ÿÿÿÿÿost habitable. I didn't like people sitting so near, but I let
her stay.

She looked like she wouldn't last the night.

Between stanzas of a bellowed ode to the abolished apostrophe, we carried on a desultory, disjointed banter. Such became our customary vis-a-vis. It didn't matter very much.

Somehow we both badly needed it not to.

Which would've been fine, except for the plague rain. The streets rippled with olivegreen slime. Attendance went down. Her poems carefully omitted all reference to that hue. One of us was certain to die.

I dreamed of stripped cars burning, lost in fields of broken glass where each particular faceted shard returned her image. The dreams did not progress. How could they?

I related how all the street signs had become for me jumbles of unpronounceable scramblegrams, & she responded by inviting me to share a raspberry-clove cigarette outside on the fire escape. Under a maroon plush sky the pullulating or abandoned quarters of the city seemed only so many clear or dust-shrouded star lanes, & a personage of several turfs, such as yours truly, could be seen as a sort of modern voyageur...

The pillar, crisscrossed with pinkish Xmas lights year round, equivocated as we departed the huge, gloomy echoing chamber of measureless apprehensions. Outside the chill bit into us. My fingers welcomed the tiny shell of heat emitted by the ember end of the saffron-yellow cylinder. The smoke, however, raked my lungs like an inhaled holly bush... "Tell me more."

Before us the lights of the city melted together & separated, in uneasy waves. I said, "We come here each to find our niche in a collective illusion that's different from the usual one. Nothing more." Her fingers brushing mine seemed colder than the cold.

I remembered a snarling two-headed angel statue I once encountered at the end of a dim blind alley in Prague. Its touch had been as unexpectedly cold. --No, its gaze: as unexpectedly intimate.

"Well, I'm not interested in anything so counterproductive," she muttered in a piercing monotone. Pushing back one lace sleeve for me to see, she unveiled a network of paler smooth lines that zigzagged the pale smooth flesh. I couldn't tell, in that crepuscular pinkgold flutter, whether they were souvenirs of suicide or vicious needle tracks or, just possibly, something worse.

"One does not renegade religion. You only end up inventing your own," I slowly answered. If she recognized my quote of Graywyvern, she gave no sign.

We went back in without further word. The kretek glowing balanced on the black iron rail. Someone was reciting a drab list of atrocities onstage. Our tables were as we left them.

Two weeks later, after a harrowing day involving the towing of my Oldsmobile, I had resumed my station in that corner of vantage. Almost without realizing, I had come to require the other table filled. Cassandra came near, her tattooed scalp raw in a new place. She stood a good distance away & addressed me. "That new chick is strange."

"Oh?" I said, & laughed. "She listens to everything. She watches all of us. But she never does give anything back." "What do you mean? She goes up there. We all do." I felt evasive.

"You know. In her poems. Not a word about anything we recognize. Whatever world she's in, it's not ours." She shifted stance, crossed her arms, which were also tattooed, in vivid cartoon characters. "That might not be so bad," I said. "Think again," was the automatic reply.

Her name, as it transpired, was either Belladonna or Archaeopteryx. The smells of the city excited her; she told me so. Where did she emigrate from, that such a thing could be true?

"I am from Southern Roumania/ I was a mogul there," one of her poems began. "I was a peasant/ Who made good..." This I very much doubted. Another time I inveigled her into coming home with me; the upshot of which was finding, on the drafty mezzanine that led to my garret room, my neighbor Grue Juliette already knew her & greeting us then, the shadows pressing close & the smoke of incense staining our poet-garb, she called for a spontaneous threesome, which ensued. Not without hilarity, bongs, & a device I had never seen before, but grew to appreciate; & the night gave way to a dawn of colors, through the broken windowpanes, like rags left by a circus. Skin dead white, the feel of sheets that needed washing; an exhaustion beyond movement, & an amity prior to words. These would have been good days, if only we could have forgotten the unpleasant sense of imminent doom that hovered over every table, every bed. I stood on the next landing down, shivering, with a sudden touch of mortal acuity. Juliette only tolerated me when she was chemicalized; clearly, my date had been the lure & I feared less for the rivalry of a better poet, than for the sanctity of her secrets I had a right to, more, as one who had also suffered strangely.

"Where are you, Puckster?" called a croaking voice from above. I wanted to go back, felt it in my marrow like a craving for candy. Instead I continued down.

When the night returned, our true game resumed.

Warmth dispelled, & even its possibility seemed inscrutable & fantastic. "You were quick to skedaddle," however, was what she said. Her fingers interlaced above a glass of something turquoise. It was early, no other poets or few had arrived yet. "I couldn't think of what to say. Does that ever happen to you?" I unfolded the sheet of paper I carry on my person at all times, & began to write. "You have words now," she said.

The walls were covered with bad paintings crookedly hung. I thought to myself that they were like images of the dreams we would have been having if, instead of this closed, dim half-life, we had chosen another; one of sunshine & night diamonds. The one nearest me depicted a purple dog behind an executive desk, in a meticulously rendered office, but the dog itself seemed slapdash or cartoonish & its expression signified little beyond doggish good-humor. I turned my gaze to the next one, but there wasn't enough light to tell even if it was an abstract or a picture of something. For some reason my eyes remained riveted on the cloudy square. "The hare has lost his spectacles," I finally blurted.

"This poem is about the smell that old vacuum tube televisions from the Fifties used to have/ A sort of clotted, hot dust smell," I was reading from the stage.

This was another night, or the same one later on. Cassandra & Speed Racer waited their turn from the edge. I saw Belladonna, or Smoke as I'd began calling her, far in the back, staring intently. It was as if she knew I was writing about her (now that we no longer spoke); & this connection, tenuous & precise, we both understood to be the only one possible for Whigs such as we.

Her secrets had become mine. Her poems simply told the life of things, from those things' own perspective; & this telling took the form of intervals & positions, juxtapositions & the nearness of absences. People did not figure in them at all except as passing shadows. When I finished reading, she listened just as raptly to the next person. Even the intensity of my fear had not touched her.

I found I could only maintain normalcy by the pretence she was dead. I wrote elegies for her. They were the best things I'd ever made. Outside, an abandoned car was burning. Orange & green flickers lit our eyes. It was hard to go back in.

Brokendown bodies in brokendown cars. And these words, helpless, feral, like maggots.


PART 2

Her funeral caught me by surprise. How many of us had gone, flailing & raving, into the fell beyond, while behind them remained that sempiternal chorus of malingerers, these compeers of avid illness? But she did die. I was shaken, though i strove not to show it.

Glistened the raindrops, ever augmenting, fast on her lustrous ebony lid; rose our keening voices above the tumult of traffic. "Let this end our dazzling numbness," said one eulogist. "Nay, we shall never feel anything ever again," chimed in another. I took my place, shivering. I never got used to these things.

Even at my twenty-seventh.

I had ceased to declaim, as you know, at Open Mike. Tonight i knew better. "For awhile he rocked with his yard inside her cunny," i read, "till /Fearful of dislodging the glove, he desisted. Her/ Hand closed on his around the moistened knurl,/ As together they withdrew it." Applause.

Lies. This had happened instead with a stranger, whom i'd met at the funeral & implored with reddened eyes till sighingly she acquiesced. Later we'd sent out for artichoke heart pizza.

The club, unchanged & immutably rank, bathed us in its rich squalor vibes. If anyone could be said to be happy, we were. "He watched the droop, as awkwardly he scrambled/ To the chrome basket next to the bed. It/ Seemed to signify the passionate futility/ Which passes for our lives, but also/ Merely a length of flesh, needing to be/ Washed."


##

Mutazilites.

" In the end, all of those feelings crumbled away as she read the last letter from her deceased son. I began feeling a sympathy I really didn’t want to feel, and as she was walking in the streets of Washington, looking at the protestors and crying, it struck me that the Americans around her would never understand her anguish. The irony of the situation is that the one place in the world she would ever find empathy was Iraq. We understand. We know what it’s like to lose family and friends to war- to know that their final moments weren’t peaceful ones…" --Baghdad Burning

"ON ZOMBIEHOOD"

'From the power to transform him into a thing by killing him there proceeds another power, and much more prodigious, that which makes a thing of him while he still lives. He is living, he has a soul, yet he is a thing. A strange being is that thing which has a soul, and strange the state of that soul. Who knows how often during each instant it must torture and destroy itself in order to conform? The soul was not made to dwell in a thing, and when forced to it, there is no part of that soul but suffers violence.'--Simone Weil, "The Iliad, Poem of Might" (in: The Simone Weil Reader, ed G A Panichas, 1977)

1. Zombies are vampires without the poetry. Nobody wants to be a zombie. If the secret of the zombi myth has already been discovered, sensationalized, then cast into oblivion, there remains, beyond the kitsch of zombiedom, a metaphor that still has us in its teeth.

2. Descartes thought animals lacked feelings & defenestrated a cat to "prove" it; the practice of infant circumcision depends upon a similarly-unsubstantiated idée fixe; zombies, of all adversaries, feel nothing--not even the pain of their final rendering. They are empty vessels animated by what appears to be blind hatred, a tireless compulsion to attack. Immediately one is reminded of that archetypal predicament, a driver among other drivers in traffic, whose communications are limited to feint & honk, & whose desires seem to have dwindled to a futile but incessant effort to get past the driver ahead. The driver will never finish his race. The zombie will never be satiated.

3. Zombies come out of nowhere, they don't remember how they got that way, or what their name is now. And the assembly of zombies is a tribe without a history. Their zombieness is a given. How is this any different from the consumerist monad, faced from day one with a landscape composed of dollars & packaged things with prices? Whether puffer fish venom, voodoo, a virus unknown to science, or the invisible hand of the market, something set this army on the march.

4. Why don't zombies fight each other? Zombies are like the separate ants of an anthill. Together they embody a single tyrannical will, a will that cannot be dissuaded, only overwhelmed by superior force. The zombie tide. The proliferation of zombies is a parody of procreation. By killing people, zombies make more zombies to kill more people. It is obvious that in a world with zombiehood, ordinary nature is at a standstill. The paralysis of nature is the triumph of the zombies. Though zombies may be defeated for now, there will always be another zombie movie.

5. The betrayal of love is the anguish of the zombie movie. This anguish is only quelled through murdering the loved one. Zombification is stronger than love, but murder is stronger still. Love exists only to be betrayed or at least threatened with betrayal. This radical disquiet outlasts the zombies' defeat. Forever after, a kiss will echo the bite of the teeth of the zombie. The only certainty in a world gone mad is the act of murder.

6. To flee from the devourer is ancient instinct & a primal necessity. But zombification is not natural selection because it contains no procreation. It is nature's antithesis. To imagine the true counter to zombification is to imagine the reclamation of human beings from zombiehood. This possibility does not exist in the myth of the Zombie. Just as Capitalism does not envision any alternative save other devourers, to be defeated by capitalistic means. Everyone is a zombie, or else food for zombies.

7. But people do have feelings, even as unwilling components on an assembly line. Most of all, it is by their fears & insecurities that they are made to act as competitors. In every worker & in every moment of consuming, there is a contest between zombification (giving in to rapacity) & a truly human response. For "zombies" are only the way humans in aggregate are seen to behave; in fact, as a corporation (which is incapable of discerning individuals) sees us. The myth of the Zombie is a story about how we seem to our creation, the capitalistic corporation; & while this is true for the corporation, it is utterly false for humans. The myth of the Zombie is an exile-myth which does not contain the existence of any (social) condition to be exiled FROM.

8. What solace is it to harbor, even for the length of a movie, the myth of the Zombie? Its principal audience is teenagers, whose condition--of bodily alienation combined with their ordained role as nonproductive consumers--makes it easy to conflate metaphorically the two. It seems to authorize the process they are undergoing; & its catharsis is to allow them to vent their revulsion toward their own terrible desires & powerlessness.

9. By identifying with the humans who are able to defeat individual zombies, they can believe that in this universe of infinite zombification, there is yet shelter for another kind of consciousness. But zombies, who have no language, force their opponents to engage them at the same rudimentary level; to become, also, killing machines.

'Suicides prefigure the far-off fates of humanity. They are harbingers, and as such we must respect them. Their hour will come; they shall be celebrated, given public homage, and we shall say that they alone, in the past, had envisaged all, had divined all.' --E M Cioran, The New Gods (tr Richard Howard, 1969)

10 09 03

"Companions of the Morass

I have seen also your angel,
In the isolation where we had descended
To frequent the naked heart.
Many a time a dove from the thorny branches,
And now one dewy, feathery, tender,
From your eyes will start.

The earth is heavy, and the clouds drop rime,
And night descends without stars;
What does it see, white creature, what do you see, O eyes?
For so at the innocent lady's feet
The blond, the young, delicate ones of heaven,
Stare on the pretty, painted skies.

It is a ground getting demons, but we call no honest demon,
We cannot conjure the swart breed;
The brooding devil at our heels has trod,
But it is he, lord of the circumscribed pit.
Here where holy and unholy are as weak as water,
We encounter the damned god.

It is said, by pinioning the angels
They keep the terrible footway; it is said,
The hardy have traversed the morass,
They that cast out devils to live without sin;
But we, coming between the devil ashamed
And a strayed angel, shall not pass.

How shall we forsake this angel and this devil?
You bottomless tarnished lustre,
And bosom pressed upon the hollow cloud,
How do you visit us, symbols without body?
We are weak earth, we run before the wind
By which our hearts were bowed."

--Léonie Adams

Listening to: Live Rust.

God's Chinese Son.

Jem and the Holograms.

names

for what

hasn't gone yet

09 15 04

couldn't

happen here

until it did

09 15 04

"Richard Nixon was the last Republican leader to feel a Christian obligation toward the poor." --Garrison Keillor (via Poetry Hut)

"Little Hans

Each sockeye of adulterous claim
The prawns which is, which cannot be
In I, like others, surds the name
Enamel edge antimony.

The weight that Sandinistas flip
Where spoons before a face I face;
The squeekers of the Squares that rip
Pedantic antic paragrace.

In words like cannot cannot choose
A glass rim's rhyme, vertiginous;
The hands (which) signal/ize & lose
the closet porcelain to us.

Though ears rang from the nose that broke
No longer there as asterisk,
Three feet above the artichoke,
Spit sunspot's claused in amethyst

Pentameters, that blunt the thumbs
And mark for models this disguise;
As succulence a calmed benumbs
The mumps of noise that nieves surmise.

Claustration's plank? But plot's bemused
And line, that on a thigh stays sure,
Abstracted in a fold, refused
The buckled logic sauteed through her.

If these are risks took parallel
To moon and Hymen's Plato Blinds
Inside a phallus--asphodel
Glebed metaphysic's double binds

When so I climb. Apostrophize
With concept "copper." Symbolize
The bobbin's sort und da while sighs
Not eyebrows, grammatologize.

Recovered (or "recouped") Sublime,
A cultured ordeal cut apart
In intervals of terms that time
The onomastic Bonaparte.

Electrostatic fields?...but "smell
Still IS (an Aristotle spelt)
That represents "noun's caravelle"
In contumed space--an uberwelt.

The syllables place formal pace,
The way sperm dictums lumps not sum;
Defined as minds that crants deface
As if the why not had come

To obfuscate as insight why
The themes conventionalize the drinking.
The macrophysics of the lie
Locate a choired symptosis thinking

Speech is the way i fry my eggs,
The bald sarcophagus that disappears
Some jazz, the hypotactic legs
In diaphragms of arrears.

Frond's cullisance returns a plum
And am I am is all i tries
Cathected through each axiom
The postcard fiction signifies."

--Steve Mccaffery, in: Messerli op cit

Thirteenth Floor Elevators.

Mamapalooza.

Birobijan.

Sasha & Zamani.

Farewell Aaron. (via wood_s lot) More.

Listening to- Korean Court Music.

d4c d4c d4c.

What the hell...

Contest.

New Beard of Bees.

Boris the Blue.

A Tale of Three Zines.

"Having mastered the art of verbal invention to perfection, he particularly prided himself on being a weaver of words, a title he valued higher than that of a writer; personally, I never could understand what was the good of thinking up books, of penning things that had not really happened in some way or other; and I remember once saying to him as I braved the mockery of his encouraging nods that, were I a writer, I should allow only my heart to have imagination, and for the rest rely upon memory, that long-drawn sunset shadow of one's personal truth.

...At the beginning of his career, it had been possible perhaps to distinguish some human landscape, some old garden, some dream-familiar disposition of trees through the stained glass of his prodigious prose...but with every new book the tints grew still more dense, the gules and purpure still more ominous; and today one can no longer see anything at all through that blazoned, ghastly rich glass, and it seems that were one to break it, nothing but a perfectly black void would face one's shivering soul." --V I Nabokov, in Nabokov's Dozen (1958)

"Military-Humilitainment Complex" (Meredith)

For fruitfullest advancement, eye a mark
Fast as windy flame devours,
For the thirst of our nature brine.

The love is here; it has but changed its aim.
Where a robber raven's tale
Joined along the plains of dew,

By serpent Apollyon blest:
For flash, much more for push, of arms.

09 09 04

"You know, sometimes you have to lose a lot of Q-tips before you realize you have a hole in your head." --Cintra Wilson

"As I thump away on my delete button each morning, I find myself pausing at the poem that says it will rid me of poetry, and I often feel I'm being offered a glimpse into a kind of M. C. Escher print in which the iterations continue on forever into some golden braid of mist and meaning." --Pantaloons

Brush Up Your Censored. (via wood_s lot) --I have to say, this is the scariest list YET.

Losing America.

'Well? Does the pallid metalloid heal you?
The civic, incendiary metalloids,
bent over the atrocious river of dust?

Slave, it is now the circular hour
in which your two auricles become
guttural, quaternary slip rings.

Mr. slave, on the magic morning
the bust of your tremulous snore
is seen, at last,
your sufferings on horseback are seen,
the good organ goes by, with its three handles,
I leaf, month after month, through your monochord head of hair,
your mother-in-law cries
making little bones out of her fingers,
your soul bends passionately to see you
and your temple, momentarily, marks time.

And the hen lays her infinite, one by one;
the earth comes out beautiful from the smoking syllables,
your picture is taken standing next to your brother,
the dark color thunders under the bed
and the octopi run and collide.

And now, Mr. slave?
Do the metalloids work on your anguish?'

----Cesar Valleo, The Complete Posthumous Poetry, tr C Eshleman (1978)

The Fourth Turning--in 1997 i thought they were exaggerating.

An engine that runs on coincidence.

Words i picked up: "dykon"; "post-ethnic" (about a person of indeterminate race).

Listening to- Bebop Deluxe: Live in the Air Age.

"The lipstick is coming off the piglet." --The Jim Side

A Mire of Words.

(Dowson & Auden)

Days yet unlived, I almost lived again;
Our wobbling way: there's a white silence
We gather and entwine.
Only I have no work
Lest the loud anguish of the waters should efface
That last landscape
Neobule, fain of sleep,
Theology and horses, our home become
A place of shadows utterly,
Inscribed on skies, escarpments, trees,
Just a little longer,
With the yearning unicorn;
That I may tell it like a rosary.

09 07 04

"Instructions in Emperor Worship" (Riding & Tennyson)

To make the day an hour longer.
With self-wrought evil of unnumbered years,
Yet nothing runs like prey.

You flash and lighten afar:
You lone survivor on paper,
There, while the rest were loud with merry-making.

The poppy edifices of sleep,
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
At the dissolving border,

Get thee hence, nor come again,
Where wing on wing folds in
Short fits of prayer, at every stroke a breath.

And you may write it as it seems,
All in a fiery dawning wild with wind
Amidst seeming speed.

Because the scale is infinite.
One shivering midsummer
The parrot in his gilded wires.

Will rise the secret, will flower up
The weight of all the hopes of half the world,
To the perilous margin, moment.

But till this cosmic order everywhere
What feel and fragrance?
Springing alone

if I perhaps such same fatality
Or else I dream--and for so long a time,
That strangeness is not strange.

Then, on a golden autumn eventide,
As it will lie unread,
Let visions of the night or of the day

The reasons, then, of this one, that one,
Come not, when I am dead,
To know how poor, how less than full

That most of them would follow wandering fires,
And no new harvest to fraction sowing.
Heard on the winding waters, eve and morn

Whose grace goes out in utmost rings
Upon the last and sharpest height,
A thousand years and more

And heard the Spirits of the waste and weald
And words below a whisper which
Before us, and against the chapel door

Hunger went.
O me! what profits it to put
Call within call

Receive, and yield me sanctuary, nor ask
Because I sit here so,
I am but as my fortunes are:

The shallow terrors, waking never far.
And all at once should sally out upon me,
Claim the conjectured corpse

This conquers: hide it therefore; go unknown;
For loyal prophetic heat
With promise of a morn as fair;

Whether the plight more ours,
And soil'd with all ignoble use.
Aura of tattered hopes

Be merry on earth as you never were merry before,
The immeasurable areas of distress
And each of them is wholly arm'd, and one

The wind takes, not the earth,
I only ask to sit beside thy feet.
One flower I saw, one I didn't,

And left me gazing at a barren board,
If this be I.
That makes me maudlin-moral.

To their momentary finish in
A ghastly something, and its shadow flew
To this awakened not forgetting.

Forever and forever when I move.
Glory the mirror and the beauty;
And, making there a sudden light beheld

The upper air usurping
And others' follies teach us not,
The dogs still bark,

Waiting to see me die.
Or were otherwise insane,
And moving thro' a mirror clear

All that was like enough to now
What is it that I may not fear?
And dear the evil name;

Beside the never-lighted fire.
The reason of the saint that he is saintly,
About the flowering squares, and thick

Nor speaking coruscation
The snake slipt under a spray,
An hour was taken

Go by, go by.
For love of hell is empty
If any care for what is here

There is much that we have not to be.
We stumbled on a stationary voice,
I know

For the mighty wind arises, roaring seaward, and I go.
There were never covenants:
O there above the little grave,

Love has no elsewhere.
But that remorseless iron hour
And the ventriloquist gulls,

We saw not, when we moved therein?

09 04 04

Become a Member of the Elephant Art Club.

The Cure in Mexico.

$125 for a first edition Farewell to Arms? Hell, the dust jacket's worth that much!

The Devil's Bookshelf.

Song covers & centos resemble each other in communicating indirectly, by the arrangement rather than the ostensible content.

If Dubya wins i think i shall give up the letter "E".

The artists i like are too prolific for my budget! Elizabeth Hand has a new book, Bjork a new album--& me, the same old shortfall.

The opposite of selfpity is honor, not self-esteem.

Listening to that famous scene in Double Indemnity, it occurred to me that those who are looking for great American poets, are looking in the wrong places...

(Tennyson)

I was cut off from hope in that sad place,
Lost in the quagmire?--lost to me and gone,
There kept it, and so lived in fantasy.

The sad mechanic exercise
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
In lieu of idly dallying with the truth,

And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
The sound not wonted in a place so still
Such waste and havoc of the idolatries,

The narrow street that clamber'd toward the mill.
A long melodious thunder to the sound
And lost to life and use and name and fame.

09 04 04

"DRAWN BUT NOT SKINNED; A Cento by Jeff McMillian

Tonight the mean winds of November
have begun to blow Indian Summer away,
pointing you north and north against your will.
North is easy. North is never love.
Without a shield of hills, a barricade of elms,
one resorts to magic. It is called breaking out
of the ground and it is done by force.

On the wind like something out of Leviticus,
a bat quivers across the porcelain of evening,
deep horror of eyes and of wings;
more come in watery flocks,
each one woven to the other like bubbles
in a frozen pond.

The dance winds through the windless woods.
Fires started by lightning make up the telling
of men: we were the fine shavings of sheepskin
mercy and love were not.
We for whom grief is so often the source
of our spirit's growth, whose veins Death
the gardener twists into a different pattern,
wonder, "Out of such numbers how will I be noticed?"
Whether caring accomplishes anything is irrelevant.
Every angel is terrifying.

It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life,
and this is the key to it all. There is a wisdom
that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness.
It is all you have and all your father had
and all your brothers. We live in
an old chaos of the sun, one sun,
one journey here and everywhere,
of that wide water, inescapable.
At evening the diminishing of the dance,
no, not night but death, makes constant cry:
Disturb even a seed sleeping and you harvest stones.
It is called breaking out of the ground and
it is done by force."

(Shakespeare)

Insulting tyranny begins to jet
And bury all which yet distinctly ranges,
To villainy and vengeance consecrate,
To desperate ventures and assur'd destruction.

And caterpillars eat my leaves away;
And botch the words up fit to their own thoughts;
I am a tainted wether of the flock,
Never was such a sudden scholar made;

To nothing but despair. A thousand knees
Rot and consume themselves in little time.
With an untitled tyrant bloody-scepter'd,
To second ills with ills, each elder worse,

But I will sort a pitchy day for thee;
Which is as bad as die with tickling.

09 03 04

"In the Forest of Estrangement"

our knowing of the rats
and that stark gnawing sound
at night
not to call it what it is

too long afraid
till all is scary and wrong
all but this phony flag
as if it could hold us

apart

as if it could
in storm or ruby flow

09 02 04

"The Revolution might write sestinas about us, but never vice-versa!" --Martha Zweig

Ecstatic Permutations.

"Gender Characteristics

so we had a few drinks
and I was telling him stuff about
my childhood and after a while he said
that sounds like penis envy to me did you
ever wish you had a penis and I said no
but I wish I had an ovipositor so I could
parasitize my enemies and infest them
with my larvae and he decided
to sit somewhere else
in a different bar."

--F. J. Bergmann

"When we are exiled from the order and unities of culture, language, ethnicity that make up the great smooth national narratives of history, we are cast out into a multicultural, multi-lingual, multiethnic 'non-nation', an empire that frustrates our need to narrate a descent from origins and forces us to confront the lyrical unevenness of our lives. This is a confrontation that from time to time, for good or for ill, we try hard to avoid. ...the medieval [is not] a moment of past time since transcended but [] a metaphor for a kind of [artistic] practice that defies the national culture paradigm." --Walter G Andrews. introductory essay to Ottoman Lyric Poetry (1997)

The War of the Senses. (via wood_s lot)

"Empire commits us to the continual violation of our own standards. " --Christopher Lydon


"...These songs of freedom
Is all I ever had..."

--Bob Marley

Covers- The Three Suns: "Colonel Bogey March".

From my notebooks-

Aristophanes: Homeric centos in 'Peace' 1090-1094; 'Frogs' 1264ff; 1285ff; 1309ff.

Hosidius Geta (late 2c. AD) wrote a tragedy of quotations from
Vergil "Medea" (461 lines; which may be found in Poetae Latini Minores, vol. IV)--& started a fad.

In the reign of Septimius Severus (180-211) "...in poetry this period produced nothing but Vergilian centos".

V. Faltona Proba (c. 351): 700-line Vergilian cento summarizing the Old & New Testaments (Jerome said: 'puerile').

Ausonius (310-394): 'nuptial cento' (naughty).

Luxorius (c. 530): "epithalamium Fridi"--this has actually been
translated.

Then there's the Empress Eudocia's...

"The earliest extant patchwork poem in English was published in 1775, written to celebrate Shakespeare's birthday." --Werd Trix

Thomas Gray liked them.

Mark Strand made one from Fitzgerald's Aeneid.

The Tradition Continues.

A Masque in the Form of a Cento.

One by Robert Mezey.

A cento from Leonard Nimoy (!!).

A few more.

Listening to- Fats Waller ("Giants of Jazz" boxed set).

Lethal Memes.

"...what if, say, IPods could mate with one another?" --Raccoon

"And, as I think of it, a human mind could, and should go through
just such a ransacking, occasionally; for you don't know half of
what an accumulation of rubbish is kicking about, in its dark, musty
corridors. Old fashions in thoughts; bigotry; vanity; all lying
stagnant. So why not drag out and sort all that stuff, discarding
all which is of no valuation?" --Gadsby

"On Olive Waters Askew"

Through waxen window, Mercury in retrograde;
Stares Quasimodo, Mercury in retrograde.

We sterve within craptacular weather Reason's made
Its very shadow, Mercury in retrograde.

Unfolds the Dance of Death--& strung through it renegade
One loco torpedo, Mercury in retrograde.

Graywyvern was by Stego tracks & slub betrayed,
No desperado: Mercury in retrograde.

08 31 04

"Seven Games of the Rood" (for B. K.)

Foolish pangs, the glow
Intenser for the rain outside.
The twin suns sink behind the lake;
The afflicted warriors come.

They little thought how pure a light,
And we sang dirges in the dark
As the ceiling blew away
My ashes in the embracing mould
And fast in chains of crystal
We sleepwalkers never age

And strange moons circle through the skies.

08 28 04

The Diebold Variations. (via Metafilter)

Plague of Locusts. (via Scrupuli)

"Poets have been known to be smug about their fine uselessness, but the Vietnam War led many poets of my generation to try to use poetry to make something stop happening. We will never know whether all that we wrote shortened that nightmare by one hour, saved a single life or the leaves on one tree, but it seemed unthinkable to many of us not to make the attempt...we produced a great many bad poems, but our opposition to that horror and degradation was more than an intellectual formulation, and sometimes it tapped depths of bewilderment, grief, rage, admiration, that took us by surprise.Occasionally it called forth writings that may be poems after all." --W S Merwin, introduction to The Second Four Books of Poems (1993)

Does this mean FLARF is over?

A poet risks leaving this trace in the someday Collected Works.

A poet risks being found out by the readers.

A poet risks becoming a symbol & never read otherwise.

A poet does not risk oblivion. That is a given.

Blobjects & Wrangling Spime. (via Rebecca Blood)

---------------- Begin Forwarded Message ----------------
>Subject: to Michael Helsem from a "bourgeois artist."
(snip)
>I am an artist showing at Artist' Showplace.
(snip)
> I know where I stand right now,since I my own worse critic as I sit behind the
>easel, striving to produce work with not only technical excellence, but also
>emotional and "psychic" content.

i couldn’t ask for more.

(snip)
> I joined the Artists' Showplace to gain exposure while I work hard to improve and
>build a body of work to approach other galleries in the area and nationally.

commendable professionalism. i’m sure there does exist a market for it; & i doubt anything i say here will hurt your chances there.
(snip)
>...gallery, which probably means you aren't impressed with any such work anywhere.

that isn’t necessarily true, but when faced with walls & walls of indifferent views indifferently executed, i admit it takes something extra special to stop me in my tracks. Van Gogh once stated his conviction that a canvas covered with paint HAS to be worth more than a blank one. there appear to be many of this persuasion among us...

>I find this very tragic, since your words are read by many people out there who
>look to something like theDallas Arts Revue to gain insight on what the visual art
>world in Dallas has to offer.

it would be tragic indeed if i regarded any medium or genre as inartistic in itself. (the closest i come in that regard is contemporary country music--but after more extensive exposure, i did start to like a few particular songs.) and if people came to Dallas Arts Revue & found nothing but nicey-nice blurbs, i wonder if they’dreally trust anything said there at all; whereas dialogue & debate, it seems to me, better indicate a flourishing arts scene.

>Representational art is not something to be thrown into one category
>called "bourgeois art."

it was revolutionary when Courbet did it. “the party on the left/ is now the party on the right”.

>With every piece I paint, I aim to stike some chord with the viewer's emotions, and
>much thought goes into design, values, color contrasts, edges, etc., to achievethat
>special something that makes a viewer relate in some way to that scene. This is why
>I paint, and I do not believe for a minute that my I am less of an artist for
>this.The last thing on my mind is toproduce something to decorate a yuppie
>suburbanite's Pottery Barn living room.

if there were no other pictures in the room, & no other destinations clamoring outside it, some sort of pleasantly unfocussed relating to that picture would be guaranteed. the real context is quite otherwise (see below)--& it’s part of the artist’s unenviable task both to realize this fully, & to try to overcome it. Auden once stated his ambition was to create something that a man on Death Row would not feel insulted by. i don’t know that he often succeeded; i do know that once having understood this thought, it’s very hard to take seriously any art whose only goal is to furnish a career for its manufacturer.

>I know that I speak for many fellow artists, such as Kevin Macpherson, Alexander
>Titovets, Clyde Aspevig, David Leffel, Matt Smith, Desmond O'Hagan--- the list goes
>on and on. Or do you even know these people?

‘fraid not. i do realize there is a considerable subculture devoted to “traditional painting”, & it wouldn’t surprise me to find someone even as good as Norman Rockwell among them. (i LIKE Norman Rockwell.) what does surprise me is that in a world full of an almost infinite number of things that have not been painted yet, & an even larger infinity of ways of looking at & presenting those things, the few people still interested in representation seem utterly content to reproduce typically artistic subject matter--without even introducing (as far as i can tell)
either their own immediate experience as nonbucolic city-dwellers, or their own anxieties & desires as 21c. citizens in a world of shattered foundations & mind-boggling enormities. i would welcome these things being painted. their decisive absence is what makes this kind of painting “bourgeois”, not the style of it.

>Maybe you should do some reading up.

you know, as much as i despise commercial films, i am not infrequently amazed that they continue to come up with a product, however conventionalized, that i can still relate to. that’s because, in spite of the belief that viewers want nothing but escapist fantasy, they will go ahead & fill those escapist fantasies with realistic images of human transcendence & suffering. contemporary novelists, likewise.

i have yet to meet a representational artist who even knows what the “Ash Can School” was--much less, wants to pick up where they left off. --m.

>Judy Gelfert

Malaparte & his house, the subject of a coffeetable book.

Why bother to counterfeit a ten-dollar bill?

World on Fire.

Country with no Name.


“AN ISLAND IN THE HARBOR

My own country my countrymen the exchanges
Yes this is the place

The flag of the blank wall the birds of money

Prisoners in the watch towers
And the motto
The hopes of others our
Guardians

Even here
Spring passes looking for the cradles

The beating on the bars of the cages
Is caught and parceled out to the bells

It is twelve the prisoners’ own hour

The mouse bones in the plaster
Prepare for the resurrection”

--from The Moving Target (1963)

“A Similitude of the Garden”

Oblong light * & old sirens
Still follow * here in the stern
Erased node * neighing limbec
Rogue imam * & mystic train

08 26 04

“A cento from Thompson & Merwin”

O Halcyon! was thine auspice not of rest?
This is now the house of the rain that falls from death
The stealthy terror of the sinuous pard,
as it bore in bore in rapidly
Then laid upon the snarling sea;
melting and freezing in silence
Now all things show amiss;
On hewn feet I follow the hopes of the owls

08 25 04

“A cento from Cranch’s Virgil”

Stormy Orion rising, on blind shoals
And waves consumed in vain. Of what avail

Our sad disasters, and in brief to know
The serpent tribe, the poison-breathing snakes,

Furious, with bristling back, while none may dare
And, building altars on the shore, you pay

And to our tables come as welcome guests.

08 25 04

“A cento from Susann & Merwin”

You’ve got to climb to the top of Mount Everest
the tracks lead out through tall milkweed
It’s a brutal climb to reach that peak,
I would rather the wind came from outside
You never knew what was really up there
Where I am walking even now
You stand here, waiting for
A description of darkness
it doesn’t come.

We are the echo of the future
And there’s no place left to climb.

087 26 04

A thousand days America's held prisoner

And nightly raped in the basement dungeon.

08 28 04

“DATES

i.

Fish.
Bequeath fish.
Able to state papers.
Fish.
Bequeath fish.

ii.

Worry.
Wordly
Pies and pies.
Piles.
Weapons.
Weapons and weapons.
World renown.
World renown world renown.

iii.

Nitches.
Nitches pencil.
Nitches pencil plate.
Nitches vulgar.
Nitches vulgar pencils.
Nitches plate.

iv.

Hopping.
Hopping a thunder.
Credit.
Creditable.

v.

Spaniard.
Soiled pin.
Soda soda.
Soda soda.

vi.

Wednesday.
Not a particle worker.
Aider.
Add send dishes.

vii.

Poison oak poison oak.
Stumble.
Poison steer.
Poison steer humble.
Prayer.
Irene.
Between.
Conundrum.
Come.

viii.

Wet yes wet yes wet yes sprinkle. Wet yes wet yes wet yes sprinkle.

ix.

Thicker than some.

x.

College extension.

xi.

Pass over.
Pass over.
Pass.
Pass.
Pass.
Pass.
Pass pass.

xii.

Not a night sight.
Pay sombrely.
Are and n and no and pail. Are and n and no and pail. Are and n and no and pail.”

--from The Yale Gertrude Stein (1980)

Cold War.

Supermarionation.


“A cento from Francis Thompson”

1.

The flying fringes of the sun’s cloak frush
The garrulous leaves among!
Young Century, born to hear
His dear nonentity--
The obdurate seasons thwart;

Sad tree, whose perishing boughs
Through the unsustaining ether.
In thy feasting-flagon’s impurpurate glows!
Her Muse, that died with her auroral dews!

Whose amethyst
Songs cannot hymn in.
This outworn vesture, tenantless of thee,
When the stars pitch the golden tents
And all so sickened is his countenance,

A silvern segregation, globed complete
To lie as in an oubliette of God,
In this Avenian sky,
And as it came,
Yet thy child still?

2.

Fate, in her extreme blindness,
Ere Winter throws
Or if these levies of impuissant rhyme
Carveth all too painfully,
Behold, I pace amidst the gloom:
With double potence of the black and white.

3.

O Halcyon! was thine auspice not of rest?
The stealthy terror of the sinuous pard,
Call up a burning blot:
Of destinate verse.

Why should amazement be our satellite?
The blank desert, blank and tan:
Let even the slug-abed snail upon the thorn
Then laid upon the snarling sea;

Star gathering.
I, the boundless strict Savannah
Now all things show amiss;
All the savour, all the touch,

Behind this dim and mortal jelly. Ah!

08 25 04

“The Scream, Stolen”


If they haggled the pilgrim mirror
Made off with cypress windmill
The suicide doors of viceroy Neverland

Black Kalashnikov
Not darkness
Vultures loose of art

Let Dubyastan receive its radint witness
Let loves torque
In the shadow of radiant harm

Pour pilgrim exiting ink
The last exciting

08 23 04

Listening to: Brain Salad Surgery.

The Coast Salish are referenced in the movie Black Widow.

Another cover- Lena Lovich: "I Think We're Alone Now" (in Japanese).

A comment my computer wouldn't let me post:

as one who selfpublished for years & also put out a zine, i know that the main difficulty is actually not finances but distribution. how many times have i been told a bookstore won't stock my book because "it didn't have a spine" or an ISBN number? (since when did Bowker become God?) i'm afraid those bloggers who haven't been through small-press hell can afford to be skeptical about this new medium, but to zinesters of old (i.e. the 80's) the Internet has been an improvement in every respect.

on the theoretical level, i also approve of the obliteration of the distinction between "published" & "unpublished" this tends to foment. such distinctions nilpertain READING anyway--they're more about the snobbery of Who's In & Who's out. and i don't see why it won't erode as well the whole Romantic identity of The Poet (along with every other form of irreducible selfhood) which is not a bad thing either: "The Poet" having become the principal commodity of poetry-writers, we will have to start doing SOMETHING ELSE for OURSELVES (poetics, anyone?).

"My childhood was a police state full of jackals." --The Hounds of No

Meanwhile, in an alternative fiscal reality... (via A Ghost of Mine)

“A cento from The Hawk in the Rain”

Now he rides the morning mist
Too tender to let break, start to the edge
And walk away from it. Closer than thinking

Yet is he monster.
Instantly beak, wings, talons crash
The diamond point of will that polestars

Unconscious under the shock of its own quick
Nightmare of command in the dawn, and a shot.

08 17 04

Add to my Heavy Metal list- "Run to the Hills" by Iron Maiden.

Reading- Persepolis.

" 'If one were as rich as those people! They pass so close to us; they see us, and we see them; but the distance between is infinity. They don't belong to the same world as we poor wretches. They see everything in a different light; they have powers which would seem supernatural if we were suddenly endowed with them.' " --New Grub Street

An effect, often seen in 20c lit, but uncommon in films: what i call meta-irony, or an abiding ambiguity as to whether something that occurs or is said, can be intended ironically or not. This i was reminded of, while rewatching the Coens' Miller's Crossing. In some ways it has become almost axiomatic, in 21c. poetry... Which means, for those coming after, we "have some 'splainin' to do".

The Welsh figure dyfalu (a series of variegated metaphors pertaining to a single subject) & Mallarmé's (supposed) procedure of describing
its effects & not the object itself: & then, by degrees, one progresses to unconnected sequences of metaphor, as the metaphors each become more & more far-fetched. This as a norm. Then, whenever the subject of a metaphor seems guessable, there is an incursion of meaning, which causes the reader to suspect the whole is a Symbolist poem, & not a nonsense poem. A different kind of knife-edge.

Looking at the cover of Tracey Ullman's album, it suddenly struck me to wonder whether, like Sandra Bernhard, she actually performed each of these songs in a different persona. (How much more interesting Pop could be!) --It's so much easier to believe in heteronymy, when you are a musician; pretending to be sincerely emoting, from the start, is a kind of mask already.

Translations as song covers.

HG Poetics sent me (via Hotel Point) to this Kentjay link: which
mentions the Aymara who, curiously enough, are rumored to have developed a "three-value logic" & as such, became the object of an attempt by the redoubtable Dr Llambias to render their system into Lojban...

"EPSILON

"There broken vows and death-bed alms are found
And lovers' hearts with ends of ribbons bound,
The courtier's promises, and sick man's prayers."
Pope

Tunnels honeycomb the Moon. In them men fly. Relieved of five-sixths of their earthly weight, arm-flapped wings of a condor's breadth suffice. They spend their lives in this labyrinthine tomb. A hundred years from now, they call it Heaven. Jasper was one of them.

Greatly he loved winging, from the moment he drew back the lacquered lid & gazed upon his personal pair the color of fire, through the careful adjustment of velvet armstraps, to the first deep tunnel-breath. He stood on the ledge of his tiny but elegant grotto, savoring the cool humid gym-smell of their reprocessed air. Down below were streams of traffic. He fell.

Winging always gave him this: a sweetness like freedom, & then the compulsory dreaming.

Jasper's birdphones immediately began to guide him through the busy multilevelled flow. From immemorial practice his muscles responded to every shifting nuance of the music that steered him & each of the others, the unceasing hymn of ornithopter flight. It emanated from deep within the heart of the city Orphalese itself: a huge computer devoted to no lesser task than the one great hymn. They call it the Bird Brain.

A part of everyone's day being taken up in service to the rapt following of these broadcast commands, a rushing array of entrainment, they all needed little else of communion, & spent the rest of their time in sundry private pursuits. Jasper painted.

He was painting when Sylvia came to visit.

A gust from her stagey arrival made the bells on the iconostasis tinkle. He turned his head slightly & saw her cloudy silhouette, like a word still unspoken. "Jasper?" she said when he hadn't stirred. He closed one eye & all was red; he changed to the other & blue reigned. She heard him sigh, & tried another name that he sometimes answered to.

"There are too many colors," he said finally.

How taken for granted these splendid aeronautics, embodiment of the ages' desire, the danger too a thing of no moment, only to wing among the others & emulate them. He never even heard the voices in his ear anymore, nor saw the rough-hewn walls of their cavern flickering crossed by a hundred thousand shadows. Jasper in winging instead sometimes imagined the pictures he would paint, oil paintings given eerily ambiguous three-dimensionality, through being painted in red & blue registers at once, entwined or opposed as the spirit took him. This he had invented himself.

True, he never yet had produced an image worthy of his thought. He persevered.

Sylvia without the special glasses on would see only a confused mass of colors. And she would ask him mockingly about this or that portion. Was it really finished yet? Shouldn't he do something about the way these clashed? And he could only respond, Put on the glasses.

No more, no more.

She held up one hand, palm toward him, & asked, "How many fingers?" "Six," he said grimly (it looked like four). "You'll wear out your peepers in this light." (She knew it was nothing physical, or they would have given him new ones.) "It's the only light there is."

Once, when they were still lovers, he had painted her all over with body paint. That was before his breakthrough. Or her betrayal. She turned in the mirror, eyes full of sharp-edged laughter, & said nothing. He brought her instead her wings. On the ledge they'd embraced hungrily, & then leapt off in unison, her arc a little smoother & more shallow.

Now she studied his latest picture. "There's so much here I don't understand," she said in a new voice, one that almost sounded as if she were looking into abysses. Hushed (he had become quite acute of hearing). But what could he answer? That as his sight dimmed, his vision increased in power, in grace? "How can what you intend ever find its way into visible expression, if your hand doesn't know if it's holding a brush of pale red or pale orange hue? I know, I know, you tell me you remember, but aren't nuances the very substance of your art,--of any art? Be honest, you paint as tumblingly as now you wing."

He shuffled to the doorway & let the breeze lift his indigo hair, a tinge of resignation in his nonchalance, like a scumble of gray over brown. "My peepers get in the way sometimes Sylvia--the way the body of a lover can interfere with the deepest feelings of your love."

"I won't follow these crooked flights," she said after a pause, "but this body is still in your way, if you'll turn around."

She left his food wrapped in a hundred-year-old shawl.

Orphalese, inverted city, hollow within that blasted orb where no one anymore even goes up to scuff the lifeless regolith; Orphalese, divided into zones according to the chosen hue of their lunar wings--this city he found himself now slowworm in. His wings gathered dust as his blindness snowballed. There were hardly even handholds on the walls of the cavern, in fact, so his course zigzagged from eyrie to eyrie (connecting the dots); while the others winged in geometric vectors. Yet he began to feel for the first time that his huge rock-bubble home was really real.

He let his nails grow into climbing claws. Spidery conversations by filtered earthlight, costume to costume, now took up his time. Everyone was wearing the black polkadot on red motley of a Ladybird Beetle. Had quit counting the black cigarettes whose golden filters they left spent on the floor like cartridges. For it was Imbolc.

Their principal talk is of the newest heresy, para-Koreshism, the twist on which is to have that looming blue globe at most a sort of optical derangement, for their world in reality was to consist of a single great hollow concavity, within an endless depth of solid stone. This Jasper's fading vision might aid in believing, but he could never shake that crucial exchange with Sylvia, long enough to entertain any lighter heresies.

Her lover of old had returned from final devivement.

Lawrence Welk's harpsichordized rendition of the "Exodus" theme greeted him as he cleared the stone doorsill with difficulty.

"Jasper! old droog," cried a familiar hoarse richness. "I heard what happened. Zounds!" Gandalf guided him to a table, & soon he tasted the mysterious reminiscence of an "Alexandrian" (one part blue curaçao, two parts green Chartreuse) cocktail, sweet & heady as a late unlooked-for love. The music changed, not disagreeably. They sat at the Poets' Table, unoccupied at this hour. "Speak," said Gandalf. His third eye, surgically implanted & optically irrelevant, regarded Jasper with a fixed stare.

Jasper considered the matter. Dawn-shadows of some unimaginable catastrophe, or mere jealous delusion? First, one does not return from the grave like that. No way, no how, no algorithm. Starkly true that Sylvia had lied, or the cad himself (yclept Phoebus Phoenix)--or else the machinations of LunoPangenesis Ltd!? "She says they'd already called it quits," he offered. He could barely make out a turquoise blur near his hand. It radiated chill without his touching.

"Then what's the tsurris?" "How much wiser to choose a corpse over one whose future is stasis & futility," answered Jasper in a croak unmoistened by all sweet liqueurs; "I know what I know." And later, when the purloined arclight made like original earthshadow, who was there to say it wasn't enough?

"Death have no dominion? Dominion is death & death, dominion. That's all." He gazed at the bright mirage of an entrance. Much later, & nearer to the last eclipse, he remembered this moment as a bitter talisman & unheeded warning. Sylvia had become a ghost, who wandered freely through his moods & stumblings, without ever breaking his clasp or quite filling it. His last picture burgeoned. Its turmoil frightened her till she learned not to look at it. They made love with a tapestry across it, figured with spectral arabesques, a dwindled malison. They spoke little of Phoebus, & she never in fact met him again. But they did hear of his bizarre celebrity.

Jasper dreamed, not of flying but of falling.

"Of the many things you have taught me," she used to say, "some you shouldn't have: & until your illness I only knew how to love one way. Now love is a chorus of contradictory voices, all harmonized by the fear of suffering. Jasper, I've realized something terrible. I don't want to watch you become an empty shell. I don't want to watch myself betray you."

More passionate than ever, they touched helmets in the pitiless vacuum. "I shall found a sect of Koreshians who worship your shadow, perhaps. And perhaps too I shall just forget I ever encountered that evil painting."

PART TWO

Often he would hear her songs passed on by others, who visited him in the cave now he never left. Her lyrics proclaimed the end of an age of secrets, but her music withheld all closure; & this was itself a kind of secrecy.

Each visitor took away a little more of his sight. After a point, it is said, he either died by his own hand or someone else's, to do his bidding. But this takes us too far ahead of the story. For she did return to him, once, before the end.

He was auditing a frail black platter of Penderecki, fabulously rare & expensive. "Almost angels," she remarked of the tormented choir.

"What? Ho! Who's there?" He peered in the wrong direction.

"Sylvia, when you knew me."

"I know no Sylvia."

"That is so."

"I tried," he said falteringly. "No. You didn't try. You fled from a second attempt." She moved closer in the candlelit fastness. "Let me tell you a story."

"More & more the tunnels become constricted, narrowed then completely blocked by repairs & meaningless construction of arbitrary barricades; finally, the population of flyers will be reduced to circling barely each in his own length. Heaven will depopulate, space exile for the ones unable to bear gravity. What was I thinking, there never even existed a colony on the Moon. Back in the twentieth century, a hundred years ago, the point was reached where they either had to choose to continue to explore the planets, or waste their wealth on guns & bombs & you know how folly always wins. You know which they chose. We were never here, we never flew on the Moon."

"I seem to recall something of the sort," he admitted. Her eyes shone with a pearlescent rigor.

"And you, you cannot meet Phoebus for he is yourself, risen from the grave; & you aren't even dead yet. You see the difficulty."

"What was it we loved then, in the spaces between the stars? That desert more than desert, those questions we only shatter ourselves against?" "Have you forgotten, Jasper? You painted it." They turned to the shrouded image.

Before their eyes it changed. They saw the world, a seething hierarchy of balanced forces, a maelstrom in incessant transformation. They saw the strand of human-entelechy come spiralling out of the center of the picture, making itself more separate & more prominent, extinguishing many others so that it could proliferate & itself diverge into different strands, which then struggled each to impose its own style & milieu. The outpost on the Moon flickered briefly, part of Man's ongoing lunar reveries...the furious efflorescence of fossil fuels & technological exploitation one huge flash in the pan, then all the following centuries of global poverty & spiritual exhaustion, the song that burns, the apology never delivered...

They saw themselves, & all they might have become: Phoebus the shadow of his blindness; & cars in the daytime driving with their headlights on.

PART THREE

Hurtling out of the morning glare, under the blast of noon, at crimson eve cars driving, driving, like Diogenes--with their headlights on in the daytime."

--Clutch Cargo

More song covers i forgot: Melanie's amazing "Ruby Tuesday". Juice Newton- "Angel of the Morning". Elton John- "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds".

"Tennyson's 'Fatima' (1832) is a cross-dressing poem, in that it speaks from the woman's point of view." --Margaret Reynolds, The Sappho Companion (2001)

And what about Sonnets from the Portuguese?

The forgery of a Dickinson poem by Mark Hofmann is the subject of The Poet and the Murderer by Simon Worrall: "The Bible is an antique volume--/ written by faded Men..."

"Intermezzo: Venetian Nights.
I. Veneta Marina

The masts rise white to the stars,
White on the night of the sky,
Out of the water's night,
And the stars lean down to them white.
Ah! how the stars seem nigh:
How far away are the stars!

And I too under the stars,
Alone with the night again,
And the water's monotone;
I and the night alone,
And the world and the ways of men
Farther from me than the stars."

--Symons

Heteronymy as the Olympic drug scandal of Poetry.

Geometric Nubian Orator.

Harry Partch's World. (via Click Opera)

"I don't feel anything for the Democrats other than the total fear of them losing. Kerry not being elected is the full moon that will allow Bush to werewolf completely into Scott Stapp of Creed.

President Stapp. That'll be a sweet ride, eh?

Monkeys will be declared unconstitutional, the state mandated petticoats will only come in blue, and Michael Moore's upsidedown crucifixion will only be available on Pay Per View." --Dong Resin

Cho on Eminem.

"A Cento from Pale Fire"

No furtive light came from their involute
Snails leave on flagstones; this good ink, this rhyme
The crowding gulls insufferably loud,

But always present, ran through me. One day,
Part of your shadow near the shagbark tree.
And then there was a kind of travelog:

Spied on it yet. Now I shall cry out as
Who's climbed the Matterhorn. The other piece
A hint of angels, and a glint of stained

08 17 04

Tauchnitz.

A Concrete Renga.

"...the real, not the calendar 20th century ended yesterday too."
--H G Poetics

Napoleon the Novelist.


"A cento from Glenaveril"

Caged in a topaz with a blazing dome.
Nor was it from that visionary grot
His vast vicarious journey over seas
Of those illimitable realms that rest
(For the Subjunctive Mood's an autocrat)
Too late to be repaired. As his distress
Of dainty bells? Who knows? in every scene
Along the hedge the honeysuckle flings
And who is injured if it chance to fit?

08 16 04

Heavy Metal in Iraq. Iraqi Popular Poetry. (via Cursor)

An ocean's phantoms surge
Bellicose in my mind
A sort of dreamy dirge
By all the lurking things that crawl
Behind the light

Verily i would purge
Myself of these unkind
Accompanists who merge
With fathoms in the crystal ball
To bind the light

But i must still indulge
Or else my shores are blind
And hurl me only bilge
And leave me as a wizard thrall
Maligned by light

08 17 04

Listening to- Aida (Zubin Mehta, 1967).

"Flippancy, the most hopeless form of intellectual vice..." --New Grub Street

Finally got to see "Europe After the Rain". This was my favorite painting when i was twenty or so, & when i went to Europe i looked for it in all the great museums i visited. I never suspected it was in Connecticut!

At the same show i discovered Florine Stettheimer. (I also saw a great portrait by Salvador Rosa, but that doesn't seem to be online anywhere.)

We ARE lost--what's scarce is clues.

Hats Are Coming Back. (via Languagehat)

Timeline. (via Miekal)

"It seems to me that the modern public prefers its poetry sung.

That doesn't surprise me, anymore than that they also prefer movies in color with sound, to silent ones in black and white.

I myself like silent movies on their own merits, but I have no illusions that there are going to be great artists practicing this medium ever again.

In the light of this argument (to which I can find no answer) the squabbles over verse or free verse seem rather petty." --Ernst Kipling in Eratosphere

Meanwhile, in Najaf...

Reading- Maus I & II.


Translation: driving a truck when you're used to a car.

A Cento from Stevens.

This looks interesting: An Intimate History of Humanity by Theodore Zeldin.

Transits. (via A Voyage To Arcturus)

"A few days ago her startled eye had caught an advertisement in the newspaper, headed 'Literary Machine'; had it then been invented at last, some automaton to supply the place of such poor creatures as herself, to turn out books and articles? Alas! the machine was only one for holding volumes conveniently, that the work of literary manufacture might be physically lightened. But surely before long some Edison would make the true automaton; the problem must be comparatively such a simple one. Only to throw in a given number of old books, and have them reduced, blended, modernised into a single one for today's comsumption." --George Gissing, New Grub Street (1891) [I have it on good authority that movies are already being written this way...]

Titles i like from the Sports section: Planet of the Umps; When Working Out Isn't Working Out.

Who is the Grandma Moses of pop? The Jackson Pollock of Haiku? The John Webster of Chamber Music? The Michael Jackson of Sumi-e? The Laura Riding of Surrealism? The Joan Baez of Imagism? The Wendell Wilkie of Langpo? The Salvador Dali of Film Noir?

More cover songs fall into my hands:

Harmonicats- Scheherezade
Banjo Barons- Georgy Girl
Johnny Puleo- Stars & Stripes Militaire [Sousa on harmonicas!]
Sammy Davis Jr- Hey There
Hootie & the Blowfish- Drift Away
Phranc- The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
Tracey Ullman- Life is a Rock (But the Radio Rolled Me)

Other music sites i like: Minty Fresh Records; Emperor Norton Records; Circledelic. Middle Pillar Distribution. Putumayo.

Halau.

“MAD WOLF IN LUNAR WEB,
MAD CROW ON THE BEACH

A PLACE YOU NEVER THOUGHT TO
LAY SHADOW ON,
Seething in
white mist
its perennial
Nipp’d. Not for
But a violent storm
opened above us
like a flower
Maple.
You can taste a
Dubbed
to be spoken,
behind the fire-wall
Our hexed American
Refusal to size up
a crook
For what he is. Just a
Gone bushwhacking.
Ask old Mister
Strangeways what
Liminoid.
When you draw the
Wrong water you
Spill human blood and
No passing. An escadrille
Fishtailing in the blue,
the face of blue
Death staring up at
Not to grow fond

Death has done something
I’m done with fixing up
As it were a kindness
On the part of the world
What we have given it;
Slow fading and perfect
To rid the world of one more
While it passes over the
Death has done a thing
Death be damned
I spit at death
What you show
Shows at all times
Nothing but what life has
Shown you, life’s plagiarist.
Not strand of auburn,
not a freckle,
but as life’s gift.

The old
Dragon variation
I am skilled at
Wolf. Rayet
Who knows what that
Think it through
Lure of the ladyhair’s
Coma
Comet,
The cool apparition
Cold in its show
Of heat. But what’s hot
Live in the sparkling
Pushing full tilt to the
Peekaboo. It slides out
in the starlit surf
Din. Minions of the
Great Sleep say
Unstarred. Crow
Wing-walking my
way all the way to
Courage to find
through the amaze
Thread. It goes on
not if you don’t be
brave enough to
I am a fool
ed. Illusioned
ing. Fast to what
Sunlight creeps along
Shapes of the lovely
Hills and meadows
Park in morning,
Daisy, I love thee
Courage, no thing but
Courage. Blue
Scrub the
Mission for the
Moment’s on fire.
Going around afeard, well
Defies the dry
lake, the windy
sandy rivers
All supposal. We are
not I am worse off
for being hexed, in
love with Wildfire.
So most.
In slow motion,
Sure self-portrait
In mist, lost time,
A relic
Of all act and push-
Matter;
hop, track, grasp, exit;
unearth, dice, cook, exit;
burgle, array, speak, exit
prove, notch, imp, exit;
groan, off, sing, exit;
The thing’s horrid squeak.
To last forever after, all.
Because a shadow
careering
500 mph
still’s a shadow.
Quaked, too.
Because it can
turn into what
that it mocks.
How to get from
One day to the next
Without thinking.
So that the giant rock face
crumbles, the illusory
Spindrift, the rearing
Immelmans,
The rottening slow roll
Spinning in the creep
Comes to a grinding halt.”

--Mac Wellman, in: From the Other Side of the Century (ed. Messerli, 1994)

Listening to: Yes- Close to the Edge (I used to have on 8-track!)

"The occupations of my finger waves

The occupations of my finger waves.
I represent for years--for years--enough.
My people, in the channel, and a slave's.
And see the flabby devil in the cuff.

Six thousand to become aware of life.
Perhaps seen indistinctly lying curled.
And countless centuries begin a strife.
What notion in an ocean of the world.

Their glassy water, sparely peopled earth.
The colonel listened, interested at home.
It over, captain, as a mode of birth.
He echoed from within my honeycomb.

I spoke in this promotion an intrigue.
So infinitely greater than a league."

--Gnoetry (via MadInkBeard)

Listening to: Les Baxter- Moog Rock.

The Loeb Classics Page. (via Click Opera) --i sometimes think this is the ideal format for a book.(Powys was crazy about them too.)



"Do you know how hard it is to find a postcard without a confederate flag on it in Alabama?" --Vowel Movements



"A Cento from Ashbery"

The gray wastes of water surround
A great wind lifted these cardboard panels
To discover its heart. The blind enemy
One morning you appear at breakfast

To stunted memories, helping them stand alone
And cause, in the distance, an old satisfaction.
On the unassassinated president's desk
Behind a shutter, two black eyes are watching them.

08 10 04

'As in the case of the newspapers we had received, we did not believe anything we heard on the radio concerning military affairs or foreign relations. We considered that we were listening not to live broadcasts but to tapes made by the Americans, who had deleted or altered anything unfavorable to them... At one point, Kozuka remarked, "When you think of it, the Americans are really good at this, aren't they?" "Yes," I replied. "They have to take out anything they don't want heard and then rebroadcast it in almost no time. ...Just one slip, and the whole thing would sound fishy. I take off my hat to them. It must be very tricky work!" Later, when I found out that the broadcasts had not been faked, it occurred to me that it had been "very tricky work" indeed for us to read into the news broadcasts the meanings we wanted them to have.' --Onoda, op cit

'One difficulty with the Japanese language is that it has many words meaning "I" and "you", and they have to be chosen with care... In the Japanese army, the common words for "you" were kisama and omae, both of which can easily sound insulting if not used with caution. We dodged this problem by using the Tagalog words ako for "I" and ikao for "you". I tried very hard not to say anything that would make Kozuka angry, and he did the same toward me. ...our world had a population of two, both male...' --ibid

'If he [Suzuki] had not been wearing socks, I might have shot him. But he had on these thick woolen socks even though he was wearing rubber sandals. ...I came to the conclusion that the young man must really be Japanese.' --ibid

Virtual Ummah.

A Jazz Pflugelhornist from Nanaimo. (via NPR)

Sundazed is reissuing classic & obscure psychedelica--including some on heavy-gauge vinyl.

Matraquage.

Listening to- More Songs About Buildings and Food.

"A Cento from Southey"

Perils which threaten'd still, and arduous toil
Of clamorous joy re-ring: the rocks and hills
Relapsing now, and now again unclosed.
For peace is with the dead, and piety
Perverts the ordinance of God, and makes
The full orb'd moon, that beam'd around
Composed like one who sleeps with open eyes.

08 08 04

Why should the forms be privileged, that trigger a response of thing-recognition? Fleeting resemblances & partial illusions of depth accompany almost any well-tempered abstract image; ditto the penumbra of near-coherence for almost any nonlinear arrangement of words. And the need for metanarrative is met by fitting each work into a sequence of prior works that it happens to suggest. So i conclude in the end the only necessity for a mode called "realism", derives from the political will to maintain a monopoly on truthful art. Langpo, even at its most extreme, is no more unintelligible than the stylizations of ballet.

"BOWLED OVER

By kiss of death, bullet on brow,
No more life can overpower
That first infatuation, world cannot
Ever be harder or clearer or come
Closer than when it arrived there

Spinning its patched fields, churches
Trees where nightingales sang in broad daylight
And the vast flaring blue skirts of seas--
Then sudden insubordination
Of boredom and sleep

When the eyes could not find their keys
Or the neck remember what mother whispered
Or the body stand to its word.

Desertion in the face of a bullet!

Burial without honors."

--Ted Hughes

"In early 1974, an amiable Japanese university dropout named [Norio] Suzuki, who had tramped his way through some fifty countries, took it upon himself to make a journey through the Phillippines...he told his friends that he was going to look for Lieutenant Onoda, a panda and the Abominable Snowman, in that order. Presumably the panda and the Snowman are still waiting, because after only four days on Lubang, Suzuki found Onoda..." --translator's forward to No Surrender: My Thirty-year War by Hiroo Onoda (tr C Terry, 1974).

The Journey from the Center to the Page.

Joe Ahearn has a new book out, Five Fictions by Sulphur River Review Press.

Stomp proof bugs across from the end blog
A paranormal panorama cerise
With blog bling, askew

Pearly rook
Dark to write the times askew
Fathoms rook

The chronicles of cerise.
Dobry fatwa the arcane nacres
Of Aleppo rook

Pawn opening (shadow purposely askew);
Cars thick as leave flies up thick as thieves
Slag cerise

Who crave ore cerise
American torture nanoninja have
Shipshape egghead crow, merle, rook
In squamous atavistic pitch die askew

08 07 04

Your Moonie Dollars at Work. (via Metafilter)

Soldier-Artists of the Civil War: Edwin Forbes; Conrad Wise Chapman.

Shuppies.

Imaginary Labyrinth.

I Gave My Love a Kerry.

I wondered what that was about. (va Metafilter)

‘Night

Imprisoned
By a myriad
Of lights from Hiroshima,
Pinpoints scratching my eyes.
Moist scar-folds winding
On the glossy keloid skin of puffed up tissue,
On the muddy street smelling of entrails
Floppy buds sprouting from seared trunks
Of trees along the avenue.
In depths of drizzle, a woman’s
Eyes grow redder than cigarette ends;
She does not seek to hide
the festering
Scab on her thigh.

Ah Hiroshima!
My virility
useless
The A-bomb has crushed it--
Desires gone impotent
In the night, the barren women,
The sperm lost in the dark.
The A-bomb Victims Inquiry Building
Looks pregnant, squatting
In the shadows of trees in
Hijiyama Park leased and glittering,
Its arc-lights eclipsed by the
Bright tail-lights
of American cars:
The placenta leaves the womb
While the tempo of Los Indios
Echos from the desert
Of New Mexico.

The trains,
their broken windows
Boarded up like
Blind eyes,
Rest under the station roof
Where even the news
(Coy tonight) blushes
At sunset, telling
Of a second, a third,
A hundredth A-bomb test.
Blood dripping
Down from somewhere a drunk
Comes staggering down
The dark riverbank
From out of a creaking barge
A gangling soldier suddenly rears up
The evening tide covers the footprints
Of scrap-iron scavengers
Stealing up from the sea.
Across the sky something swishes
Metallic blue like a moth
From night to dawn
From dawn to night again
Far hanging light
Caught before falling; and
Anxiously trying to forget
Lights like dropping fire-flies
Flickering light, dying light,
The lights ofHiroshima
Dragging blood, seond by second
Drawing away from that day
Seeping up from nowhere.
In the darkness of History
The lights of Hiroshima
Teem quietly below.’

--Toge Sankichi

How much better it would be, if instead of invading another country, we'd just used that money to buy everyone with a driver's license a Vespa--& a turntable--?

Covers, versions. A Thousand Acres as "King Lear"; Clueless as Emma. Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare. Jeffers's "Medea"; & Mark Cullingham's Jeffers... And what about "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead"?

Listening to: Dir en grey.

Some Poet-Painters:

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

D H Lawrence

Sylvia Plath

Wyndham Lewis

e. e. cummings

And of course Michelangelo & Blake.

Pollution Level Red.
Nieman’s: the rich in black pajamas.

Many people know that W S Merwin spent years of rustication in the French countryside, but it is a revelation all the same to read his Mays of Ventadorn, one in an interesting new series of literary travelogues. I previously advocated poetry criticism on the model of Poets in a Landscape, & this volume certainly fits the bill. Merwin delves into the Occitanian language & medieval history to produce a vivid portrait of the troubadour Bernart de Ventadorn & his mystical courtly culture.

“The city changed hands between competing factions so frequently that the inhabitants could not agree, when it was all over, whether the number of these occasions was as low as fourteen or as high as nineteen.” --Ronald Hingley, Nightingale Fever (1981)

Found a Sam the Sham & the Pharaohs record. I hadn’t known he was from here (--like Question Mark & the Mysterians, another Tex-Mex band from Sixties Dallas). I was always fascinated by the custom car this band drove, featured in a car magazine (one of the first i ever bought) from the days when bands--even one-hit wonders--had to have their very own unique means of transportation.

"We might feel that pan-Maya ideologies are, in a strict sense, "invented traditions" based on imaginary reconstructions of past culture, but it is not easy to dismiss them as "inauthentic" if they are capturing the imaginations of large numbers of people and becoming their cultural traditions as far as they are concerned." --John Gledhill

"Smart" movies for stupid people: American Beauty, The Usual Suspects, Memento.

A different list of song covers at Mosses from an Old Manse.

Paintings by a Synaesthete. (via Metafilter)

"The entire queue/
clapped, and proclaimed as one: "You is Da Man! "

"The grounds keeper apologized profusely but said that they were bringing in an average of almost 100 bodies a month this year to his graveyard alone- where was he supposed to bury the bodies?"

" 'This deep relation which music has to the true nature of all things also explains the fact that suitable music played to any scene, action, event, or surrounding seems to dislose to us its most secret meaning, and appears as the most accurate and distinct commentary upon it.' " --Arthur Schopenhauer in: Joseph Lanza, Elevator Music (1994)

"Symons's The Symbolist Movement in Literature was translated into Japanese quite early in the 20th century. In Japan it became a sort of critical bible. The young Korean poets had some English and less French. Most of their translations seem to have been made from Japanese texts with an eye sometimes on the English." --A Handbook of Korea (1990)

Some of these song covers are glimflashes; & when i consider a band such as Big Daddy or Laibach (with its Stalinist chic--a kind of camp that is disturbing because the corpse of Stalinism hasn’t quite cooled yet) i am led to thinking of such exercises in musical heteronymy as the Beatles’ “Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts’ Club Band”, Bowie’s “Ziggy Stardust”, the soundtrack to an unmade Logan’s Run sequel, & (which i just saw in our store--in the glass case) Zappa’s “Ruben
and the Jets” album. And then, the novel Norman Spinrad did, as by the science
fiction writer Adolf Hitler, The Iron Dream. (Also, BTW, to a topic i hope to return to, the movie-within-a-movie device & its uses.)

On the one hand, in our marketized culture, every artist is to some degree playing themselves in quotes, especially with the tease of confessional pseudo-intimacy; on the other hand, the basis of our high culture is the Romantic cult of “sincerity”. I think the greater the fictional basis for the disguise of the artist, the more they approximate a deep cultural context such as all traditional art once possessed, & which in 20c. art got lost. This is why people immerse themselves in alternate-worlds, systems of counter-discourse: either as esoteric blixen, fantasy fiction, or the more kinetic surround of RPG’s. Poetry, however, has invariably refused this
option--even when the role of the avant gardiste might have permitted it. (How much more acceptable the wartime broadcasts of “Uncle Ez” would sound, if we didn’t have to think Pound meant them seriously!)

Khlebnikov, Pessoa, Borges, Spicer (especially After Lorca)--Umbrist saints; a 21c. whakapapa.

Complementarity Revoked? (via Metafilter)

Hate is Up. (via Orcinus)

Of course, as soon as i’d posted my list of cover songs others began crowding into my brain. First of all, it was seeing an album featuring the Living Brass’s “Indian Reservation” that set off this whole train of thought. (I now have the record, & it is every bit as awesome as i could have expected.) Second, digging through my record collection has caused me to revisit Joseph Lanza’s Elevator Music. Then, the gods have responded to my 25-year prayers by giving me a mint copy of the only collectible Jackie Gleason album, Lonesome Echo (because of its cover by
Salvador Dali)...

Emerson, Lake and Palmer- Toccata [4th movement of Ginastera’s 1st Piano Concerto]
Jethro Tull- Bouree [Bach]
Miles Davis- Concerto de Aranjuez [Adagio movement]
Streisand- If You Could Read My Mind
Harmonicats- Love Is a Many Splendored Thing
Bill Justis- Cast Your Fate to the Wind; Alley Cat
Sheryl Crow- First Cut is the Deepest
Esquivel- Nature Boy
John Zorn & Naked City- Peter Gunn Theme
anything by Clara Rockmore [theremin], or the Koto Connection
Perez Prado- Blue Tango
Arthur Lyman- Blowin’ in the Wind
Jerry Goodman- Perry Mason Theme [violin!]
Martin Denny- Clair de Lune; Take Five
Chim Kothari- Guantanamara [sitar]
Gus Vali- Aquarius [flute & xylophone]
Electronic Concept Orchestra- Atlantis [Moog]
Pat Boone- Holy Diver
Diamanda Galas- Gloomy Sunday
Julie London- Sometimes I Feel
Gipsy Kings- Volare
Rare Earth- Eleanor Rigby
Manfred Mann- Quinn the Eskimo
Odetta- Gallows Pole [also Led Zeppelin’s]
Tori Amos- Smells Like teen Spirit
Aerosmith- Come Together
Sonny & Cher- Like a Rolling Stone
Michael Buble’- Fever
Dan & Dale- This Magic Moment
Roches- It’s Bad for Me
Ventures- Nadja’s Theme
Ace Cannon-Blue Prelude
Hugo Winterhalter- Theme from Rosemary’s Baby
Sara Brightman- Whiter Shade of Pale
Michael Hedges- Purple Haze [acoustic!]
Jimmy Lafave- Walk Away Renee
Judy Collins- Dress Rehearsal Rag
Huun-Huur-Tu: The Internationale [Tuvan throat-singing]
The Luv’d Ones- He Cried [was “She Cried”]
Dead Can Dance- The Wind that Shakes the Barley
Concrete Blonde- Everybody Knows
Johnette Napolitano- Dancing Barefoot
Roseanne Cash- River
Indigo Girls- It Won’t Take Long
Sophie B Hawkins- The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down
Johnny Rivers- Baby I Need Your Lovin’
The Baroque Inevitable- Wild Thing/Sunny
Big daddy-Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds
K D Lang- The Joker
The Lions- Happy New Year Twist [Auld Lang Syne]
Joe Cocker- You Are So Beautiful
Laibach- Let It Be
Pointer Sisters- Fire [Bruce Springsteen's]
Ronstadt- The Waiting is the Hardest Part
...& of course that Symphonic Stones album...

And a related thought: are there ever any good movie remakes?
Off the top of my head, Herzog’s Nosferatu; The Italian Job; The Thomas Crown Affair; Coppolla’s Dracula.