Gary Sullivan's quiescent blog appears to be overflowing. he's looking back over the years, and the influences in them. watch out, I might be inspired to do the same. as in: nice to see Happy Hollisters pictured!!!

nice action word stuff at Pantaloons, especially as unexpected on a blog. standard (high) quality interview with Nick Piombino at Tom Beckett's blog, Tom simply does interviews. and I wiped my compute after a trojan did enough, but I'm back and I'm proud...

monday ocean 

the excitement mounts

yep, soon enough I will be transforming this blog into a whole new realm of wonders. but that's not to say you still won't get the same great vision of a future that is now, poetrywise, with scintillant examinations of contemporary problematics and wiseacre fun. so keep checking out this blog. when I finally up the ante here, you'll know I've upped it something fierce.

I've decided to start wriitng really great stuff for this blog so queue up, the hit points will be mounting something fierce.

and the point wasn't really that Whimsy mentioned me, tho it's just a surprise mostly to get noticed, but that the variety on the blog and scope is good and worth reading. I am very scattered now.

oops. link thus to Tim Peterson's commentary re Kasey's post, and thence to Kasey's.

Whimsy Speaks works for me (so onto the blogroll doth it go). even mentioned me. ah, to be mentioned! Whimsy says simply that the Lowell flarf piece I wrote gave mixed results. one might say less than mixed if the attempts by the other flarfsters were compared. I think this that I wrote 5 years ago is better flarf, assuming that I know what flarf is. what I gleaned from the others concerning their method: they start with a vision or intention, then bring the poem out of that. Kasey replaced letters with other letters, spellchecked, babelfished, then edited into what he liked. I was much more tentative in the method. Google searches generally are pretty focussed or thematic, like having an underlying Scott Baio allusion. I'm not particularly comprehensive, I suspect, so I caught up in phrases that sounded good. making the poem was another matter, just stringing lines together. note Jack Kimball's work here and there on his blog for fascinating flarfoid methodology, not to label him. it's a way of gathering tone together, isn't it? it's not really about method, except in a minor technical sense, but the presence of the work. anyway...

I liked Tim Peterson's response to Kasey Mohammad's disquisition upon the topic of publishing. I think Tim is right that Kasey in this go sticks to dialectical materialism rather than including socialogy and psychology. I have dumped what I wrote about this as I added nothing to what was already said. I know when to sit out.

we took a day trip, Erin, Beth and I, north even unto southernmost New Hampshire. we meant to do an overnight on Cape Cod in this time, maybe Provincetown, but maintenance of the dog placed kibosh on that motive in the time we had available. we took 128, that mole that gets at Tyre, till Rt 1. which is to say, we hit Massachusetts North Shore (Nawth Shaw, in local parlance, tho not really), and into the little bit of NH's coastline. well whatever. we found Hampton Beach, NH, a scuzzy seaside focal point of summery pizzas, arcade games and shoreline distribution of pleasure, small version. resident of this state for 52 of my 52 years, I natheless don't think I've ever exactly hit this locale before. we saw a sign that said: Hampton Beach, Open Year Round. apparently that just meant that the roads continued to exist in wintertime. it looked like Jersey's boardwalk, but it had succumbed to the terrible disease called winter. not a lumpy grease of pizza could be procured, nor arcade game explosive reliance on success, either. it was fuckin' WINTER there, completely absorbed in winterness. we removed ourselves from the car and I took a few pictures. the wind was beastly off the water, and the waves were serious tumble of oh my god. it was lovely, if biting. an ecstatic moment when I looked up to see a large number of gulls hanging close overhead in full throttle hover. my photos thereof didn't capture the raiding thrill of immobile flight, alas. from there we motivated back to a clearly lively restaurant that we passed in plain Hampton. from there a journey toward Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Portsmouth was settled in 1623, wowzer. this whole area was a major commercial node of the continent until Jefferson started instituting embargoes. it's still alive there, plump with mill beauty and several gazillion restaurants. it is anti-New Hamphire: a-buzz and prosperous and secure. life is art and restaurants and successful leisure. I mean that seriously. check out the college towns, where vitality translates as cute restaurants and quirky bookstores. sure, there are people there too, but it's about having something to do that isn't just 'doing'. that's even true in West Virginia, which is only physically like heaven, and only if the trashing where you are isn't too explicit. something beyond church socials, and I am not speaking against church socials, only noting that a more compulsive energy DOES exist, unbranded by church wardens. I am laying it on heavily, but only in self-defense. my father is dying. my brother called as we were wending homeward. that my father relapsed. that he is not eating. that he's taking oxygen and IV fluids. sad and all that, this is no different from you and yours. I am trying to add the parts together. we found a beach entrance on Plum Island (Massachusetts), where I could barely see for the windblown sand. but the crashing grey waves, taking pictures of Erin, love among all. meanwhile my father in an iceberg roaming loss, tho my brother's call came later, if sequential time is really our cue. some tumbled rocks, into the sea, upon which Erin clambered. reminding me of Halibut Point in Rockport, and time squeezed into neurons and expectation. are you following me here, I mean just a little? I'm just curious. Newbury and Newburyport, slightly lost in Salem. I took 168 pictures, some of which are focussed. the monstrance sea, the look of here and there. I wish I could practice the sensible meander. we made a family day, drove a family distance, feel a family loss, all in a simple day.

Internal Jorie Graham

Please have the new deadly astounded teacher of rhetoric and eloquence read manuscripts in the night by students begged to be discussions of deadly art in the fall by poetry attached to hopes. Graham passed from Harvard of the workshops of the astounded boasted authors to the deadly University of Iowa, where since 1983 she has taught conducted poetry. Largely begged Graham publicly predominated six books of original poetry in the course of the last deadly 20 years, and several anthologies spent as of the main astounded votes in American poetry. This volume of chosen poetry, called the deadly astounded dream by deadly astounded uniform, gained ground on the price of a Pulitzer in 1996. Anyone begs Graham, the first deadly astounded woman professor at the department keeping United Kingdom and American literature and language, a chair with boasted slaughter that returns begging to John Quincy Adams. She has the astounded unanimous choice of establishing an especially international mental committee of research for the laureate nobly replacing Seamus Heaney, who kept the astounded position dead the previous year. "It is a terrible rendezvous to have been called," the chair Laurent Buell, deadly astounded John P. Marquand Teacher of Craven England, said. "We are very lucky to have it." According to colleagues and former students at Iowa, Graham is not a poet but an extraordinary head of scientific staff shine.

Beth and I had visited my father, and were standing at the elevator holding hands. this woman sat at her post nearby. she hadn't said anything when we were at the desk, but as we stood there she says, oh what a lovely couple. she's smiling sweetly, your dream grandmother. she says to Beth, are you married? yes. do you love him? yes. does he love you? yes. oh that's so lovely. earlier I noticed her talking to a nurse. not crabby or abusive at all. a stunning change in demeanor. when my father was in the common room (he's getting better slowly but jeez is he tired), 2 women sat together at a table. my father lunched with them once when we were there. one woman appears blind, very discouraged and unhappy. she roared out during that lunch, this food SUCKS. the other woman is nervous but engaged. she encouraged the other woman and my father to eat. she tucked in pretty well herself, tho with a lot of nervous movements. yesterday, as I already said, she sat with the blind woman. she spent the time tapping the table with one hand and doing a wiping motion with the other. at one point, she reached her hands out to the blind woman and said firmly, give me your hands, give me your hands. reaching out, putting a touch of the world to the blind woman. another woman roamed around in a wheelchair. she held an infant doll to her breast and a children's Christmas book sat next to her. I think of that missionary we encountered the other evening. what he had to give, tho couched in religion, was mere political resolution. what is religion anyway but cultural stricture. it's the city's relief, not mine or yours. one day that woman is spouting religious crunch, and I mean crunch as in an insect's carapace, underfoot. another day, she sees a spiritual light. I mean, isn't that the difference in the 2 encounters? all these needy, needy people, what does religion do for them? it gives them hardened, emptied words to project, projectile in indifference. empty words abound, thus touch is so important.