Mark Wallace reviews Steven Farmer's _glowball_.

Mark Wallace reviews Steven Farmer's glowball at his blog Thinking Again.

Not at all difficult for me to say that SF's glowball is probably the most sophisticated and brilliant title that theenk Books will ever have the great fortune to publish.  Along with Crag Hill's 7 x 7, I call it one of the two most robust poetic critiques of our dizzy little big horker country's dazzling decade of debacle and tragedy and insanity, too.

I take no issue with Mark W's tight, definitive analysis of Steven's glowingly brilliant book, except for of course the little snit I've had in my head about re-using Bernstein's old, old and now, I believe, "sensationalized" term "interrogate."  That term is PURE sensationalism, at least TODAY.  Or maybe my snit with it is that it self-describes "radical" poetic inclinations in a too much romanticized and, to my mind, VIOLENT way, for, seriously, what and how much is ever really going to be "changed" if interrogation is the means for "forcing" others...  But this is of course an entirely irrelevant and, here, sloppily articulated snit that I really should someday ask Charles B. about, not complain about in a post that's supposed to Thank Mark Wallace for writing such a right-on, distinctive praise of S. Farmer pal's excellent, excellent book.  glowball... I've still got copies here and I'm going to be printing another run. Send me an e-mail.  I'll give you a discount and I'll give you a complimentary copy of the Black Spring "Lawrence issue," too.

Seriously, I'm not in it for "money."  I made these books so that really first rate writing can get out into the world and transferred to other intelligent beings... Really.    

Tom Beckett's _Parts and Other Pieces_ BEST Philosophical-Poetics Poetry book there will be for next several decades.

If Ron Silliman's Sunset Debris was the first of its kind (poetry in the form of opening-unended Questions) and served everybody's intelligence for the last 2 1/2 decades (in The Age of Huts, 1986), then Tom's Beckett's Parts and Other Pieces (2011) will, I believe, serve everybody intelligent and everyone who wants and supports intelligence, for the next 2 1/2 PLUS decades.

AND it resolves, in part, at least, the sticky question of "addressing," but more on that as I type up notes and as I try to do Tom's book reasonable justice in essay in process that I'll complete at a later date. But that's the least of its value and merit. The greater merit is that Parts and Other Pieces functions as BOTH Philosophy AND Poetry, and for this reader, THAT is no small achievement in any way.

Goodbye FLUSH Limburger, you 30 year fascist pig!

It's so damn nice to see FLUSH getting flushed.  I have prayed for this day since Reagan was in office.  Well, I think that it's been that long.  Now, how about O'Reilly, who's perhaps even more dangerous, as he appeals to so many older folks...

Depressing...

And this isn't the best place to make one's political work effectual...

Anyways, though, it'd sure be nice to see him EXIT, obviously...

Is this American Letters? Is this even American?

You scratch my back, I'll kiss your ass.  You let your cousin sleep with my under-aged daughter, I'll give your son his first homosexual experience. This is American Letters.

Has it ever been otherwise in the world?

In just two quick years, the novice golfer had become an avid golfer and relatively proficient, especially compared to his three other novice golfer friends, Ezra, Gertrude, and Hilda. Indeed, he outplayed them regularly, even Ezra, who practiced twice as long on the driving range and the putting green and invested thousands of dollars in expensive lessons with the highly paid local pro Jack Lacann, though Jack Lacann had never earned a P.G.A. Class-A card and Jack Lacann had never in fact in his thirty years as a teacher mentored a single student who advanced through Q-school to make the American Pro Tour or developed a strong enough game to earn a spot on the European Tour.

The novice golfer scored in the low 90s and upper 80s, usually at least fifteen strokes better than his friends Ezra, Gertrude, and Hilda, none of whom could "break 100" and therefore fell into that classic category titled "the average golfer," which as all golfers know comprises 90 percent of all golfers in the history of "the Great Game" (not to be confused with "the Stock Market," which is in some or many ways purely "a lottery"). This or that is to say that 90 percent of all golfers cannot and never will "regularly 'break 100.'"  It's an exceptionally exacting game -- Golf -- and there is a sheer and precisely mathematical, or scientific (nay "Creationist," nay nay nay), FACT and statistical yardstick or "measure." Again, 90% of ALL GOLFERS cannot "break a hundred" and are therefore "average," the norm.

For the other 10% or ten percent (consistent terms may be necessary here, though), for those who are not so very average, typically their "scores" range from "the 60s" to the "mid-80s/low-90s."  The truly talented and committed and diligent become "scratch" golfers and regularly shoot 74, 73, 72 ("Par") or even better, 71, 70, 69, 68, 67, 66, 65, 64, 63, even 62, 61, 60, and two or three times in the history of the Pro Tour, 59, under the strictest and most controlled situations, competition in USGA and P.G.A. Tour golf tournaments.  They comprise the very best of the truly best.  This is a scientifically verifiable and indisputable FACT.  (It is no less "believable" and "trustworthy" than the equation 2 + 2 = 4 or historical phenomena that everyone sane agrees has "happened," been witnessed.  There is no way for an honest golfer to delude herself (or himself), and there is not way to fool others about "the Score" in legitimate USGA monitored golf events.

The novice golfer knew these facts well and, being neither egotistical nor insane, accepted them along with several other indisputable facts: (1)Although he regularly "broke a hundred" and outscored his three friends on his home golf course, he usually did so ONLY there, on his home course, which was a very modestly challenging course that he'd become intimately familiar with and accustomed to playing on; he was like a singer who could sing one song fairly consistently. When he ventured off to other courses more challenging and "defamiliarizing," he usually couldn't even "break a hundred."  (2)He rarely scored better than 94-98 in "tournaments," like the annual "club championship" tournaments that were played at the end of the season, when golfers have had plenty of time to groove their games all summer, when the weather conditions are usually warm and mild, not windy or cold or rainy, when the golf course itself has been spruced up to provide the golfers with the very best consistency, so as not to be blamed for "irregularities" that might favor one golfer or another, and when he was typically paired with less familiar playing partners, and when "the Rules of Golf" and "Tournament Tees and Tournament Pin Positions" were applied. (3)He was abundantly "successful" and "accomplished" in his vocation, Medicine.  His IQ was what cognitive psychologists call "genius level" -- it was in the high 150s -- and his track record for "Savings Patients diagnosed with critical stomach ailments" was the best among over 442 other physicians in his specialty in the United States.  In brief, he knew what it meant to possess "talent" and humility, to work extremely diligently, to make sacrifices and commitments to his pursuit of saving lives.

But Golf is an amazingly mysterious game, too.  Nothing gave him more pleasure.  Nothing was more fun.  Nothing satisfied and fulfilled his soul's capacity for curiosity, adventure, peace of mind, and, above all, the glorious and divine escape from "everyday life and consciousness" like Golf did.  And THAT was "good enough," as his friends Ezra, Gertrude, and Hilda, ALL highly effective and devoted Object Relations psychoanalysts renowned for having "verifiably" freed hundred of patients, or clients, from the awful and debilitating snares of mental illness, also termed their deeply fulfilling but essentially "average" actualizations of their potentials to play the game well.  Therefore, Dr. Williams NEVER for a single moment in his life entertained the grand delusion that he was entitled to play in the U.S. Open and had a right to take the place of truly accomplished golfers who had appropriately earned a spot on the 144 player roster which comprises the world's and history's absolutely best players once each new year to compete for the U.S. Open Championship Trophy.  Dr. Williams NEVER once in his lifetime entertained such a monstrously inappropriate delusion of sheer narcissistic "entitlement."

Thus, we all must ask ourselves from time to time, Readers, why on this rich and infinitely beautiful, infinitely delightful earth would a boy or girl or a man or woman who gets published in a mainstream rag like American Poetry Review, or wins a $25,000.00 literary prize, or acquires a PhD from a Harvard or a Yale or a U.C. Berkeley or a University of Chicago think beyond a shadow of a doubt the so-called "thought" that based on the above described criteria, he or she has truly produced "a really Good Poetry?"  If we subtracted the getting published part or the monetary award or the PhD credentials, each of which are, after all, determined by "Outside Power sources," NOT the poetry, itself, all by itself, how does a boy or girl or man or woman know that he or she has produced a good poetry anymore than the novice golfer knows he scored a 72 ("Par") or a 101 (didn't "break a hundred") or 58, albeit his/her honest, truth-loving playing partners witnessed how many strokes he/she took, "attested" the scorecard, and don't really believe "scores" matter, anyhow?

The one woman had enormously ample institutional backing. The one man played "the Gay Card." Another man had some very well connected grandparents.  Was this American Letters?

John Roche and his ROAD GHOSTS interviewed by Charlie Coté.

My dear excellent adventure(S) amigo John Roche and his Road Ghosts is interviewed ever so eloquently and wonderfully here at Charlie Coté's blog, Flying for the Window: The Bloggings of a Curious Man.

Cranky today... Ha!

I read poets like philosophers, psychologists, and other serious thinkers. If you’re full of shit and you don’t cut it, then fuck you and your poetry.

Look, A-hole, this isn’t a fucking “game” and I don’t approach you and your fugging “poetry” as if I’m enveloped in a delusion that you’re “a name in a book I had to buy at the university,” and just because of that, I should distinguish between “reading philosophy” and “reading Literature.” This is LIFE. You’re “an Other,” or “another Object” (and subject, but for the moment, let’s just use the term “Living Organism”), whose precious moments of being here on this small, temporal planet are right now criss-crossing with my own, as well as infinite Others’, precious moments. What you write and what I read of yours, regardless the “Agency” that your ideal reader may have allotted your writing, is no more and no less than some animal crossing paths with me, perhaps looking to consume me, perhaps looking to provide me with nourishment, perhaps toxic to me, perhaps NOT ALL ABOUT, much less even aware of, “ME,” at all. But this is NOT “a Game,” and I read you, friend/foe/”other” pomer, with much of the same “digestive facility” that I am compelled to employ when I interact with any other Objects and Experiences in life.

Quick "Close/Closet Read" of j/j hastain poming:

That’s a bang-bang dang nice piece/poem, bit of poming you sent me in e-mail the other day, by the way. Was just revisiting it again a minute ago – and able to give it good concentration, j/j hastain:

A piece I composed yesterday for the sake of--




like lavender being poured over a section of purring

rice.

globules emerging. something like a hymen

being reborn

through dreams of being lifted in rare ways.

these messages of dark through dark.

these cleanlinesses that result from and rely on

rogue.

Snagged at “purring” but then delighted when, following “sneaky” line break there, you delivered “rice” (making “purring” an adjective, after all, AND keeping it as “mind’s eye” noun/meaning at the same time. Very long lead into it, and one begins sensing discomfort that one will be a little bit disappointed (as purring, so utterly ethereal and “Romantic” (re: Pound, or maybe it was Williams, what’s it all matter, anyhow, the uninformed don’t get it and the rulers of Poetry Cosmos use the last names like badges of high ranks) railing against “fuzzy,” NOT “hard, cold” more “objective” language, Imagists ) contrasted with hard, cold “fact” of “lavender” made the end of the line appear, MOMENTARILY, excessively dreamy, vague, too soft, “fuzzy,” but then – and standing all alone for emphasis, set off with its own single line – there’s “rice.” And one (can) proceed as “curious as ever” to see what lays ahead – as it turns out, more good and UNIQUE, thoroughly substantial, non-transparent (but also NOT SO “opaque” as to be meaninglessly indeterminate) poming.

a beginning or a next

perhaps jazz-ly, but so by improvisation and not by way of the jazz ‘standard’—histories being perplexed by momentary perceptions--“a huddle of saints and angels waits to be worked”—Nielsen’s mixage is itself a working, out and through the saints and angels that wait—working by integrations and inclusions--the vitality of these acts. As Nielsen brings layers and splices to surface, we are compelled. Sometimes by abruptness and sometimes gentler--sometimes leaving us with blanks (literal space on the page) and sometimes leaving us with gaps (sudden or subtle stoppages in rhythmic flow)—we move through Nielsen’s document where supple meat makes new motions—we begin to pant--pant to de-limit, to engage—“and wound itself around the majestic book”—we recognize ourselves as coming closer to, by way of “the most wonderful specimen of composition.”

-j/j hastain

"Close/Closet read" with j/j hastain of Aldon Nielsen's _MIXAGE_ (Zasterle 2005)

j/j hastain and I collab on "Close/Closet Read" of Aldon Nielsen's MIXAGE:

Steve:
Jesus, this is a smart, wise (and also FUN), intelligent, serious book.

There’s SO MUCH new, (C)old reliable, mature Nielsen in it that I almost cannot recognize who the pomer was or what he used to write in that previous time when few would have been ready for this, anyhow, that now forgotten era during which he also wrote so darn well that this new incarnation should surely not be any sort of surprise at all, and yet it's so amazingly compact and lucid.

There’s something here for everyone who can dance (on any size pins and needles), the damage done entirely amphibiously, if not altogether aquatic.

j/j:
a beginning or a next
perhaps jazz-ly, but so by improvisation and not by way of the jazz ‘standard’—histories being perplexed by momentary perceptions--“a huddle of saints and angels waits to be worked”—Nielsen’s mixage is itself a working, out and through the saints and angels that wait—working by integrations and inclusions--the vitality of these acts. As Nielsen brings layers and splices to surface, we are compelled. Sometimes by abruptness and sometimes gentler--sometimes leaving us with blanks (literal space on the page) and sometimes leaving us with gaps (sudden or subtle stoppages in rhythmic flow)—we move through Nielsen’s document where supple meat makes new motions—we begin to pant--pant to de-limit, to engage—“and wound itself around the majestic book”—we recognize ourselves as coming closer to, by way of “the most wonderful specimen of composition.”

---

On "Manufacturer's Warning" (which opens the collection):

Steve:
Key term is "upon," the pun pivots on that word.

Is the "manufacturer" "God," the proverbial creator of the world? Or the author, who warns readers about the ensuing poetry?

j/j:
to begin with a ‘warning’? certainly a pungent attention-grabbing auditory-ness—a punch--which is often how that first, dragging melody emitted from the saxophone, sounds—my need to view the introduction as an invitation without didactic, means that in my read, there is no “God” nor hierarchal “author” –but instead the primary melody coming out of what was prior to it, dark and not yet sound-filled, space. the dark of the book before it opens.

Steve:
Yep, that’s what I figure, too. _MIXAGE_ (author/poet) mocks such “divine inspiration” for the poem/poming, as well as most all other paleo-tightie-whitie-mindset, anthropomorphic deity and other hierarchal, totalizing reading/production, interpretation, agency, and reader-prescriptions. You write, “coming out of what was prior to it,” oh, okay, I can go along with that. Yes, nice!


The earth rotates. The ensuing poetry in _MIXAGE_ will "rotate," also. Musical discs "rotate" on a phonograph, also. Words (and "meaning" rotate in reader's mind. Last, this poetry's "surface" will mix and mix and mix is its underlying "core" spins "upon" or should/would that be "on" its axis.

Are we readers really being warned that it is dangerous in "play upon" the "rotating surface" and if we are prohibited from sitting or standing, also, then "how on earth," will we keep our balance or remain securely rooted? Naw, I believe that the "warning" is ironic and we are being encouraged to "play" upon the ensuing "surface" and abandon "flat earth," mono-dimensional thinking altogether.

j/j:
yes Steve! I agree—not so much a didactic, finger-wagging ‘warning’--but a deep push. A push toward proceeding without fear of falling—

Steve:
Yes, if anything, I’d expect A. L. N. to make fun of “didactic” wherever/whenever possible…


Steve:
Finally, I recall a book or line by Ron Silliman or maybe Barrett Watten, _Stand, Sit, *******" something-or-another and also the start to Watten's book _Progress_, something like, _*******, Attention!_.

Whoops, sorry, I'll have to look those up in my library, j/j.

j/j:
also yes—to begin a text with a gesture of attention. a calling forth. interesting to consider that the ‘heralding’ of sorts—is an announcement that though seems to be coming from a centralized voice (as we spoke of above—“God”or “author”?), throughout the book itself, voice is more multi-chromatic/multi-resonant. sounds and text like sewing, pulls new ways of thinking, into form—“I don’t know but appears to me” “we speak the names of our languages into an incomprehending (as opposed to uncomprehending) hold.”

Steve:
Yep, languages PLURAL. Absolutely, multi-chromatic, yep.
I love that, j/j – “sound and text like sewing, pulls new ways of thinking, into form,” REALLY nice, that, yep.


"After Jealousy" (the second poem in the collection):

Steve:

What's the most "habituated" suffix/meaning/word when American readers see "under?" Understanding is, I would say, the most "habituated" term/suffix that we see/hear/read following "under," but Nielsen takes a stanza break and substitutes "side." That is, the "meaning" is "along the underside," where "dirty" stuff resides. Often "beneath" us, as in beneath our more dignified and polite moral sensibility. Hence, "beneath Notice." But then, if it's "beneath / Notice," then we would, declining to get our hands dirty, so to speak, fail to see what may be necessary and vital and useful and important. We may neglect or chance to notice what we actually NEED (to notice). We may also MISS what is necessary and vital once the "snow jobs" are removed, once the lies and lying are eliminated, once we are not snowed under the bull short and the crap.

j/j:
what you say here about what is left once “the bull shit and the crap” are removed—is important. I think you translate Nielsen in this poem, very well. from here--what is the relationship between understanding and undercarriage? or what gaps between them? I ask because I want to know what would happen if our quest to intake and undertake came from there being no gap or separation between what we consider ‘ourselves’ (reason for understanding) and where what we are ‘removing’ is located (undercarriage). or—what type of life wherein there is no longer any need to remove “the bull shit and the crap”—what if we noticed that “the bull shit and the crap” were dramatically of our own making, and what would it mean for us to consider ‘ourselves’ responsible for the necessary removals and upkeep of removals applied? perhaps speaking on the level of a new ethics, where habituated limit and norm are substituted with “slatted” skies? skies that are more than partially able to be seen-through. or—what is on the other side of sky? I believe that Nielsen is encouraging that we shift our attention to these…


Steve:
Why are the skies "slatted?"

May be a pun on some Zukofsky, but I believe "The order of" is a compound noun, as Nielsen sets the verb "snows" off with a line break and then emphasizes one word, "Here," with a Cap H. He then gets or delivers "snows" as BOTH noun AND verb, "the order of [as noun] snows [as verb] / Here."

But also, these are surfaces of snows, and, again, we are encouraged to LOOK beneath several surfaces. Well, then, if we do look "underneath" and through the several surfaces of snow (jobs) we will encounter "mountains" of meaning, a "Music" of the "orders" (BOTH arrangements and commands) of enormous GROUND.

j/j:
just to affirm that this is beautiful and relevant and true here. good.



"Supple Meant," the third poem in the collection, is a gorgeous poem, j/j:

j/j:
I could not agree more about the beauty of “Supple Meant”—surely a pun on “supplement”—but also in my hearing (in the context of music)—this supple meat! the poem itself a type of supple meat but also, our reading it—a fleshy flexibility.


Steve:

A pun on "supplement," of course, but the poem IS supple in its delicate, flexible, sensuous sound, too, isn't it. I LOVE the word "generously," and also "generous," used this way. You may recall a line of my own in _Rugh Stuff_: "generous trousers." I LOVE using "generous" that way. And OLD art/poetry, Synonyms are like OLD, that is, butterfly collecting, eh? I mean, "drying its wings under the noon sun," yes, you too read this poem this way?

j/j:
on use of the word “generously”—yes. I too read the poem this way. what do the wings of a synonym look like? feel like? you mention your use of word “generous” in your _Rugh Stuff_ in the paragraph above, the closeness there—and I too wish to speak of a resonant intimacy with my own work. the relation of synonym to image. are images themselves synonyms for felts? “drying its wings under the noon sun” is to me a thorough image, and also an action. so let’s say gesticulation—and what other synonyms for refined gesticulations like these?—which are moments.

also—did the “jealously eyed” make the synonym’s wings dry? beautiful—perplexing.



Steve:
That is a damn nice two lines, isn't it. "He jealously eyed the synonym / Drying its wings under the noon sun." And then "Fiercely desiring that whose place / it had so generously taken." Gorgeous! Fucking Gorgeous!

"Oklahoma" must also be the movie _Oklahoma_, though the artificial nature, though, the real landscape being so vast and acrid and bland versus the movie set so "staged" and phony and fake.

which brings us back to the nature of the Synonym, how it fucks up what is REAL and original and True NATURE and wild and not man-made or artificial or reductive (using language in plae of actual, concrete reality.

j/j:
interesting here Steve. I hear what you are saying in the read of Nielsen’s—but I do not think that I can agree that the Synonym “fucks up what is REAL”—perhaps because for me what is REAL is often something that in some way responds to “man-made thought.” a vital after, folding. I am talking about compositions that have within them, bridges to future (I know in previous posts you have said “future does not exist”--) that are not inherently ‘natural’ but in some way combined. that the compositions that feel resonant and reviving for me are often provoked by convergence between a thing of (I believe you are referring to it here as “True NATURE”)—organic, green etc. and something rigorously else. a robotic arm coadunated with a deep tree. this co—to me is original. and I am trying to consider synonyms for these feral unions—however divergent they may seem. to consider things in regard to their potency or their potentials, rather than in the context of how they have been historically categorized.

Steve:
It's "blasted," as in "sand-blasted," stripped mined or stripped, totally raped and pillaged by WORDS and language and artificial, man-made thought.

j/j:
I appreciate the strength of your feeling here. I however, think that words can be an inherent part of “True NATURE.” (if) they come from the reach of human-animals, which are organisms. the desire to communicate—the desire to commune. I also think that the particular shape of the particular beaver’s home (the sticks used, the shape), is itself part of “True NATURE.” I see words and language (if a part of the vivid experiences of us as organisms (rather than used for bureaucracy or hierarchal gain, or any other number of hurtful/harmful approaches) as powerfully poised purpose. as yet another way to get into our senses and deepest probabilities concerning a new ethics.

Steve:
Hence "his screen," what in truth his human ego and "intelligence" (verbal=human) uses (uses) to filter, clean, strip, sift from the original substance of its original and true nature. God, we've fugged up this planet with our awful, wretched, disgusting human "intelligence," haven't we? "But deep in the basement," "filmy" (dirty, scummy), the original Oklahoma's gather. In the Unconscious, I gather...
j/j:
What of our “intelligence” is wretched, awful or disgusting? I wonder—because to me, there is only fault in the arrogant, self-preferring perspectives designed to set us apart from_______--designed to increase chasms. I think that it is possible for us to renovate our lives and acts and bodies so that we continually configure from the ‘truths’ of “the deep basement” where the “filmy” (rather than dirty, scummy--could also be complex, mysterious, still in need of engagement, still un-adulterated by the arrogances of ‘surface’ living) originals still exist. I think that depending on how we engage them, the “Oklahoma” that gathers—can in many ways be the words themselves. to re-vigorous language so that it is us—is our moments combining, rather than language being a thing that controls us or a thing that we use to control________.

Ken Warren from latest HOUSE ORGAN, exquisite essay on poetics of Lang Po and Olson/ProjectiveVerse.

Big, big apologies to Ken Warren and others that this is, for now, just a first draft, quick notes response, but I do want to post some of my early, infinitely appreciative response to his outstanding scholarship and analysis in his most recent essay on Olson's and the Black Mountain poets' poetry and on the Clarke/Glover "Soul" project. I'll word this better later, but for now, these quick notes I made while at work last weekend:

Fascinating essay, research, and analysis by Ken Warren in the most recent HOUSE ORGAN (March 2011). Endlessly enlightening proposition of a dialectic (interpretation) between "Innis" pomers' (Lang Po main theoretical honchos, particular Charles B., Steve M., and Ron S., and what Ken calls, thus, "Introjective" verse) orientation to writing (poetry/poming/poems/hybrids) and "Outies" pomers' (Olsonian Projective Verse) orientation to writing (poetry/poming/poems/hybrids). The one focused on ****** (sorry, I don't have Ken's essay right in front of me) and the other (Olsonian, "projective verse") focused on "intuition."

I (may, in small part,) disagree that one (Lang Po and/or "Introjective Verse") is essentially "Left Brain" and the other (Olsonian, and/or "Projective Verse") is "Right Brain." That's "a False Split," however "useful" it might be for making some of his other points. BOTH orientations, after all, require using language/words, so both are by definition largely ALWAYS left brain, for the most part. Also, BOTH are (probably equally) necessarily right brain. I do NOT believe that any writing can be reduced to preponderence of activity occuring in either lobe. I could, and will, argue (again) some day, that some/much female, gay, transgender writing has, throughout human genetics/history, derived from GREATER masses of neurons connecting left and right hemispheres and that that greater density and accummulation of connections accounts for "females" having greater range/subtleties/quality of "emotional" experience, but I believe that ALL poets, at least essentially, have greater masses of those neurons -- it's one of the reasons they become poets, or artists, to begin with. Plus, I simply do not believe that the whole left brain / right brain thing is nearly as simple and thus "intuition" is, I believe, probably a combination of the two lobes' general ("specialized") qualities. Plus, two, in fact, I would argue that the Lang Po practitioners have actualized, and endeavor to actualize, far greater range of "non-linear" writing forms and experience, and thus that they are frequently MORE, not LESS, right-brained than their Olsonian pregenitors. But this is getting off track and missing much of the thrust and solid-gold of Ken's ABSOLUTELY FANTASTIC essay. This fellow is creating a most astute and rock-solid scholarship and Literary criticism.

I disagree also with (Lang Po) claims that one eschews (or precludes by it's very orientation) "Subjective" or "personal." Whether one constructs writing from other texts or from "original," self-invented words and other textual particulars, ALL writing is still, at the proverbial end of the public day, a SELECTION of what is put on the page -- UNLESS the writing is presented (made public and then circulated) anonymously. None of the Lang Po practitioners, to my knowledge, have fully or genuinely operated anonymously even when they have worked collaboratively. It's still, thus, always a referentially fixed name, even if via Group identification, that presents such texts and thus it's subjective by definition. Unless using a pseudonym that comes from "a source" that cannot be physically located (i.e., tagged with an actual person and existing in real time in real place), NO texts can purely constitute complete break from the so-called "subjective," personal. They can only play on received assumptions and habituated responses to textuality and context that readers, who ultimately determine the meaning and experience, bring to the experience of processing what is on the page. Let's get real1

But these are just the rough "early," first impression thoughts/thots of a nit-picking guy fascinated with Ken Warren's essay in the latest HOUSE ORGAN and chomping at the bit to give it serious time and attention here at a later date. He's produces truly remarkable essays and criticism in that mag, HOUSE ORGAN.

On Ron Silliman considering exiting the blogosphere...

Ron will be dropping his blog (which is of course sad, but, like his dropping the "Comments section," he probably must do in order to get back to writing activities that are most and more primarily fulfilling and necessary:

For example, having by now arrived at more than 1,300 followers on Twitter, might it not make just as much sense to forego the massive link dumps here for individual posts there? I have some questions about the efficacy of Twitter, but I have them about this format as well. When I posted my links list last week, it included over 300 links – but my file of potential links had grown to more than 500 that I simply never got to.

Likewise, having reached my maximum number of permitted Facebook Friends – I can only add somebody when somebody else unfriends me or quits Facebook altogether – I have had to set up a rudimentary “fan page.” Unless you are a close personal friend, it makes much more sense for you to “like” that page than to try & link to my clogged-out personal page. As I grow more comfortable with that format, I may figure out how to get tweets to automatically show up on the fan page rather than the personal one, etc.

It's probably, thus, just my small grief about his leaving the blogosphere, this small protest: In actuality, a lot of folks at not so incredibly "social" corporations and workplaces are NOT permitted to access FACEBOOK and TWITTER and YOUTUBE. Here where I work, all three were "blocked" until just this last 6 months, and YOUTUBE is STILL BLOCKED (and THAT is just the small percentage of people at this company who have "internet access at all"). The Blogs, thus, provide infinitely greater agency to writers who want to share ideas, art, writing, poming, as well as social and political discussion. The "social networks" -- FACEBOOK and TWITTER and YOUTUBE -- are essentially censored by anti-social bad-capitalist (versus "good-capitalist") companies and organizations. Of course, they're basically like, ummmm, let's call them, "reality-TV" poetry and politics, too.

So that is my small protest to his plan to quit his blogging and switch to TWITTER and FACEBOOK... After all, why would he not keep his blog and simply use it when he something he wants to write/share there? (Again, just more small grief talking. I surely should point out that he has "given" enough to "blogging" already over the past decade and that I am very grateful for what he's done.

Jeezis, I just keep reading Crag Hill's _7 x 7_ and THRILLING line after line.

Some more of Crag Hill's 7 x 7, in case the book isn't in hand and one can only GET IT via the internet (ne me téléphone pas à mon travail).

Part of note I sent Aldon Nielsen recently regarding Crag Hill's _7 x 7_.

Cool! Yeah, it’s really, really good. Well, ya know, there’s an amazing and inexhaustible variety and range of fantastic writing in the last 10-15 years. Maybe 5-10 times as many really, really very good poets and poetries. (And I believe A LOT of the “playing fields have been nicely, considerably leveled,” which is mostly a fantastic thing, though of course “in-betweeners” like me and I think you and Crag and so many others, did I mention any females, whew, them, too, Ha, face even greater “competition” to get some recognition, which is NOT a big deal, either, of course, but…) But although Crag’s 7 x 7 IS “hybrid” and definitely “avant garde,” it is also VERY TRADITIONAL in the sense that it focuses on a particular time period and personal, political, mature response to that time period, etc. I.e., it is “not” an exercise in “making a new form” (nothing “wrong” with THAT, either, but I want to point out that “making a new form” is NOT his goal) and 7 x 7 is simply spectacular poetry from a fellow who has ALL THE GOODS, somebody who CAN and in fact does take his tools to the work bench and carve out absolutely brilliant, and also "vintage-Hill" poming thoroughly focused on its subject matter (not an effort to explore a so-called new break in "the Tradition," and I don’t think anybody is going to have done what he’s done better. I really don’t think that anybody is going to have “captured” (sorry about the lameness of that loaded term, but it’s also exact) the most complete tone and intelligence that is needed for such a study/treatment of that subject matter, the Bush-Cheney 2000s, etc.

So there’s TWO things, I suppose, yeah: (1)Crag’s poming, in general, deserves greater attention, particularly because he’s, one, shortchanged as “Viz-po” and, two, he’s from the lost, left coast up in off-the-map, obscure Idaho; (2)THIS BOOK, in particular, deserves MUCH GREATER attention than it gets since it’s written by Crag and somebody of his/our generation, not the annointed ones from the previous generation (alright, my usual delusions coming into play now, so I’ll can it, Ha!).

Anyhow, onwards…

More HKs this week, too...

YOU

        may be able to see
                nothing but

        blank white page

                SPACE

---

I may only be

        able

to feel
                a braille
        translation

---

of the concept
of the sound
of frail
        rhymes        unreal
in theory syntactically

---

I touch you, your
        lips my
fingertips rounding up
and down the curves of sound
I can only feel and conceive

---

I breathe in and out
        air
                you say
makes sound you hear

me translate into words

---

My words
        my thoughts

as they were
        as they are

as far as memory is concerned

---

What I could feel before
words and after

I learned to use them

        to feel more

or less is a cheap joke

---

Not that I desire

to tell
you my feelings
or learn how I feel about

them but that I have thoughts, too

---

What is thought
            without words

what
            does a dog think

to choose to bark or not to bark

---

Is it thought

to repeat the same words

over and over 2 another thinker
until she too must have the feel
of identical bumps

---

They say, I think
            they said, as I
                        haven't always heard
them well, a thot equals
a thousand dots

---

Of all the words
you've taught me to feel
from beginning to end
"period" makes space
for the greatest sense

---

All this talk
          about
is a preposition and yes it takes one to know one

but about "closure" I do believe
we give those words too much credit.

---

Open and Close -- these
concepts I can feel

as I fall asleep
          and something opens
          and something closes

---

I think
therefore I may use words

to learn how to live
and die with dignity

as I understand it

---

What is the use
using words

other than to pass time
back and forth

between being and being

---

Words are not thoughts

Orange is merely the color,

I hear,

of the fruit you see

before peeling away its cover

---

I can chew my gums and walk
at the same time, but all this talk
goes straight through the gaps
in my teeth like so much hot air
shoved down my throat

---

After the so-called falling
asleep I wonder what sound
                sounds like
or if I can feel what I cannot see
with my outer eyes

---

I's, Eye's,
what's the difference

to me beside themselves

in their different rows of dots
if only 1's inside

---

HKs of late... Missing original formatting, though, so NOT done yet.

Apparently, deaf dumb blind

too,          you require

24 hour seven
attention from

                me

---

But    I    need

you,    please please
I beg you to

sense somehow
me, too.

---

Where
    I begin
or you

end we must
learn to know better

---

I know

you love

me you say
this is true

all the time

---

I have come to my senses
whether deaf or blind
but seldom dumb,     please

please won't you for me
use your good ears and eyes

---

The good whole
earth I can believe

common sense
all the heavens on earth

require theories neither here nor there

---

You don't need theories

to believe me, Love.
You have eyes, you
can see with your own original, natural

eyes. Just try.

---

They may sound
better, even more

musical
and hence make sense

more poetic, but

---

Who am I

to know what love is

I have only my common sense
Others, eyes and ears and words and theories

Must I feel even more?

---

All this (is) theory about
needing you to be

me, it's not entirely true.
I need only solitude

he said, but he had eyes

---

I feel most

ALIVE
the very moment

tired, exhausted, spent,

done, I fall asleep

---

But if I loved dearly

My Henry Miller

as well as her

Life, his Poetry, even her Emily Dickinson

and thus all poets, what's wrong with that

---

I will make no new

formal innovation
for career contentment alone

I promise I promise

to make sense new,
two,         if I kan

---

Not enough comforting

Bad too much
Worse I may BE

Male whether hetero or homo

Later Same /difference







At two you (so they say)
must hold me
Am I
you or me
& Sea





Time I can breathe
in and out

Count, then lose count

Sleep always about
the same moment






Sleep. I can
pretend
I am

unaware of your

caresses caresses caresses



Fighting but

we are both old

enough to know
each other better

enough already






I need you
you need me
too
the two of
Us






Two of us
the smell

I no longer notice

when you go away

means I am here





I tell
you
what
I love you

but





What if they ARE

true
about words
Mere abstraction

Power Perversity Annihilation






I know a Man
who

depended on others

who

were not Men


Who
were
not
Women
or children, either





Jesus, Creeley,

Emily and Gertrude,

Dana and Ron,

What does it matter

to us / We are only humans



Rough hands
Soft

skin
measured breath

in, out, time of our lives





One, so very wise and worthy,
advised: “Know yourself, a life
unexamined is not worth living.”

Wise, also worthy, I think she says,
“Know others, examine life and all living.”

Note to buddies Jerry and John and Linda sent today:

Good-good, Jerry, and glad to hear youse guys are, too. :)

Nice "title," too: "here's a pOm," of which I particularly love your turning me onto that spelling with three letters and the center O capitalized. Ideal! AND "the Answer" I've been looking for for a few years now, trying to make an alternative to "poem." :) Nice going!

Well, hands in several pots, as usual. And we got a new puppy dog, named Andrew, and he's absolutely adorable, even when he's running me ragged and keeping me from getting much sleep, HA!

Writing/scribbling plenty (albeit, too often, beginning this and beginning that, too frazzled to carry most things through a whole 2 days in a row). Wrote several "Helen Keller Series" pOm's a few nights ago. DO BELIEVE that I will carry that "series" through multiple developments until it also becomes a kind of poming that meets some kind of very different sort of thing whereby the pOm's comprise texts that could not possibly come from a source blessed with vision and hearing OR texts that don't "address" readers with vision and hearing OR texts that work out of some sort of abstract p.o.v. of a "Helen Keller" entity that/"who" does not have vision or hearing OR something... (Probably from all of the above AND MORE, but also keeping in mind that these are just "ideas" and not necessarily the best "place" to start from (if following a Williams' "no ideas but in things").

But I think that the overall thing is that I have (a repeatedly too vague, but I have to hold onto it until IT articulates itself to me when it's good and ready) some sort of intuition that something and some things could "get written" that somehow do not or cannot have the "feel" of coming from "a subjectivity," referencing either "inside OR outside," and addressing "others." BUT not desiring to get some sort of preposterous Steinian thing going, either. Nor some sort of braniac Spicer "radio transmission" thing, either. Or, rather, something that in fact just does the exact opposite of everything hinted at or hinting from above, and simply and straight-forwardly thoroughly investigates and makes concrete and actualizes the entire realm of "subjectivity," itself, but, as oddly as it sounds, somehow from the p.o.v. of, again, a deaf dumb blind "person" (OR an animal or plant! ! !) "who" has only "Braille" and other senses, as opposed to language from "written" and "spoken" familiarity. Well, OR, say, IF INDEED the moment of individuation into a separate entity/individual/being from umbilical cord "mother" occurs as in Lacanian theory (I guess) when the child of the first time starts learning/using "language" and finds out he/she/it is not experiencing the exact same "other" BEING that mother is experiencing (for suddenly, using language, the he/she/it entity is coming from a different location in time and space, also, and can now suddenly "reflect" on (otherwise unconscious or surely at least infinitely NON-VERBAL) AWARENESS, well, WHAT would "that" come out as? Or something...

This is about as articulate as I can make the "idea" for now, and I feel it is best to keep going back to the original "basics": a poming from a subjectivity NOT, if at all, greatly familiar with visual and auditory ability, much less, visual and auditory experience of words/meaning the rest of us have. At the same time, that "subjectivity" has an innate need and predisposition to somehow "make contact" with "the World," particularly with "others," and other "objects) (Object Relations theory), "CONTACT" without which that subjectivity cannot differentiate between "self" and "world" and therefore BE...

This all fascinates me. Plus, I want to TAKE DOWN "Lacan" for the home team (Object Relations folks like Nancy Chodorow) and Gestalt Therapy and Bioenergetics folks like Fritz Perls and Alexander Lowen) because for one thing, I like TRUTH and will fight for it very hard and if Lacan was thoroughly full of shit (and if other pomers are full of bullshit), then I plan to splatter his/their crap all over the ceilings and fans of academia/culture someday. (Or, similarly, if I'm really being unfair to him, TOO, then I will "deconstruct" and otherwise annihilate my own bullshit and whatever bad, paranoid hunches I have developed. Well, there's also "the Lacan Series" of poming that I started a few years back... (and of course, even ALL of my hunches are WRONG, and not "truth," some dang could poming/"truths" could come out of all the confusion, too, as it goes in life... HA!

Yers and alls,

Steve :)

Galatea Resurrects #15, VERY COOL things happening!

Well, for one, totally want a copy of Mark Young's At Trotsky’s Funeral (Kilmog Press, Dunedin, New Zealand, 2010) after reading Eileen Tabios' surely EVER-deserving and right-on rave review/ENGAGEMENT of this latest NewZealand/Aussie pomer's fine-lined poetry: Tabios' review. Man, Mark Young uses delicate, short line form about as adroitly as anybody writing anyplace on the planet, doesn't he?

And Jerry Schwartz hits the proverbial nail right in the heart of the head of what Sarah Sarai does so well in her The Future Is Happy: Schwartz' review/ENGAGING.

Allen Bramhall totally GETS the someday theenk Books Stephen Ellis classic, O P U L E N C E: Bramhall's sterling, cogent review.

Hey, heck, a couple of my own books got some serious attention, too, HOORAH! Mr. Jimmy McCrary checked out my Loose Gravel Press Mr. Magoo: McCrary review.

And Eileen Rose Tabios (Rose, hey, that's my mom's name, too) gave Behave some thorough quality time: Eileen's review of Behave, California Rant 66.

And there's a whole lot more, links for which I'll post later -- like Richard Lopez, Tom Beckett, Lynn Behrendt, Anny Ballardini, John Herbert Cunningham, Thomas Fink, and Rebecca Loudon, to name just a few! Super-exciting! Wow, what a difference a day makes, aye?

This may start a new series, or not, future doesn't exist:

        Andrew

    we'll go to sleep now

        we'll have our dreams

            we'll go to sleep now
                / Little Puppy Dog

            we'll have our dreams

        They'll have their schools
          / we'll have our dreams

          we're just the doggies

                they're only humans

test

What I am myself working on, have been working on, for some time...

(1)What does IT (one's writing/poming) say or DO back to oneself (originally, What does it (your writing/poming) say Back To You)?

(2)Or, to whom (or WHAT) is your writing/poming Addressed?

This second question is the clincher for me. I vaguely but definitely/vitally want to make a writing/poming that addresses Nobody (and certainly) not the usual suspects -- posterity, Silliman, Frank O'Hara, Dale Smith, Tom Clark, my close buddies female and male alike, a hip culture, an atrophied culture, the next avant garde, the old guard including all the "names" in D. Gioia's anthology (which, albeit an "anthology," I like, though I may not like D. Gioia's poetics-politics and shilling for the old guard one teensy bit and "Santa Rosa's finest" in my poem "Chanting for beginners" was surely NOT Dana G., and surely was David Bromige, at the same time that it was, of course, a pun on any major city's police force, Folks-literary, Folks-nonliterary, "Academia" including my several hundred friends who teach and the several thousand fudcakes who give that term A such a problematical name, AA, Triple-A, the Oakland A's, and any asshole I've ever been, whenever...

Maybe I want a writing/poming closer to math, science, programming, engineering, research, something that uses language to actualize greater life force thought, beauty, harmony, health, etc. -- that is, distinctly NOT a product for consumption, sale, consuming, "selling." It's purely a process for self and world engagement, as well as interaction (and it is Volunteer Work, of course).

3 very different, equally industrious, nourishing, bright, elegant books: 22 Skiddo / Sub Tractions (Michael Boughn) & The Book of Frank (CA Conrad)

THREE+ very different, equally industrious, nourishing, bright, elegant books: 22 Skiddo / Sub Tractions (Michael Boughn) and The Book of Frank (CA Conrad).

These two books (in fact, THREE, as the Michael Boughn book is really, actually, two books in one) both deserve separate readings and blog posts, but I wanted, for the moment, to just jot down that they are so very different and for me compliment each other because of that -- one, Bougn's, is stacked with rich, long, force-multiplying syntaxes and DENSE language, deep allusions (including literary allusions that emanate (always only) from long acquired and intimate reading/familiarity/erudition), and brain-bending thought-power, and the other, Conrad's, works from simple, gentle, ingeniously conceived structures on the surface "childlike" and "playful" yet packing lethal blows to all our "super-ego," "Top-dog," "Parental" prescriptions against what in all of us is abundantly healthy CHILD as well as, indeed, essential "spirit."

You'd want BOTH books and forms of intelligence at the time of your death when the universe questions you to decide what level(s) of "being" you would be eligible to return as in your next life (if reincarnation is reality) or how close to Shakespeare and Stein and Li Po and Tu Fu you'd live or if you'd end up in some trailer park closer to Dana Gioia and T.S. Eliot and a bunch of egotistical greeting card producers for eternity.

But BACK TO Boughn and Conrad poming:

(1)Who/What is the implied and literal "you" throughout most of Sub Tractions? When I get to the bottom of that, I'll apprehend a great deal of the sub-content and thrust(s) of this intriguing poming/book much more deeply and comprehensively.

(2)What is the repeating "penetralium" in almost all of the separate poems in Sub Tractions? "Petroleum" "MINUS ONE" or Plus 1?

If penetralium describes "the inner most or most secret part of a building," one then must ask, Whose "building" or at least What kind of building, as well as, Is "building" a metaphor for a system, perhaps a system of "secrets" (and again "whose," the poet's, the reader's, society's, modernity's?).

Or is "penetralium" the inner most "secret parts" of the poet's mind/self/Unconscious, or is it society's, for example, a "Collective Unconscious" (Jung) or "the uncreated conscience of my race [modern N. American culture/society]"(Joyce)? Or the secrets of American/(&Canadian) society, which some might argue distinctly lacks in "conscience" (while others might argue equally persuasively, such an argument would be overly-totalizing).

penetralium (plural penetralia)

the innermost (or most secret) part of a building; an inner sanctum

Now, then, permit me to add yet another ENTIRELY different poming to this mix, Peter Ganick's Er a densely packed, I suspect chance-procedures produced, spare use of white space work that METHODically resists habituated "totalizing" description (the kind that sells so dang well in our American universities largely populated by overworked professors with little or no time to teach writing that cannot easily be summarized). Here, Er, is like the proverbial dense (essentially American tree but its trees and foliage surely could be found in other temperate climates and foreign grains) forest; we may easily get lost in it and not be able to find our way out, too. It's also like, say, an enourmous and vast collection of data, like what Darwin ACCUMULATED b-e-f-o-r-e he condensed his findings into a remarkably flexible, malleable, and USEFUL theory -- "useful," QUITE, in my humble opinion, like what Mr. Olson was fond of wanting, and like Michael Boughnn's and CA Conrad's, which are equally useful, at least here in this still relatively free country or here on this still fairly free North American continent.

But before I go with this (apples/oranges mixing) strange what-it-is/what-it-isn't form of review, close-read, another million dollar question needs to be asked -- if I'm crazily "analyzing" three very different kinds of poming in the same READ, why don't I have any female poming in the mix. Hmmm, I'll need to address that question, too, I should theenk...

More Stephen Ratcliffe from H U M A N / N A T U R E

Talk about “arbitrary,” how about the word “beautiful” in the following statement? I don’t know of too many folks anyWHERE on the planet who are writing anything as beautiful as Stephen Ratcliffe’s poetry. Nonetheless, I’m going to start with that adjective, one that means so many different (albeit universally similar) things to so many different (albeit universally similar and beauty-needing) and generally the same, common people – BEAUTIFUL – and go from there, and I mean it, trust me:

Stephen Ratcliffe
Poems from HUMAN / NATURE

11.17
silhouette of song sparrow perched on fencepost below feeder
in left foreground, sunlit green oval of tobacco plant leaf
across from it, sweptback wingspan of jet passing overhead



man on left explaining “the moment an emotion or fact is
transformed into a photograph, is it no longer a fact”



man on right asking “did Picasso consider the paintings
finished when he had them photographed, and if he changed
his mind in one or two instances, then why”
plane of high
thin white cloud reflected in the motionless grey plane below
point, gull standing on triangular orange tip of the GROIN sign



11.18
black-capped chickadee pecking up seeds from table in right
foreground, golden-crowned sparrow landing on tobacco plant
branch above it, grey-white fog in front of invisible ridge



man on left noting “the eye also distinguishes better the so-
called middle greys, which to photography are often flattened”



man across from him adding “‘white water is inconceivable, etc.’
means we cannot describe how something white would look, don’t
know what description these words demand of us”
white line
of jet trail slanting across cloudless blue sky above point,
blue-green shoulder of wave breaking to the right below it



11.20
yellow circle of sun below silhouette of black pine branch,
blue jay pecking seed from feeder across from it, sweptback
wingspan of jet passing overhead
woman on phone explaining
“‘writer’ and ‘writing’ come from Anglo-Saxon word for ‘weave,’”
for example “the red gaze weaves in and out with morning light”



woman in black sweater asking “have you noticed how adjectives
have become ‘marginalized,’ I’m just waiting for the Buddhist
couple to arrive, corporate crooks are fucked”
sunlit line
of white cloud in pale blue sky above the ridge, oval green
mouth of wave breaking to the left across channel below it



11.23
pink line of jet trail moving across blue whiteness of sky
in left corner, right-sloping shoulder of still dark ridge
below it, sound of waves breaking in channel
man on left
wanting to “demonstrate a gradual stepping up and down
between white and black, between lighter and darker”



Kandinsky recalling that “Van Gogh asked, in his
letters, whether he might not paint a white wall
dead white”
white of spray blown back from wave
breaking across channel, whiteness of gulls moving
to the left across shadowed plane of ridge above it



11.24
sunlit edge of egg-shaped rock on rectangular white table
in left foreground, green of passion vine-covered fence
behind it, sweptback wingspan of jet passing overhead



Kandinsky noting “the whole triangle is moving slowly,
almost invisibly forwards and upwards”
man on right
explaining “the spacing seems bound up with an effort
to alter the visual weight of the larger right-angled
triangle that had, at Sorgues, lorded it over the picture”



silver of low sun reflected in blue-grey plane, whiteness
of tern flapping across cloudless blue sky toward horizon

So damn freaking gorgeous! Gawd, I hope that I don’t have to give up ALL of my verboseness, my irony, my self-reflexiveness, my wordplay, my sound-for-the-pleasure-of-it, my natural punning (my essentially theenking-via-punning), my wit in part inherited from Bromige and in part from being “class clown” back in school when so frequently “bored,” my “vehicle” stacking syntaxes with "mixed" metaphor and punning overlapping, all the thoroughly different kinds of “beauty” in order to write like this, Stephen. I can and I can’t! I can’t give up the other things I like to do poming. But at least SOME of what I will write in the future MAY be much like this. As best I can, anyhow. Maybe, we’ll see...

I mean, it’s so much more “truthful,” for starters, and I’d want that: Truthful. Truthfully, I would. And, two, it’s so freaking “real,” but also it is THE “real” that YOU, Stephen Ratcliffe, have gotten to in “the World,” not just that which landscapes (Yes, used as a verb, something I usally don’t like to do, but…) mind and particularly BODY of the place/space off the page (actually, Bob) that you inhabit, Stephen -- Bolinas -- but also that which landscapes OUR entire “outside” world not yet bulldozed over or intruded upon by a dullard, dead, brutish machine age cacophony of NOISE like a military body bag blanketing all consciousness and attention, perverting and poisoning AWARENESS, all that which previously relax itself into our HEADS by both silence, “nature,” and gentle LIFE.

Stephen Ratcliffe poetry above can also be found in Del Ray Cross' fabulous Shampoo, where it has been meticulously formatted and arranged, as it should be.

Stephen Ratcliffe's poetry, TOO b e a u t i f u l -- so my heart is broken

The only problem that I have with Stephen Ratcliffe's poetry, albeit a "game-changing" problem (Take that, I took that, Good Ms. Huffington, smiles), is that it virtually makes most all of my own impulses to write futile. I mean, when stuff is this good, what else is there ever to do? It's TOO dang b e a u t i f u l, dang it all, Stephen! Now, AT BEST, I can only hope to renew study of Stephen R's and Bob G's and Joanne K's and Larry E's poetry and maybe, AT BEST, figure out a way to follow in their naked holy shoes:

Click link to the rite!
You'll never respect me again if you do...
But go ahead, anyways, and CLICK:    R e m a r k s    o n    C o l o r    /    S o u n d

For my FACEBOOK friends:

For Chrissakes, BUY this book, will you!
Or that one, Grasshopper!



Sheesh! What do I have to do, give you a discount as one of my FACEBOOK friends? Alright, then, I will! Steve Tills’ FACEBOOK friends get a $4.00 discount on any new theenk Books selection (IF you must, and if you can PROVE that you are one of my friends).

And I understand what it’s like to be poor. I just cashed out my IRA for $800.00 to pay the rest of the bill for the O P U L E N C E print run. And I have two dollars in my pocket, $2.05 in my Checking account, and $1.87 in my Savings account until next paycheck next Thursday on the 21st.

(Please do not worry about me, though. I can stop off at my parents house on the way home and borrow some money from them (probably, although they're in their 80s and on a fixed income. And my wife has probably $100.00 cash on her, probably, right Sweetheart? Yes? Honey, we do, right? Well, anyways, I'm going to get a Seasonal part-time job at UPS, also.)

"we all want to change the world"

Jim M and Richard L and Tom B were having some discussion about whether their writing (poming) “changes anything.” This question seems to me silly on the face of it. Every day, what we read and what we write changes us, some stuff a great deal some stuff almost imperceptibly – when I first read Henry Miller talking about “spontaneity” in Cancer, Capricorn, or Black Spring when I was 16, I “immediately GOT IT.” I immediately understood that it was “healthier,” much more satisfying, and fulfilling to permit oneself and others to be open to spontaneous behaviors, events, instances, “happenings.” The writing, Miller’s writing, did indeed CHANGE ME; it gave me much greater “permission” TO BE open to and supportive of considerably greater, more satifying experience in my life and to deeper self-actualization of (human) “potential” that is ever genetically available to a person but that can easily remain “latent” and undeveloped, un-triggered by the kind of beautiful “mirroring” that “writing” can provide, as the writing of “a trusted other” like Miller presents miraculous substitute when actual human support for the actualization of innate wisdom is absent or not yet available.

By the same token, our own acts of writing, however meager they may appear to others, ALSO CHANGE US, for they corroborate our own best “instincts” and help vindicate our own innate “common sense.”

Now, then, if reading others (including most definitely POETS and including equally definitely Jim McCrary and Tom Beckett and Richard Lopez) and writing CHANGE US, me as a reader and you as a reader, then WRITING CHANGES THE WORLD, period. We are all, individually, no less “the World” than things and nations and cultures and systems and concepts and perspectives outside of our bodies are “the World.”

No, not ALL writing has much effect to change the world. OLD, cliché poetries/poems denouncing this or that “war” (like the Iraq War) have very little effect. Hence, (I think that it was, at the time) Charles Bernstein’s admonishment of OLD “poetries” hashing out the same old same old same old hackneyed “ I I I I say war is really bad and I approve of this message,” poems and poetries. They simply have very, very little effect; indeed, they may, as many Language Poets have argued for decades, probably actually REINFORCE the same kinds of thinking and conceptualization that is part and parcel of repeating the same kinds of cultural animosities and passions that cause wars to begin with. At the same time, Bernstein and others, for example Silliman (and, in truth, IN SPIRIT ALL true post-modernists to some extent, whether they admit it or not), error to the other side equally naively and ridiculously by “dividing even the greater poetry world up” into US versus THEM, avant po versus Quietude. No matter how anybody thinks s/he is cutting the cake(s), ALL exceedingly tired and exhausted FORM only serves to reinforce old forms of engaging with, viewing, and perceiving the so-called world. (By the same token, groovy groovy groovy super “new” technically ultra-“experimental” forms and approaches sans any genuinely remarkable content or discernible purpose (other than to land university jobs sanctioned by the hippest senior avant po practitioners) probably don’t have any great effect on “the world,” either. They only serve to honor and fatten the estates of the status quo who enter life in the upper middle class and get at least part of their easy quick advancement in rank to “Officer” class because their inherit power from social class.)

Overall, though, Jim and Tom and Richard, OF COURSE READING AND WRITING, including ours, ALTERS “the World,” perhaps just one of own brain cells at a time, perhaps only incrementally, and perhaps much more, at the end of the day, than we ever even may have wanted to…

Tom Beckett posted this, for starters:
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
I'm bringing forward this note by Jim McCrary from the comment section of an earlier post:

"thanks for noticeing, tom. and i do have this additional thought....my beef is with those who CALL for poetry in order to CHANGE the world...i.e. "end the war". and as usual because i am a poet who doesnt 'try harder' i left too much out of the post. "

I'm sorry to disagree with my friend, but my beef is with those who don't call for poetry to change the world (somehow, even a little, but more would be better).
Posted by Tom Beckett at 3:26 PM

There's way too much to write today, this week, this month, this year, but here are a few quick things...

This may be the beginning of a poming series, although I already have half a dozen series already started -- in fact, begging night, day, and yearly for attention/time -- so I'll just call it 1 lame (or maybe "flame") line for now:

All 33 miners are out of the hole, NOW, and we're crying,
K., about Ron's having closed his Comments section?

---

Tom Beckett sent me a nearly complete set of TEMBLOR some years back and I've been reading them quite a bit lately. By the way, Tom, the Sheila Murphy line that you quote there is SOLID GOLD FOREVER...) Reading them tonight, I thought to myself, "actually, I must WRITE, Charles Bernstein, Rae Armantrout, Bob Perelman pp.74-89, TEMBLOR #2 1985, sixteen pages (candles?) of the most sublime poming you'll ever love / to take as proper inspiration and appropriate example." I'm serious, Friend.

---

Alan Casline's "Not understanding Charles Olson" in the Summer 2010 House Organ is pretty dang dang cool.

---

Ken Warren's "The Deep Pivot of A Curriculum," also in the Summer 2010 issue is pretty spectacular, also. Ditto, Stephen Baraban's "Doonesbury," in the Fall 2010 issue -- a full blast of the very freshest and most invigorating air. And Ken W's piece from his ongoing The Emperor's New Code, "Anima Vox Cock: Frances Boldereff and the Rise of 'Projective Verse'" is heaven on this and all other planets, particularly those informed by broad, rich insight into the great treasures of psycho-analytics and depth psychology.

Reading Crag Hill and Sarah Sarai this week.

I'm reading Crag Hill's marvelous, remarkable, outstanding, intoxicating 7 x 7 (the book is seven miles wide and seven light years tall) presently.

I'm also re-reading Sarah Sarai's The Future is Happy. And that's just one of the reasons I am, at present, pretty darn happy, and when I'm not at work here at "the plant" and actually have Sarah's poming/poetry right in my hands, I'm ecstatic.

Good for you, Ron, closing comments (like making a telephone number unlisted)

Just now (October) learning that you decided to close your Comments Section, something, given what must be absolutely unbearable stress caused by the infinite cranks you must have had to deal with. I fully empathize with and admire your decision. Let the dick-fucks go find some other venue where they can act out their obvious and exhausting anti-social compulsions. And should also encourage/force the rest of us to spend more of our time “creating,” less attaching ourselves parasitically to others’ venues/projects (like yours) because we neglect to actualize realities coming from our own centers.

Although I wasn’t reading, much less “hanging out at,” your Silliman’s Blog a whole lot the last couple of years (doubt that I even visited it for more than a yearly total of 300 minutes these last 12 months – seriously, so much else to do in life and so little time to get things done in life), hell it was a great ride while it lasted. Then of course more and more, like any other hot spot on the planet, the cranks must have started gathering there in droves, as they do any place where things are “free” and don’t require any responsibility on their part (like getting their own fucking blogs and earning their own reasons for deserving attention).

The fucking cranks… They’re all over the culture these days, aren’t they. Reality TV, the Internet, everyplace… Needing their “attention” to something that they refuse to create or actualize from within themselves. Or simply can’t, being so “damaged” or underdeveloped inside, psycho-dynamically, and all – so they go out and impose their insatiable hunger for attention on others who ARE fully developed and functional human beings possessing authentic centers (R.S., for example). We need to create more poetries that assist these invalids and schizoids to seek genuine self-actualization and the development of fully functioning personalities. The therapists and therapies are out there. Waiting for them. Silliman’s is yet another half-way house that got over-run by them, couldn’t feed and shelter them any longer, too many, and they were starting to harm and harass all the others who were more deserving. Which of course is criminal. Hooray for R.S. finally shutting the doors on them. We should all work to find out who they are so that we can get them the real help that they need (or at least keep them from acting out their psycho aggression and harming those of us who never invited them into our homes in the first place).

Craig Conrad's rad rad fab tribute to his Emily Dickinson:

Poming after reading Craig Conrad's rad rad fab tribute/reverence to Emily D:

Totally EXCELLENT, Dude!

Or since a/the CAPS rankle readers/reading
maybe
                    and if in any way detract from the sublime
humility informing this impeccable homage

to our

                    several Emily’s
Dickinson, all,

                                        how about just this:

Excellent poming (AND) g-r-e-a-t ideas for something to do some weekend
or/AND
any other time, for that&what matter(s), CA!

Ken Edwards and David Bromige

Ken Edwards, who came to read at our Johnny Otis Club venue/incarnation of the Russian River Writers' Guild in 1994, writing about David Bromige. Ken's Reality Street will be publishing David's Collected. COOL!

Link to lovely web site commemorating David Bromige.

Link to Remembering David web site at WORDPRESS where the best of friends are recording their/our warm and lovely thoughts and memories of David, who touched so many with his remarkable spirit and his indefatigable wit.

I, myself, cannot quite yet begin to post here my innumerable cherished memories of this enormously good soul who has passed and now, surely, sits up there in Poets' Heaven, I'm certain, busting Shakespeare’s and Chaucer’s guts right about now, a couple of comparable wits, and they probably appreciate his getting their humor, too, three like souls (Bromige and Shakespeare and Chaucer) and all, and just before going in front of Saint Peter or some such Higher-up and saying, “Say, Chap, I’d like two pickets to Tittsburgh and change in dimes and nipples,” then, when admonished by old Saint Finger for failing to show properly reverent comportment, shaking his peter at him.”

Wrote this "David Bromige poem" about three months ago...

Steve is one fourth asleep (alternatively, "Feeling like Food")
after Jim McCrary's "Dub and Neva"

"Feel like toast tonight, or butter?"

"I feel like steak."

"I'll just be a glass of water."

"You like that, don't you? Part impervious transparency. And the other part unadulterated and liquid opacity. You like that, don't you?"

"Beats feeling like over-cooked spaghetti drowned in watered down tomato sauce that didn't use any pork."

"I thought you were Italian and weaned on 'spaghetti sauce.'"

"That doesn't mean I have to use a spoon to roll the stuff. I'm not an amateur, you know."

"No, of course not. Now tell me what you really feel like!"

"What I really feel like? You've got to be high or something. What I really feel like is sex."

"Having it or Being it?"

"No, just the thing itself."

"Actually, I never do that anymore."

"You talking about getting high or having sex?"

"The thing itself. Just the thing itself. Like you were saying."

"You know, it was Bromige who named the book Behave. I was going to call it Rant 66."

"Was that a pun, don't you think? Be and Have. Behave. Folks can either lust for 'having' or for 'being.' If they BEHAVE, then they can have their cake and be it, too."

"Oh, I thought you meant Rant 66 and Route 66. You get your kicks, etc. And your life took that westward, and wayword, route to California."

"Yeah, that too. But actually there never was a Rant 66. It all started with Rant 67."

"And they weren't really rants, either. They were more like anti-rants."

"Yeah, but I think that David also wanted for me to behave and not diss the Lang Pomers, or for that matter Anybody, too self-destructively. He's a very wise human."

"Well, there's also a Behave title of his, so . . . "

"Yeah, now THAT is the coolest thing! My Behave tied to his. I couldn't possibly be prouder of anything else."

"Yeah, only a Ron Silliman would notice that kind of thing..."

"It's too bad there were only about 25 printed."

"That's fine for now. I feel like bread or cookies."

"There aren't any in the house."

"No, that's alright. I just feel like 'em."

"Okay, sounds good."

Brand New BRIGHT Blog, Sarah Sarai's

It won't get much better than this, friends: My 3,000 Loving Arms, Sarah Sarai's new blog.

Review of TOM BECKETT book in Galatea Resurrection #12

In Eileen Tabios' terrific Review and ENGAGEMENT journal Galatea Resurrection, #12, my review of Tom Beckett's This Poem / What Speaks / A Day

Posted this at David-Baptiste Chirot's new NOS OBRAS OTROS this evening:

David-Baptiste Chirot's launched a challenging new blog recently called Nos Obras Otros, and he kindly invited me to participate in this neat new group venue and post some notes, thoughts, explorations whenever I felt I had something worthy. I immediately thought of this little essay that Sarah Sarai liked a lot when I posted it in the "Comments" section of a Note by FACEBOOK friend Dorianne Laux: "Shoot from the hip rant-rave response to 'poetry brothel'"

RUGH STUFF reviewed in JACKET MAGAZINE by Gerald Schwartz

Rugh Stuff reviewed by Gerald Schwartz in Jacket magazine! Wow!

Reading these Outstanding Books received recently:

Alex Gildzen's It's All A Movie:

This is a classic "one of a kind" book, like Michael Murphy's Golf in the Kingdom, or Henry Miller's The Colossus of Maroussi, or Edwin LeFevre's thinly-disguised biography of Jesse Livermore’s trading life Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, or any given volume from Anais Nin's incomparable Diaries.

Alex Gildzen's is a craftman's fine, precise, and exact ear. You can hear his natural, careful counting of syllables, or just his supremely balanced superb feel for it, a cadence, a quiet mathematic, a very fine metric that always and at all points declines to broadcast desperate muzaks as it simply, consistently filters out all that would merely function as noise. There is no noise here. Do note the gentle, silky registers of his elegant list poem "In the beginning," which prefaces the rest of the collection:

In The Beginning

Richard Barthelmess wearing a barrel
Rod LaRocque a towel
William Haines with his trousers down

in Doctor Reefy's parlour on Third St
I leafd the pages of Blum
till his pictures of lost motion
spun a world I wantd

somewhere between Valentino smolder
& Gloria Swanson allure
I learnd an alphabet

memorizing those still images
from Fatty Arbuckle in drag
to May Allison sipping a soda
I began a quest to bring them to action

& so I found Lillian Gish slipping on ice
Lois Wilson breaking dishes
Mae Murray waltzing into eternity

"Wearing" and "barrel," "towel" and "trousers" and "down," "Blum" and "spun," "Lillian" and "Gish" and "slipping" -- nowhere does "sound" overpower or clash; nowhere is rhyme and alliteration forced or artificial; and nowhere does the intelligence of the sensibility and import not also gain precise accentuation from the poet's fine, subtlety-attuned instinct for what exact meaning he hears with both his mind and his ear. If you don't get the perfectly mellifluous pitch in those last two lines of that last stanza, "Lois Wilson breaking dishes / Mae Murray waltzing into eternity," especially indeed the way those y's from "Murray" and "eternity" slide off the tongue of your mind's EAR, well, then, you're probably tone deaf. They're just positively exquisite!

It's All A Movie combines select, unique poetry with vintage autobiography, personal cinema-history photography, and a vitally dedicated archivist's personal and professional, private and public indispensable expertise -- all in one timelessly vital inventory of irreplaceable movie memorabilia and cinema lore.

There's no way to quite categorize this kind of book. You might find it in the Poetry section, you might find it in the Cinema section, you might find it in the Autobiography/Biography section; it would do any such sections of Barnes and Nobel or Borders infinite justice. And then, of course, if they had a special section for unique and "one of a kind" type books that you simply cannot locate if you're looking for generic, dime-a-dozen reading, that'd be the section where it should be located.

It's available through Australian Mark Young's smart, grand Otolith's press. At $12.50, It's All A Movie is a complete steal.

Tom Beckett's ThisPoem/WhatSpeaks?/ADay:

ThisPoem/What Speaks?/ADay, as the title suggests, consists of three fine and substantial "medium length" poems, the kind that good poets (usually) work through for days, weeks, even months, at a time. That is, these kinds of poems, these medium length poems are NOT simply "everyday" (nor "every day") or "occasional" poems. They're the kinds of poems one actually prefers to call "poetry" or "poming" instead of "poems." This is NOT to say that there's anything wrong with so-called "occasional poems," or any poems that arise and evolve quickly, in a burst of enthusiasm and inspiration, and get onto the page and largely finished in minutes or otherwise very brief, immediate actualizations/realizations of urgent inspiration. It's just to say that these particular Beckett poems here have at least the feel of "more sustained and extended concentration/commitment of Focus." And I believe that that is the way he, Tom Beckett, works, frequently, which is absolutely fabulous. The art of poetry is so abundantly democratized and, alas, so happily decentralized that infinite new brands of the stuff every day pop up on our beautiful blogs and other social networks as if the entire manufacture of "poetry" is now (over?) determined by the various and sundry technologies of the American Daily Narcissism Industry. It is thus always enormously consoling to see that at least one old-school practitioner of sustained concentration can maintain his standard and a focus on subject matter(s) or form for more than twenty-minutes of Starbucks caffeine rush. (Again, I have n=o=t=h=i=n=g against the penning, or even the speed-typing, of really, really fast, lightning-quick-thinking poming that produces said-and-done pieces of the one-two page varieties in seconds, and I write a lot of that kind of stuff, myself, sometimes very satisfyingly. I'm just saying that Beckett's poming here presents us ADHD and non-ADHD readers and consumers alike with old-fashioned sustained focus poetry that we know and trust required Unconscious processing (that is, full sleep and rest cycles) and time encompassing days and nights plural.

That said, initially, I am turned off by any "poetry," "poming," or writing that would title itself with the word poem or the word poetry. Or that would use the word poem. Or that would take as its subject matter such a thing -- "poetry." But this is Tom Beckett, and he's quite different, so I take both the pen and the whole electric typewriter out from up my arse and relax a little bit. I know that as soon as I get past my usual impatience with so many run-of-the-mill "poetries" that never neglect to remind us that they're poetries by using poet and poem and poetry as key terms, I'll enter the Beckett poem with my wits about me and the proper patience I'll need to take in what for most readers is stuff just way too difficult for everyday narcissistic reading engagements... Beckett's poetry will yield substance, always, regardless words like poem and poetry might obtrude upon my sometimes ridiculously tight-assed sensibility and the chip I always place on my shoulders to tempt friend pomers to flick off, fuck off, beat off, chew off...

After all, "This poem / Proffers / its ass " (right straight from the get-go, in fact) and that "penetrates me" immediately, too. And yeah, it's "blue," both sad and faux-porno, among other things. And "colored / Outside / Its lines," which is (also) to say alienated like blacks in the U.S. were so agonizingly alienated; as well as "outside" of what's in and in fashion and immediately accessible and acceptable; as well as, like a deliberately misbehaving OR like an innocently under- or pre-coordinated school child, UNABLE TO STAY WITHIN THE PRESCRIBED "margins"; as well as readable between the lines, not just at their surfaces or at their solid, obvious periods. And it's "parenthetical," as so much exceptionally good poetry is; that is, there's so much depth and breadth to what the lines/words offer, one needs yards and yards of parentheses to contain and to extrapolate what meaning has become facilitated; plus, well of course there's a little of the pomer's "parents" in the poem, no doubt, and no doubt, a little of mine and yours and what was (unfortunately, surely) absent in our parenting, as well -- let's face it, this poet hits notes universal, notes relevant to all of us.

So maybe "This poem / Is fucked" and maybe "This poem / Sucks," but "This poem / Requires a / Degree / Of leniency." No, NOT "a degree" from the University, though most of us even minimally "ready" to read something this sophisticated DO have college degrees, maybe not Ph'Ds that would in some cases preclude us from writing something as courageous and pure as "This poem / Is fucked," but, Yes, college degrees, nonetheless. It's just that our college degrees don't work against us (the way too many college degrees work against too many straight members of college "educated" classes of our society and impair their psyches' abilities to appreciate the kind of intelligence that can produce this kind of substance): "This poem / Sleeps with / Its dreams. // This poem / Sleeps with / The fishes" and "This poem / Stares into / A mirror." And guess what ALWAYS? "This poem / Is taking / A chance." And thus, "This poem / Multiplies," and at the same time that it "Subdivides," and in fact it DOES do this, also; it "Posits / A rhetorical / Stance." Hmmm, now that's not an everyday occurence, is it, positing a rhetorical stance? You know what, "This poem" has got guts, and legs, and balls, as well as eyes and ears and brain.

---

"What Speaks?" has got legs, too. How could it not, with lines like "Letters splatter in a puddle" (Jackson Pollock School of Avant Po gone wrong?) and "Graphite nights," which are, for this reader, poems in themselves. (Oh, graphite, you know, Next Generationeers, is the lead in old-fashioned pencils, what previous generations still use to pen their poems because in many cases the mind moves more slowly and in tune with the body and the heart and the breath, or so the theory would go, and Yes, that doesn't mean that using a typewriter in order to keep up with a brain that wants, or may want, to move even faster than the heart and hand and pen can move cannot be equally effective in other writing situations...)

Actually, the complete line is "Graphite nights / Going down / On erasers," but I didn't like the "going down / On" part, but that's just stupid me trying to alienate some of the same "sex" that Beckett, I believe, wants to UN-alienate, address and undress the Puritan and the Puritanical in all of us -- Goddesses Bless Him! And heaven knows that (one of) the other meanings there is that the poet is (perhaps furiously) wearing down the pen from the lead/graphite end until it gets to the eraser end, too. And there is nothing sensationalistically (hyper) "sexed up" about that kind of image; rather, the poet is truly working honestly hard and seriously (and should be taken seriously).

Oh, I know that I've been on a Post-structuralist RAID (redundant array of insipid dissing) or rampage, of late... And maybe that obsession would explain my finding this line troublesome at first: "You-bris. Check Derrida on circumfession/circumfictions." Don't get me wrong! I love the puns: Hubris. Cum. Confessions. Cum-fiction. Circumcision. Circumspection. But who can ARGUE against intelligence that reads Nietzche so brilliantly and so sensibly: "knowledge = paralysis. Action = epilepsy = involuntary." // (S)he can't remember the convulsions."

And that's BEFORE he, Beckett, writes this immaculate, daunting SELF-awareness: "Parent-thesis: maybe I should interview -- no, interrogate my own / fucking selves (deliv, deliber-atively -- damn it = misspelled, but not salvaged) at the edge of the plural, almost raveling." EXACTLY! Like R. Silliman -- the poet wants to allow the misspellings because they are, for lack of more modernized and less loaded terminology, "Freudian slips" which the very best process pomers/poets recognize as alerts to meaning worth salvaging or meaning that leads to other meaning that the Unconscious is trying to salvage. Or at least that's my interpretation of "not salvaged," and indeed in this case, evidently, Beckett's "deliv-, delibera-tively == damn it - misspelled, but not salvaged)" was NOT able to grab the whole enchilada of what he sensed was there out from his deliciously accessible because long trusted and coordinated Unconscious...

---

This third "medium-length" poem, "A Day," is not, I think, my favorite of the three. ("What speaks?" is certainly my favorite.) "A Day" is not even, I think, my second favorite of the three. Why not? Is it thus, perhaps, the one that I should pay most attention to, the one I should take more time with?

Surely "A Day" is the most unequivocably autobiographical of the three poems in ThisPoem/WhatSpeaks?/ADay. Oh, the others can be intimately tied to Tom Beckett, and there are no bones about that -- if anybody, or at least any male, in America is intimate, it's Tom Beckett -- but with the other two poems, it can be argued that "a speaker" narrates, or filters, the material. In "A Day," the speaker, per se, is Tom Beckett, and he's "all in," as the Poker expression/term for risking one's entire wad, goes. He's ALL IN "A Day"; the poem couldn't really work any other way. It's part narrative, part story of a man's life from waking in the morning to retiring for the night, part chronicle of the most unromanticized and least glamorous iota of the pomer's existence; it is thus the most intimate, most genuine, most authentic, and least "marketable," least "commercial," least narcissistic, least extravagant, and most thoroughly unavoidable, routinely responsible, "disciplined" aspects of his existence and life. Vintage INTIMACY, vintage vulnerability, vintage risk-taking where other poets so industriously impress upon us how like Frank O'Hara's their flip, carefree, exhuberantly unmessy and unassailable lives are:

Right hand
shaving, left
hand caressing
oneself
a bit --
idly, really,
almost
to see
if one
still feels
at all
for oneself
*
Irritation of
having to dress,
literally to
pull clothes
from the closet
& drawers,
slap public
self together,
inhabit colors,
& textures
that drag
& move
damn it
out
into cold
cruel whirl [world]
of wage
earning ethos,
or of
weekend errandcies.

Depressing? Yeah, a little bit. At least I think so, but then how different is my own life some days, many days, if looked at through the same clear lens and no rose-colored glasses. Oh, I see some other windows and I don't want to plaint them black or any other colors, but I'm not going to deny that - I CANNOT deny that -- they are pretty damn grey, and occasionally gray, and frequently, like Tom Beckett's, at best pale. But then, I live in western New York, not far from T.B.'s own "rust belt" Kent, Ohio, not NYC or LA or Hollywood, or wherever LIFE is apparently any arbitrary, post-structuralist color or shade in the seemingly innumerable rainbows we choose from.

Alex Gildzen's Beth


K. Silem Mohammad's Breathalyzer


Meg Wither's A Communion of Saints


Susan M. Schultz's Dementia Blog


Eric Selland's The Condition of Music


Eric Selland's Inventions


Hoa Nguyen's Red Juice


Clayton A. Couch's Artificial Lure:


Dale Smith's Black Stone:


the journal Area Sneaks, edited by Joseph Mosconi & Rita Gonzales:


the journal Abraham Lincoln, #4, edited by K. Silem Mohammad and Anne Boyer:

Skip Fox's Delta Blues:

Skip Fox's For To:

Judith Roitman's No Face:

John Roche's Topicalities:

I'm sure he's not the only Truth-teller in Town (Rochester), but certainly he's among the most stalwart. His Topicalities (Foothills Publishing, 2008), for example, breathes Rochester line by line, page after page purifying what posterity will read many years from now as testament and witness and clarity. Unadorned and unpretentious, Roche tells it as it is, and where we would wince were he to waste words on "the teller," he gives us the world. Where old worlds once welcomed only high styling of telling and too many post-mod worlds contemplate endless philosophies of telling, itself, Roche focuses on simply getting the job done, responsibly making sure that what needs to be told gets told, particularly how senseless and tragic have been these long, unbearably repulsive de-evolutionary years under the gangrene thumb of Bush/Cheney 2000-2008 and how much of America's CHARACTER has been lost. All the other truths will come and go with fashions as time sales, ummm, sails, on, and myriad other cyclical truths will also come and go and no doubt some rare few will even prove evolutionarily useful one day, but the ones John Roche writes down in his plain, good, thoughtful, sincere Topicalities will remain truths as eternally as the historical facts that this honest text makes concrete and unobscured.

John Roche's On Conesus:

John Roche, who could be called "the conscience of Conesus," neither pushes the envelope of form into a pulsating electronic twitter of fifteen nanosecond fashion-frenzy nor gets in our face books ad nauseum postulating me-me-me post-millenial muddle chat celebrating instant messaging. WTF, if there's possibly ANYTHING we really do not desperately need -- and you know I cannot possibly be so serious, but, I mean, "waste not, want not," right? -- it's yet another hypertext-no-logical exploration of the further reaches of why-space and a trillion more acres of rain forests cut down to print infinite regurgitations of chaos theories. But my my my, if anbody in Rochester, New York, has enough common sense to keep an eye on the twentieth century before this miserably sickly twenty-first swats away our babe Mom Nature with the nasty, foul bloodbath insecticide spray of "Man" Nature on steroids and oxycontin, it may be John Roche. He steps up to the proverbial place, so to "speak" (and write). He preserves courageous consciousness, declines playing pied piper to the latest generation of lemmings frantically, frenetically advancing over all ends of (the cliffs of) HIStory just so that future visitors to the planet might recognize them as the final frigging auteurs of glorious technologies (all too frequently designed, whether in Literature or in Capitalist Business ventures, NOT out of any particularly worthwhile human, animal, and plant true needs but simply to advance the resumes and wages of the "inventors").

Bill Lavender's While Sleeping:

Bill Lavender's I of the Storm: