Erin belongs to the Mock Trial team that our homeschool cooperative put together. Mock Trial is a national competition of high school age competitors who formally try cases. the cases, I believe, are actual ones. there've been 2 trials so far. actual attorneys (scoring pro bono points) coach the teams. each team supplies lawyers to try the case, and whatever witnesses for their side. there's real lawyering being done, as well as acting. Erin, so far, is just an understudy. only half the team gets to participate in a trial. the 1st trial was in a small local law school. it was fascinating. the 4 (2 boys, 2 girls) lawyers for our team dressed the part, in suits. the girls on the other team all dressed neatly but not in suits. the one boy on that team of attoprneys wore a suit but took the jacket off. that's a points off offense, which the judge noted. the case was a civil suit, someone wanted to collected damages because they got into a traffic accident while using a gps. our side defended. probably the highlight of the trial was when the plaintiff's attorney cross-examined one of the defense's witnesses. the girl who played the witness was very relaxed in her role (a girl on the other side had gotten the giggles and could barely finish), and quite hosile. she wasn't about to give up any incriminating information. which in fact is exactly how the expert witness in the OUI trial we saw recently acted. the attorney was tenacious and it was exciting to watch. I thought the attorney got knocked back on her heels a bit but the judge afterwards commended her performance. one of our attorneys was keen to object, even pointing out to the judge some Mock Trial rules that the judge didn't know, and he had the boy on the ohter side totally flustered. the judge was kindly about that. he didn't score the boy well, but he empathized aferwards. it seemed tense as we watched but in fact our team won by a large margin (each performer is rated on a 1-10 scale). the 2nd trial wasn't even close. the other side at least dressed lawyerly, but they weren't well-practiced. the one who did the closing argument got completely lost. I grant nerves, and wouldn't want to be overly critical, but she'd already done at least one trial before with the same closing, AND she was reading it. the other team didn't object once. something that I noticed, and maybe this is the point of this post, is how the homescholers seemed more mature than the high schoolers. or maybe maturity isn't the right word. I think I perceived a social ceiling over the head of the highschoolers: the school hierarchy. the molding and manipulation that goes on. the implicit weight of judments: what does my teacher think of me, my coach, the popular kids, what, even, do the dorks think. it's all lumped on the backs on every student. everyone is judged, but the homeschoolers inhabit a much less rigid structural system of judgment. the first team that we faced was pretty sharp but a sense of their own freedom was lacking. it seemed telling that one of the team in the 2nd trial was on her cellphone as soon as the trial (not the competition) ended. the Pavlov bell rings and it is time to move on. it is worth at least considering the alternative to public school, admitting the obvious failings thereof. not to proselytize nor to assume homescholing is for everyone. Erin has Asperger's, a high function sort of autism. how does the gristmill deal with that sort of child? fill in he blank.

Ron Silliman sometime back mentioned the Lucipo listserv and presented Ken Rumble's thoughtful history of the list. the level of discourse is not universally high there (where is it high, btw?), tho I leave you to ascertain for yourself. there seem to be some advocates for the Boring School of Poetry there. you'd think that would be a hard sell. anyway, it's a lively list, and if you send me an email, I'll send you a coded message telling you who I like and who I don't.

Super Sunday, of which I witnessed nary a lick. Beth and I went in to Boston, however. 1st stop: yet another furniture store, where both hard candies and Hershey Kisses(tm) were available. I'm easily amused. I had my camera so took pictures of the house on Fresh Pond Parkway my father grew up in as we passed. a kinda perfunctory act, but he mentioned life there so often that it is sort of a shrine. seemed like a perfect spring day, sunny, perhaps 50. scads of runners in shorts running along the Charles. we crossed on Mass Ave, over the bridge. Beth wanted to see Newbery St, one of the places in Boston where i imagine it's possible you'll hear the word chichi spoken. we didn't, tho. parked near the Ritz, strolled down the street. lacking furniture stores, we opted for art galleries. the 1st we came to wasn't open. me, I'd figure sunday was a good day to be open. maybe sunday they keep the hoi polloi out so that they can serve chardonnay and pigs-in-a-blanket to the high rollers. je ne sais pas. next door was open. I flinched on entering, expexting a snotty welcome (or none at all) but surprisingly we were welcomed in every gallery. this 1st one had drawings by Matisse and Dali and I guess lithographs by Rembrandt. we got several of each, they'll look great in the bathroom. by the nature of the place, I'd guess their expected clientele would be on the stuffy side but the offered sculptures were, each one, lulus. florid, hokey, over the top. I couldn't even bring myself to look at them carefully, they were just too busy. I don't know if they were all by the same person. they were marbles of human figures, females mostly, with leaves and birds and whatnot. top heavy creations balanced on one hand or whatever. hightoned equivalents to velvet portraits of Elvis. I can see some oil money lunkhead sticking one of these things in the foyer as a warning of what money can buy. and no doubt the piece's price would be mentioned in any discussion of its artistic merits. I really do believe in to each his/her own but as I said, the things were simply too busy for me even to look at, let alone grok. that gallery may've been the one that had a Pissaro oil, and one in pastel. I loved looking at the brush strokes, a feature I miss in books, where the translation of the image naturally loses something. I read a fascinating description of a Monet by a writer named Ball (David?). a very detailed and close up (microscopic) discussion of Monet's brush strokes. I like seeing that level of a painting. the next gallery was better still. a lovely Chagall in pastel, a bunch of Picasso ink drawings and other this and that. a series of prints with highly charged colours that reminded me of psychedelic album covers. another artist only does paintings of no more than 2"x3". art that fits pocket or purse. Beth asked a question of someone there, and he readily engaged. I worked in a wine store for a long time, and I didn't care if you bought Mouton-Rothschild or Soave, but customers often apologized if they weren't prepared to pay a lot. I felt like that, but the guy wasn't putting that over on me. he guy spent a lot of time talking with Beth (I roamed, and pocketed the offered hard candies). the next gallery had some weirdly glum pastels. they seemed to depict a world of pollution, which is not a subject you think pastels are made for. Beth was particularly taken by the work of a French artist. his paintings are both intense and distressed. several portaits of women that really bear down. the best perhaps was a scene in an ancient city (Pompeii, Beth wondered). some of the figure wear togas, some pants. one figure is on the ground. all very enigmatic but quite compelling. again Beth asked questions. the woman who answered was much more sales-oriented tho not obnoxiously. she said, take the ancient scene home and try it out. man, I'd hate to do that. err, the cat somehow.... the cat could, too. or I'd stumble as I carried it. or a meteorite thru the window. I think that ws he last gallery. Beth skipped into a curtain store which was too crowded and way too sensory-overloaded for me, I stayed outside. it was a day of indecently unseasonable warmth for Henry Aaron's Birthday. and the SuperBowl? I just didn't cae enough. certainly I could miss the hype in my face.

home of hey now the language beast

One city after another discards language for the more vital infidelities, those that can't lightly be named. Thus poetry, hounded by the principles of mayhem--which are resident in ticklish parlours of pleasantries (try to decide why)--invites disaster by writing essays concerned with dragon lore and cellphone history, thoughtless of priceless readership.

Cellphones, august with the sulfurous approval of righteous dragons, seems pent up for destruction. All words go thru this channel, to wire up a concern and prove, again, that dragons need dough to live, even big bucks, just like your excellency. So how, prithee, do we break this mode of thought in the dull morning exactly?

Often we are drafted into humdrum wartime exercises, finding couth in all manner of tricking those religious beings who push us forward. There is no nicer dragon than the one oh my god it has ruby eyes of fire and makes dreams seem like wasted youth! Yet can you calm down? No. Religion amasses fairly, sold with proper consideration, and kept by the door for moments of real need. If we were really taken by poetry, we wouldn't be so afraid of the dragon's swooping presence.

Our fears, see, grow up in archetypal normalcy, having to do particularly with doesn't that creaking sound on the stairs make you think of other features of fear? And so language trumps our every super hand, as if the cellphone weren't a vital vortex into which the pure language, like aces up the sleeve, flows. Enter the field now, await the dragon's next batch of carnal proclivities that will once again send us to windows screeching for medicine, the more unguent the better.

Slowly, the essential characteristics appear soluble, like trams of which we've heard. As we ride in charming rattle, our cellphone rings. Conversation will touch modes of inheritance, until we reach our stop. Some teens are louder than the very moment you said hello, but that energy isn't shared. You are appealed to: can you justify a dragon? You look to your cellphone's palette of potent functions, even text messaging and music downloads. It fits in pocket or purse with slim efficiency, ringing you up alert at movie theatre or elsewhere with the pressure of news, joyful emphasis of someone who knows you. Does poetry so survive its inadequacy that it can share such bountiful imbroglio? Dragons march on the town, securing ramparts and otherwise making the most of movie history. Language next will fall. It will be your fault, pilgrim, you and your ranking behaviour behind these frail fortress walls.

evenings are for theorists

When vital endeavour squeezes off the town, voted tough by ignorance, and what the hell smells of everything known to come along, then does the dragon lurch from lair of darker than you want to know, to become a poetry such as when you call home, home is a vague tilled field.

Late histories assert of dragons as taller than guesses, skipping gravity as if it were a complaint and being very full of language, tho it seems like fire.

This sort of cellphone, clamped onto the ear while disaster accepts our pleas, shortchanges announcements and maybe poetry is the key.

Eminent charges for expressing self-doubt become a way to eke out or even thru (if possible) with bold upright or perhaps a musical squeak, telling folks of your admirable degree and easy pace.

Awesome post upon which notorious examples are spiffy, unvanquished, laughing at turgid or praising it, and still leaving news for the forward minded, this post has been excavated from the primal brain, which went every which way but loose.

Not letting self-doubt be more than the full complete impetus for pulling the poetry in from the cellphone heaven whereat it resides, then does the dragon become a kind of an act of. Sleep trips many verses that were ignored primarily for their toasted repose, now shows up as best friends and nations of the dammed.

A pile of money awaits the winner of succulent contests, and in the ear of the many a new language starts to perk. This becomes throb and throb is a rhyme.

Deliberate evenings, marked by relentless following of sunsets, predate nights and the scuffy attitude of mornings. All these are times when the dragon full of words starts the sky's fires and exacts just enough spittle as to emphasize a ripe whistle, which then, across decades of mileage, succumbs to the glamour of the newest cellphone.

And we theorize bothersome ideas that conclude with ringing bells and whistles, shuddering with moody mayhem concerning the reputed worth of dying to say more, yet honestly inveigling sight unseen the choosy hump day workaholic tribunal set up in collegiate sport for the safety of even wild cellphones, that are dragons in disguise.

We must loosen our grip on a society without poetry, reeks the cellphone in promenade across the mighty dragon's back. The dragon returns from bleating about how language strictly speaking composes itself in our lives, almost.

And even a writer, a poet, tooled to the latest cellphone, brightly assays a dragon past quenching those rumbling fires of eek we're doomed and the hero, arrived at logically defined and thru patient rendering of factual matter into all sorts of gimcrack, dates the newest cellphone to tricks of the trade, including doomy speeches towards, about and so much praising for the dragon.

Beyond that, history's just a lot of work.

self hone dragon poetry lower

The cellphone, which is poetry, flies into the fullest empyrean, reeking of dragon that rips off archetypal.
That cellphone hits on something really flame from the mouth, wily eyes, ravage landscape sort of prime dizzying effect.
That phone of something certainly has made its depth charge as much as flying thru the air scary.
We need id and ego on the boat, says captain in charge of what's that ahead it looks strange and possibly dangerous call in the troops.
The people want poetry near the ledge, almost owing to something that they read about archetypally,
hence the dragon.
Dragon lore fits prime eddy of literary sequence threshed from the straw base stubblefield of which the dragon knows so much.
Dragon makes a struggle of poetry into the air above the village where those who till and reap and run around in circles cite other examples of similar scary times, well-based in times of lore.
What's up with this cellphone that needs to be poetry all the time, even leaving the church school or movie theatre and tell your friends just that?
The poetry, which is ardent cellphone in the need of passing quick text messages to the one over there, giggly, is something thru the space of time.
The cellphone, prominent and you can tell that the camera will be a boost to sales, absolutely any moment could be photographed sent and saved.
What's better than to prove poetry as a vehicle for the survival of cellphones, personally together as we get around to studying some theory in between poems and dragon attacks?
Finally a document named poetry comes into the forest of cellphones where dragons lurk mighty and prevailing wind, but the poetry public, they are not quite so loose.

Miss Hoover Will Say "The Children Are Right to Laugh at You"

a small volunteer team started methodically counting all poets reported killed in thinly settled Kentucky alone by Dan Hoy, who laughs, then spouts off a litany of self-aggrandizing rhetorical questions demanding a return to a tortured life with outrageous problems: “This is my sandbox, I'm not allowed to go in the deep end”

when Dan Hoy had the poets killed, how did he do it?

by baptism
by an Israeli helicopter
by his junk diet
by bears
by a booby-trapped mobile telephone
by a CIA spy plane
by falling trees
by Death
by legal abortions
by an avalanche on the crête de Lachat in the Lauzière range close to the ski resort of Valmorel
by drought
By Hammer
by One of the latest Palestinian children
by Americans
by a falling banana
by Palestinians and 707 Palestinian children
By Suicide Attack In Iraq
by rebels backed by Uganda
by prejudice
by contempt
By Hype
by security forces
by police at his middle school

poets, friends, remember the time you said Snagglepuss was outside?

NB: the name Joan Houlihan can be substituted for Dan Hoy depending on bete noir preference

Beth and I visited not one but 2 furniture stores yesterday, roughly 2 more than I really need. I don't mind furniture stores per se, but they represent big sensory overload for me. well 1st we hit Panera, where the soft pseudo-jazz stylings lull you into your coffee and bagel. it pleased me to see a Panera in West Virginia last year, there seems so few little pleasures in WV. I mean, we were in Spencer WV once. the big place to go to for a special time was McDonald's, which had 3 televisions for your viewing enjoyment/transfixation/narcotizing. at Panera you can at least expect to get something more robust than brown water when you ask for coffee, WV being a bleak outpost for coffee aficionados. after Panera was a visit to Ethan Allen, and soft rock sounds piped over the sound system. too much to look at, and we have no immediate needs. hard to figure old portraits that you figure should be hanging on castle walls. in one rather frumpy livingroom arrangement, the display books were the Hardy Boys. a nice touch at Ikea is that the prop books are in Swedish. to get me to enter Thomasville down the road, beth suggested that we hit Barnes and Noble after. Thomasville store was better lit than EA but not much different otherwise (to these critical eyes). bowls of hard candy were my main points of interest and--score!!!--a bowl of Hershey Kisses(tm). a crappy rock station sounded merely obnoxious, not the music but the dopey patter of the djs. tho I must admit that that old song by Melissa Etheridge gets on my nerves. it's almost inexplicable why she starts yelling in the song. I can explic, however: it's a show of passion and sincerity, but it sounds like phony shit. I was glad to leave. B&N was its same old self. trying not to spend heedlessly, I avoid a lot of areas of consideration. in fact, I spent little time downstairs at all. Beth, on the other hand, can stand there and read, which I can't do. she found a book that had postcards from anonymous people who detailed secrets they've never told. unnerving to say the least. someone pees in her husband's coffee when she's mad at him. others carry tremendous guilt for some little acts or failings. a little is funny, a lot disturbing. I looked at books by Jung, but I must admit that I got a lot to go thru as it is. the poetry section looked bleary. the highlight table seemed better than what was displayed at Christmas. Berrigan, for one. I get the feeling, tho, that someone thinks they ordered too many of that. I saw Legitimate Dangers (misnomer alert), which looks like smell. author photos and CVs accommpany the poetry, which suggests to me sleight of hand: look at this not the poetry. I can't remember where I read it, but apparently Dante Rossetti and Algernon Swinburne lived together for a time. and one of them had the idea--alas, never fulfilled--of getting an elephant to clean the windows. that's the sort of thing I want to read in one's bio, not where you went to school or what forgetable magazine you've been published in. please, tell me about your window cleaning elephant. in my absolutely hurried scan of the anthology I detected no aesthetic, which is to say, no compelling idea to make me want to buy it. it was just a bunch of poems, hey hey hey. I don't know why people buy anthologies except for teaching purposes. few rise up to more than targets for potshots like this. I glanced briefly at the philosophy section. B&N has put out affordable editions of a lot of philosophy classics in the public domain. I wasn't hankering to buy anything however. nothing new from Terry Pratchett, Beth's passion (I've read the 1st 20 or so Disc Worlds but nothing since). it seems Gertrude Stein wrote only 2 books, Alice B Toklas's autobiography and Three Lives. there were at least 3 editions of On the Road, makes no sense to me. nor the 23,000 editions of Lord of the Rings. I'll leave the thinking to the folks in marketing. Beth almost got a Tony Hillerman and a Robert Ludlum but threw them back when she saw a history of the French and Indian Wars, which is my cup of tea as well. that book represented our swag for the day.

I invoked John Ashbery in previous post, which I'm sure if Sean Finney saw, would exasperate, as if he were a subdivision of JA. I do such likening all the time, it's a manner of handhold for me, but I know it could be read as a confinement. I don't mean Finney is channelling, nor am I even suggesting that Finney might feel that connection. I've managed to package him in Ashberian wrapper nonetheless, which is not my intent. misuse of such likening can be egregious, as Dan Hoy helpfully illustrates in Jacket 28. he lumps flarfists together, he lumps Googlers together, all within the sofa soft confines of Boolean critique. I worked for a company that was bought by Harvard MBAs, who decision-treed the company to its least functionability, and Hoy proceeds similarly. how he glommed onto such a moral tone in the circs is beyond me, but I wasn't really going to go clout on him here. still, when he directs his inquest to the point of phrases like "dick-waving", I think animus took his scooter. returning to Finney, I had a slow entrance to his work just as I had a slow entrance to Brandon Downing's. I don't need to bring up any wattage concerns I may have about myself, I actually do not mind my tentativeness towards poetry. the untentative, the utterly definite, like Hoy, are the ones who do the damage. part of my difficulty to enter the work of Downing and Finney stems from a whirling few months, having moved and made big changes. my concentration level is piss poor. and I'm still burying my father. so I'm having trouble making the leaps that both Finney and Downing do so well. I just want to wave my wand (ce n'est pas mon dick) to function up a welcoming glow for you around these two writers, as the pleasures that have gotten thru my fog are genuine and tough.

I've been reading The Obedient Door by Sean Finney (Meritage 2005) for a while now. pathetically, really, but my reading focus has perforce been elsewhere, so I'm just reading mere morsels at a time. I like the work and think Ashbery's blurb "cheerfully slipshod" says something accurate and appealing about Finney's work. I don't want to prove further how critically lame-o I am, so nothing in depth here, but i want to note 2 things. 1st just to mench at least a hint (and this is not to suggest teammates or that sort of lazy critical round up) of Ashbery to the work, specifically a voice rising from what? the clutter and confusion? works for me. the 2nd thing is simply to quote a line, from the poem "Row Out": "Pupil-tired she was of my guts for ambition." it reads like 2 separate sentences deciding to merge and get along. it seems like a wistful declaration but that awkward (slipshod) word order brings a screwy poetic delight. to me, anyway. it's not exactly like folksy locutions that you might hear like throw me down the stairs my hat or throw me over the pencil, but it does bring a disaster that unsettles, but pleases too, in a humourous yet unnerving way. enough for the present. now it's back to more hommages a Joan Houlihan...

some lovely visual works by John M Bennett. there's something fascinating about letters, which we usually miss because we are too busy looking at the word. the rest of Dan Waber's site, Logolalia, offers a rich and fascinating variety of works. I officially recommend his site.

I enjoyed this interview with Ron Padgett. the historicity bubbles up, his connection to long dead artists like Berrigan and Brainard, not that he isn't vital now. LANGUAGE poets carry a sort of apres le deluge feeling, not speaking of the work but the now firmly formed reputations of its actual members. even flarf and younger groups are developing this Aspern Papers aura. Olson died less than a year before I 1st heard of him. what does this add up to? the boundaries of time and age are pretty permeable, I guess. at least, they ought to be. Kyger seems pretty vital now, tho her generation is dying off. I liked hearing Padgett declare that he recently went back and read all of Marvell (not the comix) and plans on revisiting Herbert. there is no such thing as today's poetry. not to say there are no fat Elvis's out there, sliding.

Patrick Herron worries it. it is always surprising how deaf we all are to our own defensiveness. does, and can, Patrick's post prove something? he lays too much emphasis on the originality of his procedure. procedure is just a road to the place. I could go on, but won't.

sampling

a
taste of
something similar to
ice
ages unwrapped
with awesome payback
(where
language equals
definite likeness and
ice
age seems
as if the
only
term full
on the nose
of
going down),
and furthermore a
relaxed
bedding of
night clause, all
the
embouchure, and
no one sells
distinctly
and in
plain sight exactly

plop 
 

oddly 
 

Job Action

There was a woman in the
ground of large poetry,
whose name was
Joan Houlihan and this
woman was perfect and right
and one which feared modern poetry

when the days of her having fun
were approximately gone, Joan
Houlihan transmitted and
increased quickly in the morning
and offered burned offerings
according to the number of the beast

Thus continued Joan Houlihan

Now there was a day in which Billy Collins
came to present before Ron Silliman and
John Ashbery came moreover between them

and did Ron Silliman say
lubricate John Ashbery?

John Ashbery answered
Ron Silliman and said,
Hast thou considered
my slave Joan Houlihan?
a messenger then lubricated
Joan Houlihan, saying,
the fire of Billy Collins fell from the sky

there's a going out of business sale at Elsewhere. pride goeth before the fall or something like that. I've always used an originality metre on all my work to be sure that it's 100% original. however, before Gary goes to prison, interesting process report on his next Elsewhere comic. I enjoy process and method reports, however much sticks with me.

part 58 of Antic view is up and ready to be ignored. check out the other assholes 1st, then if your busy schedule allows, read our blog as well.

Stephen Vincent's piece about / review of a presentation by photographer Richard Long (Big Valley???) is keen and thoughtful. Stephen picks up on a certain unread quality to Long. did he, Stephen wonders, traipse about out there without some connection to Muir, Snyder, Whalen? could one traverse this landscape here and not think of Thoreau putting in the mileage? it seems so out of touch, notin the sense of having to worship those predecessors, but that they were there, they help form the tradition in which he himself. oh, did this Charles Olson write about Gloucester too?. a basic lack of connection.