The Barnyard

READ IT

2011-11-28T15:31:00.001-08:00

new work [updated]

2011-09-30T08:40:00.000-07:00

Some work from some deer left the yard moving day has just been spotted at Elective Affinities - "a cooperative anthology of u.s. contemporary poetry" - deftly edited by Carlos Soto Roman out of Philadelphia. To read, click here.

&&&&&&&

a selection from my some deer left the yard moving day manscript have also been placed gently in The Golden Lantern, an online zine that publishes Buddhist/Taoist inspired poetry. To read, click here. (& once there, you can navigate via clicking on the little triangles at the bottom of each poem...)

summer stock, "a literary journal for animals", returns!

2011-08-06T10:48:00.000-07:00

Livestock Editions is proud to announce the release of summer stock, an online lit journal for animals! (Available at: summerstockjournal.com). Our premiere online issue features a happily varied company of lyric/conceptual/serial poetry, prose, vispo, collage-postcards and photography by some very talented animals:

Cara Benson, Megan Burns, Reed Bye, Amina Cain, JenMarie Davis, Susana Gardner, Geoffrey Gatza, Elizabeth Guthrie, j/j hastain, Jennifer Karmin, Kevin Kilroy, Ella Longpre, Travis Macdonald, Bianca Moscatelli, Jefferson Navicky, Tanya Phattyakul, Abbey Pleviak, The Pines, Jai Arun Ravine, Marthe Reed, Robert Roley, Linda Russo, Rowland Saifi, Kaia Sand, Kathrin Schaeppi, Brandon Shimoda, Danielle Vogel, & Andrew Wessels.

This summer stock issue is dedicated to the memory of our friend Akilah Oliver, an inspiring poet, performer, and educator who passed on in 2011. We are honored to include Jai Arun Ravine’s touching remembrance to Akilah in this issue.

Please keep in touch and let us know what you think of summer stock. Email us at livestockeditions@gmail.com.

We hope you're enjoying a fine, productive summer, and hope to see your friendly silhouette along the field's folds sometime soon. Thank you for keeping the world safe for poetry and prose.

honk, gobble, moo,

The Livestock Editors

I think I was thinking when I was
ahead I’d be somewhere like Perry street erudite
dazzling slim and badly loved
contemplating my new book of poems
to be printed in simple type on old brown paper
feminine marvelous and tough
– Ted Berrigan, from “Sonnet XXXVI”

New Chapbook from Elizabeth Guthrie Available!

2011-08-05T14:11:00.000-07:00

Crater 13: April 2011. Elizabeth Guthrie: X Portraits.

The new Crater, the 13th, is Elizabeth Guthrie’s X Portraits; 10 odd and unsettling lyrical non-lyric realizations of portraits of America and Britain. Accurate representations of modern life! Each copy includes an individual painted iteration by E.G. reminiscent of 3 stoppages etalon's dropped string measure; they all include a wood block by Dirk E. Lee and are letterpressed, handbound &c. Requires paperknife. £7 + p&p. Tim Atkins on Guthrie: ‘Elizabeth Guthrie’s poems - thoughtful, unusual, tender & (of course) tough - do far more interesting acrobatics than so so many of the more - shall we say? - pumped up ones. It is a joy to see her appearing in this latest Crater. Who can say no to it?’

http://www.craterpress.co.uk/

New Journal: Buddhist Poetry Review

2011-06-06T06:36:00.000-07:00

Buddhist Poetry Review is edited by Jason Barber. Issue 1 includes poetry by Alison Clayburn, Yvette Doss, Peter J. Greico, Paul Hostovsky, Becky Jaffe, Stephen Jones, Ed Krizek, Hal W. Lanse, J.D. Mitchell-Lumsden, Andrew K. Peterson, Ron Riekki, Stephen Rozwenc, J.R. Solonche, and A. Stein.

www.buddhistpoetryreview.com

from a psychoanalysis discussion board content stream

2011-05-06T12:56:00.000-07:00

along the lines of topology and psychoanalysis and poetry in this stream...here is a thought and two poems: formal topological procedures, done inexpertly and idiosyncratically within the context of language production...(this is not your standard borromean knot necessarily...but it is my own idiosyncratic formal relation as reader/writer)...these procedures, create their own remainders...and these remainders are art/artifice's unconscious/poetry...maybe? poems (both created through inexpert psychoanalytic topologies: YOUR LOVE by joseph s. cooper, There is no end to it // And this was off-putting // In the classic sense // No end to the drifting wreckage // The years of gravel roads like unfamiliar lakes // Sentiments crumbled into cursive // Fog concealing the navigable waters // With relative ease-- // The space between this figure and that figure // The marred foundations we forgot, // The wind in the rosebush cussing and coughing, // An end crawling over a universal statement // As if blown toward me, half recalled // By coupling a roadmap with the road....AND from INTO THE FURROWS by me, (in life, as soon, as // I say my) roaring shadow // (as soon as I forget) // through thought showers the steely // (other way around) blood-red // (surviving is not what we // think) rain hard through your // pores (half the body) like // eternity-teeth (deported) so deeply // (a metaphor avowing the unavowable)

Using Cut-up from Roland Barthes “a lover’s discourse: fragments”

2011-02-24T16:57:00.001-08:00

Dear friend,

I haven’t been around lately. How are you –this memo is collecting dust in times of haste. You moved on too fast for me to catch the trail for your sent and the recollection of this comes without warning, either by effect of an unendurable image or by an abrupt sexual ejaculation – how appropriate.

I am not interested (Werther says) in my mind; you are not interested in my heart.

isayisayisay
isayisayisay
isaythe moment lives in memory

the lack thereof you grace my presence in pancakes and a coffee
we clink the remembrance of Derrida and share a sigh
you migrated space translucent all the bullshit and pause
Akipoet a grace amongst us all – vigilant warrior naked lady
Leaving is too soon – never enough of now

2011-02-24T11:26:00.000-08:00

akilah

New Work

2011-02-04T09:41:00.000-08:00

Some new writing up at Otoliths. 2 pieces from a conceptual series "31 branches", and an excerpt from a found poem-assembly, "Mist Connex".

the-otolith.blogspot.com

love,
andy

Dinner Poem/ Transcribed into Phonetic Alphabet, Sound Patterns Color Coded/ Assignment from Lisa Jarnot/ One's Own Language/ 2004

2010-12-15T20:11:00.000-08:00

Joe Cooper reads "The Sweeper" by Ron Padgett

2010-11-05T08:56:00.000-07:00

Now Available! Here Come the Groovies by Joseph Cooper & Andrew K. Peterson

2010-10-10T14:12:00.000-07:00

LIVESTOCK EDITIONS, LIMITED presents Here Come the Groovies,
a collaborative poetry chap/book by Joseph Cooper & Andrew K. Peterson

ABOUT THE GROOVIES...

...Joe says, "Working with Andy is always maniacally educational. His profound insight into humanity makes even the most mundane moments scintillate with creative energy. Andy is a writer whose poetic aspirations, while certainly emotionally charged and deeply personal, selflessly reveal our various relational symmetries through playful experimentalism and a journalistic interrogation of truth. Groovies deeply embodies his brilliance and inventiveness, as much of this text was composed on bar patios stealing observations and menu specials, riding shotgun while transcribing our absurd dialogues, storefront advertisements, and coffee house sessions with MuuMuu House diatribes. Every Goon visitation is an effort to encapsulate, often a year's worth of phone conversations, poetic invention, suppressed delight, into about four days. This particular Buffalo venture culminated in dozens of pages of work, one hangover after another and interminable laughter. Though, never before have our adventures so honestly depicted the madness of these encounters. Here Come the Groovies is a compilation of poems delivered truly by friendship, frenzy, and an insatiable desire for the poetic."

...Andy says, "Working with Joe is a delightfully maddening challenge, because Joe is a poet and lives that way with gusto. Joe's action-speech is always provocative and personal (therefore universal) and solicits meaningful and intimate conversation. About what you said, what he said, what you thought he said, what he thought he heard you say about what you thought about what he said, etc. Mostly this book blossomed during my recent visit to Buffalo, & unspools that experience in a variety of unconscious collaborative forms: personal poem, found language, minimalist dialogue, invisible imitation, notation's dream, and mystery text. I hope these poems capture honest, collapsible joys and exhaustions of a friendship fueled by poetry, presence (over distance) and other ephemeral substances. A kiss for good company."

Groovy info: 76 pgs., 26 copies lettered A-Z & printed in October 2010: side-stitched, laser-printed on fine business paper with Coconut cardstock covers, & some extra-special limited covers printed on brown ("summer") stock.

Please contact either Joe or Andy with your mailing address to receive a complimentary copy!

Xoxo,
Livestock Editions

*

Joseph Cooper is currently writing and teaching in Buffalo, NY. He is the author of the full-length books TOUCH ME (BlazeVox 2009)and Autobiography of a Stutterer (BlazeVox 2007), as well as the chapbooks Memory/Incision (Dusie 2007), from Autobiography of a Stutterer (Big Game Books 2007), and Insuring the Wicker Man Shadow Created Delusion co-authored with Jared Hayes (Hot Whiskey 2005). He is the 2009 winner of the Equinox Chapbook Award from Fact-Simile Editions with his chapbook, Point of Intersection. In addition, his work has appeared in numerous journals including most recently The Ash Anthology, Counterexample poetics: Assemblage of Experimental Artistry, Bombay Gin, Brown Bagazine, Sentence: a Journal of Prose Poetics, Sex and Murder, and Sous Rature.

Andrew K. Peterson is the author of Museum of Thrown Objects (BlazeVox 2010), bonjour meriwether and the rabid maps (Fact-Simile, forthcoming 2010), and Between Here and the Telescopes (with Elizabeth Guthrie, Slumgullion 2008). He lives in Massachusetts.

2010-09-29T16:22:00.001-07:00

THE CROWNING

Lucy’s pond reflective skin

simulated a steady infusion of surprise

and delight.

She licked each finger absorbing civility and consciousness.

The sketch is fading. “I don’t believe it should be this way,

but I’ll do it anyway.”

“Isn’t it a lovely night Dynamo?”

“Did you say sentiment or sediment?”

He wouldn’t wear any clothes. Everything

was whispers, the corrosion of

satisfaction.

“You have lost almost everyone you love,” cried Lucy,

her fingers grappling

her belly. “Call my lover,

for your final seconds.”

“Your breath is voluntary

making you making me

love you, still.”

“Make me beautiful again,

without searching your

pockets for razors.”

Look at me, I am your reflection.

I’m always looking at you, for you.

Do not rush this ceremony, the deducing of shadows.

“I am happy here detached from my body.”

“There is nothing to stop this incongruity.”

Thump.

“I am met with constant hostility.”

“You are a trained lover.”

Dynamo walked through the forest

dreary and heavy. “She is a pleasure.

She gives me pleasure.

She tries.” Father and Mother and Margaret deprived

of moisture choke down the mirth in death.

Their love became mercenary,

a savage trivia,

especially during sexual punishment.

Lucy is a watercolor,

a half-imagined thing,

a salvation of cloak and dagger.

Her mouth is a tower in flames,

smiling politely as the dead

peer out from inside. This is paradise,

a framed transparency

the position of her hips

stained in agony. This is paradise.

Everything has been said. Only the tribal confrontation

for tongue remains.

Yet, no city, no images come, no poppies in the rain, no severance,

no Jesus, and no chains.

“Only cover your eyes and sigh.”

It is called morning, a revolutionary pleasure,

the profile of a tongue in a knot.

“What is the truth about this landscape?”

“To whom do I sing as I wander up the path?”

“You are beautiful and mad, the mirror of a city.”

“Even when we are talking of ghosts,

with our clothes off, the afterlife

only strategic for demons,

our legs and our arms

make motion of these words,

the trees and the leaves

the dead and the living

the argument

continues.”

Lucy sank her teeth into Dynamo’s chest

and began sucking at the anti-image.

“What we call the beginning is often the end

And to make an end is to make a beginning.”[1]

“The afterlife is time travel.”

“Who invited you to dinner?”

“Be serious.”

“The screams of ghosts are vanishing

desperately in the company of disappearing ink.”

Dynamo awoke to the stench of horseshit,

a wafting invasion of spirit.

Lucy crawled into his armpit and

nestled her tiny body

into his caves and holes

and there disengaged from

his throat and loins

a treachery not quite her own.

“You wait this time in hunger.”

“You behave like a goddamned wheelbarrow.”

“All our faces have wings,

and all our wings are clipped.”

A dead forest is a prison, a riddle,

an angel watching foolishly

slick music

burning their backs

bent in morning.

“Around me you animate yourself.”

“I don’t know if there is time in this world

for miscommunication.”

Dear Lucy,

Being with you is like hunting

for a drunken comment

stranded on a dry tongue. At a great distance

you never tasted so strange. But when we mirror

each other, you become science fiction. The door

opens and you are merely domestic

skin disguised as art.

And upon your revision

at the edge of withdrawal

when deep emotion clings

to each squinting map of your youth

you will turn

mysteriously,

sigh,

a translation, or

a symbol an immediate telegram

a new language

letters and numbers,

a rose petal antiquated

with yesterday’s lover.

Remember eternity,

how directionless its graceful miles

lead between song and myth, how pure

the air was before our dreams,

nasty, short, and brittle

skulls half-eaten,

and the naked loss of metaphor

trembles

remembering the very bones

we have left behind.

Dynamo

“I love you, yet, I wander,

through your weary prose,

impatient for poetry.

I tell you darling,

this transformation,

this bursting forth,

a bouquet of flowers

bloodied from bullfighting

the substance of a single image. Adam and Eve

a comprehensive melancholy,

all the unemployed coffins,

the bridges and rooftops,

the drawings of still clouds,

I feel sorry for you,

unaware of your attachment,

to the few strings left to pull,

your teeth from the doorknob,

your hair shaven by shaky hand,

you eyeballs stitched into sand castles

your faces screaming at the tide, to love, to love,

unaccustomed to magic, the sacrificial loneliness

in beauty.

My poetry is suspicious of you,

born from dance,

like a dream of your watery eyes,

the silhouette of an imaginary rose.

There is nothing more desperate

than yesterday.”

This is paradise,

that boundary line

where love is outlined white,

liberated like a ghost,

many miles forward and backward

a childish grace answered by the last

abyss, a fake dream, a camera flash,

a time traveler invited to dinner

for the last time.

Lucy invited Dynamo inside. All of their children

crawled the floor with apples in their mouths,

a mild garnish lathered their bald flesh.

“Which do you prefer?”

“None.”

Lucy crossed and uncrossed her legs

in a dream of lilies, more beautiful than her

ravaged city. “Say nothing more. Say nothing

that will erect staircases between us.

Say nothing more.”

“We are both independent of images. We are liars.

I am covered in cloud,

and you are the taste of lemon

on my cunt. In these erotic musings

you are a beautiful boy

decayed an equivalent being

a crow cawing its head off,

a Valentine pretending

a bullet hole.”

“One touch of moonlight

stronger than my fingers tight

the unsuspected shooters glance

the proposition of a dance.”

“‘I hope that we shall find that we have one tongue,’[2]

that poems mistake pretending

for a hovering threat.”

Dynamo and Lucy lay upon the shared grave

of his family. “Could this have ever

been an alphabet, a place for answers?”

Lucy made a fire in her mouth and sucked

Dynamo’s skin until he was comforted

by bones, a real child

born a silhouette,

sucking every memory

from an imaginary rose.

Birds fly away.

A little boy in the forest splashes in the water

dancing,

listening to unfamiliar sounds.

[1] Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot

[2] Letter to James Alexander (1958-1959), Jack Spicer

Opening soon!

2010-08-28T08:30:00.000-07:00

Cornered Rooms. Facing In Facing Out
Seminar: Poetic Corners. From Modernist Spaces to Homecomings
4 pm, 16 October 2010
Waterside Project Space, London

The exhibition "Cornered Rooms" is about corners and being cornered
within the context of contemporary architectural exit codes. The
exhibition will take place from 2 September - 17 October at Waterside
Project Space London. Works by the following artists will be shown
Hreinn Fridfinnsson (b.1943 Iceland), Karim Noureldin (b. 1967 Switzerland),
Anna Ostoya (b.1978 Poland), Damien Roach (b. 1980 England),
Egill Sæbjörnsson (b.1973 Iceland), and Patrick Tuttofuoco (b. 1974 Italy).

Near the end of the exhibition on 16 October there will be a seminar
with Stephan Trüby. Trüby is the author of the book "Exit-Architecture.
Design between War and Peace". He will speak about his concept, 'exit
architecture', and discuss how the corner is presented in "The Poetics of
a Wall Projection" by Jan Turnovsky. Alice Gavin a PhD candidate from
the London Consortium will speak about how Samuel Beckett and his
contemporaries install characters in tight corners, both architecturally
and ontologically. The poet and PhD candidate Elizabeth Guthrie will perform
"Dub-Notes - to Refrain (from Condition)" a body of text projected onto the wall.
"Dub-Notes" is the superimposition of the psyche, the dreamscape of the
dislocated voice within a room. As once said by Gaston Bachelard in
"The Poetics of Space": "Our house is our corner of the world. As has often
been said, it is our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word."
The concept of the 'home' today as between longing and leaving will be explored
by the London Consortium PhD candidate Elia Ntaousani. As our relationship to space
has changed so have the dimensions of home and homeland. Ntaousani will open up a
dialogue between staying and leaving, homeland and homepage, of alterity and foreignness.
The goal is to engage the audience of artists and students of the London Consortium with the speakers in a form of dialogue within the context of the exhibition "Cornered Rooms".

http://watersideprojectspace.org/

The Infection

2010-06-11T22:18:00.000-07:00

www.theinfectioncomic.blogspot.com

3 Poems for Joe Cooper on His 31st Birthday

2010-05-31T08:12:00.000-07:00

Alternating Lines of Joe Cooper and Maureen Owen

(Because we met in Maureen Owen's class)

Because we have gone on trying
pointing in different directions
stuborn laughs of sad error
bounced into the trees
without eliminations,
pointing to things absent
a slippage
left behind & where are my pyjamas
memorably laid out,
wrinkles and slides
quietly broken
tucked in a virtue saint of dropped futures
gods, many voices
snack food for the fishes
sleepy, it might snarl
glances parted the air struggling
constructing a
memory made of flower printed umbrellas
& oddly disturbing
dance like a drummer dreaming
toward the door we never opened

*

Things in Joe's Poetry (Sonnet)

teabags and rank and tones and grapefruit and
paint and stirrups and buoy and tongues and
prosthetics and tags and static and meanings
and gloves and perimeters and artiface and
rodent and masks and veterans and filth and rain
and cardboard and sandpaper and papier mache
and hedges and trampoline and cello and tooth-
paste and The Twilight Zone and bible and demon
and war and battery and fingers and Bambi and
body and telephone and navel and panel and
corpse and jewels and disposition and baseball
cap and thighs and bath and crack and
Trophies and photographs and thongs and
boxes and concert and grimace and mirror and knob

*

20 one-word homages for Joe

bohoemoth
.
o r G A S m !
.
A R I O S A
.
t t h i m b l e
.
Gram Parsons
.
trunbuckle
.
i c k l y
.
onsider
.
y s p h e m i a
.
k y j e r
.
e e c h
.
"tirer-les-marrons-du-feu"
.
i p s o
.
tugger
.
o ou g h
.
U R i n a l
.
p a b l u m
.
f r a g m e n
.
t o u l o u s e
.
m n y m p h

2010-05-07T17:53:00.001-07:00

I suffer from party
Narcolepsy says
Tim sipping
Schlitz
From the can
As Andy stands
Commands
A fervent gesture
Rendering
Me speechless even
As Jared
Tickling skin
Bids
Mustache rides

2010-05-06T08:30:00.000-07:00

Cigarette burrowed between
Lips fist steady
Around the jib
Under a generous
Pacific sun,
Wisps of chest hair
Whorled the second
Brass button
Of his single breasted
Blue denim
Button down,
Blue beret
One-sided
Halved by
Setting sun
And a sail,
Left eye
Winking
For all
Time

2010-04-30T18:24:00.001-07:00

sexandmurder.com

issue 10

Reading Tuesday Night @ Desperate for Love

2010-04-26T05:14:00.000-07:00

Same time, different channel ~

http://poetryevents.blogspot.com/2010/04/desperate-for-love-tuesday-27th-april.html

Hope to see you there! ;)

xo

today while dancing through the kitchen she sang

2010-04-18T19:31:00.001-07:00

"together
everyone achieves
mythology"

and she stops her dance
limbs suspended
looks at me
and adds quietly
"daddy, i don't know
what that means"
before she continues
her morning song

Reading tomorrow night @ Crossing the Line

2010-04-06T02:57:00.000-07:00

Along interest and possibility

http://www.openned.com/

xo

Now Available! Museum of Thrown Objects by Andrew K. Peterson

2010-03-29T13:45:00.001-07:00

Greetings Friend, Happy Spring and All!

I'm excited to share this announcement with you for the release of my first full-length book of poems, Museum of Thrown Objects, just published by BlazeVox Books (Buffalo, 2010). The cover (above) features beautiful artwork by Atlanta-based artist Dayna Thacker.
*

Here’s what some beloved readers are saying about the book!

Andy Peterson's poetry combines visual art, both his own and some found elsewhere in the universe, with words redolent of mystery, thrillers, clues and riddles, and does so in a far more intelligent and sustaining way than present popular literature -- while not adopting any sense of "superiority" to same. Museum of Thrown Objects is a terrific "read" and a likewise "look" as well. -- Anselm Hollo, Guy Fawkes Day 2009

Imagine an ocean leaving its bed to hover above itself, where it should not be, to form a "silhouette" visible against an "afternoon." The technology of displacement is deployed, in Andrew Peterson's brilliant book, to create: not "delay" but "fusion." It makes sense, then, to build a museum out of artifacts that would, in the wetness beyond architecture, disappear by "low tide", but are instead "kept." Locked away in a decaying archive, "the thrown objects" form perverse alliances when the lights dim. Where the genitalia should be, for example, are "leafs and bugs." Intra-species, foaming, future-soaked, and with a "metallic corsage" delicately sewn to the wrist, the figures in Peterson's poems come to get you. And they do. They get you and take you somewhere until: "we are all here together in our new place." -- Bhanu Kapil

Museum of Thrown Objects exists as a poetic architectural phenomenon. Peterson constructs a kaleidoscopic wunderkammer of lyric, vispo, and conceptual experiments. Reading/Performing through its various wings I am activated into an environment of idiosyncratic relations. Things/Objects/Words have a collaged and artificial sensibility; as if Peterson is laughing at the overbearing seriousness of our contemporary museums with some incredulous anarchistic cut & paste. The difference between encasing an artwork behind glass as a stale and defined representation of some imagined mastery and staging things/objects/words in a dynamic and active performance of potentiality. This museum is enacting a perception embedded in things as much as in ourselves and, to me most importantly, things and selves in relationship to each other. Peterson, and the reader emerge throughout as poet-collectors (curators) in the process of mapping and performing transformation and relationship. Museum of Thrown Objects instructs the reader/performer: "Do not deny you are the work of art.". And so doing provides as it performs a dialogic and critical ethics of reading. We experience Peterson experiencing and thus find our own museums everywhere. -- Jared Hayes

*
I’ll say: been a joy building/cutting/pasting/curating this 'liquid architecture' from myriad found things of memory & place: errant ink petals, torn comic strips, flaky wallpaper, extinct flightless birds, rocks shaped like extinct flightless birds, transformed instruction manuals & diagrams, dream music, talking monuments & furniture, Oulipian place-mats, unsent love letters, puzzle pieces shaped like Idaho, ransom notes for missing bathroom materials, faded family photographs, errata, & other language/objects found & lost along-between there & here (from Boulder-Missoula-Arizona-desert-along-Massachusetts-coast-to-wherever-you-are...)

*
Ordering info: You can purchase from me directly for $12 (which is below publisher's price & includes shipping!) by visiting my blog, www.songfromyourhometown.blogspot.com, then clicking on the PayPal “Buy Now” button on the right-hand side. (If you’d rather not order through PayPal, please feel free to send a check to me: Andrew Peterson, PO Box 532, Marshfield Hills, MA 02051). Or, I heartily encourage you to purchase by visiting BlazeVox's website, here. Oh, & trades are great, too! (E-mail me!)

Thank you so much for all your love, friendship, support, & inspiration. Hope to see you soon!

Love, Andy

iii Duchamp, Dickenson, Olson: Stutters of History (from Redell Olsen's dissertation)

2010-03-21T17:53:00.000-07:00

.....the link between written and spoken language in highly visual terms. By creating visual "hinges" within words ("receiv / ing...h / ieroglyph") and extending spacing between words ("the mute vocables") the text self-reflexively notates a nearly aphaisic form of language. The reference to a "stuttering" extends this idea as the stutterer is forced to break words up into a series of linked and repeated sounds. Howe has even described her own critical work as stuttering, a stuttering that is "acoustically charged" with "a feeling of needing to write or say something but having no idea how to say it" (Keller "Interview" 27). The hinge is one of several devices that Howe uses to foreground a moment of delay, a stuttering space which fractures the languages of her intertexual sources, thereby calling their completeness and accuracy into question.
Duchamp's The Green Box (from which Howe takes her epigraph to Hinge Picture) consists of notes for his major work The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Batchelors Even. Duchamp gave the piece the subtitle "Delay in Glass" (26):

Use "delay" instead of picture or painting on glass becomes in glass--but delay in glass does not mean picture on glass--It's merely a way of succeeding in no longer thinking that the thing in question is a picture--to make a delay of it in the most general way possible, not so much in the different meanings in which delay can be taken, but reather in their indecisive reunion "delay"-- / a delay in glass as you would say a poem in prose or a spittoon in silver. (26)

The materiality of the work is part of its meaning. Howe has made it clear just how central this art object is to her: "It would take a book for me to go on about what The Large Glass means to me...It is so two-sided. Synthesis, antithesis, reflection and delay" ("Dialogue" 286). A delay in glass is directly comparable to Howe's stutter because it is a hesitation in words that emphasises the difference between phonemes and morphemes, a space that emphasises the materiality of utterance itself. To think of the poem as occupying a space akin to a delay in glass gives Howe a position from which to criticise conventional representational structures. In The Western Borders (1976), she writes, "Enchantment like lies can alter the sight of the beholder / but not the reality of the thing seen" (n.p.) Howe's texts resist the enchantment of conventional modes of representation, modes which attempt to construct a direct link between language and the world that it purports to represent. Just as Duchamp's "Delay in Glass" call attention to its own materiality by suggesting that the large glass does not refer to something outside itself ("no longer thinking that the thing in question is a picture"), Howe's stutter calls attention to the materiality of language, thereby calling into question language's capacity to represent a referent. In effect the visually notated stutter in Howe's text offers a critique of the natural voice as the bearer of truth.
In this sense of stuttering voices and practices that seem to face certain obscurity which continually inderlies Howe's work. Her desire to invest time in "a writing practice that seems unacceptable" ("Dialogue" 380) is confirmed by her interest in Emily Dickinson. Over her life-time, Dickinson produced a series of hand-written poems in small sewn packets. These were subsequently torn apart by editors and converted into type-written approximations of their originals. Early editions of Dickinson's work superimposed a standardised punctuation onto the texts and reordered the fascicles according to themes chosen by the editors themselves, who also dismissed the multiple variants of both the texts and the individual lines within poems. For Howe, the recovery of Dickinson depends on a recovery of these verbal and visual elements from the original texts. This is obviously a difficult task. Howe reads Dickinson's poems as if they were delays in paper, moments of spaces of suspended communication that are dependent on their material manifestation (handwriting on paper) for their effect. Mistrustful of previous editorial strategies, Howe asks "Can quick particularities of calligraphic expression ever be converted to type?" (Birth 4). She struggles to reclaim a writing practice which resists the standardisation of canonical norms and so is threatened with loss and erasure.
Howe describes the way in which Dickinson created her own hybrid discourse from "higher' female education" and combined it with what was termed "unladylike" outside reading:

Pulling pieces of geometry, geology, alchemy, philosophy, politics, biography, biology, mythology, and philosophy from alien territory, a 'sheltered' woman audaciously invented a new grammar grounded in humility and hestiation. (My 21)

It is this moment of hesitation that is according to Howe gendered: "He may pause but he must not hesitate" she quotes from Ruskin (21-22). The stutter is an acoustic or phonic moment of hesitation, but it is also for Howe a kind of visual mark. Like the stutter, the visual mark (when "read" as language) falls outside the recoverable space of meaning, it does not seem to stand for anything beyond itself. Howe highlights this connection in her discussion of Hawthorne's story "The Birth-Mark", from which her own book of essays takes its name:

One day, very soon after their marriage, Alymer sat gazing at his wife, with a trouble in his countenance that grew stronger, until he spoke.
"Georgina," said he, "has it ever occurred to you that the mark upon your cheek might be removed?"
"No, indeed," said she, smiling; but perceiving the seriousness of his manner, she blushed deeply. "To tell you the truth, it has been so often called a charm, that I was simple enough to imagine it might be so."
"Ah, upon another face, perhaps it might," replied her husband. "But never on yours! No, dearest Georgina, you came so nearly perfect from the hand of Nature, that his slightest possible defect--which we hesitate whether to term a defect or beauty--shocks me, as being the visible mark of earthly imperfection. (Hawthorne qtd. in My 7)

The husband's wish to edit the face of his wife parallels the relationship of editorial control and censure that Howe seeks to address in her critical work on Dickinson. Howe challenges a tradition of editorial scholarship which has repeatedly removed and expunged the visual marking of Dickinson's texts, precisely because their characteristic features were not apparently assimilable into the recognizable orders of what could be read as language. For Howe this issue of editorial control is certainly "a gender issue" (Keller 33)

He might pause, She hesitated. Sexual, racial, and geographical separation are at the heart of Definition. Tragic and eternal dichotomy--if we concern ourselves with the deepest Reality, is this world of the imagination the same for men and women? (My 21-22)

As this passage suggests, Howe's stance toward the reclamation of a hybrid scripto-visual practice has profound implications for the feminine writing subject. Howe begins her book, My Emily Dickinson, by asserting that she will contradict her own epigraph from William Carlos Williams:

It is the women above all-there never have been women, save pioneer Katies; not one flower save some moonflower Poe may have seen, or an unripe child. Poets? Where? They are the test. But a true woman in flower, never. Emily Dickinson, starving of passion in her father's garden, is the very nearest we have ever been--starving.
Never a woman: never a poet. That's axiom. Never a poet saw sun here. (Williams qtd. in My 6)

At the same time, Howe makes it quite clear that "A poet is never just a woman or a man" (7): "We are all both genders. There is nothing more boring than stridently male poetry and stridently female poetry" (Birth 172). Gender effects language, but this is not the whole story: "we constantly confront issues of difference, distance, and absence, when we write" (My 13). And it is this distance which is also found in the scripto-visual notation of a stutter, a hesitation, a stammer--that which falls outside the laws of speech and of writing into the realm of the visual.
Kathleen Fraser's influential essay "Translating the Unspeakable: Visual Poetics, as Projected through Olson's 'Field' into Current Female Writing Practice" argues that a number of women writers (Myung Mi Kim, Hannah Weiner, Laura Moriarty, Susan Howe and Barbara Guest) adopted Charles Olson's visual use of the page, its "spatial, historical and ethical margins" (644), to configure an alternative feminine writing practice. As Fraser points out, Olson offered an alternative to "the narcissistically probing, psychological defining of self" typified in the work of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. Olson's visual and typographical experiments seemed to coincide with their "scepticism towards any fixed rhetoric" (644). Fraser saw in Olson someone who resisted the "prescription of authorship as an exclusively unitary proposition" (644). According to Fraser, Olson offered contemporary women writers "another kind of use value" for language, one that allowed for a more complex subjectivity that might be able to incorporate the inconsistencies of temorality; "its continuous broken surfaces, its day-by-day graphs of interruption and careening" (644).
Like Olsen, Howe is drawn to the visual notation of a stutter. At first sight it would appear that the two of them have much in common. The conception of the page as a visual field connects Howe to Olsen's poetics as he describes them in "Projective Verse." Howe clearly admires Olsen for his visual use of the page:

At his best, Olsen lets words and groups of words, even letter arrangements and spelling accidents shoot suggestions at each other, as if the page were a canvas and the motion of words--reality across surface. Optical effects, seemingly chance encounters of letters, are a BRIDGE. Through a screen of juxtapositions one dynamic image may be visible. ("Where" 6)

For Olson, the field of the page consists of "OBJECTS", syllables, lines, images and sounds in relation to one another. Following Robert Creely, Olson asserts "FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT," i.e. the logic of the poem to dictate its rules (Selected 16). This synthesis of form and content emphasises the importance of process in generating meaning. Olson further links the poem's processual character to the breath. The line on the page is to be governed by the direct relationship between the ear and the breath:

But breath is man's special qualification as animal. Sound is a dimension he has extended. Language is one of his proudest acts. And when a poet rests in these as they are in himself (in his physiology, if you like, but the life in him, for all than) then he chooses to speak from these roots, works in that area where nature has given him size, projective size. (25)

In Olson the stutter is also connected to his stress on the syllable which he describes as "these particles of sound" whose juxtaposition is as important as "the series of the words which they compose" (18). Olson connects the visual look of the poem on the page directly to the body itself. His model for the ideal line is the male body at the peak of its physique, as it "gives voice." Similarly, he clearly connects the visual potential of the page and the mark-making capabilities of the type-writer to the acoustic pauses of the breath:

If a contemporary poet leaves a space as long as the phrase before it, he means that space to be held, by the breath, an equal length of time. If he suspends a word or syllable at the ends of a line (this was most Cummings' addition) he means that time to pass that it takes the eye--that hair of time suspended--to pick up the next line. If he wishes a pause so light it hardly separates the words, yet does not want a comma--which is an interruption of the meaning rather than the sounding of the line--follow him when he uses a symbol the type-writer has ready to hand:

'What does not change / is the will to change' (Selected 23)

It is these visual "interuptions" on the page, this series of stutters between meanings, which suggest a link between Olson's and Howe's scripto-visual practice.
In any interview with Cole Swenson, Howe describes the "immediate shock of recognition" that she felt on encountering Olson's work: "It was his voracious need to gather "facts", to find something, a quotation, a place, a name, a date, some documentary evidence in regard to place" (381). Like Olson, Howe is concerned with the marking and bounding of territory, the representation of the self in an already inhabited landscape. However, there are clearly distinct gender problems with making too close an identification between Howe and Olson. Howe maintains that Olson's writing is "for a woman, an indeterminate, sometimes graphically violent force" ("Charles" 168):

I am a poet. I know Charles Olson's writing encouraged me to be a radical poet. When I was writing my first poems I recall he showed me what to do. Had he been my teacher in real life, I know he would have stopped my voice. ("Charles" 166) Furthermore, her work suggests a different relationship to the visual in relation to history and to the voice to that found in Olson because of her attention to the articulation, reframing, and representation of the feminine subject.

By Jared Hayes...HA!

2010-03-16T16:25:00.000-07:00

Bob:

Play that plinkety Plinko Pirate Patrick!

Patrick playing Plinko for pirate’s booty!

Patrick, do you have a pet parrot?

Pirate Patrick I do believe…you’ve plinkety
plinkoed your way to a fine …FINE (wink, handshake) booty!

[PIRATE PATRICK] playing plinko

plinkety.plink.plink.plink.parrot.pet.pet.pirate.Patrick.plink.
Patrick.plinko.plinkety.parrot.plink.plinkety.pirate.plinkety.
parrot.pet.pie.plink.pink.parrot.pie.pie.pirate.plinkety.plink.

plink.plinko.plinkplink.plinkety.Patrick.plinkety.plink.plink.
plinko.parrot.plink.plink.pirate.plinko.plink.plink.plinkety.
plinko.Patrick.plink.plink.plinkety.plinko.Patrick.plinkety.

plinkety.plinko.pirate.plink.plink.parrotpet.plinko.plinkety.
plink.plink.plinko.petparrot.Patrick.plink.plink.plinkoplink.
pirate.pirate.Patrick.Patrick.plinkety.plinkety.plinko.plinko.

par.par.plink.parrot.pirate.plink.plink.plinkety.plinko.plink.
pie.pie.plink.parrot.pet.pie.pie.plinkety.plink.plink.plinkety.
plink.plink.pirate.Patrick.plinkety.pie.plinko.plinko.plinko.

ANNOUNCEMENT from The Offending Adam

2010-03-08T07:03:00.000-08:00

Announcing Issue 006 from The Offending Adam (http://www.theoffendingadam.com/). Issue 006 features a serialized poem from Andrew K. Peterson, spread out from Part I on Monday through Part IV on Thursday. Come back each day and don't miss a single installment.
.
While you're around, if you missed our previous issues, don't worry. All of our contributions remain archived and accessible on our site, including:
005: Schlesinger & Archambeau
004: Lemon & Bendall & O’Brien
003: Hicok & Schaberg & Yakich
002: Steensen & Long
001: Beachy-Quick & Reddy & Stobb & Sweeney & Clark
.
We are also excited to announce our forthcoming first limited edition chapbook, Canto. We are offering a special pre-order rate of $8 ($2 off the list price) + $2 shipping and handling. Get a preview of the first three cantos in the book (http://www.theoffendingadam.com/2010/02/01/from-canto). Learn more about the chapbook, and check out the cover art by Shawn Stucky, in our bookstore (http://www.theoffendingadam.com/store/).
.
Currently we are reading submissions for new writing, essays, book reviews, and feature projects. We will be reading between now and April 15, so get us your work soon! You can review our submissions guidelines at http://www.theoffendingadam.com/submit/ So we invite you to drop by this week to http://www.theoffendingadam.com/ as Issue 006 arrives.
.
Bookmark or add us to your reader so that you don't miss a single issue of content. And of course, we encourage you to pass the word of the launch along by passing along this message to anyone you think would be interested or post a note on facebook or a blog.
.
If you have any questions, comments, or concerns or if you want to contact us for any reason, please email us at editors@theoffendingadam.com.
.
The editors of The Offending Adam
Andrew Wessels
Cody Todd
Nik De Dominic
Ryan Winet

2010-02-21T18:08:00.000-08:00

check out AN AVERAGE PREGNANCY in www.counterexamplepoetics.com

Who dat? Dem saints dat!

2010-02-08T08:11:00.000-08:00

Coming Soon from BlazeVox Books!

2010-01-25T16:46:00.000-08:00

Museum of Thrown Objects
Poems by Andrew K. Peterson
Published by BlazeVox Books 2010

blazevox.org

ISBN-13: 9781935402848

Please stay tuned to the Barnyard for ordering information, blurbs from some of your favorites, and perhaps a mini-essay review from Jared Hayes!? In the meantime, enjoy the wonderful cover art by a great Atlanta-area artist Dayna Thacker (above), and (below), the amusingly serious response by the printers to the "erasure issue" of the cover's name/title designed by BlazeVox Editor Geoffrey Gatza and myself. (We hope not the last provocation this book incites. In a friendly peaceful way, of course.)

Thanks, and see you soon!

Love, Andy

.
.

Hello Geoffrey,

Prepress and the Production team has paused this title in system pending a revised cover due to the design element over the title and author name. I realize you advised the element is intentional and I communicated accordingly to Prepress. Since that time, the cover file has been reviewed by both the Prepress Manager and Production Manager. The finding is the cover will fail production when printing as previously advised in the file review notes (copied below again for reference), therefore we are unable to move forward with the current cover file.

We will need to ask you to provide a revised cover file with the "erased" design element removed, or we can have our graphics team revised (sic) the cover, if this would be helpful. Attached is low res cover file as for reference of the requested change for your review.

File Review Notes:
"We have reviewed the files submitted for this title and there is one concern that needs to be addressed before we can move forward. The title on the front cover is difficult to read and could appear to be a production error when printing. Please upload a revised file ensuring that the title is easily read. Thank you for your understanding. Please upload a revised cover file for further review. "

I apologize for the inconvenience this may cause as a result of this development.
Thank you for your continued patience and cooperation.

XXX

Save the Date: Cooper and Cebula Next Saturday in Denver‏

2010-01-02T14:28:00.000-08:00

Dear Reader-
.
This is just a reminder for everyone in the Denver area that Fact-Simile will present our first reading of 2010 at The Dikeou Collection next Saturday.
.
Come on out and celebrate the release of Fact-Simile Editions' Equinox Chapbook series with readings by Joseph Cooper and Travis Cebula.
.
In addition to hearing some great poetry you will also receive considerable discounts on all of our titles.
.
So save the date:
Saturday, January 9th, 2010
@ The Dikeou Collection
1615 California Street, Suite 515
Denver, CO 80202
.
We hope to see you there!
.
Sincerely,
Travis Macdonald & JenMarie Davis
The Editors @ Fact-Simile Editions
http://fact-simile.com/

Happy Holidays Goons!!

2009-12-27T19:20:00.000-08:00

Love, Andy
circa 1982

cooper and hayes

2009-12-22T16:09:00.000-08:00

If you love her barter for her sustenance. Eat eat the abortion is about to take place. That is lovely in women. Flimsy winged setting out on the greatest adventure. There was another woman I also loved. Smashes gate they took away the needle. I leaned over an elbow and kissed her. the greatest waves of happiness as we beat up the dog. I’m going to roll it up in a rug and smoke it. And in the outside there is reddening red. I slipped between good intentions. Among the days of pasture’s beat the dog gave a little quiver. I cannot be more than the man who watches. I’m the one who should lick you.

I’m a narrow bed in a box. No wiser than the days of waiting. Let me count the ways that you are dead. You are a proper form without sound. To see the sea written in cement upon the sidewalk. Some god truly looks down upon them. Now I am going to travel. Born of sexual shock. Another tractor is invented. Words will not say anything more than they do. I am lonely unto sickness because no one’s fucking me. I cannot relieve it nor leave it. God remains in the animal you’ve taken leave of your senses. There is love only as love is.

Issue #2 is out!

2009-12-16T08:36:00.001-08:00

http://requitedjournal.com/

Hayes and Cooper

2009-12-09T18:57:00.000-08:00

The faraway livestock the faraway live the nearby crook. Whose is the voice that empties? Babel her tower doeth tie my tongue. So with his daughter they reemerge grotesque. Oh I am so happy I am so happy I like Santa Claus. I remember those good old days the warm spots on the body. Upon which my very being depends. The body beneath the wrapping. Its power which vivifies the brains. The branches of the pine drooped heavily an insufferable prick. We know doubt suffer all kinds of injuries even violations. Yes it is sex and money that matters. Jack Frost is a funny fellow he bites little girls he bites little boys. We saw they object like everyone else.

Visitors are hurried to unlearn them. Day that passes day that stays day that passes. The first, third, fifth, seventh, ninth, eleventh, and thirteenth stanzas are contractual. It’s a shame I’m not a better Buddhist. Here and there it was very light and dark. Hear her clear mirror care his error. Cross an unusual and complex meter. It should read: unpacking my heart with words. A headless man, woman, or dog calling for their god. Perch less bird fly on the leaves be heard. Slut-bitch support my revenge. Be patient I’m sorry. I dreamt we were deceptively simple. P.S. I want to resign

SWP 2005

2009-12-09T06:09:00.000-08:00

I had to "repost" these photos - from John Sakkis' Facebook post

Too much!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/77948983@N00/sets/1084499/show/

Authenticity Made The Tourists Weep...for and after akp

2009-12-02T09:45:00.000-08:00

phallic to freud, that fucking
freak felled yellows. signs to
become historical spill through the
keyless lock swung-off like
a harry smith obsession we
are left to our bottomless
sea-palms fishing these over-
flowered waters… your tune to
wail a loon with me

AWP Denver 2010

2009-12-01T08:47:00.000-08:00

hey goons - Registration costs are cheapest now through december 15. i am a non-member and am looking to register, but want to get the deets from everyone who is traveling into town - also, i have room at my downtown condo, which is walking distance to the events, first come, first serve!

Happy Thanksgiving Goons!!

2009-11-25T12:31:00.000-08:00

FIRST COURSE
.
Corn
.
Corn is a small hard seed.
.
Corn from Delft
Is good for elves.
.
White corn, yellow, Indian
.
Is this kernal a kernal of corn?
.
The corn they sought
Was sown by night.
.
The Corn Islands are two small islands,
Little Corn Island and Great Corn Island,
on an interoceanic canal route.
.
Any of several
insects that bore in maize is a corn borer.
.
(Bernadette)
.
* * *
.
SECOND COURSE
.

Turkeys

for Tom Carey

They have bent.

They cling.

They attack & capture.

It is a treat, a nightmare, a punch in the face.

He wanders by himself.

He lingers. He idles

In his little house.

He absorbs, and is absorbed.

He begins to bear down on what he sees:

Young faces, puzzling argot, meat, or "the postulant":

You nod and scrunch up your face and chuckle.

Let me out of here you silently shriek.

"I've got to hang up now, a man is yelling at me."

A pill always seems to be about something.

(Teddy Ballgame)

* * *

THIRD COURSE

Thanksgiving's Done

All leaves gone, yellow

light with low sun,

branches edged

in sharpened outline

against far-up pale sky.

Nights with their blackness

and myriad stars, colder

now as these days go by.

(Creeley)

* * *

DESSERT

The Best Thanksgiving Ever
.

After the meal, Sandy decided we should spice up charades

by slapping the loser's butt with a ping-pong paddle.

Whenever Ed got slapped, he farted because he was so nervous.

The ladies won, slapped all the men's butts, but then what to do?

"Take off your clothes!" I told Sean, who didn't seem like the kind

of guy who'd do such a thing--but he was, and he did. Then Jim

took off his clothes. Then John. And then the other Jim

who brought all the lovely bottles of wine. And finally Ed.

Deb came out of the bathroom and saw five big men naked in the kitchen.

They screamed, "Take off your clothes!" We all figured she would,

and she did. Then Sandy the Slapmaster, then me, then Tomoko

who kept her glasses on. We walked around the house naked,

talking about how it was to be naked with other naked people,

how none of the guys had boners, and how cold it was out in the garage.

Somebody found a big bottle of vodka. We made a no-hugging rule.

John kept trying to open the curtains and show the neighbors

what they were missing. Deb thought an orgy was imminent,

but since we'd all spent a lot of time in Iowa, I didn't think it would fly.

Jim passed out. Ed put a robe on. I passed out. We woke up

the next morning in T-shirts, ate bagels from Bagel Land, and

said, "We all got naked last night." That afternoon, on our way

to the Walt Whitman Mall, the ladies gave each other nicknames

ending with the word Bitch. Deb was Shy Bitch,

Sandy was Gentle Bitch, Tomoko was Slutty Bitch and I was Silent Bitch.

All the bitches agreed that slapping people's butts with a paddle

was something we needed to do every weekend, that this was the best

Thanksgiving ever, and that Ed had the biggest dick we'd ever seen.

(Jennifer L. Knox)

A Sh Anthology Reading in Denver, CO

2009-11-04T07:32:00.000-08:00

Fact-Simile Editions
invites you to join us as we celebrate the release of the
A Sh Anthology

Saturday, November 7th at The Dikeou Collection in Denver.

The evening’s festivities will include live performances by:

Selah Saterstrom
Erik Anderson
Sara Veglahn
Andrew K. Peterson
and
j/j/[pleth

Doors open at 6:30 and the reading starts at 7pm.

If you're unfamiliar with The Dikeou Collection , check out their website, and be sure to arrive early so you can explore this amazing space:

Saturday, November 7th @ 7pm
The Colorado Building
1615 California Street (at 16th Street)
Suite 515
Denver, CO 80202

We hope to see you there...

Oh yeah, and the A Sh Anthology will be on sale for one-time-only price of $9.99!

For those of you in far away places, stay tuned. We will be posting a full video recording of the event on our blog as soon as we get back to New Mexico.

In the meantime...

Best Regards,

Travis Macdonald & JenMarie Davis
Fact-Simile Editions
http://fact-simile.com/
Travis@fact-simile.com
JenMarie@fact-simile.com

& Now Review

2009-11-03T16:45:00.000-08:00

A Review of the recent &Now Conference in Buffalo includes a small write up on Jared-Joe-Cara-Jennifer's piece, as well as some rrrecording of it! Here:

http://bigother.com/2009/10/21/now-conference-a-conference-of-innovate-writing-the-literary-arts/

2009-10-31T11:47:00.001-07:00

HAPPY HALLOWEEN ALL YOU GOONS!!!

the buffalo concussion

2009-10-18T18:21:00.000-07:00

(departures/ronceverte/charleston/dc)
i remember
the first day at naropa
sitting on the front steps
silent
surrounded by other silent
people
until jared hayes
said the first word
and soon
our small crowd
dissected
a path
that snuck down
towards the water's edge
the fringe of the fringe
and continued to hold that space
until there were continents
between us

i remember that
andy peterson didn't show up
until later that night
and he sounded familiar
with panic
when he announced to an
auditorium of words
that he had driven from Arizona
with no idea
where he would sleep that night

i remember
how the bouncers
at the dark horse
thought my id was fake
because they had never
actually seen someone
from west virginia
for the rest of the summer
they called me "westie"
and made wisecracks about
my dreadlocks
and our general attendance
at naropa

i remember
going there for karaoke
flabbergasted
when joe coooper
belted out bob dylan
and his impediments
sulked toward the door
defeated
while the audience
picked their chins
up from the floor

i remember
knowing instantly
that these people
would be some
of the most important
friends i would ever know

(arrival/bufffalo)
strange transcendences after playing mental reels over again for four years. a friend from undergraduate picks me up at the airport. i call cooper and get directions. at joe's house he says, "this is your friend!?" and they recognize each other right away.

blizzard provisions
goons and
carry onwards
niagara
and now?
preparations
interruption
meeting
speaking
preparations

do you want to keep rushing towards this wall?
i just started talking

i tend to have party narcolepsy
if i'm not careful about my posture

what does it mean to go
straight at it?
to try not to have an agenda is an agenda

when is it that i surrender
to the material?
interested in interruption
aren't we supposed to be innovative?
is interruption a structure?
so much text
just start hearing things
how much can you put up with?

reflection diagnoses
the momentary spasms
welcome back
ceiling fan
snick
death
hair
cut or not
sorry is the subject
a blind dog shits in living room
upon guests entering
the questions persists

At What Point Do the Authors Take Control?

Jared Hayes tagged andrew peterson in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged himself in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged Joseph Cooper in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged Joseph Cooper in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged andrew peterson in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged himself in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged andrew peterson in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged andrew peterson in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged you in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged andrew peterson in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged Joseph Cooper in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged himself in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged Cara Benson in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged jennifer karmin in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged jennifer karmin in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged Cara Benson in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged himself in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged himself in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged Joseph Cooper in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged himself in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged Cara Benson in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged jennifer karmin in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged himself in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged you in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged you in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged himself in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged himself in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged himself in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged Joseph Cooper in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged Cara Benson in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged jennifer karmin in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged Joseph Cooper in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged Cara Benson in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged himself in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged Cara Benson in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged jennifer karmin in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged jennifer karmin in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged annie weiner in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged annie weiner in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged annie weiner in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged jennifer karmin in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged Cara Benson in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged annie weiner in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged himself in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged Joseph Cooper in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged jennifer karmin in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged Joseph Cooper in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged himself in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged Joseph Cooper in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged Cara Benson in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged jennifer karmin in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged himself in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged Joseph Cooper in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged Cara Benson in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged jennifer karmin in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged Joseph Cooper in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged himself in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged Joseph Cooper in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged Joseph Cooper in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged himself in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged Joseph Cooper in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged himself in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged Joseph Cooper in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged himself in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged Joseph Cooper in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged himself in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged Joseph Cooper in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged himself in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged Joseph Cooper in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged you in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged Joseph Cooper in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged himself in one of your photos. Jared Hayes tagged you in one of your photos.

and another night sets away
head still bent tender
beneath glittery ceiling
like a dream
that can only be explained
by a stack of
smuggled books

Poetry Marathon

2009-10-17T04:44:00.000-07:00

http://www.serpentinegallery.org/2009/06/poetry_marathonsaturday
_and_su_1.html

....I maintain, Vito Acconci...mmmmmm.......

Cantos Reading Group

2009-10-15T02:45:00.000-07:00

http://www.openned.com/blog/2009/10/5/cantos-reading-group.html

What we talk about when we talk about readership/writership or lighting up on the harvard church steps

2009-10-11T02:54:00.000-07:00

l to r, joseph, jared, andrew...photo by jennifer dunlap...

this past july, andrew peterson, joseph cooper, and myself met in beantown for some daysnights of thievery and general pirate-like behaviors. i want to recap (from some distance now) on some of the conversations as well as attempt to (re?) vision gestures in my own poetic repetitions.

We walked: from the Y, to Northeastern U, to the fens, to fenway, to cambridge, to boylston, to MIT, to Harvard, to bookstores, to etc...we walked. we took the trains. we dove headfirst into a sideways rainstorm. we drank. we walked. we burned. we walked. we had a catch. but most of all...we read poems. we read poems out loud. we talked about what was just read. we (re)membered our own histories. we created. we collaborated. we destroyed. we talked. we read. we continued to walk. Joe had blisters.

as i look back into my memory (is memory something to look back into or to actively create?)i am overwhelmed by the pleasure of encounter and the friendship the three of us shared together that weekend. in fact, as of this moment, the joy of it clouds some of the fruitful knowledge making that occurred (as exegesis may be a kind of illusion anyway(?)). im learning i shld carry a digital recorder with me everywhere i go so that i might mis(re)member more succinctly. in any case, andy, seems to always be carrying the right texts for (dare I say it) coterie engagements. i'm sure it has to do with his love and attention to the various constellations of New York School.

Non-New York school related Sidenote: i smiled, and am smiling again thinking about a moment when we all brought up Creeley and his idea/use of the living-room-word "company"...and now it seems as though my moment was not singular but rather a congruence of a few choice interactions when it seemed as though no other word made more sense in its relation to us there, then in those particular momentums...

So Back to it: Andy has immediately with him at a bench at Northeastern U, ron padgett's YOU NEVER KNOW. I remember thinking as we shared the reading, volta, volta, volta (like marsha, marsha, marsha) and...these are amazing TEXTBOOK prose poems...and now i'm also (re)membering mr. padgett has also written poetry TEXTBOOKS...

padgett sidenote: those prose poems are, to me, exemplifications of a kind of postmodern reading/writing through of a modernist lineage...the manner in which (i apologize for the quick labeling rather than an extensive unpacking) a kind of "personism" infused with padgett's relationship to other new york schoolers, berrigan and koch in particular (again, to my less than comprehensive reading) combine with a line of breton, aragon, shlovsky, and jakobsen...wait...not sure that NY/surrealist/futurist labels can really describe what i mean now or what i meant then...no matter...the reading cld stand a closer gesture sometime...Joe...what was it you said, there, then, about cinema, about padgett's imagery, about his skullduggery? about his influence and relation to a different kind of visual world...and andy, what was your observation about the actual films he wrote about and through? will you both attempt to remember for us, (or make it up again) and add your thoughts here( ).

by then we were lit up...the twilight shone through our eyes and we felt spirits in our smiles and word-voices...we went to some bars...we read from each of our newest projects...re-re-vealing our poetics to one another...my own overtly obsessive interaction with ethics and architextural pre-conception, joe's pursuit of transcendence through excess, violence and desire, andy's deconstructive phenomenology of dream-presence through lyric dream (collecting) memory (collecting)...all of us landing in a matrix of shared relationships to poets, geographies, histories...a shared desire for the blaser labeled spicerian PRACTICE OF OUTSIDE...for a dialogic or polylogic approach to reading and writing (our worlds)...and maybe connecting most of this is the desire for the disruption of traditional, phallogocentric, static, singular, authoritative panoptic modes of authorship...but maybe i'm just projecting my own values upon that great time...

...so although we didn't know it yet in beantown...the best was yet to come...installment two with buffalo addendum coming in the near future!

Susan Howe

2009-10-07T05:02:00.000-07:00

Lecture today Birkbeck College, reading Thursday South Bank Centre

http://www.bbk.ac.uk/cprc/news/Howe_Grubbsseminar

will let you know how it goes - sorry

and again...

2009-10-04T09:21:00.001-07:00

50 + 30

into the light directly with
what I knew to be
Myself light up within entirely
the length though I was
also it is this the
deepest this light, I said,
our light, is the same
as the awhile; then I
spoke again: I’m at peace
with being longer of this

world, he has left it behind the world, something the
living survival, indeterminate, indifferent, about Hear, her / Clear / Mirror, / Care?
His error. / In her / Care his error. In her, / Care /

my new favorite poetic form...the fifty plus thirty...

2009-10-04T03:05:00.000-07:00

50 + 30 (+1)

Finally, finally my envelope had
finally burst and spread out
unto all the ways, coming
to dwell at the brink.
May in fact be filled
by different individuals them into
some concrete form of He
says (or wanted to say,
or said) undertakes his critique
of the notion of the

Specification of the subject-function whose status, form or value,
and regardless of Indeed, the partner is none other than
s/he who I might…I have…/(unintelligible) Charlie Parker was called.

check this out...old but incredibly relevant...

2009-09-22T11:52:00.000-07:00

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/03/25/MNGI85QTK11.DTL

2009-09-15T11:34:00.000-07:00

2009-08-31T16:46:00.001-07:00

SNUFF POETICS!!!!!! WHAT COMES TO MIND? CUZ HOLY SHIT I'M IN IT...

good grief

2009-08-27T08:42:00.001-07:00

http://bombsite.powweb.com/?p=3872

from Casual Encounters, ch. 1 Lust

2009-08-23T16:59:00.000-07:00

I too have come to seek the hasty discretion of mirrors. I am and who is there. In content’s dream everything is repulsive and lovable. Muscle spasms brushed against regret. Admit the body is a ribbon, an ocean rolled into darkness. Admit the constant hatred of intimacy. It pushes straight through to savage interior. Originate as appetite, a neutral pornography, a monstrous arbitrary semblance discreetly reaches. They are all my screaming dolls, in what grimaces of disgust they wallow. Speak only of their servitude. Bodies split with visitors, orifices of ghosts. We deserve everything inflicted on us. There is no fragility. Flesh demands disgust and brutality.

bostonian productivity

2009-08-05T18:54:00.000-07:00

well gentlemen, i for one am sitting in a sweaty corner in the living room, jealous of a rendevous i had wanted to attend. hope you freaks had a cute time together, remeniscing and poeting and finding some river with a bank wide enough for a congregation of goons.
as compensation for my immobility i had, at the very least, looked forward to some undoubtedly depraved collaboration sprawled across bar napkins and punctuated with little drops of Jameson's...

i'll be sharpening all my knives in preparation for whatever glorious beef inches a bloody trail out of the closet...

from The Frenzy

2009-07-21T08:16:00.000-07:00

Never would you have considered me crazed, passing you by in the road newspaper in hand, kicking a stone from side to side along the sidewalk. And yet there I was finally out of my mind, free of it all. Surely you are not to blame. There was nothing about me that would have given it light. My dirty blond hair neatly disheveled, parodied my deliberate jaw line. A three-week beard shaven neatly along my neck overlooked by a pair of thin wire-framed glasses. Masked the simpleton gauged by my sorted blue eyes. Anyone would have trusted me, extending my hand in a gentle embrace of solidarity and goodwill, even you. But when I look into your eyes, I do not see you anymore. I see the flesh that clothes your body, the various forms it takes, and how it can be shaken from you. Your eyes glazed over with trepidation and woe, finding a charismatic glimmer in my tone that would convince you kindly of my intentions. And you would not be mistaken most of the time. However, I have had very little occasion to abuse intention. In fact, there has been little need until about one month ago.

A. I wrote about the bloodstream—a transformative state. It arrives amid swarms of desperation. Discern a character, an artificial waking, like falling in love with a puddle, dripping, raining down. Shake her head like a dog, with others at the meat. Elbows and wrists flex with primal questions. That was her thinking. She will not be identical.

B. The dismantled dead are either triumphant or compromised. I stole from them their trajectory of experience. The pleasure in feeling the split is the act of getting here at all. But how she sketched the wolves from memory translation under treatment. The photographs were blurry from thrashing. Beg for family. Beg for life. Beg for unknown. Days are stripped of color.

C. I became fascinated by the desire for love, that it bore such indiscriminate trust. We all wish to be admired, to be adored. We all wish for someone to hold in the night. This is our forever dream. But as you sleep, as your brain splashes through waves of iridescent, strangulated memory I stand over you, you’re body-impeded dreams, and my fingertips serrated chewed flesh. And this is your forever dream. You wish for the opening out, the walking through it, time syncopated with fiction. Sketch distant from villainy. In this room where I kept her—blank for the camera. In retrospect we are a collision of line, tracks in January beneath the permanent silence of action.

D. Supposedly daisies, each garment folded precisely to location. Supposedly strawberry jam, two scoops of sugar, television from eight to ten. Supposedly at the limits of cruelty, absorb compassion, startling rigidity. Another sealed and catalogued the tended animals. Now almost worn away, the grizzly is serene.

FROM the Rights of Man and the Rights of the Other

2009-07-15T13:26:00.000-07:00

"Immediately, one and the other is one facing the other. It is myself for the other. The essence of the reasonable being in man designates not only the advent in things of a psychism in the form of knowledge, in the form of consciousness rejecting contradiction, that would encompass the other things under concepts, disalienating them within the identity of the universal: it also designates the ability of the individual, who initially appears to exist relatively to the extension of the concept--the species man, to posit himself as the only one of his kind, and thus as absolutely different from all the others, but, in that difference, and without reconstituting the logical concept from which the I disengaged itself, to be non-in-different to the other. Non-in-difference, or original sociality-goodness; peace, or the wish for peace, benediction; 'shalom' --the initial event of meeting. Difference--a non-in-difference in which the other--though absolutely other, 'more other,' so to speak, than are the individuals with respect to one another within the 'same species' from which the I has freed itself--in which the other 'regards' me, not in order to 'perceive' me, but in 'concerning me,' in 'mattering to me as someone for whom I am answerable.' The other, who--in this sense--'regards' me, is the face."--Emmanuel Levinas

THE PROTAGONIST

2009-07-04T13:42:00.000-07:00

CHAPTER ONE
One night Jack Brady was seated on the mattress in his second floor apartment. A stack of rejection letters huddled on the nightstand under constant scrutiny of a nearby candle. He lifted a bladder of boxed wine to his lips, carelessly spilling red lines down his chin. Then placed it beside a stack of overdue library books and stared out into the darkness.
This was an important night in Jack Brady’s life because he decided, after much consideration, not to end his life. He planned on chasing a bottle of prescription pills with several liters of wine. Fall asleep and let shadows suffuse.
At the last moment he changed his mind. Dashed the handful of tiny spheres across the floor and turned on the radio. Trilling violins sent tremors over his flesh. Massaged them into his shoulders and thighs and stretched his arms. Reached for the wine and mouthed the spout of the bladder once more before resting it on the stained sheets.
Brady climbed from bed and stood with his bare feet on the cold hardwood floor. Legs stiffened contracting fever. An anxious sweat devised his face. Right hand flattened against the grain of the beige wall feeling the drum of a headboard next door vibrate his fingers before letting his arm drop to his side. Walked to the bathroom and cupped his hands underneath the faucet for a stream of water. Splashed his unshaven face and turned on the light. His eyes dragged down his cheeks by racks of flesh. He rested his hands upon the sink and inspected himself closely, peering up into his nostrils, sniffing and blowing, jiggled his index fingers inside his ears and then brushed his teeth voraciously, spitting gobs of toothpaste and blood into the rusted drain.
Removed a lone towel from the rack and wiped his mouth. A spider ruled an unwavering line, divided his face vertically in the mirror. He sighed gently against the line watching the pendulum sway in certain circles from side to side, the spider delegating an invisible crag before pedaling upward toward the ceiling.
Brady walked over to his only window and raked his eyes over the infectious animation below. Wrestled open the window and propped it up with his radio. Voices in the street broke like glass against dance clubs and late night jazz dives. Bodies shifting in shadows bore no explanation for their footsteps. They treaded laughter and applause irrecoverably into action. Flickering lights jabbed through darkness.
While the night bawled into the past, Jack Brady’s life was going nowhere. He made a meek living writing and creating greeting cards, distributing them for sale at various shops in the area. His specialty was staining 4 x 6 sheets of poster board with wet tea bags. He’d let them dry onto the board, the string threaded out beyond the border of the paper. The manner in which they rested on the page reminded him of message bottles romantically rushed ashore. Beside them he composed short verse, mostly lines stolen from published writers, hoping that someday someone would purchase one of his greeting cards inevitably awarding him triumph and success after his many grueling years of pedaling baubles to the masses. But this prostitution was wearing thin his patience. He wanted nothing more than to be a successful writer, but as each day passed he became more and more convinced of its intangibility.
What little money he had slipped quickly through his fingers on paper and supplies. He tried gambling on dogs like some of his idols, but quickly abandoned it after several losses. He also tried gainful employment at a number of positions: hotel clerk, waiter, janitor, department store assistant, but each one seemed to drag the soul from his very fingertips leaving him stifled, aggressive, and resentful of a day poorly wasted on false kindness and a pathetic paycheck. Though impoverishment was a lifestyle he had no ambition of surviving, his will to pursue the distinguished road of his predecessors became so pervasive that his reality allowed little else entrance.
Brady had been on rinse and repeat for about eight months. The alarm went off to the same three DJ’s squandering their wilted ethics over the best call-in sound effects contest: honk, gobble, and moo. He opened his eyes, interrupted from dreams of his ex-girlfriend, the sex they rarely had, her manikin body, unresponsive and resistant. Shower and dress and leave, splinter morning with irresolute mobility, spend money on something, anything at all, anything to gauge contribution, then return home and wait by the window until it was dark enough to drink wine without guilt, read and sleep and begin again.
There was nothing spectacular about him or his life and this, he felt, was the reason for his rejection. After his girlfriend left him, he had acquired enough rejection slips to wallpaper one wall in his apartment, which is exactly what he did. From small presses to large publishing houses he decorated his apartment with unoriginal lines from various editors who found his work unappealing or, while occasionally “exciting and emotional,” unsuitable at this time. Most of his excitement came from examining his body in the mirror each morning and debating whether or not shaving his chest and pubic hair would inspire great literature and opportunity.
Tonight, however, was different. Tonight and every day after this night would be forever changed by his actions. He realized that by killing himself he would deprive the world their god given right to the great American novel. And while he had no qualms about pushing daisies after the fact, he had not yet accomplished this feat.
What he needed was a female lead. Someone to share protagonist adventures, the mystery and eroticism of a fond love affair. He needed a story so compelling, so honest in its right it would be irrefutable to the critical eye. Brady paced the floor for several minutes, gnawing at the flesh around his fingernails, feeling the anticipation rise from his bowels to an inspired glaze over his eyes. Always told that to write a truly brilliant novel, one must write from experience. To write a tragic love affair one must have a tragic love affair. To write a murder, one must commit a murder.
Walked out from the bathroom beside his mattress and dropped to the floor. He began exercising voraciously, doing pushup after pushup, followed by a succession of crunches. He could feel his muscles resisting under tear and strain but continued forcing his body to exceed its expectations. To accomplish his goal of becoming a great American novelist he would have to experience horrible things, take actions he never thought possible.
Brady stood and walked over to the window. A group of girls dressed in dramatic club attire pirouetted through the smog and stench of hotdog vendors and alcohol ignited streets. A man in a hooded sweatshirt walked a dog at a hurried pace as if he were expected. Hundreds of others carried along fracturing the night to pieces with laughter and idiocy, heartbreak and lust.

Maurice Blanchot from The Gaze of Orpheus translation by Lydia Davis

2009-06-17T16:30:00.000-07:00

"Remaining is not accessible to the one who dies. The deceased, we say, is no longer of this world, he has left it behind him, but what is left behind is precisely this cadaver, which is not of this world either--even though it is here--which is, rather, behind the world, something the living person (and not the deceased) has left behind him and which now affirms, on the basis of this, the possibility of a world behind, a return backwards, an indefinite survival, indeterminate, indifferent, about which we only know that human reality, when it comes to an end, reconstitutes its presence and proximity."

some thoughts on "HERE" by DL, AH, HG,DB,TW, and SMH

2009-05-26T19:09:00.000-07:00

i wld like to offer a few thoughts about a chapbook i recently read titled HERE, authored by six authors whose initials mark their poems throughout the chap.

...the writing in HERE is concerned with boundaries (as perhaps all writing is?)...HERE is framed and inhabited by poems searching out questions of identity... "who am I?" or " who are we?"...the horizon of this work existing as the possibility for difference and agency...the poems acting as kinds of technologies for metamorphosis...machines for constructing the temporary nourishment needed for transformation...or more to my thinking...lacanian psychoanalytic linguistic instruments for transformations...these poems are the search for identities in self- and co-construction...identities in relation...identities in transformation...the possibility of the being-in-language as an gestural agent of liberty...but also...part of the action of this writing is also necessarily about the pain of transformation...the poems themselves harbingers of dark transmissions of personal experience...in these ways i'm reminded of the power of writing to aid memory as well as writing being a psychoanalytic tool for self discovery...Not simply reportage or journal entries of activities HERE is a collaborative poetry manuscript built upon a polyformal and multiplicitous potentiality...the forms utilized range from anaphora, list, lyric, prose, free verse, acrostic, the poetic play, the google search, epistolary, renga, and hybrids and variations of these to perfom a geography of body and of mind...but one in which the boundaries and horizons of the future are being formed...

Here are some of my favorite excerpts..

...From DL's "My Heart's Language"...

...Love isn't easy

It is hard to gain and lose

Our beliefs change

I can't believe that was me

Afraid of time

When she was scared

She was her mother

She was her own being

We just have to dig within our bodies

...From AH's "La, Mariposa, the butterfly woman"...

...i dreamed of a girl whose soft body opened like a cabinet

inside the cavity were embryos shining, daggers on

shelves and bags packed with the first green color of

spring

this was the Skeleton Woman

she stretches from heaven to hell,

we're all here, here, here

...From HG's "Part 1"...

...She (the jumper) is already accepting, moving

on to the next moment in time, society places her back

and dwells like gulls in a stand still cold front unable to

fly out of it and enlisting her among their ever familiar V-

formation.

White Noise: Becoming a transfixion, an escape out of

hell. Rid the conscious mind of the tedious aspects of our

tedious minds.

...From DB's "[Written in an address book]"...

...Stillness except for rocking,

Back and forth

Green, green, green, brown.

Darkened windows

A brick asylum

Darkened trees

Branches intertwined

Leaves cover every bit of light

Missing the escape holes...

...From TW's "[who am i?]"...

...I am a night owl who lives for the stars and

the crazy things that happen at night. I am a friend who

can be trusted until the end. I am on a journey to

discovery of what i want out of life. I am a girl who has

choices. I want to be free....

...From SMH's "Google Search"...

...You can't

remember a time when your thoughts of purpose did not

include others. It is kind of a relief to feel sure of yourself

You realize that we are all here for each other

and searching for a purpose. Suddenly a wave of

exhaustion comes over you. You turn off the computer,

walk back to your room, and crawl into bed, soft and

warm.

...lastly here is the RENGA from HERE in its entirety...

Slick as a motherfucking architectural major

Building buildings off of my irises

I sometimes crave Newport's, but my

Mother and father completely disagree

I'm scared they might disown me

Let's pretend

This ended hopeful

My mom won't let me watch scary movies

She says their innapropriate

Just like church

I wish that black crows on their wires visited me oftener

And more than I would like, I find myself singing "wrong

way"

She winces at my smoker-alto voice

The overall theme and structure of the poems in this work remind and encourage a reading of the order of the lepidoptera (moths/butterflies) as examples of the ways in which horizons and boundaries shift after metamorphosis...the ritualistic passage from one stage to another carries within itself the solidification of new social bonds and boundaries...to the caterpillar the personal relation to the boundaries of the world is one of gravity and nourishment...while through the ritual metamorphosis the moth/butterfly becomes relative to new amazing and dangerous stimuli, the winds sway, the vastness of travel, the settling on a flower, the availability and dangers of greater accesses of flight...HERE as a book exists as a series of texts reinforcing a collective experience of relational ritual...the ritual of transformation...as i read through the texts i view the diffracted angles of a shattered chrysalis...the poems of HERE are the pieces of a passed through space...it is an architecture for passing through, for passing time...but one marked with a horizon that is about to be different...an architecture with internal folds and excesses left as marks of the vast machinery of socio/biological (mis)understandings and frustrations that contribute to the shifting boundaries of an identity in...about....and beyond...transformation...

...i want to thank Tim Armentrout for sending this book to me...HERE is a testament to the powers of the imagination...the power to create your own path...the power to understand the paths of others...the power to continue to become...

Happy Memorial Day

2009-05-25T05:44:00.001-07:00

Ted, an excerpt from "Memorial Day":

http://ubu.artmob.ca/sound/dial_a_poem_poets/corpse/Corpse_05_berrigan.mp3

From Facebook (my apologies)

2009-05-22T12:02:00.000-07:00

(from Charles Bernstein)- Thanks to Univ. of Calif. Press, PEPC Library is able to make available this key Robin Blaser essay on Olson and Whitehead. I tried to get the html as close to the book as possible, but let me know if you see any errors. Robin Blaser -- The Violets
Source: writing.upenn.edu
fromThe Fire: Collected Essays of Robin Blaserr, ed. Miriam Nichols Univeristy of California Press, 2006. PEPC Digitial Publication of one essay from the book.

tribute to blaser

2009-05-14T11:29:00.000-07:00

the incomparable robin blaser

2009-05-08T09:57:00.000-07:00

robin blaser

man of love

May 18 1925 - May 7 2009

:::::::I HEART ANSELM HOLLO::::::::

2009-04-18T09:14:00.000-07:00

LISTEN TO ANSELM

"those who rule the symbols rule us"--william burroughs

"if i surround an area with a fence or a line or otherwise the purpose may be to prevent someone from getting in or out. but it may also be part of a game and the players be supposed to jump over the boundary."--ludwig wittgenstein

:: fromfiftyfarmsreviewed ::

2009-04-15T18:29:00.001-07:00

Home Video Review of Books (scroll down)

ellectrique press

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

and if you want to read some of silliman & co. briefly meander around (but not actually into) RecollecTed//CaGeD click here blah, blah

SPICER on TEDDY BALLGAME

2009-04-14T19:10:00.000-07:00

[after listening to spicer's vancouver lectures for the umpteenth time today i found myself chuckling outloud at one of spicer's baseball analogies...and like usual...i mostly agree with him...but for the sake of spring...with baseball season having just begun...i'll recount the analogy here...] excerpted from lecture 3 part 2 june 17 1965

questioner: ...if you know what you want why is it wrong...this is what i can't quite follow?...

spicer: ...well on account of the fact that i ain't myself only...i'm a member of a team and uh...like ted williams always knew what he wanted and the red sox never did win the pennant...(pause)...i'm sorry but let's face it...

questioner: lay off ted williams that's all...

spicer: he gave that marvelous finger...uh...i was there in boston when he was giving it...it was a marvelous finger...but if you get any hits in front of him or behind him...he still stayed at the plate and uh took it very easy and you know he'd take a base on balls if he wanted a base on balls because he felt he clnd't get a hit and uh it wldn't matter if the red sox had a one run deficit and it was the ninth inning or anything else he wld still take the base on balls and that kind of thing...and he was a goddamn lousy team player...uh which is nice...but i don't really think that it wrks uh if you wanna win pennants and i think that i do and my poetry does...

Where the Light Is, Part 1

2009-03-31T18:57:00.000-07:00

"Oscillating and how": Elizabeth Guthrie’s Yellow and Red: A Poetic Play
(Black Lodge Press, 2oo8)
A Review by Andy Peterson

Pre-faces: Stages, and Codas of no after-thought. Of thought itself, as in: august and autumnal humming, warming orchestras with audience noise – a bright fit of laughter here, a dry cough there, mouths around popcorn going munch-munch – of definable objects and indefinable gestures, of being within feeling, to which only the imagination holds; without her, imagination, really, where would we be?

The cozy theater of the mind that stages the world, as in: "All the world’s a..."

we, who trust this, settle in to that familiar soft command, the conductor’s tap-tap-tap upon the stand, and we begin...

Poet Elizabeth Guthrie’s chapbook, Yellow and Red: A Poetic Play, released with elegant and loving craft by Black Lodge Press, 2008, creates a dreamy real-state site of hybrid-ditty, a calmly surreal series of performances/stagings/happenings, a confirmation that art becomes life becomes art becomes life becomes art. Difficult to summate such a uniquely inventive work, so to quote the text, in its most approximate descriptions of Self: a ""Lyric Touching Realic", or "The surface of reflection as precursory indication of the actual."

Y&R moves through four organic stages of constructions, represented by the elements of the four seasons ("an experience of phenomenon"), the abstractions of the titular colors become speaking characters alongside the inanimate – instruments, "Empty Paper Cup", and the centrifugal stage construction of an autumnal dandelion – and the animate – Conductor Ren Juffalo and Concertmaster Barry Alitzer, whose dialogues and movements explore the mysteries of moments – that is, the Eternal Moment– in change, the constant creativity of life, with the image-nation of ethereal word play.

Guthrie draws upon such happily varied avant-garde philosophies of performance artists and poets like Andre Breton, John Cage, Meredith Monk, Yoko Ono, and Gertrude Stein, who one could argue pioneered the form. The poetic play: more than just a narrative drama set in verse; a postmodern hybrid akin to the prose poem, which raises the stakes of relationships between language, page, and stage: a tuned stand-in for the physical world.

Y&R puts these elements in motion, elevates language from the page and into space, like music, and like feedback, reflects and inflects of change there occur. The finale, like all great art, asks us for our own answers to its tantalizing questions as we leave the theatre, marveling at compressions, voices in wires, constructions and reflections, and alerting us to possibilities of the lyric in everyday life, "oscillating(,) and how."

. . .

To order, visit our friends at Black Lodge Press
blacklodgepress.org
blacklodgepress.blogspot.com

light, as if to say that matter is the eventual recession from darkness

2009-03-23T08:23:00.000-07:00

TOUCH ME

2009-03-18T16:06:00.001-07:00

Hey everyone....Touch Me is out, but Blazevox has not yet enabled the purchasing site (you can find blurbs and cover image in the soon-to-be released area of blazevox catalogue) so i thought i'd offer to anyone interested...send me a check for sixteen dollars to

19 Chateau Terrace So.
Amherst, NY 14226

...and i'll send you a copy of Touch Me, no shipping payment necessary, plus this allows me a bit of a payoff which is always nice...thanks to all who encouraged and endured this crazy text...much love goonnation

poetry makes headlines

2009-03-13T16:49:00.000-07:00

here's me

Tim Armentrout joins Livestock Editions as Co-Editor

2009-03-06T09:17:00.000-08:00

Welcome, Tim!

from "Pioneers of Modern Poetry" Edited with notes & a preface by Robert L. Peters and George Hitchcock (A Kayak book, c. 1967)

2009-03-06T09:08:00.000-08:00

Measurements of Large Mammals

by OLIVER DAVIE

1.
Circumference of neck
below the head
Circumference of neck
in front of the chest
Circumference of body
behind the fore legs
Circumference of body
before the hind legs

The circumference
of the
muzzle
is always recorded
also of the head
in front of
the ears

2.
Humerus and femur
measurements:
feel
for the knobs
of the humerus and femur
and measure
the distance
between them

feel for the knob

of the femur
and then
strike
the center line

ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT MEASUREMENTS
WHICH CAN BE RECORDED

feel for the knob

should be taken again
after the animal
has been skinned.

3.
Length of the back
is made by beginning
at the base of the skull
along the line of the back
to the base of the tail

Length of tail
is always a
necessary
measurement

when
a mammal
is to be
mounted
by the dermo-
plastic
method.

(from "Methods in the Art of Taxidermy", 1894.)
______________________________________________________
"The Measurement of Large Mammals" deals with a problem which so far as we
know is entirely original in poetry. The subject matter is so basic that the work
might well be a part of a longer poem on Noah appointing the specimens for the
ark, or on Adam and Eve taking inventory in the Garden of Eden. Oliver Davie
writes with a marvellous unenigmatic sureness; he knows precisely where the
various measurements of these mammals are to be taken and exactly how one
detects say the position of humerus and femur by feeling the living, as opposed
to prehistoric, animal. There is absolutely nothing blind here; Davie is not another
of those legendary Orientals mistaking the physical parts of the elephant for
entirely incongruous things. He knows his craft intimately, whether it be writing
or taxidermy. On of his delights is the superbly handled repetition of key words
and phrases. The opening stanza is a structural marvel based upon repeated motifs
combined with sentence units of approximately the same length and syllabic
arrangement. Further, one is impressed by the neat logical progression of parts
from head to legs to back to tail. There is something clean and neat about this
entire performance. We feel assured in the hands of this master, and are nearly
willing to allow him to take our own measurements along the lines he describes.
In fact, his gentleness is so appealing that we may even crave to have ourselves
stuffed by him. Is this illusion, however, or is it delusion? A quality does emerge
slowly from these lines not entirely unlike lust, and one comes to wonder whether
sodomy isn't the writer's true subject. In fact, the more one considers it, the more
anxious one grows. See the material in part 2 which advises repeated feelings of the
knob, striking the center line, and feeling the knob again. And doesn't one detect a
sort of lustful snigger behind the block capitals of "ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT
MEASUREMENTS / WHICH CAN BE RECORDED" ? Davie seems to be cruising for
contacts. The last line of this section -- we blush to say it -- may refer to the nasty
business of drawing back the prepuce of the horse, bull, tiger, elephant, etc. Finally,
there is absolutely no concealment in section 3: by "the dermoplastic method", the
affixing of skin to skin, the "mammal" (note the wonderful equivocation here -- as we
suspected, humans are included) "is to be / mounted". Penetration is, of course, one
such "dermoplastic method". If it were not for the consummate artistry of this
exceptional poem we would surely have excluded it. Our criterion has been through-
out that quality of execution supersedes content; and we can only hope that the vast
majority of readers will agree that we are justified in allowing this disturbing poem to
appear in print. Finally, it does illustrate a contemporary principle -- that no subject
matter ought to be excluded by the poet, no matter how potentially disgusting or perverse.

For Logan Ryan Smith

2009-02-24T17:37:00.000-08:00

from CARRION SUITE

2009-02-18T07:53:00.000-08:00

for Jared Hayes

I. Wry Savages
The bats always come back, making music by striking against footprints
Filling the world with the humor for a low intrigue
The emergence of lover and assassin, a congress of empty rooms
Useless and therefore trustworthy
A problem confronting an imaginary sex
[line accepted though obscured for continuity]

In circuits—ever, however, someone plays the piano
Of the occupation reasons which the stars permit
An unpropitiated snuggling of a greater anemone
To the unscrambled accidents of the obvious
Your rhythmic bedroom is nursery to flesh, girl flesh
Wolf flesh, meat in the doorway, spilling into the orchard
The smell of autumn, a vicious banquet of proposition
A dining room of Sawako candles,
The accuracy of arrangement pauses to remember
Parched vessels of the ocean’s milk cuff
Into which we reach, discounting the confluence of fluids
“Its hints of earlier and other creation:”
Backbones slither glittering, rough and cool
Wings clamor the city’s foam glee
The more delicate view is nothing if not ambitious before the crime
On the suburban tennis court of your spirited pasts
Where the gears of voices have unhinged the attractor
Of The Modern Empress Disaster
Unzip your victims
And puff on them a bit until the room begins to sparkle
Error
Is the sparkle of your spirited past
Heard frigging an ambitious vaginal scroll
That reads: dear Keith, on second thought…
Form is the language of captors
So write me a letter, I’m feeling sad tonite
Heaving groaner drawn into narrative
Rounding homewards, the bats always come back
The oppression of punctuation without words
Their attack and decay resembles violins
Strummed by the unhurried inquisition of lovers’
Milkswell, untimed
Tightly strung, tighter
Than anxious shores
Calculating an epithet or act
That proceeds, more or less on its own,
To suspend the mean and sleazy,
To precede the day when the rat is on its side
Before the morning watch bends backward for a kiss
From within the milkswell, the rose fire burns;
That is and was a stumbling into position
That burning
Is a model of Helen Adam

II.
This glass is holding only time, the soundless end to it,
Echoes in slow fall leaves,
Dropping motionless, the repetition of a question
The scene of the apartment with all those people in it
The continuum of bone lacquered like an arm chair
Oh heartland television of Missouri, we grovel at your ugly festivals

There is no end to your museum of organized space
In rebellion the virtual sum
Would somehow explain eating metaphor
As onslaughts of matter deteriorate
The most delirious consumed quietly by earthbound branches
Unforgiven crude constructions of this beast

To play or perform the failing
The something monitor sitting down as clothing
An unattached devotion for the young and loving man that the wolf ate
Smuggled into the poem by the salesman of authorship
Undeniably listening as the warm blood welled
Around the steaming legs bitten by jumping music

Where ends the breasts of reckless men
Scraped bundles of fur my lover leaves
Cleaning talons over shallow banks
Of latticed blood around the mouthing action
Of dancing girls and singing boys
Of bats we seek in sheets as if to feed the cat

Think of them despite footsteps falling light
In warping blue industry domestic
The shallow unchanging taste of her kiss
Joke. “Drying sails at dockage:”
Spilling the debt of a savage bed
Where the imagined pedestrian-you turns orange

Bail lily fields of one magnificent prize
Spilling silver from a fountain to a silver screen
As Thomas Culpepper sprang from the crocus
Onto the slanted playground of the dead
Where bone prayer is made payable only
On Halleluiah day

As it flows from thought to ear to tongue
To ear balanced of a christened raving
A partial fallacy adored and dreaded in worship
As the warm math of honeymoon
Lilies dance as they tread
Sinking higher always at the wrong time
Fruition of night beneath a haunted wave
A hungry ghost dreaming in the forest
Lilting rhyme trembled in the absence of meaning
The nectar of the carrion suite restores dissent
In a form that longed for no lover
And obscures nothing of its envy for the bats
The crust of the moon, and mortal wound
Found in the kitchen mixed inside a bowl
Unforgiving of the grizzly dance of their captors
Found drowned return in charge clear
A backward look crawled through a keyhole crack
Elbow notch above a flowering boner
The primitive terror of coeds and kerosene
Caught in a down under looming
A bundle of tantalizing contradictions
Of Baroque nods and looks of explicit knowledge
Permanent as morgue attendants
Lighting skulls secretly behind mirrors
The agony of another heads from the body
To bridge shadow tastes, black slashes in sky
An active flicker in the bone
Reluctance, light of moonless knowledge
Attrition between legs of muscular bodies
Calmed in the meeting space of sleep
Mitigate and shock, restore
Small semblances of truth to the crumbling republic
To the barn, to the crow’s bitter apple
Dropped along the eyelash of the shore
Waves washing over them confidently
Running to the fluid notions of land
Navigating vacancy
Dissolving lines of odors trail among the house
Parting the curtains, for the doll won’t rest

- Joseph Cooper & Andy Peterson

Buddha Says, "Happeph Brrphderph Jarry Hayrph! Ern Hrrph Groondhoph Derph!"

2009-02-01T20:39:00.000-08:00

I think what Budda is trying to say is,
"Happy Birthday, Jared Hayes!
and
Happy Groundhog Day!"

May your birthday bring you

S P R I N G A N D A L L

how the hell is everyone??

2009-01-30T11:47:00.000-08:00

C as in closure and concensus
they ran their fingers
to gain smell

some blogs to check out (they'll also be on the link list)

2009-01-27T15:07:00.000-08:00

mnp

transladaccion

Poetry Reading In Portland

2009-01-26T19:46:00.000-08:00

Spare Room presents

Laynie Browne
Jared Hayes

Sunday, February 1
7:30 pm

Concordia Coffee House
2909 NE Alberta

$5.00 suggested donation

www.flim.com/spareroom
spareroom@flim.com

Laynie Browne is the author of seven collections of poetry and one novel. Her most recent publications include The Scented Fox (Wave), Daily Sonnets (Counterpath) and Drawing of a Swan Before Memory (University of Georgia). She was for many years a member of the Subtext Collective in Seattle, and now is part of the POG reading series in Tucson. She is currently developing a new a poetry-in-the-schools program for K-5 schools, through the Poetry Center at the University of Arizona.

jared hayes lives in portland, oregon. he is publisher and co-editor of livestock editions. jared hayes believes in ghosts. his poetry can be found.

=============================================

from Radiolarian Atlas

Petalospyris arachnoides

Descending claw
spider thrift
Ten-legged trope
with triceratops leanings

Inside your yellow-chambered
soirée is a bouncing
reverie of a ballroom
O hidden balustrade,
from whose aquamarine invitation
was this divine gathering sung?

Laynie Browne

from night after night

mesostic transpsych(ot)ic iteration

this is the best leJos to do things. this is the very best ecerrAda to do things. this is the very best sIempre to do things exactly poeMa transparEncia now and excluSiva is the night acercAdo doing the night dEstino and this is the night illumiNan doing the night veZ at the night caJa and these are the night brAzos at the night imagIna and this is the night Mascara doing the night Escribe at the night Seno in the night rosAs and these are the night tormEnta doing the night muNdo to the night quiZa at the night refleJaba and these are the estrellA that are exactly night and these exactly night habIta are doing their Muerte which is night and carnE is the night poSa to oscuridAd at the night gravE which is night now and night now cuerNos is exactly night night now where atroZ is.

Jared Hayes

"There wouldn’t be an experimental poetry scene to speak of here without Spare Room, which brings to town readers from the same tribe that tends to circulate between the Poetry Project or Segue Series in New York, Small Press Traffic and 21 Grand in San Francisco, Subtext in Seattle, Kootenay in Vancouver, In Your Ear or Ruthless Grip in DC, I.E. in Baltimore, Woodland Pattern in Milwaukie, Myopic in Chicago, or The Smell in L.A., just to name a very few. The fact that that’s only a few—that there’s a network of “Spare Rooms” across the nation—indicates the health, really the lifeblood, of a poetry culture the media and arts funding biz more or less ignore.

While I’d like to see the poets who travel here get paid more, there’s a bliss in that ignorance, too: the fundamentals of the poetry economy Spare Room’s a part of remain sound despite downturns, budget cuts, shifting enrollments, shrinking bequests or bloating windfalls. As Portland collects more arts refugees from the big cities, I hope Spare Room carries on for 100 more." --rodney koeneke

for more about spare room visit their website spare room

and read rodney koeneke's modern americans blogmodampo...

the mark of the beef

2009-01-21T20:47:00.001-08:00

mesostic transpsych(ot)ic iteration

2009-01-14T12:39:00.000-08:00

for Jaime Saenz after Lisa Jarnot's Right Poem

this is the best leJos to do things. this is the very best ecerrAda to do things. this is the very best sIempre to do things exactly poeMa transparEncia now and excluSiva is the night acercAdo doing the night dEstino and this is the night illumiNan doing the night veZ at the night caJa and these are the night brAzos at the night imagIna and this is the night Mascara doing the night Escribe at the night Seno in the night rosAs and these are the night tormEnta doing the night muNdo to the night quiZa at the night refleJaba and these are the estrellA that are exactly night and these exactly night habIta are doing their Muerte which is night and carnE is the night poSa to oscuridAd at the night gravE which is night now and night now cuerNos is exactly night night now where atroZ is.

a quick note from michel de certeau...on bosch's garden...

2009-01-14T11:54:00.000-08:00

(click on picture for a closer look)

"Despite our knowledge of the iconography of the late middle ages, we have here the "pure and simple volatilization of meanings." Wilhelm Fraenger concurs, but, being an acute observer, on the lookout for anything that might "signify," he wants to force the "mute oracle" to speak nonetheless. His dictionary-machine (this "means" that) constrains each signifier to confess to a signified, thus transforming the painting into the transcription of a textual system. For others, and the best of them at that, such as Dirk Bax, the secret ofThe Garden arouses a rapt attention to its details. It is the labor of a Sysiphus, curiosity trapped in the cryptogram-rebus. This painting plays on our need to decipher. It enlists in its service a western drive to read. The meticulous proliferation of its figures calls irresistibly for indefinite narrativizing, whether it be that of a folklorist, a linguist, a historian, or a psychologist. This narrativizing, by countless erudite convolutions, makes each iconographic element tell a meaningful story. Like the discourse that is produced on the basis of dream fragments, the literature on The Garden is an endless series of stories elicited by some detail or other of the painting. Using a great many references, works, and readable documents, that literature produces its learned stories on the basis of pictorial fragments. Lettered stories seemed endlessly generated by The Garden of Delights. In point of fact, these scholarly tales (the thousand and one nights of erudition) follow, or postpone, or deny the moment when the pleasure of seeing is the death of meaning...

...The Garden cannot be reduced to univocity. It offers a multiplicity of possible itineraries, the traces of which, as in a labyrinth, would constitute so many stories, until one comes to a dead end that marks a forbidden meaning. But there is something more here. The painting seems both to provoke and frustrate each one of these interpretive pathways. It not only establishes itself within a difference in relation to all meaning; it produces its difference in making us believe that it contains hidden meaning."--from the mystic fable

:implication:implication:hyperbole:transmulti:hybridity:differance:
hyperbole:interintra:trans:discipline:discourse:implication:
implication:poetics:vispo:hyperbole:void:

2008-12-31T15:07:00.001-08:00

Happy New Year Goons...it can only get better from here!

The Feneon Collective

2008-12-31T12:38:00.000-08:00

if you haven't already heard of the faits divers de la poesie blog....now you have

Meanwhile, outside the barnyard ...

2008-12-29T16:49:00.001-08:00

2008-12-25T12:49:00.000-08:00

HAPPY HOLIDAYS TO ALL YOU GOONS!!!

..."what is the body capable of"...

2008-12-16T17:06:00.000-08:00

go find out what j/j has to say about it: "what is the body capable of". (if you're not taken directly to the essay click on the blog link on the left.) or go here: what is the body for.

...and remember that j/j's new books are out!!...get .compilate. by emailing livestockjared@gmail.com..and get asymptotic lover//thermodynamic vents at blazevox.

Blush

2008-12-05T16:36:00.000-08:00

The boundary and margin are out of order. We love what we love, fearing it at the same time as a machine of death. The fascinating defilement of the social aggregate. Fires still burning in heart, the exchange of presences and absences. The human body is metaphor for exclusion and prohibition. Don’t ever refuse that which, separating it from itself, breaches the living voice. The speaking being is permanently engulfed. And what the hell else to say but I too am a dreamer; I give my dreams as dreams. The result of such is worth confronting. Echo of what it has come for it leaps over the text toward its presumed content. Without going into the details of the demonstration, note the following. There is a long stretch of sky before us. The speaking being is separated by sex and language. I want to fuck you in a classical shape that gives itself out to be a synthesis that faithfully restores.--cooper/hayes

Dirk Lee print for cover of Slumgullion's spontaneous Montana Festival of the Book collaborative zine

2008-12-05T15:54:00.000-08:00

2008-10-17T16:30:00.001-07:00

five tangents in praise of j/j hastain's livestock edition, .compilate. (available today!!), or a special episode of abc's of attention with guests j/j hastain, robert grenier, andrew peterson, joseph s. cooper, gertrude stein and the duncanator.

in the process of reading and doing the layout design of and for j/j hastain's .compilate. i was inexorably moved outward into the past and future of my relationship with poetry and thus my relationship with the world. in many ways i wanted to write a short note explaining or offering some brief insight or captivating and influential press release to share this book with the world. as i was writing these blurb like phrasings/opinions i was thrust beyond them via the texts own diverse momentums into further thought and other books. so, here, rather than condense my feelings/thoughts/impressions/relations of and to j/j hastain's writing, i thought it might be useful to map the movement of my thinking and reading...those processes being produced by the varying gestures of .compilate.'s text....as an introduction and example set, here is a short sampling of the book (please understand my personal html limitations in formatting produce a text not identical in format to the original):
from the first section:

.amor surgical.

.stolen. books. objections. personas. exiles.
membrane. junky jolted you. in groan and
localized eros. corporeality of any cicala
theory. if it matters when it goes engraved.
salted. strung together to make more than two
hundred miniaturized girls.

.with accommodations the sentences begin to shift.

.the room is opaque often laminatedly related.
something like out of the top of your. who
does the incremental switch belong to. making
beings that extend beyond contradictions in the
fashion. general constructions beading banality.
dead cats then a dress made of cast. calle as
in this to reach renee. the hospital is not
fake. the infant and its numerous furry bulks.

.nomadic taxi touch.

.sockets become unexpected shovels. the
syringe buries. impulses of sea umbrella.
waning circulature. intelligence actually dying.
the sacrilege of dedicated grosspace.

.skewering sonata.

.work itself verge or spill construction.
the trusting blackened. grind to and ash.
tumultuous turning floatations into sanskrit.
or potatoes between hardening hands.

tangents:

I. this text is one that co-operates with language. as i have heard mr. duncan point out in audio lectures: some "use" language others "co-operate" with it. this is something fundamental for/to me as a reader/writer of text/world. i am prompted to continue that premise...knowledge/language exists outside of myself and only in relationship to others/geographies/texts do i (whatever/whoever i may be) collaborate in meaning making....compilate. did not necessarily reveal this to me, yet .compilate. is a text that re-members this consistently throughout. and maybe that is the process that this book encourages in the experience of it...the re-membering of these polysemous cells. i am brought into the biological act of fusion, or no, something more dirty...some prosthetic or transformation process where membranes are introduced to each other and either reject or assimilate themselves. here in .compilate. i believe we as readers/writers both assimilate and reject this prosthetic membrane. we as co-participants in the meaning making process re-member and suture this monster to ourselves (willy-nilly and with momentum). it hangs strangely and comfortably off of ourselves...changes our functions as we learn its own kind of consciousness.

I. in the beginning of .compilate. the reader is given a few brief "pre" poetic texts. these texts act to me as a womb or gestational mediation system viewed from an outside...or maybe through ultrasound.... texts like: "compilate: collect+compile+grate.", "gathers things from many different sources. much duration. this matters." reveal some of the clues of the form and shape and parts of the baby/monster to come...then the book proceeds into the birth, "has no affinity / to the history book". this birthing of things collected, compiled, and grated resembles the ways i have read benjamin, arendt, and jae emerling (on benjamin and arendt). each of these authors has lauded the collector's relationship to her/his/their world...by re-contextualizing objects/words/things through a kind of "pearl-diving" into the past (arendt on benjamin) the genuine collector "exhibits a love of things, a care of things, that refuses to appropriate their alterity...in the presentation of the what-has-been, a past that was never present the as yet unlived." (emerling on arendt and benjamin). from here i suggest also that recent discussions of kenneth goldsmith's work in a parallel fashion, as well as thought in/around/about viktor shlovsky's queering/making strange/defamiliarization can be thought in terms of this kind of idiosyncratic and and times radical collecting/birthing. pulling texts/worlds together through a variety of personally idiosyncratic methods of construction/reconstruction/rereconstruction so that their past breathes in the present. In fact through reading/writing this .compilate. monster i am reminded that maybe this process--of idiosyncratic collecting--is what builds (and possibly has always built) the polysemous human conversation/narrative [and not just what is called "discourse" (but that too)]...is it only now that humans have been so easily rendered useless to their own future through the lack of attention to their past? Or have we always been so forgetful?....compilate., through its attempt at collection and dispersal, is building a narrative in conjunction and in relation to the reader/writer and their world. this monster is growing/transforming on/into us...it is re-membering itself as it attaches its history to you and your room presently.

and don't these notions/notes also reinforce similarities between benjamin's ideas about brechtian performativity and relationships between our objects, ourselves...a dialogic or polylogic dialectics of reading/writing.

(note to self: write a paper on benjamin's brechtian influence towards a performativity of the reader/writer: a benjaminian performative dialogic dialectic of reading/writing a new art-historical poeisis?wtf?.)

I. .compilate. is a text that meditates, that breathes, that sits and yet transfoms. I am reminded and sent back to gertrude stein's stanzas in meditation, a text in which language comes back to itself...back to its own breath (huh?)....the form of .compilate. is phenomenological in this sense...or attempts to be so...it does not seem like a record of meditation (though it may be)...rather it appears to me to be the enactment or embodiment of meditative states....the reader/writer of .compilate. is confronted with accumulations of meanings and contexts only to be moved steadily, if not swiftly, (on the wind horse) into others...just as during a sitting meditation one's mind may wander and body may begin to fatigue (these never being mutually exclusive), one attempts, consistently, to bring their mind and body back to the immediate moment...it is in in this sense that .compilate. seems to be operating in my mind and body...as i read/write the text i am brought back to the immediacy of each phrasing...then group of phrasings...then back. then back. again. again. consistently. back. again. .this movement is not one that gives a sense of forward linear movement...there is no "progress"....trajectories are rhizomic in .compilate....we breathe. we read. we sit. we go out. we come back. we set the book down. we go back. we hear the gong. and the music doesn't stop. rather, we experience our moments and .compilate. rests itself uncomfortably and monstrously in our breath and seats...

I. so far in writing responses and close readings/writings of texts it has been difficult for me to express specifically what it is that is happening lyrically. now here .compilate. has added another insight into where i find lyric and lyricism most intriguing. in the past year or so a handful of texts have stood out to me lyrically for the simple reason that there forms seemed antithetic to lyric or to use nezval's phrase (i think) antilyric...these texts are joseph cooper's autobiography of a stutterer, andrew peterson's anselm hollo private eye, gertrude stein's stanzas in meditation, and now j/j hastain's .compilate....what each of these texts does in their own ways is to create a music that would at first seem to be impossible. "stutterer" places reader/performer in the place of the author through the use of symbols that articulate the difficulties and seizures of his own tongue. a brief look at the text is dizzying due to the number of disruptions. yet a clear lyric is imbedded and made possible by the impediment. one finds herself working through the text in her own disruptive singing. i have spoken briefly in the past about AHPE by peterson and will again reiterate how a period after every line created a kind of stop. /and. /go. /experience. that motion becomes a kind of music of musics or musics of music as you move through...small voices combining for an overall effect of song. stein, of course, in stanzas uses almost no nouns in her masterpiece which serves to alter your presence with it...the text is most difficult to stay involved with in prolonged readings...yet its music becomes unmistakeable with all of the prepositions and articles repeating in every possibility...(in an ideal world i'd give lengthy examples of all...but...)....compilate.'s music is also at first an interruptive one as well. we are confronted and released by periods on both sides of the text...in a way framing but also a kind of punching through the page...as if the periods were holes in this fabric...or to look back to duncan again in his warp and woof lecture...this is a fabric that is hol(e)y. so even though i am in a way interrupted by its formal architecture i am pressed through these (w)holes into another weaving. into another weaving. into another weaving. and so on. and these are, ultimately, part of the same fabric. (which is why it is possible to be read at all...for anything to be read.?)...but the music is in the movement from warp to woof and back...wait...does that make sense? .compilate. is an interruptive lyric or antilyric in the sense that you come to abrupt holes (metaphorical and lyrical) that move you into and out of cushion-ey...then rocky...then velvet-ey...then abrupt sound spaces...but the only way to travel from stop to song is through those portal period holes. And those portals are revealed two-fold: architecturally [periods (punctuation and length of time)], semantically [meanings (relationally created)]. the result is a movement of sound that traverses underneath between, over and through the accumulated text...a kind of superstructure...or ego...there it! is!...the sound of compilate is the accumulative identity binding its monstrous baby system to our own as readers/writers/experiencers...the lyric of .compilate. acts as a barb extending out of its tentacles which have wrapped themselves around yr torso...sticking its lyric inside of your body this monster releases its genetic sonic fabric changing again and again the way yr ears make their sense.

I.…ralph the naropa bookstore owner while i was attending (whose been at naropa since its beginning) would bring certain books in (i can only imagine his stashes from previous 30 odd swp’s) one at a time to be found by the most steadfast explorer of books. some of us understood that if we spent the time to look (three to four x's a week) we might find some crazy textual rainbow loot! something not visible (and most likely not even there) the day or two before and placed there just for us (or so it seemed)…this is just how i came across robert grenier’s attention, a curriculum of the soul book, #28 that was put out in 1985 by the institute for further studies at glover publishing…so, here (in portland), the other day i see it sitting next to .compilate., as if placed there by the ghosts of kerouac and stein, and i pick them both up and read them into each other...and so here is part of that experience.

here are grenier narratives, IV., V. and .compilate. poems, .susceptible variations., .borderlands as in late noon., .the magma of the alley., .lace vortex., .this is a party., .so what nests after woman.:

“IV.: What’s the ‘connective tissue’? what does “it makes another syntax” mean? ‘Syntax’ & ‘narrative’ clearly indicate (?) ‘the same thing’? What a charming muddle!—Darling, don’t leave!

.susceptible variations.

.invoices. repetition polarities. seek tendencies
authoring what differentiates the frogs. forums
filled with buttered corn. scrolls and apparatus.

Almost everything remains to be undertaken in the investigation of ‘narrative’—we don’t know what it is—what’s the ‘symbiosis’ between language (apparently a ‘structural event’) & human (animal, generally, huh? Semicolon; rocks?) ‘mental process’—“language”?/”mind”?(“language are”—‘in’ the brain?)? Almost everything is “in quotes” including, particularly, that previously casually supposed copy-relation among /between “language” & “the world” (now presupposed to be merely the image, purely projected by men’s and women’s wills, as language, within which ‘we’ are trapped, rather unfortunately, but within which we can alter the environment by transferring ownership or employing a competent & highly recommended gardener to reduce traffic noise?—the notion of ‘syntax’ as some total ‘governing’ language’s pre-programmed ‘narrative’ of ‘events’ arrived?)?

.borderlands as in late noon.

.what loops it to itself. a regional frothing
of circular. the revolt of parabolic literals.
playing music out of the tips. of a war
who can speak for halle barry leaving her
husband. the most complex biological slates.

What’s the ‘comparative time’? Eh!? How, then, ever know what follows? One thing after another?—“one one one”—what does that language mean? Form is what it looks like afterward, depending ‘from’ what happens?—well, then, on same old question, how such? Mark what happens, extant sort!—how ‘then’?—how did what happen?—the past, It Was—outcome of what mysterious ‘flesh’…? What made it?—something make it?

.the magma of the alley.

.form of how it does or does not respond
to the cat the henchman. the reach. akin to
over fifty. retaliations against the etymology
of darwin drawing. dissolution of embedded
organs. self-invention in break with god.

“Don’t mess with narrative!”—absolute dictum of society which would phase you in, phase you out, ‘finally’—assumption of “beginning/middle/end” & series form through which we are supposed to ‘live’, so heavy-handed & pervasive it’s not even noticed—until you step out, on occasion—with ‘narrative’ as henchman of this awful mind-control, that spreads abroad, with intent to aggrandize whatever it can push/persuade the world is this the way to—the whole thing ‘organized’—synchronized/in sequence—in our lifetimes!

.lace vortex.

.not named but nameable transmissions.
disintegrating loons taste the great arousal.
upside down pineapple. hive. closest. flute.
ferret running in its passage. they go. because
they made it.

V.: What is the passage of time to time, that's narrative, what is the order in which 'things happen', in 'language' of course--i.e. in & through language--but more primarily order of events through man perceived to share that same 'structure' that...
All writing is essentially ‘narrative’—not only storytelling/prose—but any combination of letters, that moves in time.

You always have to tell the story of.

It does its activity as a major means to salute & acknowledge, recognize & ‘define’ & manifest itself, I write.

.this is a party.

.send out the coaches. accesses of
ontology. zoo roams. protruding
reimaginings of refused vestibule.
this is a cup is an orb calculation.
caress. am still leaving. the me
of my doctored herbs.

The mere activity of a reader ‘reading’—by moving through words and syllables (at high speed or at a crawl) while thinking almost anything about/never everything by any means of what the words ‘say’, in toto—makes a small (unwritten) ‘narrative in itself’, for itself.
Essentially, the reader makes the narrative—the writer, as a reader, makes the narrative?

.so what nests after woman.

.snorting vein along the coast of your
squiggling cuerpo. ligatures activate
the temporary barn. each other politic
hygiene. shines exquisitely press-on
can’t say blatantly. moss-complications
meaning you stay if not one shape.
then dividable in the cleanest. the
final body becoming the first.

Ok, then, the issue is the same thing (as if the writer makes the story up, out of the Imagination)—its glory forth—

:: ummm, so ya....compilate. is available today!!!
email me at livestockjared[at]gmail[dot]com and order yours!

livestock editions does not charge for their books...but is always happy to accept donations or trades!!

"It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there." - WC Williams

2008-09-30T19:57:00.000-07:00

Revolutionary Letter #9 By Diane di Prima

advocating
the overthrow of the government is a crime
overthrowing it is something else
altogether. it is sometimes called
revolution
but don't kid yourself: government
is not where it's at: it's only
a good place to start:
1. kill head of Dow Chemical
2. destroy plant
3. MAKE IT UNPROFITABLE FOR THEM
to build again.
i.e., destroy the concept of money
as we know it, get rid of interest,
savings, inheritance
(Pound's money, as dated coupons that come in the mail
to everyone, and are void in 30 days
is still a good idea)
or, let's start with no money at all and invent it
if we need it
or, mimeograph it and everyone
print as much as they want
and see what happens

declare a moratorium on debt
the Continental Congress did
'on all debts public and private'

& no one 'owns' the land
it can be held
for use, no man holding more
than he can work, himself and family working
let no one work for another
except for love, and what you make
above your needs be given to the tribe
a Common-Wealth

None of us knows the answers, think about
these things.
The day will come when we will have to know
the answers.

2008-09-17T10:26:00.000-07:00

...a lot of things in the world today have been reminding me of this old ginsberg quote...something like..."Well, while I'm here I'll do the work — and what's the Work? To ease the pain of living. Everything else, drunken dumbshow." ...

kenneth goldsmith via linh dinh via tony tost

2008-09-07T07:25:00.000-07:00

(for Linh Dinh)

"I thought to myself, wow, writing is so far behind other art forms in this regard. . .

Twenty five years after Baudrillard, these poetry students were still prioritizing Romantic notions of authenticity -- "truth", "individuality" and "honesty" -- over any other form of expression. My god! Is it a case of naivety, amnesia or just plain ignorance?. . .

Now is the time of possibility we can be everyone and no one at all. With digital fragmentation any notions of authenticity and coherence have long been wiped. When we're everywhere and nowhere at once -- pulling RSS feeds from one server, server-side includes from another, downloading distributed byte-size torrents from hundreds of other shifting identities -- such naïve sentiments are even further from what it means to be a contemporary writer. Identity politics no longer have to do with the definition of a coherent self, rather it has to do with the reconstructed distributed, fragmented, multiple and often anonymous selves that we are today. We're infinitely adaptable and changeable minute-to-minute. Shouldn't our notions of art expand once again to include these as well?"

-- Kenneth Goldsmith

2008-08-25T06:24:00.000-07:00

Sunday afternoon

naptime

re-reading Don't Let Me Be Lonely

in preparation for teaching this fall

butterfly swarmed my head

whispered wing motion in my ear

before landing on my shoulder

to extend proboscis

eat something I could not see

rested there for some time

turned and looked right at me

it only had one eye

this morning, taking out the trash

wolf spider perched

just at exit of white hornet nest

waiting

I am being told something

I cannot completely

understand...

AFTER ANNE WALDMAN

2008-08-12T02:32:00.001-07:00

joseph cooper is a race car. joseph cooper is a fast machine. joseph cooper is fast. joseph cooper is a machine. A desire machine. joseph cooper is a desire machine incarnate. joseph cooper is intent upon languaging desire. What languaging desire means for joseph cooper is hot...is fuckin hot....what languaging bodies means for joseph cooper makes people hot...they won't let you know it either...cause it can be dirty..but it's fuckin hot and they know (it)....joseph cooper is desiring the fuck of hot language. thrusting it into itslf into you yrself it language it yrself thrusting yr desire into it...anyway cooper u it hotness...language...desire...hot...fuckin...hot...it....hot.

Collaborations of Hayes and Cooper

2008-08-05T18:01:00.000-07:00

yes, yes that’s what I wanted between the invention of writing and the birth of modern science; I always wanted to return to the body, where I was born. The sudden interruption of affect, skin peeling off in long tatters revealing the musculature beneath. I am speaking of compassion, now blurred or the window, so weak and subject to so many evils; it is an empty house. The strange baby is the opposite direction to a human baby; the body bearing no mark of its debt to nature, when it is sheltered in a body that is unleashed only with the help of masculine degradation. Remember the way you italicized only the word harmony. Two unyielding protagonists appeared, disposable for this purpose, slightly blemished, thriving on hazard. Pedagogy cannot help but encounter the problem of imitation, velvet couch, red velvet, all the people I’ve ever known. Between the theme of love and sick body, this being occurs at the center of fear. It still makes sense, the inscription within a system of differences, to know the song after all. The speaking being as separated by sex and language, locomotion and digestion, as functions, stay intact. He feels small as he awakens, writing himself in that first instance. Fluctuating inside and outside, this was monstrous: the inability to assimilate. As I said to my friend, “we must now form and meditate upon the law of this resemblance.” I am writing to you, the frailty of symbolic order itself.

An interpretation of resistance throbs with blood as you ask the question. What I call the erasure of concepts night, good, night, good, good, night, ought to mark the places of that future meditation. An economy of analytic listening, historical manifestations, is undisturbed by the extraction of foreign body. The eye I look out of would be a relationship of translation. Even when human beings were involved with it, they complained of violent spasms. It’s expanse of sky, contradiction, between desire and pleasure. Ornery experience of the intimate recasting syntax and vocabulary. What I am to myself, shall constantly reconfirm that writing is the other that must be remembered. Incandescent, unbearable limit between inside and outside separated from mouths. It is the question of a supplement, where it cannot, my mind sinks, falling short of itself, is born. The violence of poetry, and silence, a depression visible in satellite photographs. Earlier in the evening the moon became capable of being imperceptible, going to bed, making love, the age of writing begins. When narrated, identity is a latticework mating to disperse your body as referent. As I said to my friend, the presence of a spectator is a violation, a silent and immobile darkness surrounds us.

Brown Bagazine Season Two

2008-08-05T06:53:00.000-07:00

Hello,

I'm glad to let you know the newest issue of Brown Bagazine is complete. Issue 5, "Borders/Exclusion/The Other Politics," includes the work of Tim Armentrout, Amanda Haney, Harish Thakur, David Trame, David McLean, and Puma Perl. It is printed in color on tabloid-sized laser paper and folded to resemble a road map. The writers represent India , Sweden , Italy , and the United States .

Information is available on the website in regards to future issues, submissions, and subscriptions.

Please also be aware the following publishers are actively accepting submissions and publishing new work:

bedouin books is an independent publisher of handmade works of literature and poetry, fiction and non-fiction. Information is available at www.bedouinbooks.com.

Fact-Simile is accepting submissions for Fact-Simile 1.2 (Fall 2008). If you haven’t seen their flagship magazine, yet (Featuring an Interview with Jerome Rothenberg), you can check out a PDF version on their website: www.fact-simile.com.

Have an excellent week!

Yours in Art,
Amy

Another TriUMPH for Goonpoetique!

2008-07-22T16:04:00.000-07:00

Check out GALATEA #10 where Michael Koshkin's Orgy in the Beef Closet reviewed by Eileen Tabios!

Then go to TRANSMISSION PRESS and buy it.

Fair Dream w/Ginsberg (to be read as a monologue by Bobby Louise Hawkins)

2008-07-09T10:34:00.000-07:00

A large crowd cued up in the Marshfield/Pembroke Burger King anticipating the beginning of Opening Night for the Marshfield Fair ("New England's largest and oldest fair"). A more antique Bohemian flavor than your usual fast food chain. Steven Tyler mingles and greets people, Steve Correll brings guests unusual food and drink. ST come up and talks to us in anticipation of arrival of featured reader & main event at fair first night - Allen G! There is a swirl of unusual, artistic, old world peoples, elaborate animal clothes, foreign languages & accents. We talk w/ ST when Allen's entourage enters - he is frailer, w/ a much bigger beard than usual. There is a great rush for him but he navigates with ease & comes right over to us, - informal introductions, - he has heard of us through the Naropa circles. We are all pleased & conversate like old friends tho soon time to go & the great rollicking energy of the place is let out when Allen leaves. We agree to meet after the reading - a great party being thrown by an old Russian restauranteur.

We stop at liquor store Rte. 139, a great buzz & crowd of townies in parking lot, many I used to go to high school with. They know nothing of Allen or the great reading, but are planning to visit the Demolition Derby at the fair that nite. We turn them on & soon everyone's excited to go; the entourage doubles. The line around fairgrounds entrance seems endless, but we pass right through into this large barn with a grandstand; tiered medieval looking room lit with huge warlording candled chandeliers. Crowd, raucous as before - barbarian furs, eastern Euro- roughstock, accented, bearded, elaborate evening dress, men & women hard to tell apart. A friendly man I recognize from around town approaches w/ large suitcase - he's been put in charge of what Allen should read tonight and what do we think? He opens suitcase to find all of Allen's books, bound in elaborate, 18th C. type leather, gold calligraphied handwriting on spines, etc. We ponder set list like excited music fans - old farovites chosen - "Howl", "Green Valentine", etc. - I want to suggest "Wichita Vortex Sutra" but we somehow mutually agree on one of his more obscure favorites called "The Beginning." (Later, awake, I check: Allen has no poem called this.)

Allen reads, all a great success, we rush off to restaurant - again, a dark, unusual other occult country feel - old friends are met again at an overflowing bar - talk abounds again with Allen, & other poets.

I end up in conversation with the owner who ushers me away into separate seating area where other non-reading attendees are dining in black tie & dress. There is a large table set for the reading guests that have arrived, tho nobody interested in sitting to eat or casual conversation. The owner - old, eastern European accent, kind dark eyes' penetrating gaze - makes me sit at a table for two with his mother (or ancient wife?). He pulls up a chair & together they take food from her plate & waiters & waitresses continuously bring & feed me the most unusual elaborate & delicious appetizers I have ever tasted ...

2008-07-04T12:26:00.000-07:00

where to begin with a bit of hard sausage or SWP wk 1 sat.

2008-07-01T08:59:00.000-07:00

the death dream in pool repelling seemed to be the century
gradually less expired endeared juniper/a miss list greeted these
breaks a plurality in asphalt placed semantic in so many spaces
to experience feet on trophies so that spectator implies dig
just like we the moment who shake a trick in discourse falls
language proposed a memory in body: the pronoun fits in curves
low to the right leg should make time for an address: it playing
the coming and soft like it just gelled in that not tomorrow before