since S Compton and J Kimball popped comments on my recent little rumination on blogs, which (really) makes it seem like this blog is a definable space and not just my romantic thrill of thinking myself, I shall ruminate further... pass me the cud, podner... in the previous, I thought of the word anthology as applying to the blogosphere. I think my articulation did gang a-gley a bit then so I want to embolden the idea more clearly. a blog is not bookish, in the sense of being a detached module of literature. instead, a blog situates with other blogs, in a way that books and mags do not. many blogs are obviously conversations, but even those that aren't involve themselves in a wider conception. so I think that considerations such as Jack is given to do, critiques of the blog machine, are not just useful as critical activity but as reminders of the greater theme. it is not a matter of rules but an embrace of the procedure. content is almost not the point, tho that's too pointedly post-modern for my shoes. I would prefer a tensile construct to the pix of babies and dogs, and the Youtube excavations as well, if we're talking content. but I could write of the Christmas tree coming down today. Erin was off at a Magic card tournament whilst Beth and I removed ornaments from the tree. then mid afternoon it was the Patriots vs the Chargers, and once more the Pats pulled away in the 2nd half. about 3 years ago my father went hospital for the final act. it seems so yesterday. last sunday, Beth and I visited a couple who we lost track of the past year or so. they now live in a rehab center, tho nursing home might draw a better picture. sadly, because of differing condition, they live in separate wings. we found one, the less restricted one, at a concert in the facility's auditorium. a small band earnestly played show tunes and standards. it took a while to find our friend, who we finally located up front, and longer to work our way to her. many sunday afternoon visitations were in progress, and the concert itself was apparently part of an extra effort to get patients involved with the outside world. brownies and punch were being served, either staff or volunteers were making stark effort to look like fun (dancing theatrically and such), and kids were overloading on sugar and creep out. before we made contact with our friend, we waited in the hallway outside the auditorium. several children were playing violently, a kind of desperate articulation of youth. a woman was wheeled from the festivities and immediately began scolding the children. I'm sure she scolded everything in her purview. our friend was pretty lucid tho with serious memory issues, which she was aware of. she was pretty calm about the memory loss, at least at the time. I remember my father's distress at times, a boat slipping from shore. she was always intellectually involved, still retained interest but her memory was an issue. we had a nice visit with her then brought her, she was comfortably peripatetic, to her room. she had an expectation that her husband would be along soon, and was fuzzy why he wasn't. she said she needed time alone to put things together in her head. we went to the other wing to visit her husband. that wing was closed off because the flu was present. they let us in with a caution. his condition was more tenuous. he made an effort to stay present and lucid. people there would be surprised to know that he was a dynamic, very accomplished person with a type A+ personality. and yet. I didn't mean to speak of specifics but it was all so sad. we are, culturally, I guess, so stupid concerning children and elders. our schools are full of adult concepts of situated success rather than progressive sense of learning procedure. our elders are captivated in the dullest gloom. my mild anointing of blogs (including my own) only remarks on the connected position of our assertions. I say that hopefully. I assert that Tributary is a Poetry blog tho you can weigh the actual references to the P-word and its productions as being mightily partial, all in all. but poetry is language with an asserted necessity. just speaking for myself, the shopping tours and what not, the contexts of this blog radiate from how language moves around a subject. the subject is not the point, the language is. returning to the beginning, the pets, the Youtube, if this is just filler or markers, it shows. when the connection to the underlying process asserts its present drive, then it lives, not just as content but as process. so I am ok with whatever, so long as something happens...

there's an industrial machine called Jukka-Pekka Kervinen who creates a lot (roughly Mucho to the 7th) of digital work that doesn't keep to boundaries all too well. in addition, he makes the work of other artists available in various publishing ways. to wit, Forward/Text. this is a culling of the Wryting-L list. it shames me that I haven't made note of this earlier. Sheila Murphy, John M Bennett, Lanny Quarles, me... etc...

Jack Kimball encourages a critical eye towards the blogs here. it is good to remember that blogging is a public enterprise. and we're all in this together, in some way. taking Jack's points:

1) obits. if you haven't written about the deceased previously, then I'm not interested now. obituaries are bad writing, almost by you definition. haven't you ever noticed?

2) youtube. I don't even follow Youtube links unless a compelling case is made. I can do my own time-wasters there, if that's all it is about.

3) snaps of infants and pets. I kind of get the sense of Facebooky sharing that must inspire these offerings, and indeed my quadrapedic friends have appeared here. maybe they should remain in the wallet, unless they have the gumption of (some sort of) weirdness.

4) reminiscences. memory as authority, good point. I like when memory springs to the instant, the tangled thing brought to light once more, so I don't mind letting these things appear even here. for me, at least, that's the opposite of authority, it's the spectacularly random invoking some radical of process. as in, why this now?

I don't mean to make rules, but for sure a causal sense of the blog you write should be endemic to the process. Jack's periodic critiques of blogging are good reminders of the larger enterprise. that the solo-est of bloggers still commits to a greater world. if this anthology is to continue to fly, an awareness needs to remain, of the intersections and rebounds, conversations and interruptions, and variously charged particles...

Eileen Tabios is willing to review wines, to which I add: hey! send me a bottle, too!!! seriously, tho, I worked a long time for a wine store and can honestly say that tasting wines in a formal way enhanced my critical faculty. when I began there, I was in my early 20s with no interest in wine. bottles were always open for sampling in the tasting room (with sinks, mind you: we all spat what we sampled), and I took the opportunity. in formally tasting wines, one methodically assesses colour, aroma, and (finally) taste. I like the idea of this methodical approach. it is a way of staying on topic. Pound's ABCs of Reading similarly offered procedures of assessment, based on one's actual experience of the work. blind tastings are often great levelers of the playing field. lacking the bolstering effect of a wine's reputation, one must rely on one's senses. which is as it should be. I came to respect the critical process. customers would ask about wines and even ask, quite frequently, for recommendations. I learned to speak of each wine as accurately as possible, bringing forth the wine's qualities, not my taste. the Boolean like/dislike function is pretty boring, after all. the excitement of a poem is not simply a tripping of the I like sensor in my brain, but the experience of its whatness, if I can use such a Heideggerian sort of term. I have what I think is a reasonable resistance to Robert Bly's poetry. to speak of the clunky way he fakes his way thru a poem is not quite a pleasure, but it is still a poetic experience in which I (the Reader) enter language's potentialities. he doesn't write what I consider good poems, but his so called bad ones demarcate, in their way, what I do like. in the wine store, I found that each wine had a raison d'etre. someone could be found to like any wine, and what's wrong about that? I definitely had my preferences, and I certainly wouldn't spend the asking price for a great many wines, but I reached a point where I respected every wine for their specific qualities. the lacuna evident in (or not in...?) crummy poems expresses something dynamic even as I, maybe, figuratively fling the book aside. of course we all have our taste, which is to say our boundaries. to leave our taste in the uncomplex world of like/dislike is lazy and unfulfilling. the idea that any poem is all bad or all good is also pretty weak. the yes/no world is flat and prosy. the poetic world is an utter engagement of all salients and dimensions of language, even if it ruffles your truculent feathers.

Tom Beckett dips into the new book by Jean Vengua, Prau, here. he apologizes for being fragmentary, but I think that the fragmentary approach is genuine, consistent with how we read. it is interesting to see the process of reception, rather than just the resolution of a formal essay. with time, the formal essay is the right thing, an exercise in pulling the pieces together, but a new book deserves to the darting interest of the first excited reading. to read poems is a constant revelation not a culminated static state. what bounces off Tom's receptors is by definition of interest. and Jean Vengua is a poet whose work I wish to read. I look forward to reading Prau, and Tom's ongoing divagations.

what is poetry, and how does it define itself from other writing? oh, like I can answer that. I am not consumed by the reading of poetry as I used to be. much of that was a dutiful consumption, as I scouted out the territory and possibility of this manner of writing. it may be that I've always looked at poetry as and all else. poetry is what other writing is not. I fell to poetry because of this indefinition. I'm reading a book on the Gettysburg campaign (not just the battle but what led up to and followed), and it seems a correct energy for me at this time. I think defining poetry's world as different from that one we live in is a poor dalliance. there's a social construct of poetry, which is fine as a social construct, just as church is fine as a social construct. social construct is not the essence, tho. my modest peregrinations and musings, as reported on this blog, strike me as essential in some way that I feel obliged to defend. that the poetry life is not just reading poetry and attending readings. but I shall defend no further. saturday, Beth and I went to Barnes and Noble. almost didn't go in, it was tremendously crowded. we followed a family just leaving the store, in hopes of snaring their parking space. it was like we would rob them once we got to the back of the building. this B&N is a stand alone castle, and next door, essentially the same parking lot, is Chili's, also buzzing. across the street, the mall was more congested than we saw before Christmas. I know there are sales and gift cards to get people out on a surprisingly foggy afternoon. furthermore, the Patriots were to play the Giants, going for 16-0 for the season. the game surely kept a few people home saturday night. among them, me. much as I like watching football, this was only the 2nd game that I watched this season. I watched the 1st half of a blow out earlier. saturday's game was fought in high dudgeon, with the Pats going for a record. I like that Brady and Moss set NFL records on the same pass. and they came up with a Solomonic solution: Moss said cut the ball in two, Brady said keep it. funny, the year my father died, both the Sox and Pats won championships. this (past) year my dog died, which somehow in my mind tied to my father's death. my previous dog died 8 years after my mother died. I looked into the dog's eyes as she passed, could see the light go out, but also, I saw/sensed my mother. one doesn't realize how much one grieves, that the loss burns on. my father's last years were difficult as he grew more distant, ans as his care became more demanding. so that it was a relief that he died. similarly with Brownie. that would be the selfish part of me talking, I guess. when the Red Sox won in 04, it felt like some rare confluence. car horns sounded and church bells rang. my father showed only mild interest, which itself was a pain for me, for him to be that distant, finally. what I write of here is deep pool stuff, twined to the idea of writing that I carry. writing is not just about making these things that people may read. it is a participation and examination. the production of poetry as a manufacturing of things becomes a distraction from the real task. those written events and the living effort that go into them announce a process that exceeds ambition. none of us are beyond ambition, of course, but spiritual implication exists in the process, which strains and gathers thru life. Ron Silliman's grim tally of poet death's for 2007, complete with death head atop the blog post, tastes obnoxious to me. these people that did something then stopped. I don't want to collect that kind of stuff, statistics. the poet's life is written in words not numbers. quantification is a dismal exercise. so we had a quiet New Year's Eve at home. the church across the street rang, more than 12 strokes. hail the new year, lads and lasses.

Walden, again

, originally uploaded by allen_bramhall.

unusual Christmasiness this year: we watched a lot of movies. okay, 1st, the solstice, Beth and I celebrated our 7th anniversary. we ate at the Colonial Inn, which belonged to the Thoreau family back in the day. a festive 19th century New England atmosphere to the dining room. afterwards we sought out the solstice drum circle by the river. it was too cold, dressed (nicely) as we were, so we passed on. saturday following, our Christmas party. Beth loves to cook for crowds. I help but Beth does the heavy lifting. essentially every dish in the house gets used, and that's what I did sunday, cleaning them, that is. on the 24th, we did a little food shopping, then visited a nearby gallery that we like. and so on, Christmas. a roast with Yorkshire pudding. I've had 3 versions of Yorkshire pudding: my mother's mine, and Beth's, all derived from Fannie Farmer, whatever edition current when my parents married in 1944. eggs, flour, water, and salt. usually throw it in the pan with the roast and potatoes. this time, more like a popover, baked in a cast iron pan. our nucular Christmas tradition. so anyway, the things we watched:

Hogsfather, presumably a BBC production, of one of Terry Pratchett's books. I read the 1st 20 Disc World novels pretty much as they came out, now I'm way behind. I turned Beth onto them, and she has read every one, most of them multiple times. now Erin has begun reading them. the production had the usual low rent special effects typical of British tv, but also the solid acting. Death, who has temporarily replaced Hogsfather (read Santa Claus), is a wonderful character. most adjustments from the book made sense, like the absence of the Death of Mice, a little rodent Reaper. surely the cgi for that would have killed the budget, as would making Death's jaws move.

Pirates of the Caribbean--seen it maybe 4 times and still love it. Depp and Rush have great fun with their roles, scenery is great, special effects, swordplay, etc. all lost in the ensuing crap. the 3rd one both put me to sleep and angered me. surely a 4th is due, whether they can scrouge up Depp for it or not. it can be the Keira Knightly show.

Fellowship of the Ring/The Two Towers. lots of issues with this but it still holds up okay. the stalwartly heroic Aragorn was a linchpin in the books and Viggo (who I want to be, someday) does the same for the movies. when he sends Frodo off, so that he can meet the oncoming orcs, you think, poor orcs. it's not that I have anything against Liv Tyler but any scene with her in it was bereft of energy. absolutely useless plot addition. Cate Blanchett was ridiculous, too, as the hey look at me Elf. so went all the Elves, really, except Orlando Hottie and, perhaps, Mr Smith. Jackson just didn't have a way to deal with these timeless creatures. Merry and Pippin were too Bowery Boys for my taste. the homoerotic theme certainly filled the book but it becomes oppressive in the movie, all that male weeping and hugging. it's funny to think that this movie may be what people know of LOTR. not that it aint being read (when the new Harry Potter is finished), but that Elijah Woods IS Frodo, etc. New Zealand looks like home to me.

several recent additions to Antic View here. the conversation that Jeff Harrison and I have here is Poet Work.

strange emanations from the paranormal world continue to be documented at Amazement Stuff. my approach to the paranormal is, of course, rigorously scientific, but don't think my discoveries cannot scare the bejesus out of you.

we've gone to the mall numerous times this Christmas season. we go without the shopping imperative, for the most part. instead, we go and look. I'm very fond of this. I don't know what sort of business season it is but it seems more lively than last year. one time, we went to the Apple Store because Erin's new iPod had a problem. they were fine with replacing it, but tried to make him wait 3 days for a new one to ship in. I gather the point of that was to prevent merchandise leaving the premise at this special time of the year for free when a crazed holiday shopper could be carting away the selfsame. after some dialogue Erin got his Pod. which just shows to go you, but while awaiting the final judgment I noted 20, that's TWENTY, people working at Apple. and a Motley Crue, too, older humans as well as young ones. and pretty darn busy. I love my 4 gig Nano dearly, with a love that's true, but it is all I can do not to yearn for... but I'll cut it off there. I notice that Sony has a store that looks to be modeled similarly. less well lit, but offered as a spacious meeting place between people and their potential new electronic toys. a more refined experience than the noisy intensity of Best Buy and Circuit City. for ambience, J Crew took the cake. the store is new to the mall. whoever designed its look deserves a gold star. the rich colours were beautiful and eye catching, the place was open and inviting. both Abercrombie & Ef and Hollister opt for dark stores and barriers to prevent anyone seeing in/out. obviously a segregation, filtering out parental units and other duds. plus the imperative dance beat to set the hormonal climate. we had a couple of pretty wonky episodes with disinterested store help. given current economic trends, you'd think stores would labour to brighten up the help. we were at the local package store where we noticed a giftie item labeled Abacus. it was in the display of specialty bottlings, in a fancy box, your basic winery sucker punch. I knew it had to be a wine but there was no telling further. Beth remarked on the box and the cashier enthusiastically said, oh yes!. I inferred she knew something about it so I asked for details. she didn't really know, but she enquired of someone of apparent greater responsibility. he said it was a wine, and that was all he was willing to divulge. earlier, at Whole Foods, I happened to notice that one of the items at the prepared foods counter listed trisodium phosphate as an ingredient. my guess was that it was a preservative, which I didn't see the need for. and I didn't see how well it might fit the all natural spectrum that Whole Foods boasts. I asked of the person at the counter, who said she didn't know. I found that perplexing. when we got home, I applied my questions to Google. Abacus is a lardy dardy bottling from ZD Wines. I always detested the fake clamour of such bottlings (in my days working in a wine store, that is). a fancy, uesless box to dazzle thee, and the wine is what? that a winery reserves certain lots of wine for their special bottlings means, literally, that their other wine is 2nd rate. it's a bullshit marketing scam that shouldn't be acceptable. but you know, iPhones and Wiis with their instrumental rarity, playing you and me to a fare-thee-well. oh well. regarding trisodium phosphate, it is indeed a preservative. it also has the feature of softening acidity. I still don't get it in terms of Whole Foods, all natural, and what not. NOR do I get that horrid song, "Santa Baby". I gather that Marilyn Monroe 1st sang it. I've heard it several times in stores. this must stop. it is a stupid song. and speaking of stupid: those inflatable outdoor decorations. they creep me out. Santa on a Harley, hahaha.

let me engulf you with my new blog, The River's View. I will endeavour to write serious, formal reviews and whatnot on this blog. introductory remarks are here.

a review of Shanna Compton's book For Girls & Others is here.

watched Anaconda 2, the sequel to the award-winning documentary starring J-Lo, Ice Cube and Jon Voight. I am a veteran of the original, from which I learned so much about the athletic and distinctly mean-spirited ways of the anaconda, and yet I still needed to learn more about this gigantic reptile that leaps thru the trees like a lumberjack. the movie begins in a conference room, where the CEO of a pharmaceutical threatens to deep six a non-moneymaking project. the project's team manages to convince him, using a Powerpoint graph (no greater argument can be made than a Powerpoint graph), that the project is a winner. and so it obviously is. as you well know, there is a flower called the blood orchid (which name appears in the movie's subtitle, which I forget). it only blooms, you know, once every 7 years. the flower has a component that prolongs life. well, that's what Big Pharma is looking for, you bet. the team is forthwith sent to Borneo, to fetch the flower, which reportedly is in bloom. why didn't the person who reported this bring a bouquet home? only a few weeks of bloom remain. okay, switch to the wilds of Borneo. I should mention that the previous movie was set in the Amazon, I'm pretty sure. I should also note that I recognize the names of none of the actors but they all were chosen for reminding the audience of... somebody... at one point, a character tells another that he read a news report about an expedition that had anaconda trouble, namely the original movie, a nice way to make it seem there was some narrative consistency going on. because of flooding, no captain wants to go upriver. none, that is, except a certain rough-hewn, unshaven someone. and they start upriver, and the viewer can start guessing which character buys it. I'll tell you right now: the J-Lo-ish big business type, the blonde research assistant, the tech guy who screamed all the time (he could've been replaced by the actor/comedian, can't recall his name, who was in the 5th Element, had the movie the budget for such spendiness), and of course Captain Heroical, were the only survivours. the captain's monkey also survives. the movie put a lot, I would even say undue, pressure on the little guy. several times we are led to believe that the little guy, Kong, is mouldering in the belly of an anaconda. okay, well, not one but two roguish sciency types on the team, who were overly interested in the females, get et quickly by anaconda. the 1st mate of the boat gets lunched. the screaming guy inexplicably misses out, much as relief from his yelling would have been nice. oh, the leader of the team decided to call the mission off after numerous misadventures, so the greedy guy on the team paralyzes him with a spider and the poor guy gets to watch as an anaconda slowly slithers into position for a gulp. I think the anaconda ate a village but I may have been repairing my brain cells with a modest doze during this sequence. I am concerned about my own home town, I don't think we are prepared for anaconda onslaught. I'll bet today's snow would just piss them off further. after much to do, the greedy guy gets his, as do all extant anaconda, except I think the one called Darth Vader. the remaining 4 characters, not counting Kong, pair up on the raft heading for home. the snakes were somewhere between 40 and 800 feet long, heads the size of T-Rex. they weren't above barfing up victims so that they could get more. tho they could constrict in a pinch, so to speak, they were more apt to lunge lightning quick and swallow their victim in a gulp. malevolent? for sure! I love hard science.

 

watched Transformers yestreen. I'd seen the trailers and was sure that it would lack gumption, but then it just cried out to me. the trailer had it right. the movie consisted of constant robotic transformation and explosions. the stuff in between the transformations owed to Gremlins and Short Circuit. the movie at least brought the viewpoint down to a mildly likable character, the boy meets girl guy. boy meets robot, as well. the plot spun around autistically while the special effects confused the show. the transformations consisted of flashing movement that never clarified into anything the brain could hold steadily. and the action was a blur. I found myself checking my email and adding content to my new paranormal blog. I believe the door is open for a remake.

I watched the Fantastic Four movie, 2nd one is it? with Silver Surfer. when I say watched, that admittedly means that I missed a certain amount (most) due to sleep. still, I did see some of it. how much does one need to see, anyway? I saw the 1st one, and this one had the quality of being the 2nd one. it begins with the dopey premise of the FF being fab NY celebs. this seems unlikely because Reed's a nerd, Ben's a grump, and Sue's too well-grounded. only Johnny seems likely for such a trip. frankly, the dark night of the soul stuff that Marvel hit the jackpot with is exactly what turned me from comix. I never cottoned to the FF anyway. I'm not sure why except I will declare that Reed's stretchy super power is ridiculous. the computer-aided effects in the movie didn't help: he had cartoons for arms. it is funny to think how much silliness you can take, then there's a bit more and you just can't accept it. I can't wait to read the book, the physics of human torches. I had pretty well permanently stepped away from comics by the time Silver Surfer appeared. I got the impression that he was just another cosmic Hamlet moping thru the clouds. I hardly saw him in the movie last night. so anyway, Reed's stretching power is stupid. I am reminded of a Justice League of America comic from my fulsome youth. the story concerned a cadre of rejects who weren't up to Justice League snuff. JLA consisted of such youthful, lauded crimefighters as Super Boy, Super Girl, Ultra Boy, and Brainiac 5, in the year 3000 (SB and SG had to fly faster than light into the future to make the monthly JLA meetings and otherwise serve the organization). B5 was the 5th generation nephew of Brainiac, Superman's Nemesis. this fact could prove puzzling because Brainiac was an android, but there you go. anyhoo, the losers decided to form their own crimefighting unit, the Substitute Justice League of America. members all had super powers that were found wanting by the esteemed JLA. Chlorophyll Kid could make plants grow at an alarming rate. Polar Kid could freeze things with a beam from his hands. Night Girl had an array of super powers that, er, only worked at night. my favourite was Stone Boy who could turn to stone. unlike Ben Grimm, Stone Boy couldn't move in the lithic state. good defense, zero offense. in the comic, the JLA got into a 1st class pickle and whaddya think: the Substitutes form a rescue mission. everyone parachutes into the fray except Night Girl who, I believe, went to the night side of the planet and dug her way to the battle scene. impressive, but then, I recall Super Boy cut a planet in half, discarded the part that was engulfed in flames, took half of another planet, fused the two together. honestly, I read this, in 8 pages of stirring action. anyway, as they float down, Polar Boy barks out directions for everyone, including the immortal cry: and Stone Boy, you turn to stone!!!. even as a 10 year old, I thought as how Stone Boy in his lithic state might be more dense, thus heavy, thus too burdensome for his parachute. as in: why the heck doesn't he plummet like a stone? it was just that one bit of implausibility too much. not to leave you fretting, the Subbies saved the day and were awarded some recognition as 2nd rate super heroes. I am not aware that they ever appeared again in JLA activities.

I have allowed you to think, Tributarians (or the Multitude, as I like to call you), that I am keenly interested in poetry, shopping and the like. I am, certainly, but I am also committed to paranormal research!!!

 

I concur with Jack Kimball that Stephen Ellis's poetry should be read. Stephen's work possesses a momentum that requires repeated reading to make sense of. Stephen writes in what often seems like a run-on sentence, tho it's a run-on sentence with a driving spiral that grows clearer by its own insistence. the spiral grows clearer? the poem does, the energy does. happily, Stephen has, so far, embraced the blog space, is posting regularly. please attend.

I saw three poets read over the weekend. I was struck by the potential, or inspiration (I know that's a hefty word), that these poets offered. both Geoff Young and Nick Montfort presented the working idea of constraint, constraint as a creative possibility. Geoff utilizing the sonnet as a form to obey and disobey illustrated a canny opportunity available in the conscious attention to process. I take it that he squeezed existing poems into the sonnet constraint. his sonnets don't behave as sonnets, as he himself said, and yet they do, as he also said. his sonnets adhere to sonnet form only in being 3 1/2 quatrains in length. yet they possess sonnet grace, let us say. let me state that the idea of free verse, somewhere along the way, transmogrified into lazy verse, where poems merely consist of adjectives busying about a few nouns, in celebration of hyped up emotion. rote poem. constraints demand more effort, and not rote effort, but creative problem solving, which is what Beth says art is. rhyme and metre got tired as poets mechanically obeyed the timeworn rules. metre and thyme are exquisite when the poet actually feels involved with these elements, with the constraint that these elements offer. going thru the motions, however, adds nothing vital to a work. Whitman, when he deigned to rhyme, shows the weakness of this duty: the music of a tin ear. Dickinson, or later, Creeley, take metre and rhyme, stare them down, and wriggle free. there is a wonderful value displayed here, a historical view pushed against a futuristic one. the wrench of wondering. Whitman had no time for metre and rhyme, except that they made him Tennysonian, so he just wasted his time pretending toward such poesy. these are lessons, friends. as to Mairead, her work spoke of vantage, or persona. the Flann O'Brien wisdom of absurdity that I heard in her work is a conscious stance (I don't mean to imply that it is from O'Brien, only that it reminds me of his work), a working program. I thought, how can I stand thus. well, I cannot, really, that's Mairead, not me. but a learning possibility exists, placing questions where I hadn't thought to put them. she read ripplingly well, so that the humour and skew made imperial sense. I really liked the sense of input and influence that came from these readings.

I'm like to wore out with a 2nd reading in 2 days: Nick Montfort and Mairead Byrne reading at Demolicious. Nick Montfort does digital whatsis at MIT. digital whatsis is a way of acknowledging the uncorralled nature of the art. his reading was lecture-like. he discussed each piece and the context was rather illustrative. he began with a vision piece, a video. Nick wrote the words and someone else did the filming. the aesthetic of the vid was Youtube. it consisted of disjointed, fuzzily rendered imagery. the voiceover favoured its own disconnection. the result was a calmly trippy sensation. after the vid, Nick read an array of pieces. all worked within declared limits. one, quite funny, was written entirely on the 2nd row of a keyboard. the last line: "you putter out rote poop." I don't mean to be brief but time is burning. Nick has a site with much on it, here.

Mairead gave a terrific reading as well. many of her poems, all from the same chapbook, were urgent sounding soliloquies. they were built on a goofy logic. "do you happen to know your height? boy, did I". I thought of Flann O'Brien because the absurdity she offered was so reasonable. I wish I had better notes but I opted to listen. I wish more had attended, it was a fine reading.