A CABINET OF ORDINARY FEROCITIES

2011-10-21T13:00:00.001-07:00

I'm teaching an online class in beginning poetry. It's called
'Foundations for a Building Made of Language', and begins 1/16/2012!
Click here to register.

Please Know You've Cheered Me

2011-10-18T08:28:00.000-07:00

It's windy in Iowa.
I wrote this letter weeks ago.
Months?

The leaves are packing their bags.
I've a poor tooth.
I hate it when dentists talk about 'bone loss.'
I don't want to become some gap-toothed old fucker.
Yet how they can spit!

There's wonderful news after all.
I bring it up the hill to tell it to the mad oak.

Caketrain issue 09

2011-10-12T13:33:00.000-07:00

CAKETRAIN issue 09 is now available for pre-order.
http://www.caketrain.org/
Get it while it's still hot!

MINE REJECTED POEM, BY ME REJECTED

2011-09-29T15:30:00.000-07:00

JUNEA DAY OF MY WRACKING BREATH

The morning dove a remnant

bone-kindred light. He broached the subject with

ashovel in his baffled hands. It was hisduty,

hisloading zone. Cornets rang their golden shells.

Thegiant fell, they

dragged him in and kicked.

III

Coldhands, cold feet, cold in other places sweet.

You are my cloistered cure, my slutty purse, my alibi.

Openyour delicate blouse, lift your linen skirt.

Upendyour tongue, unlatch your gated thighs,

releaseme from my squandered pen
where beasts go slovenly forgiven.

Theday its lurk and tremble. The day its lowly creek.

Everywhereits tongue fitted out with high-toned

brakeand halted scrub, a calendar of weed atop a post.

Strangledroot, loam-full mouth, hands dug down,

andman that hurried animal clapping at an awn.

Itraises our woolly sleeping selves. It goes, it gone.

Thecold bed is the old bed is the sold bed.

Comefind the unmoored Bohemian Cemetery,

aquiescent slurring iron gate near Summit Street

and Prairie Road by drunk-lit Hilltop Lounge.

Thebeauty of the stone that is there at rest

andlinden peace where birds go to feast.

Blackberriesand wild rose cling there fast.

A MANDATORY SENTENCE

2011-09-22T11:45:00.000-07:00

Poetry
is one
mistake
madly
fucking
another
into a
brilliant
garden
overrun
by
weeds.

AMERICA IS THE LAND OF ...

2011-05-24T05:32:00.000-07:00

OF FREE JAZZ AND STRIKERS
AND THE DESPERATE NEED
FOR A LIVING WAGE AND
HEALTH CARE FOR ALL

It's like free jazz.
No more nothing.
Down with death.
Go cat go.
It's a perfect nothing.
It's nowhere.
Everything is empty.
America needs
a shovel to dig holes.
America needs
a smoke.
No one's got a match.
Everyone's on strike.
The wages of sin
is death. The wages.
The sin.
America grab
grab a backpack.
Walk the highway.
Walk to where
there is no highway.
Rain on
the lonesome.
Make it now.
Make it a perfect
emptiness.
Like Jack.
Jack Kerouac.
Down with death.
It's perfect.
Let's ride.

A POEM for Rufo Quintavalle

2011-05-18T13:59:00.001-07:00

Lemon,
penny.
Marble,
ash.

POEM

2011-05-04T05:55:00.000-07:00

A BRIGHT AND SHINING PEOPLE

Clog dancing drunk or huffed.

Rickety children bouncing off walls.

Bite him, bite him good!

This be us as we live

the lives of Riley.

Hung from a axle tree,

hung from a bridge, hung

from the stone horse of

the village founder in

the western square.

I seen Johnny Cash out front of
the Pit Pony Tavern.

Est. 1974.

I tried to sell him jumper cables.

'Not worth my time, son’
is what Mr. Cash said.

I'd sell jumper cables to anyone back then.

So I got a tattoo that says

‘Not worth my time’.

Life is

theft.

QOUTE QUOTE QUOTE QUOTE QOTE QUOT

2011-04-24T20:09:00.000-07:00

I say, "I'd like to see
The poems Li Po
Distributed in the Yellow River"
And Whalen says "Alright
We'll go down and dive
And See."

by JACK KEROUAC, from 'Haiku Berkeley'
in POMES ALL SIZES (City Lights, 1992)

That One Day All Money Will Be Made From Mint

2011-04-18T19:39:00.000-07:00

THE WORLD SHALL BE LIKE UNTO A FORM GIVEN YOU IN A DREAM BY SAINT JOHN OF PATMOS (6-100), JULIAN OF NORWICH (1342-1416), CHRISTOPHER SMART (1722-1771), WILLIAM BLAKE (1757-1827), WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS (1865-1939), ANTONIN ARTAUD (1896-1948) AND VAN MORRISON (1945-2075)

142 The rain like rain like rain like rain like rain like rain like rain like rain like rain like raining! The rain like rain like rain like rain like rain like raining! It’s falling down! It’s coming down! It’s falling down! It’s falling! It’s coming! It’s falling! It’s coming! It’s coming down! It’s falling down! It’s coming down! It’s falling down! It’s coming down! It’s falling down! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain like rain like raining! O the rain like rain like rain like rain like rain like rain like rain like rain like rain like rain like rain like rain like raining! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain!O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain like rain like rain like raining! O the rain like rain like raining! The rain like rain like rain like rain like rain like rain like rain like rain like raining! O the rain like rain like rain like rain like rain like raining! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain ! O the rain! O the rain like rain like rain like rain like rain like rain like rain like rain like rain like rain like rain like rain like raining! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain like rain like rain! O the rain like rain like rain. O the rain! O the rain! O the rain! O the rain like rain like rain like rain like rain like rain that rains on us. That falls on us! That comes down on us! That rains on us! That falls! That falls! That falls! That comes! That comes! That comes! That comes down on us! That falls on us! That falls! That falls on you! That falls on me! That falls on us! The rain that falls on us! That falls! On us! On you! On me! On you! On me! On you! On me! On you! On me! On you! On me! On all of us! On all of us! On all of us! On all of us! On all of us! On you! On me! On all! On! On! On! On! On! On! On! On! On! On! ~~~~~~

On rainy evenings I allow myself to feel the influence of Robert Creeley's book FOR LOVE

2011-04-07T18:08:00.000-07:00

***

FINGERNAIL MOON
OF JOHNSON COUNTY

You were going fast.
It was beautiful,
how fast you were going.
You were beautiful
like a perfect incision.

It’s crazy.
No one knows anything
but the fish go in the river anyway.

A Garden Variety Materialism

2011-04-06T11:17:00.000-07:00

Two wooden horses.
Think of that.
Two of them.
Two.
Made out of wood.
Who would do this, to wood?
That particular type of wood.
From a tree.
Said tree doubtless felt pain.
Which ended thus
In the forms of these two.
One horse and then another.
The two of them together.
Two wooden horses.
And their likeness,
Especially their likeness.
Outstanding, this likeness.
To each other, of course to each other
But also to horses, a horse, the
Perfect horse.
A horse of meat and bone,
Neighing, shitting.
That one.
Different from these.
The two.
The two of them.
Think of that.
Two wooden horses that maybe do nothing or
Maybe do no more than stare at you.
A miracle stare.
Because they are wooden horses.
Because they are neither quick nor dead.
Because they refuse the apple-bits in your hands.
Two wooden horses.
On my desk.
Did I tell you that already?
That they are here, before me,
Right on my desk.
Like two scullers.
Gliding in weird mist
On the River Arno.
In Florence,
Where the Uffizi is.
Ciao.

A lineating lineation

2011-03-19T15:49:00.001-07:00

7 Poems Encountered On A Night of Singular Evolution

1

Darkness
then the wine-dark wine.

2

Like an avalanche my desire to sit and think of nothing.

3

The memory of a baloney sandwich
is gospel to my hunger.

4

The woodpecker in his autistic dawn
and the fingernail moon that floats
above the drunk
trundling the tracks
toward the abandoned silo.

5

I walk in snowfall
where hope rots the dark heart of
despair and my duct tape shoes are in need
of a good mend.

6

I walk in light-fall so that I can gorge on oranges.
The juice that stings my chin where I cut myself.
I drink three glasses of water. I can’t slake
this thirst. Outside wings are beating loud ungainly melodies.
There is a crow
named Bartok who plays for me and my friends.

7

And then went down to the beach where
I yelled at seagulls and chanced on a tree trunk
worn down to an amputated bone of great character.
The light hung from a ceiling of messy cloud.
I thought of Carol whose ass thrilled me,
of that gasbag Geoffrey of Monmouth
(see also William of Malmesbury,
Adam of Usk,
Henry of Huntingdon)
and the free jazz scene of Milan, Illinois.

RISE AND MEASURE

2011-03-15T14:00:00.000-07:00

Rise and measure, rise
And measure, rise and measure
Rise and measure, rise and measure,
Rise, and measure, rise and measure, and the angel
Stood saying, rise and measure, and the angel
Stood saying, rise
And measure, and the angel said
Peace visit thy house, peace visit
The length and breadth and height of it,
Peace visit thy house.

He cometh up and is cut down
Like a flower, he cometh up
And is cut down like
A flower he cometh up and is cut down
Like a flower, peace visit thy house,
Peace visit thy house and is cut down like a flower.

Like man that is born and hath a short time to live,
Peace visit thy house and is cut down
Like a flower that is born
And hath a short time to live,
To suffer us not, to fall not from peace
That visit thy house like a flower that is
Born and is cut down.
Peace visit thy house.

***

Note: If the phrases above seem familiar, that is because they are familiar or should be to any literate reader of the English language since, say, the time of King James.

ON PERSONAL ALERT

2011-03-11T14:47:00.000-08:00

Birds are everywhere in bookstores.
My cat dragged
the day. It was horrible.

I wish they would resist
what is grilling in their blood,
what the jaw bone preaches when the rest is gone.

The human
animal is more than a pocketful of dimes
and the dimness found there.

POEM

2011-03-03T06:45:00.000-08:00

Here is a poem from Jean Valentine's most recent collection
Break The Glass (Copper Canyon, 2010):

"HE DISAPPEARED INTO COMPLETE SILENCE

The wild ladders of longing
no longer pieces of wild wood, sawed off
and fitted to each other,
no longer stored in a closed-off room
with one blank window

But called back, through
the closed-off wooden ceiling, to his
speech returned."

[52]

Quotes

2011-02-27T12:49:00.000-08:00

They say one of the hardest things for the young monk to master
is tennis.
Michael Earl Craig.

The poem must be meaningless.
Richard Hugo.

Lucidity is the wound closest to the sun.
Rene Char.

The only aristocracy is that of consciousness.
D.H. Lawrence.

If you are a poet, all you have to do is be there when the bread
comes fresh from the oven.
Rene Char.

Words

2011-02-24T10:10:00.000-08:00

Some words of mine here
http://www.everyday-genius.com/2011/02/jon-cone.html

And here
http://snowmonkeyjournal.blogspot.com/2011/02/jon-cone.html

And here
http://www.elimae.com/2010/12/About.html

POEM

2011-01-04T07:11:00.000-08:00

HAPPY WERE THE PEOPLE GIVEN NEW POSTURES TO PERFORM AT DAWN AND AGAIN AT DUSK

If it isn’t comprehensible, then what shall we do with the body, Mother?

Five Titles To Which Numbers Are Applied

2011-01-04T07:04:00.000-08:00

DIMINSHERS
SAD THE LONELY HAPPY
INTO THE CRUST
WILLS & REFERRALS
I-80

FRANK O'HARA and DONALD DRAPER of MAD MEN

2010-10-28T13:05:00.000-07:00

In an episode
of the television show
Mad Men,
advertising executive
Donald Draper
reads aloud
the final section
of Frank O'Hara's
poem titled
'Mayakovsky.
This poem
is from O'Hara's
collection
Meditations In An Emergency
(Grove Press, 1957).
Here is
what Donald Draper
reads:

Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interersting, and modern.

The county is grey and
brown and white in trees,
snows and skies of laughter
always diminishing, less funny
not just darker, not just grey.

It may be the coldest day of
the year, what does he think of
that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,
perhaps I am myself again.

SENTENCE: an exemplary instance of

2010-10-26T20:25:00.000-07:00

Of the weird way they cut meat in the market, of how hard it was to get milk, even finally with the assistance of Eddie Kent, of the very existence now of the flowers in the garden, the tulipan hedge that screened Eddie's lawn from the swimming pool, for instance, the zapotes like chocolate jello but tasting of delicate flavors (so she said), of all these things he would have known nothing, had she not told him.

Malcolm Lowry
from DARK AS THE GRAVE WHEREIN MY FRIEND IS LAID
(New American Library, 1968).

CAKETRAIN

2010-10-20T09:28:00.000-07:00

The latest issue of Caketrain is available for pre-order here

http://www.caketrain.org/

Do yourself a favor and get this one while it's available.

You won't be disappointed.

REVIEW

2010-10-11T03:27:00.000-07:00

Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The psalm is sung to that Other we will never know. The knowledge of its imparting is sorrow and joy. It tells us only of what we cannot say, what will be revealed only when there is little left of us to know. The burning bush gave something that was not a psalm because Moses carried the tablets down and the people learned the meaning of fear. The other side of that same currency is where the psalm tunes its harp. These are ancient currencies, beyond the clock’s tock, the heart’s closing gates. If poems expressed a usefulness then these would be the suits brought against such an expressiveness. Perhaps the ideal reader these poems calls to has never been prepared by an understanding of poetry or song. And so one must go to that place where wonder sets the seas on fire. There set your final self down. There take up that golden light. Be some furrowed deep, a flame of inextinguishable beauty, a sword, a chalice, a tree upon which meaning crucified by song is given flesh once more.

View all my reviews

A SELL OUT NOTHING BUT A FREAKING SELL OUT!!!!!!!

2010-09-27T07:34:00.000-07:00

My chapbook THE PLESYRE BARGE has officialy sold out
at Greying Ghost Press.

http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/GreyingGhostPress

Another fragment from something I wrote that I hope to use one day

2010-09-24T10:27:00.000-07:00

***

When we left no one
came to say goodbye
because even the neighbors remembered how many times
we left milk on the porch
to sour.

***

A sentence I wrote the other day which I will use in a poem someday, I hope

2010-09-23T11:48:00.000-07:00

...

I revered the murals in your father's house, especially the one called
The New Boredom.

***

REVIEW:

2010-09-09T08:24:00.003-07:00

Stories in the Worst Way by Gary Lutz

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Lutz is a writer of lyric sentences. He composes one, then another, then another, then another, then another. Eventually, or finally, these sentences obtain to some kind of fever. The story which these sentences build then breaks. The story ends, abruptly or not, but it ends. Lutz was championed by Gordon Lish, which makes eminent sense, though he materially reminds me at certain moments of Harold Brodkey. (Brodkey was also championed by Gordon Lish at one point, but they had a falling out over some trivial matter, which happens.) Aspects these stories demonstrate: brevity, grotesque detail, sadness, sexual thrummings, an admixing of strange vocabularies and syntactical disruptions, narratives rooted in dream or nightmare, undiagnosable symptoms. And so on. This is a book poets would enjoy. Also paranoiacs. Or writers of the new grotesque. Or writers (and readers, let us not forget readers -- are there readers in this day and age who don't first and foremost think of themselves as writers?) for whom the dark is more intriguing than the light. More effective than what I've expressed thus far would be to quote Lutz. Here are the opening lines from his story 'Onesome':

To get even with myself on behalf of my wife , to see just how far I had been putting her out, I began to ingurgitate my own seed. I had to go through everything twice the first night, because it came out initially as thin as drool and could not have possibly counted as punishment. The next time -- I had let an hour or so elapse -- some beads of it clung to a finger, and a big mucousy nebula spread itself in the bowl of my palm.

I don't mean to suggest the above is 'representative', though it is suggestive of Lutz's style. No matter what one might think of his stories, one can't help but marvel at his brilliantly employed sentences. *

* In this sense, and in this sense alone, he is equal to that other great writer of the lyric sentence: Barry Hannah.

View all my reviews

REVIEW:

2010-09-07T09:28:00.001-07:00

A Crackup at the Race Riots by Harmony Korine

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I thought the book was a novel, at first, then realized quickly it wasn't, that it was more compendium hastily and sloppily arrived at than a careful selection arranged by an unstated artistic purpose. The book felt very zine-like, a gathering meant to shock and spur, a punk-like contempt within its many furies. When I learned that Korine had indeed written and published a series of zines this book made more sense as an expressive experiment. Those of you who know Korine for his brilliantly strange, disruptive and disturbing movies will find this book familiar. At times it reads very much like a filmscript in the process of being made more final, an unrevised nightmare on the way to a greater concision. If you enjoy Lynch, and maybe Richard Brautigan -- if you enjoy Brautigan's play with innocent forms -- then this book might interest you. It is a book filled with a great deal of space. You'll read it in an afternoon.

View all my reviews

REVIEW:

2010-09-07T06:26:00.003-07:00

Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work by Matthew B. Crawford

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I would recommend this book to any student pursuing a liberal arts degree, and to any who might be working toward an MA or PhD. The importance of the issues this book raises can’t be downplayed. Crawford presents here a serious, elegantly written apologia for the trades as a choice for those about to enter the working world bringing with them little but a knowledge of what is arcane, obscure, and perhaps even morally suspect. (This last, my interpretation though not far-fetched.) It is an unfortunate belief in today’s society that the trades and, in particular, those trades that fix the world around us – think mechanic, electrician, carpenter, plumber etc. – are held in low esteem by those who imagine a better life for their children and even for themselves. Yet it is these very occupations that offer much that is cognitively rewarding as well as a measure of independence, and the true material possibility of effecting positively the world in which we live. The trades offer us the chance to experience both unambiguous success and failure – it is the possibility that we might fail before ourselves and our peers upon which Crawford lays the basis for a moral soundness, a kind of humility that he finds lacking in much of the work that we are asked to do in our so-called information society. The office work place, and the work done there, is harshly exposed. For anyone who has performed mind-numbingly dull, deeply unsatisfying and clearly pointless office work, this critique will sound a clear bell. As a former employee of a conservative think-tank whose job consisted in writing reports possessing only the sheen of objectivity but nothing else, Crawford learned a great deal about the dispiriting forces that curl like wood lice in the modern office. So Crawford saves money. He opens a motorcycle repair shop, and while working as a mechanic begins to meditate on work, the nature of work and why some work is sustaining and why other work weakens the soul and body, causes the upright man to wilt, the good woman to surrender herself to pettiness. It is those parts of the book where Crawford writes about motorcycle repair that he attains a pure lyricism. A work of idealism, SHOP CLASS is nevertheless rooted in the pragmatic and material; it is a work that is democratic yet does not shy away from admitting our desire for the rewards that accrue from our personal merits, to know and feel ourselves in possession of human agency, to be given the chance to express an excellence in our daily lives.

View all my reviews

Epigram

2010-09-01T05:51:00.000-07:00

My love for epigrams compels me to relay this timely message from Lisa Robertson, encountered in the chapbook cuba A book by Monty Reid (above/ground press, 2005):

People are fucking in the ruins of their recent past.

***

One could hardly believe otherwise.

GREYING GHOST CHAPBOOKS

2010-08-08T06:53:00.000-07:00

Please help me unburden Greying Ghost of my chapbook THE PLESYRE BARGE. There are only a few copies left and can be ordered here http://www.airforcejoyride.com/gg25.html

The world of small presses where craft and care are fully exemplified ...

AN ADAPTATION OF A TRANSLATION

2010-08-04T11:14:00.000-07:00

PROTEVANGELIUM OF JAMES (18.2)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Now I slouched in my cab and did nothing.
And I stared at the sycamore
and I saw that it didn’t bend in the wind.
And the high crows didn’t move much.
And I stared at the fields and saw
a corona of dusty
cornstalks. Workers

lying in rows and their hands
were cracked. They lifted
the dust to their mouths and they put the dust
in their mouths so as not to taste what they put there.
Their faces they pointed skyward. And

there were hogs
that did not want to move and so were led.
The slaughterer raised his knife and his hands
remained up. And

I stared upon the waters and beheld
the hogs there and they drank less than an ounce,
it was nothing. (How great the span
between zero and one.)

And they moved in due course.

***

This passage can be found as the epigram to Mary Ruefle's collection of poems entitled Tristimania (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2004). It follows that text literally in some places, and evades it completely in others. Where the text comes from originally, I have no idea.

TWO DOMESTIC POEMS

2010-07-29T09:09:00.000-07:00

Shoes going nowhere

they too
are eager to leave

*

The memory of bells rung, of hills and light
from an open window

ghosts, all

PRAYER FOR THE BLOODY NEW YEAR WAR

2010-07-20T08:28:00.000-07:00

It isn't much this thin bread.
If peace be prevented, then give us the gun's small silence.
If there be fewer friends, then grant us our lax indifferent enemies.
Let the ill,
the sick,
those who hurt now and those who hurt tomorrow,
let them all find
refuge.
Let the strong break at the kneess.
Let bells ring round and clear.
Let gentleness reign.
Let kindness be what we know,
one day and all of one night.

A Public Service Announcement, Not Really

2010-06-09T19:52:00.000-07:00

Only a few copies left of my book The Plesyre Barge.

Get it here http://www.airforcejoyride.com/gg25.html

May the gods etc.

Review: I IS TO VORTICISM by Ben Mirov (New Michigan Press, 2010)

2010-04-14T14:42:00.000-07:00

The poems of Ben Mirov come at you from odd angles. They seem about to tell you something – eat a hamburger, learn to juggle, go to the movies – but surprise you instead. One feeling is ‘[a]nger at the cucumber’ and ‘beer is also a feeling.’ Literary and artistic allusions abound – Max Jacob, Robert Walser, James Tate, Moondog, Tu Fu, Haruki Murakami – yet these poems aren’t freighted like you might expect. They’re light, they move quickly, short efficient lines, spare images in simple language that ask the reader to leap from one line to the next. Though Mirov nowhere mentions him, Tomaz Salamun -- the Slovenian poet who will one year in the near future receive the Nobel Prize -- is a looming influence. Just as Salamun proceeds recklessly through a poem, so too Mirov. In an age when workshops distribute their polished fakery everywhere there is something incontestably courageous in writing a poem that aspires to be nothing less than a sincere and final dishevelment. “No feeling is also a feeling,/a powerful one surrounded by all feelings.” The poem concludes with a wonderful fragment that ‘[f]lows together at 4:17 in the afternoon.’ This seems an allusion to that other wonderful poem about Time’s passing: Frank O’Hara’s ‘The Day Lady Died’. Whereas O’Hara chooses to move his banal catalog of time-ridden duties to that moment where the narrator experiences a grief-filled alertness – and experiences being thrown out of time -- Mirov uses a catalog of timeless instances – narcotic, artistic, poetic, sensual – to remind us suddenly that this flowing outside of Time is nevertheless surrounded by Time: all things flowing together at a specific time in the afternoon. I wish I had Mirov’s facility for producing poems with such grand aristocratic ease – at least this is the way his poems appear to me. I wish I had his material disregard for what a poem should be or sound like. And I wish I had his ability to leap from line to line, to segregate revelation and issue the results sequentially in a way that yet makes a sense. Of his parents Mirov writes: ‘They are so dear to me/like two wolves who raised me/to be nothing like them.’ [6] A group of people playing ultimate Frisbee gives each other high-fives and this is an occasion to wonder about high-fives, what they mean and what happens to them as the occasion for their display recedes: ‘The high-fives continue well into the night, at the bar, thought the intensity of the exchange grows less and less. For some of us the high-fives continue even longer, as we lie alone in bed.’ [23] Loneliness kept at bay is what high-fives are really about. The image is poignant, innocent. It suggests. The prose poem ‘Cloud of Unknowing’ is a collage piece based upon an English textbook for Nepalese students: ‘How many years did the house stand after it was built? […] Did the various automatic machines in the house realize that there was no one home in the house that day? What do you think caused the sickness and death of the dog? What happened to its dead body?’ [20] The original writer was some kind of genius that Mirov discovered and worked on as Lish worked on Carver. And the odd title? It’s given an explanation, of sorts. This collection comes highly recommended.

Another Item From Greying Ghost

2010-04-13T07:43:00.000-07:00

An elegancy done

on my behalf by the

great Greying Ghost

of Salem, Mass.

REVIEW OF THE DRUNK SONNETS BY DANIEL BAILEY

2010-04-07T11:41:00.000-07:00

---

THE DRUNK SONNETS by Daniel Bailey (Magic Helicopter Press, 2009)

http://http//www.magichelicopterpress.com/drunk.htm

To be drunk is to swing between the poles of malice and beneficence; it is a state wherein the fist is as likely as the feather to make a statement, and subtlety becomes an impossible language no one attends to nor cares anything about. The drunk is dangerous precisely because emotion is tempered only by intemperate recklessness, and the ‘considered opinion’ a drama without any weight whatsoever. At its most extreme, the condition of being drunk renders everything intolerable. And joyfully so. And monstrously so. It is the morning after, as the headache pounds the brain pan to black tissue, and the stomach roils at merest sense of shifting breeze, in which drunkenness leaves an invisible mark in memory: what actually transpired the prior evening is anyone’s guess. We refrain from trying too hard. I said what? I did what? One’s shit eating friends allow their testimony to define our experience: Dude, you were fucked!

Daniel Bailey has written drunk sonnets, though I do not believe he wrote them while drunk yet even so these wonderful poems suggest much about an inebriated sea, waves moving like mountains above shifting plates. These sonnets, upper case throughout, are direct in their stumbling directness. One reads them and feels a finger jabbing at one’s chest:

I’M A LITTLE HUNGRY BUT DRUNK
I WANT FORGIVENESSS IN A BEEHIVE
LIKE A DOG WITH THE BENDS IN THE ARCTIC
AND COVERED IN ICE FURS

‘Drunk Sonnet 1’

Right from the start these poems establish themselves, uncluttered by any looming vocabulary, they nevertheless draw us in, simple language thick with a kind of bereftness. Which does not want to be anything other than what it is: poetry clothed in love and all of love’s varying confusions. The tone is shifting, we all know why because being in love is being drunk, and being drunk is to be ridiculous even as one proves the measure for what is sublime, lit-up, brilliant, an inward glowing matched by an outward.

There's conscious craft here. These sonnets (there are fifty-three) pay attention to an idea of the sonnet as a formal lyric construction. The first forty-three adhere to a strict form: two stanzas of four lines each, followed by two more stanzas of three lines each, for a total of fourteen lines. From sonnet forty-four on there is a breakdown, of sorts. It’s been a long night, we’re winding down, try as we might everything gets a little shaky.

The drunk imagination might very well be inclusive but it is frequently uninteresting. If you want to hear cornball, really pay attention the next time your friends are wasted and in a confessional mood. I love you, man. Really? I’m not even sure you know who I am? Bailey doesn’t ever resort to imitating the deep banality most of us fall into, or he does indeed resort to imitating this banality but he shores up this tendency with an invigorating high hilarity. Maudlin is dashed in these poems upon the rocks of its own parataxical awareness:

I’M GLAD THAT YOU’RE ALIVE AND DOING WELL
I’D HATE TO LIVE IN A WORLD WHERE YOU DON’T EXIST
I CAN SAY THAT HONESTLY AND I AM GLAD I DON’T
[HAVE TO LIE
IF YOU KNOW ME, AND I THINK YOU DO, YOU KNOW I’M NOT
[A LIAR

‘Drunk Sonnet 9’

This is special pleading, obvious sentiment, touching if overdramatic but the drunk seldom stays put – alcohol serving as steroid for attention deficit disorder – and Bailey moves him along (‘him’ because I imagine myself in this poem):

EXCEPT WHEN EVERYTHING GOES WRONG IN LIFE
AND I HAVE TO BACK AWAY FOR A LITTLE WHILE
INTO ANOTHER CORNER OF LIFE WHERE I’LL SAY ANYTHING
TO MAKE YOU BELIEVE IN ME RIGHT NOW

SOMETIMES THE ONLY THINGS THAT WORK OUT ARE MUSCLES
AND I GOT A VERY FEW OF THOSE AND IT HURTS
TO SEE YOU DOING WELL AT ALL

OR TO IMAGINE YOU DOING WELL, BUT YOU ARE
BUT I MAKE IT THROUGH THE DAYS
AND THAT’S OK, I THINK, AT LEAST I CAN DO PUSH UPS

Dulled physicality, dulled control over the body, these are aspects of a literal drunkenness. It is a perfect touch that in the midst of confession there occurs an assurance that one is able to perform up to a minimal standard of physical competence. Hand out the Presidential ribbons now. Which is very funny.

The pretty young woman sitting at the next table is reading from Samuel Beckett’s Three Novels and The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson. We’re all clichés, even in the matter of things we love.

I don’t want to be someone for whom excess becomes a burden, a noise. I want to be that person for whom love is a matter of importance to living, whatever else I might say or not say about its presence in the small grim skies I often sit under. In the distance I see the thunderhead. I see people hurrying to and fro. They aren’t drunk, aren’t jabbing me in the chest with a finger. They aren't all: LISTEN, BUDDY, YOU THINK YOU'RE BETTER THAN ME! The music isn’t loud SO THAT I MUST SHOUT ABOUT WHAT IT'S LIKE TO WRESTLE WITH LOVE, because there is no music, for once. Perhaps these poems aren’t intended to be my pleasure, yet they are. I have no difficulty placing them beside Ted Berrigan’s SONNETS. (Another love besotted sequence.) In the distance is Petrarch and closer but still at some remove is Shakespeare and his monumental sonnets, that cathedral in words, but I can see it from where I sit, I really can. And this makes perfect sense to me. The compass of the heart aligns itself no matter what, sort of: “I FEEL LIKE A SMALL TRIBE OF HALLELUJAHS/ GETTING SENT UP TONIGHT, STUCK IN THE RAFTERS, ECHOING”.

‘Drunk Sonnet 53’

GATE LEFT OPEN & FOUR GONE ASTRAY

2010-04-06T13:46:00.000-07:00

...

LESSER HABITS
I went outside today and looked at the sky for oh about ten minutes. It was clear and high, you could look at it for hours if you had the time. I had to get ready for work. Back inside I got ready to go. Then I did.

THIS IS NOT ANY KIND OF

Vanishing rare that day was. Today is pleasant. Not really. What does it matter what I feel? What you feel? One of those stupid senseless arguments took place today. In my house. The kind of argument you have with someone you love that is full of such animosity. Why are humans like that? Why do we do the things we do? Not learning is what humans do best.

DECIDING TO BE SOMETHING I AM A LAMPOST
I must confess to feeling a great deal more contempt for literature than at any time in my life. Poems seems utterly idiotic to me. Contrived, overwrought, a scaffold made from lies. But I like the imagination going where I will never go in life.

MY HANDS HURT
You reach a certain age and your hands hurt. I’ve worked at manual jobs a lot in my life, the kind of jobs that leave your hands a mess at the end of the work day. It is getting harder for me to type. My fingers are often sore. At times I find myself unable to pick change up from flat surfaces. This is depressing to think about. Growing old isn’t a great pleasure. There is not one thing associated with growing old that is to be looked forward to. Perhaps death. But death isn’t a part of life. We live through other people’s deaths. We don’t live through our own. Perhaps there is a god after all. Have mercy on me, O Inept Maker.

O You Red Wagon Naked In A Geo-political Context

2010-04-01T11:22:00.000-07:00

***

My severed!

Lonely, apart!

Rough-edged, bloody!

I bought the milk and eggs like you told me to.

Then I climbed from the river.

Marilyn Monroe Reading James Joyce

2010-03-26T13:13:00.000-07:00

I wanted something to eat. I didn't know what I wanted to eat and couldn't come up with any ideas. I was thinking how wonderful it would be to write a book and have a really pretty girl read it. My hunger went away. It astonished me, that my hunger was so easily defeated by desire. The question was would it stay this way, would I always be someone for whom desire would provide an immediate alleviation from hunger? Because I had my doubts. I had read Hamsun, after all. But for one moment, in the spring, in the sunlit exterior, it seemed as if an answer had been stumbled upon, gracelessly perhaps, though indisputably. I felt like Descartes or how I imagined Descartes felt upon discovering his 'indubitable proposition.'

BOOKS I WOULD LIKE TO READ IN A WORLD OF ABUNDANT GENEROSITY

2010-03-24T06:52:00.000-07:00

Look I don’t have any money. I don’t have any pennies – okay maybe I have a few pennies – but I don’t have any money right now, and I want books, I want to look at books, hold books, I want to look at front covers and back covers, I want to read blurbs the better to understand what I am reading because I don’t understand words too well, I don’t understand poetry yet I read poetry all the time, well not all the time but a lot of the time, and did I mention I don’t have any money, not much anyway, I mean I’m not wandering the streets or anything and I have a lousy job stocking grocery product in a grocery type store, and I hate it but that doesn’t matter, what does matter is that I have no money and I really feel the urge to read some books and the books I want to read are below these words, these are the books I want to read, so anyone? anyone out there? publishers? editors? poets? ... why not? why not send them to me? It doesn’t matter, either way, I’m not asking for a lot, just the books below, send them to me.

Gordon Lish COLLECTED FICTIONS (O/R Books)
Ben Mirov GHOST MACHINE (Caketrain Press)
Daniel Bailey THE DRUNK SONNETS (Magic Helicopter Press)
Sam Pink THE SELF-ESTEEM HOLOCAUST COMES HOME (Six Gallery Press)

Thar She Blows!!!

2010-03-18T15:02:00.000-07:00

In all its living glory

http://www.airforcejoyride.com/gg

because I spasm sometime appears again

http://www.airforcejoyride.com/gg

My new chapbook is almost here, and here

2010-03-15T15:02:00.000-07:00

Again it remains, remains as possible. As the possible
outcome, newness, what happens next, my chapbook
the one I have been proclaiming, the possible arrival
of its arriving. I call it THE PLESYRE BARGE. And it is
an available or near available thing, hand-made by hands,
by GREYING GHOST OF SALEM, MASS. Think of buckles, think
of hats, think of hands making hands making hand-mades.
Pleads: this thing is for you to buy. Buy it. Thank you.

THE PLESYRE BARGE
THE PLESYRE BARGE
THE PLESYRE BARGE
THE PLESYRE BARGE
THE PLESYRE BARGE
THE PLESYRE BARGE
THE PLESYRE BARGE
THE PLESYRE BARGE
THE PLESYRE BARGE
THE PLESYRE BARGE
THE PLESYRE BARGE
THE PLESYRE BARGE
THE PLESYRE BARGE
THE PLESYRE BARGE
THE PLESYRE BARGE
THE PLESYRE BARGE
THE PLESYRE BARGE
THE PLESYRE BARGE
THE PLESYRE BARGE
THE PLESYRE BARGE
THE PLESYRE BARGE
THE PLESYRE BARGE
THE PLESYRE BARGE
THE PLESYRE BARGE
THE PLESYRE BARGE
THE PLESYRE BARGE
THE PLESYRE BARGE
THE PLESYRE BARGE

O the advert!
O the commercial heart!

An Enigmatic E-mail Sent To Me

2010-03-07T16:33:00.000-08:00

GREAT OFFERINGS

veqomu meaa atuopovy mivaku iqogude ypyrisel adunuyec
hywid kyifugype ayco utuqu erodeubiur ritaso
egadag tigejy xoda ofutiro oiux yeladasico
aisivociqy byna imatyq labijoj xyzaiwu hycekuolaa xybir
ewavyyd foaezeboel ytiov ylipowat evoz avafyl iemak
usenaniba voumexoac ohiife ruoumik ovynewu oegayvu cioibah
uiquufobea awahelevi nupucejo yjide
feage wapaf uuweve ofifokeaoc
oxao youcocepe ieva myyodyge itipoqit oemudio
dyhup etej ejieteqo ehygen dijowuayb hajiho ycykejibuk
aborycud efiki ceuhim lygyzuqya
aweguy oehy ixehujuho nodyepaotu
toxue ebajitee pyfoip lopufely
zycofigul oudehal ehuxol ytoiutuqa elyoaj vulusato ylyz
erobivi siby yveoevacyi unevaaryp guhilulet obou xyoedel
ajedy jybypu erua ewarovag omyu auretafof yhezuhyole
pinosah nemud dauififyx qeda
jytigahoy kywuj enajecynyz uheahuyyfy
kajyn inyv uxey
bija axadiyrys ehuvuefu

New Title

2010-03-02T11:09:00.000-08:00

Observe the new title:
A CABINET OF ORDINARY FEROCITIES.
Everything else remains intact.

Advertisment

2010-02-24T13:39:00.000-08:00

Please consider
purchasing
my chapbook
THE PLESYRE BARGE
from
Greying Ghost
of Salem,
Mass. If

you do
this
small simple
act,
you'll have
my
undying
gratitude.

Available
shortly
from
Greying Ghost
of Salem,
Mass.

Document

2010-02-18T06:09:00.000-08:00

PROOF CORRECTIONS: THE PLESYRE BARGE (forthcoming Greying Ghost)

pg. 2 The second last line of section 3 reads “In the cold the crummy north-west-wind bends …”. Delete hyphen connecting west to wind, so the line now reads “In the cold the crummy north-west wind bends …”

***

pg. 4: The first line of section 1. Here I use an antique method of abbreviating William in the name William Harvey. The name is abbreviated by ‘Will’ followed by a superscripted ‘m’. Thus: ‘Will[superscripted 'm' goes here] Harvey'.
***

pg. 7: First line of 2nd stanza: delete extra space at beginning of “told me it’s fine…”

***
pg. 8: Last line. Delete extra space at beginning of “to wrap our splintered …”

***

pg. 9 In the quotation by John Clare, second line, “you Are. You must excuse …” Are should not be capitalized. It should read: “you are. You must excuse me for I have nothing to communicate or”

pg. 9: Last stanza on this page. Second line. In my copy the possessive form of the proper name
‘Sir Clyde “Humpy” de Bank’s’ contains a symbol – a rectangle containing an X -- where the apostrophe should be. Please delete symbol, add apostrophe.

pg. 10: Add italics to phrase “You, too!” in the poem’s penultimate stanza.

***

pg. 11: First line. ‘Rest-room” should read ‘restroom’.
.
***

pg. 16 Italics missing from several lines in MONSTER PICKS UP A TENOR. The following phrases/lines should be italicized:

… Got my golden
horn to drink from, man.

And:

[… ] Don’t fuck
With me or my tenor!
Sweetest slice
in the world comes
from my horn.

And:

“Believe Me, If All Those
Endearing Young Charms.”

***

pg. 20 In the subtitle ‘From Reports of The Princeton University …’ there is an extra space between ‘of’ and ‘The Princeton’
Please delete.

In line 7: ‘awn’ should be italicized ‘awn’.

In line 8 ‘Stems’ should be italicized ‘Stems…’

In line 25: ‘way’ should be italicized ‘…way leafy.’

***

epigram

2010-02-06T03:36:00.000-08:00

I fell in love with a girl.
O and a gash.

John Berryman, LOVE & FAME (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970).

THISTLE

2010-01-31T05:20:00.001-08:00

Outside is the grim thistle. Through streaked-fly window the dull bisected horizon. A blue foil with cloud-like melt. That remains till dark and then falls away from me. I see the stars on nights when it is clear. I see the moon. There are nights when I think the moon is close enough for me to reach out and touch. I could stroke her cheek. In my eyes the moon is a woman. And she smiles. I would like to think her smile is directed at me, but I don’t know.
Now it is dawn. I stew low in the kitchen. It is a sparse affair, a table, a single chair, a cupboard inside of which are the following items: one bowl, one plate, one cup. What did I say? Simplicity is fierce like a potato. I am unworried by this isolation in which I live precisely because it is so simple, and in that lies my sense of a being who is supremely secure. In his own protected world. The water has boiled so I pour it into the French press. And that is how my day begins. With the simplicity of a pot of coffee. Is it simple? Well. The smell is one thing that you would notice. That earthenware aroma of bean treated by flame. How could one not like coffee. I suppose some don’t but I don’t know if I could like anyone who doesn’t also enjoy coffee. One moves in lesser realms.
My days are unlikely. They strike me as days drawn from another century. I hardly strike myself as modern in any way. My temperament is slow-moving and inclined toward what is wet and gloom-filled. Those things make me happy or happier. I think at times that I am not entitled to one moment of happiness, and this does not bother me in the least. I move. I rise. I get up. I brush my teeth. I come out of the bathroom into the kitchen to make coffee and this is how my day begins. I apologize if this strikes you as dull. Because it is. This is what being human means to me, because this is how I live my life, like a hog opened above a drain.
The phone rings.
Not today.
Why are you calling me?
I didn’t say anything of the sort.
You’re a liar!
Afterbirth!
Shit-stain!
Ha!
This conversation. Kaput!
I put the phone down. I hate talking on the phone. I hate the intrusion it works into my day. For in spite of what you might think I’m a busy man. I work hard at my job. And I do not like to be interrupted by the distractions the day might bring. Oh we go toward the day.
I go.
I trundle these here sliding stairs.
One foot preceding another. I could tell you about the climbing of stairs, how the weight shifts, how the heart floats inside the rib cage, how the teeth rattle against each other and how one’s eyeballs slosh about in the cavities that hold them. The sensation of climbing stairs is familiar to you because you are human, a monster like myself. If we share nothing else, we share a common combustible fear. When I get to the top of the stairs I will sit at my desk and open my notebook. I’ll begin.
For now, though, I climb the stairs. I notice my right hand hurts. The hand that serves me throughout the night. For that reason alone it would be my favored hand but it is also favored since it is deeply scored like the field-stones leading to the water pump hidden by an overgrowth of wild forsythia and where another new growth, something vine-like and thorny, seems to have established itself. This scoring is quite beautiful. I don’t mean to brag. But it seems so to me. As for the new growth, I noted it in my notebook only yesterday. Using pencil. Held by my right hand.
Small details reveal much about the person who remarks upon them. A pencil, for example, that is specified in a certain way, for example. A subtle unveiling. You have learned a little about me. And I might not have even the slightest clue. In fact I know I don’t. You should feel proud of yourself, for your alertness. Your eyes are working fine. Behind your eyes there might be secret plans for riots. And devotion to a merciless insurrection.
A heresy.
There being no greater heresy than love.

A Workshop

2010-01-23T18:49:00.000-08:00

This looks like a very interesting workshop. I only wish I had the time to attend.

***

95 Cent Skool: Summer Seminar in Social Poetics
By jms | 1/20/2010 | 1 reacties »
The 95 Cent Skool is a 6 day long experimental seminar that will be offered in Oakland, California, July 26-31, 2010. It is convened by Joshua Clover and Juliana Spahr. It will explore the possibilities of poetry writing as part of a larger social practice, at a distance from the economic and professional expectations of institutions. We believe a dozen people sitting around a table can’t ruin poetry, but that costs, professional context, mythologies of individual genius, and client/service-based models can — and in our own experiences teaching in pay-to-play writing programs, often do.

Our concerns in these six days begin with the assumption that poetry has a role to play in the larger political and intellectual sphere of contemporary culture, and that any poetry which subtracts itself from such engagements is no longer of interest. “Social poetics” is not a settled category, and does not necessarily refer to poetry espousing a social vision. It simply assumes that the basis of poetry is not personal expression or the truth of any given individual, but shared social struggle.

The 6 days will feature:
• Morning discussion groups lead by Juliana and Joshua
• Two guest speakers: one on the political economy and one on ecology
• Afternoon group and/or collaborative writing sessions
• Dinners and drinks at a nearby bar

The 6 days will not feature:
• Workshops led by a “master poet”
• Agents or editors who will advise your work into publication
• A Richard Wilbur Celebration Night
• Instruction in reciting poetry to bring out the emotional content of the poem

The final program will be available later in the Spring.

Each participant will be asked to contribute up to 1% of annual gross income as their 95 cents exclusively towards operating expenses. The workshop leaders and as many other organizers as possible will donate their time. No one will be turned away for lack of funds. Email us if you’ve got questions about how much you can pay. We will also help in finding free housing for any participants in need.

The program is open to any interested participant with any level of prior engagement with poetry. This program is not affiliated with any institution of higher education and no transferrable institutional credit will be offered. There is no application fee, but space is limited. Please send a note indicating interest and experience to 95centskool@gmail.com

Please feel encouraged to re/post this listing to your blog or otherwise redistribute. If you would like to receive further information about the 95 Cent Skool, please email 95centskool@gmail.com, or join the 95 Cent Skool facebook group: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=300963159304&ref=mf
The 95 Cent Skool will happen with the support of Small Press Traffic and 'A 'A Arts.

Thank you very much,

the 95¢ Skoolers —

The Window: a play for puppets in three acts

2010-01-20T06:34:00.001-08:00

ACT I

A man. A woman. Perhaps lovers.
Somewhere sometime.
Low music, intermittently.

Shannon:

In a dream I saw a woman swallow a python made of agate!

Jimmy:

When I was born my brother ran into the room and screamed, ‘Get that thing out of the house!’

Shannon:

Why do you insist on the lung’s cloudburst?

Jimmy:

That was nothing. Seven hammers and two butcher’s aprons, and three blind mice.

Shannon:

Price of an orange.

Jimmy:

What did you –

Shannon:

Price.

Jimmy:

What?

ACT II

Shannon:

Of.

Jimmy:

I don’t –

Shannon:

Price of an –

Jimmy:

Illness? A desperate longing?

Shannon:

[Slowly, with contempt.] Price of an orange. You dumb fuck!
It isn’t the fact, you being mean and everything. But you just couldn’t do it.

Jimmy:

They didn’t have to burn them. They didn’t need to press them with stones.

Shannon:

Perfection is a form of terror. Who spews such nonsense?

Jimmy:

Fight me if you want to. But it won’t do any good,
I still walk beyond certain fences. I’m protected
like a seashore, a porkpie hat.

Shannon:

And women accused of witchcraft.

Jimmy:

Plurality is sweet in the singular form.

ACT III

Shannon:

Who the fuck cares, who the fuck?

Jimmy:

Let me sour a beer in a familiar dive. Smoke
like a red-winged blackbird.

Shannon:

Sack it, sister! Clock out!

Jimmy:

No star is as bright as a cat entering a room.

Shannon:

Style doesn’t subvert class consciousness.

Jimmy:

But those in power know only their own corruption.

Shannon:

I would love even in the harrow, under stone,
sky, tempest, tyrant. I would love, Jimmy.
I would, too.

FINIS

POEM

2010-01-19T13:20:00.000-08:00

Here is a wonderful poem from Remainland by Aase Berg, translated by Johannes Goransson, (Action Books, 2005):

THE HARE INFECTS DAD WITH RABIES

Hare-spring conduit
hare track
rabies is freedom
in the Year of the Hare

Here in the blackfathermilk
of loneliness
from the man of the woods
with hare

Fragments

2010-01-13T15:13:00.000-08:00

Criticism works away at what one knows; if it is to have any value whatsoever, an erosion of faith must be the inevitable result.

Man is nothing around which he practices a precarious posture before an abyss that is his immaterial birth.

Coffee is the philosopher's sacred mud. It sustains him in his state of agitated repose.

I would choose Blake over Shakespeare because his innocence is greater, though it is Shakespeare who exhibits more violent charm.

Poetry consumes various insults in order to produce one singular shame.

The writer needs at least three cats who will torment him with their greed, beauty, and magnificent indifference to Art.

The writer is first and foremost a reader.
Page after page of scrawl: the miseries of an ecstatic failure.

2010-01-13T14:45:00.000-08:00

A translation

by Philippe Bille

of my poem

In Praise Of Zen Being

excerpt from THE ASH-WIND HEAP (a play)

2009-12-19T03:09:00.001-08:00

Woman: You know I’ve written a play?

Man: You have! My God that is amazing! I have, too. Recently completed. A real play with actors and actresses and speeches and so forth. I can’t claim it’s any good, but it is completed. I finished. [Pause.] Not especially good. But who cares? I did it. The thing of it is. Most plays are shit. They go on and on and everything is utterly unbelievable and then there is a shoot-out or some guy goes crazy in a storm or a ghost arrives and kills everyone or a mother goes completely bonkers because of the pills she’s popping or an old man is betrayed by his sons and he goes about an awful dying on stage and everyone is wailing and howling or two guys meet somewhere which is nowhere and there is a lot of banter little banter that goes on and on and then they leave and come back and then they come back again for more witty banter it is endless you see that is the point of the whole thing the endlessness of it all. And maybe a mechanical horse comes on stage. Or a clown wearing armor. Or a monster does a tap-dance. Or a guy with no hair kills a guy with a lot of hair. Or a women with big tits wrestles a woman with small tits. Or a kid makes a tank in his room takes it out of the room to visit mayhem on the town that spurns him. Spurning is crucial. Some plays are tragic, some are tragi-comic others are romantic some are tragi-romantic others are comic, a comic play ends in marriage, a tragedy ends in marriage and a romance ends in divorce. Songs burst forth from an audience who are robots without brains. There is much laughter. Tears. Laughter and tears. Clapping. Roars of approval. Shouts of disappointment. After they pretend to talk about the play. They complain about the price of the ticket. They think about cancer, sex, money, the banality of their lives, the stress in their lives, they think about nothing, they think about how angry they are because of what happened at work that day. It is horrible what they think about. How they go on. The relentless force of the shit-river flowing inside them. Nothing makes a difference. They are impermeable, like meat fortresses. Spaceships free floating, detached from home base, hysterical, undignified, prone to crying jags as they drink coffee. They remember every petty detail, won’t every let something go. With the tenacity of the fiercest kind of suction cup, they relinquish their hold on nothing, hanging from walls, steering wheels, telephones, keyboards, bra straps, pills, alcohol, beach towels, umbrellas, old magazines, guns, the entire contents of the vast mud room of human history. Bang bang boom boom bang boom bang boom bang boom bang boom bang boom bang boom [Pauses to catch breath. Grips his chest.] Oh my! What is this? [Falls on stage. Thrashes a little.]

Woman: I’m sorry dear. I wasn’t listening. What did you say?

[The curtain falls. A man holding a sign runs in front of the curtain. On the sign is an abstruse mathematical equation. The audience reads the sign, dumbfounded. The man retreats.]

Against Optics

2009-12-12T18:03:00.000-08:00

August 23, 1732

From out north by north a seeming fury drowned

A flurry-hammered pirled by the grey-lit year

Oh it was a bout of flake tumbled just outside

My hutch where I scour cold ready to admit

I steamed with my cap along the wilted wall

At first an anxious hand and then a sod and then

A final misting sound that wrought no arriving spell

But sere-hammered tin leaves skirting hem-edged

No drier thing than that dry deepened wheel

Lines Written in Public

2009-12-12T17:23:00.000-08:00

Small details. A pencil,
for example.
The right hand.

Subtleties.
You’ve learned
a little about me.

I don’t have a clue.
Behind your eyes
secret plans for riots,

your devotion
to an insurrection,
heresy.

There being no
greater heresy
than love.

Poem

2009-12-12T13:45:00.001-08:00

Here is a great poem by Brian Beatty from his collection Duck! (Brouhaha, 2009):

MY BOOK IDEA

Two ghosts fighting
over an oatmeal cookie

for 400 pages of enormous
Times New Roman --

I'm thinking it's a mystery.

***

I would buy such a book, buy it and read it.

POEM OF LIMITED PURPOSE

2009-11-20T15:49:00.001-08:00

The manicurist maintains the proper nose temperature by agitating the dead.

The eggs resemble your porter who labors in the dossier of his poems.

Serpents vein their way into the heart.

A musical soul burns in my love for the Museum of Death.

Campion (1567-1620) and Cervantes (1958-1970) are both easy companions, one born meat, the other
a man's shot.

The royal pony is the myth of the return.

Fish seducer close your mouth office.
***

A 'draft.' I have no recollection of writing this poem, but discovered it one afternoon as I stumbled about on behalf of another purpose entirely. Hence, the title.

My Geographical Imagination

2009-11-20T03:47:00.000-08:00

Melville took me to the water to show me.
He pointed to the horizon.
Do you see it?
I didn't.

Another Machine To Praise

2009-11-19T17:09:00.000-08:00

I might lie to you.
The way wood rots, growing darker
like a coastal edge receding
over the earth’s curve.
At this desk boredom is a fire.
I might light a wooden dog on fire to praise your
Beauty which is illegal in the country
Of my brain-pan where dictators
Follow easily each other
Soft and large and prone to sweats.
One pretended he was blind.
I might lie again like a tongue
upon your various fractures.
And if I lie what then, what tools
do we need to save the carousel, the hammered lion,
to feed him with our hands.
I might wish to hold you before the trumpets
And later the skyline.
I might lie to you about a childhood
When I drank from a creek
Because I was far from home.
It was hot and I liked it that way.

***

Here is a revision, suggested to me by my friend Adam Tavel.

A NOTE RETRIEVED FROM THE DYING MAN'S THROAT-CAVE

I might lie to you the way
Wood lies, growing darker
Like a coastal edge receding
Over the earth’s curve.

At this desk boredom is a fire.
I might light a wooden dog on fire
To praise your Beauty which is illegal
In the country of my brain-pan
Where dictators follow easily each other
Soft and large and prone to sweat.

One pretended he was blind.
I might lie to you again, cleanly,
Or tongue the armor of a tank.
In either case, an incurious compass
That aligns the various fractures.

And if I lie to you, what then, what tools
Do we need to save the carousel,
The hammered lion, to feed him
With our hands. I might wish to hold
You before the trumpets
And later the skyline.
I might lie to you about a childhood
When I drank from a creek
Because I was far from home.

America's Favorite Hemorrhoid Cream

2009-11-18T14:31:00.000-08:00

a

Swivel it my way
I mean coin
Or coins
Plural is genius my turnips
Gone to far away hills
Dirt on this here map you aren't
Saying it like they said it would be
I'm the disappoyted King of Malaria

b

No matter, cat
We dun brung groggy you home on a hand basket
You kin bite if you like
You kin bate in the lake
I don't care
We all friends here
Killers aint welcome

c

I warn't borne here but I learned
The language I learned the language
Of health and crime I learned
How to praise her pubic kite
You know the famous slogan
I wrote that one I wrote it:
America's Favorite Hemorrhoid Cream
That was me that done that
That totally owned it
Stone cold disowned it

another letter to M --

2009-11-04T13:43:00.000-08:00

[circa 1959]

Dear M --

I saw Irving read in New York the other night, and I was disappointed there weren’t more people in the audience but Irving seemed relieved there were at least some in the audience. I went with Carolyn. He read from his new novel and he gave a good reading though I could tell at one point he wished he’d worn his sweat band as he was having trouble under the hot light. I believe his wife was with him. Before his reading Irving told me about the wonderful thrift shops in the Village, and that I didn’t know how good I had it – in terms of thrift shops. And then Harry showed up and he and Irving chatted. And then some woman who was very pleased with herself gave the introduction, I thought she was very enamored by the sound of her own voice. She seemed to go on a little too long, first talking about how she felt ‘betrayed’ or something like that when she learned Irving had written a memoir as she was such an admirer of his fiction. Then she proceeded to talk about Irving’s index card method,and how greatly she admired this method, and I thought but that is pure fiction, everyone knows it is, so what are you going on about. Irving looked as if he’d lost weight, he looked healthier certainly than the first time I saw him up close, which was on the plane back from Vermont as he headed to Minneapolis, we shared the flight to Detroit where we would then go our separate ways. Irving looked to be in considerable discomfort, flushed and his breathing slightly labored. But when I saw him last week he looked, as I said, so healthy. And in high spirits. People asked questions. He answered buoyantly. He laughed, was self-deprecating. He told how easy it was for him to give up characters once the book was over. During the writing of his book, however, he could think of nothing else but his characters. His immersion was that deep into their lives, their psyches. Another question was asked. He told how he hardly ever reads Nabokov anymore as he spent so much time on his work for many years, read all of it and at such a level of intense involvement, so that he now felt no need to return. He was pleased that Nabakov had gone on posthumously to have such a fine writing career. Everyone laughed at that. There were other questions. A tall man with a scraggly beard, long hair and floppy hat asked some stupid question that people ask when they simply want to hear their own voices: “What time of day do you prefer to compose sentences in?” Or something like that. I didn’t like him as I often see him around town, mostly in the Café House; he smells badly, and slurps his tea very loudly. He sprawls his long legs in a way that disgusts me. He isn’t good looking at all, though he has the arrogance of someone who is. I don’t remember exactly what he asked. I wish I did. No, no. I don’t. It wasn’t that bad a question because Irving gave a good answer and made it seem like the best kind of question someone might ask. You know the kind of wonderful grace that Irving can display, suddenly and unexpectedly; he is such a wonderful speaker. Then it was over and Carolyn bought a book for Irving to sign, I had my own copy of the book which he also signed. Irving said to Carolyn, “But you don’t have to buy a copy, James already bought one.” And Carolyn said to Irving, “I know. James doesn’t like to share his books”. Irving replied, “Really! So James doesn’t like to share books? I find that very interesting!” Carolyn: “No, no he doesn’t like to share his books.” Of course I am standing right there, “That isn't entirely fair." Carolyn says to Irving: “He has a lot of secrets like that.” Or something to that effect. Irving chuckled to himself as he wrote a very nice comment in Carolyn’s book. Then it was time to leave I asked where they might be going, and Irving invited us along but for some reason I thought he’d prefer to be alone with Harry and their guests. Now I wish I’d accepted the invitation. It was cold that night. Kind of gloomy. I hate leaving people behind. I hate not knowing what to do. The next day I was in the store and Alice came up to me and asked if Irving was disappointed with the poor turn-out. “No. I don’t think so. Maybe a little. Irving was happy for the chance to visit the city.” This seemed to confuse Alice, for some reason she thought Irving lived in the city and had a place in the country. Then Alice had to answer a telephone call. Conversation over.

I wish I had more to tell. But I live so quietly. Like a church mouse. Or a mole. However, this you might find of some interest, from a psychological perspective. I was in the backyard, doing yard work. There is always so much to do. I had been clearing brush, using a machete. I paused and saw something moving in the grass. I went up close. To inspect. Thinking it might be a snake or even a cat. It was only a mole. For no reason I kicked at it hard with the toe of my work boot. Just like that I killed it. Then I went back to chopping as if nothing had happened.

Someone should send me a big sack of money. I worry about money a lot these days. I worry about my teeth.

Best wishes,

J.

a remix e-book

2009-10-15T15:36:00.000-07:00

http://www.featherproof.com/Mambo/downloads/ScrotalCashEbook.pdf

epigram

2009-10-15T10:32:00.001-07:00

What changes singularly in the organization ... is the relationship between the voice and graphism: it is the despot who establishes the practice of writing (the most ancient authors saw this clearly); it is the imperial formation that makes graphism into a system of writing in the proper sense of the term. Legislation, bureaucracy, accounting, the collection of taxes, the State monopoly, imperial justice, the functionaries' activity, historiography: everything is written in the despot's procession.

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, ANTI-OEDPIPUS

(1972, tr. 1977)

for crows at daybreak

2009-09-22T08:11:00.001-07:00

A new collection of my poetry titled

FAMILY PORTRAIT WITH TWO DOGS BLEEDING

is now available from:
Phrygian Press
58-09 205th Street
Bayside, NY 11364

The cost is $5.00 (U.S.)

Poem

2009-09-16T12:28:00.000-07:00

‘The Shuttle of a Ripening Egg Combs the Warp of His Days’:
ON THE ENDNOTES GIVEN BY SAMUEL BECKETT
TO HIS POEM ‘WHOROSCOPE’ (1930)

I like these notes even though
they really do little to explain.
In fact, these notes read
as if they were lines
deleted from the poem itself.
'Saint Augustine has a revelation
in the shrubbery and reads St. Paul.'
Shrubbery being a word
the novelist Nicholson Baker
doesn’t like. And this one:
‘He proves God by exhaustion.’
Which is an interesting idea
and very interesting line.
And this final sadness
plainly stated and more sad
for being so plainly stated:
‘His daughter died of scarlet fever
at the age of six.’ Imagine that.
How terrible facts can be.

Festive

2009-09-08T18:50:00.000-07:00

… jug, jug, jug …
John Skelton

What love is this drunk and misshapen and bullying, menace in
its loud visceral surge. I wish I’d enlisted as witness elsewhere.
So the hulking man tugs the co-ed by the waistband of her shorts,
and hangs her from his wrist like later meat. What love is this
in yellow and black uniform the bee-hive stirs. What love is this
that loiters on the hair-trigger and spits into the bull’s eye.
‘What the fuck you lookin’ at?’ What love is this that forms
into three unsteady angels holding hands in jean-shorts
and halters, floating down the alley where dumpsters reek.
What love smoothes her skirt and skips and smoothes some
more her hands like sparrow wings upon her ass. What love is
this that needs the Black & White to ferry home at 3:36 on a
scalded afternoon in early fall. And where is home anyway
and why did you leave for this occasion taking with you
only the essential right to vomit in the square. What love is this
that seems to shade the lithe red-head as she is tentative in
passing and I am tentative on her behalf. I see her go alone.
Someone won one golden high-stakes game today. This great day.
Victorious were the good and glory their reward. So adjust
your figs, remove your shirt to put it on your nickel skull
and wobbly nab a smoke at curbside but know a detailed list
of casual harassments somewhere boils above the cost of every
glass you broke. What love is this, subterranean and thereby lost,
ugly shaved head looking in at all that loud aggressive joy,
that strains against its festive irons to be invited in.

letter to M --

2009-08-28T12:31:00.000-07:00

August 27, 2009

Dear M--,

It has been raining these last two days, everywhere it is wet and there seems no place to go that is dry. Even what is dry in its bones is wet. I wanted to write you a letter for the longest time. Then I thought I’d save something special for you but that wasn’t working because nothing special seemed around. I went outside and picked up Biscuit and brought him in and said, “Such a handsome cat.” That was it. One day was like that and the next day, too. And then it was night so there. You can see I have my little boat in the pond but it is tied to the dock and anyone who rows it will stay in that place, close to shore, rocking uselessly against the rope. I told Nora I was going to write you a letter and she said she was jealous and I said you should write M--. Really, Nora asked. I said, yes, just don’t mention poetry. Nora said, that is good to know. After I felt badly because I thought, you don’t know that. You don’t know that M-- wouldn’t like to hear from Nora and moreover you don’t know she wouldn’t like to hear Nora talk about poetry, because after all Nora is a prose person and she is deeply intelligent and interesting and so might have fine things to say about poetry, plus she is Nora so M-- would like that right off the bat. I will write her and tell her she should write you and that anything I said about what should or should not be said should be discarded. I have a red history of saying things I shouldn’t have said. Oh well. Right this moment in the kitchen I am eating Swedish almond cookies that C-- made. They are very simple as the ingredients are simple: butter, one egg white, sugar, flour and almond extract. They are small round domes dusted with confectionery sugar. I made tea. It is quiet here. C-- is in the living room. J-- is up stairs. The cats are out for now. (They’ll be in soon.) The washing machine is churning quietly away. It would be nice if you were here. Drinking tea. Eating cookies. Well, it would be.

Next moment seemed
Remarkably like
The previous.

I was deeply touched you gave me erasures at the graduation, deeply. I think I love them, in my way, and after my own fashion, as much as any set of words I have ever seen. They are quiet and beautiful, and sad. Which is fitting. But wonderful for being all of those things. Notice I said, things. That is what I meant. For I feel qualities of life at times to be things, made, material. Anyway what question did I ask?

How deeply moved I was by the erased poem that in its entirety goes like this:

Our hearts were
Death-stones of the
Voice
Unborn.*

Those words found under what text I do not know, but those words suggest to me the voice of Paul Celan. I think about those death-stones when I read those words and I think I see them they are beautiful and sad and quiet. They might be stones on a beach or, more likely, in a creek.

I have saved everything you gave me. The cardboard, the envelope, the typewriter ribbon. All of it. I have saved it. It all seems special to me. All of it is the gift.

Some days I wake up and I want to say “Fuck poetry!” or “Poetry is bullshit! “ and think maybe we should just hand-write notes to one another and that would be all the ‘literature’ we need. ‘I saw a bird today.’ ‘Look behind you. Sunset.’ ‘Your shoelace is untied. Tie it, please. I don’t want you to trip.’ ‘Come to my house. We have almond cookies. They’re delicious.’ And so on. Maybe this would’t satisfy anyone but there are days when it would satisfy me. Maybe the notes could be in French. “Je suis … partout …’

Late at night I love to hear the sound of trains. In my boyhood I heard them all through the summer. My mother had a thing for open windows. There was a hand crank that opened the window in my room. I slept with my feet outside the covers. The breeze felt nice.

Here is a story I heard that instantly I thought you would love. Someone told me they saw all these dogs swimming in a pond together. One of the dogs was wearing a small life jacket. She didn’t understand. When the dogs came out of the water, she understood: the dog with the life jacket had only three legs.

True.

Three legs. The three legged dog is a marvel. She sprints in waltz time.

Poetry. Sometimes maybe it should be tossed in the river. Other times I think it would be best if we saved it and held it close and kept it in a quiet place.

I have hardly written anything though I find myself not at all concerned because while some people have told me about how they are rushing around trying to get their poems and manuscripts published I believe what will happen will happen in spite of our best intentions seldom because of. This might be delusion on my part, who knows. When it is fall there will come additional energies.

M-- I hope everything is going well for you. We – by that I mean C-- and I – might visit Vermont in the fall. We must wait, finances are terribly difficult these days. My job pays poorly and I have debts from dental work and automotive repairs that seem to cling forever to our poor factory of a household. Don’t worry though, somehow we’ll weather the storm.

Your friend,

J.

----------------------------------------------

* From an erasure sent to the author by Mary Ruefle.

NOTES ON

2009-07-30T19:09:00.000-07:00

NORMANCE by LOUIS-FERDINAND CÉLINE
translated by Marlon Jones
(Dalkey Archive, 2009)

It is difficult to read Céline’s NORMANCE without feeling ill-effects from its catastrophic style. I don’t mean to suggest that I don’t admire the book, because I do and to a great extent; however, reading it was not always easy and I felt at certain points that I would not be able to finish it. The book is dedicated to both Gaston Gallimard – Celine’s long suffering publisher – and Pliny The Elder. It seemed a curious choice, including Pliny The Elder within the book’s dedicatory flourish, until one recalls that Pliny died near Mount Vesuvius and that he was there because he’d commanded ships to go to nearby towns to find survivors or, as another account would have it, to observe the spectacle of massive destruction the volcanic eruption wrought.

In NORMANCE, Celine describes his version of Vesuvius, of the man-made as opposed to the natural sort: namely, the bombing of Paris on the night and morning of April 21-22, 1944.

It is the saving grace of novels that a structure is erected in each case which is familiar, though not identical to what has gone before. These structures remind us that continuity in story telling is essential to the novel’s place in our imaginative landscapes. To read a book by Celine is to have all this familiar landscape razed, so that what confronts us is less the surrounding of what a novel might be but only its remnants, the parts that have been reduced to ash and skeletal debris. This is hyperbole, of course, and it is specific in that it is directed at Celine’s later works, the books he wrote after his appalling adventure writing the anti-Semitic books just prior to and during the Second World War. These books – the so-called ‘pamphlets’ -- represented Celine’s downfall into condemnation and misery. Which condemnation and misery he brought upon himself as a punishment deserved.

How does one read Celine’s later books? For they do seem unreadable at times, great vast lumbering weights that must be moved up mountains or deep down into cellars. Finding light sufficient by which to read them is always a problem. Breathing is difficult. I want to write about NORMANCE, published in 1954, a book that continues the story begun in the preceding novel FABLE FOR ANOTHER TIME (1954). (In French the two books are titled Féerie pour une autre fois I and Féerie pour une autre fois II: Normance). The two books come from the same epic cycle, as it were, though they do not need to be read in order for either to make sense to the reader, if making sense of what is read is what the reader of these books is finally after.

Celine is grotesque. His power in this novel is his inertia. The story goes nearly nowhere. Celine describes an attack on Paris, one night and into the following morning. He focuses on what he sees and hears, what happens in his immediate vicinity or the vicinity his visions travel in. We would do well to begin this discussion by wondering how he could write such a novel, a novel in which something seems to begin and then twenty pages, thirty pages, forty pages, fifty pages later the same thing seems still to be on the verge of beginning. Nothing has changed, though an exhaustion has entered the reader’s mind. For his part, Celine appears inexhaustible, able to continue pounding the same stake into the same spot of ground over and over. No writer in any language has Céline’s capacity for such relentless repetition. And while Celine has this power of inertia – some would deem it no power, merely a flaw -- nevertheless something is happening, he is a chronicler like Pliny The Elder was a chronicler, and so perhaps in spite of his own furious raging, a grotesque progress is made. Glacial progress, volcanic. The surging material that is a toxicity in progress, a slow strangulation.

Satire is literature at its meanest and Celine is frequently cruel in his writing; in being cruel he nevertheless is capable of making the reluctant reader laugh. Poison given the guise of an hilarious vernacular. Or the vicious face ready to explode suddenly seen as nothing more than an oval that is brightly ridiculous. The reader laughs against all determinations not to, at least this is my experience when reading Céline. For life is nearly always absurd in a Celine novel, and death is ever present, and both life and death meet in ways that dignifies no one: the great are just as prone to being humiliated by these polarities as are the poor and misbegotten. I have no idea how to convey the reason behind my laugher, because much of what one reads in a Céline novel is unreasonable. I simply assert this laughter happens and I can’t deny how his rage often leaves me feeling braced against the absurdities that seem our common lot. I’ve never survived a bombing, never walked streets strewn with dead, never stood my ground and expressed the most pernicious opinions … in my life I have been a hider, someone who flees, who fled. Perhaps that is the point at which Céline becomes familiar to me. Céline is fugitive, was a fugitive, both literally and figuratively.

We pick the story up, as Celine is picked up: “ Telling it all after the fact … easier said than done! … much easier! … After all, you can still hear the echo … baboom! … your head’s spinning … even seven years later … your neck … time’s nothing, memory’s what matters … that and watching the world burn …” [1]. An explosion has thrown Celine down the elevator shaft of the building where he lives with his wife, Lili, and cat, Bébert whose fame is legendary in 20th century literature. They gather him up like a bag of bones. We’re off. Céline is off: “ I’m telling you, they brought me back up! … I was telling you they carried me back like Marlborough … you know? When they put him in the ground? … me, I was in the air … with four … five knights and ladies in waiting … Lili told me … all seven flights! … I’d fallen down the elevator shaft, ‘cause the door was open … no! … further than that … I fell even further …” Our narrator is ruined right from the start. His novel begins in shambles because the narrator is in shambles and it continues through the violence that war is and it seems to go on interminably as the violence continues and after the violence there is only a momentary lull. We know it is momentary, because Céline – because the genus loci’s sputtering envoy -- is nearby.

***

[This is the introduction. I will post further versions until the essay is complete. Jon Cone.]

Found Poem

2009-07-23T16:15:00.000-07:00

All

lack salt.
A small man take of half.
Bees in the warm sun.

Call Ward.

I dare not.
Pare a plum,
with care. Snare
hare. The flare
and glare scare.

Ask the lass for a glass.
Of milk? I guess so.
Graft the branch.

Chant for the grass
they dance on.

Did the ass pant
at his task.
I think it did.

***
Lines abstracted from the marvelous book WATSON'S COMPLETE SPELLER: ORAL AND WRITTEN/by J. Madison Watson, Author of the National and Independent Readers, Spellers and Primers; Hand-book of Gymnastics; Manual of Calisthenics; Tablets, etc. (New York: American Book Company, 1887).

Found Poem

2009-07-14T11:20:00.000-07:00

Lead

the lean horse
to the sea.
He needs to eat.
Peat yields heat.

The dead cause deep grief.
Seek the thief.
My deaf friend and guest is
dead.

I had health
and wealth.
Death cut this thread of life.

Learn
to work. Earn
that rare urn.
Search the earth
and the world for her.

Burn burch wood.
A cur hurt a bird.
Worms turn and curl in the dirt.

Shy birds fly
high in the sky.
A dry sty.

At night a lynx
ran by our door.
Plow, toil.
Joy in soil.

***

See above note for information on WATSON'S COMPLETE SPELLER: ORAL AND WRITTEN/by J. Madison Watson (1887) for full bibliographical information.

Workshop Poems [Rejected]

2009-07-12T12:22:00.000-07:00

1

I cross the river
because I
can't swim
dry-land
gravel.

2

What happy
ducks we
were, sitting
on a
plate.

3

Q: Why rain? Why
leaves? Why limestone?
Why wild
rose?

A: Fuck off.

4

Cataplux.
The name of a
cat
not yet arrived.

Enjoy.

Westgate

2009-06-21T12:03:00.001-07:00

Yesterday I was like young.
It didn’t seem peculiar to anyone.
The ordinary is a blue cup leaking by a white plate.
It rains. I wander interstate
the inkless vein that fuels.
I think it would be nice to leave this room.

2

At night rain travels northward,
when I by darkness I do not own travel northward too.
Light ever magnifies
the list of days on which it snowed
and those on which it only rained.

3

Others huddle under covers in their beds,
because there is no hill to stand on.
Upturned palms staunch the rain
though seas flood toward the crowing cock:
a bastard I have known
who routinely killed the dreams I stroked
like the brutal farmer does his lovely horses in the field.

4

In darkness the eye is left to sense its limit.
Hands search walls to find a divot.
I pack my eyes
in chloroform beside my broken skis.
Laud bells announce the feast
to ring the skin off some immaculate beast.
It would have been nice to have wasted a life other than my own.

Barbarians

2009-06-19T14:38:00.000-07:00

The clock I give you
with my blood inside. This clock

I leave at your door beneath
your pillow. In the forest
of hair in the castle of its
brush.

I guard that gate
they must always be absent from.

Or oar: from 'The Epics'

2009-06-14T09:40:00.000-07:00

after Louis Zukofsky

OAR,
an equity --

and ore and orange
an inequity's also

Dear Critic,

2009-06-14T09:34:00.000-07:00

I believe I could learn to love
this newest theory of yours --

if you could learn to tongue
these lines, your lips
smeared sloppily
with that gash-red lipstick I dream on --

a dirty open-mouthed kiss
that I would gently feed
myself into --

obdurating the irrelevant
meat of my art.

epigram

2009-06-06T17:23:00.000-07:00

I always feel less anxious when I recognize that the collision is already well under way.

Joe Wenderoth, Letters To Wendy's (2000).

epigram

2009-05-17T18:27:00.000-07:00

This is a poem about a horse that got tired.
Poor. Old. Tired. Horse.
I want to go home.
I want you to go home.
This is a poem which tells the story,
which is the story.
I don't know.

from "Please" by Robert Creeley

epigram [from Susan Howe's THE BIRTH-MARK] followed by a comment of sorts

2009-05-17T15:55:00.001-07:00

Ground and dont suffer your Cattle to tread upon it
and so poach and break the soil, and you will never
want any Dung.

Diary of John Adams, Tuesday, June 25, 1771

__________________________________

DUNG Hog Horses Oxen Cows
And Sheep

FOG

POACH

We knew their names once because we had spoke of
Them to our neighbor
And at market.

remnant memory

2009-05-17T09:29:00.001-07:00

This remnant ark, this hollowed horse
where you hid to hear the owls and
squander blood in the begging bowl
of your hands, it is here you curse
with lightest breath, drift as eye-flicker
in tall grass by the creek with its moving shells,
it is here. Each torn day it is here,
you tick at it with fingers first dabbed
in stiff ink made by what you hold
in your palm, stain-wise. Ten thousand
light-years from now your mother scuttles
on her back to see what you saw:
a man in animal head, shaken, raw.

***

This is a revision of a poem that remains elusive. I doubt it is finished, or even barely begun. Something about an ancient rite is felt here. More than that I am unable to offer specifics. This will probably never appear in any collection, so I give it here a kind of burial.

the situation you find yourself in

2009-04-28T14:20:00.000-07:00

Say you need something. Late at night you need something:
a box of band aids, a quart of milk, shaving cream, razor blades.
It doesn’t matter what. Just the fact of your need. So you drive
to the grocery store in a modest sized city. Anywhere.
You’re there at night getting whatever it is you need to get.
Life is settling in on you. Now you've got what it is you need,
now you're waiting in line. The cashier is doing her thing,
checking the items of the guy in front of you, she does it efficiently
enough. A little grimly you think to yourself. You hear a voice,
behind you, it takes a second for you to realize the voice
is pointed at you. “Excuse me, pal.” You turn around.
He stands looking directly at you. His face is narrow,
slightly worn. Well, he is slightly worn. Not too tall,
thin and used up. He stands there holding a large
pack of diapers. He says, “Do you mind if I cut in front?
I got a taxi waiting. I need to get out quick.” Before
you answer he's already moving in front of you.
You think, okay, the guy needs diapers, needs
to get them home quickly. You know what that is like,
how desperate it can get on the home front, maybe being
new to the job of raising a baby, how your life seems turned over,
how responsibility seems to pursue you, maybe how love
itself seems to have loosened its grip on you. And you step up
and find it in yourself to pay attention to what is needed,
what you need to do. If it means late-night runs to the grocery
store for diapers, then so be it. You do what is asked of you
by the situation you find yourself in. Well, this is what
you were thinking, standing in line, waiting to pay.
Then you snap out of it and focus on what is going on
directly before you. You see the guy arguing with the cashier.
You see her take the diapers and drop them behind her.
You see her turn to her register, you see her open the drawer,
reach in and pull out some bills and then some change.
She hands this to the guy, who licks his lips. He turns,
looks calmly at you with a smirk on his god damn face!
He leaves the store, nearly running to his waiting taxi.
And you realize no one in the history of the universe
has ever exchanged unused diapers for a cash refund
with a cab outside and meter running. Not ever. No one.
A different scene comes to mind. Somewhere a woman
paces the length of a shabby apartment. Cursing.
His name is Pitcairn. That gone, used-up guy. Pitcairn.

scrawled near base weeds behind the fast food joint

2009-04-28T07:14:00.000-07:00

Her sacral saccade in
madding briefs and
aslant low hillocks of
her exfoliated shudder.

Oh her gesso
athwart
my looming
foci.

I admire her legs.

We flail
gladly, onto hunkered plains

fragments in search of a lecture: handout

2009-04-23T11:23:00.000-07:00

The fear that a small wooden thread sticking out of the hem of my blanket may be hard, hard and sharp as a steel needle; the fear that this little button on my night-shirt may be bigger than my head and heavier; the fear that the breadcrumb which just dropped off my bed may turn into glass, and shatter where it hits the floor …

Rainer Marie Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

frg. 1: Fear
· Setting out

frg. 2: And then went down to the ship
· Ezra Pound. The Cantos. “I have tried to write Paradise …”

frg. 3: The Force Pump.
· I. A. Richards

frg. 4: The Window With Bars On It
· Childhood recollection
· Basement apartment, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

frg. 5: The Importance Of Learning How To Count
· One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. Whereas prose is spatial, poetry is temporal. Ten. What the hell does that mean?

alt. frg. 5: Genetics And The Poetic Imagination
· Homer
· James Joyce

frg . 6: Speech Therapy
· My father’s stutter, stutter

frg. 7: Grocery Store Dictionary
· The process whereby a household dictionary is ‘convened’

frg. 8: Prodigious
· “Large in quantity or size”

frg. 9: The Knife Sharpener
· It was good to have sharp knives once again

frg. 10: X-Men
· Comics
· Superheroes in a beatnik café

frg.11: Tempus Fugit
· In which the audience is asked to imagine something, for a second or two

frg. 12: The History Of Canadian Blues
· An interlude musicale
· Richard Newell aka King Biscuit Boy

frg. 13: My Brother’s Transistor Radio
· Bob Dylan
· "Like a Rolling Stone"

frg. 14: High School Librarian
· Mr. N. R[..] C[......]

frg. 15: Hand-Written And Framed On The Wall
· Leonard Cohen
· "Go by brooks, love … "

frg. 16: Chagall
· Lawrence Ferlinghetti
· "Don’t let that horse/eat that violin … "

frg. 17: My Criminal Past
· Whereat the stolen property is displayed as proof of abject state

frg. 18: Mermaids
· ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ by T.S. Eliot

frg. 19: Staring Out Windows
· University College reading lounge [University of Western Ontario]
· Winter is determined to be the better season

frg. 20: On Blind Poets
· John Milton, briefly

frg. 21: … That Lead To Other Thoughts That Lead To Their Unraveling …
· William Blake. "Tyger! Tyger! burning bright …"

frg. 22: How My Boots Got Dry
· W.B. Yeats
· ‘The Second Coming’

frg. 23: An Open Letter To The World
· My literary review. Mine, mine, mine!
· World Letter

frg. 24: My Flooded Basement
· My flooded basement

frg. 25: Not Enough ‘Poetry’ To Continue
· Wallace Stevens

frg. 26: What The Editor, Writer and ‘Infamous’ Workshop Leader G[........] L[...] Told Me
· In a letter
· G[........] to Jon
· Iowa
· Punishment

alt. frg.26 What Gertrude Stein Had To Say About Iowa
· You are brilliant and subtle if you come from Iowa and really strange and you live as you live and
you are always well taken care of if you come from Iowa

frg. 27: The Transcendent Desk of Saint Thomas Aquinas
· My desk and one other

frg. 28: R[.............] J[..............]
· Iowa City, IA
· Drinking from plastic cups
· Montpelier, VT
· Riding bicycle home, neatly drunk and fearless

FIN

Was this a lecture? Was it useful? Like a hammer is useful? Like dental floss? You tell me.
I didn’t see Neruda in Paris, in 1957.
In 1957 I would have been two years old.
Well, okay then.
I was here, and so were you.

epigram

2009-04-23T09:08:00.000-07:00

Each time we exert our will we are exhibiting hope inside emptiness.

Fanny Howe, The Wedding Dress: meditations on word and life (2003).

allude to Shakespeare by 'using' a language

2009-04-23T06:38:00.000-07:00

THAT IS ‘KIND OF LIKE’ ENGLISH BUT PLAINLY MORE STUPID

If a freaking yeti were to walk into the café where I brood
like a hammer in a sack I would be like all, ‘hey yeti, fuck off,
I hate you!’ and the yeti would be crying and shit and then
he would get up exit pursued by a bear and I would be like
laughing my ass off, then I would begin weeping myself etc.
but with serviette or some such paper product placed against
mine own ‘gorgeous’ face so as to kind of disguise my tears
as if such betrayed a weird tic or seizure or something.

fragment from a contest

2009-04-23T06:26:00.000-07:00

[Translator’s note: My fear has stolen something from me. I am afraid of butcher’s aprons, cigarette lighters, dust, halos. I am afraid my mind went walking. I am afraid of hubcaps, burlap, pennies, dusty jawbones, metronomes. I am afraid of worms and pavement cracks. Anaphora is a form of fear and so: of moss and ivy, cornerstones, inscriptions, marginalia, graffiti, enclosures, broad sheets, variable spellings. I am afraid of yogurt, toy rocket ships, eye pencils, toothpicks, gusts, metallic, funnels. I am afraid of starts, coughs rolling down long dark hallways, the bells that always stop at seven, staplers, gods, hollow gods, stapled gods. I am afraid of tall men with one eye, ghostless dead, wooden dogs, the word ‘Peru’, men who do handstands for their children, microphones that smell of iodine, iron lungs, watercress, I am afraid of all that calls to me in this new world where language has been mugged, and kicked and punched, and skewered. I am afraid of chicken, turning on its spit. I am afraid, shivering, pullulating, obverting, reduced to pork, afraid. I am afraid of old keys, slippers, fruit flies, tennis balls, turnips, orange peel, lavender, forests, canoes, soprano saxophones, minnows, fishwives, wrist bands, bee hives, torture chambers, walnuts, chipmunks, bears, viral video, bare-knuckle fighting, assassins, marshmallows. I am afraid of tea stains, yellow teeth. I am afraid of the walrus if the walrus is Juan. I am afraid of mold, mildew, showers in basements, resumes. I am afraid of touching your wound, your monkey, your toothbrush, your ordnance, ordinals, ordination. Stairways that go nowhere and stairways that do. Rusted hulls, gulls, gall, gills, gaols, goals. The ribbed portion. The level reading. The heavy air. The humid light. The desk of the dead man, where he slumps at his desk, translating. The dialect of what matters most to those who live in now. The now. I am afraid of this moment, the next, the next. And binary code. And the plumber’s assistant of the strange milky left eye, wandering, appraising. I am afraid of diamonds, jewelers. I am afraid the arc of this hunched convulsive art, dream versus nightmare, locked, invertebrate. Your name, my name, her name, their names. I am afraid of poor typing, poor spelling. Ugly things. Beautiful things. Plastic spoons. Dental hygienists. I am afraid of argyle socks, pipes unattended, old studies, bookshelves, carbon dating, cross-eyed women doing the splits, shuffling psychos, absinthe, flying saucers, Bigfoot, bowling shoes, arcades, old unused diaries, panty lines, nuns, folding bicycles, wet towels thrown on the floors of change rooms, low tide, peanut brittle, middle-aged figure skaters, finger puppets, Punch and Judy, wires, dried turtles, physics equations, rinds, fingernail clippings. I am driven to a ‘kind of pseudo-afraid’ by bass clarinets, one armed drummers, death metal performance artists, videographers, sentence parsing, jelly fish, greens eggs and ham, the word ‘homoeroticism’, the word ‘plankton’, the word ‘watercress’, the word ‘plenitude’, the phrase ‘coming of age’, the word 'slack', the word ‘moist.’ I am made afraid, raised to a state of ‘fear fearing itself’, by barreling bison and erupting sausage. The Sieve of Eratosthenes. One or two or three or seventeen things. Of which I am afraid. I am even afraid of that of which I am not afraid. I am afraid of everything that is actual and everything that is not. Everything that might be but is not. Everything that will be but won’t. Everything and anything. Anything and nothing. Nothing and everything. All things that are, are light. And light makes me afraid. Omnia sunt, lux sunt.]

***

The above post was reposted by someone -- with minor alterations -- to a website with which I have no connection whatsoever. No permission was sought, nor was there any attribution. All my attempts to have my work removed from this website have thus far proved futile. Attempts to pursue this matter further have led to me to the point where a message reads: 'This user has decided to delete their account and the content is no longer available.'

fragment 27

2009-04-22T13:48:00.000-07:00

HOW MY BOOTS GOT DRY

Winter. A sky brought low with cloud. I’m in the lounge, reading Yeats. Puzzling my way through the widening gyre and those falcons that cannot hear, wondering about ‘the center [that] cannot hold.’ I try to imagine his ‘rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem’ in monstrous terms: thick-limbed, carrying in one claw a hammer and bucket of blood in the other, and extending a killing horn back to the symmetrical tiger of Blake. It is the fearsome tiger in this comparison that seems truly loved.

My boots were often wet back then. By the time I was ready to leave they would be dry.

for it to make edge-wise in this living hatch

2009-04-16T11:51:00.001-07:00

A DIFFERENCE THAT IS WORTHY

What skirrs beyond |an eye-globe pitched
To where is kept brim | from the ricked oak tree
And I am too much sold | for these loud brunts:
Any a gall-shod beast |and burst-lit seed extending

epigram

2009-04-15T18:14:00.000-07:00

Yoursebl live on demigorgon offspring fearfnll love.

Susan Howe, The Birth-Mark: unsettling the wilderness in American literary history (1993).

***

The above is not a mistake, but surely one of the more surprising sentences in American literary criticism.

fragment 7

2009-04-13T03:20:00.000-07:00

GROCERY STORE DICTIONARY

There were never many books in our house, when I was young. We weren’t that kind of family. The only dictionary I used through all the years I lived at home was one purchased in sections from a local grocery store. Every week a new section would be added to our shopping cart. As the weeks passed, the dictionary grew before me like some kind of weird alien sibling. It assumed its final form when my parents bought the red binder into which all sections were carefully placed. I have loved this dictionary for many years. It resides in my father’s house.

OLYMPIC TOOL & DIE CO. BY THE SEA

2009-04-12T10:01:00.000-07:00

I didn’t fully understand what I’d been told,
but galloped ahead. The lash I understood
to be the first step, unleashing and re-threading
of a turbo-charged hand-scallop. Next I hauled
the lanyard about two feet. Gave an extra six
inches for safety’s sake. No sweat. I broke for
five the better to appreciate and review what I’d
accomplished so proceeding would be smooth.

Hephaestus gimped by. Bullshit, he spat.
You know it, I echoed. Away he humped as
I renewed my purchase of the task. The pintle
chain was tangled, so I untangled. Applied grease
to the sever horns. Used a winch to tighten the wing
leader up to about the head of the weighted grim.
Nicely done. Then Aphrodite sashayed by,
diaphanous Aphrodite from payroll. I paused
to admire her magnificence. Her liquid rolling hips.
I jerked myself back. Again to my blackened paws

I drifted, gripped the south yaw, wound it once twice
thrice about the stud pin, extracted its center gort,
which I half-noted was missing several punts and
heavily pitted. This is where things began to go south.

I don’t know why I figured a compass trout was plugged or
that I could re-route the trundle-set anyway. I pushed
at it hard, using my hips against its frontal globe.
Across the shop floor, reflected in the walk-in freezer door,
I could see it, the grind prop sheathing in then out,
far into the dock-niche. Suddenly in one long
loud unforgiving crack the whole thing shuddered
to a sickening end-stop. Silence like a flood. My heart
the single pump. Just then Hephaestus leered
around the corner. How he lived for
this kind of shit. Guys blowing it, fucking up.

All I could think to keep myself from losing it
was Aphrodite, transcendent Aphrodite,
acutely sweetly imperiled, while I balanced on a trireme’s
oar-lock tearing my coarse shirt, set to leap overboard
to save her from that vast tumult of wild dark water.

epigram

2009-04-10T14:56:00.000-07:00

Truth is water. Attraction makes it open.

Fanny Howe, The Birth Mark: unsettling the wilderness in American literary history (1993)

a poem to complete section 40 of W.S. Graham's 'Implements In Their Places'

2009-04-09T09:57:00.000-07:00

YOU ball peen hammer ………………………
YOU toilet plunger ……………………………
YOU needle nose pliers…………………………
YOU hoe……………………………………

epigram

2009-04-06T18:29:00.000-07:00

And then the storm of shit begins.

Roberto Bolano, By Night of Chile (2000, tr. 2003).

the cullings

2009-04-03T03:06:00.000-07:00

From Reports of
The Princeton University
Expeditions
to Patagonia (1896-1899)

A creeping small,
glabrous with short
truncate
ligules.

Dorsally scabrous,
subapically awned,
the awn exceeding the flower.

Stems clustered from a running
rootstock.

Very closely imbricating,
distichous,
ovate,
more or less silky.

Obtuse, their margins, thin-purplish.

Cleft from the middle, moderately
bulbous-thickened at base.

Small, handsome.
Often curved,
leafless.

Floating, stemless, pubescent
with fibrous roots.

Dense tuft,
in simple and compound
umbels.

One third way leafy.

Having a straight cylindrical
calyx-tube.

Erect,
annual,
hairy,
FOOT LONG!

Flowers numerous, somewhat
salver-shaped and nutant,
and rather obscured.

The labellum, its rostrum
winged.
LABELLUM! ROSTRUM! WINGED!

Leaves and stems unknown,
yet common in mountains,
certain meadows.

Leaves all radical.
Nerves slightly
or not
projecting from the surface.

Fruit a drupe.

Dense bush,
with leafage of boxwood.

PENDULOUS & FIVE-TOOTHED!

At length distending
and rupturing
the calyx.

Placentae fleshy,
central.

Cosmopolitan,
8-12 ribbed,
yet abounding in the tropics of

Magellan, moist pastures of
Fuegia and Falklands,

Of North Patagonia, near the mouth
of Rio Negro,

At confluence of Rivers
Limay and Neuquen

– in the rainy zone as high as man –

By Hatcher at Coy Inlet,
Nov. 18th
year not noted.

nice going, august

2009-04-01T15:16:00.001-07:00

I love the rain.
I hear someone speaking in Spanish.
Now they are laughing in Spanish.
Another woman is explaining
how to write a paragraph. This is crucial,
she says. This is crucial. Someone asks
How was your summer? Like those
clear moments when glass shatters.
We will never outlast them.

***

Tradational, Jon Cone. Arrangement, Mary Ruefle.

beauty? language? threshold?

2009-04-01T14:51:00.000-07:00

This stuttering sky strung this day and hour
under which the world conducts itself, oblivion
to its what? Could you describe it? Would
that be meaning added to the world as is?
The iron gate at the park entrance sort of floats.
What color is it? What atomic weight? Where
the brave horses heroically still on hind legs?

Here the noisy avenue is muffled, a surf heard
in semi-swoon. What else? Maybe an idler
left behind catches a cyclist who seems a flash
of bloodied form hurtling through greenish cloud
set down beside the pond with its ordinary frogs.
So much is simple drift. The stone benches
for example are wonderful. But let’s be honest,
impossible to sleep on. Questions appall me.