Seize Song #9, totally fresh at _______, or click on the link to the right for the blog version (black background!!!).

a poem I posted to Trade Station. it consists of the words in the 1st panel of today's Rhymes With Orange comic strip, and some of the words in the final panel of today's Dilbert. when a method becomes methodical one enters into the world of repetition. today the authors in eternity used comic strips to get their poem across. the point would be to be open to possibilities. that a single way of writing doesn't exist. I don't need to explain my limitations but sometimes, even so, I notice a different means. yesterday John Bennett posted a poem with the occasional word spelled backwards. he has experimented with that a bit, but yesterday's poem really worked for me. the effect is of oblique emphasis. unscrambling the words you land on them longer than you might otherwise. interesting that one of the words used was nword, which itself has a life as a word, a highly charged one. I was about to post John's poem but I can't do the format, and tho Google archives Wryting (as Fiction of Philosophy), it is several weeks behind. anyway, I liked the poem that came my way today.

lovely sounding recipe but I tried all day and couldn't get the oven to 30%. 30% of what? I wonder what prison this child is incarcerated in and what's she in for.

John Latta on Davenport. I don't hate that Davenport's dead so much am as glad that he was alive.

my comments below on Davenport are wholly inadequate. I didn't want to be saying he gave 27 cents to every dime. I enjoyed his worked in the way I enjoy few, like O'Hara, say. and I learned from him. I know I did, tho that is so hard to identify let alone quantify. I still hate eulogies.

part 8 of Seize song here at my popup village. blogger version ici.

Guy Davenport just recently died. he was a writer I enjoyed reading greatly. I place him with Flann O'Brien as a writer that simply never a made a bad sentence. he comes to mind when I realize my writing's getting tortuous. helps me to keep each word in view. he bore his scholarship lightly. he was as comfortable with Ancient Greece as he was with North Carolina. his essays aren't just perceptive, they are invigourating. he has set me off reading many writers just by sharing hgis loving attention. his stories are wonderful modernist intersections, playful and wittily strange. I don't recall thru what agency his writings came to my attention. glad that it did.

thanks to Mark Young for linking to Seize Song, as well as supplying useful criticism. he quotes a bit, which, when I read it, reminded me of my own writing. I suspect that if I knew my writing better, I would write less freely. I don't think this is true of everyone but I have found it true for me.

If time restarts they
may present a
possible future, but in
this tableauxed moment
only the music
captures him.

Mark Young's poem stands by itself as a poem. with reference to the painting (I read the poems on Series Magritte before I check out the painting), the poem becomes an interpretation. I don't know Magritte's work well, recall that Jeff Beck's 2nd album bore a Magritte (was it apple head man?). I think of RM like Escher, as in: whoa, that's pretty whack! Magritte's both weird and compelling. this painting is not just a little disturbing, not as goofy as some of his works. Magritte's more dreamlike than nightmarish but so very odd.

Seize Song Seven

Mark Young offered me the suggestion of using Blogger as a place to put Seize Song, to which I mean to make daily additions. to avoid the popups of my site as well as Blogger's anti-chronological presentation, he suggested one blog with daily links to the work, and one with the work itself. right now, I offer the Seize Song blog. the web site will continue. if this thing get 'done' I'll make a pdf available. for my fans, you understand. I put Digital Cellular Phone into pdf format but, haha, my free web host doesn't allow files greater than a meg (this one is 1.1 mb). if you're interested in DCP (the format's better than my rudimentary html work), email me, and I will spam you. anyway, thanks to Mark for the advice.

yeah, popups exist on my site. and I don't like 'em but it's the best I can do. I spent a long, long time entirely unread. I just wasn't connected to other writers. when I came to the internet 6 years ago, I began finding outlets for my writing. I posted to listservs, I entered correspondence with writers, and more recently, I started a blog (several, actually) and a web site. I suppose it looks like vanity press to publish via one's own website, but to me it's no more so than the vanity of seeking the editorial okay (The Shifted Flower wants three of my poems!!!). I think my writing is worth reading, which is kind of like saying I think my life is worth living. I love printed books but the cost of producing them isn't within my realm currently. and how many publishers seek 300+ page mss from little known writers? I have an 800 page ms, my best work yet, just waiting to be seen. so I have begun (slowly) learning a bit about doing it myself online. popups sure are not an aesthetic choice, they are practical. if having popups allows me to have an online presence, I'll accept it. I think my blog proves that I think about other writers, and support their efforts. it is actually a breakthru for me to push my own work. matters like whether I am 'not good enough' or that I 'haven't played the game' aren't important at all. some small part of my work is available, and people can choose to read or not. it is like this for all of us. I've gone years and years without anyone reading my work, so I can get by without audience. but that's not to say I don't wish to have one. as I've already said, I'm doing the best I can.

the Penn Sound audio files (linked to the right) are really exciting. listened to Stacy Doris, Berrigan, Olson. Berrigan does all of The Sonnets. great intro, in which he just riffs on how he came to write this grand d'oeuvre. Olson sounds like a previous generation. he reads in a dramatic way that sounds a little old-fashioned. his accent is sure New England, 'purer' maybe. than you'd here much now. my father was born 3 months afer Olson, in Cambridge, 50 miles east of Olson's Worcester, but the accents are different. it's a gold mine here. Blaser lectures on Olson, Hannah Weiner, Oppen, Reznikoff, Dorn's Gunslinger, and younger poets too.

Seize Song, part 6

things outside 

more Seize Song: As Drift Into Daylight. trying to get a daily rhythm of not just writing but posting to my site. by the way, don't regard them as popups, recognize them as GREAT MORTGAGE RATES!!!. um, the above title sounds kinda poetryish, doesn't it? I doesn't want to go that route.

filling in some blanks. 1st Slought Dot Org audio files. Olson's here, as I mentioned, and I just noticed Coltrane and Sun Ra interviews. looks like one of these sites where you do a lot of clicking afore you find the goods. some transcripts of the audio files, which is handy. 2nd: Spaceship Tumblers, more audio (L Carter, T Tost, as I did mench yesterday). I would ask for the text as well. I don't know the history of poetry readings in our modern sense. I know the Romantics would party down with poetry read and written, Whitman must've impressed his acolytes with his latest correction of the text, etc. Vachel Lindsay hit the circuit with his dramatic readings. what about Pound and the modernists? I suppose the Beats brought readings to popular public consumption. I read my work aloud now and then. sometimes to/for Beth, sometimes as part of the writing process. my own sense of reading wants the work to do the work, id est, I would prefer as the reader to temper performance. à la Michael Gizzi, who reads low key but crisp (low key I got but I'm probably not crisp). but I recognize other ways exist. anyway, stuff to listen to.