Books Gratefully Received

Douglas Messerli, *First Words*,
Green Integer #147, 2004

Kier Peters, *A Dog Tries To Kiss The Sky*
Green Integer #89, 2003,(7 Short Plays)

Tom Beckett, *How Say*
Backwoods Broadsides Chaplet
Series #64

Tom Beckett, *Vanishing Points of
Resemblance*, Generator Press
2004

Kiosk 2004 {click here}
edited by Gordon Hadfield, Sasha Steensen, & Kyle Schlesinger.

A Midsummer Night's Dream
(The Unbearable Lightness of Blogging)

The Boohbah Zone {click here}
brought to you by the inimitable
ululations (Nada Gordon)
**
Types of Divination {click here}
via Caterina {click here}
**
then I googled "inimitable" and got this:
The Marx Brothers {click here}

Rushing out right now
but had to tell you

Douglas Messerli
has published a
lovely book of poems
called *First Words*
by his own Green
Integer Press


from
"Expectations"

People say goodnight.
People remain about as heathens.
People with faith fashion
their decrepitude..."

How else would I be motivated
Except by emotion, not by desire
To do for pure athletic expression of life
Though this is good, has often been good,
Now I only want to lol around and complain.
Something will happen to smoke out
The old laziness, I can tell by all the work
That someone's trying too hard
And it just doesn't pay to try too hard.

It's true- I am not being pleasing
In fact, I'm even decrying my own urge to write this-
This is not only the result of fatigue and bad luck
Though we've all had plenty of that-
This comes from routinely sensing what's ahead,
Almost like having a T.V. Guide to real life-
One day I understood that anyone can read it if they want to
It's the denial that makes it impossible to forget
And just live- so is the poem part of this denial
Or is it something else?
A shadow on a beam of sunlight
In an elevator shaft.
You get out to shop
And the mannikins transfix you.

notebook: circa 1985

The Unbearable Lightness of Blogging

One habit, I wanted to say rule,
that has emerged, is that if I can't
stop thinking about some poetry, I blog it.
A passage from e.n.s.a.m.b.l.e. (Heriberto Yepez){click here}
here miserably, hopelessly translated by Babel Fish
keeps recurring in my thoughts:

"To write once in a while for inexperienced
readers in an electronic page,
that is more or less like writing
in the wall of a toilet.
Paradoxes of the life,
miseries of Literature.
It thought to be a good writer
starting off of the inevitable failure
of the my life, not remembering most obvious:
the failure it cannot leave victory some.
On the other hand, nobody is no drama in knowing a gift.
To be a smaller writer,
an author rather spoiled has his advantages.
No longer you dream.
You are the exact photographer of your own existence..."

> The East Bay's Finest Burlesque! Music! Poetry! Sex Dolls!
>
> Featuring a playlet a la Loretta
Lynn by Del Ray Cross; The Cherries play
> country music, with
> Maraschino, Bing, and Wild
(Mary Burger, Tanya Brolaski,
and Brian Bulkowski);
> a Psychiatric Farce
> in Verse by Julia Block and
Zoe Ullman; rock opera with
Judith Goldman, Maggie
> Zurawski, Joel
> Nichols and Brandon Brown;
Rodney Koeneke and Lesley Poirier
read Sapphic
> fragments and mix noise
> music; a play by Brent Cunningham
and Cynthia Sailers about a poet who orders
> sex dolls, including
> Taylor Brady as the Nemesis Poet;
Kevin Killian as Nico and Geoffrey Dyer as
> Lou Reed playing
> "I'll be Your Mirror" and "Femme
Fatale"; a Vaudevillian song and dance number
> by K. Silem
> Mohammad entitled "Myrtle Poe," starring Patrick Durgin and Jen Hofer.
> Comedic interludes and
> hosting by the inimitable Sean Finney!
>
> "Ludicrous...perverse" -Robert Pinsky
>
> The New Brutalism CABARET!
>
> Sunday, July 18th
> 7-9 PM
> at 21 Grand
> 449 B 23rd St., Oakland
> (between Broadway and Telegraph)
> $5 cover

Admitting her obsessive-compulsive
proclivities with charming sagacity,
DWP endlessly showers us with delectable
literary details re: contemporary Russian
literature, particularly that of St. Petersberg
(Leningrad, once upon a revolutionary time)
and Arkadii Drogomoschenko.

Yours for a click right now on

Chimira Song Mosaic (Deborah Wardlaw Patillo)

Every now and then one comes across
a poem that puts perfectly just
the way things seem to have been
of late. This poem published today on
exzentrick libretti {click here}
including these lines nails it:

“When I consider the injustice done
To me: A wonder I am sane,
Though not far from that place
Where the mind recoils at the notion
Of being human, of being a human being.

I have nothing but scorn for their gleeful faces
Their actions the thoughts that drive them
Winning is everything: nothing means anything?
Something is wrong; my world has gone for dead
I wish to stay, without the engineered thought forms.”
-Alexander Cumberbatch
from *Cloud Foliage*

Into The Blogosphere {click here}
*The Labyrinth Unbound: Weblogs as Literature* by
Steve Himmer, Emerson College
(via wood s lot (Mark Woods){click here})

Janet Holmes takes issue with Ben Friedlander's
*Simulcast*"
"I started reading Ben Friedlander's Simulcast, which feels like I'm reading the study guide to an in-joke, given all the name-dropping of Poetics List regulars. Not to say that it isn't great fun! (The alt.fan.silliman fake Usenet group, based upon the alt.fan.madonna messages, is coffee-snortingly funny.) But it just reinforces my belief that male poets are very often pack animals, carefully delineating their territories and eagerly pointing out the unforgiveable differences among their aesthetics (which activities Friedlander satirizes, but also participates in)..."

Right now on
Humanophone {click here}

Really Bad Movies {click here}
reviews a really good movie.

After I had not had that one
world fell apart

If you had ten like this
a personal communication
so they went back
it was not a mystery
did it all in one night
what does the statue look like at dawn
and it all enfolded inward
that was a good word
gold communication
it look like this

think of things fast enough to say
you whispered in like that
that it took more than one night
in fact took five pages
i didn't save it one
I would need that much
it would be hieroglyphics
that's why we would be left out
of bread
one at one wine

I got there. I took the exam. Another breakthrough before
August. No, I wasn't the one. You took it back. I am still
writing to you. It never took off. No reading. Off the list.

Is this ww

Notebook: circa 1990

1. Wouldn't it be embarassing, at the beginning,
to put my words in the mouths of your characters,
even if they are available to anyone who would
read them, necessary but not sufficient. In
itself, history is just as fixed in the eye of
the beholder, eye of the storm, within the words
themselves, that a character beginning with A
would not be complete. But it might be possible
to go beyond the first letter to get to another
register, if at last the integers compared would
not be shaken by our presence. The vault that
encloses such vocabularies is as arbitrary and
unrecordable as this exact movement of tides. The
boundaries of any reading- present or deferred- must
accord, gestures from the minds of tyrants, visual
figurations inside their own, endlessly enwebbing,
power lines. But like all insignificant and dried
branches, soon to break away, leaving us all the
more exposed to our intensions.

2. Is it by chance that I return to you roday by
the same route that I came to my own reverie-resolve
(a boy pausing before his book, etc.)? The seascape
still bears traces (passed on, not remaining) of
another epoch (not in the past, perhaps, but in
another *clime*) which surrounds some unspoken
utterances in the full chorale of the senses. They came
here by another route, i.e.: the cool breeze on the chest
and arms, waves crashing between thick silences,
gulls crying loudly among us