1/18/87
Wall Sing Matilda (She Take Me Money &)
The representations call for something
of their own. Their mimicry is an
imitation of the dots that connect the
present sum total of the present from the
already transformed past moment present
in that plane. All ties in pyramidically
(algebraic watchwords I once called it-
some thing- dash parenthesis- a made
object.) Something ( the card game) is not yet
named. (Include the newspapers in this and all
of 20th Century political history- the Lindy,
Beatles, Peter, Paul & Mary, Ford Motor Company,
Al Capp- Jesus Christ why won't these names
leave me alone? (reconstruct your whole childhood
for a grade, close parenthesis).
Now name it- starving children, burning children!
Pianissimo (up yours, buster, D blank K, Cherry
Cola-
All contain bannisters, all utter themselves
into too many history lessons, all trade in
their clarinets for company air time. Castenets!
I think it's time to glissando into a linguistic
revolutionaria.
For this, he kept to himself in
chains, he dragged himself from office to office in
unholy tedium- for fragments of time once a year he
was totally free to Polka his/her brains out.
Wanna ketchup of flow behind- airflow
or go with the Flo.
Drop this show, through some filter, into reality.
1/20/86 acoustical differentiation= information
(hearing thoughts/ hearing outside sound)
1/28/87
2) Salvator Dali's Critical-Paranoiac
method- to see the interconnections
of "terror" and power
awareness of
1) The interconnections between
events may be the deepest form of
knowledge-
to connect knowledge the deepest knowledge
2/11/87
Doubling, tripling, quadrupling of thought:
what is called "the associative chain"
is a linear image which does not provide
an adequate visualization (visual
representation) of this inner process (experience).
One thought does not simply "lead" to
another thought. When a thought is "heard"
more resonantly, it gets up a resonant
"strumming" across many latitudes of
inner experience. These "strings" or modalities
or aspects of cognition and emotion are
spread like nets across wide areas of
inner life, encompassinng countless "points,"
nuances, memories, hungers, fears, wishes.
Yet, at certain times, a thought or feeling
leaps across all
boundaries of sense and sensing, interconnecting
and interweaving innumerable nuances of
experience, yet encompassed in some specific
sequence of words [Wittgenstein: words are like
notes on the keyboard of the imagination.]
Note I fouind tonight (written about 1976)
"All substances have a trick."
The idea of going through my notebooks
with an eye towards what I like
*now*-
2/15/87
When you know what you want you
look at the obstacles as annoyances,
not disappointments.
All notions of succession or tracking
or measurement, all ordering
paradymes, in fact, are dependent
on and built upon everyday notions of the
consecutiveness of temporal experience.
A brick is piled on another brick which is
piled on another brick. After a time the
walls are complete and then they are connected
by a roof. Above the roof, the sun and
moon are shining.
Yet nothing follows anything else,
though day by day the house remains &
the walls remain, and the roof remains and
the sun and moon rise and set over it, again
and again, and again and again.
There is no end to this because there is no
story and never was a story. We
wanted the stories to quiet ourselves- lull ourselves
on a cold night, in the
scary dark. Deep into the darkest night of
evening we sang songs and still sing them
because the future is unknown, remains
unknown, eventually & once and for all, all unknown.
Time is still, it's our hands than move.
(I completed this book the same night I saw
Ron, whose name is the first to appear in it.)
2/15/87
The question of immensity is a question
of visualization. if it is possible to
imagine an actuality, its possibility of
actually being perceived is greatly
increased. This is the place when attention
comes in. When I'm not looking for something, it
is hard for it to get my attention.
Distribution Automatique
Monday, November 10
Last night, at the Zinc Bar,
Maryann Shaneen and
Nada Gordon "interviewed"
each other. For this
event these two excellent
writers created a new
form for poetry readings
(these sorts of events
could very well use an
innovation and these
two did it!) I
expected more of a
parodic experience, but this
did not happen at all.
After a long, respectful
introduction by Brendan
Lorber, Nada asked
Maryann a question.
"You are no
minimalist, thank
Goddesses ...Whence
this breathlessness,"
Nada asked, "do you
dislike limitation? Is
there any connection
between the
pell-mell
forward rush of your
writing and the
kinesthetic
quality of your other
chosen medium, film?"
Maryann began
with a direct answer:
"Do I dislike,
limitation...if there is
one quality that defines
me to myself, it's my
dislike of limitation.
In the writing
it's related to a
hyperawareness,
everything being
too rich, too resonant
to be able to even get
out of the house in the
morning, it's why I am late
for everything...everything
is so filled with history
ithat it's overwhelming,
it's a mania, perhaps a
kind of autism, a way of
processing an oversensitivity
to stimuli, it's also a stance,
I suppose, in a world
based on homogenization
and depletion of
resources
and species. I want the plethora,
it's an urgency-
writing is a place to contain
mania and to layer and layer...
but I also wanted to slow it
down which is
why I moved away from poetry
to prose... The
breathlessness comes
from the frustration with the
medium itself, having to
write one word at a time,
to read line by line, page
by page, the utter linearity
of writing, I want to disrupt
that but thematically
not formally. I want to introduce
layer upon layer
and superimpose and disturb
things thematically
and conceptually...I'm not
really going to address the
film issue...what I'm not doing
in my prose I try to
do in film...people have called
my writing obsessive...
as in being haunted...or possessed
by an evil spirit...
an insistence beyond reading...
something
Drew said about poetry and activism...
writing as a form of exorcism...a purging
of the relentlessness
with which information
and ideas assault and bombard
but also
as a light, being overwhelmed
by the
knowledge that I can't know,
read and
say everything and a way of
processing
that urgency...I want to instill
the work with
a similar kind of urgency and
overwhelm and
to reorder it into another
form of chaos or
something that can't be controlled
or tamed
and this is also a stance
against
an overprocessed, over refined
world,
against the fashionable
over determined
formal or procedural
constraints of
writing...there are multiple
streams of
information...the breathlessness
is a form
of addressing fear...afraid of having
my access to information
controlled...
Then she read from a
terrific piece called
"Recovery"
Douglas Rothschild then
asked Nada
to repeat her question
to Marianne.
Then Marianne asked
Nada a question:
"Your writing I see as
hermaphroditic:
varying between being
unabashedly
unapologetically feminine,
unafraid of lush feminine
emotionality,
vulnerability, sincerity,
fragility,
and male irony,
defiance and formalism.
I want you to address
that and to
talk about the role
and the need
for the ornate
and opulent in your work
and I see one of the most
compelling
and engaging aspects
of your work
as the tension and movement
between its emotionality and its
obvious
awareness of formalism. And talk
about the
brilliant term you coined:
"procedural
expressionism."
Nada:
False dichotomies:
no simple binaries please,
I rear up at these, taxonomic
nonsense separating out
qualities for fear of identification
with what might be deemed weak:
vulnerability and irony, sincerity,
and defiance, fragility and formalism
not mutually exclusive, intertwined,
interpenetrating, kind of like snails,
and codependent.
Hermaphroditism,
with Aphrodite in the center,
she helps
me to smudge the chalk at the
boundaries of the two worlds
and then
what's contained in either
can spill
in and over. Being hermaphrodite
also allows me to objectify women to
the point I can keep my own harem:
Marianne: Am I in it?
Nada: Of course. I'm not sure
but I think this can be a form
of table turning or power grabbing,
revenge for the centuries of oppression
that infect my gender memory. When I
say harem I mean my poems, they
are more seraglio to me
than any kind of usable
or tradable cultural capital.
At once emotional
chattel and dowery,
to me poems are
odalisques, women:
bodacious, inscrutable,
frustrated, querelous,
seductive, languorous,
fragrant, manipulable,
manipulative, hard to
understand, easy to please.
[some laughter and joking
from the audience at this]
Then she read one of her
snappy, thought-provoking,
beautiful poems.
After the break, the performance
was to continue,
but unfortunately
a musical performance
in the
adjoining bar began
so their presentation
had to
stop at that point.
The rapt audience
however, was left
stimulated, excited and
craving more from these two
charismatic poets.
I hope Nada Gordon and Marianne Shaneen
can be convinced to repeat this unique and
exciting performance-work again soon
so that others can enjoy and benefit.
Maryann Shaneen and
Nada Gordon "interviewed"
each other. For this
event these two excellent
writers created a new
form for poetry readings
(these sorts of events
could very well use an
innovation and these
two did it!) I
expected more of a
parodic experience, but this
did not happen at all.
After a long, respectful
introduction by Brendan
Lorber, Nada asked
Maryann a question.
"You are no
minimalist, thank
Goddesses ...Whence
this breathlessness,"
Nada asked, "do you
dislike limitation? Is
there any connection
between the
pell-mell
forward rush of your
writing and the
kinesthetic
quality of your other
chosen medium, film?"
Maryann began
with a direct answer:
"Do I dislike,
limitation...if there is
one quality that defines
me to myself, it's my
dislike of limitation.
In the writing
it's related to a
hyperawareness,
everything being
too rich, too resonant
to be able to even get
out of the house in the
morning, it's why I am late
for everything...everything
is so filled with history
ithat it's overwhelming,
it's a mania, perhaps a
kind of autism, a way of
processing an oversensitivity
to stimuli, it's also a stance,
I suppose, in a world
based on homogenization
and depletion of
resources
and species. I want the plethora,
it's an urgency-
writing is a place to contain
mania and to layer and layer...
but I also wanted to slow it
down which is
why I moved away from poetry
to prose... The
breathlessness comes
from the frustration with the
medium itself, having to
write one word at a time,
to read line by line, page
by page, the utter linearity
of writing, I want to disrupt
that but thematically
not formally. I want to introduce
layer upon layer
and superimpose and disturb
things thematically
and conceptually...I'm not
really going to address the
film issue...what I'm not doing
in my prose I try to
do in film...people have called
my writing obsessive...
as in being haunted...or possessed
by an evil spirit...
an insistence beyond reading...
something
Drew said about poetry and activism...
writing as a form of exorcism...a purging
of the relentlessness
with which information
and ideas assault and bombard
but also
as a light, being overwhelmed
by the
knowledge that I can't know,
read and
say everything and a way of
processing
that urgency...I want to instill
the work with
a similar kind of urgency and
overwhelm and
to reorder it into another
form of chaos or
something that can't be controlled
or tamed
and this is also a stance
against
an overprocessed, over refined
world,
against the fashionable
over determined
formal or procedural
constraints of
writing...there are multiple
streams of
information...the breathlessness
is a form
of addressing fear...afraid of having
my access to information
controlled...
Then she read from a
terrific piece called
"Recovery"
Douglas Rothschild then
asked Nada
to repeat her question
to Marianne.
Then Marianne asked
Nada a question:
"Your writing I see as
hermaphroditic:
varying between being
unabashedly
unapologetically feminine,
unafraid of lush feminine
emotionality,
vulnerability, sincerity,
fragility,
and male irony,
defiance and formalism.
I want you to address
that and to
talk about the role
and the need
for the ornate
and opulent in your work
and I see one of the most
compelling
and engaging aspects
of your work
as the tension and movement
between its emotionality and its
obvious
awareness of formalism. And talk
about the
brilliant term you coined:
"procedural
expressionism."
Nada:
False dichotomies:
no simple binaries please,
I rear up at these, taxonomic
nonsense separating out
qualities for fear of identification
with what might be deemed weak:
vulnerability and irony, sincerity,
and defiance, fragility and formalism
not mutually exclusive, intertwined,
interpenetrating, kind of like snails,
and codependent.
Hermaphroditism,
with Aphrodite in the center,
she helps
me to smudge the chalk at the
boundaries of the two worlds
and then
what's contained in either
can spill
in and over. Being hermaphrodite
also allows me to objectify women to
the point I can keep my own harem:
Marianne: Am I in it?
Nada: Of course. I'm not sure
but I think this can be a form
of table turning or power grabbing,
revenge for the centuries of oppression
that infect my gender memory. When I
say harem I mean my poems, they
are more seraglio to me
than any kind of usable
or tradable cultural capital.
At once emotional
chattel and dowery,
to me poems are
odalisques, women:
bodacious, inscrutable,
frustrated, querelous,
seductive, languorous,
fragrant, manipulable,
manipulative, hard to
understand, easy to please.
[some laughter and joking
from the audience at this]
Then she read one of her
snappy, thought-provoking,
beautiful poems.
After the break, the performance
was to continue,
but unfortunately
a musical performance
in the
adjoining bar began
so their presentation
had to
stop at that point.
The rapt audience
however, was left
stimulated, excited and
craving more from these two
charismatic poets.
I hope Nada Gordon and Marianne Shaneen
can be convinced to repeat this unique and
exciting performance-work again soon
so that others can enjoy and benefit.
Sunday, November 9
6/4/94
Always (there are) the reasons to
write. The inchoate, confusing thoughts,
findings, piling up one atop the other, like
the books, papers, envelopes and magazines
on the floor, on tables and desks, chairs and
dressers, bookcases, anywhere there is a flat
surface.
Whatever and whoever I envy, the corrosive
feeling resists my motivation to do, to
connect, to express.
(After writing this I called X
and we talked for 3 and a half hours.
We discussed the Language Movement, our
careers as writers, relationships
between men and women, his view of letting
the negative emerging be absorbed in a
Zen-like way, the New York school of
poets, (their snobbery), French snobbery,
air fares to Europe, the lack of a "wise
man" in the Language school, his distrust
of Y, his own overcoming of his
difficulties w/becoming known, my
idea of the cultural unconscious to
counter his idea that the avant-garde
just effects itself-
Always (there are) the reasons to
write. The inchoate, confusing thoughts,
findings, piling up one atop the other, like
the books, papers, envelopes and magazines
on the floor, on tables and desks, chairs and
dressers, bookcases, anywhere there is a flat
surface.
Whatever and whoever I envy, the corrosive
feeling resists my motivation to do, to
connect, to express.
(After writing this I called X
and we talked for 3 and a half hours.
We discussed the Language Movement, our
careers as writers, relationships
between men and women, his view of letting
the negative emerging be absorbed in a
Zen-like way, the New York school of
poets, (their snobbery), French snobbery,
air fares to Europe, the lack of a "wise
man" in the Language school, his distrust
of Y, his own overcoming of his
difficulties w/becoming known, my
idea of the cultural unconscious to
counter his idea that the avant-garde
just effects itself-
Saturday, November 8
...Shhhh- it's not official but... it looks
like I'll be reading at Wordsworth Books
in Harvard Square, Cambridge on November 29th at 5pm.
Thanks to Mr. Jim Behrle of The Famous Monkey {click here}
like I'll be reading at Wordsworth Books
in Harvard Square, Cambridge on November 29th at 5pm.
Thanks to Mr. Jim Behrle of The Famous Monkey {click here}
10/18/86
Afrodisiac
Staunch
Why save a light?
Too fattening
Unearth delight
Mayan codices
Practical
softeners
Pistol
Swamp
Lorgnette (cards)
Sheriff
Loud voice
Promenade
It's not about- it is about
Decca records
Billy Holiday
Descending sharps
Read flat
Who said that?
Labels, air shafts, tight waistline,
Precocious martyr- guilt
A sharp
Hairline
Dustmop
Coastline
Ice pick
Furniture
Total the past
Draw a line
Forget your schedule
Endless warfare
DON'T BE THRILLED
Resist arrest- keep silent- advise keys to
anxiety- select political realities- crumpled
roses, bunched paper
Spills
Discount
Slips by
Alternate- record- repeat- standby
Blastoff- maximum security- countless
murders- bloodthirsty- severs connections easily
Afrodisiac
Staunch
Why save a light?
Too fattening
Unearth delight
Mayan codices
Practical
softeners
Pistol
Swamp
Lorgnette (cards)
Sheriff
Loud voice
Promenade
It's not about- it is about
Decca records
Billy Holiday
Descending sharps
Read flat
Who said that?
Labels, air shafts, tight waistline,
Precocious martyr- guilt
A sharp
Hairline
Dustmop
Coastline
Ice pick
Furniture
Total the past
Draw a line
Forget your schedule
Endless warfare
DON'T BE THRILLED
Resist arrest- keep silent- advise keys to
anxiety- select political realities- crumpled
roses, bunched paper
Spills
Discount
Slips by
Alternate- record- repeat- standby
Blastoff- maximum security- countless
murders- bloodthirsty- severs connections easily
Friday, November 7
Well,
Perhaps there's more on that
page than you think. Your tones
keep ringing in my head like a cell
phone in a movie theatre.
Do you think poetry is some kind
of parlor trick? Do you think the
word "love" is to be bandied about
like the last bastion of a faded technology?
O laser beam of sarcasm why must you infiltrate
every last vestige of Madame Butterfly? Why must all
the best Sonatas be written in the key of irony ? Oh, I'm
bored out of my skull with cascades of brilliantly witty polemical opinions!
Life is becoming more and more like the restroom after the office party at an art magazine.
Perhaps there's more on that
page than you think. Your tones
keep ringing in my head like a cell
phone in a movie theatre.
Do you think poetry is some kind
of parlor trick? Do you think the
word "love" is to be bandied about
like the last bastion of a faded technology?
O laser beam of sarcasm why must you infiltrate
every last vestige of Madame Butterfly? Why must all
the best Sonatas be written in the key of irony ? Oh, I'm
bored out of my skull with cascades of brilliantly witty polemical opinions!
Life is becoming more and more like the restroom after the office party at an art magazine.
10/18/86
A
peck
a cord
a carillon
Save me
Tongue-in-cheek
Sam
paralysis
Bed
Northern lights, purple tights
Apples
Ashtrays
Mise-en-scene
A
peck
a cord
a carillon
Save me
Tongue-in-cheek
Sam
paralysis
Bed
Northern lights, purple tights
Apples
Ashtrays
Mise-en-scene
Lunatic
Sergeant-at-arms
Embrace-moi
Turnip
Ketchup
Mums the word
Change I to inheritance
Swoon
Tap into sounds of slaves- trombones?-
Answers, hills, a slow pace
(must be pain)
Kills the proud- ach-impossible
Then kiss me
Virgin spills
A shirt- clean
Hustle (missy)
It's the past
Sentence-caught still-
No one's saying anything
Sergeant-at-arms
Embrace-moi
Turnip
Ketchup
Mums the word
Change I to inheritance
Swoon
Tap into sounds of slaves- trombones?-
Answers, hills, a slow pace
(must be pain)
Kills the proud- ach-impossible
Then kiss me
Virgin spills
A shirt- clean
Hustle (missy)
It's the past
Sentence-caught still-
No one's saying anything
-lst, 1st, st., Str., stress
or here abide,a bite
inside (lower)outside (higher)
(again) beside (again)
Fierce streets
or here abide,a bite
inside (lower)outside (higher)
(again) beside (again)
Fierce streets
A limited number of choices
Feelings say different
Continuous phases suggests melody,
A displaced thought
Nearer, my memory, to thee
Feelings say different
Continuous phases suggests melody,
A displaced thought
Nearer, my memory, to thee
Thursday, November 6
[fait accompli
is pleased to
highly
recommend
the following
event. Don't
miss this
incredible
duo!]
Maryann
Shaneen
and
Nada
Gordon
will enact
a mutual
interview/
reading/
talk/
performance
with Q
and A
to follow
this Sunday,
November 9
at the
Zinc Bar
90 West
Houston
between
Broadway
& Thompson
at 6:37 pm
hosted by Brendan Lorber
is pleased to
highly
recommend
the following
event. Don't
miss this
incredible
duo!]
Maryann
Shaneen
and
Nada
Gordon
will enact
a mutual
interview/
reading/
talk/
performance
with Q
and A
to follow
this Sunday,
November 9
at the
Zinc Bar
90 West
Houston
between
Broadway
& Thompson
at 6:37 pm
hosted by Brendan Lorber
6/8/97
Dream state
lesson- something seeps through
and remembered
hardly comprehended
or barely understood
why something (this)
was even started
another text made (it possible)
another text opened the door
words on paper
the feelings, thoughts, ideas
stain the paper
a conversation with myself
coming through
a shock quickly erased
effaced
barely probable
no one bumped into me
something I thought or felt
pushed its way out of me
letting it come though
Dream state
lesson- something seeps through
and remembered
hardly comprehended
or barely understood
why something (this)
was even started
another text made (it possible)
another text opened the door
words on paper
the feelings, thoughts, ideas
stain the paper
a conversation with myself
coming through
a shock quickly erased
effaced
barely probable
no one bumped into me
something I thought or felt
pushed its way out of me
letting it come though
Wednesday, November 5
9/14/88
A poetics that allows a poem
to begin with any word or with
no words at all. This is no
simple democracy of experience
or call for "automatic writing"
This is the complete abandonment
of any kind of privilaged experience.
Chance need not play the role of
leveller, a kind of yardstick to compare
one kind of observation with
another. That there isn't
(won't be for long) one absolute
means of measure or comparison
leads not to a benign or complacent
recognition of the relativism of
values, but to a conceptual glimpse
into the intrinsic ferment underlying
reality. A recognition, sometimes
ectastic, sometimes terrifying,
sometimes simply dreary, that actuality
*is* revolution, or *actuality* is revolution.
A poetics that allows a poem
to begin with any word or with
no words at all. This is no
simple democracy of experience
or call for "automatic writing"
This is the complete abandonment
of any kind of privilaged experience.
Chance need not play the role of
leveller, a kind of yardstick to compare
one kind of observation with
another. That there isn't
(won't be for long) one absolute
means of measure or comparison
leads not to a benign or complacent
recognition of the relativism of
values, but to a conceptual glimpse
into the intrinsic ferment underlying
reality. A recognition, sometimes
ectastic, sometimes terrifying,
sometimes simply dreary, that actuality
*is* revolution, or *actuality* is revolution.
6/3/93
I can describe no greater pleasure than
to be a poet and neglect writing the poem. To
leave them all implied, unstated,
potential for me is a kind
of rapture. You will think, no doubt
that this is a cover-up
for an impoverished imagination,
and though this could even
be true, it doesn't matter. Because,
with the poem, as with a lover, it is
the intent that counts- because no
single act could ever begin to
convince- but the steady evidence
of *intent* to love finally soothes even
the most delicate and subtle types
of romantic anguish. Yes, it is
because I love the possible poem
and the already existing ones so
much that I proudly announce my
indifference to the one I could try to
create right now, if I wished.
And still the potential poem stays by and
awaits me, torturing me with its
seductive air of complicity, but
its final reluctance to give in to
me completely and passionately, with
its total attention and its generosity
of response. No, this is not to
be not because the poem refuses
me, but because I refuse it. I play
hard to et, giving my complete
atttention to other arts like
music, or visual art, or even
to even-tempered science, which is
so strong, but so
often lacking in poetry's delicacy and charm.
But, then again, with the poem
I know what will happen
soon, no matter what I do.
No matter how I start, whether
i amble by nonchalantly, with
an air of savoir-faire, or
throw myself at it intently
with a look of mildly desperate
hope. A cloud will catch my eye,
moving quickly across a blue horizon,
or a bit of music or a child'
mischievous smile will hit
me head on and I'll be gone.
I can describe no greater pleasure than
to be a poet and neglect writing the poem. To
leave them all implied, unstated,
potential for me is a kind
of rapture. You will think, no doubt
that this is a cover-up
for an impoverished imagination,
and though this could even
be true, it doesn't matter. Because,
with the poem, as with a lover, it is
the intent that counts- because no
single act could ever begin to
convince- but the steady evidence
of *intent* to love finally soothes even
the most delicate and subtle types
of romantic anguish. Yes, it is
because I love the possible poem
and the already existing ones so
much that I proudly announce my
indifference to the one I could try to
create right now, if I wished.
And still the potential poem stays by and
awaits me, torturing me with its
seductive air of complicity, but
its final reluctance to give in to
me completely and passionately, with
its total attention and its generosity
of response. No, this is not to
be not because the poem refuses
me, but because I refuse it. I play
hard to et, giving my complete
atttention to other arts like
music, or visual art, or even
to even-tempered science, which is
so strong, but so
often lacking in poetry's delicacy and charm.
But, then again, with the poem
I know what will happen
soon, no matter what I do.
No matter how I start, whether
i amble by nonchalantly, with
an air of savoir-faire, or
throw myself at it intently
with a look of mildly desperate
hope. A cloud will catch my eye,
moving quickly across a blue horizon,
or a bit of music or a child'
mischievous smile will hit
me head on and I'll be gone.
Tuesday, November 4
11/02/95
Winter
This poem refuses any allegiance
to literary expectations. There may
be no cold at all, in fact, or
reference to snow or cold. Newness,
as a thing in itself, beginnings,
vows, numbers might also have little
substantive relevance. It is so confining to
be forced to couch the poem's
context within a conventional set of
given correspondances. All of this is made clear
in the first few lines.
Time's target is refusal
Bared to withdraw from expectations
Presented as the primary agent
The frame becomes the whole picture.
To be new, here , is to recognize
some discomfort. It is winter's warmth,
its succor, which is being regarded.
11/04/95
Appendix 1 Some Very Early Poems
The congregation is convened and
after the spoken portion of the service
is over those present are asked to
rise and sing together. They
are directed to a hymn in their
hymn books having to do with
their God (who was a living god)
as a youth. As a youth this god
was a beautiful young girl. Everywhere
she went people took notice of her.
A shining glimmer
On crystal water
She danced and spun
Above blue waves
Now we see this girl as a young woman
She is courted by countless young men
Who beg to have even a few moments with
her. She notices this less and less however
as she beomes preoccupied with her visions.
These visions are of terrible events:
flood, fires, famines, wars, great
epidemics and terrible
social disasters. She falls into
constant reveries about the
power of prayer to avert these things.
She dreamt her wish
To end all pain
Turning to her visions
Again and again
One day we see her walking with her
sister. An earnest young man approaches
her and asked for a moment of her time.
She consents and looks into his gaze.
Some heaviness of heart immediately
drops away within her. This
man becomes her lover and later her
husband. They are contented together.
Years go by and they have no children.
This is not of great concern to them
because they are satisfied with each
other. One day the husband has to travel
by horseback on a long journey. We see
her near his horse bidding him goodbye.
She is afraid and again turns to prayer.
She had not prayed like this for a
long time. This hymn is of her visions:
From far in time
The hurt draws near
To cover and increase our fear
But when the truth can once be told
Courage will come to warm this cold.
Word comes that her husband has been
enlisted in the army. He is fighting on a
dangerous front. That night she has a
dream that a Spirit comes to her and
whispers the magic words of peace. When
she awakens she realizes she has
to somehow communicate these words to
the world.
She travels all over the kingdom.
People come from far away parts of
the country to hear her. More and more
are convinced of the truth and power
of her ideas which are communicated
in simple songs accompanied on her
guitar.
Parts of the populace take her for
a transcendent spirit. A movement
grows to create a universal
peace.
One night she is preparing a
song and the word is delivered that
her husband has been hurt & is going
to return to her. That night he is
brought to hear her sing. Later he has
a dream that her spirit has been transformed into
a rising tide of peace which
covers the world.
His wounds heal and they return to
their former lives. However, her songs
have become part of a growing
belief that a part of her spirit has
become personified in these songs, which
can somehow lead them all to peace
and prosperity.
*
Te Deum
Tedium
Te Deus
Tedious
*
Some myths can be vaguely remembered
but not directly referred to.
No one knows why what is remembered is
remembered. Comprehension lost.
Winter
This poem refuses any allegiance
to literary expectations. There may
be no cold at all, in fact, or
reference to snow or cold. Newness,
as a thing in itself, beginnings,
vows, numbers might also have little
substantive relevance. It is so confining to
be forced to couch the poem's
context within a conventional set of
given correspondances. All of this is made clear
in the first few lines.
Time's target is refusal
Bared to withdraw from expectations
Presented as the primary agent
The frame becomes the whole picture.
To be new, here , is to recognize
some discomfort. It is winter's warmth,
its succor, which is being regarded.
11/04/95
Appendix 1 Some Very Early Poems
The congregation is convened and
after the spoken portion of the service
is over those present are asked to
rise and sing together. They
are directed to a hymn in their
hymn books having to do with
their God (who was a living god)
as a youth. As a youth this god
was a beautiful young girl. Everywhere
she went people took notice of her.
A shining glimmer
On crystal water
She danced and spun
Above blue waves
Now we see this girl as a young woman
She is courted by countless young men
Who beg to have even a few moments with
her. She notices this less and less however
as she beomes preoccupied with her visions.
These visions are of terrible events:
flood, fires, famines, wars, great
epidemics and terrible
social disasters. She falls into
constant reveries about the
power of prayer to avert these things.
She dreamt her wish
To end all pain
Turning to her visions
Again and again
One day we see her walking with her
sister. An earnest young man approaches
her and asked for a moment of her time.
She consents and looks into his gaze.
Some heaviness of heart immediately
drops away within her. This
man becomes her lover and later her
husband. They are contented together.
Years go by and they have no children.
This is not of great concern to them
because they are satisfied with each
other. One day the husband has to travel
by horseback on a long journey. We see
her near his horse bidding him goodbye.
She is afraid and again turns to prayer.
She had not prayed like this for a
long time. This hymn is of her visions:
From far in time
The hurt draws near
To cover and increase our fear
But when the truth can once be told
Courage will come to warm this cold.
Word comes that her husband has been
enlisted in the army. He is fighting on a
dangerous front. That night she has a
dream that a Spirit comes to her and
whispers the magic words of peace. When
she awakens she realizes she has
to somehow communicate these words to
the world.
She travels all over the kingdom.
People come from far away parts of
the country to hear her. More and more
are convinced of the truth and power
of her ideas which are communicated
in simple songs accompanied on her
guitar.
Parts of the populace take her for
a transcendent spirit. A movement
grows to create a universal
peace.
One night she is preparing a
song and the word is delivered that
her husband has been hurt & is going
to return to her. That night he is
brought to hear her sing. Later he has
a dream that her spirit has been transformed into
a rising tide of peace which
covers the world.
His wounds heal and they return to
their former lives. However, her songs
have become part of a growing
belief that a part of her spirit has
become personified in these songs, which
can somehow lead them all to peace
and prosperity.
*
Te Deum
Tedium
Te Deus
Tedious
*
Some myths can be vaguely remembered
but not directly referred to.
No one knows why what is remembered is
remembered. Comprehension lost.
Monday, November 3
Bill Marsh (Dead Letter Game)
-in from San Diego- and I just spent a good
part of the weekend talking about-
guess what? Starts with a b and
ends with a g and rhymes with
logging and flogging. Anyway,
more on that later. By the
way, well-balanced, thoughtful
man that he is, he found lots
of time to talk with Toni about
art, so she took the three of us
on one of her famous
brief tours of the Metropolitan
Museum, including the wonderful
Philip Guston show- a "must see."
Bill Marsh read at the Bowery Poetry
Club on Saturday. He read from
a collaboration he did with Steve
Carll based on the Tao Te Ching. It
is an inspired work and Bill is an
excellent reader. A number of others
read (they are listed on
my sidebar to the left)
including Jen Hofer, John
Wilkinson, Prageeta
Sharma (who was introduced by
Lisa Jarnot) and Daniel
Bouchard. Let me tell you, Subpress
makes beautiful books (every one
of them sport mysteriously attractive
covers, by the way) and I bought
a stack of 'em (discounted for the
event, of course). My booty included:
*a day in the life of p.* by kari
edwards, a book I have been looking
forward to reading for a long time-
I am long familiar with kari edwards'
writing from the Suny/Buffalo poetics list.
I've already read parts of the book
and I like it a lot. For some reason
it reminds me of Valery's *M Teste*.
Terrific. I enjoyed hearing John
Wilkinson read who is from the UK
and who introduced his reading
by saying it would be hard to
recreate his punk rock attitude
from the 70's. As a reader of
-fait accompli- you might know
how I enjoyed hearing this bit
of time travel- so I purchased
his "Oort's Cloud."...
Lucky me, with Lisa Jarnot sitting
right there to request a discount for me,
I scored - I am just noticing at this
moment-a signed (!) copy of her new CD
*Ring of Fire* with vocals by Lisa
Jarnot, accompanied by
musicians Jermiah Hosea
Landess, Eric Eigner, Ivan Katz and
Kirk Douglas. (Imj67@hotmail.com)...
Even though I had one moment
between readings as Jen Hofer
was leaving I managed to introduce
myself to her.
No time to get her to sign her
book *Slide Rule*:, which includes
a number of lettered "corporeal manifestos":
"Things are not o.k." By means of
a spontaneous swap I am also now
the proud owner of a a copy of
Daniel Bouchard's *Diminutive Revolutions*.
This book contains his unforgettable,
and perhaps to some, unforgiveable
"Pax":
"I make a pact with you, venerable LangPoets-
I have studied your works long enough.
I look back on you as an honorable bunch
Laying new asphalt over old roads."
Wow! That oughta set a few hearts
thumping, including my own. Also,
Dan Bouchard offered me a copy of his mag
*The Poker* (Fall 2003) which contains
a review of Anselm Berrigan's *Zero Star Hotel*,
work by Alan Davies and
an exciting, if paradox-studded interview
with the inCOMParable Kevin Davies:
Marcella Durand: Great. Your poetry
makes me happy.
Kevin Davies: What, are you nuts? But
I'm glad to hear that. I was just over at
a friend's house listening to Kenneth
Koch and Allen Ginsberg improvising a
ballad. Have you heard that? That made
me feel something approaching *happy*
in a normal person.
**
This town was crammed
with poets *and* bloggers this
weekend. I hear
Eileen Tabios and
Arthur Sze had
a fine event in Manhattan
at around the same
time as the BPC events
this Saturday. All kinds
of marathons around
here.
(via Venepoetics (Guillermo Parra))
-in from San Diego- and I just spent a good
part of the weekend talking about-
guess what? Starts with a b and
ends with a g and rhymes with
logging and flogging. Anyway,
more on that later. By the
way, well-balanced, thoughtful
man that he is, he found lots
of time to talk with Toni about
art, so she took the three of us
on one of her famous
brief tours of the Metropolitan
Museum, including the wonderful
Philip Guston show- a "must see."
Bill Marsh read at the Bowery Poetry
Club on Saturday. He read from
a collaboration he did with Steve
Carll based on the Tao Te Ching. It
is an inspired work and Bill is an
excellent reader. A number of others
read (they are listed on
my sidebar to the left)
including Jen Hofer, John
Wilkinson, Prageeta
Sharma (who was introduced by
Lisa Jarnot) and Daniel
Bouchard. Let me tell you, Subpress
makes beautiful books (every one
of them sport mysteriously attractive
covers, by the way) and I bought
a stack of 'em (discounted for the
event, of course). My booty included:
*a day in the life of p.* by kari
edwards, a book I have been looking
forward to reading for a long time-
I am long familiar with kari edwards'
writing from the Suny/Buffalo poetics list.
I've already read parts of the book
and I like it a lot. For some reason
it reminds me of Valery's *M Teste*.
Terrific. I enjoyed hearing John
Wilkinson read who is from the UK
and who introduced his reading
by saying it would be hard to
recreate his punk rock attitude
from the 70's. As a reader of
-fait accompli- you might know
how I enjoyed hearing this bit
of time travel- so I purchased
his "Oort's Cloud."...
Lucky me, with Lisa Jarnot sitting
right there to request a discount for me,
I scored - I am just noticing at this
moment-a signed (!) copy of her new CD
*Ring of Fire* with vocals by Lisa
Jarnot, accompanied by
musicians Jermiah Hosea
Landess, Eric Eigner, Ivan Katz and
Kirk Douglas. (Imj67@hotmail.com)...
Even though I had one moment
between readings as Jen Hofer
was leaving I managed to introduce
myself to her.
No time to get her to sign her
book *Slide Rule*:, which includes
a number of lettered "corporeal manifestos":
"Things are not o.k." By means of
a spontaneous swap I am also now
the proud owner of a a copy of
Daniel Bouchard's *Diminutive Revolutions*.
This book contains his unforgettable,
and perhaps to some, unforgiveable
"Pax":
"I make a pact with you, venerable LangPoets-
I have studied your works long enough.
I look back on you as an honorable bunch
Laying new asphalt over old roads."
Wow! That oughta set a few hearts
thumping, including my own. Also,
Dan Bouchard offered me a copy of his mag
*The Poker* (Fall 2003) which contains
a review of Anselm Berrigan's *Zero Star Hotel*,
work by Alan Davies and
an exciting, if paradox-studded interview
with the inCOMParable Kevin Davies:
Marcella Durand: Great. Your poetry
makes me happy.
Kevin Davies: What, are you nuts? But
I'm glad to hear that. I was just over at
a friend's house listening to Kenneth
Koch and Allen Ginsberg improvising a
ballad. Have you heard that? That made
me feel something approaching *happy*
in a normal person.
**
This town was crammed
with poets *and* bloggers this
weekend. I hear
Eileen Tabios and
Arthur Sze had
a fine event in Manhattan
at around the same
time as the BPC events
this Saturday. All kinds
of marathons around
here.
(via Venepoetics (Guillermo Parra))
Sunday, November 2
Check it out- A piece of text of "Zazie at the metrostation" written by Raymond Queneau:
Zazie's Biography. Zazie is a terrific
surrealist whose website is well worth studying:Zazie's Zone
Zazie's Biography. Zazie is a terrific
surrealist whose website is well worth studying:Zazie's Zone
Coincidence of The Day Dep't
While Shanna Compton
of Brand New Insects
(who I know only from her blog, by the way)
was in her workshop with Harry Matthews,
I was at a poetry reading at the Bowery
Poetry Club talking with Lytle Shaw during
a break. Somehow we got to talking about
blogging, and writing journals and
Harry Matthews' name came up and
Lytle recommended Matthews' book
*The Journalist* and I enthused about his book
*20 Lines a Day*
which is one of my all time favorites.
I hope Shanna Compton
will tell us more about her
weekend workshop with
Harry Matthews and tell us
about some of the exercises
Matthews recommended.
While Shanna Compton
of Brand New Insects
(who I know only from her blog, by the way)
was in her workshop with Harry Matthews,
I was at a poetry reading at the Bowery
Poetry Club talking with Lytle Shaw during
a break. Somehow we got to talking about
blogging, and writing journals and
Harry Matthews' name came up and
Lytle recommended Matthews' book
*The Journalist* and I enthused about his book
*20 Lines a Day*
which is one of my all time favorites.
I hope Shanna Compton
will tell us more about her
weekend workshop with
Harry Matthews and tell us
about some of the exercises
Matthews recommended.
Saturday, November 1
from This Journal 10/17/03
"a funny thing: this past week
fyp and this journal found
themselves bloglisted at buffalo's
electronic poetry center. seems
the epc asked mr. nick piombino
of fait accompli for his
poetry bloglinks...
among which my stuff was
listed. this is
kind of funny because i
didn't know mr.
p. had added me to his list...
sometime
ago i was surprised to
find fyp named
under fait accompli's
"these blogs are hot"...
but then i never made
it to his permanent list...
so i just figured i wasn't
really all that hot...
and then whammo
there i am this week...
not only at his place
but also over there in
buffalo...
in the company of some
really sharp writers
and thinkers and
goofballs...
which all raises
the big question...
what the heck
do you want,
murphy?
does this linking
stuff really matter
that much to you?
is yr ego so
starved? aren't you
above all this?
to which i answer:
well, no i guess not...
but i ain't now nor
never will be writing
fyp for to get myself
linked...or known
or famous or...
i'm happy that
somebody
likes it... that much...
however much
that is... but i got no
confusions of grandeur...
now it's getting late on a
friday evening and gbv is
done wailing... i hope
we won the football game...
i bet we did..."
--------------------------
Man consists of two parts,
his mind and his body,
only the body has more fun.
Woody Allen
(This Journal; 10/17)
********
"Organic and Inorganic"
Animals and plants cannot
understand our business,
so wehave denied that they
can understand their own.
What we
call inorganic matter
cannot understand
the animals' and
plants' business,
we have therefore denied
that it can under-
stand anything whatever.
What we call inorganic is
not so really, but the
organisa-
tion is too subtle for
our sense or for any of
those appliances
with which we assist them.
It is deducible however as a
necessity by an exercise of
the reasoning faculties.
Popel looked at glaciers
for thousands of years
before they
found out that ice
was a fluid, so it has
taken them and
will continue to take
them not less before
they see that the
inorganic is not
wholly inorganic."
From “The Notebooks
of Samuel Butler”
Selections arranged
and edited by
Henry Festing Jones
NY EP DUTTON & CO.
1917
*******
from “Adagia”
“The poet seems to confer his identity
on the reader. It is easiest to recognize
this when listening to music- I mean
this sort of thing: the transference.”
“The collecting of poetry from one’s
experience as one goes along is not the
same thing as merely writing poetry.”
“All poetry is experimental poetry.”
“Politics is the struggle for existence.”
“A poem need not have a meaning and
like most things in nature often does not
have.”
“Poetry is a response to the daily
necessity of getting the world right.”
Opus Posthumous
Wallace Stevens
Edited by Milton J. Bates,
Knopf, NY 1989
"a funny thing: this past week
fyp and this journal found
themselves bloglisted at buffalo's
electronic poetry center. seems
the epc asked mr. nick piombino
of fait accompli for his
poetry bloglinks...
among which my stuff was
listed. this is
kind of funny because i
didn't know mr.
p. had added me to his list...
sometime
ago i was surprised to
find fyp named
under fait accompli's
"these blogs are hot"...
but then i never made
it to his permanent list...
so i just figured i wasn't
really all that hot...
and then whammo
there i am this week...
not only at his place
but also over there in
buffalo...
in the company of some
really sharp writers
and thinkers and
goofballs...
which all raises
the big question...
what the heck
do you want,
murphy?
does this linking
stuff really matter
that much to you?
is yr ego so
starved? aren't you
above all this?
to which i answer:
well, no i guess not...
but i ain't now nor
never will be writing
fyp for to get myself
linked...or known
or famous or...
i'm happy that
somebody
likes it... that much...
however much
that is... but i got no
confusions of grandeur...
now it's getting late on a
friday evening and gbv is
done wailing... i hope
we won the football game...
i bet we did..."
--------------------------
Man consists of two parts,
his mind and his body,
only the body has more fun.
Woody Allen
(This Journal; 10/17)
********
"Organic and Inorganic"
Animals and plants cannot
understand our business,
so wehave denied that they
can understand their own.
What we
call inorganic matter
cannot understand
the animals' and
plants' business,
we have therefore denied
that it can under-
stand anything whatever.
What we call inorganic is
not so really, but the
organisa-
tion is too subtle for
our sense or for any of
those appliances
with which we assist them.
It is deducible however as a
necessity by an exercise of
the reasoning faculties.
Popel looked at glaciers
for thousands of years
before they
found out that ice
was a fluid, so it has
taken them and
will continue to take
them not less before
they see that the
inorganic is not
wholly inorganic."
From “The Notebooks
of Samuel Butler”
Selections arranged
and edited by
Henry Festing Jones
NY EP DUTTON & CO.
1917
*******
from “Adagia”
“The poet seems to confer his identity
on the reader. It is easiest to recognize
this when listening to music- I mean
this sort of thing: the transference.”
“The collecting of poetry from one’s
experience as one goes along is not the
same thing as merely writing poetry.”
“All poetry is experimental poetry.”
“Politics is the struggle for existence.”
“A poem need not have a meaning and
like most things in nature often does not
have.”
“Poetry is a response to the daily
necessity of getting the world right.”
Opus Posthumous
Wallace Stevens
Edited by Milton J. Bates,
Knopf, NY 1989
Friday, October 31
"Human imagination is immensely poorer than reality.
If we think of the future, we always see it unrolling
itself in a monotonous progression. We forget that
the past is a multi-colored chaos of generations. This
can help console us for the terrors inspired by the
"technical and totalitarian barbarization" of the
future. In the next hundred years it may well happen
that we have a sequence of at least three moments,
and the human spirit will be able to live consecutively
in the streets, in prison and in the papers. The same
can be said of one's personal future."
Cesare Pavese
*This Business of Living*:Diaries 1935-1950.
Quartet Books
1980
If we think of the future, we always see it unrolling
itself in a monotonous progression. We forget that
the past is a multi-colored chaos of generations. This
can help console us for the terrors inspired by the
"technical and totalitarian barbarization" of the
future. In the next hundred years it may well happen
that we have a sequence of at least three moments,
and the human spirit will be able to live consecutively
in the streets, in prison and in the papers. The same
can be said of one's personal future."
Cesare Pavese
*This Business of Living*:Diaries 1935-1950.
Quartet Books
1980
[click here] Caterina's reverie:
magazines, memories
and "an obscure language of things."
Caterina lives in Vancouver, B.C.
She's been blogging since 1998,
and began when she
became ill and couldn't leave
the house. She's fine now and
no one could be livelier. Her blog
receives around 2000 hits a day-
no sign of blog fatigue here!
Caterina's Vancouver [click here]
art show opens November 7.
magazines, memories
and "an obscure language of things."
Caterina lives in Vancouver, B.C.
She's been blogging since 1998,
and began when she
became ill and couldn't leave
the house. She's fine now and
no one could be livelier. Her blog
receives around 2000 hits a day-
no sign of blog fatigue here!
Caterina's Vancouver [click here]
art show opens November 7.
1975
How other 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 spatial design, suggestive perhaps
of the mind's language before words,
the cacaphony and squawks of
feeling- of anger and laughter
delight and fear, terror and awe.
But the mind does not want ambiguity.
The mind wants words that illustrate.
These are the words that get things
done, the words that partake of solid
space. These words, the heavy ones have
little to do with the lighter hued
words that the mind can fashion
to *reflect* the sexy feeling of light
clothing over the body. Words have
visual pleasure and the pleasure
they evoke as objects in their own right.
Sculptural, gigantic, massive letters
that amaze the mind's eye because
they are stone but they represent
sound. The life of their value is
unlike the history of the fashioning of
materials to satisfy man's physical
needs although they are used for
that. Words have an aesthetic value of
their own which, on the sensual level,
is represented by the sounds of voices,
the meanings coveyed by these
vocal articulations as they relate to the
awareness as it attempts to organize
experience and respond to it.
At every moment words are spoken
in the mind. The flow of thought, the
continual attempt to correlate these
thoughts to external experience and
thus "reason out our actions." the
experience of "wishing things would
happen" is the natural reaction of minds
that often experience this after reasoning
out a decision in language, that what
we think will happen is spelled out in
language during that thought. The idea
that this language is an unimportant
by-product of thinking is
surprising considering the imporantance
allotted to the spoken word. The magic
word is a spoken word, not the
words of thought. This must be one of the bases
for the ideas of incantations, mantras,
the religious base of theatre and
the dramatic importance ascribed to every
day behavior. Words as amusement.
Now fear brings the transparent.
As far as the jet-age goes.
Synchronous with diversity, the
paper factories are producing paper,
language appearing as luminous. [illegible]
sound of amusements, language has
no multiple place if [it] is unlearned
from just comprehension to the peelable
surface words, added to the top of the
stream of chaotic squawks of thought to
make them appear familiar. Thought,
like everything is always unfamiliar.
It is also identical from mind to
mind. But the sequences are infinitely
varied rhythms.
Lovin' isn't one of the best talents I have
I just seem to have to leave people's minds
alone somtimes
I go drifting inside my own
Just wondering, just wondering
Just wandering, just wandering
1) A friend who's somewhat dull. His
mechanical gestures- smile, language,
habits. Liking him anyway.
2) Reading your own self-image by
thinking about what somebody else
might think about you.
3) Using not the "first" word but the
word most comfortable- the
plainest word for what you mean.
4) Type of quotes from poetry process
book and Andy Warhol.
5) "The futility" of distinctions- (P.S.) - specifically
what pleases others and pleases yourself.
6) "The idea of performance"- E.F.
7) Mysterious, private, secret-
privacy & lying- "fiction" "narrative"
8) As if existence were not naked
enough, every nerve exposed to the eye,
we repeat it in writing- a double
exposure- it's like picking at a sore
9) Fear of laugter
10) Why "so what?" makes
certain situations more interesting (sort of Zen?)
11) Are you afraid? Or are you
afraid to be afraid?
13) "Ow" as a title, the sound of
something as a title.
What's a "fragment" of something.
Right up against the whole thing.
Margaret Drabble-
Tillie Olson-
92 & B'way xxWest Bway
June-Wednesday Sept 24- 12:00 on
Breton-biography- Anna Balakian
Oxford Univ. Press - *Strand*
How other 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 spatial design, suggestive perhaps
of the mind's language before words,
the cacaphony and squawks of
feeling- of anger and laughter
delight and fear, terror and awe.
But the mind does not want ambiguity.
The mind wants words that illustrate.
These are the words that get things
done, the words that partake of solid
space. These words, the heavy ones have
little to do with the lighter hued
words that the mind can fashion
to *reflect* the sexy feeling of light
clothing over the body. Words have
visual pleasure and the pleasure
they evoke as objects in their own right.
Sculptural, gigantic, massive letters
that amaze the mind's eye because
they are stone but they represent
sound. The life of their value is
unlike the history of the fashioning of
materials to satisfy man's physical
needs although they are used for
that. Words have an aesthetic value of
their own which, on the sensual level,
is represented by the sounds of voices,
the meanings coveyed by these
vocal articulations as they relate to the
awareness as it attempts to organize
experience and respond to it.
At every moment words are spoken
in the mind. The flow of thought, the
continual attempt to correlate these
thoughts to external experience and
thus "reason out our actions." the
experience of "wishing things would
happen" is the natural reaction of minds
that often experience this after reasoning
out a decision in language, that what
we think will happen is spelled out in
language during that thought. The idea
that this language is an unimportant
by-product of thinking is
surprising considering the imporantance
allotted to the spoken word. The magic
word is a spoken word, not the
words of thought. This must be one of the bases
for the ideas of incantations, mantras,
the religious base of theatre and
the dramatic importance ascribed to every
day behavior. Words as amusement.
Now fear brings the transparent.
As far as the jet-age goes.
Synchronous with diversity, the
paper factories are producing paper,
language appearing as luminous. [illegible]
sound of amusements, language has
no multiple place if [it] is unlearned
from just comprehension to the peelable
surface words, added to the top of the
stream of chaotic squawks of thought to
make them appear familiar. Thought,
like everything is always unfamiliar.
It is also identical from mind to
mind. But the sequences are infinitely
varied rhythms.
Lovin' isn't one of the best talents I have
I just seem to have to leave people's minds
alone somtimes
I go drifting inside my own
Just wondering, just wondering
Just wandering, just wandering
1) A friend who's somewhat dull. His
mechanical gestures- smile, language,
habits. Liking him anyway.
2) Reading your own self-image by
thinking about what somebody else
might think about you.
3) Using not the "first" word but the
word most comfortable- the
plainest word for what you mean.
4) Type of quotes from poetry process
book and Andy Warhol.
5) "The futility" of distinctions- (P.S.) - specifically
what pleases others and pleases yourself.
6) "The idea of performance"- E.F.
7) Mysterious, private, secret-
privacy & lying- "fiction" "narrative"
8) As if existence were not naked
enough, every nerve exposed to the eye,
we repeat it in writing- a double
exposure- it's like picking at a sore
9) Fear of laugter
10) Why "so what?" makes
certain situations more interesting (sort of Zen?)
11) Are you afraid? Or are you
afraid to be afraid?
13) "Ow" as a title, the sound of
something as a title.
What's a "fragment" of something.
Right up against the whole thing.
Margaret Drabble-
Tillie Olson-
92 & B'way xxWest Bway
June-Wednesday Sept 24- 12:00 on
Breton-biography- Anna Balakian
Oxford Univ. Press - *Strand*
Thursday, October 30
M Merleau-Marcuse- click here theorizes website writing with an accent that may bring the vampires of book prize competition wearily back to life- or send them fleeing the light back to their coffins!
1975
I've received several messages and I
feel the necessity to let you know
about them. Several messages from
the furniture- particularly the desk.
I'm going to translate them for you.
Not take me seriously? Not glass
or drunk or hours or whispers after
confusion, let it up, not teasing or
what- I - need or where-to-go or
little colors? Humpback, he's back,
or a kind of use for terribly, let
alone, signals, a kind of move. Up
the stairs, or, too familiar, let me
alone to name it a star pointing
towards to take a circle. Why spend?
They collect nouns, things. In a
hospital. Translate the dream into
a bunch of rooms in a house (a
building?) Whose shapes? And get
angry about color about whatcha callit.
Out of gloom. Take an object. Heals
it. Once called it a serviceable
chair. Hum chance. Low low lose.
Low hum. Bleeps out of the simple
shape before the brain yells "usage,"
take it, ornate as the illustrated
castle, this stands for that,
easily sliding into a perspective
laughing at kinds of time, drifting
on associations, star-pointed,
ruby still, long lasts a week
or weddin's sunk, slunk,
slinking, slinging. No, I don't
no. 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 the light of what
comes next, not what came before
that but what's next as what's
coming before.
Abbreviation, not "of what?" a
mouth opens a bit on "art." Not
taking pain seriously. Uh-oh.
The house has finally become a
constant thing. The items wouldn't
coalesce but seemed to dominate
their spaces independently like
unconnected telephone poles.
If no one calls I'll call it a hat.
Each separate wire, individual
substatements strewn around. If I
put this together with that, sailing,
and go around the house, "I dub thee
Arthur, pillow," another splendid wall.
What was said? I noticed the
utterance but I think I misunderstood
the intent. But was I looking for
hidden meanings again. A slap,
slapping waves, slapping the face
with aftershave, slapping your legs.
They were unshaved. After him. They
go after him.
Something uncovered. A photograph.
No, I'll never say she went out.
They don't speak to understand this.
You have to make friendly. I begin
with child's language, a glow,
excitement, attempting to stand,
peeking. What's that? In red.
Below a charge. It explodes.
I'll elude them. Dot dot dot. I
forgot the morning, slept, the
dog & then shopping, laundry,
small disappointment. The two
sarcastic commments converged: one now,
one weeks ago, added up to what? It
was nothing, but still. It isn't a
goddamned puzzle. A long loving look,
then remembering what a bitch she can
be. That should make me laugh. A
small, jumpy bird becomes the
emblem of a search.
In the code to be accepted as a
given or do I dispose of it entirely
and subsitute suspense. Either not
knowing & just speaking or substituting
a metaphor for what I don't know &
proposing we both don't know it but both
do, in a way, we have all the
information & try to guess.
No event too trivial to write about.
The more trivial, in a way, the more magical.
The attempt to change someone
from being cold to being warm. Also,
decorations, arabesques, as in Matisse
and Gauguin. The encounter with horror,
rapid change, shifting modes of
interpretation. Mirrors, laughter,
morbid satisfaction with pain & fear.
Ideas or about ideas. Concentric
figures of concentration & comprehension.
Ideas stretched out, elaborated. Word
and picture, word & object. Spoken
language. Protons, nuclei. Danger.
Spools of thread. Covering space.
Covering space or lowering space
each decision need not be monumental.
Allowing for the arbitrary, the
ambiguous, the shadings of exactitude
and restraint, the wish not to
choose. What is the exact measure
might be more than what I thought.
Exactly what I wanted. Silence.
Unbelievable incredible silence within
which all is in balance.
I've received several messages and I
feel the necessity to let you know
about them. Several messages from
the furniture- particularly the desk.
I'm going to translate them for you.
Not take me seriously? Not glass
or drunk or hours or whispers after
confusion, let it up, not teasing or
what- I - need or where-to-go or
little colors? Humpback, he's back,
or a kind of use for terribly, let
alone, signals, a kind of move. Up
the stairs, or, too familiar, let me
alone to name it a star pointing
towards to take a circle. Why spend?
They collect nouns, things. In a
hospital. Translate the dream into
a bunch of rooms in a house (a
building?) Whose shapes? And get
angry about color about whatcha callit.
Out of gloom. Take an object. Heals
it. Once called it a serviceable
chair. Hum chance. Low low lose.
Low hum. Bleeps out of the simple
shape before the brain yells "usage,"
take it, ornate as the illustrated
castle, this stands for that,
easily sliding into a perspective
laughing at kinds of time, drifting
on associations, star-pointed,
ruby still, long lasts a week
or weddin's sunk, slunk,
slinking, slinging. No, I don't
no. 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 the light of what
comes next, not what came before
that but what's next as what's
coming before.
Abbreviation, not "of what?" a
mouth opens a bit on "art." Not
taking pain seriously. Uh-oh.
The house has finally become a
constant thing. The items wouldn't
coalesce but seemed to dominate
their spaces independently like
unconnected telephone poles.
If no one calls I'll call it a hat.
Each separate wire, individual
substatements strewn around. If I
put this together with that, sailing,
and go around the house, "I dub thee
Arthur, pillow," another splendid wall.
What was said? I noticed the
utterance but I think I misunderstood
the intent. But was I looking for
hidden meanings again. A slap,
slapping waves, slapping the face
with aftershave, slapping your legs.
They were unshaved. After him. They
go after him.
Something uncovered. A photograph.
No, I'll never say she went out.
They don't speak to understand this.
You have to make friendly. I begin
with child's language, a glow,
excitement, attempting to stand,
peeking. What's that? In red.
Below a charge. It explodes.
I'll elude them. Dot dot dot. I
forgot the morning, slept, the
dog & then shopping, laundry,
small disappointment. The two
sarcastic commments converged: one now,
one weeks ago, added up to what? It
was nothing, but still. It isn't a
goddamned puzzle. A long loving look,
then remembering what a bitch she can
be. That should make me laugh. A
small, jumpy bird becomes the
emblem of a search.
In the code to be accepted as a
given or do I dispose of it entirely
and subsitute suspense. Either not
knowing & just speaking or substituting
a metaphor for what I don't know &
proposing we both don't know it but both
do, in a way, we have all the
information & try to guess.
No event too trivial to write about.
The more trivial, in a way, the more magical.
The attempt to change someone
from being cold to being warm. Also,
decorations, arabesques, as in Matisse
and Gauguin. The encounter with horror,
rapid change, shifting modes of
interpretation. Mirrors, laughter,
morbid satisfaction with pain & fear.
Ideas or about ideas. Concentric
figures of concentration & comprehension.
Ideas stretched out, elaborated. Word
and picture, word & object. Spoken
language. Protons, nuclei. Danger.
Spools of thread. Covering space.
Covering space or lowering space
each decision need not be monumental.
Allowing for the arbitrary, the
ambiguous, the shadings of exactitude
and restraint, the wish not to
choose. What is the exact measure
might be more than what I thought.
Exactly what I wanted. Silence.
Unbelievable incredible silence within
which all is in balance.
Wednesday, October 29
"Worth Doing"
"If I deserve to be remembered, it will be not
so much for anything I have written or for any
new way of looking at old facts which I may
have suggested, as for having shown that a
man of no special ability, with no literary
connections, not particularly laborious,
fairly, but not supremely accurate as far as
he goes, and not travelling far either for his
facts or from them, may yet, by being
perfectly square, sticking to his point. not
letting his temper run away with him, and
biding his time, be a match for the most
powerful literary and scientific coterie that
England has ever known.
I hope it may be said of me that I discomfited
an unscrupulous, self-seeking clique, and set
a more hopeful example myself. To have done
this is the best of all discoveries."
The Notebooks of Samuel Butler (1835 -1912)
selections arranged by Henry
Festing Jones
Dutton, 1917
"If I deserve to be remembered, it will be not
so much for anything I have written or for any
new way of looking at old facts which I may
have suggested, as for having shown that a
man of no special ability, with no literary
connections, not particularly laborious,
fairly, but not supremely accurate as far as
he goes, and not travelling far either for his
facts or from them, may yet, by being
perfectly square, sticking to his point. not
letting his temper run away with him, and
biding his time, be a match for the most
powerful literary and scientific coterie that
England has ever known.
I hope it may be said of me that I discomfited
an unscrupulous, self-seeking clique, and set
a more hopeful example myself. To have done
this is the best of all discoveries."
The Notebooks of Samuel Butler (1835 -1912)
selections arranged by Henry
Festing Jones
Dutton, 1917
A note from the Electronic Poetry Center (click here) informs
me that the bloglist is now one of the most
frequently visited pages there.
me that the bloglist is now one of the most
frequently visited pages there.
Much appreciation to the following bloggers for recent feedback
on your blogs and backchannelled,
and to Arm Sasser (Carl Annarummo)
for the collage postcard: Carl, I will be reciprocating shortly; thanks for your patience,
and for your wit, which continues to elicit much needed laughter; and to all of you: for your blogs which I read at least once a day, and frequently more often
abolone (Li Bloom)
fluss (John Most)
Crag Hill's Poetry Scorecard
Never Neutral (Ernesto Priego)
The Well Nourished Moon (Stephanie Young)
San Diego Poetry Guild (Bill Marsh)
Overlap (Drew Gardner)
The Skeptic (John Erhardt)
Blue Kangeroo (Jean Vengua)
Automobile Xerox (Andrew Lundwall)
tex files (Chris Murray)
Pantaloons:Tykes on Poetry (Jack Kimball)
Derailed Commodity (Alexander Trimble Young)
Venepoetics (Guillermo Parra)
Elsewhere (Gary Sullivan)
Savoradin.com
Bellona Times (Ray Davis)
ululations (Nada Gordon)
Boynton
Bloggedy Blog Blog (Katie Degentesh)
Eeksy-Peeksy (Malcolm Davidson)
Marsh Hawk Press Blog
Semioanalysis Discotheque (Karl Merleau-Marcuse)
on your blogs and backchannelled,
and to Arm Sasser (Carl Annarummo)
for the collage postcard: Carl, I will be reciprocating shortly; thanks for your patience,
and for your wit, which continues to elicit much needed laughter; and to all of you: for your blogs which I read at least once a day, and frequently more often
abolone (Li Bloom)
fluss (John Most)
Crag Hill's Poetry Scorecard
Never Neutral (Ernesto Priego)
The Well Nourished Moon (Stephanie Young)
San Diego Poetry Guild (Bill Marsh)
Overlap (Drew Gardner)
The Skeptic (John Erhardt)
Blue Kangeroo (Jean Vengua)
Automobile Xerox (Andrew Lundwall)
tex files (Chris Murray)
Pantaloons:Tykes on Poetry (Jack Kimball)
Derailed Commodity (Alexander Trimble Young)
Venepoetics (Guillermo Parra)
Elsewhere (Gary Sullivan)
Savoradin.com
Bellona Times (Ray Davis)
ululations (Nada Gordon)
Boynton
Bloggedy Blog Blog (Katie Degentesh)
Eeksy-Peeksy (Malcolm Davidson)
Marsh Hawk Press Blog
Semioanalysis Discotheque (Karl Merleau-Marcuse)
10/16/95
For several years, since writing
"Explications" I've been trying
to figure out a way of writing-
like that one- where I can
move freely from tone of essay,
to tone of poem, to quotation,
to reflection.But when I try it-
invariably I get something which is
"preachy." I don't get exactly
what it is I keep slipping into
which is not at all what I am
envisioning.When this starts to
happen I have to wonder why.
It could be I am lapsing into
writing cliches because I am actually
not feeling very motivated. Right
now I have 6 weeks left & I
think I've already allowed myself
to avoid this (as usual) as long
as possible. My reading is in
late January- 3 months away which
I am feeling is a tremendous
luxury of avoidance. As Charles
put it, "procrastinatioin is the poetry
of our lives." This is actually the
luxury of waiting to get a really
exciting idea.But excitement of this
type involves risk- and
avoidance of anxiety is a big part of
avoiding that risk.
A few days ago I got an inner glimpse
of what this text might look like-
then I've been avoiding this.It is
hard to see because everything
that I've been told is criticism &
poetry I am countering. That is really
why it feels so hard to do. It
really should be easy to do- easy
if I can only let go of all those
stupid assumptions that make me a
slave to the rules of the past. At the
same time I feel a sentimental
nostalgia for all that- which also
makes me feel like one of the gang.
This doing exactly what I want
to do- which feels so dangerous
when I contemplate it- but oh so
easy and pleasurable when I do
it- consists exactly of letting all
that old baggage go.
*
Book I is a book with no beginning.
It proceeds as a series of
postulates, as disembodied from
a moment-to-moment recounting
as could be imagined.
*
What I want is continuous
access to theoretical speculation
with simultaneous continuous access
to visual and aural imagination.
This crosses over into "just thinking"
but "just thinking" is just as
accumulative as anything else. Simplify,
Sven Birkirts advised me. Simplify
and thus amplify. And more time for
fishing.
Stop to do what?
Stop to stop thinking.
Stop to go back to thinking.
What other kind of thinking?
*
Stanley Lewis.Great bookman.
What was my book to this man? Now
I'll never know. What was I afraid of ?
What was he afraid of ? Now I'll never know.
*
Actually composed of hundreds and hundreds
of everyday observations. Thousands and
thousands. A minute, an hour, a day,
week, month, year, decade, a life,
a random string of such experiences.
The feeling of uniqueness of each
constellation is the freshening breezes of
right now. At a distance, they are
less and less illuminated by such freshened
aliveness. Real memories- full memories
contain some afterglow of this
life-textured vibrance. Just the
pushing- forward, the moment after
moment accumulation of time also
contains some of this spirit.
1/1/2000
Never, in a thousand
years could so-called
progress repress what is native
to the human spirit. It
will cry out for the most
vulnerable ones who are suffering-
a cry of mercy. The young ones,
as they told us, would lead
the way, but this is the
only thing they were right
about.This intrinsic thing,
this spirit cries out in
some root part of everything
that exists. Someone, or
something has to say this
always to say this.
We are wrapped about it,
and it is wrapped about
us.There are only
indications, inside the
totality.
All things eventually rest-
and still will reappear.
*Listen*: what is it that's calling?
Listen again. Then you don't
have to avoid it.
It spreads out, it
takes over, we breathe it
and it breathes us. An
inhaling and exhaling, just
like us. the "anthropomorphic
argument" is a way of
measuring this way of measuring.
(Meanwhile a small bulldog has
taken notice of me, and when I
look up he is looking down on me
from the hill and just across from
me.Then he runs off).
*
If you serve writing raw
it is bitter. It has to
cook.
1/17/00
Someone called us
and asked for
Dr. Happenstance.
For several years, since writing
"Explications" I've been trying
to figure out a way of writing-
like that one- where I can
move freely from tone of essay,
to tone of poem, to quotation,
to reflection.But when I try it-
invariably I get something which is
"preachy." I don't get exactly
what it is I keep slipping into
which is not at all what I am
envisioning.When this starts to
happen I have to wonder why.
It could be I am lapsing into
writing cliches because I am actually
not feeling very motivated. Right
now I have 6 weeks left & I
think I've already allowed myself
to avoid this (as usual) as long
as possible. My reading is in
late January- 3 months away which
I am feeling is a tremendous
luxury of avoidance. As Charles
put it, "procrastinatioin is the poetry
of our lives." This is actually the
luxury of waiting to get a really
exciting idea.But excitement of this
type involves risk- and
avoidance of anxiety is a big part of
avoiding that risk.
A few days ago I got an inner glimpse
of what this text might look like-
then I've been avoiding this.It is
hard to see because everything
that I've been told is criticism &
poetry I am countering. That is really
why it feels so hard to do. It
really should be easy to do- easy
if I can only let go of all those
stupid assumptions that make me a
slave to the rules of the past. At the
same time I feel a sentimental
nostalgia for all that- which also
makes me feel like one of the gang.
This doing exactly what I want
to do- which feels so dangerous
when I contemplate it- but oh so
easy and pleasurable when I do
it- consists exactly of letting all
that old baggage go.
*
Book I is a book with no beginning.
It proceeds as a series of
postulates, as disembodied from
a moment-to-moment recounting
as could be imagined.
*
What I want is continuous
access to theoretical speculation
with simultaneous continuous access
to visual and aural imagination.
This crosses over into "just thinking"
but "just thinking" is just as
accumulative as anything else. Simplify,
Sven Birkirts advised me. Simplify
and thus amplify. And more time for
fishing.
Stop to do what?
Stop to stop thinking.
Stop to go back to thinking.
What other kind of thinking?
*
Stanley Lewis.Great bookman.
What was my book to this man? Now
I'll never know. What was I afraid of ?
What was he afraid of ? Now I'll never know.
*
Actually composed of hundreds and hundreds
of everyday observations. Thousands and
thousands. A minute, an hour, a day,
week, month, year, decade, a life,
a random string of such experiences.
The feeling of uniqueness of each
constellation is the freshening breezes of
right now. At a distance, they are
less and less illuminated by such freshened
aliveness. Real memories- full memories
contain some afterglow of this
life-textured vibrance. Just the
pushing- forward, the moment after
moment accumulation of time also
contains some of this spirit.
1/1/2000
Never, in a thousand
years could so-called
progress repress what is native
to the human spirit. It
will cry out for the most
vulnerable ones who are suffering-
a cry of mercy. The young ones,
as they told us, would lead
the way, but this is the
only thing they were right
about.This intrinsic thing,
this spirit cries out in
some root part of everything
that exists. Someone, or
something has to say this
always to say this.
We are wrapped about it,
and it is wrapped about
us.There are only
indications, inside the
totality.
All things eventually rest-
and still will reappear.
*Listen*: what is it that's calling?
Listen again. Then you don't
have to avoid it.
It spreads out, it
takes over, we breathe it
and it breathes us. An
inhaling and exhaling, just
like us. the "anthropomorphic
argument" is a way of
measuring this way of measuring.
(Meanwhile a small bulldog has
taken notice of me, and when I
look up he is looking down on me
from the hill and just across from
me.Then he runs off).
*
If you serve writing raw
it is bitter. It has to
cook.
1/17/00
Someone called us
and asked for
Dr. Happenstance.
Tuesday, October 28
Allegrezza Blog (Bill Allegrezza) offers a visual poem on yesterday's post, 10/27; it is said a picture is worth 1000 words. Why not use text and photos?- check out today's posts on: Solipsistic,
Topher Tune's Times (Christy Church)
Never Neutral (Ernesto Priego),
The Ingredient (Alli Warren),
Wood s Lot (Mark Woods).
Hey, I'm gonna go out and buy me a scanner!
Topher Tune's Times (Christy Church)
Never Neutral (Ernesto Priego),
The Ingredient (Alli Warren),
Wood s Lot (Mark Woods).
Hey, I'm gonna go out and buy me a scanner!
9/19/92
What is the next step? It is
to consider the next step, If
you find that the flowers you
gave were untended then tend
for them.
Who cares who you are if you
know what to do. (Like follows
like, as word follows word).
or
"Like follows like, as word follows
word."
But this is only a question of
lighting. *Only* style?
If you are uncomfortable, this
is itself an accomplishment.
Someone touted some writing I like and I
felt it was no longer mine to like.
The seasoning of self.
"Now I follow you."
They say, "Go forward."
A line at a time, like a step
at a time. As they say, "timing
is everything."
It is said, "timing is everything."
Overdetermined.
Worth waiting for (cool breeze
on face, quiet, flowers &
trees).
Only a few elements.
"Yes, I like it. [I love it, "he
says, (Crossed out).]
Plenty of specifics.
"Stop and figure it out *first*? But
*that's* no fun."
Composed of voices.
"Push yourself" (remembering owing some
letters).
Momentum (more memories).
Anything you said, say, will say
has its opposite- which can be said,
even if not true.
Lies exist to be shunned. Their existence
motivates action.
To stop is to shape.
To shape is to see.
To see is to approach.
To approach to say
To say is to hear
To hear to surround
To surround to stay
To stay to know.
To know is to have
So
To stop is to have.
(This is inside.)
The external is shared but the inside
is covered over, private. It maintains
a privilaged silence. The
world won't provide the scaffolding
but the materials are available and are out
there.
First, a tapping, what does it
represent? Then a warble, what is
this telling? It fades, but the
process is repeated again and again.
The remoteness of some people
is as enlivening as the welcoming
warmth of others. Each contibutes
some ingredient to life's elixir.
Outside a breeze moves among
the branches and the trees. Inside
another flow touches thoughts which
stay and grow but also
vanish inexplicably.
Then something moves and catches
your eye & the thoughts start again.
Until what follows comes, the
duration is an eternity. So clearly
eternity is just as brief as anything.
Time is a hill.
What is the next step? It is
to consider the next step, If
you find that the flowers you
gave were untended then tend
for them.
Who cares who you are if you
know what to do. (Like follows
like, as word follows word).
or
"Like follows like, as word follows
word."
But this is only a question of
lighting. *Only* style?
If you are uncomfortable, this
is itself an accomplishment.
Someone touted some writing I like and I
felt it was no longer mine to like.
The seasoning of self.
"Now I follow you."
They say, "Go forward."
A line at a time, like a step
at a time. As they say, "timing
is everything."
It is said, "timing is everything."
Overdetermined.
Worth waiting for (cool breeze
on face, quiet, flowers &
trees).
Only a few elements.
"Yes, I like it. [I love it, "he
says, (Crossed out).]
Plenty of specifics.
"Stop and figure it out *first*? But
*that's* no fun."
Composed of voices.
"Push yourself" (remembering owing some
letters).
Momentum (more memories).
Anything you said, say, will say
has its opposite- which can be said,
even if not true.
Lies exist to be shunned. Their existence
motivates action.
To stop is to shape.
To shape is to see.
To see is to approach.
To approach to say
To say is to hear
To hear to surround
To surround to stay
To stay to know.
To know is to have
So
To stop is to have.
(This is inside.)
The external is shared but the inside
is covered over, private. It maintains
a privilaged silence. The
world won't provide the scaffolding
but the materials are available and are out
there.
First, a tapping, what does it
represent? Then a warble, what is
this telling? It fades, but the
process is repeated again and again.
The remoteness of some people
is as enlivening as the welcoming
warmth of others. Each contibutes
some ingredient to life's elixir.
Outside a breeze moves among
the branches and the trees. Inside
another flow touches thoughts which
stay and grow but also
vanish inexplicably.
Then something moves and catches
your eye & the thoughts start again.
Until what follows comes, the
duration is an eternity. So clearly
eternity is just as brief as anything.
Time is a hill.
Monday, October 27
9/15/92
All artists should get jobs.
This is the only way to create
enough idleness in order to think.
9/16/92
Blankness, indifference, unresponsiveness,
aloofness, these are
the subjects of great interest- because
their existence prevents everything
from existing. Vapid enthusiasms which
spring from a shallow root cover over
this pervasive tendency only slightly-
the way air freshener briefly covers
over an utter lack of freshness in
the atmosphere.
*
Alchemy of writing: the boundary
between public and private obliterated.
9/18/92
Oasis...
The falseness of Stevens' concept of
the artist's "radiantly productive
atmosphere."
I have a greater and greater
dread of noodling around as a
way of producing any quantity of
writing.
I am talking about writing that consists of
what are essentially long winded answers to
questions nobody has asked.
The person asking the question is
the writer. But why not look for
the answers in a book
or in a conversation with another
person? Granted, the answers are
inconclusive but the process is
soothing. A kind of harmony comes
out of this. Yes- but it still
sounds like a lot of noodling around,
though very pleasant noodling around.
I presented my new theory of writing
to T. (my wife). She is skeptical.
She sees no harm in "warming up."
But, I tell her, what you are
calling a "warm up" I
am calling "noodling around" &
this noodling around
while appearing to evidence some
momentum, actually slows me down
in the long run because when I reread
the work I feel it has been done
by some alien being I can't
recognize. Now that I think of it,
that is probably exactly what I liked
about doing this sort of thing in the
past. The writing would look like a
foreign language because it felt
so distant from what I was actually
thinking of doing. But T. is skeptical.
I say that convinces me even more
because it seems that I have
worked out an idea that is very
custom-made to my own needs.
It sounds like a
rationalization- but I
think I have to have this with
writing because it is not available
*anywhere else*. This gets to the
core of what I want for myself
out of the process of writing.
*
A friend of mine
fequently complains about writing which
is nothing more than writing about
writing. I seem to be interested in
this much more than him. How not to
talk about a thing most frequently
thought about when doing it? I see the
avoidance of this as an intense
form of self-destructiveness. The
dependence on indirectness & allegory
is a poison that slowly murders
culture. It is an escape to
the fairly obvious from the completely
obvious.
As soon as I see that a
quantity of writing has
anything more than the barest
scaffolding I get bored
with it.[And being a little bit
bored is like being a
little bit dead. (crossed out
in the notebook)]
When writers talk too little about themselves
in their work it is as uninteresting
as when they talk too much
about themselves in conversation. Either
way, when they are unselfconscious
about it, it is intolerable.
This is a certain type of naive and unrepentant
self-absorption that feels homicidal
to me.
*
If I have to depend on
inspiration, the rest of the
time I have suffocation.
*
What is the difference between
being interested in something and
being skeptical about it? If you
agree with something or
recognize it well, you look
& smile & listen & put your mind
on something else.
*
If it is publishable, it is
boring.
All artists should get jobs.
This is the only way to create
enough idleness in order to think.
9/16/92
Blankness, indifference, unresponsiveness,
aloofness, these are
the subjects of great interest- because
their existence prevents everything
from existing. Vapid enthusiasms which
spring from a shallow root cover over
this pervasive tendency only slightly-
the way air freshener briefly covers
over an utter lack of freshness in
the atmosphere.
*
Alchemy of writing: the boundary
between public and private obliterated.
9/18/92
Oasis...
The falseness of Stevens' concept of
the artist's "radiantly productive
atmosphere."
I have a greater and greater
dread of noodling around as a
way of producing any quantity of
writing.
I am talking about writing that consists of
what are essentially long winded answers to
questions nobody has asked.
The person asking the question is
the writer. But why not look for
the answers in a book
or in a conversation with another
person? Granted, the answers are
inconclusive but the process is
soothing. A kind of harmony comes
out of this. Yes- but it still
sounds like a lot of noodling around,
though very pleasant noodling around.
I presented my new theory of writing
to T. (my wife). She is skeptical.
She sees no harm in "warming up."
But, I tell her, what you are
calling a "warm up" I
am calling "noodling around" &
this noodling around
while appearing to evidence some
momentum, actually slows me down
in the long run because when I reread
the work I feel it has been done
by some alien being I can't
recognize. Now that I think of it,
that is probably exactly what I liked
about doing this sort of thing in the
past. The writing would look like a
foreign language because it felt
so distant from what I was actually
thinking of doing. But T. is skeptical.
I say that convinces me even more
because it seems that I have
worked out an idea that is very
custom-made to my own needs.
It sounds like a
rationalization- but I
think I have to have this with
writing because it is not available
*anywhere else*. This gets to the
core of what I want for myself
out of the process of writing.
*
A friend of mine
fequently complains about writing which
is nothing more than writing about
writing. I seem to be interested in
this much more than him. How not to
talk about a thing most frequently
thought about when doing it? I see the
avoidance of this as an intense
form of self-destructiveness. The
dependence on indirectness & allegory
is a poison that slowly murders
culture. It is an escape to
the fairly obvious from the completely
obvious.
As soon as I see that a
quantity of writing has
anything more than the barest
scaffolding I get bored
with it.[And being a little bit
bored is like being a
little bit dead. (crossed out
in the notebook)]
When writers talk too little about themselves
in their work it is as uninteresting
as when they talk too much
about themselves in conversation. Either
way, when they are unselfconscious
about it, it is intolerable.
This is a certain type of naive and unrepentant
self-absorption that feels homicidal
to me.
*
If I have to depend on
inspiration, the rest of the
time I have suffocation.
*
What is the difference between
being interested in something and
being skeptical about it? If you
agree with something or
recognize it well, you look
& smile & listen & put your mind
on something else.
*
If it is publishable, it is
boring.
"-the way the *potlatch tax* works is that any
writer who uses the word
*potlatch* has to pay the *potlatch tax-"
Buck Downs from *Thread Wreck*
published in Zazil 1- winter 2000-San Diego, California-
agents: Stephen Cope, Joel Kuzai, Bill Marsh, Joe Ross
zazil1@email.com
Guy Bennett, Steve Carll, Norma Cole, Danielle Collobert,
Stephen Cope, Buck Downs, Kris Dykstra, Dan Featherston,
Heather Fuller, Lisa Jarnot, John Lowther, Nancy Gates Madsen,
Douglas Messerli, Mez [Mary-Anne Breeze], Reina Maria Rodriguez,
Rod Smith, Eleni Stcopoulos, Mark Wallace, Bobbie West
writer who uses the word
*potlatch* has to pay the *potlatch tax-"
Buck Downs from *Thread Wreck*
published in Zazil 1- winter 2000-San Diego, California-
agents: Stephen Cope, Joel Kuzai, Bill Marsh, Joe Ross
zazil1@email.com
Guy Bennett, Steve Carll, Norma Cole, Danielle Collobert,
Stephen Cope, Buck Downs, Kris Dykstra, Dan Featherston,
Heather Fuller, Lisa Jarnot, John Lowther, Nancy Gates Madsen,
Douglas Messerli, Mez [Mary-Anne Breeze], Reina Maria Rodriguez,
Rod Smith, Eleni Stcopoulos, Mark Wallace, Bobbie West
misbehaving.net (click here)- a weblog devoted to women and technology. This weblog apparently opened in September: with the epigraph: "Well-behaved women seldom make history." --Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
(via Caterina)
(via Caterina)
Sunday, October 26
9/25/86
Poetry Exam- True or False
1. We will go two by two into the ark.
2. Ted Berrigan encouraged work
outside the New York School.
3. As long as you can still hold a pen,
pencil or scratchy instrument
you are still a writer.
4. Once a writer, always a writer.
5. Writers write mainly to transform themselves.
6. Transformation resonates beyond the
immediate boundaries of the structure
which guides.
7. To judge the merit of some poetry
you must see it mainly in the context
of the poet's overall style.
8. Style is everything.
9. A successful poet is judged by the
excellence of a single poem.
10. The quality of a poem is judged
by the amount of quality poetry the
poet has written.
11. Great poet- 300 great pages.
Good poet- less than 300 great pages.
12. The child's endless delight
in the repeated story is one source
of poetic sustenance.
Poetry Exam- True or False
1. We will go two by two into the ark.
2. Ted Berrigan encouraged work
outside the New York School.
3. As long as you can still hold a pen,
pencil or scratchy instrument
you are still a writer.
4. Once a writer, always a writer.
5. Writers write mainly to transform themselves.
6. Transformation resonates beyond the
immediate boundaries of the structure
which guides.
7. To judge the merit of some poetry
you must see it mainly in the context
of the poet's overall style.
8. Style is everything.
9. A successful poet is judged by the
excellence of a single poem.
10. The quality of a poem is judged
by the amount of quality poetry the
poet has written.
11. Great poet- 300 great pages.
Good poet- less than 300 great pages.
12. The child's endless delight
in the repeated story is one source
of poetic sustenance.
Crag Hill's Poetry Scorecard today:
"It's pitiful how much energy has been spent
fighting for but a few thousand readers of
contemporary poetry. Fights between those
inside and outside the universities, the
supposed canonizers; fights between
younger innovative writers and those
in the preceding generation; fights
about poetry published electronically
and poetry published in hard cover; fights
over the microscopic print space devoted
to reviews of poetry; fights between poets
who foreground the performative aspects of
poetry and those who do not; fights
between small- and medium-presses
for distribution... We're squabbling
over disappearing crumbs,
ladies and gentlemen.
How to bake more bread?"
It's important to note in this context an example
of how this might be done. Note how frequently
Ron Silliman's list in his important anthology
*In The American Tree*, of 90 or so additional
names of poets and artists, along with these words,
is referenced: "These individuals and
many others participated in the greater discourse
of which this poetry is a particular axis." This sort
of effort to include, not exclude, remains a model
for future anthologists and editors.
*In The American Tree* was recently reissued by
the National Poetry Foundation.
"It's pitiful how much energy has been spent
fighting for but a few thousand readers of
contemporary poetry. Fights between those
inside and outside the universities, the
supposed canonizers; fights between
younger innovative writers and those
in the preceding generation; fights
about poetry published electronically
and poetry published in hard cover; fights
over the microscopic print space devoted
to reviews of poetry; fights between poets
who foreground the performative aspects of
poetry and those who do not; fights
between small- and medium-presses
for distribution... We're squabbling
over disappearing crumbs,
ladies and gentlemen.
How to bake more bread?"
It's important to note in this context an example
of how this might be done. Note how frequently
Ron Silliman's list in his important anthology
*In The American Tree*, of 90 or so additional
names of poets and artists, along with these words,
is referenced: "These individuals and
many others participated in the greater discourse
of which this poetry is a particular axis." This sort
of effort to include, not exclude, remains a model
for future anthologists and editors.
*In The American Tree* was recently reissued by
the National Poetry Foundation.
"The actual order of things is precisely what
"popular" tactics turn to their own ends,
without any illusion that it will change any
time soon. Though elsewhere it is exploited
by a dominant power or simply denied by an
ideological discourse, here order is "tricked" by
an art. Into the institution to be served are thus
insinuated styles of social exchange, technical
invention, and moral resistance, that is an
economy of the *gift* (generosities for which
one expects a return), an esthetics of *tricks*
(artists' operations) and an esthetics of *tenacity*
(countless ways of refusing to accord the established
order the status of a law, a meaning, or a fatality).
"Popular" culture is precisely that: it is not a corpus
considered as foreign, fragmented in order to be
displayed, studied and "quoted" by a system which
does to objects what it does to living beings.
The progressive paritioning of times and places,
the disjunctive logic of specialization through and
for work, no longer has an adequate counterpart
in the conjunctive rituals of mass communications.
This *fact*cannot become our *law*.It can be gotten
around through departments that, "competing"
with the gifts of our benefactors, offer them products
at the expense of the institution that divides
and pays the workers. This practice of economic
*diversion* is in reality the return of a sociopolitical
ethics into an economic system. It is no doubt
related to the *potlatch* described by
Mauss, an interplay of voluntary allowances
that counts on reciprocity and organizes
a social network articulated by the
"obligation to give." In our societies, the market
econom is no longer determined by such
an "emulation": taking the abstract individual
as a basic unit, it regulates all exchanges among
these units acccording to the code of generalized
equivalence constitued by money. This individualistic
axiom is, of course, now surfacing as the question
that disturbs the free market system as
a whole. The a priori assumption of an historical Western
option is becoming its point of implosion. However
that may be, the *potlatch* seems to persist within it
as the mark of another type of economy. It survives in
our economy, though on its margins or
in its interstices. It is even developing, although
held to be illegitimate, within modern market economy.
Because of this, the politics of the "gift" *also
* becomes a diversionary tactic. In the same way,
the loss that was voluntary in a gift economy is
transformed into a transgression in a profit economy:
it appears as an excess (a waste),
a challenge (a rejection of profit), or a crime (an attack on property).
This path, relative to our economy,
derives from another; it
compensates for the first even
though it is illegal and (from this
point of view) marginal. The same
pathway allows investigations to take up
a position that is no longer defined
only by an acquired power
and an observational knowledge, with
the addition of a pinch of
nostalgia. Melancholy is not enough."
*The Practice of Everyday Life*
Miichel de Certeau
"popular" tactics turn to their own ends,
without any illusion that it will change any
time soon. Though elsewhere it is exploited
by a dominant power or simply denied by an
ideological discourse, here order is "tricked" by
an art. Into the institution to be served are thus
insinuated styles of social exchange, technical
invention, and moral resistance, that is an
economy of the *gift* (generosities for which
one expects a return), an esthetics of *tricks*
(artists' operations) and an esthetics of *tenacity*
(countless ways of refusing to accord the established
order the status of a law, a meaning, or a fatality).
"Popular" culture is precisely that: it is not a corpus
considered as foreign, fragmented in order to be
displayed, studied and "quoted" by a system which
does to objects what it does to living beings.
The progressive paritioning of times and places,
the disjunctive logic of specialization through and
for work, no longer has an adequate counterpart
in the conjunctive rituals of mass communications.
This *fact*cannot become our *law*.It can be gotten
around through departments that, "competing"
with the gifts of our benefactors, offer them products
at the expense of the institution that divides
and pays the workers. This practice of economic
*diversion* is in reality the return of a sociopolitical
ethics into an economic system. It is no doubt
related to the *potlatch* described by
Mauss, an interplay of voluntary allowances
that counts on reciprocity and organizes
a social network articulated by the
"obligation to give." In our societies, the market
econom is no longer determined by such
an "emulation": taking the abstract individual
as a basic unit, it regulates all exchanges among
these units acccording to the code of generalized
equivalence constitued by money. This individualistic
axiom is, of course, now surfacing as the question
that disturbs the free market system as
a whole. The a priori assumption of an historical Western
option is becoming its point of implosion. However
that may be, the *potlatch* seems to persist within it
as the mark of another type of economy. It survives in
our economy, though on its margins or
in its interstices. It is even developing, although
held to be illegitimate, within modern market economy.
Because of this, the politics of the "gift" *also
* becomes a diversionary tactic. In the same way,
the loss that was voluntary in a gift economy is
transformed into a transgression in a profit economy:
it appears as an excess (a waste),
a challenge (a rejection of profit), or a crime (an attack on property).
This path, relative to our economy,
derives from another; it
compensates for the first even
though it is illegal and (from this
point of view) marginal. The same
pathway allows investigations to take up
a position that is no longer defined
only by an acquired power
and an observational knowledge, with
the addition of a pinch of
nostalgia. Melancholy is not enough."
*The Practice of Everyday Life*
Miichel de Certeau
Thanks to
Ernesto Priego (Never Neutral)
for publishing my poem "The Disappearance" on
his blog yesterday. Which reminds me to go look
for that Spanish course on a couple of CDs I
bought just before Heriberto Yepez came to
town last year to read at *The Drawing Center*,
introduced by Lytle Shaw. I wonder if I could
interest Ernesto in translating my poem into
Spanish. (I've enjoyed having some of my
writing translated into French,
Japanese, Serbo-Croatian and Finnish.)
Ernesto Priego (Never Neutral)
for publishing my poem "The Disappearance" on
his blog yesterday. Which reminds me to go look
for that Spanish course on a couple of CDs I
bought just before Heriberto Yepez came to
town last year to read at *The Drawing Center*,
introduced by Lytle Shaw. I wonder if I could
interest Ernesto in translating my poem into
Spanish. (I've enjoyed having some of my
writing translated into French,
Japanese, Serbo-Croatian and Finnish.)
Saturday, October 25
The Disappearance
I don't even know why it's not there.
I looked among my papers for hours
Remembering a feeling I'd lost long ago.
So many thoughts passed through my mind
I couldn't hold on to one of them.
There were pictures I'd misplaced
Photographs of faces which are landmarks in my life,
Letters received and letters never sent,
Souvenirs, a few forgotten schemes,
Lists of things I've done and never done
Reminders, tokens, dreams.
Perhaps in some other untracked world
I've never left this scene
Fumbling in a timeless reverie
Among the numbers and the scrawls
Diving and swooping down again
Like gulls and shadows on the sea
In random cries, flights and descents
Towards and away from me.
I don't even know why it's not there.
I looked among my papers for hours
Remembering a feeling I'd lost long ago.
So many thoughts passed through my mind
I couldn't hold on to one of them.
There were pictures I'd misplaced
Photographs of faces which are landmarks in my life,
Letters received and letters never sent,
Souvenirs, a few forgotten schemes,
Lists of things I've done and never done
Reminders, tokens, dreams.
Perhaps in some other untracked world
I've never left this scene
Fumbling in a timeless reverie
Among the numbers and the scrawls
Diving and swooping down again
Like gulls and shadows on the sea
In random cries, flights and descents
Towards and away from me.
"...Certainly, with respect to the sort of writing
that separates domains in the name of the division
of labor and reveals class affiliations, it would be
"fabulous" if, as in the stories of miracles, the
groups that formerly gave us our masters and
that are currently lodged in our corpus were to
rise up and themselves mark their comings and
goings in the texts that honor and bury them
at the same time. This hope has diappeared,
along with the beliefs which have long since
vanished from our cities.There are no longer any
ghosts who can remind the livng of reciprocity.
But in the order organized by the power of
knowledge (ours), as in the order of the
countryside,or the factories, a diversionary
practice remains possible.
Let us try to make a *perruque* in the economic
system whose rules and hierarchies are repeated,
as always, in scientific institutions. In the area of
scientific research (which defines the current order
if knowledge), working with its machines and making
use of its scraps, we can divert the time owed to the
institution; we can make textual objects that signify
in art and solidarities; we can play the game of free
exchange, even if it is penalized by bosses and
colleagues when they are not willing to "turn a blind
eye" on it; we can create networks of connivances and
sleights of hand; we can exchange gifts; and in these
ways we can subvert the law that, in the scientific
factory, puts work in the service of the machine and,
by a similar logic, progressively destroys the requirement
of creation and, by a similar logic, and the "obligation to give."
I know of investigators experienced in this art of diversion,
which is a return to the ethical, of pleasure and of invention
within the scientific institution. Realizing no profit, (profit
is produced by work done for the factory), and often at a
loss, they take something from the order of knowledge in
order to inscribe "artistic achivements" on it and to carve
on it the graffiti of the debts of honor. To deal with everyday
tactics in this way would be to practice an "ordinary" art,
to find oneself in the common situation, and to make a kind
of "perruque" of writing itself."
*The Practice of Everyday Life"
Michel de Certeau
that separates domains in the name of the division
of labor and reveals class affiliations, it would be
"fabulous" if, as in the stories of miracles, the
groups that formerly gave us our masters and
that are currently lodged in our corpus were to
rise up and themselves mark their comings and
goings in the texts that honor and bury them
at the same time. This hope has diappeared,
along with the beliefs which have long since
vanished from our cities.There are no longer any
ghosts who can remind the livng of reciprocity.
But in the order organized by the power of
knowledge (ours), as in the order of the
countryside,or the factories, a diversionary
practice remains possible.
Let us try to make a *perruque* in the economic
system whose rules and hierarchies are repeated,
as always, in scientific institutions. In the area of
scientific research (which defines the current order
if knowledge), working with its machines and making
use of its scraps, we can divert the time owed to the
institution; we can make textual objects that signify
in art and solidarities; we can play the game of free
exchange, even if it is penalized by bosses and
colleagues when they are not willing to "turn a blind
eye" on it; we can create networks of connivances and
sleights of hand; we can exchange gifts; and in these
ways we can subvert the law that, in the scientific
factory, puts work in the service of the machine and,
by a similar logic, progressively destroys the requirement
of creation and, by a similar logic, and the "obligation to give."
I know of investigators experienced in this art of diversion,
which is a return to the ethical, of pleasure and of invention
within the scientific institution. Realizing no profit, (profit
is produced by work done for the factory), and often at a
loss, they take something from the order of knowledge in
order to inscribe "artistic achivements" on it and to carve
on it the graffiti of the debts of honor. To deal with everyday
tactics in this way would be to practice an "ordinary" art,
to find oneself in the common situation, and to make a kind
of "perruque" of writing itself."
*The Practice of Everyday Life"
Michel de Certeau
"The operational models of popular culture
cannot be confined to the past, the countryside
or primitive peoples. They exist in the heart of
the strongholds of the contemporary
economy. Take, for example, whatin France
is called *la perruque*,
"the wig." *La perruque*is the worker's own
work disguised as work for his employer. It differs
from pilfering in that nothing of material value is stolen.
It differsfrom absenteeism in that the worker is
officially on the job. *La perruque* may be
as simple as matter as a secretary's writing a love
letter on "company time" or
as complex as a cabinetmaker's
"borrowing" a lathe to make a piece
of furniture to make a piece
of furniture for his living room.
Under different names in
different countries this
phenomenon is becoming more
and more general, even if managers
penalize it or "turn a blind eye" on it in
order not to know about it. Accused
of stealing orturning material
to his own endsand using the machines for his
own profit, the worker who
indulges in *la perruque* actually
diverts time (not goods, since he uses only scraps)
from the factory
for work that is free, creative and precisely not
directed toward profit. In the very place
where the machine he must serve reigns supreme,
he cunningly takes pleasure in finding a way to
create gratuitous products
whose sole purpose is tosignify his own
capabilities through hishis solidarity with other
workers or his family through *spending*
his time in this way.
With the complicity of other workers
(who thus defeat the competition the factory
tries to instill among them), he succeeds in
"putting one over" on the established order
on its home ground. Far from being a regression
toward a mode of production organized around artisans
or individuals, *la perruque* reintroduces "popular"
techniques of other times and other places
into the industrial space(this is, the Present order)."
From *The Practice of Everyday Life"
Michel De Certeau
U Cal press
1984
cannot be confined to the past, the countryside
or primitive peoples. They exist in the heart of
the strongholds of the contemporary
economy. Take, for example, whatin France
is called *la perruque*,
"the wig." *La perruque*is the worker's own
work disguised as work for his employer. It differs
from pilfering in that nothing of material value is stolen.
It differsfrom absenteeism in that the worker is
officially on the job. *La perruque* may be
as simple as matter as a secretary's writing a love
letter on "company time" or
as complex as a cabinetmaker's
"borrowing" a lathe to make a piece
of furniture to make a piece
of furniture for his living room.
Under different names in
different countries this
phenomenon is becoming more
and more general, even if managers
penalize it or "turn a blind eye" on it in
order not to know about it. Accused
of stealing orturning material
to his own endsand using the machines for his
own profit, the worker who
indulges in *la perruque* actually
diverts time (not goods, since he uses only scraps)
from the factory
for work that is free, creative and precisely not
directed toward profit. In the very place
where the machine he must serve reigns supreme,
he cunningly takes pleasure in finding a way to
create gratuitous products
whose sole purpose is tosignify his own
capabilities through hishis solidarity with other
workers or his family through *spending*
his time in this way.
With the complicity of other workers
(who thus defeat the competition the factory
tries to instill among them), he succeeds in
"putting one over" on the established order
on its home ground. Far from being a regression
toward a mode of production organized around artisans
or individuals, *la perruque* reintroduces "popular"
techniques of other times and other places
into the industrial space(this is, the Present order)."
From *The Practice of Everyday Life"
Michel De Certeau
U Cal press
1984
Friday, October 24
Flash!yesterday, Noah Eli Gordon (click here) linked to two of his own poem sequences on his blog
*Human Verb*!
*Human Verb*!
The "Yeah, well I've been saying *this* all along!" department:
This just in: "The Politics of Male Blogging"
Halley's Comment
via Caveat Lector
(By the way, have you been reading
Caveat Lector? "Let the reader beware!")
This just in: "The Politics of Male Blogging"
Halley's Comment
via Caveat Lector
(By the way, have you been reading
Caveat Lector? "Let the reader beware!")
Tanya Brolaski's workshop (*niagra/cinematic*) on how to breathe underwater. Right now on:
Swimming for Dummies.
Swimming for Dummies.
2002
Team Work
The decision is everything, yes.
I like the material outcome of the
noodling around also. The quotes
don’t necessarily have quotes around
them- either appropriation,
recommendation,
accommodation or admiration.
The settings
are the places we go to. These are
made of all the decisions we
struggle with, the web
which constructs- moment by moment-
what the whole thing is. Now that I’ve
done that, I want to do this.
The places we go, the things
we do, the people we are.
What do we actually do? We
get in touch
with each other, we meet,
by accident or on purpose, and we
say things. These things are done
and said in places. In the particular
chain of sequences I have in mind,
we meet in all the places, we go to work.
(Think of the distinction between
“work” friends and “real” friends,
but don’t get stuck on that either).
At one point I decided to have
friends that would challenge me.
This was a decision with
very good consequences.
I could go back to the time
when I sometimes chose people
as friends who gladly undermine me.
Sometimes the two are built into
the same person.
When all the clues are there you
are prompted to proceed. What would
a manifesto be if it were not addressed
to the actors themselves, each of whom
would have to weave some part of their
actual work lives into this poem?
It wouldn’t be everybody everybody
is working with. Each person would have
to choose. This would be equal to what
they call in psychoanalysis, the “latent content”-
or might be also considered the background content.
Each actor becomes a character made out of
their own lives, each actor would “co-produce”
their “team” from their past from their own work
lives. Allowance is made for overlap between
non-work lives and work lives.
As always, a project is the result of a series
of meditations. Only solitude can allow for this.
Solitude is built in, even when it is not provided
for in, in the transitions . During transitions
we don’t still, or don’t yet, know who we are.
Team Work
The decision is everything, yes.
I like the material outcome of the
noodling around also. The quotes
don’t necessarily have quotes around
them- either appropriation,
recommendation,
accommodation or admiration.
The settings
are the places we go to. These are
made of all the decisions we
struggle with, the web
which constructs- moment by moment-
what the whole thing is. Now that I’ve
done that, I want to do this.
The places we go, the things
we do, the people we are.
What do we actually do? We
get in touch
with each other, we meet,
by accident or on purpose, and we
say things. These things are done
and said in places. In the particular
chain of sequences I have in mind,
we meet in all the places, we go to work.
(Think of the distinction between
“work” friends and “real” friends,
but don’t get stuck on that either).
At one point I decided to have
friends that would challenge me.
This was a decision with
very good consequences.
I could go back to the time
when I sometimes chose people
as friends who gladly undermine me.
Sometimes the two are built into
the same person.
When all the clues are there you
are prompted to proceed. What would
a manifesto be if it were not addressed
to the actors themselves, each of whom
would have to weave some part of their
actual work lives into this poem?
It wouldn’t be everybody everybody
is working with. Each person would have
to choose. This would be equal to what
they call in psychoanalysis, the “latent content”-
or might be also considered the background content.
Each actor becomes a character made out of
their own lives, each actor would “co-produce”
their “team” from their past from their own work
lives. Allowance is made for overlap between
non-work lives and work lives.
As always, a project is the result of a series
of meditations. Only solitude can allow for this.
Solitude is built in, even when it is not provided
for in, in the transitions . During transitions
we don’t still, or don’t yet, know who we are.
Thursday, October 23
Today, Wood s Lot(Mark Woods)
draws attention to Michel Foucault's book of lectures, *Fearless Speech*. Click here:
Cynics.
**
"Diogenes went up and put a crown
on the head of the horse who stood
its ground...What are you doing when
you award a crown in the Isthmian games?
For if the crown is awarded to someone
as a moral victory, then Diogenes deserves
a crown. But if it is only a question of
superior physical strength, then there is
no reason why the horse should
not be given a crown."
p121-122
**
"There is, however, very little
positive doctrine in Cynic
preaching; no direct affirmation
of good or bad. Instead,
the Cynics refer to freedom
(*eleutheria*) and self-sufficiency
(*autarkeia*) as the basic
criteria by which to assess any
kind ofbehavior or mode of life.
For the Cynics, the main condition
of human happiness is *autarkeia*,
self-sufficiency or independence,
where what you need to have or what
you decide to do is
dependent on nothing other than
you yourself. As a consequence-
since the Cynics had the most
radical of attitudes-they preferred
a completely natural life-style.
A natural life-style was supposed
to eliminate all the dependencies
introduced by culture, society,
civilization, opinion, and so on.
Consequently, most of their
preaching seems to have been
directed at social institutions or
laws. In short, their preaching
was against all social institutions
insofar as these insitutions
hindered ones freedom
and independence."
p120
"The crisis of *parrhesia*,
which emerges at a cross-road
of an interrogation about democracy
and an interrogation about truth,
... at the end of the Fifth Century...
What I mean is that there
is a new problematization of the
relations between verbal activity,
education, freedom, power
and the existing political institutions
which marks a crisis in the way freedom
of speech is understood in
Athens."
p73-74
from the editor's preface:
"a verbatim transcription of his
lectures""compiled from tape
recordings of lectures given by
Michel Foucault at the
University of California, Berkeley
in the fall term of 1983"
draws attention to Michel Foucault's book of lectures, *Fearless Speech*. Click here:
Cynics.
**
"Diogenes went up and put a crown
on the head of the horse who stood
its ground...What are you doing when
you award a crown in the Isthmian games?
For if the crown is awarded to someone
as a moral victory, then Diogenes deserves
a crown. But if it is only a question of
superior physical strength, then there is
no reason why the horse should
not be given a crown."
p121-122
**
"There is, however, very little
positive doctrine in Cynic
preaching; no direct affirmation
of good or bad. Instead,
the Cynics refer to freedom
(*eleutheria*) and self-sufficiency
(*autarkeia*) as the basic
criteria by which to assess any
kind ofbehavior or mode of life.
For the Cynics, the main condition
of human happiness is *autarkeia*,
self-sufficiency or independence,
where what you need to have or what
you decide to do is
dependent on nothing other than
you yourself. As a consequence-
since the Cynics had the most
radical of attitudes-they preferred
a completely natural life-style.
A natural life-style was supposed
to eliminate all the dependencies
introduced by culture, society,
civilization, opinion, and so on.
Consequently, most of their
preaching seems to have been
directed at social institutions or
laws. In short, their preaching
was against all social institutions
insofar as these insitutions
hindered ones freedom
and independence."
p120
"The crisis of *parrhesia*,
which emerges at a cross-road
of an interrogation about democracy
and an interrogation about truth,
... at the end of the Fifth Century...
What I mean is that there
is a new problematization of the
relations between verbal activity,
education, freedom, power
and the existing political institutions
which marks a crisis in the way freedom
of speech is understood in
Athens."
p73-74
from the editor's preface:
"a verbatim transcription of his
lectures""compiled from tape
recordings of lectures given by
Michel Foucault at the
University of California, Berkeley
in the fall term of 1983"
It has long been my feeling that
in the U.S. we are in
deep denial regarding the
extent of the traumatized
state of our national consciousness.
It is in the nature
of Americans to rely on taking
action as a solution
to all problems, including those
of self-esteem. I am by far not the
only person who has noted the great
irony in The Terminator becoming
California’s governor. The persona of
the Terminator is constructed to be able to
act without any power being capable of
deterring that action. While Superman
had a vulnerable side (Kryptonite)
and self-examining side (Clark Kent)
we have moved on to an unfeeling
robotic superhero that keeps on
going:no interaction, no dialogue,
no possible deterrence.
Underlying this is a
form of denial created
unconsciously
to persist in the face of any trauma
or threat. This is at the heart
of the masculine ideal.
However, the symptoms of
anxiety that
result from the trauma do
resurface. They resurface in the
form of a growing and widening
sense of anomie and
meaninglessness
in human endeavor and in
relationships,
an increasing difficulty in finding meaning
in anything, or anyone,
an increasing reliance on a facade of
indifference, as a defensive reaction to
actual tragedy and the
resultant deprivation and despair,
summarized in the
far-right wing philosophy of “kill the beast,”
meaning, destroy all semblance of
vulnerability to the sufferings of others
and to threats of futher destruction.
Ron Silliman published the
following statement on his blog recently
offering his thoughts about the poet’s political
life, that grew out of a recent poet’s
retreat in Philadelphia:
“I point this out to note that the way to challenge & defeat “militarized language & propaganda” is not through poetry, but through same political action a steelworker or waitress might take. The idea that poetry is in this sense a different practice strikes me as a genre-based mode of megalomania. If poets are serious about taking on the forces of darkness, the avenues for action are plentiful.”
But poets need not turn
only to the available public
avenues to express their political feelings
or “take on the forces of
darkness.”
Are steel workers more needy
of political organization than poets?
I may agree it is certainly
somewhat futile for poets focus
on political change through the
application of the forms of poetry to
by means of metaphor or lilteral meanings
enlightening the "mainstream mind." And yes, this is
not the day of Dryden, Swift and Pope,
or Shelley, Keats and Byron. The culture
industry and the political industry are
united and we all realize
they don’t give a hoot about
what poets have to say
as a group.
I do think it may be worthwhile
for poets to see what might happen
if they were to work much more on
using their considerable knowledge
and intellectual insight and
experience in the direction of
changing the politics of the poetry
field itself. If we can’t do
much about our clout with the mainstream,
the least we could do is create more
fairness and mutual support, and the
probable resulting
effectiveness, in working
with each other.
It seems to me there is a next step
for poets to take
after so much insight has been
gained through innovative writing,
through the struggle with form and
formal innovation. I think so much
has been accomplished- the form issue has
not exactly been "done to death"
but it has been done, and done
very effectively at that, not that
there is general consensus among poets
and poetry readers by far,
but the territory, and the main avenues have
certainly been very well sketched out.
It seems to me the next step to take
is to pull together all this linguistic
advancement in verbal skill and work to
connect it to the "forms" or “genres”
poets choose to work together
cooperatively, not destructively.
To understand this means most of
all to examine the forms by which
we publicly acknowledge what each
of us has accomplished, rather than
perpetuate the conventional systems of
awards and traditional critical
and academic apparatus, canon building
and the like, negative reviewing and
piecemeal scholarly fiefdom
creation around specific earlier writers,
as well as personalized,
systematic, destructive “polemics,"
directed at particular individuals. This
activity attempts to achieve its own competitive
goals by means of a "divide and conquer"
mentality, that sometimes leaves
the polemicists
themselves pathtically isolated.
I realize that academic professionals in
the writing field face these issues in
everyday
practice much more that I do or
ever did.
I also realize that what I am
saying may be
interpreted as similar to the naive idea
of putting all the
power of decision in beginning
students' hands,
etc. This is not what I am
implying. I am talking
about (frequently covert, or unstated
or discussed)
assumptions
about
what we think of
as a writing "career" and what the
outward trappings of
this "career" might mean, etc, and
how these assumptions might
ultimately interfere
with the process of the net of
writerly relationships
empowering the field as a whole.
I’ve concluded that the best
place right now
for me is to seek political change is
within the (sometimes covert) systems
writers employ to relate to each
other in their work,
and about their work, within academia
and outside of academia and to
come to grip with the ways that writers
can best work together to get the
message out about each others work.
Writers have been working collaboratively
so intensively for so long, that gradually
together many of the old customs
have already been eroded, as has the
need for the old system so much,
it could possibly now, with a unified effort.
just be tipped over, or gradually abandoned,
in order to scatter the essential
elements around, and to change our
own culture the way radical
linguistic dynamism operates
in our poetics changed our poetry.
There are social
implications to our poetics that
*none* of us are completely facing
up to in ourselves and with each other.
Because of poetry’s
commitment to authenticity and
truth, we have the rare opportunity
to attempt to assure social avenues
for that authenticity and truth
to be activated
in our ways of experiencing and
responding to each others work
(and, as a result, each other’s lives)
that don't exist very much overtly now, but do
exist covertly. They exist covertly
because of what we have learned from
non-narrative techniques, from cut-up,
enjambment, defamiliarization and
deconstruction, catachresis,
free association, Dada, surrealism, collage,
abstract expressionism,
automatic writing, visual poetry,
acoustic experimentation, hypermedia,
collaborative writing, conceptual art and
many other technical
processes. Obviously we have not been
studying and practicing
these techniques for so many years to
become better union organizers
and workers for the Green party
or the latest hip Democratic
party leaders.
There's a missing link here. If there is
so much meaning in the formal
operations of our poetry
and poetics, then couldn't it also potentially
reside in the meanings we
give to our writerly judgments,
and the social avenues we endorse
that activate these judgments in
our real life relationships,
the ways in which we share our work
and ideas, and as a result,
and how we compete
and receive and give support,
recognitions, response to our work
as writers; how we condemn, and undermine,
criticize and exclude each other; how we connect
and how we cooperate and we try to destroy
these connections and cooperative efforts?
The archaic system of accumulating stacks of
manuscripts to add to more stacks
of books,to be evaluated and processed
by experts, labeled and distributed as significant
and important, can frequently amount to so much
canon fodder
(I am a decent speller plus I have a
spell check and the word "canon"
is spelled right).
The reputation industry,
the way we expect each other to live it out,
is our politics. It is what we live and breathe
as writers every day. If my perception
is apropos,
what we are doing is
compiling technique after technique
of critiquing and reconstructing form in writing,
while frequently neglecting to take the implied next
steps by closely, and together, examining
the implications of
these significant discoveries and resulting
changes of formal applications that
we employ in our writing work
in the way we organize our writerly
relationships, our working relationships.
All the politics are right there on
the table within the implicit formal
critiques of mainstream writing practice
that have been accumulated by so much collaborative work,
meaning carefully shared and discussed accomplishments in
the area of technique and the application
of writerly ideas of a work's
form to its content,
(therefore thinking), and much opportunity,
so much potential for change has
already been accomplished.
Just as professional government
representatives and corporations
have to deal with assumptions
regarding competition that have
awesome real life implications
regarding survival and the
utilization and control of violence,
as writers we will either be doing
what is needed to convince the world
by following our example,
to work together for mutual advantage,
or be submitting to their
observing all of us work
against each other, because of
unbridled competition,
towards universal mutual disadvantage
and destructiveness.
Writers also compete, and like the
rest of the culture,
we are necessarily obsessed
with competition. In this area,
I think we are well positioned
to exploit a deficiency in our culture
as an advantage.
Since, as we all know,
few are paid very much
for writing,
what's the point of so
much emphasis on competing
in the writing field?
Or intensifying the small amount
of competitive feeling that others’
accomplishments arouse in us,
but that one may relatively easily overcome
by means of acknowledgement and support
of others, as well as self-challenge?
I understand that increasing and exposing competiveness
may appeal to those reponsible for
creating excitement, and for obtaining some attention
to bring revenues to cover the cost of publications
and their distribution. The problem with this is that
the politics underlying this assumption may not be the
best one for writers as a group to support.
Could we not undermine and parody and
illuminate and complicate and
basically turn the whole business
of competition inside
out in our own community?
Aren’t we are all sophisticated
enough with techniques of enclosing
form within content,
with "nesting," with
using mirror reversals
and randomizations of content
and innovative modes of
organization to struggle with such
complex philosophical issues? Isn't
it perfectly clear that the next
step is to apply this to our ways
of sharing and collaborating and
finding purpose and meaning in
each others work?
If our work is at heart
composed of our meditations,
and it is not-for-profit, and
it is resonant with
writers works and with
what other significant,
valuable and interesting
works we can track down
to read, and should we not
work to link that
understanding to each other on
as many levels as possible
(in contrast to the
slow-paced linear
movement of culture
industry products)?
In applying this
understanding
of writerly
forms to the forms
of our writerly
organizations,
institutional
and informal,
would we not be using our
writing on
our own behalf
directly, politically
and in the arena
that we know best:
our everyday life , the one we
are most trained to comment on:
our everyday lives?
Political representation
is obviously a fraud:
in this era. It no longer
exists. This is one of the
main reasons why things
in our culture are
unraveling so quickly.
Public media are
an unhealthy but fun
fast food meals at best,
hypnotic poisons at worst;
the political/government industry,
the entertainment industry,
the culture industry, sadly, even
the education industry,
all interlocked,
horribly enslaved, frequently against
their own better judgement,
and their united will,
as the Third Reich of the
contemporary intellect and imagination.
This stagnant situation
prevents any possible
political change at the same time
manipulates writers into working to
undermine all previous political change
by participating in these utterly
compromised institutions.
(“Starve the beast.”)
It is my sense the best chance
writers have to change the political
situation is to use our
own writing culture
as our political workshop.
In turn, we will be empowered
with tools that can be used to
powerful advantage in critiquing the
system that we are replicating in the
traditional ways we empower our own
work, each others work, our own “careers”
as writers and each others “careers”
with each other: the modes by which
we exchange and interpret each others
writing work,
sometimes helplessly
permitting its exploitation
and subservience to the system
we purportedly want to change,
that must be changed so that
we can rediscover and redirect
the most productive
and generative political
energies.
in the U.S. we are in
deep denial regarding the
extent of the traumatized
state of our national consciousness.
It is in the nature
of Americans to rely on taking
action as a solution
to all problems, including those
of self-esteem. I am by far not the
only person who has noted the great
irony in The Terminator becoming
California’s governor. The persona of
the Terminator is constructed to be able to
act without any power being capable of
deterring that action. While Superman
had a vulnerable side (Kryptonite)
and self-examining side (Clark Kent)
we have moved on to an unfeeling
robotic superhero that keeps on
going:no interaction, no dialogue,
no possible deterrence.
Underlying this is a
form of denial created
unconsciously
to persist in the face of any trauma
or threat. This is at the heart
of the masculine ideal.
However, the symptoms of
anxiety that
result from the trauma do
resurface. They resurface in the
form of a growing and widening
sense of anomie and
meaninglessness
in human endeavor and in
relationships,
an increasing difficulty in finding meaning
in anything, or anyone,
an increasing reliance on a facade of
indifference, as a defensive reaction to
actual tragedy and the
resultant deprivation and despair,
summarized in the
far-right wing philosophy of “kill the beast,”
meaning, destroy all semblance of
vulnerability to the sufferings of others
and to threats of futher destruction.
Ron Silliman published the
following statement on his blog recently
offering his thoughts about the poet’s political
life, that grew out of a recent poet’s
retreat in Philadelphia:
“I point this out to note that the way to challenge & defeat “militarized language & propaganda” is not through poetry, but through same political action a steelworker or waitress might take. The idea that poetry is in this sense a different practice strikes me as a genre-based mode of megalomania. If poets are serious about taking on the forces of darkness, the avenues for action are plentiful.”
But poets need not turn
only to the available public
avenues to express their political feelings
or “take on the forces of
darkness.”
Are steel workers more needy
of political organization than poets?
I may agree it is certainly
somewhat futile for poets focus
on political change through the
application of the forms of poetry to
by means of metaphor or lilteral meanings
enlightening the "mainstream mind." And yes, this is
not the day of Dryden, Swift and Pope,
or Shelley, Keats and Byron. The culture
industry and the political industry are
united and we all realize
they don’t give a hoot about
what poets have to say
as a group.
I do think it may be worthwhile
for poets to see what might happen
if they were to work much more on
using their considerable knowledge
and intellectual insight and
experience in the direction of
changing the politics of the poetry
field itself. If we can’t do
much about our clout with the mainstream,
the least we could do is create more
fairness and mutual support, and the
probable resulting
effectiveness, in working
with each other.
It seems to me there is a next step
for poets to take
after so much insight has been
gained through innovative writing,
through the struggle with form and
formal innovation. I think so much
has been accomplished- the form issue has
not exactly been "done to death"
but it has been done, and done
very effectively at that, not that
there is general consensus among poets
and poetry readers by far,
but the territory, and the main avenues have
certainly been very well sketched out.
It seems to me the next step to take
is to pull together all this linguistic
advancement in verbal skill and work to
connect it to the "forms" or “genres”
poets choose to work together
cooperatively, not destructively.
To understand this means most of
all to examine the forms by which
we publicly acknowledge what each
of us has accomplished, rather than
perpetuate the conventional systems of
awards and traditional critical
and academic apparatus, canon building
and the like, negative reviewing and
piecemeal scholarly fiefdom
creation around specific earlier writers,
as well as personalized,
systematic, destructive “polemics,"
directed at particular individuals. This
activity attempts to achieve its own competitive
goals by means of a "divide and conquer"
mentality, that sometimes leaves
the polemicists
themselves pathtically isolated.
I realize that academic professionals in
the writing field face these issues in
everyday
practice much more that I do or
ever did.
I also realize that what I am
saying may be
interpreted as similar to the naive idea
of putting all the
power of decision in beginning
students' hands,
etc. This is not what I am
implying. I am talking
about (frequently covert, or unstated
or discussed)
assumptions
about
what we think of
as a writing "career" and what the
outward trappings of
this "career" might mean, etc, and
how these assumptions might
ultimately interfere
with the process of the net of
writerly relationships
empowering the field as a whole.
I’ve concluded that the best
place right now
for me is to seek political change is
within the (sometimes covert) systems
writers employ to relate to each
other in their work,
and about their work, within academia
and outside of academia and to
come to grip with the ways that writers
can best work together to get the
message out about each others work.
Writers have been working collaboratively
so intensively for so long, that gradually
together many of the old customs
have already been eroded, as has the
need for the old system so much,
it could possibly now, with a unified effort.
just be tipped over, or gradually abandoned,
in order to scatter the essential
elements around, and to change our
own culture the way radical
linguistic dynamism operates
in our poetics changed our poetry.
There are social
implications to our poetics that
*none* of us are completely facing
up to in ourselves and with each other.
Because of poetry’s
commitment to authenticity and
truth, we have the rare opportunity
to attempt to assure social avenues
for that authenticity and truth
to be activated
in our ways of experiencing and
responding to each others work
(and, as a result, each other’s lives)
that don't exist very much overtly now, but do
exist covertly. They exist covertly
because of what we have learned from
non-narrative techniques, from cut-up,
enjambment, defamiliarization and
deconstruction, catachresis,
free association, Dada, surrealism, collage,
abstract expressionism,
automatic writing, visual poetry,
acoustic experimentation, hypermedia,
collaborative writing, conceptual art and
many other technical
processes. Obviously we have not been
studying and practicing
these techniques for so many years to
become better union organizers
and workers for the Green party
or the latest hip Democratic
party leaders.
There's a missing link here. If there is
so much meaning in the formal
operations of our poetry
and poetics, then couldn't it also potentially
reside in the meanings we
give to our writerly judgments,
and the social avenues we endorse
that activate these judgments in
our real life relationships,
the ways in which we share our work
and ideas, and as a result,
and how we compete
and receive and give support,
recognitions, response to our work
as writers; how we condemn, and undermine,
criticize and exclude each other; how we connect
and how we cooperate and we try to destroy
these connections and cooperative efforts?
The archaic system of accumulating stacks of
manuscripts to add to more stacks
of books,to be evaluated and processed
by experts, labeled and distributed as significant
and important, can frequently amount to so much
canon fodder
(I am a decent speller plus I have a
spell check and the word "canon"
is spelled right).
The reputation industry,
the way we expect each other to live it out,
is our politics. It is what we live and breathe
as writers every day. If my perception
is apropos,
what we are doing is
compiling technique after technique
of critiquing and reconstructing form in writing,
while frequently neglecting to take the implied next
steps by closely, and together, examining
the implications of
these significant discoveries and resulting
changes of formal applications that
we employ in our writing work
in the way we organize our writerly
relationships, our working relationships.
All the politics are right there on
the table within the implicit formal
critiques of mainstream writing practice
that have been accumulated by so much collaborative work,
meaning carefully shared and discussed accomplishments in
the area of technique and the application
of writerly ideas of a work's
form to its content,
(therefore thinking), and much opportunity,
so much potential for change has
already been accomplished.
Just as professional government
representatives and corporations
have to deal with assumptions
regarding competition that have
awesome real life implications
regarding survival and the
utilization and control of violence,
as writers we will either be doing
what is needed to convince the world
by following our example,
to work together for mutual advantage,
or be submitting to their
observing all of us work
against each other, because of
unbridled competition,
towards universal mutual disadvantage
and destructiveness.
Writers also compete, and like the
rest of the culture,
we are necessarily obsessed
with competition. In this area,
I think we are well positioned
to exploit a deficiency in our culture
as an advantage.
Since, as we all know,
few are paid very much
for writing,
what's the point of so
much emphasis on competing
in the writing field?
Or intensifying the small amount
of competitive feeling that others’
accomplishments arouse in us,
but that one may relatively easily overcome
by means of acknowledgement and support
of others, as well as self-challenge?
I understand that increasing and exposing competiveness
may appeal to those reponsible for
creating excitement, and for obtaining some attention
to bring revenues to cover the cost of publications
and their distribution. The problem with this is that
the politics underlying this assumption may not be the
best one for writers as a group to support.
Could we not undermine and parody and
illuminate and complicate and
basically turn the whole business
of competition inside
out in our own community?
Aren’t we are all sophisticated
enough with techniques of enclosing
form within content,
with "nesting," with
using mirror reversals
and randomizations of content
and innovative modes of
organization to struggle with such
complex philosophical issues? Isn't
it perfectly clear that the next
step is to apply this to our ways
of sharing and collaborating and
finding purpose and meaning in
each others work?
If our work is at heart
composed of our meditations,
and it is not-for-profit, and
it is resonant with
writers works and with
what other significant,
valuable and interesting
works we can track down
to read, and should we not
work to link that
understanding to each other on
as many levels as possible
(in contrast to the
slow-paced linear
movement of culture
industry products)?
In applying this
understanding
of writerly
forms to the forms
of our writerly
organizations,
institutional
and informal,
would we not be using our
writing on
our own behalf
directly, politically
and in the arena
that we know best:
our everyday life , the one we
are most trained to comment on:
our everyday lives?
Political representation
is obviously a fraud:
in this era. It no longer
exists. This is one of the
main reasons why things
in our culture are
unraveling so quickly.
Public media are
an unhealthy but fun
fast food meals at best,
hypnotic poisons at worst;
the political/government industry,
the entertainment industry,
the culture industry, sadly, even
the education industry,
all interlocked,
horribly enslaved, frequently against
their own better judgement,
and their united will,
as the Third Reich of the
contemporary intellect and imagination.
This stagnant situation
prevents any possible
political change at the same time
manipulates writers into working to
undermine all previous political change
by participating in these utterly
compromised institutions.
(“Starve the beast.”)
It is my sense the best chance
writers have to change the political
situation is to use our
own writing culture
as our political workshop.
In turn, we will be empowered
with tools that can be used to
powerful advantage in critiquing the
system that we are replicating in the
traditional ways we empower our own
work, each others work, our own “careers”
as writers and each others “careers”
with each other: the modes by which
we exchange and interpret each others
writing work,
sometimes helplessly
permitting its exploitation
and subservience to the system
we purportedly want to change,
that must be changed so that
we can rediscover and redirect
the most productive
and generative political
energies.
Wednesday, October 22
Thanks to the following blogs and listings for referencing my recent
Sidereality pieces:
and thanks again to ululations(Nada Gordon)
and Elsewhere (Gary Sullivan) for
publishing "Confessions of a Blog Artist" in the
Poetry Project Newsletter
shopiere
random items (German/English)
The Cassandra Pages
Blue Kangeroo(Jean Vengua)
Boynton
Cahiers de Corey(Josh Corey)
Caterina
Mike Snider's Formal Blog
Hatstuck Snarl(Stephen Kirbach)
Limetree (Kasey Silem Mohammad)
The Well Nourished Moon
Savoradin.com
Wood s Lot(Mark Woods)
Electronic Poetry Center
Sidereality pieces:
and thanks again to ululations(Nada Gordon)
and Elsewhere (Gary Sullivan) for
publishing "Confessions of a Blog Artist" in the
Poetry Project Newsletter
shopiere
random items (German/English)
The Cassandra Pages
Blue Kangeroo(Jean Vengua)
Boynton
Cahiers de Corey(Josh Corey)
Caterina
Mike Snider's Formal Blog
Hatstuck Snarl(Stephen Kirbach)
Limetree (Kasey Silem Mohammad)
The Well Nourished Moon
Savoradin.com
Wood s Lot(Mark Woods)
Electronic Poetry Center
Contradicta-available from SPD and Green Integer
Contradicta: Aphorisms with illustrations by Toni Simon
.
<br />
<br />Let there be global doubt about all implications!
<br />Let government reside on the postage stamp
<br />Let kinds and queens be revived logistically
<br />And meaning be minted by the proper authorities.
<br />
<br />After all, he won on the basis of opposites
<br />He won on a rhythm that can't be recorded
<br />He made sons and daugters out of sentiment
<br />He spent plenty of lazy afternoons denouncing the tongue.
<br />
<br />Today, let's visit the graveyard of hurt feelings
<br />Let's follow the pain of all repetition
<br />Lets deify the very marrow of prepositions
<br />Lets make all critics laureats.
<br />
<br />The past is past: this is why the furniture is covered
<br />In white sheets, this is why the lunch is digested
<br />By code words, this is why all connection is doomed to detect
<br />The organs of impossible nuance, this is why all conjunctions
<br />Are composed like accordions, delicious sausage of success,
<br />Delicious final decisions, ecstatic final paragraph of intentions.
<br />
<br />Finally, the ruinous stop sign has been deified,
<br />Finally contradictions are recognized as geniuses
<br />Finally the hieroglyph is edible
<br />Finally teenagers are elected.
<br />
<br />Be reasonable and die
<br />Be patient and illuminate all insults
<br />Take charge of the numerous indebted
<br />Be proud of the street's exigencies.
<br />
<br />Thankful for all buttons, I wander plaintively
<br />Around types of erasure, I glorify the simplicity
<br />Of turning on the lights, watching the way doors simply open and close
<br />Taking the moments that electricity engulfs.
<br />
<br />These enthusiaistic followers beware
<br />The plants, embrace the fan,
<br />Scratch meanings across the nascent table
<br />And swallow double messages in one joyous gulp!
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