iTunes has something called iTunes University, something like that, which offers a bunch of college courses as podcasts. I listened to a talk by Harold Bloom today, How to Read a Poem, a class he gave in 2006. I really enjoyed listening to it, which I did not expect. I find his ideas interesting enough but gosh his writing is tiresome. the vocabulary of his writing chimes uncomfortably with awkward words. trope as a verb: yech. I mean trope used as a verb thruout the book, seemingly on every page: yech. and his Canon of Western Civ, I do not want to hear about that. I mean, writ on 2 stone tablets or what? he is such an edifice. the lecture was quite charming, tho. I assumed that he would be demonstrative and overbearing but instead he was quiet and thoughtful. his lecture (1st in a series) was a close reading of a Wallace Stevens poem. he kept apologizing about his tangents, but his tangents were worth trailing along, and showed a more interesting process than the plangency of professional critic. his tangents tended to include close friends, Paul de Man, Kenneth Burke, John Hollander... I am forgetting a few... Bloom in the swirl of interest. so, as I say, it was surprisingly entertaining to listen to him. his humour is dry and self-deprecating. and Stevens is a great poet. the pungent array of evocations that occurs in Stevens' work is enticing and strange. the guy was a drastic weirdo in a way that we do not, perhaps, really need to overthink. Bloom mentions Holly Stevens saying that her family never had anyone to dinner, ever. Bloom did not emphasize Stevens' oddity, but I was minded of, oddly, Lovecraft in the sense of a highly-charged intellectual and imaginative world, and a strangely bereft daily one. but anyway, I got a sense of a love of poetry that I do not get so much from Bloom's writings. that critical world of his seems demarcated and limited, whereas as he spoke of Stevens and other poets (but not the so-called confessional poets, Lowell et al., who he declared a distaste for), the pleasure of poetry shone thru. years ago, if I might follow a tangent, a neatly timed snowstorm arrived in time to have work called off. unexpectedly, I had the day off. I read Bloom's book on Stevens. I spent the day at it, reading the poems Bloom referred to, as well as hunting down other works that Bloom brought into the discussion. it was delicious to do this, especially under a non-academic directive. I think that is the difference between his writing and his lecture. on one side is something more like career positioning, wherein his declarations provide structure for his world place. in class, this one at least, he is not asserting that so much, certified as he is, but instead he is allowed to speak his pleasures, simply that essential. I will take Olson's canon, because it is quirky, personal, and directed from his personal craze. Bloom's was a public predictability, just one more book. I think it might be nice to break the academic hold on poetry and the critique thereof. poetry is not a tribal code, it is a personal lighthouse on the edge of something wildly fascinating. so okay, all you teaching poetry in college: get out, you are not happy, your light aint working. poetry is important, unloose, and a pleasure for the mind. if you do not sign that contract, you should not be talking about it. yes, I am just yapping...

before I hit the hay, a few thoughts on the new Microsoft ad. Microsoft decided to spend a bunch to respond to Apple's Hodgmanian ongoing smack down. Jerry Seinfeld was paid a pantload to help in the effort. and Bill Gates his own self was in the mix. my thought was to mimic the Apple ads but offer Gates as the antagonist, and Seinfeld could represent the Microsoft side. that is not how the commercial went, alas. instead, it was a Jerry cliche. he goes thru his shtick of enforced whimsy. he connects with Gates, and the commercial becomes oddly homo-erotic. I mean, they meet cute, Jerry gropes the richest foot om earth, and they... well, whatever. Jerry asks for a sign that there will be edible computers, and Gates wiggles his (his own) ass to adjust his (his own) underwear. there is confirmation here that Seinfeld is fully over and that Microsoft suffers in the mode of overdog. you have to think that you could do better, what evidence exists that you could not?

watched The Scorpion King. I watched it on Hulu, where you can stream movies and tv shows for free. not an enormous list of items, but a reasonable range of stuff. as I recall, this was an outgrowth of the remake of The Mummy. Vince McMahon was executive producer, and The Rock starred. it is basically Conan, but with more energy than I recall those movies having, but not quite the production values. Arnold Schwarzenegger has always been oppressive to me. in comparison, The Rock is subtle, varied and easy to take. the movie started with some sort of plot stuff, which included The Rock rescuing his brother from some anti-Akkadian creeps. after the rescue there's some more plot stuff, in which The Rock, his brother, and another guy go off to do something. there's a guy that looks like Eric Bana, and quite a few who look like they've worked for McMahon in the squared circle, tho I could not name any of them. the big plot centers on Memmnon, a bad ass king, who has a sorceress who can tell him which battles he will win. the Rock and his team invade a camp to kill the sorceress, I am not sure of the particular impulse for this. brother and other guy get killed but The Rock manages to kidnap the sorceress, who is suitably slinky. um, comic relief guy, who is in a lot of movies in the same role, becomes part of the team. utterly surprisingly, The Rock and sorceress become enchanted with each other. well who would have expected that? okay, there's a scene in which The Rock goes alone against 11 assassins, in the employ of the badass king. there's a sandstorm, okay? and The Rock chases this crew into cave. in a, like, sinister way, he kills off the assassins one by one. it's totally like he's magic. he's free of the constraint of physics, but he's not magic, man. okay. so we got the love interest, the weasly comic relief. do not worry, the cute urchin appears. there's Amazon fighting force, and the guy who happens to have figured out how to make gunpowder. oh, there's the chunky warrior who begins as an adversary but succumbs to the Rock's charm (patented lift of one eyebrow, of course). this crew makes an assault on the city, which happens to be Gomorrah. check it out, there's quite a battle between Rock and hard place, aka bad ass king. simultaneously the big warrior, who is convincingly big but not convincingly agile, fights a mob, the Amazons have a crew of well-timed combatants to defeat (well-timed as in: wait till the guy ahead of you is defeated before you rush in madly), the weasly guy and the inventor have their scene. the denouement occurs when The Rock gets hit by an arrow. he is down, may be out. just like in every Coppola movie, there is a simultaneity of events, each group with their dark night of soul. the weasly guy, desperately breaking free from some guards, sets gunpowder afire, which sets the good vibes a-vibing. The Rock rises as if from the canvas, pulls the arrow from his back, and nice touch, notches it to his bow. it has already been established that the bad ass king can catch arrows, but The Rock outquicks him something fierce, and that, dear friends, is that. as with the best of such movies, it is refreshing to have physics relaxed, so that we can watch The Rock perform felicities of physical nonsense. he has a lot of style as he moves thru space. he should not be given more than 2 sentences in a row to recite, because he has issues with sincerity. he had a good wrestling rap, as I recall, but his conversation come out more like urged declarations. there's a comedic touch there, and he is likable, unlike Arnold. a classic film experience of how small bits of plot and whatever can be coaxed into something almost larger than the what you expected.

I have written several times about Tom Beckett's The Difficulties, and now, recently, Tom has writ a few words about the experience. of publishing, that is, this influential (at least it was an influence for me) journal. I came out of a schooling at Franconia College much inspired by Robert Grenier (and Olson, Williams, Stein, Niedecker, Eigner), but still unable to see a clear path, which is to say that the poetry shelves at the library were monolithic in the confusion they bred in me. Tom's work as editor did a mean job of clearing the way for me. his publications were succour, can I say that? I recognized that his publications found their way to me from, you know, OHIO. an outpost. I valued that, and still do. I learned so much from my confrontations with The Difficulties. I know that I scribbled muchly in my copies, I know that I ordered copies for a friend. I am pretty sure that I added a few bucks to my orders (peccavi, Tom, if I did not). talking with Tom's daughter after his reading last fall, and she remembering collating pages as a child on the kitchen floor or some such picture. and then Tom sells the archive to Yale for a goodly chunk, tho zeroes could be fairly added now. I knew Tom 1st as an editor, tho every work of his that I read, that I would buy or he would add to orders, was solid, serious, great, as anyone who has placed their nose within the pages of Unprotected Texts knows. it is a crappy business, certes. the hustlers get heard, tho I write that and immediately must edit. energetically placing one's words before eyes is no bad thing, but chop back blocks are. aiming for the knees sort of imploring. territorial jerks. Tom mapped an essential hunk of land, essential landscape. for which, all honours from this voice.

 

 

 

yestreen Erin invited me to join him on the green for I presume the last weekly town concert for the summer. I was tired and said no but thought it s nice to be invited, by a stepson, so I mustered myself and hopped on my bike. which is indeed NOT what I did: no one hops on a bike without some manner of excruciation. there have been concerts all summer, and we have witnessed several. the concerts tend towards generic classic rock, competent work by old farts. I mean, one group consisted of doctors and lawyers. I do not mean to disparage, it is just that you realize that a Richard Thompson, or whoever, simply goes beyond, that the engine can be amazing, and not just fun. when I got close to the green I recognized "Magical Mystery Tour", done in straightforwardly Beatles style. hotcha, I like that song. I hurriedly locked my bike and hustled to the music. the band was a foursome, 2 older guys and 2 younger. I think I understood from the start that they were a Beatles cover band. that they played MMT confirmed that. the bass player was a grey beard and played, like Paul, a Hofner bass. the mix was heavy to the bass, but at least he was good. as was/is Paul, his bass lines were awfully tasteful and pretty. they zipped thru the Beatles catalogue competently. the sound system declined thru the night. vocals were not a patch on the original, but then the Beatles were largely a studio band, there's not a lot of extant examples of Beatles live. I was happy to hear the tunes, altho "The Ballad of John and Yoko", a mailed in song (by John et al.) if ever, just annoyed me. the Beatles hit Ed Sullivan and the American consciousness when I was 11. they flipped my world around. it has occurred to me that I can sing, words and lyrics, a very large percentage of the Beatles' catalogue, without having studied much, and without listening to much of it the past 25 years or more. the Beatles were a mega something. you think of Elvis having a similar cultural completion, and Sinatra. I think Mariah Carey may have more #1s than anyone, or some such stat. granted I am not paying attention but all that comes to mind with MC is those looping high notes. who/what is the Beatles of the 90s or the 00s? or is that a deprecated concept now? could Nirvana be said to be the Beatles of the 90s, that is, unavoidably influential? is Radiohead, for the current 15 minutes? maybe the media divergence has made such a unifying force impossible. The Beatles were a cultural imperative then, when I was 11. that concept may hold little or no water now. I certainly do not intend to present the Beatles as some necessity. Erin noted the song "Ticket to Ride", which has been taken by the homeschool coop as the theme song for graduation. which maybe is akin to taking "Born in the USA" as a paean to Republican virtues, but anyway. Howl was the culminating or coalescing thing for that time but god knows no poem will have such influence now.

Books!

Beth and I got around to unpacking books into the built in bookcase in the living room. we moved a few weeks ago, but had not gotten around to freeing our books from their boxes. we are talking only some of our books, we still have much to do getting the rest out, and in fact all will not be freed. we no longer have any in storage now, at least. the point I am working on here is just the deliciousness of unpacking and organizing the books. Beth and I have catholic taste in books, we cover a lot of genres. I had not seen some of these books in a while. I mean, oo, War and Peace: I've been reading about Napoleon lately so rereading W&P is tempting. several Wittgenstein books, I would like to spend some time. an older edition of Mrs Browning's Poetry, and a newer edition of Robert's collected works. The Letters of Henry Roots, they are riotous and will be left out for ready appreciation. a nice illustrated edition of Walden, must be time to read that again. Tristram Shandy, to be read by the fireside, with a dollop of tawny port. the 2 volumes of Olson's Muthologos, which have always been energizing works for me, his conversations and lectures. what about collections of stories by Ray Bradbury? Locus Tides by Mary Rising Higgins, which Beth and I published. Beth knew and was touched by Mary, remembered her untimely death. Eileen's brick, a delight to pick up and wander in. Emily Dickinson's Collected, tho I have not yet found my copy of Howe's remedy to the overarching harvardness involved in that collection, that is: My Emily Dickinson. oh, and My Angie Dickinson (Michael Magee). does this list bring forth any visceral tingle to yourself? Carl Sauer's review of 16th century North America. Simone Weil's discussion of the Iliad. Fitzgerald's translation of the Iliad. 3 different translations of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, each one vigourous and worthwhile. Newton's Principia. 3 books by Carl Sagan. Don Quixote by Kathy Acker, which I have not read yet. I list here books that I am eager to read/reread. 5 of the 17 Aubrey books by Patrick O'Brian that I own. which Beth has just recently begun working her way thru. woohoo. Drafts 1-38 by Rachel Blau Duplessis. I never read Don Quixote by Cervantes either, but the books sits patiently. all books do. maybe 20 dictionaries of various sorts, including Oxford's dictionary of Scottish, a mine of weird looking words of great vigour. says the Sasenach. a wonderful batch of field guides, including mushrooms, the atmosphere, as well as birds, fish, and flowers. I could go on. most of my poetry books are still packed away. poetry as a limitation, as defined by the Poetics list, is a fade, deflated tire. the poetry books are at topshelf, stand on a chair height. to be stepped up to. the spectrum, its light of inclusion, is a poetry. our library, that is, is a poetics.

little known poetry hermit Eileen Tabios has published a new book. she knows that publishing old books sniffs poorly. look here for particulars. some while ago, Eileen asked if she could use blog comments that I made regarding her work. I said yes, because she asked, and because any writer wants the words in front of eyes. I had to say, tho, and did, that my comments seemed pretty Bramhallcentric. her reply was that that was fine, that the use that I (or anyone) could make of her work was of interest to her and, with hope, to others. and it is. I have not read The Blind Chatelaine's Keys but I have read some of the commentary contributed by others, and look forward to the usage that she makes. this kinda brings me to recommend Goodreads, a Facebook for readers, where people share their reading interests. especially cool seeing what other writers are reading. Jeff Harrison, great under-known poet, opened the door of this to me. the connections that we make seem magical, but they are imperatives sprung from the source.

I should have had Jim Andrew's Vispo site in my links long ago. his work is seriously playful, and he is one of the most eloquent thinkers on the subject of visual... well, I was going to say visual poetry, but Jim's work inflects more particularly towards the internet whereas visual poetry conjures the work of, say, Geof Huth, who is indeed an eloquent champion of that vocabulary. if you want to get caught up in terminology. I like this integration of theory into the artistic act. Grenier has this same integration. his visual work extends from his poetry, his poetry from his theoretical work. totally ambient.

Stephen Vincent thoughtfully comments on my thoughts on Grenier's gallery show below, rare visitant to my comments box. my comments were not aimed at Grenier, and certainly were not grudging. I will not say that I was the only one who appreciated the hallway of poems that Grenier created at Franconia, but what I still take as a liberating effort on his part did not garner much attention at the school. but at least he is getting his turn in the limelight, and getting paid. and Grenier looks good in the pictures, just as lean and wiry as I remember him 36 years ago. Grenier's influence is large tho mostly indirect: the people he influenced influenced the many. When Silliman bio'd Grenier for In the American Tree, he neglected to mention Franconia College, where Grenier produced at least some of Sentences, at least one issue of This (in which my 1st publication), and so on. how could Mr Detail miss that? Grenier has a thereness in contemporary poetry that is treated like the most glorious of footnotes. the art world delivers on spiked glamour, with the Warhol Clock ticking. Grenier's minimalist scribbles garner chardonnay attention but his minimalist poems are given asterisks in some regulated scheme of things. if my story's correct, Grenier went from Tufts (alma pater: my father went there) to Franconia, possibly not the sweetest of career moves (the FC student population was 1/2 the size of my high school graduating class). had he hung around Harvard or MIT he would have been locked in. no I do not begrudge the art world attention he now commands, I just wish poetry were seen as just as important.

Robert Grenier en gallerie (scusi the phony French, tho it seems a propos). 6 years before Sentences was published, Grenier pinned the cards thereof onto the corkboard lining a wall at Franconia College. I had next to zero concept of the dynamics of art, the conceptual part, but walking down the hall struck me as a wonder. felt like a gallery, tho its demonstrativeness was warm and unassuming. this picture looks like NYC: synthesized, glisky, opulently reverent. this is not a grudge speaking. I am interested in Grenier's visual work but the seminal formation apparent in the presentation at Franconia has more gusto for me than the chardonnay in the plastic cup stance of the gallery crowd. I remember seeing him pinning the poems up, it had a guerrilla vibe to it, tho it was not like graffiti, just that he was making unusual use of the space. galleries strike me as bemusedly tolerant rather than engaged, and Grenier would be regarded as the latest screwball, soon to be replaced. I learned so much from him. I find myself not wanting to see him in this flashy scene. I saw much of the seminal experience of LANGUAGE poetry, the stuff that Kent Johnson et al. have missed, by way of Grenier's lessons, curiosity and openness. Grenier as just the next artist in a gallery is kinda depressing. I did not expect to get to this point when I began this post.

I am smart enough to join the chorus: Galatea Resurrects is THE thing that is out there. that and the podcast You Look Nice Today. dynamoed by Eileen Tabios, and writ large by everyone, this is an effort to get work involved with readers. the weight is on the side of the look here part of the equation, and less on the branding. the editorial instinct has to do with what engagement the reader discovered. I have written a few reviews for GR and would do more if time allowed. I like the feeling of offering something not definitive but inviting. not reviews but invitations for consideration. not Perloff and Bloom setting up walls but welcoming resonances from the poems. the ratio of review to works extant is so minuscule nowadays that it is simply quantum fresh air to read the light on all this stuff. huzza!

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.

internet fast: just to mench: I wrote "Worcester as an Average" quickly, a rapid evocation of something that had built up. I immediately posted it to Wryting, as is my wont. Halvard Johnson wrote within 20 minutes of my beginning to type the poem, asking to publish it. (this is not a common occurrence for me, but anyway). think of Dickinson, Clare, Blake able to dash so boldly into sight. it does not mean that the public would be ready, as training for Dickinson, and Blake, seems to have been needed, but the process would not have been left to a possibly entrenched editorial concern. think of possibility.

Hamilton Stone Review, edited by Halvard Johnson. A poem of mine, concerned with Worcester, Mass, sits prose-like to be viewed. other poems by other marvellers. a poem is a collection of word-like conveyances that produces the sensation of word-like conveyance.