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.