Saturday, June 25, 2005
Friday, June 24, 2005
I made contact with Alli Warren re her chapbook (Hounds) and the getting thereof. Jack Mohammad and Kasey Kimball both have jumped that vintage gun, and lit the instigation fuse, so you don't have to follow my ilk suggestion. my own primped instinct requires that this poetry (AW's) is something warming rock into motion. I suggest that you do a likewise vis-a-vis getting a hold of said chapbook. after I read about 3 words writ by Alli I decided she must be something, but at least the brainiacs concur.
I was invited to join a collaborative blog, which I done, thusly: Taking The Brim. this is an opportunity of blog that I like. I think it was Ted Berrigan, describing the scene (probably in one of the really pissa interview collections with himself: he was someone who could make an interview an event (Olson would be another, off the top me head)), and how people would add stuff to unattended typewriters, collaboration without hardly trying. and then there was the mimeo movement, a sort of potlatch distribution of texts. both pieces I've posted so far are text twiddles. one of a poem by James Thomson, one a snatch from the Book of Mormon. I don't consider this 'my' writing, in the sense that I claim nothing but the idea to mess so with these texts. not that I don't stand by that. but I'm talking the falsity of claim, of what I am 'doing'. it's a received process, I guess, just as it would be if I started dripping and heaving paint on a horizontal canvas might be effective but I'd feel Pollockish. I can absorb practices, but when my mind consciously experiments, it often seems imitative. any of that make sense? I'm not building up creative sovreignity, just identifying my most natural course.
Thursday, June 23, 2005
Stuttering Cop
the poets slop over the till. They muck about in sand and mud, real flossy bosses and querying glances towards the back door of the bar. From there, snuck or boldly, a guidance system missile formation. What were you wondering in the little store where cigarettes turn into mounds? Did you need a bottle of surveys? The coast wasn't even clear, it was murky, yet you coughed up this dream emphasis, and made it a rage. Rage doesn't work well. Not here, in the gloaming of the perfect tunnel. One place exists so that another place can, balanced thus. Reference is for kids, mostly, but adults, as poets, can gather their trodden with a verity of tradition and lies, all waxed nice. The coffee they drink will surprise. So you say Ted Berrigan died?
He died. He was readied, pleased, something. A short drift across the natural river, a loan of some trouble, then cross to deeper waters. Forever, even, sweet as that. It's not the dying who care so much, we like to claim. It's the growing readership, and their friends in the phone book. The phone book may look anachronistic, but at least it is orderly. Each person constitutes some universe of beginning and end. Then you go to the library. Then you quietly approach.
But the biography of Ted Berrigan becomes more hesitant the more one looks. Why should we include each name in our debts? Doesn't injunction carry some colour? Will the whole process become moribund before we even have a chance to try? Alert and creamy, that coffee tricked up so nicely will be important in the annals. It will be cited as the monstrance for 'quite a day'. Ted Berrigan, you know, did this and that. Famously. It seems like it all becomes our second nature. And you can point to evidence, just as daybreak starts so real. Starting now always sounds wonderful in the light of morning. You should pay that much respect.
Meanwhile,
Bernadette Mayer dusted off a few things. Life is the colour of tremendous items, each organized toward processual delight. Delight then is a tiny button on the exclusive machine. Trust a blossom of hurdy gurdy readiness, plush carpet field of dandelion loss and comfort, all tied to a radial beginning. Are we met with stipulations everyday, or do we just adjust our tuners to conditional response? Bernadette Mayer will grow a story over old and new, likely as that sounds. Our libraries will exceed.
Walt Whitman, then, and following on: what a tradition of tripe! Bosh at the door when you arrive so formidably. The cops got us surrounded. Frankie, they plugged me. Tell Lola I love her! and so a life of crime for our Good Gray. shields are down. The beachhead has been made into pudding, lovely effect of sprinkles on the crown of sauce or vision. Eventually you resist the throng of emphatic violations and instill a right perception via tear ducts, ramparts, delivery trucks, beach umbrellas, dorsal fins and more merriment than a bottle could include. Such vitality could be a beginning, a chance for the old professor to show some stuff. Yes, it is stuff.
Walt Whitman rides it high, worth extra points. His coffee is smack. We like to point out the little things, and how they vary with the wind's chucking sound (out goes 'another'). Chuck this, and the brothers and sisters of the same.
A reunion vote, a plectrum institute, a votive merger, a causality machine, a membrane word, a vent preen, a cup society, a chandelier umpteenth, a squawk wallop, a desperate keyboard, a verb choice,
and that is how we inhale the hovering. Sample of Anne Waldman at work, rustle of New York and so on. What a trend to invent, while worrying about the institution as a hole. Those simple reading bookstores were just down the street, clean as covered but just for a time. in that suffering, much went into trying out. You didn't forget Alice Notley or James Schuyler did you, as you looked for a book? You were angry only when things found arrangement without your hand in the deed. No one criticizes with complete pictures, what would be the point? The city has its guttering flames, as do we all. Church choirs effect some rational difference, likewise those ridiculous trains running over and over the same news. Everything is quite screwed up, and more wonderful than ever. Thus a piquant version arrives via delta formation every few years. And erstwhile stories radiate something fresher than companionship. Oh but love, inside the least version and never surely just the childhoods served. A likely explosion will save New York once again. And we'll have a generation, all to ourselves.
It is that simple.
He died. He was readied, pleased, something. A short drift across the natural river, a loan of some trouble, then cross to deeper waters. Forever, even, sweet as that. It's not the dying who care so much, we like to claim. It's the growing readership, and their friends in the phone book. The phone book may look anachronistic, but at least it is orderly. Each person constitutes some universe of beginning and end. Then you go to the library. Then you quietly approach.
But the biography of Ted Berrigan becomes more hesitant the more one looks. Why should we include each name in our debts? Doesn't injunction carry some colour? Will the whole process become moribund before we even have a chance to try? Alert and creamy, that coffee tricked up so nicely will be important in the annals. It will be cited as the monstrance for 'quite a day'. Ted Berrigan, you know, did this and that. Famously. It seems like it all becomes our second nature. And you can point to evidence, just as daybreak starts so real. Starting now always sounds wonderful in the light of morning. You should pay that much respect.
Meanwhile,
Bernadette Mayer dusted off a few things. Life is the colour of tremendous items, each organized toward processual delight. Delight then is a tiny button on the exclusive machine. Trust a blossom of hurdy gurdy readiness, plush carpet field of dandelion loss and comfort, all tied to a radial beginning. Are we met with stipulations everyday, or do we just adjust our tuners to conditional response? Bernadette Mayer will grow a story over old and new, likely as that sounds. Our libraries will exceed.
Walt Whitman, then, and following on: what a tradition of tripe! Bosh at the door when you arrive so formidably. The cops got us surrounded. Frankie, they plugged me. Tell Lola I love her! and so a life of crime for our Good Gray. shields are down. The beachhead has been made into pudding, lovely effect of sprinkles on the crown of sauce or vision. Eventually you resist the throng of emphatic violations and instill a right perception via tear ducts, ramparts, delivery trucks, beach umbrellas, dorsal fins and more merriment than a bottle could include. Such vitality could be a beginning, a chance for the old professor to show some stuff. Yes, it is stuff.
Walt Whitman rides it high, worth extra points. His coffee is smack. We like to point out the little things, and how they vary with the wind's chucking sound (out goes 'another'). Chuck this, and the brothers and sisters of the same.
A reunion vote, a plectrum institute, a votive merger, a causality machine, a membrane word, a vent preen, a cup society, a chandelier umpteenth, a squawk wallop, a desperate keyboard, a verb choice,
and that is how we inhale the hovering. Sample of Anne Waldman at work, rustle of New York and so on. What a trend to invent, while worrying about the institution as a hole. Those simple reading bookstores were just down the street, clean as covered but just for a time. in that suffering, much went into trying out. You didn't forget Alice Notley or James Schuyler did you, as you looked for a book? You were angry only when things found arrangement without your hand in the deed. No one criticizes with complete pictures, what would be the point? The city has its guttering flames, as do we all. Church choirs effect some rational difference, likewise those ridiculous trains running over and over the same news. Everything is quite screwed up, and more wonderful than ever. Thus a piquant version arrives via delta formation every few years. And erstwhile stories radiate something fresher than companionship. Oh but love, inside the least version and never surely just the childhoods served. A likely explosion will save New York once again. And we'll have a generation, all to ourselves.
It is that simple.
Henry Gould's recent notes on poetry are dense, well thought out, useful. I would say this is a good use of blog. working out the central launch pad of poetry as he understands it. I wouldn't say he's being controversial here, but working out a problem due to intrinsic need. blogs are a place for that. there's a sense of ephemera with such writing. I know if my blog ever disappears, then it is gone: I am not saving it, it is writing on the wall. that transitoriness informs the writing, tho one can of course save one's posts. this is public mulling, should be respected as such. that this refers to he 'genre' here evoked, and to Henry's specific contribution.
Wednesday, June 22, 2005
Henry takes my writing seriously in a way that I can only humbly appreciate. or maybe not humbly. see: as dumb as I sound, or superficial, in this playful arena, I have put mental effort to what I 'do', as a writer. the piece to which Henry refers carries my intention, even if I didn't begin with a paragraph of theorhetical construction. I recognize an emotional value, one that cozzens to certain New York poets, say, or the exciting sight of the GW Bridge. I take that emotion seriously enough, that the words that I write will ride properly. maybe I am unnecessarily defensive about this. there is a an obvious care to Henry's work, and to Ron Silliman's work (hail to thee, strange bedfellows) which, I surmise, is less obvious in my work. but my writing possesses care as well. I think my integration is done on a different level. blah blah, of course, I don't mean to preen. I rarely see comments on my work, but find the preceptions useful.
Similar Stance Among Heating Elements
the season broke onto regards, while streets were stippled. Avast hard farthing, that undue piece, that screen across the nether. Whichever prong side with the sorrow, those oceanic miseries of genuflection, that scuff of language. We sent a throng into the merger, strong case for a body politic. We set up a recon, a daily brim, a buoyant little lattice. Then the days were golden, for range existed in terms that would relinquish finally. We would read every word, before and after, even the haze and canyon. Here we found a document:
the praying monster occurred at status round, process heard of, verbal rendering stricken off course. Gestures swell to maximum, almost settling into New York. We can buy the island with 2 more complete payments. Here's Walt Whitman, in time to the late news and tune:
my aches and endless breeding stirred, and love, gust, it was all the same. Then feeding the hazard just a slight, then rockets towards the Republic, then a minor destiny fattened with scholarship. I tell you, it could happen.
Then Ted Berrigan roamed a trifle:
as if scuzz were no better. As if church all across the meandering, without a parking lot safely funded. We jammed a dawning thought on doughnuts, fucking the symptom for a princely sum. You bet your ass.
Then Bernadette Mayer:
surely the coastal waters, subsumed in literature, practiced by anyone. Surely too the strong guff of ghosts, monkey business, surreptitious practice on the sly side of meaning. everyone goes there, almost, and no one runs across the street so merrily as this one joke of a word. No, not that one, a believable trip.
Then Frank O'Hara;
then nothing less, and if I could dance, all the preening stars of Hollywood trouble could send their artists into the salon. Oh salon, itself a tributary! The gold of haste, the treason of spur, the gallop up the stairs to identify a plush carpet trust. Is this really the last days of anything?
Identity can be patient, after all. The streets are thick with what people do. They even say they did it, sometimes, but that's often a lie, often a perfect misconstruing. What legs the subway has, and what junk heaps come to the tall hotels, buffed into conviction. Illuminate the world with a special broadcast, about the city and even the few people. There are seven people in New York right now: seven. What seems like the rest have not unpacked.
Then John Ashbery:
I think I could lift a hand, or two, or even walk across the room. I think I have said enough, or two things even, in a fuzzily lit room. We are not doorknobs or excavation sites, when we talk late at night about perfect coffee machines. We stretch limits into anything, explaining the molten coffee rings on our most cherished books.
Then Anne Waldman:
scream consists of daily rags, not ragas, petulant combinations resistant to change. I've had enough of effrontery and the triage of jagged sidewalks. We won't be postal orders tonight, so why pretend there's pizza in the kitchen? I'm going home forever. I'll be back in half a sec.
Excuse the purpleness of this dawn, which could have been more rare in a grainier red delivery truck colour of divining fortune over cold waves. The ocean settles some bets, pays off, looks gorgeous like a truck instead of information. The harsh effort of street lights floating out to sea in lonely image, confusing but swirl, you won't relieve yourself of your drama. Then the waves smack something soft, like the rest of your love. Then the waves swarm the sandy palate of shoreline, the nibble we can invest. Then we look across the bay or shortly see more visions. Viking ships and native canoes and what not in a flood. There's more to carry, more. New York is toasted lightly, sprinkled with something to instill a right respect, and left to be enjoyed. We're ready as we wake. The smell is existence, laugh the poets, fresh in beer and it's 8 am. 8 am is an attitude, muddling much of the wanton job but still: look over the trees to see the real manhole covers. Forget the squirrels and pigeons and remind yourself of religion. Religion's door needs a covering chance, just so you can turn a phrase away from the obvious. That's how much the city cares!
Then trust these others, but leave them nameless:
gunk on shoes! Trucks stopping in the air at midday! Churches full of swept floors! How much more after leaving Boston, Omaha or halfway homes in mind or body? You spurn some frequencies and lavish presto marks on others. The champions run to the corner, buy bread with ritual, chew their own ideal, and spit in the gutter as planned. This city stuff makes us fractious, and no one wants to be vocabulary, alone in the way of all things. Here's too much, it just might be enough.
The city has a berry, round as completion but not very good in the sense of bringing rain when we come toward the light. We need a few things and hate a lot of jabber. The talk inside is just a bit better, when we drink coffee forever and order the sun to stop. The sun stops now, but night is in no hurry. Fog plumps up the cardiac insistence on fanning the flames. The flames will start the sun again, even as we weep. We do weep, it has been a long past, of complaints and mixtures and just the ordinary. We let the city continue its survey, because we haven't any power to command. We just run across the street, feeling guarded and swelling, then run back. The street is no process but an organic thump. The drum goes into the books, precious and scattered and righteously annoyed. the drum has a hold, firm and brittle. Like we're going to scream out orders to dance. Well we might. We might settle our love with the rest of humanity, finding the upper limit ridiculous but no less attractive. Are you listening as you read? Then you must seem to care. And having done that, seemed, you are ready to rush. Rush is for prisoners like us. We've felt the city's nearness and distance, twice per second in consecutive adherence. Trust language to go where it goes, and trust people to follow meekly. Why? Because everything is red.
One might as well ask the poets to surprise us. They may, or they may guard the pass.
the praying monster occurred at status round, process heard of, verbal rendering stricken off course. Gestures swell to maximum, almost settling into New York. We can buy the island with 2 more complete payments. Here's Walt Whitman, in time to the late news and tune:
my aches and endless breeding stirred, and love, gust, it was all the same. Then feeding the hazard just a slight, then rockets towards the Republic, then a minor destiny fattened with scholarship. I tell you, it could happen.
Then Ted Berrigan roamed a trifle:
as if scuzz were no better. As if church all across the meandering, without a parking lot safely funded. We jammed a dawning thought on doughnuts, fucking the symptom for a princely sum. You bet your ass.
Then Bernadette Mayer:
surely the coastal waters, subsumed in literature, practiced by anyone. Surely too the strong guff of ghosts, monkey business, surreptitious practice on the sly side of meaning. everyone goes there, almost, and no one runs across the street so merrily as this one joke of a word. No, not that one, a believable trip.
Then Frank O'Hara;
then nothing less, and if I could dance, all the preening stars of Hollywood trouble could send their artists into the salon. Oh salon, itself a tributary! The gold of haste, the treason of spur, the gallop up the stairs to identify a plush carpet trust. Is this really the last days of anything?
Identity can be patient, after all. The streets are thick with what people do. They even say they did it, sometimes, but that's often a lie, often a perfect misconstruing. What legs the subway has, and what junk heaps come to the tall hotels, buffed into conviction. Illuminate the world with a special broadcast, about the city and even the few people. There are seven people in New York right now: seven. What seems like the rest have not unpacked.
Then John Ashbery:
I think I could lift a hand, or two, or even walk across the room. I think I have said enough, or two things even, in a fuzzily lit room. We are not doorknobs or excavation sites, when we talk late at night about perfect coffee machines. We stretch limits into anything, explaining the molten coffee rings on our most cherished books.
Then Anne Waldman:
scream consists of daily rags, not ragas, petulant combinations resistant to change. I've had enough of effrontery and the triage of jagged sidewalks. We won't be postal orders tonight, so why pretend there's pizza in the kitchen? I'm going home forever. I'll be back in half a sec.
Excuse the purpleness of this dawn, which could have been more rare in a grainier red delivery truck colour of divining fortune over cold waves. The ocean settles some bets, pays off, looks gorgeous like a truck instead of information. The harsh effort of street lights floating out to sea in lonely image, confusing but swirl, you won't relieve yourself of your drama. Then the waves smack something soft, like the rest of your love. Then the waves swarm the sandy palate of shoreline, the nibble we can invest. Then we look across the bay or shortly see more visions. Viking ships and native canoes and what not in a flood. There's more to carry, more. New York is toasted lightly, sprinkled with something to instill a right respect, and left to be enjoyed. We're ready as we wake. The smell is existence, laugh the poets, fresh in beer and it's 8 am. 8 am is an attitude, muddling much of the wanton job but still: look over the trees to see the real manhole covers. Forget the squirrels and pigeons and remind yourself of religion. Religion's door needs a covering chance, just so you can turn a phrase away from the obvious. That's how much the city cares!
Then trust these others, but leave them nameless:
gunk on shoes! Trucks stopping in the air at midday! Churches full of swept floors! How much more after leaving Boston, Omaha or halfway homes in mind or body? You spurn some frequencies and lavish presto marks on others. The champions run to the corner, buy bread with ritual, chew their own ideal, and spit in the gutter as planned. This city stuff makes us fractious, and no one wants to be vocabulary, alone in the way of all things. Here's too much, it just might be enough.
The city has a berry, round as completion but not very good in the sense of bringing rain when we come toward the light. We need a few things and hate a lot of jabber. The talk inside is just a bit better, when we drink coffee forever and order the sun to stop. The sun stops now, but night is in no hurry. Fog plumps up the cardiac insistence on fanning the flames. The flames will start the sun again, even as we weep. We do weep, it has been a long past, of complaints and mixtures and just the ordinary. We let the city continue its survey, because we haven't any power to command. We just run across the street, feeling guarded and swelling, then run back. The street is no process but an organic thump. The drum goes into the books, precious and scattered and righteously annoyed. the drum has a hold, firm and brittle. Like we're going to scream out orders to dance. Well we might. We might settle our love with the rest of humanity, finding the upper limit ridiculous but no less attractive. Are you listening as you read? Then you must seem to care. And having done that, seemed, you are ready to rush. Rush is for prisoners like us. We've felt the city's nearness and distance, twice per second in consecutive adherence. Trust language to go where it goes, and trust people to follow meekly. Why? Because everything is red.
One might as well ask the poets to surprise us. They may, or they may guard the pass.
back from New Jersey. we went to help Beth's mother move, and also to chill out. Beth's mother and aunt have lived together for the past 2 years. in which time they discovered that their living together compatibility didn't quite exist, being as one is highly energetic and tother highly laid back. they go to their separate corners, the aunt leaving the place she lived in so long by the shore, the sale of which house will help finance the future. Beth's aunt had contracted a painter to paint her new condo before the move. this painter, tho he had a deadline to meet, did practically nothing except outrageously ask for more money, tho he'd been paid half, which was a bad move on the aunt's part to begin with. so with clock ticking (oh god, Reader, I've bored you already!), and in the face of perfected unreliability, the aunt fires the painter's ass. the aunt colourfully said on the phone to him, I don't care if you're Michelangelo painting the Pope's prick. so upshot, or upshit as I initially typed, Beth and I offered to do the painting. and when we got to the condo, a suspicious watery sound greeted us. water leaking from the valves of both toilets, and thru the ceiling, tra la. should I say long story short at this point? it appears our painter friend, when collecting his gear, tampered with these valves. he also scrawled a nasty note on the wall. so someone to dry out that mess, plus police report, plus change of locks. the plumber enjoyed piecing together a possible scenario (we supplied the motive for the alleged crime). one toilet could be a normal screwup but two incriminates... the guy knew that I wasn't going to be indigenous to this condo, but he took the trouble, inspired by native exuberence, to show me how he adjusted the ball thingie so that the tank wouldn't fill quite so much. I admit the workings of toilets are rather fascinating, but I'm sure what I witnessed was not quite the wonder that he saw. Beth and I did our best to paint during all that commotion. it got worse when the fans and dehumidifiers were set up, hellish noise. and air conditioning was turned off for a while, then nobody could figure out how to get it back on, with the temperature close to 90. so, basically, didn't relax much. I'm an inexperienced painter and born slob, so it is especially difficult for me to bear down and not paint the carpet, myself and everything else. at one point the neighbours, a young couple with their 1st baby due, came by, offering drinks, and the husband, former professional painter, helped for an hour. which meant a lot to us, the gesture. Beth cried. and so. the aunt has lived in the same place for some 40 years, has bigger than big issues about that, to the point of not wanting to sell her place, tho that money is integral to a lot of things going right. basic shit + fan meeting, as we learned driving back last night and so. I don't want to talk about it. well listen, I brought Tony Towle's Memoir with me. I had read it before and enjoyed it again. TT was lucky enough to live in a milieu of O'Hara, Koch, Berrigan. he's neither awed or ascerbic, is charmingly unassuming. I'd love to read more such memoir. he mentions his and Frank Lima's stagefright at their 1st big poetry reading. and Paul Blackburn somehow going on too long, so that people actually left the reading. I could name names of a couple poets who went on too long. one poet was boring from the beginning so that anything was too much, but the other had some good chops. I survived 2 Ginger Baker drum solos when I saw Cream lo these many, so I have a good sense of just taking it too far. the poet wated to read the entire chapbook, which was of a piece, but the poems blurred after a while (he'd read other stuff as well) and the clock tried and tried to say no. anyway, I haven't read Ron Padgett's portait of Joe Brainard but I'll bet it's good. Brainard seems so likeable. I've read 2 memoirs of Berrigan. Tom Clark's is workmanlike, as is everything that he does. Ron Padgett's is much warmer and useful. I don't connect too often with other artists, this wee blog is about the extent, but memoir is a sort of writing I'd like to do. would that I were interesting. anyhoo, I wrote some 10 pages while away, thick with New York and poets identified with it. it's a way of reacting to and imbibing my reading without the nature of thesis. I'll probably put a bit of it up, as well as some of the pictures I took. I also managed to read some of a history of the Latter Day Saints. otherwise it was eat, paint, and drive between the three basecamps. you know, New Jersey has a lot of traffic. perhaps the proper authorities could be informed about this.
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