Only when you give yourself over to the dream
(thought, idea) does it fully open itself to you.
But then you are no longer the you that gave yourself.
This is why you hesitate.



notebook: 12/1/1991

My chapbook *Hegelian Honeymoon* (18 Haiku)
is just out from
Chax Press {click here};Thanks to
Charles Alexander, publisher!
***********************************************

DagZine (Gary Norris) {please click here!}
responded to a maxim recently published here
with a stirring *accompaniment." Right now
I can only respond with:

The final words when there are no more
words are: I am speechless!

(In this case, of course,
with surprise and delight.)

Sometimes, close-up, a piece of writing,
a solution to the puzzle seems all wrong.
Yet somewhere, someone touches me
and I touch back.

notebook: 10/31/87

Patiently observing a few of our
soft shoe shuffles on the themes of
"linking" and psychoanalysis -see As/Is {click here}(around Magritte's
*The Therapist* and Mark Young's
poem on that theme) we are delighted
to link to a new poem that Mr. Young has written
in response to our occasionally versified comments,
posted on his Series Magritte {click here}, and dedicated to yours truly!

Consciousness, that master poet, never
forgets that final touch, even when the heart
itself does.

notebook: 10/28/88
*******************************************
Thoughts for Voters - from Toni Simon

Toni feels that voters may have not fully considered the dangers and abuses
of one-party rule as seen historically...


"They've got the Presidency, both houses of Congress, and
increasingly the Supreme Court. What ever happened to checks and balances? To protect our democracy, vote for John Kerry.

Restore Checks and Balances
End one party rule:

A simple and obvious point which I haven't heard mentioned as a talking point by anyone…and time is running out. Direct to swing voters.

Don't know who to vote for?
Think all politicians are corrupt?
Consider this:

Use your vote to restore the balance of power
Republicans control every branch of government, even the judiciary. What we have now is the fox guarding the chicken coop.
We need the oversight of a 2-party system again. For this reason alone you should vote for a Democrat.

Many Americans don't vote because they think politicians are corrupt and want our money. We have a huge deficit and our tax money is being shoveled into the pockets of Republican party contributors.
Mention examples of scary one-party governments.
Give examples of corrupt power-grabbing by republicans.
'Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.'"
*******************************************************************
Tiime Travel Thoughts on 9/11

Thanks to Arlee Christian {click here}
for quoting, linking to and further considering
the powerful contemporary signficance of a passage from
Dreiser's *Jennie Gerhardt* (1911) quoted here on 9/09/04

An odd thing about human beings is
that they cannot truly rest until
they have done everything they can.

notebook: 8/22/91

The final thought of thought
is freedom from thought.

notebook: 1988

In order to do a new kind of thinking,
we learn to do a new kind of writing-
the *relationship* produces what is new,
like a new kind of speaking. Art combines,
where science atomizes.

1/1/88-2/13/88
********************************************
Ear Today


Cahiers de Corey {click here}

The pathos of life lies in the disparity
between the specific thing we are focused
on and the fact of life itself.

Notebook: 12/12/87
*******************************************
thanks to

Blindheit: clarity is overrated {click here}
for the link

Style is as much a question of undress
as it of dress. Letting down my guard, I
imagined saying things to people I would
never allow myself to say in everyday life.
In this fantasy, I usually pause for a moment of
intense satisfaction. It is life, not the imagination,
which is oblique and mysterious.


from notebooks:1/1/88-2/13/88

Sacred, Secret Haste

From word to word
A step to define
A moment. A sequence
Drawn from the life.
Yet between them, what
Thoughts, what gaps
From picture to
Habitation. Tilted
Towards remembrance,
What is still is real.
All the rest, beginnings,
Furtive grimaces, scratched
Surfaces from whispered
Conversations, an utterance
That encircled a night.
When, like a joke, sprinkles
Of images appear in one place
After another, unbidden,
Ungracious, unkempt. And
Breathing, full and radiant,
Painted simultaneously with their
Inception, fingers mount
Meanings against the sound of
Quick phrases, presences announce
Vanished emphases, particular
Nuances survive briefly before
Succumbing to a new flow of
Different days. Suspended, immaculate
A generation of reflected yearnings
Drops out of sight, replaced by
Long philosophical asides, yet
These too had a way of just reminding
One of an experience, and there again
Is life, frowning and gaping, sullen,
Unmoved, muscular, buoyant. But
Prefaces amount to pronouncements,
Noon sports new habitudes, and
A choral *allegro* echoes sweetly and
Quietly, now in the Nineteenth Century.
Poems? They must be plucked
Out of the in-between silences,
Huddled inside the inhalation
Before yet another anticipated
Listening. If it hadn't happened
Just the way it did
It wouldn't have happened
At all. Think of the looming
Times, the shadows of expectation
Leaning from their lonely cells
In dreams. Spoken from in there,
Something else, could yet be
Understood from what was left
Unsaid. O, like a stutter, like
A surprised exclamation, an
Involuntary gasp. Right
Up to it then, and not
Turn away. An utterly coherent
But vast and unconquerable beating,
Like a hand against a wall,
A foot against a bench, the
Insides establishing the rhythm
And the sound, uncomprehensible,
And the singing, in unison.

notebook: 8/6/86
Previously pubished in
*Avec*, edited by
Cydney Chadwick
***************************
"Secular Jewish Culture / Radical Poetic Practice"
Tuesday, Sept. 21, 2004 -- 7pm; $10 admission
Center for Jewish History
15 West 16th Street, Manhattan
a public forum with Paul Auster, Charles Bernstein (chair), Kathryn Hellerstein,
Stephen Paul Miller, Marjorie Perloff, Jerome Rothenberg
Tickets available from Ticketweb {click here} or the Box office: 917-606-8200. More informationCenter for Jewish History {click here}
What are the innovations and inventions of American Jewish poets, over the past century? Can we say that there is distinctly Jewish component to radical modernist and contemporary poetry? What is the relation of Jewish modernist and contemporary poets to the historical avant-garde and to contemporary innovative poetry? How does Jewish cultural life and ethnic and religious forms and traditions manifest themselves in the forms, styles, and approaches to radical American poetry? What role does a distinctly secular approach to Jewishness by poets and other Jewish artists mean for "radical Jewish culture"?

Steve Tills (Black Spring) {click here}
likes Neil Young-and Drew Gardner's {click here}
2001 chapbook *Student Studies*

Pant a looney take(s) on poetry {click here}
This time it's Gray Sullivan & Brandon Downing.
Makes you kinda wish you were there!

The Analogous Series {click here}
curated by Tim Peterson

Today:

Gary Sullivan and Brandon Downing!!!
*******************************************
Blogging gets older

Congrats to Jordan Davis
Million Poems {click here}
is two years old today.

Try to imagine blogworld without
JD. I can't.
******************************************
Same for
Bemsha Swing {click here}
that celebrated its second birthday last
Sunday.
*****************************************
Thanks to
Jay Thomas (Bad With Titles) {click here}
and, of course,
Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino
the editor of
Eratio {click here}
for making this the nicest September 11th
in a very long time.

I am delighted to announce that
Eratio/Fall 2004 {click here}
edited by Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino
is now online including three pages from my photocollage novel
Free Fall {click here}
( or click on the horizontal diacritical mark above the E in Eratio)
as well as verbal/visual work by
Catherine Daly, William Compton and
Mark Young with Jukka Pekka-Kervinen (click on the other
diacritical marks)
Click on each letter and diacritical mark to view all the
work and for epigraphs and more information about the
webzine.

the issue includes writing by

Jack Foley 
Amari Hamadene 
Jake Berry 
Aamir Aziz 
Paul Hardacre 
Jonathan Minton 
Thomas Lowe Taylor 
Hazak Brozgold 
Laurie Price 
AnnMarie Eldon 
Eli Jones 
Danielle Grilli 
Sandra Simonds 
Elizabeth Kate Switaj 
Marcia Arrieta 
  Anne Boyer  
  Stan Mir 
  Dee Rimbaud
  Jeff Harrison
  Ian Randall Wilson
  Skip Fox 
  Jesse Glass
  Hugh Tribbey
  Robert Furze
  Brian Howe
  Scott Keeney
  Michael Estabrook
  Nick E. Melville
  Clayton A. Couch
  Steve Timm

After finishing reading Jenny Gerhardt, by Theodore Dreiser

Never fear anyone's pain or suffering, even your own.
It's like a lighthouse, a buoy in the harbor.
Thinking about it, wondering about it,
talking about it, trying to understand it, alleviate it or
end it may be the only way left
to look for and find a sense of direction.

Although it was a relief to learn that there have been
no West Nile Virus cases reported in New York
City so far this year, the dead bird
situation is dire in California, I just learned from
Harry K. Stammer

California West Nile Virus Statistics {click here}

A thorough read through of a lot of web sites re: mosquito bites
tells me that the use of Deet, whatever the toxicity danger, brings
the only protection and relief. Aloe is very soothing
to the bites and reduces the bumps, and it is helpful
to sleep with a sheet completely covering you.
***************************************************
Big Brother Uses Big Scare Tactics Once Again

"It's absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on Nov. 2, we make the right choice," Mr. Cheney told a crowd of 350 people in Des Moines, "because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we'll get hit again and we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States."

Excuse me, but unless I'm mistaken, didn't 9/11 occur on your watch?
And while you're at it, ask yourself the question, why did half a million
New Yorkers come out and march against you? It happened here,
you bloated fool.
**************************************************
Jordan's right {click here} don't miss
Ron Silliman {click here}
today (hint: a moment involving censorship in poetry history that included Robert Duncan and Silliman and Jack Kimball, among others)

Murder by Numbers

The Ingredient {click here}
***********************
a related aphorism of my own:

The poetry of murder gave way to the murder of poetry.

"There are fanatics without ability, and then they are
really dangerous people."

[Notebook F- 1776-1779]

"You should never look for genuine Christian
convictions in a man who makes a parade of
his piety."

Notebook J-1789-1793

"You can make a good living from
soothsaying, but not from truth saying."

Notebook J

"I can never see anything wrong with
theorizing; it is an impulse of the soul
that can prove useful to us as soon as
we have accumulated sufficient experience.
Thus all the follies of theorizing we at
present commit could be impulses that find
their application only in the future."

Notebook K 1793-1796

"Man loves company, even if it is that
of a smouldering candle."

Notebook K

"Whisper, immortal muse, of the insanity
of the great."

Notebook L, 1796-1799

Georg Christoph Lichenberg
*Aphorisms*

translated by RJ Hollingdale
Penguin Books, 1990
*******************************
Norman Fischer & John High will be
Reading at the Bowery Poetry Club
308 Bowery @ Bleecker
Tues., Sept 14, 9pm



Robert Grenier & Ken Irby
Read at Columbia University
602 Hamilton Hall.
Thurs., September 16, 8pm
Mr. Grenier will also slides of his
Drawing-Poems

Lots of mosquitoes around Park Slope lately,
my skin is allegic, so I'm an itchy guy. So far
no West Nile virus to worry about, and looking
around the www for info on spraying, turns
out that doesn't help in the long run. So, meanwhile,
itch cream and covering my body with
anti-mosquito spray.

What's all this got to do with poetry? Looking
through, today, Bob Holman's *Call Collect
of the Wild* (John MacRae, 1995) I found
this:

"A million years ago" Bob killed a mosquito
when high on LSD. 22 years later
He wrote.

*No Longer Killing Mosquitos*

here is the ending:

"...Today heavenly, above Lake Canandaiga,
Twenty-two years later, far from madding, no drugs, I sit
In a spot of nature and write this poem
So on a downed lodgepole pine, some calcified droppings,
By my feet- bear's? or human's? From the scat I carefully
Extract, using my pen, the carcass of a Daddy Longlegs
And watch as an ant carries it off. A caterpillar
Wriggles over my pants, and again with a pen
I lift it off and transport it, dangling,
To new oak leaf. At home, West 12th Street,
10014, my daughters are just getting back from school,
Elizabeth and I have been married 11 years,
I am writer-in-residence here at Gell House,
Finger Lakes. I am perched out behind
The hidden cabin, just above the tombstone
of the Gells. When mosquitos land,
I wave them gently on their way."