goon news

(photo...Harry Smith, Reed Bye, Jack Collom, Steven Taylor)

A note: the new issue of Jacket features three of us goons!! Mr. Armentrout's chapbook All This Falling Away is described in the introductory essay. And My own CaGeD is featured with a few poems as well as a selection of Mr. Cooper's Touch Me jacket issue 35 Dusie Feature (scroll to bottom of page)

Yo, and all yall should keep yr eyes out next month for the new issue of Fence. You'll find work by yours truly as well as goon mama, Jennifer Koshkina/Rogers translating mr. viteslav nezval....(i'm almost positive we're both in the upcoming issue!)


Also, last but not least, check out bhanu's new blog at kerouacispunjabi

TOUCH ME

Hello Goons...just wanted to inform you all that my second manuscript is finally completed. I sent it off to BlazeVox, but if anyone has any suggestions for publishers who might be interested in sexually violating memory games then let me know...i'll send it off...and by the way,

CONGRATS TO THE ARMENTROUT FAMILY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Garren Hunter Armentrout

Here he is! Born at 7:50am, 4/21, 7 pounds and 10 ounces, 20 inches long

words find their readers

so i've been reading through the complete poems of anna akhmatova for the last several days, and i keep coming across amazing shorter pieces of her work, most from the last years of her life.

today in our little world we have been rushing around the house getting ready for the baby's arrival tomorrow morning and i took a break from cleaning to read and "randomly" opened to this poem.


CREATION

it says:
I remember everything simultaneously;
Like the distant beam from a distant lighthouse,
I carry the universe before me
like an easy burden in an outstretched palm,
and in the depths, mysteriously growing, is the seed
of what is to come...


we'll be in the hospital for a few days, but as soon as there are pictures i'll post them.

cross country collaborations

jared, i'm jolted by the last two posts, as i have been teaching a course on vietnam and the 1960's and the last two weeks have been entirely dedicated to music. we've been discusing music as outlet of protest, an obvious place to start considering the time period, but from there one of the assignments that i gave was for my students to bring in lists of the 10 songs they felt best described the current social climate. i played as many of the songs they chose that i could access from the classroom, and also offered up some of my own selections. note, i teach all teenage girls, so their taste in music is often drastically different from mine, but we are able to learn more about each other through sharing music in the classroom than through some of the conversations we've been ahving over the last several months. one of the girls had chosen an older metallica song, and that led me to talk about their original bassist cliff burton and we listened and free wrote to the last song he played, "orion." the haunted tongues came to life in my classroom, but until i read the post i didn't have the language to explain what it was like. although everyone in the room wrote something similar, like the message was lingering in the air and coming down through each individual pencil. mystic indeed. i love how we can go months without directly communicating and still be on the same wave length.

on a separate note, i wanted to link you to a site from a poet who recently moved to portland. one of the guys that i work for is friends with him and told me about his project a few months back, and i took a look at it again today when i realized that he's in your area. it's www.thepeterprinciple.org

Levinas is not always the easiest thinker to understand...and so here is one of the best summations of his thinking that i've come across...it also serves as a kind of addendum to yesterday's post...This quote is from Wlad Godzich:

"Against a notion of truth as the instrument of a mastery being exercised by the knower over areas of the unknown as he or she brings them within the fold of the same, Levinas argues that there is a form of truth that is totally alien to me, that I do not discover within myself, but that calls on me from beyond me, and it requires me to leave the realms of the known and of the same in order to settle in a land that is under its rule. Here the knower sets out on an adventure of uncertain outcome, and the instruments that he or she brings may well be inappropriate to the tasks that will arise. Reason will play a role, but it will be a secondary one; it can only come into play once the primary fact of the irruption of the other has been experienced. And this other is not a threat to be reduced or an object that I give myself to know in my capacity as knowing subject, but that which constitutes me as an ethical being: in my originary encounter I discover my responsibility that will lie at the root of all my subsequent ethical decisions. Knowledge and its operations are subordinated to this initial ethical moment, for the responsibility that I then experience is the very ground of my response-ability, that is, my capacity to communicate with others and with myself in noncoercive ways."

I am wary of Wlad's heroic approach and his ability to call an encounter originary...but nonetheless he expresses some other thoughts eloquently.

This quote, interestingly enough, (at least to me) is from one of Mr. Blaser's favorite philosophers, Michel de Certeau....and although, in lectures, i've never heard Blaser mention this particular book, The Mystic Fable, by this passage you might guess they've had some kind relationship psychic, mystical or otherwise...

"The music hoped for and heard, echoes in the body like an inner voice that one cannot specify by name but that transforms one's use of words. Whoever is 'seized' or 'possessed' by it begins to speak in a haunted tongue. The music, come from an unknown quarter, inaugurates a new rhythm of existence--some would say a new 'breath,' a new way of walking, a different 'style' of life. It simultaneously captivates an attentiveness from within, disturbs orderly flow of thought, and opens up or frees new spaces. There is no mystics without it. The mystic experience therefore often has the guise of a poem that we 'hear' the way we drift into dance. The body is 'informed' (gets form) from what befalls it in this way, well before the intellect becomes aware."--Michel de Certeau

For Jared

A distant finger, well-greased
Fleshly gears of disportation
Flushed clean of moral drive