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:

Bill Lavender's While Sleeping:

Bill Lavender's I of the Storm:

Jim McCrary digging it, too, RUGH STUFF.

Over at his course Resisting Poetry, Jim McCrary could be right about the "79 pages" equals score of 79. It IS true that in some of the years when I played some of my best golf, namely those 1990s when I wrote Rugh Stuff, 1996-1998, and was "in my prime," my average score was probably 79. Truthfully, I cannot say that I "intended" the 79 "pages"/strokes equals 79 "score" (both musical and literal). But I will say this MOST EMPHATICALLY: golfers who work hard and ultimately reach "single digit handicap" level on the golf course, OBSESS endlessly about that mark called "breaking 80," and it becomes an intense (and frequently Insane) goal or mark that they constantly push themselves to achieve, the same way a pianist pushes himself/herself to play a composition "just so" or the way a marathoner trains himself/herself to run at a given pace in competition; i.e., "79" is "alright," whereas anything 80 and over pains the accomplished, single-digit golfer grievously and hastens him or her to the driving range to "work on it," work out the "defects" that prohibited them from making their mark, "the Seventies."

But then, NOT "breaking 100" and NOT "breaking 90" pains other golfers grievously. You see, ALL golfers have their individual Satisfaction levels, and that is one of the beauties of the "game." ANYBODY can hit what is called and experienced as "a perfect contact shot," which feels "orgasmic," frankly, and all golfers seek that "incredibly pleasurable feeling," so don't let me suggest that only single digit golfers are "accomplished." EVERYBODY experiences pleasure and accomplishment and meaning in golfing, sometimes most particularly just the incomparable pleasure of being out there in the fresh air and beautiful green countryside taking "a good walk spoiled." "You're all welcome here."

Well, of course, this is all enormously egotistical nonsense "performing," at certain levels in our endeavors as we live our lives, but so are other "disciplines," including Meditation and Poming, whereby one endeavors to "reach" a certain standard or comfort zone of consciousness, being, and of course it ain't whether one actually really reaches these zones and levels consistently or not; what is important is that one commits oneself to the endeavor, any endeavor, really, and "tries," without beating oneself up "trying too HARD" AND without prohibiting oneself from at least making one's best effort. Without caring "too much" AND without caring "too little."

Pretty dang proud of this note by Alex Gildzen, believe me!

Another new brother on the Links having a ball with Rugh Stuff, Alex Gildzen at Arroyo Chamisa, counting strokes, and counting me and the balls stuff among his folks. As good as it gets! :)

He writes, "but the chef beneath is all balls out."

Jee Leong Koh's response to RUGH STUFF, Yay!

Very generous and insightful response to Rugh Stuff from Jee Leong Koh, who, happily, "gets it" thoroughly, regardless the golf jargon is of course obscure.

Thank you so much, Jee, for your penetrating and patient reading. I'm absolutely tickled that folks get it without being familiar with Golf. :)

Lacan 30

Lacan 30

It's not that I // come to vary
         you, Seizure, or
that for Stephen Ellis
this want is to tear

out your liver, Barrett. After
all, the last time I saw you
fairly recently, in fact,
in Buffalo at

your

reading of your
Frame, you
were actually quite friendly
and signed the books of yours
that I purchased to read

and to add to my collection of others
of yours, and you remembered
me
from the days at Bay

area's many venues where
I came to listen to you
read
often for long periods
and, I'm quite sure,
brilliantly,

though you likely do not know one single line of one single bit
of my own poming or have ever wanted to,

but really it was Lyn who snubbed me
so almost
obviously
('cept that I am much more sophisticated
than I was in the 80s
and know that she may in fact
have simply avoided eye contact
with me because)
she didn't know my name
but knew Rodrigo, and Hung, and
Steven F., and brightly, generously
greeted them, just as she
completely treated me as if
I was invisible

I just don't know why

after all I had so deliriously expressed my rapture
after her reading six months earlier
at U.C. Berkeley and directly in her eyes
and so thoroughly generously, which
she obviously loved and appreciated,
that evening after she read with Rae Armantrout
or somebody or an-
other,

but I'm not coming to bury you
in Autobiography, B.W., or for
the reading in SF in the early 90s
when Carla admonished me
for registering lack of enthusiasm
for learning more and more and more
and more French to get in to University
of San Diego to study
more Language Poetry --
and that never happened, either -- but
weren't most Language Poetries already foreign
languages enough?

Well, you may recall that I focused four years
on you and Lyn, particularly,
for my thesis on Language Poetry,
and only Bob G. and Kit and Nick and Tom and especially Ron, REALly,
have given me the time
of day,
and you and Lyn never so much
as dropped me
a postcard to try and make a decent essay
for your Poetics Journal,

what's up with that, twenty-two years later,
when you won't ADD me as a friend at FACE-
book, either, Shit, I own six of your fucking books,
and I traveled from Rohnert Park at least a dozen times
to come down

and attend your readings over the years, like the time
at Larry Blake's on Telegraph with Steve Benson
when there was an old(er) codger, a bit drunk,
stage left and away from you

muttering

antagonistically but confidently
but drunkenly and obnoxiously
but hilariously and secretly
(except to me, 'cause I notice such things)
"What a fucking Bore" as you read,

and to think that I "championed you
and Language Poetry" ALL

of those years, and still do, why
can't we be friends? Why can't we
be friends? Why can't we be friends?
Do you and George Lakoff remember
that song, or did George end the war
in Iraq with his theory
of frames and such?

I am not going to marry
you in autobiography, Barrett. I'm just
going to make you laugh
until you admit that I'm not so pathetic
in my phallusies as I pretend to be.

New, latest, FINAL cover for RUGH STUFF.

New, latest, FINAL cover for RUGH STUFF, which is "At The Printers," now, finally:

If you click on the image, the generous back cover blurbs that Chris Murray and Stephen Ratcliffe wrote expand to regular size and become readable...

Reading Jim McCrary's _All that_ this morning.

I am reading, and re-reading and re-reading (for, after all, this book is a composite edition of his many excellent chapbooks over the decades), Jim McCrary's All that this morning.

"Ad Astra Poetry Project #24," by Kansas Poet Laureate Denise Low, is just one essay that spells out some of the singular merits of bro Jim's poming, most all of which, frankly, I would stack up next to the best of any other favorite Bromige, Smith Nash, Hill, Ellis, Beckett (scroll down the bottom for review of McCrary's "Being Frida Kahlo"), Gevirtz, Cole, Eigner, Silliman, or Kyger poetry that I love and expect it to hold up some of theirs at times, too. But I am not supposed to say All that, am I?

Lacan 29

Lacan 29

New York
City

is
like
an all-powerful head
severed from its
body. It

has no feeling
for its extremities,

like Iowa, Oklahoma,
California, or Dayton.

Those who kow-

tow to it must
publish
work
so abstract
they can’t explain
why

there’s so much violence
in the new
hurricanes
that rain forests emit
when they get really pissed
on and off
or
off and on.

Shoulda coulda woulda

Shoulda coulda woulda

I probably really should
read Pound
now,
so that

I can truly say that
I have read Pound

and hang out
with those who have read Pound
and can always say that

they have read Pound
and do

even tho, though,
I have read many
others
who read Pound,
even thoroughly
and

whatever

in Pound was truly news
was passed down
through those others

much closer to what
is news
now.

Lacan 28

Lacan 28

If your poetry was genuinely good, wouldn’t it make you healthier? Wouldn’t it
make your town, your culture, your species, the planet, healthier,
at least spiritually? If it doesn’t and you continue to produce it,
what does that say about your world view?

I’m not saying that increased “consciousness,” or its sister, “awareness,”
is articulated and clear and paraphrasable. The terms consciousness and awareness
only really refer to “the apprehension” of the existence of something; they do NOT
have to refer to some thoroughly refined and long percolated condensation
of a given thing. I’m only saying that it, whether consciousness or awareness,
by definition, is GOOD, and always has been. It may be consciousness
of “worth,” “dignity,” “merit,” for instance, and the precise meaning of that
may not be paraphrasable, but wouldn't it, nonetheless, always make you healthier.
Let’s say it makes you laugh, maybe A LOT. And you cannot explain the laughter,
exactly, but geez, just the laughing, I take that to be GOOD,
don’t you? Healthy, don’t you think? Whether you can explain why or how
or not.

But there are those who say, and will say, “Oh, well it was a good idea
but ‘bad’ poetry.” Because they’re experts at that – calling such and such “Bad
poetry.” That’s what they do; they call stuff Bad poetry.
They contribute Nothing. Their whole thing, their entire game,
trope, “expertise,” what have you, is the calling of such and such “Bad poetry.”

That’s ALL. And they don’t think they’re wasting your time.
They think their thing is valuable, necessary, useful, desirable,
dignified, but all they really do, the only thing they really, actually do
is gain or retain attention for themselves (and, yes, of course it’s nothing
but useless negative attention, at least most of the time). And that’s ALL.
That’s all that they do. Calling such and such “Bad poetry,”
if you’re really, really “good at it,” is big business and big attention.
In other words, you can get great big bucks and great big fame,
if that’s what you love so much.

Now, NO, of course I am not saying that your poetry cannot be negative
in the sense of alerting everybody to what sucks in the world.
Of course not. And of course that is GOOD and necessary
and valuable, too. Increase consciousness and awareness of what sucks
in the world. That, TOO, is necessary. But shouldn’t that, wouldn’t that,
also make you healthier, too?

And happier. Wouldn’t it make you happier? If you write for years and years
and you don’t get happier, what on earth are you writing?
Or writing for?

But then there are those who insist that they are contacting, observing,
reporting, witnessing true reality, and it ain’t pretty, they say,
grim as all get-out and get-up and giddy-yup. And year after year
after year. What does that say about “the real World?” Who are they trying
to fool? It’s their “world,” and maybe it’s unique, which is
in itself a very good thing -- being unique -- but it’s just their world determined
by their world view determined by their poetics determined by maybe some genetic
disposition to repeat the same old “poetic” themes, maybe, but seriously,
I do think it’s fair to ask, does it make you healthier?

---

“Oh, but I’m not going to write THAT poem! Then I’d lose my health coverage!”

“Oh, but I’m not going to paint THAT picture. Then the government would come
after me and I’d lose my health coverage!”

“Oh, but I couldn’t possibly teach them to write novels like THAT
in my Creative Writing classes! Then the Dean would take away my Creative Writing
classes and make me an Adjunct for life!”

---

“No, as a matter of fact, he never did live on the shadier side
of town, shoot heroin, or spend some years in South America. One time
he did get a postcard from the middle east, or from Israel, actually,
but other than that, he was a Creative Writing instructor at the University
and his wife and her parents didn’t want him to lose their health insurance.”

---

Well, the thing about American Poetry and American Literature for the past
eighty or so years -- imagism, objectivism, for instance,
but even the exceedingly and tediously “straight” poetics
of the 20th Century, “objective correlative” and “poetry should not say, but be,”
etc., and the simple but deadly oppressive “show, don’t tell”
shoved down the throats of already enormously humiliated and repressed
fiction writing class students -- is that everything has been
exhaustingly and maybe also exhaustively dominated by out-of-control
and largely unconscious adherence to unquestioned and untouchable allegiance
to Objectivity,
regardless that that so-called objectivity has often been a ruse, a game,
a trope, a program, a false divinity, a delusion, a tyranny,
an authoritarian value when overarching, an at best temporal be-all-and-end-all,
a motto and a model and a no-tell motel.

Kill the personal! Kill the Self! Kill those subjectivities! Kill the splits
between subject and object, human and World, inherent in the very doctrine(s)
of Objectivity! We’ve been instructed like this for almost a century or so now,
and much of it has been fabulous instruction, but perhaps it’s gone too far
and too long and dried up access to other phenomena of “the World”
that needs to be apprehended, contacted, actualized, created, too.
Or not.
I dunno.
I’m just a dumb fuck who’s never taken a Creative Writing class in his entire life,
and I am frequently and unabashedly (though also histrionically and disingenuously
and desperately apologetic about it) personal and self-absorbed,
at least as much as the next fella or femme, to be sure.

Steve is one fourth asleep:

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."

"Sustantiality" in poming by Gerardo Diaz that Halvard Johnson sent this morning:

Halvard Johnson sent me this excellent poming by Gerardo Deniz:

Manifest Destiny

Upon burying my mother the other day I contemplated
a point in space--prism, three-dimensional volume--
where credibly soon I must decompose.
Since the company won't affect me then,
it won't matter I've forgotten how the discriminating get on.
Given that, I declare: the emptiness
didn't seem bad, not bad at all;
it's in the mountains which I have always preferred;
very far below rise numerous institutions of poor quality
--so in this respect, at least, things won't change.

--Gerardo Deníz

tr. Judith Infante
in Marlboro Review,
No. 8, Summer/Fall, 1999

Ya know, it not always easy to tell the difference between poming that has, let’s say, or let me say, a certain requisite substantiality (or just plain old Substance?) and poming that is, seriously, really just fluff. For me, telling the difference is, alas and unfortunately, more an intuitive thing (and thus of course no less fallible than other means and methods). Well, this poming of Deniz’s HAS the certain requisite substantiality. I can just “feel it.” Can I go beyond “just feeling it?” Yes and No… But I DO feel it. There’s substantial “weight” to the lines and/or no-bullshit tone and tenor of “where credibly soon I must decompose,” “it won’t matter I’ve forgotten how the discriminating get on,” “the emptiness / didn’t seem bad, not bad at all,” and “numerous institutions of poor quality” and the way they cut a deep, deep and gaping deep fucking hole in the bourgeois tinted and seemingly innocuous but otherwise deadly “iota” that is described and observed in the phrases leading into them: “a point in space – prism, three dimensional volume,” “the company won’t affect me then,” “Given that, I declare,” and “it’s in the mountains which I have always preferred.”

I really like this poming of his. I’ll have to check out more it of course. Gerardo Deniz, eh? Good stuff!

Pal, you better go back

Pal, you better go back

The CPR class you took all Fall
hadn't targeted the fat cat at Kodak
who ran over that thin little squirrel
the same morning of the very same
day he returned from Whyte Bridde
Country Club drunk as a harmless
homeless man and struck your dad
and killed him, a tea-totaler, not a two-
timing, three-DUI exec at Merrill-
Lynch the same year the mobs lost
their stuffed shirts, but you still save
him when he collapses on the steps
of the Courthouse you just happened
to have been protesting at, protesting
the same rhetoric he had forced on him
by his old man or his old lady or some-
one just like you writing this pomer-
hang, harangue, Orangutan, one-little-
ring-a-ding ring-a-ding dinggy, Ding-
dong, the watch is dead and your hands
all point to a sundial great-assed paper-
weight holding down the back lawn as
you make all of this up for the best of reasons
or no reason at all or because you love poetry
or because you love yourself "as a person"
who writes poetry or because it's really
late on a Friday afternoon before closing time
and the three-day weekend and no
special reason other than that at all.
But listen, Pal, you better go back and
take "your dad" out of this or I'll rip your
typing fingers off your hands somehow!

Tribute to Keith Wilson from his dear friend Halvard Johnson:

Halvard Johnson sent this stirring tribute for his dear friend Keith Wilson:

Keith Wilson died the other day. He was a friend I've known since the mid-60s, when I spent some years living in El Paso while he was living in southern New Mexico: Anthony, right on the Texas-New Mexico border; then San Miguel, farther north, up the Mesilla Valley of the Rio Grande; and then Las Cruces. Any house of Keith and Heloise Wilson was full of music and wine and poetry, a caravanserai for poets traveling north or south, east or west.

Keith, at one stage of his life, often wrote of the sea, and his sea poems were among the best poems to come out of the Korean War. Here's one that's not overtly war related:

The Sea

"On the beach
the ocean ends in water.
--George Oppen
The Materials

The crisp line, taut, in all
intimations, thrown out, cork circling
the water, splash, my hand

reaching out

--the call, rightly named, these
Materials, the call is there
simple, demanding

response and a certain
attention to pulse, the
movement of whatever the work

asks of man--is that what
I'm trying to say, a man,
and how, sometimes, he doesn't

drown. Coming up spitting
salt water, safely past the
screws, it is a man
intact who waves

from the calm wake; behind
him the sea clear, oceans
held in place by a line.


And he wrote of dusty New Mexico
towns:

The Politicians

come
come here with full bellies
& shined shoes to the one street
of San Miguel, talking, waving
hands, their harsh gringo Spanish
shouted in the hanging dust
of the square

the men of the town
stand uneasy, aware of their hard
hands, the blue of the stranger's
eyes, their own mudcrusted boots
stiff with clay

they are ashamed these men
whose hands are strong with work & loving.
they listen. then go to the bar,
beer & red wine, juke box Infante songs,
his dead voice singing of a Mexico
which was sad, beautiful, but theirs
--riding free across a green land,
gritos on their lips & dead politicians
fall, one-by-one before their dreaming guns.

--both from Graves Registry and Other Poems
[New York: Grove Press, 1969]

Coincidentally, while 1969 did not mark the first publication of a collection of
poems by Keith Wilson, it did mark the first publication of a collection of poems
by me. And it was Keith Wilson who sat me down on his living room floor and
showed me how to put a collection of poems together. That first book that bore
a epigraph by Keith Wilson: "a sunlit unity / desperately sought" and contained
this poem written on the occasion of Keith's and Heloise's moving from Anthony,
New Mexico, to a big new (well, not new new) house in San Miguel:

Moving Out

for Keith & Heloise Wilson

saying goodbye
is no trouble:

a house is a skin
to be shucked

wriggled out of
room by room

closet by closet
until what remains

is piles of boxes,
a few empty hangers,

a heap of debris
on the kitchen floor

which never seemed so wide,
a neighbor's dog

who come to say goodbye
from a respectable distance.

fr. Transparencies and Projections
[New York: New Rivers Press, 1969]

--HJ

--

Halvard Johnson
================
halvard@gmail.com
http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/index.html
http://entropyandme.blogspot.com
http://imageswithoutwords.blogspot.com
http://www.hamiltonstone.org
http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/vidalocabooks.html

Lacan 27

Lacan 27

Y -- So let me get this straight! You're a Department Head (English or Humanities
Division) at a top community college and you've won the state's top Distinguished
Teaching award, yet the date stamps on your e-mails to the EPC Buf List
and the multiple Comments columns on 30 or so high fashion literary blogs
clearly indicate that you must be logged into a computer and bouncing around
the Internet at least nine hours a day establishing and debunking innumerable
high profile, low endurance poetics manifestoes. I dunno... Something in this
sloppy notion doesn't jibe really well with the picture of English Department Heads'
responsibilities and politics that I observed during the ten years that I taught,
took care of the real grunt work at the seriously time-consumptive level
called community college teaching.

One, the English Department heads that I watched come and go over the years,
about twelve or thirteen between 1988 and 1998 at two very different community
colleges, displayed, on average, ZERO passion for or interest in sensibility
advancing, or any other kinds of serious, poetries, really, either. Two,
ninety percent of them were fanatically engaged in college politics,
department politics, department pedagogy, department protocol, department rules
and regulations and procedures, and, most especially, deeply labor-intensive
nuts-and-bolts department administration tasks so exclusively you'd never imagine
why or how they'd ever gotten degrees in Literature, not degrees in Business
or Public Administration. Almost To A Woman, or To A Man, they were the least
literary and most conspicuously "political" tenured department members at either
school (the huge one with 38,000 students, and three campuses, and Millions
in federal and state matched funding or the little one, the little cow college,
owned and operated by ex-high school teachers and administrators who switched
over in the 1970's or who invested in California real estate before my generation
migrated to the golden state in the early and mid-1980's) and no one at either school
had any serious interest in any kinds of newly challenging poetry, much less
New American strains, perhaps cliches of pre-twentieth century IMAGES
of poetry and LIT-tra-chur(n) they would use to advertise themselves
as the key "Creative Writing," "Introduction to Poetry," and other "Plum Lit
Bum-Phony Class" experts at the two schools. Three, NONE of them
had so much as five minutes a semester for non-careerist activities like e-mail,
writing, reading, poetics, polemics, criticism, theory, cultural studies, civil
disobedience, poetry readings that the deans' daughters and sons won grants
to organize, or squabbles with real poets off or on campus. Four, none of them
showed even a fraction of 1% of the erudition or intelligence that Kent Johnson
shows in a single day at Harriet or Silliman's Blog. I submit that you, Sir, Yasusada
or Kierkegaard or Dickinson or Donne or O'Hara or whatever your real name is,
YOU can in no way on this earth be a Department Head or a Tenured professor
at ANY community college or university in this country anywhere. It doesn't add up.
You're too sharp, too advanced, too well-read. You're either a complete fraud
or a combination of several people, probably second or third tier Lang Po operatives
hired by Computer USA to keep alive debates about Poetry's true mattering
so that the you-know-who's of the NEA and corporate colleges don't fully monopolize
Writing and lock up the 21st century for all but...

Z -- All but whom, Butt-breath? Hmm? You can't finish every fantasy sentence
you spin and spin and spin like Linda Blair's head in special avocado green effects
no matter how many times you break your lines or rake our blineys selinby bilesny
inlesby sinleby.

Lacan 26

Lacan 26

Y -- So how do you actually Feel, now, Z, Trash-
ing everybody you don't really even know
all that well.

Z -- I don't know.
Leave me alone.

Y -- What Good does it do?

Z -- It's what everything is based on. Take
an existing body, body, even, if you will,
if you want, and take it apart, locate it's defects,
ring changes upon it, change bad money
to good, turn the laugh
back against the jester...

Y -- No, it's NOT what everything's based on.
It's what competition in the job markets
and competition in the schools is based on.

Z -- No, they're not. The schools don't want real
competition. They don't want real questioning...

X -- Some do, some don't. Quit fucking around
with the small fry, "schools," generalizations, bullshit,
Z. Ya got anything going on inside? If not, then relax!
You don't owe anybody anything. Not really, anyhow.

Lacan 25

Lacan 25

Y -- Sounds so fucking simple,

doesn't it...

Y -- Well it is, of course,
like most all rhetoric, drivel,
doggerel, and pomposity.

Lacan 24

Lacan 24

Attention!

The more ya got

the less ya want. True

Love: one attends to an-

other, and one's other, in turn,

attends or doesn't; it doesn't

matter so

very much. Each

disappearing Self

unconscious, attention itself ALL

ya really, really, really want

outside of your body, More

than self-conscious Desire

dares attend to. More than all

the world means to you when

you so small think that you need

your spotted light.



But we all know this
one minute, for-
get it another, and
must teach it to others
who had so little as younguns.



And then we attend to matters

more urgent than ours,
themselves.

Lacan 23

Lacan 23

Y -- Actually, it's just plain Ugly, Boorish, Rude, Ugly,
ALL the truly worst things. It's not merely "flat," X.
And yeah, sure, YOU can put it in "a Poem
or poetry," Z, like the salt the Romans put in the Carthaginians' soil,
farmlands, Gardens. Yep.

Or compare to something that is true poetry,

like D. Smith's Black Stone.

Even YOU will cringe,
Z, when you see
how Ugly you are.

Lacan 22

Lacan 22

Z -- Why can't WE put this in a poem:

Zizek and Lacan. Zizek and Lacan. Zizek and Lacan.
C'mon, GUYS, get your fucking heads

Y -- You're going to use linebreaks for this fucking slosh!

Z --

out of your asses! Get out of your Heads!
Lacan lived in his fucking head! When you live
in your head, you don't explore your Unconscious
and discover yourself or your personality. You
only discover endless theories of who you are
and who others should be, endless rationalizations
for avoiding finding out who your particular individual mother was
and how her Mothering had a much greater effect on you than your so-called Oedipal Complex relationship
to your Father
or symbolic languages ever could.
What are you fucking afraid of, Guys? They're our mothers,
for chrissakes! They're full of LOVE, too.

Zizek and Lacan. Zizek and Lacan. Zizek and Lacan.
Repeat after me: If you want to succeed in Academia and Literary
Theory in America,
Zizek and Lacan, Zizek and Lacan, Zizek and Lacan.

Zzzzzy and CONzie, Zzzzzy and CONzie, Zzzzzy and CONzie,
dead from the neck down, how do you walk into the world
with their reflexes and proprioceptions without bumping into a zillion words keeping you from seeing what IS, right now, real?

If instead you wish to actually approach "the World,"
and truly interact with it and others genuinely, tangibly
instead of tangentially, I suggest
Karen Horney,
Melanie Klein,
Carol Gilligan,
Nancy Chodorow
(you can read Judith Butler, too, but hers is an entirely different book, actually),
Perls,
Lowen,
Barry Stevens,
for starters.

Lacan and Freud lived in their Heads, Chumps! Which is GREAT for the GRE's, but your writing isn't REAL, sorry!

You're not equal to your last mistake,
your life's mistake,
your great faux pas,
or
anything that can be described in language. Nor am I.
If you don't love this, then read your europeans. Surely they're in the same boat over to the New World that you're in
(I mean, it's a big boat)
and it should be sailing into the Atlantic loaded to the proverbial
gills with logorheea to eradicate our ignoble savagery right "about"
now. What you are transcends language and is no less real
than a fawn or a forest or a single tree or photosynthesis
or your dignity is real. Fuck Lacan! He lived in his head
and cannot therefore be trusted for every single intellectualization
that he recorded in his enormous smoke signals and screens,
regardless those corny fruits and nuts in California are all burning up
in ecosystems the lower animals would not have overpopulated.

Y -- Jesus, Z! That's a cliche, too, and you fucking know it.
"You're all living in your heads."
There isn't a bodywork therapist in all of California
who hasn't picked off a former Freudian analysand with that line
calling them "intellectualizers." Even when it WAS the case. C'mon!

X -- If it ain't still a problem, then why is all of "civilization"
so pathetically out-of-touch with animal instinct that we're rapidly destroying our universal body, Mother Nature, something the lower
animals would never do? You know, he may have a point?

Z -- How do you know I'm "male?" How do you know I'm not female
or gay or lesbian or bi-sexual and therefore have extra bundles
of neurons connecting the two lobes of my corpus collosum
so that I have greater emotional sensitivity and depth,
which makes me different, and therefore NEW and worthy of attention?

Y -- Well, there's one Dead giveaway, "different," maybe...

X -- Guys, this has been really real today, but seriously,
we're kind of flat today, don't ya think? There was a lot of garlic
in that guacamole dip the other night during the "popularist"
Super Bowl and I'm still not right, frankly.

Y -- They're humans, too, X. Some even live in Blue States.

X -- This is still quite flat.

Lacan 21

Lacan 21

You mean, "Freed laughter."

Lacan 20

Lacan 20

Y -- You're not finished with "Lacan 19," you know.

Z -- I had to work for a living.

Y -- We all do, so why do you call this "work."

Z -- I don't. I abhor the term "work" for one's "work." It isn't labor; it's avocation.

Ghost or somebody on television, John McEnroe, maybe -- You cannot be fucking serious!

Y -- No, YOU cannot be serious and fun at the same time. Well, actually, you can, but...

X -- Let's get back to "Lacan 19," namely your fear of "destroying Kent Johnson, driving him to suicide by hanging him with the term Narcissist." And hurting Dale S., too. You cannot even pronounce his name or write his whole last name because you don't want "to hurt him."

Z -- Isn't all "Poetry" hurting, destroying, others and "the Past" to make space for the Present, what needs to exist NOW?

X -- Only from a Male's perspective. From a whole person's perspective, Poetry is both chewing up the past and reinCORPORATING it, celebrating what is good and still or always relevant.

Y -- And "you" have the authority to make such a pronouncement or assertion?

X --I'm really not fucking interested, to be truly honest. And you're quite correct, I have zero authority compared to the authority that a Dale Smith or a Kent Johnson has to make pronouncements about poetry. I don't even like the name or term. Poetry.

Z -- Yeah, but stop being so excessively self-effacing. No, you're no Zukofsky or Zukovsky. You're not even a Ben Friendlander or Ron Silliman. Jeepers.

Y -- Nice mention of women there, Bozo! And it's Freidlander, not Friendlander.

X -- Actually, it IS Friedlander, Dum-dum. I just googled it.

X -- Gots ya again. Got me again.

Z -- (Gatza?)

X -- No, c'mon, leave Geoff out of this. He's a neat fellow. Your concern is with "hurting" Kent Johnson or "hurting" Dale Smith.

Y -- (Yeah, I know they're both "big boys" and can take care of themselves.)

Z -- Why are you hiding, behind parentheticals, Y?

Y -- I don't know, but all of this is "hiding," isn't it, somehow?

X -- No, you almost sound like Z now, with that kind of bs.

Z -- Hey!           Okay, I see your point, though...

X -- Let's get back to the problem. One of you is afraid of hurting others, particularly Kent Johnson or Dale Smith. One of you is afraid of hurting yourself, or your chance of being included as "a poet" if you go on with this obsession and these tedious, so-called narcissistic notes about those two fellows.

Y -- Yeah, so what! So WHAT! What's wrong with Caring. Yeah, Cap C. For real this time. What's wrong with that and what's wrong with caring more about Caring and about others, like K.J. and D.S., than about this insipid subject, "Poetry?" Tell me, X! Because I really want to know. Look, let's get just a little BIG bit more fucking real here for a second. I don't give a flying fuck about Poetry, about being thought or included as a poet by Kent Johnson, by Dale Smith, or by the Flarfists, or even by deeper projections of narcissism like "my" Ben Friedlander. I mean, compared to these actual people, that is. I would prefer that all of these folks suffered no hurt or pain over this person writing your goddamn fucking Cap P Poetry or "being included" among the brother/sister -hoods of your goddamn fucking Cap P Poetries. Got it! I don't fucking need it! Do you understand!

Z -- Yeah? Then why weren't you able to spell that "Need" (Cap N) or "NEED" (Caps all the way through), huh? Why did you have to hesitate, and then, after hesitating, choose the lower cases?

Y -- Fuck you, Z! I am fucking serious on a far deeper and deadlier level than any of your chickenshit taunting at this moment.

X -- Yes. I believe you.

lacan 19

Lacan 19

Y -- I feel absolutely wicked about perhaps having hurt him and...

Z -- Do you have any idea how much you might have hurt him and...

Y -- I thought "I" was the one who felt snubbed...

Z -- I don't know... It could be that you were so Intense, as usual, that he became overwhelmed and he may have gotten so enraged by you and your notes that...

X -- He may have simply had Zero interest in our notes and desire to communicate and make a connection with him. Accept it! You cannot be liked by everybody. Some people are NOT going to give you the time of day. Others don't have enough time in any superhuman's day, as he clearly said, to attend to YOU YOU YOU, Steve Tills, and your sometimes insipid needs and desires. Geez, didn't you say already that you understood that? And didn't you read quite clearly that he suggested that some of us e-mail him, or visit them down in Austin? Do you have any idea how much you are smothering...

Y -- No, actually I don't. I am not going to play that game. I am not going to let you hang with me, hang me with, shut me up, with that. If I have imposed myself on someone else's boundaries, then I want to know. I will not tolerate being ignored, or treated with condescension. Not anymore. I'm tired of it. I do not deserve it. I did NOT ask for too much.

Z -- Then what are you writing THIS gibberish for?

Y -- Why are you asking instead of taking responsibility for your want and telling me to stop, if that is what you want? I'm tired of "taking care of others."

X -- There's a big split here. (And this has crossed over into the Psychological, the psychodynamic. PSYCHOpathological?)

Y -- And you have a problem with that, Assface Lacan Book? You are such a fucking jerk. Jesus, you make me pissed off!

Lacan 18

Lacan 18

Y -- And why would you be trying to deconstruct your own so-called "narcissism" in the first place?

Z -- You mean, like, Others?

Y -- I mean, I Mean, a lot more than that, as you well know.

Z -- You mean, like, why did I suggest mySELf, uck, in the first place?

Y -- No, Other Fucker, I mean like THAt, Idiot, that Fuck Self there just now. You are not a bad person, and you actually already "did the work," and deconstructed...

Z -- "The Work," it's an on-going, lifelong project, isn't it?

Y -- Yes, of course, but Stick To my Point! My point is that you have intentionally made yourself the bad guy here, the weanie, the narcissistic project. The most neglected blog in blogdom land, too.

Z -- And THAT, too, is "narcissistic," Cap N.

Y -- Stick to my point, Asshole, a la Lynn Behrendt and James ****:

X -- Alright, calm down, you guys! Just because Smith and Johnson so thoroughly discounted and ignored and "snubbed" you doesn't MEAN you have to go to pieces, get Crazy, all over yourselves and all. You were writing our Lacan series long before our attraction to Dale's blog, then our attraction to his poetry, then our attraction to his Baraka book announcement, then our attraction to his and Johnson's reconstituted rumbles with Silliman and Bernstein and others via "Flarf" merits/non-merits Ever came into play. You have been focused one way or another on deconstructing Narcissism and Self-absorption and its seemingly obvious FACE loss in Poetry, cap p, and the deification of same for a long, long, LONG time.

Y -- Well, now, don't we deserve a fucking award and medal?

Z -- (No, not to the Poetry world unless you make your obsession and argument poetic.)

Y -- Oh, Fuck you! You are such a fucking pig!

Z -- And that's just it, though. You're nothing but feeling and "they" don't want that.

Y -- Wait just a minute, Assface Book! "They" just happens to include ME, too, and that IS something that you frequently forget. Just this morning I received notes from S.F., J.M., and C.H. all of whom continually include you in their definition of "poets," so, seriously, you need to truly examine your self-alienation or whatever it is, probably more REAL NARCISSISM, that regularly prompts you to separate yourself from the group you so dearly want, and genuinely already ARE, to be included amongst. Why do you fucking do that? Why do you fucking seem to believe that you need to do that?

Steve Tills -- Is it projection of my own criticism or alienation of others?

Z -- (Nick P. would probably, would perhaps, would possibly, would maybe be interested in that...)

X -- Maybe, maybe not. Seriously, you've, we've, crossed over into the...

Y -- (Actually, I think that Nick's interested in a lot of stuff we write, think, feel. Why didn't you defend him against that snarky attack by your pal Dale that his was Prozac Blog award?)

Z -- It's not my place?

Y -- Why? It wouldn't be "Poetry," your all fucking almighty fucking Poetry? It's not your place to defend friends against rot like that?

Z -- I didn't want to attack somebody else that I also wanted to become friends with?

BRILLIANT poetry by Anne Boyer and "the New MAMMALFICATION.":

I need to "close/closet read" this poetry by Anne Boyer:

Lines like this in Anne Boyer's poem, "25 Things About North American Mammals":

24. One skunk longed, as many do, to be gentle and beautiful, but found herself attracted to the strange, brave, and scarred. She grew evermore impatient with beauty, as if beauty (unaltered, as it is, by struggle) was not just banal, but dumb.

Absolute, complete Brilliance!

Here's why: this incredible poetry that Anne Boyer is writing is not "about" US, us humans, U.S. humans, monotheistic humans, Israeli humans, al-Qa'ida humans, Republican humans, Progressive humans, poetry or language or form or tenure. It's about the others who make up "the World," AND it's playful, gentle, funny, witty, sharp, and intelligent. I think that it's positively Brilliant, and I believe we will see a lot more poming in the future that will FOCUS on this Kind of New Content and WORLD.

I might be inclined to call poetry like this "The New Mammalfication," except that (1)of course that term is terribly campy, possibly terminally campy (like me, myself); (2)it would only "foreground" a small proportion of the organic life forms on the planet, in "the World," that I believe should should should, shouldly/wouldly/woodsie/shouldsie, BE foregrounded in the next several decades or centuries until our species turns around the Death Machine, death spiral, that we are on because we have so arrogantly, AND naively, privileged ourSELVES and "used up" all of the rest of the plants and animals here. Mammalfication, though, is a Kind of a Neat Alternative to the Old Personification, a switch from making our "others" in our own image (the way we make divinity and spiritual energy in our own image with our anthropomorphic gods) and instead making us humans in the image of our others, beginning with mammals, also threatened by our self-absorption.

I suppose "the New World" would be a better term, a term that would encourage Discovering What we have lost or may soon Forever Lose, hellbent on Conquest and Territory and all, as we have been and still are...

Nada Gordon informed me that she never in fact got the Comment I wrongly assumed I had posted at her blog.

Nada Gordon informed me that she never in fact got the Comment that I wrongly and hastily assumed I had successfully posted at her blog.

I should not also have so hastily concluded that she was being "selective," then, either.

Sorry, Nada. My fuck-up. I need to slow my ass down, sometimes, to be sure.

David-Baptiste Chirot, who often and in many, many ways puts ALL OF US to shame, Bless him!

Reading Harriet, today (no less predatorially than what I decry in poems of mine last week's "news" or Dale Smith decries in his "Robot" poems, surely), I read someone who deserves far more "Attention" than I do, a lot of the time, David-Baptiste Chirot:

This is why poetry of the language and post language etc varieties are so perfectly suited to the institutions of Power— Because they offer no direct resistance whatsoever other than what they claim to be doing on the page— And that is a wonderful place to be isn’t it –“safe and sound from all alarm”--

Having separated the “material word” from reference and al sorts of other evils including “grammar” which is completely falsely asserted to be constructed by Capitalism—having done al this poetry has created a smooth Deleuzian Plateau on which Power, the State and Institutional apparati can travel without obstructions—without anything indeed to indicate anything other than

Home
Home on the Range
Where the deer and the antelope play
And where seldom is heard
A discouraging word
And the skies are not cloudy all day--

http://davidbaptistechirot.blogspot.com
http://cronacasouversivafeneon.blogspot.com

And then, on Bill Moyers, tonight...

Well, for one thing, the incredible greed of the professorial and administrative classes at the universities, like in Nevada, where they are talking about raising tuition 200+ percent, and apparently everyplace else, also, up on average $6500 per year. Where on earth does the money to pay for college educations come from? If for example, people like me make $30,000.00 and Take Home from that is, say $23,000, and the bills chew up most all of that $23,000.00, where would I or my wife or my stepson get monies for 4 years of college? I don't get it. How did the universities turn in to such corporations these last 15-20 years? Sheesh, in the 1980s, the state university system in California permitted me to get a graduate degree for just $350.00 per semester for tuition. Why would anyone in the world pay stuck up idiots at places like Hobart in Geneva, New York, 30-40,000 per year for their asinine piece-of-worthless-paper? Absurd! Take that 30 thousand times 3 is OMG, 100 plus thousand bucks, right? Who could not start his/her own business and be self-determined, self-employed, for the rest of his/her life and READ everything intelligent that has ever been written instead of everything that is insanely useless, but "Required" because the tenured profs have to teach what they know, which is next to fucking nothing! Unfucking-believable! Yeah, I'd love to still be in teaching, and I'd love to be tenured, or even just full=time at a couple of different colleges, again, but jesus christ! I almost feel like I'm better off, more "ethical" as a human being in the world NOT working in academia. At least what I do essentially makes it possible for others to work, stay employed, earn their keep, whereas "teaching," if in fact creeps are getting 70-100,000 a year (9-10 months, actually) for their "work," then, frankly, maybe they're just stealing from the rest of society, really... I'm not sure that I "get it." Forgive me for complaining. Seriously, I'm relatively healthy, my family is healthy, we have roofs over our heads, we have gas and electricity (the guy upstairs had his NYSEG turned off and that is very rough in upstate New York in January), we ate deliciously prepared meatloaf, green beans, purple potatoes, and Italian bread for dinner, Maxie the dog got a treat for his dinner, why should I complain about Anything!

I suppose I really miss college teaching and that "environment." It's really a paradise. I don't understand what seems like Greed to me, though...

Four pages into Dale Smith's _Black Stone_, which is obviously TRUSTWORTHY.

I am four pages into your Black Stone, thus far, Dale Smith, and it is Very SWEET. It is good, and it is wholesome, and it is genuine, and it is Trustworthy, as I expected it would be.

What is the Beef? What's everybody's Beef. Including my own? Why is everybody so, ummm, paranoid, still? Shouldn't everybody be deconstructing, ummm, Exxon-Mobil?

I'm quite moronic today.

Your Black Stone, however, is quite Intelligent, Gentle, Assertive, Compassionate, and Human, Dale.

Fine essay of a new poetics by Anne Boyer:

I share this vision of Anne Boyer's, as well as another cousin, paisan, from the same family, Gabriel Gudding's "Kind" poetics. I think that you are indeed on the right track, Anne:

It will somehow organize itself around the notion of committing one's life to soothing and assisting, but this art will soothe and assist in ways as yet unknown. It will not soothe like base sentimentality or luxury goods, which are not that soothing. Instead it will use art to find methods of delirious compensation for the twentieth century. It will be “extreme care."

At the same time, and I'm not sure it's a contradiction, much less a so-called contradiction that cannot be accepted as part/parcel of the same poetic, I believe that you, Dale Smith, have always been on the right track, as well. I suspect that I have hurt you, insulted you, disgusted you, bored you, offended you, "hatcheted" you, or otherwise pushed you away, alienated myself from you, moved you to ignore and reject me. I don't get it, why you won't let me converse with you and Kent at your blog, in your Comments. I don't get why you, Nada Gordon, didn't post my second Comment this afternoon, either. What I DO understand is that obsessing about this and "speaking out about it" MAY BE the "narcissism" that Gabriel Gudding posits eloquently, so I am loathe and embarrassed to press either of you to stop rejecting my statements, and, Fuck it, anyways, neither of you has much given me so much as a look-see in all the 6 years that I have been blogging here, but then, Tom Beckett, who once thought me "born to write," has dropped me from his reading lists, also, so maybe I've become a caricature of myself and the original wasn't much more interesting, either, I dunno.
I don't think that would be a fair assessment of my "thot" over the years, however sporadic my commitment to blogging has been, though, so I'll just have to keep trying to "improve" and trusting that it all comes and goes, anyhow. Hey, Nick Piombino, gave me a note, and Ron S. has put my things in his Reading Lists twice in recent weeks, so those three "fixes of the almighty Attention opiate" oughta sustain fne enough, and folks at FACEBOOK appear to trust me just fine, so what should I be whining about?

Good question. Maybe I should voice the whining more loudly, make a bigger fool of myself? Why the heck not? This is just a big discotheque and we're all just "on the make," are we not? Disgusting notion, even there's truth to it, Yes? No? I'll bet I'm like those two guys on Saturday Night who used to push their groins into women while dancing at the Euro clubs, same as my generation's guys did in the original disco 70's. Yeah, actually, we WERE the original disgusting jerks. That's one of the reasons that I know a thing or two about what Gudding calls "masculinist." I don't like it in myself, either. Well, now, ole Ron S. talked eloquently and persuasively and I will always believe brilliant in the early days about "the Repressed Element." Back then, it was, to the LPers, anyhow, the media, language, itelf. What is it now? The sort of "narcissism" I'm trying to deconstruct in myself, here, now -- demands for attention from people who hardly know me or indicate that they want to? I think that the main "repressed element" TODAY is the kind of poetics that Anne Boyers is speaking to and of with her post today. That's means, I think, that we should be doing a lot more "close reading" of each other's poming, too. Well, shoot, I just got your Black Stone in the mail today, Dale, so I really need to shut up and read.

Here, though, is a Comment I tried to post on your blog today, followed by one that I tried to post on Nada's blog. It seemed that, unless I'm repressing something, both of your are quite "selective" in your posting of folks' comments. I guess I should think that I am "embarrassing myself," so you're both being kind and that's why you're rejecting my efforts to add to the on-going discourse? Surely it cannot be a closed game:

To Dale's Blog, but rejected, it seems:

Yeah, I agree with most all of this, Dale:

"My experience of the world reveals moments of hostility, crass acrimony, and vindictive, barely-hidden rage from both sides of the callously constructed gender divide. Although there is much to say about feminism and the history of the relations between the sexes, such accusations in current poetic contexts of masculinist aggression are derived as a straight, white trip engineered to shut down conversation: end of story. The goal as I’ve understood it is to integrate masculine and feminine qualities, so that both are native to the psyche—the strengths of both intermingled to arrive in the world so that we are informed by what they offer. Otherwise, we have only the equivalent of playground rants."

Still a lot of questions and developments from what remains an on-going process. And I think that criticism of BOTH masculinist and hyper-feminist "labelled" discourse is quite valid, too. In fact, personally, it's where I myself have the MOST interest...

Anyway, thanks for the good stuff going on at your blog.

P.S. For my money, Gabriel Gudding is still "in the lead," the most relevant, "ahead of" you/Kent and the Flarfists having your on-going Attention Monopolizing poetics "arguments" at your respective Blogs and Forums. (That's a teaser, of course... But keep in mind, it's the same "GAME" played by Ron S. and Quietude, the same game
played by Lang Po and Dorn/Clark (going back to the "Stalin as Linguist" days at Poetics Flash in SF heydays), and the same game played by Kent/others and Buf List. Indeed, it's a great fucking game and loads of fun and true Value, in my opinion. But there are, in addition, at least two drawbacks, also: (1)it's still just "a Game," and marketing ploy; (2)it excludes a great number of people ya'll think want to come to the "stadiums" and hang out and "watch/listen" to Others' entertainment and competition. But to some degree of all this is essentially and ultimately "Attention" to people and their perhaps who knows ("vital" ?) need for that narcissistic thing; it is NOT "Attention" to a lot that might seriously need to be said, attended to, written in our age/era... I dunno... I keep saying this over and over at my blog and everyplace else for years/decades, and I guess I just repeat the same line of bull shit or somebody would agree... (And even that last sentence is more bs, effort to draw "attention" to myself... It's obsessive...)

P.S. II I'm not sure that I buy this line of yours without chewing on it a bit more: "masculinist aggression are derived as a straight, white trip engineered to shut down conversation." Personally, NO, arguments against problematic and tedious "masculinist" bs should be coming from all genders and all races and all classes, actually. Why? Because EVERYTHING derives from MASCULINIST games and architecture. I think... "Aggression" is, for most folks like me steeped in Freudian outcast/Better Fritz Perls' quite healthy Gestalt approach, and itself also criticized by some darn good feminist questions, "a Good Thing." "Repressing aggression" is "a bad thing" AND developing "meanS" for actualizing "aggression" effectively and gracefully, including in "poetry writing and close reading" would, I think, be a darn good goal, always. (So YES, you're very Strong and Right, imho, reminding folks that everybody's "experience of the world reveals moments of hostility, crass acrimony, and vindictive, barely-hidden rage [ALL of these things, if were healthy] from both sides."

But where's the "straight, white" thing come into play? Is that a response to MY criticisms of Baraka, still lingering? Well, they're still lingering for me, of course, too, since our exchanges earlier may have let some of my own latent racism cats out of the bag, which IS a good thing, right? I do want to spit them up and taste to what extent I'd like to "swallow them," those "introjects," whole, again... And/or, maybe No, I had a good point, too? After all, can folks of color always just respond to criticism of problematical "masculinist" criticism by just simply writing it off as "straight and white?" That wouldn't be remotely fair, either.

The cool thing is this, imho: there's lots of questions and energy here...

To Nada's blog, but also rejected, apparently:

Jordan wrote, "Actually, I'm inclined to think that Gabe's use of the term is a lot of hooey, and that his phrase "venally hyping" sounds to me like a character name Roald Dahl rejected, not to mention grossly inapt; whereas Dale's denigration of flarf poems as tag clouds strikes me as half an insight putting the yoke of half an argument on half an ass."

I firmly disagree. I firmly believe, and am, yeah, long inclined to believe, that everything from Ron S.'s sometimes cogent and sometimes aggravating delineation between Avant Po and Quietude to Charles B.'s sometimes inspiring and sometimes petty exhortation to "interrogate the received assumptions of official verse culture" are thoroughly "masculinist," that these are the parameters by which folks are supposed to approach ALL MEANINGFUL WRITING, and particularly Poetry, and that the underlying and eternal trope advocated and repeatedly reincarnated is COMPETITION, which is THE essential MALE APPROACH TO LIFE AND SOCIAL ORGANIZATION.

Blah blah, I'm sure that that is ridiculously oversimplified, but truly, how could the last 8 years of harrowing war and division so universally intensified possibly have taken place if in fact the collective consciousness of the human species has not, or had not, reached critical mass with this kind of intensity and doesn't it tell us that we are all fatally obsessed with DIFFERENCE? Particularly the fundamentalist religions' followers divide the species with overarching focus on DIFFERENCE, but even the secular humanist Left in this country probably pushed the evangelical Right so hard since 1992 that the society went to the other extreme and gave rise to the opportunity for Bush to get elected and "backed." Then, the flipside of the Christian Evangelical right in the Middle East, al-Qaeda and Moslem
fundamentalists (as well as the Jewish fundamentalists, ALL anthropological MALE
deity co-dependents), seized a once-in-a-millenium opportunity "to Engage" our country here, and Bingo, we had the invasion of Iraq and the SAME EXACT MALE, or
Masculinist, habituation of conflict and disagreement. I think...

Forgive me, as I will contradict myself soon enough; this "masculinist" thinking is deeply embedded in the genetic and social makeup of our entire collective consciousness, as Jung would call it. But that's my excuse for the moment.

Gabe Gudding, on the other hand, has NOT rejected my post to his Comments section:

Great stuff, Gabe, keep it up!

"Economies of Attention," for instance, is right on.

C'mon over to my blog (and read Me Me Me) sometime if ya ever feel lonely. I believe we've been traveling some parallel roads for quite some time, fwiw. :)

(Of course, I believe Everybody is traveling these parallel roads together, regardless various arguments and "words" assert that everybody is DIFFERENT, or that one is right and relevant and the other wrong and meaningless. Indeed, it IS, after all, only language that makes us so "different," (indeed is our human species' primary tool for doing so and for permitting us to interact with the world in such a sophisticated, powerful manner compared to what other species are able to do) as that is language's thing... Oh, and "masculinity" makes us "different," also, because "Identity," which is necessary for the individual's survival when "groups" threaten it, is contingent on "separation" from "the primary (m)Other"; and "males" gain such "difference"/self-identity differently than females do, so males grow up continuing to aggressively, and this is Good (AND "bad"), assert difference more crudely to survive, which is good when, say, they even "violently" stand up to injustice or fight in wars. "Women," on the other hand, get their "difference" with considerably more "identity WITH" the (m)Other, and they bring into the survival equation much less "difference," and a lot more "similarity," thus balancing out the "community/group" instinct ALSO necessary for the species' SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST. We have, according to Eisler, _The Chalice and the Blade_, been exaggerating the "difference extreme of things for about 15,000," hence so much "War," hence theories like Saussure's (and perhaps much of the rest of structuralism? I dunno), and hence debates between individual poets / groups of poets, for "survival" of their "Identities" and Immortality ("Permanent Attention"). But all of this is perhaps far too "individualistic," AGAIN, "Masculinist," and thus "Poetry" is no longer focused on "the World," but on poets, themSELVES, and their "attention" to themselves and away from the problems of and joys in "the World." [Anne Boyer, here is precisely why your poetics is I think extremely prescient; YES, precisely as seers like Riane Eisler assert, what is needed is more nurturing, more Community, more of "the Social," i.e., what is essentially and not entirely in a sexist fashion, accorded the sphere of "the feminine or Female," the truly "repressed element of the last 15,000 years?]

I keep saying this over and over and over for since I first discovered Eisler in the early 1990's and taught her essays in my Freshman Comp classes years. Am I just full of shit and redundant and stupid? Or are ALL saying this, one way or another? Aren't Dale and Kent arguing against "attention" to groups of poets who write wickedly fun poetries that are perhaps much more about "poetry," itself, and thus being identified as poets, than about anything that has to do with the world? Didn't Dorn's and Creeley's poetries attend to the world and treat it fairly directly, whereas Lang Po attended to the tools for addressing the world and "attacked SELF-absorption" from the other end of the spectrum? I think so. Hence, Dale and Kent (aligned with Dorn/Creeley/Baraka's FOCUS), "Sons, and daughters, of Olson and Pound", spar TODAY with "the Flarfists" (aligned with the Lang Po's FOCUS), "Sons, and daughters, of Stein and Saussure and Dada?" Or some thing(s) along these lines and lineages...

I think that, as Dale points out precisely (and also because it IS, after all, the obvious common sense all of us agree with, always) we NEED Both the masculine and feminine, both acrimony and group hugs, both of everything.

Blah blah

Kind of thing I was writing in early and middle 1990's for part of "The World Chronicle."

In the early and middle 1990's, I wanted to (re)Write/right an entire newspaper, mostly Satire and Parody, to be sure. I never followed through on that ENORMOUS, and perhaps a bit grandiose and overly ambitious, project, but I did start with several pieces whereby I "revised" articles from The San Francisco Chronicle in my own The World Chronicle. Here's a jpeg of one of them, called "Language Writing should not be taught in Public Schools," which is a rewrite of William Jenning's Bryan's "Evolution should not be taught in public schools":


Click on the jpeg/article and it will open up full-size if you want to give it a quick read. Note the usual suspects of those years -- Gingrich, Hatch, Schlafly, Bennett, et al, naturally...



(Actually, now come to think about it, this piece may have been cleaned up and published in Aldon Nielsen's upper limit music / lower limit speech, but I cannot remember right off hand; I'll have to search Shelf 11, but I don't have time right at the moment. Aldon DID put poems of mine into his magazine, one of the truly GREAT staple job journals of that era, though, and they are still to this day some of the "proudest publications of my life." Thanks always, Aldon!)

I feel the present rate of history.

Ever

History is moving twice as fast as ever,
but ever still maintains a significant lead.

Lacan 17

Lacan 17

Just a thought like that could set you back two-three
careers; the fellow from the other by the lake
he never wronged you, brother,
filling out the apps that you
ignored.
The men have wives and kids and licked you
fair and square. You theenk them squares;
they merely lick the stamps that
you neglect; they say their
prayers.
The men that you’ve rejected looked like rivals,
the women that they loved were just like
yours, their children leak in bed
just like your
brother.
Nothing you’re said to lack finds ardor in your words,
nothing overcooked in leeks stinks quite
like yours, your character raw
assassination it’s just
turd.

The other thing that would be cool...

The other thing that would be cool but probably isn't going to happen:

It'd be incredibly neat if various pomers formed a broad coalition, including several poetry journals, presses, think tanks that focused on the American Constitution, the Supreme Court, and the Justice System. A 10-year program, or for as long as it takes, systematically working to truly understand and refine Power and Laws and Justice and our American Systems at the most central, precise levels. Imagine... and Imagine that... and Imagine those apples... Seriously.

(No, the object of that kind of "poetry" would NOT be self-aggrandizement or SELF-importance; however, there would be plenty of room for those for whom self-importance performs a necessary motivational key, but even for those fellows and femmes and felons, "intelligence" would be harnessed to a project bigger than the individuals enlisted.)

What's everybody waiting for?

Here's something that I don't understand (or I do, and I'm being coy, but) why is it that we pomers are not on Countdown and Hardball and other such genuinely influential news shows. They ARE quite smart, the folks directing and hosting those shows (whether we pomers want to admit it or not), and we delude ourselves thinking that we're smarter and we perhaps cheat ourselves staying in our little fucking university Sitting Rooms giving our symposiums and our dainty, polite readings (Yes, oh don't I wish...).

Seriously, though, why aren't we on the Jon Stewart Show or Saturday Night Live or Colbert or that new show with Fareed Zakaria (forgive me, for years a loco-maniacal News Junkie, I really haven't been watching TV much lately, not since November 4th).

I mean, presently History, I think, is moving twice as fast as ever, and the old incentives for writing "poetry," particularly "Immortality," are, well, rapidly becoming old news. Poming is locked in the universities; pomers limit themselves to what heretofore were restricted "territories of human value and actualization."

Seriously, if pomers are decently RELEVANT (yeah, I'm shouting that), or don't think that they're so superior to everything on the boob tube, then how come we're not there giving our take, possibly via our poetry/poming, what have you, on the Gaza situation, the economy, Gitmo, etc.

Don't even have to be particularly political. What's the difference between a good pomer and that Lewis Black fellow, for example? You write poems and your mind doesn't work as fast as Robin Williams' mind does when he plugs himself in to his STAND UP work?

Blah blah...

Lacan 16

Lacan 16

And yet, if you're,
if you are, if
yr, if u r, if yer

weak,

well,
then the big cats, they
do have to clear out
the jungle, every NOW

and then because

if you and maybe your whole pride
or pack of fat cats
has got flabby and pretty
fucking weak,

well, in that case,
Jesus Christ I hate this!

you're praying
their preying

it IS going to be survival
of the fittest
or the luckiest
(sometimes just those lucky
twists of fate, i.e., not
the apron strings of bust out
mutations,

New evidence
shows a species evolves
or adapts
by going through a process
which begins with several large mutations
before settling down into a series
of smaller ones.

but anyway just fucking luck);

either way, if you're quite flabby, quiet
to a fault, too, I guess

they the lean and the hungry
have every right
to eat your heart out, Baby

and you'll not ever know
if they were male or female,
you'll be dead,
as you should be,

Go ahead, Baraka, Ellis, others of the old line,
and clean 'em out, what
don't count their syllables with Frugality,
(gawd that's a weak fucking line!), rather,
paid by the syllable, not
the job, take/s them to the pain,
I mean
bank, bred
in humvees, not Honda Haiku's.

(blockquote borrowed from "How Species Evolve," in The Hindu, Thursday, Nov. 20, 2003, http://www.hindu.com/seta/2003/11/20/stories/2003112000060200.htm)

Lacan 15

Lacan 15

All I want I need

to know
is this, Jacques, What
were you thinking

in 1938, the year Sig's jaw dropped
off, he "left Vienna on the Orient Express"
(No, Flarfists, that's not the movie, actually,
this IS a cheap, cheap dig, more deconstruction
of myself) and, according to Elisabeth R.,
"he left behind his four sisters,
Rosa, Mitzi, Dolfi, and Paula. All
were to disappear
into the darkness of the final solution,
at Theresienstadt or Treblinka." You
were "not present"
"on the morning of June 5, 1938,
Marie Bonaparte and William Bullit"
met "Freud for a twelve-hour stopover
in Paris," you "had nothing to gain," you
"said later" you "didn't want to kowtow
('faire de grậces') to Marie," a female,
but "the truth," according to Ms.
Roudinesco, and the clever, clever manner
by which I've cut up and pasted
in these rude and perhaps deceitful
snide (cliche) snippets
of creative quotation and documentation
is that you weren't "invited," and "in
any case," you "had nothing to gain . . .
from a meeting with the sage from Vienna."

But where were you "when all Europe was living
in dread of war" in 2003,
full-timers and tenured profs at SRJC
and other well-funded state universities.
Most of the poets I know were frantic
enough to act
in ways that could have gotten them fired,

where were you and where am I now

that this rage has finally smouldered so long
that I can tuck it into footnotes & parentheticals
you'll never read, but real poets like Gardner
and Smith and Schultz and Stefens and Johnson
and Bellamy and Silliman and I'm sure Gordon
and Sullivan and Mohammad and so many others
enough to list to make enuf Ponzi Schemes
to go around and around and around for
everybody -- here comes me again -- could use
and use and use and use, could
actually close read eknugh, actually, enough to
get it; this is all about ME again,
and you idiots who wouldn't, literally,
give me tenure, Jacques,

but goddamn it, Dude, page 87 for you
is pretty fucking damning, "'when
it became clear that the training'"
you "'gave was unacceptable,'" you
said you would "'obey the rules,'"
but you "'immediately put up for membership
an unusually large number of candidates
analyzed by'" yourself, "'so again'" you
were "'forced to admit that the training . . .
was unorthodox, because'" you
"'had economized on time,'" and "'with this defect,
no scientific
discourse, aspiring
to be a branch of knowledge,'" etcetera etcetera,
"'so when I [actually] read his work [say, Gardner's,
Baraka's, et al], "'I can't help thinking,
"Words, words, words" [maybe Anybody's n=o=w if
you don't catch them at just the right time,
so there are so many
right times, but does anybody know
what time it is, does anybody really care]
And yet I love and admire Mallarmé.'"

And still, where were you thinking? Frankl,
according to Man's Search for Meaning,
was in Auschwitz or Dachau
and Perls (I can't find my In and Out
the Garbage Pail, off hand,
but he) and Laura had escaped
to South Africa by then, and why
don't several women come to mind first
before these early pre- Beat
Existentialists and Phenomenologists,
I don't know (Yes, I do)
but shit, Man, where were you and I both
thinking when our wars for career success
began before any respectable Oedible Pals Complex,
actually, before the age of 2?

My dearly dispirited

My dearly dispirited
for Richard Lopez


It will pass.

AND you will replace it

w/ among other ('s)
things

new habits
reviewing
moves, movies, and

rights, writing,
poming

Trust me,
on this one thing, at least:
I did the same damn stuff
surfing msnbc.com and cnn.com
until

November 4th, and one of the
wars was finally over
and I just walked back
out
into the world again

or maybe golf season 2008
(my first with Hope in years
and a $250.00, yes, just $250 fore
full playing privileges, membership
my dear dad got me
I hadn't been able to pay/play
for several seasons, really,
after to be honest a bankruptcy)
had ended. Anyways,

I don't read or watch
the old news pounded out
daily by Hardball
or Countdown hardly
at all anymore

NOW.

Niece, how will I protect you (or Lacan 14)

Lacan 14
for Dale Smith and Kent Johnson, or not

Darling Niece,

How will I protect you
from the predators, they

"never attack nor apologise
looking you in the eyes,
in person, in the First Person,
Ann Lauterbach."

I could burn
every book on my shelves
written by a male, but
only some of them deserve
to be cited
           closely.

They'll tear you and your innocence,
your humility, their own,
your every eighty little pounds of naiveté,
all that is feminine
about you
and your loved ones
into some soldier

some HOW armed to
the Teeth Amiri the role
model of ancient anger mis-
management proclaimed the sole
(or he meant soul,
forgive the ambiguity
it does him no poetic justice
at all) arbitor of validity
(or "poems are bullshit")

or some weapon

           they

can           use

to ignore you
the same way they were

ignored in Leningrad
or that poem "Between"
I wrote when I was young
and got published -- Whippppee! --
in Texture,
spoke to the same male ache.

           They
are boys
and you are so sweet
how will you or your
grandchildren survive

if I cannot stop

them
or change us.


I can call them out,
but their Ego tree
is on private property

and even tho I have worked
in IT nine years
I'm still not a good enough hacker
to get in
to their Comments

intellectual properties --
their mommies
gave me a cookie or something
to go away and clear my cache,
all 2 cents worth.


I don't know, Sweetheart,
but I need to face it, face them,
grow up and be a fucking man, stand
between them and their acid
hate they spray all over
the nations' campuses
like Pakistani men
spray women who try
to get away,

like full-balled boy
cats dull as inaugural poetry
automatic as, well,
much automatic writing is,
in their appetite for Territory.

I don't fucking know,
my dear niece,

What I must do
to stop them. They're all over
every magazine edited
by avant-garde university professors
and even the best community

college profs in Illinois

with additional Arts
monies and grants
my working class wages pay for;

every poetics forum --
Harriet, R.S.'s blog,
Lime Tree, all the Syndicate
Channels, give or take
an old EPC they got kicked out of.
They're bigger than fucking

Jesus Christ!
Clear Channel radio,
and I can't leave the factory
job until 5:00 p.m.,
or even track them down

blogging like Ezra Pound-cake
Fruitcake, their God
expounding his horseshit
Henry Miller persuaded me
to ignore with "Money
makes money makes money
What"
      on Company College

TIME

           paid for with our
tax dollars, our time on the planet, working for THEM

but if I could get my hands
on their words

I'd fucking throttle them,

Sweetheart, Kiddoe,

I am, after all, Male,

mySELF, I'm sorry
that I have failed you, failed
us.

On Amiri Baraka's _Ed Dorn & the Western World_

Scott Pierce's Effing Press and DaleSmith/HoaNguyen's Skanky Possum have in a joint production published a great new, little Amiri Baraka book recently which I definitely recommend for any reader of my own beloved "tradition," the New American Poetry tradition. It's titled Ed Dorn & the Western World, and it's a great piece of history and poetics for all sides and even those who don't want to take sides so very much. Of course, it's an especially good piece for scholars of Amiri Baraka, of Ed Dorn, of the Language Poets, of Ron Silliman, and of the entire Industry. Below, my gut reaction, which is, as usual, full of my usual piss, spit, vinegar, crap, and idiocy, and bull, though that's me, frequently, as you know (which explains why you, whoever you are, so seldom come here anymore, or maybe you're busy, of course, having lives and all -- I'm so full of myself, sometimes, as you also know):

Naw, geez, I'm reading the last of it, guys (Kent and Dale and Mark and Mike and Joe), and I'm sorry, but it's pretty fucking pathetic. I'm sorry you guys, but if anybody's "fascist," it's A.B., the chicken-diddly references to Silliman; the blanket condemnation of all Homeland Security personnel as if none of those folks are allowed to be regular human beings with spouses and kids and mothers and fathers and sons and daughters and best friends from high school like my own buddy who was high up in the Secret Service I won't tell you how high, but let's just say top 5 in the country, and has a good family and is a decent human no matter who he has had to work for; the reference to 0 women, as if "[J.] Kennedy, Malcolm, [M.L.] King, and [R.] Kennedy" were the only folks worth anything in his narrow, narrow, narrow, fundamentally intolerant small small thin straw of cocaine the fascists' favorite mind-shrinking Control-of-the-body EXACT OPPOSITE OF REICH/LOWEN drug; the actual conflating of "dizzy little pimp nerd professors and assholes in waiting want to make poetry the servants of cowards" and "right wing pundits," and it goes on and on and on, predictably, unfortunately, just at the age when some wise men really show that they got wise. I want to FUCKING SCREAM, Dale and Kent, are you fucking absolutely fucking kidding me! If anybody in the entire world is a fucking fascist and a coward, it's this little little little fella. I'm terribly freaking sorry. But nowhere in any of this -- and he had me hoodwinked a couple of pages back, and I walked straight into it anyway because, after all, the same "opening of my mind" that he and his generation prescribed for me 45 years ago, the opening of the "fields," the opening of my heart, maybe it didn't let me trust Bush/Cheney, of course not, 8 years ago, but it made me give him (Amiri), at least, the benefit of my knee-jerk doubts -- is any genuine freaking effort whatsoever to question himself. He just simply does not dare. THAT, my friends, I'm sorry, I'm fucking so fucking sorry, but that is Cowardice. I'm sorry.

And it is repugnant and it is Exactly the Same, is it not, as Bush Admin sociopaths with their flip-side of the same coin mirror image fascism -- I'm sorry, fellas. I just don't get why you accept or tolerate, revere or advocate such ridiculously small-minded arrogance and Power-madness, world of Winners and Losers, Survival of the Fittest, etc., ad infinitum...

Or it's a game and a joke, and I'm not getting it, so okay, I've been fooled, and it's PRECISELY WHAT HE WANTED ME TO THINK/SAY in response, or what you fellas would have me think/say... If that is the case, and I don't rule it out, then let's play this nine yards out all the way and laugh at ourselves, or just Steve, and it's perfectly OKAY, trust me, I've been around some very humbling enlightening blocks. Yes, indeed, let's play this out as if we're thoroughly one-dimensional, fixed, static little fellas who cannot "change" or ever laugh, at ourselves. I'm thoroughly game, believe me. THIS is precisely where language is fun, where Poetry is a joke except for all the poets for whom the grand label poet is more important than life itself or the dignity of every human being on the planet who is illiterate or philistine or uneducated or "stuck." Let's get it on.

"What we miss in Dorn is an actual gladiator poet at the very top of the number" (p. 26) -- Okay, maybe so. Just the same, that term "gladiator," I mean, this IS 2008-2009, and heaven knows we've all smoked a lot of numbers, but seriously, Ame, what is the GAME? If "competition" and "dominance" is the game and the aim but these games/aims have targeted nothing but destruction of all the "losers," the weaklings, the "lower species," like micro-organisms of the oceans, and that same same same same oughta be able to recognize it by now, GAME threatens the LOSS of ALL species, do you really want to WIN WIN WIN, or is it time to at least reduce some of the mindless Competing, and do "the sissy female thing and start Relating? (P.S., Ame, I am equally arrogant, myself. I, too, suffer from the same disease, Masculinity. So seriously, I admit that I have no right to be calling you Ame or Amiri or "my friend," too. I'm going to anyhow, perhaps to undercut myself on purpose. I want to undermine my own arrogance and bullshit first and foremost.)

"Fridgidaire" (p. 27) -- Miller's The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, in which H.M. demolished America and Amiriki, Ame... (I add this note to remind you that yr poets aren't the only ones vitally critical of America... I pun on your name because I am, and maybe it's a bit sinful, so "my bad," overly self-indulgent with punning, but why scrub the fun, seriously? This is not "the last word," and "words are bullshit, anyhow." Reality and Life are so much bigger and lovelier.)

"who fought against the rule of the dead" (p. 27) -- yeah, I can dig it. I fought against them, too, and lost my job to a couple of Department Heads who would tolerate zero enforcement of standards for Freshman Composition students writing garbage logic Evangelical Christian "Creationist" papers AND maybe I was wrong being so heavy-handed towards them, shoving Darwin and secular humanism down their throats, too. Nothing is so black and white as my own arrogance in younger years and probably half of this now protesting yours, Ame.

"the sterility of literature disconnected from American reality" (p. 27) -- you said it, again, but yeah I know that pain, too, because maybe I would have gotten a tenure track opportunity if I hadn't quietly but firmly advocated the New American Poetry and the Language Poets (about whom I'd focused my Master's Thesis) instead of the Agrarians and Eliot and the like for ten years at the other school where I taught as a second-class citizen, an "adjunct," and, frankly, was treated relatively well, but not getting full-time, that pissed me off, so I left, but this is, as usual, about me, instead of about you, whom it should be about; here we go again...

"as the publishers are now letting great works go out of print or made hard to get while they wholesale restock the American bookshelves with garbage as iridescently dull as Eisenhower's oatmeal the harbinger of McCarthy" (p. 27) -- not so fast, my friend, I mean, what, "publishers?" C'mon, amigo, we don't have publishers anymore. There are now on the planet five times as many of us, AND, because good fellows like you fought to Expand and Re-distribute Power, now there are 50 times as many "voices" and things worth reading, so today's generations must TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR THEIR OWN MEANING AND PUBLISH THEMSELVES. Publishing in the hands of "the Few" and limiting the number of voices deserving to be heard is a direct contradiction of everything that you, yourself, fought for. You see, Ame, precisely because of what you already succeeded in doing, ALL KINDS OF PEOPLE can now be heard and they don't have to look to just the few experts and messiahs like you and your generation who already had yr day in the sun, Brother, it's time to let the younger ones, and there are many, many MORE of them NOW (logrithmically so), have THEIR MEANING, even if you, yourself, from your past vision, cannot like it or respect it. Besides, THEY, these new and "iridescently dull" ones, actually have to Live in this world you and I will be exiting. YES, damn right Ed and you and Robert and Robert and Allen and Charles and Malcolm and y'all had and still have all kinds of wonderful and useful things to hear and see and get and use and keep developing, but seriously, Ame, these younger so-called pimp nerds and kids do have the right to claim their own meaning, just like you had the right to do that, and did, so eloquently and cool and all, Man. Oh, and one other thing, Man, and I know it's not really, really fair to ask, but where are the women. I know it was "a different day" and all, but as you know, one of the reasons the Women's Movement got started was that you all in your movements were decidely one-dimensional in your advocacy for rights and power and rewards and such. Dare we imagine that, just as your own New American Poetry liberated so many of you to explore and transfer "energy" that was previously unexplored and repressed, Today's poetics are developing out of entirely different pressures to Free what is locked up and to Restrict what is decadent, over-determined, and degenerate?

"The reason a silly man could not grasp the explosive power that such gun slinging truth makes is that many of these scared cows Dorn blows away" (p. 26) -- but the thing is, Ame, "explosive" and "power" and "gun slinging" aren't necessarily as desirable as they used to be. Yeah, it's fun watching old John Wayne movies with one's papa, sure, and ya know, it was really quite a freaking strong generation that preceded yours and fought in WWII and fought the earlier real live Fascists and got through the Depression and didn't get spoiled like the 60's generation's kids are spoiled, but seriously the trick is in finding when and how the "black and white" terms are effective and finding when the fun and Unconsious liberating O'Hara terms are effective, because, ya know, Amiri, there are a whole lot of folks in the much more packed and claustrophobic world Today who, as soon as they hear words like "explosive" and "Power" and "gun slinging," well, they start blowing up people they never even knew personally or tried to know, like the folks at the Oklahoma Federal Building (murdered by those narrow-minded white haters), or at the Twin Towers (murdered by those narrow-minded monotheistic haters), or on the ground below the criminally insane U.S. Shock and Awe Planes that sociopaths like W. and Rummy and Wolfie and those TRUE NERDS murdered, and jeepers creepers, Amiri, you must freaking understand this by now, don't ya? I mean, you're almost, what, 70 or 75 or so, and you DID do some of those "mind-expanding" drugs instead of the mind-narrowing ones back "in the day," the almighty, ever-heralded, ever-worshipped freaking day that is, I'm sorry, Amiri, but it's a Trope, too, ya know, and it's a big big big industry, especially for the 60's generation's kids, but geez, haven't you got enough, Fame, Retirement Funding, Health Insurance, Royalities, Readers, Books Published, by now? Jeepers, a lot of us haven't got ANY of those things and aren't going to have those things because, quite simply, resources are a tad tighter, and it isn't because you're Smarter, you're a Genius, you're more Fit, you're Stronger, and we're weak and stupid and inferior and we got bad genes, it's because there are a lot more of us NOW (yes, National Organization of Women, which isn't altogether fair to you, no, but you laid into R.S. with the several "silly man" puns, and this is JUST WORDS, they don't keep either of us from getting treatment for illness or paying our Electric and Gas bills damn good invisible Ralph (you bet I taught that Great novel when I taught) found a way to get around, sorta, way back then), so let's just have some fun, 'cause we're only on the planet a little while, and all of us deserve to live and laugh, Forgive Me, I am much too mean towards you, and you are a good man."

I've got much more to write, probably, maybe. I should especially give some good attention to the "actual poetics" that are being argued here -- the BM poets' are closer to "the World" via particulars and short lines and "direct treatment of the things" and other such good stuff, which Baraka DOES articulate and argue, especially in regard to his Mr. Creeley**, quite eloquently, I think, VERSUS the more ambiguous, "indeterminate," reader-determined, language-focused and new Worlds, including worlds of process and self-reflexivity and theory and subjectivity etcetera that Baraka finds so inferior in his arguments. Maybe, in fact, this book really is all about THAT -- the evaluation of the relative worths of the two different generations of poetry, which is truly "explosive" and which is quite rather worthless, if we accept his (or R.S.'s?) terms, which truly gets to "Truth" and which doesn't even produce any True Beauty -- but, alas, as usual, I have lapsed into my usual "personal" diatribes, and that means that for me, anyway, this book of Amiri Baraka's is a last little send-off designed to get a last word in about who's the fucking best and who sucks and who's fucking worthless and how fucked up the world is, and such. And, well, I reject a good deal of that, OR maybe I am engaging in the same bullshit, myself, unable to transcend it. For after all, this book is ALSO a genuine and sincere homage to Ed Dorn, to be sure, as well. Anyway, it is certainly worth reading and it is certainly a steal at $10.00.

** whom on two occasions I did sit close two after readings at the Marin Civic Center in the 80's (I think that Cole Swensen organized it and another reading in the city, San Francisco), but I never more than shook hands and got introduced and sat quiet and watched, so, well, why should I have anything to say, except, well, that's a ridiculous fucking notion and completely disingenuous and stupid on my part, it's time for everybody to speak up and write down and sing or scream or think or care or breathe, even me, seriously, I'm tired of pretending to be so respectful

Congratulations, Barack and World!

Congrats to and for ALL OF US, ALL of Life on the Entire Planet:

Lacan 13

Lacan 13

I should not have kicked that lady in the teeth
Nor raised the ardor of the hard-ons of perpetuity.

Random questions of the day, month, season, year, we'll see...

Does Flarf contact a new range of “content” or perhaps represent, rather, an altered approach to content?

Does Flarf engage a new range of subject matters, particularly subject matters that are neither concerned with the media of poetry, language, and representation nor concerned principally with “theory” and “criticism” and “aesthetics” and such?

Is a typical Flarf poetry “about” language (for instance, prepositions, nouns, taking one to know one, and all), or is Flarf “all about” POETRY (particularly that which has been institutionalized as the primary language game played for careers in Academia), which is to say, not exactly THE WORLD that most of us outside of the academy live in but the one that most seriously entertains the last of the BOTH priviledged and stubborn among us who keep alive, for ourselves, such “high art” and what continually threatens to become an artifact as world population growth makes such “diversion” more and more irrelevant to succeeding generations radically confronted with new realities of mere survival?

If Lang Po could be said to eschew traditional subject matters in a broad effort to expand both the means to accessing content and the territories of relevant, substantial meaning needing to be legitimated, does Flarf mostly explore some of the new territories that predecessors, and the Internet, opened up, or does Flarf represent a healthy, perhaps overdue restriction or narrowing of focus that in some way newly discovers “the World” that has perhaps been invisible as we’ve so obsessively investigated the (metaphoric and metonymic) glasses, microscopes, telescopes, and other tools we use for accessing, exploring, interpreting, creating such a so-called world?

Yes, it is true that none of these questions might apply to Flarf at all, but I am interested in asking them regardless of their relevance to Flarf. They are at least as important to me as learning what Flarf is and celebrating Flarf’s on-going contribution to the advancement of thot and existence.

Or

Or the hard ons of perpetuity...

Lacan 12

Lacan 12

We lacked the following laser jet toner cartridges, I lacked
sufficient explanation for using so much ink, you
looked far and wide for a gaffe
in their wholesome
exuberance.
I should not have licked that lady in the lake, she knew
her nipples would show through that man’s
simple white Hanes tee-shirt
all wet with April in
Canandaigua.
Behold! He lurks in the afterthoughts of that non
sequitur, from which leaks abundantly
the clarity of his perpetual
charley horse, this
confusion.
Lucky me, lucky you, we say routinely, and they like
us for that and the fact that we can shop
all over the county for the best
price of leeks
necessary.
Thus the lark was the last in the list, or on one, that
expression which yet persists, yet insists
on yoking, linking, yucking up
what otherwise remained
defunct.

Lacan 11

Lacan 11

Mixed Criminal

      Mixed Kremlin

            Mixed Gremlins

                        Mixed Grumbling

                              Nixed punch lines

& Nixon punchlines

I like this Tom Beckett three-liner a good deal.

Hysterical good three-liner, what he and, I think, Eileen Tabios and Jean Vengua call hay(na)ku, over at Tom Beckett's Slim Windows:

You
fucking trope.
You fucking trope.

Actually, this three-liner of Tom's could easily be ME (yes, Steve Tills!); the second person pronoun and the way I employ it habitually; the "trope" and tropes that I, Steve Tills, habitually harp on, as well as the actual trope of habitually engaging in that harping (which evidently I am NOT breaking out of, either, not getting closure on; it's the same hysteria, perhaps, drummed up time after time); and my lower middle class, very Italian-American of the late 60's and early 70's diction that permits "fucking" to impose itself on so much of my utterance/articulation/@poming and at the same time manifest "realness" that comes with letting "personal" reality BE.

But of course THIS is all self-absorbed fantasy, and Tom Beckett's three-liner should NOT be read as having anything to do with me (Steve Tills); however, I'll reveal this narcissistic interpretation anyways. Got better or more personal ones, Reader?

Lacan 8

Lacan 8

X -- It occurs to me, more and more often, that writing poetry,
or for that MATTER, Poming, should not be "contaminated
with Anger." Why not a new magazine called Anger.

Z -- Go ahead, Dude! Just DO IT! Like most other, not other,
things that you do DO and especially things that you do NOT DO.

Y -- Oh, go fuck yourself, Doo-doo!

Z -- Dude! Dudeler! El Dudeathon! Le Dudeutification!
Mon aime Duty! You have almost never written ANYTHING
that didn't derive from at least some "Anger,"
so relax, Paesan (friend from another village,
in Italian-American, in case you don't know
and feel pissed at me for shoving in all the foreign
languages)!

Y -- Oh, go fuck yourself, even if Bush is out and I have stopped
obsessing about politics for the first time in 9 years!

Z -- Dude, it still ain't gonna be "poetry" unless they say so.

Y -- Oh, please! Please, seriously, go fuck yourself!
You're out of your fugging mind.

Lacan 10

Lacan 10

Y -- Watch out! How about "the Poet" who habitually chooses
and reengages "hysteria" IN ORDER TO create "Poetry"
(Cap P, of course), whereas Clarity, leading to INSIGHT,
is what s/he truly requires?

Z -- Yer Spicer, again?

Y -- Yes, if that's your prerequisite
for framing it, of course.

X -- I don't think that Hejinian does
Poetry (no scare quotes, there, needed)
via "hysteria" at all. I believe that she becomes
quite lucid and begins from exceptional Clarity
when she composes. I believe that you, yourself, do NOT
seek Hysteria but write out of it frequently. You
like THAT kind of word play, pleasure, entertainment;
at the same time, I do NOT believe you deem it Clarity,
Insight, or Meaning.

Y -- Hmmmm...

X -- And I don't believe you will ever regard Poetry
as Clarity or Insight, although I do believe
that like laughter and humour, you will regard it
as equally valuable, necessary, and worthy, kind
of "to the body" as the others are "to the soul."

Z -- X, how come you get to be "the rational one"
all of the time?

X -- Z, you really think that that's so damn great?
You "get to be" the dark side, the irrational one,
the despised self, the one who's repressed often,
reproached regularly, valued almost never.
I'd trade with you in a heartbeat. I think that
I'd trade with you FOR A HEARTBEAT.

Lacan 9

Lacan 9

Y -- poetry is to hysteria as clarity is to insight

Z -- does that mean poetry is to clarity
as hysteria is to insight

X -- I think that you know hysteria, clarity, and insight;
I think that others, who know poetry, do not
distinguish between clarity and poetry.

Z -- I think that you suck.

X -- I agree that Clarity, as you've experienced it
in psyche sessions, engages a mental/emotional tenor
that Poetry Writing, FOR YOU, does not. I believe,
however, that SOME OTHERS may well experience both
Clarity and Poetry Writing simultaneously,
and that their own poming may be of course "superior" to yours.

Y -- I believe that YOU are obsessed with "poetry,"
"being recognized," "getting attention," and "validation." Why?

Z -- Good questions. I should not care about any of those things.
I should not care about any of those things. I should not
care about any of those things.