Monsters and Memories: A Visit to Chelsea

In a further effort to rid Toni of a persistent headache, we headed for our monthly (or so) review of the Chelsea galleries, starting with a failed attempt to sip some take-out tea on the Chelsea piers. Francie Shaw, a recent immigrant from Philadelphia, showed us how to do this last summer, only yesterday it was far too windy and cold. But, lo and behold, with Toni's usual perfect timing, when we headed for our first stop- Mike Kelley's show at the Gagosian Gallery, we ran into Lee Ann Brown and Tony Torn, who were showing their friend Peter Culley around, who happens to have a blog I've long enjoyed, mosses from an old manse [click here]. Peter Culley told me he's heading up to U Maine soon, to be reading in Steve Evans' New Poets series. The Mike Kelley show is well worth seeing: ghostly clothes blow in the wind, revealing fondly remembered erotic fantasies, tv monitors feature phantom mystical, mythical, religious initiations, reminders abound of Holloween parties of yesteryear, the show is a feast of latent childhood anxieties and superstitions; I didn't realize how well the entire effect was working on me as I chatted with Peter about blogging (I realize I can over-enthuse about this, as any reader of this blog must know). When Peter was called away by Tony a to check out the show further, as I was searching around for Toni I got startled by my own shadow!

From there we headed for the Nancy Spero show at the Galerie Lelong (528 W. 26th Street). The show, titled Cri de Coeur [click here] is a must-see (fortunately it's open until December 3). Toni explained to me that the female figures, who I thought were praying, represented a "lamentation" or ritual morning. This piece is consistent with Spero's superb work since the 60's- political insight powerfully illuminated by means of feeling. As you enter the large room of the gallery, the collaged paintings are placed around the lower part of the wall like a fresco. As you look clockwise around the room, the paintings move from light to dark, in vibrant blues, greens and reds, getting darker and darker, possibly tracking the progression of mourning and loss- finally to a cinematic fade or blackout.

From the Lelong we headed for one of Toni's usual haunts, PaceWildenstein (534 W. 25th Street). Today is the last day for the Keith Tyson show, Geno Pheno, an interesting and diverse assembly. One piece in this show impressed and moved me greatly: *Cutting the Fungal Chord #776+1 (2005)*. This sculpture consists of a large enclosure with a figurative polyester sculpture housed within. The figure is holding up a large cracked mushoom with a cord. I regret I didn't have the time to write down some of the interesting poems embossed around the sides of this eight feet or so tall, polyhedrical enclosure. The piece was constructed with steel, medium density fiberboard, glass reinforced plyester, glass, synthetic milk and pump. There were 37 pieces in the show. Born in England in 1969, Tyson has exhibited at the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Venice Biennale and the Tate Modern.

From there we headed for Michael Feinberg Fine Art [click here] (526 West 26 Street) to see the Emilie Clark *Studies in Nature*, which also closes today. Emilie Clark's strikingly beautiful paintings in this show are based on the work of Mary Trout, a little known botanist friend of Charles Darwin's, which Emilie found out about in his correspondance. Mary Trout raised carnivorous plants as did Emilie to prepare for her painting in this show. The plants Emilie raised are also on exhibit in the gallery. Emilie photographed the plants and created the paintings from the drawings, which were also exhibited. Sorry to report on this show so late, because it was superb. We promise to get to her next one much earlier, and wouldn't miss it for the world. Emilie also carefully researched earlier classical paintings concerning carnivorous plants for this show.

On to the Paul Kasmin Gallery to see the latest Kenny Scharf show which was well worth a visit. My favorite in this show was his large *Time Flies When You're Having A Good Time* which seemed like a reference to the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. A huge car is headed for a huge clock and is painted against a star-studded cosmic background. Around the corner Scharf did a must-see installation in a small space. From floor to ceiling on all the walls you find a representation of *Scharf's Closet*. Toys, fans, radio chassis, odd pieces of discarded objects are hung merrily in disarray around the room; you are supplied with a few ancient bean bag chairs to stay as long as you like and watch the fans (as in the Mike Kelley show above) blow memories around in the wind.

Our last stop yesterday was an unexpected treat, given the understated title of the show *Looking at Words*. About 275!!! artists who have used words in their works are represented. There is an amazing number of incredible works in this absolutely must-see show, up until January 14th at the Andrea Rosen Gallery, 525 West 24th Street. Some of my favorites in the show included: Jackson Mac Low, Vito Acconci, Shusaku Arakawa, Max Ernst, Henri Chopin, John Cage, Henry Darger, Marcel Duchamp, Oyvinnd Fahlstgrom, Alfred Jensen, Ray Johnson, Jasper Johns, Anselm Kiefer, Christopher Knowles, Willem DeKooning, Barbara Kruger, d.a. levy, Robert Motherwell, Picabia, Picasso, Sigmar Polke, Liubov Popova, Richard Tuttle, Dieter Roth, Rosenquist, Ed Ruscha, Kurt Schwitters, Robert Smithson, Nancy Spero, Fred Tomaselli, Jess, Jacques Mahe de la Villegle, the list goes on. Almost 300 works worth seeing many times, tons of famous artists and many I had never seen before, including 5 great pieces by Marius de Zayas [click here], an amazing artist completely new to me. This show, on its own, is a short course in art history- including many of the works that presaged the growing vispo phenomenon.

Poetry Reading Cures Week Long Migraine

In what might be a first in medical and poetical history, Toni Simon announced yesterday at the Bowery Poetry Club that a poetry reading had made her laugh so hard it cured her week-long migraine headache. Two poets were featured at the Club, Drew Gardner and Alan Davies. Drew read from his book - Petroleum Hat- (newly published by Roof Books). He accompanied himself excellently at the electric piano along with a fine bass player and drummer; shades of Bob Dylan. Is this possibly a preamble to a new major poetic form: the flarf opera?

Here are some lines from the poem that knocked out Toni's headache: (*JOHN DENVER WAWA SHADOW PUPPET GOVERNMENT*)

"soon we'll all be praying to John Denver
if we don't allow right-wing poor people to be happy ALL the time,
teach their kids how to pray in the direction of pizza
yet see no problem
with the Lord's Prayer printed in ghostly pubic hair"

Since a CD was cut at the reading, there is some possibility that those of you who could not be there might at some point get to listen to a recording. Stay tuned!

Alan Davies read from a long work-in-progress. I spoke with him after the reading and learned that the work is, at this point, well over 300 pages! The whole is as yet untitled, and is divided in 10 books. He read from Book 9. These were powerfully lyrical, meditative poems. It was hard to break away from listening to jot down some lines:

"the words are like dictation from one's self to one's self"

"don't try... it writes itself"

"let the wild words win"

"no more smoking
no more drinking
just looking
to see if you're there"

"frail fugue of video"

"literary anxiety's the worst
blaming everybody
for cultural demise
when it's the reverse"

"the lollipop hop
before we drop"

"just as plunder hungers
hunger plunders"

"people are designed
to be stupid"

"it's all about risk, asshole
if you're not going to take it
you ain't going to make it"

Alan Davies left the stage, all too soon, to thunderous applause.

Audience sightings: Lee Ann Brown, Mitch Highfill, Bob Perelman, Marianne Shaneen, Ulla Dydo, Pierre Joris, Bruce Andrews, Tom Savage, Katie Degentesh, Tim Peterson, Sharon Mesmer, Jonathan Mayhew, Adeena Karasik, publisher James Sherry, Deborah Thomas, Rodrigo Toscano, Laura Elrick and hosts: Nada Gordon and Gary Sullivan.

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Blogger

I was surprised to hear myself say, at lunch with a very
close friend, that I didn’t care for blogs as much as
I used to. Then, when I found myself yesterday and today reading and re-reading
this post, from Cosmopoetica [click here] and this one from Equanimity [click here] I wondered what I could have been thinking the other day, chatting with my friend, who does not happen to be a blogger, but who is otherwise intensely involved with poetry and the internet. Maybe part of the feeling had to do with the conversations I had read recently on Limetree [click here] about Dead Kitten poetics. This discussion has to do with a Mary Oliver poem that KSM, Drew Gardner [click here]and others, possibly including Mary Oliver herself (never can tell with these comment signatures)have been intensely discussing. The issue is an all too familiar one in blogland: can anyone say with certainty that this or that poem is “bad.” Kasey concludes that you can say a poem is adequate or inadequate. I’ve succumbed to this discussion too many times already (usually with Jonathan Mayhew- who, as has been once celebrated in song, is back in town again -I’m sure to see him tomorrow at the Bowery Poetry Club where Alan Davies and Drew Gardner are reading).
My point, during the last go round with Jonathan (or was it the one before?) that a poem is sort of like a prayer, and what would be a bad prayer? I think Jonathan’s response had to do with the possibility of opening a ball game with one, or praying that your team might win, I’m not sure which, or if I got his point right at all. I guess I got a little impatient, along with Drew, that the whole discusion seemed a bit too reminiscent of the dark side of the poetics list .

The thing is, I really liked Jordan’s little essay above, as I did the one above that from Cosmopoetica. I remember recently that Ernesto Priego [click here] made the comment that blogging is evolving its own form of literature. And I think of the somewhat damaged copy of Rousseau’s confessions deposited now in the smallest room in the apartment. Gertrude Stein famously said that remarks are not literature. Sorry Gertrude. But, sometimes, at least, in blogland now, they most definitely are, despite the occasional gusts of hot air. We pick and choose, we like and we don't like, and sometimes we talk about why, why, why.
*
Ernesto Priego (Never Neutral) [click here] expands on his thoughts about blogging as a form of literature, with a few understandable, and crucial, caveats. Thanks, Ernesto for dedicating your 1000th blog post to me! I am moved and eagerly looking forward to the next 1000, and many more.


******
Tony Tost's The Unquiet Grave [click here] hosted a discussion on Dead Kitten poetics, replete with rewritten versions of his own, Thomas Basboll, et al.
**
Laura Carter [click here] weighs in on Dead Kitten poetics.

**
Guess what Jonathan Mayhew [click here] would say about the Mary Oliver kitten poem.

Time Undisturbed: A Quick Interview with Nico Vassilakis


Nico Vassilakis’ recent works include Concrete: Movies, a vispo dvd, Texts for Nothing, But Cut Up and StampOlogue. At the end of StampOlogue there is an afterword by Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino to which Nico wrote a brief response. When I quoted this response on fait accompli recently, I mistyped the final sentence as :”staring at vispo creates the potential for vispo.” Nico emailed a note of appreciation and corrected my typo. This led me to suggest a mini-interview because I found his actual statement not only to be interesting but to ring true.


NP: I am curious, though. How does "staring at textpo create the potential for vispo"?


NV: “I’m looking through you, you're not the same.”

The initial act of reading is staring. When you add saccades you initiate movement.

Text itself is an amalgam of units of meaning. Words, right. As you stare at text you notice the visual aspects of letters. As you stare further meaning loses its hierarchy and words discorporate and the alphabet itself begins to surface. Shapes, space relations, visual associations emerge as you delve further. Alphabetic bits or parts or snippets of letters can create an added visual vocabulary amidst the very text you're reading.

As when you are perched on a mountain’s peak though the panoramic view is fetching you tend to focus on an interesting pebble at your feet. Something quantum about it.

(In my early twenties my friend, John Ventimiglia, and I hammered out our own simple art movement. We called those involved The Starists. The idea is that a person is engaged in two ways of interacting with the world. One is action, people immersed in myriad levels of activity. The many physical attempts to manipulate time. The other is staring. That being people involved in varying degrees of focus. The constant observation of being inside or living alongside time. Action is a means to harness time. Staring as a portal, a doorknob into the larger notion of time. The immediacy and infinity of time vying for attention. The starist is drawn toward promoting “time undisturbed”)

(Mildly similar to the abstract expressionists or the Morton Feldmans of the world that offer both a snapshot and a container for time to exist unfettered. There is both a muted ego and non-aggressive intention in their work. Mildly dissimilar in that it's a less productive endeavor. There is less art product when staring is the poem & noise is the music. Living in wider time is the silence of doing, the doing of silence. Staring, etc.)


NP: Can you say more about “meaning loses its hierarchy?”

NV: Staring changes content as we think meaning is permanent. Meaning loses value, clarity, importance, its ability to generate income. Staring changes a word irrevocably, but only once and in one way only.

A moment is bundled. You see a word and it means what you recall of its definition. That happens in less than a second. As if automatic. You don't typically spend more time than that, but if you did.

The word call. Stared. Is see all or california eleven or circa 2.
It loses or sheds meaning.

You draw words. A picture of a word of what it's related to. The object’s verisimilitude in a word.

c c
c
a a a
((((((((((((((( l l
l )))))))))))))))
l l
l

I suppose meaning can shift from moment to moment, from reading to reading, from hat to that, from appetite to appetizer, from trend to bend, but the signifier, the definitional aspects of words are so deeply embedded they hardly stray.

But when you do spend time it's instantly apparent that we are not only surrounded by our writing (and what we're told the writing means), but there are fewer places to go to retreat from it. What started as cave drawings has yet to cease and we have tagged everything around us.

So visual writing is closer to it.

(Stopped in traffic, waiting for the light to change - you find a logo. These people exploit our ability to stare. They tap into our personal time, the time yre not doing anything, that special disconnected to immediacy time. Meaning loses hierarchy when what yre looking at doesn’t matter, when it begins to alter without constraint, when it enters a tunnel and exits elsewhere.)

NP: Meaning, meaning everywhere, and not a drop to think. This was the appeal of Ashbery's *Tennis Court Oath* for me at the time of its publication in the 60's, the absence or transfiguration of meaning into words to look at. I liked what you said in your MiPoesias interview about letting "time and experience accrue."


NV: Squeeze more breath out a sentence and press Ashbery’s margin return key.

Writing from back to front, from last to first, from then to now. After an allotment of time starts the culling & gleaning of texts. Longhand into tiny notebooks I carry for months. Preferring to wait, to ripen chemically. I don’t wipe down the walls to make room for more words. Approaching it as needed. A late bloomer, not till 15 yrs old did it happen that I heard voice in my head. Previous, my thoughts were in a flowing visual continuum. So writing was to document my own new sound.

The twang of inebriate accuracy. The carousel dizzy plummet devises entry. Where you want to be. Delete the bullshit to point at what remains. When is truth a mule, when is truth a chaos you carry, when is truth an obsession you wear. Approaching buttons you are ready to push. One stare is one flower only through the tethers that connect it. Made of the same ingredients we harness the same drive to continue, but it replicates naturally with no intention of worth in another's eyes. A quizzical foray into tearing this wall paper, this build-up, but I am not a wall. It is trickery this fabricating a way to absolve the veils between it and me. The closest it gets is still tucked in self-absorbed extraction. The monkey distraught at finding itself in the city. No puzzle of beer strong enough to cajole the entirety out, so it’s a snippet. And this equals the time you’re willing to spend. Written during commute. Drafts in segue. Shiny morsels. Encapsulations on the run. No disciplined scribe here. No calendar specific pen. No keyboard soldier. A mountain’s an easier target. The subtle adjustment, the oversized straw’s struggle to suck out miniature fluids. A careless minefield. Erupting in time. Throwing nets to catch the one. Attracted to misreading and the tumult of turning words. Tiny notebook. The weather’s not it, it never is. You write your way through. Glad to remove the glare, the weight, the ashtray, and the pendulum sound. Always trying to fill tiny notebooks.

The mishaps and misadventures of mishearing.

"My obsession with surface is the subject of my music. In a sense, my compositions are really not "compositions" at all. One might call them time canvases in which I more or less prime the canvas with an overall hue of the music. I have learned that the more one composes or constructs --the more one prevents Time Undisturbed from becoming the controlling metaphor of the music."
MF
*****************************************************
Links, Responses


Crag Hill (Poetry Scorecard) [click here] recently posted some links to online publications of Nico Vassilakis' work.

**************************
Quoted by < Harry K. Stammer [click here](from the Nico Vassilakis interview above)"As you stare further meaning loses its hierarchy and words discorporate and the alphabet itself begins to surface. Shapes, space relations, visual associations emerge as you delve further. Alphabetic bits or parts or snippets of letters can create an added visual vocabulary amidst the very text you're reading."

(Harry K. Stammer's response): >>>the staring is key, even in textpo that becomes other textpo... not as visual vocabulary but as unintended alphabetic/word/sentence vocabulary. yeah, it branches back to visual snippets and associations... i love the mixture of both,,, Nico has it down... break it up without doing anything (it breaks itself), one word many syllables other meanings... His work is very cool!<<<<

************************
Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino sent us this link
from
Eratio [click here] that includes selections from
StampOlogue and St. Thomasino's response (included
in the print version of the piece)
Note: use the horizontal scroll bar and keep scrolling to your right to view the piece and read St. Thomasino's notes to the piece.

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]

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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.