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?

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

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.

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.

A Ruefle and Yepez Delight

People out there,

Do you know that "mouse potato" has made it to dictionaries? From the OED the entry for mouse potato reads, "a person who spends large amounts of leisure time using a computer, esp. surfing the Internet."

Regardless, please watch two videos. A Mary Ruefle reading, and a Heriperto Yepez video.

Yes?

Heriperto Yepez's "Voice Exchange Rates"

Mary Ruefle 2002 Reading

Guy Poems

Coffee, the roto-rooter motivator,
has a fee. I published first poem

of a bathroom stall, hid some more.

Someone once yelled out these
are like "guy poems"

Organ as Toad

can you raise me two

and a butterfly-shaped groan
for a no, your it

cunning dot another dot
(maybe in a domino)

easy does everything
ruckus cus cus cus

Lesser

Lesser


Nothing to press, not a one
to press a field of treated trees. Twitching like a woman
afraid to twitch, I’ve seen enough
of lesser wigs, those bee-stung faces

afoot in the field. A man in rags (no rage)
hands me a poster: in high blue heels
a corpse. Possibly, it was just that—
chatting with a group. The pressure of liveliness,
an overkill.

U in the UK?

If I lived in the UK I'd submit to the #6 edition to Dusie.

http://www.dusie.org/about.html

Jacket

Damn, what a nice-looking Jacket (July 2007)! 90 pages on humor in poetry, Fraser on "Placing silence" and more.

Cat Power

Thank you to any of you who turned me on to Cat Power. How I was oblivious for so long! I am certainly a fan now. I just saw her last night in concert, and she lived up to the great performances I'd heard about. (I wish I could go to the Pitchfork Festival? Enjoy, to those who do!)

This link tells you that she was the first woman to win "The Shortlist Prize." Sweet.

Regular Lovers

The dancing scene in the French film Regular Lovers is great!

A Polyurethane Heart

Hello to you. Soon I will go pedaling a first book of poems. If hope the sweetest chapbook publisher will gobble up Dead-Eye Spring, which has seen a lot of recent revisions. To those of you who know this poem, I confess to you that I fiddle for so long. Wish me the best. Likely I can wish you luck too as you pedal poems.

When you write poems, my life is better. Yesterday I said this corniness but meant it. And pedal bone is the principal bone in the hoof of a horse. Coffin bone is the other term. ("And" can be such fakery. And, in the presence of horse people I hesitate to write about horses; sugar lick or pedal bone.)

I have a new tortoise, so look for tortoise posts. I have found myself in the middle of a chapbook? called A Polyurethane Heart. I'm sure it will change. Yahoo! I want its simple exclamation back. To crave simplicity is a complicated matter; that's for scholars.

Here is one poem from "A Polyurethane Heart." Forget that. Here are 5 new new poems.




A Polyurethane Heart


Come up, no air, sorry. Such intolerable
stridor. Whether striking someone
or an apologetic wink, I can practice grace
but barbarity jettisons it. Don’t you want
to kiss a sexy lover, hold up placards
of emotions (remorse, briars, relentless,
get-off, wavelength, bad headshot, effort,
and fall-out). I happened to look when a kid
pushed a smaller kid off the teeter totter.
Thrown off my emoting polyurethane,
I could remember




the first time I saw an animal tied up
in an awful yelping or prancing in a yard
way, if I tried. She may've lunged at me
for saying it, that memories arise from effort,
cold to the touch, a dark temperature. Never
discuss the repercussions of a school paper’s
sentence like “In the times of ancient grease
a strigil was used, perfect too for shaving
strigose skin.” The information was there
but so what. I put my coat on backwards,
mocking a crowd, wiggling tragically cute,
thinking I was that. To make another corpse
scrape in the coating required your hand.




A cat, one man on the gurney, other
people, suffer heart palpitations. I rode
closer in on the heart, with a protective
covering for my eyes. Please don’t say
a number of years before later or before
as in “twenty years later” or “twenty years
before.” I’ll throttle the resins, coatings,
insulations, adhesives, foams, and fibers
or throw spiders at your slack jaw.
Cabello on top.




Gentle. I want to talk into handheld devices
about metallurgy, rust, cheesecloth, poly-
urethane for now, can there be any durables
left, the Merck manual’s heart section,
tiebreakers, bandages, an ice-creamed
cheek, what has snuck in. I twang a lot, pop
the microphone, order carryout
and fuss up my house. Don’t you want me
to rest. It is humorous in the dark. Are you?
Metallurgic, darling?



She's smacked me with a pork loin,
packages of seeds (I couldn’t catch
the names). A shopper walks back
to the bathroom, usually near the meat,
to sit there and miss someone.
The aisles shorten. After punishment
comes one lover who had doodled loops
or danced helluva a lot, had oily or
dry hair, not sure, braids or steady
nightmares, never helped anyone
unpack or feed on swan, except for
“Tuércele el cuello al cisne, " the best
gesture of slashing a past, trimming
hedges. For that we put on frocks.

Prizes

Prizes for the best plural word for poemish are...


-Repeated lashings from an oversize lord
-A visit from the cheeseclothsmith
-A visit to Turkey Valley gas station store with the big square hole in the wall near the toilet. That one, definitely a suspicious prize.

Multiplicity

Multiplicity



sweet friend and I rode from Iowa City to Boston yesterday
21 hours straight, damn rain in Ohio/Pennsylvania, an oversize

lord getting off the ramp at "Lord's Valley"

or was it "Paradise Valley"?

see my new turtle Gertrude climbing the glass 

we had given ten dollars to a student 

(what he called himself) driving a "40,000 thousand dollar car"
(how he proved his parents could pay us back double) 

who had ran out of money for gas. Dear Universe, 

May That Lost $10 Given to that Spoiled Rich Kid driving Said Car Return through a Multiplicity of Riches Unbenownst to us.

melissa dancing

melissa dancing

nico dangling on melissa dancing and andy and m
miss you


love,
janine

A job

A job

is like a calendar with with no moo(ns).


(an infection, mutiple choosers)

Whose whoot?
Great-Horned Owl, I believe
you left. Nibble.

Mom (a poet once told me to say mother) says
never get in the middle.

The Apartment

In two years I haven’t filled the ice cube tray

“Is twelve o’clock tomorrow, alright?”

Sitting on the computer chair I wait for them to leave my apartment

My slowly undoes itself

Possible renters wear shoes, t-shirts, pants

The poet doesn’t remember saying she wanted to write a three-sentence novel

I make a disc of ninety-five photos for a friend who just bailed on our moving plans

Lately I don’t haul ass and I'm tired of being alone

Gurgle is all that occurs to me or, I am lonely as hail

Movers, answer the phone at ten p.m. on a Sunday

Moochers sound better as lickplates

My selfishness extends to licking plates

Can I have a drag?

"I don’t want to be smart in poems"

"I don’t want to be smart in poems"

Can I kiss you?
Can I kiss the you that or who hasn’t been kissed?
Can I kiss the heat beneath you?
Can I kiss the buzzard of your faults?
Can I kiss the lyrics the singer forgot? I will kiss
Ella and Mack the Knife. Ella calls out her name.
I am making a wreck out of not being small, not a child
suctioned cupped to pity. I am kissing. Cheryl is making bluebirds
tell the truth or tip a bad waiter and dance and dance and dance.
The arms detached. I love that part. The blue basket out of blue.
I will kiss Lou Rawls instead.

translation

Hello,

I have a translation of a poem by Mexican poet Tedi López Mills on the online journal Xchanges.

If you are so inclined, I hope you take a look.

The Full Moon, tonight.
Get a checkup.

La Commune

I'm halfway through Peter Watkins' film "La Commune" about the 1871 brief socialist revolution in Paris. It's worth watching how he blends historical research with a modern media twist. I hate to tell you more than watch it. Here's a link about it.

I suppose this week was french-themed since I also saw Jean Renoir's "The Rules of the Game." Viola.

The next post is unrelated to this one.

go see that

1.

go see that



bird foreigner.
the succulents.
to be peaceable.
to wrangle that.

distant answer.


(nothing ringing)



2.


the miser and his ilk.
flunky and the floozie.
a hunk named Dory.

not that.
all over that.



3.

clothe me.

not with enchantment's
one day sale


speedy crinolines
the clunky rich

my speech 

biceps



4.


get another movie
of a dead singer

light gone lime

say you were always there
for the songs

The ground had it.

The ground had it.

"Figures! I’ve had it. You always get the good arts."

Bullets.

•
•
•
•

A question for men:

Do you use a booklight in bed?

Egyptian

A la Lamoureux, hey mr., I checked out my Egyptian astrological sign...

Isis Honorable, straightforward and idealistic. Active and self-confident. Colors: male: white, female: blue Compatible Signs: Osiris, Thoth Dates: Mar 11 - Mar 31, Oct 18 - Oct 29, Dec 19 - Dec 31 Role: Goddess of motherhood, women, and magic; goddess of the South; protector of Imseti (the son of Horus who watched over the canopic jar containing the liver) Appearance: Woman wearing the hieroglyph for "throne" on her head What is Your Egyptian Zodiac Sign? Designed by CyberWarlock of Warlock's Quizzles and Quandaries

Dear Squire

There was a question about the squire....thanks for asking...


Dear Squire,

You are the upheaval of olden language found in our poems. Our golden time machine. Logically this may not compute(grr). You have a future, and I am asking you to see into our future: its ore, whether profitable or extractable. Profit's a retrofitted disaster (more on that later). We is problematic, but I keep trying. No. This is nothing like my other poems.

Your servant,
2006

Back door of the Blog

It's been so long that I feel like I am sneaking into the back door of the blog.

Rusty doorknob, stained glass smeared with pigeon's work.
Dirty hand, knowable.

Beard alone. Quick.

Thwack the able
on the heavy-handed. We got a long way to go un-
ruly. The tools

are big and rusty. You will never take conundrum
away from me. Discombobulation, either,

sweet miser, even though your third-grade waddling
English teacher loved it too.

-ThE TodDlers coMe Running. ThEy DO

Dear Squire,

Dear Squire,

We write to you from the future. We are unsure of our future’s future. More on this later. You may be happy to know Be Bop has few allusions in poems. Any dances connoting foods are on the wayside. Wait, you wouldn’t know this since it came from your future. But you, dearest squire have risen high into the ranks of pirates and gold slingers. This may not sound such a prize, but we in our post-postmodern leanings—I forget where we are now—, you see, gurgle with two-parts Listerine, one-part …(this brings me to my question, what was your favorite drink?)

Your servant,
2006

Tanning

Here's a great snipit of an interview wiht Dorothea Tanning. Few years old. But in case you have never seen it....Interview

Pray Tell

Pray Tell

When you were around, extricate became extra karate.
One more pork chop too many. One night you told me

doctors are in business to tell us we have high cholesterol,
or how the other animals are planning a coup inside us.

And you thought global warming was a problem. Well, it is.
There’s a movie about it by the former Vice President

and people go to the theatres
when it gets too hot outside. This is brilliant.

When you were around, remorse was a much better morsel.
See,

I can’t even do it when you’re not around.

“Oh to be seventeen years old
Once again,” sang the red-haired man, “and not know that poetry
Is ruled with the scepter of the dumb, the deaf, and the creepy!”

-Kenneth Koch, Excerpt from “Fresh Air”

My Trip to the Book Annex: Adventures in Dialogue

“What are you looking for?”
“Oh, something I can’t live without. Lately I’ve been looking for Charles Olson.”
“You like the guys.”
“Uh, I like the guys and girls,” matching the informality of guys with girls, which still doesn’t match. I pull out a 1967 Poetry Anthology. “In this they only have Dickinson and Marianne Moore,” as if noting this disgrace shows I’m not lost, but she goes on to provide me with direction.
“Adrienne Rich is great. Plath and Sexton too, though depressing.”

“Thanks.”

The Lamp

Since I haven't written in awhile I give you a poem, that I love, by Charles Olson.


The Lamp

you can hurry the pictures toward you but
there is that point that the whole thing itself
may be a passage, and that your own ability
may be a factor in time, in fact that
only if there is a coincidence of yourself
& the universe is there then in fact
an event. Otherwise—and surely here the cinema
is large—the auditorium can be showing
all the time. But the question is
how you yourself are doing, if you in fact
are equal, in the sense that as a like power
you also are there when the lights
go on. This wld seem to be a
matter of creation, not simply
the obvious matter, creation
itself. Who in fact is any of us
to be there at all? That’s what
swings in the matter, also—
the beam hanging from

Fireworks

Fireworks
Originally uploaded by cherword.

Back from Brooklyn...

no squirrels

Choose the one to watch. Had there been a need for language the language would be watched. Pull-horses. Ocean bluffs. Fondly speaking. Less fondly, pond made it to the snapshots from a throwaway. Near settler’s rock are the surmountable leaches most talk of burning.

On the mainland, as I heard the islander refer to us mainlanders, a snapping turtle crossed the street. While I yelled turtle you yelled snapping. Had this been a reason not to stop? One night I read my favorite chapter thirty times. Short, slow passage of the turtle.

Walking through the same path never gives me the same path. People remember more of how you make them feel, than what you say. For today my adages are simple.

Stick it. When you hear me complain, I had to convince you not to rip off the anti-abortion bumper sticker from the neighbor’s car. Otherwise known as pig.

Rainy day fun: Visit a grave at "Find a Grave"

Had there been Concord

(as i have mentioned before, i keep this space for revising, allowing poem to morph into different poems, try to break up the preciousness of the "publicized" writing. in my revision, there is a constant rejuvenation of forms--breaking the line in variant ways or shifting from proem to poem--so of course the words keep changing. i like to look at them in these different ways, like a family, I then decide whom to adopt if i may rely on such matronly language)


1.

Practice undoing. Others try to collect the undoing.
One takes heat
for forms spilling into other forms. I separate

our landlady’s pills, placing them in the day or night
container. No deviation. The cat needs to be fed.
I am full and thinking of wolf fish.

In Walden Pond the man caught crawfish, feeding them
to a nearby bass, I thought of casting longer sentences.
To what end? I ask myself. I ask the cat.

2.

You want to feel alongside, and are not convinced.
I change the names since this is not a record. One
wants the feeling, alongside. I am not convinced

anyone is here, with
a lot of practice. My own traps
set.


3.

What is adored is the permeable.
I adore the permeable.
My own desires abstracted

by tracing a headstand on my wall—hundreds of feet high,
toes the onlookers—not the man
on his cell phone who constantly places himself

in public spaces. Placed somewhere to meet someone.
You know, the ones who call themselves. A stranger
skirting the puddingstone or the granite wall,

covered in piss-colored paint, is on the side
I’d normally walk. I need to know
the materials.

4.

Museum-head. The woman
ready to throw her head over the terrace,
since (logical propositions abound)

baby is too large.
You said so yourself.
She looked like me.


5.

The sculpture next to the video
of the sculpture animated.

Stainless Steel. Steel.
Copper. Bronze.

P-a-t-i-n-a.

Worn out, stockpiled
beauty of damage.

6.

Paintings of downloaded images
layered with digital geometrics
gave me the creeps. See a random woman,

random leg, five images in one room
were too much for me.

Permeability.

Do prestigious words
have more legs?

Our progeny
will laugh at words called 50 cents.


6, starting over

Octopus legs regenerate.
He talks of pulling one off, getting lost
in the ink. Keep the spear gun at home.

Sugar at half-mast.
I have no reason.
(Consider weather patterns.)


7.

The can of chirping flipped over
inside the birdcage, and the mechanical parts
floating in oil imparted a jellyfish, an ocean.

The sky
a jellyfish making love to a can
of chirping. Gives the sense of

the point of impact
where Norwegians build
a doomsday repository for seeds.

Chronicles

Practice undoing and the others try to collect the undoing. One takes heat for forms spilling into other forms. As I separate our landlady’s pills, placing them in the day or the night container, there can be no deviation. The cat needs to be fed. I am full and thinking of wolf fish.

In Walden Pond the man caught crawfishes and fed them to a nearby bass as I thought about steering the flux of longer sentences. To what end?, I ask myself. I ask the cat.

One wants to feel alongside. One is not convinced. I changed the names since this is not a record. One wants the feeling of being alongside the sentence and is not convinced. Neither am I, convinced anyone is here. What would change if there were?

What is adored is the permeable. I adore the permeable. My own desires are abstracted by tracing a headstand on my wall—hundreds of feet high, my toes the onlookers—not the man talking on his cell phone who constantly places himself in public spaces. Placed somewhere to meet someone I suppose. You know the ones who call themselves.

The man skirts the puddingstone or granite wall on the side I’d normally walk; it is covered in piss-colored paint. I need to know the materials.

The woman ready to throw her head over the terrace, since (logical propositions abound) the baby is too large. You said so yourself. She looked like me.

The images downloaded from the internet with a layer of digital geometrics gave me the creeps. What is seen is a random woman, a random leg, five images in one room were too much for me. Permeability. Does a prestigious word have more legs?

Octopus legs regenerate. He talks of pulling one off, getting lost in the ink. Keep the spear gun at home. Sugar at half-mast. I have no reason. Weather patterns are considered.

The can of chirping flipped over inside the birdcage, and the mechanical parts in oil imparted the sense of a jellyfish in the ocean. The sky looks like a jelly fish making love to a can of chirping.

At the point of impact Norwegians build a doomsday repository for seeds. The sculpture appears next to a video of the sculpture animated. We stood. Who does the animating? I love the sound can. Can you make the sound?

Dispatx

Dispatx does it again with a great edition on the Plague of Language.

Two City Living Gripe

It's quasi-me until I get my box of books, foolishly uninsured. Hurry please. After force feeding a quitting meter quarters, quarreled with the post office jammed at the quay in my head since Midwest to East Coast transit has no loaded harbors, so no flotsam. What the qua! Are we back to mules? What about trucks or planes or precision or my books?

the moon

When I was born the moon was a waning crescent. What was it doing when you were born? See this site. Do tell.

Back in Boston only three days and I attend a poetry reading by Xtina Strong who is heading to Brooklyn (we should now shut the gates to deter great poets from leaving Boston for New York), and by Jack Kimball whom I was glad to have heard read. Xtina showed two films that stirred up thoughts of Sept 11, the War in Iraq, and the Katrina floods with newclips from the nemesis George W. Bush and Others, and voiceovers by Xtina posing questions about the language we use (operation, etc.) and our wartime maneuvers (another skanky word, though not included). Jack Kimball read a series of short untitled poems (what was that last haiku-ish poem of the ovary?) that gave me a sense of a person's need to write to see what can be done, and equally to question what has been done. This self is ever-ready to take some shots: when I was born I was so ugly "the doctor slapped my mother." (Sorry, don't know the exact line.) At each turn of the page, I was helicoptered into a new situation, often with an overlooker critiquing this scene. He can sure pack a wallop of voices condensed in a few words.

I'm quite horrible at this type of review, especially covering such a great reviewer as Kimball, which probably makes me want to try it more. I will not fear failure. Off I go, I will not fear failure...


Related links:

Demolicious: The great reading series, more to come in the fall
Xtina's site
Jack Kimball's blog


Now I'm off considering the possibilities of the typo "needless to see."

Other great movies to watch, if you trust me:

Black Cat, White Cat; and Underground by Emir Kustarica. I'm telling you, you will want to dance. I'm telling you twice.

Cabaret

If you have never seen the 1972 film Cabaret with Liza Minnelli, etc., directed by Bob Fosse, watch now! so good.

To Mother

This is not a letter, but a duel. Parlez-vous français ? Not I.
And you? Don't teach me technology but classify flowers
on my behalf. Luckily, you don’t need to teach me anything.

T-Rex is my prescription for the fear of regressing. I remember
when I realized that my friends' parents were professionals,
or that they were home schooled. I’ve been smoking

in the backyard, wearing pioneer clothing. Put that in your pipe
and savor it. What happens if I were writing a letter to you,
but in the writing I realize the letter isn’t written to you.

Isn't that what happens? My desirous inclination
for direct address becomes apparent. What is it then,
to come clean? From one scenario to the next,

I am shifty. At nap time, I test the waters;
The pillow is testy, the day is not testicular.
There is one thing for sure, you love to line dance.

Fondly,
A Daughter: a desire and an inclination

Need love. Feel depressed. A springtime phenomenon it seems for me.

Some on Ultraism

I initially posted a comment in response to Liz Henry, who has been responding to my promises of writing about the Ultraists and Creacionists of Spain and Latin America. Thanks! Liz, are going to make me stay on track, I know it. I feel it. I've been distracted by Dada, and classes that keep coming....

This could interest others, so let me send you,quite honestly, a freewrite of my thoughts. Hold on, ya'll.

Around 1918, at the onset on ultraism in Spain, before it later expanded to Argentina when Borges moved back, the group comprised of others such as Guillermo de Torre, Rafael Cansinos-Assens, Gerardo Diego, Juan Larrea, etc. (ladies?) and they wanted an avant-guard movement distinct from the others, a movement for the Spanish-speaking world. They had the need to react against the modernism of Ruben Dario of Nicaragua--a particular history to which they wanted to respond. The magazines that heralded Ultraismo were called "Nosotros" or "Ultra" between the timespan of 1918-1922.

Creacionism is often considered the first Latin American avant-guard movement since it began in 1912. When Vicente Huidobro from Chile showed up on the scene in Madrid, he was en route from Paris, and I believe the Ultraists thought his ideas were "tainted" by those foreign influences. Or, at least, Borges was quite militant about his reactions at the time, which he later denounced. People such as Guillermo de Torre were likely less interested in such critical distinctions. Huidobro would often be a part of these literary conversation circles at Madrid's Cafe Colonial, and it seems that Huidobro "recruited" people to creacionism by the nature of his exuberance. Some left the ultraist movement, so to speak, for creacionism. They would write creacionist poems. (Later I could talk about some of the publications, and possibly some of the aesthetics differences--but that's almost suicidal when they are so difficult to name. The question being: What does it mean to change from an ultraist aesthetic to a creacionist one?)

Yes, these distinctions between movements are so slippery. At the same time that Borges was trying to make these distinctions, he was drawing upon the work of Apollinaire or Mallarme. And, as do many manifestos, ultraism embraced many other writers prior to the naming of this movement.

(To me, the study of manifestos can be one big psychological study of the literary psyche...but that's another topic.) I will later post some sources too. And of course, you are welcome to add your information. I think this is really a collective building of knowledge.

Peace,

Cheryl

Cranky?

I don’t want to write about my feelings
I don’t want to write the books I just read
A wad of them

I do want to post some quotes
but I don’t want to type them
I don’t want to type

I don’t want to keep track of blogrolls
I don’t want to appear any way
So I don't appear

That's the problem--the crisis of imagined identity
Uggh

I don’t want to figure out how to fix this template.

That being said, I've been reading a lot of dada: Duchamp, Tzara, The Baroness, Mina Loy, Breton (who split from Dada and stirred up Surrealism)

Have you ever checked out the "International Dada Archive"?

To Mina Loy (revision)

To Mina Loy or Nima Oly or Amin Yol


I don’t want to leave you.
I’ll go back.

Courteous discomfort. Ideas
in eyes, an allotment; the facets
of all your inventions—

an invented face, “an implied whole.”
I think you’d like the word mug.

Did something happen in the reign
of your Adolescence?

Mine was pretty screwy.


*


Today in class we chuckled about the Curtain
starring as the Curtain, and of course, WCW and You
in Lima Beans. I’m glad you didn’t fall for him.

I think I love you. I think you are a hatchet
and hatchets are lovely. Literature
is a corpse-friendly place.


*

The editors are searching
for your lamps. Who has hidden a broken
lamp of yours? Today I don’t want to look
up a word and find it doesn’t exist.

I think existing is really no big deal.


*

The security man at the art museum said,
“I’m so old I don’t know if I’m alive or dead.”

Reply: “What are dead things?
What does ‘deadened’ really mean?
I mean, really?”

He walked away walkie talkie in hand.
I used to have one of those.



*

Mina, I think you were my neighbor.

“Get out of my yard,” you’d holler.
Would you, could you, ever yell at me?

Two things tell me a lot about people:
whether and how they yell,
and their bathrooms.

Mina, did you ever have a yard? Yell
across a yard?

To some, it’s so important. They say,
“Better get out your shears.”

Let’s take a walk, Mina. Really,
can I call you that?

bendy

urged worm
I am engaged
with bendy straws

urged worm
I protested a lot
with placards

bendy worm
urged me to step
so as to see steps

bendy worm
assuming
multiples

bendy worm
could've beaten up
calculus

its lessons stir
up in the brain
its functions

playthings-
serious
at some point

urge bendy
to return
as carbonated

balloon

Teaching "America"

Kept trying

in reaching


Never (resigned?)


Haven’t found

Nothing in the


How they thought they were superior
We are superior they thought

Everyone wants to be us

No one would want to be us because…

Have them mouth this

We are inferior because…

Mina Loy or Nima Oly or Amin Yol

I don’t want to leave you. I’ll go back.

I think you’d like the word “mug.”

Courteous discomfort.
Ideas in eyes, allotment
of a whole lot.

Facets are full of brochures
of your inventions. “The implied whole,”
I liked it when my professor said that.

Did something actually happen in your Adolescence—
in its reign and jawbones? Mine was pretty screwy.

Startling enough, I may have broken a lamp of yours.
Somebody else has to have one. The editors are searching.

Today in class we chuckled about the Curtain
starring as the Curtain, and of course, WCW and You
in Lima Beans. I’m glad you didn’t fall for him.

I think I love you. I think you are a hatchet
and hatchets are lovely.

This really is a corpse-friendly place. I just mean literature.
Some days I don’t want to look up a word and find it doesn’t exist.

I think existing is really no big deal.

The art museum security man said, “I am so old
I don’t know if I’m alive or dead.” “Excuse me,

is the art alive? It’s old. What are dead things?
What does ‘deadened’ really mean? I mean, really?”
He got out his walkie talkie and walked away. I used to have one of those.

Mina, I think you were my neighbor. “Get out of my yard,” you’d holler.
Would you, could you, ever yell at me if I walked through your yard?

What were you like when you yelled? There are two things that tell me a lot about people: whether and how they yell, and their bathrooms.

Mina, did you ever have a yard? They seem so important around some people. They say, “Get out your sheers. Your blades of grass are about to touch the sidewalk.”

Let’s take a walk, Mina. Really, can I call you that?

Librarything

My version of the "librarything"--not very orderly. Maybe I will begin "lovenotefile"? Anyone know code?

a company of moths

Finally reading Palmer's _A Company of Moths_, and this isn't a review. I realize that every time I see the word "Company" and its warmth, I can't help thinking of Creeley. What a wonderful legacy to leave, among many others, in our world's corporate-driven frenzies. In the case you haven't yet looked up Palmer's use of "windrow" (which I also love), see definition below. To those who already know the word, pat your toochie, sweet cheeks.


A windrow is a row of cut hay or small grain crop. It is allowed to dry before being baled, combined, or rolled. For hay, the windrow is often formed by a hay rake, which rakes hay that has been cut by a mower into a row. For small grain crops which are to be harvested, the windrow is formed by swather which both cuts the crop and forms the windrow.
The term may also be applied to a row of any other material such as snow[1].

In the case of snow, windrows are created by snow plows as they plow streets. The windrow may block driveways. Some municipalities have windrow removal service where a smaller plow goes to each individual driveway to clear the windrow. Most cities simply make the home owner clear the windrow to their own driveway. A few cities will plow the windrow to the center of the street, blow the snow into trucks, and haul it away.

Good ole "windrow removal service."

Once again, I find myself linking to Conjunctions. Some great poems and an interview from Rosmarie Waldrop:
http://www.conjunctions.com/justout.htm

Happy New Year. The greeting has not yet expired.

Tequila

Back in Boston for Thanksgiving Break. I'm finishing off the last drops from the beautiful bottle of Tequila (Azulejos) that I picked up last year in Mexico. So tasty.

I'd like to return in the summer, if I can pull it off financially.

Peace.

comments

Gracias por sus comentarios. Thanks for comments. Yes, OED look-up is a
better addiction than most.

And, about Ultraists and Creacionists, I really will write more later. I
have found some great books in this search.

Far-Fetched

Since I now have instant (I initially miswrote as instinct) access to the OED through the privilege of the university, I can't stop looking up words. The latest? Far-fetched. It's earliest known usage: 1583 STUBBES Anat. Abus. I. (1879) 33

Farrefetched and deare boughte is good for Ladyes, they say.


Hey, Christmas is coming up...

The usage of "studiously sought out; not easily or naturally introduced; strained" isn't recorded until 24 years later, in 1607.

How did those lovely far-fetched things become difficult and strained?

Blogroll

You will be happy to know I finally figured out how to begin the blogroll (i'd like soup with that puleez). Well, Mark, since you recently commented on the boob comment, I have added you first, right between google and edit-me. (Yes, I knew it was about Fence--such small talk in the poetry world, cloistered big talk...what the hell am I saying.) So, stay tuned for other blogs I peek at once in awhile since I am not a hefty duty email or blogger player.

Ok. I'm procrastinating at 12 a.m., making bean soup and blogging, instead of reading about the Ultraists. I have been figuring out the differences between the Spanish and Latin American avant garde movements called creacionism and ultraism. I've been reading the original ultraist texts published in Spanish magazines in the early 1920s. I'll try to say more later.

Dispatx

Just Received this--It's a great site to check out.If you look at the archive, there is an artist's book that I completed.


We are pleased to announce the publication of the fourth issue of www.dispatx.com : ABANDONMENT. This edition contains 14 works comprising narrative and poetry, essay, photography, oil painting and sculpture, and video.

To speak of abandonment suggests a withdrawal or relinquishment of influence, the exposure of a physical or social structure to the dereliction of time or a cessation of protection. It can also describe a state in which one is given over to forces beyond oneself - the extreme highs and lows of the human condition. Above all, the act of abandonment implies transfer - something orphaned is passed to another controlling agent, something is gained. Understanding abandonment not only as a binary, final state but also as part of a natural dialectic incorporating positive and negative elements has been critical in developing this edition.

Contents

Always-Already - Anna Simmonds [dialogue]
At the Entrance to the Arcade - Stephanie Bolster [topography]
Bifurcate - Ramón Galindo [overlay]
Collie Lane - Shannon Doubleday [recollect]
Erorr [sic] - Aaron Anstett [unease]
Estacionario - Vanessa Oniboni [embodiment]
Holism and the Gestalt - Stephen Levy [refutation]
Inwendig - Maribel Oldigs [placement]
Isolation - Karen Ann Myers [retreat]
Oradour-sur-Glane - Sharon Jefford [evidence]
¿Por qué, Por qué? - Rafael Andreu [assimilation]
The Three Gorges - Jade Ireson [inundation]
Transición - Natalia Guarin & Vanessa Oniboni [vector]
Usos y Desusos - Catalina Salazar [montage]

Please go to www.dispatx.com for details : we will announce a new theme for exploration in December 2005

If you would like to be removed from this mailing list, please let us know.

dear potential commenter

(which reminds me of the theme of non-existence),

Due to spam comments, you will need to decipher a blur of letters before submitting your insightful flashes. Think of it as "risk management" or practice in eye-hand coordination.

Yours,
Cheryl

boob one

"oh you got the boob one?" i overheard a poet say

A Visitor's Upper Echelons

not surprisingly you talked of
subordinate clauses as your posture
doted on its own arrogance

wingéd elbows
beside your nape-cradled head
the caldera between your legs
a site for rutting elk

the tree outside matched,
and was a match for,
your red shirt, I glimpsed
back into your head
and was lonely there

of course

I don't want to name names...so, N. elbows me to say my blog is bland and dried-out and I reply "what about the archive." How useless a response I know because we turn to the blog to see the latest blurb and jottings but I can't seem to keep up. I can barely keep up with sleep, which seems more necessary. Sleep. Rest your eyes for a moment.

Have you? (so phatic, a new word that I have learned. I make learning these words transparent.)

I tried. And I have tried to go to sleep and sleep cajoles "nice try." As so the blog begins to tease me much the same. Who is in control here? When the telephone rings I remind myself that I am in charge of deciding to answer it. The ringing phone is not my master. Discpline is a ciphen.

N., I hope I've done some justice. Yet, I've drifted from my subject: the fascination with "of course." No. When I wrote that poem I hadn't read that other poem. So, how is it multiple people are driven to repeat the expression "of course."

Its earliest meaning was a nautical term...oh, so many nautical terms that seeped into our speak...and then it took on the meaning of "customarily," and, most currently, the meaning of "obviously," which is also often used as an emphatic affirmative response that stands alone. I am butchering this progression. Let's turn to OED for the earliest indications of this latter meaning of "obviously":

1823 J. D. HUNTER Captiv. N. Amer. 39 She made some very particular inquiries about my people, which, of course, I was unable to answer.
1838 DICKENS O. Twist xxxiv. 266 You will tell her I am here?..Of course.
1861 M. PATTISON Ess. (1889) I. 32 It would be easy, of course, to exaggerate this truth of the continuity of history into a falsehood. Mod. And you were present? Of course; why not?


In these jottings I rest for now. In "of course" we stand alone emphatically but we are in a current current, apparent waves, and we question what's customary.

May I only blog in bogs of sleep....

beginning this entry I am reminded of my diary when I was eight

this week's entry would say:

recently I moved, got married, started grad school, had horrible experience with Enterprise Rental Car

then:
need lightbulbs, figure out how to put my bike together

then add:
someone asked about my poetics

I said "to erase"

on the go

Hey, I'm in the midst of a move so I will blog when I settle in a bit more.

Poematic

Do you want online magnetic poetry? If it barely gets used on the fridge, you could try here.

Spies

Subway:

Your eyes
Your ears
Our security

Your eyes
Your ears
Our security

Supposedly
I've joined
some team


Moving on...


Computer:

settings
hijacked

Familiar spy
Suspicious spy
reason to believe
small or large

familial spy

Summer, Revising more

I keep trying to approach this peice. Not sure if previous version was holding a center. I was interested in the language of the beginning, but it may be of a different poem.


Stirred up

We the jalopies
playing on the driveway
flirting with the dart board foraging
the red dot, unlikely
given a melodious limp wrist
(the handbrake)
and mode of transport:
synchronicity, wild flowers,
first sighting of a minnow trap
... slowly recovering
its genus from a less than
steel-trap headwhirl
where minnows were
erroneous birds
thrashing about their wings
inside mason jars.

Creeley

Not unlike many others, I've been spending a lot of time with Robert Creeley's writings. I remember his reading on the porch of the Longfellow House in Cambridge when he talked about Acton, MA and read his poems about his travels abroad--(at the moment I can't remember the collection). More recently, I had signed up for his workshop in July at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, but you know how the story goes...

There is an excellent video of a reading and conversation with Creeley on April 1, 2004 at the University of Chicago. He tells a great little story about leaving a jazz club one night! See Video of Creeley reading.

May good company continue...

Collage

As I was packing, I found this collage.

Summer, revising

Some changes thus far.

Stirred up

The manifesto (a misnomer) grew tired
before it raged. The worry wart
you burned off. The sliver
you buckled under, born-again
complainer given to rise to fist fight
with the neighbor kicking back a cool one:
a better-not juggernaut. A mandate
for training: training wheels for man.
A truncated version of the mandate:
Modulate, modulate, modulate!
We the jalopies playing on the driveway
flirting with the dart board foraging
the red dot, unlikely
given melodious limp wrist (the handbrake)
and mode of transport: synchronicity,
wild flowers, first sighting of a minnow trap
... slowly recovering its genus
from a less than steel-trap headwhirl
where minnows were erroneous birds
thrashing about in mason jars.

Summer

Hello, here is draft of a poem from today. What the heck!

Stirred up Summer

A mandate for training: training wheels for man.
A truncated version of the mandate. Modulate,
modulate, modulate! The manifesto
(a misnomer) grew tired
before it raged. The worry wart
you burned off. The sliver
you buckled under, born-again
complainer. Ward off fist fight with neighbor
imbibing a cool one: the juggernaut.
We the jalopies playing on the driveway
flirting with the dart board foraging
the red dot, unlikely
given melodious limp wrist, and mode
of transport: synchronicity, wild flowers,
the minnow trap that slowly recovered
its genus from a less than steel-trap
headwhirl where minnows
were birds thrashing about
in mason jars.

Maine

Blogwise, I've been quite inactive. Otherwise, quite active. I just returned from a 10 day camping trip in the White Mountains in Maine. Hung with the moose!

"From the cool cisterns of the midnight air/ My spirit drank repose;" writes Longfellow (born in Maine), which isn't why I went.

I'm also thinking of Forrest Gander and Kent Johnson's striking new translation of Jaime Saenz's _The Night_, which begins
"The night, its rack of antlers twitching in the distance..." (Check out the 7th edition at Mandorla.)

I am now preparing to move so pardon the sporadic bloggin'. I will post soon! And I need to fatten up my blog skills like creating links and "sidelines." Ciao!

Shorn

I own no bed or cooking ware or sheets or utensils or sofa or couch. I have books and bookshelves, and I'm not even sure I'm going to bring the shelves. I'll make my own shampoo and cleaning detergents as long as I remember which mixture of elements don't combust. These are my daydreams of frugality and I have incessant nightmares of disappointing and annoying and angering everyone I know or threw away. I am unable to wake up from their tisk-tisk. Waking myself up from nightmares is on my I-would-love-to-learn-that list--not to mention...isn't the point for it to go unmentioned? All I want is to drink sake and bourbon and moonshine. They move me. Unfortunately, I'm not drinking liquor, coffee, or any caffeinated drinks at the time so I could be chosen for a sleep study for $1,000. Waiting to see if they will select me resembles my version of Miss America. Will they pick me? Flossing makes me new. Every once in a while curly hair comes back. I keep going funny though nothing seemed funny today. I keep going wacko and nothing was funnily wacky today. Am I in someone else's landscape?

Lezama Lima Quote

Lezama Lima Quote
Originally uploaded by cherword.

Not Even a Ditty

Submission Rejection note:

Better luck
when dead

Hopscotch

At times, I take some prior ramblings and revise in the blogsphere. Here we go.


Hopscotch is the Savior

amulets and bird droppings
the cardinal at my door
adamant
for me to screech into the playing ground of a furrowed field

just as there is no "I"
in team (so it's said)
there's no "u" in footwork
(so it's never said)
it's fatal nonetheless

take me for what I am
big willy soft spot
rake me for what I am
some perrennial in the hour of planting
to sprout in some other year
some other texture
claiming your saviour
with a "u"

Carve

Now available! CARVE 5 April 2005 Cheryl Clark Richard Caddel William Corbett on Richard Caddel Jordan Davis Guillermo Juan Parra Stacy Szymaszek 32 pp. Visit Carve

take in fatality

there is no fiction when
unrelegated pronoun is blessed to return
to the midst of hopscotch

hopscotch is the savior


what could protect you

amulets and bird droppings

the cardinal at my door

adamant

for me to screech into the playing ground of a furrowed field



boxed up poker face selling for my demands

"fast spacer" key (lament lament)

de-morphed into sculpture


take me for what I am

big willy soft spot

rake me for what I am

some perrennial in the hour of planting


i'll come in some other year
some other texture


claim your saviour
with a "u"