Pant a looney take(s) on poetry {click here}
This time it's Gray Sullivan & Brandon Downing.
Makes you kinda wish you were there!

The Analogous Series {click here}
curated by Tim Peterson

Today:

Gary Sullivan and Brandon Downing!!!
*******************************************
Blogging gets older

Congrats to Jordan Davis
Million Poems {click here}
is two years old today.

Try to imagine blogworld without
JD. I can't.
******************************************
Same for
Bemsha Swing {click here}
that celebrated its second birthday last
Sunday.
*****************************************
Thanks to
Jay Thomas (Bad With Titles) {click here}
and, of course,
Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino
the editor of
Eratio {click here}
for making this the nicest September 11th
in a very long time.

I am delighted to announce that
Eratio/Fall 2004 {click here}
edited by Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino
is now online including three pages from my photocollage novel
Free Fall {click here}
( or click on the horizontal diacritical mark above the E in Eratio)
as well as verbal/visual work by
Catherine Daly, William Compton and
Mark Young with Jukka Pekka-Kervinen (click on the other
diacritical marks)
Click on each letter and diacritical mark to view all the
work and for epigraphs and more information about the
webzine.

the issue includes writing by

Jack Foley 
Amari Hamadene 
Jake Berry 
Aamir Aziz 
Paul Hardacre 
Jonathan Minton 
Thomas Lowe Taylor 
Hazak Brozgold 
Laurie Price 
AnnMarie Eldon 
Eli Jones 
Danielle Grilli 
Sandra Simonds 
Elizabeth Kate Switaj 
Marcia Arrieta 
  Anne Boyer  
  Stan Mir 
  Dee Rimbaud
  Jeff Harrison
  Ian Randall Wilson
  Skip Fox 
  Jesse Glass
  Hugh Tribbey
  Robert Furze
  Brian Howe
  Scott Keeney
  Michael Estabrook
  Nick E. Melville
  Clayton A. Couch
  Steve Timm

After finishing reading Jenny Gerhardt, by Theodore Dreiser

Never fear anyone's pain or suffering, even your own.
It's like a lighthouse, a buoy in the harbor.
Thinking about it, wondering about it,
talking about it, trying to understand it, alleviate it or
end it may be the only way left
to look for and find a sense of direction.

Although it was a relief to learn that there have been
no West Nile Virus cases reported in New York
City so far this year, the dead bird
situation is dire in California, I just learned from
Harry K. Stammer

California West Nile Virus Statistics {click here}

A thorough read through of a lot of web sites re: mosquito bites
tells me that the use of Deet, whatever the toxicity danger, brings
the only protection and relief. Aloe is very soothing
to the bites and reduces the bumps, and it is helpful
to sleep with a sheet completely covering you.
***************************************************
Big Brother Uses Big Scare Tactics Once Again

"It's absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on Nov. 2, we make the right choice," Mr. Cheney told a crowd of 350 people in Des Moines, "because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we'll get hit again and we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States."

Excuse me, but unless I'm mistaken, didn't 9/11 occur on your watch?
And while you're at it, ask yourself the question, why did half a million
New Yorkers come out and march against you? It happened here,
you bloated fool.
**************************************************
Jordan's right {click here} don't miss
Ron Silliman {click here}
today (hint: a moment involving censorship in poetry history that included Robert Duncan and Silliman and Jack Kimball, among others)

Murder by Numbers

The Ingredient {click here}
***********************
a related aphorism of my own:

The poetry of murder gave way to the murder of poetry.

"There are fanatics without ability, and then they are
really dangerous people."

[Notebook F- 1776-1779]

"You should never look for genuine Christian
convictions in a man who makes a parade of
his piety."

Notebook J-1789-1793

"You can make a good living from
soothsaying, but not from truth saying."

Notebook J

"I can never see anything wrong with
theorizing; it is an impulse of the soul
that can prove useful to us as soon as
we have accumulated sufficient experience.
Thus all the follies of theorizing we at
present commit could be impulses that find
their application only in the future."

Notebook K 1793-1796

"Man loves company, even if it is that
of a smouldering candle."

Notebook K

"Whisper, immortal muse, of the insanity
of the great."

Notebook L, 1796-1799

Georg Christoph Lichenberg
*Aphorisms*

translated by RJ Hollingdale
Penguin Books, 1990
*******************************
Norman Fischer & John High will be
Reading at the Bowery Poetry Club
308 Bowery @ Bleecker
Tues., Sept 14, 9pm



Robert Grenier & Ken Irby
Read at Columbia University
602 Hamilton Hall.
Thurs., September 16, 8pm
Mr. Grenier will also slides of his
Drawing-Poems

Lots of mosquitoes around Park Slope lately,
my skin is allegic, so I'm an itchy guy. So far
no West Nile virus to worry about, and looking
around the www for info on spraying, turns
out that doesn't help in the long run. So, meanwhile,
itch cream and covering my body with
anti-mosquito spray.

What's all this got to do with poetry? Looking
through, today, Bob Holman's *Call Collect
of the Wild* (John MacRae, 1995) I found
this:

"A million years ago" Bob killed a mosquito
when high on LSD. 22 years later
He wrote.

*No Longer Killing Mosquitos*

here is the ending:

"...Today heavenly, above Lake Canandaiga,
Twenty-two years later, far from madding, no drugs, I sit
In a spot of nature and write this poem
So on a downed lodgepole pine, some calcified droppings,
By my feet- bear's? or human's? From the scat I carefully
Extract, using my pen, the carcass of a Daddy Longlegs
And watch as an ant carries it off. A caterpillar
Wriggles over my pants, and again with a pen
I lift it off and transport it, dangling,
To new oak leaf. At home, West 12th Street,
10014, my daughters are just getting back from school,
Elizabeth and I have been married 11 years,
I am writer-in-residence here at Gell House,
Finger Lakes. I am perched out behind
The hidden cabin, just above the tombstone
of the Gells. When mosquitos land,
I wave them gently on their way."

Kerry's speech in 1971 {click here}

Harlequin Knights {click here} Portrait of John Kerry, April 1971- by Elizabeth Peyton

Why is Texas
#1 In Executions? {click here}

As a child I was an army brat, so my family constantly
traveled. Libraries became my refuge, especially soon
after arriving at a new army fort. But still I've been surprised
by how much time I've been spending at the Brooklyn
Public Library at Grand Army Plaza here in Park Slope.
One of the great things about visiting libraries is that
I am more likely to borrow a book that I probably wouldn't
buy. On my last visit, I managed to score a whole stack
of Jonathan Lethem novels (I'm reading novels more now
that I am commuting to Manhattan to my office). I've gone
through all of these in a few weeks and
have enjoyed every one of them
immensely, especially *Motherless Brooklyn*, *Amnesia
Moon*, and *She Crawled Across the Table*. Using
a gift card I recently bought his big new book *Fortress
of Solitude.*

Patiently going through a good portion of the fiction section,
after realizing there were few Jonathan Lethem novels left
for me to read, except for *Kafka Americana*, which is a collaboration,
I came across Andrei Codrescu's new novel
*Wakefield*, which I took out, and a Brazilian novel called
*Turbulence*. And then I happened to notice *Jennie Gerhardt*
(1911) by Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945).
The happy coincidence of the Labor
Day weekend opened up time for a book that is just the right
fare for Labor Day during a time of U.S. right-wing domination.
Like his most famous book, *Sister Carrie*, Dreiser's fiction powerfully
reveals the vulnerabllties of poverty, not from a moral, but from
a social viewpoint. Perhaps it might be fair to say that
Dreiser is America's Emile Zola, or even, as in
the passage below, our Walter Benjamin. Here is a taste of
*Jennie Gerhardt*:

""We live in an age in which the impact of
materialized forces is well nigh irresistable: the
spiritual nature is overwhelmed by the shock. The
tremendous and complicated development of our
material civilisation, the multiplicity, and variety
of our social forms, the depth, sublety, and sophistry
of our imaginative impressions, gathered, remultiplied,
and disseminated by such agencies as the railroad,
the express and the post office, the telephone, the
telegraph, the newspaper, and, in short, the whole
machinery of social intercourse- these elements of
existence combine to produce what may be termed
a kaleidoscopic glitter, a dazzling and confusing
phantasmagoria of life that wearies and stultifies the
mental and moral nature. It induces a sort of intellectual
fatigue through which we see the ranks of the victims
of insomnia, melancholia, and insanity constantly recruited.
Our modern brain-pan does not seem capable as yet
of receiving, sorting, and storing the vast army of
facts and impressions which present themselves daily.
The white light of publicity is too white. We are weighed
upon by too many things. It is as if the wisdom of the
infinite were struggling to beat itself into finite and
cup-big minds."

Engaging, witty, enlightening and practical aphorisms mostly about
"indiosyncratic" writing from the late Ron Sukenick (1932-2004)
Electronic Book Review {click here}
via Wood s lot (Mark Woods) {click here}
**********************************
"Dogs

The great pleasure of a dog is that you may make make a fool
of yourself with him and not only will he not scold you, but
he will make a fool of himself too."

from *Samuel Butler's Notebooks*
EP Dutton
Edited by Georfrey Keynes and Brian Hill
*********************************
Bemsha Swing (Jonathan Mayhew)
had its second birthday today. Sheez- seems like yesterday JM wrote to
me explaining how to copy a link from my template in order to
display it on a post.

Bunch of us bloggers started out around that same time. Doesn't seem
like one to two years, not at all.

Anyway, here's hoping Jon's having a swingin' "blog birthday", listening to a little
Getz or Mingus, or whatever.

"In which all dreams founder . In
which an image explodes on the tundra.
In which dialogues are primitives. In
which the indestructible
invisible. In which Aristotelian
hash. In which art imitates
government. In which sex is
proprietary. In which Big Buddha
is watching you. In which we put the self-
evident truths on hold. In which
duplication. In which you in the name
of suffering. In which I garnish your
celery. In which twigs. In which
medicine, status. In which we are
enjoying an emergency. In which hardly
a man is now absurd. In which black
September. In which a sixth sense
stamp. In which ten dollars will
break you. In which butterflies *in
toto.* In which no man's land is
an island. In which tradition is what
they put together yesterday. In which
wall-to-wall Montparnasse. In which
old left shoes. In which elitist scribes.
In which wave actions off Okinawa. In
which mad foolscap. In which all this
is solitary melts into air. In which
apostasy & apogee. In which the map
of genesis. In which corn stalks. In which
detumescent bulbs. In which caricature
meets parody. In which hermetic
seals. In which decentralization, talking
turtles. In which chills, cells. In which the
score is left for the newspaper. In which
3 balls for a nickel watch the milk crates
fall. In which post-time. In which gasoline.
In which hierarchy on every level. In
actress makes perfect. In which reflections.
In which Czechs and Balinese. In which
a street instead of a testament. In
which multiples of unions. In which goods,
news, shambles, In which the fetishistic
tools of the intuitionist. In which the small
coin of concrete questions. In which sum
pelicans. In which blue Dahlias. In which
the invention of sound. In which Yule,
Bryn Mawr. In which structuralism, tic-
tock-toe. In which vaginal *detente*.
In which Te Deum. In which rig & wig
genitalia. In which bazooka music. In
which catharsis in residence. In
which closets, TV. In which just
positions. In which a liaison officer.
In which the collective & the many.
In which LIttle Egypt, agitprop. In
which a rhythm & blues brass band.
In which epiphanies for the old guy.
In which *ibid*, 2 spoons. In which
goods and value. In which the grapes
of Ra. In which the road to riches, the
march of dimes. In which any serenade.
In which El Deco."

Frank Kuenstler
*In Which*
(from section 12)
Cairn Editions, 1994
116 pages
michaelobrien@mindspring.com
*************************************
This just in with work by and an
interview with Robert Creeley:
MiPoesias New England Edition {click here}
An earlier edition (April), edited by
David Trinidad contains work by and
an interview with Elaine Equi and work
by Jerome Sala
MIPo-guest editor
David Trinidad {click here}
*************************************
Two upcoming conferences
"Secular Jewish Culture / Radical Poetic Practice"
Tuesday, Sept. 21, 2004 -- 7pm; $10 admission
Center for Jewish History
15 West 16th Street, Manhattan
a public forum with Paul Auster, Charles Bernstein (chair), Kathryn Hellerstein,
Stephen Paul Miller, Marjorie Perloff, Jerome Rothenberg
Tickets available from www.ticketweb.com or the Box office: 917-606-8200. More information www.cjh.org .
What are the innovations and inventions of American Jewish poets, over the past century? Can we say that there is distinctly Jewish component to radical modernist and contemporary poetry? What is the relation of Jewish modernist and contemporary poets to the historical avant-garde and to contemporary innovative poetry? How does Jewish cultural life and ethnic and religious forms and traditions manifest themselves in the forms, styles, and approaches to radical American poetry? What role does a distinctly secular approach to Jewishness by poets and other Jewish artists mean for "radical Jewish culture"?


& keep in mind ...

The Louis Zukofsky Centennial Conference
Columbia University & Barnard College
Friday, Sept. 17 to Sunday, Sept. 19, 2004
registration is free but required
Program and registration information:
Zukofsky conference {click here}

The bravest person in the United States explains why
Democrats should not be scared-
USA Today-
Michael Moore reviews the RNC {click here}