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.


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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.

"...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 ...

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

David Park's "The Figure":

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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..."

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.



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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.

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 )



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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.

"...Lulled away, I am a perfect / cornfield, I am / a perfect cornfield..." / Poems in the upcoming So and So

Santa Fe, Los Angeles, Big Sur, Santa Cruz

Today spent in the ol' city of cities, a majority of which at The SF International Poetry Festival at Civic Center with my lassies.  And, and, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, 93, read from his new "Time of Useful Consciousness." Then a woman we met at the literary labyrinth earlier ( I mentioned Hart Crane and she insisted I help heave her up onto a chair, where she spat out/recited "The Hive" by memory outward to the toothy city ) yelled that he should read out something from memory, and he did. What a grand ol' man.




Also acquired:


"The Selected Poems of Federico Garcia Lorca"

Melville's "Moby Dick"

Henry Miller's "Tropic of Cancer"

Berryman's "Love & Fame"

Then Chinatown and ( delicious, all-you-can-eat ) mystery foods, SOMA drinks on someone else's expense account.

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O, and So and So is planning a re-birth, and propping up a few of the "I'm  sorry ,  about  Baseball" poems in their next issue. I feel like the applause that erupts intermittently during this scene of Enter The Dragon:

"The keeper hooks the vast knee..." -D.h.

Immersions in ol' D.H. Lawrence's "Birds, Beasts and Flowers!"  Meditations on the landsphere of New Mexico, almonds, bats, saints. "...myself so little dodging rather scared against the eternal wrinkled pillars of their legs, as they were being dismantled..."






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Holy Shiite, somebody killed the author: > kill author to close its doors for keeps ( ! ), check out their archives, soon to be their only body.


Plus, been submitting poems outward, which means feeling productive, editing, which means writing, my divisions watch me.

Flag Rags / 4th, July

Take ya clothes off.

Natives, surreptitious sneakers, pilots with the rust, riders of a shaking frequency, ( I like how you define all my frequencies ), read some of Blake Butler's "Cake" at Sleeping Fish. 

Also, was the vibrating heatworld pleased, did I see 'poetry in motion' ( a culturists brainchild doubtless ) on a bus and then never again? I want more, guerilla poetry in busses, on busses, on busmen, no jury in cultured lands would have me do community service for already having done the community a service. 


Here's for a bus or two, John M. Bennett's

"Blow Away"

the crusted wind I covered with
eyesight the wind and tooth
lost in the bottom drawer there
was a wind I nailed to a board
in the splintered garage the wind
of numbers fogged in my pocket I
shaved the wind from my trembling
coat dogged the wind with my
tongue gagged and soaked with
wind your glasses retained my
sandwich hollowed with wind and
my undershirt a coughing towel of
wind I cornered in the loot
hidden in my closet the dribbling
wind caressing my face I shoveled
my ashes behind the wind and
twisted around to the front of
my wind a moon sunk in a bucket I
cradled a wind in a darkened street
in St. Louis 1961 the wind was
a throat I strangled and opened
was a sea its lunging mountains
where I was the wind
in 1948 I was a ship a small grey
wall quaking and clanging
in the circular wind

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These are the mad hot days, this Independence I have been stabbed upon the breast by a spider, I'm listening to all the Of Montreal, Frog Eyes, Velvet Underground, Women I can get my hands on... Off ( ! ) to east Nash to see who I see and smear, and eat, drink, music, dog, chicken, fire, un-work, flag, fire in a bottle, compressions of affection on me.