I Do Not Speak While I Type

Unlike the woman I've been sitting next to at this coffeehouse, who does speak while she types. Slowly, carefully & loudly.

Luckily I have Betty Davis to blot her out.



Growling, hard-hitting soul-funk. Her first two records were recently reissued by Light in the Attic Records. So nice.

And she has pretty much the most amazing record cover ever.

I had a strange night last night. And this morning seems glazed. I spent a lot of time yesterday morning & this morning looking through this website, looking at the faces of dead soldiers. With the tiny online pictures they all look like someone I've met, someone I might have known. Old students, old friends, people I might pass on the street. When I turn around they aren't there. When I turn around there's a single note hanging in the air.

I kept thinking of Larry Levis' poem "Caravaggio: Swirl & Vortex," thinking about how the cascades of history leaves me breathless & dizzy.

Larry Levis

Caravaggio: Swirl & Vortex

In the Borghese, Caravaggio, painter of boy whores, street punk, exile & murderer,
Left behind his own face in the decapitated, swollen, leaden-eyed head of Goliath,
And left the eyelids slightly open, & left on the face of David a look of pity

Mingling with disgust. A peach face; a death mask. If you look closely you can see
It is the same face, & the boy, murdering the man, is murdering his own boyhood,
His robe open & exposing a bare left shoulder. In 1603, it meant he was available,

For sale on the street where Ranuccio Tomassoni is falling, & Caravaggio,

Puzzled that a man would die so easily, turns & runs.

Wasn't it like this, after all? And this self-portrait, David holding him by a lock
Of hair? Couldn't it destroy time if he offered himself up like this, empurpled,
Bloated, the crime paid for in advance? To die before one dies, & keep painting?

This town, & that town, & exile? I stood there looking at it a long time.

A man whose only politics was rage. By 1970, tinted orchards & mass graves.

~

The song that closed the Fillmore was "Johnny B. Goode," as Garcia played it,
Without regret, the doors closing forever & the whole Haight evacuated, as if
Waiting for the touch of the renovator, for the new boutiques that would open—

The patina of sunset glinting in the high, dark windows.

Once, I marched & linked arms with other exiles who wished to end a war, & . . .
Sometimes, walking in that crowd, I became the crowd, &, for that moment, it felt
Like entering the wide swirl & vortex of history. In the end,

Of course, you could either stay & get arrested, or else go home.

In the end, of course, the war finished without us in an empty row of horse stalls

Littered with clothing that had been confiscated.

~

I had a friend in high school who looked like Caravaggio, or like Goliath—
Especially when he woke at dawn on someone's couch. (In early summer,
In California, half the senior class would skinny-dip & drink after midnight

In the unfinished suburb bordering the town, because, in the demonstration models,
They finished the pools before the houses sold. . . . Above us, the lush stars thickened.)
Two years later, thinking he heard someone call his name, he strolled three yards

Off a path & stepped on a land mine.

~

Time's sovereign. It rides the backs of names cut into marble. And to get
Back, one must descend, as if into a mass grave. All along the memorial, small
Offerings, letters, a bottle of bourbon, photographs, a joint of marijuana slipped

Into a wedding ring. You see, you must descend; it is one of the styles
Of Hell. And it takes a while to find the name you might be looking for; it is
Meant to take a while. You can touch the names, if you want to. You can kiss them,

You can try to tease out some final meaning with your lips.

The boy who was standing next to me said simply: "You can cry. . . . It's O.K., here."

~

"Whistlers," is what they called them. A doctor told me who'd worked the decks
Of a hospital ship anchored off Seoul. You could tell the ones who wouldn't last
By the sound, sometimes high-pitched as a coach's whistle, the wind made going

Through them. I didn't believe him at first, & so then he went into greater
Detail. . . . Some evenings, after there had been heavy casualties & a brisk wind,
He'd stare off a moment & think of a farm in Nebraska, of the way wheat

Bent in the wind below a slight rise, & no one around for miles. All he wanted,
He told me, after working in such close quarters for twelve hours, for sixteen
Hours, was that sudden sensation of spaciousness—wind, & no one there.

My friend, Zamora, used to chug warm vodka from the bottle, then execute a perfect
Reverse one-&-a-half gainer from the high board into the water. Sometimes,
When I think of him, I get confused. Someone is calling to him, & then

I'm actually thinking of Caravaggio . . . in his painting. I want to go up to it

And close both the eyelids. They are still half open & it seems a little obscene

To leave them like that.

Graduate From Everything

Some Things I've Been lately

Karen Weiser's Pitching Woo, from Cy Press, has a way of pushing at the edges of sense while still attempting a language game of conveying information. In "landscape on shuffle" (which is an awesome title) she writes

A conk on the head can take you around
the cloudburst back to where I left
you flowered sack of abundant signs spilling
oyster shells and invisible currents in the patter
of patterns. This way of geysering
is first a way of building,
donning the story's once wonderful
bookends or sentries on either side of the door

There is enough sonic play to keep me focused on the pleasure of the text as words-in-the-mouth, but the real intellectual pleasure of this stanza is working back & forth between the creation of scene, character, something that evokes a place in the world, versus the wild spin of the surreal.

But for me the anchor for the surreal is the way it recreates emotions. The logic of emotion is the surreal, just as the logic of politics is scars & highways. It's the way Weiser creates new analogues for emotions that I love. In "they were hard to kill, those places" she writes

You fished for chance in the oddest places
moving to feel stopped
toppling over planetary motion
along the balconies of our clothes

The balconies--clothes metaphor is so good, so damn good. But it's the arrival there through the sentence that cements it. Weiser's poems find their moments of impact, rather than whittling a set of language down to its razors. These are not poems that smack you around, nor do they make you follow a meandering path. This is a collection of crafty poems, at turns clever & direct, bizarre & conversation, evasively ironic & surrealistically sincere.




Robert Krut's Theory of a Walking Big Bang, from H_ngm_n B__ks overlaps somewhat on the aesthetic venn diagram, but he has a different use for the surreal, employing it to create moments that jab you. Witness:

Brothers and sisters,
we are not object
nor subjects, but motion
without context.
Man bleeds starlight wrapped in dirt.

Krut's poems intend to enter your life, speak to you about the world. And they're very good at this. His poems lean forward, pushing head-first into the next line. It's not reckless, not a tumble, but more of a concerted effort at finding some way of speaking about the world that makes sense. Whereas Weiser's poems seem to work in the world, finding a way of speaking about it, Krut's have goals, ideas to explore.

The poems that closes the chapbook "The Easy Star in Chinle" starts off

Standing on the discreet lip of the canyon,
it is easy to believe There is no self--

Not a human sound or sight,
black lake that is the chasm before you--

Feeding the recurring stray dog
fry bed and shredded beef--

The only light, fire light
red and white inside a hogan below--

It is easy to thing, This is the first light, the last night
of a big bang, cosmos buried in earth.

This kind of meditative poetry attempts the definition of the world, but for Krut the definition is always just beyond sense. He needs to resort to the surreal to try to get things close to right. It is not play for him. The surreal is not other.

Say hello to Claire, who's animal for human.



If you're in the Bay area you should go to this reading.

Lily Brown, Sharon Osmond, Andrew Kenower, Adam Watkins

Back Room Live
Saturday Night
May 26th 7pm
Mc Nally's Irish Pub
5352 College Ave
Oakland, CA 94618

You should already know this, but Lily is pretty much the best. I'm going to move to SF tonight so that I can go to the reading.

More Movies

The Predator & Joshua Marie Wilkinson Reading from Figures for a Darkroom Voice

Ham & eggs, comin' at you.

Also, if you like my apartment (pre-flooded with blood stage) & skeleton gloves that glow in the dark then you'll love Always Swim at Night

Emails From the Dead

Last night I dreamed I got an email from Joe Brainard. The email didn't make much sense. I wasn't sure if he was sending me a poem or he was on something or if it was a message I couldn't decipher. I forwarded it to my mom & asked her to read it, thinking that since she isn't a poet she wouldn't jump to any conclusions. Instead she wrote me back that she was in the hospital & they wouldn't let her use the computer there. I woke up to the roars of industrial fans in my apartment. I'd somehow fallen asleep with all my lights on, my computer with a half-written poem on it in my bed & I was immediately thrown off, scared of my apartment.

"Shall we filter the sediment, sea tortoise buddy?"

I think I expected something anti-social or crass from Michael Koshkin's Orgy in the Beef Closet, considering its somewhat shuddering title. Instead it's a poem that, while using a kind of gut-punching humor at times, works to hold its fragmentation together through the prosody of sound. It turns each line in search of answers to unvoicable questions. Check it:

I want
whistling
the dumpsters
I'm sticking between
Reed Bye and a radio

& then

I don't understand the pajamas
the glum alleys
between a discourse of doublings
The anonymous carcass turns my teeth into a play prison
a dance for the nebula

It's a really great poem. The first thing I've seen from Transmission Press, which looks pretty damn cool. Like you-should-give-them-all-your-money-&-cry-into-your-turkey-stuffing cool.

Check Out Me & Cindy King

Reading "Semi-Indexicle Twins"

4529 Miles

Since I left the east coast some of these things have happened:

Betsy & I gave a reading for the ghosts of the Stadler center.

Brett & I gave a reading for his cat.

Eric, Trisha, Matt & I read our burritos to death & then saw Jerry Springer at a hotel bar.

Cindy King & Adam Clay gave an incredible reading in Cincinnati. Really incredible. Adam read a new poem of his that is one of the best things I've read all year. After the reading I stole his copy of it & a bunch of us kept rereading it while shooting pool. Pretty soon it'll be published & you'll memorize it & recite it decades from now to your great-grandchildren.

I'm back in nebraska. My apartment flooded while I was gone. Now I have industrial fans blowing through my place. Everything smells like motors.

Up & At 'Em, Some for a While Now

Kulture Vulture
La Petite Zine
Action Yes!
Diagram

Please pay close attention to:

Sommer Browning's poems;

Justin Marks' "Best Practices," Jen Tynes' & Erika Howsare's intereview, & Adam Clay's "I realize my words are only a footnote to the sea. /I realize the sea is only a song to myself";

Poems by Ivan Blatný & Hiromi Itō (伊藤比呂美) & the papers from the panel on excess that I missed in Atlanta;

the absolutely astounding piece by Jake Adam York.

Another Story By My Niece

Once upon a time there was one babysnake. He was yellow. Yellow & orange. No, red. The sun was purple. No, that is the clouds. The clouds were purple. The sun was yellow. The grass was green. The babysnake floated four feet above the grass. The babysnake was named Timothy. He was born in Virginia but moved to Raleigh, North Carolina. He likes cats. And his pet Sasha ran away & ate frogs. They found Sasha in a drainpipe, cooking frog soup. Timothy & Sasha ate frog soup together & then went to the store. They bought horses together. Horses to ride. They rode the horses at the beach. Then they drew a door in the sidewalk & stepped inside of it. Inside the door was a house made of pancakes. The pancakes were delicious. The End.

Don't Make Me Blog About You!

I got so many chapbooks Monday night at the KGB reading! Luckily the chapbook is the perfect NY size—it’s essentially a single subway ride’s worth of reading. And I have a lot of subway rides to go. Check it:

Cynthia Arrieu-King’s The Small Anything City
Monica Fambrough’s Black Beauty
Dan Hoy’s Outtakes
Gina Myers’ Stanzas in Imitations
Valzhyna Mort’s Favourites for Accordion
Travis Nichols’ I Am Trying to be a Good Horse
Jeremy Schmall’s Underneath an Obnoxious Moon
Betsy Wheeler & Dean Gorman’s Absolutely You

I'm going to keep writing about these as I think about them. While all of the chappies are great so far, Valzhyna Mort’s is what’s knocking me out the most, probably because I don’t remember having read her poems before. Though she was in Cannibal, so I must have at least once. She has a precision of surreal image that is terse & breathtaking while conveying a kind of soapy innocence:

in the craters of cities names we’re reciting
starting with Sir in a whisper

because we are children
we are the sugar of the earth

and if we seem green
it’s only on account of the traffic lights

At the same time these poems are deeply grounded in some pretty high sentiment, images of the Romantic Russian bones & woods:

and I am on my knees
howling like a wolf
at the white moon of your skull
grandmother
I’m telling you it’s not pain
just the embrace of a very strong god
one with an unshaven cheek that prickles when he kisses you

All in all, some damn good stuff. I want to read lots & lots of her work.




I’ve been looking forward to getting & now I'm so happy to have Cynthia Arrieu-King’s The Small Anything City! Now I can finally read a batch of her poetry all together. I’ve been enjoying her work for a while now & reading it in concert within this chapbook I admire it even more. These are intense, sincere poems that demand rereading & rethinking. She has a clarity to her language that allows her generally narrative or meditative poems to open into the imagistic without it seeming disruptive or clashing. In the poem “Independence,” which features a woman working at a hospital King’s syntax sets the poem outside of simple story-telling:

The woman was working. She works.

The man tries to get off the stretcher.

I like this room with nothing.
My face is a death’s head in the shoe-store mirror.

And so she was turned somewhat away waiting for someone to relive her.

It was like there was an instant secretary.

That syntax focuses me on the presentation of scene as speech act, rather than as a frame to be ignored in favor of the “real” experience. The opening line deadpans the verb into both a time-span & a despair. By the time I hit the totally stunning line “It was like there was an instant secretary” I am prepared by the poem to not feel like it’s a moment of epiphany, but rather the speaker averring the underlying facts of a woman at work & how she transforms into a kind of version of a woman working. Nurse, secretary, I can almost see the cloud of unintentionally sexist clip-art float behind the poem.

Arrieu-King’s work de-essentializes the notions of “accessibility” in poetry, presenting scene, character & meditation in such a way that all of them are brought fruitfully into question at the same time that they wire their emotions to you.

Rank swan either eye ripe

Threading treading threw up the word: skylark

Scent and scene audible tooth and tongue

A vowel is that which a consonant brought to touch

Noses of corralled animals part species a flame

Perfidy method divisive

Point a composite significant sound



--Myung Mi Kim, from "Anna O Addendum" in The Bounty



I'm thinking of the moment when I can't remember the word & my eyes look up, as if I could peer back into my brain to find where that word is hiding. Sometimes I can register the sound of the word. My lips can almost make the word appear. I can define the word, but the words itself is a lost key to a lock I do not need to open. I'm thinking about the nature of language as it flashes & sputters through the brain at those moments, a rapid process of arriving & discarded words. This passage of Kim's poem is obviously dancing around a few words with its consonance & play, but it's not only writing "about" the sound. The skylark is the point, the node of meaning within the electronic flux of thought. It is thrown up, like a toy, like bad shrimp. What is speaking but another form of extrusion, the syntax of the body around air or the predation of the paper by the ink? Corral the words within the mathematics of logic. Kim's logic is not accumulative but attenuated, sense arrives not through the creation of a sentence but through the way the mouth moves itself around the words, the way the words create their own spaces with the mind.





On the other hand Racter says this:


PAUL. Hello, Joan.

JOAN. Hello, Paul.

PAUL. Joan, I was fantasizing that a white crow flew across the black sky of night.

JOAN. I too have been thinking about a white crow. It flies in the night and it flies in the day. It incites my dreams. My fantasy is that I can soar with it.

PAUL. A single white crow or many winging eagles. All inflame my dreams and cogitations. A single bird or many birds are in my dreams.

JOAN. Paul, have you bolted meat today?

PAUL. I have bolted lamb and chicken.

JOAN. Have you drained sherry?

PAUL. I have sipped seltzer.

JOAN. Shall we show our love by the reflections of our desire, or shall we dream of a white crow?

PAUL. The dream is a reflection of our passion just as the white crow is a reflection of our ambiguity.

JOAN. My desire to incite myself in my dreaming is also a reflection of ambiguity.

PAUL. Well chanted, Joan. I craftily desire you.




Can Racter be wrong? Can a bot write something that is more or less emotionally or simplistically correct? Why can one writer be more true than another? How does the same whirligig read false from the wrong lips? I say "My desire to incite myself in my dreaming is also a reflection of ambiguity" out loud to myself & it is no longer true. I don't dream. I have too many bank accounts full of paper cranes for that. I let the popsicle melt & then the stick melts as well.

A Drawing of Horses That Walk Like Humans, Some of Them Injured; Four Stories by My Neices; & Three Portraits Of Me

Once upon a time there was a black cobra & it had a dress, a tooth rag, a wand & a crown & beautiful long hair. Every night when people lose teeth she comes with her long hair, her dress & her wand. The people in the morning are really excited, they scream & yelp & run around the house. Mommy, mommy I got something from the black cobra, black cobra tooth fairy for my little teeny weensy, weensy, weensy, weensy little tooth. I got a dolly for it. And the tooth fairy had nineteen hundred baby snakes. The End.



Once upon a time there was a brain & toe cheese. The toe cheese & brain loved each other & they had sixteen baby snakes for their pets. The End.



Once upon a time there was a horse, a horse, a horse, a horse, a horse, a horse, a horse, a horse, a horse, a monkey, a monkey, a monkey, a monkey, a monkey, a monkey, a bear, a monkey, a bear, a bear , a bear, a bear , a bear, a bear, a chick, a chick, a chick, a hen, a hen, a eyeball, a chick, a chick, a chick, a chick, a chick, a hen & a hen. The horse, bear, monkey, hen, chick, they all got eaten. They got eaten by a fox. The End.



Once there was a fox & the fox go to the park. he goed swimming & then he went a hike in the woods. He saw his friend bear in the woods. He said lets go to the park. They played slide a million times. The End.



Once upon a time there was a nose hair & chest hair. They, uh, I don’t want to do this story. The End.

Travels, Trees, Records

One of the pleasures of traveling is finding a book that I’d have never seen if I didn’t happen to be right at this place at this time. Despite the availability of any book via the internet & worldcat, the experience of bookstore browsing is still ideal for finding something that hits like a mysterious chunk of broken glass on the otherwise clean kitchen countertop.

I picked up Barbara Guest’s The Confetti Trees, a collection of prose pieces that are ostensibly ideas for films, or inspired by the filmmaking process. Unable to sleep last night, I read it while lying on my friend’s couch, the humid air settling like a layer of sea-salt on the room. I’m sure you know enough about Guest, & I think there is a Collected Poems on the way, but she’s in that position for me where I have read much of her work but far from all of it. Each book I come across is still a new discovery.

While The Confetti Trees continues the syntactically protean elements of Guest I associate with her later-career work, it is working in a pretty settled French New Wave cinema style as well. But with Guest’s voice these elements that could be seen as the kind of painful strangeness of hyperrealism become chewier, more fabulistic, less needling in their archness. The first paragraph of “The Guerrilla Reporters” opens with a moment that could be in The Weekend, at first mixing meta-violence, puerile sexuality & imagistic precision & then opening up the scene to the space beyond the screen:

The guerrilla reporters move into the first reel and “Scanty Panties” moves out. Over the hill slowly a mass of shadow lights up as on camera facing front there floats a pink tutu. We never tire of this scene it crosses our eyes at night mixed with the director’s sweaty palm holding onto the tree while the mobile camera moves toward him past a sack of rice.

It was this piece, “Noise,” that really knocked me out. Most of the book is good but it works directly in relation to cinema. This piece, however seems to begin in that mode & then uses the fantastic elements available to writing to transcend the cinematic experience. While I don’t see Guest being this catty for reals, I’d like to think of her finishing this poem, leaning back into her chair, & giving herself a bit of a congratulatory smile for showing how lyric writing is always going to trump film. Nothing too expressive, perhaps only a slight turn of one edge of her lips. Maybe just a tilt of her head as she reread the piece. Or somehow the windows in her room became more truly filled with light at that moment. A bit more history to record. A small bird landing to examine the necklace left on the black bench by a widower.

Noise

It was midnight and the chief cutter was turning out the lights in the cutting room when he heard a noise. The noise seemed to shift around the room like an obscure cloud. From the open window of his house he often watched the montage of these clouds.

He had been in the country so long he was accustomed to the continual shifting of noise. His native home was in the Black Forest as it edged around Freiberg. Later in Berlin he learned to edit out the city noise. He became a film cutter because he could control the little shifting sounds that attempted to warp his life.

He remembered an actress in Berlin. On the set her heel caught on the hem of her gown. She fell as the camera turned. The curls of her hair were spread over the nape of her neck. The Director murmured “Lovely,” then he called “Take.”

Later the cutter had return the film in his machine and decided to delete the fall; to use only the moment when the actress lay on the floor her hair spread around her. He noticed the cast had gathered to watch the fallen actress and left them in the film.

Now he recognized the source of the noise in the room. It was his scissors cutting into the woman’s hair.

Another pleasure of traveling is how music takes on different meanings than during normal times. So far the records that have made this trip makes sense are CocoRosie’s The Adventures of Ghosthorse & Stillborn, Sun O))))’s White 1 & 2, Jolie Holland’s Springtime Can Kill You & Neil Young's Live at Massey Hall.

Three Chapbooks Your Eyes Should Be At

Matvei Yankelevich’s The Present Work is a chapbook-length poem/ play/ reinvention of aesthetic history. It pendulates between ideas, between sense & the opposite of sense, between concept & joke, between coca cola & the truth of the facts of the matter. It also has disarming moments of emotional correctness that are all the more true for coming through. Witness:

It aches Gustave

don’t you know. Like a missing part
aches in the junkyard. Use me!
I want to be the gear in the universal
elbow of rapid decline, to shine
like the last days of sun
imprisoned in the rafters of the el

Courbet says verbatim

the same thing in a letter back. And we commiserate
having been left by the wayside on the median
strip of progress

Pens are no drafting pencils. Paper

is no capital investment. A lightbulb has a better
idea than whatever it is the dictionary can suggest.

This book will suck you through it’s tunnel of love & when you get to the end of it you’ll realize you accidentally were making out with a textbook. And the textbook is looking good.




Sandra Simonds’ s The Humble Travelogues of Mr. Ian Worthington, Written from Land & Sea: (or notes on the life and letters) is another disruptive play of genre, somewhere between a travelogue, a sci-fi short story in epistolary form & the aw-shucksy surrealism of your cousin who speaks too quietly at the dinner table. While on first read it made me laugh I read it later in the day, after some bad news came my way & the same poems make me want to crawl into a hollowed out coin & get spent. You can read a sample poem from it here. Each one of these poems has the power to armor you with ice.




Bronwen Tate’s chapbook Souvenirs, which you can buy here, works between travel-writing & the lyric elements of personal interaction. In an even, pure voice akin to Cole Swensen’s declarations, Tate takes in the Italian experiences & presents them not as tourist snapshots but as poems of reinvention & turn. These poems are like little river rocks, the kind of rock that you pick up because of some desire to hold that smoothness in your hand & then you slip the stone into your pocket & then into your desk drawer & pretty soon you’re being buried & your grieving widower is tossing these river stones into your grave instead of handfuls of dirt. One of my favorite poems “Extra Virgin Olive Oil” starts off:

It felt less aimless if there was water nearby. A rhythmic banging from downstairs made me wonder if they were having sex, washing tennis shoes, or performing minor household repairs. Anything I asked was like tossing a match.

That is good.

A Set of Thank Yous Resulting from The So & So Series

Thank you Chris Tonelli, you are a blessed pile of pretty bones.

Thank you Gabriella Torres, you dodge & punch like a hungry boxer of glass boxes.

Thank you Bronwen Tate, you steel the sentences to the air & the air is relieved.

Thank you Julia Cohen, you have two of anything, shin shin, wolf wolf.

Thank you Justin Marks & Sam Starkweather, you are forever forthcoming.

Thank you Cambridge, thank you Cohens & your incredible hospitality, thank you nice people who showed up to listen, thank you sars czar, thank you bowling alley wax.

So & So & Such

I am going to be reading Saturday night at The So & So Series in Boston. Saturday May 5th 8pm The Lily Pad 1353 Cambridge St. Cambridge, MA, Inman Sq. I'm reading with three fantastic poets, Bronwen Tate, Gabriella Torres & Julia Cohen. Plus, I haven't been to Boston in a while. I'm excited.

Before that happens I have to drive an X-TREEM-ly long distance. So if you're awake in the wee hours of the night, having existential crises or delicious malts you should give me or Shannon a call. I'm pretty sure that by the time we hit Ohio we'll be both giddy & sleepy until dawn. So call us & bug us.

My phone number is right here