Having a thought is like cooking an egg:
the precision is all in the cracking.

Notebook: 1/1/88-2/13/88

**************************************************************
Pont de Looney -Tokes on Poetry- {Jacques Kimball) {clique here} is on hand to essay the droll habits of poet-collectors of poetry collectibles, as we enter the heart-pounding
yard-sale, flea market and tchachkee emporium season.
**************************************************************
"We live now in an empire which, in the name of reasons, has stolen our
lives away from us, but which will sell them back to us at the cost of all that we
have, if only we can provide that empire with sufficient reason for letting us
live. Every time we speak of a reason, we let the theft occur all over again, we
participate in the theft....If we lived in a world where poetry existed, who knows
what it might be? It's a question I ask myself when i'm writing the poetry I can't
be writing..."

Mark Wallace, "Reasons to Write"
from *Haze*
Edge Books {click here} 2004
***************************************************************
Lanny Quarles' new blog:
Boppo Blog {click here}
**
Baghdad Burning {click here}
is back
****************************************************************
Thinking more and more about
"the Worst of the Best of",
the "Mad Ave." aspect of the poetry world.

As Gary Norris puts it in DagZine {click here}:

"...poetry is not market-bound, left the market, for its own good,
catapulted itself back into language, left the everyday behind
which it is consistently, obsessively even, attempting to regain,
and now is quite frankly bound up within itself and its own
problems. This isn't a problem. It should be only the slavish
versifiers of lilting sounds and nonsense, those who wear
poet-masks of poets gone, who really care whether poetry
makes any sound sense in the market. The Poet Capitalists
have lost out, thankfully. The idealism is there, but the
idealist is an isolationist."

Beware, dear philospher, behind every argument is
the ghost of a philosopher come to haunt you.

Notebook: 4/21/89

Much appreciation to
Gary Norris (DagZine) {click here}

for his continued discussion of an aphorism posted recently
on *fait accompli*



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


Wood s lot (Mark Woods) {click here}
today: Marjorie Wellish interview (from *Conjunctions*); translations by
Murat Nemet -Nejat

So, when's someone going to interview Mark Woods?

"It takes two to speak the truth- one to speak,
and another to hear."

Henry David Thorieau

Online with
The Namedropper


f you haven't seen it yet, and missed it on that most necessary of all blogs
wood s lot {click here}
check out Brian Kim Stefans' interview with Monica de la Torre right now on
The Brooklyn Rail {click here}
***************************************************
by the way, Mr Stefans is now the editor of /Ubu Editions {click here}
which includes, among many other very good things,
speaking of Wittgenstein {click here}
Mr Ron Sillilman's classic
The Chinese Notebook {click here}
***************************************************
In other news, Kenneth Goldsmith, overall editor of UbuWeb {click here}
is now teaching some courses as a resident fellow at
U Penn {click here}
***************************************************
Wow! Just found out from
Chris Murray's Tex Files {click here}
that Sowako Nakayasu's terrific blog
Texture Notes {click here}
is back online, with a poem dedicated to the honeySwooners
Nada Gordon (Ululations} and Gary Sullivan {click here}
who are curating the exciting Segue Poetry Reading Series
at the Bowery Poetry Club {click here}
(Gary 's *Elsewhere* lists the full program through
January '05)- the program includes, among many other fine poets,
Sowako Nakayasu,
who also reads, with Dana Ward
(publisher of Cy Press, who brought out
James Meetze's {click here} chapbook *Serenades*)
on October 4 at
The Poetry Project {click here}

Most works could probably consist of one sentence
But since we're never patient enough to think of
most of the implications of even one sentence, the
author offers hundreds or thousands seducing and
flattering the reader into hanging around almost as
long as it would take to fully understand the one.


notebook: 3/7/90

Norman Fischer's *Slowly But Dearly*
is out from Chax Press.
Norman and I swapped our freshly
published books, with Charles Alexander
our publisher sitting close by-
at the Zukofsky conference
this past weekend.

A sample from *Return Trip*

"Undermined disinclinations toward increased speculation.
Detrimental focus on condign researches into fallen determinacies.
Old tricks for new dogs and new tricks are very disturbing.
Holding slowly down the primordial path with displaced urgencies of gloom."

Wow! Nicely put. Love that vocabulary! But now I have to look up "condign":
"condign" {click here}

Poetry encourages us to say things aloud-
or think them aloud- an action that tends
to jog memories.

Notebook: 3/22/89


(Many of the aphorisms recently
posted here were pubished in my
collection, *The Boundary of Blur*
(Roof, 1993)

Somewhere between the need to connect
and the wish to express, language
missteps and compromises. This compromise
gradually undermines the initial impulse
to transcend the self. At all levels we more
or less misjudge how we might connect
with each other in order to protect ourselves.
Language is the document of this frustration
and dissatisfaction. Poetry is the written
result of the attempt to overcome this dilemma.

notebooki:3/4/90
**************************************************
Ernesto Priego (Never Neutral)
has won the Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes Jóvenes
Creadores grant for essay writing for 2004-2005.
**************************************************

Katie Degentesh (Bloggedy Blog Blog) {click here} who unearths endless
sources of amusement in her fellow passengers on subways, ferries and busses,
this time spots a truly distinguished denizen of the Underground, underground.

Jay Thomas {click here} brooks no finality in the idea, broached here, and compellingly elaborated by Gary Norris (Dagzine) {click here} that "The final thought of thought is freedom from thought."