Whatchamacallit

Facts, facts I was bored with them. I wanted something more important, bigger, more encompassing. I turned to specific words, to abstract ideas, to shapes, to colors. I tried to learn and absorb principles wherever I could find them, generalities, rules, systems, explanations.

Yet gradually these became blank, monochromatic, inert. Lately, I've come back to those concrete details, but not as a windbag might so respectfully refer to them, intoning them monotonously, as I angrily understood and rejected them so long ago, or as a miser might collect them, reveling in their exactitude.

One day I noticed that as overly treasured or trivial as any of these might appear to be to those who search out the most useful of them as liferafts, facts are the very specific colors, textures, odors, shapes of experience itself, without which there remained only those so familiar thoughts, those protective insights I always found so warming and alive. Instead of converting every object into a mental keepsake before I'd even held it, I try now to allow these details to shine, sharpening and shading each moment into, yes, something hard and real, untransformable, irrevocable, and quotidien, but nevertheless, something you can name.

**************************************
Happy Birthday, David Bromige!

Ron offers up a warm tribute to the bard, who lives in Sebastopol, CA right now on Silliman's blog [click here]

**
A Master's Voice

If you have a few minutes, listen to some of David Bromige's poems on Penn Sound [click here]. Most of the selections are about a minute or less, and are
very gratifying to listen to. If you've never heard David read in that so gentle, so lightly teasing and funny way he has, with that charming accent from his UK origins , you are in for a real treat. I kid you not.

A Passing Comment

made by Ray Bianchi and commented on by Bill
Allegrezza on pr-ramblings [click here]has evolved into that most pleasurable of all blogosphere moments- an ongoing discussion in a comments section, this one about poets, students and reading. Want to check it out, and perhaps chime in?

Postcritpt 10/26

"I NEVER THOUGHT THERE WAS A DIVISIONM BETWEEN RFTEADING, MUSIC, MEMORIZING, LOVING, THE EROTIC, AND POETRY."
David Shapiro

Don't miss David Shapiro's thought provoking outburst re: reading on p-ramblings (click above), and his quieter note added later. I have to think about his interesting typos- vispo? I like RFTEADING above as "retreading" or "retreating"
Shhh- I'm trying to talk David into opening a blog. He may do it, but for, guess what? His collages. Now hear this,dbqp [click here]. By the way, move over Ron Silliman- Geof Huth is getting over 700 hits a day!


David Shapiro reads with Ron Silliman at the Bowery Poetry Club Seque Series on November 19th hosted by Gary Sullivan and Nada Gordon

Alan Davies reads with Drew Gardner on November 5th

*Three Trees* by Nico Vassilakis

Geof Huth's *dbqp Visualizing Poetics* [click here]

*********************************
Jackson Mac Low's new book from Granary is out!
(via the SUNY/Buff poetics list)

Granary Books is pleased to announce the publication of Jackson Mac Low's DOINGS: ASSORTED PERFORMANCE PIECES 1955-2002.

"...The book includes detailed performance instructions as well as notes on the specific procedures of composition through which the works were created. The curious reader finally has access to some of the most important yet most elusive works within Mac Low’s oeuvre, including many examples of “Gathas,” “Vocabularies,” “Asymmetries,” “Light Poems,” and more. Doings performs the dual task of sourcebook and Baedeker — a looking glass through which to see where we’ve been and where we’re going as we
sift through the radical poetries of the postmodern era looking for renewal, for the inevitable path to the future. Doings includes an introduction by publisher Steve Clay, five gate-fold pull-outs, and a 60 minute CD of live and studio performance recordings..."

The Sooner The Better

Vincent Van Gogh Drawings at the Met [click here] opened today. As we've noticed in the past, the sooner you get to blockbuster shows at the Met, the better. Although the galleries were, of course, quite crowded, these crowds are sure to grow to huge proportions as the holidays grow near. Although the show is billed as a drawings show, there are lots of paintings also, many of them hung next to the drawings they were based on. This is a huge show, and the early drawings especially have been rarely, if ever, seen here before.
*****************************
Charles Bernstein interviews Douglas Messerli

on his recent poetry, his pseudonyms, his
interest in and publication of Brazilian poetry,
his *writing through* and collaborations with
other poets, and a memoir he is working on

in


Jacket (Ocober)[click here]

Poetry, Prose Poetry and Vispo: Good Reads

Of *Atellier* by Claire Lux [AQP Collective, 179 Azelea Drive,
Afton, VA 22920, 26 pages] John Most [click here] says: "This small book of poems is the first of thirteen such books, each written using a different character/voice that I have invented: *Atelier* by Claire Lux, et cetera. The plan is to print each book separately in a small run and then compile then into a single book after the project is over."

"The festering wound
Impatience
Diagnosed through hypnosis
Sculpture failure /
Silt from the streets
Of my states urban
Center coursed through
Tangled veins
Mistreat
Little WANTS"
**************************************
Sheila E. Murphy *Concentricity* from Pleasure Boat
Studio 201 West 89th Street, #6F, NY, NY 10024
$13.95

Of Sheila Murphy's many excellent books in recent years, I am most excited by this one. It is all prose
poetry-this book has something like 80 dense, intensely imagistic, thoughtful poems, each one a complex, lyrical, dense puzzle, tempting the reader back to unlock its mysteries again and again. For years I've been delighted when I've come across a prose poem in a lit magazine by Sheila Murphy. She's one of those rare top-flight contemporary poets who isn't coy, is constantly in the fray, (frequently on the collective blog, As/Is). whose work is constantly inventive without being opaque in an annoying way:

(from *Pleasure*, p.44)

"Rhumba, samba, doe-eyed opposite of clash is education. Pens to match the theobald of summer slingshot into monster's eye. Spotted on the cry end of a seamed chaise facing all the brick light of a world through olive palms and chaps on someone riding. Do the half-tones rise with Adam's apple to the sonnet in a copybook? And do the whiled appointments harbor space of modesty? Cold bristles soften to the lanolin-bathed fingers close to sheep in lengths of semi-automatic flight. A gathering of leathergold
still suitable for taming..."
****************************************************
*StampOlogue* by Nico Vassilakis
the Runaway Spoon Press Box 495597
Port Charlotte Florida 33949

photographic visual poetry
afterword by Gregory St Thomassino
with a response by Nico

Gregory writes: "'X' genealogist I know has 'rubbings' framed and hanging in her study. These remind me of them. I must tell her, there is something 'shroud of Turin' about them"

Nico responds: "...the process of doing vispo right now is still fun for me. sometimes it bites and i hate it and i don't do it for months, years, it loses its flavor and appeal for me if fussed over excessively. i try to learn how and when to approach vispo with openness. occassionally i get it right. sometimes it takes me from my text writing. it does that bcause it's easier for me to access less torment in creating vispo, i think. staring at textpo creates the potential for vispo."

MiPOesias, edited by Tom Beckett

Reading and rereading the engaging work in this issue... I'm the least fan of the "best ofs" but you've got to check out Nico Vassilakis' "profile." Lots of writers, who were interviewed, jumped or wriggled through or over and around that hoop, but Nico [click here] leaped through it deftly and with enviable elan. And the poems!
**
What the hell, while you're at it check out these *Texts for Nothing, but Cut Up* on UBU web:
Nico Vassilakis [click here]

*********************************
In A Dark and Desperate World

it's a joy to focus on a few rays of sunlight. The MiPOesias issue, discussed above, Karl Rove under indictment and Harold Pinter winning the Nobel Prize:
Los Angeles Times online [click here].

*Notes*

You can't always get what you want, but you can almost always read what you want; that way I read more, think more, and usually even write more.

Forget about being a writer and you'll be happy. Then keep on writing.

*Notes*



Decisions

If you are 40 and still ambivalent, consult more
deeply within yourself. If you are 50 and continue to suffer from mixed feelings, try to seek out the opinions of others. If you are 60, flip a coin.

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

The Debt

Much of what I am came out of books, so much of what I become goes back into them.

Fishing The Street

A heavy, punishing rain beat down on the streets outside the Bowery Poetry Club yesterday where a respectable and respectful crowd came to hear and cheer Marianne Shaneen and Anselm Berrigan, introduced by Gary Sullivan and Nada Gordon. Each of these young poets read, with witty, charming and quiet force, a combination of new and earlier works to appreciative whistles and applause from the drenched audience. Marianne has a new chapbook from Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs [click here]; Anselm spoke about his father, Ted Berrigan's new Collected Poems [click here]. Reading over the blurbs, I noticed that two are by poets who recently died, Robert Creeley and Lorenzo Thomas. Anselm mentioned that the latter, who died this year on July 4th, passed away on the same date as Anselm's father, 22 years later. Anselm, who was 10 when his father died, read several great poems by Ted I never heard before. As I've mentioned previously on these pages, I attended my first poetry workshop with Ted Berrigan in 1967. I am not ashamed or embarrassed to state how fond I was of this man, who, like so many people, was what I call a 60's victim, in relation to his early death, anyway... As I write this I realize that there are many others, like myself, who survived the 60's, who were also its victims (and its beneficiaries). In my case maybe you can't see the wounds, maybe you can, but I can often feel them, especially when I think of Ted. For a taste of the real 60's see the Scorsese documentary about Dylan and read Ted. Especially read Ted. As I turned to leave, I spoke briefly with the maestro, Bob Holman, who, by the way, is performing on Wednesday night at 10 pm at his own club, the BPC with the Billy Bang Trio. Bob mentioned how you could hear, at times, that Ted Berrigan lilt in Anselm's voice. Yes, I heard and loved that, and also the way Anselm couldn't stop laughing at one of his father's poems as he read it- the one about a truck and fish all over the street.

********************************************
Ted Berrigan Reads

Listen to Ted, thanks to Al Filreis and Charles Bernstein at Penn Sound,
and Alice Notley.


Ted Berrigan at Penn Sound [click here]

Notes

Watch for the moment in each day when you are given the choice to change.

***

Innocent until proven guilty is a fair and just formula, but intelligent until proven otherwise will waste a lot of your time.

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

Spirit Photography

Don't miss the astounding Spirit Photography show [click here for Kimmelman's review in the NY Times] at the Metropolitan Museum, especially the photos by Ted Serios. By the way, there is an excellent hardbound catalogue for $60.

Think Again

"Every difficulty slurred over will be a ghost to disturb your repose later on."

Frederic Chopin


from *The Harper Book of Quotations*
edited by Robert I. Fitzhenry

...................................................................

When you use something, you no longer know it. To know it, you must leave it alone.

...................................................................

'"But I don't see it," she continued sadly. "So, it's useless, isn't it? -and so cruel..." He was about to speak, but she went on: "I shall never understand it- never!"

He looked at her. "You will some day :you were made to feel everything----"

"I should have thought this was a case of not feeling----"

"On my part, you mean?" He faced her resolutely."Yes, it was to my shame. ..What I meant was that when you've lived a little longer, you'll see what complex blunderers we all are: how we're struck blind sometimes, and mad sometimes- and then, when our sight and our senses come back, how we have to set to work, and build up, little by little, bit by bit, the precious things we'd smashed to atoms without knowing it. LIfe's a perpetual piecing together of broken bits.'"

from *The Reef* by Edith Wharton (1912)

The Consolations of Art

"Ah, those strange people who have the courage to be unhappy. *Are* they unhappy, by the way?"
Alice James, *Diary*, 1889

What might be the alchemy that transposes suffering, or mere contentment, into happiness? Most artists come to understand and hold to one ineradicable consolation: every type of experience, without exception, contains food for thought, material for contemplation, a lesson in life. Perhaps their acrobatic feats of regeneration and renewal are as much explained by this tenacity, linked to unbounded curiosity, as it is by those all too noticeable balancing acts around recognition, motivation and self-esteem.

Reading

"There is hardly any grief that an hour's reading will not dissipate."

Montesquieu, *Mes Pensees*, c. 1722-55.


Woman reading [click here]

*****************************************
Jordan Stempleman's

poetry and images plus
Kari Edwards' new blog
featured now on
Chris Murray's Tex Files [click here]

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Blogger

Certain sites of reading project a promise of intimacy- the reader knowing full well that some degree of suspension of disbelief will be expected; but so what, nearly any intriguing read asks for some of that. Such intimacy, intuited from the first moments- at first sight, so to speak- immediately invites thoughts about possible time and frequency factors- where and and how often to hang out, for example.

More words are there and you come back to read again. A factor of possible interaction now imposes itself or is suggested. This time, as it happens, no stickiness or embarrassment, it's comfortable in fact, you don't even think that much yet about the content, though it's intriguing, especially from the standpoint of some early ambience of fitting in. It's a room you can hang out in for a bit - while that other place comes across more like a workout space, for example, ithe way a gym is intimate but the object being so much on self-improvement or strengthening and alert presence- you go but you don't necessarily linger.

With intimacy, connection, warmth, familiarity almost invariably trump revelation- true, both are present, but the revelations themselves seem to some degree to want to provoke chat not mere "response", and ultimately, some sort of involvement- after all you yourself do these things as well, and with a similar sense of pleasure and satisfaction: you too go to openings, you eat, you identify passages in poems you return to, you recognize, greet, mention artists. A book like this recently made me feel so welcome it actually got me past a whole day, maybe even a longer period of doldrums and whining.

I picked up Michael Coffey's *cmyk* at St Mark's when I first got back from a longish vacation in Provincetown. Immediately I was more enmeshed in thinking about New York than I expected to be reading a book of poetry, in particular its references to the lives and deaths of literary figures, many known personally to me, opening the book as I did just now to the line:"Half-lamenting the passing of Pessoa and Armand Schwerner." Armand was a close friend, a deeply influential poet for me and many others, so I personally appreciated this, that is, Coffey's projection of the simultaneous (literary) reference/ greeting and (personal/literary) grieving. By now I realized i'd been immersed in an intimate space and though I put the book down for some reason and wandered a bit around the bookstore, I soon picked it up and came back. This time I read it through completely, hungrily looking for references (Coffey once remarked to me he had noticed he himself had appeared as a sort of cameo in a book of mine, titled -Theoretical Objects- where he shows up as "the guy with the moustache" (the face hair is gone now) that I recognized at events and kept noticing and got curious about. Coffey mentions poets in the book including Ted Berrigan, Jackson Mac Low and Bruce Andrews, focusing on his affection for sonnets. Artists too, like Tim Hawkinson and Vito Acconci- so the book space intimately enters the art space, and eventually gets around to the restaurant space- a diary of menus and meals and social moments. But these intimacies, redolant as they are in some way with a nostalgia for the old New York School fondness for immediacy of experience, are not presented here exactly as such. In -cmyk-, casualness is less offhand, though still not all that earnest, or "cloying", but perhaps neighborly (maybe slightly like the way John Godfrey can be neighborly in some of his books- evoking the street and chararacter of the Lower East Side) - factually, meticulously detailed, while remaining emotionally substantial. Somewhat similar to a social visit, the way bloggers at first thought of people coming over to their blog as being like a social visit. He quotes Warhol:

"There is hardlly a better way of describing the situation of the late twentieth century artist who has everything at his disposal but for whom nothing is really present as he can no longer grasp the depth, all that has survived of The Last Supper's spiritual wealth, its spiritual substance are carbohydrates and that which, apart from pizza qualifies worldwide as Italian fastfood cuisine."
-Carla Schlulz-Hoffman, p 11 Warhols Last Supper

"Where do Italian art and culture intersect in your mind?
Andy: "Spaghetti?"

For its voyage through the abundant and various humidities, admixtures and intertwinings of writing the reading experience as an exploration of various doors-including doors, archways and entranceways constructed of intricate and intriguing typographical designs crafted by a master of such entwinings- Guy Bennett. -cmyk- proposes the seeming possiblity of a book as a temporary domicile: an enticing place to hang out and wander about within, with clues and/as memories popping up around to make you wonder if it might yet offer itself to you as a frequent stay. Early on, though, Coffey does drop a suggestion given such an open invitation, a certain requirement: you'd at least have to know how to hang out with a group of friends and have a relaxed beer.

O Books 2005
typesetting by Guy Bennet
cover by Rebecca Smith

Dreams and Nightmares

The important work of Ligorano/Reese, now on view at Cooper Union and elsewhere (see below), is critical, probing, sharply satiric of American politics today. We checked out a show based on a book by Joel Sternfeld, -Sweet Earth: Experimental Utopias in America-, on view September 16- October 22
at Luhring Augustine, 531 West 24th Street, NYC 10011 (212) 206-9100. Thankfully, for those of
you who can't get to the show, you can purchase or look at the book, which is well worth seeing and having. The show concerns experimental utopian communities across the United States, focusing both on their use of space and housing and on the essence of their communal ideals, structures and activities. This show comes at a crucial moment in US history, when it can be best described, perhaps, as a dystopia. There are at least 40 huge photographs on view, each accompanied by an excellently written, lengthy description of the history of the community. Some are well known, others obscure. The link to the New York Times review of 9/18 is: Mostly Lost [click here]

Another hightly recommended show now at Caren Golden Fine Art, 539 West 23rd Street, NY, NY 10011, tel: (212)727-8304 is Tom Burkhardt's *Full Stop* Here Tom Burhardt has wittly reconstructed an entire 50's style artist's studio, replete with pot-bellied stove, book and record shelves, numerous details all nearly full scale and constructed out of cardboard! It is dedicated to his father, Rudy Burkhardt, among others. See it on Tuesdays- Saturdays 11-6 pm. Some of Tom Burkhardt's excellent small paintings are on view in the show also.

If you're in Chelsea, make sure to check out this excellent gallery devoted completely to collage: Jeremy Lawson, 525 West 24th Street (212) 627-6000. On view until October15 are the fascinating collages of Rita Ackerman.

A Knock on The Door

The collaborative art team Marshall Reese and Nora Ligorano have a recent work


Ligorano/Reese
Pure Products USA [click here]


up at a literally dynamite
art show called *A Knock at The Door* at
Cooper Union

A Knock on The Door [click here]

The show-and the Ligorano/Reese mug shots
were featured both on a recent
cover of the New York Post (reviling
it, of course, as dishonoring the losses
of 9/11) and a surprisingly respectful
review in a recent issue of the Art section
of the New York Times. The Ligorano/Reese
work was the lead-off photo in the Times
review!

This is a must-see show!

Blankness

'Bear with me. I know that I sometimes stray from the point, but unless I write down things as they occur to me, I feel I wil lose them for good. My mind is not quite what it used to be. It is slower now, sluggish and less nimble, and to follow even the simplest thought very far exhausts me. This is how it begins, then, in spite of my efforts. The words come only when I think I won't be able to find them out again. Each day brings the same struggle, the same blankness, the same desire to forget of ever bringing them out again....Memory is the great trap, you see, and I did my best to hold myself back, to make sure my thoughts did not sneak off to the old days. But lately I have been slipping, a little more each day it seems, and now there are times when I will not let go..."


Paul Auster
*In The Country of Last Things*
Viking, 1987
***************************************************
Oblivion


"No Oblivion

Someone, I tell you,
will remember us."


Sappho
translated by Willis Barnstone
Green Integer 26
1999
***************************************************

Pain

"Our hearts were filled with so much pain but this past week or so, the pain
seems to be capitulating to the point where she can pronounce..."

Nada Gordon
*V. Imp.*
Faux Press,
Cambridge, Mass 2003
*****************************************************
Ecstacy

"Now experiencing mounting feeling of ecstacy and anticipation; this is all
*leading somewhere*"


Gary Sullivan
*How To Proceed in the Arts*
Faux Press,, 2001
*****************************************************

Astonishment


There are things about reality
that continue to astonish almost everyone.

Notebook
2/24/85

War and Treachery

"This war has produced perhaps the richest crop of treacheries that has every been known; which indicates a revolutionary climate- a climate, that is, where the initial state of things is gradually changing and the general standard of discernment is beginning to differ from the views of this or that group."
10th July, 1940


Destiny and Peace

"Life is not a search for experience, but for ourselves. Having discovered our own fundamental level we realize that it conforms to our destiny and we find peace."
8th August, 1940


Completion and Transcendence

"A man completes a work only when his qualities transcend that work."
14th August, 1940


Cesare Pavese
*The Burning Brand:
Diaries 1935-1950*
Walker and Company
New York, 1961

Henry Hills' Experimental Films {click here}

This rich site has a lot to offer, not only links to and discussions about the fascinating and richly conceived films of this important avant-garde filmaker, but it also features tons of links to information about many other filmakers and terrifically detailed essays concerning contemporary filmaking.

Also included are links to ::fait accompli's:: and Nada Gordon's blogged commentaries on Henry Hills' latest offering, the ongoing series *Emma's Dilemma* featuring Emma Bernstein's interviews with artists and writers including Carolee Schneeman, Ken Jacobs, Fiona Templeton, Richard Foreman, Susan Bee, Charles Bernstein, Susan Howe, Kenneth Goldsmith, Jackson Mac Low and Tony Oursler.