Tom Beckett is the first publicly to take the gloves off with Days Poem. he notes his encounter here, his worthy blog. I am honoured by his notice. he is a serious, generous presence in the poetry world that counts, the one where words actively associate in their process, not merely in the social construct. aesthetics-wise, he and I may seem to stand at antipodes. does my flow seem exhaustive? whereas Tom metes out each word with deliberation. I see Tom caring for every word. I saw this in Robert Grenier, too, an implacable attention. I care too. my own attention, however, does not boil down like Tom's does. it bubbles up. I don't see this as conflict or contraries. DAYS POEM was written willfully as a marathon, an exercise of extent. tho it comprises 1000 pages, those pages are filled with scads of paragraph-sized bits. those bits are for you, if you will take them. aptly, Tom wrote his note on Thoreau's birthday, Thoreau, and Walden (his creation), being frequent visitors to DAYS POEM. a poem is a poem, a map, a membrane, a shock, suddenly, when day seemed ordinary. I can only proffer what I wrote. thanks to Tom for the touch. thanks again, too, to Eileen Tabios for taking the machine I gave her and letting it run. Eileen is too too.

I haven't done Youtube justice, what with musical groups to catch glimpses of (Moby Grape on Mike Douglas Show, where they are introduced, typical, as the Moby Grapes) but for the nonce, this bit about Led Zep. begins like a Monty Python skit, which, essentially, it is. the controlled, disdainful 'aesthetic' argument here is no different from any other representation of the new in the fuddy world. Led Zeppelin as the latest thing that the youths have come up with. the BBC tool is just playing along with the joke. this is exactly how poetry dies slowly, how the arts get boxed in. the taxonomists use their tried and true metric to measure the anomaly, having 1st determined that it is an anomaly. it's a defensive reaction, as if the walls will be overwhelmed by this new mutation. which, perhaps, they will. and is that so bad? but really, Led Zep doesn't cancel The Beatles, nor vice versa, and I daresay the Grecian Urn remains despite Charles Bernstein deciding to write poems. I HATE AESTHETICS.