: Friday, May 16, 2003 ::
Truthfully, I haven't had a single interesting thought for about three days.
--
:: John 1:00 PM [+] ::
John Erhardt of *The Skeptic* is now officially a nominee for the *fait accompli* Oxymoron of the Year award. Personal disclosures being almost always interesting on a blog, this statement technically qualifies.
Bill Marsh is the other nominee with his statement on *SDPG* that he is "trying to survive as a writer without actually being one."
4.18.2003
Press Release: SDPG Nominated for Award
SDPG has been nominated for the prestigious "Best Blogged Oxymoron of the Year Award" for a statement issued earlier this week.
The announcement came on the morning of Wednesday, April 16. Fait Accompli, an organization dedicated to "spellbound speculations" and "time travel," offered the nomination in response to the following statement, which appeared in the April 15 edition of the SDPG blog:
"I'm trying to survive as a writer without actually being one. Perhaps that's the best way to put it."
SDPG accepted the nomination, but according to an anonymous spokesperson, the Group is cautious about its prospects.
"We're hopeful, but then again, there's so much oxymoron out there you never know who's going to walk away with the award," the spokesperson said.
SDPG also promised more oxymorons in the near future. "We'll do what we can for as long as the luck holds out."
However, SDPG denied allegations that the oxymoron was deliberately planted in the April 15 blog in order to win back disgruntled fans lost in the wake of the Group's unexplained name change.
"We don't operate like that," the spokesperson said. "All of our oxymorons are free to come and go as they please."
Nonetheless, SDPG is grateful for the nomination and plans to attend the award ceremony, scheduled for later this year.
bill marsh | link
4.15.2003
Distribution Automatique
Friday, May 16
5/17/76
While I am remembering something,
something else occurs.
In one space every movement is vast,
in that movement I am a whole world.
After each feeling I look back. That
world no longer exists. It's only a
moment and its already changed. I
(made up) told a story and I expected to
correct it later.
(Later)
I got drunk on my anger, etc.
(turns up)
Many pictures emerge, repeat in a series:
Every moment has duration, a
presentiment, a disclosure, a destiny
and a specific quality all its own.The
predicted, the genuinely experienced presentiment
of the future can be a blindfold because it
excludes the moments between, the gaps between
the shared events.That is your private
world. Its lines trace its thoughts back
to words.
Images don't correspond to moments.
Someone is caressing the sand, someone
the sea itself, developing some pictures.
Someone said "you should think before you
act" and someone said "give it a few
more weeks." That's not a person though.
A person is more like "though" not
meaning or wishing a specific definition
of anything (least of all a sequence of words).
Unmemorable.
I can (build up) arrange my collage like this each piece random and unalterable, but
instantly changeable into its opposite or placeable on some
other edge or ending, some
vein reaching out for some other
vein.
I want to decipher the collage.
It is a language like thought
unconnected to objects, undistracted by
objects, impervious to the illusion that
an idea might exist in such an attachment.
I spell it by cutting out
and arranging the pictures in a
hieroglyphic series:
if that's how you were I just forgot, etc.
Just as forgetting has a neutral
scent, like a long breath of air into
the mind, the mind exhales what it
draws to itself.The sea is ungrateful for my attention
same bones washed up on the beach
are my bones, same mistakes
Its meaning is clear, the words opaque,
the gestures are visible, the text
transparent
The amazing red dawn
gulls going by that morning on this
morning present past
during, not before
thinking of those colors
and the big gulls descending ( they ? descend, etc
would this abrupt sound scare her away?
The heat suddenly overcomes a man and he
feels detached.Slowly, so infinitely slowly
he notices the sea. It seems to take such a
long time. Anticipation of surprise shows
on his face.
What speaks clear dies in its expression. The inexpressive
silence that began the day was not completely
resolved in its masked absence. No person is
composed of a series of altered signs. Make him speak in
symbolic characters,make his words
untranslateable figures,hieroglyphic
signposts preceding language. It isn't
only silent when it negates itself, it is
silent in its act of observing its own
transitions.
I picked up the scissors and cut a
black and white photograph of a plain wood
building (an obviously deserted army barracks) out of
a magazine.I cut out another picture of a rainy day. three people singing
in front of a small church, cut it
down to one person and half the other,
attach, it to the left side of the wood building.
etc. to > "obejcts of thought"
Words are abstract, close disorders of
thought not fit for remembering. Or thought
grows away at its words, seems to
pause without pausing, excitement for
nothing. A bone and fruit, side by side.
they went- etc.
Every time I write the date I speak your name.
And I retrieve it from the dust of its origin.
A poem has an imperfect face.- noplace
to let it fall- outside more inside-
rhythm is memory- nothing precedes-
nothing more
The rain looked white on the windows
and felt like ashes on my fingers.
In silence
In a dim language
without reference
to the inner counterpart
the small acts of pleasure, etc
it' like a big skip in the fabric of time
a particularly tough weave in the wholecloth of our association
Somewhere around St Thomas
I found something red
which reminds me of you
and I know you know
this is my only way to keep silent
and listen
to transform my thoughts
according to specific memories
we hare
the birds around here
have to sing into the ever-increasing density
of the implosion my silence draws into me
an empty universe inside an even emptier order of memories
No, I don't know
No, no in a dream
the text's a chance
no bets
the professor is quiet
out to the bar- games-
an accurate phrase out of phase
Listen in light of what comes next
not what came before that
but what's next as what's coming before
How else to express it than in
symbolic characters, words returning away
from representations into abstract forms,
untranslateable figures thrown out of the
mind like formless masses of spacial design,
suggestive perhaps of the mind's langujage
before words, the cacaphony and squawks
of feeling- of anger and laugter, delight and
fear, terror and awe.
While I am remembering something,
something else occurs.
In one space every movement is vast,
in that movement I am a whole world.
After each feeling I look back. That
world no longer exists. It's only a
moment and its already changed. I
(made up) told a story and I expected to
correct it later.
(Later)
I got drunk on my anger, etc.
(turns up)
Many pictures emerge, repeat in a series:
Every moment has duration, a
presentiment, a disclosure, a destiny
and a specific quality all its own.The
predicted, the genuinely experienced presentiment
of the future can be a blindfold because it
excludes the moments between, the gaps between
the shared events.That is your private
world. Its lines trace its thoughts back
to words.
Images don't correspond to moments.
Someone is caressing the sand, someone
the sea itself, developing some pictures.
Someone said "you should think before you
act" and someone said "give it a few
more weeks." That's not a person though.
A person is more like "though" not
meaning or wishing a specific definition
of anything (least of all a sequence of words).
Unmemorable.
I can (build up) arrange my collage like this each piece random and unalterable, but
instantly changeable into its opposite or placeable on some
other edge or ending, some
vein reaching out for some other
vein.
I want to decipher the collage.
It is a language like thought
unconnected to objects, undistracted by
objects, impervious to the illusion that
an idea might exist in such an attachment.
I spell it by cutting out
and arranging the pictures in a
hieroglyphic series:
if that's how you were I just forgot, etc.
Just as forgetting has a neutral
scent, like a long breath of air into
the mind, the mind exhales what it
draws to itself.The sea is ungrateful for my attention
same bones washed up on the beach
are my bones, same mistakes
Its meaning is clear, the words opaque,
the gestures are visible, the text
transparent
The amazing red dawn
gulls going by that morning on this
morning present past
during, not before
thinking of those colors
and the big gulls descending ( they ? descend, etc
would this abrupt sound scare her away?
The heat suddenly overcomes a man and he
feels detached.Slowly, so infinitely slowly
he notices the sea. It seems to take such a
long time. Anticipation of surprise shows
on his face.
What speaks clear dies in its expression. The inexpressive
silence that began the day was not completely
resolved in its masked absence. No person is
composed of a series of altered signs. Make him speak in
symbolic characters,make his words
untranslateable figures,hieroglyphic
signposts preceding language. It isn't
only silent when it negates itself, it is
silent in its act of observing its own
transitions.
I picked up the scissors and cut a
black and white photograph of a plain wood
building (an obviously deserted army barracks) out of
a magazine.I cut out another picture of a rainy day. three people singing
in front of a small church, cut it
down to one person and half the other,
attach, it to the left side of the wood building.
etc. to > "obejcts of thought"
Words are abstract, close disorders of
thought not fit for remembering. Or thought
grows away at its words, seems to
pause without pausing, excitement for
nothing. A bone and fruit, side by side.
they went- etc.
Every time I write the date I speak your name.
And I retrieve it from the dust of its origin.
A poem has an imperfect face.- noplace
to let it fall- outside more inside-
rhythm is memory- nothing precedes-
nothing more
The rain looked white on the windows
and felt like ashes on my fingers.
In silence
In a dim language
without reference
to the inner counterpart
the small acts of pleasure, etc
it' like a big skip in the fabric of time
a particularly tough weave in the wholecloth of our association
Somewhere around St Thomas
I found something red
which reminds me of you
and I know you know
this is my only way to keep silent
and listen
to transform my thoughts
according to specific memories
we hare
the birds around here
have to sing into the ever-increasing density
of the implosion my silence draws into me
an empty universe inside an even emptier order of memories
No, I don't know
No, no in a dream
the text's a chance
no bets
the professor is quiet
out to the bar- games-
an accurate phrase out of phase
Listen in light of what comes next
not what came before that
but what's next as what's coming before
How else to express it than in
symbolic characters, words returning away
from representations into abstract forms,
untranslateable figures thrown out of the
mind like formless masses of spacial design,
suggestive perhaps of the mind's langujage
before words, the cacaphony and squawks
of feeling- of anger and laugter, delight and
fear, terror and awe.
May 8, 1976
Every time I write the date I speak your name. (There is no ambiguity about which year it is. The words before are symbols for the very specific fact that this year is separate, specific. When I forgot how to write I could read almost any sign before or after the sign (Does this shuttling avoid emotions that are subsequent to an absence of the corresponding words- the disclosure of a secret message behind the words that contains everything? I hold back the response, and loaded with language I can change the pitch. Where do I get the colors from, then, the form of the things described. Does everything have to remain previous to the disclosure, restraining myself before I write the symbol that corresponds to its object? Reverie and confusion. When the world seems to be conspiring for me I feel it is conspiring against me. Also, I see in this a desire for freedom. Love believes very strongly in its opposite. The thing in us most strongly bound wants to get bound in order to get even more strongly bound in order to get the strength to break free. The relativity of my feelings in relation to yours makes this whole game seem ridiculous. After all that struggle I only found out that the feelings existed only for themselves. Only for themselves! And the ambiguity never changes. It is our only real surprise.
Every time I write the date I speak your name. (There is no ambiguity about which year it is. The words before are symbols for the very specific fact that this year is separate, specific. When I forgot how to write I could read almost any sign before or after the sign (Does this shuttling avoid emotions that are subsequent to an absence of the corresponding words- the disclosure of a secret message behind the words that contains everything? I hold back the response, and loaded with language I can change the pitch. Where do I get the colors from, then, the form of the things described. Does everything have to remain previous to the disclosure, restraining myself before I write the symbol that corresponds to its object? Reverie and confusion. When the world seems to be conspiring for me I feel it is conspiring against me. Also, I see in this a desire for freedom. Love believes very strongly in its opposite. The thing in us most strongly bound wants to get bound in order to get even more strongly bound in order to get the strength to break free. The relativity of my feelings in relation to yours makes this whole game seem ridiculous. After all that struggle I only found out that the feelings existed only for themselves. Only for themselves! And the ambiguity never changes. It is our only real surprise.
I wrote this on May 2, 1976.
The Museum Factory
Smoking
No smoking
Order as the desire for order...the body
is light.
No smokiing I take it there as the
arrangement prefigured there
Smoking I make the symbols attach
simultaneously alone and not alone in term of my awareness of a person.
No smoking the pronoun seems to have a decision and can be copied.
Smoking for one instance
What has absence
of what is absence
No smoking bent the selected word has an apparent vocabulary. to increase the extent of this vocabulary, at a certain intensity, the raised voice has a certain distinction.
In the absence of smoking, the absence of reference- a colored crayon, for instance- the particular shape of a moral choice.
Smoking it seems to have an ascent. One single noise could erase all this. I am at the point of noticing the inception of preventing something from emerging, the said desire. I can illustrate it's all inflamed- imflamed or inflamed. The order of a calligram as the suggestion of a symbol. No, so I stop mself. This stopping has its own paper. I scribble out the thoughts on the erasable pad. And just forget.
Just as forgetting has a neutral scent, like a long breath of air into the mind, to setting down to naming the inanimate parts of the smell. the mind refuses what is drawn towards yourself. No smoking no smoking no smoking. Or, you can uncover new forms of smell and write it all backwards, drawing it on the back page and now and again referring to it. Smoking, it is the answer of those words referring to another complete language. No smoking creates the immediate urgency of no smell. No words for one person. Presented as an inanimate being in the transition of signs, the denial of symbolizing transfers the effort to the back-up position: no smoking. Eventually I will be obliged to negate the value of the image, the pictorial command in my brain that directs me to the objects those thoughts represent.
(this fades out as the argument loses its force)
Again, the signifier has been defeated. The history recorded here seems to lack certain details. True, it returns, it repeats itself centering on the same old patterns, positive and negative, prohibition and freedom, the text does seem spare. Or maybe just not spare enough.The whole atmosphere of immediate danger alludes to change. Its texture suggests a puzze.
No one in his right mind would have troubled to be worred about a concept of vertical and horizontal to the extent that this worry would replace the value of a postive sign for absence. Still at the first onset of a delay the explanation would be almost randomly juxtaposed. Afraid, accused of rhetoric, I back away from the elusiveness of the signifier. I am filled with a happy disgust because I feel relieved of being trapped by the sensuality of the image. I am inevitably drawn to smoking, to conversation. Smoking I am conveniently avoiding the terrifying question of purpose. Only with absence, and denial, I am truly affirming the signifier. I am relieved of naming the name.
"I've looked at words from both sides now from win or lose from up and down, it's words' allusions I recall I really don't know words at all."
The conversation is recorded as a catalogue of relics. Memories forcibly retracted. Expropriated- or, taken from private ownership for public use. Insofar as I can say, I was really relieved at first that the density of the signification decreased in value to me as much as it increased- the effects of these two values invariably cancelled each other out- the essential "no smoking" and "smoking" might be too conventional. In the brown leather carpeted train car I add the sign: "Smoking sometimes." Not exactly a masterpiece of situational melodrama, but linguistically it is suggestive. No smoking, definately no smoking.
(A locale emerges)
Teste: "I don't even think anymore, having the presentiment, as soon as an idea arises, that an immense system gets started an enormous toil is called for, and that I shall never go as far as I know it is necessary to go."
(Abbreviation- think more about what that is used for. I say goodbye with a reminder.)
(May 2, 1976)
The Museum Factory
Smoking
No smoking
Order as the desire for order...the body
is light.
No smokiing I take it there as the
arrangement prefigured there
Smoking I make the symbols attach
simultaneously alone and not alone in term of my awareness of a person.
No smoking the pronoun seems to have a decision and can be copied.
Smoking for one instance
What has absence
of what is absence
No smoking bent the selected word has an apparent vocabulary. to increase the extent of this vocabulary, at a certain intensity, the raised voice has a certain distinction.
In the absence of smoking, the absence of reference- a colored crayon, for instance- the particular shape of a moral choice.
Smoking it seems to have an ascent. One single noise could erase all this. I am at the point of noticing the inception of preventing something from emerging, the said desire. I can illustrate it's all inflamed- imflamed or inflamed. The order of a calligram as the suggestion of a symbol. No, so I stop mself. This stopping has its own paper. I scribble out the thoughts on the erasable pad. And just forget.
Just as forgetting has a neutral scent, like a long breath of air into the mind, to setting down to naming the inanimate parts of the smell. the mind refuses what is drawn towards yourself. No smoking no smoking no smoking. Or, you can uncover new forms of smell and write it all backwards, drawing it on the back page and now and again referring to it. Smoking, it is the answer of those words referring to another complete language. No smoking creates the immediate urgency of no smell. No words for one person. Presented as an inanimate being in the transition of signs, the denial of symbolizing transfers the effort to the back-up position: no smoking. Eventually I will be obliged to negate the value of the image, the pictorial command in my brain that directs me to the objects those thoughts represent.
(this fades out as the argument loses its force)
Again, the signifier has been defeated. The history recorded here seems to lack certain details. True, it returns, it repeats itself centering on the same old patterns, positive and negative, prohibition and freedom, the text does seem spare. Or maybe just not spare enough.The whole atmosphere of immediate danger alludes to change. Its texture suggests a puzze.
No one in his right mind would have troubled to be worred about a concept of vertical and horizontal to the extent that this worry would replace the value of a postive sign for absence. Still at the first onset of a delay the explanation would be almost randomly juxtaposed. Afraid, accused of rhetoric, I back away from the elusiveness of the signifier. I am filled with a happy disgust because I feel relieved of being trapped by the sensuality of the image. I am inevitably drawn to smoking, to conversation. Smoking I am conveniently avoiding the terrifying question of purpose. Only with absence, and denial, I am truly affirming the signifier. I am relieved of naming the name.
"I've looked at words from both sides now from win or lose from up and down, it's words' allusions I recall I really don't know words at all."
The conversation is recorded as a catalogue of relics. Memories forcibly retracted. Expropriated- or, taken from private ownership for public use. Insofar as I can say, I was really relieved at first that the density of the signification decreased in value to me as much as it increased- the effects of these two values invariably cancelled each other out- the essential "no smoking" and "smoking" might be too conventional. In the brown leather carpeted train car I add the sign: "Smoking sometimes." Not exactly a masterpiece of situational melodrama, but linguistically it is suggestive. No smoking, definately no smoking.
(A locale emerges)
Teste: "I don't even think anymore, having the presentiment, as soon as an idea arises, that an immense system gets started an enormous toil is called for, and that I shall never go as far as I know it is necessary to go."
(Abbreviation- think more about what that is used for. I say goodbye with a reminder.)
(May 2, 1976)
Thursday, May 15
Density, what's in that? I don't know another word for what I'm thinking. If it is too close it burns. Words burn. Somebody might say hot shit, planets, the earth doesn't fall apart, it's firm. Who goes in there. Back up, make a poem, not everybody has to believe in me. For example, would Frank O'Hara say that. I could check that out thoroughly. Dictionaries can tell you something but nobody really needs a dictator. Dictionaries may say things.
How much distance does someone need to accurately describe a toothbrush, for example, or create a definition for love. I was waiting a long time for that. Glad it's understood.
If you don't look close you can see the Eiffel Tower. If you look you can see it. I read magazines and discover all poems take place in galleries for example. I wonder how you would say that in French.
You can still see the Eiffel Tower. Pain lasts long no matter how long it is. I wonder how that would be spoken in Chinese. If you spoke to me in Chinese softly I would understand a great deal more of what you're saying. Got that? PLanets proceed on their courses, love isn't accurate, pleasure, after a after a after a after a word.
And what defines the grammar of density, the coefficients of communication, the minute meaningless gestures of obliqueness. A somewhat long pause could surprise the action of dictionary definitions, the monotonous frontline descriptions of chance, church liturgies are filled with such rituals that are constructed to contain the elaborate rhythms of mental speech. Orders of incantation are boring. But sometimes boredom brings such wonderful colorless explanations, smells and just plain astonishing emptiness. Ah the bells and the bells' voices are wonderful, they're appearing to hum a hieroglyphic diagram of word concepts.
(3/13/76)
How much distance does someone need to accurately describe a toothbrush, for example, or create a definition for love. I was waiting a long time for that. Glad it's understood.
If you don't look close you can see the Eiffel Tower. If you look you can see it. I read magazines and discover all poems take place in galleries for example. I wonder how you would say that in French.
You can still see the Eiffel Tower. Pain lasts long no matter how long it is. I wonder how that would be spoken in Chinese. If you spoke to me in Chinese softly I would understand a great deal more of what you're saying. Got that? PLanets proceed on their courses, love isn't accurate, pleasure, after a after a after a after a word.
And what defines the grammar of density, the coefficients of communication, the minute meaningless gestures of obliqueness. A somewhat long pause could surprise the action of dictionary definitions, the monotonous frontline descriptions of chance, church liturgies are filled with such rituals that are constructed to contain the elaborate rhythms of mental speech. Orders of incantation are boring. But sometimes boredom brings such wonderful colorless explanations, smells and just plain astonishing emptiness. Ah the bells and the bells' voices are wonderful, they're appearing to hum a hieroglyphic diagram of word concepts.
(3/13/76)
Later
I got drunk on my anger.
I sang my song to you without words first.
But later I spoke in anger.
I don't remember now what I was saying.
Maybe you were thinking of seagulls or the
dead earth welcoming a flower.
Maybe you were tired and resonant
like wood drums out of your heartbeat.
I promise I was listening.
I crept towards what I felt to be later
and later when I caught myself speaking
again about me and some stupid notion
of respect I was also watching you and trying hard to understand.
Sometimes I kept silent. I was wondering
what you were gathering in your corner
of small secret objects.
I'll say I invented a color for you for today-
I had to do it...the ocean, I have
it all figured out. It is arranged in the form of
a sign and not a name. Later things
will remember their given names.
So goodbye to the seed of the poem.
The fruit is already
here and it will be eaten
or die, rotting.
The rotting will be beautiful.
It creates a strong perfume
that lingers.
(3/13/76)
I got drunk on my anger.
I sang my song to you without words first.
But later I spoke in anger.
I don't remember now what I was saying.
Maybe you were thinking of seagulls or the
dead earth welcoming a flower.
Maybe you were tired and resonant
like wood drums out of your heartbeat.
I promise I was listening.
I crept towards what I felt to be later
and later when I caught myself speaking
again about me and some stupid notion
of respect I was also watching you and trying hard to understand.
Sometimes I kept silent. I was wondering
what you were gathering in your corner
of small secret objects.
I'll say I invented a color for you for today-
I had to do it...the ocean, I have
it all figured out. It is arranged in the form of
a sign and not a name. Later things
will remember their given names.
So goodbye to the seed of the poem.
The fruit is already
here and it will be eaten
or die, rotting.
The rotting will be beautiful.
It creates a strong perfume
that lingers.
(3/13/76)
1976
Type up sections that will be read as/ they are and rewrite later / a unity will emerge
Collage pieces-"in this collage...the domain of thought"
collage piece- "I am planning a collage"
Why did I have to find the collage piece and make that connection?
I think of Bernadette writing- this is no collage
the reading a (personal) narrative parly of the past several years since average thought-
as I was going thru the work I thought of /alluding to things I have written-
the poem of involuntary memory springing from an object- quickly reading through them as I arrange the writing- *thinking of the reading as a symphony*- so that the parts will flow from each other musically and the feelings will vary as in life-
John- "French like a violin." me- /(English like an orchestra-) the opening phrases-introductory-/then- the main theme stated
(5/16/76)
vacuumed, mopped bath and kitchen. Jan saw Jeff. She came home upset. I got angry. Crazy stuff about lovemaking and me feeling she is silly. Blown away from the table. But someone is here. Before, during and after- 3 notebooks.
(5/17/76)
the deepest part of a poem is brought into being by its profoundest hearing.
"...the fertile/Thought- associations that until now come/ So easily, appear no more, or rarely./...receiving/dreams and inspirations on an unassigned/Frequency/...withdraw that hand,/offer it no longer as shield of a greeting, Francesco:/...an invitation/Never mailed, the "it was all a dream"/Syndrome.../...and the ache/of this waking dream can never drown out/the diagram still sketched on the wind,/Chosen, meant for mel.../once feels too confined"
Self-Portrait In A Convex Mirror
(5/18/76)
Now she keeps interrogating me. "Why are you angry at me," etc. That I'm not talking about.
(5/21/76)
My rage. And then I read tonight and it was boring. Osvaldo said- if you read like that you'll put them to sleep. And John talked about young professors reading their papers. In his 40's- they started listening to Mallarme. Because they never listened- does this mean I didn't say it? C felt nothing.
J- I'm too intellectual.
But I'm trying to crack the code of the universe.
And Jennifer- barraged with images. I feel so hopeless. Like it was all a waste. And I felt driven all along.
You people someday who pore over this- these diamonds- I am so angry- know that I am 33 and still suffering in silence. Only P is listening. And now a few more. So remember- only P listened and read what he said. Also for history- I am so angry- I almost died trying to crack the code and now it's cracked. It is only a few pages- 20 pages now and no title and 25 poems. But nobody has done better, of this I'm sure. If someone bothers to unravel it- sound out the music and listen- it is very beautiful. I feel crazy tonight. Really crazy. But I wrote the 17-20 pages and I did that. It took me so long.
(5/26/76)
Read interview with Paul Newman. He was saying that nothing is happening in the theater because there is no new vision following Williams. The other day in the shower I thought a characteristic of this age would be the age of autonomy. Sort of where the Williams play ended. What happens to Jim then? You hear the image of a Kerouak-finally back with his mother- so the idea of a person struggling to achieve autonomy not in relation (only) to others- but within. He also talked about emotions. The Jung distinction. It's true people are not interested in politics. He described all the old stuff as "Kitchen drama." Mary Hartmann- meaning- centering in the family.
You see the autonomy constantly in Antonioni. Of course a theory of drama is a prime requisite for a new artistic vision- otherwise the perspective is fragmentary. Nothing wrong with fragments- but fragments cannot hold the attention of a mind that is not particularly creative. And art is not just meant for creative minds. Novels, t.v., movies, record, all in a vacuum because there is no unifying vision.
Stillness, repose(Lacan- feminine)/ Waiting for Godot-/End of the idea of "development"/w/o "story"-no ":plot"/w/o "plot" - no drama/Actors Studiio-still-evocations of "lower class" emotions- Williams, Inge/now "emotions" are flattened out- t.v./a person *alone*- to reverse the/old hollywood romantic notion-/romanticize autonomy (Antonioni's long walks)- also the dream- / the person alone uncovering/significance-the/"private eye" wakes up and makes his own correspondances and formulates his own values- also the appeal of such a person- he operates alone and discusses his plans with no one- is thereby free from the mother symbol-
Now uncovering significances- value in relation to a self-/ The value of the class is practice in emotional recall- exactly what I couldn't learn from A- I'm practicing there-/Finding a media for the communication of my energies-/All the bullshit about human potential. One of the things wrong with psychoanalysis. A new vision of drama wd be a new psychology upon which to base *actions*/A. Why do you have to stay angry for so long?
You're never going to change./A' s giving *up*on people.
Interesting- the class is on *Tuesday*
(5/30/76
Type up sections that will be read as/ they are and rewrite later / a unity will emerge
Collage pieces-"in this collage...the domain of thought"
collage piece- "I am planning a collage"
Why did I have to find the collage piece and make that connection?
I think of Bernadette writing- this is no collage
the reading a (personal) narrative parly of the past several years since average thought-
as I was going thru the work I thought of /alluding to things I have written-
the poem of involuntary memory springing from an object- quickly reading through them as I arrange the writing- *thinking of the reading as a symphony*- so that the parts will flow from each other musically and the feelings will vary as in life-
John- "French like a violin." me- /(English like an orchestra-) the opening phrases-introductory-/then- the main theme stated
(5/16/76)
vacuumed, mopped bath and kitchen. Jan saw Jeff. She came home upset. I got angry. Crazy stuff about lovemaking and me feeling she is silly. Blown away from the table. But someone is here. Before, during and after- 3 notebooks.
(5/17/76)
the deepest part of a poem is brought into being by its profoundest hearing.
"...the fertile/Thought- associations that until now come/ So easily, appear no more, or rarely./...receiving/dreams and inspirations on an unassigned/Frequency/...withdraw that hand,/offer it no longer as shield of a greeting, Francesco:/...an invitation/Never mailed, the "it was all a dream"/Syndrome.../...and the ache/of this waking dream can never drown out/the diagram still sketched on the wind,/Chosen, meant for mel.../once feels too confined"
Self-Portrait In A Convex Mirror
(5/18/76)
Now she keeps interrogating me. "Why are you angry at me," etc. That I'm not talking about.
(5/21/76)
My rage. And then I read tonight and it was boring. Osvaldo said- if you read like that you'll put them to sleep. And John talked about young professors reading their papers. In his 40's- they started listening to Mallarme. Because they never listened- does this mean I didn't say it? C felt nothing.
J- I'm too intellectual.
But I'm trying to crack the code of the universe.
And Jennifer- barraged with images. I feel so hopeless. Like it was all a waste. And I felt driven all along.
You people someday who pore over this- these diamonds- I am so angry- know that I am 33 and still suffering in silence. Only P is listening. And now a few more. So remember- only P listened and read what he said. Also for history- I am so angry- I almost died trying to crack the code and now it's cracked. It is only a few pages- 20 pages now and no title and 25 poems. But nobody has done better, of this I'm sure. If someone bothers to unravel it- sound out the music and listen- it is very beautiful. I feel crazy tonight. Really crazy. But I wrote the 17-20 pages and I did that. It took me so long.
(5/26/76)
Read interview with Paul Newman. He was saying that nothing is happening in the theater because there is no new vision following Williams. The other day in the shower I thought a characteristic of this age would be the age of autonomy. Sort of where the Williams play ended. What happens to Jim then? You hear the image of a Kerouak-finally back with his mother- so the idea of a person struggling to achieve autonomy not in relation (only) to others- but within. He also talked about emotions. The Jung distinction. It's true people are not interested in politics. He described all the old stuff as "Kitchen drama." Mary Hartmann- meaning- centering in the family.
You see the autonomy constantly in Antonioni. Of course a theory of drama is a prime requisite for a new artistic vision- otherwise the perspective is fragmentary. Nothing wrong with fragments- but fragments cannot hold the attention of a mind that is not particularly creative. And art is not just meant for creative minds. Novels, t.v., movies, record, all in a vacuum because there is no unifying vision.
Stillness, repose(Lacan- feminine)/ Waiting for Godot-/End of the idea of "development"/w/o "story"-no ":plot"/w/o "plot" - no drama/Actors Studiio-still-evocations of "lower class" emotions- Williams, Inge/now "emotions" are flattened out- t.v./a person *alone*- to reverse the/old hollywood romantic notion-/romanticize autonomy (Antonioni's long walks)- also the dream- / the person alone uncovering/significance-the/"private eye" wakes up and makes his own correspondances and formulates his own values- also the appeal of such a person- he operates alone and discusses his plans with no one- is thereby free from the mother symbol-
Now uncovering significances- value in relation to a self-/ The value of the class is practice in emotional recall- exactly what I couldn't learn from A- I'm practicing there-/Finding a media for the communication of my energies-/All the bullshit about human potential. One of the things wrong with psychoanalysis. A new vision of drama wd be a new psychology upon which to base *actions*/A. Why do you have to stay angry for so long?
You're never going to change./A' s giving *up*on people.
Interesting- the class is on *Tuesday*
(5/30/76
Wednesday, May 14
Two books I was thrilled to receive in the past two days:
Bob Harrison, *Chorrera* (Bronze Skull Press, 2542 N.Bremen, #2, Milwaukee ,WI 53212, bohar@earthlink.net)
Eileen R. Tabios, *Reproductions of the Empty Flagple* (Marsh Hawk Press, PO Box 220 Stuyvescent Station, NY, NY 100098 ($12.95), www.marshhawkpress.org
Bob Harrison, *Chorrera* (Bronze Skull Press, 2542 N.Bremen, #2, Milwaukee ,WI 53212, bohar@earthlink.net)
Eileen R. Tabios, *Reproductions of the Empty Flagple* (Marsh Hawk Press, PO Box 220 Stuyvescent Station, NY, NY 100098 ($12.95), www.marshhawkpress.org
Look at this beautiful poem Sandra Simonds wrote (lucky me!)
A Poem for Nick Piombino
I pretend to love what I cannot
pretend to
do. The maze in the poor man's throat
was multiplying like a wild
cell. Any given situation
has its own set of premises but these ones keep
changing so it's impossible
to base
your conclusions on any one specific set
of terms.
the mathematicians know not to look
at the equations directly
in the eye
this is the finite logic of dreams
he says "my dream of the sea is no worse
than my dream of the earth"
With Open Arms
Writing poetry is an incessant and proud pursuit of the impossible and the improbable.
Poetry is a graceful disaster.
Poetry is accepting that its own idea is beyond help, or hope.
Poetry is a balloon losing air.
Poetry must pretend to do what it cannot do, it must do it anyway.
Poetry loses itself in itself. It loses what it finds—it hides its finding from itself, finds its losses.
Poetry refuses to be what everything else is. It lives here not the way most other things do.
Poetry wants to be alone, around everybody.
Poetry contradicts its own discoveries. In refusing to categorize, or allow categories for what it finds, it conceals from itself what it already knows, in order to discover, again and again, what it already knows.
Poetry, in being pure motivation, has no motivation. It is motivation.
Poetry is beyond what it is.
In singing it speaks, in speaking sings, poetry is voice with no voice.
Nothing could be softer than poetry. No part of its form comes from hardness.
Poetry won’t congeal. Poetry refuses order, thus burdens itself with new orders.
Poetry, in trying to say what is thought before it understands, attempts to say things honestly.
Poetry in trying to say what is not yet understood, risks confusion, unintelligibility.
Because it is honest, poetry is prophetic. It admits what is usually masked by artful lies.
Poetry is seductive in its gestures, reductive in its arguments, conductive in its strategies, productive in its tenacity and durability, and inductive in its rhythms.
Poetry is a trapdoor out of conformity.
Poetry is selfish in its goals, but exceptionally generous in its scope.
Poetry is an invitation to slip away and fondle thought.
There is never any time for poetry. It must be stolen. In this sense it teaches the weakly accommodating the art of throwing off chains.
Poetry, in making something out of nothing remains suspect, so it is considered worthless.
Poetry burns with flow, wets with fire.
Poetry in being composed of change, moves without motivation forever. In having nowhere to go, just goes.
Poetry is so fast it can’t be caught. So you can never be completely sure if you had it, have it, could have it, should have it. You can never be sure if you’ve caught it. As soon as you look again, it isn’t what it was.
Poetry remains the monarch of the first time, and of all time.
Poetry comes only when it wants to, like a cat. It does not want to be held, though sometimes it wants to be stroked.
Poetry is never satisfied, so it never satisfies. Poetry provokes and will not relent. But it won’t intrude either.
Poetry is a chameleon. Poetry changes form faster than perception can follow, so poetry can enlarge perception.
Poetry never refuses but it will not submit.
Poetry and time are not compatible. Poets can change what time is, so time does not like it.
Poetry denounces authority because it can be created by any category of persons. Category and poetry are not compatible because poetry dissolves category.
What tries to contain it, poetry dissolves. This is why it is threatening.
Poetry is mercurial—it melts, but remains globular.
Poetry reminds thought how to wander, and gives new breath - and breadth- to the heart. This is why it likes love and lovers like it. But unlike love, poetry cannot be directed. Poetry can cloak, even conceal, but it cannot be encompassed.
Freedom escapes the poverty of slavery through poetry. Even in the land of the unfettered tyrant, poetry finds a place to hide and offers sanctuary to the oppressed.
Freedom is a kind of poetry and poetry a kind of freedom. Over time, each escapes to the other because eventually each has been hounded from everywhere else.
Poetry is one third costume, one third make-up, one third voice desperately searching for air.
Poetry, in searching out a place to breathe, discovers where the air is to be found.
Poetry hides nothing, so anything can find a place to hide within it.
Poetry holds with open arms.
(published in *Kenning* #10- Spring 2001; thanks to Patrick F.Durgin)
Writing poetry is an incessant and proud pursuit of the impossible and the improbable.
Poetry is a graceful disaster.
Poetry is accepting that its own idea is beyond help, or hope.
Poetry is a balloon losing air.
Poetry must pretend to do what it cannot do, it must do it anyway.
Poetry loses itself in itself. It loses what it finds—it hides its finding from itself, finds its losses.
Poetry refuses to be what everything else is. It lives here not the way most other things do.
Poetry wants to be alone, around everybody.
Poetry contradicts its own discoveries. In refusing to categorize, or allow categories for what it finds, it conceals from itself what it already knows, in order to discover, again and again, what it already knows.
Poetry, in being pure motivation, has no motivation. It is motivation.
Poetry is beyond what it is.
In singing it speaks, in speaking sings, poetry is voice with no voice.
Nothing could be softer than poetry. No part of its form comes from hardness.
Poetry won’t congeal. Poetry refuses order, thus burdens itself with new orders.
Poetry, in trying to say what is thought before it understands, attempts to say things honestly.
Poetry in trying to say what is not yet understood, risks confusion, unintelligibility.
Because it is honest, poetry is prophetic. It admits what is usually masked by artful lies.
Poetry is seductive in its gestures, reductive in its arguments, conductive in its strategies, productive in its tenacity and durability, and inductive in its rhythms.
Poetry is a trapdoor out of conformity.
Poetry is selfish in its goals, but exceptionally generous in its scope.
Poetry is an invitation to slip away and fondle thought.
There is never any time for poetry. It must be stolen. In this sense it teaches the weakly accommodating the art of throwing off chains.
Poetry, in making something out of nothing remains suspect, so it is considered worthless.
Poetry burns with flow, wets with fire.
Poetry in being composed of change, moves without motivation forever. In having nowhere to go, just goes.
Poetry is so fast it can’t be caught. So you can never be completely sure if you had it, have it, could have it, should have it. You can never be sure if you’ve caught it. As soon as you look again, it isn’t what it was.
Poetry remains the monarch of the first time, and of all time.
Poetry comes only when it wants to, like a cat. It does not want to be held, though sometimes it wants to be stroked.
Poetry is never satisfied, so it never satisfies. Poetry provokes and will not relent. But it won’t intrude either.
Poetry is a chameleon. Poetry changes form faster than perception can follow, so poetry can enlarge perception.
Poetry never refuses but it will not submit.
Poetry and time are not compatible. Poets can change what time is, so time does not like it.
Poetry denounces authority because it can be created by any category of persons. Category and poetry are not compatible because poetry dissolves category.
What tries to contain it, poetry dissolves. This is why it is threatening.
Poetry is mercurial—it melts, but remains globular.
Poetry reminds thought how to wander, and gives new breath - and breadth- to the heart. This is why it likes love and lovers like it. But unlike love, poetry cannot be directed. Poetry can cloak, even conceal, but it cannot be encompassed.
Freedom escapes the poverty of slavery through poetry. Even in the land of the unfettered tyrant, poetry finds a place to hide and offers sanctuary to the oppressed.
Freedom is a kind of poetry and poetry a kind of freedom. Over time, each escapes to the other because eventually each has been hounded from everywhere else.
Poetry is one third costume, one third make-up, one third voice desperately searching for air.
Poetry, in searching out a place to breathe, discovers where the air is to be found.
Poetry hides nothing, so anything can find a place to hide within it.
Poetry holds with open arms.
(published in *Kenning* #10- Spring 2001; thanks to Patrick F.Durgin)
Tuesday, May 13
Ah ha! Billy Batson is the secret identity of Captain Marvel in the old Shazam comic books. Not that that really explains anything.
posted by Kasey 10:31 PM
Sheez, Kasey, I guess this Batson business on Well Nourished Moon is deep. And I thought the whole thing was a joke!
posted by Kasey 10:31 PM
Sheez, Kasey, I guess this Batson business on Well Nourished Moon is deep. And I thought the whole thing was a joke!
Carla:
There is something in your written voice that I respond to by wanting to address you directly.
Journalism would offer the illusion of everyone having been seen and heard. You writing exactly the inverse. I seem to want to answer you directly or is it that this voice of yours is simply more "out loud" than I am used to "hearing" when I read? So that having been addressed out loud I want to repond out loud. This has occured since I first read -Under The Bridge- in 1980.
Forms usually invite people into a private room to hear the author. Yours seems to invite me into a public room to talk to you. So, hi Carla! Nice to read you, just now in -Animal/Instincts Prose Plays Essays from *This* (1989)
*
One ideal is to be able to savor the words while not having your own thoughts be disturbed at all. "Your own thought" really being your feelings of sharing a space. Two people sitting side by side feeling things and saying nothing. Not as in a movie by Michaelangelo Antonioni, but the people feeling things about being with somebody else. These are not necessarily romantic feelings, but just responses to being in the other person's company.
If you've promised yourself something for a long time and have also been waiting for a long time this not only doesn't make it more or less important but if might have becme meanwhile semi- or completely unconscious. This is how the arteries get clogged, the conduits and passageways are filled with awkward, even playful silences. These promises are fully meant and fully intentional.
Some writing you can read for years and not completely penetrate it while other writing completely penetrates you and surrounds you like an aura in seconds or minutes. It's hard to read both kinds of writing (even though you want to very much) because the one exhausts you in details, while the other, in a few details, exhausting you with so much connection and intertwining feelings you are immediately overwhelmed with a combination of unconscious pleasure, sympathy, grief, pity , anger, frustration, compassion that the emotions almost cross each other out.
It is because I am on an extended vacation that I have any of the time to see these feelings come to light and air each other out enough to permit their being seen. In a sense, this is more a public space than a private space, and, for once, I'm almost comfortable in the public space.
"A funny thing happened to me on my way to the public space."
(Now, don't forget to write that letter to Michael (Gottlieb), too- the one where I mentnioned -96 Tears- and wrote several passages in a way I wrote awhile back and haven't written like in some time.)
Reading- certain kind that makes you remember what you thought you'd remembered but really forgot. Carla- your writing does this. There is a contrapuntal aspect to this- and invitation to harmonize. You make me want to ask: now what is it about me that makes me want to be forgotten- when, what a writer needs more than anything else to be remembered. I long to retain my status of invisibility while appearing everywhere. Now, am I imitating you or have you recently asked me to be somewhere where, for once, I am completely myself- but still, I have disguised myself by placing all of this in a disruptive state- so, while it appears I've gotten nowhere actually I've filled up several pages while heightening with an excited mood only what I must have expected would happen- and would expect to happen all the time- when it felt like it was hardly happening at all while still allowing me to suspect it might still be happening.
At some vantage points everything looks like Beckett and feels like Beckett- a big desert with, nevertheless, ample space to breathe.
(8/18/93)
There is something in your written voice that I respond to by wanting to address you directly.
Journalism would offer the illusion of everyone having been seen and heard. You writing exactly the inverse. I seem to want to answer you directly or is it that this voice of yours is simply more "out loud" than I am used to "hearing" when I read? So that having been addressed out loud I want to repond out loud. This has occured since I first read -Under The Bridge- in 1980.
Forms usually invite people into a private room to hear the author. Yours seems to invite me into a public room to talk to you. So, hi Carla! Nice to read you, just now in -Animal/Instincts Prose Plays Essays from *This* (1989)
*
One ideal is to be able to savor the words while not having your own thoughts be disturbed at all. "Your own thought" really being your feelings of sharing a space. Two people sitting side by side feeling things and saying nothing. Not as in a movie by Michaelangelo Antonioni, but the people feeling things about being with somebody else. These are not necessarily romantic feelings, but just responses to being in the other person's company.
If you've promised yourself something for a long time and have also been waiting for a long time this not only doesn't make it more or less important but if might have becme meanwhile semi- or completely unconscious. This is how the arteries get clogged, the conduits and passageways are filled with awkward, even playful silences. These promises are fully meant and fully intentional.
Some writing you can read for years and not completely penetrate it while other writing completely penetrates you and surrounds you like an aura in seconds or minutes. It's hard to read both kinds of writing (even though you want to very much) because the one exhausts you in details, while the other, in a few details, exhausting you with so much connection and intertwining feelings you are immediately overwhelmed with a combination of unconscious pleasure, sympathy, grief, pity , anger, frustration, compassion that the emotions almost cross each other out.
It is because I am on an extended vacation that I have any of the time to see these feelings come to light and air each other out enough to permit their being seen. In a sense, this is more a public space than a private space, and, for once, I'm almost comfortable in the public space.
"A funny thing happened to me on my way to the public space."
(Now, don't forget to write that letter to Michael (Gottlieb), too- the one where I mentnioned -96 Tears- and wrote several passages in a way I wrote awhile back and haven't written like in some time.)
Reading- certain kind that makes you remember what you thought you'd remembered but really forgot. Carla- your writing does this. There is a contrapuntal aspect to this- and invitation to harmonize. You make me want to ask: now what is it about me that makes me want to be forgotten- when, what a writer needs more than anything else to be remembered. I long to retain my status of invisibility while appearing everywhere. Now, am I imitating you or have you recently asked me to be somewhere where, for once, I am completely myself- but still, I have disguised myself by placing all of this in a disruptive state- so, while it appears I've gotten nowhere actually I've filled up several pages while heightening with an excited mood only what I must have expected would happen- and would expect to happen all the time- when it felt like it was hardly happening at all while still allowing me to suspect it might still be happening.
At some vantage points everything looks like Beckett and feels like Beckett- a big desert with, nevertheless, ample space to breathe.
(8/18/93)
Time travel...now the Brahms is playing...conducted by Bruno Walter...memory next to memory next to memory...in memory, a series of photographs
12/22/91
Projection overuled
Let them eat space
(2/8/92)
Psychoanalysis: the art and science of lilstening
(2/8/92)
I got the idea today that what people often do is doom themselves to the sidelines. This is an unconscious choice and is symbolized by the need for news. The desire for gossip is the breeze that fans the fire when the fire is already being kept deliberately low. When you're at the center of your own activity, this desire for "knowledge" decreases and a deliberate envisioning of actual possibilities for action is substituted. Action is usually envisioned when the image of risk is outbalanced by the image of gain. This is why bad news for "stability" drives down the stockmarket. In reality, the image of risk is reduced most effectively by images of steady gains which off-set the damage of occasional losses ("bad risks.")
This is where my idea of the "sore winner" comes in. No amount of winning will completely eliminate images of risk and loss. Impending loss vs. real- the ultimately unforgettable reality of death for each individual makes complete elimination of images of risk and loss unhealthy and undesirable. This is the real unconscious wish of the "sore winner." Enough is never enough for those touchy and demanding people. Ultimately, the "sore winner" is the tactic par excellance for reinstituting sidelining. Never feeling satisfied for long means that ultimately the sore winner feels that she or he has not yet recived the proper credit. Back on the sidelines again.
(2/12/92)
Why do I hate lists and stacks of things to do? As soon as I put something in an organized pile, I have the temptation to "desert" the pile- not go near it.
Something in the form of a syllogism creates a "thrusting push" towards conclusions- wish for outcomes (endings). Is this equated with orgasm- release?
"Release."
You can always return to a pile because you know it's there. But the feeling of surprise is eliminated. The activity becomes remorseless and joyless. Now I remember. My father was extremely neat. I came to hate this "organization"- to equate it with his distancing tactics. As soon as I see a pile, I am reminded of him and I want to avoid it. the same feeling exists for lists.
Perhaps it was in studying diaries, like that of Pavese and literary journals like that of Valery, that you can write something without drawing a conclusion. Or write only the conclusions (perceptions).
*
Title: The Functioning
(2/17/92)
12/22/91
Projection overuled
Let them eat space
(2/8/92)
Psychoanalysis: the art and science of lilstening
(2/8/92)
I got the idea today that what people often do is doom themselves to the sidelines. This is an unconscious choice and is symbolized by the need for news. The desire for gossip is the breeze that fans the fire when the fire is already being kept deliberately low. When you're at the center of your own activity, this desire for "knowledge" decreases and a deliberate envisioning of actual possibilities for action is substituted. Action is usually envisioned when the image of risk is outbalanced by the image of gain. This is why bad news for "stability" drives down the stockmarket. In reality, the image of risk is reduced most effectively by images of steady gains which off-set the damage of occasional losses ("bad risks.")
This is where my idea of the "sore winner" comes in. No amount of winning will completely eliminate images of risk and loss. Impending loss vs. real- the ultimately unforgettable reality of death for each individual makes complete elimination of images of risk and loss unhealthy and undesirable. This is the real unconscious wish of the "sore winner." Enough is never enough for those touchy and demanding people. Ultimately, the "sore winner" is the tactic par excellance for reinstituting sidelining. Never feeling satisfied for long means that ultimately the sore winner feels that she or he has not yet recived the proper credit. Back on the sidelines again.
(2/12/92)
Why do I hate lists and stacks of things to do? As soon as I put something in an organized pile, I have the temptation to "desert" the pile- not go near it.
Something in the form of a syllogism creates a "thrusting push" towards conclusions- wish for outcomes (endings). Is this equated with orgasm- release?
"Release."
You can always return to a pile because you know it's there. But the feeling of surprise is eliminated. The activity becomes remorseless and joyless. Now I remember. My father was extremely neat. I came to hate this "organization"- to equate it with his distancing tactics. As soon as I see a pile, I am reminded of him and I want to avoid it. the same feeling exists for lists.
Perhaps it was in studying diaries, like that of Pavese and literary journals like that of Valery, that you can write something without drawing a conclusion. Or write only the conclusions (perceptions).
*
Title: The Functioning
(2/17/92)
Monday, May 12
The Chelsea Girls
From time to time Toni Simon and Susan Bee, who are two of my favorite artists, have a field trip to Chelsea and lately i've been invited along. Susan's recent show at the A.I.R. was gorgeous, and Toni had helped her to mount it. By the way, I am the proud owner of four of Susan's paintings, two of which hang in my office and two here at home. A recent painting of a tiny fox in its mother fox' s arms, "Foxy Lady" is on the cover of Adrienne Rich's recent book *Fox: Poems: 1998-2000.* A small note graces the photo: "From the collection of Nick Piombino and Toni Simon!"The whole time we were getting ready Toni was sure we would be late, but when we got there Susan had just arrived. We were off to a quick pace immediately, and within a few hours we were many pounds lighter and had visited about 25 galleries. I'm not going to discuss all of these visits, but I think you would enjoy going through a virtual tour with these two.Someday I will be able to provide you with some images along with this kind of discussion, but for now you will have to settle with some quotes and a few descriptions. Within minutes, it seems, we had been to 10 galleries at least and in an out-of-breath, hoarse voice I whispered the word "coffee' which must have sunk in few galleries later because we were taken to a wonderful take out place, but before I had the coffee in my mouth Susan was halfway across the street again, so I grabbed my cup and followed. (I had been up all night blogging as usual). I'm not going list all the galleries we visited Saturday but I'm going to list my very favorite shows. Going with Susan to the galleries is like having a great workout with a gym trainer when you are feeling flabby; lately I've been feeling visually flabby and lazy (Susan helped curate the * Poetry Plastique* show, along with Charles Bernstein and Jay Sanders, that showed 8 of my photocollages at the Boesky Gallery early in 2001.)
My #1 favorite artist has a new show in Chelsea, Tony Oursler. Small, squat alien gnomes are constructed out of globes on the floor by videos being projected onto them. A sound track in the background adds a touch that sent me into charming elswhere where I could overhear their hilarious conversations. (When we ran into our filmaker and poet friend Abby Child, who is a friend of Tony Oursler's, she offered a quick feminist critique that gave me more than one thing to think about as we continued through the rest of the day; Abby has ideas about "bad boys" and "heroic males" that I find worthwhile and fascinating, but also make me a little bit squirmy. This show is at Metro Pictures, 519 West 24th Street.(5/6-6/6)
You should absolutely not miss Fred Thomaselli's beautiful paintings at the James Cohan Gallery, 533 West 26th Street, 5/9-6/21. These are a must! The notes read:"Tomaselli's new works are richly layered collage and painted surfaces incorporating plant life as well as images from anatomical illustrations, magazines and nature guides. The paintings draw on such varied influences at Tibetan Thangkas, Indian miniatures and the 16th Century Italian artist Guiseppe Arcimboldo. Similar in spirit to Tomaselli's earlier work which referenced the relationshiop between the sub-culture of psycedelia and utopianism, these new painting expand the dialogue into a fictive landscape where figures populate a frenzied, cosmic and worldly universe." Go soon so there will be a chance to see it again!
An awesome artist who is amazingly new to me, according to Susan we should have known of her before, is wonderful Julie Heffernan. Susan agreed that there is a pre-Raphealist quality to these three works. They are paintings of women as mythic idealized beings, such a mermaids, bathed in faded, gorgeous colors. White Box, 525 West 26th St, May 1-24. Also in this show has one work by Lisa Yuskavage whose painting I always enjoy very much- opening on Tuesday at Marianne Boesky.
Another must see is Frank Stella's new metal sculptures which are gorgeous, very graceful, and huge with an art deco feel, color and style. Definitely do not miss this show called "Bamboo" at Paul Kasmin, 293 10th Avenue, May 8-July 4.
I don't think there was complete agreement about Luc Tuymans but I loved these huge paintings depicting grays and blues painted very lightly and gently with elongated shapes in white and pink breaking through like openings in a cloudscape. A huge lovely postcard is available to take home. David Zwirner, 525 West 19th St, April 24- May 21. I think it was here that Toni ran into the sculptor Riva Potoff who is a friend of our friend, the sculptor Sal Romano.
Max Gimblett's beautiful drawings are well worth seeing at Margaret Thatcher Projects, 511 West 25th Street, May 1-31. Max Gimblett has done collaborative books with Robert Creeley and John Yau.
Amy Silliman's paintings at Brent Sikkema, 330 West 22cd Street, through May 24, Dorothy Attie at P.P.O.W., 555 West 22cd St, May 1-June 7, Lucio Pozzi at the Marvelli Gallery 526 W. 266h Street May 1-June 7 and Louise Fishman, Cheim and Read, 547 W. 25th St, through May 24th, all should be seen, if you want to get that special Susan Bee boost I am talking about.
Although there wasn't complete agreement about the following artists, we visited these and you might try to include them if you are not yet exhausted (you can easily afford to skip the gym the day you go). Allen Ruppersberg at Gorney Bravin + Lee, 534 W 26th St, through May 31, which is a homage to Allen Ginsberg's "Wichita Sutra"; Francesco Clemente at Gagosian, 555 West 24th St, May 10-June 21; Ursula von Rydingsvard at Galerie Lelong, 528 W 28th St, May 8-June14 (loved these, that include a huge wooden cabinet which opens and closes on its own creakingly; this show is reminiscent of the Andy Goldworthy shown here last month -Toni and I also saw the Goldsworthy movie at the Film Forum, and, like so many others have become real fans) and Larry Clark at the Lurhring Augustine Gallery, 531 West 24th St, through June 28.
My recent preoccupation with Kafka, which may have been kicked off by a fine show about him at the Jewish Museum not long ago, perhaps explains why I loved Catherine Chalmers' show at the Rare Gallery, 521 West 26 St, May 8-June 7. The show is titled "American Cockroach" and at least one painting, the one on the postcard you can take home, shows the little critters literally in a larger than life pose, looking as graceful as gazelles, in front of their blurry shadows.
Well, my feet were tired but my spirits were soaring as Susan headed home and Toni and I headed down to Mogodor on East 8th Street for some wonderful lamb couscous, after which I headed over to St Mark's bookstore and bought *All Poets Welcome:The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 60's* by Daniel Kane (U Calif Press, 2003) which was recommended to us by Bernadette Mayer- later, we looked at it we realized she had mentioned yours truly as being part of her workshop in early 70's in the chapter on "Bernadette Mayer and 'Language' in the Poetry Project"; *Push The Mule* by John Godfrey (The Figures, 2001)-we had spent a half an hour chatting with John on 8th St on the way to Mogodor, and learned some things about his family history that we didn't know before, including the fact that his father was an Epicopal priest; *From the Warring Factions* by Ammiel Alcalay (Beyond Baroque, 2003), a gorgeous little book that I received a review of by Joe Safdie, that I may soon post if he gives me permission and Jack Kerouak's *Book of Haikus* (Penguin, 2003) another irrisistible small but very packed book.
Thanks, again Susan Bee for the fabulous gallery tour. I think I'm about ready to face those collages again! I might even unpack that new video camera...though Toni's volunteered to read the book and learn to work this thing... Why am I so technologically challenged? Keep meaning, in that regard, to reread the 60's classic on this topic *Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.*
From time to time Toni Simon and Susan Bee, who are two of my favorite artists, have a field trip to Chelsea and lately i've been invited along. Susan's recent show at the A.I.R. was gorgeous, and Toni had helped her to mount it. By the way, I am the proud owner of four of Susan's paintings, two of which hang in my office and two here at home. A recent painting of a tiny fox in its mother fox' s arms, "Foxy Lady" is on the cover of Adrienne Rich's recent book *Fox: Poems: 1998-2000.* A small note graces the photo: "From the collection of Nick Piombino and Toni Simon!"The whole time we were getting ready Toni was sure we would be late, but when we got there Susan had just arrived. We were off to a quick pace immediately, and within a few hours we were many pounds lighter and had visited about 25 galleries. I'm not going to discuss all of these visits, but I think you would enjoy going through a virtual tour with these two.Someday I will be able to provide you with some images along with this kind of discussion, but for now you will have to settle with some quotes and a few descriptions. Within minutes, it seems, we had been to 10 galleries at least and in an out-of-breath, hoarse voice I whispered the word "coffee' which must have sunk in few galleries later because we were taken to a wonderful take out place, but before I had the coffee in my mouth Susan was halfway across the street again, so I grabbed my cup and followed. (I had been up all night blogging as usual). I'm not going list all the galleries we visited Saturday but I'm going to list my very favorite shows. Going with Susan to the galleries is like having a great workout with a gym trainer when you are feeling flabby; lately I've been feeling visually flabby and lazy (Susan helped curate the * Poetry Plastique* show, along with Charles Bernstein and Jay Sanders, that showed 8 of my photocollages at the Boesky Gallery early in 2001.)
My #1 favorite artist has a new show in Chelsea, Tony Oursler. Small, squat alien gnomes are constructed out of globes on the floor by videos being projected onto them. A sound track in the background adds a touch that sent me into charming elswhere where I could overhear their hilarious conversations. (When we ran into our filmaker and poet friend Abby Child, who is a friend of Tony Oursler's, she offered a quick feminist critique that gave me more than one thing to think about as we continued through the rest of the day; Abby has ideas about "bad boys" and "heroic males" that I find worthwhile and fascinating, but also make me a little bit squirmy. This show is at Metro Pictures, 519 West 24th Street.(5/6-6/6)
You should absolutely not miss Fred Thomaselli's beautiful paintings at the James Cohan Gallery, 533 West 26th Street, 5/9-6/21. These are a must! The notes read:"Tomaselli's new works are richly layered collage and painted surfaces incorporating plant life as well as images from anatomical illustrations, magazines and nature guides. The paintings draw on such varied influences at Tibetan Thangkas, Indian miniatures and the 16th Century Italian artist Guiseppe Arcimboldo. Similar in spirit to Tomaselli's earlier work which referenced the relationshiop between the sub-culture of psycedelia and utopianism, these new painting expand the dialogue into a fictive landscape where figures populate a frenzied, cosmic and worldly universe." Go soon so there will be a chance to see it again!
An awesome artist who is amazingly new to me, according to Susan we should have known of her before, is wonderful Julie Heffernan. Susan agreed that there is a pre-Raphealist quality to these three works. They are paintings of women as mythic idealized beings, such a mermaids, bathed in faded, gorgeous colors. White Box, 525 West 26th St, May 1-24. Also in this show has one work by Lisa Yuskavage whose painting I always enjoy very much- opening on Tuesday at Marianne Boesky.
Another must see is Frank Stella's new metal sculptures which are gorgeous, very graceful, and huge with an art deco feel, color and style. Definitely do not miss this show called "Bamboo" at Paul Kasmin, 293 10th Avenue, May 8-July 4.
I don't think there was complete agreement about Luc Tuymans but I loved these huge paintings depicting grays and blues painted very lightly and gently with elongated shapes in white and pink breaking through like openings in a cloudscape. A huge lovely postcard is available to take home. David Zwirner, 525 West 19th St, April 24- May 21. I think it was here that Toni ran into the sculptor Riva Potoff who is a friend of our friend, the sculptor Sal Romano.
Max Gimblett's beautiful drawings are well worth seeing at Margaret Thatcher Projects, 511 West 25th Street, May 1-31. Max Gimblett has done collaborative books with Robert Creeley and John Yau.
Amy Silliman's paintings at Brent Sikkema, 330 West 22cd Street, through May 24, Dorothy Attie at P.P.O.W., 555 West 22cd St, May 1-June 7, Lucio Pozzi at the Marvelli Gallery 526 W. 266h Street May 1-June 7 and Louise Fishman, Cheim and Read, 547 W. 25th St, through May 24th, all should be seen, if you want to get that special Susan Bee boost I am talking about.
Although there wasn't complete agreement about the following artists, we visited these and you might try to include them if you are not yet exhausted (you can easily afford to skip the gym the day you go). Allen Ruppersberg at Gorney Bravin + Lee, 534 W 26th St, through May 31, which is a homage to Allen Ginsberg's "Wichita Sutra"; Francesco Clemente at Gagosian, 555 West 24th St, May 10-June 21; Ursula von Rydingsvard at Galerie Lelong, 528 W 28th St, May 8-June14 (loved these, that include a huge wooden cabinet which opens and closes on its own creakingly; this show is reminiscent of the Andy Goldworthy shown here last month -Toni and I also saw the Goldsworthy movie at the Film Forum, and, like so many others have become real fans) and Larry Clark at the Lurhring Augustine Gallery, 531 West 24th St, through June 28.
My recent preoccupation with Kafka, which may have been kicked off by a fine show about him at the Jewish Museum not long ago, perhaps explains why I loved Catherine Chalmers' show at the Rare Gallery, 521 West 26 St, May 8-June 7. The show is titled "American Cockroach" and at least one painting, the one on the postcard you can take home, shows the little critters literally in a larger than life pose, looking as graceful as gazelles, in front of their blurry shadows.
Well, my feet were tired but my spirits were soaring as Susan headed home and Toni and I headed down to Mogodor on East 8th Street for some wonderful lamb couscous, after which I headed over to St Mark's bookstore and bought *All Poets Welcome:The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 60's* by Daniel Kane (U Calif Press, 2003) which was recommended to us by Bernadette Mayer- later, we looked at it we realized she had mentioned yours truly as being part of her workshop in early 70's in the chapter on "Bernadette Mayer and 'Language' in the Poetry Project"; *Push The Mule* by John Godfrey (The Figures, 2001)-we had spent a half an hour chatting with John on 8th St on the way to Mogodor, and learned some things about his family history that we didn't know before, including the fact that his father was an Epicopal priest; *From the Warring Factions* by Ammiel Alcalay (Beyond Baroque, 2003), a gorgeous little book that I received a review of by Joe Safdie, that I may soon post if he gives me permission and Jack Kerouak's *Book of Haikus* (Penguin, 2003) another irrisistible small but very packed book.
Thanks, again Susan Bee for the fabulous gallery tour. I think I'm about ready to face those collages again! I might even unpack that new video camera...though Toni's volunteered to read the book and learn to work this thing... Why am I so technologically challenged? Keep meaning, in that regard, to reread the 60's classic on this topic *Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.*
Sunday, May 11
Too late to organize a blogger's party (still thinking about how a "virtual" blogger's party might be arranged) but if anyone would like to join me in a quiet toast I would love that. Today is the third month anniversary of the opening of *fait accompli* which was 2/11.
My sincere thanks to those who visit or have ever visited this page. Hope to see you again, and often.
*fait accompli* loves letters!
Saddened by the news about Ted Joans. We were introduced a few years ago by Charles Borkhuis in Paris. Ted immediately arranged for a wonderful reading for the three of us in the magnificent old Parisian villa and garden of a friend of his. An unforgettable evening that included a surprise performance by Phoebe Legere whose sultry accordian playing and singing has haunted me ever since. I learned that Ted loved to travel and frequently did book tours and readings including many in Africa. Ted liked to tell stories of his beat days, he was easy going and lots of fun to be around. He called one his favorite publishers "Nude Erections" (*New Directions*) I saw Ted once more a couple of years ago. We spent the day together going to some bookstores. I had told him about some signed books by him I had purchased from the Skyline bookstore downtown around 17th and 5th, and the owner, of course, knows Ted.Then Ted wanted ice cream and we went somewhere and they happened to serve blue ice cream.. Ted immediately named the day our "blue ice cream day." I've never forgotten that moment, and I realized that Ted knew something important about memory and imagery that I had planned to discuss next time I see him. Toni remembers another occasion when she and I went out with Ted and his companion, the warm and very lovely Laura Corsiglia to one of Ted's favorite Village coffee houses, the "Figaro." Ted gave us some drawings in exchange for some books.Toni just located a terrific photo of Ted, Laura Corsiglia, Charles Borkhuis, Toni and myself in an outdoor cafe in Paris. Ted Joans died one or two days ago at the age of 70.
(The photo referred to above, through the kindness of Charles Bernstein, is now available on my Home Page at the Electronic Poetry Center. Scroll down to the section marked *Images*)
(The photo referred to above, through the kindness of Charles Bernstein, is now available on my Home Page at the Electronic Poetry Center. Scroll down to the section marked *Images*)
This report just in from Kasey Mohammed on Stephanie Young's reading in San Francisco. Stephanie taps her beat with her feet!
Thanks, Stephanie for reading from our collaboration. I was very glad to hear about the great time you had at your (our) reading.
Here's one of the poems from our collaboration:
Closeness figures near imbibing
tender breath for a weakened
will. But, in spite of such shapeless
overtones, implications wander
unnecessarily among relentless
thoughts. Standing near, loss
counts its change in hidden
hopes. Unremitting ceaseless
regard, that's what it is, exploding
its virtues continuously aloft, changing
its character invisibly among familiar
irresistible, attractive friends.
Here's one of the poems from our collaboration:
Closeness figures near imbibing
tender breath for a weakened
will. But, in spite of such shapeless
overtones, implications wander
unnecessarily among relentless
thoughts. Standing near, loss
counts its change in hidden
hopes. Unremitting ceaseless
regard, that's what it is, exploding
its virtues continuously aloft, changing
its character invisibly among familiar
irresistible, attractive friends.
Saturday, May 10
Three beautiful books received:
Charles Bernstein, *Let's Just Say* (Chax, 2003): "Let's just say that every time you fall you never hit the ground./ Let's just say that when the day ends the night refuses to come/Let's just say that if all else fails you can at least count on that/ Let's just say that a bird in the fist is better than a bird and a foot"
Hank Lazer, *Deathwatch for My Father* (Chax, 2003)
"if the words have value
they have value there too"
Jean Fremon, *Island of The Dead* (Green Integer, 2003)
"Karl's notebood is filled with a very fine handwriting. The notes were discontinuous and somewhat separated by a long horizontal line that cuts across the page from one margin to the other. "
Charles Bernstein, *Let's Just Say* (Chax, 2003): "Let's just say that every time you fall you never hit the ground./ Let's just say that when the day ends the night refuses to come/Let's just say that if all else fails you can at least count on that/ Let's just say that a bird in the fist is better than a bird and a foot"
Hank Lazer, *Deathwatch for My Father* (Chax, 2003)
"if the words have value
they have value there too"
Jean Fremon, *Island of The Dead* (Green Integer, 2003)
"Karl's notebood is filled with a very fine handwriting. The notes were discontinuous and somewhat separated by a long horizontal line that cuts across the page from one margin to the other. "
Silliman
discussed one of my favorite writers
David Markson on Friday, May 9th. Reading Markson is like reading an excellent blog. Here's some snippets from - Reader's Block-
"Nerval once tried to lead a lobster by a ribbon through a public garden in Paris.
Tristan Corbiere did the same with a pig in Rome. In evening clothes.
The necessity is greater than mine
Said Phillip Sidney in passing a drink to a dying soldier while dying himself.
Gottlieb Frege.
The saloon that Protagonist now and again stops in is an Edward Hopper.
Its name in semicircular lettering on the windows. REader sees, viewed backwards from at the bar against wintry late afternoon sunlight.
Hillaire Belloc was an anti-Semite.
John Clare spent his last twenty-three years in an asylym. Not recognizing his own wife. At times claiming to be Byron. Or Nelson at Trafalgar.
No needle marks on your annunciation's arm now.
We do not come to thoughts. They come to us.
Thought Heidegger.
The first translation of a major length for purely literary purposes was a Latin *Illiad*, ca. 250 B.C. by Livius Andronicus.
Sherri Martinelli.
Diane Arbus committed suiced by opening her wrists in a bathtub.
Clare's parents had been illiterate. He himself never revised a line.
I am yet what I am who cares, or knows?
My friends forsake me like a memory lost.
I am the self-consumer of my woes.
In Joseph Conrad's view, there is not a single sincere line, unquote, in *Moby Dick*
Boris Christoff and Tito Gobbi were brothers-in-law.
Richard Tucker and Jan Peerce also.
When Sopocles was nearing ninety, his sons tried to have him declared incompetent. Sophocles won easy dismissal by reading to the jury from *Oedipus at Colonnus.*
Which he was only then finishilng.
Schliermacher."
David Markson, *Reader's Block* (Dalkey Archive, 1996) p 74-75
discussed one of my favorite writers
David Markson on Friday, May 9th. Reading Markson is like reading an excellent blog. Here's some snippets from - Reader's Block-
"Nerval once tried to lead a lobster by a ribbon through a public garden in Paris.
Tristan Corbiere did the same with a pig in Rome. In evening clothes.
The necessity is greater than mine
Said Phillip Sidney in passing a drink to a dying soldier while dying himself.
Gottlieb Frege.
The saloon that Protagonist now and again stops in is an Edward Hopper.
Its name in semicircular lettering on the windows. REader sees, viewed backwards from at the bar against wintry late afternoon sunlight.
Hillaire Belloc was an anti-Semite.
John Clare spent his last twenty-three years in an asylym. Not recognizing his own wife. At times claiming to be Byron. Or Nelson at Trafalgar.
No needle marks on your annunciation's arm now.
We do not come to thoughts. They come to us.
Thought Heidegger.
The first translation of a major length for purely literary purposes was a Latin *Illiad*, ca. 250 B.C. by Livius Andronicus.
Sherri Martinelli.
Diane Arbus committed suiced by opening her wrists in a bathtub.
Clare's parents had been illiterate. He himself never revised a line.
I am yet what I am who cares, or knows?
My friends forsake me like a memory lost.
I am the self-consumer of my woes.
In Joseph Conrad's view, there is not a single sincere line, unquote, in *Moby Dick*
Boris Christoff and Tito Gobbi were brothers-in-law.
Richard Tucker and Jan Peerce also.
When Sopocles was nearing ninety, his sons tried to have him declared incompetent. Sophocles won easy dismissal by reading to the jury from *Oedipus at Colonnus.*
Which he was only then finishilng.
Schliermacher."
David Markson, *Reader's Block* (Dalkey Archive, 1996) p 74-75
Eurydice Pleading With Orpheus to Stay Home
Somehow, having left behind the pain in contemplation,the poet finds, at last, some satisfaction. This ciircumstance, far from undesirable, is understood as a one-way street, a direction with no return. The Orpheus myth is referred to as a way of comprehending the situation.
But it is difficult to release the idea that suffering is a necessary component of comprehension. Can a distinction be made between pain and the image of pain?
In the Orpheus myth,the singer of the dawn may not gaze upon his lover and lead her out of the underworld to the sun's light at the same time. An analogy is drawn to the idea of inderminacy (can't specify a particle's locale and velocity at the same time).
Moments are saturated with choice, caked in blue or orange, numbed by rumble or speech, carved in curve or ridge. Each is cracked open in turn, revealed as hard or soft, lost or found, empty or full, clear or obscure.
What is even more striking and perplexing: no continued light without a frame of dark, no new path without fumbling, no vanishing into pleasure wiwthout the sound of tearing in the soul, before and after, no taste of water in the mouth without a lip of stone that so easily breaks. And, hardest of all, not a hint of the so-called mystery of so-called transcendence without the sublime Ridiculous, the embarassed laughter echoing in the brain so very recently it still can't be forgotten.
The poet endured the public's anger for consenting to so much humiliating awkwardness. Were books to be treated as bibles? Were bookstores to become the churches and temples? I heard that someone recently went into a bookstore just to die. Are we tortured to hold to continued expectations from words? Still, if it doesn't feel holy in your hands, what is it?
It is hard to resist becoming frightened in these times. Events toll by like a bell ringing repeated messages in your ears. How may they be described musically? First of all, they are shaped so they can't be confined. They are made to slip by drifting. Through hythmic intervals of separation, they give names to the alchemy of changing the sound of cymbals to that of rushing water.
As wtih Orpheus, we ask that the poet leave us alone until we want the dawn. Until then, they should practice quietly in their rooms. This is how the cicadas are heard for themselves, bucked by the termporal submergement of television.
In the perception of the division between being and non-being, the poet comes to understand that to know anything means to forget what is already known, to find the sun only by emerging blindly from the shadows.
(2/22/94) (from *Theoretical Objects* Green Integer, 1999)
Somehow, having left behind the pain in contemplation,the poet finds, at last, some satisfaction. This ciircumstance, far from undesirable, is understood as a one-way street, a direction with no return. The Orpheus myth is referred to as a way of comprehending the situation.
But it is difficult to release the idea that suffering is a necessary component of comprehension. Can a distinction be made between pain and the image of pain?
In the Orpheus myth,the singer of the dawn may not gaze upon his lover and lead her out of the underworld to the sun's light at the same time. An analogy is drawn to the idea of inderminacy (can't specify a particle's locale and velocity at the same time).
Moments are saturated with choice, caked in blue or orange, numbed by rumble or speech, carved in curve or ridge. Each is cracked open in turn, revealed as hard or soft, lost or found, empty or full, clear or obscure.
What is even more striking and perplexing: no continued light without a frame of dark, no new path without fumbling, no vanishing into pleasure wiwthout the sound of tearing in the soul, before and after, no taste of water in the mouth without a lip of stone that so easily breaks. And, hardest of all, not a hint of the so-called mystery of so-called transcendence without the sublime Ridiculous, the embarassed laughter echoing in the brain so very recently it still can't be forgotten.
The poet endured the public's anger for consenting to so much humiliating awkwardness. Were books to be treated as bibles? Were bookstores to become the churches and temples? I heard that someone recently went into a bookstore just to die. Are we tortured to hold to continued expectations from words? Still, if it doesn't feel holy in your hands, what is it?
It is hard to resist becoming frightened in these times. Events toll by like a bell ringing repeated messages in your ears. How may they be described musically? First of all, they are shaped so they can't be confined. They are made to slip by drifting. Through hythmic intervals of separation, they give names to the alchemy of changing the sound of cymbals to that of rushing water.
As wtih Orpheus, we ask that the poet leave us alone until we want the dawn. Until then, they should practice quietly in their rooms. This is how the cicadas are heard for themselves, bucked by the termporal submergement of television.
In the perception of the division between being and non-being, the poet comes to understand that to know anything means to forget what is already known, to find the sun only by emerging blindly from the shadows.
(2/22/94) (from *Theoretical Objects* Green Integer, 1999)
Concerto for specific idea and series of background thoughts.
1/23/94
Is it lack of love or lack of feeling
or pure exhaustion
that leaves me reeling?
(1/25/94)
How we press our hands and faces against the glass divide that separates us from this world. With laughter, with sorrow, with unending faith and learning, with acts of unimaginable devotion and cruelty, we work to wring some kind of reaction out of an essentially unreponsive universe. Well, perhaps this is unfair- the universe can be very responsive- for very brief periods of time, but soon enough it will return to its routine business of creation and destruction, not significantly influenced by my tiny contribution one way or another, again, for very long. So this longing to be so much a part of things, to join others passionately in a spirited exchange, eventually gives way to the cycle of recognizing each of our individual alonenesses. True, we celebrated our common victories and mourned together our common sufferings. Still, we had to struggle, sometimes repeatedly, to remain focused on our common interests and challenges.
*
It was hard because no sooner have we disclosed our sincerity in our determination to participate and be finally elected to the select inner circle of those who have won reknown, either permanent, or evanescent, we realized, like Aurelius, that it is all evanescent. After a quiet moment of serious reflection we usually laugh. This is, if we're lucky.
*
How good it is to stop sometimes, especially when you can remember that soon it will be followed by another beginning.
*
Then it is endings we decry! In every one of our sadnesses, we are reliving the keenest one, all of them
*
Things are neither as far, nor as close, as we think they are.
1/27/94
1/23/94
Is it lack of love or lack of feeling
or pure exhaustion
that leaves me reeling?
(1/25/94)
How we press our hands and faces against the glass divide that separates us from this world. With laughter, with sorrow, with unending faith and learning, with acts of unimaginable devotion and cruelty, we work to wring some kind of reaction out of an essentially unreponsive universe. Well, perhaps this is unfair- the universe can be very responsive- for very brief periods of time, but soon enough it will return to its routine business of creation and destruction, not significantly influenced by my tiny contribution one way or another, again, for very long. So this longing to be so much a part of things, to join others passionately in a spirited exchange, eventually gives way to the cycle of recognizing each of our individual alonenesses. True, we celebrated our common victories and mourned together our common sufferings. Still, we had to struggle, sometimes repeatedly, to remain focused on our common interests and challenges.
*
It was hard because no sooner have we disclosed our sincerity in our determination to participate and be finally elected to the select inner circle of those who have won reknown, either permanent, or evanescent, we realized, like Aurelius, that it is all evanescent. After a quiet moment of serious reflection we usually laugh. This is, if we're lucky.
*
How good it is to stop sometimes, especially when you can remember that soon it will be followed by another beginning.
*
Then it is endings we decry! In every one of our sadnesses, we are reliving the keenest one, all of them
*
Things are neither as far, nor as close, as we think they are.
1/27/94
Friday, May 9
Nick, my very first essay ever touching on poetics had this quote as an epigraph, too:
You arrive at truth through poetry. I arrive at poetry through truth.
--Joseph Jourbet
And Nick, when I checked your site to make sure, your banner ad proclaimed an anthology's title:
WOMEN BEHAVING BADLY
I guess that's why I'm writing you, too, dear Time Traveler (and, by the way, I apologize for cutting your spaceship off from making that left turn in the year 3015).
posted by Eileen Tabios | 11:15 AM
Copy that. Looking forward to your visit in 3015, Sirene. See you soon. Love your poetics top to bottom. Thanks for visiting me in 1992. Thanks again for the link - love your updated sidebar.
You arrive at truth through poetry. I arrive at poetry through truth.
--Joseph Jourbet
And Nick, when I checked your site to make sure, your banner ad proclaimed an anthology's title:
WOMEN BEHAVING BADLY
I guess that's why I'm writing you, too, dear Time Traveler (and, by the way, I apologize for cutting your spaceship off from making that left turn in the year 3015).
posted by Eileen Tabios | 11:15 AM
Copy that. Looking forward to your visit in 3015, Sirene. See you soon. Love your poetics top to bottom. Thanks for visiting me in 1992. Thanks again for the link - love your updated sidebar.
Stephanie Young
is giving a reading tonight with Elizabeth Robinson, I'm not sure if the reading is in Berkeley or San Francisco. She's going to include some poems from our postcard collaboration. Go, Stephanie!
Some of our postcard poems will be in the upcoming 3rd Anniversary issue of Shampoo (edited by Del Ray Cross). There's a hefty sample bottle up now (for a quick rinse), and the full bubble bath will be available quite soon!
is giving a reading tonight with Elizabeth Robinson, I'm not sure if the reading is in Berkeley or San Francisco. She's going to include some poems from our postcard collaboration. Go, Stephanie!
Some of our postcard poems will be in the upcoming 3rd Anniversary issue of Shampoo (edited by Del Ray Cross). There's a hefty sample bottle up now (for a quick rinse), and the full bubble bath will be available quite soon!
Here's a toast (holds up glass) to Eileen (sneaks sip) Tabios (sneaks longer sip) also known as WinePoetics. Might I say, on this proud occasion, that here at -fait accompli- we are truly- oh, what the hell (glug, glug, glug....burp!)proud to be included on Sireen, I mean Eileen's link bar. Glug.(Guess I'm not a sipper, I'm a glugger. A glugger blogger), Anyway, thanks Eileen!
In writing "Lost Horizons" I achieved a landscape of imageless writing of which the line "this storm...this storm" is an ironic comment and indication of the mode's eventual and inevitable collapse. (If I am to continue writing). One is led to images despite any attempt to avoid or circumvent them. But why avoid them at all? First, because they are too accessible and inaccessible. There are no new images (Dadaism), there are only literary references to images (Eliot) and mundane reality (Warhol) exagerrated or understated. Such images may abound in the visual field but are they relevant to the landscape of language that composes the printed page? Variations in line, experiments with the printed line (Mallarme, ee cummings) are attempts, in this vein, to bring awarness to the page.itself on which the poem is being impressed, that this page is a landscape. Now, if there are images on the page, attention is drawn back to the visual imagination, and this ejection from an entanglement with language offers relief and sometimes elation. Employing images the poet also provides words that are not encoded within the poem's own logic and disctinctive habitat- he pauses with them and offers reference points to the "outer" world. My intention in writing "Lost Horizons" was to eliminate these concrete references and place the poem in a world uninhabited by nouns that desribe objects. If the face of poetic association images offer exit from obscurity and poems are interesting only when they extend past the boundaries of langugage and sign or indication of precept.
(8/15/74)
(8/15/74)
Joan Retallack's poems remind me of the necessity of allowing "negative" feelings (this label implies a value judgement) to emerge in the poem. The words of everyday life, the thoughts of everyday life, are no more "representative" of that the experience of life is than a random listing of current magazines. What is "current" is largely illusory, a projection based on a number of largely unconsciously held, socially determined, assumptions. Besides this, the "unfolding" of lilfe from birth. to youth, to middle age, to old age is perhaps also somewhat illusory. Although events appear to us in a consecutive fashion, we learn early on of the reality of what the whole of life includes which encompasses aging and dying. Attention to the innumerable, constantly emerging erphphanies, demands and frustrations of everyday life also shields us from focusing for very long on an overview. Ambitious plans. fantasies, memories, disappointments, hungers, frutstrations, constantly lead consciousness away from an "aerial" or overall view and towards forcusing on the significance of emerging events for the next upcoming sequence of actions.
(4/7/92)
The "key" in which you tell a tale is the equivalent to the "key" in music. It's a tone of voice and an attiude, combined.
(4/22/92)
You arrive at truth through poetry. I arrive at poetry through truth.
Joseph Jourbet
Indifference to poetry is oneof the most conspicuous characteristics of the human race.
Robert Lynd
Habits are fitst cobwebs, then cables.
Spanish Proverb.
(4/22/92)
(4/7/92)
The "key" in which you tell a tale is the equivalent to the "key" in music. It's a tone of voice and an attiude, combined.
(4/22/92)
You arrive at truth through poetry. I arrive at poetry through truth.
Joseph Jourbet
Indifference to poetry is oneof the most conspicuous characteristics of the human race.
Robert Lynd
Habits are fitst cobwebs, then cables.
Spanish Proverb.
(4/22/92)
Isn't my difficulty with writing narratives the same problem I have with dealing with "boring" details in everyday life. I realized reading the Auster book is that he takes the trouble to construct all the "boring details" that creates the feeling of an actual scene- yet the writing has the "driven" quality of the aphorisms of E.M. Cioran.
The aphorism contains all the same qualities as the Auster books- doubts, suspicions, exaltations, above all *impulses*- but Auster organizes them around specific *scenes.* So you could write a novel with a visual storyboard- index cards.
"I have all the defects of other people and yet everything they do seems to me inconceivable."
Em Cioran, "The Trouble With Being Born" p.31.
"Easy to imagine the elements , bored with their exhausted theme, disgusted by their invariable and utterly preditable combinations, seeking some diversion: life would be merely a digression, merely an anecdote." (p.47)
(3/30/92)
The aphorism contains all the same qualities as the Auster books- doubts, suspicions, exaltations, above all *impulses*- but Auster organizes them around specific *scenes.* So you could write a novel with a visual storyboard- index cards.
"I have all the defects of other people and yet everything they do seems to me inconceivable."
Em Cioran, "The Trouble With Being Born" p.31.
"Easy to imagine the elements , bored with their exhausted theme, disgusted by their invariable and utterly preditable combinations, seeking some diversion: life would be merely a digression, merely an anecdote." (p.47)
(3/30/92)
In 1947, Melanie Klein defined projective identificatin inwhich the mechanism of splitting, denial, omnipotence and idealization are operative. Idealization is linked to splitting. The idealized breast helps provide protection from the persecuting breast. Idealization is the result of persecutory fears. Equally itis lined to the intensity of th instincts which seek unlimited gratification from the inexhaustible ideal breat.
*Ego Ideal* Chasseguet-Smrigel (p.179)
(10/16/93)
Grandiosity and the reduction process.
*
Time is not "relationship" but "relationship within change."
Einstein sees the relativity of time to matter. There is also the relationship of time to change. Where there is no change (pockets of slow change) time seems absent.
Time is change. Heraclitis saw that you can't stop into the same river twice. But Hericlitis is relating time to number or *frequency.* (the same river *twice* and physical reality. But time *is* the river. It's the changing itself that we relate to time. If there is a beginning, there is an end to things. But there is no end to change. Change is changeless, unceasing, eternal. Change is the eternal.
(10/3/93)
Don't let me ever catch you lying about yourself like this.
(10/7/93)
Adorno, quoting Valery, in Valery 's -Deviations-:"Unless it's new and strange, every visualization of the world of things is false. For if something is *real* it is bound to lose its reality in the process of becoming familiar. Philosophic contemplation means reverting from the familar to the strange, and in the strange, encountering the real." (v. 14, p 39-40, *Analects*)
(10/993)
*
Time is not "relationship" but "relationship within change."
Einstein sees the relativity of time to matter. There is also the relationship of time to change. Where there is no change (pockets of slow change) time seems absent.
Time is change. Heraclitis saw that you can't stop into the same river twice. But Hericlitis is relating time to number or *frequency.* (the same river *twice* and physical reality. But time *is* the river. It's the changing itself that we relate to time. If there is a beginning, there is an end to things. But there is no end to change. Change is changeless, unceasing, eternal. Change is the eternal.
(10/3/93)
Don't let me ever catch you lying about yourself like this.
(10/7/93)
Adorno, quoting Valery, in Valery 's -Deviations-:"Unless it's new and strange, every visualization of the world of things is false. For if something is *real* it is bound to lose its reality in the process of becoming familiar. Philosophic contemplation means reverting from the familar to the strange, and in the strange, encountering the real." (v. 14, p 39-40, *Analects*)
(10/993)
I prefer the artist who is a grown-up acting like a child, then the one who is a child who acts like a grown-up.
"Success is to the cunning, who bow to circumstances. The follow the main stream, so they always win. They win, but they don't exist, they have no being since they merely identify themselves with the stream, they adapt shapes, they are shapeless."
Eugene Ionesco
Fragments of a Journal, p. 28
(9/21/93)
"Success is to the cunning, who bow to circumstances. The follow the main stream, so they always win. They win, but they don't exist, they have no being since they merely identify themselves with the stream, they adapt shapes, they are shapeless."
Eugene Ionesco
Fragments of a Journal, p. 28
(9/21/93)
I just realized that I have quietly learned to find exciting what for many years I found frightening: that writing is like walking along a cliff in the dark. Once you realize this, it is more or less easy to understand all the many pathetic and hilarious postures writers resort to in order to prop themselves up. Reading Gombrowicz' diatribe against poets has just this pathetic and hilarious quality. Like a formerly religious person losing themselves exuberantly in a satanic ritual.
The hardest thing in an age of disbelief is to find a reason to have faith. It is harder even then to actually have faith than to find a reason to have it. You cannot share your faith with others, but you can share your reasons. Perhaps blind faith is based on a kind of ignorance. But lack of faith- which is, after all, lack of trust, is the doorway to hopelessness. And hopelessness is the doorway to death-in-life. I don't mean faith in God by the way, far from it. I'm talking about faith in life.
After reading Gombrowicz' diaries for about an hour I can only say: nothing more pathetic then someone whose raison d'etre is to find someone *to blame*. He's much closer to Cioran then he realizes. But I share his love for diaries.
(8/27/93)
The hardest thing in an age of disbelief is to find a reason to have faith. It is harder even then to actually have faith than to find a reason to have it. You cannot share your faith with others, but you can share your reasons. Perhaps blind faith is based on a kind of ignorance. But lack of faith- which is, after all, lack of trust, is the doorway to hopelessness. And hopelessness is the doorway to death-in-life. I don't mean faith in God by the way, far from it. I'm talking about faith in life.
After reading Gombrowicz' diaries for about an hour I can only say: nothing more pathetic then someone whose raison d'etre is to find someone *to blame*. He's much closer to Cioran then he realizes. But I share his love for diaries.
(8/27/93)
Thursday, May 8
Desire to have boundaries - but then, not TOO inflexible - I guess we're naturally permeable, anyways (Nada in Swoon talking about the affect of substances - coffee, tea, food, anything - on the body - how generaly porous we are - if caffeine affects us - imagine the affects of another PERSON, a BODY)
Well Nourished Moon, today
Go for those boundaries, Stephanie , porous or not, Well Nourished Moon is my cup of tea! But hold the dcaf, I'll probably be up all night blogging again.
Well Nourished Moon, today
Go for those boundaries, Stephanie , porous or not, Well Nourished Moon is my cup of tea! But hold the dcaf, I'll probably be up all night blogging again.
Dave, you're very quiet today. Are you packing to move to New York already? Out there getting up the money?
Red Sox Tickets 20% Less
Local Ma ticket agency. Great seats 20% less then other sites. www.AceTicket.com
Jim Berhle check this out. Now we've got a *price war* going. Do I hear 50% less? 75% off? *Free*?
Russian Tea Room closed several months ago. I got to go right before it closed. A little glitzy, but the food wasn't bad.
Local Ma ticket agency. Great seats 20% less then other sites. www.AceTicket.com
Jim Berhle check this out. Now we've got a *price war* going. Do I hear 50% less? 75% off? *Free*?
Russian Tea Room closed several months ago. I got to go right before it closed. A little glitzy, but the food wasn't bad.
Kasey responds: " So maybe I feel that giving a detailed account of a reading is a kind of pornography, and as such, a naturalistic, mimetic mode that I'm just not tuned in to."
Omigod Kasey, I hope Cori Copp doesn't see this. We were just starting to get along!
Also, I forgot to mention that after Cori's reading, the curator of the series, Chris, said he felt that "blogging is voyeuristic." Actually, once you go down this line of reasoning you end up with Freud, who finally, in exasperation at the joy everyone was having with seeing sex everywhere (it is everywhere), said "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."
Anyway, Kasey, I think you might be just a bit jealous of my having the chance to go to Charismatic Cori's reading and write about the wonderful time I had. Don't feel too bad. Somebody has to live in California!
Omigod Kasey, I hope Cori Copp doesn't see this. We were just starting to get along!
Also, I forgot to mention that after Cori's reading, the curator of the series, Chris, said he felt that "blogging is voyeuristic." Actually, once you go down this line of reasoning you end up with Freud, who finally, in exasperation at the joy everyone was having with seeing sex everywhere (it is everywhere), said "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."
Anyway, Kasey, I think you might be just a bit jealous of my having the chance to go to Charismatic Cori's reading and write about the wonderful time I had. Don't feel too bad. Somebody has to live in California!
"The only thing that can happen between us is revenge—"
Heriberto Yepez is back in English and is ready to rock! Check out his
Border Blogger page (scroll down his former English page and click on his Spanish site).
Heriberto Yepez is back in English and is ready to rock! Check out his
Border Blogger page (scroll down his former English page and click on his Spanish site).
I never get sad and sit on my couch with a six-pack of Sam Adams, a pint of Cherry Garcia and the dvd of Amelie. Damn.
:: Cori 11:32 AM [+] ::
Cori, I often go through a down feeling after I give a reading, and succumb to tv. Of course, I am very different from you because under these circumstances I'll have a Bass Ale, a pint of Chocolate Chocolate Chip and watch a VHS tape of Road Warrior.
:: Cori 11:32 AM [+] ::
Cori, I often go through a down feeling after I give a reading, and succumb to tv. Of course, I am very different from you because under these circumstances I'll have a Bass Ale, a pint of Chocolate Chocolate Chip and watch a VHS tape of Road Warrior.
Hey Jism Berhle, the Red Sox are getting desperate! They are advertising above FA!
Red Sox products galore
Find a vast selection of Boston Red Sox products at FansEdge www.FansEdge.com
Red Sox products galore
Find a vast selection of Boston Red Sox products at FansEdge www.FansEdge.com
There has been some discussion lately about amazon.com reviews. "Eddiewat" who I assume is Eddie Watkins, posted this review of my book "Theoretical Objects" a few years ago on amazon.com and I've always liked it. Recently it appeared on my Google pages:
Theoretical Objects by Nick Piombino
List Price: $10.95
Buy new: $10.95
Special Order
Exploratory Principles Of Pleasure December 1, 2000
Nick Piombino humanizes experimental poetry by demonstrating its fidelity to human experience on fundamental levels and our responses to such experience. No writing can be completely free of ideology, but in comparison to the work of most "LANGUAGE" writing theorists his is refreshingly flexible and open and accepting, with relieving touches of Romanticism and sheer lyricism. I was initially attracted to Mr. Piombino's The Boundary Of Blur (by all means pick it up too if you can find it) because of his linking Surrealism and Debussy and "LANGUAGE" writing into a multivalent optimistic beast whose main requirement of us is that we remain rigorously honest and true to our own experience. Theoretical Objects, for the most part, strikes me as putting into actual practice ideas put forth and illustrated in The Boundary Of Blur. Both are low-key textbooks dedicated to experiential fullness in an increasingly homogenized and unknowingly borrowed world.
Theoretical Objects by Nick Piombino
List Price: $10.95
Buy new: $10.95
Special Order
Exploratory Principles Of Pleasure December 1, 2000
Nick Piombino humanizes experimental poetry by demonstrating its fidelity to human experience on fundamental levels and our responses to such experience. No writing can be completely free of ideology, but in comparison to the work of most "LANGUAGE" writing theorists his is refreshingly flexible and open and accepting, with relieving touches of Romanticism and sheer lyricism. I was initially attracted to Mr. Piombino's The Boundary Of Blur (by all means pick it up too if you can find it) because of his linking Surrealism and Debussy and "LANGUAGE" writing into a multivalent optimistic beast whose main requirement of us is that we remain rigorously honest and true to our own experience. Theoretical Objects, for the most part, strikes me as putting into actual practice ideas put forth and illustrated in The Boundary Of Blur. Both are low-key textbooks dedicated to experiential fullness in an increasingly homogenized and unknowingly borrowed world.
does anyone really want to hear what a reading was "like"? I mean, if you weren't there, you missed it, right?
KSMohammed
Kasey , most writing is about some other time and place, is it not? Even the thoughts we read took place somewhere else and at another time. So with this line of reasoning, why write or read at all?
KSMohammed
Kasey , most writing is about some other time and place, is it not? Even the thoughts we read took place somewhere else and at another time. So with this line of reasoning, why write or read at all?
This, too, is about memory. They replicate themselves, doubling into twins. Exact, but still a replica. You can hear the aura, we all copied that. "Mechanical reproduction" I copy that. Someone is juxta-exposed. Out at the edge of the gleaming.
Done only once, announcing a career. Permission given- it's all a script for a movie. By the time you make it, the movie has caught up up with you by being predicted. The thought is the thing, as Seth said. "You create your own reality." By leaving nothing out, everything is forgiven. This is the strategy of the father- confessor and the automatic writer alike. Standing quiet and waiting for me to announce whether to go left, or right, downstage or upstage? Completes the lexicon of a legion of voices, spacing themselves out geographically to hear themselves thingk. The path of a career, divisions in space-time. No rest for the weary or the unrelenting. The sadness on the spaces between the cracks. Give pleasure a name.
Continuity takes itself in stride.How many voices in the chorus? Again, spread out in light and shade unfurling like a cloud or a flag.
By now, you've followed all my clues and have found out that all this time I've been tracking *you*, dear reader. In your thoughts I'll hear all my echoes before I've even thought them. You're constantly ahead of me, you've already decided before I've begun
I apologize, that was unfair. Can we still be friends? Acquaintannces, anyway? I wasn't really watching you, just listening, as always, for particulars. And then we'll go our own ways.
(7/21/01)
Sand
*
Camoflage was the word I was looking for.
(7/23/01
.
Done only once, announcing a career. Permission given- it's all a script for a movie. By the time you make it, the movie has caught up up with you by being predicted. The thought is the thing, as Seth said. "You create your own reality." By leaving nothing out, everything is forgiven. This is the strategy of the father- confessor and the automatic writer alike. Standing quiet and waiting for me to announce whether to go left, or right, downstage or upstage? Completes the lexicon of a legion of voices, spacing themselves out geographically to hear themselves thingk. The path of a career, divisions in space-time. No rest for the weary or the unrelenting. The sadness on the spaces between the cracks. Give pleasure a name.
Continuity takes itself in stride.How many voices in the chorus? Again, spread out in light and shade unfurling like a cloud or a flag.
By now, you've followed all my clues and have found out that all this time I've been tracking *you*, dear reader. In your thoughts I'll hear all my echoes before I've even thought them. You're constantly ahead of me, you've already decided before I've begun
I apologize, that was unfair. Can we still be friends? Acquaintannces, anyway? I wasn't really watching you, just listening, as always, for particulars. And then we'll go our own ways.
(7/21/01)
Sand
*
Camoflage was the word I was looking for.
(7/23/01
.
Wednesday, May 7
This morning I was unable to track down where Cori Copp was reading and I was determined to go. I got part of the story on her Google page, but then decided to post a blog asking her this afternoon and for some reason I had a hunch she might check -fait acompli- today and fortunately for me, she did! By the way, as I wrote below, this banner ad was flying above her site: "Find Nick: Contact Nick" (See below)
I kid you not! One of those synchronicities that seem to happen to bloggers constantly, especially when they get in touch with each other regularly. I had just come home from a day at the Metropolitan Museum and seeing X2 (XMEN 2). I wanted to go to Cori's reading but I didn't have the address and I didn't get home until after 6:30pm and the reading started at 7. After checking Cori's blog with her note to me, I sort of ran to the #2 train which is a quick trip down to Chambers Street. So I went down to the First Tuesday series which is located at 142 Duane Street in a comfortable, nicely laid out, lovely small gallery. I walked in and saw my friend Vicky Hudspith there and she introduced me to Eddie Berrigan. Cori Copp led off, followed by Marco Villalobos, then Rachel Levitsky and Garrett Kallenberg. Cori Copp, who I had only just met last Sunday at the Zinc Bar, whose blog *Little Shirley Bean* is quickly becoming a favorite, is a very poised and attractive reader who writes with wit and depth, a rare combination. In a clear voice she read a strong group of poems, each constructed thematically, yet each encompassing multiple and overlapping facets, read in a steady voice that resonated more and more complexly with her material as she got warmed to the situation and became comfortable with the audience. She stopped to kid once about her own height vis a vis that of the podium, but she didn't undercut the the work's complications with a lot of comedy (this was clearly a choice, as she is a good comic also: you can tell, just talking with her and noticing the quirky moments in her texts.) Cori read in a clear, but not exagerrated or overwhelming voice. Her work reflected a level of quality and interest where I have to restrain myself from begging the poet to let me read all the poems immediately after the reading. They were witty, rich, layered, resonant and complex. Her reading did them more and more justice as she continued at a good quick pace, quick enough to give the words and ideas a chance to resonate with each other and to give the listener a sense of each poem's proper pace and network of transformations. The poems were dense but individualized.This won me over because I like individual poems as individual personalites, not as conceptual wallpaper.Later I asked her for the titles because a poem's titles frequently telegraph the range of a poet's understanding of the complex issues that pervade how to introduce poems to their readers. Cori's titles are great: "Ploditics." I loved this title and poem because it talks to the issue of the boring, and bogged down, pace of political discussion and exchange. The others were, "A Mad Day," "Past Antepartum" (my favorite), "Post Holiday," and "Ethics In Real Time." I was lucky to get to talk with some of Cori's friends including Eddie Berrigan (we discussed his father Ted who was my mentor and friend), Richard O'Connor who explained how I could do the collage animations on my IBook, and promised to answer some questions (I'd like to see his animations) and Jenny, who reads blogs a lot and feels she should cut down. Cori even asked her if she had read my blog! Thanks, Cori! The other readers were Rachel Levitky, Garrett Kallenberg and Marco Villalobos. All were well worth hearing and I would go to hear any of them again. I have Rachel's book "Under The Sun" (Futurepoem) and I plan to get Garrett's. Marco Villalobos sold me his chapbook "barrio gold."
Cori asked me at the gallery if I was joining them and I said "Definitely" and the next second she was gone! I went out there and looked all over. Her friend, Richard O'Conner, was saying goodbye to Cori on the corner and then she vanished! I figured maybe she was coming back. So I waited for Rachel (who I got to know last week when I read with her and Jerome Sala at the Ceres Gallery) who then said Cori had gone across the street. I got to hang out some more with Chris, whose introductions I like a lot and has a way of reading more poetry on the breaks, a sense of devotion to the art I really enjoy seeing. I talked with Rachel and her friend Erica Kauffman, a recent MFA graduate poet from the New School. My friend Elaine Equi was her mentor and she's met Jerome Sala, her husband, who read with me and Rachel last week. We talked about SoftSkull Press and the fact that they've accepted Jerome's book and what a terrific press it is. I mentioned that they are looking at a book of Jim Behrle's also. She mentioned she had some poems on his Give Me My Ball Back site.
After the reading, Cori was sitting at this great cafe across the street. You have to be swift to keep up with Cori; *she's* damn well not a plodder! The cafe, on West Broadway across from Duane, features a terrific $3 artist's meal, which is a burger, salad or pasta dish! Pretty good, especially for the price. Over a beer, Cori and I talked about her poetry, blogging, her jobs and her plans for the future. She was sitting with a table of friends who clearly admired her but were amiable, low key and easy to be around: Eddie Berrigan, was sitting outside at the table, another guy I never met and Cori's firend Jenny.
A little later Cori sat down with me, gave me the list of poems and talked with me about "Past Antepartum." This refers to the period of time before the pregnancy as compared to postpartum which is the time after. Cori believes, and I happen to agree with this, that children may know things from previous lives, or the time previous to life, during pregnancy. Then the knowledge is lost as the child gets older. She remembers saying certain words to her mother (perhaps she will remind me of what these were) that she could not possibly have any inkling of living in Lawrence, Kansas at the age of 2. Cori clearly distrusts new age cliches, but she's not too cool to talk about thoughts of past lives and the interesting things children get into at a very early age and then seem to forget once they get older.
Cori came to New York three years ago, after a short restay in Colorado, after living and going to school in New Orleans. She hasn't lived in Kansas since she was 11, at which time she moved to Colorado. She has been working at the Poetry Project , at BAM and Dance Theater Worshop. She's thought of going for a Bard, MFA, but she's in no hurry. Cori has an interesting way of establishing a pace for her poems and performances that I kept noticing she will apply to other things like plans or activities; when poems or actions come across as being governed by thought, then form has a better way of establishing content and vice versa. No limit to the areas of life wherein we might establish an individual stride. It's a freeing notion that reminds me of Goethe's aphorism: "Never hurry, never rest." Cori Copp has a way of establishing a suitable stride, particularly in relation to all things surrounding her poetry, which is what a poet should be doing, of course; the notion is catchy and that's not a bad thing.
I kid you not! One of those synchronicities that seem to happen to bloggers constantly, especially when they get in touch with each other regularly. I had just come home from a day at the Metropolitan Museum and seeing X2 (XMEN 2). I wanted to go to Cori's reading but I didn't have the address and I didn't get home until after 6:30pm and the reading started at 7. After checking Cori's blog with her note to me, I sort of ran to the #2 train which is a quick trip down to Chambers Street. So I went down to the First Tuesday series which is located at 142 Duane Street in a comfortable, nicely laid out, lovely small gallery. I walked in and saw my friend Vicky Hudspith there and she introduced me to Eddie Berrigan. Cori Copp led off, followed by Marco Villalobos, then Rachel Levitsky and Garrett Kallenberg. Cori Copp, who I had only just met last Sunday at the Zinc Bar, whose blog *Little Shirley Bean* is quickly becoming a favorite, is a very poised and attractive reader who writes with wit and depth, a rare combination. In a clear voice she read a strong group of poems, each constructed thematically, yet each encompassing multiple and overlapping facets, read in a steady voice that resonated more and more complexly with her material as she got warmed to the situation and became comfortable with the audience. She stopped to kid once about her own height vis a vis that of the podium, but she didn't undercut the the work's complications with a lot of comedy (this was clearly a choice, as she is a good comic also: you can tell, just talking with her and noticing the quirky moments in her texts.) Cori read in a clear, but not exagerrated or overwhelming voice. Her work reflected a level of quality and interest where I have to restrain myself from begging the poet to let me read all the poems immediately after the reading. They were witty, rich, layered, resonant and complex. Her reading did them more and more justice as she continued at a good quick pace, quick enough to give the words and ideas a chance to resonate with each other and to give the listener a sense of each poem's proper pace and network of transformations. The poems were dense but individualized.This won me over because I like individual poems as individual personalites, not as conceptual wallpaper.Later I asked her for the titles because a poem's titles frequently telegraph the range of a poet's understanding of the complex issues that pervade how to introduce poems to their readers. Cori's titles are great: "Ploditics." I loved this title and poem because it talks to the issue of the boring, and bogged down, pace of political discussion and exchange. The others were, "A Mad Day," "Past Antepartum" (my favorite), "Post Holiday," and "Ethics In Real Time." I was lucky to get to talk with some of Cori's friends including Eddie Berrigan (we discussed his father Ted who was my mentor and friend), Richard O'Connor who explained how I could do the collage animations on my IBook, and promised to answer some questions (I'd like to see his animations) and Jenny, who reads blogs a lot and feels she should cut down. Cori even asked her if she had read my blog! Thanks, Cori! The other readers were Rachel Levitky, Garrett Kallenberg and Marco Villalobos. All were well worth hearing and I would go to hear any of them again. I have Rachel's book "Under The Sun" (Futurepoem) and I plan to get Garrett's. Marco Villalobos sold me his chapbook "barrio gold."
Cori asked me at the gallery if I was joining them and I said "Definitely" and the next second she was gone! I went out there and looked all over. Her friend, Richard O'Conner, was saying goodbye to Cori on the corner and then she vanished! I figured maybe she was coming back. So I waited for Rachel (who I got to know last week when I read with her and Jerome Sala at the Ceres Gallery) who then said Cori had gone across the street. I got to hang out some more with Chris, whose introductions I like a lot and has a way of reading more poetry on the breaks, a sense of devotion to the art I really enjoy seeing. I talked with Rachel and her friend Erica Kauffman, a recent MFA graduate poet from the New School. My friend Elaine Equi was her mentor and she's met Jerome Sala, her husband, who read with me and Rachel last week. We talked about SoftSkull Press and the fact that they've accepted Jerome's book and what a terrific press it is. I mentioned that they are looking at a book of Jim Behrle's also. She mentioned she had some poems on his Give Me My Ball Back site.
After the reading, Cori was sitting at this great cafe across the street. You have to be swift to keep up with Cori; *she's* damn well not a plodder! The cafe, on West Broadway across from Duane, features a terrific $3 artist's meal, which is a burger, salad or pasta dish! Pretty good, especially for the price. Over a beer, Cori and I talked about her poetry, blogging, her jobs and her plans for the future. She was sitting with a table of friends who clearly admired her but were amiable, low key and easy to be around: Eddie Berrigan, was sitting outside at the table, another guy I never met and Cori's firend Jenny.
A little later Cori sat down with me, gave me the list of poems and talked with me about "Past Antepartum." This refers to the period of time before the pregnancy as compared to postpartum which is the time after. Cori believes, and I happen to agree with this, that children may know things from previous lives, or the time previous to life, during pregnancy. Then the knowledge is lost as the child gets older. She remembers saying certain words to her mother (perhaps she will remind me of what these were) that she could not possibly have any inkling of living in Lawrence, Kansas at the age of 2. Cori clearly distrusts new age cliches, but she's not too cool to talk about thoughts of past lives and the interesting things children get into at a very early age and then seem to forget once they get older.
Cori came to New York three years ago, after a short restay in Colorado, after living and going to school in New Orleans. She hasn't lived in Kansas since she was 11, at which time she moved to Colorado. She has been working at the Poetry Project , at BAM and Dance Theater Worshop. She's thought of going for a Bard, MFA, but she's in no hurry. Cori has an interesting way of establishing a pace for her poems and performances that I kept noticing she will apply to other things like plans or activities; when poems or actions come across as being governed by thought, then form has a better way of establishing content and vice versa. No limit to the areas of life wherein we might establish an individual stride. It's a freeing notion that reminds me of Goethe's aphorism: "Never hurry, never rest." Cori Copp has a way of establishing a suitable stride, particularly in relation to all things surrounding her poetry, which is what a poet should be doing, of course; the notion is catchy and that's not a bad thing.
Tuesday, May 6
Try not to get annoyed, listening for mistakes (resonances). Another name for memories. Yes, this was to be recognized as a kind of automatic manufacture as well. Phrases that warm, a pestilance to cool. Out of Africa, a way of effacing lack of reciprocity in conversation, polylogue or monologue recommendations notwithstanding. Fatuous, fractions, fecetious, fractions, reflections, confessions. Aspects of the not so novel. What else is new? Speaking in sponge, an entire poetics created out of perverse subversion. (reveals universal reversions) [these three words crossed out] Reviling, reveling, revealing. Something understood is tucked between, is stuffed within, tied in, sandwiched in the corners. Sven strugges.- I don't know him. Who am I? "Freudian sollipsisms" a makeshift enterprise in N. This slips. Out of the- murky, foggy cadences. Stop and another word will start. To be continued like a ladder, "take me to your ladder, I'll see your leader later" lattices, attitudes, rain. Anything revealed behind a smokescreen. The world is enough and is filled with time. Or it is running out of the other side of the question. Which invariably answers itself, the sound of a screaming jet forever in my ears. The distance, a makeover was a series of suggestions soon to be passee.They think and earn themselves a piece of learning. Sky is a kind of tribe incomprehensibly. There is nothing ordinary about it Follows suit, Makeshift attitudes suffice. Nearing the perpetrator eventually. The words translate themselves. Each has a face. Each face has its ludicrous side and is also conspicuously variable in the time it takes to change pens all the facts have been replaced. Alteration is a way of forgetting. This is how each is disguised but in the light of day you can recognize a face and its changing expression. "If a fool would persist in his folly he would be wise." [Incorrect: he would become wise] Don't forget to send one to Joan (of ellipsis) Retallack. Ain't it the truth? Work just creates more work. Don't be upset by the fact that the trickster makes ample use of decoys (the kind of military garb that uses this). The trail leads us right to the entrance. The door is the cover to a dictionary. Follow the faces one to the other like a sleuth. The reader is the suspect in this tale of intrigue, betrayal and mistrust. But even, or perhaps particularly, the violence is nuanced. To have method in your madness you must have madness to your method. Time is a suspect too, as are almost all ideologies. They had their dreamers too, if you wait for your whole lifetime, you will finally do it, but you may not be able to match the outcome with the original intention. As the reader, you are the casting director, not just the projectionist. All's fair in aphorisms and lies. I'm not Haydn so come and get me. Seventeen and forty-two.
What an atrocious understanding that listens without wit.
Always and again, feeding your way into things. they linger, they tango, they thank you, they disregard, they understand. What does it look like? Like, you don't know your own size, the feel of things? You have to get the measure of the pleasure. Feet on the ground, head in the air.
"Head up the ass," you mean.
Who said that?
What is the sound of incomprehension?
"May day, may day, may day." So they say. Does what helps, sound good? Action at a distance in time. At all events cpatured some. *Trances afterwards*.Sounds like what? "MIght have been the water" is what Toni said.
Esimates, roughing out the design captures some. Listening to something not said yet is an echo from somewhere else.
I still can't remember the name of the disguise, its title. Secrets suffice. I can (can't) explain it. Officially, anyway. There are exams to take, I can tell you that much.Monotonous study, tedious accumulation of details. A map. Surrounding all the dishonesty, exposing the fakes. Someone had to be disturbed or confused. Loitering between the sun and the shadows. Making believe, imagining, pretending. "He's pretentious," that one. "Anybody can do that."
(7/21/01)
What an atrocious understanding that listens without wit.
Always and again, feeding your way into things. they linger, they tango, they thank you, they disregard, they understand. What does it look like? Like, you don't know your own size, the feel of things? You have to get the measure of the pleasure. Feet on the ground, head in the air.
"Head up the ass," you mean.
Who said that?
What is the sound of incomprehension?
"May day, may day, may day." So they say. Does what helps, sound good? Action at a distance in time. At all events cpatured some. *Trances afterwards*.Sounds like what? "MIght have been the water" is what Toni said.
Esimates, roughing out the design captures some. Listening to something not said yet is an echo from somewhere else.
I still can't remember the name of the disguise, its title. Secrets suffice. I can (can't) explain it. Officially, anyway. There are exams to take, I can tell you that much.Monotonous study, tedious accumulation of details. A map. Surrounding all the dishonesty, exposing the fakes. Someone had to be disturbed or confused. Loitering between the sun and the shadows. Making believe, imagining, pretending. "He's pretentious," that one. "Anybody can do that."
(7/21/01)
Monday, May 5
"Woke up this morning and found an entire women’s outfit strewn across the guest bed. This means what, all you married folk?
It means my wife changed her mind about the outfit she picked out last night.
I thank God all I need are a pair of pants and shirt, with “matching” being an optional quality."
John Erhardt
Yeah, "optional" matching unless she notices your outfit before you leave for the day, right?
Or if you're going out together?
Unless I move quick, no getting out of the house unless everything "matches."
It means my wife changed her mind about the outfit she picked out last night.
I thank God all I need are a pair of pants and shirt, with “matching” being an optional quality."
John Erhardt
Yeah, "optional" matching unless she notices your outfit before you leave for the day, right?
Or if you're going out together?
Unless I move quick, no getting out of the house unless everything "matches."
Did you know that the Boston Red Sox sold Babe Ruth for a few hundred thousand dollars so an investor could get more money to angel "No No Nanette?" Did you know that ever since then, the Boston Red Sox have never won a world series and the Yankees have won 26? Did you know that when he played baseball Jim played catcher, that he lives in an overly expensive apartment in Brookline with two roomates, that he has two brothers, including one in the internet business who lives in the Boston area and the other one lives in Tempe, Arizona in a boring suburb? That Jim saw X Men 2 twice on Saturday (wish I had)? That he recommended a spin off movie now on video that is a follow-up film to Chasing Amy? (Can't think of the name now).
It was an amazingly quick trip from West 95th Street to Yankee stadium, maybe about 20 minutes. One very surreal moment when I had to run across the street after waiting on a long line to check my backpack in an anti-terrorism measure. The Yankees lost 2-0 in a tight pitchers' battle. With Jim's running explanations and frequent hilarious asides to people sitting by (Jim develops audiences wherever he goes) the game went by in a few minutes, though on the clock it was a few hours. Although Jim was interested in the game, he was not fascinated by it and I assumed this was because his beloved Red Sox were not there. Jim kept kibitzing with all the fans around him and they shared lots of baseball facts and lore. Jim was mostly interested in the stadium itself. It is a grand piece of architecture, breathtaking in its scope, and is rolled out all around you very regally from the perspective of the bleachers. It was a cool and very bright day with a light breeze. You could see every pitch very clearly from our vantage point. Even though I am no baseball adept I could call almost every pitch correctly. I could even see that the Oakland A's pitchers were using the strategy of intimidating the batters by throwing fastballs very close inside. Jim said yes this could scare the batters and that no one can help this reflex. In the 5th or 6th inning, one Yankee was hit and got a free single out of it. The sun came out and stayed for the day.
Every kid that went near Jim and could get a look at him seemed to know immediately what a baseball fan he is and seemed to want to talk with him and follow him around like a puppy. On the subway, I thought one kid was going to break away from his father and follow Jim off the train. As soon as we got off the train another kid started beaming at him! They all wanted to talk with him about baseball.As we descended the stairs from the bleachers after the sad ending of the 9th inning, Jim paused to look out at the enormous green expanse gleaming in the late afternoon sun. He loved this venerable stadium and couldn't stop admiring it. I stared out at the huge signs on the high back wall of the stadium and saw a gasoline ad with the letters HESS. I thought of Dave. Then I thought: if you have never seen that special look of joy on the face of someone in love with baseball you have not lived.
We came back to my apartment and had some more tea. Toni came home and talked with Jim about what is now hilariously known as "Nick's obsession with blogging." Several bloggers names came up in the course of the day including: Stephanie Young, Jonathan Mayhew, Jordan Davis, David Hess, Josh Corey, K Silem Mohammed, Catherine Meng, Tim Yu, Ron Silliman, Joe Massey, Andrew Mister, Sandra Simonds. Toni talked about her nephew Michael (for those of you who read this blog regularly, he's the one whose music I put up on two audio blogs awhile back.) Michael has decided to go to Emerson College and Toni asked Jim a lot of questions about it.
We then headed down to Central Park and Strawberry Fields. Jim's never been there. Then we took a slow "C" train, then the West 4th Street (S) Shuttle to Broadway-Lafayette down to the Zinc Bar. I kept apologizing about getting him there late and Jim was cool as a cucumber and as it turned out we were only a few minutes "fashionably" late. We heard two poets (I'm sure Jim will supply the names, Andrea , who works in London and says "zed" instead of "zee.") both of whose work I enjoyed. There were a few bloggers there: Brian Kim Stefans, Drew Gardner and Cori Copp, who I met for the first time, but didn't have a chance to talk with very much. Would love to go hear her, Rachel Levitsky and Garret Kallenberg on Tuesday night. Counting Jim and I, bloggers made up a good percentage of the audience at the Zinc tonight, more than half. Douglas Rothschild had a cold, but was as weirdly entertaining as ever. Before we left the Zinc bar, Jim asked me to take care of his Yankee hat. I guess he didn't want to be seen wearing it or carrying it around in Boston. Especially late at night when lots of drunk Red Sox fans will be staulking the streets of Chinatown looking to beat up guys with Yankee hats where Jim's bus will be dropping him off about 1:30 am. Waiting for the bus I told Jim about my friend Jerome Sala, who also has a ms. with SoftSkull press. Jim may be planning to come back for a Mets game next Saturday and if this happens, I plan to go. Later next Saturday also planning to go to the Bowery Poetry Club to hear Lee Ann Brown sing with four of her friends. That will be a treat! Saw some videos at the book party for Laynie Browne and Hannah Weiner's new books on Saturday at the BPC. Also a terrific video made when Lee Ann was 9 months pregnant with beautiful photography of Lee Ann dressed in white costumes that reminded me of Frida Kahlo in front of mirrors and with great music by DJ Spooky. Laynie Browne' lovely new book "Pollen Memory" (which is graced with a drawing of tiny gloved hands reaching out from flowers by Toni Simon) was being celebrated, with generous portions of pita bread and later, a cake. Even heard a nice band, with a singer named Morley and I bought her CD which she signed: "peace, love and music," which I enjoyed listening to on the way home on the subway, after leaving Jim at the bustop in Chinatown.
Check out the two audioblogs Jim and I did at Yankee Stadium today on Uncle Miltie Behrle
Hey Jim: See you "on the blog..." .
It was an amazingly quick trip from West 95th Street to Yankee stadium, maybe about 20 minutes. One very surreal moment when I had to run across the street after waiting on a long line to check my backpack in an anti-terrorism measure. The Yankees lost 2-0 in a tight pitchers' battle. With Jim's running explanations and frequent hilarious asides to people sitting by (Jim develops audiences wherever he goes) the game went by in a few minutes, though on the clock it was a few hours. Although Jim was interested in the game, he was not fascinated by it and I assumed this was because his beloved Red Sox were not there. Jim kept kibitzing with all the fans around him and they shared lots of baseball facts and lore. Jim was mostly interested in the stadium itself. It is a grand piece of architecture, breathtaking in its scope, and is rolled out all around you very regally from the perspective of the bleachers. It was a cool and very bright day with a light breeze. You could see every pitch very clearly from our vantage point. Even though I am no baseball adept I could call almost every pitch correctly. I could even see that the Oakland A's pitchers were using the strategy of intimidating the batters by throwing fastballs very close inside. Jim said yes this could scare the batters and that no one can help this reflex. In the 5th or 6th inning, one Yankee was hit and got a free single out of it. The sun came out and stayed for the day.
Every kid that went near Jim and could get a look at him seemed to know immediately what a baseball fan he is and seemed to want to talk with him and follow him around like a puppy. On the subway, I thought one kid was going to break away from his father and follow Jim off the train. As soon as we got off the train another kid started beaming at him! They all wanted to talk with him about baseball.As we descended the stairs from the bleachers after the sad ending of the 9th inning, Jim paused to look out at the enormous green expanse gleaming in the late afternoon sun. He loved this venerable stadium and couldn't stop admiring it. I stared out at the huge signs on the high back wall of the stadium and saw a gasoline ad with the letters HESS. I thought of Dave. Then I thought: if you have never seen that special look of joy on the face of someone in love with baseball you have not lived.
We came back to my apartment and had some more tea. Toni came home and talked with Jim about what is now hilariously known as "Nick's obsession with blogging." Several bloggers names came up in the course of the day including: Stephanie Young, Jonathan Mayhew, Jordan Davis, David Hess, Josh Corey, K Silem Mohammed, Catherine Meng, Tim Yu, Ron Silliman, Joe Massey, Andrew Mister, Sandra Simonds. Toni talked about her nephew Michael (for those of you who read this blog regularly, he's the one whose music I put up on two audio blogs awhile back.) Michael has decided to go to Emerson College and Toni asked Jim a lot of questions about it.
We then headed down to Central Park and Strawberry Fields. Jim's never been there. Then we took a slow "C" train, then the West 4th Street (S) Shuttle to Broadway-Lafayette down to the Zinc Bar. I kept apologizing about getting him there late and Jim was cool as a cucumber and as it turned out we were only a few minutes "fashionably" late. We heard two poets (I'm sure Jim will supply the names, Andrea , who works in London and says "zed" instead of "zee.") both of whose work I enjoyed. There were a few bloggers there: Brian Kim Stefans, Drew Gardner and Cori Copp, who I met for the first time, but didn't have a chance to talk with very much. Would love to go hear her, Rachel Levitsky and Garret Kallenberg on Tuesday night. Counting Jim and I, bloggers made up a good percentage of the audience at the Zinc tonight, more than half. Douglas Rothschild had a cold, but was as weirdly entertaining as ever. Before we left the Zinc bar, Jim asked me to take care of his Yankee hat. I guess he didn't want to be seen wearing it or carrying it around in Boston. Especially late at night when lots of drunk Red Sox fans will be staulking the streets of Chinatown looking to beat up guys with Yankee hats where Jim's bus will be dropping him off about 1:30 am. Waiting for the bus I told Jim about my friend Jerome Sala, who also has a ms. with SoftSkull press. Jim may be planning to come back for a Mets game next Saturday and if this happens, I plan to go. Later next Saturday also planning to go to the Bowery Poetry Club to hear Lee Ann Brown sing with four of her friends. That will be a treat! Saw some videos at the book party for Laynie Browne and Hannah Weiner's new books on Saturday at the BPC. Also a terrific video made when Lee Ann was 9 months pregnant with beautiful photography of Lee Ann dressed in white costumes that reminded me of Frida Kahlo in front of mirrors and with great music by DJ Spooky. Laynie Browne' lovely new book "Pollen Memory" (which is graced with a drawing of tiny gloved hands reaching out from flowers by Toni Simon) was being celebrated, with generous portions of pita bread and later, a cake. Even heard a nice band, with a singer named Morley and I bought her CD which she signed: "peace, love and music," which I enjoyed listening to on the way home on the subway, after leaving Jim at the bustop in Chinatown.
Check out the two audioblogs Jim and I did at Yankee Stadium today on Uncle Miltie Behrle
Hey Jim: See you "on the blog..." .
Sunday, May 4
Behrle here. Just showed up at Nick's, in plenty of time. This will definitely be a blogtastic ballgame. Had a nice nap on the Fung Wah Bus ($20 round-trip) and a smooth ride on the C train. Nick just made me tea. Stay tuned to this and to jism.blogspot.com for all the latest. Have a wonderful Sunday, tigers and bears. For one day, go Yankees.
One of the most beautiful books of prose poetry ever is Carla Harryman's "Under The Bridge." I thought of this poem when I renamed Jordan Davis' link here "River Jordan."
Jordan River
"What year is this he asked another on the banks of the river.
But land is not in question here. Only the day. The range of vision. The distance between the mountains behind the lake and the mountains behind the men who face the lake.
The agreed that the river had become a camera, their souls shutters, their faces dim images.He felt absorbed by the water and locked inside a fluid but mechanical body. The other saw himself an old man, dim but no longer nervous, about to die but no longer lost in the habit of pretending calm in the face of other's esteem.
And all around there was barter with those forces. A trading off of materials for another's thought. Over the river he watched the duck hunters."
from *Under The Bridge* Carla Harryman
*This* Press, 1980
Shouldn't this great classic be reissued? Soon?
Jordan River
"What year is this he asked another on the banks of the river.
But land is not in question here. Only the day. The range of vision. The distance between the mountains behind the lake and the mountains behind the men who face the lake.
The agreed that the river had become a camera, their souls shutters, their faces dim images.He felt absorbed by the water and locked inside a fluid but mechanical body. The other saw himself an old man, dim but no longer nervous, about to die but no longer lost in the habit of pretending calm in the face of other's esteem.
And all around there was barter with those forces. A trading off of materials for another's thought. Over the river he watched the duck hunters."
from *Under The Bridge* Carla Harryman
*This* Press, 1980
Shouldn't this great classic be reissued? Soon?
Here I am waiting for Jim Behrle to come by so we can head up to Yankee Stadium. If he gets here on time, maybe Uncle Miltie will consent to saying hi to you on -fait accompli-!
Also- thanks to Ron Silliman for mentioning our little blogland park. He left out quite a few bloggers I read everyday but I think everyone has their own list they read, some of which may not be on their "recommended" list. But "short lists" are unhappy things, aren't they? I think they are an artifact of print culture that has to worry about the expense of paper. Hey, no limit on space here, right? All you have to do is check out Muse Apprentice Guild which routinely publishes 600 poets in an issue to see how that works out in cyberspace. Ah, these wide open spaces of blogland!
Also- thanks to Ron Silliman for mentioning our little blogland park. He left out quite a few bloggers I read everyday but I think everyone has their own list they read, some of which may not be on their "recommended" list. But "short lists" are unhappy things, aren't they? I think they are an artifact of print culture that has to worry about the expense of paper. Hey, no limit on space here, right? All you have to do is check out Muse Apprentice Guild which routinely publishes 600 poets in an issue to see how that works out in cyberspace. Ah, these wide open spaces of blogland!
Hey, I've got to go to sleep. Jimmy Behrle of ("more names than I can ever mention") blog and I are going to go to the Yankees Game tomorrow. He's coming over here where I live on W. 95th Street. Then we will take the #2 train on Broadway to W. 149th Street where we will switch to a #4 to E.161st Street. So far they say the weather will be cloudy, but no rain.
JImmy's already blogged about this once on his audio blog. I'm already blogging about it right here. This may just turn out to be the most blogged baseball game in history. On a poetics type blog anyway. Oh, I'm just procrastinating. Good night.
Life *in* literature- or the literature of life.
(6/21/01
The "off-world colonies"- the off-topic reveries.
Constantly come into a topic slowly, like slowly pushing apart the brush, to eventually spot the quarry (unheard.)
(7/6/01)
The reader is the detective, the writer is presenting his or her case.The clues are not so much hard to decipher as they are tedious to pay attention to because they are emerging constantly. It is the type of attention required that makes it hard, not the nature of the puzzles which must be unwound by using this intensity of concentration.
(7/12/01)
(Autobiographical samples. A note to me, to you, or both of us?)
The first time we stayed at David Dramm, Anne Le Barge and Diamonda's place (in Amsterdam) I had not brought much music with me. David, who is a composer, had hundreds of CD's, but not so much classical. I found the Beethoven String Quartets and played most of them constantly.The second trip to Amsterdam I brought a lot of Haydn String Quartets. Shortly after coming back I discovered the Haydn String Quartets and have been listening to them carefully. You can hear where Beethoven got his start.Like all the best composers, Haydn defies classification. The emotional lines are clear, suspend beautifully, and the voicing rarely comes across as mechanical or automatized.
(7/16/01)
Things resting in their place. Trying too hard to understand something that may not be worth it. Understanding it on the other hand, this issue is often one of an appropiate time or place.
The process in and for itself.
A question of where and how to let thought fit in comfortably.
What opens it up and what closes it.What is an infringement on what. With a bang or a whimper.Like a conversation or a dialogue.things feed into it or don't. Otherwise, they rest. Noticing the small detail. Richard Tuttle said something about optimism. The rage, the fury. Let it slide. The devote themselves. A talon. Swept in in quotes. Don't make the difficult impossible. Who says you can't. Slides in.
Elaboration. At least this one. They corner it, splicing the vastness. Or a blessing in disguise, a blessing in disguise makes time. After the fact. More ways than "in more ways than one." They should. Or should they? Even a reverse is more than one thing, getting up and making (creating) them in disguise. Singing or singing (sin-ging) a planet. How to pronounce it- who leads? - Or make something to understand. Under a narrowing...tendency. Or can make it up (create with) by and for. At last, at least.
Quarters, folded. A siren- attention to the police. Clearing it up, cleaning it up. They cause, or create a tendency, a destiny, a destination. It was, or someone cleared it up. Devil's in the details. Effacing or erasing the crime, the comma a copy, a retroforce in will. Stay alive. Can measure. Up to a force, another kind of connective. Just start and don't stop. Conjunctions, ampersands. A full stop.The rhythmic gestation. Land, ahoy. Name of a detective, reflection of a game. The narrative stretches in. So between, alright of (for) a game. Evidence, or shards, applause or a cause, sanwiched between the present and the past. Pieces of evidence to lead one on, from writer to reader. Under suspicion, under assumption- some pressure, not too much or too little. A slight but of permission.To horny, to slur. Not enough time to compose a vast lie, only time to contrive loitering for a time around an opening. Critics are needed to differentiate, a force for change. Launches an unlistenable diatribe (all hell breaks loose in a whisper). To embed, or notice. That was directly autobiographical, a mistatement. Never enough of anything, let alone appreciation in quotes. Had presented a space to introduce an underwood (underworld). Can resist a pun, is fun. Outside atlantic Atlantic City is a code.
The waves create a mystique. Im (plausible).
They (some) separate themselves.
Is a kind of scrolling web sites in reverse, play it again Sam Daniels. Whose middle age? juxtapositions, an ascension. Captialize on want , gesturing change.
A industry, industrious at for and by repetition.This copy (un)scrolls forward and backwards in reverse.The min(ed) uncovers itself retropregressively curling up inside its travesties. Put that on hold. Transvestites, reader and writer, dressing, addressing, undressing, progressing (a dirty word).
(7/21/01)
(6/21/01
The "off-world colonies"- the off-topic reveries.
Constantly come into a topic slowly, like slowly pushing apart the brush, to eventually spot the quarry (unheard.)
(7/6/01)
The reader is the detective, the writer is presenting his or her case.The clues are not so much hard to decipher as they are tedious to pay attention to because they are emerging constantly. It is the type of attention required that makes it hard, not the nature of the puzzles which must be unwound by using this intensity of concentration.
(7/12/01)
(Autobiographical samples. A note to me, to you, or both of us?)
The first time we stayed at David Dramm, Anne Le Barge and Diamonda's place (in Amsterdam) I had not brought much music with me. David, who is a composer, had hundreds of CD's, but not so much classical. I found the Beethoven String Quartets and played most of them constantly.The second trip to Amsterdam I brought a lot of Haydn String Quartets. Shortly after coming back I discovered the Haydn String Quartets and have been listening to them carefully. You can hear where Beethoven got his start.Like all the best composers, Haydn defies classification. The emotional lines are clear, suspend beautifully, and the voicing rarely comes across as mechanical or automatized.
(7/16/01)
Things resting in their place. Trying too hard to understand something that may not be worth it. Understanding it on the other hand, this issue is often one of an appropiate time or place.
The process in and for itself.
A question of where and how to let thought fit in comfortably.
What opens it up and what closes it.What is an infringement on what. With a bang or a whimper.Like a conversation or a dialogue.things feed into it or don't. Otherwise, they rest. Noticing the small detail. Richard Tuttle said something about optimism. The rage, the fury. Let it slide. The devote themselves. A talon. Swept in in quotes. Don't make the difficult impossible. Who says you can't. Slides in.
Elaboration. At least this one. They corner it, splicing the vastness. Or a blessing in disguise, a blessing in disguise makes time. After the fact. More ways than "in more ways than one." They should. Or should they? Even a reverse is more than one thing, getting up and making (creating) them in disguise. Singing or singing (sin-ging) a planet. How to pronounce it- who leads? - Or make something to understand. Under a narrowing...tendency. Or can make it up (create with) by and for. At last, at least.
Quarters, folded. A siren- attention to the police. Clearing it up, cleaning it up. They cause, or create a tendency, a destiny, a destination. It was, or someone cleared it up. Devil's in the details. Effacing or erasing the crime, the comma a copy, a retroforce in will. Stay alive. Can measure. Up to a force, another kind of connective. Just start and don't stop. Conjunctions, ampersands. A full stop.The rhythmic gestation. Land, ahoy. Name of a detective, reflection of a game. The narrative stretches in. So between, alright of (for) a game. Evidence, or shards, applause or a cause, sanwiched between the present and the past. Pieces of evidence to lead one on, from writer to reader. Under suspicion, under assumption- some pressure, not too much or too little. A slight but of permission.To horny, to slur. Not enough time to compose a vast lie, only time to contrive loitering for a time around an opening. Critics are needed to differentiate, a force for change. Launches an unlistenable diatribe (all hell breaks loose in a whisper). To embed, or notice. That was directly autobiographical, a mistatement. Never enough of anything, let alone appreciation in quotes. Had presented a space to introduce an underwood (underworld). Can resist a pun, is fun. Outside atlantic Atlantic City is a code.
The waves create a mystique. Im (plausible).
They (some) separate themselves.
Is a kind of scrolling web sites in reverse, play it again Sam Daniels. Whose middle age? juxtapositions, an ascension. Captialize on want , gesturing change.
A industry, industrious at for and by repetition.This copy (un)scrolls forward and backwards in reverse.The min(ed) uncovers itself retropregressively curling up inside its travesties. Put that on hold. Transvestites, reader and writer, dressing, addressing, undressing, progressing (a dirty word).
(7/21/01)
Everything in the world after coming backward in time is too loud and too bright.
The flashback story- they were travelling and working in a new area- telepathic software. They were nearing a breakthrough but they were arguing very heavily every day. An error in the experiment leads to his disappearance. After a period of three years, he is considered dead.
What has actually occured is that the experiment had been successful but only in one direction.
When he gets to the new world it is half-virtual and half real. Even as he adjusts to one situation and date in can change.The characters can be the same people in different outfits.
After a period of anger and depression, she finally gets back to work. Immediately she understands there may be a solution.This solution involved going backwards in time, in order to discover the real root of the situation. Change one right thing and everything can be changed.
She hadn't really wanted to do this in such an isolated place. He insists and this becomes the reason he is so hard to find. In the city there are more coordinate points. More minds, more coordinate points. People are all connected as in "six degrees of separation."
Right now she has gotten him back. This is shown in a flashback where he appears in Central Park near the tennis courts. Ashbery's book "Tennis Court Oath" comes into it.
Now it is too loud and too bright.This situation encompasses instability in the time factor. Everyone is getting older- travelling in time together.
(image-people in different cities all over the world).
Of course it is incredibly illegal to time travel from that era.
(6/9/01)
The flashback story- they were travelling and working in a new area- telepathic software. They were nearing a breakthrough but they were arguing very heavily every day. An error in the experiment leads to his disappearance. After a period of three years, he is considered dead.
What has actually occured is that the experiment had been successful but only in one direction.
When he gets to the new world it is half-virtual and half real. Even as he adjusts to one situation and date in can change.The characters can be the same people in different outfits.
After a period of anger and depression, she finally gets back to work. Immediately she understands there may be a solution.This solution involved going backwards in time, in order to discover the real root of the situation. Change one right thing and everything can be changed.
She hadn't really wanted to do this in such an isolated place. He insists and this becomes the reason he is so hard to find. In the city there are more coordinate points. More minds, more coordinate points. People are all connected as in "six degrees of separation."
Right now she has gotten him back. This is shown in a flashback where he appears in Central Park near the tennis courts. Ashbery's book "Tennis Court Oath" comes into it.
Now it is too loud and too bright.This situation encompasses instability in the time factor. Everyone is getting older- travelling in time together.
(image-people in different cities all over the world).
Of course it is incredibly illegal to time travel from that era.
(6/9/01)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)