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.