poets write poems, I guess. writers write. it took me a while to admit with confidence that I was a writer. that producing whatever shitload of work, crappy as it might have been, was not confirmation enough. I think Dickinson had 4 poems published while alive, as you know, and Rossetti pumped Blake to life, did he not. I kept keyboard and pen busy for several years before I accepted that I was a writer, and not just that I wrote poems: I was a poet. well, anyway, I no longer recall the point of this preamble. I wanted to speak about Microsoft One Note, which prolly aint the most poetic of possibilities, you might think. what is this unsulliable poetry of which you speak??? je ne said pas. and so. the program came bundled with the rest of MS Office that I scarfed at 91% discount, legal, as recounted here in May. SO One Note. it is not so much a program that I mench here, but a method. it is like note cards, bits of data collected, manipulated, and used. I am only now getting the hang. One Note gives you fields upon which you can write anywhere. discrete units can be combined, or you can draw lines between to connect the thinking process. collect urls, notes, ramblings. organize later. One Note gives you options for putting things together. a good study aid for the computer age. cut and paste cogent passages to your heart's content. I am not selling One Note so much as tickling the possibility. poetry is not just a dose of fly agaric and a bit of transcription. methodology is part of the plum. the learning aggregate enters in, the dashed off, the unthought-thru expression. I am trying to use this program practically, collecting bits that will add up. I see in One Note the excitement of the barely formed. you doodle out what comes to mind and see what that thing is. this is exciting to me. I have always loved notebooks, what people dash off without the effort of formality. if Silliman's School of Quietude deserves any whammo of critique, it would be how foreign incompleteness would be to the work. that is, a drive to make poems start and finish with narrative imperative, this is SOQ. what is most exciting about Olson is his incompletions. poems as notes, or glances. isn't this wonderful? Cinvat Bridge, aer, a mole to get at Tyre. I love this sense of narrative that leaps with the mind. One Note is a tool for very rational building of logical form, and I am trying to use that. but it makes me think, also, of a poetics of incomplete lines. the mind jumps, jumps. not just the press to disjunct, LANGUAGE POETICS 101, but an affirming sort of processual movement. George Oppen comes to mind, just now. Susan Howe collecting and collating. we can learn from the tools we use.

Carl Annarummo writes real purty about Walden Book:

Walden Book is an open door in an era of locked doors and drawn shades. It is a wildly lucid testament, not a eulogy, to the beauty that is Massachusetts' natural world. The poems in Walden Book are as inviting and intimate as a westward drive on route 2 from 128. There will be no poo-pooing of the modern world here - just the history of a place with all of its lights turned off. At least to me, Walden Book assures us that we can have simultaneous submissions of neon lettering and white pines. Picture Thoreau sharing a bill with the Modern Lovers.

5x8 chapbook printed on quality linen paper with hand-stamped envelope. Printed in an edition of 75. The covers are from a book of old Massachusetts coastal maps. Each chapbook has a different cover.

sure, it is a blurb that he writes, but as the author, I would be happy if one took such impressions from Walden Book. or any other impression, really. I invite you.

I just received copies of Walden Book, which is a chapbook of my work, published by Greying Ghost. Carl Annarummo did the work, and the web site is ici. Carl hath not yet gotten ordering info for it up yet, so buy something else from him. he did a lovely job with the design, and I happen to like what I wrote. support these precious examples of DIY, scaled to the person. poetry is intimate.

someone on Poetics posted thoughts about the new Boston Poet Laureate. great, except that the old Poet Laureate never left office. I mean, I saw a need last year, and filled the vacuum. if this Sam Cornish guy thinks he can usurp me from the position, he has another think coming. I am here to stay.