Jordan Davis reads Drew Gardner- Lemon Hound

via ululations

Jacob Russell on Silliman's Alphabet

" What is sadder than the small book of well-wrought
poems, none spilling over to the next page even, each pretending to its own completeness."

Ron Silliman: The Alphabet. ZYXT, 985

LIfe by Ernst Herbeck translated by Gary Sullivan and Oya Ataman

"Life

The life of the chickens is red.
The seism of compassion is red.
Life is beautiful.
Seism of the hearts in the body of dogs.
The life of the heart is dear.
The life makes the heavens heer.
Life would like to be longer.
may love live slower.
slowest life is long."


read more on Gary Sullivan's Ernst Herbeck site

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Il Pleut by Apollinaire conceived by Gregory Vincent St Thomasino, digitalized by Mary Ann Sullivan

Il Pleut

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Derailing The Sublime: On Alan Davies Odes

Joe Brainard's Pyjamas

via Pantaloons

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In October 2008, Stephen McLaughlin, Gregory Laynor, and Vladimir Zykov published Issue 1, a 3,785-page document featuring almost as many poets. The pdf was posted at forgodot.com. The poems were produced by a poem generator called Erika, or Erica T. Carter.

The ISSUE 2 document is a collection of the blog posts and comments that responded to the project and/or responded to responses about the project and/or responded to issues that were raised within the discussion (419 pages).

Issue 2

via Pantaloons

MiPoesias

Some Recent Links

Green Integer Blog-Contradicta, with collages by Toni Simon

Venepoetics (Guillermo Parra)-Contradicta translated into Spanish

Gregory Laynor- poem beginning with a line from Nick Piombino

Gregory Laynor-poem ending with a line from Nick PIombinol

Stan Apps on Sarcasm

"There are few legitimate responses to a world in which idealistic narratives are repeatedly used to devastate communities, where devastation is routinely applauded as long as it is for the sake of ideals. With ideals like these we don’t need enemies..."

Read more:
elective annoyance

Notes from Underground


Life as it is lived today underground at times feels impersonal to the point of sterility. This atmosphere results not only from the dire warnings loudly and constantly announced over the loudspeakers in every car, contrasted with wistful advertisements recommending schools for dental assistants or college degrees, but also the atmosphere of trauma within which we have regularly lived has dampened nearly any sort of spirit of connectedness that might be mustered. No one can remain light for very long under these conditions, while the efforts of the nightly tv comics elicit more of a sense of generosity and determination than shared hilarity. The homeless on the train asking for change this week seemed a notch more desperate than usual. Maybe it's just the full moon. Obama's promises of hope notwithstanding, now hovering on the edges of the future, even spontaneous pleasantness and brief polite interchanges, while intensely welcome, still feel strangely alien, or even surreal, after a few moments. Next to me, near my seat, two very small children cling to a vertical metal supporting bar and act themselves, that is, very silly. The parents smile warmly towards them and chat about quitting caffeine. The wackier the children behave, the more serious the passengers become, certainly not annoyed, since the kids were not in the least bit being disturbing. The children were happy, that was all. These moments reveal our social conditions far more than any news broadcast will ever be able to encompass. I think about the bank teller that I go to regularly who demanded I rewrite my signature to match my ATM card even to withdraw a small sum of money and the man who asked for five dollars for the seat he has vacated in Barnes and Noble. It was a try at a joke, and my silence made him add; "Only in New York." Crossing the street in Brooklyn after leaving the train station a car cuts me off rudely. As we hurtle towards a holiday unlike few in many decades in New York, it will be awhile until we feel the emotions that we might expect after such a startlingly uplifting election. I think about my visit with my old friend Alan today and how the conversation, once again, turned towards the Weimar era. We talked about novels by Alan Furst, Tana French, Joseph Kanon and Candace Bushnell that point up moral ambiguities in times like these, recent and long ago. On the bus home, I think the subway is a good metaphor for how I see this period. For the moment, most emotions have gone underground, and as we move inexorably down a dark tunnel, over a route we know all too well, while images of light at the end of that tunnel have yet to appear, we think about them as they have been suggested, yet we seem to endlessly slow before arriving anywhere, holding mainly to an attitude set to endure what is likely to remain a bumpy ride for quite some time.

Green Integer Review- Contradicta collaboration with Toni Simon


Green Integer Review



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Nada Gordon Decorates The World

Ululations

Phillip K. Dick Predicted a Black President

In 1966, Phillip K. Dick published The Crack in Space which had, as one of its characters, a black Presidential candidate, Jim Briskin.

From Phillip K. Dick's 1966 novel The Crack in Space:

"But it was inevitable. Sooner or later, there would be a Negro president....'I don't agree with you,' Briskin said, 'I think there'll always be a hate organization like CLEAN, and there'll always be people to support it.' After all, CLEAN had a point. they did not want to see a Negro president, and wasn't it their right to feel like that? Some people did, some people didn't; that was perfectly natural. And, he thought, why should we pretend race is not the issue? It is, really. I am a Negro. Verne Engel is factually correct. The real question was: how large a percentage of the electorate suported CLEAN's views? Certainly, CLEAN did not hurt his feelings; he could not be wounded; he had experienced too much already in his years as a newsclown. In my years, he thought to himself acidly, as an American Negro.
A small boy, white, appeared at the booth, with a pen and a tablet of paper. 'Mr Briskin, can I get your autograph?'"

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Otoliths issue 11

"Debt springs eternal in the human bank"

"Interior Demolition" (mp3 on Penn Sound)
[From Light Street, Zasterle Press, 1996]

Interior Demolition

Contradicta




When there is little crisis fear is a problem; when there is nothing but crisis fear is a beacon.





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What can easily be said puts people at ease but is rarely believable.

Contradicta




Beauty goes from what you are to who you are or it just fades away.





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Happiness is not the lack of sadness; it is what sadness learns to wear in order to shine.

Contradicta


There are parts of ourselves that allow no effect, either from ourselves on the world, or the world on us. These parts are the hinges on which we allow the portals between ourselves and life to swing, open or closed, as need be.




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Nothing is the place in which everything breathes or stands, moves or falls.

Anny Ballardini's Fall Folio

"Don’t blame me!... It all started on Alan Sondheim’s WRYTING-L list. Dirk Vekemans has to be blamed. His Autumnal poem made the long list of answers that followed. I therefore had the idea of gathering the poems. Not only, I also forwarded an invitation to the WOM-PO and New Poetry List, and to several chosen Poets. Here is the Harvest in its colorful unfolding. I do hope you will all enjoy it."

fieralingue

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Nico Vassilakis on Mike Burakoff's video of Free Fall

Verse in the eye

When you’re drawn to focus. When you’re moved to veer. The trigger’s pulled before you know the question’s near. So ask what looking gives you and twist the eyes reply. The function of its thinking immediate, yes, immediate. This the staring won’t deny. Your brain answers while swerves align, as-best-it-can-it-should, that it knows a further capsule driven, I say driven, further into focus. That your eyes dart here and there as things of interest do & that coming here and leaving have left a stain on you.

Issue #1 Faux Anthology

I would just call it-The Unbearable Lightness of Issue #1. There is something about that huge sudden ironic parody that calls for instant recognition of the non serious nature of the intervention. This is the "unbearable lightness of blogging" as I have termed it, par excellence. A poetry circus wagon blows in, warm wind and ill wind, spins a few sails, shakes a few tails and blows out: a party with real laughs, a few growls and roars and some intense conversations where you recognize a lot of people, don't know some, you figure "everybody" was there, but of course that's not literally possible. The feeling is, maybe they were out of town or something, or just couldn't make it, but not that they were deliberately excluded. I know I would have felt left out had I not been mentioned. But since I was I do get into that lightness, but it is a blue lightness while still feeling nostalgic for the more private days of the whole long stretched out thing- getting an invitation, figuring what to send, waiting to hear, then getting accepted. But in this party atmosphere it's just all so quickly thrown together, no time, so quickly check how my poem was dressed and acted, ok, did I see some friends, yeah, their poems are ok. So then it's over, and there's the hangover of- what did I do, did I actually write that thing, no way, nobody did, a computer wrote it. After all, it is the era of the machine. So what did I say- I'm not sure how I feel now. Then the party really starts and everyone talks about it for days. No, not like a reading or an opening, more like a bash, or an old fashioned happening where people were only half aware of what was going on. Maybe all the evidence has already been put away and the place has been swept up. Maybe a few people actually kept their party favors and others left and forgot them. But now there's a memory, that Godot thing that gets talked about. People have been saying that we are in a time warp in that in New York now, that we are in a repeat of the Weimar era. Maybe this Godot thing is our cabaret- rude, crude, risque, funny, a little dark, with music by Kurt Weill and a set by Kirchner, Grosz or Hannah Hoch. I had even written in the comment section of Issue 1, "There has been talk of a poetry bailout. Is this it?" It looks like the powers that be are plotting to send the whole batch of us poets and day workers out onto the streets as in *The Threepenny Opera* while "citibank" robs everybody blind. And then we'll listen to the barrel organ sound, in the city while the sun sinks low.

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On a trade basis, the "Godot team" is making hard copies of the anthology available. You send a chapbook and postage and it's yours. Here's the link:

Sending for Godot


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After writing that line I had to go and reread the poem I was thinking of by Alfred Noyes:

The Barrel Organ (1938

The Art of Prediction

It is fascinating that Nassim Nicholas Taleb the author of The Black Swan, the biggest best selling non-fiction book of 2007, who is extremely skeptical about the value of predictions, could have published this statement last year:

"As if we did not have enough problems, banks are now more vulnerable to the Black Swan and the ludic fallacy than ever before with "scientists" among their staff taking care of exposures. The giant firm J. P. Morgan put the entire world at risk by introducing in the nineties Risk Metrics, a phony method aiming at managing people's risks, causing the generalized use of the ludic fallacy...A related method called "Value at Risk" on the quantitative measurement of risk, has been spreading. Likewise, the government-sponsored institution Fanny Mae, when I look at their risks, seems to be sitting on a barrel of dynamite, vulnerable to the slightest hiccup. But not to worry, their large staff of scientists deemed these events 'unlikely.'"(p.225)

New on 9thst Labs: Visual Poetry by Nico Vassilakis

Between: The Art of Collaboration, by Douglas Messerli

Green Integer Blog

Some years ago, Douglas Messerli invited a group of poets to send him poems linking his work to theirs, in many instances writing through poems he had written incorporating their work into his. As part of a mammoth ongoing memoir project, each book encompassing one year of his life, Douglas here writes about the year 2000, the year in which he launched this project, that included a poem of my own, based on work of his.

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Some months ago, Geof Huth courageously blogged about his open heart surgery, a post that included photos of the event. Here Douglas MesserIil writes about his recent prostate surgery, an operation that strangely followed his writing a beautiful piece about his father's death of that disease.

Contradicta




There is imagining without doing and there is doing without imagining. Neither require much in the way of patience or courage.



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You can chart a world of nuance between harsh and firm, between certainty and empathy, between the truth and what is apropos.

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Blogger: Sharon Mesmer on Poetry and Theory in The Brooklyn Rail

"Poetry has become an overscheduled toddler run ragged by ambitious, bickering parents, its very existence a compromised simulacrum of their disharmonious projections and expectations". In this article, Sharon Mesmer identifies an issue that has also been troubling me for a very long time. The causes have been argued and discussed by poets and others for years. Mesmer focusses on the addiction to "debate" as one of the problems, a topic I have taken up on *fait accompli* countless times. The last time I wrote about this during the presidential debates of 2004 it was becoming very clear to me that the "debate" model was failing to inspire and sputtering to a halt.(Time March's On, 3/2/04) This year Obama and Biden are likely to impress and the other team to depress. But in the poetry world, it's getting tiresome. Don't get me wrong. The 70's poetry debates, following the breath of expressive freedom of the 60's, were invaluable, even, at times, beautiful to contemplate. But after more than 25 years of echoes, the model is wearing thin. If there ever was indeed a "politics of poetic form" that political point has been more than made. It has been paddled around to death and is now choking off the poetry, or at least focus on the poetry. The assumption is that creating controversy creates interest. In the case of contemporary poetry, the reverse is happening. Instead of making the poetry scene vibrant, it is making it soggy. The arguments are not snappy, they are stale. Although Sharon doesn't say this, and may not even be thinking this, to me this debate form in poetry is a masculine, tennis or racket ball oriented adaptation of dealing with issues of concern to poets. Game over. What would I substitute? Responding to the work of specific poets thoroughly, carefully, lovingly, angrily, lightly, whatever. Making observations and arriving at conclusions based on actual poems, not the strategies of your "team" with the endless arguments about the dynamics, the advantages and disadvantages, the importance and unimportance of "types" of poetry. Let's give it a break, guys.