EOAGH

I'm glad to have some poems in EOAGH.

Delay

For lack of blogging, let me share some photos from NYC.

A Still: Name that Film

Dance!

Lately I've been finding ways to write poems related to my love of dance. Just in time, my friend J passed on a video of an inventive dance performance. Do watch it if you can.

There are different ways I've been engaging dance in my writing:
1. kinesthetic ekphrasis (writing while watching dance & writing/chanting/talking while dancing)
2. memory engagement (recollecting dance)
3. distancing (using dance reviews as found language).

It is so common for the thing we love or know most to be missing in our poems. A friend once told me that he lived near a lighthouse, and someone once commented that no lighthouse ever appeared in his poems. Reading his poems, I started to see "lighthouses" in all the other objects. A hat. An angel. Etc. Maybe this knowledge finds its place in other ways.

I am on the lookout for poetry and other writings that relate to movement and dance. Feel free to recommend anything.

In my next posting, I will write about my visit to Boston's Museum of Fine Arts two Mexican exhibitions: one on Mexican prints during and soon after the Mexican Revolution and another on Edward Weston's two years in Mexico.

Clinton on the Americas

U.S. Secretary Hillary Clinton speaking on the Americas. Knowing that she is speaking to the Council of the Americas, I am left wondering how often she extends such a hemispheric message.

Mundo a Mundo Literary Translation

I participated in this program a few years ago. It convenes a great group of dedicated translators, and is located in a great place, Querétaro.

Join us in beautiful Querétaro, a UNESCO World Heritage site, for two

weeks of literary translation.

Unete con nosotros en hermoso Querétaro, patrimonio de la humanidad,

por dos semanas de traducción literaria.



Applications still being accepted and some scholarship assistance

available, with preference given to residents of Mexico.

Todavía quedan plazos. Existen tres becas valida por 80% de la

colegiatura. De preferencia se ocuparán para residentes de Mexico.




www.iusi.org/translation.html

" The Lyric Surgeon"

By Maureen N. McLane, a thoughtful and lyrical essay on Fanny Howe. She calls her "the lyric surgeon."

She remembers sight

New Zealand poet Michele Leggott describes how her writing process has changed over the past twenty years of losing her vision. She explains that she can "project [her visual memories] into writing"; this process can give them back to her. When she talks about writing on the computer screen, relying on gigantic font, she ends with this beautiful image: "It is as if I am passing a huge magnifying glass over this language." I've enjoyed listening to her experience. You may too.

By the way, I wrote this blurb. Feel free to let me know what works, what your blurb would be. Is it even called that?

"Before your death now"

Digital Archive, a journal I've happily encountered for the first time, offers a second issue on Transnationalism. Listen to Lily Robert-Foley's "About the author and the translator" for a swirling Borges biography.

Let Light

I do what some may consider unimaginable: I revise deep inside the archives of this blog. No new post. But somewhere in the middle, rarely to be encountered, a new word. Or one gone missing.

The blog, this medium, certainly isn't suited for backlog revising, but I like it. I have reasons too, but providing them extends beyond my time now. Not a lot.

Last night my friend J mentioned her tendency to excise words in her poems.

And dears, how do I get started on the forty-some papery writing journals I have? Much, much to excise. Or is it some forty?

In a few years, I hope that I am not "pushing forty" (how it sounds so heavy). I will grow light. Lighter and lighter. Let light

A poem and its visual wonders

Do you have a few minutes? Visit Jon Woodward's "Poems to Stare At." Let it be a little retreat for you.

For starters, I tried the 3-minute one. My soundtrack (all of our soundtracks will vary) was a man outside shaking a spray paint can. With this poem, he wore a mustache. Thank you, neighbor.

Robin Blaser

Robin Blaser reading poems at Berkeley. If you've just quit your job, there is a special treat for you.

Literature by Immigrants

In a one-minute interview, the author Amara Lakhous offers a concise and insightful comment about literature by immigrants.

Bioluminescence

I recently watched this BBC edition of the Deep Sea. It's widely fascinating.

The Blue Planet, part 1

The Blue Planet, part 2

preserve and adventuring

During one week in Boston, I went to a poetry reading where Mary Ruefle stuck to reading the poems and one where Paul Muldoon tried to clarify all the allusions he could, and in transport to these readings I began an admiration for the musician Clem Snide.

At the end of the reading, when the students were asking Mary Ruefle questions for x-tra credit, she had a revelation: the time had come when when she was painting and/or making visual art for the public. To her, making erasures had been a private enterprise. She had always thought about visual art as her "bank account of joy"--something she could rely on if everything else failed. Her language reminded me of something David Lynch would say.

Before she left, she kissed one manuscript goodnight, whispering you will be home with me soon. Her name was signed on the bottom of the title page of an old book.

I walked away thinking that what we are willing to abandon affects our relation to what we make.

At the Station

At the Station
To A

At the station I’m hungry
if my eyes are closed
or open. A man turns around
to see who just sighed.
I sigh again (completion
I want to offer a stranger)
but now through pursed lips
as if the world’s a balloon
I’ll fill, a long flight
tantamount to what can be
remade with hunger, a sadness.
I don’t want to begin.
Yet another man runs out
right before the door shuts.
Every middle gushes toward you

still on the plane funeral-bound.
Like a stack of books
I wait for you. This alone.

Olson Reading

As I sit inside on March 2 during a snowstorm, I drop deep inside the darkness that is winter, lingering here in Boston. I listen to Charles Olson step into this darkness in his reading of "In Cold Hell, In Thicket" found on Pennsound, #1 under Featured Resources.

Having no transition from Cold Hell, I congratulate Michelle Taransky who I see is working for Kelly's House. Cheers!

And, this post is for N, to whom I promised a weekly posting at least!!

Reading

Hello, I am reading on March 6 at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education's Faculty Reading. Come support an evening of poetry and prose.

Also, please check out the sixth edition of Inertia magazine for two of my poems among a solid collection of writings, with cover artwork I just can't stop looking at.

Notley

Alice Notley's poems continue to make me shiver, and her readings magnify this sensation for me. Here is a 2003 reading that I keep coming back to. Oh, I forgot to say greetings to you in the New Year. How rude. I've had my first dreams in which I was playing, running around in a game of tag, I think. I wish for more play in 2009.

Spread your Manifesto

If you are in Boston, spread your manifesto on Inauguration Day.

Etymology-wise, the word comes from augur. It's time to foresee. So let us portend a good outcome.

Barely-there

Photo I found of Iowa. I love its barely-there.

Private

all the fish
Morse crowd

let the open the door taut

chalk between bone

soft middle

of your cheek story told

private

quite primate
at the moment

and to you tu I suspect

Dead-Eye Spring

Cy Gist Press has just released my first chapbook, Dead-Eye Spring. You can order it through the link above.

Many thanks to Mark Lamoureux for publishing this one long poem and for his x-ray vision. Check out his other publications for their unwavering attention to detail and design. I'm convinced that he will give the first poetry reading on the moon.

After finishing this book, I realized that the poem moved me over so that I could look at myself as someone new, a fingerprint the world left, which is the only type of poems I've written that I trust.

I'm shy all of sudden. I want you to vote, not skulk or sulk. And if you get a chance check out this book.

To Build a Little Nothing

Not a ting of gruesome.

Not a weeded-out feud.

Not a wall for shooting at.

Not wisteria with blood.

Not a we-are-family.

Not a turnip, not a man,

Not a sprawling sad. We

Lug our likenesses around.

Rauschenberg

To celebrate Rauschenberg (1925-2008), here is one of his thoughts: "Narrative is the sex of picture making."

On a Lark

To ML

For singing telegrams it was wearing
to sing to the throat

patients. What a cruel or stupid friend
to hire me. So I bought Operation

(in my tiny recuperating narrative) to pull 

plastic screwdrivers out of his belly

as the buzzer sounded off. No doubt

all the rage

of this profession grew; I would sing to him.

Nullipara

All March I wasn't there
But news of another wacko

Replenished the drive

For a dynasty

We live around a lot

Are Barely there

With a Grip on

Truth be not so bare

Through my legs
Through my embellishments
Through my love a lot
Through my night breeds
Through my thinking how
Every "nulli" fits I watch you
Leafing

Through books for primiparas...

Languages unrearable

and Bursting ward to be

Breasted look up

midwives See it fitting

'the season fits'

All but replenished

for we are with truth through

and through every leafing for languages

Bursting breasted see All

are through every bursting

Can I Pi Noir?

No, I won't

go
in the yard.

I'll walk back

to the house.

The night

in the backyard

of my mind.

Poetry Month, 3 Days

1.

Not necessarily, we swim in
for a heist, a shipment of nude delivery trucks
on that barge, a resting stop. We will paint them

the color of fruits to be eaten
only after their decay. Weight of

our clothes, the trucks their height. The measuring
can be the pressure so we

count out our cousins. "What did you get
all wrong?"


2.

Of workers rushing their work
an influx
allows for failure. Wouldn't be here
otherwise, a brief usurping.

Give me a bite of that medlar.


3.

We covered ourselves, kept trying to send
our language barrier back. And back.
Who supplied it

collected it in a bag for troubles,

a suitcase for setting out,
a cup of superfluous rainwater
wrapped in thirty-four sons there.
A double unsure.

Joseph Cornell

Six months ago, the Joseph Cornell exhibition was nearby in Salem, but I never made it. Check out the online exhibition.

I would have preferred the name, "His Mining of Far-Flung" (words the curators use in the description), instead of their title "Navigating the Imagination." Grrr, I was a ferry ride away.

Structure: poem in progress

On one hand a news jump cut

from a blown fuse box (a boy

pointing to a burned wall) to

the electrocuted man

(shot of cables in the rain).



On the other I tell my students

the new confessionalism, always

incomplete. Never

complete me. Even the woman

who took her own life

began for me once I knew

it wasn’t me. It wasn’t a matter

of taking my own life. The new

confessionalism is not to be trusted,



like the old. Like the dairy or the meat

or hair coloring. For the first time I’m on

a special diet. The world is what

I can’t eat. And this weekend

what I can’t touch or come close to,

children, pregnant ladies, I can keep

a good 5 feet away from adults.

Atonement, what a waste. Go rent La Vie en Rose.

2008

Happy 2008.

I finally added some blogs I tend to visit. I'll add some more.

And George Oppen news:

Three new George Oppen recordings on Penn Sound.
I am most likely to weep to his poems. To them? With them? The latter, I suppose.