from Call Me Ish:

You can approach BIG America and spread yourself like a pancake, sing her stretch as Whitman did, be puffed up as we are over PRODUCTION. It's easy. THE AMERICAN WAY. Soft Turn out paper cups, lies flat on the brush. N.G.

Or recognize that our power is simply QUANTITY. Without considering purpose. That is, so long as we continue to be INGENIOUS about machines, and have the resources.

Or you can take an attitude, the creative vantage. See her as OBJECT in MOTION, something to be shaped, for use. It involves a first act of physics. You can observe POTENTIAL and VELOCITY separately, have to, to measure THE THING. You get approximate results. They are usable enough if you include the Uncertainty Principle, Heisenberg's law that you learn the speed at the cost of exact knowledge of the energy and the energy at the loss of exact knowledge of the speed.

I think this is wickedly wise stuff. doesn't that 3rd paragraph sound like a disquisition on language? America, that thing beyond country, is a language, as well as an implement. it is a political unit, of course, even as it slops over boundaries. but stop not there. you maybe heard of the investment turbine, the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China). bursting at the seams with the new working monster. not talking just poli sci or economics. here is language caught in people, or vice versa. a language of usage, and a usage of language. think of the recent examples in poetry. LANGUAGE poetry, which is so consciously political in its self-regard. or flarf, which is consciously apolitical it its sources. apolitical doesn't exist, of course, so naturally we have a cognitive intensity of concern in flarf's welcoming of the so-called inappropriate. I throw these out as examples of the merrie making to be confronted. I mean I go back to Olson, who I have been reading for 35 years. and he goes back to Melville. and Melville goes back. the news aint old, and it has something to do with how poetry aint a knick knack. it aint. it don't gotta be fraught with laboured points, but certainly it seems to live stronger in a confrontation of essential speech and action. love America? hate it? what's the point? sure there are American acts you can point to, either way, but the more majestic problem is the machine itself, and how it construes us. and by us, I mean every which person, creature, plant or entity humbled on this orb. how do we contain any of this in speech? how does speech become action? no doubt I'm way beyond myself here, but I just want to maintain that Olson aint ready for the back shelf, so far as I can see. and Moby Dick continues as a new and vital puzzlement.