At Last

Hurrying up the stairs,
never quite ready for
the landing I'm on.

Our heartfelt gratitude goes out to Tympan (Tim Yu) {click here}
for intervening on the latest Poetics List
verbal onslaught. Since Okir (Jean Vengua) {click here}
mentioned "silences" on the part of list members
we feel it is important to overtly censure
harsh and offensive comments made on the list
and all such mean spirited activity
that abuses the freedom of speech granted there or anywhere.
Why do so many people conflate harshness and strength?
Apologies for our slowness in response:
we are still knee deep in boxes, and we have yet
to tell you in detail about the occasional
jet scream problem
going on here since moving in March 26th, finally very nicely
alleviated by the purchase
of a Marsona sound conditioner.

Brother Tom Murphy
Wednesday, April 07, 2004 {click here}
"his leader... impractical instructions from
his self-esteem... our attention reduced to
his poetry... conditional lamentations in
his nerve... exceptional subversions of
his room... uncertain sanitation of
his wardrobe... suspicious origins of
his past... our puzzling adherence to
his bidding... lost in the clouds over"
posted at 3:26:29 PM

Longtime Poetry Project board member
Vicki Hudspith {click here and scroll down}
has been nominated for
a Pushcart Prize
*************
Spalding Gray memorial: Tuesday, April 13 {click here}
via wood s lot {click here}

notebook (untitled poem): 2/12/90

This isn't work, I insisted,
If it is work, I will not do it,
If it's work I cannot relate to it
Or will not relate to it,
This is mine and it can't be sold.
Outside it is raining
Outside it is night time
I listen to the whoosh of the cars passing
Nothing has changed for 15 years:
Books not alphabetized, an obscure order
I long ago forgot, an invisible
And fading order- importance vanishes here
And is built again on the outside by others-
But they have to strain or exagerrate things
to make it a saleable article
And I don't believe it, but a fiction nevertheless, no blame
That it makes this acceptable- a good you- rationalized
Approachable- things are harder & harder to hide,
My name is a made thing and a brand name
Making illegible articles, incomprehensible
Noplace to hide in the whole flourescent universe.
As soon as you hear this I am invisible to you
As soon as you answer I can't see you.
I close my eyes in the middle of the conversation
something is changing and I can't keep track of it.
Rousseau thought that he lived to keep the conversation going-
Try to relax- all we have is time.

FUTUREPOEM SPRING READING AT THE BOWERY POETRY CLUB
308 Bowery @ Bleecker (Bowery between Houston & Bleecker),
F train to Second Ave | 6 train to Bleecker | 212-614-0505

SATURDAY, APRIL 10, 2:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m., $5.00 admission (to support
the press)

PRESENTS

A FUTUREPOEM SPRING READING EXTRAVAGANZA

A Futurepoem Book Party and Reading by current and forthcoming FP
authors, editors and friends of the press including: Charles Bernstein,
Lewis Warsh, Jo Ann Wasserman, Merry Fortune, Garrett Kalleberg, Rachel
Levitsky, Kristin Prevallet, Dan Machlin, Heather Ramsdell, Virtual
Edwin Torres, And special guests: just-announced 04/05 authors: Michael
Ives & Shanxing Wang.

And stay on afterwards for Drew Gardner and Deborah Richards at the
Segue Series at 4:00 p.m.

notebook: 1980

Her schedule in the present (hospital, clinic,
parents, male friend she used to live with,
husband, etc.), classes, events- parties,
visits, concerts, films books she's reading
Her schedule- *then*

type the lists

t.v. programs she watches

make illustrative collage of *her* life
from magazines-

her *casual* observations
her *casual*, peripheral memories, feelings,
thoughts, reflections, beliefs
her *way* of talking to friends about her problems
what makes her cheerful
what saddens her
*how* she responds when people
give her advice, criticize her, praise her,
talk about themselves, tell her their
problems

her response to pain
what gives her pleasure
her strengths
her weaknesses
what she likes to look at
where she likes to go- how she likes to travel
her ways of dealing with loneliness
her attitudes towards people
he attitude towards money
how she sleeps
how she wakes
************
write about each seperately
write the events, then outline, then order (order
last)
*as* I live- use the events of the day as
material for specifics
************
the list- go to the list for *topics*
compound the topics

attitudes
feelings
ways of resolving
her ideas

thoughts that could create a structure

It wouldn't have to be one continuous
emotion- in fact, it could begin with her
angry or enraged- I could score the emotions
before each section of writing- it's emotions
not music- I could be precise about those-
she does not always have to be likeable or
understandable-
the music-
Her emotions
her fantasies
the situation "explained"


-My abstract writing as purely music

her memories- the beach, school
feelings
relationships
interests-
her clothes
her obsessions
her needs
her desires
her disappointments
her intelligence, her intellectual experiences-
I don't have to use all the details but I
have to know them-
bring *all* of my intelligence to bear on the
writing

describe her physically *completely*
her apartment completely
her car-
her neighborhood

I could base her character on F

How she feels physically during each
what she things about *as* she *does* each
use index cards in front of me as I write
because I can't hold it all in my mind

my resistance to really concentrating on writing-
the energy level need not be ecstatic as
when I write poetry-

Before I write- the topics on cards-
*don't worry* about fragmentation- that's
what stops me-
Not my mood, but the mood of the narrator-

I don't really feel like writing about you.
I still hate you too much.

It's my hate that stops me- if I write
& discharge the troublesome emotion or
find a way to discharge it, I'm free-
I no longer hve to worry about the
text- it will get written

notebook (untitled poem): 10/3/83


in the event of solitude
after a time of waiting
purer tones will follow

the precise hour
is vague
the time of collection
varied
after a pure stop
vanish
listen

place things back
put them in order
collect your thoughts
organize your time

disrupt the interval
bend time to follow
circle facts
with varied tones

in the surest interval
repetition is foregrounded
mostly by memory
this is precisely matched
to bring all the shrill tones
to a halt

freedom
is not a
counter-command
the release
is more than
the subtotal

characteristic in cities
is the primary concentration of value
what remains is more than
the simople dictation of virtues

to release what is there
it is insufficient to let go
or the secondary resonance
will occur out of phase

Notebook: 3-30-88

Energy a kind of
information-
therefore matter
a kind of information.

3-31-88

Scene:
Musician in
subway is ragged
and pathetic. Gradually
he draws an impressive
crowd- and is
surrounded by an air
of serene confidence.

6/25/88

To give things a
name is to personify
them to some degree,
because we call
persons by names,
which also tends to
rob- in our perceptions
of them- persons
of their thingness.

But an identity is
something that has
thingnesss but is not
a thing

Because they are so familiar
to me the Catskill mountains are
just mountains.
It is a place to
be in the mountains
as much as it is
a place in the mountains (that has
its "own" locale-
and character.)

Why am I so
reisistant to the
specificity of place?
I easily get lost.
Do I like it?

8/23/88

The emphasis
this year
should be *flow.* Flow
over *particularity*.

Musa McKim by Phillip
Guston {click here}

January 10, 1973

Dear Bernadette,

You asked about the sources for Bunting Ideas last night
and in my excitement about what was going on I didn't really
get it together to remember it all after I came home from
my office where I typed up Bunting Ideas during my lunch hour
(it was a long one!) i wrote out a list of sources- the
world of silence is the book by max picard that ron padgett
read from at the recent poetry reading in the greene street
loft ive had that book around for years and never have been
able to decide whether i liked it or not it is a very strange
and interesting book ... the table of contents goes the ego
and silence knowledge and silence things and silence history and
silence world of myth images and silence love and silence and
so on...at the workshop ron padgett told us that he hadnt been
writing i think for 6 months (i think he meant poetry) so that
fitted in nicely...when I have times that i cant
write sometimes i have trouble haring what people say and
it really feels like a world of silence...i don't like it so
much and once wrote a poem against silence...for a long time it was
my favorite word...X once sent me a book by john cage
titled silence and he sent it anonymously...also sonnet xivii
by Ted Berrigan...ideas of order at key west by Wallace Stevens
you asked about the war image coming from another poem and I
looked at the list when I came home and saw the hollow men by
TS Eliot...but i changed in my mind "not with a bang but a
whimper" to "whisper" also as I said last night ron padgetts
spontaneous poem about the anonymous poets poem b52s bomb people
b83s bomb pretzels he said if he were to write it it would
go something like that...also as i was writing i thought about
a poem by Jack Foss in Locus Solus iii-iv

The Categorical Avoidance

To say you are like this
or this is like you
is to begin the comparison
and you would become
less like any other thing;
and would become relatively pale
and absolutely die,
belonging finally everywhere
metaphorically (p242)

[correction: this poem is by
Musa McKim]

there was someting else...oh yes...i appreciate your encouragement
to write prose as I have been planning to drop out (from social
work) for awhile and write poetry and a book about psychoanalysis
and poetry...X has been encouraging me for a year now to write
about poetry and i think i can work it into a sort of fictional
literary journal (did you ever read *The Burning Brand* by Cesar Pavese?)
im so excited about publishing the basil poems with you...I wrote
to my analyst (alan grossman) yesterday morning saying that if it
were to be published i might want to dedicate Bunting Ideas
to the memory of my father who was a career soldier and fought
in africa and italy during world war II... he died of a heart
attack on October 2, 1972 During the war
he received the Bronze Star

Well I dont know how to express my gratitude for
your encouragement except to say that Bunting Ideas is especially a
gift from me and you to you and everyone

"Sometimes my inability
to understand spoken English frustrates me"- from a new puppet
slide show on Ululations (Nada Gordon) {click here}

Notebook: 4/1/88

The lustre of
something new.

The reader
brings something
dead to life.
For me,
learning to read
got connected to
ancientness,
particularly thoughts
about mummies,
pyramids, and
most of all,
ancient hieroglyphic
tablets.

I'm able to glance
through such books
as Bridges to
Infinity or Playing
and Reality by
Winnicott by
realizing the entire
span of thought of
one person is
just as much
an example of a
kind of unravelling.

Reality is like
a suit of clothes
or a dress hanging
in a closet. It
tends to sustain
itself much longer
than it keeps
its lustre, therefore
giving dissolution
a measure of
respectability.

The universe ages
gracefully and
stormily, just
like the individual.

[B hated
paper with lines-
which I love-
probably
because it remnded
her that her
mother was not
"straight" with her
in some way.]

Titanic Operas {click here}

notebook (poem, untitled): 1990

All's well that ends well.
This story has a thousand endings.
One is narrowed into a corner.
Another funnels itself out into the sun.
The thought. Somehow, the trail leading
To the word. In the exactitude...
You were skipping. There were devices.
It was even, evening, Eve. It was loud.
It was aloud, it was allowed. It was a.
There were diaries. These tunnel into also.
This was listening. And if not, what.
Now coming into the suspense. Possible to start
From the need. Possible to start from the
Need to hear. Possible to start out from
The need to hear. Possible to hear.
Possible once. The thought...the trial leading
To the crime. If you could specify
This once. In a sense, leading
Backwards, or weaving the two together
Shuttling back and forth.
Not so crafty to hide them.
These were displayed with curious care.
Now the bookcase. Now the sudden opening
Of time. Now the amount. Now the
Timetable, the schedule, the instructions.
The ornaments, please. Behind the bookcase.
"Look in the back of my brown slacks.
And one Socony station." To let the stop go,
This is all that was wanted.
All aboard! All a bored who? All
Abroad whatever you wanted done with it.
Whatever you wanted to have done with it.

"Il pleut. Il pleut dans mon couer
Comme il pleut dans la ville."
Il est un memoir.
Il est un memoir d'une histoire
Da beaucoupo des gens.
Now, people are streaming in from everywhere.
There are millions of planets in the solar system.
Come in. Over.

Caught. Caught again. Caught again empty.
This constant interruption for stories.
An lllustration. Perhaps no one's sure.
A story can still exist. Can you say
One? What do you remember about the last one?
Were you only a bystander, or part of the
Event yourself? How would you define the
Difference? Can you supply us with enough
details to convince us you were there?
Can you supply us with enough details to
Convince us you were there?
Can you supply us with enough details to
Convince us you are actually here?
Your name? Occupation? Telephone number?
Social security number? Your religious affiliation?
What is the month of your birth?
Where were your parents born?
Do you have sisters or brothers?
Your current bank references.
Did you vote in the general election?
Are you registered to vote in primaries?
Have you served in the armed forces?
Have you been arrested for a felony?
Married? Single? Divorced?
Do you suscribe to one of the following
Nationallly circulated magazines?

Come in. Come in.
Climate control. Do your hear me?
Yes, I read you. Coming in loud and clear.
Thank you. Over.

The sun. Glossolalia.
Glossolalia of moonlight and sunlight.
Soon light.
The harbor.
Outa here.

Department of Need I Say More?



The politics of social/literary invitation.

"Someone please tell me, on which page of the rule book does it say
that you can't write a novel, have a life,
and keep a weblog, all at the same time?" {click here}

"The individual
human being was
founded on a basis of
order in public life;
This is why he is helpless
when he cannot recognize
it anywhere."

Robert Musil
*Diaries*

Jean, I know how you feel... {click here}

**

I Finally got a chance to read
this terrific poem by Jonathan Mayhew,
reminscent of Ted Berrigan's *Sonnets* {click here}

**

The Corpus Callosum {click here}

An occasional journal of armchair musings, by an Ann-Arbor-slightly-left-of-center regular guy who reserves the right to be highly irregular at times. Topics: social commentary, neuroscience, politics, science news. Mission: to develop connections between hard science and social science, using linear thinking and intuition; and to explore the relative merits of spontaneity vs. strategy.
------------------------------------------------------------------------

I'm not running away; or maybe I am hiding.
I'm trying to find where you were,
where we were talking, dear blog reader.

So I reached into a suitcase and out fell this:

Notebook: 12/6/80

Observe people working-
suppression of emotion-
concentration on action &
external form-
Like not knowing which
streets- finding by
feeling- a different
remembering

Overwhelmed and not even time
to read beautiful new posts on
The Ingredient {click
here} or Jonathan's new poem on
Bemsha Swing {click here}

Just grazing over these two blogs
quickly, I'm already feeling better!
Have I mentioned that moving
sucks?

Today, I'm having a major
pity party. Last night I felt so down
I couldn't even blog. There's a first
time for everything. But this too
will pass, of course.

Didn't even have time to call up
Nada and Gary to try to cheer them
up for missing Nada's reading due
to their both having the stomach flu.
But I've got the moving flu.

"Please be patient. Our sanity will
return in just one moment. We
appreciate your call. Our operators
(our mental functions)
are busy with other callers. Please
hold on and we will be with you as
soon as possible..."

incertain plume {click here}
is heading east, ringing the changes
on the blogs

This moving stuff is where-ing me out! "Where's this, where's that,
did you see where I put this, where the hell is that?"

Seeing the branchy brown trees in the
park across the street soon to spring
to leaves and buds, listening to the
children play in the small schoolyard
on the other side, it occurred to me that
if people realized our job of parenting
didn't end with children, or even other
adults in need at times, it extends to every
growing thing, even every living
thing at times, then life's energies might shift away
from destructiveness and towards growth.
Still Kali has two faces and conflict
never ends.

Nonliving things need care too, and
respond to it (read Ponge).

In any case. Toni's idea from Seth
that "you create your own reality"
is true; it's just that the reality
around us changes isomorphically
with our own transitions; see
*It's A Wonderful Life*. How could
Jimmy Stewart have been so right
wing and come to represent caring
so much in that movie?

While Toni and I are knee deep in boxes,
Shanna Compton's *Brand
New Insects* {click here}, social fireflies that they are,
are buzzing around everywhere
bringing back glittering bits of poetry news. Flashy!
**
Jim Behrle {click here}
reads tonight at the Zinc Bar.
Don't know if we can make it- we
have to go back and clean up our
old apartment so the landlords can
do a walk-through tomorrow. Ugh!
Meanwhile Caterina's {click here}
apartment near Vancouver has been invaded,
but Caterina describes it as a conceptual
art piece.
**
A bouquet of dahlias, dahlings,
from Boynton {click here}
**
Some new poems on
UMBRellA {click here}
**
Beautiful, but heartrending,
personal blogging byMark Lamoureux {click here}.

Wish I'd Said That Dep't

"The world people peruse
is not the one they pursue."

from Crag Hill's Poetry Scorecard {click here}

Got to make a long story short and just
say the move took two days but all's
well that ends well and we're in the new
place. A broken elevator and a delay,
but no broken hearts, the opposite,
we like it here and we're sure we'll
be comfortable. Toni likes the
kitchen, and the Park Slope
vibes, and we like the layout and
the bit of river view far off in the distance,
you can see from the bedroom
window; especially at sunset time.
Hope someday to post some
images here. Too tired to blog much more,
and still too much to do. Special
thanks to Toph for the kind words
and congratulatory poem. Love those
images on Topher Tune's Times(Christy Church)
{click here}
and Toph's way of describing
that moment of finding a poem you wrote
lying around, especially if a certain slice
of it catches your eye.

Thanks also to Okir (Jean Vengua){click here}. I had
written to Jean when the necessity for the move first came up.
She was surprised to hear I was giving up Central Park,
and I was too, but this is right on Prospect Park,
a park also designed
by Olmstead, and the Botanical Gardens are right
up the block. By the way, I got to meet Jean in when she came
to a reading I gave there in SF with the Postcard Poets
and at 21 Grand Performance Space {click here}
in August last year.

It's 8:40 am. The movers haven't arrived yet,
but we're almost ready! Unbelieveable!
Thanks for all your kind words
and support.

Well, I'm really not quite going mad,
but anyone who has moved with a long term
partner knows why the kindly Claude
who shares my office reminded me that
moving is up there with the top stressors
like, well, the worst things that can happen!
Claude told me he has an Inuit shaman statue
whose head is upsidedown and represents
the Trickster. Claude says in Jungian psychology
the trickster is in rare form having a great time
with your head while you are going through transitions.
Toni and I have tried to be as patient with each other
as we could but at certain points tensions ran high. But
we're working on a project to improve the way we
work together, and while there have been some
discouraging moments, late last night (it's now 2:38
am and the movers are coming around 8 am), Toni
showed a moment of stellar empathy when I kept
looking around for a certain flashlight and kept losing
it, and Toni keeps on finding other flashlights and
giving them to me. At the very moment when I was most
frustrated in having lost it again (don't go there:
sometimes a cigar is just a cigar) at just the moment
I was finding the one I was looking for she was offering
me still another one.

Don't tell me these small triiumphs don't count!

"Oh lord, shine that little ol' light right on me...!"

Though we're excited about moving to Park Slope,
it is difficult to leave these familiar surroundings. In
yesterday's *fait accompli* I evoked the names of'
some bloggers, I realized as I awoke this morning, as
people who have become important to me, who I
hope wll continue to be there, to be here, wherever
I go so I had a need to evoke some of these names, not as
some kind of "roll call" and I am hoping that no one
feels left out, because that list was meant to be
evocative, not inclusive. Even if I put together a list
from the Bloglinks on the EPC and all the ((((HOT))))
((((BLOG)))) lists we've published here, it would still
not be inclusive. I forgot to mention Alex Trimble Young,
Ron Silliman, Deborah Wardlaw Patillo, for example,
Gregory Vincent St Thomassino,
and Laura Wiley, Carlos Arribos and Chris Murray
just to name a few. If I have forgotten anyone else,
and I suspect I have, I hope they
will forgive me; at the moment, moving
has driven me clear out of my mind. Also,
like so many other bloggers, I am
constantly rediscovering blogs I haven't read recently
and enjoying the excitement of discovering new ones
all the time.

Notebook: 1988

There is nowhere a
more intense life
than the one you are
living right now. If
you think so you are
buying into a Hollywood
or a bohemian scam.
Ideas are everywhere.
I would have trouble
getting along without a good
bookstore, on the
other hand...

I felt the effects,
short term and long-
term of events that
hadn't actually
happened. As this
capacity to
imagine such events
flourished, I felt more alive.

Style is as
much a state of
undress as it is
of dress. Letting down
my guard, I imagined
saying things to
people I would never
allow myself in real
life. In this fantasy, I always
hang up the
phone in a state
of intense satisfaction.
It is life, *not*
the imagination,
which is oblique
and mysterious.
(Truth of poetry: St John Perse).

The source of humor
is the tolerance
for paradox, and
this is gained
by increased participation
in acquiring knowledge
about anything, as
we reach the limit-
or saturation point-
this is intimately
connectede with the
balance between
satisfaction and
frustration. For
example: the necessity
that teachers and
students (hearers and
speakers) attack each
other- however
nimbly- is related
to the necessity
to acquire *playfullness*
in order to learn.
What Lorenz limited
to humor should be
extended to include
the capacity to
hurt and be hurt
and to reinvent
creativity in
*that* connectedness.

All sense organs
are also sexual
organs.

I guess I've
known for a long
time now that, in
the long run, I'm
for the poem not
for the book. Poems
seem to last longer
than books- (like songs).

Let's put it this
way: I've never
wanted to think of you
as confused, but I've
always known you were
a lonely man.

I've had to hide
my work from you
the way the mother
of a handicapped
child hides her child's
defect- inside part
of herself which is even
a mystery to herself.
Because she is protecting
something more valuable
than the truth.

Even freedom hnas
its price. But this
is true because price
is such a good parasite
that feeds on everything.
Freedom protects itself
in its constant attention
in watching for an
opening.

Freedom evades
something- right. But
this is because
it is advancing.
While evasion
contains a kind
of freedom it is
not generative of
freedom. Freedom
raises, so it scares.

Structure is strong.
This is why it seems
beautiful. But the
spark of beauty is
not in the structure.
It is in the particularity.

Where am I going?
I'm going back to
where every particle
came from. Why
do I come? The tendency
for particles to
come together.

Senses play with
each other, like children,
like birs.


People attach themselves
to things and to
ideals. Often the
two conflict. But
both committments are
strong.

The depths of
human tenacity are
inestimable. Is this
the most visible
similarity- in
personality- to our
immediate ancestors-
the apes?

Why do we
imagine that
readers have no
sense of touch in their
eyes? Reading is
*all* Braille.

Reader and
writer- no faith in
each other.Both
fear betrayal-
but the reader-
more, even though
the writer takes
most of the risk.

The final thought
of thought is
freedom from thought.

Three more days, two nights in an apartment on
the Upper West Side where Toni and I have lived
for 12 years. And 12 years in the previous Upper
West Side apartment. When I moved back here from
Park Slope in 1980, John Lennon was living
in the Dakota- a few blocks away on Central
Park West. A few years earlier, Jim Brody
dubbed the local L=A writers, The West Side Wall
of Words.

I'm glad to be moving back to Park Slope and Toni
is also. My office is here, on West End Avenue, so
I'll still be around here frequently- so technically the
Wall of Words is still extant.

I've given away or sold over 40 boxes of books, and just
finished packing 40 more. As anyone who has done this knows,
you can't help but see your life passing before your eyes.
This isn't easy, but there is still lots to look forward to. Especially
here in blogland- glad to see the likes of Li Bloom,Alli Warren, Ray Davis,
Jim Behrle, Mike Snyder, Jonathan Mayhew, Nada Gordon,
Guillermo Parra, Gary Sullivan, Eileen Tabios, Dagzine,
DaDooDoFlow, Josh Corey,
Drew Gardner, Lanny Quarles, Brother Tom,
Katie Degentesh, Jukka-Pekka Kervinen,
Stephen Kirbach, Jack Kimball, Christy Church,
Amanda Cook, Tony Tost, Jordan Davis, Clayton Couch,
Mark Woods, Andrew Lundwall, Michael Bogue,
Christina Strong,Cassandra and Boynton,
the Dovecote, Shanna Compton, Caterina,
& all the New Brutalists, Savoradin, Priego,
Amy Bernier, Michael Gates,
Jean Vengua, Heriberto Yepez, Marianne Shaneen,
John Latta, Michaela Cooper,
Malcolm Davidson, Daniel Nester, Mark Lamoureux,
the Umbrists, Tim Peterson, Bill Marsh,
kari edwards, Steve Tills, Tom Beckett, Crag Hill,
Johanna Rauhala & so many other hot bloggers
still enthusiastically blogging and new bloggers jumping in
alll the time. (Check out the sidebar to your left for a link to the
most recent *fait accompli* ((((HOT)))))((((BLOGLISTS))))). There are,
of course, thousands of great bloglists out there to be discovered.
Technorati has added some new features including current events
as seen in blogland, as well as a new links beta feature.
Silliman is determined to blog less, and better. That is no doubt a given.
Nice to see Robert Creeley more and more in the blogging midst.
Will he be the among the first septuagenarians to start a blog? Imagine
that! Usually, when bloggers start getting letters from terrific poets, it
means they're thinking about it.

Well, rummaging around my stuff, naturally I came across a few lost
journals. Here's some time travel back to 1988.

**

Notebook: 1988

I do have something.
Little pieces of paper
with words on them
to look at. They call
it reading but first
and last it is looking.

1) Stack

2) Alphabetize

Why is is that few
care to state the
obvious? The government
collapsed so the
economy collapsed.
The peoplle are more
ordered than the
language because they
are free.

You think because
I am not dressed
I am not armed.
You think because I
stand here poised to
glimpse the future I
don't understand what
the stacks in front
of me represent. the
secret to finding order
is to attend to the
disorder. But, for now,
we know each other
only by our effects.
I have to stop if only
to pause on a word,
returning to the sisyphus
labyrinth. And *if* you
stop in time it
momentarily unifies.

You can protect
yourself by consciously
assessing others. Mark
their traits well. Do
not feel guilty about
it- there's no other
was to establish
reciprocal relations.

An inner measure
of things taken
as a gradual edge
is cut by a person's
individuality set against
experience's constant
pressure. The mind has
a chance of staying
ahead of this- but
the disparity is often
hard on balance.

There is a give
and take when the
thought comes back
to me, dear reader,
just the way it comes
back in thought. It
circles around and
won't go away,
anyway.

Poets, poets, poets.
Everywhere I see
poets. Poets to the
right of me, poets
to the left of me.
Poets seizing the sun-
paragraph, and poets
gathering the moon
paraphernalia. They
resist my bolts and
dress in the most
obvious forms imaginable.
No matter
how hard I try to
imagine them
fooling me with
their masks
(no one told them to
stop concealing their
attacks) I still
recognize all the
animal disguises
they use- almost
immediately.

Realizing perfectly
that my assertion
contains an invitation,
which may, of course,
be refused.Then
again, life is a
series of occasions
not matter what.
Isn't this also, in
itself, a kind of
companionship? As
one poet said (as
another poet said and
this *could* go on
forever) opposition
is true friendship.

The close you
look into a mirror,
the more you see
your own face.
Something else is
exactly what you
won't find there.

Hold a few
things in place and
watch where the
change takes place.
Order is one kind
of illusion very
useful for steadying
the structure. "I
hate structure*
writes Alan {Davies}. Rock
what? Rock the
boat (the "ship of
state") says Allen {Ginsberg}.

Numbers confuse
me. No more trace of
this and trace of that.
Lets go back to copying
pages one at a time
and passing them around.
(Let the machines take care
of themselves. Rusty
ventilator or Venite
Adoremus, Daddy.)

Again, the idea
(deja vu, for you) that
a poem is a kind
of legalized symbiosis.-
(Another way of expressing
Winnicott's idea of
transitional objects, an
idea which stresses the
developmental phase aspect
of art, (not* its *timelessness*.)

Blake's "Enough- or
too much"= go
too far and come back-
or don't go at all.

All in good time.

The abandoned journey
began with a single step.

To love is to return.

Notebook: 1/4/90

Adversity

The human capacity
to create or even to
fabricate
the human out of the
inhuman is at the center
of our ability to
tolerate and finally to
weather adversity-
sometimes even to
recognize
the challenge inherent in
adversity and to rise to
the occasion,
adapting to even
the most
tiresome burden, gradually
the circumstances become
part of the landscape,
and then ourselves.

A child's father is
poisoned. The boy clings to
the stretcher and in
order to make him
let go of his father- who
is bleeding from the
mouth- an attendant
tells him his daddy
will live. He is 4
years old. It is
Christmas Eve. When
he dies- the boy
cannot forget- night
after night his
mother must rock him
quiet.

5/20/90

One day you see that
you can do no more
than accept the
washings, the
wendings, the
meanderings of
feelings which
arose from the comings
and goings of joys and
sorrows.

Emotions wash over
me, splash through
me

Fate's tides
approach my feet on
the beach.

I watch the waves
but I want to keep
my feet dry.

Bush Flash {click here}
This link is hot!!!

"Aggression against the individual self, the denial of the
personality, seems to me to be, consciously or not, the belated fruit of the
two main collectivist trends of our century: Nazism and Left-
wing totalitarianism (as realized in history).(The personalist
philosophy of Emmanuel Mounier and his journal *Esprit* had
overcome this problem at one time, and provided an answer;
how urgently we feel the need for a new personalism!) If the
individual self is an illusion, who's to prevent me from repudiating
it, from destroying and despising it, from killing or imprisoning
my fellow men?

And yet the fact that there is such a relentless attack on the
personality suggests that basically it is still believed in, that it is not
considered an illusion, that people believe in it so strongly that
they want to destroy it. Other selves are resented as rivals by those
who deny the self. Yesterday's politicians, today's ideologies, all
those who deny individualism are fierce and violent individualists,
impelled by a pathological will to power and an excessive urge
to assert themselves, to realize themselves, to absorb or dominate
others so that only their own hypertrophied self may survive:
personalities, races, works, signatures, everything must be
submerged in the collective impersonalism, in the collective
unconscious, except the self which denounces the presence of the
*others* whom he seeks to drive out from his own being."

Eugene Ionesco
*Fragments of a Journal*
Grove, 1968

no more little miss nice kantogirl {click here}:
"Online we lie less...
Perhaps in the machine age
everything be remembered,
none forgotten."
This reminded me of the fascinating
*Physics of Immortality* by
Frank J. Tipler in which someday
computers resurrect everybody
and everything.

Bush the Tush
Twist & Turns (Michael Gates) quote of the day {click here}

Collage & poem by
Anita Rust {click here}

Notebook: 8/8/98

It comes down to little
specks of things.
Even the smallest
particle of time
can be
crucial. Like
an accordian, life
expands and
contracts.

For example
a bit of a
lesson might
be gained in
experiencing a
mistake. Such
contractions and
expansions emit,
over time, a
considerable amount
of energy.

I wonder
what the relationship
is between such
tiny specks or
particles of things
and the constant
expansion of time which
is called "forever,"
Except as an
idea, whatever
forever is can only
be understood in
relation to the
tiniest portion
of time.

"Anything might
be transformative
if you would only
allow yourself to
complete it."

He had come to
distrust any
kind of explanation.
Or is it that a way
to talk about
what you might
talk about in
everyday conversation.

For example,
some sentences may
be incomplete,
in verbal terms.
But the nuances
of a person's
gestures and tone
of voice- not
to speak of
years or even
decades of
exchange...

Always, some
things are too
much to say,
or too little.
Then, more and
more things are
too much to say
or too
little.

The glances
may become embarassing.
More and more
and eventually you
turn to your
violin.

You take your
violin in your
arms and play
it. As you play
it. you're creating
the melody. You've
put on a tape
recorder.
Unbelievably, you
realize as you
are playing that
you are actually
creating music. As
a result, later,
when you put
it down, you
suspect very
strongly that you'll
come back to it.

As you are
playing, you
realize that the
opening chords
were very
important. You go
back and listen
to them. You
go on your way
after them, but
now and then you
come back to
them.

To know how
to do something
is to know that
the constituants
of the doing might
be. These might
be many difficult
kinds of steps,
but there will
always be steps.

Sometimes there
is an apprehension
that precedes
steps. The step
is visualized,
imagined, and
anxiety creeps in. On
some level,
however slightly,
danger has been
realized, or
rather, recognized.
There might be
hardly any
expectable order
in the events
that precede
the steps.

Happy blogday Cassandra Pages {click here}

Selected placards at today's march to stop war:

NEW JERSEY STILL SAYS
NO TO WAR

VETERANS FOR PEACE

CLINTON LIED
HILLARY CRIED
BUSH LIED
THOUSANDS DIED

NOT IN OUR NAME
& NOT WITH OUR MONEY

I KNOW REAL CHRISTIANS
MR BUSH YOU'RE NOT A
REAL CHRISTIAN

PUTTING THE CON
BACK IN CONSERVATIVE

BUSH LIES
WHO DIES

(PICTURE OF BUSH)
PROOF THAT EMPTY WARHEADS
CAN BE DANGEROUS

WAR- A WEAPON OF
MASS DECEPTION

IF YOU'RE NOT OUTRAGED
YOU'RE NOT LISTENING

STOP THE 9-11 COVERUP

(PICTURE OF BUSH)
MY FRIENDS WENT TO IRAQ
LOOKING FOR WEAPONS OF
MASS DESTRUCTION & ALL
I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY T-SHIRT

(PICTURE OF BUSH)
READ MY
APOCALIPS

Enjoying the discussion of Drew Gardner's
post re: "nonevents" on
A New Broom {click here}
and elsewhere, I remembered that my poem
The Simple Poetry of Sleep {click here}
concerns this interesting issue in poetics.
**********************************
A nose is a nose is a nose
right now on
Dagzine {click here}
**********************************
Up to my aching elbows in packing boxes
(one week to moving)
I had to miss what may have been the
greatest poetry event of the season,
Douglas Rothschild's Poetry Game Show
at the BPC. I hope someone,
A Laurable Log (Laura Willey)

Bloggedy Blog Blog (Katie Degentesh)

Elsewhere (Gary Sullivan)

Equanimity (Jordan Davis)

fluss (John Most)

Free Space Comix (Brian Kim Stefans)

Froth ... Marianne Shaneen

Jim Behrle's Famous Monkey

Overlap (Drew Gardner)

or
ululations (Nada Gordon)

will be kind enough to blog it
********************************************
Thanks to Jack Kimball {click here}
for the discussion of my chapbook *Two Essays* (Leave Books).
Send a stamped, self-addressed mailer to the address at the
bottom of the sidebar to your left, and I can send one to you in about
about six weeks.
*********************************************

Facade

Remember to look close
for the small bits of life
embedded within.

The Avenging Monkey hath emailed me the following.

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


Please TiVo the Simpsons to appear at the Zinc Bar to hear Jimmy the Poet
and whatever wonders may occur.

from "New Poem"


an unthinkable grid throbs on thru the nite

if spunk could cross-pollinate

this is how I self-thwart dear Gabriella

the future history of the Earth is not for us

TiVo The Simpsons and head with me to

neighborhoods thirsty while yes underwater

to connect with other like-minded playmates

let air fresheners flow and turn up the Watergate tapes

an explosion that seemed quite intense

hey, pass me that fruit you invented

tucked up your shirt like a shoplifter

SUN 3/28/04 7 PM
with Jen Benka
Zinc Bar TRS
90 West Houston Street
corner of La Guardia Place
New York City, NY
hosted by: Brendan Lorber

----------
Jim Behrle
Events Director
WordsWorth Books
30 Brattle St.
Cambridge, MA 02138
(617) 354 5201
fax (617) 354 4674
jim@wordsworth.com
www.wordsworth.com

"...man can no more survive psychologically in a psychological
milieu that does not respond empathically to him, than he can
survive physically in an atmosphere that contains no oxygen. Lack
of emotional responsiveness, silence, the pretense of being an
inhuman computer-like machine which gathers data and emits
interpretations, do no more supply the psychological miieu for
the most undistorted delineation of the normal and abnormal
features of a person's psychological makeup than do an oxygen-
free atmosphere and a temperature close to the zero-point supply
the physical milieu for the most accurate measurement of his physiological
responses. Appropriate neutrality in the analytic situation is provided
by average conditions. The analyst's behavior vis-a-vis his patient
should be the expected average one- i.e., the behavior of a
psychologically perceptive person vis-a-vis someone who is suffering
and his entrusted himself to him for help..."

Heinz Kohut
*The Restoration of The Self*

"The fluidity of the differentiation between ego and ideal,
the easy revival of the mechanism of undoing the separation
between self and powerful object, the loss of ability to distinguish
wish from fulfillment, the temporary disintegration of reality
testing, are the decisive characteristics of these primitive
structures, which I would prefer to call narcissistic "ego ideals"
in contrast to the normal superego. When in pathologic states,
as for instance in manic triumph, a dissolution of the superego
occurs, we may speak of a regression of the superego occurs,
we may speak of a regression of the superego into more
primitive ego ideals.

The fluidity of ego differentiations is regularly found in so-called
"narcissistic personalities." Undoing of the differentiation
becomes the basis for exorbitant self-esteem; its reappearance
leads to the outbreak of "narcissistic anxieties" like fear of being
inferior, over concern with other people's thoughts about oneself,
etc.

The faculty for regressive undoing of ego differentiation is based
upon fixation at early levels of ego development..."

Annie Reich, *Psychoanalytic Contributions*
International Universities Press, 1973

"In essence then, I believe that man's destructiveness
as a psychological phenomena is secondary; that it arises
originally as the failure of the self-object environment
to meet the child's needs for optimal- not maximal,
it should be stressed-empathic responses. Aggression,
furthermore, as a psychological phenomenon, is not
elemental. Like the inorganic building blocks of the organic
molecule, it is, from the beginning, a constituent of the
child's assertiveness, and under normal circumstances
it remains alloyed to the assertivness of the adult mature
self.

Destructive rage, in particular, is always motivated by
an injury to the self. The deepest level to which
psychoanalysis can penetrate when it traces destructiveness
(whether it is bound in a symptom or character trait or
expressed in a sublimated or aim-inhibited form) is not
reached when it ha been able to uncover a destructive
biological drive, is not reached when the analysand has become
aware of the fact that he wants (or wanted) to kill. This
awareness is but an immediate station on the road to the
psychological "bedrock": to the analysand's becoming
aware of the presence of a serious narcissistic injury, and
injury that threated the cohesion of the self, especially
a narcissistic injuty inflicted by the self-object of childhood."

Heinz Kohut
*Restoration of the Self*
International Universities Press, 1977
p.116

Steve Tills of* Black Spring* {click here}
promptly commented on our quotes from
Paul Zweig's classic book, *The Heresy of Self-Love:
A Study of Subviersive Individualism*.
In the preface to the second
(1980) edition, Zweig comments:
"While writing *The Heresy of Self-Love,*
I had spent several years tracing the curiously
persistent revivals of Narcissus in our cultural
traditions. Over and over again, he became the
figure of a powerful longing for inward
autonomy, a sort of spiritual Robinson Crusoe,
as in the fantastic poems of the
Gnostic sects which competed with early
Christianity; or else, a grim figure of
warning: a starved lover staring into
cold water; a woman gazing into a mirror....
Narcissus was the failure of love, the fray
in the social bond...The social effervescence
of the 1960's quickly faded, and the
vaunted revolution in personal style-what Charles
Reich called the 'greening of America-
have left behind the feeling of an
unsolved problem, which has fed cultural debate
in recent years. The galvanizing word of that debate is
'narcissism'..."

"Marcel Raymond has written, 'The objects whose
thoughtful images Rousseau welcomes within him
have lost their 'objective' quality; they have become
a part of him, surrrounded by a flame endowing all
existence with the charm of a subjective magic...'
We see now how the difference in style between
Montaigne and Rousseau corresponds to a vastly
different intention. Whereas Montaigne meant to
philosophize with truculence, in a spirit of psychological
realism, Rousseau was concerned with the 'fictive'
inner surface of the events....

Between Rousseau's character and his social philosophy
there is an exchange of insights which is apparent as early
as the first *Discourses*, where the governing virtue of the
'natural man' is made to lie in what Rousseau calls
*amour de soi*, an expression rendered variously
as 'self-esteem,' self-love,' or 'self-respect.'
In the *Discourse sur L'inegalite*, we read,
'Self-love is a natural feeling which leads all animals
to care for their own preservation;
when governed, in man, by reason and
modified by pity, it had long since been
obscured, for Rousseau,
by the overlying constraint of civilization,
'each single man considers
himself to be the only spectator of his acts,
the only being in the
universe to be interested in him, the only judge of his merit.'
Thoughout his life Rousseau was to argue
that man's best nature
lay, as he wrote in *Emile*, in 'the only natural passion of man...
self-love'; years after writing *Emile*,
harried by paranoia, he still insisted,
'All positive feeling derives immediately
from self-love. It is quite natural that a man who
loves himself should try to extend
his being and his pleasures,
and to possess by attachment whatever
he feels to be good for him: it is a simple question of the emotions...'
Rousseau contradicts the orthodox opinion that human nature is
corrupt because man has lost sight of God and
loves himself. Instead,
he sets the energy of
*amour de soi* at the center of our humanity....
On the other side of the line, however,
lie the corrupt energies of
society, where the natural self has been sacrificed
to the passion for
appearances, for comparison, and finally for vain pretense. Here,
the natural *amour de soi* has been twisted into a simuacrum; it has
become *amour propre*, vanity, which for Rousseau was the source
of all 'negative sensibility' and all aggressiveness."



Paul Zweig, *The Heresy of Self-Love*
Princeton UP, 1968, 1980
pgs. 152-153

"At the dinner table, as they all ate, Ragle Gumm sat
deep in thought. Across from him, Sammy yammered
on about his club and its powerful machinery of war.
He did not listen.

Words, he thought.

Central problem in philosophy.Relation of word to
object...what is a word? Arbitrary sign. But we
live in words. Our reality, among words not things.
No such thing as a thing anyhow; a gestalt in the
mind....

Word doesn't represent reality. Word *is* reality. For
us, anyhow. Maybe God gets to objects. Not us,
though.

In his coat, hanging up in the hall closet, was the metal
box with the six words in it.

SOFT-DRINK STAND

DOOR

FACTORY BUILDING

HIGHWAY

DRINKING FOUNTAIN

BOWL OF FLOWERS"

from *Time out of Joint*
Phillip K. Dick
Vintage Books, May 2002

Further Thoughts on Blogging and Narcissism
[continued from Sunday, March 14]

"Every day we go out in search of transcendence,
and find objects."
Novalis


It is difficult to imagine self-sufficiency as
being anything but advantageous.
One might speculate that the United
States, having emerged as the
prodigal child of the British
Empire, began its existence
with a strong step in the direction
of self-sufficiency.
In 19th Century European literature,
Americans are viewed as prosperous businesspersons
with little sophistication and insight
and this image continued into the
20th century with the emergence
of "the ugly American." Part
of this must certainly be understood
as envy, as if Americans
were perpetural adolescents to be secretly
(unconsciously) admired
for their boldness
and inventiveness but consciously despised
as selfish, inconsiderate bullies.
In any case, we remain the new kid on the block,
creator of charismatic, independent heroes like James Dean
watching the easily duped enemy go over
a cliff in the dark during an car race in *Rebel Without a Cause.*
The latest in this series is Johnny Depp:
nonconformist, eliciting
longings for long lost autonomy,
idealistic values, and optimism,
perpetual adolescent,
perpetual bastion of hope for the future.

Almost all American heroes embrace
autonomy and self-sufficiency,
however, and in recent decades,
more and more they incorporate these
noble values into militaristic, fascist
philosophies. This might be
because such values are so easily
melded into materialism. The courageous
Nick Cage of *Leaving Las Vegas*
succumbs to films reeking with box
office formulas; the same for the Harrison Ford
of *Blade Runner.*
The self-sufficiency of one developmental
stage, adolescence, is easily exploited
for its contiguity with materialistic values.
This is because
self-sufficiency is the flexible,
moldable inner substance of narcissism. As an aspect
of a healthy personality,
self-sufficiency contributes to independent thinking,
functioning, perception and insight.
But when it becomes a central aspect of
the personality, ultimately neutralizing the
ability of the personality to empathize and work generously
with others, it becomes the hardened heart of narcissism.

There are crossroads in the developmental
highway of the individual personality
and that of nations. In adolesence,
this crossroad juxtaposes degrees of self-
sufficiency with degrees of empathy.
The right mixture of the two can amplify
both tendencies, but this mixture must be fairly precise.
Too much empathy can
torque the personality towards a hopelessly
utopian, passive idealism, while too much
self-sufficiency creates a twisted Scrooge.
We live in a nation of narcissistic,
twisted Scrooges, who are held in check
only by the energetic work of a relatively
small group of visionaries who have the
wisdom to understand that only by
working closely with everyone else,
can the success of the few be directed towards
healing the illnesses of a pathologically
wounded and conflicted world.

At this moment in time, blogging,
as a writing movement, is blessed with an opportunity
to evolve a writing tendency that can combine
self-sufficiency with empathy in a way
that can be advantageous to the individual writer,
and at the same time to the writing
community, the local community, the nation,
and the world. Blogging is quite capable of
allowing individual writers quite a lot of
space to take a place on the continuum of
community involvement and sustain
quite a lot of automonomy. This is largely because
of the technological advances inherent in html linking, and the
fact that, at the moment, it is being made available free of charge.
The issues of distribution have
been discussed here and elsewhere again and again.
At this moment, the blogging
community, and the country as a whole
has a unique opportunity to heed
Matthew Arnold's lyric, dire warning that

"The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night."

Further Thoughts on Blogging and Narcissism

Since the word "narcissism"
derives from the Greek
myth of Narcissus, which
centers around the mythological
character's contemplating his
own image in a pool, while
his partner Echo looks on,
narcissism is rightly thought to
center around issues
of bodily self-esteem and self-absorption.
But this is only part of the story. In
psychoanalytic theory,
the appropriate functioning of
self-esteem derives from the
wholesome development,
and ultimate crystalization within
the ego, of what is known
as the ego-ideal. The dynamic between
the part of the personality
known as the ego, and its partner in
negotiating issues with
others,
derives in part from the outcome of
this development.

In early, or perhaps very early, childhood
the child gradually becomes
aware of its extreme dependency on
its caretakers. There
is a delicate balance to be resolved
between the child's feelings
of love and admiration for its relatively
"rich and powerful" parents
and its feelings of anxiety flowing
out of its awareness of its
vulnerability if the caretakers are
unavailable to offer necessary
physical or emotional supplies.
Over time, the child's feelings of
pleasure and security obviously
derive from the ministrations of the
caretakers. The caretakers' apparent
knowledge and mastery of this world,
clearly riddled with dangers and risks,
with its potential deprivations of comfort and
necessities, for example, becomes
part of the source of the child's idealization of
the caretakers, which is the core of what
later are to become feelings of love. As the
child becomes aware of
its gender, the gender(s) of his caretakers
also enters into the development
of experiences of identity and the corresponding
feelings and sources of knowledge
about living.

Gradually, however, as the child gains
separate mastery over his or her environment,
this idealization of the parent becomes
less an aspect of immediate reverence
and dependency, and more an aspect
of its identifications and sense of self.
"If I am like the powerful caretaker,
and I love and admire
the 'rich and powerful' caretaker,
the caretaker will admire and love me,
and so will others." Such feelings are at
the core of the development of the
ego ideal, and ultimately, the superego.

The internal struggle over these feelings
gradually emerges over latency
(7-11) and comes to a crisis during adolescence.
This is the moment in
development when the personality is in the
most danger of succumbing to
pathological narcissism. It is at this moment
that the individual personality
crystalizes and must choose between ideals,
and give some external expression
to these ideals. Usually the individual chooses
a peer group that personifies
and activates such ideals. While feeling
varying degrees of ambivalence about giving up
some aspects of the conscious idealization
of the caretakers and other sources
of internal identification, in favor of symbolic
heroes like cultural icons and
other admired people in the individual's
immediate environment, there is
a corresponding reduction in felt dependency
on the caretakers. This
sense of self-sufficiency is at the core
of the healthy, or unhealthy development
of an internal self-esteem mechanism.
It it at this moment of development
that pathological narcissism has its greatest
opportunity to take root in the
personality. A relatively dangerous bridge
must be crossed, as the personality
negotiates between its desires for self-sufficiency
and the powerful pull of crucial, previously developed,
ego ideals. If the individual feels
the necessity of trying to completely
eradicate these earlier ideals, if they are too
threatening in their tendency to dominate
or engulf the individual, for example,
or the person's felt awareness of some
profound failures on the part of the
caretakers, the individual may consciously
reject the ego ideals, but all the more
unconsciously embrace them. This becomes,
then, fertile ground not only for unconscious
conflict, but for assuming the existence of varying degrees
of to some degree false self-sufficiency. False, because the
unconscious identifications remain intact,
while at the same time being consciously rejected.

[As it happens, right now we happen to be listening to
Laurie Anderson's *Oh, Superman*, which
powerfully evokes many of the points I am making here.]

(to be continued)

notebook: 8/21/90

1. The work to be built out of what's
occurring to me at the moment.

2. All of the material connects. The fact that
I constantly choose to write something now
rather than assemble (re-assemble)
what came before is what makes this
poetry. The greatest push is towards
the future. Writing poetry is tidal.
It is this sense that the words
are the producers and the poets
are the transcribers. Writing poetry is like
listening to a pulse- sometimes to see if
life is still alive- sometimes
to diagnose its
current condition.

3. Don't believe in stories. Life does
not occur this way. It utters
itself like the Delphic oracle. This
is why oracles sound so familiar. It's
all the other daily stuff that
sounds so strange.

4. How gingerly we created this
apparently real dailiness and then
coated it (with dreams) to look
like granite. We then exuberantly
(or sulleny, as the case may be)
ride our inventions like a see-saw.

5. Try to remember never to put the
numbers down *before* something
occurs to you. Get ahead of yourself
and you spit in two.

6. Hope are remembering are linked
together, just as understanding and
anticipating are.

7. The dark waters of the imagination
are cold at first and the tides
and winds are unpredictable.

SUNDAY 3/14 - 9:30pm at ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVES
(corner 2nd ave. & 2nd st., NYC)



THE NEW YORK UNDERGROUND FILM FESTIVAL PRESENTS:
Robert Beck Memorial Cinema: Hex


BRADLEY EROS, MARIANNE SHANEEN, MARIE LOSIER, GHEN ZANDO-DENNIS, GLEN FOGEL, JOEL SCHLEMOWITZ, BRIAN FRYE

Notebook: circa, 1983

Beginning Outline for the Experiential Base in Modern Art

1. My intention is to show that art as a mirror of
existence is not narcissistic but a necessary complement to
self-realization (?)

2. That psychoanalysis is a form of drama that has life and
death consequences- as theatre traditionally existed in
antiquity- i.e. the Roman circus, the Greek tragedy

3. That psychoanalysis as drama is the only viable alternative
to war- that the traditional forms of drama can no longer
seriously supply this need-meaning, that


4. 3 is so because as several hundred years of journalism
has proven- the revelation of social fact turns us repetitively
back on the basic philosophical, moral and conceptual conflicts
between individuals

5. The goal of art as release of *energy* is assumed here-
the most significant discovery of Freud in human libido-
the evidential experience of genius proves that libido is
virtually inexhaustible- Wilhelm Reich's advancement of the
"orgone" is simply a "s-f" metaphor for the fact that the
sum total of libido is the actual energy of human society

6. That art is a method for releasing libido- that
psychoanalysis is the most precise & succcessful method
releasing libido

The best psychoanalytic book I've read
in a long time: *The Shadow Of The Object*
by Christopher Bollas includes a discussion
of a syndrome he calls "normotic" where the
child's subjectivity is so sparsely responded
to by the parents or caretakers
that the person becomes excessively
preoccupied and overly connected with the material
non-human) environment. These
speculations are very rich in political/psychoanalytic
implications. Too busy packing right now
to write very much more, but here's a little
appetizer:

"When Winnicott wrote that 'it is creative
apperception more than anything else that
makes the individual feel that life is worth
living' (1971, p. 71), he was aware that
psychoanalysis focuses on those disturbances
in human subjectivity that make creative
living difficult. As if to gesture towards a different
pathway of disturbance, he suggested another
axis of illness.

'People may be leading satisfactory lives
and may do work that is even of exceptional
value and yet may be schizoid or schizophrenic.
They may be ill in a psychiatric sense because
of a weak reality sense. To balance this one would
have to state that there are others who are so
firmly anchored in objectively perceived reality
that they are ill in the opposite direction of being
out of touch with the subjective world and
with the creative approach to fact.' (1971, p.70)....

I believe that we are witness to the emergence of a new
emphasis within personal illness or we are just getting
around to perceiving an element in personality that has
always been with us. This element is a particular drive
to be normal, one that is typified by the numbing and
eventual erasure of subjectivity in favour of a self that
is conceived as a material object among other man-made
products in the object world....
A normotic person is someone who is abnormally normal. He
is too stable, secure, comfortable and socially extrovert. He
is fundamentally disinterested in subjective life and he is
inclined to reflect on the thingness of objects, on their
material reality, or on 'data' that relates to material phenomena....
We may speak of a common normotic element when we
identify any mental activity that constitutes a transfer
of a subjective state of mind into a material external object
that results in the de-symbolization of the mental content....
Such a person is alive in a world of meaningless plenty."

from *The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis
of the Unthought Known* by Christopher Bollas
NY, Columbia University Press, 1987 (p. 135-137)

Adam Phillips (the English psychoanalyst)
says this in a review of a biography
of Dylan Thomas in the London Review of Books
*Dylan Thomas: A New Life*
by Andrew Lycett, Wedefield, October 2003

"Every distinctive poet notices something new about
the language: Thomas's notion was that if you looked
after the sound it didn't matter whether the sense
took care of itself; that it was possiblle to write great poems
without worrying too much about what they meant. The
pleasure one gets from a Thomas poem has nothing
to do with the pleasure of working it out or even the sense
that one day one will be able to work it out; and because it
isn't just a matter of time before you get it- as is the case, say with
John Ashbery- you can't get much literary criticism out of a Thomas
poem....

The poet is a comic figure now because his poetry is not funny.
He didn't have a theory about this because he didn't have theories-
or not that kind- but he had noticed something. It was becoming
increasingly difficult for poets to take themselves and what they
did at all seriously. Poetry might matter to people who liked
poetry but it wasn't important."

But this is the strange thing: I've yet to read a single piece
by Adam Philips that is the least bit memorable. But I've thought
about Dylan Thomas' poem *And Death Shall Have No Dominion*
hundreds of times:

And death shall have no dominion
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost, love shall not;
And death have shall no dominion..."

(there are 6 more verses).

What is Phillips talking about? Though I have read this
poem and thought about it so much I have memorized
parts of it, I have yet to be impressed by a single
thing Adam Phillips has written; including his biography
of Winnicott. Adam Phillips is a bore; Dylan Thomas
is an interesting, memorable poet.

Notebook: 7/22/89

The world is the exciting and dangerous sea I embark on
to make my voyage as a poet- but the sea and
the world as it is given are not the
objects of my investigation as a poet. I know that
the powers I summon up from the deep can have immense
political consequences for myself and those around me-
but I cannot take reponsibiity for the outcome because
it is partly an accidental byproduct of my search.
Like the scientist, while I may be drawn to support one
or another tremendously significant political strategy or
cause- I am far too concerned about the
"individual case"- far too fascinated with the
particularity and the exotic connections between
things- to provide much impetus for those
concerned with immedite political action.

As a poet, I am a phenomenologist of the
inner socious- I must leave it to others to discover
what benefit might derive from the strangely shaped
fossils I discover there. They may have significance
for the politician, the political activist, the political
scientist or the political theorist- but as a poet,
I may be the least able to see this in my own work.
When I look at the work of others, I am most likely
toi frantically search through every word for the esoteric
information I am strongly driven to try to find.

I view as essentially political the readiness
to take action- and though political action
is completely conditioned and informed by writing at every turn (and
writing as such is profoundly influenced by every political
reality) - I think to be realistic about
relationship between the two- you're looking at a
stormy marriage- where both parties often want freedom
from each other more than they want a committment.
Politics and poetry cannot avoid each other because
they are both great talkers. You could never miss
with one at a party, for instance; the politician
will say many things meant to test your
reactions- the poet will say things leaving
you very unsure of all your reactions.

Michaela Cooper (Mikarrhea) {click here}:
"Fashion is a continuation of politics by other means...So then, what is war?"

Charles Borkhuis' two terrific radio plays,
*The Sound of Fear Clapping* (produced
on WNYC in 1995) and *Foreign Bodies*
(produced on WBGO-Exit 3 productions, in
2001) are now available on a CD, produced
for National Public Radio by Sarah Montague
under the tltle *Black Light*.

*The Sound of Fear Clapping* is also
available as a chapbook, published by
*Obscure Publications* in 2003.

"FAT MAN: Yes, well as fate would have it,
we happen to be looking for a nobody
just like you. We've always got our eye out
for certain drifters and malcontents. People
who have erased their identities and backgrounds
somewhere along the line. Peoole who are on
their way to becoming...blank slates. So you see,
you're perfect for the part."

Once again- over at Ron Silliman's blog-
poets have been drawn into rating peers.
Why is judging, rating and comparison
the activity most poets are drawn to
most of all? It seems most people get
bored without making a competitive game
out of poetry. I don't deny my own competitive
feelings, however, the activity of poets rating
other poets is the one I like least in
this field. Sure I make comparisons like
everybody else, but making a public
spectacle out of it this is the American obsession
I like least. It is the essence of the Society
of the Spectacle, the poetic equivalent
of a beauty contest. Sure I'm jealous of
all the attention Ron's blog is getting, but Ron
is a very generous friend and I applaud his
success. But this "best of" and
classification drive makes
me sick. How did I ever fall for
joining in? I guess I was in a great mood
that day because a blogger friend had
highly complimented me. Well, I should
be more wary about what I say
when I get so excited and happy.

Untitled poem: circa 1987

Unmixed, colors hold their integrity.
Digression: I thought about single minded pursuit,
That change meant subdividing oneself
In combination with parts of the world, viz:
To interact with means to become part of.
As for the primary, it is the domain of the particular,
Specifically the visual sovereign., lord of the merely proximate,
Lady of the soft familiar. Of course, at first
I was not ready for such bright shadows,
I faltered at the thought of the continuous,
I trembled at the feeling of ownership.
Battle ships tall in number ordained my sentences,
And, like any other pawn in this game,
I numbered the drawers according to my luck-
And things got misplaced and forgotten.
Don't be quarrelsome, I understand that
And recognize the duplicity of a leisurely denial.
Meanwhile the sky grew dark and serious,
Terrible lightning split the mailbox in two,
(A number with a way of knowing everything already.)
Down at the beach they strolled away,
While we sunned ourselves with silence and newspapers.

Congruence: an adult plays as a child playing as an adult
Playing as a child. A thing is like any other thing,
Each widens out believing in and not believing
And never waiting. And *now* we know that the beginning of the game
Is interesting because we don't know the end,
But in the end it is always the same. But we
Don't know it then. There's the lighthouse like it always was,
The horizon, the boats, this solitude, a favorite poem.
Pedantically, pontifically I observe that
The romantics had children too, that innocence
Must always exercise its charm. To us to be surprised
Presumes an absence, for her to remember is a joy.
We are learning to smile in spite of what we know,
She is learning to know bereft of any spite.

Reality: quicksand, deceptions,
manipulations, illusions at every turn.
The conviction it takes to sustain
energy, persistence, focus,
and not to succumb to the
many complex and seductive traps
at moments of surprised
accomplishment or
discouragement; their
sly accompanying complacencies
or subtle forms of passivity requires
not so much a renewed state of
vigilance (I thought that once) but
more an odd and a potentially estranging
combination of forgiveness, determination,
improvisatory readiness to confront
false assumptions, and most of all,
the ability to laugh at all those solemn
earnest expectations (entitlements),
at nearly every slippery transition.

Heriberto Yepez {click here} has translated
an aphorism from yesterday's ::fait accompli:: into Spanish.
"El poema: cualquier forma, la que sea, donde cada parte es necesaria".

Muchas gracias, Heriberto.

***************
Steve Tills' responses to ::fait accompli::
time travel right now on
Black Spring {click here}.
Theenk of that!

*The Loneliness of the Long Distance Blogger*
Detailed Commodity (Alex Young) {click here} picks up the pace.

Notebook: 8/9/87

Follow out all of your desires, only to come back to the same
place. But now that place is in more places.

Aesthetic sublimation of the fear of death into plumbing its desires.

The lightest of things- like insects, like birds, like joy- can be easily
crushed. The heaviest of things- stones, sorrows, these stay- and
tend to hold their shape.

Art teaches us how to bring the dead to life.

The poem may occur in a place which is greatly dissimilar from the world
made apparent to the senses. But wherever it is, one fine day there or nearby you
will meet its poet.

Satie on the radio. Girl rolling and rolling in the foamy sea- black hair and
red bathingsuit.

8/10/87

Learn to plan your thinking.

It took very long for me to learn to enjoy the first deep draft of an experience.
Experience only apparently repeats itself- and because this is the most comforting
illusion of all- we can forget so quickly how fortunate we were that things finally
took the pass they did. Not only fortune did this but no doubt it took a tremendous
effort of will- or so it seemed- even if this effort consisted mainly in determining
not to throw it all into the air in total frustration.

8/11/87

Dream in which I saw Ted Berrigan- only he was very thin. I see a woman who
may or may not be Alice Notley and she is naked.

Maybe a writer is an obsessive who wants to do more than think.

My first thought was about Ted.

As I child, I rarely suffered from feelings of being left out or lonely, once
I discovered books. In themselves, books constitute a world for me.

9/5/87

Art prepares us for a gradual dissolution into inorganicity. Those silent
sculptures, those immense spaces... we feel events by means of their
continuous collision in the current space of time...things and their effects
accumulate...so- called synchronicities are not synchronized...the opposite...
disjunctive "connections" are made...you see now, you see ahead...copying
this may be a way of hearing it now...resistance to hearing is another way
of listening...listen to *that too*, and this voice reminds me of Alan Davies...
equivalence of moments is a way to *keep going*...

9/7/87

Give me the unexpected, in small doses, I hasten to add...tumble into life, jolting
forwards...see this from valleys and high peaks...how can you not bump
into things sometimes...don't beat so hard on them...don't calm down, calm *into*...
what makes you think someone would track you there?....the stealthier you are, the
quieter they'll be...if you make a lot of noise, they will too, so you won't hear them
as loudly...Select a few words when the occasion suits you...Stop, roll it into a
ball, and fling it into the first patch of gray light you eke out of the dark...or into
the slight shadow you still see lingering on the horizon (forget the violins)...

9/8/87

The story of a man who never tires of the smell of books and the look of words,
for whom existence is read through books, for whom the "point of departure" is
books (I've not found a way to describe this yet).

The author's personality "pervades" the work. But what is this personality but
clusters of innumerable choices ("Three of Four Things I know about Him"- Charles
Bernstein).

9/15/87

Revolutionary thought is yet burning a hole through the pages of history. One
day it may claim more- and only then will the relations between people change.

There is no disputing freedom.

9/20/87

Poem: Anti-alphabet

Make things free by making them freely.

Traditional writng separates the analysis from the content- you can see but
you just can't touch.

The continuum between forms.

"Permitting" things to gather (Toni Simon's *Space Surrounded By Its Objects*)

Strategy and movement.


9/29/87

An image is all that cohered.

And it was nothing more than the passing of a gleam.

Take the objects out of any poem and hold the world as it is.

notebook: 5/24/87

At the moment we discover a way to express something, that very action
propels us all lthe more firmly in the world that was being addressed. Then, when
we have given it, that world grasps itself around us and it. What could make
one feels more separate from oneself, than that? Advancing towards the horizon of
exchange: -laughter and anguish.

To listen is to learn the alchemy of the known.

The poem: any shape at all where every part is necessary.

"Such people are dangerous. They do not obey known hierarchies."

Jealous individuals show their greatest brilliance
in destroying the joy or confidence in the objects
of their envy. The most inventive of these people
are often able to completely cloak their activities as
positive contributions to the circle that includes
this object.

Note:11/1/80 (written on the final page
of my copy of *Interaction Ritual* by Erving Goffman)

The parallel between aliveness and
wakefulness. If we were not alive
we would be in a condition analogous
to sleeping as in the (finite or
infinite) amount of time we were not
yet born. Waking is seeking
to adjoin, sleeping to separate.
Separate wakefulness or adjoined
dormancy is painful because it
conflicts with the cycles of birth
and death.

"To read is to experience time
as strangeness itself, in which
you colme to reckon with the
spatial mystery of a voiceless
speech and a bodiless embodiment."

Jed Rasula
Sulfur 24 (Spring, 1989) p. 88

An interview with Julia Tsuchiya-Mayhew right now on
Bemsha Swing (Jonathan Mayhew) {click here}

Went to work on the storage space today
to get ready to move. Call it synchronicity,
spirit or just plain luck but the first book I
saw in the first box I opened was
*Onion Leaves, Her Map Untended*, by
Elizabeth Was .The gorgeous xexoxial
book, with about 8 pages of text, with
mysterious xerox graphics, with the look
of woodblock prints between each
page of continuous prose texts with varied
fonts, was given to Toni and I when Miekel and
Liz came to visit at our West 87 Street apartment in
1986 or thereabout, around the
time the book was published.

"*Up out of & in touch*. Talk to break between
sentence, to bathe before noontide, she hesitates
stately the ideas like pajamas. Pollution worries this
'granite-nut tender. Laughter is homogenous reliance
out the back door in a flashy pants. (Type justifies
the wandering. The explorer stumbles over the trailmarks,
cursing the numbers irate nonstop cuticle. A breath *before*
penning, vibrant, inner-aural prowl minus the sun or a new
distraction. Unrecorded voume the atlas of her going. Silent.
A modal detail hollowed to nothings diminutive. AS IF STUCK
ON A GLEESTRING, SELF STANDING ABOVE, HER HANDS
HEADSHINE; TOO FAR, ONLY THE GLOBE."

Other books of Miekel and Liz
we have include: *formula for labor* (about an
inch wide),*euy:,
a zaumist biography of Alexei Kruchenykh*,
*the plagiarist codex*,*L=I=N=G=-L=A=G=E*
and *The Aperiodic Journal of -Pataphysical-
Succulentosophy*

Notebook: Circa, late 1986

To present the raw coal to
take in, burn , and finally bring
to a red- hot state, to
present the substance in its
various states of polish,
from unpolished mineral to the
finest faceted stone, these
are the essences of the results
of presented form. So my
choice is to present the coal, for
we are now all miners of the
unknown regions, and the time is less
one to bedrock ourselves in
finery, but to burn through to the core
within which lies the substance
of still greater forms of energy. To
bring together our combined
essences must be the goal of
poetics, for this project if
it is to have a goal, it must be re
readjust the lines of the mind itself.

Thus it is that poetics came to be the
center of poetry's white heat,
not because it
offered the greatest promise
of new and better products-
we've all listened to
Ron Sillman's views on this,
who has shown us the
futility of seeking paradise there-
the fact is, poetry, and therefore
the profession of poet has, like so
many others, been sent packing to
the back laboratories- and the majority
have selected this humble position,
indentifying with the potential for
authenticity in these quiet and unequivocal
surroundings- does not at all
detract from the fates of these who have
chosen to publicize their "findings"-
for the best of those who have
embraced that role have recognized
the provisional nature of their "results"
as well, knowing well that a billion
successful poems could not make up
for one minute of the lives of the billions
still *suppressed*, and all the rest
*repressed*, or the millions dead
in our own beloved century,
by the unaccountable
primitive tidal pull towards power
struggle and death- also
at the glowing core of
our deepest energies.

But we did not find such unalloyed
conditions of authenticity in our laboratories,
in our untested state of reflexivity
and exploration of the products of the thought
process because these products defy
ownership in the same way that we cannot
own ourselves when the divided nature
of our identities hold a sense of wholeness
ever out in front.

The poems cannot be ours as long
they must continue to be ransacked for the
buried treasure that loses currency
before its distributed. The shall game of
power is none other than the matching
shell game of selves. As fast as we
stitch them to keep up
with the shifting conditions of the games,
of recognition of the continuity of dailiness.
As quickly as we might
examine a poem's
existence by its objective value as a poem,
just as instantly do we search the entire context
of its existance, including the most private
aspect of its very atmosphere-
the self of the poet-
also as simultaneously consumed
for its promise of breaking down
the margins between the public fact
of the poem's existence, and the relative public
skepticism about the possibility of such a person
having any consistency of relavance
to him or her.

Under such conditions, it seems to me
one of the most attractive positions
must be to embrace this secrecy and to, more or less
permantently lock the gates between the front stage
until a better distribution is possible, until the relative
positions have changed, possible as one
result of a change in power conditions.
One would not be hoping for an accord
to be reached between poets in this way,
but a growing mutual recognition that what is
shared between poets is not truly
shareable between the reader and the poem.
The sutation is truly fragmented and
the conditions are severe.The poet's quest
for authenticity has actually become
more dangerous, however, the risk inherent
in marginality. On the other hand,
it is a little more subtle to see the direct
relationship between this emergence and
actual satisfaction.

Very sorry to miss Ron Silliman & Michael McClure
at the Poetry Project, as well at the Boog City
Carve reading. Engulfed in all the details and the difficulties
of moving. Damn!

I appreciate Drew's brief reviews at Overlap{click here}

Now I'm looking for one re: the Carve reading.

My Quizilla query vias Chris Murray's Tex Files {click here}.

*You are naturally born with a gift,
whether it be poetry, writing or song.
You love beauty and creativity,
and usually are highly intelligent.
Others view you as mysterious and dreamy,
yet also bold since you hold firm in your beliefs.*

All of this because I like gray and write in a journal and
like to make new friends?

Anyway, I'm a sucker for astrology too.