... Howard Junker ... Are you kidding me? ...

Q: Who is your favorite Bay Area author and why?

A: Robert Frost. He was born here, near Polk Street, 135 years ago today. He didn't move east until he was 11. His father was a journalist and wannabe politician. Tonight, we're having our annual dinner in his honor at Hayes Street Grill.

...

(I don't mean to offend anyone (well obviously one person) but Howard Junker is a joke, par excellence!)

... top ten reasons I started and continue to write poetry ...

Four) THE COLLECTED POETRY OF
JACK SPICER
(my vocabulary did this to me)




...

Jack Spicer (epc page)
30 January, 1925 - 17 August, 1965

...

"This Is the End of the Poem"

How Jack Spicer broke through the pieties of the avant-garde.

by Geoffrey O'Brien

...

(from PennSound)

Jack Spicer

Vancouver Lectures

June 13, 1965:
Lecture 1, part 1 (1:24:18): MP3 , RealAudio
Lecture 1, part 2 (1:14:00): MP3 , RealAudio

June 15, 1965:
Lecture 2, part 1 (1:26:11): MP3 , RealAudio
Lecture 2, part 2 - second half of this section to come (44:16): MP3 , RealAudio
[ excerpt: on Wallace Stevens's serial poems (3:27) ]

June 17, 1965:
Lecture 3, part 1 (1:27:06): MP3 , RealAudio
Lecture 3, part 2 (29:00): MP3 , RealAudio

Peter Gizzi's edited and annotated transcription of these lectures, The House that Jack Built, was published by Wesleyan University Press, 1998.
This electronic edition of the lectures is presented in cooperation with Peter Gizzi and Robin Blaser, for the Estate of Jack Spicer.

The Holy Grail, July 15, 1965
1. Introduction (2:15): MP3
2. Jack Spicer's Remarks (0:37): MP3
3. The Book of Gawain (6:37): MP3
4. The Book of Percival (6:18): MP3
5. The Book of Lancelot (5:44): MP3
6. The Book of Gwenivere (6:38): MP3
7. Applause (0:23): MP3
8. The Book of Merlin (7:19): MP3
9. The Book of Galahad (6:31): MP3
10. The Book of The Death of Arthur (7:11): MP3
Complete Reading (49:36): MP3



Spicer reads Language in its entirety — Vancouver, June 1965
1. Thing Language (14:10): MP3
2. Love Poems (7:30): MP3
3. Intermissions (2:35): MP3
4. Transformations (2:51): MP3
5. Morphemics (3:27): MP3
6. Phonemics (5:46): MP3
7. Graphemics (8:45): MP3

(recording courtesy of the Robert Creeley estate)

Jack Spicer speaks and reads from Language (full work)
The second of two shows edited by Mark Weiss in 1975. Based on recordings from the Spicer estate. [The opening comments are from the 4th Lecture on Poetry & Politics at the Berkeley Conference on July 14th 1965. - P.Gizzi}

(58:03): MP3 (full program)
Spicer reads Language (44:43): MP3

(Note this replaces the mp3 and ra "WBAI" mp3 we had previously made available)

Spicer reads three early poems
"The Song of the Bird in the Loins" (1:08): MP3 [Collected Poetry, p. 62]
"The Dancing Ape" (0:51): MP3 [CP, p. 25]:
"Psychoanalysis: An Elegy" (2:54): MP3 [CP, p. 31]
Complete Reading (4:52): MP3; RealAudio

ALSO OF INTEREST:

1. from Exact Change 8 - "Imaginary Elegies," April 11, 1957 (11:10)
2. from Book of Magazine Verse (1965) (20:25): MP3 , RealAudio

...

A Book Of Music
Coming at an end, the lovers Are exhausted like two swimmers. Where Did it end? There is no telling. No love is Like an ocean with the dizzy procession of the waves' boundaries From which two can emerge exhausted, nor long goodbye Like death. Coming at an end. Rather, I would say, like a length Of coiled rope Which does not disguise in the final twists of its lengths Its endings. But, you will say, we loved And some parts of us loved And the rest of us will remain Two persons. Yes, Poetry ends like a rope.

...

Thing Language

This ocean, humiliating in its disguises
Tougher than anything.
No one listens to poetry. The ocean
Does not mean to be listened to. A drop
Or crash of water. It means
Nothing.
It
Is bread and butter
Pepper and salt. The death
That young men hope for. Aimlessly
It pounds the shore. White and aimless signals. No
One listens to poetry.

... recently watched and was blown away by:

... ANNE CARSON ... in the NYT ...

Family Feuds

AN ORESTEIA

By Translated by Anne Carson

255 pp. Faber & Faber. $27

... three Tarkovsky videos ...

Tarkovsky Interviews

...



Scenes from The Mirror

...



Scene from Stalker

... top ten reasons I started and continue to write poetry ...

Five) Lyn Hejinian's My Life



...

Back and backward, why, wide and wider. Such that art is inseparable from the search for reality. The continent is greater than the content. A river nets the peninsula. The garden rooster goes through the goldenrod. I watched a robin worming its way on the ridge, time on the uneven light ledge. There as in that's their truck there. Where it rested in the weather there it rusted. As one would say, my friends, meaning no possession, and don't harm my trees. Marigolds, nasturtiums, snapdragons, sweet William, forget-me-nots, replaced by chard, tomatoes, lettuce, garlic, peas, beans, carrots, radishes--but marigolds. The hum hurts. Still, I felt intuitively that this which was incomprehensible was expectant, increasing, was good. The greatest thrill was to be the one to "tell." All rivers' left banks remind me of Paris, not to see or sit upon but to hear spoken of. Cheese makes one thirsty but onions make a worse thirst. The Spanish make a little question frame. In the case, propped on a stand so as to beckon, was the hairy finger of St. Cecilia, covered with rings. The old dress is worn out, torn up, dumped. Erasures could not serve better authenticity. The years pass, years in which, I take it, events were not lacking. There are more colors in the great rose window of Chartres than in the rose. Beside a body, not a piece, of water. Serpentine is fool's jade. It is on a dressed stone. The previousness of plants in prior color--no dream can come up to the original, which in the common daylight is voluminous. Yet he insisted that his life had been full of happy chance, that he was luck's child. As a matter-of fact, quite the obverse. After a 9-to-5 job he got to just go home. Do you have a compulsion to work and then did you have a good time. Now it is one o'clock on the dot, but that is only a coincidence and it has a bad name. Patriots drive larger cars. At the time the perpetual Latin of love kept things hidden. We might be late to the movies but always early for the kids. The women at the parents' meeting must wear rings, for continuity. More sheep than sleep. Paul was telling me a plot which involved time travel, I asked, "How do they go into the future?" and he answered, "What do you mean?--they wait and the future comes to them--of course!" so the problem was going into the past. I think my interests are much broader than those of people who have been saying the same thing for eight years, or so he said. Has the baby enough teeth for an apple. Juggle, jungle, chuckle. The hummingbird, for all we know, may be singing all day long. We had been in France where every word really was a bird, a thing singing. I laugh as if my pots were clean. The apple in the pie is the pie. An extremely pleasant and often comic satisfaction comes from conjunction, the fit, say, of comprehension in a reader's mind to content in a writer's work. But not bitter.

...



...

Eight justifications for canonizing Lyn Hejinian's My Life

...

Reading from My Life

at San Francisco State University in 1979: (15:27) MP3

...

... three basketball videos ...

Iverson Crossover Jordan...

...



Vince Carter Slam Dunk Comp.

...



JORDAN...

... top ten reasons I started and continue to write poetry ...

Six) W.H. Auden:
Collected Poems



...

Musee des Beaux Arts

...

The W. H. Auden Society

...

© Nancy Crampton		W. H. AUDEN The Art of Poetry No. 17 Interviewed by Michael Newman Issue 57, Spring 1974 Download a PDF of the full interview

INTERVIEWER You have always been a formalist. Today’s poets seem to prefer free verse. Do you think that’s an aversion to discipline? AUDEN Unfortunately that’s too often the case. But I can’t understand—strictly from a hedonistic point of view—how one can enjoy writing with no form at all. If one plays a game, one needs rules, otherwise there is no fun. The wildest poem has to have a firm basis in common sense, and this, I think, is the advantage of formal verse.

...

...

Caliban to the Audience

If now, having dismissed you hired impersonators with verdicts ranging from the laudatory orchid to the disgusted and disgusting egg, you and, of course, notwithstanding the conscious fact of his irrevocable absence, you instinctively do ask for our so good, so great, so dead author to stand before the finally lowered curtain and take his shyly responsible bow for this, his latest, ripest production, it is I --my reluctance is, I can assure you, co-equal with your dismay--who will always loom thus wretchedly into your confused picture, for, in default of the all-wise, all-explaining master you would speak to, who else at least can, who else indeed must respond to your bewildered cry, but its very echo, the begged question you would speak to him about.

...

Books and Writers
8 October 1971 European Service
WH Auden talks to Kevin Byrne about

the influence of Marx and Freud on his poetry, the didactic nature of his work, the aim of the arts, the importance of fun 2 min 56

Audio Archive
20 November 1971 Radio 3
WH Auden talks to Hans Keller about

	recognising great art 1 min 38
	the musical treatment of poets' work 5 min 30

... new books! ...

(hardback)

... top ten reasons I started and continue to write poetry ...

Seven) The Collected Poem of
Kenneth Koch

...

An Interview With Kenneth Koch
by David Kennedy
Recorded in Huddersfield, England, Thursday 5th August 1993

...

Reading at the Kelly Writers House, University of Pennsylvania,
April 15, 1998

Songs From Plays
1. This Dancing Man was Once the Pope (0:32) from Easter in the Vatican
2. When I was a Young Woman (0:36) from Easter in the Vatican
3. Your Genius Made Me Shiver (0:55)
4. Driving Along (0:21) from New Faces of Forty Years Past
5. They Say Prince Hamlet (1:02) from Shakespeare Amended
6. Songs Are about Death (0:17) from The Unicorn
7. Allegheny Menaces (0:38) from New Times, New World
8. Let's Pour a Coca-Cola on the Priest (0:25) from Don Juan of Quixote
9. You Want a Social Life with Friends (1:28) from Brothers and Friends
10. What Makes this Statue Noble Seeming (0:39) from Two Worlds
11. from My Olivetti Speaks (10:14)
12. Some plays from One Thousand Avant-Garde Plays (18:50)
13. One Train (5:57)

...

From ON AESTHETICS

AESTHETICS OF BEING A SAILBOAT

Go this way and that
Have a reflection
Be upside down


AESTHETICS OF PLATO

There has to be something better
Than what we see.  Otherwise, we'd see it.


AESTHETICS OF SURREALISM

To find the impossible
With breasts.


AESTHETICS OF CERTAIN THINGS

Certain people for certain things.
Certain women for certain things.
Certain men for certain things.
Certain occasions for certain things.
Certain lives for certain things.


AESTHETICS OF SILENCE

Silence is not everything.
It is half of everything
Like a house.


AESTHETICS OF THE MAIN PART OF LIFE

The late early and the entire middle
Are the main part of life.  Be as kind
As you can in this part, and get done
What it seems to you has to be done.
If you find time for it, have a good time.


AESTHETICS OF BEING GLORIOUS

To be glorious, take off your wings
Before you fly.


AESTHETICS OF STONE

The gods take stone
And turn it into men and women;
Men and women take gods
And turn them into stone.

...

... new from Pennsound ... Forest Gander at the Ear Inn ...

Segue Series Reading at the Ear Inn, May 1992
Complete Reading (15:14): MP3

... three videos that I find astounding ...

Japanese Popping Competition

...




David Antin Talking about Kathy Acker

...



!!!!WITTGENSTEIN!!!!
(for mark)

Dance

Or if the yellow-masked man behind the ladder permits you to speak
May I be allowed to refute something you said a week ago?
The capitalized gimmicks attention allows will show a week ago
What I hope to expect to understand tomorrow, sometime in the day
May “Goodness me” mean different to an anarchist

Pray like to lay a kneel behind someone you love
The dream of distance censorship and refundable
Exhausting cityscapes for the folk of a shroud
Invoice when lifetime is utmost approachable
You were weeks ago sad sandalwood blocks, pet

The CG draws the body to near high quality
Ohhh, ho ho ho. Not me, that’s not even close to that!
The instrument of passive, warm, fuzzy human interest
Grotesquely mistaken in urged animal stance
A week ago you had something to say I’d like to refute

Permit me to say so and I will
As I do have nothing to refute
Doggedly kitten hiding from the shelf not here now
Picture after picture staggered to shadow
I took a life for you

And a week ago this hadn’t happened yet
What’s this “What’s with this, now?”, anyhow
If strumming gets you on with it
Don’t look shocked at all
When looking at two kittens, Ahhhem

... three ballet videos ...

Jane Vorburger

...

THE EGG, THE MONK AND THE WARRIOR

...

Schönberg: Verklärte Nacht ("Finale")

Jirí Kylián's ballet

... top ten reasons I started and continue to write poetry ...

8) Ground Work: Before the War/In the Dark
ROBERT DUNCAN


...



(from) The Introduction by Michael Palmer

The story is well-known in poetry circles: around 1968, disgusted by his difficulties with publishers and by what he perceived as the careerist strategies of many poets, Duncan vowed not to publish a new collection for fifteen years. (There would be chapbooks along the way.) He felt that this decision would free him to listen to the demands of his (supremely demanding) poetics and would liberate the architecture of his work from all compromised considerations. He would allow the grand design (“grand collage,” Bending the Bow vii) to emerge in its own time from the agonistic dance of Eros and Thanatos, chaos and form, darkness and light, permission and obligation. It was not until 1984 that Ground Work I: Before the War appeared, to be followed in February 1988, the month of his death, by Ground Work II: In the Dark.

(the whole introduction: HERE)

...

All the Audio from PENNSOUND:

Reading and discussion of "Often I am Permitted" at the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University, May 18, 1959

Complete Reading (1:01:41): MP3

Often I Am Permitted (2:00): MP3

Original recording by the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University. PennSound publication made with thanks to the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University for their archival work.


Reading in Vancouver, British Columbia, 1961
July 23 Reading (3:05:22): MP3
July 24 Reading (3:32:11): MP3
July 25 Reading (3:10:17): MP3


Reading in Vancouver, British Columbia, July 26, 1963
1. The Question (3:01) : MP3
2. Structure of Rime 9 (2:11) : MP3
3. Structure of Rime 10 (1:41) : MP3
4. Structure of Rime 11 (1:31) : MP3
5. Ingmar Bergman's Seventh Seal (2:15) : MP3
6. Apprehensions (17:35) : MP3
7. Come Let Me Free Myself (1:39) : MP3
8. Risk (4:44) : MP3
9. Structure of Rime: "Back to the figure..." (4:34) : MP3
10. Osiris and Set (4:31) : MP3
11. Two Presentations (5:46) : MP3
12. A Song of the Old Order (4:04) : MP3
13. Witch's Song (from Faust Foutu: A Comic Masque) (3:26) : MP3
14. Opening: On A Set of Romantic Hymns — To Michael McClure and Percy Bysshe Shelley (1:28) : MP3
15. A Set of Romantic Hymns (8:38) : MP3
16. Sonnet 1(2:53) : MP3
17. Sonnet 2 (0:57) : MP3
18. Sonnet 3, from Dante's Sixth Sonnet (0:53) : MP3
19. Sonnet 4 (1:34) : MP3
20. Opening: On the Pindar poem and Apprehensions (1:16) : MP3
21. Witch's Song from Faust Foutu (repeated) (2:16) : MP3
22. A Poem Beginning with a Line from Pindar (12:12) : MP3

complete reading (1:34:05) : MP3


Reading at the University of British Columbia, August 5, 1963
complete reading (2:02:38): MP3


Reading in Albuquerque, New Mexico, February 29, 1964
1. Introduction & Opening: On The Open Field (5:17) : MP3
2. Roots and Branches (1:18) : MP3
3. What Do I Know of the Old Law? (3:23) : MP3
4. Opening: On Publication & The Floating Bear (2:26) : MP3
5. Afterthought (4:47) : MP3
6. Opening: Play in H.D. Book (1:09) : MP3
7. "What Time of Day Is It?..." (6:53) : MP3
8. Opening: On "Passages" (The Cantos and Spring & All) (3:50) : MP3
9. Passages (7:33) : MP3
10. A Song of the Old Order (2:48) : MP3
11. Witch's Song (from Faust Foutu: A Comic Masque) (3:29) : MP3

complete reading (44:07) : MP3

At The Berkeley Poetry Conference, 1965
1. Often I am Permitted to Return to a Meadow (from The Opening of the Field) (1:08) MP3
2. Structure of Rime 9 (from The Opening of the Field) (2:03) MP3
3. Structure of Rime 10 (from The Opening of the Field) (1:38) MP3
4. Structure of Rime 11 (from The Opening of the Field) (1:13) MP3
5. Apprehensions (from Roots and Branches) (17:02) MP3
6. Osiris and Set (from Roots and Branches) (2:54) MP3
7. A Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar (from The Opening of the Field) (11:14) MP3
8. The Continent (from Windings) (4:30) MP3
9. The Multiversity (from Groundwork, Vol. 1) (4:04) MP3

Reading at the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University, December 12, 1972
1. Poetry, a Natural Thing (2:46) : MP3
2. Spark from this Flint by von Heartstruck (3:46) : MP3
3. Opening: Eliot & the Metaphysical Poets (3:34) : MP3
4. Being Imitations, Derivations, and Varitations upon Certain Conceits and Findings Made Among Hard Lines (0:52) : MP3
5. From Sir Walter Raleigh's "What Is Our life?" (3:43) : MP3
6. From Thomas Suttle's "The Burning Babe" (5:33) : MP3
7. From George Herbet's "Jordan I" (2:47) : MP3
8. From George Herbert's "Jordan II" (1:26) : MP3
9. Passages 36 (False Start and Tape Change) (1:12) : MP3
10. Passages 36 (Complete) (6:39) : MP3
11. Despair in Being Tedious (4:20) : MP3
12. Opening : On "Over There" (3:28) : MP3
13. Over There (4:26) : MP3
14. Structured of Rime 28: In Memoriam Wallace Stevens (3:23) : MP3

complete reading (48:46) : MP3

Original recording by the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University. PennSound publication made with thanks to the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University for their archival work.


Reading in Buffalo, 1982
Preamble (17:54): MP3
Reading (1:02:08): MP3
Sermon (21:02): MP3


The Opening of the Field (date and location unknown)
part one (29:23): MP3
part two (29:23): MP3


Reading and Discussing His Work (date and location unknown)
complete reading (16:34): MP3


Reading From Passages, March 6, 1970 (location unknown)
1. Introduction & Passages 1-10 (48:23): MP3
2. Passages 11-13 (25:18) MP3
3. Passage 14 (29:03) MP3

(recording courtesy of Ron Silliman)


Lectures


Lecture on Ezra Pound
part one (45:41): MP3
part two (45:26): MP3


"Romeo and Juliet as a Mystery Play," UC Berkeley, February 8, 1972
complete recording (1:45:01): MP3


"Physics and Literature," Miriam College, 1978
complete recording (1:00:10): MP3


"The Adventure of Whitman's Line," recorded February 18, 1979
Part One (50:25): MP3
Part Two (50:47): MP3
Part Three (25:35): MP3


"Another Look at Imagism," recorded March 31, 1983
at University of Maine, Orono
part one (46:35): MP3
part two (46:41): MP3
part three (30:46): MP3
(recording courtesy of Rachel Blau DuPlessis)


Seminar on H.D., 1986
part one (46:42): MP3
part two (46:12): MP3
part five (44:29): MP3
part six (44:11): MP3

...

(the first poem and, obviously, the first lines of this monumental work):

Achilles' Song

I do not know more than the Sea tells me,
told me long ago, or I overheard Her
telling distant roar upon the sands,
waves of meaning in the cradle of whose
sounding and resounding power I

slept.

Manchild, She sang

--or was it a storm uplifting the night
into a moving wall in which
I was carried as if a mothering nest had
been made in dread?

the wave of a life darker than my
life before me sped, and I,
larger than I was, grown dark as
the shoreless depth,
arose from myself, shaking the last
light of the sun

from me.

Manchild, She said,

Come back to the shores of what you are.
Come back to the crumbling shores.

All night

The mothering tides in which your
Life first formd in the brooding
light have quencht the bloody
Splendors of the sun

and, under the triumphant processions

of the moon, lay down
thunder upon thunder of an old
longing, the beat

of whose repeated spell
consumes you.

Thetis, then,
my mother, has promised me

the mirage of a boat, a vehicle
of water within the water,
and my soul would return from
the trials of its human state,

from the long siege, from the

struggling companions upon the plain,
from the burning towers and deeds
of honor and dishonor,
the deeper unsatisfied war beneath
and behind the declared war,
and the rubble of beautiful, patiently
workt moonstones, agates, jades, obsidians,

turnd and retrund in the wash of

the tides, the gleaming waste,
the pathetic wonder,

words turnd in the phrases of song
before our song ...or are they

beautiful, patiently workt remembrances of those
long gone from me,
returned anew, ghostly in the light

of the moon, old faces?

For Thetis, my mother, has promised
me a boat,
a lover, an up-lifter of my spirit
into the rage of my first element
rising, a princedom

in the unreal, a share in Death

*

Time, time. It's time.

The business of Troy has long been done.

Achilles in lreuke has come home.

And soon you too will be alone.

_____________________________________

Donald Barthelme for the Day

Patricide is a bad idea, first because it is contrary to law and custom and second because it proves, beyond a doubt, that the father's every fluted accusation against you was correct: you are a thoroughly bad individual, a patricide! - a member of a class of persons universally ill-regarded. It is all right to feel this hot emotion, but not to act upon it. And it is not necessary. It is not necessary to slay your father, time will slay him, that is a virtual certainty. Your true task lies elsewhere.

"...if we hone our razor sharp enough, there is no such entity as a poet or a hero. At best we have bundles of poems that are bundles of words. So much for analytic logic as a tool for establishing foundations. What we can take as a significant entity is relative to functions. All functions, though, are not equal. If we want to understand a general situation that contemporary poets might share, we need to construct a hero, however provisional a one, as our emblem for cultural pressures manifesting themselves in individual choices....

"...Part of our wanting a hero involves wanting someone who can get the light to focus on poetry at all."

--Charles Altieri

... submit? ...

The Colorado Review is currently accepting submissions of fiction, non-fiction and poetry through April 30, 2009. For short fiction and personal essays with contemporary themes (no genre fiction or literary criticism), there is no specific word or page count but stories and essays are usually somewhere between 20 and 25 manuscript pages. Please submit one story or essay at a time. Poetry of any style is considered. Please limit poetry submissions to no more than five poems at a time. Manuscripts must be typed (double-spaced for fiction and nonfiction; poetry may be single-spaced) or printed on white letter-sized paper. Please include a cover letter. Be sure your full name and address appear on the manuscript. No submissions via e-mail. Include a self-addressed stamped envelope OR an e-mail address for response. Please state in your cover letter if you want your manuscript returned, if so, please include proper postage on your SASE. Work must be unpublished. Simultaneous submissions are accepted; writers must notify Colorado Review immediately if the work is accepted elsewhere. Send manuscripts to: Colorado Review, 9105 Campus Delivery, Department of English, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO 80523. For more information, see coloradoreview.colostate.edu.

... top ten reasons I started and continue to write poetry ...

Nine)The Poems of
Marianne Moore

...

| On Moore's Life and Career | A Moore Chronology | On "Poetry" | On "The Fish" | On "Sojourn in the Whale" | On "A Grave" | On "Silence" | On "Marriage" | On "An Octopus" | On "No Swan So Fine" | On "The Pangolin" | On "Bird-Witted" | On "The Paper Nautilus" | On "Spenser's Ireland" | On "Peter" | On "An Egyptian Pulled Glass Bottle in the Shape of a Fish" | An Essay on "Marriage" by Pamela White Hadas | Moore's Use of Quotation in "Marriage" and "An Octopus" | Photo Gallery | A Moore Exhibit | External Links |

...

Poetry

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond
  all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
  discovers in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
  Hands that can grasp, eyes
  that can dilate, hair that can rise
     if it must, these things are important not because a

high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because
  they are
useful. When they become so derivative as to become
  unintelligible,
the same thing may be said for all of us, that we
  do not admire what
  we cannot understand: the bat
     holding on upside down or in quest of something to

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless
  wolf under
a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse
  that feels a flea, the base-
ball fan, the statistician--
  nor is it valid
     to discriminate against "business documents and

school-books"; all these phenomena are important. One must make
  a distinction
however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the
  result is not poetry,
nor till the poets among us can be
 "literalists of
  the imagination"--above
     insolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, "imaginary gardens with real toads in them,"
  shall we have
it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,
the raw material of poetry in
  all its rawness and
  that which is on the other hand
     genuine, you are interested in poetry.

...

Clips from the Voices and Visions Documentary of Moore:

Part 1
&

Part 2

... three Shakespeare speeches ...

Shylock's Speech

-----------------------------------



Iago's Speech

-------------------------



(and Ladies and Gentlemen) Sir John (Jack) Falstaff!!!

Donofrio Chronicles

To have the 11 studies and single completed Albrecht Dürer painting of Vincent Donofrio sitting in a diner, sipping from a thermos, contemplating weak quantum mechanics (as if the conception of the painting originated in the mind of a dog Donofrio has yet to, but will eventually, purchase from a man claiming to have attended the same high school 11 years before the assassination of JFK: and note that this year is six before Donofrio’s own birth, yet he doesn’t at first consider the significance of the seller’s ravings but is still somehow transfixed by them in a way that reminds him of a minor role –though for the life, he can’t recall for which part or series- he auditioned for in an 80s sitcom), and realizing that he misses – mostly from his seemingly-but-not-altogether-lonely childhood- the companionship of a k-9. The expression on the actor’s face –a look of foregone conclusion in the eyes and cheeks- says most of this, but tends to be (at least by the viewer and perhaps occasionally Donofrio, himself) at once fleeting in Dürer’s crude, sweeping brush strokes and his –but maybe the dog’s- choice in florescent music notes and stave streaming from the thermos and gold and tan blazer at Donofrio’s right (the audience’s left), and insignificant by way of its being a forgery.

... reading!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ...

Tuesday, March 24th: The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest

Readers at this event are Stephen Ratcliffe, Garrett Caples, Rena Rosenwasser, Susan Gevirtz, Andrew Joron, and Patricia Dienstfrey.

Garrett Caples is the author of The Garrett Caples Reader (1999) and Complications (2007). He's an editor at City Lights Books, where he prepared volume 59 of the Pocket Poets Series, Tau by Philip Lamantia & Journey to the End by John Hoffman (2008). He is also the editor of the new American poetry series City Lights Spotlight. He has written on Barbara Guest in the San Francisco Chronicle, Women's Studies, The Chicago Review, and, most recently, The San Francisco Bay Guardian, where he is a contibuting writer.

Patricia Dienstfrey’s publications include The Woman Without Experiences (Kelsey Street, 1995), winner of the America Award for Fiction; Love and Illustration (a+bend press, 2000); and The Grand Permission: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood (Wesleyan, 2003), which she co-edited with Brenda Hillman. Her work has appeared in a number of anthologies including Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women, edited by Mary Margaret Sloan (Talisman House, 1997) and The Addison Street Anthology: Berkeley’s Poetry Walk, edited by Robert Hass and Jessica Fisher (Heyday Books, 2004). She is a co-founder of Kelsey Street Press.

Andrew Joron's latest poetry collection is The Sound Mirror, published by Flood Editions. After a decade and a half spent writing science-fiction poetry, culminating in his volume Science Fiction (Pantograph Press, 1992), Joron began to elaborate other forms of lyric speculation. This work has been collected in The Removes (Hard Press, 1999) and in Fathom (Black Square Editions, 2003). The Cry at Zero, a selection of his prose poems and critical essays, was published by Counterpath Press in 2007. Joron is also the translator, from the German, of the Marxist-Utopian philosopher Ernst Bloch's Literary Essays (Stanford University Press, 1998). He lives in Berkeley.

Stephen Ratcliffe's Real , 474 pages written in 474 consecutive days, was published by Avenue B in 2007. Two more recent manuscripts, Cloud/Ridge (also 474 pages) and Human Nature (1,000 pages), appear in ubu editions' “Publishing the Unpublishable” series ( www.ubu.com ). The complete (14 hour) reading/performance of Human/Nature at UC Davis is available at PennSound. Previous books include Portraits & Repetition_ (The Post-Apollo Press, 2002) and SOUND/ (system) (Green Integer, 2002). His book on offstage action in Hamlet ( Reading the Unseen / (Offstage) Hamlet ) is forthcoming from Counterpath this fall. He lives in Bolinas and teaches at Mills College in Oakland.

Rena Rosenwasser was born in New York City where she received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College. Later moving to the Bay Area she became an active member of the local literary community and completed an MA at Mills. She co-founded Kelsey Street Press in 1974 and in the mid-eighties initiated a series of collaborations between writers and artists. She served as Director of the Press for twenty years. She is currently Vice President of the Board of Small Press Distribution. Her publications include Unplace. Place (Leave Books), Isle and Simulacra (both Kelsey St. Press) were collaborations with the artist Kate Delos. A Livres d'Artists, Aviary (Limestone Press) was produced with Kate Delos. She resides in Berkeley, California with her partner Penny Cooper. Together they actively support the work of contemporary women artists.

... spring stint ambitions ...

But First:

... top ten reasons I started and continue to write poetry ... the continue part is why you will not see Dr. Suess, Kenneth Grahame, et al. ....

TEN) WALT WHITMAN

SONG OF MYSELF

...

Draft lines from "Song of Myself." Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.

...

30.
All truths wait in all things,
They neither hasten their own delivery nor resist it,
They do not need the obstetric forceps of the surgeon,
The insignificant is as big to me as any,
(What is less or more than a touch?)

Logic and sermons never convince,
The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul.

(Only what proves itself to every man and woman is so,
Only what nobody denies is so.)

A minute and a drop of me settle my brain,
I believe the soggy clods shall become lovers and lamps,
And a compend of compends is the meat of a man or woman,
And a summit and flower there is the feeling they have for each
other,
And they are to branch boundlessly out of that lesson until it
becomes omnific,
And until one and all shall delight us, and we them.

...

(song of myself: in its entirety: here)

...

... three music videos ...

Buck 65

---------------------------------

Why?

--------------------------------



(and: oh my goodness!) Subtle

Odds

I’m lucky to have written this. It’s lucky this was written.
Why wasn’t it written in the first place or before?
Was it written at all? It must be dumb luck?
Generally, luck is overlooked. We luck out when we
Recognize. If you don’t feel lucky after reading this
Maybe you will. It may take more than one reading
To see the lucky chance. It’s overwhelming.
Take another chance and read this as if it were you’re lucky day.
Play with it and create luck from rearranging the letters
Or words. Perhaps find the letters of your name (zq, etc.)
It’s pure luck this was written when it was, otherwise
Why would you be reading now? I’d be a liar if I said I'm not lucky.

... Interview with Frank Stanford ...

An Interview with Frank Stanford

Irving Broughton

IRV BROUGHTON: What does the river mean to you?

FRANK STANFORD: The river is like a travellng friend who keeps going. You remember them and you forget them, but they just keep passing on. They are always strangers and always friends, and that's the way the river is

IB: What's your favorite river?

FS: I don't think I have a favorite river. I think I might have favorite small creeks or small bodies of water.

IB: Can you stand to be away from the water?

FS: Oh, I can be away from the river, but it's pretty hard to be apart from water. I like to be around water.

IB: Why?

FS: Because Lao-tse said water was the most powerful thing and it was the most passive thing - you could pass your hand through it quite easily, yet it can destroy cities and towns with its force.

IB: Have you ever felt the power of it?

FS: Yes. The power of it is like there is an eyeball you can't see and the waves come and loosen it out of a head - it's as if a horse kicked another horse's eye in and it's just waiting to pop out.

IB: What is strange to you?

FS: A lot of people have come up with some neat aphorisms and platitudes about reality and commonplace and inimitable and ineffable ways of living. But I think New York is strange; I think Cape Cod is strange, that Maine is strange. I don't think you should try to say the more experience someone has had the more varied experience, that therefore he is going to open himself up to strangers.

IB: When did you realize this strangeness?

FS: It took me a long time to realize anything about my past or experiences or that the way I wrote was strange. I thought it was just my way of doing something, and I didn't think it was stranger than what I was reading.

IB: When did you begin to realize this?

FS: Other poets, teachers, and editors pointed it out - people who read my things.

IB: Such as?

FS: Well, the person who thinks I'm the strangest would be Alan Dugan. A letter I received once from John Berryman - he thought my poetry was pretty strange. When editors reject or accept your poems they seem to put on mine - they say they like the music, the architecture, and the originality. But then, a lot of them put that it's no good at all. They don't like it at all.

IB: Do you think they understand it?

FS: No, and I don't think that a lot of them want to understand it.

IB: What would it take besides the desire for them to understand it?

FS: If you had a stack of poems that you had been reading all night I think you might as well reject mine, too. If a person is quiet enough inside he might be able to catch on to what I'm trying to do in my poetry.

IB: What are you trying to do?

FS: Although I don't want people at the end of it to say that this was obviously a poem, I want it to have the traits of a poem - as a symphony has the traits of a symphony. What I want to do is use movement and rhythm on different levels. I want it to be like the reader was going into the reading of the poem as they were going for a boat ride in some swift water, and each layer of the poem was a different thing you have to do. One was the river and one was the use of his paddle. Many of the poems around are too simple. They take us for granted. Our sensibilities have been taken for granted for too long. I don't think that much of it is really poetry. It's just a coalition of things that might take ten minutes or ten months to write. However, I do believe that maybe it's just that I don't keep up with what's going on, but there are a hell of a lot of good young writers. I don't want to say any names because I would be afraid of leaving some out or maybe not even remembering some of their names.

IB: Do you think you can really capture the strangeness of your work? Or the environment?

FS: I don't go out and say, "I'm going to hunt down what is strange, then I'm going to put it down on paper." You can't do that, and to do it would be like killing and mounting it, and there is enough of that being done. I want to just let it exist in the flux of things. It is the poetry of being awake and asleep at the same time. It's just not night or day, it's both.

IB: I think James Dickey points out that a line of poetry can be too good. Would you say that an experience could perhaps be too good - too strange?

FS: Yeah. I hardly ever use a direct experience. For one, I don't like to do that. For another thing, a lot of people probably think that what a person writes he has done. They are too strange, and it would require too much time, and I'm just not interested in doing that. There are things that have taken place that I couldn't touch with a ten-foot pole as far as using them.

IB: George Garrett said of Southern writers that they are a "race of storytellers."

FS: I know there are storytellers, liars, whatever you want to say. It's easy to be in a situation in a room - you're not getting out of trouble or you're not doing it to just promote yourself and company - but it's just as easy to offhand come up with a story. To this little tension of trying to keep the attention of someone else, I would say that he's probably right with those people who identify themselves as a group or a race of people. It's still hard for me to think of myself as a writer or a kind of writer - poet is about all. I don't mean this to sound self-effacing or naive, and a lot of people agree with this. But I do think of myself as a poet.

IB: How many drafts do you do of a poem?

FS: It depends. I might do a hundred. I might do one. On shorter poems - single poems that aren't in a series - I probably revise over and over and over, whereas the narrative poems under three hundred or four hundred lines, possibly forty or fifty revisions. But poems that are a cycle I tend to revise the cycle rather than the poem. In the case of a very long poem, say over ten thousand lines, there will be passages which will be very much revised.

IB: Do you have a short attention span?

FS: No, to the contrary, one of my problems is I can sustain my attention too long, thereby being spellbound or overwhelmed by a particular genre or a particular piece, which sometimes makes for neglect as far as other genres are concerned. I've done a little painting recently - just enough to speak of. No music, no filming.

IB: You do sumye painting. What is sumye painting?

FS: It's just a form of Japanese painting, and it's done very quickly. The staff is like a pin or a sword. You just sit there, and you may stare at a blank piece of paper for hours and hours, and suddenly you unsheath it and execute your strokes. There's no revision. I don't say this is analogous to my poetry, but I enjoy that painting.

IB: Who is your favorite violent person?

FS: Carl Orfi; the composer, and Muhammad Ali are probably two of my favorites. I would rather have been Muhammad Ali than T.S. Eliot. Or I'd rather have been Brando than Eliot.

IB: Dickey feels Faulkner strains too hard to be literary.

FS: Dickey might have the same problem as his crew of people and the people he was influenced by. They tried just as hard to strive to be non-literary. It's the same way Lawrence hated himself as an intellectual and he was always trying to deny this. His language is adverbs and adjectives and convoluted sentences that the reader would like. Both sensibilities can be accommodated.

IB: What about Dickey's characters in Deliverance; What did you think about the mountain people?

FS: I've seen this phenomenon take place. Take an old fast, fairly unknown river - except that people lived around it and turn it into a big reservoir. They have them all over the South now, mainly because Arkansas is one of the first Places they started doing it -and Tennessee. I assume you're dwelling on Dickey because he is a very popular poet and writer and a personality in the screenplay, and I would hope it has nothing to do with me. There is a similarity in some of our work -people have pointed that out. I think some of his poems are among the best written, especially the one called "Shark's Parlor." After all, we poets have to realize that, except for Agee and Faulkner - if you can call Faulkner poetry, that only a few of us have broken into the motion-picture industry. We have to do that. We just can't let these second-rate novelists and playwrights keep jumping the gun on us. Just think of this: if Galway Kinnell or William Stafford or Daniel Hoffman or some of these men could have a chance, maybe they wouldn't even want to do it.

IB: Getting back to the Deliverance characters. What about the mountain people?

FS: I've come across people that are ornery, and these people do exist. I don't think he intended to stereotype all mountain people like that. It reminds me of the Easy Rider film where the hippies get shot. All these things take place. It's not strange, I don't think what happened in the story was strange to Dickey. I think it's easy to indict a screenwriter or a poet for stereotyping, and it's easy to indict some kinds of novelists. But I give the author the benefit of the doubt that he's just not interested in the empty form where he can pull off something that he is interested in - the other man's character.

IB: What types of the novel would it be a problem with?

FS: We've had a lot of war novels - things that have a lot to do with the war. A lot of people label all Southern things as "Southern grotesque." They throw it in like that. I've had some Yankee say, "This is Southern grotesque." And I've seen men actively come out against anything that can be construed as Southern.

IB: What makes a genuine poet?

FS: You know that there are many poets around now. A lot of them seem to be fighting over this or that. I don't really know. I don't even know what makes me a poet. I certainly don't want anybody telling me what does or what doesn't.

IB: Do you ever concern yourself with the morality of dreams?

FS: Yes, I do. In reality things happen that we try to understand with our consciousness as a judiciary, and it's the same way in sleep. You wake up and you dreamed something that might not be any stranger than what happened to you the day before. You want to know why it happened, more than any psychological reason for why did I dream this. I want to know why did the action take place? What happened to this man? What happened to this woman? Is it good or is it bad?

IB: Does this trouble you sometimes when you don't know?

FS: Yes, it does.

IB: Can you trace your dreams to experience - maybe something the day before?

FS: You can come across things that may be insignificant during the day or maybe not insignificant, and they turn up in that state. But imagine this: that during the day a man is a cartographer for that geography, that terrain, those rivers and waters and all this land - topography of what he goes through at night. I don't advocate that we should abolish order and accept chaos of just sleep unless we just want to sleep all the time. I look to William Blake for instruction in those matters. When I comer across a problem I can't solve, generally, I'll read a poem by Blake - a very simple poem from something like Poetical Sketches, or maybe one of the longer things. I come to some realization. Then I might read something by Burns to lift me up.

IB: Who are your two or three favorite poets?

FS: I would think that most of the Old English and Middle English work. I'm talking about the English writers. I like all of the Romantics. I like Dickinson, Whitman, Rossetti. I believe I learned more about form from William Blake than anyone else.

... three prose writers ...

Gary Lutz!!!
(Gary Lutz Video! ... I would say, without much hesitation: Gary Lutz is the strongest "younger" prose writer living ...)

------------------------------------



Brian Evenson!!

-----------------------------------



Sam Lipsyte!

What goes around

The lunar cycle (a distant, slower cousin to the motorcycle) takes its time.
As we know: in high school the two became rivals -each with their own clique. Yet when we look up to the vast, wide open sky or out at the far-reaching stretches of road, we can’t help but remind ourselves of the microcosmic, chain-driven differences.

Perhaps it’s easy to cross-section the two: the first moon arrest by a moto-cop.

But remind yourself of this: A motorcycle officer can travel from Miami, FL to Las Vegas, NV in 52.7 hours while a lunar ray wiggles at 4.9 zenzizenzizenzic mph.
In this instance we reflect upon dreams or science class,
even though in the back of our minds we know we’d like to be hogtied on our way to that stink.

Event Invite

“Celebrate celebrity cerebral palsy week
With us as we come together September 17th
With Hawking to host the event on horseback.”

What’s wrong with this invitation?

A) It lacks clarity: What type of horse is it?
B) It’s a superficial jab at disability.
C) It doesn’t tell the location.



ʇɔıɹʇsıp ʇuǝɯnuoɯ ǝɥʇ uı ǝɔɐןd sǝʞɐʇ ʇuǝʌǝ ǝɥʇ (ɔ

... Barthelme Biography ... NYT ... Link ...

"Goals incapable of attainment have driven many a man to despair, but despair is easier to get to than that -- one need merely look out of the window, for example."

The Story Artist

... top five living poets who intimidate me ... and by intimidate I mean an intimidation by reverence ...

1. John Ashbery


2. Rosmarie Waldrop


3. Susan Howe


4. Anne Carson


5. Keith Waldrop

... the thin string videos ...

James Dickey

----------------------------------------



Thomas Lux

--------------------------------------



Amy Hempel

"'Origin and destination are the same': if there is truth in this statement at all, then it must be in the field of art."--Theodor Adorno

... videos from the dialogical ...

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel

------------------------------------------



Cornel West (on Socrates and Education)

--------------------------------------------



Debate (but is this sufficient?)

... yes! ... big link! ...

... Reading at Moe's Books ...

Thursday, March 19th: Poetry Flash presents D.A. Powell & Hugh Behm-Steinberg: 7:30pm...

D.A. Powell's new book of poems is Chronic from Graywolf Press; J.D. McClatchy says of it, "Whenever I change the channel to D.A. Powell's work, there beneath the screen's headlines runs the simultaneous quicksilver crawl of news from elsewhere: from underneath, behind the scenes, the half-secret places where love is brokered and power is spent.... Chronic gives us the time of our lives in ways both ardent and exhilarating." Powell's previous collections are Tea, Lunch, and Cocktails, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Hugh Behm-Steinberg's book of poems is Shy Green Fields; Jane Miller says his debut volume ". . . is in company with books by poets who wrote about glorious ordinary days in extraordinary times. In a pillowbook of a hundred seven-line poems, this life, as it is written, has the shadow of Robert Creeley's A Day Book behind it, and the shadow of Federico Lorca in his famous, reiterated line, Green, I love you, green..... "A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, Hugh Behm-Steinberg has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. He is the editor of the California College of Arts literary journal Eleven Eleven.

... link: you can thank me later ...

Martin Buber

Martin Buber has profoundly influenced all of us who are interested in interpersonal communication. This website was created to share information about Buber's life so that you may have a better understanding of the man behind the philosophy; to give you a chance to "meet" Martin Buber.

Click to begin the presentation

... this is the final blow for pitchfork media ... no longer pitchfork ...

Tuesday, March 17

Bob Dylan's Port-A-Potty Put

on Blast

---

"Mr. Civil Rights is killing our civil rights."

If you lived next to Bob Dylan, you might expect some strange sounds coming from beyond the fence. But how about strange smells? Strange smells that smell like shit mixed with chemicals, to be precise? According to the L.A. Times, the Bard's neighbors are complaining about noxious odors coming from a port-a-potty located on Dylan's compound in Malibu. And if the Times didn't already run with the "blowin' in the wind" wordplay, someone else would have.

While this story is tons of fun for anyone who doesn't live next to Bob Dylan, it seems quite unpleasant for those who do. According to the Times, since the stench became a problem last September (!), several people claim to have fallen ill, possibly due to the grossness. One not-dramatic-at-all neighbor set up five industrial-sized fans in their yard to combat the port-a-smell. The same family also came up with the money quote: "Mr. Civil Rights is killing our civil rights."

The outhouse is apparently used by Dylan's security team, which is sad to think about-- these people are forced to use a fake toilet at work and then they get yelled at for using it. Bob: There's this thing called Clear Springs Glade...

Thanks to Richard Anderson for the tip.

In much less important news, Dylan's new album, Together Through Life, is out April 28 on Columbia.

... after giving it away ... just received in the mail today ... I am in the Battlefied again ... link ...

... to combat the horror of the former ... poetry videos by the finnest of poets ...

William Carlos Williams
(read by Philip Levine)

-----------------------------------------------



Anne Carson

----------------------------------------------



Stephen Rodefer!!!!!!!!!!!!

(i just found this video!)

... three people that pretend to write poetry ... oh, videos of them ...

Billy Collins

-------------------------------------

Kooser excerpt
by UTwil

Ted Kooser

----------------------------------------------



Charles Simic (he is going to pay a much worse price for his attack on Creeley)...

---------------------------------------------

(i apologize now for all those who actually sit through these videos... but i felt that it had to be done... you can forgive me later...)

Natürliche Sekretion

Nature’s milk comes from a breast whose nipple, when excited, protrudes a clever tuft of auburn hair.

The retraction of the tuft is thought to revivify the inner lining which ever-so-slowly becomes polluted by every-day wear and tear.

Nature is an organism of many facets, and, collectively, we are lucky to be a part of it.

For example: there is a lever in the back which, when pulled, allows for an assortment of juices and spirits to be extracted.

The excreted liquids are commonly called "nature feed" and are the means by which we survive.

Survival is at the heart of our existence, so when the pump runs dry, nature can
be manipulated in such a way as to procure synthesized compositions
which have come to be known as "unnatural feed".

The many nutrients contained in feed and milk (both natural and unnatural)
have made possible the evolution of mammalian brain development.

Like most mammals, nature reflects upon a sincere, perhaps overtly-confident
idea of itself which permits or encourages dreaming.

Because natural dreaming is one of but a thousand speculations of natural unconsciousness, it is necessary to treat it as such.

For this discussion, however, we will understand natural dreams as regularly occurring episodes.

In order to avoid being sucked down the proverbial rabbit hole, rules must be set forth and are as follows:

1)Nature often dreams in color, and the subject matter of these dreams
may range from vibrant orthopedics to Otto von Gericke’s original
design of the vacuum pump.

2)Upon waking, nature has vivid memories of suction, flow, transference, and jets of dense fluids.

3)To nature, these recollections are synonymous with the role it plays in existence.

4)Existence is vital to the survival of nature, therefore nature offers
at its front an assortment, which is to say, a selection of itself.

5)It is existence, not nature, which governs natural dreams, and so,
speculation must be recognized as an unnatural phenomenon relying so
heavily upon existence as to be counterintuitive.

... as it is, for today: my life:

... forging the connection ... links ...

The phenomenon of anguish and the unity of the solicitude that anguish has revealed
to us presents the first stage on the road of the ontological characteristic of existence. From
there, the interpretation will be pursued to the unique source of solicitude. We will find
there the root of personality and of freedom. We will deduce from it finally the
phenomenon of theoretical knowledge. We will find time at the heart of everything.
Already the fact that the structures studied are modes of existing and not "quiddities"
allows us to guess their kinship with time which is not a be-ing but being. And already
expressions such as "always already," "in front of," and "next to"-all charged with the
tragic sense which is that of solicitude-allow us to discern in them the ontological root
of that which one calls in everyday life, which is plunged into a trivialized and inoffensive
time, the past, the future, and the present.

&

... this video stands alone ...

Frank Stanford read by his friend Bill Willett

.

... what lies in the holy shelf ...

...

The Complete Works of Tadao Ando
Looking back at Francis Bacon
Ashbery Collected Poems 1956-1987
John Ashbery's Hotel Lautreamont
The Tanakh
Bob Creeley's If I were writing this
Bob Creeley's Windows
The Collected Essays of Robert Creeley
Charles Olson & Robert Creeley: The Complete Correspondence Volume One
Charles Olson's Maximus Poems
The Gospel of Thomas
Martin Buber: The Life of Dialogue by Maurice S. Friedman
Martin Buber's I and Thou
Martin Buber's Eclipse of God
Martin Buber's Between Man and Man
Martin Buber's The Knowledge of Man
Martin Buber's On Judaism
Martin Buber's Paths in Utopia
Jacques Derrida's Learning to Live Finally
Jacques Derrida's The Gift of Death
Emmanuel Levinas' Otherwise than Being
Emmanuel Levinas' Of God who Comes to Mind
Emmanuel Levinas' Proper Names
Emmanuel Levinas' Entre Nous
Whitman Poetry and Prose
Roland Barthes' The Neutral
Wittgenstein's On Certainty
Wittgenstein's Culture and Value
Introducing Wittgenstein
Edmond Jabes's From The Book to the Book
Apollinaire's The Poet Assassinated
The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer
Wallace Stevens Collected Poetry & Prose
Kafka's The Castle
Kafka's Metamorphosis and Other Stories
Kafka's Amerika
Kafka's The Trial
Kafka's The Zurau Aphorisms
Pound Poems & Translations
T.S. Eliot Collected Poems: 1909-1962
Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment
Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground and The Grand Inquisitor
Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals
Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra
Nietzsche's Ecce Homo
Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil
The Norton Shakespeare

...

... three living infinite philospher videos ...

Judith Jarvis Thomson



-----------------------------------------

Julia Kristeva



----------------------------------------

Helene Cixous

... James Purdy R.I.P. ...

James Purdy Has Died

(17 July 1923 – 13 March 2009)

an obituary

... rebirth ... Pound ...

Any existential work (in other words: any work of merit) remains within a process of unfolding (birth-death-rebirth-death etc.).

I consider this blog a work of existential tension. This may seem hyperbolic but, however mediated the tension is, it certainly is still there.

I say all of this because this image, which I had never seen before, is so astounding and telling that it feels as though nothing can be the same (in this work (that happens to be on a proverbial blog) and in life (which happens to be in this proverbial world)).

"Somebody said that I am the last American
living the tragedy of Europe. "

(can someone tell me, if someone knows, who took this photograph and where it can be found... in a collection or a gallery?)

... some Paris Review Interviews ...

CHARLES OLSON The Art of Poetry No. 12 Interviewed by Gerard Malanga Issue 49, Summer 1970 View a manuscript page Download a PDF of the full interview

T. S. ELIOT The Art of Poetry No. 1 Interviewed by Donald Hall Issue 21, Spring-Summer 1959 Purchase this issue View a manuscript page Download a PDF of the full interview

ROBERT CREELEY The Art of Poetry No. 10 Interviewed by Lewis MacAdams, Linda Wagner-Martin Issue 44, Fall 1968 View a manuscript page Download a PDF of the full interview

... Frank Stanford ...

A Life Taken In The Throat Of A Tree Frog

I took my rest under the shade of an ice truck
that used to belong to a singer
all summer the chinaberries
ruining the windshield
for the life of me
who was it whistling those songs

... three music videos ...

Murcof

-----------------------------

Buck 65 "All There Is To Say About Love" LIVE New York

---------------------------------

Arnold Schoenberg: Kammersymphonie op. 9

... the slow working list... , so to speak ... revision 2 ...

Poetry

1. ?
   
2. ?
3. ?
   
4. ?
   

Poetics

1. ?
2. ?
3. ?
4. ?

Philosophy

1. ?
2. ?
3. ?
4. ?

The Supplements

1. ?
   
2. ?
3. ?
4. ?

... pics from the People's Bazaar in Berkeley ...

... Wittgenstein ... (side note: the hands below are soap) ...

I opened On Certainty by Ludwig and came across these passages:

272. I know = I am familiar with it as a certainty.

273. But when does one say of something that it is certain? For there can be dispute whether something is certain; I mean, when something is objectively certain. There are countless general empirical propositions that count as certain for us.

... three fine artist videos ...

Francis Bacon

---------------------------------------

Matthew Barney

---------------------------------------



Kiki Smith

... my three "works" on Linh Dinh's Lower Half Project.... links ...

1. LET US CLEAR THE AIR...

2. KLAUS KINSKI...

3. from THE BOOK ON KNEES...

... an Olson, a Beatles roof sequence, and a Moshe Idel ... videos ...

Charles Olson

--------------------------------------



Beatles roof Part One...



Beatles roof Part Two...



Beatles roof Part Three...

----------------------------------------



Moshe Idel

... London Review of Books ... Guy Debord ...

(Guy Debord at 19)

Crack Open the Shells

Hal Foster

Correspondence: The Foundation of the Situationist International (June 1957-60) by Guy Debord, translated by Stuart Kendall and John McHale

...SPD Best-sellers that I care or care to know about ...

SPD Poetry Best-sellers January/February 09!

2. FOUR LETTER WORDS by Truong Tran (Apogee Press)

6. LYRIC POSTMODERNISMS: AN ANTHOLOGY OF CONTEMPORARY INNOVATIVE POETRIES edited by Reginald Shepherd (Counterpath Press)

24. NIGHT SCENES by Lisa Jarnot (Flood Editions)

... three Spicer audios ...

Transformations (2:51): MP3



Morphemics (3:27): MP3



Phonemics (5:46): MP3

... last one, i promise... pps dear diary ...

&

If you want to email me about a post make sure that it has my name underneath the posting. Other people, though they don't have administrators privileges, post poems, links, etc. I may be the captain of the boat but I don't control postings. Adieu.

...

... p.s. dear diary ...

&

Chelsey Minnis' new book is not Bad Bad part 2. She, at least in this moment, must be read by me.

...

... three philosopher videos ...

Iris Murdoch

-----------------------------------



Jacques Derrida (part One)

-----------------------------------------------



Richard Rorty

... books acquired ...

... dear diary ... links ...

An authentic friend gives birth to you.

&

Joseph Massey has a presence; a variant kindness. I will never read his poetry in the same way.

&

Lisa Robertson is the most commanding reader I have encountered in my twenty seven years of living in this physical body. She is not just reinventing the wheel, she is constructing something in place of it... something far more advanced.



&

People, even those I respect, don't like Jorie Graham's work. I don't understand this.

&

Self-important "poets" should at least have decent poetry.

... from the Paris Review ...

INTERVIEWER You have often been characterized as a solipsist, and I wonder if this isn’t related to your reputation for obscurity. The way the details of a poem will be so clear, but the context, the surrounding situation, unclear. Perhaps this is more a matter of perspective than any desire to befuddle.

ASHBERYThis is the way that life appears to me, the way that experience happens. I can concentrate on the things in this room and our talking together, but what the context is is mysterious to me. And it’s not that I want to make it more mysterious in my poems—really, I just want to make it more photographic. I often wonder if I am suffering from some mental dysfunction because of how weird and baffling my poetry seems to so many people and sometimes to me too. Let me read you a comment which appeared in a review of my most recent book, from some newspaper in Virginia. It says: “John Ashbery is emerging as a very important poet, if not by unanimous critical consent then certainly by the admiration and awe he inspires in younger poets. Oddly, no one understands Ashbery.”

... ! ...

THE DAY OF RECKONING IS UPON US...

Saturday March 7th: Rae Armantrout & Lisa Robertson

Rae Armantrout's most recent book of poetry, Versed, was published in January, 2009. Next Life (Wesleyan, 2007), was chosen as one of the 100 Notable Books of 2007 by The New York Times. Other recent books include Collected Prose (Singing Horse, 2007), Up to Speed (Wesleyan, 2004), The Pretext (Green Integer, 2001), and Veil: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 2001). Her poems have been included in anthologies such as American Hybrid (Norton, 2009), Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology (1993), American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Language Meets the Lyric Tradition, ( Wesleyan, 2002), The Oxford Book of American Poetry (Oxford, 2006) and The Best American Poetry of 1988, 2001, 2002, 2004, 2007 and 2008. Armantrout received an award in poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in 2007 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008. She is Professor of Poetry and Poetics at the University of California, San Diego.

Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip has just been published by Coach House Books in Toronto. Her previous books include The Weather, The Men, and Occasional Works and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture. She currently lives in Oakland, by way of Vancouver and France, and teaches at California College of the Arts.

... two poets and a DALI ...

Heriberto Yepez

--------------------------------------------

Bob Perelman

------------------------------------------



DALI

... Chelsey ... link ...

I think there might be a typo on page 43. Honestly, does anyone else see it?
and
Is this Bad Bad part II?
and
I haven't even gone through it in full yet, but...

I & II

I. (By whose estimation?)

Do you want something? Is anything the matter?
Do you know what you want? Can I offer you something?
Is there anything you need? What can I get for you?
What’s the matter, now? What do you need?
Do you need to be somewhere? What is it, now?!!?
Are you two together? Are you with anyone?
If nothing’s the matter, you wanna go somewhere, sometime?
What is it, this time? What’s with you?
When did you get here? Do I know you from somewhere?
What are you doing here? How do you know this place?
Have they offered you anything, yet? Will you please tell me where we’re going?
Where did you get that? What is it, by the way?
What time is it? What time do you have? What’s the time?
Is it time, yet? What do you want to do?
When do you need to be there by? What are you doing in life?


II. (What’s not to like?)

Why don’t you like me anymore? What did I do?
What can I do to make this better? What should I do?
How did we come to this? Whose fault is it?
How would you know? Do we have to do this, right now?
What kind of way is that, to talk to me? Can we talk about this later?
Who do you think you are? What’s that supposed to mean?
Where did you get that idea? Why would you say that?
What do you mean, “what do I mean”? What’s the big idea?
Where do you get the nerve? Where’d you come up with that?
Why do we have to do this? When is this gonna stop?
Do you like doing this? Is this how you treat people?
What did you do? What are you gonna do about it?
What a ridiculous idea!! How can you say that?
What am I supposed to do? How should I know?
What the hell does that mean? How am I supposed to know?
How does that help? How in the hell...?
What is this? What the fuck?

... the worst of SPD ...

SPD's AWP BAD POEM CONTEST

    the winners are

1st Prize Winner: Lucas Rivera

Category: Worst Flarf Poem

The Dissolution of Eric Maskin

1st Prize Winner: Christian Bök
Category: Worst Poem Intended to Lead to Sex

... two poets and a Nabokov ... (videos)

Ezra Pound

-----------------------------------------



!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!FRANK O'HARA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

-------------------------------------------



Nabokov on Lolita (Part One)



Nabokov on Lolita (Part Two)

... three poet videos ...

James Tate

---------------------------------



Robert Creeley

-----------------------------------------



Gary Snyder

... books acquired ...

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature... Richard Rorty

Ten to One... Bob Perelmen

Shakespeare & The Question of Theory... Edited by Patricia Parker Geoffrey Hartman

i never knew what time it was... David Antin

Tadao Ando... COLLECTED WORKS.

... BOOK ZOO EVENT !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ...

A conversation with Yu Hua about his recently translated novel, Brothers.

A bestseller in China, recently short-listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize, and a winner of France’s Prix Courrier International, Brothers is an epic and wildly unhinged black comedy of modern Chinese society running amok.

See the following links for recent articles and reviews about Yu Hua and Brothers:

New Yorker
L.A. Times
New York Times
Wall Street Journal

FREE

and

Wiki Link: Here!

... three poet videos ... or the variation: two poets, one repeated three times ...

Lisa Jarnot (Terrific!)

-------------------------------------



JORIE GRAHAM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

... I don't know what to say about this poem, therefore I will just let it stand here ... this is birth ...

Uptick

We were sitting there, and

I made a joke about how

it doesn’t dovetail: time,

one minute running out

faster than the one in front

it catches up to.

That way, I said,

there can be no waste.

Waste is virtually eliminated.

To come back for a few hours to

the present subject, a painting,

looking like it was seen,

half turning around, slightly apprehensive,

but it has to pay attention

to what’s up ahead: a vision.

Therefore poetry dissolves in

brilliant moisture and reads us

to us.

A faint notion. Too many words,

but precious.

... ...

In lieu of many recent events this blog will be going through a revamping period. Many things will remain the same, with the hope that what will change will be changed for the better. Any of those fine women and men, who have helped out with this experiment and that wished or wish that this or that could be added or deleted should email me. I take all suggestions (at least one's of seriousness) as suggestions of import.

... three poet videos ...

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge

-----------------------------------



Clark Coolidge

--------------------------------------------



Cole Swensen

... another ...

... Bard ... Jack Falstaff ...

Falstaff:



Peace good Pint-pot, peace good Tickle-braine.
Harry, I doe not onely maruell where thou spendest thy
time; but also, how thou art accompanied: For though
the Camomile, the more it is troden, the faster it growes;
yet Youth, the more it is wasted, the sooner it weares.
Thou art my Sonne: I haue partly thy Mothers Word,
partly my Opinion; but chiefely, a villanous tricke of
thine Eye, and a foolish hanging of thy nether Lippe, that
doth warrant me. If then thou be Sonne to mee, heere
lyeth the point: why, being Sonne to me, art thou so
poynted at? Shall the blessed Sonne of Heauen proue a
Micher, and eate Black-berryes? a question not to bee
askt. Shall the Sonne of England proue a Theefe, and
take Purses? a question to be askt. There is a thing,
Harry, which thou hast often heard of, and it is knowne to
many in our Land, by the Name of Pitch: this Pitch (as
ancient Writers doe report) doth defile; so doth the companie
thou keepest: for Harry, now I doe not speake to
thee in Drinke, but in Teares; not in Pleasure, but in Passion;
not in Words onely, but in Woes also: and yet
there is a vertuous man, whom I haue often noted in thy

companie, but I know not his Name

... books traded, books acquired ...

... three poet videos ...

KEITH WALDROP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

------------------------------------



Brenda Hillman...

----------------------------------------



Kasey Silem Mohammad*