Wednesday, December 19, 2012

COR Vol.VIII, No. II



The new Cricket Online Review is up n done. One thing is "Episodes, of mouth."


/


I want to go teach spacecamp in Turkey. And I'd like to approach the innernet with the somewhat realistic hope of finding a song by its lyrics.




Sunday, December 16, 2012

Nashville Topographical-time-plinths



Lots n lots. 


Bad news first: Jake Adam York isn't alive anymore. He read at friggin Dino's like six months ago. A personal blow as disbelief as things don't add or cohere so this proof. Dang dang, and more dang.



/


Finished Marjorie Perloff's "Dance of the Intellect," a collection of essays written some twenty years ago, but poetry, you know, stays news : poetry criticism stays it too. Also sheds light on the passage of time toward developing/defining genre/coterie within poetry. I always enjoy reading her writing on writing.

Also did Cole Swensen's "Goest," of which the second portion, "A History of The Incandescent," is a magnificent sure eccentric adventurous semi-factual engagement of some various historical narratives on the inventions of light/(s).



/


Monstrously chic liberated art diva Ellie Caudill did up Main Street Gallery over on the eastside ( events every Friday, apparently ). Hot wine, styrofoam, color, cocorosies, funschtuff.

Does one theory about a work? One can, one may, but one abolishes something in the discussion, discussion is the gradual abolition of mystique, mystique the hope for unsolvable connotation, endless emotional/psychic dimension, a singular response unquantified, enables the encounterer of art to assume a responsibility ( as translator-missionary-scout) and become as the artist. Some art resists, and some artists make their art resist.










Monday, November 26, 2012

Xmas Country / Lost Poetry Reading Remark



Yet a place has teeth. Had particles of all of it in ma teeth, and held each one ( when one is being computerless this is what one does ), dear dears.

...


The second track:




Also: Phantogram's pop song.



/...


One was that I forgot (!) to mention perchance the most good reading to've taken place in Nashville since my arrival: I think it was October 25, but Robert Wrigley read Vanderbilt with spirit, and an audience to chirp it at.

Kenneth Koch, small prosodic Ginsberg. Continuity of jolt. His poems spray volumes of themselves, deal co-directly ( which is to say, many veins are subject/ subjected to each other within a single poem, even questions the validity/relevance of that which it contains ) with the occasion of the poem, all is valid, attention to flashings that enter, man in the boat considers oceanic play off the lightning, affect the innards of poem. Assonant, sentence propulsion like synecdoche, resists the will to explan, but explains the state, the attentions.

Someone got a video of the entire affair and they are hiding it for themselves.



/...


Ol' Chettie Boy got his baby, PoetrySucks!, written up at radmag Coldfront. Represent.



/...




Saw Drive then re-saw the next night. Am sifting through Cliff Martinez's handling of many soundtracks, especially Solaris. All sorts of other stuff: book of Camus essays called "The Myth of Sisyphus," including the title track of the same name, incidentally not nearly as good as the locale essays in the book.



Christmas smoke is filling Nashville late at night, so you gotta coat up and go get it.







Tuesday, October 30, 2012

"...kisser hymns / drifted aura, silent / molar / confusions..." / Poem with Cricket Online Review



Been long, and many rows, a shark's mouth of things, really, become Fall, and now post-fall, winter's preface. My electronic Isabell, seven years old ( 139 computer years ), refuses electronic embracing, now is dormant along with my will to get her de-wintered.






I had meant to list some hot debate moments:

ROM: "Migrating bird act" / "renewables" / "He isn't Mr. Oil, Mr. Coal, Mr. Wind, Mr. Gas" /  "This is a nation of immigrants" / "currency manipulators" / "We can't kill ourselves out of this one" / "we interrupt them" / "responsible" / "we want a peaceful planet" / "responsibility has fallen to america"

BAR: "We saw adrift" / "which loophole are you gonna close?" / "gangbangers" / "when folks mess with americans we will hunt them down" / "I am the one who greets those coffins" / "those who killed us"




/




I had meant to give a report from the field of Nashville's Southern Festival of Books:

Scampered my quiet to, Nico morning, on everywhere, things above my lungs, I cawed  and bit the space near my head. & inside, people in clothes, and me, a hidden cigarette butt in my bag. We are working on pieces of longing. We can undo pieces of language, or do, and no more, covering, a place, which is to say, relocating. Awhile-region, voids.

Clay Matthews was simply bronson. Notes of Ben Learner ( A of Yaw ) in his writing. Adam Vines read some good stuff from his Coal book.



 
/  



I had meant to tell of the books now, of the music too:

Reading about Eskimos of Thule. And reading Whitman. I blame Pitch Perfect. And Freaks and Geeks. And my Beefheart.






/

 


And getting a poem, "Episodes, of mouth," to Cricket Online Review's next thang. How grand they are. Volume VIII, No. II, due before the end of the year.  







Tuesday, October 9, 2012

Hoist The Quiet Self Somewheres It Can Escape





James Franco is a Marlon Brando sometimes. I will commence to use 'Brando' as a synonym for 'dope' ( noun, verb, adj ). This is Brando:


I hear Kimya, Patsy, Kath Bloom, Jimmie Rodgers in there ( ! )



/


Southern Festival of Books is soon to be roll into Nashville like a carnival ( sure to be other ), presentations, discussions, readings. Over at Lipscomb. Friday, Saturday, Sunday.


/



I don't, on the whole, agree with the bloke ( he objects to a supposed simplification to the whole of poetry into simple dichotomy - traditional/ experimental - within anthologized poetry ... ), but I find this textured with horses, months of horses: "As the radical tendency became more and more institutionalised the writing within it has increasingly catered to an academic market demand. To me much of it now seems like a narrowing, at worst a betrayal ..." 


Riley wants a solutionesque poetry that yields, not one of parts, but of wholes: "Disruption and problematisation are terms of praise here, as if we didn’t already have enough of both of them to cope with in the world..." That mirroring, that play between banks, and that happens on the water holding them to each other, the water being the thing that carries a relation of all the thingness of things in and on the water. Often, in this a time of woe decrepitude, a legitimate photo of the world does not arrive with praise, heavy with agency, or over-infatuation of the fracas from which it is derived. Riley wants a phenomenological absence in language, vessel to be through, but not itself, vessel to carry that not effect the carrying? 


Plus the review reads like a whine, fundamentally, on the state of poetry america. And the schools ( both as coteries, and institutions whose function in Poetry is so skeletal I dismay). 


I want to mention Arielle Greenberg's article on 'Hybrid' poetics from the last American Poetry Review, go read it a bit. She wants more out of poetry, formal category smearing, intermedia things, cross-utility things, things that become, in their artistic actualization, finality, not-things. Unfortunately, until APR figures out that placing more of their content online could work too, you gotta go read it in meat-space.






Monday, October 1, 2012

Haunt The Season ( I am your plant )



Oct,

I have a baby plant ( though plants seem timeless and, thus, are never baby ), a succulent the Gambler brought upon me at the yard sale yestermorning. I cried 'Ezmerelda' and thusly she named according to my semiotic whim. It looks like Henry Kissinger, who was a baby when he was a baby.







"There are no isolated events." -Henry Kissinger




Zeitgeist, fall, transient both, but both here now. Zeitgeist will soon be disintegrated into a thousand shiny condos. How grand. Good chat with Lain York ( whose intricate statements surface other surface just below lake site atop deteriorate constructing palimpsests have been a staple of my experience of there ) on Nashville's art and re-locating the hierarchies of access to it ( gallery / warehouse : 'SoBro' / outlying areas ), ArtWalk, Hilsboro's business-integrating-art temperament, and ArtCrawl's art-integrating-business skew. 


Missed National ( Poetry ) Book Award winner Nicky Finney read at Vanderbilt the other week, puke on me. 


...

Djuna Barnes' Nightwood
Complete Poems of Hart Crane ( ed. Waldo Frank ),  
Jimmy Carter's Always a Reckoning ( ! ) 



Monday, September 17, 2012

Steve Roggenbuck





With a cautious step I consider Steve Roggenbuck. Postured, slim, and thick, a socialite, digital conveyor, a proficient of media and social media conduits. And I'm reluctant, though compelled. I encountered his daisies long back, and continue to find the pandering, audience-poking sinister. Sinister for poetry. 





Poetry has, in its functions, and blessed be it, a built in counter-capitalism, a non-commodication. Because it's constructed by its own language. Seeing Roggenbuck do well is a thing. Seeing his poetry online is a thing. The type of poetry he writes is a thing. If libraries were in airports, or if airports had libraries they would have that language. One has the other, the internet has Steve Roggenbuck. To me, his approach is derivative, Urban Outfitter Apparel cruds the celebratory crapduck whose audience is composed of e-people avatars that click around ( no, no one clicks, they tap ). Exposure ( and the hearty, unmasked pursuit for it ), ain't a part of ( it's usually oppositional to) poetry. The same way that politicking politicians are the least capable humans to form government.


He has a voice, that's certain. Unfortunately, it's not a voice I want to read much of or spend time with ( and that may be the most positive thing I can say about the writing: it's over quick, it reads fast and easy, like that song on the radio, what's its name, by that one bloke, what's his face ). 


Coteries of folk I've found in e-corridors adore him; Maybe because he's untraditional(ly a poet ), off-handed, quirky, modern (in the sense that you survey this coffee house type of modernness at coffee houses ), a hydra-thing that esteems an audience a peer-group from which to receive, first and either, consideration-dismissal, then second, affirmation-rejection. To manufacture the audience ( I've read 'community-building,' which is to say 'audience building,' in place of 'poetic dialogue' ) in a way that considers the 'they' a 'we' is a simplistic, take-back the high-art from the highs (or whatever practice/art/culture-thing from those that traditionally engage in it) maneuver that experiences cyclical resurgence every so often. Bukowski happened there. The pocket is socially birthed and socially sustained. 


All of this is aggressive, excited, anxious, polarized, I know. I think it's a reaction to media's reaction ( & other writers neutral references ) to him ( of which his writing is a portion, sure ). I've heard of this same condition befalling Nashvilleans who witness other musicians reach popularity or a bigger audience or higher ( word of mouth ) circulation than them. I understand that he understands what changes you doesn't require categorization or title. 


But what he's doing with the vicinity of poetry is a thing that is not poetry. Here is the point: he is morphing the social presence/prominence of poetry, by doing a thing that is poetic, a writing that has poetry in it, or around it. Engage in the open skewing of the thing into something/where else, ( but, christ, the thing upon which the tools are working is the thing the tools, in this case, define - and poetry is an annotation, an aside ). A superficiality that is matched by a generation of screens, a terrain that yields what you select.


This and this.




Tuesday, September 4, 2012

"... injury kept to me / attentions / the peripheries ..." / Poem in Dear Sir, & some Leslie Scalapino



Dear Sir, received and enjoyed "Town, of Furs," and might will place the thing in their ( 'edible'-themed ) #12, arriving, um, April-ish, 2013.  We sure do forget the dates this far in the future, but I'm re-minding. You re-mind, too.




August, over and done with but whose energy rolls on into the Septembers ( there should be two of 'em, like Dakotas ). And
a new bookstore ( ? ) in Nashville that you haven't told me about, or maybe you did and I was eating bread.




I prefer listening, that is something, usually commitments from more than one of my senses imbues me with inertia, passive, cerebral inertias. Leslie Scalapino does with my brains with her one front of her face. The more frenetic ones you can feel her face saying words if you put your headphones in:





Saturday, August 25, 2012

Front Porch / PoetrySucks!, So and So #7





Night before last resumed my silent presence at Vanderbilt's Front Porch reading series. Jeff Hardin read to us, he being more southern than us, us being a packed room. Mr. Hardin's swallows, lilac stems, morning dew, grass blade, dusks, ease was some thing: during the reading I had written, "HE IS A SOUTH," followed by, "tender as a tenderer describing a tender night in the tender South." The peach, that Georgian lilt, of his speech matched perfectly to his poetry. "...Ain't laff the swaytess thang..."







The two swimmers in Nashville's ( tepid ) poetry pool are Dino's PoetrySucks! reading series ( which apparently had a reading that very same night as if to illustrate the point ) and Vanderbilt's Front Porch series. 

The two are more than contrary: one coursing in the ruthless, cursing, confessionalist vein. I've seen whoops, shatters, a ( mock? ) break-up because the details of a poem were bonkers. Energetic, alcohol-cigarette-fueled, blaring, zesty, PoetrySucks! is a slick joint to get your poetry on. Vanderbilt's Front Porch is perhaps too easy, too James Taylor. ( This whole thing is about the two of James Taylor. This one and this one. ) The readers are usually extracted from Vanderbilt's faculty list ( which usually means they have health, dental, vision, 401k, security, stasis ). and present a more aged, patient, tucked-in, somber/subtle, reflective/introspective character.


/


Yowzah. 

So and So has their new one, #7, out and about. Thank Chris Tonelli for manhandling the entire affair & take your peek at the last of the "I'm  Sorry ,  About  Baseball" poems from before Nashville.



Wednesday, August 22, 2012

"...I stay noise..."



Marked a finish line with the Desert Poem "( Kiln )" and that is that ( deserted ): 


                          ... series the

 fingertips, evictions, of months  

 of projections / of  

 monthsbent
 everyone chipped scalds 
 off the car, out  
 in this repeating

   mar / I stay noise ...





/



From SF Moma lingering: Leon Golub's "Mercenaries"




David Park's "The Figure":






/



Been into the Oppen.  His certainty, the detailing, Poundian appreciation of the bucolic ( stripped of the Japanese and re-set into the urbans of America ), the omnitemporal ( yet/thus elegiac ) quality of the poet's treatment of objects and processes, a comprehension that is itself poetic, with little assumed or illegitimate prolificacy, things are just this important.



"...The distinction of what one does 
And what is done to him blurrs 

Bodies dream selves
For themselves

From the substance 
Of the cold..."




"...How forget that? How talk
Distantly of 'the People'?

Who are the people? that they are

That force within the walls
Of cities...

Possible
To use
Words provided one treat them
As enemies --Ghosts
Which have run mad
In the subways
And of course the institutions
And the banks...

And not only victims, and they may have come to the end
Of all that, and if they have
They may have come to the end of it..."




"Parallel lines do not meet
And the compass does not spin, this is the interval
In which they do not...

In which things explain each other.
Not themselves..."




"...More in it
Or seem to,
It is our home.
Wolves may hunt

With wolves, but we will lose
Humanity in the cities
And the suburbs, stores

And offices
In simple
Enterprise....

It is a place.
Nothing has entered it.
Nothing has left it.
People are born

From those who are there. How have I forgotten...

How have we forgotten
That which is clear, we
Dwindle, but that I have forgotten
Tortures me..."






Sunday, August 12, 2012

More directions exist in the north



Holy smokes my soul, been in grand states these last weeks, the trip, the return, the weathers, hunterer-gatherer friendzos, meteor gazer grid of good bodies updark, keg, mosquites can have all they please ( they, ah, usurp spiders to belong now to the hard undersides of bridges and me), phone broke and better, diving the
Ed Roberson, Aase Berg, Zach Savich.


Listen to
t h i s  my poney honey money dearies. The heebie-jeebies, creeps, coiny forests, saturation pockets pulled out to your air, and lighter anyhow.



//






Still intrigued by desert. What do you know about them? Werner Herzog, man of men, filmed them ( "Fata Morgana" ), and grafted atop poetries amazingly from the Popul Vuh, and, I think, his own mental brains ( ps. I hope you can read Spanish subtitles, and adore Leonard Cohen )




Are phones not working, write that letter.



Tuesday, August 7, 2012

Returns outdoor language / "To have its functions upon you..."



Arrived 'ol Nashville, unslept weary after a maniac drive push across country, Salt Lake City, Wyoming, Omaha, St. Louis. 


Formed emerge, are a smell in this space, animal thin, like this land was this vast chopped up land, loose mound of dissolving weathers, smell of, startled isolated objects, the convincing echo material, percussive sketch that proves finally now exist, and insists the area, usher a process disland.







The return of a type of heat, Olympics and nation-states, arrays of review enacted about the last month, here is one of materials brought back, most are, bummer, d e a d:


Ed Roberson ( Voices Cast Out )
Djuna Barnes ( Nightwood )
Aime Cesaire ( Notebook Of a Return )
Duncan ( Bow, Ground Work II )
H.D. ( Trilogy )
Gertrude ( Writings and Lectures 1909-1945 )
Ted Pearson ( Songs Aside )
George Oppen ( Selected Poems )
Alexei Kruchenykh ( Suicide Circus )
Heidegger ( Poetry, Language, Thought )
Carl Sandburg ( Harvest Poems, 1910-1960 )
Kandinsky ( Sounds )
Thomas Merton ( Selected Poems )
Stephen Ratcliffe ( Distance )



/


Plus, < killauthor's editor is now a revealed thing where before he did his work behind an emerald green curtain doing the slot machines. August, in the month for Octopus. Grand conversation con grand artist Brett Goodroad at the Marin Headlands Open House art thing whilst in the city. Die Antwoord. A Desert ( Kiln ) under way, rifling through notes.