem at Two

2010-10-17T17:26:00.000-07:00

There is a hole in
the trees where the street
was made and from these
front steps I can be
in its heart

for some hours

with poets Robert

Creeley Frank O'Hara

two men I knew but

not like this following

the sun down or rather

over to the shade that waits

for us at the end of a day

to say sorry I have lived

inside you until this

moment and now

it's time we go visit

other peoples

other places unlike this

and go inside

but until then I sit

and when this cigar

has smoked through

and this coffee is only

grounds sitting quietly

at the bottom being

with you though you

make me seasick

maybe not seasick

just too warm and

too lonely and just a little

too pure

Imitation

2010-10-17T14:34:00.000-07:00

Donald V. Rainville

I get lost sometimes

in the word imitation

the trees multiplying

confound me

the three suns

speaking through

crossed branches I never knew

these woods

kept so much junk

of farm rust or crab

apple mountain rock

and this tree here

crooked in its long life
thinking it was
only a giraffe mis-

placed in the old

hands of New England

not a chair not a

letter in my name

not yours

The Fog Machine Calls Home

2010-10-04T19:24:00.000-07:00

Joseph Mallord William Turner. 1842.

THE FOG MACHINE CALLS HOME

For months now, we've been itching for a storm here. A reason to coup up and go camping in our homes. How the danger of living comes quick at sudden sundown and huddles around with us by the hurricane lamps, spoiling our meat in the refrigerator of sour milk. See, you don't get that in the real world—I mean, North America. A good outage takes the edge off things and it's been so long since we've felt severed. Overwhelmingly, my life is a whole. I dream some nights of falling down stairs—like I did when I was younger—and wake up, feet on the ground, looking at Vienna sausages in the basement. And, for a moment, I feel a distant memory rising: that I'm one of them, rolled up like a sleeping bag in an aluminum can. The broth we live in is something mysterious: not us, and yet, not entirely different. In this half-dream, we are a happy family. We play board games and listen, agreeing, to the news. And when a true disaster strikes us, we are ready as we can be. Even if it means going on without me. For the world is harsh and gorgeous and we are but tiny sausages within it.

2010-10-02T09:48:00.000-07:00

Edward Burtynsky

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acorns are deadly

Cluster bombs are acidic

Mushrooms make you death-like

The cloud is eating over

Chicken is God's favorite

The oven is stuck on Sabbath mode

China is a fog machine

The fog machine calls home

The antelope think about winter

The plains are already spoken for

America is a wave machine in a bathtub

A seagull lives forever

I will die when the mime comes

I will when the cavern's lost its teeth

The beach is a fleshy appendage

An amputee wants his minutes back

The water tower is nobody's cousin

Working in October means you know what

The fields are covered in horse hair

If you smoke it, you will glow from the eyes

An armistice means no more tapioca

The cigars felt obliged to say thanks

A baby is a puppy with tonsils

The movies will irrigate your mind

Rain means no work for the blues song

A chute is another way to be delivered

The pigeons mean no harm in gambling

The birthday party is Sunday

Sunday is a thousand years ago

The morning is a brilliant I.U.D.

Everyone is sleeping it off

We were extinct before we duplicated

Pangea is my favorite Xerox machine

The Middle East is a family heirloom

My uncle never said I'm sorry

The ancient art of taxes never said I'm sorry

The spider said I'm sorry but spun its web regardless

Everything is besides the point

The future is too ironic

The animals were trained to eat

Without shelter, the world turns lo-fi

A ghost told me a joke that never ended

The punchline was all scratches

Breath is a moth in daylight

Mexico is a coyote alone in the desert

The sagebrush has an escape plan, but it's not talking

The drugs are in your mother's couch

Culture is a highway ditch

The house is filled with collectible thimbles

The places you've been are tattooed in your full-sleeve

The oil spill is the jet black of your hair dye

Its politics are far from town center

The party is a dog named Stella

The feeling of love is a nip at your ankles

The ballot is a jukebox with unlimited hits

The tractor is pretty much a Libertarian

The road doesn't say much

It is rolling its own cigarettes

It is looking for employment

The cloud is coming down around us

The dark is a silver horse going west

I am inside a corn field where no exit is lit

The corn is a good friend to talk to

The corn is never awkward the next day

It is raining and the cats and dogs are hurting

Roads are blankets for any unborn thoughts

My aches tell me someday the world will be thoughtful

The dream refuses me at its silicon palace

The gate calls home and the bug is fixed

Chicken is my favorite

God has no sauce

The soldiers are on facebook

The river brings them flowers

Mercury makes me warmer, though so does the oven

Houses are tabloids

The supermarket shimmers

The drive home is a life most won't admit to

The furnace is an escape route for husbands

A well-groomed lawn is a lie to your neighbors

Whose car that is must be on steroids

The angry stars bury their own dead

Wearing sun glasses is illegal

Breathing fire gets you girlfriends

Girlfriends live forever

America invites the parents over

The war is a flash card with the answers in red

Dogs eat the scraps of a renegade sunset

Death is a word with spaghetti sauce on its mouth

A mouth is a room with many rocking chairs

A room is a door where the bats fly in

It is permitted to say I love you

It is permitted to go outside

The sky is a board game I lost the rules to

The ladders are never ending,

and then they do

What an Undertaker Does to His Family at Night

2010-09-18T22:10:00.000-07:00

Seraphine Louis de Senlis

WHAT AN UNDERTAKER DOES TO HIS FAMILY AT NIGHT

Heather Christle
from The Difficult Farm

What an undertaker does to his family at night
cannot be spoken of in man's paraphasic tongue.
For that we need actual metal. Steel signs
arranged by giants. We expect them any minute.
We can hear them sighing and soiling
themselves behind the great mountain.
Compared to the undertaker they lack a career.
Most of the world gets embroidered in the end.
We know that. It's a fact we carry around
like a small sack of seeds with a hole.
Most of our lives got forgotten. It's an assignment,
a motherhood that can't be avoided. I'm not Catholic.
Episcopalian poets control the future from 1953.
Which is the reason for houses. When I'm born
the whole world's born with me. And time
contained in a button. My first trip to the moon,
then my last. I almost stayed there, but then
I remembered Earth's need for new rocks.
I tugged the string and came sputtering back into air.
I have never attended a baseball game, but I understood
it is the only place on this continent where I could
finally stop lying and sleep. I apologize to everyone.
Darling offspring, terrible in Butte, I don't believe in you.
If you're under a sheet, you're a ghost. If you're under
my feet, you're a plant in a poem by an Episcopalian poet.
During the first wireless era, department stores moved
information from one area to another in canisters
shot through pneumatic tubes. That is how I travel.
There are times I'd like to be perfect, i.e. digital.
Other times my knees and elbows are brass and
Catholic poets from 1910 are polishing me. Years ago
at parties we tried to touch people for as long as we could.
Strangers. Once we stood on their couch to sing
the national anthem. My favorite kind of singing
is choral, but I don't believe in harmony. When we all
sing the same notes, we wake a newborn monster.

Two Readings

2010-09-11T15:21:00.000-07:00

" I have something to say, but not at this time."

Grover Cleveland Redding, convicted of murder. Executed June 24, 1921.
From Last Words of the Executed, Univ. of Chicago Press.

THE SEA

Hugo Claus (1929-2008)

The husky sails, the snowing sea with
The finch-trap of the billows: her leaves
And the naveled desire: her waves

Ride up against the land where the flag of rut
Hangs out, recruit the walls,
Lure moss and people, mares and sand,

Leave behind the stones like constellations
And release--they, the sea and her frothing beasts--
The moon in all women, the teeth in my mouth.

translated the Dutch by Paul Brown & Peter Nijmeijer

Waiting for Earl

2010-09-03T20:50:00.001-07:00

summer's eaten us senseless so we swim

wine-lipped to that hazeled island

tucked in the heat wave effluvia

of trees your name krauts

this weekend with hurricane breath

how on earth do we blind-clouded

exist? sky on stilts grasses

grassing that fear-

tickled toy of some flowers spangling

red-red when the red

doesn't kindle castle sage russian yarrow

the vividest dreams nobody knew

the polaris preyed on starlight

or black-eyed when the prairie sun woke up

these arked houses can & battery ready

in doppler bloom doppler echo

summer's eaten us senseless

& the world non-stop grows sick

with ornamentals

The Order of Things

2010-09-01T20:22:00.000-07:00

Rachelle Mozman. "Blonde Head"

From Conduit.

THE ORDER OF THINGS

Bob Hicok

Then I stopped hearing from you. Then I thought
I was Beethoven's cochlear implant. Then I listened
to deafness. Then I tacked a whisper
to the bulletin board. Then I liked dandelions
best in their afro stage. Then a breeze
held their soft beauty for ransom. Then no one
throws a Molotov cocktail better
than a buddhist monk. Then the abstractions
built a tree fort. Then I stopped hearing from you.
Then I stared at my life with the back of my head.
Then an earthquake somewhere every day.
Then I felt as foolish as a flip-flop
alone on a beach. Then as a beach
alone with a sea. Then as a sea
repeating itself to the moon. Then I stopped hearing
from the moon. Then I waved. Then I threw myself
into the work of throwing myself
as far as I can. Then I picked myself up
and wondered how many of us
get around this way. Then I carried
the infinity. Then I buried the phone.
Then the ground rang. Then I answered the ground.
Then the dial tone of dirt. Then I sat on a boulder
not hearing from you. Then I did jumping jacks
not hearing from you. Then I felt-up silence. Then silence
and I went all the way.

Sestina

2010-08-24T18:24:00.000-07:00

“The truth is that we live out our lives putting off all that can be put off; perhaps we all know deep down that we are immortal and that sooner or later all men will do and know all things.”

—Jorge Luis Borges

The sun is finally ripe today. See, when you squeeze it, it's soft and ocean simple. We can't stop thinking about oceans. Ocean this, ocean that. Until, of course, it's night time. Your birthday this year was an especially painful color. On the sandy floor, I felt an angry sunburn coming through a gate to the jungle, an awfully silly thing to walk through, into the heaven chapter, the Edenic part, not exactly applicable today. How many recipes do you know for this rose color lambskinning the water making it so goddamn lambskin soft? The broken lightning flashes help us keep time with the batteries dead and all we can think about is the rising of the ocean. How, while we sleep, it slips closer, spreading ocean over the dark sands. How the starving dogs and red armored crabs work to claw through. And in the morning, we read these markings as the dithyrambs of time; insomnia drunk, star blotched scribblings, resembling something like today. But maybe not. Further down the beach there, where the trees sag rotten soft, there's a collection of colors the sea keeps in her sand. Broken toy pieces of color, swept there by a house cleaning ocean, not just my childhood but everyone's childhood, baking soft and permanent in the sun waves we slop through. You've gotta live for today, a South African woman tells me, a stone hovering above my palm, at a rainy moment in time. Yesterday is gone and now so is she, for all I know, lost in a crease of her lifetime, a semiprecious moment told in opal and jade colors. I talked about you in Spanish last night and somehow it was like staring at a desert ocean. A dry place where the sky cracks and pterodactyls fly through my heart, which seems to cook and cook but never gets soft. And a skeleton, excuse the metaphor, moves like an oven across the soft and fetid floor. The hanging hair and sawing sounds of the trees smelling like a realer than real time (if that makes sense) that kept itself on repeat while the rest of the world sifted through the background music. In its sleep, the jungle dreams in the colors they based colors off of; a true story. And in those dreams it thinks it's an ocean soaring through the machinery of today. The truth is, some colors just never bleed through. The ocean might act like your friend today but, really, it's just waiting for that soft spot to say, See you later, pressing that giant red flummox in time.

When We Are Old The Rest Will Be Swimming

2010-08-23T18:05:00.000-07:00

WHEN WE ARE OLD THE REST WILL BE SWIMMING

At night, we'd breed new ways

to say yes to the drubbing,

a black stereo playing our song.

Children have a way, don't they,

of flinging doors open

to feel the lucky doorjambs

rattle, down in their miniature spines.

You built me a heart once,

teetering on a teenage abyss:

a bridge maybe or your father's

half-finished cellar

and he walked in on us

and watched as we watched

the planes explode.

It was September, the leaves not pulp yet

and most recipes for this, quick and

easy-to-follow. It goes like this:

the children pry the cavity open,

pluck out the organs and hammer them fixed

before tossing them back in.

This is the most ancient kind of surgery.

But, as at ground zero, some like wounds

to stay open, like two zeros of light.

Worried what the neighbors think

when the dogs fight, biting

straight for the neck, the face flesh,

and mount. But it's just play

lightning on the other side of the mountain.

Curious, we carry our curtain rods

to the make-out tower and watch.

Since the Skull Cannot Smile in a Village Somewhere on a Map You Wouldn't Recognize

2010-08-14T22:05:00.000-07:00

SINCE THE SKULL CANNOT SMILE

for Marc Paltrineri

wind in the little places
a soda fizz smile
a jerry-rigged staircase
you meander toward
some exultance of the flesh
this tight-coiled jack-in-the-box
this fist
for tomorrow
everything happens again
and is different
a rain of truisms
unburdens the pleats of one's face
a map of stains
a map of places you've been
you think of things
you could never know
in a village somewhere
on a map you wouldn't recognize
where a mine once was
semi-precious stones
locked in yellow rocks
real chasms
a gate
what time does
to the unbroken earth
ice cream men
soldiers of fortune take turns
flipping coins
I dont know
who knows
your name maybe writ
in that chance
in that palimpsest
since the skull cannot smile
since no one ever dies

--Daniel Owen

IN A VILLAGE SOMEWHERE ON A MAP YOU WOULDN’T RECOGNIZE

for Daniel Owen

Air is endless was your first genius thought
and from there the view deepened,
the language trudged through the mud.
And the ignition of sky seems, in lightning's snapshot
of death, also endless—don't you think? The rain does too.
Step by step, waves rustle in the leaves where
the beach plays the desert in its midnight shawl.
It is different now to see through the surface,
the bodily cool of an ocean churning backwards
and through that window, greens cascading greener,
on a bus with shacks and towns passing
in their poverty of sun. Rippling sheets of bold colors,
chickens, children in the front seats of yards.
You are swimming with the door open,
through mountains and oceans, jostling canyons in their sleep.
And you awake to a jungle of stars screaming
but there is no entrance to the jungle or stars.
You have paid your fare and must be careful.
There are thieves in the woods and no one understands you
when you talk with your mouth full
of this new language: chewing air, that endless gristle of air.

Going

2010-08-14T21:08:00.000-07:00

The following is a travel journal/poem of sorts, mined from scraps and notes taken while driving from Vermont to Oregon almost exactly a year ago. I'm publishing them here, in a rather unrefined and unfinished state, because it now seems fitting that these notes retain the momentum and elliptical nature of traveling in their form. It is hard (for me) to think cohesively while on the move perhaps because when in motion nothing is cohesive, stable, or clear. Maybe I'm just making excuses. Either way, here are some blurred snapshots from a moving car heading West in August.

GOING: A TRAVEL JOURNAL

The white wind slips in the waves' inner pockets.
Really, nothing is happening and that is fine.
The wedding ended in a dusk summer light.
The air grew dense with the moss of our lives,
living apart but still holding on like small stones
kept in our pockets so that someday, like this,
we might take them out and place them
on a windowsill and see, hoping someone
will know what they mean.

The water is large at Niagara Falls.
Please take my picture in a blue poncho smiling.
But leave out the city, the old industrial rust.
That's not America over there, it's this way to parking.
Those aren't Americans there by the rail, no, zoom in closer.
Get just my head and my shoulders. Not my hands.
Get the mist. Get the water going. The blue
boat wanders out into the fall. Okay, thank you.
Now, just take one more.

An upholstered chair at the edge of a vast cornfield.

Abraham Lincoln drives an RV.

The clouds all chopped off at the bottom.

It's easy to see this country
is made out of corn.
God hangs low in the flattened fields,
counts his wooden teeth, and
cuts down an apple tree, saying,
The world never lies; it goes on.
Mouth agape, asleep in the passenger seat,
the hills grow forever downward.
This needle and thread—
of power lines passing,
the need for talk talking—
stitches us to the way
the road moves, taking us
everywhere, leaving us behind.

From the car's constant moment
it almost seems possible to step out of it
as if stepping out of a stream
and stand firmly on the horizon's dry shore.
To hold one's breath passing through corn fields,
for the dead, exiles of history. The black sky
emptied like an ocean with no memory
in which clouds drift so noble and uselessly.
Road cones appear for no reason,
leading us by the frayed ends of our future
where a vision of us goes on walking
the glass surface of its perpetual lake.
The plains of nothing go on.
Noon licks the black cows black
with the soot of the sun.
Not everything is made to wait between
borderless fences. A cringe exists
in every roadside death. How mornings
you see them sleeping with the hides
of torn tires—the bloody tracks
leading to the center—where, in a moonlit dream,
two eyes appeared, distant and star-like.
And the road, turned orange then pink and then red,
rose with the thirst of unquenchable thunder.

The blurred foreground, windswept
worn smooth. Curtains of rain
hung low, sweeping the distance
with dark dust.

Perhaps the future is the past inside-out.

What is there is never there
in the camera.

They sell it in giftshops,
a hand-me-down memory from who-knows-who.

Early enough, the road is still quiet.

The yellow scent of coffee, wood-paneled.

Truck stop sunrise, Utah dust beginning to light.

There is no home to travel towards.

A migration of birds moves across the sky.

There is no America is.

There is no America is desert is green, black cows grazing in the canyons, in the corn, the modular homes, dilapidated ranches, the growths of box stores, middle class gray, stucco as corn, the soybean diners, gold mining ghost towns, prairie journey, covered wagons on the freeway, and the trucks, the trucks, tourists, and the corn.

There is no America is.

At what point does one begin believing in the sky-mirrored mirage
and at what point does one cease to reach towards it?

[Praise These Erotic Skeletons Who]

2010-08-14T20:19:00.000-07:00

Praise these erotic skeletons who,

beneath skins, allude the mysteries

of their own deaths. Perhaps, a pale

tanless corner gets revealed, meaning

there are still lands undiscovered

out there, with personalities at their

mountain's peaks and culture down

in the valley. Could you tie me? she says,

baring her naked back.

These borderlines are undesirable

in their proof we are not lit

by internal suns. And, yes, years of this

will make the skin droop off you

all for touching this warmth and not

letting it go. The way our eyes rise

from the page like from a marsh,

distracted by the passing flesh...

Look at me, look me

in the eyes when I speak to you.

The ocean can't keep track of her kids.

They go screaming, kicking sand,

building castles, reaching for a

thinly concealed breast. Hunger

has several functions and separate

compartments therein: one for the gnaw

of a bikini's skinny strap; and one

for the hot dog, two dollars, at the stand.

Just as, at both ends of our lives,
we go nude and couldn't care less;

as in sandy shower houses the old

and the brand new unashamedly change

in the pale cool and sunless mildew

while the rest of us grab our towels
and look away.

Aubade

2010-08-14T20:03:00.000-07:00

AUBADE

In the humidity of theft
glamour is a ruined street
where a blackened iglesia
molds in its trash.

The sounds of the city
are a violence in sound.

To say, we are alive here
is to say we are cells,
blood cells amongst blood cells,
flowing outward

toward oceans darker than night
and back again
to the machinery of the heart.
America is here,

everywhere, in the tortured flesh
of billboards and people passing.
The youth gathered in the park
wear black. They know

there is no escaping, their dreams
charcoaled by the home
I continue to resist.

My Heart is Made of Crabgrass

2010-08-04T20:58:00.000-07:00

Cynthia Soto. Costa Rica. Photographs.

MY HEART IS MADE OF CRABGRASS

is the last line of a poem I will write.

I'll be honest, I have no idea

what the poem is about

or what will come before those words

just as today, I am a tourist

killing time in a city somewhere

in Central America and tomorrow,

I will work on a farm even farther from here.

What will be the difference?

We all know the Marie Antoinette

with her peasant house

and the one with her castle

were the same Marie Antoinette

of that feisty guillotine.

Perhaps a wide open scene like that

will be pleasant for a bit. Where

the car sounds I’ve gotten used to

get smothered in silence, the thick

summery silence only available

in tropical places. There are always

trees changing, reminding you of something—

home or a not-so-home—crawling

the landscape like crabs.

And perhaps this could precede the last

line, the line about crabgrass,

though crabs and crabgrass

are definitely not the same thing.

The former hide in holes

and when no one’s looking

inhabit the earth as if nothing else exists.

The latter grows like chain-mail, hooking

with tiny hinges a tedious carpet,

knitting that uniform simplicity

that makes lawns say, for example,

I love you to each person passing on the street.

Because crabgrass believes

in the power of positive thinking

which is, more or less, like the thoughts

of my heart. But, to tell you honestly,

I really have no idea what the last line will be

or what my heart would look like,

if I could recognize it in a crowd

or even if someone put it in my hand

and showed me, this is your heart.

No, I would scream. I would think

something fatal and only vaguely related

that my heart is made of crabgrass

and corazon is a nice word, isn’t it?

Reminds me of bees stinging

a man in Spanish armor,

but the man in the armor still says,

Ouch!

"A good many dramatic situations begin with screaming."

2010-06-23T20:50:00.000-07:00

"Decrucify the angel or I'll melt your face."

Barbarella. 1968.

***

"When he made the skeleton enter the flesh tent, it flowered at every joint."

--Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts

***

Nina Simone sings "Just like Tom Thumb's Blues"

Alejandra Pizarnik

2010-06-06T13:29:00.000-07:00

Alejandra Pizarnik (1936-1972), the Argentine poet. The translation below is the best of my abilities, so please excuse any errors in choice.

FIESTA

He desplegado mi orfandad

sobre la mesa, como un mapa.

Dibuje el itinerario

hacia mi lugar al viento.

Los que llegan no me encuentran.

Los que espero no existen.

Y he bebido licores furiosos

para transmutar los rostros

en un angel, en vasos vacios.

FIESTA

I unfolded my homelessness

out across the table, like a map.

I drew the route

to my place in the wind.

Those who come never meet me.

Those who I wait for don't exist.

And I drank furious liquors

to change the faces

of an angel, into empty glasses.

Kate Beaton and the Gatsbys

2010-04-30T15:57:00.000-07:00

A funny little comic I came across on The New Yorker's Book Bench. (Ha!)

The Fate of Birds in Cruel Times

2010-04-24T23:07:00.000-07:00

after Zbigniew Herbert

If the executioner's branches
bend with pale snow

you walk the salt sores
with the sky's dark semblance

stringed to the dream you visit
somewhere on display

blackbirds knot their voices
beneath the heavy panes is a secret about glass

into the wood of dirt
then back into silence

whose theft is the dead
trucked off in shoeboxes

or the parade's busted iris
then birds in the room

thousands who burn with their brushes
the words bequeathed this purpose

speaking in a rotted daylight
of times cruel or crueler than these

BlazeVOX

2010-04-24T23:02:00.000-07:00

(Painting by Angela Dufresne)

Read the Spring 2010 issue of BlazeVOX.

100 poets (including myself).

Since the Skull is Always Smiling

2010-04-01T22:54:00.000-07:00

Holes or not we'll never know

The silver lining mends the inner coat

In the soda of starlight and good luck

Again time for our pennies to fizz

It's time for a change

Glow indefinitely the historical dark

All our trees fit noosed or christmas tasseled

In a storage unit somewhere

Or frost for that matter for spring

As we abandoned the lyre

We abandon these playthings

Left for their rubbernecking answers

On we go a correspondence of stars

Named these streets and will rename them

There's a river beneath this river

Out of view

In small letters

Then your cameo ascending

Of adults like dandruff

Is blood a poison? that century was full

Not real I tasted different metallic when you asked me

To whiten the teeth was

Who was I back then? The grape they used

A colorless sunset

I fade in my most worn-out places

A sparrow gets lost in the eaves of your nightgown

Since the skull is always smiling

Since thousands more are dead

Cobalt

2010-03-27T18:50:00.001-07:00

Cobalt is the color of a horse I knew. She was a slow horse and thus rode in a short bus no bigger than this pinky. They got lost one day and ended up in a zoo where a documentary film was being made about a recent rebellion. What's your take on the coup, a reporter asked her, the cobalt horse. Well, she said slowly, as she did most things slowly, none of us are getting any younger. Then, she walked off camera. She joined the mob. Last I heard, she was living in Detroit or somewhere. She builds sets for a circus, a circus of deer ticks and other marginalized squatters. She wears scarves, I hear, mostly crimson and gold. She gives money to the poor.

Dear Lorca,

2010-03-22T19:31:00.000-07:00

These letters are to be as temporary as our poetry is to be permanent. They will establish the bulk, the wastage that my sour-stomached contemporaries demand to help them swallow and digest the pure word. We will use up our rhetoric here so that it will not appear in our poems. Let it be consumed paragraph by paragraph, day by day, until nothing of it is left in our poetry and nothing of our poetry is left in it. It is precisely because these letters are unnecessary that they must be written.

In my last letter I spoke of the tradition. The fools that read these letters will think by this we mean what tradition seems to have meant lately—an historical patchwork (whether made up of Elizabethan quotations, guide books of the poet’s home town, or obscure bits of magic published by Pantheon) which is used to cover up the nakedness of the bare word. Tradition means much more than that. It means generations of different poets in different countries patiently telling the same story, writing the same poem, gaining and losing something with each transformation—but, of course, never really losing anything. This has nothing to do with calmness, classicism, temperament, or anything else. Invention is merely the enemy of poetry.

See how weak prose is. I invent a word like invention. These paragraphs could be translated, transformed by a chain of fifty poets in fifty languages, and they still would be temporary, untrue, unable to yield the substance of a single image. Prose invents—poetry discloses.

A mad man is talking to himself in the room next to mine. He speaks in prose. Presently I shall go to a bar and there one or two poets will speak to me and I to them and we will try to destroy each other or attract each other or even listen to each other and nothing will happen because we will be speaking in prose. I will go home, drunken and dissatisfied, and sleep—and my dreams will be prose. Even the subconscious is not patient enough for poetry.

You are dead and the dead are very patient.

Love,

Jack

[from After Lorca by Jack Spicer (1957)]

Sestina

2010-03-21T12:15:00.000-07:00

Open your umbrella, this is yesterday's rain. It was the mold that made us long and wander, blacking like sleep on a crumb-creviced moon. Wind crafted wind then made glass out of boredom, boxing what we couldn't feel: the touch of a window, brush of bare arm. The forest creaks at its hinges, arm against arm, while the rain falls like someone else's, a piece of furniture, draped in blue, so as not to feel the worn meadows of age. How long, how far will she wander the ghost who corks my distance in glass, cures it and distills it. I think I'm turning part moon, waxing linoleum, bland as any other moon. There is a sound the flesh on flesh makes when I touched you, your arm, or the jungle of our heads, that still makes glass drip like glass, and windows open to windows in a cellophane rain. Home is where the heart grows yonder, even if to wander is to smudge out your name and feel the erasure of driving through deserts, to feel the blank blueness of windshields seeping in. And yet another moon swallows the map so I wander out into the tattooed personae of my arm. Somewhere, there's a horizon curtained by a silent film of rain and behind that shower curtain grows a city of glass; and if that's true, then what else is glass but the opiate of distance, because how could I feel the rain when there is no rain, the moon coined-over with some counterfeit moon? I pinch the skin, but of course, it's only my arm that wanders the leash-length of hope that someone else out there wanders and, in turn, shatters and fits into this panel of glass. From this spot, the world is naked past the arms, shivers slightly, and this time I finally feel like falling in the mood of a present day rain, to pool in the craters of a cloud-nothinged moon. Shuttering the umbrellas, let your bare arms feel. The wandering marrow, the indoors of rain is now open. Just please watch the glass. We broke trying to find life on the moon.

The Motion Makes Me Last

2010-03-18T07:14:00.000-07:00

From Matthew Cooper's new album under the Eluvium moniker. "The motion Makes me Last" on Similes.

A New Way of Saying Things

2010-03-15T17:29:00.000-07:00

“It's always one world

if you can get there.”

—Robert Creeley

Eclipse means everything, so goodbye.

I'm disappearing now

into the newborn palm of the street.

The world is full of jack-o-lantern hearts.

The twilight says so

with its leafy breath,

that we'll be dead before

the sun is, waiting anonymously still.

It's like a hole, you can't fill it

without pouring some story into a stranger's glass.

And is it boring? To say too much

is to wander a road,

lost in the pupil of conceit.

Orange rain falling

through a pewter night's blue,

I wait on this side of a midnight departure.

The city closes its fist,

keeps me warm,

briefly, as the figure in the window drifts

from one lit room to

the darkened next.

A Recipe for Winter

2010-03-15T15:35:00.000-07:00

There is a laugh I buried in the furnace for you

harkening back to a prenatal music. More or less,

the glow of a lava lamp's recording

is a domesticated dream. How light builds landscape

with its own blue hands, mulling over the furrows,

we can't be so sure. If the shell fits,

climb in. Old homes are made for swimming,

a Crystal Light when your clothes are hidden

in any unseen region, twilight forest, for example,

of the arid scalp. Lanterning through the denseness,

you are climbing bramble over bramble beyond

my expectations of you. And I, a bleak chrysalis,

am changing beneath a towel into the dust of a moth.

Alone in a room overpopulated with chairs,

I opened our past and it was a tangle of hair

we'll sooner or later disappear from. Voice over-

lapping voice in the crowded hallways of our skin,

take this bouquet of nerve endings, these trees for the fire.

No one ever knew the true color of happiness

until it molted, hardened into its thick black cloak.

Juan Luis Martinez, almost.

2010-03-15T15:06:00.000-07:00

On the plane back to the east coast, I read this poem by the Chilean poet Juan Luis Martinez (1942-1993). I am very intrigued. Unfortunately, it appears there is little (if anything?) in print by him that is translated from the Spanish. Is this a Borges story?

Taken from the Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry:

"Juan Luis Martinez was born in Valparaiso, a seaport city located in central Chile, where he also died. His object books--a blend of plastic art and literary work--place him among the most disruptive contemporary Latin American poets. Although not well understood by the critics of his time, today, however, he is regarded as a cult poet and an example of ethical standing. 'His poetry has the effect that Goethe demanded, namely, the ability to make one shudder...' stated the critic Volodia Teitelboim."

Breathing House, Almost the (Author's) Little House
La casa del aliento, casi la pequena casa del (autor)

(Interrogate the windows
about the absolute transparency
of the missing windows)

a. The house we build tomorrow is
    already in the past and it doesn't exist.

b. In that house we've yet to visit
    a window we forgot to shut stays open.

c. In the very same house, behind the very same
    window the curtains we pulled continue flapping.

"Maybe a house in the country
where the past is about to take place
and the future happened long ago."
(by T.S. Eliot, almost)

Translated by Robert Tejada

Findings from Brooklyn

2010-03-05T08:47:00.000-08:00

An hiatus has been made from this blog and so my half-hearted apologies for being elsewhere are extended. To get the ball rolling again, I'll begin by posting a few things I saw at the Brooklyn Museum of Art last week. More soon. Promise.

Marsden Hartley, (1877-1943) Painting No. 48

Kiki Smith (b. 1954). Silver Bird. Sojourn exhibit.

Randy Dudley. (b. 1950) Gowanus Canal from 2nd Street.

Nick Cave ( b. 1959) Soundsuit

There was no place for it

2010-02-06T14:11:00.000-08:00

The books seemed to harbor
their own cold, vibrato
of the microphone air.
Can you hear me? I am learning this
language to dance with you,
not our minds (hummingbird
moments) but standing upright, salud!

They saw their son from the window
in the form of an airplane rising.
To them, it meant something
like touching the altitudes of watchfulness,
cold glass of a vacuum, and
losing service, letting go.

In the regions of ice familial to starlight,
there is no such thing as missing you,

darling. The world is way too blank.

Just go to bed, now.

2010-01-31T15:11:00.000-08:00

"Full fathom five thy father lies;
    Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
   Nothing of him doth fade
   But doth suffer a sea change
Into something rich and strange."

William Shakespeare, from The Tempest

* * *

"And now when after after finishing his work in the stable the coachman walked straight across the courtyard with his slow swaying gait, closed the large gate, then came back, all this slowly and meticulously, focusing only on his own tracks in the snow, then locked the stable behind him, and all the electric lights went out--for whom should they have shone?--and only the opening above in the wooden gallery remained bright and briefly arrested one's wandering gaze, it seemed to K. as if they had broken off all contact with him, but as if he were freer than ever and could wait as long as he wanted here in this place where he was generally not allowed, and as if he had fought for this freedom for himself in a manner nobody else could have done and as if nobody could touch him or drive him away, or even speak to him, yet--and this conviction was at least equally strong--as if there were nothing more senseless, nothing more desperate, than this freedom, this waiting, this invulnerability."

Franz Kafka, The Castle.

* * *

"Seymour once said that all we do our whole lives is go from one little piece of Holy Ground to the next. Is he never wrong? Just go to bed, now. Quickly. Quickly and slowly."

J.D. Salinger, Seymour: an Introduction

* * *

Vienne la nuit sonne l'heure

Les jours s'en vont je demeure

May night come and the hours ring

The days go by and I remain

Guillaume Apollinaire, "Le Pont Mirabeau"

Two Poems

2010-01-27T00:15:00.000-08:00

CHANGES OF WEATHER

Think of the flocks of days we spend

knocking on those little doors.

As one by one a cold hush surrounds us

and vanishes in a blank verse of birds.

Say goodbye to the ones we wore

tight-fitting, a little out of mold.

The soul is the only food worth packing.

Send them off with napkins

of sleep, a flowery time

dripped like castles from a shallow pool.

There's still a tide where all our secrets go.

That bastille, single-pinned to the coast,

billows when it oscillates that-a-way,

storms when the sun sucks in, bleaches out.

CANDID

Some trees grow in circles. Of pain,

my answer is a hidden place.

Benches where smokers meet and carve

their hearts out of greenish wood.

Should this iPod shuffle moods and fade

into the backdrop, say whereabouts our innards

kick the can or soup our love. Sometimes,

the lighting needs a flash in there

but you go on blurring anyways

as if the wall truly understood you,

swept you with its broom for days.

Distances

2010-01-26T18:03:00.000-08:00

Robert Adams

The following is the finished form of a poem Daniel Owen and I collaborated on. We worked on it for roughly six weeks in a sort of leap frog manner--I wrote one section, Dan edited it, wrote the next one, I edited it, and so on. 10 sections of 10 lines each. Now, we are moving on to the next one.

DISTANCES

Daniel Owen & Marc Paltrineri

1.

oceans and countries
lapsing between this boundless
conversation and the last

at once the sun like a tuning-fork quivers
salting these visions   a life at sea

horizon's way of zipping then un-
zipping    tonguing this coldsore
of memory   these winter garden

stalks of absence     faded crackle
in the vacuum of my ear

2.

how much is between us?
space equal to

space   a mirrored vertigo in glass

ripe as a cliff's edge
a river empties into this grey-

gulled ocean    capturing whatever
the sky does     a white flag of

surrender    blue empty of
eyes and volcanic ash

the miles necessary to know

3.

what's on your side of silence?

labyrinth of intangibles

citymap   I walk to be walking
there is water in the street

what makes the blood flow
onward?     the lungs open
close? the ocean exists

in snow but does it?
speak but not to me
I'm there

lag between the moment
of arrival and recognition

a hangar holds
a legendless atlas

oceanic and turning
not toward or from

a still axis

what cleaves together cleaves
apart

an empty tide hello

5.

a study of the face finds
the reach of eyes

unstable

an open plain once known

fenced who are you?

a phrase

lost on the tarmac

please hold these bags for me
I'll call home
say I made it

it all falls outside the shapes of a moon
in open and obscured phases

on the outskirts    something else
other faces     orders of anatomy

kingdoms of the horizon line
of my furthest reach

there a setting and a rising
and a shedding like bark

this peekaboo presence
sinuous and vast

7.

imagine those islands call them alone
as the hills shudder in longitudes of youth

the taste of scattered coins seems reason enough

to move   the summer is not a summer

a dirty kitchen wrung out flutters at the stubs where
the wings once were     those red berries once leaves

this pond   a living room    the sun goes off
toward its beginning     a silence like rain

we each go afloat in our driftwood decisions

that thick braille of stars

dusk stalks sprouting what's left of youth
in snow and steam rambling bluejeans

pockets of paper clips and dimes

in the space between summit's view
and blue earth   sky enters

crossing rivers and lakes
to return     wind to the hollow
space     a crow sings

this semblance of tune
torn from a still blue dusk

in the empty belly of this window

the giant night appears    bored

as a chord built from wood and glass
the music in the brick    in the plastics of forever

we drink it like water     the cool thought
of currents seething a white blue unknowing

counting these truths with our thumbs

tiny scraps of paper jawless moods

that affliction of need swims between us but how far

how exhausting these two steep shores

10.

some cloud passing over

a moonlit pond cabin perched

on edge a roof without walls

the tongued wind carries

motes of all intervals between

two people all that unaccounted

intimacy flaking paint of kitchen walls

faint breath of sleeping voices rise

like a blue balloon

into a blue sky

Scapes

2010-01-25T21:01:00.000-08:00

Scape by Joshua Harmon

(2009) Black Ocean Press

The "scapes" of Joshua Harmon's first book of poems are neither land- nor sea- nor night-scapes, but something in between. Whatever they are, they are potent; potent as the residue of a bottle left to ferment for a hundred years. There is hardly enough room for the two of you in there.

from SUMMER LETTERS

to hedge's green layers

we turned a twig

roots of my woolgathering

speaks to the beginning

or two years back

the pulse in winds

dwell atop silent house

Oneonta countrymen

roots of the beginning

of dusty lines awakened

the leaves' silver ends

remembered through memory

how often the grass bent

and boards cracked

and when he returned

returning forgot

paled into another

Yet, what is most impressive, given the incredible tautness of their weave, is how the poems seem both contemporary and esoteric; here and not here. These are not poems to live by, but rather to live through and be absorbed in.

[Untitled, p. 27]

At home in the lean-to, my renewal succumbed

to pared bones, paired pistols

strafing the beached remains,

the beach's sifted sources:

bits of shell flaked and tinny, a raw skin

The footpath I followed

here is irreversible,

let us say,

speaking slowly,

calling the blue that awaits puberty

or puberty was a pony I rode till sunset

then pitched my tent in a parking lot.

2010-01-21T20:56:00.000-08:00

Fairfield Porter (1907-1975)
Anne, 1965

I was once discussing with my friend, the painter Fairfield Porter, someone's definition of a portrait as a painting of somebody where there is something wrong with the mouth. Porter felt this was true and said that he once had the experience of correcting that error in the mouth and having the painting go dead. This can happen in poetry, too.

—John Ashbery (Nassau Literary Review, Spring 1980)

One of these things in this world

2010-01-21T11:47:00.000-08:00

John Frederick Kensett (American, 1816–1872). October in the Marshes, 1872

From John Gallaher's blog, Nothing to Say and Saying it:

EPONYMITY MANIFESTO

1. There are things in this world. One of them is language.

2. Scientists claim that we are one of only two species known to use representational language. The other is the honeybee.

3. Most delays are harmless.

4. If we think of language as a harmless delay, then we have made a sentence. If, on the other hand, language manifests as a delay that harms, we must make another sentence.

5. Language itself dwells in the interstices between sentences.

6. It follows, then, that while most sentences are harmless, what is rather more dangerous is the space between sentences. One word for this is ellipsis. Another is the line break.

7. All rational assertions have an irrational base.

8. Conversely, and as in mathematics, all irrational bases, multiplied, yield rational and irrational assertions, in alternating sequence.

9. Another term for this is grammar.

10. In the alternating sequence of positive and negative space--rational and irrational assertions--that constitutes grammar, the sentence emerges.

* * *

On Shea Zellwegger

From Jerome Rothenberg's Poems and Poetics:

"In 1953, while working a hotel switchboard, a college graduate named Shea Zellweger began a journey of wonder and obsession that would eventually lead to the invention of a radically new notation for logic. From a basement in Ohio, guided literally by his dreams and his innate love of pattern, Zellweger developed an extraordinary visual system called the “Logic Alphabet” in which a group of specially designed letter-shapes can be manipulated like puzzles to reveal the geometrical patterns underpinning logic. Indeed, Zellweger has built a series of physical models of his alphabet that recall the educational teaching toys, or “gifts,” of Friedrich Froebel, the great nineteenth century founder of the Kindergarten movement. Just as Froebel was deeply influenced by the study of crystal structures, which he believed could serve as the foundation for an entire educational framework, so Zellweger’s Logic Alphabet is based on a crystal-like arrangement of its elements. Thus where the traditional approach to logic is purely abstract, Zellweger’s is geometric, making it amenable to visual play.

"Like his notation, Zellweger’s working methods are delightfully unconventional. While constituting a genuine research project in logic, his notebooks (made between 1953 and 1975) have remarkable visual appeal, passing through phases reminiscent of Russian Constructivism, outsider art, concrete poetry and pop. These days we accept outsider artists, and are perhaps aware of outsider scientists, but Zellweger may be the first we could define as an outsider logician. Although he has worked on the Logic Alphabet for over fifty years, his professional life has not been spent in departments of philosophy or mathematics, but in psychology, mostly at Mount Union College in Ohio, from which he retired in 1993. After half a century of obscurity, Zellweger’s work is starting to attract the attention of some mathematicians who believe it offers an exciting new perspective on logic."

[A full interview & dialogue between Zellweger and Wertheim appears at the Cabinet Magazine web site, issue 18, summer 2005, and an overview of Wertheim’s own work and career can be found on the CalArts web site.]

Tomaz Salamun

2010-01-20T20:39:00.000-08:00

It's no secret, but Tomaz Salamun has to be writing some of the strangest, most beautiful poems today. Though I sometimes get a little impatient with his obtuseness, these poems published here in the online journal Conduit are really incredible. To top that, you can listen to them in both English and Slovakian!

We are the sleeping fragments of his sky

2010-01-20T18:22:00.000-08:00

"To be nothing--that is the cry of the mind exhausted by its own rebellion."

Albert Camus (from The Rebel)

* * *

photo: Linh Dinh

* * *

Thanks to both Tony Iantosca and Dan Owen for reminding me about this guy.

from THE SONNETS

Ted Berrigan

His piercing prince-nez. Some dim frieze

Hands point to a dim frieze, in the dark night.

In the book of his music the corners have straightened:

Which owe their presence to our slippery hands.

The ox-blood from the hands which play

For fire for warmth for hands for growth

Is there room in the room that you room in?

Upon his structured tomb:

Still they mean something. For the dance

And the architecture.

Weave among incidents

May be portentous to him

We are the sleeping fragments of his sky,

Wind giving presence to fragments.

* * *

New Panda Bear material.

Notes for an Essay on Naivety and Art

2010-01-18T15:16:00.000-08:00

There is no avoiding the condescension that comes along with the term "naive art." It is as equally dicey as the term "primitive"--which, in terms of art, it is a close cousin to--and for that matter to the recently popularized genre of "outsider art." All three share in common a labeling that is clearly from without looking in--that of the collegial anthropologist jotting down notes, the art historian or critic assessing his "new discovery." Especially within the realm of "outsider" and "primitive" arts, there is the tendency of academics to make a freak show spectacle of the quaintness of their abilities. With a little caution I'll try to sidestep these pitfalls as well.

What I'm interested here, rather, is the concept of naivety inside and outside of its usual perimeters. The word "naive" is a direct descendant from the French word for natural or instinctive (naif) with cousins in the Greek term for native (nativus.) It is a word of retrospect, steeped in nostalgia. The popular expression "ignorance is bliss" could just as easily be rephrased as "naivety is bliss," and perhaps for the better, because in the lure of the once innocent is inherently the conscious recognition of its loss--of having moved on. It is the "other" of supposed learned experience, as Blake made use of in his "Songs of Innocence and Experience," and it would be strange to find an artist who described themselves as such.

Still, there is a certain aesthetic that carries through the history of so-called naive art. It is an art that either comes from some "natural" place (i.e. not the university or through training) or it is the result of abandoning these institutions. It is not a question of high art and low art, but rather of the innate abilities of the artist and the learned ones.

By Picasso's endorsement and his questionably ingenuous exhibition of his work, Henri Rousseau's admission into the Parisian avant-garde was solidly established, whether he was aiming for that or not. Like most artists of the "Naive," it seems he was similarly discovered, treated a bit at first like a novelty act, before being fully appreciated as something more than an artist with "childish" drawing skills. "Simplicity," or pejoratively, "simplistic" are commonly used words to describe the work of Rousseau (1844-1910) and his style. There is a boldness of color reminiscent of Gauguin's imports from "primitive" arts of Tahiti. Above all, however, what draws me to works like these is the overwhelming sense of wonder that exists in the quasi-imagined lands of his paintings. The sky and the sprawling natural world itself often dominates the characters, such as in "Evening Carnival" (top right). The leaves of trees are painted with a stencil-like repetition, as if by memory not model. Drawing more from an illustrative, rather than an expressionistic perspective, Rousseau's work goes deeper into the jungles of the imagination than most of his contemporaries. Where artists like Monet, van Gogh, Manet, Seurat had experimented in the distortion of reality in order to visualize emotion, Rousseau's work goes in an entirely different direction--to fabricate a reality in order to visualize the imagination. In this respect, while the Impressionists anticipated the work of abstract and non-representational artists Rousseau anticipated the work of the Surrealists; exploring the realms of the unconscious and its associated images and archetypes, viewing the world in its ideal state--that of the mind.

Both endlessly playful and philosophically austere, Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) is a paradox of a poet. An insurance executive by day and a poet by night, if that helps explain things. Regardless, throughout his life's work in poetry--and especially in his first book Harmonium--his use of imagery, language, and color could be seen as similarly "naive." He paints in bold and primary colors, plays with both high and silly diction, and the logic of his poems often take flight. Take, for example, the well anthologized "Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock:"

The houses are haunted

By white night-gowns.

None are green,

Or purple with green rings,

Or green with yellow rings,

Or yellow with blue rings.

None of them are strange,

With socks of lace

And beaded ceintures.

People are not going

To dream of baboons and periwinkles.

Only, here and there, an old sailor,

Drunk and asleep in his boots,

Catches tigers

In red weather.

The poem moves rather rigidly at first in its repetition of colors. Like Roussea's jungle paintings, Stevens' poem deals in exotics and archetypal images--periwinkles and sailors, baboons and tigers--which he estranges, not by description, but by their bizarre placement and action. The images of a poem like this are naive in the sense that they ask you to not question their improbability, that the improbability might in fact be the point. Stevens talked at length about the imaginative role in poetry, and through him, in part, we inherited this approach to art that places the "act of the mind" at the forefront of the artist's intent. As in the poem above, the imagination becomes not only the primary vehicle of the poem, but author and character as well. In a sense, it is a return to innocence--to a place before or beyond logic--where it is entirely possible for drunken sailors to catch tigers in red weather.

Given Stevens' quite prestigious education (Harvard alum), his mode of naivety is certainly a stylized choice rather than a pathological state, as is the case with many so-called Outsider artists. As far as I'm concerned, the cause of naivety as an aesthetic is arbitrary. Though, more often than not, the trail does lead to mental illness, self/ lack of education, or just regular old eccentricity.

Daniel Johnston (1961- pr.) is, alongside Henry Darger, perhaps the most well-known "Outsider" artist. Both a musician and illustrator, Johnston has been embraced in many music circles for his simple song structures, darkly charming lyrics--Casper the Friendly Ghost, funeral homes, and gravediggers recur throughout his work--and the general myth that has come to surround his name, especially after the release of the biographical documentary "The Devil and Daniel Johnston." While the documentary largely follows the emergence and struggle with schizophrenia, much can be said about what attracts listeners to his music. For one, he is a folk singer in the postmodern sense. His songs are of love, heartache, madness, and Kool-Aid all the while characterized by chord organ or acoustic guitar, and a faltering voice recorded on a 4-track in the basement of his parents' house.

Johnston helped define the "lo-fi" aesthetic in indie or underground music, a genre that came to value the raw, natural, and imperfect qualities of home recordings. As a whole, the emergence of lo-fi music--whether inadvertent or intentionally "stripped down"--shares a similar history with Naive and Outsider art. Like with painting, the attraction is to its "realness," to its having escaped or lived outside of the theory and trends of socially-acceptable art as if it were the feral child to the main stream music industry. Like Rousseau, Daniel Johnston wasn't formally trained--nor did he need to be--but was industriously obsessive in his independent ambitions; wanting to be as big as the Beatles, being one of them.

But it is not only the weirdness of so-called lo-fi/ outsider artists which gives them their charm and authenticity, but the imperfections that the medium allows. Listening to Daniel Johnston's early home recordings, especially those compiled on "Hi, How are You?" and "Welcome to my World," you experience the music on a more intimate basis. There are wrong chord changes, awkward rhymes (often double rhyming), and of course the cracked singing of Johnston. Embedded in this, however, is a certain deeper kind of humanness--a frail, insecure, and isolate kind--that a cleaned-up studio produced album can rarely duplicate.

While sadness and loneliness often pervades many of his songs, there is an equally strong streak of hopeful, youthful--even absurd--optimism in Johnston's work. His attention, when it is not on lost love or evil, is often on everyday topics or objects, such as "running water" or "walking the cow." Whatever the subject is, his songs are charming and refreshing in their perspective. One does not have to believe in the world of Daniel Johnston, Rousseau, Stevens, or any artist for that matter, to be able to experience a piece of it, even if only by glimpses. In some ways, it feels like a visit to the forgotten world of the past and in others like going to a parallel universe.

The increased attention on mental illness throughout the twentieth century can partly explain why we have become captivated by such oddball artists. I think, however, the attraction exists outside of the world of Outside art as well as within it. Naivety is not synonymous with mental illness or childishness necessarily, but rather a state of suspended reality, of a hopeless hope, and of nostalgic impossibility.

To our generation, "The 1960's" have crystallized in our minds as the penultimate decade of naivety. We look back, whether having been involved in the times or not, at an era of dashed hopes and abandoned revolutions. As we look back on it, we realize it was time looking back to previous times itself--the moving back to the land, the peasant frocks, and psychedelic renaissance fairs. Of course, there was much else--war and rebellion, racism and death--but this largely how the times have been encapsulated, or marketed, shall we say.

It is this aspect of 1960's counter-culture--the clean young hippy one--which has given contemporary music its many revivals. From

twee pop to neo-folk, psych-folk to freak-folk, numerous bands have inherited the paisley dressed cookyness and innocence of the summer of love. Devendra Banhart was perhaps the first artist to do so so outwardly, but many others have followed ensue. Take, for example, this 2009 music video from Best Coast:

While the video samples as its video from a 1967 French film (Les Demoiselles de Rochefort), the song itself is irresistibly charming in its naivety and whimsy. Like Johnston's, the lyrics are incredibly simple: "The world is lazy/ But you and me we're just crazy/ So when I'm with you I have fun" and repeats as such for most of the song. With its surf/ shoegazey (surf-gaze?) sound, you can't help but wonder which century this song sprang from.

As it is, movements in art and music look either forwards or backwards to influence their work. More often than not, however, they tend to look back. In doing so, it is impossible not to do so without some taint of nostalgia in your gaze. This is the nature of memory, after all; and as we often look to artists as the historians of the consciousness, it is natural and perhaps necessary that a certain naivety exists in their vision. It reminds us of our losses--of childhood and our pasts--and presents the world in a beautified simplicity. Given the chaos that is living, in whatever era it is, we look sometimes to artists like these for a vision of the world that is, not exact, but more humanly faulted; human in its imperfections and in its lapses of acknowledgment. It is the reality of the imagination that each of us carry with us, our own "sense of the world" as Stevens put it. We take pleasure in getting to know artists such as these for the uniqueness of this sense, both in how we are similar and how we are existentially estranged. At worst, their work is a cute form of escapism; at its best, it is the cleansing of the palette to a critical elitism.

Small Black/ Yoonha Park

2010-01-08T11:14:00.000-08:00

Small Black: Despicable Dogs by Yoonha Park on Vimeo.

I don't know anything about this band other than that they are from Brooklyn, as are hundreds of other bands out there. Regardless, I came across this video on the ButterxFace blog and think it must be one of the best music videos I've seen in a long time. Not only is the song pretty great, but the film itself is just a terrific portrait of the singer's uncle. I wish more bands made videos like this.

in a clown sonnet landscape

2010-01-04T22:09:00.000-08:00

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)

Clown and Circus Tent, 1958

Gelatin silver print. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,

LOST SONNET

John Ashbery

They grow up too fast
these days. Unassumingness
becomes unwieldy, the woods
a place to walk from briskly.
You say your cunning comportment
is artless? Well then so am I
for containing you, champ.
Your tracks are alive with new interest.

The trail always sees what’s up ahead,
which is resistance. No tooth
or star contradicts what is made
and hard to screw up. Wash the guest’s
feet, the aviator. Jack was his name
and we were like brothers, though we never knew each other.

Emily Bronte has been too busy to facebook

2010-01-03T17:15:00.000-08:00

from Status Updates

by Darren Wershler-Henry and Bill Kennedy
Originally published in Action, Yes Online Quarterly

Emily Brontë is glad she's having the chance to remember how much she likes driving on the highway with the radio blasting. Emily Brontë sends best wishes for your health and happiness in 2009. Emily Brontë is not skiing today. NO SNOW WTF. Emily Brontë is editing and deconstructing. Emily Brontë is not ready for another baby today. I can pencil something in for Nov. 1 if that's good for everyone else. Emily Brontë is closing the bar. Emily Brontë: at the Horseshoe turning over might have beens as if playing marbles with dark glass spheres. Emily Brontë is a closing argument. Emily Brontë is spending her Saturday marking CS315 papers - who needs a life? Emily Brontë is dating an extra on 'The Border.' Emily Brontë is meh. Emily Brontë 's chainsaw pony shirt design is a zazzle.com pick of the day. SWEEEET. Emily Brontë is remembering Rome and Mike and busting up her camera in Florence. Emily Brontë has certainly had better days than this one. Emily Brontë is essentially off the grid for another day or so. Emily Brontë secretly likes Gwen Steffani. Emily Brontë probably shouldn't be saying anything on updates at present. Emily Brontë: gold bikini. Emily Brontë is ready for things to stop getting worse. Emily Brontë is about to get on the plane with Sonia & Lalo,well perhaps some day if the plane ever leaves. Emily Brontë is having lunch for the third time this week with her daughter who is at Laurier for the Suzuki teacher institute ... Emily Brontë and her Playstation are overly friendly these days. Emily Brontë is finding a lake to swim.

Emily Brontë has an RSS feed. Subscribe now!

* * *

Last night I was reading about the use of "ready-mades" in modern and postmodern art and this poem seems to me like a natural contemporization of this concept. I have no idea if these "status updates" are borrowed or completely fabricated--does it matter?--and I would defend a poem like this in that I feel it does get at and address through irony a significant presence in our our everyday lives--that is, Facebook/ Twitter. Though, do I like the poem? Does it give pleasure, as Stevens would say? Well, no to the latter. I laughed a bit but really had to struggle to finish the thing. But then again, did it not succeed in a certain emulation of boredom, of triviality in the context of canonized literature?

The fact that these status updates (see the link above to read Lord Byron, Jim Morrson, Mary Shelley, and others) are not simply anonymous, but well-known (and dead) literary figures, adds to the tedium a cross-generational critical joke. The poem responds to the wristband-like idolatry--What Would Ezra Pound Do?--with an entirely contemporary answer: he'd log on to Facebook. Meanwhile, the joke is on all of us--on the hyper-communication of our digital age and on the canon itself, Joe the Plumber and the Oxford tweeds.

Is this the model to how poetry should adapt to the information age? Hopefully not. But like Duchamp's wheel on a stool or mustachioed Mona Lisa, it's a pretty good joke.

The Timid Herd

2010-01-03T15:26:00.000-08:00

They were afraid that it would shock the ears of the timid herd
foraging along the edges, so at the first sign of danger
they can quickly hide in the woods.

By the exercise of this power, withdrawn from the House,
the court might easily have prevailed
with the timid herd. Our violence, or any similarity we bear

to 'a beast of prey' that needs a moral disguise, but rather the timid
herd animal with its deep mediocrity. Most people are part
of the timid herd.

Through water-meads where dews tossed
flashing at thy feet and tossing flashed again;
when the timid herd, Constable, I think the timid
herd need a little more prodding!

Gee will do you doggie style!
gotta grin at dex's naturalistic no holds barred
existential avalanche on the timid herd.

The report has scared the timid herd from their repose.
Note if the timid herd shall trace their wonted path with heedless pace,
let me join the timid herd. Let me lay upon the land.
And Trample anything between me.

And lest we forget, it's God? not the timid herd?
we don't want to offend.

Youth is a scam.

2010-01-02T18:27:00.000-08:00

From the Samizdat (Robert Archambeau) blog:

"One problem with becoming a figure of major literature, though, is that the initially liberating articulation of social values can come to seem oppressive to later generations, for whom values have changed. I think this is why there's such a strong movement against Neruda-style grandeur in later Chilean poetry. I mean, Nicanor Parra invents anti-poetry as a kind of negation of the large-scale, sublime, majorness of Neruda's poetry. And Parra inspired Roberto Bolaño's work, with its stripped down style, and its refusal to articulate values for any group larger than the disillusioned, politically frustrated, economically marginal youth of Bolaño's generation.

I suppose Bolaño's minority, in the Deleuzean sense, is one reason for his current vogue among literary types in the U.S.A, where literary culture has long since become minor culture. I don't mean to discount other, more material factors, like the coincidence of timing for all those Bolaño translations, which allows publishers to roll out his works like hit singles. But there's certainly a minor-lit fascination going on in the Bolaño craze. Reading him is, after all, almost as good as reading someone sing the praises of local oddballs, misfits, and literary weirdos."

2010-01-02T18:18:00.000-08:00

Gordon Matta-Clark. Splitting (in Englewood), 1974.

And every day I waited for you on the hood of my car

2010-01-02T16:15:00.000-08:00

On a lighter note, The Drums have a pretty damn catchy and good EP out.

The first two tracks, I would say, are close to perfect masterpieces of pop.

Really, just adorable in all senses of the word.

If we can't live in peace, then let's die in peace.

2010-01-02T15:32:00.000-08:00

A recently discovered podcast: Tony Tost's America sent me on a late night tangent reading about the "revolutionary suicides" at Jonestown in 1978. The whole story seems like something, had it happened a decade earlier, that would have fit well as the epilogue to Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem. The 909 members of the "People's Temple," having followed a self-proclaimed socialist messiah, into drinking cyanide-spiked Kool-Aid. "The largest single loss of American civilian life in a non-natural disaster" until 9-11, so says wikipedia.

The fourth track of Tony Tost's podcast is an audio recording from the event. The rest of the show is worth listening to, regardless.

Valzhyna Mort

2010-01-01T21:05:00.000-08:00

The public library here in Bend has a strange selection of books. There, you can find eighteen copies of Mrs. Dalloway and think Virginia Woolf wrote nothing else. Someone there, whomever it is that controls the new book orders, seems to have a good taste for things. Along with John Ashbery's new book Planisphere and GC Waldrep's Archicembalo I grabbed Valzhyna Mort's new (and only?) book Factory of Tears. From Belarus, she's the only poet to publish a book translated from Belarusian in the US. She read here a few months ago at the Nature of Words literary festival which I skipped due to the ridiculous price of tickets. So far, I think the book is pretty incredible and question my decision. Here is a (seasonally appropriate) excerpt:

ON A STEAMER

at night from far away
the city looks like
a huge overturned christmas tree
decorated for a holiday
then thrown away
now
it's lying
with its branches scattered
and its lamps
still glittering
in the dark

A first entry

2010-01-01T19:58:00.000-08:00

It might seem a little preconceived to start a blog on a day like this. January 1st: the day I quit smoking, pledge to lose 20 pounds, learn Russian, go hang gliding. This is the month for promises and the abandoning of promises such as these. However, starting a blog was not on my New Year's resolution list today, nor was beginning it on a day as cute as this one.

I don't know what this blog will be. A depository for thoughts, clippings, and objects. The miscellanea of the mind. A place irrevocably intimate yet unavoidably obtuse. There is, of course, the question of audience--who are you, anyways?--and the desire/ need to read the thoughts of an unknown person; and beyond that, there is the question of purpose--why further clutter the inter-wilderness with yet another voice of no authority? Why create this in the first place? Why not keep the scribbling to the notebook? Well, I'm not going to feign an answer here, because this is the same ancient question that has yawningly probed the (quite ethereal) foundations of art, philosophy, and all other disciplines of non-marketable merits. Purpose, we are trained to think, must be translated into profit, profession, success. But not everything we do fits into such quantifiable cubicles. Communication, sociability, community, and--excuse the reductiveness of it, but--living are all elements outside of measurement, of gauging exact benefit and purpose, that tether us to our understanding of life in this world.

Art, too, has a hazy instruction manual. Stevens was known to say that he wrote poetry to help others live their lives. I am not claiming that sort of responsibility for myself, though I can see what he means. You will not starve, physically at least, without a gallery to go to, a book of stories, or a poem to read. However, the hunger that we feel--call it spiritual, existential, extraterrestrial, whatever--to discover ourselves more fully will never be sated. And without such food of the poetic sort to feed it, the mind will go on--like the bloated bellies of starving children--devouring itself and growing large in its cannibalized egotism.

In short, art helps me to live my life. To see out as well as in. In this respect, what I will be posting here will be less about myself and more of my findings from others. I encourage you: respond, hate, love, shrug. Something or other.

Hello out there.

the planet on the table

New Things on the Internet

10 Poems

Poem at Two

Imitation

The Fog Machine Calls Home

Table of Contents

What an Undertaker Does to His Family at Night

Two Readings

Waiting for Earl

The Order of Things

Sestina

When We Are Old The Rest Will Be Swimming

Since the Skull Cannot Smile in a Village Somewhere on a Map You Wouldn't Recognize

Going

[Praise These Erotic Skeletons Who]

Aubade

My Heart is Made of Crabgrass

"A good many dramatic situations begin with screaming."

Alejandra Pizarnik

Kate Beaton and the Gatsbys

The Fate of Birds in Cruel Times

BlazeVOX

Since the Skull is Always Smiling

Cobalt

Dear Lorca,

Sestina

The Motion Makes Me Last

A New Way of Saying Things

A Recipe for Winter

Juan Luis Martinez, almost.

Findings from Brooklyn

There was no place for it

Just go to bed, now.

Two Poems

Distances

Scapes

One of these things in this world

Tomaz Salamun

We are the sleeping fragments of his sky

Notes for an Essay on Naivety and Art

Small Black/ Yoonha Park

in a clown sonnet landscape

Emily Bronte has been too busy to facebook

The Timid Herd

Youth is a scam.

And every day I waited for you on the hood of my car

If we can't live in peace, then let's die in peace.

Valzhyna Mort

A first entry