busy sky 

sculpture at/in Great Salt Lake 

every once in a while, I clean up typos. honest!

I feel some defensive about Jonathan Mayhew's cliches concerning Coolidge as several said cliches have appeared on this very blogaroony. my sense of Coolidge the jazz drummer is very specific. I was told the fact some 33 years ago, after a reading by double C. I can't recall the book title but in class we read from the one featuring all those prefixes and suffixes. sure it was strange, but then, I hadn't faced any dada or whatever. lots was new to me then. Coolidge read very firmly, with a sense of time. the drumming thing comes in not so much in the sense of beat, but in the sense of space between beats. negative space, so to speak. his poems spoke, thus emphasized, only parts of words, yet a syntax existed. I suppose a syntax must exist, but at any rate his implication of this negative space was powerful, and drummerlike. my favourite drummer is Dave Mattacks, ex of Fairport Convention and all sorts of studio work. tho he certainly can go Keith Moon as needed (tho without losing the beat), his hallmark is that sense of time between beats. not all of Coolidge's work is percussive so. much is quite effusive. what I learned from Creeley's line is the sense of space and time. especially, I guess, his enjamnments. the negative space between lines is powerful and effective with Creeley. one sees his mind work within time, with the musical beat space. I don't think one needs to know that Coolidge is a drummer to appreciate his work, nor do I think one needs to know of Keats' tuberculosis. but those facts are in there, to use or misuse.

coolplace in Winnemuka 

other blogging poets write of their travels in terms of poetry readings attended/participated in. that don't seem my doorway. I hadn't/didn't travel much till I married Beth. who was raised in Nevada mainly, and conceives distance differently than I do. people in the Boston area regard wetern Massachusetts not just as another state, but one immensely difficult to reach (a 2 hour drive). for Beth, a 2 hour drive is what you might do for a cup of good coffee (Beth's excitement was palpable when she espied a Starbucks somewhere near Orem, Utah on saturday. I'm less infatuated with coffee, but I recognize dreck, which seems the norm in a great patch of this country). the space of the western states really astonishes me. Olson writes of an extent, but Dorn conceives a different perspective on that. so that I think it right to add that perspective in reading Olson. Olson read about the west, Dorn lived it. so we flew west last monday, arriving late in SLC. there is a reason why we didn't go directly to Reno by plane, but it's too hard to explain. I read the Evans-Wentz edition of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, possibly the earliest English translation of that text, on the flight. that and a book about the Tibetan Book of the Dead are all I read on the trip. I woke wide awake the next day, went down to the lobby, where one desk person sat on a couch watching tv. the other was at his post and sprung up with polite surprise: good morning sir! the clock read 4:00, ie 4 hours after I went to sleep. but I didn't turn around right away, I went outside and wandered some, as if I had a purpose. eventually I went back to bed, then arose at a more sensible time, to sit in the lobby, listen to Fox News (did you know Michael Jackson killed a girl in Aruba?) and wrote. I wrote in a not quite pocket-sized journal I got at Barnes & Noble. my young friend Isaac saw me with it once, and got himself one just like it. I brought my computer but wasn't interested in using it on this trip. a journey thru hellzapoppin winds, rain and snow to Sparks. Beth's sister put us up at the Nuggest in Sparks, a bigass casino/hotel. we weren't there to gamble, nor were we funded for it, so we only gave a modest tribute to the great God of Gambling. I wandered around inside and out then found a place to sit and write. it was too rainy to take the camera outside. most times we went out (something the casino does everything it can to keep you from doing), I brought the camera. scenic pictures, family pictures, and pictures of interesting trees or whatever, all mixed up. I feel either intrusive or geeky taking pictures of people so I tend to take more pictures of manhole covers than the sort of thing you might share wih relatives. on friday we drove to Boise. in Nevada, I kept missing pictures of dust devils, small ephemeral cyclonic pillars of dust. they'd fizzle out by the time I got the camera out or even just on. I couldn't get an effective picture of a rainbow sort of thing that we saw in Oregon. it was this short spectrum right at the horizon between 2 hills. likewise a full rainbow just didn't show up properly in the pictures I took. let alone the golden eagle on a fence post, the dead antelope in the road, and so on, all passed before I could ready the camera. each morning I'd sit in the lobby where we stayed and wrote. final stop was Orem, just down the road apiece from SLC. Orem/Provo are hip zesty towns, owing a lot to Brigham Young University sitting there at the foot of the mountains. plus the influx of skiers and tourists. how astounding to see these snow covered mountains so close by. SLC is a vast perplexing mess of rectilinear streets and solid values. a little too solid, if you know what I mean. I stayed in SLC for a while years ago. looking for rentals, you would see the notation: no coffee drinkers. I imagine such injunctions are no longer legal, but the spirit of them remains. don't you be starting up with your sinful ways. SLC is bizarre anyway. imagine coming to the valley in the day, a desert, a huge unpotable lake, salt flats and alkali, and think: here's where we shall settle and multiply. well, they done it. which means that on sundays, almost no restaurants are open. saturday night, Orem is a-bustle, sunday no stores and very few restaurants will take your fare. it's not the lack of service but the fundamentalist imperative beneath it that makes the area unwholesome to me. but it is awful beautiful. we killed time before our flight by driving thru Provo Canyon. probably the best photographic subject of the trip, but I had neglected to charge my batteries. and was, after all, a mite tired of taking pictures. anyway, you tend to get the feeling you haven't experienced something if you didn't get a pic, so I was happy to crane my neck sans camera. so that's my trip, somewhat.

up ahead 

Lake Bonneville 

returned from a short whirled tour, and I am glad you bloggos out there were able to carry on without my earnest presence last week ('ceptin' a few pictures dropped down from on the road). a Logan airport to Salt Lake City connection, then a ramble across the desert to Sparks, Nevada (next to Reno), then a stopover at Boise, then a stopover at Orem, Utah (next to Provo), then a reverse flight into the humidity of Boston. see, the weather west was cool and rainy. the drive from SLC to Reno as for instance began in violent winds and lightning. as we neared Nevada, we met snowfalling. in Sparks rain was the weather quotient. the whole high desert region was way too green. I'm sure the mountains back of Provo and Orem were skiable, not just dusted, freshly laid snow at that. I could tell adventures, or whatever. Beth's niece graduated from a special school that features college courses. only 70 in the class (my graduating class was 700). the ceremony took place at the Hilton hotel. our first glimpse of the graduates came when they rose on a platform from below the stage. the final image to savour was at the end when the curtains parted and an American Airlines plane roared towards the crowd. decked out about the plane were the grads. we are talking a show! I didn't attend my own festivities lo these many, but I am pretty sure that it was a straightforward here's your goatskin, plus a bunch of go forth words by teacherly figureheads and the students who sucked up to them. as each grad walked across the stage to receive a diploma, a teacher would read words that the students prepared. pictures of each student were projected on a screen, a baby pic and something recent. Beth's niece sang the Star-Spangled Banner, kudos to anyone who can hit the notes and remember the words.

thru sunglasses darkly 

and the windows of heaven opened 

bird & clouds in Sparks, Nevada 

I hadn't planned to bring my computer out west but Beth reminded me that I would need to download pics. I think between memory card and internal memory I can get about 180 pix at a time, a mere pittance. so the computer comes along. and if there si internet access, I may just give that a try, reporting live from the road. we'll be literally on the road much of the time, so I won't be using the computer much. try not to miss me too much.

circs beyond my control prevented me from witnessing any of the Wichita Baptist Church protests. I am kind of down on counter demonstrations, when it comes to the battle of clever placards. even if they refuse an intelligent engagement does not mean you should. I just wanted to see them in their day. I know these people are crazy, but they sure are organized, savvy, well-funded. and confused and hateful. all of which are powerful elements to deal with.

more green 

geranium 

I probably don't know what Tim means by dramatic-monologue-in-advance. I realize there's an if there, so I can misread to my hearts content. I got to thinking of how so MUCH of what I've written in my life was done with no consideration of what it (the writing) was doing. I'm thinking of what I wrote in school, even elementary school: essays, poems, test answers, stories: whatever I was told to write. the diffrence between what I thought I meant, and what the words ended up doing. this is a developmental thing, I know, part of the critter entering the world. at 16 I took the initiative to write what I wanted, even to say poetry. well, I wrote what was present for me to write, big difference: "he wants to say something but is saying it anyhow". gradually I saw that my writing wasn't what I thought. the thing in my head, amorphopus but somehow powerful, was not necessarily what found its way onto the paper. was never so, frankly. so I started rewriting. also considering what the matter of poetry was. that's a hard question, of course. my 10 year old friend Isaac understands his writing as 'art', as some integrative process. he has that consideration when he writes and draws, but he doesn't rewrite. essentially, he doesn't read his work, he still sees on the page what his mind saw in the writing glimpse. wow, I'm writing a confused here, but maybe I'll hit on a glint. my mission, then, is trying to shorten the distance between what I thought (my own writing glimpse) and what makes it to the page (or whatever medium). I'm sure you're trying to do the same. ever since I became aware as a writer that someone on the other end might respond, I assumed a you. readers of my work will see a frequent use of 1st person plural. it doesn't feel like a dialogue, nor solioguy, nor monologue. it feels, to me, however much I delude myself, as an act of sharing. but of course I flub that a lot.

For Tim: Yes yes New Man in the American cell, points gadget at act. Act is vital at the time of words over cooling lava pits, one favourite way of stopping. My ownership wasn't pricked by thorns only for the forested continents of getting. On this we can agree, each in stance, yet requiring has a habit. A lip service that doesn't die like some people die has been condition for our response. We're working on ways to agree without a lot of plight. Plight makes plot. when we follow those literate lines, we discover the book ends suddenly.

grandma called out, but the bogeys were intent 

here's what I say. I say you go back to your Imperial Space Lord and say that Earth does NOT accept these terms. Earth and all Earthlings will NEVER accept these terms!!!