at home with the tree 

notice 

tangle 

clouds 

admire me I am a violet

palimpsest cuts written this poem against you:

Does Shall we allow the question of what constitutes have speaking subject to answer itself?

not one my watch.

Inclusive I' m attempting to Be here.

beans are inclusive of beanness, I think.

With camera sides from left to right, appears to reorient figure absent from the frame, tenders flexibly combative abdication from the photograph of castle drawn in pencil.

then the happy squirrel raced across the lawn with the nut in its mouth.

This is what we might call has process.

peerage has its ventures.

Reach the end of the board and you' Re allotted higher notch, one whipping post of ghost hierarchy's boldfaced blacklist.

and when the drain gets clogged, turn to Drano for relief. Capital This is what we might call the cost of equipment.

yew could Be conscious of the pennies involved in just laying it all out.

has mechanical delivery system failed to account for the weight of another clause scratched onto its surface, so palimpsest attempts via the unknown to give terminology purpose.

log jams wait.

Alli Warren one

Alli Warren two

I can say what I like or don't of writings. I enjoy the transitions in Alli's writing, which is fast but not aggressive. she doesn't have to lift the car off its tracks and onto different ones, the car just bumps over there. that's an ear listening to the words arriving rather than the eye watching the audience. a less defensive stance than...

World Bitchin' Toad Returns

May bitchin' Person in the sink answer my bitchin' belief in himself.
I jolt pig without staring at flame.

bitchin' but supercilious grammarian bitchin' this bitchin' bottom some bitchin' alive bitchin' I return, true bitchin' he bitchin' himself.

I do not hear, I answer bitchin'.

You bitchin' infamy, bitchin' topic sentence, bitchin' without.

LEFT to go them, and I then, when the evening extends against the sky like a patient etherized on one table, leave.

with some ways half-abandoned, 5 bitchin' nights churned in the hotels.

economic night saw dusty restaurant and pensions, cottages with oyster-shell.

Ways that follow like a painfully reasoned bitchin'.

the insidious intention to conduct to a Casablanca issue...

10 times OH, do not ask, "and this is he?"

We leave to make our visit.

In the room the women come and enter speech, bitchin' Michael Angel.

The yellow fog that smells like oregano is the posterior part of glasses.

15 times yellow smoke of oregano nuzzles the glasses.

staccato has its language in the bitchin' angles.

evening lingers to you on the swimming pools that are kept in the drains.

leaves fall on posterior part.

sooty fireplaces fall without warning, slide from the terrazzo, make a jump.

Lanny Quarles seems to be back in bloggery. cool links to Poe Stuff. Poe's critical work is fascinating. he throws so much of his hard won learning in, and it's clear that he's just superiour to so much of the common fare. I remember somebody he reviewed, for no reason, this writer wrote all footnotes in French, the rest of the book in English. a fact that amused Poe. Poe is definitely a there. as to Lanny, he pours out a striking array of verbal and visual work that doesn't fall into neat borders. too bad, right?

terrific post by Nick Piombino, ruminating here and there, to end with some useful thoughts on Ted Berrigan. John Latta fizzed recently about blogging, that the preening and networking can make for a tiresome experience. to which I agree. but there's potential for a NY energy in the medium, if you go. not into snotty ass tiffs, but go for a ride. that's Berrigan to me, he rode it. which doesn't mean speed up unless speed is your dialect. Nick rambles at a pace and it is just the thing. when I write about Ikea or shopping the mall, the conscious thought is that this is a ride of surprise, which I would choose over the kind of entrenchments one sees often enough, the spectacle of being so right. I mean, when your opinion isn't surprising to yourself, why bother the go? so I'm happy to read Nick's wandering course, with its implicit I didn't know it was a subject. subjects are for essays.

I read in the Globe today about a man with the goal of drinking a cup of coffee at every Starbuck's. good enough, we all need our adventures. his may be hopeless since Starbucks, it said in the article, averages 11 new stores domestically and 3 internationally every week. AND Starbucks plans to add 1000 new stores next year. I don't know if that is 1000 internationally or for each township that Starbucks can find. either way: quite an expansion. er, Diorite Man.

both friday morning AND saturday morning found Beth and me at the mall. part of our anxiousness to prod the economy forward, into the guts of tomorrow. stores were offering discounts and time-limited sales, you CAN'T beat the savings!!! ne'er before had I been to the mall on the day after Thaksgiving, which, I read in Scopes.com, is NOT the busiest sales day of the year. it may be the busiest with hordes out pressing flesh, but not the moneyest. so that shows to go you. we found parking in the same county, so the hordes hadn't quite gotten the message about helping the US economy in its time of need. 1st adventure was bras for Beth. since I wore my glasses and Beth forgot hers, I got to paw the merchandise for the right size. does it get any better than that? and standing in line with the selection while Beth darts off for socks. poked thru the Levis selection while serenaded by a door alarm that wasn't about to be hushed. a stop at men's fragrance to enter in a contest offering Carlos Santana signed bongos as prize. should I stop here to note that I am writing here New York prose? yup, NY School of Prose, Massachusetts Division. Beth stopped at a makeup counter, and got the whole treatment. the sales person there, a sweet Russian woman, practically shooed me away for fear I'd gather too many female secrets. I did toddle off for a run down the main mall lane. where the pushcart folk resemble moray eels as they lunge at you with their dreadful calling plans and appliances that steam away wrinkles. I popped into a music store and looked at iPods (forget the music). our 2nd visit to the mall began with a purchase of a coffee maker. Beth saw glass bird ornaments. over the last few years we've accrued a monster array of Xmas ornaments. Crate and Barrel offers these brightly coloured ones that appeal to my taste: this side of gaudy. down the escalator to the thumpthumpthump of trendy clothes. I mean the music, some manner of techno, the pride of drum machines. down the escalator from there, and do I hear bagpipes merging from the dance beat? sure and begorrah! a designer from Waterford Glass was in the house ready to sign your purchase. a fellow in green kilts was playing the warpipes to keep everyone amused. the cosmetics saleswoman greeted us as we passed. Beth showed her a glass bird, which the woman cooed over. Beth gave one to her. then we went to the music store because those iPods... I got a Shuffle for myself and wanted to get the next size up for Erin but they were out. when I finally got it all figured out at home, I listened to "Omaha" by Moby Grape, and I was really home.

I was struck by this picture, and liked the ensuing text. the elderly aren't the only ones liable to remain shut in, but they often end up that way. for a brief time, my father flourished in adult daycare. he got out and saw people, he was after all, gregarious by nature. soon, tho, he became anxious about getting home again, and the experience became a worry. I've seen this with some of the people with whom we do a painting class. sometimes the world's too big, and too much with us, to boot.

 
 

 
 pink floyd

E.T.

 
 

expressive cat ears

 
 

 
 

a thought that Ted Berrigan is certes a poet I would want the collected of. that the poem's essential event seems always assured in his writing. the other side would be Allen Ginsberg, whose collected has so many millstones. I would always want the collected of any poet that interests me. with Ginsberg, sometimes he's too ready to sweep things into his poem, you know, Blake, Buddha, his rather public interests. the self-conscious poet. of course there is conscious and there's conscious. Howl is self-conscious but undistracted. I guess that's the note I'm trying to ring. when self-consciousness becomes distracting, the poem starts looking for effects. Berrigan's hyperactivity (I don't mean that as a medical assessment) doesn't let him stay too long in his self-consciousness. that could be what he learned, what can be learned, from O'Hara: write it then leave it. that is, each word (this isn't a screed against editing). as in: don't go looking for weighty words, the ones with special pleas in them. as an addendum to this scribble, I want to say how intrigued I was by Ron Silliman's read of Jordan Davis' article on the generations of NY poets. the idea of cataloguing these writers. I honestly don't see the point, yet I like thinking of this New York cauldron. so many writers that I like, with some manner of aesthetic shared, if only the naked energy of the city itself. I remember the excitement of coming to these many readers in the early/mid 70s, while at the same time being confronted by LANGUAGE poetry, while also catching up on earlier poetry. my interst in poetry, you see, was zilch till I was 18 at least, even tho I began writing it when I was 16. it all happened at once, more or less. the receptivity of the NY poets (1st and 2nd gen), and their looseness, certainly wre beneficent influences for this tyro. and so on...

the last 2 years we've travelled to Beth's mother's place in New Jersey for Thanksgiving. this year, with a new place to enjoy, we stayed home. 5am, a few flakes of snow gently fell. by 7, when I walked the dog, there was modest accumulation, which was slippery when I later ran. determined to be fairly worthless for the day, I watched the Thanksgiving Day Parade. here's a fine example of the pure products of America going bonkers. it can't just be a parade, it has to be lip sync. there was a taped piece of bull crap that was oh my god so ridiculous. a Broadway style musical skit that apparently was about spelling bees. it featured people in their 20s and 30s pretending hopefully and quasi-cutely to be elementary school kids. how embarassing is that? they all had theatre voice, they all worked hard, they were all downright plucky. the dancing was faux clumsy, which you could associate with humour if you were bored enough. the choreographhy was the sort determined to make the performers look silly. it's so implausible. what's the aesthetic of Broadway singing anyway? well, it was jolly good fun watching these people and their lack of pride. a so-called country act called Big and Rich did what I assume is their big hit in a taped sequence on an aircraft carrier. aircraft carrier = support our troops, or trope, as the case may be. the band was fronted by 2 guys. one just sang, he was longhaired, bearded, wore a hat with LOVE on it, looked hippie-inspired. his mate was shorthaired, wore a cowboy hat, played one of those A-line Stratocasters, so he was mostly country but look at the rock guitar! the rest of the band hung in the background. it included a fiddler. there was a dwarf on crutches back there, seemingly part of the band. maybe he was to fill the role that Joe whatshisname filled for Kid Rock. too many mixed signs, at any rate, tho the song was catchy. the big news in the parade was that a balloon hit a light post, that sent a lamp into a crowd, injuring a couple of people and perhaps giving M&Ms the wrong sort of pub. Santa slid thru with a gang of elves, who wore stars on top of their heads, a fashion statement that looked both inconvenient and silly. what I really wanted to do was watch football. I've seen really only part of one game this year. I saw most of a crappy tussle between the Falcons and the toothless Lions. after that was a better game between the Broncos and Cowboys that I couldn't see the all of because we were going out to dinner. a repast at the Concord Inn, for which we dressed up. the inn is almost 300 years old and was once owned by Thoreau's father. Beth called a week or so ago, taking a flyer that we could get reservations. by crackie we could. I assumed it was one of those year-in-advance deals. the place was plump with people, many of them from the tweedy prep school squad that inhabits Concord and environs. the reservation desk was in a small, low-ceilinged room, something of a zoo. the guy in charge of reservations was a fussy, slow moving older fellow with 3 earrings who was clearly fed up. everyone was pushy, eventually even me, and he just wasn't built for the pace. he doled out tables as they became ready. a waitress periodically reported on the the table situation. I don't know if she misspook or he misunderstood but it came out that two tables for two turned out to be one for two. that required a rather lengthy expresion of his exasperation. I stayed near the desk so that I'd be ready. a little later the same waitress came back with knews of several tables open, one 2 and 2 4s. a woman enquired about when her table would be ready. he said he called 1/2 an hour ago. she was a bit irate that he hadn't come tell her, in the next room, where the bar could be accessed. he replied, well I couldn't very well leave this desk could I? point taken, tho indeed he did leave frequently. I somehow enquired for our table in between other people's interruptions (my interruption was more important than theirs). he slowly went down the list, checked us off and directed a frail, elderly woman to see us to our seats. he room was a-buzz but we could relax. it ws a limited menu. the waiter was friendly and efficient, and tho the pace was considerable, seemed unfrazzled. a big headed turkey entered the room doling out chocolates. I had turkey, the others pork loin. Beth cooked a turkey yesterday, to serve today, but I like turkey. the waiter not only gave Erin a 2nd dessert, he brought another to take home. on the way home we passed 2 houses already lit up for Christmas. like last year, both houses have as many lights and decorations as possible. one house is quite tasteful for all that. the decorative elements are nice ones, and there's some harmony to the lights. the other house is maxed out gaudy. all mny of Christmas gimcrack is thrown onto the roof, the trees, the yard. snowman and magi and Rudolphs and whatever. last year, the roof was lit with the display: Support Our Troops. a happy reminder for Santa. there's an airfield nearby, so truly, the message does get out. this year it's merely Seasons Greetings. I didn't mench that wednesday evening there was a bonfire, to rally the local troops against those footballing lads of Concord. yesterday morning the thing was still smouldering in the snow. thus the holiday, and Beth says she needs to go to the mall. I dunno if I will be part of that venture.