SEPTEMBER 5
Koret Auditorium
7:00 p.m.
The de Young Poetry Series: Christian Bök and Kasey Mohammad
Author of the popular collections Eunoia and Crystallography, Christian Bök is a leading figure of Newlipo, which employs innovative concepts and procedures in the creation of poetry. He is also a brilliant voice talent who created artificial languages for Gene Roddenberry's Earth: The Final Conflict and author of a unique book of criticism, 'Pataphysics: The Poetics of an Imaginary Science.
With his poetry book Deer Head Nation, Kasey Mohammad inaugurated Flarf, a poetry movement that makes use of online search engines. His other works include A Thousand Devils and Breathalyzer. He co-edited Quentin Tarantino and Philosophy: How to Philosophize with a Pair of Pliers and a Blowtorch.
The de Young Poetry Series is curated by Paul Hoover, a poet, editor, and professor of creative writing at San Francisco State University. Major U.S. poets read from their works, followed by a book signing.
Sunday, August 31, 2008
JUST IN CASE YOU FORGOT!
NEW KASEY MOHAMMAD POEM! (LINK!)
Upbeat Hula-Hoop Castration
I'm feeling really positive
after being intellectually castrated
by a picture of Jesus riding a donkey
William Wordsworth's wife, aka "Penthouse Zee"
still poops her pants for blue whale fisting noises
always carrying a soft case full of stuff, usually
antipsychotic peepshow
nipple-lick immateriality
a fear Freud termed "girl squirt"
there's a 17-year-old who doesn't feel the dream
getting spanked with a hula hoop in Latin
also who are the nurses, their socialist past
fat gynecology at deciding
the proportioned Clay Aiken of an intricate name
human ashes suck
ROBERT DUNCAN!
If swarming poetry were seen as an expanse of war,
those dead, bleeding or infected there,
would be imaginary hurt or dead;
words imaginary wounds, gestures
of pretend grief, perhaps
beautiful men become real
all our soldiers here are heroes
expanding as voice expands
to body-dimensions of
expansive loss or sacrifice
And we may picture old cold in this place
as vastest cold of human waste,
unintelligible outpost of feeling,
no-man’s real land facing all alien self —
An Asia inscrutable as unrealized desire
awakening; a China patient mire
of otherness; an ideology, an enemy
necessity, an unyielding resisted
army; we may picture all
unrewarding meaningless engagement,
a Korea; expenses imagined
of blood, of order, of love, of ardure
— misty nothingness of profound intention —
sketchd out of metaphor from the actual stink.
Saturday, August 30, 2008
Watching Tinnitus
Fisherman dredging oysters, soaked lid of a coffin decayed
submerged skull, cracked ribs, giving an accurate age
“Gonna be an easy one,” black dress pants piled high
finding coffins floating away, denying the living lies
Storming back together, graveyards hit left unclaimed
unidentified sub-merged bodies, memorial’s shapeless shame
above ground bodies, broken tombs, Chodak fled Tibet
twisted Buddhist message spoke: non-violent, world-wide regret
Sympathy’s story perched above, tranquil tea plantations
old fame monk trimming debts, without refuge, without station
last surviving guerrilla fighters, symbol of peaceful resistance
linchpin operation of war: not peace unanswered, insistence
Those who would harm it publicly, aim a surprising stroke
thematic chortle inspires pro-test, white embarrassing yoke
policies injected to intervene, human wolf with devil’s face
international public relations war, sabotage, without a trace
SFMOMA...THUS FAR THE MOST IMPORTANT CONTEMPORARY ART EXHIBIT I HAVE SEEN...
| ||||||
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| Yves Netzhammer Furniture of Proportions, 2008 Preparatory sketch for drawing and animation to be included in mixed media and multi-channel color video installation with sound Courtesy the artist and Galerie Anita Beckers, Frankfurt, Germany © 2008 Yves Netzhammer |
STEPHANIE YOUNG!
6.3
Who's there?
I called out in the poem.
no really
who's there?
1.15
I'm getting there, in a million little ways, if that's the way you want it. Formerly attractive handtowels folded in an unattractive way. That pack of du Mauriers--a hard time.
Poor Thurber. Eyes almost torn off by the end of writing class. Everybody had him in their arms, everybody with the anxiety of strong guys. Me too. Let me hold a part in my hand.
I look up "comfort, held," related to holding, being held, mother, nurture:
1. vibrator
2. Tetris Challenge Hand-Held Game
3. a demonstration held against rape camps whose occupants sometimes as young as ten
years old were raped by seventy soldiers a day tortured and killed
(from PICTURE PALACE)
Friday, August 29, 2008
Fresh
He so fresh
Check his fresh threads
Fresh fruit for sale
Fresh from the dryer scent
Refreshing
Fresh baked bread
Fresh kill!
You look fresh faced,
Wanna skin it?
Freshly brewed coffee
Woooh, refreshments?
Doctor asked for fresh stool sample
If we so fresh
How do we know this?
Maybe we aren’t
I be promised to smell fresh
Taste fresh, look fresh
Be fresh
But what is fresh?
We haven’t known fresh
In two centuries
Holloway Starts Again!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
THE HOLLOWAY SERIES IN POETRY [http://holloway.english.berkeley.edu]
presents
FACULTY READING
This Thursday, September 4th
Reception at 6:00pm, Reading at 6:30
in the Maude Fife Room (Room 315 Wheeler Hall)
Featuring UC Berkeley Poet-Professors CS GISCOMBE, ROBERT HASS, LYN
HEJINIAN, GEOFFREY G. O¹BRIEN, and JOHN SHOPTAW
CS GISCOMBE¹s most recent book of poems, _Prairie Style_, has just been
published by Dalkey Archive Press.
[http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/catalog/show/564]
ROBERT HASS¹ most recent _Time and Materials_ (Ecco, 2007) won both the
National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.
[http://www.harpercollins.com/books/9780061349607/Time_and_Materials/index.a
spx]
LYN HEJINIAN¹s most recent publications are a collection of collaborations
with Jack Collom, _Situations, Sings_ (Adventures in Poetry, 2008), and
the forthcoming _Saga/Circus_ (Omnidawn, 2008).
GEOFFREY G. O¹BRIEN¹s most recent book of poems is _Green and Gray_
(California, 2007) [http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/10744.php]
JOHN SHOPTAW has recently written the libretto for Eric Sawyer¹s opera
_Our American Cousin_. [http://www.bmop.org/cd_detail.aspx?cid=4]
* The Fall 2008 Holloway Series: 9/4 Faculty Reading * 9/11 Tom Pickard *
10/14 Michael McClure * 10/30 DS Marriott * 11/12 Caroline Bergvall * All
readings at 6:30 pm in the Maude Fife Room *
...introduction to max and lucas...feedback is always appreciated...
PRE-SUBJECTILE: AN INTRODUCTION
Of all the words that have common usage. New "community" of the lexicon. Used in a certain way. With vocabulary, there's nothing wrong with "community". Syllables with common interests. It has been hijacked by us against their "communities". The method as advertisement. Those with axes. Permanently identifiable "communities". With the rest of us they are "the community". Described as "a community". Reference to the "community". What?
CONTRAST
Guest representative of "the community". No community.
Even those in "communities". No-nonsense.
Those whose lives are so prevalent. I'm beginning to feel left out. I thought I was if only I could.
Rapists and pedophiles.
The spokesman discovered that imaginary debate.
Mr. "the community" was immediately axed.
Simply sleepwalking stories to the job conducted with empirical labor.
A reaction to institute culture.
Pioneered by rejecting urges. An industry.
No reliance on.
“Losers.”
In other words, reject "the community"; join the world.
SPEECH CAVES PROPS, AND YOU LOVE IT?
Thursday, August 28, 2008
new purchases at SPD (necessary):
Stephanie Young's Picture Palace and Lytle Shaw's Cable Factory 20
and
Lytle Shaw's A Side of Closure
Lytle Shaw and Emille Clark: Flexagon
reading!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
SEPTEMBER 5
Koret Auditorium
7:00 p.m.
The de Young Poetry Series: Christian Bök and Kasey Mohammad
Author of the popular collections Eunoia and Crystallography, Christian Bök is a leading figure of Newlipo, which employs innovative concepts and procedures in the creation of poetry. He is also a brilliant voice talent who created artificial languages for Gene Roddenberry's Earth: The Final Conflict and author of a unique book of criticism, 'Pataphysics: The Poetics of an Imaginary Science.
With his poetry book Deer Head Nation, Kasey Mohammad inaugurated Flarf, a poetry movement that makes use of online search engines. His other works include A Thousand Devils and Breathalyzer. He co-edited Quentin Tarantino and Philosophy: How to Philosophize with a Pair of Pliers and a Blowtorch.
The de Young Poetry Series is curated by Paul Hoover, a poet, editor, and professor of creative writing at San Francisco State University. Major U.S. poets read from their works, followed by a book signing.
JOSHUA CLOVER'S BLOG:
August 27, 2008
"the new phone books are here"/"it's all happening"
Both Stephanie Young's Picture Palace and Kevin Killian's Action Kylie have arrived from their Canadian hibernation and are now available through Small Press Distribution. Now there is more good poetry in the world. Stay tuned for a special announcement about a release party and reading coming this fall!
LINH DINH...NEW POEM!
Buy Milk
On our fridge,My wife stuck:
The trouble with women is that
They get excited about nothing
And then they marry the prick.
* WHAT TO DO TODAY *
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jive coffee , faux tea &
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no fucking, really, since
_____christmas_______
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(of 2001)____________
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__________free-ranging
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oh__________forget it_
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learn Spanish, Dutch or
_____Japanese_______
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___________eggs_____
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Thus Spake Zarathustra
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ARCHIGRAM
ARCHITECTURE REVIEW; From the 60's, Paper Dreams
That Reflect the Modern City, by Herbert Muschamp,
The New York Times
ARCHIGRAM: Welcome To New York, by William Menking
Peter Cook, interview
JIM ROCHE FOR THE DAY cont. ! (THANK YOU RYAN FOR REMINDING ME OF ROCHE!"
In the 1970s, Jim Roche, a performance artist from the deep South, made his way into the New York artworld and began doing pieces in galleries where he'd go into a trance-like state and channel redneck characters from his home turf:
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Jim Roche For the Day
http://ubu.artmob.ca/sound/roche_jim/Roche-Jim_Learning-To-Count_04_Bubble-Blower.mp3
or
http://jim-roche-bubble-blower-mp3-download.kohit.net/_/16281
We Are The Poets
why do i
keep dating poets
they’re lazy with
everything but words
their work inspires
riots and change
but where are the riots
and change in the bedroom
in the family or politically
i used to think
it was just me
that i was the source
of their insolent
complacent deportment
ha ha ha No!
mental carpenters
that construct only
what is needed inside
try sleeping
next to a limp dick
a dry vagina
a beautifully
constructed mind
speak to them of
emotional issues
and you’ll know what
i’m talking about
LINH DINH!
I hate to admit this, brother, but there are times
When I'm eating fried chicken
When I think about nothing else but eating fried chicken,
When I utterly forget about my family, honor and country,
The various blood debts you owe me,
My past humiliations and my future crimes—
Everything, in short, but the crispy skin on my fried chicken.
But I'm not altogether evil, there are also times
When I will refuse to lick or swallow anything
That's not generally available to mankind.
(Which is, when you think about it, absolutely nothing at all.)
And no doubt that's why apples can cause riots,
And meat brings humiliation,
And each gasp of air
Will fill one's lungs with gun powder and smoke.
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
LYN HEJINIAN FOR THE NIGHT!
Lyn Hejinian
from Oxota: A Short Russian Novel
Chapter 7
One person believes in nothing and another dislikes poetry
They don't present equal dangers to society
The lowness of the light stole the field from its shadows
An old babushka on the ice atop the ridge of snow packed
beside the street
In deed and word
She was hissing
And a pedestrian screaming, what are you doing up there, you
stupid old woman
The shouting samaritan jerked the granny to safety
She was hissing like a street cat, not snakily
An engine, an omen of weddings
An habitual association with daily aesthetic impressions
An omen of the love of art and its social functioning
An orb standing for an orbit
The old woman still standing in the street
Monday, August 25, 2008
----^v^---------^v--------------^v---v^-v---
Insistence that oil sprays through hearts
interests me as much as the next
Hear it flow even follow valvular activity
the severity of impact mild in medical terms
------------^V-----------------v^----v^-----
System pumps weaker as the oil
spreads failure not an option
Asthmatics be cautious
stimulatory overload treatment unknown
-------^v--------v^-----------------------^W
As measurements calm more widely
bagged vessels, veins, capillaries
Controllable elevation strikes 11 of 17
menstruating women contact doctors
----v----^v---------------^--------v^-------
Insistence remains less calculated
aiming surgical procedures to third worlds
AHA withholds records/statistics
pending further study
-----v^----^v-----------v--------------w^---
Patients seem at ease awaiting this
However advocates pose chins upward tilted
Diameters lube DUB lub-Dub open
close practice holds patient’s hearts still
------v--^--------v^---------v^---------M___
____________________________________________
chelsey minnis...publishers weekly...and bill knott...
From Publishers Weekly
Juvenile mockery of poetry and the American poetry establishment, as well as excited reverence for both, are the themes of Minnis's second collection. Sixty-eight prose Prefaces open the book, chastising career-minded poets (You should not think of getting a job with your poetry.../ .../ Poetry careers are a bad business) while spelling out her own manifesto: I want to write a poem because I don't feel very boring! In the middle are nine extended examples of the kind of lyric that filled Minnis's debut, Zirconia, in which dots, periods or ellipses sprawl across the page, interrupted by lyric outbursts: if you will promise....... to be a young girl.../ ......... I will give you a moustache. Many, most even, may find these dots distracting or annoying, though it's interesting to ponder their meaning. The book closes with alternately compelling and silly prose and verse pieces, including an anti-résumé: 1996/ No car.// Apply for no teaching jobs. Don't publish book. Petulant, clever, sometimes funny, sometimes irritatingly flippant, Minnis's poems will inspire questions as to whether this work qualifies as poetry at all, though some readers—fans of, say, Bill Knott, at his silliest—may find much to like. (Sept.)
CHELSEY MINNIS WILL FUCK YOU UP: FOR TODAY!
PREFACE 44
I have not yet decided to be happy
But I have decided to write poems...
I do not like to see a loveless thing
But I can write an unloving word...
If you promise not to cry like a little girl I will write you a poem...
Preface 23
If someone tells me I have to read so-and-so then I usually don't...
I don't want to criticize anyone in poetry! I don't want to break apart their
rocking chairs etc...
I just want to be a sucker too...
Bay Readings:
Bay Area Poetry Marathon 2008, curated by Donna de la Perriere and Joseph Lease, presents this last of three summer readings featuring Edward Foster, Matthew Zapruder, Elizabeth Robinson, Jennifer Scappettone, Cynthia Sailers, Sara Larsen, Michael Nicoloff, Myron Hardy, The Lab, 2948 16th Street, at Capp, SF, one block from Mission BART, $3-$15 sliding scale, 7:00-9:00 (www.myspace.com/bayareapoetrymarathon)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Canessa Park Poetry Series presents The Etherdome/Woodland Chapbook Party and Reading, hosted by Colleen Lookingbill, Elizabeth Robinson, and Jamie Robles, Canessa Gallery, 708 Montgomery Street, SF, 3:00
Evelyn Avenue Reading Series
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sunday, August 24, 2008, beginning at 2pm.
632 Evelyn Ave., Albany, CA 94706
Susan Gevirtz and Steve Dickison
-------------------------------------------------------------------
CANESSA GALLERY READING SERIES
curated by erica lewis
Friday, August 29, 2008
Featuring the works of Lara Durback, Geof Huth, and Truong Tran
----------------------------------------
SEPT 11 UNDERGROUND AMERICA narratives of undocumented lives
SEPT 17 PHILIP LAMANTIA TRIBUTE
SEPT 18 RIGOBERTO GONZÁLEZ and BHANU KAPIL
OCT 2 NONA CASPERS and COOLEY WINDSOR
OCT 9 GENNY LIM with FRANCIS WONG and OSCAR PENARANDA
40th anniversary SFSU student strikes
OCT 10-11-12 OTHER WORDS international poetry festival
with LI LI (Sweden) GENNY LIM (San Francisco)
INGVILD BURKEY (Norway) and others
OCT 23 and OCT 26 NATHANIEL TARN 80th birthday celebration
OCT 30 ALBERT FLYNN DeSILVER
and MAXINE CHERNOFF
NOV 20 ISABELLE GARRON with SARAH RIGGS
and ELENI SIKELIANOS
DEC 4 FANNY HOWE
Sunday, August 24, 2008
SHARON MESMER FOR THE DAY! FOR THE DAY! FOR THE DAY! FOUR THE DAY!
Squid Versus Assclown
Arthur Treacher grabs my assclown
Assclown grabs my squid
Squid signs me up for the NOW Action Alert list
NOW Action Alert list adds ice cream to my Jäger bomb
Jäger bomb waits patiently to turn into a little boy
Little boy shoots a rather alarming streak of squid in the nose of Jesus
Nose of Jesus thinks 9/11 was a comedy about Afghanistan
Afghanistan is evidence that Bush hates black people
Black people likely hold political views about huge bat wings
Huge bat wings can’t sit still in the chair, do any work, or even hold my pee
My pee will whoop you like it whoops everything else
Everything else has a nice “cottage cheese butt” equal to a good “assclown”
Assclown will “find God”
God will “find squid”
Squid versus Assclown
Don’t hold your breath
Saturday, August 23, 2008
KIT ROBINSON FOR THE DAY!
Sweetness
Blue jeans and black cotton pullover
give the skin a sweetness powered up
from inside, a nostalgic glow and current
Sunday dazzle, as Pepsi and generic
Tylenol she brings him fashion a scrim
across blankness, the harmonic bolster
placed fair beneath head in the shape
of a hay bale. Hair cropped shift
and nuzzle in the buzz garden flyway,
a seam-blent parallel sound fray empties
the power mower mention in the mental
pink section. Hot to say, the stretched-
out use of language in these lanes
approximates the happy and wonderful feeling
of being alone on stage, making up a mess
of greens for the family, always expected
home at any moment. Linking them, the separations
bend plausibly in light, and we can see into
by far the deepest afternoon shade, sun
on the backs of our necks, summarily chatting
and swatting away the cares that troubled you.
Friday, August 22, 2008
No More Strays
defenestrate open air ball
detail widen distance
severed botanical
war correspondents
journal from vibra
once whole penknife
text cut blood cut egg
blood warf blue
mistress missed
halloween
children
dressed like
biggie smalls
they invade dance
halls to reclaim music
and scene grandfathered
by allowance tough and tan
as hinds students fear
geometry physics begs
no more strays
no more strays
no more strays
updaters:
Kareem Estefan's Blog:
Five Shows on PennSound
Mike Young's Blog:Magic Helicopter Press
ryan call press release
Brooklyn's Blog:
a pretty good name?
JOSHUA CLOVER'S BLOG:increasingly shorter sunday, or: good question
LINH DINH LINH DINH LINH DINH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!PENNSOUND:
Two New Lectures By Robert Duncan
Ceptuetics Radio: 5 New Episodes
K. SILEM MOHAMMAD'S BLOG:
100 Best-Loved Poems: William Shakespeare, Sonnet LXXIII
KEVIN DAVIES FOR THE DAY!
[from The One-Eyed Seller of Garlic]
31.
Yet even as we grope
each other in this small stall another
language dies
And miniaturization proceeds
"apace"—let me show you what I mean
We don't need
names we have gadgets
And a good fifteen minutes
before anyone comments on our absence
Relax I've got you—that's just
the blood
rushing to your head
And I have been here before, okay
not here, but here, with others
But never
you mind
Lack of comfortable space
is the whole point
Later
I want you to strangle me and drag
me to a river
That leads ultimately to the open sea
And to sing
at the launch of the subsequent bookwork
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
INTRODUCTION BY LYTLE SHAW:
Thursday, August 21, 2008
updates:
lihn dinh linh dinh linh dinh!!!!!
SPD TODAY!:
ZYZZYVA to live on!
Good Friday: The Death of Irish Republicanism by Anthony McIntyre (Ausubo Press)
A Chagall and a Tree Leaf by Shuntaro Tanikawa, translated from the Japanese by William I. Elliott and Kazuo Kawamura (Katydid Books)
Famous Suicides of the Japanese Empire by David Mura (Coffee House Press)
American Fugue by Alexis Stamatis (Etruscan Press)
Airs & Voices by Paula Bonnell (BkMk Press)
Mourning Sickness: Stories and Poems about Miscarriage, Stillbirth, and Infant Loss edited by Missy Martin & Jesse Loren (Omni Arts)
The Sacrificial Circumcision of the Bronx by Arthur Nersesian (Akashic Books)
The Swing Voter of Staten Island by Arthur Nersesian (Akashic Books)
Rhinoceros by Kevin Ducey (Copper Canyon Press)
JACKSON MAC LOW FOR THE DAY!
1ST LIGHT POEM: FOR IRIS -- 10 JUNE 1962
The light of a student-lamp
sapphire light
shimmer
the light of a smoking-lamp
Light from the Magellanic Clouds
the light of a Nernst lamp
the light of a naphtha-lamp
light from meteorites
Evanescent light
ether
the light of an electric lamp
extra light
Citrine light
kineographic light
the light of a Kitson lamp
kindly light
Ice light
irradiation
ignition
altar light
The light of a spotlight
a sunbeam
sunrise
solar light
Mustard-oil light
maroon light
the light of a magnesium flare
light from a meteor
Evanescent light
ether
light from an electric lamp
an extra light
Light from a student-lamp
sapphire light
a shimmer
smoking-lamp light
Ordinary light
orgone lumination
light from a lamp burning olive oil
opal light
Actinism
atom-bomb light
the light of an alcohol lamp
the light of a lamp burning anda-oil
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
a gem
THE MUSIC CREPT BY US
-Leonard Cohen
I would like to remind
the management
that the drinks are watered
and the hat-check girl
has syphilis
and the band is composed
of former SS monsters
However since it is
New Year's Eve
and I have lip cancer
I will place my
paper hat on my
concussion and dance
updaters:
DODIE BELLAMY FOR THE DAY!
"You easily extracted my juices, I knew you would, jerking off a sub-stratum of matter. You’re so refined. You appear to belong to a physical body when you hold and suck my cock. Your breasts. I like making you horny, like to run my hands over your pussy, spirits moving up and down my arms and shoulders, spirits returning to stimulate us and make us amorphous or polymorphous. Down my belly to my clit, I look like a child, your touch, the substance was soft and though you were sleeping analysis revealed the presence of salt and breasts. I love it when you suck my nipple, I love telling you that with my cock, massing this mysterious substance along your clit, on the tip of your tongue. I love sodium, potassium, water, chlorine, albumen, and you, cocksucker. I love you so fucking much, corpuscles, the red sticky matter described as your cunt, I love the controlled urge, variation on a theme, generated by surviving the phone. I made breakfast and thought I must possess you very much. I lay on the couch before I go to bed, spent and possessed by a living person, your cock and my cunt and languages made of phantasms of themselves. Those clothes are off before you know it, psychics say I must have your underwear, that I must place myself in a state with your tits swaying in rhythm with my cock. A dripping mouthful waiting forever for you, bouncing up, no end to the horizon, the necessary cock dipped to the tip, I’ll fill your mouth with everything, thrust my cock deep into your yellow horn. No pilgrims. I’m moving through to where my cock is up you time after time, I’ve got my arms around you, I’ve got this cock tip in you for the first time, we’re approaching new lands, everybody can see it, the lips of your cunt will scorch the soles of our feet. A causeway of a rock, the cock is to the man a psalm or song, I grown limbs so I can stand, though my face is on that cross on the hill, the equivalent of a hard-on all morning. Language is sand. Erect, I’m filling you with silver, saying you be a good girl. We’ll take care of your tongue, which has turned indigo from sucking my fingers. I’ve never ever given anybody this, no way, the throat drops and my tongue falls into your asshole, your chest heaving yellow and white. Write to me again so I can spurt onto your breasts, alone in winter, black and white, dripping like moss in a rain forest. I’ve still got this red vivid tilt. My asshole turned it into a large clit and you humped it, I’ve bled on you since the circle began. My thoughts flutter down your purple neck and that gives me a hard-on. Your hips hugged against my belly, be inert, be happy, I just want to feel you with both feet overhead, all my fight waits to fuck your swollen pink and white spaces, to jostle you around gently until you turn blue. I kiss your finger and touch the head of your cock, you’re wild now, invisible."
(from Cunt-Ups)
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
from Max and Lucas (Part Two: 16 Years)...
III.
What she crafts is of modest import.
Being what of whiteness can provide.
Evaluate, the cavernous won’t tolerate supplementary endowments.
The pump rotting in the fenced neighborhood.
Adjectives like cocks in winter bawl.
Messiahs jump out of idioms.
Idiots localize as a consequence of NASA photography.
Photos of death repeat the message:
spring
crates
dosed prying no adoration everyplace
You are an object in the box that peeks out of the dust-ground like weasels after a mouthful of foam.
... some words from fucking CHARLES BERNSTEIN ... LISTEN UP! ...
When we—the poets around L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E—were first centering on non-narrative and non-voice-centered paradigms, we were often accused of being too intellectual, that is to say, not emotional enough—too difficult, too complex, and also too theoretical. Now all those epithets are OK by me; I think it’s best to take on their negativity, to wear such stigmas as badges of honor. Indeed, they suggest the problem with the kind of poetic practice that was dominant, and still is, in the United States. In the 1970s, to be directly expressive, lyric as they like to call it, in free verse, was the sine qua non of poetry. That remains the dominant theory of poetry and it is far too complacent, too dogmatic, a theory for my taste. It’s not that “theory” prescribes the alternative but rather poetry and poetics both emerge out of a conflict with a given state of affairs. Poetry and poetics, theory and practice, are interrelated. Poetics is an extension of the practice of poetry, and poetry is an extension of thinking with the poem and also the reflection of poetics.
Let me introduce Walter Benjamin here, as a good example of multipolar, rather than linear, thinking. Benjamin’s form of reflective writing suggests a poetics of multiple layers or figures. A line of thought may seem to go off into one direction then drops back to follow another trajectory, only this new direction is not a non sequitur but rather echoes or refracts both the antecedent motifs and—this is the uncanny part—the eventual ones. I mean this as a way of rethinking what is often called fragmentation or disjunction. Think of fragments not as discontinuous but as overlays, pleats, folds: a chordal poetics in which synchronic notes meld into diachronic tones. You find this in the Arcade Project as well as in Benjamin’s early essays: an openness to the multiplicity of connection that exhibits not discontinuity but a verbal and paraverbal echoing between interrelated motifs that, on a rational level, do not, at first, seem related. Yet, as you go into details, as you begin to listen to the essay as would a piece of music, you begin to register how intricately everything is connected.
Theory is as theory does. If I prefer to write poems that are exploratory and intuitive, still there is always a great deal of conceptualizing that leads up to any intuition. Intuition can be informed and it can also be practiced (ars de faire). Then again, in writing poetry and poetics, I resist what I understand or what I can formulate too well. So theories are a little bit like crutches, to be tossed off the moment you are able to walk, and yet a comfort in times of stress. I’m trying to go through a process of connections as I’m moving along in a poem (or even in answer to your questions): it’s much messier than if it were the product of a theory (thinking of theory as a rationalized outcome of reflection and research). At the same time, I’m interested in talking about the process; it seems to me important for poetry not to be just on an emotional sleeve (“I’m a poet, I’m emotional, I’m writing about my feelings.”). The art of poetry is just as much the navigation as the boat. Which is why it’s important not to valorize one side or the other, poetry or poetics. I leave theory to those far more confident than we who stumble from point to point, finding ourselves in the blank spaces in between.
One medium of culture, one genre of writing, cannot, in and of itself, be secondary to any other. Journalism, for example, is not secondary to literature. As social forms, both have their limitations and possibilities. But in our time, the point that needs making is that a good poem is just as good as a popular movie. Since the mass scale of journalism and movies and pop music undermine the criteria of evaluation in our culture, it’s important to emphasize that a singular value of poetry is the freedom, complexity, and depth that derives from its small scale, the fact that it has few readers, that it is difficult to access, that it’s not a mass art form. The Library of Congress just announced that our new U.S. Poet Laureate “writes of universal themes in an accessible manner.” That sounds like an ad for soap. I’d rather our poet laureate wrote of particular themes in a complex manner; but then we have a President, selected by a minority of the voters with the help of a anti-democratic Supreme Court, that impugns the value of “nuance” in foreign policy. Within our culture we need, desperately need, small, difficult, rebarbative art forms. Poetry can do many things with language that can’t be done with conventional story-telling. And, as William Carlos Williams says, people die, every day, for the lack of what is found there.
Lost and found and lost again.
Itself counts three polysyllabic short sounds
dependent reality contains many strictures
ultimate form unknowable after existence
unknown nature inherently unknown
necessarily unknowable not particularly
agnostic metaphysical theology
Painting his lifetime affections combined
claiming painterly style today
artists’ genuine understanding of truth
value claims principles getting mentioned
imagist theoreticians canonize order
events and original images imply unbelief
Venerable posts abandoned reposed
designated sects innovate public harness
racing colts profess support for abortion
castrated speculative theories promote self-identity
useless research sweeps across meaning
death, aloneness, freedom, and optimism emerge
Period of recovery pessimistic losses mount
who works at Dunkin’ Donuts
who’s sister used to date a lounge singer
traditional clues subsequently bend lower
the comic tale: eat my face gelding freedom
negative repercussions live down the street
Imaginative spelling errors form a surprising place
ridiculously bad precedents are the problem
constitution righting support coming constantly
encourage dangerous ways to address arguing
trying to counter the intuitive
event publicity and momentum are central
updaters:
... JACK SPICER ... SPICER, JACK ...
K. SILEM MOHAMMAD FOR THE DAY!
Amerika was built on the slaughter of a people
specifically during puritan America where
some people simply became giants
look into a map and see people waving
cut away everything that doesn’t look like
penis envy people in pink tutus
space shuttle Tylenol and old walrus
I hate it when people stick a flag on their car
that had the total IQ of monkey
and drive around thinking ohh wait she is me
the missing link a guy bites people
he whose tusks of gold figure in
terrorism exit strategy from Afghanistan
using three hookers and a show
of weakness from people in suits
stood here and mumbled in my face
my name is Sammy Small fuck’em all
pounded his chest and said fuck’em cold
fuck’em young fuck’em old
fuckin’ fine fuck’em all
fuck’em all but nine
sweep up the bull and let in the people
crowd starts to scream fuck’em up fuck’em up
the hell let them fuck you up get the shit out
of them and fuck’em all up what
the fuck is wrong with you people
ye Jacobites by name
--------------------------------------------------------------
"The best theoretical concept I can situate the Flarf collage process in relation to is Charles Bernstein’s “dysraphism,” which he glosses in a note to his poem of the same name in The Sophist:
"Dysraphism is a word used by specialists in congenital disease to mean a dysfunctional fusion of embryonic parts—a birth defect.... Raph literally means “seam,” so dysraphism is mis-seaming—a prosodic device!"
I don’t think I was actually thinking of Bernstein’s concept when I wrote these poems, but the idea of things wrongly sutured together, like the pathos of a badly taxidermied funny animal or a world falling to pieces being stacked back up in clumsily re-ordered columns, was there."
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Monday, August 18, 2008
... watched ...
PLOP REVIEW COMING SOON!
EASILY THE GREATEST ROAD MOVIE I HAVE EVER SEEN!
SEE IT IF YOU CARE ABOUT FILM!
HOLY SHIT!
Here (Mute Succumbing to Stray Horse) 2nd Draft
Blistering ships yearning my teenage CAT scan
Mistering bound coagulate, akin to some diamond era of the 20s
Pensive trail stitch staggered young now
Record it
Stifling towers, a dozen mechanics' fingers rainbow, gray now towards tarnished silver
King of the accidental mulatto baby, grab bag garbage embargo
Tarmac wreck you straight into aversion
Towards the learning of guard rails*' (*apostrophe ceiling comma). Doctors call twin disease plagiarizing.
Plaster mold of Scotch drinker gutter crib, ask for it, gears well in movement.
It's like religion, writing, thinking: As sensitive as silk micro-hush, borrowed Amber Alert hype
Hold on stray hero, the fade is out this year
Our graded station widdled, half home invasion said horizon
Mindfully buries here memories in the stack of Faye Dunaway bodies
Str8 from SuperMax flarf?
Light up your life:
particularly as realized
tonight romantic sterling
silver jurisdictions ancient
modern most serious crime
following day intended
continue working
later on fainted
model was working
called for help
put to bed
never left it again
The Great Anticipation:
position held 5,000 men
49 cannons hidden
places attackers view
silently gazed the flower
treaty was signed
hair was removed
tanners bate material
pounding dung into skin
soaking skin in animal brains
Greek is highly inflected:
PCP quickly absorbed
gastrointestinal tract ingestion
languages do
liberal America conservative America
great deal of public wealth
United States of America
now youngest veterans
formed by clicking different
areas of picture protects
society confining offenders
controlled environments
Hottie Hunting, a freaking phenomenon:
shank tank and Kong block
Lightning Bolt wants golds
ghosts
Billy the Kid
Pat Garrett
John Chisum
even Pancho Villa
titular creatures franchise special
transmission outside scriptures
Sleepy Gun
Oh chubby metaphor, you tiny, witty, whiny coffee table, wake up!
Oh, embarrassed thermos, you contain life and coffee? Wake me!
Sleep to wake to sleep to wake to sleep, go to sleep.
Their people teach math to math. Teach tech to tech together.
I’ve seen them gather in Rapist Hallow: several hundred buried eyes, fluid smoke and surprise.
Those people tell us of sincere reproach.
The people speak of Gods: Jerkules and Aphrodisiacs climb mountains, buy cigars.
This “Others”, others, Others, others, Otters, others, Others’ Otoliths clamp.
Dream catcher, pigeon feather, reservation mile marker, and other useful tribal memorabilia teach us of life. Teach us of us of us of us and so forth.
Dad says nothing bad ever happens to us. But collectively, shit happens. A shit storm brought about by shitty rain dances. I think.
my little review on GOODREADS for Hejinian's The Beginner...
What does Wittgenstein's work look like without the naive philistinism and the moral dogmatism? What does Gertrude Stein's work look like without the embedded permutation and an unrestrained mission against closure that removes itself from the restraint of 19th century realism? Something like Lyn Hejinian's oeuvre over the years? No! Hejinian's The Beginner is the full encapsulation of these strains but it is also something else entirely:
The beginner pursues.
Impatient, in preparation, in anticipation
of the unrealized--the beginner looks around.
Things lowering and slow, things fast and
high--spiders, nouns--they pursue tracks they
have themselves made.
You have to see all that's around you in order
to work with the spider.
If someone referred to by a personal pronoun
feels emotions to great to continue, the pronoun
will come to refer instead to a rock, a natural thing.
The rock has an obscure beginning in it the
missing person waits.
Rocks are pried out of walls and parried into
openings, they are never finally still.
Finality may be added, but the whole story is
never known and why? because it never occurs.
Empathies remain.
My identity is indistinct.
Hejinian is in a constant state of writing an ars poetica and The Beginner is the place place to begin. Everyone should own this book. Everyone should begin with this work. The beginning is beginning right there and right here and over there. The Beginner is a shovel in the resonating skull scooping reindeer off the roofs while giving wings to the fruit under your car seat!
blogs, etc. :
SILLIMAN'S BLOG:
The Positions Colloquium schedule
Talking with Lydia Davis
The place of Mahmoud Darwish
(includes a last poem)
White Heat –
Emily Dickinson & Thomas Higginson
Steve McCaffery, Bob Perelman, Charles Bernstein:
What’s the Word?
(MP3)
Bob Dylan’s book of poems
Kafka & porn?
Why are movies about
Andy Warhol
always so bad?
DENISE LOW'S BLOG:
AD ASTRA POETRY PROJECT #20
PHILIP MILLER (1943 - )
ALEX'S BLOG:
Mike Young: Folk-Morrisey
A great new story / essay by Mike Young at Nerve.DODIE BELLAMY'S BLOG:
A Gauge of Reality
WHY WE CONTINUE TO LOVE NADA GORDON:McCall's 5591
Out of this extraordinary cotton print, purchased in Shimo-Kitazawa in May:
LINH DINH LINH DINH LINH DINH...
Abraham Lincoln #3
... berman ... candy ... Louis Zukofsky ... top ten ...
"When you were writing this record and you were switching guitars, was that a big mindset shift for you?
DavidBerman: Yeah. I would say after the songs got kind of started up and had a direction or something, I'll use whatever to put me in the mood, whatever that means, whether that means reading. Like when I'm writing a song, I'll read certain books around that subject, especially if I'm stuck.
Like I was really stuck with candy, and I read like four books about candy. There really aren't any great books about candy."
-----------------------
"it's how I imagined a poet like [Louis] Zukofsky working, having examined each word and putting each word on trial and made it pass. So I kind of felt it was very old-fashioned. Growing up and making art sort of slapdash is sort of an artistic position that also seemed somehow virtuous in 1980 or 1990 with postmodernism. You're thinking, "Well, I really like this not only because it's really interesting and its critique is unbelievably enjoyable, but it takes the privileging of craft away." When art is about craftsmanship, then guys like me don't make it as artists."
---------------------
"The funny thing is, there's this book that I have right now. It's this big cheap coffee table book I got at Barnes & Noble that's called The Big Top Ten Book. It's like the Guinness Book of World Records but put in the form of top ten lists. It's like the top ten glaciers, the top ten industrial disasters. I really love that, but it kind of brings it really down to mountains and valleys, and-- Where's that dumb top ten book? Well, forget it.-- but it's my number one this season."
Sunday, August 17, 2008
added to GOODREADS:
I ADDED THESE BOOK COVER IMAGES (and some ISBN numbers) TO THE GOODREADS SITE:
(Dodie Bellamy's Academonia, Aaron Kunin's The Mandarin, Scott Bentley's The Occasional Tables and Gary Sullivan's PPL IN A DEPOT)
IF YOU HAVE READ ANY OF THESE BOOKS WRITE A REVIEW ON GOODREADS...IF YOU ARE NOT A MEMBER IT IS EASY TO BECOME ONE AND IT IS DEFINITELY WORTH IT:
GOODREADS LINK
... redone ...
BLOG UPDATE...
SILLIMAN'S BLOG:
My turn on Joe Milford’s internet radio show...
K. Silem Reviews:
The Obscure Object of Desire
Mike Young's Blog:
see chelsea, i told you i would
CLAY BANES
LINH DINH
ALEX'S BLOG:
How Spain Begins To Hum Against You
...ironic?
DODIE BELLAMY'S BLOG:Lawrence's Myspace Page
Charles Bernstein's Web Log:Deborah Karpel, soprano
Nathan Resika, bass
Leandra Ramm, mezzo-soprano
Ishmael Wallace, piano
Go to blog web site to see this video.
New EPC author pages
Donato Mancini
rob mclenanan
Gustave Morin
A couple more newspaper reviews of
OEI selected poems & essays
De svåra dikterna anfaller, eller Högtspel i tropik-erna:
Dikter, essäer, samtal i urval, översättning & montage
Klassekampen (Norway)
August 9, 2008
Svenska Dagbladet
August 12, 2008
What's the Word?
2003 MLA Radio Program in which I am featured along with Steve McCaffery, Bob Perelman
(29:11): 
mp3
PoemTalk #9: John Ashbery's "Crossroads in the Past"
UBU WEB:
Bernard Heidsieck Interview (2008) [PDF]
... work in process being processed (part I redux) ...
from MAX AND LUCAS: POST-HUMAN POETRY
PART TWO: 16 years
I.
Discovering Braille by instinctual catharsis you brought the succession opportunity through a teaching of ballet discovered anthropocentrically but disapprovingly like variable octants following the dribble shake contention.
No discovery by cellular insistence so this won’t be a good day to enlighten.
Let the pre-cedent volley occasion; let the pre-cedent be “expressed perceptibly through the senses”; let the pre-cedent use a rock sling in its environs; let the pre-cedent if without the pre-cedent become as dispensable as a dot.
Untaken iniquitous verse will undo itself.
No more commemorative handshakes for indicators.
Small coins float on scull heave.
Low objects are arcane.
The primary inability advantage of male cannot be “notional imprudence.”
Great work when one decided to stop working.
Immense regard when one ignored vantage.
I’m taking them…
Pretending it‘s Halloween.
II.
You’re earlier but tart when the trees align themselves with other hanging substances like Vitruvian modulations and unsullied reservoirs:
He calls the pools of hands second-order gestures.
We can’t natter about conversation at a summit of narrative.
You will find a vagina-payroll delineated at the house.
Maybe this demiurge is third-order vantage, but you are rightly distrustful.
Take attitudes.
Take them fatally.
... text that we should all heed ...
from The Beginner by Lyn Hejinian
The beginner pursues.
Impatient, in preparation, in anticipation
of the unrealized--the beginner looks around.
Things lowering and slow, things fast and
high--spiders, nouns--they pursue tracks they
have themselves made.
You have to see all that's around you in order
to work with the spider.
If someone referred to by a personal pronoun
feels emotions to great to continue, the pronoun
will come to refer instead to a rock, a natural thing.
The rock has an obscure beginning in it the
missing person waits.
Rocks are pried out of walls and parried into
openings, they are never finally still.
Finality may be added, but the whole story is
never known and why? because it never occurs.
Empathies remain.
My identity is indistinct.
Town Out of Time of Out of Time
I'm completely out, all out.
Get out. Get out more often. Get out of town.
Stay out of trouble. Stay out of jail.
Get lost, get me?
Outta my way! That's out of the way. Out of reach.
Reach out.
They're down and out, out on their ass, all out of luck.
Out reach programs reach the masses.
Stand out in the crowd. Stand out now.
Cute outfit, too bad he's an outsider.
Cut it out. You're out of line, go play outside.
___________________________________________
1 I like her, but she doesn't put out.
2 Yeah, she's a total out put. How do you put up with it?
1 I had to outsource.
2 Doesn't that leave you out of breath?
1 Yeah, but I'm an outlaw...
2 Outstanding!
1 Isn't it far out?
2 It is. You're out of control!
1 It's like an out of body experience.
2 I wish I could check it out.
1 Get out from under there.
___________________________________________
To apply, fill out this application: He really filled out nicely.
Get outta the car and buy an outboard motor.
That's no outline, is it? That's more of a corporate buyout.
Mike Tyson's PUNCHOUT.
All out of quarters?
Outie 5000.
Lights out.
Inlaws, no outlaws. Spread out!
Out of the office, living outside of said means.
Always out to lunch, outlandish.
Stay out of my life
Make out time
Speaking of Which
Don't talk loud, talk slowly. Talk with conviction.
Speak of that which interests you. Speak clearly.
Speak easy.
Clear your speech. Speak in Italian. Talk in italics!
Don' colloquio di t agli sconosciuti.
Talk of speech. Speaking of speech, talk.
Don't talk in the car, talk at home.
Don't talk to me that way, tuck me in...
We'll talk in the morning.
SILENCE
Talk and talk, and talk and talk.
Boy, he's a talker. Speak man, speak!
Talk like a big girl, use your words.
Treat your talk right, speak in broken
Sentences.
Incomplete thoughts.
Test your
Luck,
Talk in
Ebonics
During speech
Therapy.
(examples)
It be like:
Use inside voices.
Chew before talking.
Don't strangle
Your speech,
Talk freely.
Talk is cheap,
Invest now!
Language is an open market.
BEWARE of
P
I
T
F
A
L
L
S
Failing to realize
This may limit
You linguistically.
(A sort of colloquial queef.
*CONSEQUENCES VARY)
All language is like this.
Metaphorically
Speaking,
Metaphysics is little
More than talk.
Words make up
The universe.
The universe
Is only
A
Word.
Words
Make
Up
Sentences.
The universe
Is a nonlinear
Sentences, soft spoken.
Saturday, August 16, 2008
Ariana Reines FOR THE DAY!!!!!!!!!!!!
from Mercury
You girls. Your knees
And waists in my mind. Your common sense.
You look weird and you know what you do.
Something is remembered and held in store.
Something is protracted and inferior
And it covers something private that has to be.
The population of the world is willing to live only and completely on its outermost skin.
Full lips obscure the birthmark.
An angle of the grandfather in the knees. Something baroque and lascivious even in his dismay face.
Two taupe eyes are beautiful because of the oblivion. Because of the attention.
There will be some to come to harm, and others to learn to be what they possess, to learn to possess at all, to enlarge and after a long time to see
Poplars shimmy like Liza Minnelli.
Steeples up in the air like what you want.
Their verdigris like what I am.
Students are slimmer now; their pills are better.
We two are faster, as fast as one another, just slightly faster than a moment before when we found out something about one another the sun was butter and we knew it and it was melting the fat of the world and we were it.
We became slow. We grew tolerant and sad. Mothers. All at once we knew. We knew the depth of our capacities. We became equaller to them, more and more.
This was our art.
When I am on all fours and I have to pee and he has to pee and he fucks me the tension in our bellies and the blood in our middles makes us have to be what we are.
Tits in the mirror like the bulges under the golden fleece.
A face doesn't have to mean anything, everything is too much and whatever it breaks is where something true will have had to have happened and will have.
Unified substance
Of all things into which the sun installs burrows and launches the first accusation.
Saying like is attaching one thing to another in this atmosphere that offers no resistance. Or the word wants to be the drop of mercury in the silver dollar sized plastic labyrinth.
Lonely and incapable and poisonous nevertheless. But the word is not this
But sometimes it almost is.
Ugly buildings immure themselves in the distance.
The woman with heavy buttocks knows how to handle the folds in her dress. Rushing, she is visibly aware of and dependent upon her dignity, she is totally believable in her self possession and in her reality.
I in the enormity
Of this interiority
Become her.
My prayer.
The time of day is now felling some loose light from out of those trees. They are becoming bluer and more solid. The satellite dishes are clear and there.
* * *
Give up the habit of weeping for yourself, says the woman to the man with the malady of death in the novel by Marguerite Duras.
The sex parts of good books are usually the worst parts, that is too bad about good books.
Some bad books have good sex in them. And sex that I can see is somebody else's.
I want to have the sex that's mine, the sex that I have, okay.
Time to tell the difference between what's emitted and what's left over and what was there in the first place.
Everything else far off in the distance, far far ahead.
The hills decline like several dromedaries slowly sitting down.
(Jasper Bernes's introduction makes me want to slit my throat but ENJOY!)
Friday, August 15, 2008
KENNETH KOCH
I'd like you to be still.
Stop talking or doing anything else for a minute.
No. Please. For three minutes, maybe five minutes.
Tell me which walk to take over the hill.
Is there a bridge there? Will I want company?
Tell me about the old people who built the bridge.
What is "the Japanese economy"?
Where did you hide the doctor's bills?
How much I admire you!
Can you help me to take this off?
May I help you to take that off?
Are you finished with this item?
Who is the car salesman?
The canopy we had made for the dog.
I need some endless embracing.
The ocean's not really very far.
Did you come west in this weather?
I've been sitting at home with my shoes off.
You're wearing a cross!
That bench, look! Under it are some puppies!
Could I have just one little shot of Scotch?
I suppose I wanted to impress you.
It's snowing.
The Revlon Man has come from across the sea.
This racket is annoying.
We didn't want the baby to come here because of the hawk.
What are you reading?
In what style would you like the humidity to explain?
I care, but not much. You can smoke a cigar.
Genuineness isn't a word I'd ever use.
Say, what a short skirt! Do you have a camera?
The moon is a shellfish.
I can't talk to most people. They eat me alive.
Who are you, anyway?
I want to look at you all day long, because you are mine.
Might you crave a little visit to the Pizza Hut?
Thank you for telling me your sign.
I'm filled with joy by this sun!
The turtle is advancing but the lobster stays behind. Silence has won the game!
Well, just damn you and the thermometer!
I don't want to ask the doctor.
I didn't know what you meant when you said that to me.
It's getting cold, but I am feeling awfully lazy.
If you want to we can go over there
Where there's a little more light.
... plop new ...
I have terrible organization skills...so in order to do a better job of archiving (or if nothing else an attempt to archive) I have set up a new blog that will include reviews of films, music, books, etc. It will be sporadic and idiosyncratic...enjoy!
FIRST PLOP:
STRAIGHT TIME...STARRING DUSTIN HOFFMAN...DIRECTED BY USU GROSBARD.
blogs:
Joe Milford Hosts Ron Silliman
Clay Banes
Remembering Lawrence from Dodie Bellamy's Blog
Gary Sullivan:
AL ACKERMAN, MEETINGS WITH IMPROBABLE DANGLERS
(101, Part 3)
Tao Lin:
i interviewed people
who taught my writing in collegeLINH DINH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
AND OF COURSE:
Thursday, August 14, 2008
... Bertolt Brecht ...
On the Critical Attitude
The critical attitude
Strikes many people as unfruitful
That is because they find the state
Impervious to their criticism
But what in this case is an unfruitful attitude
Is merely a feeble attitude. Give criticism arms
And states can be demolished by it.
Canalising a river
Grafting a fruit tree
Educating a person
Transforming a state
These are instances of fruitful criticism
And at the same time instances of art.
LINH DINH FOR THE DAY!
A Peripatetic Purveyor of Nothing
On The Avenue of Idleness, there is a man who pushes a pushcart around with nothing on it. He rings a bell to announce his arrival. Children and other undesirables like to throw rocks at him.
‘I was never made out for this. I don’t want to sell nothing. I don’t even want to buy nothing.’
‘So much for nothing today?’
‘You better know it.’
‘A little cheaper by the dozen perhaps?’
‘Not at this weight, ma’am.’
‘But my children are grossly underweight!’
‘Like the billboards say, We can’t modernize overnight.’
‘Please wrap it up then.’
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Book release party for Jam Alerts
Kelly Writers House, University of Pennsylvania,
April 24, 2007
1. Introduction by Adrian Khactu (3:05)
2. "Speechless" (6:51)
3. "Getting Up: Conditional" (1:28)
4. "The Persistence of Animism" (0:29)
5. "Nature Freaks" (1:21)
6. "Afflictions" (0:47)
7. "Deadly Bravado" (1:09)
8. "Spiralling Jetty" (1:45)
9. "Fortunes" (11:57)
10. "Book Review" (11:37)
11. "My Local Burning" (1:09)
12. "An Awful Joke" (0:16)
13. "2084" (0:48)
14. "Recent Archeo News" (2:28)
15. "Beloved Alone" (0:39)Recording of the entire program (1:05:30)
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
ELIZABETH TREADWELL FOR THE DAY!
Postulancy
too big a house, too many children -- homelife a pastry riddled with ants, allegorical forms: slippery silent never roof, almost ursuline nuns. that echo was answered 40 years ago now, he said, this woman moved into the shadowed motherlode where she first experienced bears, outside, that is, of the tales of her european youth. a defiance wrecked on waves of trash, banging daughters and sons of pioneers to the landshore, grown tall and handsome, weak and grim, the sliding glass, the eaves, garden and the patio, the dump up above town, bent against history, highway and mountainface, sky, river, or the stupid antique. black, brown, and golden these years and their tiny faces, heavy limbs wonder camper. and when the wagoner, the wolf came courting. behind the altar, thieving, thieving. creamy-faced doors beckon, they told the knapsack'd serving girl: deepest apostle nooks began to wash and scrape, do anything, keep down to the barn companion. wild apples and wildflowers. lupine bottle of coke. have another drink and eat it all up.
BLOG UPDATE...
RON SILLIMAN'S BLOG:
My own interest in folk art is that the work of untrained artists often strike me as being much closer to what I’m doing in my poetry than the excessively processed works of the MFA mills.
CLAYTON BANES'S'S'S'S BLOG...
GARY SULLIVAN'S BLOG:
KATHY ACKER (1945-1997), GREAT EXPECTATIONS
(101, Part 2)
NADA GORDON'S BLOG:
How to Avoid Fleeting Poetry Trends
IF YOU DON'T HAVE YOUR HEAD IN THE SAND:LINH DINH'S BLOG
... ...
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Oh, Great!
What’s good is good. What’s good?
What is good? Good is good.
Good people smile. They always smile at good people.
Good behavior gets rewarded.
No kicking. Have an apple.
Rewards are great.
Meeting new people can be rewarding.
Good to meet you!
Good old fashioned prayer solves problems.
The right religion can be great.
A great lord is good.
Heaven is not good. It’s silly.
Great clergy members are good to have around.
Avoiding temptation can be good.
All of a God’s creations are good.
Killing is not good. Good God!
Good manners are great. They’re appreciated. Thanks.
Appreciation is good. Appreciating good times is great.
Great times are good. They’re the best.
The best is great. Being the best is good.
Being the best at work is appreciated by bosses. Good work!
Employment is good. Good employment is great.
Good work is hard to find. Find it and get paid great.
Good people work hard. Hard work is good. Great job!
Comedy is good. Good movies have comedy.
Great films can make you cry.
Crying is good. Feelings are good.
Sharing feelings is great.
Feeling great is good.
Living for the moment can be good.
Loving for the right reason is great.
Loving loving is not good. Goodness gracious!
A good wetsuit keeps you warm.
Wet dreams are good.
Martin Luther King Jr. was good.
Black people are great.
Black holes are neither good nor not good.
Space is great.
A spacious apartment is good. Groundskeeping is essential.
Cheap rent is good. Great Deal!
Good timing is great. Timing is everything.
Trying new things is good.
Sports are good. Baseball is boring.
Golf is not boring. The Scottish invented golf.
Great Britain is good. The British love good clean fun.
Family time is great. A good stepmom is great.
Britney Spears is a stepmom. Good examples are useful.
Sarcasm is good but sometimes confusing. Good for you!
(HAREER FALASTEEN) FREE PALESTINE...FOR TODAY...FOR TOMORROW...AND FOR EVERY FUCKING DAY OF OCCUPATION!
blog updates:
SILLIMAN'S BLOG:
So what role might theory play today, both for poetry and in the broader world?
SPD TODAY:
Mahmoud Darwish 1941-2008
DENISE LOW'S BLOG:AD ASTRA POETRY PROJECT #19
BARRY BARNES (1960 - )ALEX'S BLOG:
so....
CECILIA ANN'S BLOG:Ron Silliman:
CLAY BANES' BLOG:
In the thick of it another reason to go back to Free Radicals.
DODIE BELLAMY'S BLOG:
DEGRADED
GARY SULLIVAN'S BLOG:
STEVE ABBOTT, LIVES OF THE POETS
(101, part 1)
JUST GO TO LINH
DINH'S BLOG!!!!!!!!!!!
He is worth revisiting
In case anyone didn't get to see his concert this time, a little something here to offset my viewing of the dreadful "The Piano Teacher". I started yesterday by watching "Passion Fish" (set in Louisiana!!). I should have watched it again after "PT" to get the foul taste out of my mouth. I'm annoyed that he's not coming anywhere near me on this tour, but it's really cool for folks in the rest of the country in between LA and NYC to get an opportunity to hear Tom; the two shows I saw him do in LA, eleven years apart, were two of the greatest shows I've ever seen in my life. And yes, "I Wish I Was In New Orleans (In the Ninth Ward)" makes me cry.
(from a food and drink blog by Chuck Taggart):
Tom Waits in concert! Okay, before we get into the drink and food porn from Tales of the Cocktail ... hie thee to NPR's website and fetch the podcast of Tom Waits' amazing performance, clocking in at 2 hour, 21 minutes and including songs he's never done outside the studio before. Story here, direct link to download the podcast (128kbps MP3 file) here.
...UPDATE!...
YESTERDAY I POSTED A TRANSLATION BY LINH DINH. SINCE THEN LINH HAS INFORMED ME THAT THE TRANSLATION IS OUT OF DATE AND HE SENT ME A NEWER TRANSLATION...SO:
FROM LINH DINH (ONE OF THE BADDEST MOTHER FUCKERS OUT THERE):
Stalin! Stalin!
A mother showed to her child
A picture of Stalin with a young child
His shirt is white against red clouds
His eyes are kind, his mouth smiling
On an immense green field
He stands with a little child
Wearing a red scarf round his neck
Towards the future they both look
Stalin! Stalin!
How I loved my child's first word
When he said the word Stalin!
The milky fragance of a baby's mouth
Is like the dove of peace and a limpid moon
Yesterday the field speaker blared
Tore my stomach to shreds
O how the village convulsed
O how can it be... He's dead!
O Stalin! O Stalin!
Without you, are there still sky and earth?
The love for my father, mother, wife
The love for myself are but one tenth
Of my love for you
The love for my child, country, race
Can't be greater than my love for you
Before there was only barren desolation
Thanks to you there's brightness and joy
Before only torn clothes and hunger
Thanks to you our rice pots are full
Before only torment and shackles
Thanks to you we have days of freedom
When people have land to till
When independence comes tomorrow
Who will we remember with gratitude?
This gratitude I'll bear on my shoulders
One side for Uncle Ho, one for you
My child, you're still so clueless
But you'll learn to thank Stalin for life
Loving you a mother vowed in silence
To love village, country, husband, child
Although you have disappeared gone
Your crimson footsteps are forever
Today on the village road at dawn
Incense smoke curled up everywhere
A thousand in mourning white, joined
In wrenching eternal remembrance of you.
[...]
STATISTICS AND INFORMATICS
Grzegorz Wróblewski:
Statistics and Informatics (30 x 30)
Exhibited in Gallery Brantebjerg
(Denmark/Summer 2008)
Again and again and again and aigin until handling
College, holding on handle bars.
Also doing something
School and something.
Something and school.
Reading and something.
Something and it’s done.
OVER!
: : :’
Wow. I’m graduate.
Decree.
Something us.
Pursue bear... More college... More knowledge
Something us.
Pursue us.
Is it done. No it’s not. More learning.
More us.
Something us.
Fuck something.
Here comes us.
40W'S LIFE?
I’ve noticed:
When children grow, they often grow in strange and unusual ways and to be strange and unusual beings.
A recent example is a run in with a young boy.
“A friend of mind turned into a bully, and I don’t like him anymore because he doesn’t like me anymore.” he says.
I sympathize with him, but I want to bash his mind with the rock you and I insecure.
I know that we should both be without this rock, so I say, “Look, every last one of us.. we're middle men here in this game!”
He responds, “I don’t know... I just wish we were friends. Right?”
Again, I understand D.
But you know? Fuck his dilemma!
I tell him that we’re all wishing so-and-so were still a part of us.
I ask him what his problem is, but before he could respond I beg of him...:
“Do you know why we have motels that contain bibles inside disgusting little drawers?”
Minutes pass. Finally he admitts he doesn't.
I remain silent, simply because I can. I stare at him for 15 minutes before he runs away and jumps into a pool...
Monday, August 11, 2008
from Pitchfork TV...necessary!
The Queen Is Dead: A Classic Under Review // One Week Only
This documentary on the Smiths' 1986 classic The Queen Is Dead explores the album through interviews with band members and biographers, and includes studio and live readings of every song on the LP. [Courtesy of MVD | More at seeofsound.com]
Self-Indulgent Self-Promotion
I have a 'short story' up at Pindeldyboz right now.
If you read it I would forever be in your debt (kind of)...
Also read everybody else. Ever.
update:
from SILLIMAN'S BLOG:
selection from A Thought Is A Bride of What Thinking by Lyn Hejinian (ON WORDLE)
Ten Propositions on (What Was?) Flarf
100 Near Perfect Books of Poetry
Andy Warhol and Gertrude Stein
FROM ALEX'S BLOG:
Pindeldyboz
Go read it, and everybody else in the new issue.
Thanks Pindeldyboz.
so many cool things happening on the internets and I don't feel like part of them
I'm staying in Oviedo, Spain until September 9th, studying Spanish at La Universidad de Oviedo. A lot of cool stuff is happening on the blog scene and I don't really feel like part of it. But it's fine. I'm in Spain. Fuck you.
So here is a list. Of cool stuff.
LM Rivera is tirelessly posting at Exit, pursued by a bear
K.S. Mohammad had a great post about Poetry (as) And Technology
Dodie Bellamy has a fucking blog!
Clay Banes, keeping it real
Angela Genusa is relentless (in a good way)
& Mike Young is popping up everywhere and has a cool reading coming up
When I get back to the states I'm going crack down and get back to blogging and writing regularly.
Lacey, Jess, & I are currently working on a summer poetry correspondence project, which will hopefully be available in print some time this fall (if I don't end up writing a bunch of unpublishable bullshit.)
FROM CECILIA ANN'S BLOG:
LANGUAGE POETRY AND THE LYRIC SUBJECT
Language Poetry and the Lyric Subject: Ron Silliman's Albany, Susan Howe's Buffalo by Marjorie Perloff, Marjorie Perloff's homepageFROM CLAY BANES' BLOG:
died
ANGELINA JOLIE IS STILL UNDECIDED ON HER CANDIDATE BECAUSE SHE IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN I AM.
FROM DODIE BELLAMY'S BLOG:
In the Cards
FROM TAO LIN'S BLOG:5x news item
brandon scott gorrell's poetry book is available to be published, it has blurbs from me and matthew zapruderzachary german was interviewed by adam robinson
chris killen's 'the bird room' (canongate, 2009) can now be reviewed on amazon, i think reviewing books on amazon is an effective tool in achieving 'steady cash flow without a real job' (my only purpose in life), i recommend my interns review my books on amazon if they want to feel productive as an intern or just don't know what to do in life generally or something (go here for more about what i think about amazon reviews), i am chris killen's intern, i blurbed his novel a long time ago, canongate is an independent UK publisher, they publish miranda july in the UK
jereme dean is giving away books by me and chris and other people including noah cicero
i am on new york magazine's approval matrix (right side, edited from this)
FROM CHARLES BERNSTEIN'S WEB LOG:
Czernin & Schmatz: Die Reise
FROM LINH DINH'S BLOG:
It is not possible to overstate how quickly this is escalating
[...]
K. SILEM MOHAMMAD'S BLOG:
More on Poetry and Technology (Sort of)
ALICE NOTLEY FOR THE DAY!
(from January)
Mommy what's this fork doing?
What?
It's being Donald Duck.
What could I eat this?
Eat what?
This cookie.
What do you mean?
What could I eat it?
Does he bite people? That fish is dead. That
fish got dead today. That fish gets dead today,
right?
These are my silver mittens Mommy
No, it's gold, they're gold mittens
On myself
I put my black
hat
and my mit-
tens,
myself.
Edmund. Edmund. Edmund. Maaaah. Lodle Lodle
Lodle
Daddy, the doctor did put a wart on you,
right?
Sunday, August 10, 2008
... new ...
ACCORDING OF PLOP
All is public and may be re-used on a non-commercial basis.
Showing commercial and noncommercial uses,
the judge took away his passport.
Is this a case of a judge throwing his gavel out of the pram?
gauzy
gavage
gave
gavel
gaveled
gaveler
gaveling
gavelkind
gavels
gavial
Gotta love those guns:
Driving Max back from Yes that goes to Anyways pulled along side and heard a in. The was at her all sorts of. The kept saying. We all know that's never the case. pay back. After a few more minutes of The wife Winter didn't care. Once we made it back to the studio, we hustled Winter inside...ONLY.
Diane Arbus revisited
Somehow this image is lacking the magnitude of the photograph Diane Arbus produced of the twins.
Something found
Left to right: Pat Reed, Michael Anderson, Leslie Scalapino, Steve Farmer (half hidden), Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman, Stephen Rodefer, Ben Friedlander
updates:
K SILEM MOHAMMAD'S BLOG:
Zizek Q&A
Slavoj Zizek acts out at guardian.co.uk.
CECILIA ANN'S BLOG:
Mark Yakich (2)
Mark Yakich: Working Girl, Shampoo #25Mark Yakich: Funeral Direction, Blackbird Vol. 5 No. 2
ALEX'S BLOG:
new names
K. Mohammad thinks I publish under my christian name (Alex is my middle name for those that don't know me that well).So compare:
Alex Burford
Maurice Burford...
any thoughts?
DODIE BELLAMY'S BLOG:
Lorraine Front and Center
I want to respond to Lorraine Graham's recent comment--which feels too important to leave buried in the comments box. Here's Lorraine's comment...ANNE BOYER'S BLOG:
acedia
« Quand j’aurai inspiré le dégoût et l’horreur universels, j’aurai conquis la solitude. »TAO LIN'S BLOG:
i was interviewed on some BBC UK business
radio thing today by rebecca pike on 'the chris evans show,' go here (or muxtape) to listen, i'm at 1:30i felt and acted like 'just a little bitch,' 'as expected'
chris evans said 'best guest ever' and something about bukowski
other UK coverage includes the guardian, granta, and the telegraph; UK rights to my books including eeeee eee eeee & bed are available through my publisher, melville house publishing
JOSHUA CLOVER'S BLOG:
Mahmoud Darwish
...has died, almost 26 years to the day after August 6, 1982: the day which provides the setting for Memory For Forgetfulness, written amidst the Israeli siege of Beirut. The book is sometimes presented as prose poems, which seems an ambivalent judgment; it may simply be "memoir," but is regardless more poetic than most books of poetry published in its century.
Somewhat vexingly, the book is also more poetic and more compelling than the vast body of Darwish's poems, often fascinating and internationally renowned, but not without a somewhat parched symbolic character. A constructivist historian who wished above all things to be a poet — turning down a post in Arafat's cabinet (after a conversation about Malraux) — Darwish's work and his life raise the most essential questions about the role of the artist in the midst of historical disaster, questions to which we would hazard no answers, having none.
LINH DINH'S BLOG:
Tail wagging dog...
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - The United States must provide a "very clear timeline" to withdraw its troops from Iraq as part of an agreement allowing them to stay beyond this year, Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zebari said on Sunday.
It was the strongest public assertion yet that Iraq is demanding a timeline. U.S. President George W. Bush has long resisted setting a firm schedule for pulling troops out of Iraq, although last month the White House began speaking of a general "time horizon" and "aspirational goals" to withdraw.
[...]
Iraq to revive oil deal with China
BAGHDAD (AP) - Iraq and China are set to revive a $1.2 billion oil deal that was canceled after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, the Iraq's oil ministry said Sunday.
An initial agreement with China is expected to be signed at the end of August to develop the billion-barrel Ahdab oil field south of Baghdad, the ministry said in a statement.
"Iraq and China are keen to show their cooperation by finalizing an agreement on developing the Ahdab oil field," it said.
[...]
In Jerusalem
(1941-2008)
In Jerusalem, and I mean within the ancient walls,
I walk, from one epoch to another without a memory
to guide me. The prophets over there are sharing
the history of the holy ... ascending to heaven
and returning less discouraged and melancholy, because love
and peace are holy and are coming to town.
I was walking down a slope and thinking to myself: How
do the narrators disagree over what light said about a stone?
Is it from a dimly lit stone that wars flare up?
I walk in my sleep. I stare in my sleep. I see
no one behind me. I see no one ahead of me.
All this light is for me. I walk. I become lighter. I fly
then I become another. Transfigured. Words
sprout like grass from Isaiah's messenger
mouth: "If you don't believe you won't be safe."
I walk as if I were another. And my wound a white
biblical rose. And my hands like two doves
on the cross hovering and carrying the earth.
I don't walk, I fly, I become another,
transfigured. No place and no time. So who am I?
I am no I in ascension's presence. But I
think to myself: Alone, the prophet Muhammad
spoke classical Arabic. "And then what?"
Then what? A woman soldier shouted:
Is that you again? Didn't I kill you?
I said: You killed me ... and I forgot, like you, to die.
Translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah
Saturday, August 9, 2008
Moscow ultimatum to Washington: Make Georgia move forces out of South Ossetia
As Russian warplanes struck positions in Georgia’s second breakaway province of Abkhazia, Saturday, Aug. 9, President Dimitry Medvedev told President George W. Bush in a phone call that Georgia must withdraw its forces from South Ossetia for hostilities to end. Its leaders must also sign a legally binding document not to use force.
The virtual ultimatum was delivered in reply to the US president’s call on Russia to respect Georgian sovereign integrity and for both sides to accept international mediation.
After deploying 100,000 troops and armor to occupy most of South Ossetia and warplanes to blast the Georgian town of Gori and Black Sea port of Poti, Russia’s ambassador to NATO said Russia does not consider itself to be in a state of war and accused Georgia of ethnic cleansing.
As they spoke, the Abkhazian foreign minister Sergei Shamba announced that the secessionist province had launched air and artillery strikes to oust Georgian troops from its positions in the Kodori Gorge. Russian jets earlier bombed those positions. The Georgian president said his forces had successfully repelled those attacks.
DEBKAfile’s military analysts: Tiny Georgia with an army of less than 18,000, having been roundly defeated in South Ossetia, cannot hope to withstand the mighty Russian army in Abkhazia, even after initial successes. Therefore, President Mikhail Saakashvili, who was planning to join NATO, must consider both breakaway regions lost to Georgia and gained by Russia.
Moscow has thus achieved payback for the US-NATO success in detaching Kosovo from Serbia and approving its independence. The Russians have also signalled a warning to Ukraine, the Caucasus and Central Asia against joining up with the United States and the NATO bloc in areas which Moscow deems part of its strategic sphere of influence.
After the severance of South Ossetia and Abkhazia from Georgia, four follow-up Russian steps may be postulated:
1. The two separatist provinces will proclaim their independence, just like Kosovo.
2. Russia will continue to exercise its overwhelming military and air might to force the pro-American Saakashvili’s capitulation.
3. The Georgian president cannot last long in office after suffering this major loss of territory and national humiliation. Moscow aims to make Washington swallow a pro-Russian successor.
4. Moscow’s South Ossetia-Abkhazia victory against Georgia and its Western backers will serve as an object lesson for Russia’s own secessionist provinces such as Chechnya, Dagestan and Ingushettia not to risk defying Russian armed might.
..........................................
"redstar" at the Life After the Oil Crash forum:
The crux of the matter is that the Georgians, with an army of less that 50,000 men (from what I gather), launched an offensive military action against Russia with armed forces of about 1.3 million. They did this obviously counting on the support of NATO and the United States if things went badly for them (notice they are now playing to the media about how this is a fight for democratic values!) . . . and this they believed they would get because of the western investment in the BTC pipeline and their willingness to play the role of an American client state in the region (as demonstrated by their donation of a contingent to the Iraq adventure). So in making this attack they took it upon themselves to potentially precipitate a confrontation between two nuclear-armed powers . . . Russia on the one hand . . . and the US (including you and me and everyone we care about) on the other . . . and if Bush and his crew mess this up like they have just everything else they have touched . . . PO will be the least of our problems. The underlying issue here is that neocon plan for empire . . . and our inability to supply the manpower to garrison the entire planet and thereby make it safe for resource exploitation . . . has created many, many situations in which we now are politically and economically invested in very dangerous places and doing business with very unstable proxies (like the Georgian leader that precipitated this act of madness). As I said under another thread, I personally do not feel comfortable with a "leader" of Bush's caliber representing my interests every time a situation like this comes up . . . especially because this and other future situations will have been created to futher the interests of a class of finance and hydrocarbon capitalists which are in fact in conflict with mine. Nor do I feel comfortable with anything I can imagine the American political system producing doing so given current circumstances. PO/economic collapse would be a blessing in disguise because it would pull the plug on this out-of-control machine before it takes us all off the cliff. I don't know about you but I didn't want to live in this kind of world.
The Georgian war – minute by minute
at Russia Today:17:05 - Abkhazian official have announced that the republic’s troops have entered the Gail district of Georgia.
15:45 - 76 Airborne Brigade of the Russian Army arrives in the conflict region - Russian military officials.
15:20 GMT – Prime Minister Putin arrives in Russia’s republic of North Ossetia to discuss aid for the refugees arriving from South Ossetia.
[...]
UBU WEB:
Jean Baudrillard Suicide Moi (1996) with Mike Kelley, George Hurley and others [MP3]"Thought Provoking Matter," Rosemarie Waldrop.
"Thought Provoking Matter," Rosemarie Waldrop
Middle English gramarye, grammar, or book-learning, came to mean occult or magical lore, and through one Scottish dialect form has emerged in our present English as 'glamor.' Spell cast by women.
Grammar girls with words that spell power to cast spells. And provoke matter. So a black panther treads at my side and above my fingers there float petal-like flames. Words with a nimbus, a glory, a sphere of radiance. Beyond the horizon called definition.
But writing is the tool of the negative. (Through which meaning comes to us?) Effortlessly it burns all substance off the blue shapes in the east. To a density less than thinnest cloud, the word "hills." Without body. Though with form. Therefore not like God. A nothing that foams on the inkplate.
The word's power to kill—I'm not thinking of white-gloved White House memos—its violence against what it names, what it can name only by taking away its materiality, destroying its presence. Is death itself speaking.
Or is it? If the word both kills and shows "a certain slant of light on Sunday afternoons" that we'd search in vain anywhere else? If the word "horse" boils the animal down to the concept, and yet, in the way of hunger, hallucinates four legs, a mane, and folds of flesh? Then maybe this death is not a simple matter. And must hold a kind of life the way fog holds light?
Some say it's because the daughters of the gods came down from the heavens and mated with humans that the order of the world was thrown out of joint and opposites became entangled. So that, without the letter that kills, there is no spirit to give life?
Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864-1916)
Royal Academy, London
The first Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864-1916)
retrospective in the UK
grateful by Laura Cumming, The Observer
Grey eminence by Maev Kennedy, guardian.co.uk
Vilhelm Hammershøi: her indoors, Telegraph
Poetry without motion by Robin Simon, New Statesman
Mahmoud Darwish Passes Away
(The only way I could get my Dad's side of the family to read poetry was by saying that it is written by a Palestinian. My uncle Anwar sent me the poem below. Lughati al arabic laisat kama yajib...so I had to find the poem in English (which it was probably written in))
Neighing at the Slope
Horses' neighing at the slope. Downward or upward.I prepare my portrait for my woman to hang on a wall when I die.
She says: Is there a wall to hang it on?
I say: We'll build a room for it. Where? In any house.
Horses' neighing at the slope. Downward or upward.
Does a thirty-year-old woman need a homeland where she might make a life?
Can I reach the summit of this rugged mountain? The slope is either an abyss
or a place of siege.
Midway it divides. It's a journey. Martyrs kill one another.
I prepare my portrait for my woman. When a new horse neighs in you, tear it up.
Horses' neighing at the slope. Upward, or upward.
Saturday, August 9, 2008
... a few pics taken from the last few weeks ...
("A" ... ZUKOFSKY)
(DAN FLAVIN AT SF MOMA)
(DONALD JUDD AT SF MOMA)
(ME AND JOSHUA CLOVER AT SPD...CARGO THUGGING)updates:
Clay Banes' Blog:
08 August 2008
As good a day as any to mention Octopus Books' debut full-length book.
BUY UNDERSLEEP BY JULIE DOXSEE NOW.
Gary Sullivan's Blog:
BLURRED VISION 4 BOOK PARTY
The Blurred Vision 4 launch party will be held tonight, Saturday August 9, from 7-10pm, at People Lounge, 163 Allen Street, in Manhattan, between Ludlow and Eldridge, a block and a half south of Houston. Party is upstairs.
A review of BV4 in Broken Frontier.
Here's a page from "The Feminist," Brandon Downing and my contribution to BV4:
Click on image for larger view.
Ron Silliman's Blog:
Theory, Grand Piano, Donna Haraway, etc.
Dodie Bellamy's Blog:
Good Bad
Nada Gordon's Blog (just one of the many reasons to love Nada Gordon):
Vogue 2267
OK, so I made this pattern:
but added godets and petite-ified it (it's shorter than the one in the pattern pic). The fabric's from Japan and has a beautiful linen-y slub texture, tho it's cotton:
I know I should just set up the damn tripod, but I'm worn out from hemming.
Charles Bernstein's Weblog:
Linh Dinh's Blog:
The Georgian war – minute by minute
17:05 - Abkhazian official have announced that the republic’s troops have entered the Gail district of Georgia.
15:45 - 76 Airborne Brigade of the Russian Army arrives in the conflict region - Russian military officials.
15:20 GMT – Prime Minister Putin arrives in Russia’s republic of North Ossetia to discuss aid for the refugees arriving from South Ossetia.
[...]
Poetry is Sounds
This poem was begun on July 12th, when I was teaching at Bard and had little time to fuss. Latest version:John speaks out about his affair. One day after ceremony,
Man stabs tourists, then jumps to Beijing. Wanna see a
Baby sloth stretch its long leg to get at an itch? A laptop
Is as ransackable as a stitched piece of dead skin, claims
Department of Homeland Security, who doesn’t need a
Bleeding heart warrant to probe your ridiculous assets.
Asshole wiggles are still rare. Immigration officials
At border entries have been searching and seizing
Some citizens’ laptops, cellphones and BlackBerrys,
As they return from overseas trips. Which citizens?
They hate us for our freedom. Sometimes a flashlight
Is needed to highlight your ears, gaping mouth, nostrils,
Vagina, foreskin, asshole and urethra, but what about
All that evil shit stashed deep inside your skull, dude?
Trepan diktat next. I used to travel with a keffiyeh and
A glazed donut, but I think I'll cross-dress from now on,
Something pastel, summery and simple, on sale at K-Mart.
Top: A photo taken by Stacy Opalewski Walsh at Naropa, 2008. Bottom: An abaya.
ROBIN BLASER FOR THE DAY!
Citation, citation everywhere: the utter prism of his care.
No other moment exists but this one.
This one.
This one.
Friday, August 8, 2008
Since Lucas didn't post this...
These are the winners of The Sorry for Snake/Idiolexicon Sedoka Contest:
David Morini
Lucas M. Rivera
J. Bradley
Kat Cornelius
Matthew Melnicki
Matt Mason
Jessica Wickens
Adam Rubinstein
Stanford Chen
Andy Nicholson
Isn't exciting? They will all receive a free copy of Sorry for Snake and be published in Idiolexicon! (trainwreckunion blog)
THE TRAVELS
Travelling with thee is the subject of when is it.
It is travelling with thee that this has with us this time.
When traveling brings this to us it is when thee is there and we are thoughtful.
Through this thee is travelling and we are here subject to that when we’re here and how.
Which is how it is thee that thee is thee in how when we the subject "we" thought of with when, and this thee can.
This can be thee.
Thee is we that travel where.
Is this the travel sought?
It is nice for thee to feel for seconds control over this poem read while traveling.
Thee travels open road, and when we’ve left and been where in bumpy pasture the settling in with time now time ahead.
Tracks thee leaves in leaves and how we see when travels bring where we are singing and joyous thee for seconds.
The seconds tick ticking car radio static how it travels here.
Here, but hearing ticks like seconds of travel, seconds of life of travel with thee where leaves are crushed by the wearing of shoes of travel.
Travelling brings thee with subject to where hills we pass and notice and hope to pass again.
The travels of subject for subject of when travels long sleep and where road is passing.
Traveling, subject passes hills admiring thee, dips and time or dips in time with long seconds.
Here, travels with thee bringing us to hills passed again so long and wide the dips of time and hills, pass through the mind.
Travels of us have here for thee our subject second to hills and road far reaching.
The travels thee has have been were we tick still sleeping, passing.
...NEWS...
BEFORE----------------------------------------------
-----------------------------------------------
AFTER
Grzegorz Wróblewski: OUR FLYING OBJECTS
OUR FLYING OBJECTS
In the beginning we observe bumble-bees and colourful petals
We are still small and fascinated by the flies
enjoying themselves in the sugar-bowl
After them are sparrows which we shoot with a catapult
Later on we keep canaries and this way
we learn to love the animals
The first sexual act we associate rightly with the nightingale
and maturity with the regular
feeding of the pigeons
Finally there are only eagle owls
We sit offended by the window and everything alive
OUR FLYING OBJECTS - selected poems
Equipage Press, Cambridge, UK 2007
Review by Tom Jenks, Parameter Magazine, Manchester, UK
... new ...
Bohemian HeadbandAcid in
A year ago doctors were treating one to two a month.
Although first described more than 60
years ago, not much is known about patients.
Blog of Shadows and Mirrors.
on Experimental Linguistics
August 2006.
Spacious two and three bedroom fully self-contained
apartments, some with air.
CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy.
This is a long poem, certainly by pop-essay standards.
Long before Delilah bruised his heart, Tom suffered serious injuries.
Always seek maximum compensation.
quote from wife from jean cocteau from demiurge from goddess from energy source from light from darkenss from television set
- Jean Cocteau
LIBRARY NEWS!
(IT IS THE 1949 RARE EDITION)
i hope i get to meet her
metanarrative (actually a decent insert at wikipedia)
a metanarrative (sometimes master- or grand narrative) is an abstract idea that is supposed to be a comprehensive explanation of historical experience or knowledge. According to John Stephens it "is a global or totalizing cultural narrative schema which orders and explains knowledge and experience".[1] The prefix meta means "beyond" and is here used to mean "about", and a narrative is a story. Therefore, a metanarrative is a story about a story, encompassing and explaining other 'little stories' within totalizing schemes.
The concept was criticized by Jean-François Lyotard in his work, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979). In this text, Lyotard refers to what he describes as the postmodern condition, which he characterized as increasing skepticism toward the totalizing nature of "metanarratives" (or "grand narratives," typically characterised by some form of 'transcendent and universal truth'):
| “ | Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives. This incredulity is undoubtedly a product of progress in the sciences: but that progress in turn presupposes it. To the obsolescence of the metanarrative apparatus of legitimation corresponds, most notably, the crisis of metaphysical philosophy and of the university institution which in the past relied on it. The narrative function is losing its functors, its great hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal. It is being dispersed in clouds of narrative language elements--narrative, but also denotative, prescriptive, descriptive, and so on [...] Where, after the metanarratives, can legitimacy reside? - Jean-Francois Lyotard[2] |
new Linh Dinh POEM!!!!!!!! BOOM!
Imagine
His palace surrounded, he fled through milesOf secret tunnels, hopped into a waiting SUV
And was driven to a house of worship, where
They finally found him, hours later, praying.
He was never stripped, then made to stand naked
With his arms spread, shit smeared on his face,
As girls grinned and german shepherds growled.
Disputing widespread verdicts that his regime
Was violent, corrupt and anti-intellectual, he
Produced a handwritten note, listing his token
Humanitarian gestures, which failed to temper
An all-volunteer firing squad. Pow! Pow! Pow!
Hearing how his sneering vice had been wasted,
Then strung up in public, he vowed, “That won’t
Be my parting scene, scenario or shot.” Kissing
His golf ball and horseshoe-loving dog goodbye,
He calmly killed his mistress and tight-faced wife,
Downed a pill, then pumped a depleted uranium
Slug into his smirking mouth. Burned and buried
By his remaining lackeys, his lying, straight teeth
Were dug up by his bummed out enemies.
No, he was never kept in a suspended cage
In a mega arena, executed during halftime.
new K. SILEM MOHAMMAD POEM
Work
work insists it contains x
and in fact it
tells the truth and that's more
than you do
what's more I'll repeat something rotten
this talented little memory
let's get into the tape
the material I have on tape
if you have never heard of Bill that's Kathy
when she encounters anything
* * *
is Battlestar Galactica doomed? no
are you kidding? Wordsworth describing a waterfall
will the shopkeeper ever stop crying? who cares
that's force-feeding excrement to children
that's an engineering accident
I blame Langston Hughes
* * *
thanks are in order but it's the truth
it is in my book, that halved statement
dry coughing does not pass the time
it does exactly the opposite
pardon me I guess I keep thinking
I mean really naked
"dogs who are poets and movie stars"
that's for National Dream Month
* * *
life then is, needless to say,
an event that had actually taken place
I'm happy just to be Ozzy fucking Osbourne
there's what many of us regard as metaphors
where did that finger come from?
oh white woman
finish this homework while sucking down meds
craptastical in the sense that it fails
devouring eyeballs! and to hell with freedom
I am not removing your freedom
I am removing a link
* * *
those of you who have been reading my reviews
for the past twenty years
everybody can write
or not? by the way, anything's not pleasant
that is simply fantasy
the age sort of said to me,
mate, mate, mate
that's what I don't particularly care for
* * *
really, on the riverbank a raccoon
expressed in the windy groves
by-and-by, navigation proceeds
not one word I heard all evening was real
it's a hymn, I suppose
it has no substance
every day we are all surrounded
then I'm not aware of it
god, this is already a failure
but that's how I feel
you think I don't want to just do whatever I want?
* * *
nobody cares about that
that's childish, that's just childish
speaking about the "pear blossom"
a single word
how would that look on the printed page?
there are agents
visible, audible, inarticulable
and the play's the thing
to the ears of bar owners
whose barnacles hosted the first smoke
* * *
that's a guy communicating an idea
not "I'm going to fight the Americans"
so when you see this regional elevated tone
it actually works as a song, not just as a wrestling theme
I have a strange love of frogs but still
the devil's everywhere, not just at Brunswick
the plain unhappiness
just obliterates everything
goodness gracious if that's not poetry
it tracks a mouse, a mouse so small
I'm Lou Reed
Adorno's unparalleled
* * *
my mouth hit the floor of the balcony
I don't want to live this life if I'm dead
by the 1930s it was less easy to shout
also, by that time the inner void
difficult, isn't it
Rosie herself will tell you
you're just reading an essay
go to Pakistan or die
but the two are one forever! I sing now
* * *
got something? drop it
my cards are bought by men
since when do we buy Tab?
"good times I dish some buns of sweet and sour"
I play bagpipes
I teach math
I'm married
but no!
non-fiction, which is stuff
thou shalt not write
updates:
nyt:
Truth and Beauty? Only in Afterlife ("Posthumous Keats)
Range of Russian Mourners Pay Tribute to Solzhenitsyn
Bernini, the Man of Many Heads
DODIE BELLAMY'S BLOG:
BEDTIME READING
GARY SULLIVAN'S BLOG:
KASEY ASKS ...
Is poetry a technology?
LINH DINH'S BLOG:
Govt finalizing war emergency plan
The Kuwait Times, August 07, 2008:'2 US aircraft carriers headed for Gulf'
PENN SOUND:
Patrick F. Durgin on Mad River Anthology
Posted 8/8/2008
We recently added a new recording of poet and publisher Patrick F. Durgin's May 25, 2008 appearance on KHSU-FM's Mad River Anthology.
The program begins with the voice of Hannah Weiner (taken from the Radio Readings Project) and a discussion of Hannah Weiner's Open House, the much-beloved 2007 collection, edited by Durgin and published by his press, Kenning Editions. Durgin reads Weiner's poem "Jackson Mac Low" and discusses his involvement with the project (from his first acquaintance with Weiner's writing), as well as the characteristics of the poet's unique clairvoyant style, shaped by her aural and visual hallucinations, which was instrumental to the creation of many of her most memorable works. From there, Durgin and host Brett Jenkins broach the topic of Weiner's schizophrenia, however Durgin is careful to neither limit, nor stigmatize the poet for her condition (as is too often done to authors such as Weiner, James Schuyler and John Wieners); he notes, "it heightens the stakes for everything that she does, and it just makes me admire her more, not because her work is a sort of overcoming of a readily-discernible disease — it's not that sort of tale — but because it's such a vivid critique of the assumptions we make based on [mental illness]." Weiner's voice is present throughout, almost as a participant in the conversation, and the first section closes with an excerpt from her reading "Remembered Sequel."
The second half of the program is devoted to Durgin's own creative output, as both musician and poet (including the overlaps between both genres). He plays an excerpt from his composition, "In Contact" (inspired by a poem of the same name by Jesse Seldess), discussing the influence of serial forms and recursive structures upon his overall aesthetic, and then reads his poem "Relay" over the loop-based music. From there, the conversation turns to Durgin's poetics, which, we discover, is a fugitive art — "I've always written on the run," he confesses — as well as his next book, The Route (a collaboration with Jen Hofer) and future projects from Kenning.
Durgin's PennSound author page also contains a pair of 2008 readings from Milwaukee's Woodland Pattern and Myopic Books in the poet's hometown, Chicago, along with two singles from recent MLA Offsite Readings. Our Hannah Weiner author page is a rich treasury of recordings from the late 70s (following Angel Hair Press' publication of Clairvoyant Journal) through to the end of her life, including a number of multivocal renditions of her signature text, featuring the likes of Rochelle Kraut, Sharon Mattlin, Peggy De Coursey, Regina Beck, James Sherry and Charles Bernstein. There's also a link to Weiner's EPC author page, where you'll find many full texts in electronic format — their preservation largely done by Durgin — a perfect next destination for readers whose interest is stirred by Hannah Weiner's Open House (as it very well should be). Click on the title above to start listening.
UBU WEB:
Roulette TV (2008) UbuWeb is pleased to announce a partnership with the legendary New York City experimental music organization Roulette. Founded in 1978, is a major New York City venue for contemporary music and intermedia art. We are happy to present ten videos from the 2008 season of Roulette TV. Roulette TV is an on-going, innovative video series which presents unique contemporary music in compelling and engaging performances given by the creators themselves. Each performance is followed by an insightful interview with the artist. This series includes performances by: David Behrman, Marilyn Crispell, Andrew Cyrille, Joan La Barbara, Oliver Lake, Phoebe Legere, Margaret Leng Tan, Kathleen Supové, Blue Gene Tyranny and Lois V Vierk. Future archive plans include several seasons of Roulette TV as well as Roulette's extensive concert audio archive
K. SILEM MOHAMMAD'S BLOG:
Thursday, August 07, 2008
Belladodie!
Dodie Bellamy now has a blog!
RON SILLIMAN'S BLOG:
Friday, August 08, 2008
Valentin N. Vološinov
I’m thinking out loud here. For a future part of the Grand Piano project, we’ve been tossing around the idea of putting together some sort of bibliography of works that were influential to us during the general period in which we were collectively active in the
I was something of an omnivorous reader in those days, more so than I am now, alas. But what are / were the works outside of poetry per se that had an impact. I tried to put together a list of just ten books, excluding volumes of poetry, and the following is at least my first draft of such a roster. I left some obvious works off of it, such as books by Walter Benjamin or Roland Barthes, or the great anthology of works from the 1966 “post-structuralist” conference at Johns Hopkins (Bruce Andrews being the one poet I know who attended) since other people were already bandying their names about. Ditto Fred Jameson’s Prison-House of Language. And there were a number of vitally important works for me that were published prior to 1965, such as Sartre’s What is Literature?, the volumes of Wittgenstein that I found most valuable, the class notes that pass for the collected writings of Saussure. Other works were important, but either not yet in book form (like Donna Haraway’s “Manifesto for Cyborgs” which first appeared in Socialist Review in April 1985, a year before I signed on as editor), or not reducible to book form at all (the performance art of Terry Fox, the music of the ROVA Saxophone Quartet, the films of Abigail Child). And every time I think of one text, I think of a dozen more (why not, say, Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia, a book that led me eventually to blogging?).
But at least today, if I had to choose ten with all of those constraints, these are some books I might think to name, and a hint as to why.
Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, 1971, NY, Monthly Review Press. Althusser is an embarrassment in the annals of Western Marxism, the old Stalinoid who turned out to be a homicidal maniac. His ideas on how to read Marx’s Capital, the most important essay of which appears in this volume, are all wrong. But his piece on “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Toward an Investigation),” the centerpiece of this volume, is the best statement of what ideology is and how it functions in practice I’ve ever read. The current Monthly Review Press edition is updated some from the version I have.
Roman Jakobson, Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning, 1978,
Fred Jameson, Marxism and Form, 1974,
Henri Lefebvre, Dialectical Materialism, 1968,
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropique, 1974,
Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972: a cross-reference book of information on some esthetic boundaries: consisting of a bibliography into which are inserted a fragmented text, art works, documents, interviews, and symposia, arranged chronologically and focused on so-called conceptual or information or idea art with mentions of such vaguely designated areas as minimal, anti-form, systems, earth, or process art, occurring now in the Americas, Europe, England, Australia, and Asia (with occasional political overtones), edited and annotated by Lucy R. Lippard, 1973, New York & Washington, Praeger. The full title gives some of the flavor of this great book. It was (still is) the Junior Woodchuck’s handbook (Huey, Dewey & Louie’s antecedent of Wikipedia) for all performance and conceptual art. I may have gotten more diverse ideas from this volume than from any other. The current UC Press edition cuts the title off just before the second colon.
Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 1968,
Charles Olson, Proprioception, 1965, San Francisco, Four Seasons Foundation. This is Olson’s best critical work, and in many ways is a restatement of Lefebvre’s concepts applied directly to literature. I would read them together, Lefebvre’s first. This is now available in Olson’s Collected Prose.
Ferruccio Rossi-Landi, Linguistics and Economics, 1975,
Valentin Vološinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, 1973, Seminar Press,
JAMES TATE FOR THE DAY!
THE NEW ERGONOMICS
just before lunchtime
so we ignored them.
Without revealing the particulars
let me just say that
lunch was most satisfying.
Jack and Roberta went with
the corned beef for a change.
Jack believes in alien abduction
and Roberta does not,
although she has had
several lost weekends lately
and one or two unexplained scars
on her buttocks. I thought
I recognized someone
from my childhood
at a table across the room,
the same teeth, the same hair,
but when he stood-up,
I wasn't sure, Squid with a red tie?
Impossible. I finished
my quiche lorraine
and returned my thoughts
to Jack's new jag:
"Well, I guess anything's
possible. People disappear
all the time, and most of them
have no explanation