I've been using writing procedures a lot as I write lately. Google trawling, find and replace, Babelfish, random spell check: these procedures all serve to remove the tyrant fromthe picture. I relinquish control to these procedures. I've tried various methods for doing so all my writer life. only recently, tho, have I felt that the results are 'mine'. partly I am more comfortable using these techniques, and partly, I'm allowing the processes to carry me. some people might worry that these proceses are too mechanical, but what could be more mechanical than squeezing words into metre and rhyme scheme? it is method, how one proceeds. I start with a text, which may or may not be especially 'interesting', which may or may not be mine. I may use phrases from it to do Google searches, in the hopes that this might turn something up (metaphor of fishing feels quite accurate). I may jostle the text via those computer techniques I mentioned. from there it absolutely feels like sculpting: remove what doesn't feel right and add what does. and play it by ear. the point is adventure. when you 1st begin writing, as a tyro, whether or not you are writing imitatively, you wreak a giddy flow. and that feeling, especially if you like the results, urges you to keep on. sometimes you find yourself trying to repeat the glory. I see that a lot in the work of Whitman and Ginsberg, but also in Keats' awful "Ode to Indolence". my own work shows many examples of that effort to return. playing with these techniques allows me to go somewhere else, bascially. find a different fountain. adventure is a good word.

Party Art

I have used the power of
words to overcome
scads of books. I call it
the serenade twice
removed. that means sharing
thoughts and ideas with
fellow weird words. I thought it
was excellent to use them
colour'd with my words
mainly. there's just a lot of
poems and the like in the
logistics, industry, association,
distribution that declare that
a procedure handles a
specified event . I enjoy
that serenade, navel-gazing,
that voice in my head.

I had ought to mench that Antic View continues to accumulate.

binocs 

arty picture 

present 

les coupes 

still life 

I enjoyed the Dylan fest on PBS. the sudden flashes get me: a brief shot of Muddy Waters working his mojo at high giddy up, a wee bit of Mike Bloomfield, that sort of thing. Allen Ginsberg acknowledging a poet more famous than he. I'd never seen/heard the infamous Newport show. not only was Bloomfield playing hard and loud, he was giving good guitar face. total folkie shock. the transformation of Dylan from soso folkie to champion songwriter is not news, but it was interesting to watch. all these pointless labels that people depended on. which is why I get squeaky over the usage of the phrase School of Quietude, with its gravity of laziness. best rock song of all time is a silly claim, albeit right in keeping with a pop slum like Rolling Stone. I would humbly offer the song "Omaha" by Moby Grape as the best, if someone really needs that kind of info. I'll grant "Like A Rolling Stone" is anthemic, tho that AAAA rhyme scheme hinders my ability to anoint it. and mid-tempo rocker doesn't quite seem appropriate for the award. whereas "Omaha" proceeds, in 2 1/2 minutes, to skip along with brisk delivery. but really, except to sell mags, who needs the notion? I almost got the point of Dylan's harmonica playing while watching the film. he uses the instrument not so much musically as gesturally. I've seen the Irish musician Andy Irvine play the melody on guitar and harmonica simultaneously, so it's possible to make much more of the guitar/harmonica arrangement than Dylan does. his harmonica playing is more like an idea, like a performance art piece. really, I got to thinking that. I liked the bit with the intense weirdo who asked Dylan about the t-shirt Dylan wears on the cover of Highway 61 Revisited. what kind of answer did this guy need? figure it out for yourself. that aspect of Dylan's audience is spooky. that the art is taken into realms of arcana, that there's some prophetic expectation from the audience. we worry that he let "Blowin' In The Wind" attach itself to whatever grim exploitation, but I see it as a reasonable recognition that the song is "out there", no longer Dylan's. tho yeah he gets the royalties. I haven't read Al Kooper's books (I think it's plural), reminiscences of his years in the music biz, but I got to put them on my list: he's got good perspective. Dave van Ronk and Maria Muldaur showed good perspective too.

I want what scrapes air
raw like wandering immune to worship
or like walking, but with steps
a kind of breathing in and between
the tallest grasses that know what we want.:

Lewis Lacook's Xanaxpop is back. I like the immediate flicker here, the quick rush to write and post. I performed by own daily duty of blogged poems for 14 months at R/ckets & S/ntries, the sense of being balanced at the point, written and performed. thus Xanaxpop. Bramhallingly recommended.

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Grecian whatsis 

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I love this picture. it evokes severally. the blimps look like fish, strange and wonderful. tho we, residents of the modern world, are used to objects in the sky, blimps, as well as searchlights, bring to mind a seemingly primal sense of war, of something impending. I'm reminded of Ashbery's dire "Europe". I once saw a fascinating tableau. I was watching a blind man confidently cross a rather busy intersection. looming largely ahead of him was a blimp, looking gorgeously framed in the sky above the buildings and trees. the blind man was missing that, tho that is not to say there aren't ferlies that I too miss. or I mean, the man was so admirably adept and adapted to his condition, yet there was a marvel he could not see. before I noted the blimp I was in something like awe at the feat of perambulating without sight so well as this person. further memory (tangent time), was standing at a cross walk in Harvard Square next to a women with a seeing eye dog. the sign adamantly read DON'T WALK but a flood of people were crossing anyway, as per Harvard Sq. just the blind person and dog (and I) took heed of the sign. anyway, I see I am boring you. it was fortuitous to capture 2 blimps at once. when you hear the engines of blimps they sound too tinny and inadequate to motivate these whales of the sky. I like and love the serendipity of camera work. I don't want to work at photography as I do with writing and painting. I just want to take pictures frivolously, and hope something shows up. the birdwatching school of photography. for that matter, I don't want to work at birdwatching (Thoreau poking about for hours), I just want to be ready when something happens.