Dans tous les sens / Readin n Ranch Ghosts

I mean what is happening in the state of the world when a scumsuckerrr like that can getaway with sandbagging a Dr. of Journalism can you tell me that (.)

Days off, library checkout ( got The Collected Frank O'Hara poems so I can be a happier one, n also The New Young American Poets anthology, which hopefully turns out better than the nepotistic, stale, creatively titled An Anthology of New (American) Poets. All three editors of An Anthology... are present, but only Lisa Jarnot's Sea Lyrics perform essentially. Also good are Beth Anderson, Renee Gladman. ), walk.

Finished Samuel Beckett's collected short prose n lost a wee bit of scaffolding on the inside, parts that aided logic that were parts that weren't operable anymore I guess: 

"Other main examples suggest themselves to the mind. Immediate continuous communication with immediate redeparture. Same thing with delayed redeparture. Delayed continuous communication with immediate redeparture. Same thing with delayed redeparture. Immediate discontinuous communication with immediate redeparture. Same thing with delayed redeparture. Delayed discontinuous communication with immediate redeparture. Same thing with delayed redeparture." 





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GlitterPony to closeup shop after 13 issues ( ?, but starting Natural History Press ). 



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Californian foodtaster exploring beefcake prince perennial paternal figure for television watching boys of state, Huell Howser crosses that river to boatman hopefully his gold in hand. From an LA Times story on Howser at Coachella:

Howser wanders the pitch working to understand a scene that's quite obviously a little alien to him. One particular fan explains how excited he is to see Portishead. Howser doesn't know who or what that is, but no worry. 

"I don't recognize a lot of these names," he confesses. "A lot of these are kind of obscure, aren't they?" When the fan says that they are, Howser asks, "Are you going to be waving your hands?"

"Well, it's slow music. Maybe waving my hands."

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White whiskey pinches yr brains, contracts yr organs. Fugues ( verb ).



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Ranch Ghost is a live band the way matches are a good type of fire: one is not capable of imagining that music without sways of locks, the unobscured process in them denim profiles bending your floor n your only foot. 

COR Vol.VIII, No. II

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


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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.

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.



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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).



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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.

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.

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The second track:




Also: Phantogram's pop song.



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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.



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



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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.

"...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"




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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.



 
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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.






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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.  

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 ( ! )

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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.

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Peter Riley on the 'American Hybrid' anthology.

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.

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. 


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