I AM NOW BLOGGING ELSEWHERE

GO HERE NOW: http://dorholtt.wordpress.com/

Sigh

Although I've been writing, I have been away from this monster for a month now, only signing on to connect to the Goransson link or to follow the paths of poets link to link. I shall return soon and with fervor. Until then, I keep making things like this:

One Current Fixation: Writing about Jean-Michel Basquiat

Happy Birthday William Carlos Williams

"It is dangerous to leave written that which is badly written. A chance word, upon paper, may destroy the world. Watch carefully and erase, while the power is still yours, I say to myself, for all that is put down, once it escapes, may rot its way into a thousand minds, the corn become a black smut, and all libraries, of necessity, be burned to the ground as a consequence. Only one answer: write carelessly so nothing that is not green will survive."--WCW

David Foster Wallace: 1962-2008

I have not been more of a mess than I am right now with the realization

that David Foster Wallace, a writer who has influenced me more than

any other writer, has left this space we inhabit called Earth.  I am torn

and cannot, at the moment, say anything else.

Reginald Shepherd: 1963-2008

It is hard enough for those who new him, but easily a very difficult 

moment for those who didn't, to accept that the poet Reginald Shepherd

passed away this evening.  His consistent and passionate involvement in

opening arenas for poetic discourse has linked many generations of poets 

together and has allowed many writers to speak more publicly about art's

allure, especially from its seemingly obscured lenses.  Aside from his academic 

genius and willingness to prod the "now" of every poetic artifice, his catalogue

of inventive and profound work as a poet will forever stamp its readers

with a sense of both rejuvenated awe and intelligently textured song.

There is much to say, but the most is that his voice will be missed; 

obviously living on.

         

Berryman: This Slays Me

">

Thoughts after Reading Perloff and others

I am quite struck, finally, by Pound’s proclamation in Guide to Kulchur, that one must bounce about not only the traditions of one’s familiar poetic predecessors, but also that of all other culture’s traditions, in that he or she “might acquire some balance in not mistaking recurrence as innovation.”  For me this statement equates to one saying that the instantism of a close friendship’s laughter, such as a witty remark come to the shores of a random weekend debate, is, because of that universal consciousness we safely herald, truly an unoriginal recurrence, for are we not allowed to drape the schizo phonetically, are we going to tell a real schizophrenic that their perception of reality in place of a revealing memoir is more fiction and thus of another’s distantly constructed mind blaze?  

I have so often, as of late, tried to shave off my self-consciousness along these lines.  I have tried to deepen the nowness of construction as opposed to question the integrity of expression.  For instance, the relatedness of automatic writing to my own energetic blasts of prose is to me less categorized as a “writing through” than as a this-works-for-me-because-it-gives-me-to-the-reader moment.  How is it that we can crank only solely from the past and thus forward, as opposed to raking the future in order to reel ourselves into it?  Sure, the practices of narrative which embolden imagery or sharpen the acuity of familiarity may blast a monotonous lobby into larger and even more familiar space, but that element is more a writer’s incapability of newing an idea than an idea feeling new, then being linked randomly by a well read critic to the past as something refurbished or only half-recurrent.    

Perhaps to quote Courbet:

"It is the duty of the human spirit to to work always on the new, always in the present, starting from acquired results.  One should never begin anew, but proceed from synthesis to synthesis, from conclusion to conclusion.  Real artists are those who take up an epoch just at the point to which it has been brought by the preceding periods.  Going back is the same as doing nothing, it is a pure waste of time...Beauty is in nature and is met in reality under the most varied forms.  As soon as it has been discovered there, beauty belongs to art, or rather to the artist who knows how to see it."

  

Days of Heaven

I just finished watching Terrence Malick's 1979 delight Days of Heaven and my eyes have been thanking me ever since. For years I have long thought that Thin Red Line, the original cut, is one of my favorite films, so what took me so long to reach back into early Malick? A well deserved academy award went out to Nestor Almendros for camera work, yet Malick's poetic input is one of the best matches of film and space I've seen to date.

It has been an intense summer for solo movie viewing. Recently I have retraced the bulk of Charles Burnett's work with joy, both The Killer of Sheep and My Brother's Wedding being amazingly alluring and full confrontations with the rawness of humanity. I have also spent a fair amount of time with both Truffaut and Godard, my favorite films in said particular mix being Shoot the Piano Player and Contempt. Then it was back to Woody Allen, where Manhattan received a viewing right before I hit up the latest, Vicki Cristina Barcelona. I thought that the latter was quite a luscious film, it's only downfall being the narrator's voice which, although distracting, thankfully does not enter too much.

Aside from these, I have very much enjoyed Wim Wender's Wings of Desire, Robert Altman's Three Women, The Brothers' Quay--the whole catch, The short films of Jan Svankmajer, Ingmar Bergman's Persona, and many other titles which I plan on reviewing soon. Needless to say, my movie viewing has been at home and since my faculty card allowed for rentals I have since accrued a horrible late fee but will always have access to these classic films that nobody tends to rent out.

Happy Shadow Day

If you finish your water the shadow grows.

Weekend at Lol(la)palOOza

It was quite a remarkable weekend at this year's Lollapalooza. The humidity was at its worst on Sunday, yet the sun was charging in a bit more the rest of the days. Not a drop of rain intervened and very few clouds rolled through. That's the weather-end of things.

The music was, as would be expected, quite smashing. Unlike last year, when it seemed as though there was an easy decision to make every moment as for what band to see, and on top of that there was also so much more greatness at all times--someone we wanted to see every slot--this year proved to be different in that there were many conflicts and many slots where not much was going on at all.

I will knock off my top ten favorite shows and add details to them later:

Right now, in no particular order:

The Foals
Devotchka
Wilco
Radiohead
The National
Kanye West
Girl Talk
Brazilian Girls
Chromeo
Broken Social Scene

Details to come

Happy Birthday John Ashbery

One of my favorite poet's birthday today.

The man to the left continues to amaze 

me.  Enjoy some of his work below:

My Philosophy of Life

Just when I thought there wasn't room enough
for another thought in my head, I had this great idea--
call it a philosophy of life, if you will.Briefly,
it involved living the way philosophers live,
according to a set of principles. OK, but which ones?

That was the hardest part, I admit, but I had a
kind of dark foreknowledge of what it would be like.
Everything, from eating watermelon or going to the bathroom
or just standing on a subway platform, lost in thought
for a few minutes, or worrying about rain forests,
would be affected, or more precisely, inflected
by my new attitude.I wouldn't be preachy,
or worry about children and old people, except
in the general way prescribed by our clockwork universe.
Instead I'd sort of let things be what they are
while injecting them with the serum of the new moral climate
I thought I'd stumbled into, as a stranger
accidentally presses against a panel and a bookcase slides back,
revealing a winding staircase with greenish light
somewhere down below, and he automatically steps inside
and the bookcase slides shut, as is customary on such occasions.
At once a fragrance overwhelms him--not saffron, not lavender,
but something in between.He thinks of cushions, like the one
his uncle's Boston bull terrier used to lie on watching him
quizzically, pointed ear-tips folded over. And then the great rush 
is on.Not a single idea emerges from it.It's enough
to disgust you with thought.But then you remember something
William James
wrote in some book of his you never read--it was fine, it had the
fineness,
the powder of life dusted over it, by chance, of course, yet
still looking
for evidence of fingerprints. Someone had handled it
even before he formulated it, though the thought was his and
his alone.

It's fine, in summer, to visit the seashore.
There are lots of little trips to be made.
A grove of fledgling aspens welcomes the traveler.Nearby
are the public toilets where weary pilgrims have carved
their names and addresses, and perhaps messages as well,
messages to the world, as they sat
and thought about what they'd do after using the toilet
and washing their hands at the sink, prior to stepping out
into the open again.Had they been coaxed in by principles,
and were their words philosophy, of however crude a sort?
I confess I can move no farther along this train of thought--
something's blocking it.Something I'm 
not big enough to see over.Or maybe I'm frankly scared.
What was the matter with how I acted before?
But maybe I can come up with a compromise--I'll let
things be what they are, sort of.In the autumn I'll put up jellies
and preserves, against the winter cold and futility,
and that will be a human thing, and intelligent as well.
I won't be embarrassed by my friends' dumb remarks,
or even my own, though admittedly that's the hardest part,
as when you are in a crowded theater and something you say
riles the spectator in front of you, who doesn't even like the idea
of two people near him talking together. Well he's 
got to be flushed out so the hunters can have a crack at him--
this thing works both ways, you know. You can't always
be worrying about others and keeping track of yourself
at the same time.That would be abusive, and about as much fun
as attending the wedding of two people you don't know.
Still, there's a lot of fun to be had in the gaps between ideas.
That's what they're made for!Now I want you to go out there
and enjoy yourself, and yes, enjoy your philosophy of life, too.
They don't come along every day. Look out!There's a big one... 

HIGH-FIVE DAY

I declare today the official

high-five day, even if in the

form of a shadow-five.  Does

common sense become

conventional wisdom?  Why

are debates resurfacing in

accordance withe the cell-

phone/cancer debacle?  Tell

us already, so we can stop

putting these chirpers up

to our drums.  The end of

Truffaut's Shoot the Piano

Player might be in the top

five of all films ever made.

Hawk & Handsaw

The kind folks over at Hawk & Handsaw:  The Journal of Creative Sustainability, have put together a beautiful inaugural issue and I am pleased to have a poem in it.  Kudos to the editorial staff and to all the artists included.

Thought

Yet I keep wanting to honk at these cows.  After leaving one of the odd numbered county roads we reach a long stretch around a white-capped lake that my uncle tells me holds a strong percentage of the state’s militia.  I remember the kids around me in junior high who wore black, not out of bohemian squalor, gothic digression, and not even out of the status of punk and its collectivity shorn from the shadows of not fitting into the mould, but who wore black because their families did, their fathers swamped in it from the moment they decided to say nigger in a public setting, the moment they decided to play with guns before and after dinner.  Yet we move around this lake in our half tank of gas, not a single person visible aside the patches of black and stilled cows, not a boat out on the chaotic breach of disconnect that a wind will beseech its passerbys.  We move around this lake and I think about how in the back seat, with an injured ankle, she might remember what had us so skeletal with out romantics eight years ago.  And since I haven’t seen her since then, since the time when our four years difference in age meant so much more than it could possibly now, I feel the liquids of an absentee adoration filling up my invisible pouch of longing, I try to match a gaze in the rearview mirror, I comment briefly through jest about her particular ailment in order to keep an order of proximity for our current situation that might generate the roots of our first meet, that might make them branch this moment into the quietude of love’s long draw on the dozen chords of complexity in which it thaws.

Morning Poem

I’ve implanted here a bloody checklist for our logistical longing:

The room holding more space than such needle intended for—

                                                                                                     an arch; gasp.

 

What fear has supplanted the old nocturnal mojo, sloped itself from

             the gut into the shut up dojo of my readymade mouth?

 

This one you’d say, and that one too, thus it is all

I fall quite plainly from and flatly to.

 

What way are we finding our way around?                        The conditioning of air, the return of a high and central fan

                                     as its arms span out like clouds above—not wanting to touch us:

 

that awful hanging mass of shapes, like some great target for the hot arrows of our squint.

Come See Some Pictures

Hey,

So, I started a new website focused on photography only.  Check it out here:  www.pondingblondephotography.blogspot.com

from Ashbery's Houseboat Days

This collection continuously plows me into the foundations.

from "Collective Dawns"

You can have whatever you want.
Own it, I mean. In the sense
Of twisting i to you, through long, spiralling afternoons.
It has a sense beyond that meaning that was dropped there
and left to rot.

It is BLOOMSDAY!

Although I don't eat it, I had to value James Joyce and dear Bloom by having sausage this morning and now a gorgonzola sandwich and some pints of course.  enjoy this scene which is one of my favorites from Ulysses.

"Would the departed never nowhere nohow reappear? Ever he would wander, selfcompelled, to the extreme limit of his cometary orbit, beyond the fixed stars and variable suns and telescopic planets, astronomical waifs and strays, to the extreme boundary of space, passing from land to land, among peoples, amid events. Somewhere imperceptibly he would hear and somehow reluctantly, suncompelled, obey the summons of recall. Whence, disappearing from the constellation of the Northern Crown he would somehow reappear reborn above delta in the constellation of Cassiopeia and after incalculable eons of peregrination return an estranged avenger, a wreaker of justice on malefactors, a dark crusader, a sleeper awakened, with financial resources (by supposition) surpassing those of Rothschild or the silver king."

i am bungalow bleeding yet i sponsor this receding

line i felt unfinished in defining.

take a heat from day from center and noon this now:

that clocking that torrential tick of wrist-wrapped time.

wanted to be between it, the parked partitions of the move, the quartered

sit down and the strapless lunch.

we are pool side with a hunch and a colder drink waiting.

Happy Birthday Allen Ginsberg

Here he is at 70.  

We salute.

Some Added Thoughts on Expression and Construction

What generates the space in which one’s writing lends itself more toward expression than construction, vice versa?  As of late, I keep hearing discussions on the difference between the aesthetics of the two (see link to Reginald Shepherd’s blog), mostly discussions noting that this type of discussion is occurring and less that it has any merit beyond such offhanded/handed-off auspices.  What is striking about this particular analysis is that it deals quite specifically with what we occasionally call the “response poem,” or the poem that knows it is doing something in relation to something else, even if that doing is never seen as done.  Coincidentally, since labeling is always a hot topic and the key for relational commentary, the poems many peers have, as of late, offered up and sutured into this last semester can indeed be called response poems, or at least poems that know something of what they are doing, or are done from having just encountered something that invites the royalty behind their veil to want at do.

 

Yet this sort of analysis, of other said analysis, might only leave us betwixt the poem and the voice creating its totality, the thing and the thang, for can it not always be said that certain po-hums are more expressive and certain others more constructive?  Yes, yes it can and now has been, but the particular gut of this conjecture is originally reacting to the idea of making space. 

 

When one knowingly constructs the shape of a work, that is to say she/he boats the words with the current cringing below them, thus striding out to tide, they are concurrently abiding by the expression that an allotment of space has made and/or is making.  For instance, the place Samuel Delaney, in his moving and commendable work Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, meets the same man over the course of years in the right rear of a pornographic movie theatre, is a known and even comfortable place for the continuance of pleasure.  The space is a part of a larger place yet it is confined in its routine, albeit an oppositional untracking of the understood regulations of routine.  Delaney, in turn, learns to construct an amalgamation of intention, resorting to the multifaceted organs of pleasure inasmuch as they are being met in a more defined pantheon of comfort—he goes to a place that in comparison to where we go (the poem) needs an inside and communal arena with similar voices and understood silences.  Plainly slated, as poets we rarely shuck the awareness we have of that which precedes the poem, but when done, when neither construction of nor expression of known content faces off first, a poem reaches a pleasing height where its delicacy is a cruda we feel we are chomping on for the first time.  However, and not entirely unnoticed, the removal of the idea of the poem, or as with Delaney the dislodging of the central meeting place, allows a poetic scope to careen from outside this very arena, almost as if it births then watches its kin settle into a space without ever governing that space with the laws of verse arrival.

 

So, what the fook am I getting at?  Remember Stan, the gentle protagonist of Burnett’s Killer of Sheep?  Okay, if not then pretend—now remember when he places the warm coffee cup against his cheek, checking out of the moment, sitting in the center of a place he is half-nakedly laboring in, shutting up the banalities of survival while reveling in one of the most arguably soft but revealing moments of the film?  Consider the expression here:  as an audience we are inclined to receive this moment as Stan’s expression of having found some calm in the impoverished off hours of a gritty Los Angeles graydayscape.  We are also aware that he may or may not be constructing, from sentience, a form of solidarity otherwise unattainable, especially given the societal boundaries the film black-and-whites us with.  What shins me here is that warm cup against the cheek, the poem after the pornographic movie theatres have been dismantled, the prose encased in a completely unknown offering of voice as bound by neither expression nor construction but the ability to be just flat out of its known productions.  As with Killer of Sheep, the most intense and visceral moments of such aesthetics reside in a sort of loud-mouthed silence, in a charge of wordery so heavy from the buds that its tongue slaps its spittle down without any sign of it having come from within or from outside of poetry’s convoluted mouth.  Needless to say, I am now always searching for cheek moment of poetry.

 

I believe the debated relevancies of aesthetic expression and construction needn’t be at the forefront of our own productivity, but instead strut as sort of an aside to the ongoing play our poetry is for ourselves and for others. Whether or not one believes all their work is a grain in the sandcastle of their own poetic proficiency, it can still be said that each minor but advantageous output is rooted in something we search for in the mad and desirous realm of our own work.  We (we being used quite generally) are less entering the field that magnetizes our passions and anxieties as writers and more so arising from that sensory field that has certain lines both raw and revolving—the things around us.  I am forever reminded of Joshua Clover’s poem “Poem,” in which the following lines rattle all heretofore discussions:  “we lie down in categories/and wake up in concepts.”  Even if this is a farfetched question in relation to Clover’s lines, I offer it up for some purified think:  what are the categorical constants that we sit down to when we make poems and do we come out of them with something notably conceived of?  Do we have the street name of our first house hung above our scribbles?  Are the pleasures entwined in our inhabiting our own physical and mental places revamped for commercial betterment when inked?  Where do we sit in the spectrum of voice, our scribble, and the relationship to that which clearly veins us all and will hopefully forever?  No agenbite, just inwit.

Happy Birthday Walt Whitman!

Strangely enough, I was able to dig out this old haikuish poem i wrote after the first time I actually read "Leaves of Grass."  I was eighteen and I remember reading the whole thing aloud, which had me breathless and worn into just over an hour's worth of time.  As a way of seeing how one's work grows, or the word choice mistakes we make, I offer this unedited slice to more or less challenge myself to see what its root was and if I can return to it.  Needless to say, this writing is bogged down with inexcusable metaphors and impatient placement of adjectives, but I want to acknowledge all the bad poetry in me until such a thing cannot be said.  After all, we begin with emulation and I thank the man to the left for at least giving me the energy to want to write through something I was experiencing in and around the time his leaves came falling round me.  Today is for Walt.

we roll our own cig
arettes and smear the smoke on
our sardonic jowls,

we drive up the hills
subsidized by thick green greens
and envision heavy

evenings where our school
(all three dimensional) sits
stoned by the street lights.

we anchor our soft
sentiments and howl crossly
at a girl our phone

likes to dial as
the dilapidated ring
seems too much for us.

we recite Ginsberg
in the pale arboretum
as a chorus

of trees allows us
to be out of tune and tuned
into the masked moon.

we let Bukowski
wrangle what we thought we could
and damn he is good;

our teeth are yellow
tomorrow and we borrowed
some booze for the likes

of one of those top- 
driven, fortuitously
insane night galas.

we told Whitman that
he should assassinate us
for failing to read

him more than we do
and then again shoes are
only full of so much

soul, you know that Walt,
we will walk wayward with our
words until they choke.

we relax around
anklets of a star shrunken
solitude, all nude,

for nature to dress
and address us as a mess,
a mixed mess of minds.

we leave bottles of
inexpensive liquor to
bounce and lounge empty

and forlorn each night;
sleeping is the medium,
without it we snap.

we smile between the
cracks on paths where girls grasp and
grip our lost tongue tips,

and we frown slit by
cracks on paths where girls grasp and
grip our round young hips.

we patiently wait
while reality rustles
with our ambitions,

and indecision
takes a kick from lost precision:
soundless dialogue.

we chain smoke, circling
like spokes spoken to by nights
dim effervescence,

and meet mornings for
vegetarian meals made
in lunchroom vistas.

then, at ends with the
bends of the week, weakly we
wish we were elsewhere,

where we have visions
of Gerard as Mexico
city recites its

pretties spanked by cats
crawling near a penniless
Jack Jack Kerouac.

we rain when it rains
and in pain we defame the
names of sweet females,

sipping on pale ales,
attacking Frisbee-like spin-
ning speech with our teeth.

we squeeze discolored
wine out of plastic plucked tubes
and free verse daily;

voraciously we
rebound the leftover lines of
distant discussions,

and come back from the
store with premium grain belt
instead of keystone.

we spend late evenings
dispelling and professing
like professors who

playfully paddle
for the sole purpose of pure
posterity and

given textbook char-
ity, blunts blunted by lips
languid with the breeze.

an oil change required
after every girlfriend;
the sun sits down and

we duct tape our car
windows because they have been
broken for years and

left broken and left
taped to melt in the sun
and gather rain on

days when rain wants to
embrace the sweltering pun:
life smelling awkward.

we feel completely
incomplete when contented
sentiments fail

to linger as long
as a waiting room tune could,
at the table she strolls

in dialogue rem-
iniscent of the gladness
that once groped our souls.
 
and we find an old
man from Hawaii swinging
a tennis racquet

at a speed beyond
his ageless age of eighty,
smiling above the earth

and its forgotten
layer of morose
individuals,

moping for miles, the
ones trailing, attempting to
emulate comfort.

and we smile sideways
as we peel the miles from the
uncoiling highways,

our open road like
a boat floats angled sharply
silent, yet vicious

in its suddenly
self-noticed independence--
freedom oh freedom!

and we reminisce
like reminiscing is a cool
calm revolution;

on the porch my dog
bakes, panting so patiently
with tender content-

ment; his heat is some
distant dog's hatred for the
long human world and,

and we have yet to
turn the soft wheels of sanity,
as insanity

says, "leave a message,
this is my chaos, cordial
on this here voice mail.

and we watch as those
pizza boxes are torn all
naked by a fire,

as they attempt to
form into dry fire logs, the
kind that can wallow

so wondrously till
their angelic orange fury
slides like a slinky

upon the fire pit;
camaraderie takes over for
an otherwise nuts-

drunken night, and yes,
up north in circles, calmly
we like stars stutter

below a barking
evening, singing in voices
unpublished each day.

That hoof again that face hair shingled from its flesh house drawn desperately below beauty with its secondary calisthenics.  Take a step over take wax in ear.  Straight armed and with destiny quite acute.  Pretend the bull red right at you pretend a crowd pays this.

 

Great dance of course.  Teacher, you made me take an animal from the garden you had us watch a steeple wobble.  Inside, the testament refilled the decanter and you poured us from the shortest psalm it is here where we remain womb we try to full stomach shouting.

 

Do now what you have done with all the utensils having thus far charted your digestion. 

 

Please good.  Swamp descent.  Fountain suckle.  Hair shorted.  One booted.  Tile taken.  Another century to talk about makes us a better way for viewing the stillness therein.

Scarlett Johansson

Why are you singing Tom Waits songs.  Please don't tell me it's because your name appears eleven seconds into "Falling Down?"

Can somebody tell me what's going on here.  I was baffled to follow a thread of youtube videos from things I love, such as Bonnie Prince Billy, whose latest album is indeed a well placed blessing, to John Berryman, to Tom waits, to Scarlett Johansson?  Needless to say, the mood I was in from the Berryman had me sad enough to be relatively okay with this estranged mangling, but now I am straight up bewildered.  I dig that she digs Waits, but I am a touch confused.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY BOB DYLAN!

more later on this

Eavan Boland & Poetry

Good morning good afternoon and welcome to less schooling more posting much more everything from here on out that involves being within the summer.  

I really enjoyed Eavan Boland’s recent letter/prose in Poetry.  Her piece, Islands Apart: A Notebook punches with concinnity.  Not only does it arrive in our boxes with a wide embrace for the side-road poetics, but it also invites the whole space of contemporary poetry to remember its width.  Even if I was not a student at Trinity College Dublin the year Boland received her honorary degree, and even if I did not live a corner store away from Patrick Kavanagh’s statue, it would be safe to say I would still have traversed her offering thrice through.  

What compels the most is the witness Boland is to the endless particulars of poetry’s many localities.  In Ireland, specifically Dublin, one is rare to find such startlingly mathematical applications and diminutions of the defined poet as they do here in the states.  The poet in Dublin, at least from my own experience, is more likely to buy a round before alerting the room that they are a poet, which by no means belittles their catalogue of verse but instead knocks off the spoilage so burdensomely stained on the announcement an American poet seems to make before even speaking.   

Since the colossal stampede of poetry's always misunderstood parameters first knocked the field down, many offerings into its defined arteries have come slowly back up from said field.  I'm continuously intrigued by the regions of poetry, as in the actual set and physical complications of its mouthing.  I remember when saying the word held its strength in a small nod toward the "try" part, but as of late I shake when I head or hear the "Poe," which feels like sending off a bowling sized bubble at a toddler's neck.  What Boland has done, perhaps inadvertently, is allowed us to recall the public versus personal space of a poet and then in turn the same space of their writing itself.  Let's start discussing.  But first, go read the notebook.

           

John Ashbery

I'm trying to start a longer essay on my relationship to the work of John Ashbery.

Right now I am referring to him as The Cantakasaurus Complex.  Thoughts?

Robyn Schiff Visits David Trinidad's Plath class

Robyn Schiff visited our Plath & Sexton class tonight and it was quite a wonderful session.  After a storming semester crackling with the worrisome weight of Plath's catalogue, the class seemed to come together with a neutral respect for the work and an overall acknowledgment that her work cannot be studied without everything that surrounded it.  The main question that kept returning this year was "can we read the work of Sylvia Plath without relating it to her life?"  A difficult question indeed, but easily answered as no.  Even if one feels the poems can be as they are, and prominent on a single stride, they are still remarkably and inextricably linked to her autobiography.  Essentially, she was writing her life out, making it as intense and exciting as possible.  The letters and journals she was writing on the exact dates she created her poems, especially those in Ariel, offer a magnificent layer for the deep investigation of poetic relevance at store in her career.  There are some quite delicious moments in Ariel that reveal many life events at high stake, including things as meticulous as having been stung by bees on the same day she constructed certain poems.  I shall offer up a fuller investigation of this for you soon, as it is an essay topic I am currently at work on.  Great class, great offering.  I never though I'd dig the work of Plath and Sexton as much as I do and it reminds me that if one enjoys any poet they should give at least three readings to their works and find out ways of explaining what it is we are drawn to readers and what we know our writing draws from. 

Mothers and Salvador Dali

Happy day to all the beautiful mothers of the world, including mine, who is awesome--"yeah...Mom's awesome!"

Also, a good day for us to celebrate the birth of Salvador Dali, who has inspired me to create things many a times and I am sure will continue to do so for years to come.  I was lucky enough to see the enclosed painting of his, "Raphaelesque Head Exploding," at a gallery just outside of Glasgow, Scotland back in 2004.  Delightful and imbedded in some cramped cortex of my visual treadmill.  

Birthday and Movies

Happy Birthday Charles Simic and cheers to a wonderful reading at Harold Washington Library last week.

Also, I just saw Thomas McCarthy's The Visitor last night, which has one of the most moving endings to a movie I have seen in years.  Remarkable acting and character focus.  Go see it.

poem a Day 5/8/08

from That Plath that Sexton

Rowing myself:  the clear vowels rise like balloons:

                                    love, my season of such fatherless waters—

hands applaud:

            I have a ticket to annihilate each theatrical

                        filling, to eat air w/o committing myself

to the country as far away as health:  that throat fires & death is out there—

rather not visit the grave then hear:  I have taken to killing radiance.

 

Or perhaps that killing is why I am given to nowhere but a dawn of frost that

creeps away from its walls to action out the sky, that child’s cry—the

eyed-out morning of famine.

 

The frost somebody’s done an affair from the body even as the baby shadows

its lips, how next mile the rock purifies fat from the nothing a message of

silence trees opt between, as minding it small to forgive the fury of love the repairs.

 

Must you piece the universe side to side the world to kill the world holding

deepened mouths as they walk about thinking of the me any less than

where I’m through, through with my face, still on its final hour.

 

White words in their oxygen up the ante of paradise, breath me now into a making of self, breath the cold wonder of a hungry but temporary strangeness come to the table

 

This glass mausoleum waxes its sheen I am fat and high to kill me makes up for the flying I’ve taken, the breath I hedge from clouds, from the pallor of a distance

 

This baby-leaved voice is blood-personal, is death whispering flat on its back, asking nothing but a bite of life shred in the fist of its colorless hands: only a minor governed life.

 

  

poem a Day 5/07/08

knife side-mouthed words eyes warriors stiff backed bird front feather men now drawn tight-mouthed outside addressed comment arms toward using warrior reputation father cannot touch the air ending its explanatory arms concluding white welcome turning such great welcome smiling knife-palm announced grunted without nerve other savages under restless fire shifted glancing for help held tongue while behind stuttered man knife speak English wanted chief devil’s chief shaded always been watching a strange thing his missiles fleeting from the storm how the edge is clouding shooting dark thunderheads about a seeming again a scene for passing the darker-flashed teeth back 

Poem a Day 5/06/08

The horses depress below the cloud they have sensed listening hard about not saying or hope ain’t for war the neigh to hear about another sitting then this cloud’s crazy bull- strange getting becomes defiant starts ignoring down & not well or next the cloud’ll occupy deep lifts the horse runs are labored precisely and told to attack greater sounds a sky so mean the cloud attacks regulars thinks about rain replacement and is a runnin’ fact for the young daughter how to see the right troop from the big fort that daughter coming up thank God along regular help and the potlatch so boiled it must turn the cloud dazy

 

Bell's Beer

Can I just say that Bell's doesn't disappoint, can I just say:  new Amber is miraculous.  For a brewery that is just four miles closer to Chicago than Detroit I am happy they take a hit at an Illinois homestay.  This new Royal Amber is Spring's first best gift and a remarkable accompaniment to the Broccoli Chicken I just consumed.  Please try it, can I just say try it.

Happy Birthday Kierkegaard

Happy birthday dear designer of appropriate dread!

Also Karl Marx, it's your day too right?

Poem a day 4/25/08

"Remember when he was going to release, like, a 100-cd set from his crazy collection of masters and you started setting a few scrubby bills aside every month like a Christmas account so you could gaffle the barn-sized box when it came out, you waited and you saved, and then the months became years and you spent the Neil's Fucking Archives Stash on three and a half hours of cocaine, and that was maybe six years ago? Meanwhile we're still waiting." -Joshua Clover

i would like to talk to you out of the broth of this gaffe construct
perhaps why the man visiting has listened to joni mitchell on vicodin

or the stirring assumption of offing religion in a tube of a tongue rolled
out of the praire: we took oil to the sea in shamed arguments then we\

considered referencing a crayon that makes its guff out of better cars
having parked in the cul-de-sac. listen to the sector you inhabited while

pausing a movie for more beer: whale: how to occupy the obsession when the
obsession within it needs refill: oh my god there is a collar on our wonder-

ing. We've needed more Neil out of every damn passage this street shods
from being north of the hickster; that sort of thing shits in scales. Please, big

holster let a landing of bullets file from its trickster autonomy there is a
shooting every tree meant to vein below its upward stardom before dispelling

in A8. the whole lot of good things is open for frisbee golf and walking into the
moody toss: want another: the best broth from chicken feet consider collagen.

poem a Day 4/24/08

We can only suit up.
It is a matter of hours and many second drinks. Legs shake so
Often so often large crying becomes comical. Just imagine the
Length of a letter I wrote you once from the distance and really
Came into a field of understanding the cats keep occupying.
To make a lot of money on breeding our best friends.
Suppose a sandwich is eaten every day suppose the letter sent
Goes as far as China and instruments need to be borrowed in
Order to be played? Spit on the envelope sweetheart let’s
Send it off to our southern-sided entrance.

poem a Day 4/23/08

how there was a new route for our rehab

how there is a shortcut in our stamina 

that reclaims the high we had in famine.

that haul from hodge-podging cranks an

inordinate amount of needle cringe

how about we are in being about an unhinged

see me get a lighter cigarette to the door

everything inside is charming the sit is

shell to the ear with water drum with wave

how there is a way to apply shine to shoe

why not assign a new pair when what is

rough is through to get older and have

old money still we made it then so then

why not it remains somewhere well to

have spent itself to shelf blood come back

Iron & Wine

I’ve been readying myself for this, for the Sam Beam moment, for the actual presence of Iron & Wine, for a face and bearded brook to hook me into an atmosphere different from the capsules I have enclosed my ears within for years. Last night, at the Vic theatre in Chicago, my readiness toed its challenge.

 

It’s hard to grip the fullness of Iron & Wine.  For years the solo acoustic songs of Sam Beam have veined me.  They brought me along the iffy and often disjointed shadows of an undergraduate career in which existential crises masqueraded in the midnight voyages of balladville.  The texture of lyricism Beam invokes had me arising from an alarmingly realistic bayou of rhythm; I was both swamped and swooned. 

 

Iron & Wine soon became a mixtape fixture, the surefire track three in any offering of melancholy, the slowdown song from Hornby’s “get em’ going” second track must.  Needless to say, my relationship to everyone around me had its foundation in song and so many of those songs were clipped from the iron, the wine.  Friends I knew were soon soft-nodding their chops to the “Sunset Soon Forgotten,” my mother took to Northern Minnesota paths whistling “My Lady’s House,” and everywhere I went I began to channel the remnants of “Jezebel,” thinking it wise to folk-implore my innards.

 

For years Iron & Wine was the acoustic safety.  I knew when I wanted the music and it seemed to be there when I arrived at the station.  Then things changed with the release of Shepherd’s Dog, an album that clearly changed the pace of Beam’s audience and their knowledge of self-attuning.  With the addition of many instruments and a few notable jazz musicians, the band’s audience became not only larger but also more varied.  They received more airplay because the softness of a seemingly folk-propelled tongue was now offering its gums as well.  No longer were the songs just a canoe traversing the beautifully invisible bayou, they were now bayou itself.  It took me a bit to realize this.  While in the audience last night, I felt the application of a full band like an all-knowing wind shaking its unaffordable ideals about the lake.  Each instrument crept in as if everyone forgot it was invited to the party, slow but with a six-pack of respect offered up.

 

The newer instruments accompanying Beam are by no means overwhelming his deeply-woven and multifaceted musical aptitude.  If anything, one gets the idea that if you put anyone on stage with Beam his quiet but Alphaesque bravados would guide the musicians into the song’s championed undercurrent.  And there is a distinct undercurrent present at all times in this music, so much to the point that the same three chords seem to sound before the beginning of every song, as if Beam himself has no control over what air is combing out the trail for his music.  The air itself, often cut like an autumn porch post-rain, becomes helpless when Beam starts the plucking of guitar.  The songs begin to shimmy the senses, drudging the open space with high waterproof boots.  I feel like discussing this realm of eardom is likely to off this response and bring us to confusion, so continuing on…

 

What I have really been getting at, or what I wanted to get at in just a few sentences, is that it was a wild delight to hear the songs I’ve been listening to for years backed by a full (ten people on stage) band.  Soon the fleece-like layers of a once acoustic thread became a pseudo-Rastafarian, straight-from-the-bayou buoyancy of appropriately-layered music.  When an ear is so attuned to hearing a song a certain way, the thought of it performed a different way is beyond foreign.  Take your favorite song, reader that might be, listener that you are, and consider it done either as acoustic or with added affects.  Toss in a didgeridoo during a Mos Def chorus, string up a harp for The Clash, jog off a bass riff for Joni Mitchell:  none of this seems to fit.  With that said, and without much worry worn within, I found it not only enthralling but musically laudable that Beam has found a different way through the Bayou every time.  What’s better than writing new songs—trying them in a newer/older vehicle perhaps?               

                

Shakespeare & Nabokov

Happy Birthday to both these giant voices and some gems to represent!

"In those days I seemed to have had two muses: the essential, hysterical, genuine one, who tortured me with elusive snatches of imagery and wrung her hands over my inability to appropriate the magic and madness offered me; and her apprentice, her palette girl and stand-in, a little logician, who stuffed the torn gaps left by her mistress with explanatory or meter-mending fillers which became more and more numerous the further I moved away from the initial, evanescent, savage perfection."- Vladimir Nabokov

"Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me. You would play upon me; you would seem to know my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my mystery; you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass; and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ, yet cannot you make it speak. 'Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me."
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III, scene ii

poem a Day 4/22/08

from an Enemy of the Wild

characteristics & circumstances & the result quite stirring--a more complex

& ironic work than the American, than the spirit of an enemy of the wild of

suspicion: had apparently become: had figure in advance dismaying then refused

to distinguish between support of demonstrating the viewpoint &, shall we say,

downright simpleton in human relations:  the wild in the opinion of mantle 

around:  seemed an unsettling self-portrait.  it would take some reflection if

warning it would take some understanding of the difference between the artist

only then would one be reconciled to the artist's truth in the wild which is

equivalent to the presentation of life itself, complexity, its absurdity & pathos.

poem a Day 4/21/08

from an Enemy of the Wild

idle to speak in the same breath

reputation has been waning

his dying words are soon applied

the yard

or ideals, so to speak, an order of comprehensiveness 

and

with perhaps no other way for seeing life steadily

quiet things do the same:

classical perspective did manifest a feeling

described this quality

with the vision of human romance, endless:

a theatre, for instance,

will possess some validity at various stages

but the enemy

the enemy imports

oh how wild

poem a Day 4/20/08

I wanted to ask you what kind of toothpaste you buy

You smell so good my whole face hurts

 

Resume

 

Objective:  to understand how each object in the room came to be placed as it is around Sara’s summer dress as she slowly brings it up her long legs each day.  To engage in a setting where  

 

 

And then the study had to stop

Our assignment will not be sequenced

poem a Day 4/18/08

contacting cram position in damn lost shove thoughts alone with dashing cavalry prop the laminate troops the cavalry adjoined
sent under way the compass shining supposed to report

our gravity

etched for the last hear: this was creek starting out of trying

once more something gave compliment
you tend to sneer more
talk wordless
riding itself to mention

slaughter thrown into searching: convince guide relief l was lost yet chance is cutting the forecast

goddamn colonel lopped off then into our handing: God get small
right tonight that darkness downtrails the guiding:
things
conclusions plan now decide finding
know being force

poem a Day 4/17/08

i was thinking about asking you what kind of tooth brush you use

how my whole face hurts at the smell of your sweep across kitchen

i was thinking 

how i'm a face painting fan of your unsaid luxuries that region this

roam across room across there's no longer room for us to consume

i was thinking

how no longer are we street lit in lamp lilt or palmed off the over

cast sorcery of the sun of the map we hoist a gun to and trigger

Reshooting Ourselves: The Old Thought

            I’m running around Lake Calhoun in Minneapolis when I notice a woman getting her picture taken with a dog out on a stretch of fading sand.  Immediately, I think about how this picture, with something like a ninety percent chance of being taken with a digital camera, will end up on her Myspace or Facebook page.  When I get back from the run, having had to weave in and around throngs of people slowly strolling around their suburban worries, I open the newspaper to see a picture of a hockey player getting checked up against the boards and in the background, behind the glass, there are four different people taking pictures of the moment with their camera phones.

            So what am I getting at?  Well, in the most straightforward fashion I want to highlight how we are living in a Society of Freeze, an era quickly becoming more obsessed with capturing a moment and remanufacturing it as an emblem of desired personality.  And before I try to highlight this, I must admit that I myself am very much part of this society, if not in its starting lineup of obsessers, so anything I comment upon is self-reflection, if not admonition.

            It has taken me a while to accept the thrust of technology, especially the advancement of cameras.  The digital camera is exampling prime here:  the ability to retake a photograph startles me. It’s like a band replaying a song at a concert.  It startles me mostly because the history of photography is built upon the perspicacity of the photographer, upon the ability of the eye to perceive something of beauty within a simple click and know the image being shot will withstand the test of untimely critics.  Aside from crowd shots (those lovely abundant bar pictures of everyone eye-glazed with licks of Patron, beers in hand), digital cameras seem to deceivingly promote the artist in everyone and thus allow too many second chances.

            Of course, this isn’t entirely a bad thing.  Movies have long had the ability to reshoot a scene, and writing, upon its very first ink-drop (key-punch), is naked for the edit, but we are now asserting perfection in every technical medium when we take another shot of the same scene.  Myspace runs on this very assumption as well.  We have a giant base of young and hip people advertising their thoughts and lives online for whoever cares to catch a glimpse.  Sure, some keep their profiles private (myself included), but the addiction is one of outlining the newness and freshness of ourselves, so that through the comments of others and the acknowledgment of ourselves as part of this very freshness we are somehow more real, more perfect. Just as taking another picture of the same scene contradicts the very intention of taking the picture, because the first snap doesn’t look as great as we thought it to be (the picture then becoming an attempt at perfection rather than spontaneous capture) placing a picture on Myspace is part of the act of representing ourselves through manipulation of scene, of giving others pictures of what we want ourselves to be, as in actuality, we are the they behind that picture, the bored men and women sneezing as they reel the film behind the walls of entertainment.

            For some time now I have tried to pinpoint the irksome feeling I have about freezing moments.  I love photography, and I willingly spend time changing my pictures all the time as to represent mood, but I feel as though the massive progression of digital photography and camera phones is coming close to trumping recollection altogether.  For instance, instead of being able to tell a story about an amazing time, anyone under the age of twenty-five is probably more likely to pull out an online album or point you toward their blog where a picture exists with a five word title serving as the complete story (i.e. “Mexico boozing”).  Just by taking a second shot of that beach or that cliff we are giving up the feeling that was strong enough to make us take the picture in the first place (I can’t decide if this is more a selfish or altruistic action), replacing that feeling with the worries of it being the best image for others to see (when they weren’t even there!).

            But Gaseous, isn’t that the very idea of photography, so that others can be put into the place photographed even though they weren’t there? It might be, but this is not the point; the point is that the second chance being given through digital photography is allowing nearly everything to be art and thus taking art almost completely away.  It’s similar to reading the newspaper online, of taking the physical joy and knowingness of something away and making only the threadbare accessible.  The palimpsestic aspect is no longer of avail.  Instead, we just have the surface level sheet of paper, glossed and grandiose.

            We are no longer allowing for the lovely wonder and mystery of the moment to be flirted with or discovered.  Items such as blogs or one’s Myspace page are so surface level that they distort the idea of there being more than what is on the page to any one person.  Such is the state of the second picture of one particular place; the original spark has been fiddled with then booted away by the perceived perfect, or, in larger terms, we are advertising ourselves more and more every day, but the advertisement is not of its original colors, it is more of what others will be enticed by and less of what is originally enticing; it is the deceit of advertising.

            A prime example of advertising deceit comes through daily on book jackets, movie posters, and music albums.  No longer are there complete critical investigations into the merits of important books or albums, but instead there is a mass mash-up of double-compounded heralding, the old academic man replaced by a multi-tasking urban hotshot who jumps on the bandwagon to call Little Miss Sunshine the best movie of the year.  Once again, the object of art itself is usurped by the two line quote from some no-name critic whose compliments, because they come from some magazine the purchaser trusts as the ultimate source, erase the object almost altogether, leaving often too many expectations and disappointments for the average reader.

            Certainly, this is not to say people shouldn’t buy a book because The New York Times’ Michiko Kikutani called it brilliant, for by no means am I going to put down anyone who reads, that being a problem in general.  The problem here is that of the second picture being taken—it is the reproduction or shortening of something that took longer to produce than it will to be held and perused, the idea that there is an actual book behind that snippet on the jacket, that the first picture you snapped of a river valley was just as instinctual as the closing lines of Mailer’s latest novel, and replacing the object you own or desire is a form of distancing oneself from the heart of the art.

            There is much more to be said here, but I feel that it might reach thesis proportions.  Text messaging seems to be a further distancing from communication in its disregarding of voice and the intimacy of conversation, but I will stop here, because I find myself textually harassing people practically every day.  I also feel we are a part of the Best-Of’s; contributors to the packaging of material that attempts to lengthen but only ends up compartmentalizing material (example:  bands having the Best Of albums in the middle of their careers).  This could just be the clinic of cynicism I am currently subscribing to, or the bitter pitter-patter of pang I stir into slang when I realize nobody writes letters or uses old school cameras anymore.  Either way, I hope it spawns some more speech about our current enrollment in the increasingly complex arena of communication. 

New Exercise

Yes, all day I have worn a wallet that wasn’t in my pocket

I have pocketed shapes of you that have not been spoken of

I have spoken of all these things that have not happened

I have happened upon museums of eating and drinking

I have eaten and drunk the delicates of wool the handwashed

I have handwashed our calls and taken out loans for animals

I have loaned a drug to the unstable bones of passable babes

I have passed out in punctured stables and yelped at church

I have churched the alarms and sent home the lot of refugees

I have allotted for shopping without ease in celebrity stations

I have stationed a gurgle for the cultural study of sentiment

I have studied the vultures of frat-enthused porn and pith

I have porned out meaning for the veinless gags of reason

I have reasoned a harp and its gap between stabbing chords

I have gapped the plankard and shanked the quiet neighbor

I have neighbored the I’ve never the I have never any of these 

poem a Day 4/16/08

you like meat and I like tea,

we love beat and I love we

 

the you is young, to-do,

do too you, for me, mine,

more time for twine,

twin swine in spine,

up-out, overblown citrus spout

in tea-relieve, in re-retrieve,

team up dear meat and leaf,

feel ream of us beat, tab

us off the bat babe, vent ten

times the sitting lime in gin-

nick of time, teem tonic and

cube on it, beckon unreckoned

we be on knock of we, ween

spleen kneel keen on new

immaculate, I’m late on camera,

want to date and mack the era,

tawny port this taupe support,

trope abort brought fond

report, done fawn escort,

after meal a daft appeal,

peel skin from spread

out reel, leering to you leap,

heap of peering out the skeet,

take sss and peep pod please,

pour pro pores poorly and rope,

puree this hiss enrich its scope,

pray this insist can cope,

reason to resist the cyst of sun

that’s dope, meat team eats

tea time, sugar forwards

into a ward for rags, side

dish disses the inside us,

we young ewes brung

out discuss, do to the to-dos.

 

 

poem a Day 4/15/08

in a wide-hipped hurry

she will still sit there & play

with the indifference tomorrow

has for today

it's the double-chinned business

inviting everyone, the sun is going bankrupt

& tossing its chants about the loop

where girls whose wranglers won't wriggle

are forced in high heels to squiggle

new sentences are shut down how out of breath

the martini hour of olives

stating from cues

the way they rely on pews

praying a la carte, oozing cabernet

subhuman, look at us cross the street

poem a Day 4/14/08

journey the lutheran women went up

downstairs we categorized assumptions

consumed gumption with luxury threads

unwound in the learning session

how diffident ghost chair impairs the blocks of learning

has a homecoming been arranged

hard to tell at the wrist a pursuit not of hirsute

plod

laden they say laden or that load of fix the old high

takes to jinx

we shall

play cards here

we shall fill our nights in perfecting the toss of a spade

poem a Day 4/13/08

after seeing Lyn Hejinian read at Woodland Pattern in Milwaukee

I too have been skeptical of how these attachments slip

it was better when Tolstoy meant everything in mention

but whose mention didn't entail the misgivings of Rostov

or the diagram of our bellies revealing cobras and boring

amounts of French academia as it has made sturdy an

oven mitt along the orbits of the frisking

there are so many more pockets in the 

forest a kind of abandon in slower

processions up the barks and not the

seasons or essentially the line picketed

is accepted into the mother night happy birthday Samuel

happy birthday Seamus both one and one day the

circle game the keepers waiting the ground opened for

a thousand eyes to steam the punch card if you didn't

get it you didn't get it there were whole philosophies dying

there were understandings way gone west against the

americaness of now remember the gift being left under

the tree we are into white teeth for jest we infinitely confess

that peace is an artifice winter keeps gummed or the

chronicle has an outtake of the ottoman of unmoved

feet those magazines crippled in their once-flipped glow

the dream to come signs in timed out times signed in at

the idiot's guide to autobiographicality sure enough

that confederacy wilts a frame complains about the rerun

of its visitors sticklers for rehab inhabit a pasture come

baby come back come maybe for the already dead recognition

and how none of this proves my life is ready not one knot

untied will reckon the short boat a docking this hay baits

its turmoil and becomes splendor-bottomed just one thing

friend just one thing, have we marked the years of the albums?

  

poem a Day 4/10/08

leg me a harp dear skybelt

tighten the shaksies cloud

over such making little too

much driving after recant

finish that at home on the

have a range for foundry

three weeks full activities

weak and mid why tomb

hour ape rules shower the

stage hates good lighting

coming off mono log the pit

poem a Day 4/8/08

grave light come back to me please understand i have needed to hate

you not being in the room some of the dead men are tending to spits

they are stalling out like misfits on the corner discussing dog knows

what about a pantheon of sorcery about how we take nearly every-

thing off the shelf and don't really get past the acknowledgments but

instead wonder about what time a thing like this came or how time

took over the prose and gets to disclose itself first before verse really digs

its spoon perfectly into my bowling eyes what sort of shade afternoon

makes in the library rows how just one to ten minutes with an awful

woman would be better than sitting out the moderns or shuffling the

muse grave light hum back to me i am one-shoed and ugly with worry

poem a Day 4/7/08

fright gawks at the refinery

i took a beard off my face

woke up

put it back on again

& stormed the shelter

of the press

poem a Day 4/6/08

yes very much so

but at least the smaller bird

knew to glide alone

no not too much though

sunday thinks nothing but now

how inward we've been

yes okay but what

of the sun dunking out west

can we live up to

poem a Day 4/5/08

knock-up off the cuff cropping the doppler into downers

heck check it out to asculate now please pin the shimmer

please leave a serious measure at the stop dear bus go

to poking around a prisoner's view a whole person even

he who sped through needle is about translating indifference

i was always out of batteries some aggressive withdrawal

chambered my absence a dear big lamp in the light of the 

day running likewise sentences have a problem with art's

relationship to color I don't have a problem with every messy

implication but with the efforts of the neglected disposed

as someone was committed for having small favorite glances

appear outside the realm of progressive chancing thus adieu  

poem a Day 4/4/08

in the time it took me to smoke a cigarette outside the coffee shop 77 people passed me
a mid-twenties woman passed me asking for pennies

i gave her the pocket change and she fell into weeping
we hugged, a tear staining my top right ear lobe

i told her the sun is out for her today
she said the sun is never out and walked away

sometimes i finish eating a cookie and the grease stays on my fingers for hours
i type with it i drag carcinogens into the dark embarkment of my cages

and rib out an audible worry
but how my hands as they fit into a hug slipped into the indentations of her

back bones and how i felt like i was arming out a dock just feeling it
wintered and closing in on the nerves we wear inches before leaping

into the spatial anxieties of the sea into the vessels of long weeds pluming
their ancestral coordinates

a few fish kicking through a few bubbles finning the absolute tenuousness
of some allegory other states may mistake into reference

i just want a cigarette i just want to not smoke cigarettes
i want the sun to do something for her the penny to glean a lip-up

Poem a Day 4/3/08

after Woman Under the Influence

can I ask you a question about me

I can be anything

I remember my wife

at my place

I get no kick from champagne

it's not very tidy

would you like anything to eat

babies in the air

tell me what you want me to be

do you mind giving me the time

do yo see how good the whole thing is

do you want to play with the kids

why aren't you having any of your clothes on

that's how it was and that's it

we're supposed to be on the inside

don't talk about the past please doctor

good times are a good idea

hello how are you normal conversation

Poem a Day 4/2/08 (in recalling Shakespeare's sonnet CXVI)

To gloom the day discerns,

Let us not to the carriage of new designs

submit in increments.  Above is not above

which falters when it falters to remind,

or lends with the lover to love:

O no! it is a clever-fixed high arriving

from a rise on the temptress as untaken;

it is the car to every coastal driving,

whose shape's unknown, although much shaken.

Above's not space's fool, though hot gasps & air

within its yawning fickle's slump comes:

Above falters not with her chief teeth & despair,

but wears it out in summer's adress from slums.

If this be air then upon me so breathed & grooved,

I never sit the low tide or no man remain unmoved. 

Happy Birthday Maxwell:  Rest in Passion

poem a Day 4/1/08

I keep a salamander in the windowsill I touch its belly

its belly like a steel sink and sometimes show children

next door how its fingers, ancient reptalia pins bowled

under, swing stillness and it's sometimes better seen

I see how it does so well staring corners getting good w/

turning its back towards us all that damp campaigning

Poem a day 3/31/08

to coaster that brooding bottle
to shingle the home w/teaspoons
dolled up in egg-breaking astringments--please hatch off

your crass and cool from the mall attitude:

at the escalator the juice-boxed kids kick into elevation, laces tied,
swoosh from shoes ripped like rawhide, isignia's side porch:

serving seconds here,
hear the seconds serve--

dear engaged rib and cage i ogle, can we cycle our rem more admirably,
can we take the shod-off hot sun

over the horses untrodden neigh and steal
that hot hoof away from saddle, save for the swept up nay say:

oh better woman,
oh unaffordable breath,
deep coin my pockets and come in condensation

poem a Day 3/28/08

fishing below a crow's love section

a group portrait without good luck

as if it's time to train yourself in postscripts

the act of guys getting out

of affection like ghosts you're

forgiving information are you only

piecing an autobiography how the moon doesn't garage

it laters its see

home again this balcony of unreal losing

or else how can an atlas 

unsudden its innocence?

so young to be right that morning inventory

the necessity of your own face as alone as reading out of light it

projects its good work old-fashionably

and loves into mistakes.

Poem a Day 3/24/08

Henry Miller Was Never at the Bagel Shop

the bumper cars grouped into a spandex click across a gray

push that push grey gone over unfound fixtures

they took a midwestern stool into a stage for you they allowed

a forum someone said bohemian someone said

beat & that plexi-grass beard crossed off its glow the island how the

coney island the mind a stumble sans light sand

frantic how a place from a paintings' glance takes race against takes race

you pooled from an age an age that new beginning

Poem a Day 3/22/08

from A Large Print Western

his face was cruel was angular

blade on the legs down on the

half shoulders forward in the

saddle the knees snugged and

over two worn low and handy

lifts making some sign how the

sign ignored now looks ready

of a voice heard true for Woman's

drawing I'm in astonishment

such suspected return in prairie

the stammering the evil-looking guide

that interpolated stare that question

where what's happened on the train

is skinned long before a turning

to face everybody is just to match

the low savage suppose you're

broke stung by ignoring him or how

you got wiped out time didn't weight

partly talking a guess any good idea?

Bob Dylan: On a Day So Long Ago

I’m having a hard time appropriating the reality of this being the day that Bob Dylan released his self-titled album in 1962. Perhaps I am more baffled by the fact that it was forty-six years ago, or maybe the immersivity I have Dylanesquely mainstayed is laden with referential perplexities. Whatever it is, whatever perpetuity hereby floats, I’d like to propound my respect and excitement about it all.

Growing up in Minnesota might be the signaled reason for my continuously loud appreciation of Bob Dylan. Even in mentioning him I cannot quite articulate if I am referencing the music, the life, or the idea of the man. For years I have celebrated his birthday, doffing a ripped gray t-shirt with a pocket that has, Sharpied into its gullet, the slanted saying—Happy Birthday Bob Dylan! Over the course of these celebrations, I’ve constructed a smattering of photographs that endlessly uncoil from the pocket, revealing, as they recede, years gone and those not so gone.

For the birthday celebrations, the day starts out with one album of my choice, and then those that attend the party are given the opportunity to select an album for their ears, ears thus a frame for the tilting of cervezas. The best part of this party rarely being the beer, but more the idea that one can attend for the hour in which their favorite Dylan album is said to be aired.
Given the meticulous stationing of this day, which usually purports is monstrous insanity more upon the lilting gibberish of admirers than the soft admiring of soliloquy, nothing really keeps consistent. But whose searching for such systems right? Sure, it’s great to hear New Morning early in the day and John Wesley Harding when the professor with a propensity for open-fielded philosophizing arrives, but the heat sticks and stimulates most in the moments when Mom forgets that “Corrina, Corrina” is on Freewhellin’ and Ruth, the seventy-year old badass with leather tightened foot to skull, decides it high time to up and scorch-scat to “Sara” on the porch.

What I believe is clipping my intrigue the most here is the timelessness of Dylan’s first album. Without storing a statement that will undoubtedly trip up my point, one must first recall that Dylan only wrote two of the songs that appeared on this album, “Song to Woody” and “Talkin’ New York.” Both songs pay respectable homage to the place Dylan enjambed in. They are the excess of Dylan’s overall fascination with what drafted his craft. Clearly and admittedly inspired by Woody Guthrie, the first song is quick to drone from an older dust, but it also flanks a story down for posterity. The very interchange of Dylan’s voice and the music he cherished is lifted into a time without end—in that it is written for a musician he was most enthralled with. So, with the stamp that Dylan makes on his recording career, he shelters in an homage and with slight but momentous additions to it. His first offering is skilled in its personal and communal proffering. Adding “Talkin New York” becomes a way for Dylan to top the old story off with a new rim. His physical move is stapled by the song as an everlasting entity, him being the sole inhibitor of this newly presented jingle-jangle.

If I could pinpoint the area that I am so instantly entered into these attractions I wouldn’t see it fit to ever speak fully of the man, I’d just write the essay and leave. But what continues to shore from the source of this congratulatory indebtedness is the speakability of Dylan’s offerings. I hereby define such speakability as the often unintended for and markedly intricate sprawling of voice, voice as an operative, voice as that which is met when its strings begin backgrounding the open spaces like veins, trees, voice that is root of wander. Unless having been young and attuned during the release of all his albums, or transfixed by the preferentiality being a Dylan erudite entails, one is rarely going to place a Dylan song in its correct time, album, or last for that matter—arrival in the specific album. And one need not, because they do not ask this of the ear. They ask, on the contrary, near nothing. They do, however, speak just as they are coming into form and song, just as they did when they filled in and then out of Dylan’s head to finger tips.

I am now less baffled after speaking through my own wonder, yet I will note that the surefire excellence that Dylan’s works parade is a source of subexistence I fully feel physical in. For that rare and mystifying artist who succeeds more from the unreferenced self than what is actually referenced as popular positioning, I prop Dylan up, not to a pedestal or a marker of an any more-than-here critiqued poet, but as a light scattered only as it can be if one were to fall on the texture of new grass. Grass that is always new, grass that is open for the cut but of its own and often indefinable growth. Forty-six years: piffle!

Hobo Local

Out my door in my ear on my coffee:
I spend ten dollars at burrito joints.
Side my step, 'hind by munch, 'front my sit:
I pay for three drinks a day.
Under my nose, top my park, within my say:
I don't share the cigarettes.
Off my shift, around my coat, after my nap:
I sleep with four pillows inside

Poem a day 3/19/08

if you walk out into the street to look for the bus it comes faster.
seriously though. why else would we be arriving here on time?

how many hours it must have taken a horse to forge the mircale
mile. other things, beyond me, like true sacrifice & known love

scoot out the pasture & settle in the lakes I feel close to. waves
ankle up to pensive stones & leg out a kick into the topsinning

yawns of two good sails about the push. here there must be good
news, or breaks in the gaze. worrying so, i take two steps out into

the street to field a bus route in--the taxi's passing, clunkingwater round my shoes as they beep: we are being charged for sleep.

Poem a day 3/18/08

facing the same way as the feet, consider how the nostrils are shaped the same,
how the grounds they're both husking 'low their strides are similarly disimilar. not
the better of analogies, but their is world beneath the nose that is grounded and
worth the dig. stamp down dry, wet, or the something that in-betweens it all:

on the corner, the sock selling hobo has switched over to Barack Obama t-shirts
that seem more funkadelic than intended, more shot off the carnival rigs. what
help is any of this, what will the kids say about sockless trots to the mailbox?

Poem a Day 3/17/08

you've done so beautifully in getting us into the first laugh that I can't help but pull this stool out for you dear friend.  how a car looks while turning into straight rain:  plush, driven, anti-establishment.  what about a carriage, the one we took to the farm before the chickens swept below the wheel and egg'd out a harmonious scramble.  how actually being called a cracker makes me think of saltines & then soda:  how those two things worked well together all those years we threw from our ribs the fears of sudden trembling.  you've done so wonderfully the layers of absence, as if we think you're up to something good or important, something dinner or diligent.  a watch goes on sale with two extra batteries.  expecting your presence, we settle into every climate of click & trouble out the hour with low heeled glancing.  the carriage is out with a middle move.  grass off the spin like ingredients, we omelet out our crack & see how the difference folds.    

poem a Day 3/16/08

such as a permitting dawn scraggles out a loose recall

we fall after acorns & submit lids from brows bocked

from the mound of admit, as if a pitching into the unhit

will culminate in the the place we field out good sit.

tell me now how the score is kept in a two-teamed 

blush for the stream, or how being caught will have

us canned & better on the salad of what has seemed

our balance:  being popped up or easy for the grab.

home then run then base then bound:  why not bunt?

Poem a Day 3/15/08

as it is gray above a light is made below

in the shouldering of indoor shrugs--

how a pint resists its last sit in foam,

how an ounce lifts into a steady roam

of speech against a shaded reach of 

room, of space spoken into and erased.

the pub talk turned and lit from within,

the grayer day the city sums with spin,

how to celebrate from an uknown field--

Poem a Day 3/14/08

Arrest me in a leathered phase of pointing

that pseudo-cough great glabulate wheels a sort

of ferris.  To more or less shuck gland shout

an auspice of the fat demands of this glazy hit.

What seems a problem:  officer off her glimmery fit.

In Being Thankful for Ulysses

Today is the birthday of Sylvia Beach, whose prolific career as a publisher brought us the first editions of many notable books but most importantly Joyce's Ulysses in 1922, which she published during the time in which it was banned in the U.S.  Thanks to the Writer's Almanac for such a reminder.  Although I have not read much upon her other endeavors, which included a housing for expatriates and writer's in her Paris bookstore Shakespeare and Company, I do know that she was a woman whose push for books and emblematic outreach concerning the willingness to spread literature made possible a scene of early 20's artistic projects that is undoubtedly one worth studying and appreciating to the fullest.  It is also Einstein's birthday.  I thus doff a set of balloons for sucking at school, publishing dearest James, and excelling behind the known frontier. 

Sexton Quote

Depression is boring, I think,

and I would do better to make

some soup and light up the cave.

Anne Sexton, "The Fury of the Rain Storms"

Poem a Day 3/12/08

Let us another-time this.

You're beautiful baby, but I gotta go.

Why these are called seizures

Why these are culled procedures

you saw me wake up blood-flushed

the nose a nightmare canal, a coup.

Flew it.  Just flew it.  Up & out.

Image act.  Now our joint clicks

for the newer things next to we.

Righting now this.  I sight you

A Note on Anne Sexton

Having spent a rather monstrous amount of time on the works of Plath & Sexton as of late, I find that one of the most common and triggering effects in one's own style of writing is the core urge an emotion has to shape itself outside of the cages of rib and the tendrils of interior pulse.  For instance, the most compelling poems I am confronting in Sexton are those written in a succession of sharp prodding upon the nerves, where the steam is at that hiss right before the kettle howl, where water is added and boiled and added and boiled until its known contents are charged in their readiness to cook and succeed in a larger dome of speakable residency.  The fixation turns the air on, but as it dissipates only an otherwise unsalvageable pinch of gut reasoning can spread its roots into the word and wave of one sub tug of one subset of one large set of relatable poetic attributes.  Note:  here I am attempting at paragraphs for an essay, if only to cut a small line in the heel for that deeply blotted blood to in a bath of warm water release.  Is the pounding of one's poetry into form a way of combating the fixed exteriors of academically-eyed expectations.  Need an academic eye arrive on a free-versed plankard of discursive creed?  In digging specifically into the ways Maxine Kumin so clearly comments on the writing progressions of Anne Sexton, I shall return here again to answer my own and at this time clearly muddled and unsolved questions.  Agenbite of inwit!   

Poem a Day 3/11/08

I am supposed to see that the 

ocean is still going on

yet I am swashbuckled in salt

turning its trinkets upon a whitecapped

wave

stopped in my stomach 

on a self-craved pump for love

Poem a Day 3/9/08

I run a club for young minds in my mall.
How a throat hurts suddenly.
In the 105 degree room we position this.
I unwrap the best looking present & find a cinder block
drop it on the common walk & know our fall
is futured. It's there, so looking forward.

poem a Day 3/7/08

i took a beer off 

my lips:  you came without song

to afford a chorus

we count hubcaps &

roll the windows up & down

awaiting our breeze

awaiting the kick

of low planes in a small sky

this temperature

Poem a Day 3/6/08

I think something celebrates itself outside of this:  the color gray, a singular & unparalleled preoccupation.

A horse will offer disappointment if stalled.

In the reins a foot can touch down dry but

lifts into recognitions of want.

Come with bark, consider wind saddle.

You ruler the moon,

you cup at presence,

you upside-down this.

Cathy Park Hong's Poetry

I can't enough from these lines, excerpted from the poem "The Importance of Being English"  in Cathy Park Hong's Dance Dance Revolution

Me fadder sees dis y decide to learn Engrish righteo dere.

Become a Jees cucking stool fo means o survival

me lineage biggum on survival.

'E tell me dis pep gem:

We have got to get ourselves back to the garden!

Poem a Day 3/5/08

Things I Suggest Paying More For

French-pressed coffee

& small French press

offerings, limousines

& single source honey 

from chubby brave bees

discussed w/o money,

doors for women to

walk through doors for

coughs to coffin, 

guacamole on the chomp

in case a dollar hoots

from burrito prompts,

rooms for well-dressed

widows & widows for

unconfessed rooms

where whores sill a

window, windows for

the ninth hour & hours

for another holler at

the infinites.

BOOKS BEING EATEN

I am going to start a new column in which every book I check out gets listed in this sphere:

In doing so, I hope to comment on one or two of them a week.

Books checked out from the Harold Washington Library.  March 4th, 2008

Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books    by   Marcel Benabou

Music and Suicide        by   Jeff Clark

Life:  A User's Manual by   Georges Perec

The Lichtenberg Figures        by   Ben Lerner

Angle of Yaw        

The Form of a City Changes, alas, than the Human Heart by jacques Roubaud

Folding Ruler Star        by   Aaron Kunin

Cosmos        by Witold Gombrowicz

Movies:         Network

       Down By Law

       Underground, a film by Emir Kusturica

poem a Day 3/4/08

the novocaine derelict

the jackass sissynecked

in readymade high-fives

how that ramshackled

discobox plugs a minus

on on our night & we

can't decide on where

it's at but trill a jig incase

Poem a Day 3/3/08

more or less if you listen it is of a way you

moved around me never without me but

about us always moving was a way for 

a definition to cup at a particular quota to

be the fat & cogent signal at the cross at the

standing of our slow-moving but moving ungulate 

a preaching

a calm on down

a shock

we have two-humped our camel but the space between

too small for sit 

gets its memories toolate & we again are

  into what has a reason to hot sand the secrets

Poem a Day 3/2/08

from a working manifesto

The lines jag out from the nails of the fingers,

I have a heated writing seat hammering them from the head.

I don't, I never, I won't cab it here:

I'm not forward in looking.

I'm big damn Gondola in the mess.

The gondola last calls it all, is still shopping its gurney in the epochal

gulf:  messy ravine below.

Quite a lofty assumption aboves itself & coos,

all the drudge of line a spread for sludge:  I certainly won't gondola

less than the black diamonds.

I spit these faceless enthusiasts off at their own risk

Poem a Day 2/29/08

Having left my phone in the cab

little bough of move shadowed

left, I wonder of ringing who is

unclipped.  I dip into a book &

go back to communicating with

chapters.  I check a message: 

The light is on.  Water shouldn't

run the whole time a tooth is 

brushed.  What about a first 

edition?  What about inklings?

I break a pencil in the thought.

Poem a Day 2/28/08

How about a better son or daughter

a brand new sound

a cautionary song

a film called  fond or

a farewell from the long way down

how a man walks into a minor place

a script ending or a new career in

town about how about getting

back in cabs & hating

a cough coming somewhere

from the room you're in

common across

how about loosening into

a good mind an outsider finds

an in 

in how about a spring quicker

a gated parking lot for bad

thought to open in a morning

of cathedrals & forgiving 

Famous Writer's Birthday Post #3

Today is the birthday of Henry Longfellow, so upon inadvertently clawing upon embittered or estranged commentary, I shall sink into the quote-recant and doff these gems for the day:

"A single conversation across the table with a wise man is better than ten years mere study of books."

"All things must change to something new, something strange."

"As to the pure mind all things are pure, so to the poetic mind all things are poetical."

-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

It is also the birthday of Lawrence Durrell, whose Bitter Lemons stares me down from the fourth level of the left bookshelf in my living room all the time.

"Like all men I set out to be a genius, but mercifully laughter intervened."  

Poem a Day 2/27/08

     dear pigeons swept from train sounds dear ground I've found

a better round about dear woman with three trips stripes arm-

     gripped to the refill dear feeling of bare arms on flannel dear

going mad in the sun dear me for seeing anything done dear

     deer bedecked in Buick paint dear drastic change in weather 

dear whether or not I go to the show dear dear rearranging of

     soul dear doldrums dapper & dining in the best booth dear

cawing in the corridors dear adorable things red shoes on 

     short-haired women dear drawn about doing different things

dear dear I fear you are everything but near but I'm still here dear

Poem a Day 2/26/08

taking things off & putting them back on. the air smells like sleepovers

& green tea.  what snow manages to stick to the window once had some-

thing to say. he yawns from the back of a dream where breathing ended

& puts three layers on in a lie down. a scene too trembling to print, the

outside lens turns back to the street, unprotected bus stops blur into

the road & the cars all turn west to punch off an unexpected arresting.

Poem a Day 2/25/08

That pain in the gulliver:  nasties knit well knit:

what of

every milk showdown will shake?

At the milkbar again, appy-polly-loggies for night & no return

we skitter in kilt the meta-hang of viddy wells, utlra silence.

'scuse me Missum, I speakin' jive jangled slang from the Ludwig:

say what form of torture this is silly brother, don't bother off

me lashing

for the betterfold:

we fodder off the watch & smash the face, clock a guttural snoop in the terrestrial,

terrorist on trial, to rest for the rest we all:  pain in me head brother.

Famous Writer's Birthdays 2/25

Today is the birthday of Anthony Burgess, whose Clockwork Orange exploited such marvelling dislocation and gritty application of language that for weeks upon first read I kept saying slooshied & gorgeousity, rassoodocks & gulliver. The interrogative diction and park-in-the-middle-of-the-night dialect wore on me woolen and itchy. I must add that, despite cutting some of the nastiest and most integrally imperative moments of the novel, Kubrick's adaptation goes down as one of the better marriages of novel to film. Today I celebrate a touch of this wild kiskipade, allowing the usage of slang so malted I must at once with concupiscence cajole a sneezing mass clap.

"There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, Dim being really Dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassodocks what to do with the evening."

OSCARS

What does P.T. Anderson have to do?

In all due respect, the Coen brothers are amazing and I hold nothing but lofty admiration for their films (despite two in which I won't mention), but the disappointment I feel in There Will be Blood losing both the Best Picture and Best Director Awards to No Country for Old Men is enough to off my irk upon scriv.  

Perhaps TWBB is too niche for the Academy, too strung up in a straight device or maybe it sports a cast too small & male-dominated.  Yet I would like to argue that it exercises everything a near perfect film can:  it draws from a remarkably timeless plot, it releases tension as viciously natural as possible, it boasts performances so internally churned that only the eyes can be blamed for deceiving.  Already we had to deal with Greenwood being snubbed for a score nod, and now we must watch this pass as well?  

It can be justified however, since Daniel Day-Lewis got his (the most deserved award ever) prize and dutifully thanked Paul for the golden sapling sprung from his head. I am being as harsh as I can right now, since I hold the Oscars dearly.  This was not a horrible moment, yet I do think it went a certain way for certain unknown reasons.  If I look at it in a way in which NCFOM won to also shed light on the monstrously moving prose of McCarthy then I am better set to ease.  But at least the Coen brothers could have wept a little, or shagged off their internal nerves enough to show a loftier spoil of satisfaction.  

That said, I'd like to say what the best moments were.  The first is when Jack Nicholson laughed twice before saying Humanity, as if he thought it an amusing concept.  The second came when Marketa Irglova was led back on stage to give her thanks for "Falling Slowly" winning Best Original Song. I thought they were going to let that slide.  Ironic how music cut her off the stage eh? Overall,  I am quite happy about Javier, Cotillard, and Day-Lewis winning as they should.

Poem a Day 2/24/08

Words are tried over

she waits sockless in the den

the last cube crackles

lamps facing the wall

she becomes a timely shelf

without an order

tiring in the hours

she falls in a shoreline sleep

aside her, cold notes 

Poem a Day 2/23/08

Having as of late released the b-side, the frequenter

hooks the fins in a fit of iron swindle, jags recluse.

There is sweater invested in his unchecked engine

& a mailbox one needs good transportation toward.

He casts a celebratory lure into the standard creek,

steps back, & forks his brow with each cut reel.

What didn't make it to the first set of play & sit?

As the arranger too turned, bait on the bottoms

broomed circles.  A wildly awaited chorus slims in.

Poem a day: 2/22/08

I just don't think 

this is serious enough:  not only the second time,

but such vigor.

Bowl super yes,

the simple plump bumble of a fumble,

& yet I'm a face-painting fan of your nude luxuries:

In the audience I holler up the courtsides, shaking

the flag & hackling the opponent.

Others the herehere:  ego is not a sink:

To pretend things clean are coming from:

I see carrot cake & thus don't need to eat it,

take the children to another room.