1987

The Recondite Wayfarer

As such, a word has color.
Its program
is made of reversals,
a trapeze swings emptily
after the circus
because the performer
has jumped and is
no longer safe. These
constant switches in time
during which
an entire inheritance
of living flesh is
endangered at the
mere site of the social
occlude any impulse to name:
now the performer
(the word) has moved
to the forefront
(the forehead)
of thought.

To keep reason
in the background
brings forth the
elephants, the
elements of style.
Exactly this repetition
reminds us of
children because
here the coughing
and jumping are
gleaming with the
bright play of
babble.

Reminders are
nascent in the
American state of
the land. Noise
travels forwrds
and backwards
in time, continuously
covering it. Decisions
are made at the
edge of action.

Premises
combining with
breath
the social
makes the
shape of the
room and
determines
the shape
of liberty:
feel it
with your
heart- this is
the boundary
of the flow
of freedom.
Now you see it
whole, you see
it flowing with the
vast complexity
of temporal
networks. Such
are the voices
of the shy and the
bold, thoughts
cling like
memories, they
slide forwards in
rhythmic twangs
beating their joys
in pumping
farewells, announcing
a concurrance of
of present
rituals.

All this
happened in an
interval of time
indefinable by the grace
of received ideas. These
are measured by the
metronome of
absolute zero,
answering and swaying,
beating a fist at the
side of feelings
announcing a tone
of total trust.

Yet by this measure
time can be swayed
to unite deficiency
with a scale
of being. The
recombinant nature
of complete response
denies the limitations
of exploded
will.This torque
promises access
to the pespective
of seeing the future
curved by joining
opposites. In the end,
the apolcalypse
is a prelude, the
expected revelation
is a call for work.

What masks the slowing
of growing love,
or should I say
who? She sees
the gestural language
of bursting, while I
count the chimings
of change.This is the
same, but the
gathering memory
of childhood's shadow
sings in a turn
that must be heard.

A listening held us
captive, a hearing
meshed with the
ringing of cash
registers, blaring clock
radios, the bursting of
hydrogen, and the smooth
sucking sounds of the the
quicksand of property
engulfing its owners.

Love keeps us loose
while certainty
hardens us
for the continuous
struggle.

Congratulations to Ernesto Priego,
whose blog is Never Neutral,
for recently winning an award, in what appears
to have been a fierce competition. I'm a
faithful reader of Ernesto's
blog and recommend that you read his moving and
open revelations about his ambivalences. The same
for Chris Lott's
recent posts.

I find it fascinating and exhilirating when
writers have the courage to be open
about their feelings about their experiences
as writers. When they do so,
I want to get to know them better and to
know their work better. How is this different
from "confessional" writing? For one thing,
bloggers invite reader response and interaction
which means they prefer to connect with others
rather focussing on being or feeling special,
which frequently leads to little more
than feeling and being isolated.

c. 1994

Leaky Thicknesses

1.

I love to get lost on the way
to completing a sentence.
A heart's forum. I like
to wander blindly inside
an idea, breaking contact
with its literal referent,
traveling on the incomplete
tracks which still haunt the
casings of things that
wanted to be, but found
themselves becoming
something else just as
they were coming to exist.
I like to close my eyes and
lie down in secret memory
inside the ridges left in the
pillows and blankets of
yesterday's dreams (I was
only greeting a future friend
who I have not yet met,
whose book might be able to
open this thought at its spine-
thoughts can mark each other
like sister spirits). I have to
be funny to haunt this one-
even echoes have to be made
out of something. Because only
here does lateral motion
encompass both the heart
and head.

2.

Embrace the whole,
but let the parts also
encompass places.The
name itself lets things
join in. Forever after,
what comes before: in music.
Heard, remembered. Extending
hand, let in. Following is
moving, eventually
coming upon (melting).
But meeting is melting.
Unless, unto. Seeming,
been. Words lie
beside each other, bask
in themselves, bask in
each other. Little hurts,
words said, real too,
eyes aside, small things
not said, not yet met,
misheard, misunderstood-
face, glances averted.

3.

Labor of love-
bits and pieces.
A part to play, dance
of the sexes. Alas,
a hesitant role
for him. A sense of
humor? Don't
make me laugh.
Anyone would
probably get up
again, if you give
them time. I can't
believe how long
it has been since I
looked at those files.

4.

Leaving things
in place I
don't necessarily
get further if I
get bored with them.
In all their skilled
exactitude, inside of
the merciless control
of their cruel and
empty meanings they
will disappear, transcending
the specific by means of
going nowhere. So much
for the intrinsic value
of order. Sometimes I
want to see them
clash just to know they
are there.This can
even involve upset,
if it is in the service of
breaking away from a
threateningly stultifying
situation. To be stultifying
is a checkmate, but
even this trap may be
eventually neutralized
by time. Do I dare
indent a paragraph?
I have seen them
disseminating and
dissolving at the same
moment, emptying
themselves voluntarily
of excess meaning.

5.

Reading as an
attempt to
challenge the mind
to understand
more of what?
Of *anything.*

"If readers were not passive,
but active and true to themselves,
literature would soon acquire a
different aspect and tend toward-
what? one wonders. An active reader
makes experiments with books; tries
out, perhaps, reshuffling their contents."

Paul Valery
*Analects*, p. 111

**

"Anyhow my poems, whether well or badly
done, always say *something.*"

Here we have the principle and origin of
horrors.

"Well or badly"- what indifference! "Something"-
what presumption!

Valery,
*Analects*, 107

c. 1993

postpone

what am I to leave, careless and tired,
to chance to represent my dream,
chosen as evidence of an invisible process
with no apparent thread?
no, I never wait long enought,
never enough long,
to repeat the song
just as I heard it,
without hesitations,
framed in the paraphrenalia
of all my books, in every least thought
I chanced to record,
to once more rearrange the figures
of what represents its total order
plus mistaken points of reference
that at one time were near enough
not only as signs
but within the accidental tracings
of diagonal colors, reminders
of token space,
specific times
now too quickly gone

***

"A hundred posters absorbing the gold not understood of days,
a treason of the letter, have fled..."

Mallarme, "La Gloire"

On The Contrary

The poet's only duty
is to praise.

8/10/77

An Explanation of Listening

I'm waiting it out. There's no choice in this.
If I made it into a chalice would you drink
From it gladly? If I am, in fact, the imaginary
Person you are waiting to appear at the head of the
Door complete with endless forgettable phrases
Twice as absent in their disguised presences
Would I be just as rosy then, widening gradually into a dawn?

Or is it simply an addition of commas which creates
All the work, a solid, impenetrable translation
Of unmade references so tangential so continuously unmade
Out of the touch of your arms breathing inside themselves
It's their breath dissolving into an aid, a helpmate.
Understand me, dear Mr. Rachmaninoff encourager?
I sure have learned how to hide absently bending forward.
How would you call that wrinked or periwinkled?
How dare you label it as words or call it horizontal
When it is transforming unmistakeable signals into singles
All neat, night clearly headed out for? We just wanted

To get a hieroglyph started with rain unmade into being possible
Only absently as a blurted shock of moisture
That isn't only not added properly, but vigorous
In its unadorned suddenness. A sneaky kind of sadness
Puts a poem to sleep. Anything bad has a bit of error
To disprove in clarity. The news before you made it up in your mind.
For example, now would be the time to refer to a rusty ventilator
Or venite, venite, venite adoremus. Welcome back, dear Mr.Beethoven,
Mr Bach, Mr Brahms, Van Gogh, Van Eyck, Van Johnson.

12/9/99

"The world is
a comedy to those
who think, a tragedy
to those who feel."

Horace Walpole

"Just because the
river is quiet does
not mean the
crocodiles have
left."

Malay Proverb

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[nonlinear poetry]

My Thoughts Thinking Through Nick Moudry

Kill Me Again

Rockets and Sentries

Automobile Xerox

TJ Desc

Derailed Commodity...Alexander Trimble Young

la photo du jour

Poop Chute...Brooke Nelson

This Journal

Poetry Hut...Jully Dybka

Semioanalysis Discoteche

Surf Poetry Collaborative

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Finish Your Phrase

******


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The Casual Tee...Trevor Calvert

Edits

In Place of Chairs

The Unquiet Grave

Baghdad Burning

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Stephen Vincent



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Dead Letter Game...Bill Marsh

Hatstuck Snarl...Stephen Kirbach

Zazie's Zone

*~Aimee Nezhukumatathil's gila monster~*

Topher Tune's Times...Christy Church

Yoo Doo Right...Mike County

Word Placement...Clayton A. Couch

Swimming for Dummies...Tanya Brolaski

fluss

The Skeptic...John Erhardt

Conchology...Gabriel Gudding

Parking Lot...Chris Corrigan

Process Documents...Ryan Fitzpatrick

Picoteando

Whiskey River

Dumb Monkey

Boynton

Caveat Lector

Sarah

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Marsh Hawk Press Blog

xtina.org....Christina Strong

Ironstone Whirlygig...Amanda Cook

prrrowess...Nada's Poems

Wood s Lot...Mark Woods

Texture Notes...Sawaka Nakayasu

Mysterium

The Brutal Kittens...James Meetze

Porthole Redux ....Catherine Meng

The Jetty...Cassie Lewis

Arm Sasser...Carl Annarummo

Bemsha Swing...Jonathan Mayhew

Bellona Times...Ray Davis

Gasps...Eileen Tabios' Poem Journal

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E.T....Heriberto Yepez

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Overlap... Drew Gardner

Well Nourished Moon ... Stephanie Young

Limetree ... Kasey Silem Mohammad

Million Poems... Jordan's Poems

CorpsePoetics....Eileen Tabios

tex files...Chris Murray

abolone..Li Bloom

The Nightjar...Jean Gier

c. 1975

Feelings in Matter


yielding literally place

you want action slip happen

to the year help category

chance...worry...fails the neglect

your price missed speaks


(he fits the same manner

for a few seconds

as you intent absent "normal"

if everywhere motion

stops suddenly)



***

The Sirens


because he...not much might have

when circulates in face

fortunate...or turn

you knew tired

have quickly past


who thought impairment

settled...the future shunned

burst back

mists those sops wish

2/10/89

Submission

It is easy to speak of the irrational in
a time when what is irrational is determined,
on the whole, by committee vote. The
committee is, in turn, so determined in its
judgement to be self-serving to the larger
institutions it represents, that the humane
judgement, like the judgement of the powerful,
is left to the individual. The group as
a whole has never known humanity and
never will. The group as a whole must be
determined in its action by forces too
dark to ever govern fully in a just way. In our
fear and frustration as a group, again and again we
turn to the individual. How the group then
longs to corrupt, destory or corrupt the individual.
The group wants the individual to submit
and only submit. But the individual
will never submit.

7/16/87

The implications of "synthesized voice"
go back to the earliest invention of machines
for translating thought through a mechanical
voice. Such a voice impersonalizes the voice,
ennabling it to be identifieded by the hearers as
a recognizable and conceivable series of
meanderings, rather than strictly "meaningful"
expressions of thought.

*

Language suggests; experience determines.
Be carefull when comparing "suggesting"
negatively to "determining." The "determination"
(the outcome) is constantly "undermined"
(un-determined) by the "suggesting." Isn't it
just that one is a "fast" process (determination)
and the other is "slow" process (suggestion).
There is no hierarchy to this that is invariant.
Slow and steady wins the race but we often
want a quick outcome- possibly to
gratify our faith in our predictive powers.

yes I said yes I will Yes

read every "beta" (e- book) posted on Pantaloons: Tykes on Poetry

again and again and again

Walt Whitman is alive and well in the thoughts and art of Nada Gordon (Friday, 9/26- 8:34 p.m.)

2/8/89

False hope is the final boundary-
the endless, lonely shore of all relationships.
(There is a lovely sunset of such sad times)

[One dark night, Death itself
grimaces there, showing its teeth.
Fat and lazy, it settles on the old
ones, who finally, softly , fall into
its mouth. Never finally
contained- at times the Horrible Monster
eats Everyone- even children.]

In order to let us live, the
mind invents anaesthetics against the
reality of death. Gradually, these
anaesthetics have turned into an institutionalized
panacea.

If we have advanced into
stasis, we need to retreat.
For some time science has
provided such retreats. This
effect has worn away- religion,
introspection- all has fallen through
the Black Hole of endless science.



Cleanliness of mind is kindness
of mind.



Competition is like a battery as
compared to "alternating current."
A short term stimulant that corrodes
what it touches too long.

2/10/89

Richie [Piombino, my brother] is 35 years old today.

To assess accurately
entails being truthful- and stoical:
e.g. just so much and no more. Yet the rebel (the debel?)
finds the Golden Mean a bore.

2/24/94 a.m.

The poet turns and turns inwardly:
from the slow rain now falling
on the fruit trees and the swimming pool,
to the hardships of the poor.

Let the fallen orange
represent the
fading hopes of youth's ideals.
Let the bird now singing
describe the dreams of an
African-American girl
walking down West 125th Street
right now enraged
and the lives of children and adults
who are forced to live under the cold
shadows of racial bias.

c. 1985

Reading

The capability of ignoring noise
Finding a center to silence
In the comforts of home
Listening to so many voices one could lose track
The sounds of machines might confuse
Or the mathematics of reason could impose its spell
On an otherwise intransigent will

Points are gradually suspended
Evenly distributed over time
Like words according favor to a speaker
Or harmony foregrounding an area of reference
In song, now that its begun
Waiting for the close
Brings both of us together

To announce a new beginning
A reprise reminds us quickly of a word
Which takes shape only to allow another
Following this path
Alongside a tapering thought
Of an actual occasion
This is your invention

But perhaps I've interfered
Between these fears exists our one connection
Now to be composed of primary apprehension
Though such avowal leads onlly to a net
Of images: yours, to be noted on the staves
Of history: mine, to be equated
With the identity of a dead composer
For the sake of smell
Something is omitted
And the choice is to blur
The edges of voice
To recreate the damp earth
Between the dry lines
Having hesitated, now begin

Hear only the tread of walking
And between each mark a thinking
Preoccupation with a remembered utterance
Becoming quite clear, but garbled
At the conclusion returning
Like a record on a stripped groove
Like a car horn beeping through eternity

Still silence echoes those sounds
To speak is to be reminded of forgetting
To describe is to elicit strict attention
And such specific forms finally demand
A portrait of music or only its enclosures
Dismiss this particular breeze
And eons of Spring gather in the opening

7/1/89

Reading Pavese's diaries: The illusion the
book [eg, a novel] offers is that it can represent
time moving faster than it does, that we
could skip over events and get an overview.
What this neglects, and the diary form restores, is
that the insight *is* the event, par excellence,
in the best literary sense. The book [the novel]
ignores the philosophical basic tenet that
knowledge of the truth, and the gaining of that
knowledge constitutes a valuable kind of
condensing that the "sequence of events leading
up to it" obviates in their importance. *This*
event marks a new *order*
of events- on a certain plane.

Perhaps Pavese was a kind of *backwards*
person in that he ended his biological life at precisely
the time that a certain mythical (fictional or
poetical) figure dissolved of itself.

8/10/88

To obtain the greatest possible productivity,
I could go to the heart of my deepest
motivations. What Freud accomplished was to
go the the heart of the motivating process itself.
By the turn of the century the world of the
book underwent changes of an unparalled scale.
Freud and Einstein understood that our most
cherished beliefs about time were crumbling. the
scale of our lives, unike those of the Pharoes of
Egypt we becoming nothing more than a few moments, over a
period of a few years. The bitterness and hopelessness,
cynicism and sadism unleashed by the loss of
Eternity made its way into every atom of
human experience. Intellectual conquistadors, both
Freud and Einstein leapt into the world's literary
mind, but Freud had the keener sense of leadership.
On the other hand, the social world of physics
maintained more factions, internationally, being the
older and far more revered profession. With the
ascent of Heisenberg's Priniciple, Einstein's influence
became divided. But Freud's influence grew-
and continues to grow proportionately- with
time. It all boils down to a gift for assessing
reality. Einstein recreated the literary reality
of the material world- Freud achived this in
the mental world. The mind was a new world
to conquer.

What Freud seized on was the values attached
to the world of (literary) science. By a deft
combination of organizational leadership and
writing, he gained the decisive leadership of
the world of psychology- both literary and social.

The world of a book contains many specific
details which are ordered for only literary effect.
In that sense, a fact in the literary composition
is equal to a sound in a musical composition.
These are heard much "faster" when performed.
Literary composition is "performed" by its
reader, exactly in the same way that a musical
composition is performed by a musician.
Reading the poem out loud is equivalent to playing
the instrument out loud.

The audible world is a world alive. Events
"occur" in succession.

Into the vacuum of "no-events" the writer offers
a concentrate of events. My motivation has often been to
reverse this process. The writer, existing as fully in the
time of no-events, will offer writing that offers the
reader access to the collaborative filling-in of events.
Like dreams, these are laconic. A few facts- such as
my dreaming of meeting with Barrett (Watten) and asking him
to say hello to Carla (Harryman). Or asking Toni (Simon)
to please give me a key for her studio. These were
significant events- made more significant by Freudian
psychology.

My motivation has been partly to stay in the world
of timeless events. But this is a contradiction.
And out of the strain of that contradiction comes poetry
to relieve it. "I think that the river is a strong brown
god" wrote T.S. Eliot, "sullen, intractable."

What is the timetable for timeless events? Pragmatically
speaking, for the poet, ultimately this becomes the
actuality of "finding" the time to write them. The
poem is thus a detective story for finding time.

Now the time is here and there is no poem. But
the poem is the motivation for writing the poem.
The poem becomes an apology for finding the time
(taking the time) to write the poem. The poem
is an exit from narrative time. The poem is
an exit from time.

During this no-time, events change their modality.
A butterfly flickers by. The fan is a focussed
whirlpool of whoosh. Marinetti is marinera.
Lunch is imminent. By degrees, time gradually
creeps to a slowdown. You can hear the few
crickets outside a little, but now that's gone too.
A slight breeze and that's gone. Dare to go on
is dare to stop. The world is a small circle
containing the Roman numerals I through
XII. A list:

plastic garbage bags
diet Pepsi, *dinner*
bread
pooper scooper
slide film
map

Buy the end, the trip was not disappointing,
but the excitement is wearing off and everyone
is hungry.
[a few moments and Toni enters saying,
"The hornet is back"]

8/23/88

You're our kind of friends.

"My ex-husband doesn't provide support.
Could he get custody of our children if I die?"

(Set and setting)


Certain books get peeled away from the surface
layer, lie buried in the sediments of trivial
concerns.

Seized with remorse for the lost collages (yet
they were certainly no further than a few
footsteps away in a drawer or closet) (closet/
closest) I refrained from my usual mad
rushing around to find them, along with
the glue, some cardboard, or a few cotton
swabs; long ago I had resigned myself to
the sheer magnitude if their contents, magnified
tremendously, I'm sure, by their
sly shyness, their deadpan,
unreasoning will to exist in their
own world. Why did I long to touch them
anyway? The answer is simple: the need
for ritual. There is no doubt that the
dada/surrealists proved more than once that
no more than two words are required to
create a whole new world. And some
would argue that one or no words are
required. And I salute their loyal
displacements! And am still charmed by
Georges Hugnet ("disparu reve")

The distance between reality and
illusion is an eyelid.

8/25/88

(Aeolian harp)

Aeolian

1. pertaining to Aeolus, the god of the
winds.
(wind harp)