chris murray's *Texfiles*

"A note to Pound in heaven: Only one mistake, Ezra! You should have talked to women" --George Oppen, _Twenty Six Fragments_




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ManY PoETiKaL HaTs LisT:

Michael Helsem's Gray Wyvern NOLA Fedora. Duchamp's Rrose Selavy's flirting hat. Max Ernst's Hats of The Hat Makes the Man. Jordan Davis' The Hat! poetry. hks' smelly head baseball cap. Samuel Beckett's Lucky's Black bowler hat, giving his oration on what's questionable in mankind, in *Waiting for 'God-ot'*. my friend John Phillips's 1969 dove gray fedora w/ wild feather. Bob Dylan's mystery lover's Panama Hat. Bob Creeley's Black Mountain Felt Boater Hat. Duke Ellington's Satin Top Hat. Acorn Hats of Tree. Freud's 1950 City Fedora. Joseph Brodsky's Sailor Cap. Harry K Stammer's Copper Hat Hell. Lewis LaCook's bowler hat(s). Tom Beckett's Bad Hair Day Furry Pimp Hat. Daughter Holly's black beret. harry k stammer's fez. Cat in the Hat's Hat & best hat, Googling Texfiles: crocheted hat with flames. Harry K Stammer's tinseled berets. Tex's 10 gallon Gary Cooper felt Stetson cowboy hat. Jordan Davis's fedora. Dali's High-heel Shoe Hat. Harry K Stammer's en-blog LAPD Hat & aluminum baseball cap. cap'n caps. NY-Yankees caps. the HKS-in-person-caps are blue or green no logos nor captions. Ma Skanky Possum 10's nighttime cap. moose antler hat. propeller beenie hat. doo rag. knit face mask hat. Bob Dylan's & photographer Laziz Hamani's panama hats. Mark Weiss's Publisher's Hat. Rebecca Loudon's Seattle-TX-Hats'n'boots.



Ever-Evolving Links:


Dominic Rivron
Unidentified
Br Tom @ One & Plainer
Dan Waber: ars poetica anthology
Dan Waber: altered books anthology
chris daniels: Notes to a Fellow Traveller
Chris Daniels: Toward an Anti-Capitalist Poetry
David Daniels: The Gates Of Paradise
subterranean poets: Beijing Poetry Group
Charles Alexander/Chax Press: Chaxblog
Headlines Poetry: the latest weblog entries
Henry Gould's AlephoeBooks
Julie Choffel's Understory
Tom Murphy's former one
Jean Vengua's New Okir
Roger Pao's Asian-American Poetry
Tom Lisk: Oilcloth and Linoleum
Kevin Doran
Reb Livingston's Cackling Jackal Blog
Janet Holmes: Humanophone
Lorna Dee Cervantes
Mark Young's gamma ways
Brian Campbell: Out of the Woodwork
Shanna's DIY Publishing Blog
Galatea Resurrects: a Poetry Review
Tom Beckett
John Sakkis: BOTH BOTH
New Francois Luong:Voices in Utter Dark, KaBlow!sm is...
Old Francois Luong: Voices in Utter Dark
Margin Walker: Andrew Lundwall
Free Space Comix: the latest BK Stefans blog
Adam Lockhart, Experimentalist Composer
Antic View: Alan Bramhall & Jeff Harrison
lookouchblog: Jessica Smith
MiPOradio
Web Log -- Charles Bernstein
Google Poem Generator: Leevi Lehto
Marie Mutsuki Mockett
Feral Scholar: Stan Goff
worderos: Tom Beckett
In Galatea's Purse
Japundit
Quiet Desperation: Jim Ryal
Luca Antara: Martin Edmond
Brief Epigrams: Ryan Alexander MacDonald
Radio My Vocabulary: 4 pm Sunday Poetry Streams
Mark Lamoreaux: [[[0{:}0]]]
Hot Whiskey Blog
louder
Nick Bruno: They Shoot Poets Don't They?
Joe Massey: Rooted Fool
Kate Greenstreet: every other day
heuriskein: Tom Orange
Chiaroscuro Metropoli: Tom Beckett
Behrle's latest spout!
Fluffy Dollars: Michelle Detorie
Jane Dark's Sugar High!
The Katherine Anne Porter Literary Center
(Charles) Olson Now: Michael Kellaher & Ammiel Alcalay
kari edwards' TranssubMUTATION
Notes on the Revival: Jeremy Hawkins
PurPur: Petrus Pokus
Snapper Missives: Scott Pierce
A Sad Day for Sad Birds II: Gina Meyers
Great Works: Peter Philpot
zafusy: experimental poetry journal
Writeboard: a collaborative writing tool
John Latta: Rue Hazard
KP Harris: Croissant Factory
Stephanie Young's New Site
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a New Word Placements
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|||AS/IS2|||
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Kasey's Old Limetree
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ultimate: Stephanie Young's First Well Nourished Moon
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Crosfader
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Catherine Meng's Porthole Redux
Josh Corey's Cahiers de Corey
Very Nice! Shampoopoetry
UTA's Lit Mag: ZNine
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Jacket
JFK's Poetinresidence
Malcolm Davidson's Tram Spark poems
HYepez: RealiTi
HYpez: Mexperimental
Aimee Nez's Gila Monster
BestMaX: Jim Behrle's jismblog
Cori Copp's Littleshirleybean
Jordan Davis: Million Poems
Eileen Tabios: Corpsepoetics [see Chatelaine above]
YaY! Liz's Thirdwish
Ultra Linking
Henry Gould's HG Poetics



Friday, April 30, 2004

 

from student work in my UTA course, Engl. 4330, Poetry Writing Seminar--the parody assignment done during the week of reading Kent Johnson's/Alexandra Papaditsas's *Miseries of Poetry* (Skanky Possum Press, 2003) :

--by Leanna Ohnheiser

The Dog

        --After John Donne's "The Flea"


Mark but this dog, and mark in this
How its barking is, though loud, remiss;
It sniffed thee first, and now sniffs me,
And in this dog our love will never be;
Thou know'st that this cannot be said
A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead,
        For this love which has no such worth,
        Will not move heaven and earth,
        And, alas, has ended before its birth.

Oh go, three lives saved in one dog's ban,
Where thou would never lose the man.
This dog is thou, not I, and this
Our marriage bed a coffin is;
As parents grudge, and well they should,
I shall not return love as thou hoped I would.
        True, I have thoughts of killing,
        Let that be a warning,
        And blasphemy, my self undo.

Anxious and sudden, hast thou since
run from love's innocence?
Wherefore the poor dog guilty be?
Except in tail, which it flaunts for me?
Yet thou did fail, and I say'st that thou
Find'st thyself more pleasant for barking now;
        'Tis true. Learn, then, how fake love's bark and bite can be;
        How much chaste love was puppy tongued and flaunted by thee
        Then lost, as ever thy dog has chased its tail 'round trees.


~~~~~copyright of Leanna Ohnheiser & edits by chris murray~~~~~~~



chris at 10:09 PM |

 

Had an email this afternoon from Tonio Savoradin about the expiration of his website, Savoradin, where for quite a while we all enjoyed lovely, fun, conversationally-based blogging, and lots of provocative poetry, as well as the feature of excerpts from all our poems. Truly, t'will be much missed, Tonio!

He kindly emailed to remind me to take down my link to the site since no one knows what kinds of weird uses it could be put to, by gosh only knows who, after Tonio has to leave it. So I have blocked my link, but left it in place with the words, Farewell, Tonio!

Hurry and get a new site, Tonio!


chris at 5:07 AM |

Thursday, April 29, 2004

 

2 from student work, UTA English 4330, the "Mean Poem Exercise" in collaboration:


--by Bridgit Cooper, Ricardo Garza, Jim Bratone:


Delicate Movement of Time is Troubled


Far in sacred consciousness, the baby lays and resigns from
Drift, in dream's negative space, slashing bright colors and shadow,
Twitching by the moonlight, shifting like trees do in autumn wind.
Sharp voices and wind slice through, etching promise in skin hollows
Of deep perspective, carving tense contours of coming years that
Echo contempt on the boy; she can only cry and console.
Words burn deep. Vapors rise. Translucent smoke bleeds holy on faith
Engraving a dove's figure stroking free from chiaroscuro,
But burdened by posture. She watches the arpeggio dance,
Setting pace for what is to come. Fast, although appearing slow,
December's moon, a lidless eye, peers past the sheltered clouds while
The delicate movement of time is troubled -- an adagio.
Waiting and watching, watching, waiting: she repents with ashen breath
And feels the urgent stars burn, drawing him clean of ocean flow
And betraying the sun for a land of gift and dark mezzo.


~~~~poem copyright of Bridgit Cooper, Ricardo Garza, Jim Bratone~~~~


* * *


--by Phyllis Halstead and Anita Fowler:


Presence & Imaginary Time


I met Stephen Hawking. While I was walking down the crowded, semi-
gloomy streets of Cambridge, he came rolling by in his unique
motorized chair that can speak. I told him I was a huge fan,
& that I had read all of his books. Of course, this was a lie.
I had only ever read one. I later attended a
lecture he was presenting at King's College. I had never
done this before, and soon realized why. Imaginary time
is a new dimension at right angles to ordinary,
real time. The universe has no singularities in the
direction of time. Assuming this condition, there will be
no beginning or end to imaginary time... this is
why we recall events only from what we call "the past," &
not from "the future." Through the distance light travels, defined is
the meter, in 0.0000000000335640952 seconds, measured by a caesium clock.
It is because of all this that I am an English major.


~~~~~~~~poem copyright of Phyllis Halstead and Anita Fowler~~~~~~~~


chris at 10:48 PM |

 

"Arcadia St. (lady of the angels) ... mother me overcome (d) as fire... "


chris at 7:19 PM |

 

"Blue notation wired for readiness..."


chris at 6:53 PM |

 

fwd from kari edwards :

-- Tarpaulin Sky : Spring/Summer Issue(s) --

Dear TSky Friends & Readers,

V2n2&3 is online at

Tarpaulin Sky

and it is huge.

The Spring/Summer double issue features black & white photography by
Jason Huntzinger and includes new work from Jenny Boully, Julie Carr,
Mark Cunningham, William E. Dudley, Jamey Dunham, kari edwards,
Michael Gottlieb, Sojourner Hodges, Louis Jenkins, Jake Kennedy,
Jeffrey Levine, Norman Lock, Thorpe Moeckel, Eugene Ostashevsky,
Matthew Shindell, Sarah Sonner, Julianna Spallholz, Jane Sprague, and
John Warner.

Here's to Spring (& Summer!)

Editors
Lizzie Harris
Jonathan Livingston
Eireene Nealand
Christian Peet




chris at 7:18 AM |

Wednesday, April 28, 2004

 

from Yvonne Caroutch (French/Mongolian poet and translator [of Montale and Ungaretti, among others] * :


The limb of forests rises up
behind the foliage stirring
Ghost people gravitate beneath the bark
assail your castles of nutmeg
Sublime thorn planted in scarlet time
Winged heel of the starry arcanum
House of sulfur and mercury
held spellbound by a feather
increased by what weight
on the scales of dreams
Logic at the triple stage
of this bleeding communion

It made the white rose of winds revolve
Nothing can ever cloud
its incorruptible retina


* * *


I come to you with the vertigoes of the source
numbed into stone
Standing up to death entwined in the grasses
we penetrate into an empire without contours
wide open to our disproportion
Silence holds its breath
in the midst of a motionless wind
and the riotings of mirrors
High walls patiently conquered by our rites
keep watch over our movements
We are monotonous stars
astonished insects in worlds of feathers

                [translated by David Cloutier]

(223)

*in Barnstone (see below).


chris at 10:23 AM |

 

from Lucille Clifton * :


Cutting Greens


curling them around
i hold their bodies in obscene embrace
thinking of everything but kinship.
collards and kale
strain against each strange other
away from my kissmaking hand and
the iron bedpot.
the pot is black,
the cutting board is black,
my hand
and just for a minute
the greens roll black under the knife,
and the kitchen twists dark on its spine
and i taste in my natural appetite
the bond of live things everywhere.

(682)

* in the Barnstone anthology (see below).

~~~~copyright of everyone. everywhere. she say. ~~~~~



chris at 9:19 AM |

Tuesday, April 27, 2004

 

From Muriel Rukeyser * :

Darkness Music

The days grow and the stars cross over
And my wild bed turns slowly among the stars.

(599)


Eyes of a Night-Time


On the roads at night I saw the glitter of eyes:
My dark around me let shine one ray; that black
allowed in their eyes       :       spangles in the cat's, air in
          the moth's eye shine,
mosaic of the fly, ruby-eyed beetle, the eyes that never weep,
the horned toad sitting and its tear of blood,
fighters and prisoners in the forest, people
aware in this almost total dark, with the difference,
the one broad face of light.

Eyes on the road at night, sides of a road like rhyme;
the floor of the illumined shadow sea
and shallows with their assembling flash and show
of sight, root, holdfast, eyes of the brittle stars.
And your eyes in the shadowy red room,
scent of the forest entering, various time

calling and the light of wood along the ceiling
and over us birds calling and their circuit eyes.
And in our bodies the eyes of the dead and the living
giving us gifts at hand, the glitter of all their eyes.

(598-599)

* in Women Poets from Antiquity to Now, Aliki and Willis Barnstone, Eds. New York: Schocken Books, 1992.


chris at 7:34 PM |

 

From my students: the parody exercise :

Students in my poetry course really did some good reading last week, which was over Kent Johnson's and Alexandra Papditsas's *Miseries of Poetry* (Skanky Possum Press, 2003). So I had them throw their lots in with parody. Originally, in keeping with the historical energy that *Miseries* deals with, they were to choose something really, um, old... from which to build their parody: something prior to, say, 1950--and I was thinking they would want Victorian models. Um: I was really wrong (and I don't mind saying so, in fact am delighted, because then I get to see and learn workably, too).

They wanted full range of choice, and so I eased up on the timeline restrictions (!). Many of them chose work from the American moderns. Some chose from 18th century Brits. And some chose ancient work, such as the biblical psalms. It was delightfully diverse, and many were well done. So here is one (and I will continue to post from these and other assignments, over the next several weeks). I think the original poem it's drawn from will need no intro or naming :

So, this one is from Jim Bratone: (who offers this clarifying statement: "This parody is intended to mark some of the contrasts between versions of 'high modernism--purity, solemnity, formalism, universality, etc.--and some versions of 'postmodernism' which tend not to privilege these qualities."


OURS, POETICALLY



A poem should be palpable and brute
As a rabid malamute,

Dumb
As untried maxims and rules of thumb,

Grating as the incessant drone
Of an insurance salesman you can't escape from on the phone--

A poem should be mindless
As pop-ups online.

A poem should never mire in the slime
of perfect rhyme,

Leaving, as the rhyme disperses,
Sound by sound, room for sonic swerves,

But the rhyme returns and with it goes,
Line by line, any power to resist a doze--

A poem should never mire in the slime
Of perfect rhyme.

A poem should be sort of, you know, exact:
Not fact.

For all the history of grief,
An empty bottle and a bag of leaf.

For love,
A Dear John letter and pins stuck in an effigy--

A poem's 'should' may mean
but laughably.

---copyright of Jim Bratone---


chris at 10:11 AM |

 

Tim Morris sent me a link to a cool journal he found while reading around
(Tim, man, you're such a book-slut!--oh hey, Jessa, there goes your cool title poppin' up here, again...) --
anyway I thought I'd share it with y'all:

Welcome to DEAD MULE : brain fertilizer for the masses


chris at 3:23 AM |

Monday, April 26, 2004

 

My Fall Semester 2004 Writing Course: Electronic Poetry: Contemporary Discourse Communities & Experiments with Image+Text

For the next full-length semester (fall, 04), I'm teaching a senior-level course on electronic writing/poetry, and so am on the look-out for interesting stuff right now (actually I've had several emails from prospective students, who are already full of curiosity and their own insights on this branch of poetics and art). With that in mind, then, when I saw this post tonight, I was intrigued: the e - experimental poet and artist, mIEKAL aND, posted a link to Spidertangle dot net & Posted, over at suny buffalo list--this is visual poetry in archive (I believe) online & it rocks! Do have an eye-stroll through Posted. And if you are reading here because interested in my course, then please email me to let me know what you think, or if you have any questions.


chris at 7:23 AM |

 

Just in case you were wondering about commentators and parody of the aspirations of *avant* or *post-avant*...
--& a great answer from Ben, too!--

* * *

Also: But T, Hey: now I am getting really curious--maybe will send a poem: will those poem reviews you mention in the Saturday 4/24 post also be about things that are yummy?


chris at 4:02 AM |

Sunday, April 25, 2004

 

New Series at Texfiles: IMHumbleO

Once a week, starting today, I'm highlighting a note on what is, in my humble opinion, a best recent post to a blog of any kind. First up in the series:

DEBORAH PATILLO'S CHIMERA SONG BLOG-ROCKIN' POSTS : especially the post for today. Deborah has been a great reader of texfiles, and here are 4 ways (I don't know why but they all begin with A!) : astutely, accurately, appreciatively, and always in good humored fun and fine, share-able wit--all of which combine to make a readerly/writerly position I most admire. But I don't want to detract from how this is all about poetry writing, too: check out her dynamite poem, "Kiss, with Tongues."

Thanks, Deborah!



chris at 10:49 PM |

 

Added Update on Joan Houlihan's Roundtable: Ya know, I never thought of this crowd as meek, so I'm surprised at so few comments (but glad to see yours--thanks, Dale !) below from this usually lively, opinionated crowd...

& I want to clarify my post below: gendering as a factor in poetics is not the only consideration absent from the "dialogue" on "avant, post-avant, and beyond," or the roundtable, or the debate--whatever it is to be called--over at Joan Houlihan's Boston Comment. Ethnicity is another absent factor to be considered. I do not see the absence of these factors as a fault of the commentators so much as a problem of underlying assumptions in the questions. As moderator, Joan Houlihan is the one participant most able to address these issues, so that the participants could then respond. Yet she did not mention these factors of poetry today, at all.


chris at 7:30 PM |

 

**Update on the Joan Houlihan Roundtable & my Thursday email to her**:

Well, now that my *ACK!!* computer (scroll down for the furiocomputer eulogy) problem has settled somewhat, I can go ahead and post about what I have heard from--the, um... don't disturb the man behind the curtain!) Wizard-of-Oz-like--Joan Houlihan:

An email really so brief as to need no posting. Fair enough. Though I know from the proverbial grapevine--in talking with several other women poets--that Joan has been in touch with some of them, too, variously: on the questions of gendering (and the roundtable about what may be "avant" poetics), and on questions of the gender make-up of her roundtable.

Annie Finch let me know that Joan wrote the same thing to her about it, which is that for this roundtable she had invited 5 women to participate, and they all declined. I have heard somewhat indirectly and via backchannel from one of them, and the reasons for declining are that her work priorities are too demanding right now to attempt such a writing/commentator role as this roundtable would require. That is understandable and not so surprising. Indeed it would be a frequent problem is my guess, since most of us, no matter our gender orientations, can only give energy to poetry after spending our days and weeks working at other things in order to live. The so-called *day job* (also certainly a misnomer for most of us) is a draining thing not to be slipped up, and can leave a writer without wit one to then give to thinking and orchestrating something either poetic or about the poetic.

I do have one slight reservation about this matter of 5 people of one gender declining while what seems an over supply of another gender, apparently in over supply, or at the least, so readily available. I know that in the initial stages of planning for this last fall, at least two men of accomplishment declined, and probably more did so, as well. So I'm wondering why it seems that it was not difficult to find others to fill in yet not to find any more women who could or would. Just, as I say, a little tweak of a nagging question in my mind. Perhaps means nothing to all this, or perhaps it means that it was simpler for the men to commit the time and energy? Obviously this is slippery ground, and there is a range of possibilities. I'm just wondering. And even if plausible answers are supplied, I will still be likely to attribute this problem in some way to the problematics gender socialization processes, vis, prescribed gender roles in social structuring.

In her email Joan also invited me--and I presume the others she wrote to, as well--to devise a question about gendering and poetics. She says that she might use it if she puts together a next, similar roundtable. Well, I just might do that. But really, I think at this point there are many of us in poetry and poetics who could put together a productive question. In other words, the public point has been made, and so is not likely to fade away or to go unasked now. I am glad for that and for having a part in it.

In any case, I am thinking it over, as are several others, and I do want to say by way of attending to some threads of rhetorical good will, it was good of Joan Houlihan to ask.


chris at 5:34 AM |

 

ACK!!!!

My pc laptop crashed last night--absolute zero--I do not even want to think specifically about what and how much work was lost. I just want to cry and say ACK!!!

Now I'm on a new computer (a fortunate part of my job as director of the UTA Writing Center is that I can get a loaner computer quickly), but I can't find my way around very well on it and I keep losing things. ACK!!!


chris at 2:04 AM |

Friday, April 23, 2004

 

More Rock-on Work from Alan Sondheim ! **

Regular readers here know I am a great fan of Alan's innovative work, and now and then post here something new of his. This one is particularly telling, I think, for the many things it brings together most effortlessly (in the rhetorical sense), or another way to say this might be to consider it a fusion. Alan makes this one very clear as to its origins as a dictionary entry used by translators. Dictionary entries are often intriguing for the cultural baggage they carry or project, and a bi-lingual, older dictionary brings together several planes of rhetorical intersection simultaneously. So I thought this piece from Alan particularly resonant (as are many of his works). I first read it at the SUNY Buffalo Poetics list--a prose-poem text & j-peg illustration posted by Alan last night. His title for this fusion of historical definition, re-defiinition on several planes that enhance the cultural and aesthetic resonances, is Hack --and do check out his many other fascinating arts and fusions of mode at the above link to his website, as well as the double-starred info noted below with Alan's email address and his other website links.

Abaction, the stealing of a number of cattle at once.

here we are cooperating. this person has cooperated with me.
i have hacked the computer of this person. i have warned
this person i have hacked this person. Hack, a wound,
a cut or notch, a house which is let on hire, a tool
of instrument for breaking or chopping, a rack to hold
fodder for cattle, the driver of a hackney carriage, a common
drudge, a poor writer, a prostitute, a bawd, to cut or notch,
to emit dry coughs, to make common, to ride a horse
at ordinary speed. Hackery, the Indian bullock-cart.


Hack



* definitions from Bhargava's Standard Illustrated Dictionary of the English
Language, Anglo-Hindi Edition, 1965.

** Alan's email is sondheim@panix.com
His innovative, influential work and philosophical thought can be found on these websites :

Portal.Nikuko

Philosophy and Psychology of the Internet

Trace Projects and Museums

Thanks, Alan!

~~~~~~~Hack words & image copyright of Alan Sondheim~~~~~/c m~~~


chris at 9:45 PM |

 

On Joan Houlihan's *Boston Comment* Roundtable:

I see that the idea of a roundtable on ideas of "avant, post-avant" did not fizzle out completely after last fall's hoopla over Joan Houlihan's hasty and irresponsible commentary about what might constitute experimental writing and poetics. She has put together something of a debate: Roundtable.

Joe Amato on the Buffalo Poetics list today posted a notice about it, adding a parenthetical remark that it is an all male group of commentators "(all men, i know)" : which I take to mean not so much that he knows them all, but that this group is a lopsided configuration in terms of gender & power relations.

It's good--instructive, thus, valuable--to question that kind of situation, so I wrote to Joan to ask about it:

Joan,

Interesting to see your revival of this idea of a roundtable on such subject matter, especially after the same idea fizzled on Webdelsol's end last fall.

But I'm curious: why have no women, feminist, or transfeminist thinkers and writers been included (other than yourself, of course) in this forum?

Then again, feminist influences and even the current manifestations of feminist thought in transfeminism, seem not to matter much to the "avant, post-avant, and beyond," and in repetitious, recycled ways that might seem very familiar to anyone studying how gender and power politics worked in U. S., male-dominated political groups of the 1930s and then again in the 1960s-70s.

Certainly someone in the roundtable can speak to that?

Chris Murray
http://texfiles.blogspot.com



chris at 4:31 AM |

 

from Tom Clark, Cold Spring: A Diary (Skanky Possum, 2000) :


4th day


Two weeks later it's tomorrow.
So many long days.
Spring rain.
The old fucks
are still quacking
to their notebooks.
Someone is out there.
Spring rain -- smoke --
someone in here is living.

* * *

5th day


This isn't inferential.
Smoke leaps through the wall
in drops.

* * *

6th day


A haunted house
in the spring rain
fills up with smoke
from a boat passing
on the night river,
with the cabin door open
and the t.v. on.

* * *

7th day


Smoke oozing through
the wall.
Mind falling in the rain.
Spinning in smoke.
Standing broken
and helpless,
old fucks
with heads
against the wall,
in the spring rain.

* * *

For Ed Dorn


The passes over & through which I've
        been driven by Edward
              are bright & shining, in

my mind. The prairie
        dog we visited, in my mind
              now that you've died

(8.30 P.M. PST
        12/10/99
              is a man alone,

in a long coat,
        on a dusty prairie,
              walking on water

because the desert is now closed.

                  1.28 A.M.
                  12/11/99



chris at 3:07 AM |

Thursday, April 22, 2004

 

From Meritage Press--sent two days ago to my AOL email & if this seems a little bit of old news now, it's because I don't check that address but a few times per week, so just now got it.
That should not deter anyone from saying with all due excitement & happy fervor, YaY ! ! Finally !
So do get crankin' on those poems, folks :

THE HAY(NA)KU ANTHOLOGY: A SUBMISSIONS CALL

Meritage Press is pleased to announce a Submissions Call for THE HAY(NA)KU ANTHOLOGY, co-edited by Jean Vengua and Mark Young. Deadline: December 31, 2004.
Send submissions (cutnpasted in body of e-mail) to MeritagePress@aol.com.
Submissions are limited to no more than ten (10) hay(na)ku per poet

* * *

"Cameron was a counter. He vomited nineteen times to San Francisco. He liked to count everything."
--from The Hawkline Monster by Richard Brautigan, as quoted June 10, 2003 at WinePoetics Blogspot (see link just below here).

The "hay(na)ku" is a Filipino and diasporic poetic form conceptualized by Eileen Tabios, as inspired by the character "Cameron" in Richard Brautigan's novel The Hawkline Monster and Jack Kerouac's thoughts on the "American haiku." More information on the hay(na)ku's background is available in the June 2003 posts at Tabios' former blog, Wine Poetics, as well as at the New Zealand Electronic Poetry Center.

As illustrated by Oliver de Paz's hay(na)ku below, the hay(na)ku is a tercet where the first line consists of one word, the second line of two words, and the third line of three words:

Dogs
tongues loll.
Emphatic earth sponges.
--Oliver de la Paz

For this anthology project, variations on the hay(na)ku are also acceptable, e.g. hay(na)ku sequences where the poem consists of more than one tercet; reverse hay(na)ku where the lines unfold as three words, two words and one word; and any other such variations as the poet may propose. Hay(na)ku in non-English languages are also acceptable, as long as they are submitted with English translations.

For examples of hay(na)ku, feel free to check out the Hay(na)ku Blog.

THE HAY(NA)KU ANTHOLOGY will be published either in book form or as an e-book. If the latter, authors will receive contributors' copies. Expected release date will be in 2005.

BIOS OF EDITORS:
Jean Vengua lives in Santa Cruz California. She is co-editor with Elizabeth Pisares of Tulitos Press. Her poetry has been published in various print and online journals and anthologies, including Proliferation, We (print and audio CD), Babaylan, Returning a Borrowed Tongue, Moria, Sidereality, Interlope and X-Stream. As Jean N. V. Gier, her introduction "Variations on a Circle in Blue," appears in Eileen Tabios's book of short stories, Behind the Blue Canvas; other essays appear in Jouvert (N.C.S.U.), Critical Mass: A Journal of Asian American Cultural Cultural Criticism (U.C. Berkeley), and Geopolitics of the Visual: Essays on Philippine Film Cultures. "Flux & Abilidad: Notes on a Filipino American Poetics," is forthcoming in PinoyPoetics, edited by Nick Carbo. She maintains the blog "Okir."

Mark Young is a New Zealander who has lived in Australia for a number of years. He was published widely in both countries during the 1960s & the first half of the '70s, but then drifted away from writing for almost 25 years. A request to include some of his poems in the anthology Big Smoke: New Zealand Poems 1960-1975 was the prompt that got him back writing again. In the last few years his poems have appeared in both print & electronic journals from Alba to xStream & many places in between. His books include New Zealand Art 1950-1967 (1968), Blues for New Lovers (1969) & The right foot of the giant (1999). He has two weblogs, Pelican Dreaming, which is his main one, & Series Magritte, which is an on-going series of poems inspired by the great Surrealist painter. There is also an author's page at the New Zealand electronic poetry centre.



chris at 7:38 PM |

 

Earth Day: don't forget to be in the green, Y'all ...


chris at 8:38 AM |

 

Times like this I really wish I could be in Chicago! Go to this reading if you are in the area, it promises to be great :

*Poetry Reading*

YaY !!
Li Bloom
Sunday April 25
7pm Chicago time,
at Myopic Books.

Note from the very generous spirited Li:
"If you're there say hello!
Or if you can't be there, still say hello!"--

Well, yes! Hello, Li! Best to you for a wonderful reading.


chris at 12:11 AM |

Wednesday, April 21, 2004

 

Check out *Transfeminism: Let Her Rip*--Yeah...


chris at 7:44 PM |

 

I just had an email from Clayton Eshleman regarding this good, developing news:

The latest issue of Jacket Magazine (# 25--which is still *under construction,* as it were; current issue is # 22, which this link opens on) contains a fine review of Clayton's Juniper Fuse (a page from the book's intro is here). Note this mini-review by The New Yorker last month (scroll down the linked page), and see Clayton's website for more details and updates: Clayton Eshleman). And Jacket 25 has published one of Clayton's poems--so do not miss this issue! :

The new, in-depth review of Clayton Eshleman's Juniper Fuse (Wesleyan UP, 2003) links it with several current threads of philosphy and poetry. The review, entitled "The Poet in the Caves," by Wilson Baldridge, includes a detailed photograph from the book (which has an abundance of photos--definitely of great interest right now), depicting the Lascaux caves that are the subject of the book's fusions in ways of knowing and being--and which provide the material for Eshleman's analysis and poetic exploration--what he has suggested might be a "new form for a long poem"--of these originary sites of human writing, metaphoric thinking, thus of art: the fullsome import of originary * cave walls.* (Not hard to hear echoes of an Irigaray in this, as well, I think.)

Baldrige writes: "While taking into account the positions of noted prehistorians and archeologists, Eshleman generously gives us the artist’s view, with his eye for decoding imagery: he shares his vision of the 'nearly invisible visible,' of the 'other side of nature”'(to quote Rilke after Eshleman) in order to show that 'Upper Paleolithic cave imagery is a language upon which all subsequent mythology has been built”'([section 5 of Juniper Fuse]; cf. “The Black Goddess” [210-214])."

& from Eshelman's poetry in Juniper Fuse: " ‘Convulsive beauty will be veiled-erotic, fixed-exploding, magic-circumstantial or it will not be’/ The exploding and the fixed at 30,000 B. P., / the Aurignacian ‘hydrogen jukebox’ "(199).

& check out Clayton's poem, "Sheela-na-Gig."

Check this entire issue out as it develops: Go, Jacket!


chris at 11:01 AM |

 

from Sean Serrell's Flingdump Scattershot :

The Game

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

Text:

"The hermetic closing of the thing." ["El cierre hermetico de la cosa."]--Jaime Saenz, Immanent Visitor: "De el pasar el cometa". Translated by Kent Johnson and Forrest Gander (U of Calif Press, 2002), pp. 23, 93.


chris at 9:23 AM |

 

As promised (yesterday!) something on Beckett's Bromige Issue (thanks, Tom!--it's come out as a poem riff, and still to be tinkered with)

Dear Bromige Issue:

Riveted having. Riveted having said how. The black & white. How language can never sweater a weather of all promised, of riveted, to con. To contrast? Things!pattern become ski-thing V necked with Oh can it be? Tie grayscale guesses: pink on button-down collar in epochal lawn chair of summer afternoons & trim beard a sign of chin given to poetry with the longish hair in a seventies moment tho it may have been sixties or even wind history tighter to who knows--eighties so nice to have such latitude? Where the hands fold as if waiting for godot (really the faint smile the smile classic mona lisa like) giving that away, a smile always a thing to be given away since one cannot ever see ones own smile but in narcissistic mimic mirror--or pond, minnows carrying it awry on minute silver backs, the staging the drama of it all too chaplin or greek but never as dear as the ones given away to others out of need for a sharing that WILL MATTER such as this foto even if the undergrowth curls innocuously as it seems & has curled its own seem here, too. Itself--is the strangest term, no? So like time, the image, all that telescoping lenticular or out. Legs of the chair even if the subjecty does not mind or is fully cognizant of that implic the green of it all about to overtake but not really how would that? This is pure picnic of structures or shoulder of summer north & cool wist of harbor or harboring of firefly nights given to collecting & canning jars, lids as doors to the Sartrean empty (a joke no doubt), diffused of light & more light (enjambment goes here for a differance) where now i must turn the foto from its side angle to try head-on again to head into its eye & knowing smile standing above the inevitable letterings, letterings i admit to trafficking in with so full a posse feathering as ink to blotter inside: The Difficulties: David Bromige Issue

* On The Difficulties: David Bromige Issue (edited by Tom Beckett), fantasia on the riveting cover foto.

~~~~~this poem is copyright of chris murray~~~~~~~~~~~~


chris at 7:18 AM |

 

Just got a new email from the Blogger tie-in with Google: Gmail.

So, when that UTA mail goes down again, which it does periodically, write to me at

chris.murray@gmail.google.com

Well, I mean, if you are inclined to write to me...

but then, if that is so, then please do so anytime--don't wait for a UTA email problem!


chris at 5:46 AM |

Tuesday, April 20, 2004

 

from Pablo Neruda * :

XII

Yo quiero que despierte
la luz encarcelada:
flor mineral, acude
a mi conducta:

los parpados levantan la cortina
del largo tiempo espeso
hasta que aquellos ojos enterrados
vuelvan a ser y ver su transparencia.
(32)

* * *

[as translated by James Nolan:]

XII

I want the light
locked inside to awaken:
crystalline flower,
wake as I do:

eyelids raise the curtain
of endless earthen time
until deeply buried eyes
flash clear enough again
to see their own clarity.
(33)


*Las piedras del cielo (Stones of the Sky). Copper Canyon, 1987.


chris at 7:44 PM |

 

from M. Foucault * :

on Bataille & the eye: "The eye is mirror and lamp... . It is the figure of being in the act of transgressing its own limit. The eye, in a philosophy of reflection, derives from its capacity to observe the power of becoming always more interior to itself. Lying behind each eye that sees, there exists a more tenuous one... ." (45)

* Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: "Preface to Transgression," translated by Daniel Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977.


chris at 7:06 PM |

 

"Carney" " ... fingertip leer..."


chris at 6:56 PM |

 

I just want to say my WoWs about this, from "some nonsense because my dad likes watching O'reilly":

...hardly time enough
to shape an interior
alphabet of your own,
much less inform him and his

of the requisite eccentrics
their pocket book
literacies presume to unabridge... "

For, oh my: how do we ever talk to fathers once they are known to be that figural thing?
It must be we do it like this--
and so have to (is there melting like a sound curving around the light--light is so straight edged--corners in all this?)
talk around them, the way similarly, sound--thank goodness for such an option--will outdo or complement, or even combine with light?

And i do mean the entire poem, it's just that for me--subjectively and after readings in theories of subjectivity, also somewhat objectively--(even if of course all such is always already arguable) the crux of this piece occurs right here in this excerpt, since it takes off into contradictory yet problematizing cultural and textual directions. Like physics being ontological and episteme, also a form of knowing. This is when, in this poem, readers can begin to realize that what is being discussed here is not limited to the perspective of only one being. So very significant to hear that, right now, whereas even five or ten years ago it would not have seemed materially important. We had a more solid I then. Nice that now it is not so monumental?

cm


Thanks, Steve Tills, for this meditation, giving more reason for meditation.


chris at 7:14 AM |

Monday, April 19, 2004

 

Falluja
by Jo Wilding, of Circus 2 Iraq :

US snipers in Falluja shoot unarmed man in the back, old woman with white
flag, children fleeing their homes and the ambulance that we were going
in to fetch a woman in premature labour.
Trucks, oil tankers, tanks are burning on the highway east to Falluja. A
stream of boys and men goes to and from a lorry that's not burnt,
stripping it bare. We turn onto the back roads through Abu Ghraib, Nuha
and Ahrar singing in Arabic, past the vehicles full of people and a few
possessions, heading the other way... "--April 11th Report

* Thanks go to Martin Jay Walker of Poetry & Etc. for sharing this.*


chris at 6:48 PM |

 

The evening has escaped my watch and will soon morph to new dawn ...
Look tomorrow evening for a few words on Bromige and Tom Beckett's 1987 The Difficulties.

But if you're looking to hear about the Poetry_Heat Reading with Dale Smith and Hoa Nguyen, then scroll down two entries here. Thanks.


chris at 10:34 AM |

 

Books Received:

--Hoa Nguyen, *Add Some Blue* (Backwoods Broadsides, 2004, Sylvester Pollet, Ed.)

--Tom Clark and Ann Waldman, *Zombie Dawn* (Skanky Possum, 2003)

--Sotere Torregian, * "I Must Go" (She Said) "Because My Pizza's Cold" * (Skanky Possum, 2002)

--Tom Clark, *Cold Spring* (Skanky Possum, 2000)


chris at 10:27 AM |

 

Report on the Poetry_Heat Reading, 17 April 04, with Dale Smith and Hoa Nguyen at UTA:


An absolute pleasure it was to host Dale Smith and Hoa Nguyen along with their beautiful children, Keaton who will be three this year (that is, Keaton-the-cat, which temporary tranformation he inhabited after he found face-painting at the Fort Worth arts festival yesterday with his parents and infant brother, and so this morning at the Coffee Haus on Center St. over the toast and grownups with espresso, was still in full cat mode: bewhiskered with raised brows and gracefully pouncing to explore everything and everyone in range of his gaze), and Waylon Hart (at present the most mellow of infants, small but bright eyed, a searching being, now just an eyelash away from having crested on the horizon of womb, newborn).

We are grateful to them for making the effort to trek over here to Arlington (a four hour drive: with small children, a trip no doubt given to a few complications) from their home in Austin, in order to spend some time here with our creative writing students during the presentation on Friday (given at the UTA Writing Center by Dale and Hoa, on small press publishing), and then to give an outstanding poetry reading last night at the University Center's Concho Room, along with two other poets, Arlington's David Bart (co-editor of the Dallas-area journal *Illya's Honey*), and Jacquelyn Taylor, whose work is some of the strongest and most innovative in my poetry course (Engl. 4330) this semester.

Jacquelyn read first, ending with a particular favorite of mine, her sestina that is woven around the story of two youngsters who inadvertently knock from their mother's knick-knack shelf a figurine of Jesus ("oh why did it have to be Jesus?--why not the clown?), which causes Jesus to break to pieces ("I watched Him descending..."), and causes the speaker no little imagined grief of conscience. The poem is spectacular, especially given that it is a first-time effort with this complex form, which work on Jacquelyn's part yields for us at least a seven-varietal Jesus--a promise that not even the Bible, with its own four square books, has (arguably) not culturally performed nor fullfilled. In this poem, though, Jesus is indeed amazing if not exactly reborn in the usual, expected sensibility...

David read next and gave a fine acquittal of his complexly, deeply imaged and layered poems. He closed his reading with a moving poem, a narrative about a girl of six who shows up at school with a black eye caused by what sounds at first an innocent accident, but which grows ominously resonant later when the teacher-persona, who is narrating the story, attends the funeral of the child's mother, who had died suddenly. The poem is as open-ended in terms of concrete conclusions to be drawn, as is any typical child abuse case where all evidence seems nebulous and/or derived from heresay. The poem may be most ominous exactly because it takes this horrific situation and makes poetry exactly mimetic in its taxing of such. Wonderfully striking during this reading was the persistent reminder that children are a strong presence in life--as evidenced by Keaton at play toward the back of the room, and Waylon periodically stirring while at Hoa's breast.

After settling Keaton with some cookies, Dale read. He'd selected pieces from some of the new work he has lately been posting to the Possum Pouch. I cannot tell you how wonderful it was to hear these aloud: they overflow with lived experience of everyday family life woven with thoughts of the literary and philosophical, of lyrical love and longing, of caring interrelations between father-husband speaker and all members of family. I see these, which Dale speaks of as his daily "notes," as merging lyrical poetics with experience in the most meaningful of ways. We seldom see this done so well, given that much in the way of the prose poem deals more with the bright lights, as it were, of postmodernity. Yet here is what is both postmodernity in form and in substance, which is to say, the substance of commonplace, real life, made wondrously full of mystery once again by the poet's imagining--really a form of giving and sharing. Pay attention to this work: it will be well remembered and spoken of as representative of an innovative, especially viable, poetry for our time. Here is a sample from what was read--Dale is a gracious, powerfully attuned reader--aloud for us:

These days soon open us, the earth-bound babe preparing for that head-down descent. Out the shaft into air and light. And there's the pressure to make more money. Be a good parent in a sadistic culture craving a flesh-flayed Christ action hero of the American Death Cult. And the earth closes up for good somewhere. The tomb's shut tight. Seek an exit by the blast of trumpeting angels. A polytheism of things, like this buzzing plastic toy my son fondles so lightly in bath water. Death is a germ we carry, loaded into the cells at birth. Note to self: cf. Bergson on mind and matter. How the purple octopus takes me by its fat tentacles to a year ago when K moved quite differently, with less physical authority, in the water or on dry land. The goofy smiling octopus spits water from its mouth. We're delighted. We seek delight.--Dale Smith, "Black Stone 3"

Oh--that the "day" can "open" not itself so much, but "us": yes--in terms of having a reading life, do not be satisfied with only this excerpt as example. Instead, do "Seek delight" : There is an abundance of such exquisite wovenness of life with perceptive and penetrating thought about what it means to be in the world right now--this world right now--via Dale's inviting, innovative approach to the poetic of the everyday (Dale mentioned he has been reading Walter Benjamin lately: I cannot wait to see what might result from that conjunction--Benjamin being one of my all time favorite thinkers & writers), really a form of not so much 'writing about life' as it is *writing_for_life* : go to the link several lines above, to the Possum Pouch and read more.

So now it came Hoa's turn, which order of reading they had chosen together. As anyone who has had the fortunate experience of getting to know Hoa will surely witness, she has a powerfully quiet voice-- really, more a form of aural presence, an effect that is wholly supported and sustained by her embodiment within a given space. Quite riveting. I think she is mostly unaware of this, so I do not want to dwell to long on it, only to note that it is there and rounds out the rhetorical presence and effect of her reading. In conversational talking during their stay here (conversations I was so happy to have!), Hoa and Dale had mentioned some of the poetic influences they admire, which they refer to at times by the resonant term, "magus." I will venture to say that neither one of them lacks that same quality of presence--a very persuasive thing, and a pleasure to behold indeed. So that is the term that comes to mind right now as I recall Hoa beginning and revving into her reading. Right from the start, the audience was lost--in the best of ways, to, by, and through, the poetry in combination with this significant rhetorical presence. Hushed yet immensely powerful. I say, in this regard, do not ever miss the opportunity to hear Dale and Hoa read if you have the chance... .

Hoa began with poems from *Your Ancient See Through* (subpress collective, 2002), first, with "Baked Alaska"--a poem that, she commented by way of introduction, reflects on how we take land culturally, materially, to name and consume it--in much the same way we blithely desire, create recipes for, concoct and consume such things as the famed dessert by the above same name :

It is possible         You can
take whole parts of land         chunk
of ice cream (pink) ice cream
mysterious meringue
Stuff it in a hot box       hot       How
is the trick of it     baking
igloos with kin inside
They are they       not real       ice
cream       white and pink
It's complicated

--Hoa Nguyen, *Your Ancient See Through*

To what degree, this poem asks, are we willing and/or able to stop/ or not, our displacing of the real onto the conveniently imaginary? Well... indeed, it is "complicated" in and beyond us, historically and materially, even when awareness is acute.

The latest of Hoa's work is contained in the recent and lovely broadside, Add Some Blue (Backwoods Broadsides Chaplet Series, 2004; Sylvester Pollet, Ed.). We had a bit of conversation about these, in which the question of the place of narrative in contemporary poetry arose. I have some ambivalence about it, I admitted. Hoa has had some, too. But finding a place for it again in the work is an enlightening part of the work and process of writing, as is demonstrated by how it enters ever-so-lightly yet with incisive impact in these new poems. Here is an excerpt from one, "They Sell You What Disappears" :

They sell you what disappears       it's a vague "they"
maybe a capital T       who are they and mostly
poorly paid in China...

What disappears is vague       I can't trade for much
I can cook       teach you cooking       ferment
bread or poetry       I can sell my plasma

...             We are guilty
bringing in sacks of food       bought on credit

--Hoa Nguyen, Add Some Blue

Here are echoes, say, of Adrienne Rich, for one, in the allusion to "bread and poetry," and here are streamlined narrative fusions. Furthermore, here is the story, and a loaded, potentially devastating one, at that: The last thing left to quantify is our plasma (already fast becoming a premium international commodity, no?--if you have doubts, look it up on the stock exchange page of your comfortable, complacent, everyday newspaper: what does a vat of human blood sell for these days, anyway?)--if the trend continues, it may be that soon we will have no plasma-credit left. The poem is here more than realistic, so cannot be passed off as a Cassandra-like impossible artifact of seem or mythic entanglings. This is a story that is real.

Keaton, however, has the last word: he provided sound effects with a constant babble of music and word--lovely, lively, & unusual for a poetry reading. He was very active while Hoa read, playing about her feet and around her presence throughout. Hoa and Dale explained in conversation with me the evening before the reading what their parenting approach entails: total physical commitment: the children stay in bodily proximity to both the parents, all the time (or as much as possible). I was happy to see that it includes poetry readings, having gone through raising my own three by similar means, including bringing them to many poetry readings: Bernstein, Howard, Yevtushenko, Ashbery. They listened and colored things--in more ways than one.

Many books were sold and signed after the reading, always a welcome way to end a reading. And to our great pleasure once again, several of us found our way with Dale and Hoa to a fine dinner at an excellent pasta restaurant, Birra Poretti's, including a nice bottle of Pinot Noir. I am so pleased: I truly cannot think of a more enjoyable evening ever than this one had in Arlington over poetry. Bravo, with hugs & kisses to you all, Hoa and Dale!


chris at 5:14 AM |

 

I'm going for a walk right now, which takes me about an hour, but when I return, 2 important things I want to blog:

1. a Report on the terrific Poetry_Heat reading with Dale Smith and Hoa Nguyen

2. & as promised, a few words on the Bromige issue of Tom Beckett's The Difficulties



chris at 5:08 AM |

Sunday, April 18, 2004

 

My newest (cm) :

Cloud Cooling Sun on Skin
--for DTM--

          Arthur [Rimbaud] picks up its heart...
         --Chus Pato, * m-Tala*--translated by Erin Moure


cloud & the ways so numerous sun
brush indelible love an emmanuel
on ear.
or to eye: observe the roller coaster across the free
way drive itself from love to inane
scream
joy as a way of
love, height a jail driving the clouds on.
become steel runner flash--
love
like that.
loud as love proverbial
tornado roar, that loud:
loud with load
picking up speed
exponentially
where yes is two fire engine
red vehicles turning
to dust right before italicized
aqueous represents clear eyes
on the meta page love
materialize love as of balls
of fleece, creme
of color soaking
the seat
& covered
by droplets of undyed
pistachio sized
wine comes one drop
wine two drop
on the love
driver's
thigh

cm 18 April 04

~~~~~~~~~~copyright of chris murray~~~~~ O~O\ ~~~~~~~~~~


chris at 9:00 PM |

Saturday, April 17, 2004

 

Received:

The Difficulties: David Bromige Issue. V.3, N.1 Tom Beckett, Editor (on initial glance this issue is facinating!--I can't wait till later this evening, after our Poetry_Heat reading with Dale and Hoa, to read through it more closely--thanks, Tom!) [Vicerally Press, 1987] . Here is the list of contributors discussing Bromige in conjunction with the sizeable section by David Bromige: Michael Davidson, Ron Silliman, Tom Sharp, Charles Bernstein, Rae Armantrout, Bruce Andrews, A.L. Nielsen, Stephen Ratcliffe, Bill Vartnaw, Stephen Tills, Carl Jensen, Michael Anderson, Robert Grenier, Barbara Weber.


chris at 8:20 PM |

Thursday, April 15, 2004

 

*****************************************************

Announcing: 2 Events
Poetry_Heat Series
University of Texas, Arlington


1. a presentation on small press publishing

Dale Smith & Hoa Nguyen of Skanky Possum Press and Journal
2:30 p.m., Friday, April 16
at the UTA Writing Center
Central Library 4th Floor

* * *

2. An Evening of Poetry

* Dale Smith & Hoa Nguyen *

with Arlington poet, David Bart
and UTA student poet, Jacquelyn Taylor

7 p.m., Saturday, 17 April
University Center, Concho Room, 2nd Floor


Poetry_Heat series is sponsored by the UTA Writing Center,
Chris Murray, Director
Kristina Graham, Administrative Assistant

We hope to see you there!

*************************************************************




chris at 1:28 AM |

Wednesday, April 14, 2004

 

Terrific :

Just heard from my good friend Kent Johnson: all the letters to the journal, The Believer, regarding the controversial article about authorship and personae (ie., Yasusada)
are now posted here, at Typo 3 :

Kent: You Rock !



chris at 10:09 PM |

 

from my UTA Engl. 4330 course: student work

I am very pleased with the results of The Mean Poem Exercise
(see post of Monday, 12 April, below).
Here is just one of the several excellent student collaborations, this one

by James Yeager, Vicki Van Orden, and Robert Flach

Muscle Car Parts and a Baseball in the Ceiling


Registers cover replacements, texturizing the returns,
Replacing factory Mustang parts with cold-air induction,
Bats lined neatly, fresh cut grass, uniformed courage, anthem played,
Where comp-time tips the heads of team-leads who, powered by suction,
Stare at the tube; rice-rocket jockey they completely ignore
for foul tips, coaches arguing over glove's fast abduction,
Estimate the scaffolding at vinyl-clad installations,
Chrome wheels peel-out, incensed green Honda blows transmission
          junction,
Runners advance, scoring teams uproar, as goes competition
Like the corporate asbestos giving them extreme unction,
Breaking game gaze to ogle the broken parking lot jap-trap,
Player's heavy sighs playoff's loss, weeping over failed function
Of FRP-fire retardant plastic smoke damage sweeping,
Escaping the hood; the sickly-green Civic's forlorn trunk shuns
The loss, preparing loose played dirt, hoping next time for the win.

~~~~~~~copyright of James Yeager, Vicki Van Orden, Robert Flach~~~~~~~~~~~~




chris at 9:35 PM |

 

from Michael Snider, Texfiles Poet of the Week :

I think it difficult, in some ways, to work with a driven, anapestic, clippity-clop metrical scheme, and still say something meaningful (since the drivenness of the meter takes over the sense), but then moreover, to sustain the threads of sense. It's the same problem found in this: "Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house..." the storyline comes second to sense. Memorized at age 5, say, much of it doesn't hold sway until several years later, imho, anyway, and as I recall it. One wants to just keep tapping ones toes and could be saying almost anything in that rythmic drivenness. In part, what Plato meant in criticizing the Rhapsodes. Also why someone as accomplished in intellect as Longfellow is not as appreciated as, say Emerson: imagine Emerson in a bunny suit doing the hippity-hop reciting couplets and you get a measure of the problem in terms of historical reception.

So that is the difficulty with this particular meter. Kids, sly storytellers, and comics do love it, but it marks a way that could say anything at all and almost no one would care or notice.

But here, Michael writes the poem in ways that deal reasonably with that tendency, telling a story that keeps the read near-comic and interesting, that keeps the reader going, so to hear what might come next--the proverbial hanging on every next word--without having consciousness fading off into mere toe-tapping (which is nice sometimes, don't take me wrong on that: but words rhetorically placed will do more work than that, or are often meant to, I think).

So, I do want to say nice work on this otherwise innocuous seeming poem, Michael. There's a lot of *strategem* tucked admirably into it.
cm




A Stratagem


When I talk about politics, poems, or art,
My wife rolls her eyes and my kids run away
And my friends begin shouting, "Enough, you old fart!
Get over it, man! We don't care what you say

About something that happened long ages ago
When a man named Somethingus said this about that
And Somebodyelsus said, 'Actually, no,
Since your whatsus is broke and your ass is too fat.'"

Then they're back to the tube, where Buffy the Slayer
Is bound by a vampire who strokes her bare thigh,
And I'm forced to conclude that there isn't a prayer
Of serious talk, nor a reason to try.

Perhaps the solution's to have myself dubbed--
Like Fellini translated to Hollywood slang--
I could say what I want, and they wouldn't feel snubbed,
And they could pretend I'm just one of the gang.


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~poem is copyright of michael snider~~~~~~~~~~





chris at 7:06 PM |

 

from Stephen Jonas, Exercises for Ear * :

LXXII

in bed where nothin' 's satisfied
we put our loins to sleep
beneath green spread vines of
      terror we wrestle the fire

(what must they -- neighbors
      meeting the averted eyes of

corridors           on the street we
speak behind glasses (dark)

vine leaves, kisses
                    & bay

(54)


CXII

yr Little World surrounded w/
      newsprint, maintain'd in orbit
via artificial improvisation a
pink innoculated soul

peeks out onto the sani-
           :   tary landscape where
abstract cars fart carbon Sums
to chase the split-person'd

Artist thru & under sluice-jazz
ways in rapid transits screaming :
don't just take these
            words from me

(74)


* Stephen Jonas, Selected Poems. Joseph Torra, Ed. Hoboken, NJ: Talisman House, Publ., 1994.


chris at 11:26 AM |

Tuesday, April 13, 2004

 

Via my friend Olja Jokic at Univ. Michigan, do check out this year's

Meme Fest visual arts competition.


chris at 10:33 PM |

 

Darn!--I found the wrong typo.

Going to see if my students want to give it a go, Eileen, but we don't meet again until tomorrow.

Meanwhile: yeah, Catherine Daly's got it going on with her poetry. I've been following her work for a while now, but this new stuff is just luminous.


chris at 7:57 PM |

 

Get on The Drunken Boat !

I do so love these community efforts in poetry: check out the new Snapshots of Poetry Etc page at the fabulous online journal, The Drunken Boat--including a good 10 or so poems of my sort-of humble self. (from about August to end of October).

But even if you are tired of me tooting my own horn, please look into the very fine work from internationally recognized poets such as Mark Weiss, Jill Jones, Doug Barbour, Anny Ballardini, Frank Parker, Alison Croggon, Patrick McManus, Rebecca Seiferle, Barry Alpert, Liz Kirby, Arni Ibsen, Deborah Russell, Ken Wolman, Gerald Schwartz. Many thanks to Rebecca Seiferle and Alison Croggon for this feature.


chris at 7:33 PM |

 

"some random thoughts on terror"-- from the eloquent Ela (scroll to Monday 12 April 04)


chris at 10:20 AM |

 

The Mean Poem Exercise * : Update on my Engl.4330 Seminar in Poetry Writing at UTA:

Definitely a whirlwind semester! But coming into the last quarter of it now and my students are reading Steve Jonas, this week, the *Selected Poems* (Talisman House, 1994). This text is an absolute favorite of mine, a must, I think, for anyone who wants to write today--but also given that my own copy is special since found and purchased at Moe's in Berkeley last summer on a lovely July afternoon while on trek through town and then over to Oakland for a reading at 21 Grand with one of the people I consider most special to poetry today, and my great pal, poet and translator, Chris Daniels (students are coming up soon on reading Chris's translation of Josely Vianna Baptista's *On the Shining Screen of the Eyelids [Manifest Press, 2003]).

The students are really getting a lot out of Jonas--or I should qualify: nearing the last of the semester here, so attendance gets a little sketchy, so I should say, those who have come to class are getting a lot out of it; those who are not, unfortunately, will have consequences for not showing up--that's just the implied-contract-end of doing this kind of thing as a college course: something to think on further, I believe. I sometimes wonder if folks such as Elizabeth Bishop were afterall entirely right in claiming that poetry cannot be taught. But then one day a class of 14 shows up and does some outstanding work, and I think, well, even if it was not due to the teaching, or the teaching is secondary at best, it is true that something did happen there and the result turned out to be something workable and sustainable as poetry.

We read aloud today, each choosing a favorite poem, and it was wonderful to hear this chorus of Jonas aloud in the room. I like that notion of chorus, even when variable so not really a true chorus as we think of it today where everyone is saying or singing the same song together at the same time however blent to differing threads of voicing (though this notion would be more true if understood by standards in ancient Greek uses in drama of the chorus as a mechanism of dialogic response to a text or character, so in that sense the notion of chorus does fit) and making the text active that way, which to my thinking is much of the point of doing poetry and certainly of attempting to teach it.

The students are working on collaborative poems, in pairs or in groups of three. Testing their poetic mettle, as it were, with contraints of form as structure, in an assignment I devised, that I'm calling the Mean Poem Exercise, partly because the poem results from or is a *mean* in the arithmetical sense, of not only a schema of quantities, but also because two or more poets collaborate on it. And yes, well, it's also a little complicatedly tough to maneuver through so is not as free as some forms and processes, so in that sense is a little mean too (but only jokingly :)

Instructions for writing The Mean Poem Exercise * :

--individually, create a free-write list of terms from one discourse community (ie., medical, literary, scientific, artistic, music, & etc.); check it for possible rhyming terms and note these.
--the poem's shape is 15 lines of 15 syllables each.
--if paired with others to collaborate, then rhyme every 3rd line (only: other lines have no rhyming pattern or effect in the schema at all) .
--if triadic in collaboration, then rhyme every 2nd line (same "only" rule)
--write line by line taking turns, in the same order throughout.
--draw your lines from your list of terms from a discourse community. cm

So far these are looking very, very, good--and here's what I also like: the students are having fun making the poems. That really is what I think it's all about most of the time for writers--otherwise, why do it? They read Kristen Prevallet last week, and so are now familiar with her wonderful suggestions for generating new ways of writing poems, so this exercise follows in the same spirit of attempting to both reign in the poetic form while at the same time opening up not only the possibilities for fresh poems, but also for making discourse communities mesh to create new ways of thinking about language, subjectivity, and all those wonders and horrors dealt with every time we open our mouths to speak, or move our bodies in rhetorics of any kind.

* ~~~~~"the mean poem exercise" is copyright of chris murray~~~~~ *



chris at 5:59 AM |

Monday, April 12, 2004

 

"Scenes in the Future from the Past" : Tribute to Jill's Vision


Jill Stengel, who is due any day now to birth a new baby (and may have already--I last spoke with her on email two days ago) wrote an incisive and provocative post (there were several, and many of them have been discussed widely here in bloggyville) to the SUNY Buffalo list last Friday, regarding the misogynist and racist rhetorical climate that tends to appear (and do not get me wrong: I do not think the list is to blame in this), gather speed and is thus perpetuated there, even though many of the list participants rightly and loudly object to such.

I was moved by Jill's post--she has a way of putting things that is forthrightly spoken from an ethos of compassion and care, yet she is able to mark well the slights, cuts, and effects of mean-spirited discourse.

Jill doesn't blog, and is rather busy right now anyway, with the work of mothering. So I want here to give some time to highlighting her strong and generous perspectives in and on poetry and life today. To my mind these perspectives are essential, even if often de-emphasized in poetic discourse in favor of the more flashy models and theories of poetics.

Thus I'm posting a couple of pieces I am fond of from Jill's Sept. 2003 chapbook--the entire chap is wonderfully done and if you have not yet gotten a copy of it, then you should do so--"Ladies with Babies" (Boog City, 2003, David Kirschenbaum, editor; artwork by Brenda Ijima).

This is in tribute to Jill and her vision of shared, emotionally sustainable life and sensual beauty, which in Jill' poetry here, is expressed through the gestures and relations of mother-love--emphasis on relations (back in my September archives there is another post on this chapbook, emphasis on the interrelational energy of the poetic at work here, also mirrored by the subject matter and nicely reflected by Ijima's lovely artwork).

from Jill Stengel, Ladies with Babies

6. and then there is the shine
of perspiration inside her
elbow inside the last crease
of her infancy remaining on
her arm those countless rolls
now one between elbow and
wrist full of sleep-sweat lightly
clenched hand with just-cut
nails some with bruises all
dirty no time before nap for
handwashing she was desperately
tired calling for milk for mama
and she rests in a Manhattan
hotel room perspiration drying
from the AC ready to spring
into the evening and she tears
my heart wide open every day


5.
these are postcards
put them in your pocket
they will remind you
of scenes in the future
from the past

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~copyright Jill Stengel~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
cm


chris at 7:03 PM |

 

Another great find, among many--kari, thanks :
** Jimmy Carter on just how wrong the Christian Right is...**

(via transdada)


chris at 10:01 AM |

 

The latest issue of Bookslut came out today--
a great issue, including :

--Laura Leichum interviewing Molly Peacock

--Dale Smith, in his Marsupial Inquirer Column, on Birth and Kerouac

--Cookslut, Tom Bernard, on the *Moosewood Cookbook*

--Jen Crispin, intro to her new "Breeder" Column

and interesting things in reviews of poetry:

--Michael Farrelly on *One Hundred Famous Views of Edo*, by Doug MacPherson and Edward Smallfield

--Janine Armin on Laura Enrick's fascinating *Skincerity* :
"... a myriad of
Built so with the humble blocks
Fits [here I find I have misunderstood what is wanted..."




chris at 3:23 AM |

 

Paul Robeson, "The Meaning of Freedom,"
(from the Paul Robeson Centennial Celebration).
--via Wood's Lot--


chris at 3:10 AM |

Sunday, April 11, 2004

 

Thank goodness the publish status corrected itself and works now. Was able to get the text for Michael's poem posted, finally.


chris at 10:29 AM |

 

well (or, i'd like to be...).
i've been pretty sick here with flu all day Saturday--since Friday night.
just now able to get up and look around online.
having trouble with *publish status* button on the Blogger screens...
posting this to see if it will go. cm


chris at 8:30 AM |

Saturday, April 10, 2004

 

Powered by audblogaudio post powered by audblog

Michael Snider, Texfiles Poet of the Week, reading :


Another Story Normalized

Why should it bother me that no one cares
How hard it was to lug my ex-wife's stuff
From our new house and up three flights of stairs
To Marianne's? Who hasn't had it rough?

Besides, I got to keep the cat and plants
And sometimes see my daughter--till they moved--
And mow the grass and look for new romance--
There's nothing like it! Nothing! It's been proved!

The only things like anything are things
Too small to pet or whisper to at night
"O darling quark, your strangeness weaves the strings
Of everything but leptons and the light!"

What multitudes I am, still incomplete.
My mother claims my father's breath was sweet.

* * *

[which is a normalized version of this poem:]


Another Story


I helped my ex-wife move in with her girlfriend
so now I've got a cat and some more furniture
and another weird story to tell,
some more plants, too--don't know
what they are, but plants aren't too hard
almost all of them you just water--
I used to feel guilty telling people my troubles
but think about this--

I've got 10 trillion cells--and every one
came from just one egg and one sperm
out of the hundreds of eggs my mother had
and the billions of sperms my father had--
and then there are things like
"What if my great-great-great-etc. grandfather
had bad breath the night my one less great grandmother
was conceived, would they still have fucked?" and so on--
I'm a pretty improbable guy, not even counting the gravitational
constant--

And as amazing as I am, the really amazing thing
is that I'm really not me--those 10 trillion cells
are outnumbered 10 to 1 by aliens--
mites, bugs, viruses, bacteria, worms,
all kinds of things in my hair,
in my guts, in my mouth and on my skin--
I'm a walking universe and so are you,
all of you, all 110 trillion of each of you--

Anyway I like the cat, which I got because
they can't afford the deposit.
All those other things, you can't pet them.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~copyright of michael snider~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


chris at 4:35 PM |

 

--You go, Eileen! (whose blog post brings a righteous balance
back after a nasty slur was posted by Andrew Loewen [who is he?--I've not seen his posts over there before...] over at the Buffalo Poetics List).

--And Barbara Jane Reyes posts a poem at the group blog, As/Is, in response to the same slur [scroll to 4/8/04].

Do keep on ! Talk Back & stop the violence.



chris at 6:43 AM |

 

" ... Jimi
Hendrix playing air
guitar... "

yes, indeed


chris at 6:08 AM |

 

Books Received:

--Chus Pato, the 2003 Nomados Press chapbook translated by Erin Moure, from m-Tala. With cover collage, "Maria Felix Babylonian" black-and-white collage photo by Erin Moure. [thanks much, Erin!]

--Tony Hoagland, What Narcissism Means to Me. (Gray Wolf, 2003). [thanks! Wendy Taylor Carlisle].

--Linda Pastan, An Early Afterlife (Norton, 1995)
Carnival Evening: New and Selected Poems (Norton, 1998)
The Last Uncle (Norton, 2002) [acquired at Baylor Univ Beall Poetry Festival, Apr 2-3, 2004: Linda Pastan and Galway Kinnell, featured poets ]

--Beall Poetry Festival Catalogue, English Department, Baylor University: 2003; poems by participants David St. John, Molly Peacock, Robert Pinsky, Frank Bidart; and student contest winners, Rebecca Munro, Osvaldo de la Torre, Derek Clemons. [acquired at Baylor Univ Beall Poetry Festival, Apr 2-3, 2004]

--Wendy Taylor Carlisle, Reading Berryman to the Dog (Jacaranda, 2000);
After Happily Ever After (2River, 2003)



chris at 1:49 AM |

 

from Texfiles Poet of the Week, Michael Snider :


Fools in Love


We didn't start with much. You had a ride;
I had a room. One night became a week,
You driving me to work to save your pride
And I so much in love I couldn't speak.
I played my mandolin, singing the song
I sang on Lisa's porch the night we met --
"Angel from Montgomery" -- and all night long
we kept my housemates up with our duet.
We were a silly pair, to think that we
Could build a life. You had two children, one
In diapers. We were broke. My daughter Lee
Was lost. Ten years younger, you should have run.
We were the portrait of improvidence --
And love has blessed us for our lack of sense.


* * *

Putting Clothes Away


Lazy, I lie in bed and watch you bend
Over the drawer, knees apart, your dress
Barely reaching your thighs. I don't intend
To take you from your work, just caress,
Lightly, your supple calf, but then my hand
Gets notions of its own and when you stop,
A little, noticing, moves on. You stand
Up half annoyed and half about to drop
Every stitch. My fingers undo folds
Of flesh and find the button just inside--
My breath unravels when you press, then hold
My hand away. "You stop it now!" you chide--
"Get up! I told you there was work to do--
We'll see how that thing fits when we get through."


~~~~~~~~~~~copyright of michael snider~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~







chris at 1:06 AM |

Friday, April 09, 2004

 

Found via artes de realidad en un blog :

Art/Work(s) On : Bushbag


chris at 3:40 PM |

 

Experiment: poem entirely as a blog composition * :

O'Hara Epigraph & a Dozen Over a Previous Century's
Memorex Remote: Memorex MVT2195, c. 1997

...and I was getting to feel like a robot. (32) ... the artist's duty to his time has nothing to do with whether he likes it or not, any more than Picasso liked the idea of the town of Guenica being bombed, or the Renaissance painters liked to have Christ crucified over and over again. (29) --Frank O'Hara, "Teens Quiz A Critic: 'What's With Modern Art?' " (Bill Berkson, Ed., 2925 Higgens St., Austin,TX: Mike and Dale's Press,1999) [many thanks to Dale Smith of Skanky Possum Press, for sending me the wonderful What's With Modern Art? --cm]


1.
As it is speechless
plastic on the table beside
the living, it calls

on the Fagles Odyssey of things: words are always
necessary & at hand
over miniscule plant & hermit
crab or all pettable others
of exo or flesh

2.
Only beings to speak of I
enter the program still
& rest there furry
with pollen electricity

across Trojan other
walls like pictures taken
where talk can call on a plastic black
gloss is one
word you
& mask
another

or to find is
an entire waterless
planet rising
blent here at monitor pleasure
dawn or yes yellow
poppyseed cake is sweet
to expel: "oh"--
or contingency
to revelations not
revolution



3.
Moving down the body Forward
giving of responsive
buttons to set--
if you missed it
try that channel again--
beginning a one
that says call sirens!
or try the power being
so bourgeois
straight to
the heartsong, hummingbird,
suck & let a letter be
ummmmmmming over love

4.
Baby where is the button for who
needs a monitor
across letters: Dear
Friend

of my leaking rupture
a continuous rewind for play
the sleek arrow Nausikaa
coming
nubile at the fingertip

5.
Next: well, you
knew that

6.
Yes, fast forward & stop
where she was music

7.
No: every other is one
she say
hanging from a tree,
or singing strange
fruit for her
birthday

the woman Holiday
walks nerve
ribbons
across femoras
no my
will ever mend

her: she is dead
or for you again
a river of preposition:
the meaning of
of is
(someone just said "asshole" around here)
no,
not together

8.
Longer necessary in the mute
record // record //record //
the counter
memory [another sighs: "rememory"]
has a stop
a reset & to [infinitives]
speeds that war hag:
Athena
her gray
drag

9.
No
textual drug I wanted
to say to you this
is what
it is: to give deer tracks
in snow
us

this daily
volume
my sleep, my oh
not oh my

10.
So cancel
on auto reset happens
here
twice about some
thing not
my

11.
Friend
of everyday sight
& sound: where
are [sign
of more betrayal
layers: rind with pores, some sand
like, yeah, give us this bread, um
crumb

12.
Between button & black plastic
seaweed hot
pepper sliver

existential ur
so carnival]


* Meaning the poem was composed only on the blog-posting screen, in one sitting of one hour's time,
early ayem, 09 April 2004. cm

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~copyright of chris murray~~~~ O~O/ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~


chris at 2:24 AM |

Thursday, April 08, 2004

 

from Cesar Vallejo, as translated by Clayton Eshleman and Jose Rubia Barcia * :

A LO MEJOR, SOY OTRO


          A lo mejor, soy otro; andando, al alba, otro que marcha
en torno a un disco largo, a un disco elastico:
mortal, figurativo, audaz diafragma.
A lo mejor, recuerdo al esperar, anoto marmoles
donde indice escarlata, y donde catre de bronce,
un zorro ausente, espureo, enojadisimo.
A lo mejor, hombre al fin,
las espaldas ungidas de anil misericordia,
a lo mejor, me digo, mas alla no hay nada.

          Me da la mar el disco, refiriendolo,
con cierto margen seco, a mi garganta;
!nada, en verdad, mad acido, mas dulce, mas kanteano!
Pero sudor ajeno, pero suero
o tempestad de mansedumbre,
decayendo o subiendo, !eso, jamas!

          Echado, fino, exhumome,
tumefacta la mezcla en que entro a golpes,
sin peirnas, sin adulto barro, ni armas,
una aguja prendida en el gran atomo...
!No! !Nunca! !Nunca ayer! !Nunca despues!

          Y de ahi este tuberculo satanico,
esta muela moral de plesiosaurio
y estas sospechas postumas,
este indice, esta cama, estos boletos.

21 Oct. 1937

* * *
[as translated by Clayton Eshleman :]

"CHANCES ARE I'M ANOTHER"


          Chances are, I am another; walking, at dawn, another who moves
around a long disc, an elastic disc;
a mortal, figurative, audacious diaphragm.
Chances are, I remember while waiting, I annotate marble
where scarlet index, and where bronze cot,
an absent, spurious, enraged fox.
Chances are, a man after all,
my back annointed with indigo misericordia,
chances are, I say to myself, beyond there is nothing.

          The sea hands me the disc, referring it,
with a certain dry margin, to my throat;
nothing, truly, more acidic, more sweet, more kantian!
But another's sweat, but a serum
or tempest of meekness,
decaying or rising, that, never!

     :  :   Reclined, slender, I exhume myself,
smashing my way into the tumified mixture,
without legs, without adult clay, nor weapons,
a needle stuck in the great atom...
No! Never! Never yesterday! Never after!

          Thus this satanic tuber,
this moral plesiosaurian molar
and these posthumous suspicions,
this index, this bed, these tickets.

(146-147)

* Cesar Vallejo, The Complete Posthumous Poetry. Translated by Clayton Eshleman and Jose Rubia Barcia. Berkeley: U of Calif Press, 1978.



chris at 10:29 PM |

 

On Mr. S/Zz: Onward with Adversarial: if Nontotalitarian and Emperor, then Nekkkidddd?

--I mean if you're into that rhetorical mode and style ... I particularly like this passage from our Janus-celebratory-faced Mr. Slavoj Zizek. * I'd note one thing though--none of it works strategically unless all players consent to being completely within the "our" or the "we." So that if you don't happen to be, or don't accept that invite, then none of this really applies. Kind of nice to think about margins that way, I think. One more way to think of the categories of gaze and metonymic behaviour together, and as not only possible, but desirable for rhetorical energy to be viable.--

So then, much to think on here:

"It is true that this [previous passage: this = "accord with the social game"] renders action difficult (to deal a blow against the adversary, our action must inscribe itself in the texture of the social game and pass for a socially acceptable act), but an even more rigorous limitation is imposed upon our [um, careful where you aim that "our," buddy] adversary: if we [ditto with that "we"] succeed in inventing such a 'doubly inscribed' act, he is confined to the role of the impotent observer, he cannot strike back because he is also prohibited from violating the rules. ... The gaze denotes at the same time power (it enables us to exert control over the situation, to occupy the position of the master) and impotence (as bearers of a gaze, we are reduced to the role of passive witness to the adversary's action) [um, did Zizek ever hear of classical passive-agressive behavior?--just asking...] The gaze, in short, is the perfect embodiment of the 'impotent Master'... [Zz adding here that Hitchcock likes this trope]...

"This dialectic of the gaze in its connection with both power and impotence was articulated for the first time in Poe's "The Purloined Letter" [ok, but keep talkin' Zz, cuz we have heard this many times over]. When the minister steals the incriminating letter from her, the Queen sees what is going on, though she can do nothing but impotently observe his actions. Any action on her part would betray her to the King, who is also present but who does not know and must not know anything about the incriminating letter (which probably reveals some amorous indiscretion of the Queen). The crucial point to be noted is that the situation of the 'impotent gaze' is never dual, it it never a simple confrontation between a subject and an adversary. A third element is always involved (a the King in "The Purloined Letter," the ignorant guests in the Sabateur) that personifies the innocent ignorance of the big Other (the rules of the social game) from which we must hide our true designs [humans are that cunning?--hard to believe sometimes: i mean, think of Bushbag: he could never devise this on his own. 'course there is instinct, too. but he does not seem very instinctual. he seems cardboard, and accident of the worst kind of slow dull simple prepositional *of*]. What we have then are three elements: an innocent third who sees all but fails to grasp the real significance of what he sees; the agent whose act--under the guise of simply following the rules of the social game taking place--deals a decisive blow to the adversary; and, finally, the adversary himself, the impotent observer who apprehends perfectly the real implication of the act, but is nonetheless condemned to the role of passive witness, since his counteraction would provoke the suspicion of the innocent, ignorant big Other. The fundamental pact uniting the actors of the social game is thus that the Other must not know all. This nonknowledge of the Other opens up a certain distance that, so to speak, gives us all breathing space, i.e., that allows us to confer upon our actions a supplementary meaning beyond the one that is socially acknowledged. For this very reason, the social game (the rules of etiquette, etc.), in the very stupidity of its ritual, is never simply superficial. We can indulge in our secret wars only as long as the Other does not take cognizance of them, for at the moment the Other can no longer ignore them, the social bond dissolves itself. A catastrophe ensues, similar to the one instigated by the child's observation that the emperor is naked. The Other must not know all: this is an appropriate definition of the nontotalitarian social field." (72-73)

* Slavoj Zizek, "How the Non-duped Err," in Looking Awry. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995.


chris at 9:20 PM |

 

"... adorned with empty envelopes. You, silly."
(see "poem 1" for Wednesday, 7 Apr)

--some lines have new little green twigs on them that catch on yr sleeve, ya kno?


chris at 9:08 AM |

Wednesday, April 07, 2004

 

UTA Poetry_Heat Reading Tonight

UTA is proud to announce its second Poetry_Heat 2004 event,
7:00 p.m.
Rady Room, Nedderman Hall

Wendy Taylor Carlisle, Mary Kim Kitchen, Robert Flach

Wendy Taylor Carlisle lives in East Texas. Her poems have appeared in can we have our ball back? Shampoo Poetry, Monserrat Review, Cider Press Review, Borderlands, Passager, Prairie Dog, Maverick, 2 River View, Unlikely Stories, Perihelion, The Astrophysicist’s Tango Partner, Isibongo, Conspire, Tintern Abbey, Zuzu's Petals, Three Candles, and Pig Iron Malt. She has won The Lipscomb Award from Centenary College, a Passager Poetry Contest Award, and has been three times nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her first book, Reading Berryman to the Dog, was published by Jacaranda Press in 2000, and her work appears in Athens Avenue: A Collection of Poetry (Funky Dog Publishing, 1999).

Mary Kim Kitchen is a poet and associate director, UTA Upward Bound Program

Robert Flach is a graduating English major and accomplished poet

Poetry_Heat is sponsored by the UTA Writing Center, Chris Murray, Director



chris at 7:11 PM |

 

from Michael Snider, Texfiles Poet of the Week :

Another set of poems rewritten one to the other in the mode of one of the ancient western rhetorical exercises, this one with a perspectival change in the form, as well as narrators.


Mysterious Ways


I found her on my porch one night, half stoned,
Black-eyed, and broke. I had a sofa-bed,
Where passing out "Will I be safe?" she moaned--
I figured while she snored she wasn't dead.
Next morning came the tale. It was her son
Who'd beat her up and robbed her for cocaine,
And daughter who, not to be outdone,
Had dropped her off with whiskey for her pain.
She wouldn't call the cops, and I got mad.
I didn't see her till the hurricane
Had come and gone and taken all she had:
"My Kenny stole so much from me God swore
He'd send a storm so he can't steal no more."


* * *


Mysterious Ways


Kenny just took and took from me till God
Said "That's enough!" and washed away my house.
I reckon it's because I spared the rod
Kenny just took and took from me till God
Had had enough of him and gave His nod
To the hurricane to stop the thieving louse.
Kenny just took and took from me till God
Said "That's enough," and washed away my house.


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~copyright of michael snider~~~~~~~~~~~~~


chris at 6:56 PM |

 

Sawako has "a field of fried umbrellas" !


chris at 11:18 AM |

 

reading over at Tim Yu's blog and found this good news:

Ali Warren has a book out (congratulations, Ali)! Schema. I'm ordering that one, yes!


chris at 10:10 AM |

 

YaY!!

Shampoo 20 is up: checkitout!--tim yu, stephanie young, cassie lewis, del ray cross, mark du charme, tanya brolaski, carl annarummo and many more fine poets/works.


chris at 10:04 AM |

 

I am ever indebted to owls.

I was surprised by one owl one time. Mottled. Speckles. The only owl. Marked by. This meaning of soft. No one hurt but the owl. Preserved on the grille of my night driving jeep. Highway 180 between Flagstaff and Junction 64 to Grand Canyon, AZ. Just coming. Down. Wave of double. Striped road. Out of the Kaibab pines into the next plateau. The Coconino pinons. Coyotes running the road now and. Pitch midnight near milkyway. Colder than stars with. World? Blackeyed Susans leaning into asphalt all the way. Dashboard greens. Radio on Emmylou: "Before Believing." Bundle of incoherent contradiction criss-crosses these are: high beams out of nowhere. Is, everywhere. Is gone. Something to pause. Then to keep going (as life will). Embodiment of fifty miles later. Home at Grand Canyon (lived there for ten or so years in another life). Owl wingspread, body crisp, across the wide grille of the Jeep, exquisitely preserved instant about no grief. Beautifully, as in. Golden, Godlen, Godling, Golem, God/Lent. Feathers on the ling and the wisp and the uplift in a breeze against the still-hot engine. Debt and talisman, fortunate unfortune transfer complete. I am indebted over. This is ever. In owls. For and Given.


chris at 9:01 AM |

 

The Owls


chris at 8:52 AM |

 

So very happy to be reminded here of the magical: via Gustav Moreau on the post of 6 April and (I'm adding hours later) on the 7th, that it is Billie Holiday's birthday: Happiness wisht, lady.

Many thanks to Mark, of Wood's Lot, one of my all-time favorite reads in blogland.


chris at 2:52 AM |

Tuesday, April 06, 2004

 

From Michael Snider, Texfiles Poet of the Week :

Michael often writes in forms, and is well known for his way with the sonnet. Here are two, on the same subject, one a rewrite of the other, which is a standard exercise in the western history of rhetoric, the specific use of poetry this way going back at least to Erasmus.

Casual Conversation


He said he was an angel
but he didn't look so good.
Asked him what was up
"Not me, man--
This job sucks."
So I bought him a draught
and settled in. "I thought
the percs'd be pretty good--
I mean, unless you're
somebody's guardian angel--
I'd hate to be mine."
"I do hate it, man."
And he drained his mug
and stood up--"See ya, pal."



Some Stranger


3 beers before he'd tell me what he did,
And I just laughed. An angel? Cherub, right?
He lost those rosy cheeks--May God forbid
You meet their kind. You'd wither in that light.
When I heard that the booth got smaller quick.
It made me wonder if beer was all he'd had--
So pale! I asked him was he feeling sick.
He shook himself. He grinned, Not near as bad
As some will feel. Now that was really weird.
I played it safe and asked about his work--
Not bad to live forever, be revered,
Unless you're guardian to some wise-ass jerk...
You got it, pal. He drained his mug and stood.
I'm damned if I know how to do you good.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~copyright of michael snider~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


chris at 7:28 PM |

 

Exciting: Wendy Taylor Carlisle coming in today. She's doing a workshop with my students and giving a reading for Poetry_Heat tomorrow night. Welcome, Wendy!


chris at 6:59 PM |

 

In the morn: new poems from Michael Snider, Texfiles Poet of the Week


chris at 11:23 AM |

 

Oh (absofrabulously promotional) Yeah, gimme more: the new

Moria Poetry is up !

and doin' good things, including:

--some very fine LYX ISH
(this is just terrific in terms of tribute-wise: special thanks for this, Bill)

--& from the rest of us wee volk:
strong work from YaY!! harry k stammer

--& Oh Yeah: mr. blues rockin' clayton couch

(personal faves of mine, i have to say)

--& not to be missed in the pleasures of the faves: jean vengua,

--& whooooowheeee:
eileen tabios,

--& sueyen juliette lee

(en total: les femmes extrordinairiandefinitely methinks).

--but please do not stop there:
go see this fine piece by the infamously fabulificus ela kotkowska !! on B-longing.
no, i mean B-logging--yeah, that's it... bloggering...

--& pulling up the caboose: lil ol me with 2 squalling new bratty ones:
The Idea of Border
&
Hysterical Homunculi

OH MAMA!

Enjoy ! !


chris at 9:31 AM |

 

Just Reading Around.
Like a Slut-- oops, sorry Jessa! fell into that one!

Oh, like I do so love to
do.

& Found this very nice bloggie thing I didn't realize Tim Peterson runs,
and now feel so silly, for,
I should definitely have looked sooner, and found this good readerly work:
(i love this name:) Mappemunde...

Well, ya kno:
it's an architechtonic, geo-been-to-AZ for
love & listening thing...


chris at 8:48 AM |

 

So nice to hear: "Home again... "-- YaY!!


chris at 7:45 AM |

 

I am so sick of George Bushbag pop-ups that I could just puke.

Sorry, all. Just had to say that. I feel better now.


chris at 7:37 AM |

Monday, April 05, 2004

 

Just finished reading a great article I strongly recommend: "Reformulating Forms," by Ravi Shankar, in the current Contemporary Poetry Review. It's an article on two contemporary Indian poets and their rhetorical situations of Indian and internationalist perspectives.

Here is a taste of the poetry and the incisive perspective (s) Shankar offers:

--from Rukmini Bhaya Nair, of Delhi, Shankar writes that we are "looking anew at the materiality of language" via (I'm quoting the first line of) the feminist poem, "Genderole":

"Considerthefemalebodyyourmost
basictextanddon'tforgetit... "

This is a terrific poem incisively read by Shankar.

--and from Keki N. Daruwalla, also residing in Delhi, comes the wake-up call to realize the material result of the on-going conflicts--really, war--between the Hindus and the Muslims. Here is the last line of the brutally yet poetically clearcut "Gujarat 2002" :

"In such times is lockjaw the best--to be dumb, to be mute?"

Shankar rightly explains that, here, "metonymy is once again used to show the extent to which human beings have been turned into weapons... ."

Here is politically active poetry in some of its internationally best manifestations. Keep on.

Do check out this fine article, this fine poetry, today.


chris at 6:24 PM |

 

Announcing: a new Texfiles Poet of the Week!

I've long wanted to be able to feature this fine poet and person, and now, finally the day has come:
a warm welcome going out to Michael Snider, who blogs at the Formal Sonnetarium, and who is now the latest feature here on Texfiles! Here are 2 of his poems:


Read, Read, Talk, Talk *


My Buddhist shrink tells me stories
Collected in Zen Flesh, Zen Bones.
He doesn’t know I’ve bought the book
Or how I quickly solve his koans.

It’s the same at work--I read the books
That no one else has time to read
And I’m a fucking guru when
Their code is tangled in the weeds.

Even you, who should know better,
Shake your head at what I know--
I talk about the things I've read,
A never-ending trivia show--

So where's the book that teaches quiet?
Promiscuous talk and empty arms
Are all the profit reading brings me,
And at 3 am, they have no charms.


* * *


Actaeon Still, on 2nd St. **


Through the left-hand window the moon
Appears each night smaller, later,
Fainter, and finally, gone.
The third night of darkness
Its thin crescent appears
On the sine-wave of love and suicide--
I feel its sway in my genitals,
In my spine, in my legs and mouth.
Every night I forget my name,
Speak a language I never knew.
I want to steal a car
And drive madly west
To the Sierra Madre, to the Pacific,
But the moon is already there--
It is easy to name her Hunter.
I feel the horn in my brain.



* Originally published in Matrix.

** Originally published in Louisville Review


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~copyright of Michael Snider~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


chris at 11:30 AM |

 

Yikes: "texticles"!? it sounds a little too close for [texfiles] comfort, if I may say so... no offense intended, just good naturedly, um... wandering through the semiotic ... Richard's poetry and the idea of *correspondences* is certainly intriguing


chris at 8:41 AM |

 

some favorites pastiched from Araki Yasusada, Doubled Flowering * :

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

--[undated] amidst condoms washed up on the beach
a plastic dinosaur bears its teeth (43)

--July 14, 1948
The facist is young--
Why does he carry a teapot
among the graves? (17)

--"Motokiyu, we know, would have shrugged his shoulders... "(Kent Johnson and Javier Alvarez, 124)

--Telescope with Urn
February 14, 1960

The image of the galaxies spreads out like a cloud of sperm.
Expanding, said the observatory guide, and at such and such velocity.
It is like the idea of the flowers, opening within the idea of the flowers.
I like to think of that, said the monk, arranging them with his papery fingers.
Tiny were you, and squatted over a sky-colored bowl to make water.
What a big girl! cried we, tossing you in the general direction of the stars.
Intently, then, in the dream, I folded up the great telescope on Mount Horai.
In the form of this crane, it is small enough for the urn. (32)

--Dream and Charcoal
[undated]

And then she said: I have gone toward the light and become beautiful.
And then she said: I have taken a couple of wings and attached them to the various back-parts of my body.
And then she said: all the guests are coming back to where they were and then talking.
To which she said: without the grasp-handle, how would you recognize my nakedness?
To which she replied: without nothing is when all things die.
Which is when she had a wild battle with the twigs.
Which is when the charcoal was passed from her body to mine.
Which was how she rose into the heavens, blinding the pedestrians.
Which was how our union was transposed into a dark scribble.
Which became the daughter calling, calling my name to wake me. (46)

--Mad Daughter and Big-Bang
December 25, 1945*

Walking in the vegetable patch
late at night, I was startled to find
the severed head of my
mad daughter lying on the ground.

Her eyes were upturned, gazing at me, ecstatic-like...

(From a distance it had appeared
to be a stone, haloed with light,
as if cast there by the Big-Bang.)

What on earth are you doing, I said,
you look ridiculous.

Some boys buried me here,
she said sullenly.

Her dark hair, comet-like, trailed behind...

Squatting, I pulled the
turnip up by the root.

*[in the aftermath of the bombing, many survivors moved into the foothills of the Chugoku mountains surrounding Hiroshima. This was the case with Yasusada and his daughter.] (11)

--June 2, 1972
delicacy of delicacies
the breeze in the thick pines
of this ink-wash scroll (115)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

*Araki Yasusada, Doubled Flowering: from the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada. Copyright of Kent Johnson. New York: Roof Books, 1997


chris at 7:21 AM |

 

Oh hey! I want to go to this!

kari... putting this wonderful thing together: you rock!


chris at 6:03 AM |

 

Two more posts coming up tonight, one the announcement of a new Texfiles Poet of the Week. Please stay tuned: I'm typing slower than ever!


chris at 5:34 AM |

 

Poetry_Heat Readings--plus an excerpt from Dale Smith's The Flood and the Garden


It gives me great pleasure to post the following. The Flood and the Garden has some of the most intelligent and vibrant commentary to be found today on the history of poetics and everyday life. If you have not yet gotten this book, look into it.

I would also like to take this moment to announce two more readings in my continuing reading series here at UTA, Poetry_Heat:

Wendy Taylor Carlisle, Mary Kim Kitchen, and Robert Flach
7:00 p.m., Wednesday, April 6, 2004
103 University Hall
University of Texas at Arlington

* * *

Dale Smith and Hoa Nguyen
7:00 p.m., Saturday, April 17, 2004
Red River Room
University of Texas, Arlington


Poetry_Heat is sponsored by the UTA Writing Center,
Chris Murray, Director

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *


from Dale Smith, The Flood and the Garden


32

Pound's concerns were occupied almost wholly with transformation. The metamorphosis of energy, forms, people, trees. The distribution of Persephone throughout the year pressed against his psyche again and again. It's hard to see those Mediterranean concerns through this arrid cacti and juniper scrub. Oak and brush on limestone gather summer heat with archaic indifference. The Steens would be a drive of several days, and present concerns of a different scale. I'm waiting for other rhythms here now. Hoa's sciatic nerve aches. I knuckle cream into her hip muscle. The light force of rain at our window resumes.


33

Dear William Carlos Williams: I read your poems tonight. June bugs pop on the porch between mosquito bites. Here, the sensual world continues, despite computers, autos, cell phones and airplanes. Words, too, drive through us. Your Kora in Hell goes strange and powerful. What looked through you then? Alone in your room late nights bringing your words to the page? Your earth tenderness took root in the freed composition of song.


37

Whitman too pushed through these things. The white death of our social urges keep us drifting. Rotating green clouds loom on some foreboding sky. Tangle of branches and thorns pull you in, poison ivy staining your arm there in the bleached topsoil. We live here between sun and moon, under sky and star, of the earth disappointed or driven by weather. Machines rage, a by-product of Western alchemy, but you understood language resembled our first forms.


49

You can gather these things everyone knows. You absorb experience--the deep past, every atom of the present. You do what you know before you know what to do. Glut of sensation beats the heart. We eat our pistachio and mint double scoops from a waffle cone.


(84-85, 89)

* Dale Smith, The Flood and the Garden. Lawrence, KS: First Intensity Press, 2002


chris at 4:22 AM |

Sunday, April 04, 2004

 

from William Carlos Williams, Sonnet in Search of an Author * :

Nude bodies like peeled logs
sometimes give off a sweetest
odor, man and woman

under the trees in full excess
matching the cushion of

aromatic pine-drift fallen
threaded with trailing woodbine
a sonnet might be made of it

Might be made of it! odor of excess
odor of pine needles, odor of
peeled logs, odor of no odor
other than the trailing woodbine that

has no odor, odor of a nude woman
sometimes, odor of a man.

(255)

* William Carlos Williams, Selected Poems Charles Tomlinson, Ed. New York: New Directions, 1985.


chris at 11:12 PM |

 

I like these, Katey.
Here is another Magritte, from Katey, on Clairvoyance...


chris at 8:42 AM |

 

 just testing		just



	testing 		this out 	for  



		just testing 		this one

out for a \\\\\///// VVVVVVVV%%%%!!!!^^^****~~~~~~~~~~

hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

YaY!!! it worked! Thanks, Tim Morris!


chris at 1:07 AM |

Saturday, April 03, 2004

 

Just out: the April issue of Poetic Inhalation & vol. 3, issue 15 of tin lustre mobile--rockin' with poetry by petra backonja, mark young, david breeden, aryan kaganof, chris stroffolino, william allegrezza, and art by trupthi


chris at 9:21 PM |

Friday, April 02, 2004

 

This Queenie series rocks!--and do have a look-see-read on the Walking Theories, & the Distributed Novel --I'm always so pleased and intrigued to read here...


chris at 10:50 PM |

 

Happy to say I will be resuming the weekly feature of a poet here on Texfiles, announcing the next Texfiles Poet of the Week, sometime over this coming weekend...

for that, and more shenanigans, please stay tuned--or even cartooned--according to your favorite lectionary pleasures ...

Look, as well, to some more posting of Chus Pato's fine work beautifully translated by Erin Moure, and I think we will have a very fine readerly weekend indeed...

: )



chris at 10:11 PM |

 

from William Carlos Williams, Pictures from Brueghel


VI. Haymaking


The living quality of
the man's mind
stands out

and its covert assertions
for art, art, art!
painting

that the Renaissance
tried to absorb
but

it remained a wheat field
over which the
wind played

men with scythes tumbling
the wheat in
rows

the gleaners already busy
it was his own--
magpies

the patient horses no one
could take that
from him

(242)


* William Carlos Williams, Pictures from Brueghel. Charles Tomlinson, Ed. New York: New Directions, 1985.


chris at 10:00 PM |

 

from the Nomados Chapbook of Chus Pato's m-Tala, translated by Erin Moure * :

--BECAUSE IT'S NOT ONLY LANGUAGE THAT'S UNDER THREAT

BUT OUR VERY LINGUISTIC CAPACITY, regardless of the idiom we speak

LANGUAGE IS PRODUCTION, language produces, produces COMMUNICATION, PRODUCES THOUGHT, PRODUCES POETIC CAPACITY, produces profit and gain, PRODUCES US as HUMANS, produces us as HAPPINESS

Language is PRODUCTION, thus CAPITAL's attempts to PRIVATIZE language, to leave us WORDLESS

------------------------------------------------------

LANGUAGE, any LANGUAGE UNDER CAPITAL, tends to wither, to be converted into an object to consume. Into a thing we as speakers no longer PRODUCE, but which CAPITAL, in its attempt to privatize us, PRODUCES FOR US

------------------------------------------------------

Under CAPITAL the creators of Language, its speakers, turn into

CONSUMERS; Language, any Language under Capital, becomes a consumer product, the same as any other MERCHANDISE

----------------------
LANGUAGE-LINGUISTIC SERVITUDE
KAPITAL-KILLER
ASSASSIN

(with Paco Sampedro)

* * *

--there's eight boats in a row
--I see twenty-four
--twenty-seven, sir

when the fog lifted we knew the enemy's full strength. We advanced pell-mell just like squadrons that break rank and leap singly into the fray. They'd cut the cables. I remember the ships breaking for open sea and the bowsprit--waves towering! --argh the waves that lashed us. So we dived into the thick of it, twenty-four boats and the rear-guard totally surrounded
--if we keep on, sir, we?ll run aground: Arousa and arousal -
--I don't care if there's fifty of them, we're attacking
our boats yes are hearts of oak, our brigantines twins of shining copper
'o'er the sea into my bower/ comes the one who bears love's flower?
Onega remembered ships and the boy?s arm and torchlight dancing across the deck, the story of Jeanne de Belleville
--traitor, him? traitor? Philip de Valois was the real traitor, he who launched his most powerful armed galleys aimless, without victuals or water, between strange reefs and islands, Oliverio de Clisson's son in agony in that mother's arms, lady of Fortune

From prow to poop, flames leapt, beneath what someone called 'moonlight's cold pallor.' Masts collapsed in the sea's phosphorus, in the battle core, Eleanor, Elenaus, Eletpolis, Eleanor, destroyer of ships, of the city, Eleeeeeeanor!!!, blood through the portholes, the diamond, the hoist. We fell between puffs of artillery smoke, powdery, beer soured and bread good only for casting overboard
--cut the line, sir
Sacau burst in with all the ships of the Corme division
--ever seen sea-swallows on September dunes? such were Sacau's resisting forces. The Nebrija destroyed

at daybreak the Admiral Kumiko Heathrow swept out his own quarters and fed the chickens
horseshoes in the cliffs and clefts, ensign of Jamaica in the depths
--get back to your post if you don't want to be summarily shot
drowning in your own tears
in the sea's agonies
in yours
Eros.

(21-23)

* Chus Pato, m-Tala. Erin Moure, transl. Chapbook available from Nomados Press:

Nomados Printer

with thanks & please note : ~~~~~~~~~copyright Chus Pato~Erin Moure~Nomados Press~~~~~


chris at 2:20 AM |

Thursday, April 01, 2004

 

Lanny!--you so Rock : the 'Too-loose-crowbar' & so much more-bar


chris at 9:58 PM |

 

Definitely got on a roll, a reading roll : check these out :


chris at 12:42 PM |

 

Figure Polish




--with Many Happy Thanks to Anny Ballardini for this treasure!

And do check out the rest of the pieces here at Oculart dot com, perhaps especially the "harp siesta."


chris at 12:17 PM |

 

"This is why they blind their slaves... "


chris at 11:45 AM |

 

"... Things as they are must be changed on the blue guitar... ." I wonder if I need to say this?--I'm with that.


chris at 10:29 AM |

 

"face on the grate dreaming still (formed) then dropped to death..."--
harry k stammer rocks
on


 

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