End of An Era?
A Laurable Log (Laura Willey)
deletes her links with
a laconic comment:

"Other Poetry/
Poetics Weblogs

Too

Many

Poetry

Weblogs"

 

Hotel Point
(John Latta),
Loss Glazier,
Spam Poetry,
Bruce Andrews
and
Troubled Sleep

I'm with
Bellona Times (Ray Davis) {click here}
all the way re: Anton Webern,
Robert Johnson, poetry & the dead
don't charge but when he writes:

"Are weblogs, in contrast, a living form?

Not the way I do them."

I couldn't agree less.
Bellona Times is pointing the way...
[see December 19th]:
*Time Flies Like A Banana*

thursday reading series...january 29 2004

poetic inhalation and the tin lustre mobile {click here}
will present their first live reading at the
thursday reading series...a joint series
of the arlington county, virginia public
libraries and
arlington county public affairs commission {click here}
on thursday january 29 2004 at 7:30pm...

perry lindstrom will be taping the event through
arlington independent media {click here}
for the first in his public access poet series
which will be poets and performance artists
as they perform and also in settings that they
choose as personifications of their muse.

Belated Happy Birthday Ulalations!!!! Hope you had a great day on your blog birthday yesterday, Nada.

And Nada's back with more of Song of My Own Self {click here}, this time with Yiddish Chanukah flavor.

Elsewhere (Gary Sullivan) {click here} checks in too!

Notebook: 1/1/87

A gathering- "writing as revery"=
selecting as revery- understanding that
the seeing that it is (contains) poetry-
from a certain perspective.

The weather-vane of attention's turret
moves with the winds of the mind's-eye
imaging. Alter the relationship between
words and images and you can alter
this relationship. The winds will sweep
wildly or sharply or may cease
with a sudden cataclysm of transformed
reference. At one word (or letter), awareness
suddenly intensifies, and the wind will
increase, shifting the turret and the eye now
turns to the nearby verbs, and with this shift
an implication emerges which
gathers suddenly around a minor phrase,
like a bank of darkening clouds. And
if the words then scatter, as the glance
sweeps across the page as rapidly as a
hundred gulls might shift direction, the
wind of memory supplies an entrance into
time, until the real moment emerges and a
sentence stops. What (or where) comes (a thought)
between? A reverse run through reveals a
trace of altered perspective, from quick
assumptions to the as quickly dropped part
images of words. This is not quite what
was meant to be marked or surrounded by
the reflection on the earlier
assumption (also forgotten). What becomes,
becalms. Thought scatters the conclusion
into a composite series of attentional
reference points, each positing a peculiar proximate
provisional point of reference. To flee from
this, to end it, is to assume that a reduction
of focus will permit an alternative sequence of
elaborated comparisons. These are required
to allow a continuous alternation of textual
inclusions and other (unmarked) areas of attentional focus.

"Picture what you language."
Ron Silliman
*The Age of Huts*

*****
Notebook: 12/19/03

5.

The ordinary is invisible. It
has a pleading voice and finds
itself upset at all the false
tones. Habitual, loyal, persistent,
bereft, it imagines itself in
outlandish costumes in a
dream space. Whenever these two
realms speak, however, they tend
to disagree. It is usually a matter
of a single unnatural element, an
undignified detail, the nuance of
a kind of weariness around the
eyes (the observational turret
of recognition). Day and night
alternate as masculine/feminine,
as legions of philosophers
clamor for a hearing. Someone claps
her hands and the audience turns
into a prism, apprehending
the piece's pulse
by means of a fingerboard of
rainbow rhythm strips.
These are systematically misheard.
"Oh, in order to strum that one,"
the conductor
pointedly remarks,
"You must play an
instrument against a song."

"But there are words to this,"
answer the trombones. And the
clarinets remark: "Ah, the latest
semblances to neutral harmonies."
"How easy recognized!"
the audience member swoons.
An usher in a bright red uniform
is completely flabbergasted, turns
and freezes in place.
With immense panache and empathy,
and with flying hair and skirt,
the ticket-taker quickly winds him up
then gracefully steps up to the podium-

The violins quicken with pizzicato
dilligence....

The conductor takes his cue....
One and-a-two and
a breeze blows through the
oboes and basoons. Now they
seem to understand, he thinks.
And then announces:

"They are
breathing
in unison!"

Notebook: 4/15/89

It's true that you can hear the sounds
of things breaking and just beneath or
beyond the sounds of things broken,
collapsing, but most of this is
dead wood anyway, so don't mourn.

________________________________
Creation, no matter how many times we
witness it, must remain partly clothed
in the deepest form of obscurity.
________________________________

Who made you
The keeper of the gate?
Who made you
The monarch of the state?

Who gave you the chalk
And all the slate?

I did.
I took the bait.

4/15/89

Dear Writing-

I guess I'll be saying goodbye.
You've been a good friend through all
these years, but it has reached the
point that you are more a part of the
problem than a part of the solution. I
know this sounds very sixties and corny but it's
me. And don't go saying I'm not grateful,
because I am. I admit you were always
there when I needed you, but I think
I can get along on my own now, so
I'll be going. Don't get mad at me
and send me those letters you always
send because I might not even read
them. I love what we had together, but
it's over now. I'll never forget you,
I'll miss you, and I really did
love you, but I don't anymore. I'm not
sorry about this, no regrets.

Love,
Nick

P.S. It's been real.

4/27/89

The price of being a philosopher
is that the truth hurts. You'd think
the philosopher invented overturning one
argument in favor of another by learning
to do the same with people. But all's
fair in love and the pursuit of truth.
The philosopher learns to convince them they are
following themselves by following him or her.
*Beware dear philosopher, behind the ghost of every argument is
the ghost of a person come to haunt you.*

Reminder: before resuming typing, go to
the end of the book.

Dear writer: if you add in something real the
sauce will thicken.

**************************************

10/22/03

4.

The tried and true circle around
you. The nonchalant at peace with
themselves sequestering a balance
for a time.This is a benefit
that can't be released. Morning
to you, Mr. Blue. He travels
light and "tells it like it is."
A gray marker. Steeped in
technological savvy, surrounded
by friends that care, warmly
regarded by your peers, dreaming
on in technicolor silence. I
had gripped the cup too tightly
and it fell from my
hand. Rainbow coalition, futuristic
voting bloc. Speakeasy. Loyalty.
Spleen.

looking for that completely different holiday present?

check out

Pure Products USA {click here}

from ligorano/reese

**

Here's a review of their work I published in *Chain*
some years back: New Languages for Old {click here}
(But to see the terrific photos of this work you
need to get your hands on a copy of Chain 3.1
*Hybrid Genres*)

Samuel Butler
from *The Notebooks of Samuel Butler*
(1835-1902)

"America will have her geniuses, as every other country
has, in fact she has already had one in Walt Whitman, but
I do not think America is a good place in which to be a genius.
A genius can never expect to have a good time anywhere, if
he is the genuine article, but America is about the last place
in which life will be endurable at all for an inspired writer of
any kind."

**
Samuel Butler

"My Books"

"I never make them: they grow; they come to me and
insist on being written, and on being such and such. I did not
want to write *Erewhon*, I wanted to go on painting and found
it an abominable nuisance being dragged willy-nilly into
writing it. So with all my books- the subjects were never
of my own choosing; they pressed themselves upon me with
more force than I could resist. If I had not liked the
subjects I should have kicked, and nothing would have got
me to do them at all. As I did like the subjects and the
books came and said they were to be written, I grumbled a
little and wrote them."

The fact that we say something is in the past
means that it will be repeated.

The fact that it is the present means that you
will ask yourself: should I continue? Should I
continue what I am doing?

What in the whole world could compare to asking
yourself a question like that?

It's enough to change your entire reality.

Wait a minute. What else is in the present except
the imperative: how do I continue?

Clearly this isn't the opposite.

The thing is, each sentence is said by an entirely
different character. You can hear that twang across
the distance between one statement and another.

Oh no, it isn't about the logic or the consistency. Uh-uh it's
not that easy. That's not what makes a person a person.

A person hears things. A person listens. A person begins to
echo everything that exists around them. A person reacts
so "they" know what's going on.

A person is a "they." A tremendous group, an enormous special
interest. As much, or more, than any group.


Notebook: 2/10/89

Submission

It is easy to speak of the irrational in a
time when what is irrational is determined,
or the whole, by committee vote. the
committee is, in turn, so determined in its
judgement to be self-serving to the larger
institutions it represents. The humane
judgement, like the judgement of the powerful,
is left to the individual. The group as
a whole has never known humanity and
never will.The group as a whole must be
determined in its action by forces too
dark to ever govern fully in a just way. In our
fear and frustration as a group again and again we
turn to the individual. How the group then
longs to corner, destroy or corrupt the individual.
The group wants the individual to submit
and only submit. But the individual
will never submit.
------------------------------------------------------------------------

   

from *A Burning Interior*
David Shapiro
Overlook Press, 2003

from "Dream of December 9"

"I was a peace emissary to Saddam Hussein
I explained that I had hardly gone to a synagogue
more than a few times in my life
I was a pacifist and hated the military regimes
better he face me than Snowcroft
The plane was lurching to a pitiless Iraq
like a bus with military views of Washington..."

Notebook: 10/22/03

1. The present seen on a movie
screen in black and white: close
up of a table. The rhythmic uncertainty
of temporal progression sequesters
the expected chronology. The
direction is never doubted, never
questioned. Memories reside in
the hands. Viewing them as
centered on the screen, then
"this must be your favorite montage."
Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers
spliced across the dance floor. No
regrets about the fingering, no
second guessing what passed. Variations
on a scream. One direction back
to circling the first generation of
pain. Hide the trigger words.
I don't want to think
about what the "objective correlatives"
were. They remain, they must
remain, disguised at all times.
Seeing them in someone
else's clothes, understanding them
as dressed in a costume, listening
to all their speeches as if
they were prepared dialogues. Of
course they were- of course they
were not. Transcending both
categories. They appear as
part of a masque, part of a
remembered and lovingly repeated
ritual.

2.
I am pleased about deleting
a word. You won't be asked to guess it
or think about it. They exist
only to give you permission. But
why must I be given
permission to think. I can
only assume that thinking has
been forbidden, as I am quite
sure it was, very long ago. The
particles that filter down,
that drift, are the only
evidence we have that
thinking ever existed. This
film has been repeating so long we have
long ago forgotten there was a
time before reruns (letters
in the public domain). Intermittent
messages from the time before. These
resonances were sporadic from the
beginning. They appeared
like glittering reflections on a lake.
From time to time they arranged
themselves in recognizable patterns.
These would be suggested by
sequences of words. For example:
forest, insignia, slope. The
words settle like particles
swirling around in water.
Brownian motion, a message trapped inside
a rock for eons.

3.
Prescience

Before there was a before,
at a time when the present was
far more urgent than it is
now, someone had an inkling.
Someone started to remember.
"Time" began with this moment.
Looking, looking around anxiously,
anxiously searching. What, or who,
remembers? Running in terror,
searching fearfully, and keeps its
close relation. I want nothing
more than to forget it. To
foresee, to understand time's
odd qualities, perceive its human aspect.
Time and being, circling around each other like
two curious, hungry, searching,
fearful animals. What can we
do with each other, so far apart?

How can we understand each
other, one completely non-human,
the other vulnerable, but seeing
time, feeling it run through,
watching it, moving, thinking,
playing within it, like a child
romping in the ocean, feeling
the strong waves, playing in its
changing currents, regarding its
vastness, its inhuman responses,
its hidden expressions.

10/23

In poetry, prescience and
relevance are the same thing.

"Trees are archangels thinking light."

Allen Ginsberg

**

"Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings-
always darker, emptier and simpler."

Nietzsche

::fait accompli:: 2003
*stocking stuffers*
These are a few of my
favorite things...


Maria Damon and Miekel And, *Literature Nation*
Potes and Poets Press “[You, the Reader, are nervous to understand the words on the screen]”

Marcus Aurelius, *Meditations*: A new translation by
Gregory Hays -Modern Library-
“Everything transitory- the knower and the known.”

Walter Benjamin, *Selected Writings Volume 4*
The Belknap Press, Harvard UP
“The interplay between antiquity and modernity
must be transformed from the pragmatic context-
in which it first appears in Baudelaire- to the
context of allegory.”

Charles Bernstein, *Let’s Just Say*
Chax Press
“Let’s just say that the truth is somewhere
between us.”

Li Bloom, *Radish*
iuniverse
“See over there/Lonely desperation/
is a surface/ Problem”

Charles Borkhuis, *Savoir-Fear*
Melting Eyes Bindery
“Meanwhile it’s snuggle-time/
inside distraction’s warp and woof”

Daniel Bouchard, editor, *The Poker*
“Marcella Durand: Great. Your poetry makes me happy.
Kevin Davies: What, are you nuts?”

Tanya Brolaski, *The High Lonesome: Letters to Hank Williams*
True West
“hank, I had to write the clouds were a bad sign
and I knelt before their omen. ‘a ghost is an
extreme emotion stuck in time,’”

David Bromige, *INDICTABLE SUBORNERS*
dPress
“Giddily they agreed: objects in space may be said
to derive their boundaries from coexistence”

Chain 10 *translucination*
“what interested us was the relentless
utopian drive within any act of translation”

Corina Copp, *Sometimes Inspired By Marguerite*
Open 24 Hours
“Twittering hammers down too the rain
like talk is like us is too, too soon”

Mike County, *Copper*
Pressed Wafer
“Of light interchangeable
with silence.”

Michael Cross, editor, *Involuntary Vision: after Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams*
Avenue B
“at the heart of this dialogue is
an unwillingness to accept objective
conditioning (which, I suppose, is
what gives the a label like ‘The New
Brutalism’ its credence).”

Jordan Davis, *Million Poems Journal*
Faux Press
“The red moon
is a banjo”

kari Edwards, *a day in the life of p.*
subpress collective
“the stopped moment that stopped
for centuries continued to fade.”

Elaine Equi, *The Cloud of Knowable Things*
Coffee House
"I'm at the corner between Can't & Won't
At the kiosk between Aroma & Automatic..."

Clayton Eshleman, *Everwhat*
Zasterle
“I come from a generation oily
with typewriter, blessed with
stubborn /angst of view”

Jean Fremon, *Island of the Dead*
translated from the French by
Cole Swenson
Green Integer
“…it’s as if I take stock of the
day’s mood by letting the pencil
wander.’

Jean Fremon, *Distant Noise*
translated from the French by
Norma Cole, Lydia Davis, Serge
Gavronsky and Cole Swenson
cover by Louse Bourgeois
Avec
“A strange dream,
the other side of passion”

Nada Gordon,*V.IMP.*
Faux Press
“Come live with me
and be my love/
and we will buy a new vacuum (Lao Tzu)”

Noah Eli Gordon, *The Frequencies*
tougher disguises
"My radio did this to me."

Michael Gottlieb, *Lost and Found*
Roof
“Those lonely, terrifying gifts.
The hall of disclaimers.”

Barbara Guest *Reflexions on Art*
Roof
“As mysterious as a herd of animals
galloping across a moonlit landscape
is the interior of a silent room…”

Lyn Henjinian *My Life in the Nineties*
Shark
“What? is the fiftieth year of my life
now complete?”

Crag Hill, editor, *Score 18*
“Meanings are jade pebbles, mildy
ways, golem cages.”
Edward Mycue

Brenda Iijima, *spacious*
Other
“Flash to a time when feelings were
reconciled by a glued in formalism”

Thomas Kelly, *All Hands*
“Don’t Touch My Art Project
Please,
It is the one that looks like
an orange pylon-”

Deb Klowden and Ben Lerner, editors
*No* (includes *In Denmark* by Ken Irby)
“By the light oranges, strangers”
Cole Swenson

Hank Lazer, *Deathwatch: for My Father*
Chax
“and for a time/the new drugs/
seem to work”

Matt Lee, editor, *Razor Smile*
Alan Sondheim CD-ROM Special
“He has been an inspiration for a lot
of avant-garde and experimental writers
and net theoreticians…”

Rachel Levitsky, *Under the Sun*
Futurepoem
“Destiny as a life written by
the wall. on the wall. frescoed
into the concrete wall”

Ligorano/Reese with Gerrit Lansing
*turning leaves of mind*
Granary
“The book sits
in a tower
of dust”

Karen McCormack, *Implexures*
Chax and West House
“today many physicists think
nothingness is the foundation
of everything”

k. silem mohammed, *Deer Head Nation*
tougher disguises
“\*=America died today
\*=America killed by the President”

David Perry, *Range Finder*
Adventures in Poetry
“I have nowhere to go
that isn’t/ automatically
written language”

Tim Peterson, *Cumulus*
Portable Press
“The grotesque imbalance of powers
fuels my morning walk: azaleas, blue
phlox, curbside junk”

Antonio Porchia, *Voices*
translated by WS Merwin
Copper Canyon
“We have a world for each one
but we do not have a world for all”
“Tenemos un mundo para cada uno,
pero no tememos un mundo para todos”

Tom Raworth, *Collected Poems*
Carcanet
“dream
into the mirror
please”

Elizabeth Robinson, *Apprehend*
Apogee
“The witch herself wears stripes…”

David Rosenberg, *See What You Think*
Critical Essays for the Next Avant Garde
SPUYTENDUYVIL
“A visionary poetry instead of omnisciently
embodying the present, must see through its
omniscience to explore the future.”

Kurt Schwitters
*Objects, Ephemera, Collages, Paintings*
UBU Gallery

David Shapiro
*A Burning Interior*
Overlook
"Dream of December 9th"
"I was a peace emissary
to Saddam Hussein
I explained I had hardly gone to a synagogue
more than a few times in my life
I was a pacifist and hated the military regimes
better he face me than Snowcroft"

Rodrigo Toscano *Platforms*
atelos
“regrets?
few…”

Stephanie Young & Catherine Meng, *Postcard Poems*
Poetry Expresso
“Dear Santa, I’ve already got
a lot of unexpected presents”
Stephanie
“And who was singing
next to me made
no difference to my brain-“
Catherine

Stephanie Young & Del Ray Cross, *Postcard Poems*
Poetry Expresso
“There was a line/ in the sugar,
of ants/ and a line to cut
the week in two”
Stephanie
“Was it something
the big stones had said?”
Del Ray

Tim Yu and Cassie Lewis, *Postcard Poems*
“Never worry about irony, looking
out over an abandoned planet.”
Tim
“The perceptions of others
and the clouds of intent”
Cassie

Barrett Watten *The Constructivist Moment*
Wesleyan University Press

Quotation of the Day Dep't

On December 7th, John Most
finished *Finnigan's Wake"
by James Joyce {click here}

I've plunged to position 9 on
Ironstone
Whirlygig (Amanda Cook's) {click here}
crush list. Crazy busy this week,
I was afraid i would fall off the list altogether
(fell from #3 to #9).

There's still hope!
(Back to the
drawing board)

Paul Valery's Blog Revelation


'THE PHOTO-POETIC PHENOMENON'
from *Analects*

"The poet has a great advantage in the fact that most people
feel incapable of pushing their thought *beyond* the point
where it can dazzle, excite, or elate them.

The spark lights up an area that seems infinite in the given
instant for which it is seen. The expression dazzles.


The shock of wonderment cannot be separated from the
objects it reveals. The strong dark outlines that appear
during the instant remain like wonderful properties in the
memory.

They are not distinguished from real objects. They are
seen as positive things.

But one must note that, to the great good luck of poetry,
*the tiny moment* I spoke of cannot be prolonged; there is no
turning the spark into a *fixed, continuous illumination.*

*That would light up something altogether different.*

In this case the phenomena a dictated by the source of
light.

The tiny instant offers glimpses or gleams of quite another
system or "world" than what can be revealed by a contin-
uous illumination. This world (to which it would be use-
less and absurd to attribute any metaphysical value) is essen-
tially *unstable.* It is perhaps the world of free and characteristic
association among the mind's potential resources? The world
iof magnetic forces, of shortest distances, of resonances...


Perhaps the element of the inexplicable here would have
*distance* as its symbol? Action at a distance, induction, and so
forth?"

from *moonshine highways*!
12/14/2003


Back at you haiku

Our fait accompli
a morning blend of ripe sounds
a lovely wake-up.
..................................................
# posted by Amy @ 8:32 AM

Thanks!!!!!




Linky Haiku

Moonshine Highways {click here}
and a bottle of
Tsingtao

still
feels
like
heaven
******

Mallarme on Blogging

from *A Break in the Act*
translated by David Paul

"How far civilization is from assuring us the pleasures
that are supposed to be its attributes! For instance one
might well be amazed that there is no league of dreamers
in every great city, existing to support some newspaper
that would record events in the light appropriate to
dream. *Reality* is a contrivance, serving to situate the
average mind among the mirages of an event: but by
that very token it must be founded on some universal
understanding: so let us see whether, ideally, there is no
essential, obvious, simple aspect of things that would
serve as basic type. I want, from my own solitary view-
point, to narrate, as it struck my poet's eye, a particular
anecdote before it is spread abroad by reporters en-
trusted by the public with the task of assigning each
thing its commonplace character..."

I've really appreciated having my two collages in
Sidereality-and on stage
Sidereality-Sundial
over the past couple of months. I'll miss it. And it
also brings to mind what a pleasure it was to work
with Lewis La Cook and Clayton Couch.
I greatly appreciate the work they did on
the current issue,
in particular, of course,
their intensive,
empathetic and generous focus
on *fait accompli* and my
other work.