In Place of Chairs

Good Point

2010-12-12T20:40:00.003-05:00

"It is no more possible to compose with the paraphernalia of critique than it is to cook with a seesaw."

"An Attempt at a 'Compositionist Manifesto'," Bruno Latour

Di Prima In Gloucester

2010-11-13T22:12:00.008-05:00

While I haven't posted in some time, this generally neglected blog is usually in my thoughts. Not long ago, I attended the centennial celebration of Charles Olson in Gloucester with Michael Peters. The effort it took to arrive in Gloucester for the festivities was downright Herculean, but well worth it. I've posted below a video of Diane Di Prima reading "Rant" at the Independent Christian Church in Gloucester during the centennial weekend, a poem which she wrote while lecturing on Olson at the University at Buffalo in the mid-eighties. I'm especially fortunate to have heard her read this particular piece, as I happen to consider it one of the most engaging poems that I've ever had the pleasure to discover.

John Wieners Online

2010-08-07T20:59:00.002-04:00

A thorough and thoroughly interesting John Wieners page is live at EPC. Be sure to check it out when you have the chance.

There Is A There There

2010-07-05T17:59:00.002-04:00

The new issue of There is now live. Excellent work. I especially found Carrie Hunter's pieces engaging...

Living Waters

2010-06-13T18:01:00.002-04:00

If you've been following the BP oil spill at all, then you'll want to check out Poets For Living Waters, an action response to the disaster, which is edited by Amy King and Heidi Lynn Staples. The work posted thus far is not only interesting, but topically poignant.

Greniereading

2010-05-04T23:06:00.002-04:00

I reread a bit of Grenier's Series tonight. Opening the book at random, I found one of my favorite pieces. Thought I'd share:

LATE

for John Dowland

you will not

save things or

make them perfect

music is power

lustrous ox

lightly the

transfigured leaves

ok on that

Poediting

2010-05-01T01:09:00.005-04:00

Issue 17 of Otoliths is now online, featuring a special section on Poet-Editors curated & introduced by Eileen R. Tabios.

43 poet-editors respond to the question: "What is (or has been) your favorite editing project and why?"

The respondees, who also provide—sometimes quite extensive—samples of their work, are:

William Allegrezza, Ivy Alvarez, Anny Ballardini, Joi Barrios, John Bloomberg-Rissman, Ana Božičević, Garrett Caples, Brian Clements, Bruce Covey, Del Ray Cross, Patrick James Dunagan, Elaine Equi, Adam Fieled, Thomas Fink, Luis H. Francia, Geoffrey Gatza, Tim Gaze, Crg Hill, Aileen Ibardaloza, Vincent Katz, Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, Burt Kimmelman, Mark Lamoureux, Amanda Laughtland, Timothy Liu, Dana Teen Lomax, Joey Madia, Sandy McIntosh, Didi Menendez, Lars Palm, Guillermo Parra, Ernesto Priego, Sam Rasnake, Barbara Jane Reyes, Christopher Rizzo, Patrick Rosal, Sarah Rosenthal, Susan M. Schultz, Logan Ryan Smith, Jill Stengel, Fiona Sze-Lorrain, Jean Vengua, & Mark Young.

It is indeed a special section, as I'm flattered to be included in such company.

Juxtaposition Just A Position

2010-04-24T18:20:00.003-04:00

"I didn't really say everything I said."

--Yogi Berra

"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened by the old ones."

--John Cage

Gertruding Avant-math

2010-02-18T19:44:00.008-05:00

Reading through Tender Buttons is always interesting, to say the very least, but today especially, since I decided to explore frequencies. Did you know that "whole" appears twenty-six times throughout the three sections of the text? "Change" appears twenty-one times and "show" (along with "shows") appears a whopping forty-two times. Just this single nexus of "whole," "change," and "show" is enough to keep one sentenced to several hard years of interpretation.

All this said, "There is no superposition and circumstance, there is hardness and a reason and the rest and remainder. There is no delight and no mathematics."

It seems to me that the whole text is constituted by superpositions and circumstances, delights and--yes indeed--mathematics. What is mathematics but the study of measurement, properties, and relationships? Wouldn't this definition serve to describe avant-garde modernist poetry writ large? It encapsulates, so far as I can see, Pound's ideogrammic method, for example. And Pound called poetry "inspired mathematics." A mathematics that breathes.

As a study, Tender Buttons methodically attends to the stuff of mathematics--measures, properties, and relationships--by making (poiesis) observations. It is a special kind of knowledge arrived at through performance, surely, but useful knowledge nevertheless: "Change a single stream of denting and change it hurriedly, what does it express, it expresses nausea." Or, rather, change expresses or shows the process known as reality. The feeling of nausea is real. Does it need "hardness and a reason" to occur?

Googlobal Library

2010-02-18T13:08:00.002-05:00

I realize that I haven't posted for some time now, and I apologize for that. But let me make it up to you. If you haven't been following Google's plan to digitize the world's books into a kind of global library--which really isn't a traditional library per say, in fact--then here's everything you need to get up to speed on the issue: "The Fight Over the Google of All Libraries."

While the concept of a universal or global library is certainly laudable, it gives me pause that a major American corporation has undertaken the task at great expense. Corporations never engage in philanthropic projects, that much is certain. The FAQ section of the article, posted on Wired.com, discusses the economics of the Google Book project. Happy reading.

Number 9, Number 9, Number 9...

2009-10-30T15:33:00.002-04:00

H_NGM_N #9 is now live.

Wreading

2009-10-26T19:42:00.001-04:00

3ssue

2009-09-09T19:48:00.002-04:00

The new Sous Rature is now live, and here's the lineup:

Shaula Evans

Ross Priddle

Aidan Thompson

Lydia Davis

Kyle Schlesinger

Uchay Joel Chima

Charles Freeland

Rebecca Wolff

Stephen Webber

Edwin Torres

Joel Chace

Danielle Pafunda

Urayoán Noel

Douglas A. Martin

Stephanie Strickland

Alejandro Crawford

Jared Hayes & Joseph Cooper

Erin Casey

Russsell Pascatore

Adam Katz

Thierry Brunet & Jeremy Geddes

Anselm Berrigan

Donald Breckenridge

Michael Basinski

Claire Hero

Judith Goldman

Jerome Rothenberg

Chris Rizzo & Katherine Sullivan

Anne Gorrick

Ching-In Chen

Andrew Zawacki

miniphillyphocus ::

dorothea lasky

adam fieled

paul siegell

hassen

jenn mccreary

sarah birl

alex kanevsky

mytili jagannathan

I'm happy to see a number of familiar names, and the work should prove interesting, as always. I'm excited about collaborating with Katherine Sullivan, a fantastically gifted visual artist. You can click directly over to see our experiment in forms here.

Anchoriting

2009-09-07T19:03:00.002-04:00

After a hiatus, I'm happy to report that The Scathering Sound, by George Kalamaras, is now available. Check the Anchorite Press blog for details.

Essaying

2009-07-24T17:07:00.003-04:00

A new essay on Robert Creeley in Jacket 37: "An Extensive Body of Work: Robert Creeley's Poetics of Affect." Hope you find it provocative.

H_NGM_N

2009-07-21T21:22:00.005-04:00

Issue no. 8. Live now.

To Fail or Not to Fail

2009-07-15T17:56:00.006-04:00

Michael Roberson asked some interesting questions on the Buffalo poetics list today, and I'd like to jot down a few remarks in response. First, his questions:

Struck by the acuteness of and subsequent attention to Christian Bök's discussion of "Writing and Failure" on the Harriet Blog, I am looking for further considerations of poetry and failure or poetry and inadequacy. In one regard, much has been written about poets and personal inadequacies or senses of failure, but what about the actual writing of poetry as an inevitably impossible, doomed, or failed endeavor? Do we continue to write poetry because it ultimately fails to do what we hope it might or should? Is the "failure of poetry" a failure of language, or poetics?

Any thoughts or ideas would be immensely appreciated.

I’m not sure that poetics can suffer failure. As human beings who ostensibly construct our world, we fail ourselves first and, thus, any poetics that we can either individually or collectively produce.

So far as I can see, this failure is not with failure as a concept, but rather with the larger theoretical frameworks that support logics of failure. For instance, one needs the assumption of either a given or elected telos—which is, paradoxically, an a priori proposition—built into any such logic. The problem is ubiquitous.

Listen, when some form of dialectic as a mode of conceptualization functions in a system of reference to foreground its own processes—which either reproduces the authority of conceptuality, or dismantles that authority through the production of an indeterminable relationship between concept and percept—the best one can do was articulated by Beckett in Worstward Ho: “Failing better now.”

Worstward, indeed.

In both its transcendent and immanent versions, the Platonic program has run the course of history in the West for over two millennia, and there is no easy solution to the problem.

Underwritten by a Hegelian dialectical idealism, Western culture dooms itself to continually iterate the problematics of race, class, gender, and so forth. And we act as the agents. As soon as poetics actively intervenes it becomes an element of such iteration—even if that poetics struggles against the inequities and atrocities that the Platonic program produces—and one is irrevocably caught in a devastatingly powerful cultural logic that will infinitely flip the value places of subject and object like the rabbit and the duck in the optical illusion.

At that point, the only alternative is to theoretically insert indeterminacy into the equation and say, reductively, that we now have a modish hybrid of rabbit and duck.

When was the last time you saw a quacking bunny waddle down the street?

Reissue

2009-07-06T13:24:00.003-04:00

I'm happy to report that Greying Ghost has reissued Naturalistless. As you can see, Carl's redesign is as gorgeous as the first edition. Copies are available here.

One Pink Bomb

2009-06-24T15:29:00.004-04:00

Deleuze & Guattari once suggested that literature should explode. In their guide to living a non-fascist life, they write: "The only literature is that which places an explosive device in its package, fabricating a counterfeit currency, causing the superego and its form of expression to explode, as well as the market value of its form and content." I received my contributor's copy of Tight 5 about an hour ago and, I've got to say, this issue went kaboom in my hands. Of particular note is the featured sequence of poems by John Coletti, Me & My Falcon. Talk about an explosive device. Find a copy here.

Rime Rhymes With Expensive

2009-06-20T16:20:00.002-04:00

When I heard the news that The Arion Press had released Robert Duncan's The Structure of Rime, which collects a series of prose poems on prosody written by Duncan over the course of his life and never previously collected, I was excited. Then, I found the price-tag: $1,350.

The work is rare. But, although the book includes an introduction by Michael Palmer and prints by Frank Lobdell, Ducan himself couldn't afford this collection! In fact, I can't think of any poet who can afford such an edition.

1968

2009-06-14T17:08:00.004-04:00

Voice: Right. Well, in a sense it's not even relevant to discuss as poetry. Are you--in other words, the question I have is, are you and Creeley and Duncan--I mean is this a new movement? Are you creating, are you at all together?

Olson: No, I think that whole "Black Mountain poet" thing is a lot of bullshit. I mean, actually, it was created by the editor, the famous editor of that anthology for Grove Press, Mr. Allen, where he divided--he did a very--but it was a terrible mistake made. He created those sections--Black Mountain, San Francisco, Beat, New York, New, Young, huh? Oh, I mean, imagine, just for the hear of it, "Young." Hear the insult, if you're young. You're suddenly classified into a thing--by one of the great editors, the found of Evergreen Review. And the first issues of Evergreen, the first four issues of Evergreen were, really, first rate. But he made a big mistake; he made a topological error. I mean he had the wrong topology. And he created somthing which is very unhappy. For example, poets, who just can't get us straight because they think we form a sort of a club or a claque or a gang or something. And that there was a poetics? Ha ha. Boy, there was no poetic. It was Charlie Parker. Literally, it was Charlie Parker. He was the Bob Dylan of the Fifties.

(from "On Black Mountain," an informal talk given by Olson on March 26, 1968 at Beloit College, collected in Muthologos II)

Ecopoetics

2009-03-31T20:43:00.004-04:00

Here is an interesting article that considers the painting of Jackson Pollock as "Fractal Expressionism." Yes, you read that correctly. Some of the language that Taylor, Micolich, and Jonas use to discuss the work, however, I find a bit confused at times. They write at the end of their discussion, for instance, that Pollock "described Nature directly," yet, "[r]ather than mimicking Nature, he adopted its language -- fractals -- to build his own patterns." In all, their claim that the paintings are indeed fractal paintings is pretty compelling, but I hesitate a bit when they attempt to squarely situate the work within a statistical and ultimately symbolic universe. It is tricky. For if the paintings abandon mimesis--i.e., if they abandon the symbolism of referential systems (and they do)--then the paintings don't really adopt the metaphoricity of language and, thus, don't describe physis with tekhne. Put differently, Pollock isn't interested in the illusion of representing the natural world with artifice, even as self-reflexively, as, say, Wallace Stevens and other like modernists were interested. Pollock's paintings are instances or events of literality: each painting means through itself, rather than through a system of references, of mediation, of infinite relations, and so forth. Yet, I'm still intrigued by the recursive processes that produce the fractal, because it seems that such repetition does not produce the habits of thought that lead, finally, to finality. They are dead ends.

Ticky-Tacky

2009-02-28T15:10:00.002-05:00

"Little Boxes"
by Malvina Reynolds

Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky-tacky
Little boxes on the hillside,
little boxes all the same

There's a green one and a pink one
and a blue one and a yellow one
And they're all made out of ticky-tacky
and they all look just the same.

And the people in the houses
all went to the university
Where they were put in boxes
and they came out all the same,

And there's doctors and there's lawyers,
and business executives
And they're all made out of ticky-tacky
and they all look just the same.

And they all play on the golf course
and drink their martinis dry,
And they all have pretty children
and the children go to school

And the children go to summer camp
and then to the university
Where they are put in boxes
and they come out all the same.

And the boys go into business
and marry and raise a family
In boxes made of ticky-tacky
and they all look just the same.

Hear it here.
Learn more.

Deux

2009-01-06T12:51:00.002-05:00

New Sous for you.

Featuring:

Bernadette Mayer / Nico Vassilakis / Brooklyn Copeland / Maria Williams-Russell / Peter Ciccariello / William Allegrezza / David-Baptiste Chirot / Rodrigo Toscano / Christophe Casamassima / James Sanders / Barry Schwabsky / Michelle Naka Pierce with Sue Hammond West / Alexander Jorgensen / Celina Su / Matina Stamatakis / Amy King / Bill Marsh / Brenda Hillman / Charles Bernstein / Samit Roy / Stacy Szymaszek / Paul Hoover / Sawako Nakayasu / Thomas Devaney / Sparrow

Pounding Wall Street

2008-12-23T21:29:00.002-05:00

The new issue of Flashpoint focuses on "Ezra Pound and Wall Street," which looks promising. Check it out here.

Just In

2008-12-21T15:00:00.003-05:00

David Rich writes, with his usual outstanding insightfulness, on Playing the Amplitudes:

Playing the Amplitudes is (1) Spicer's golden-gloves screw-you ("my business of screwing business") (2) Olsonian Jeremiad ("two thousand years of shimmer shimmy / and oops, the loop of leggo my ego ergo a Plato") (3) Deleuzian analysis ("manage the state of desire with the state- / ment you guess") reimagined as dissonant bebop, after-hours, furious, head-long; the intense, riffing word-stream a tab of respite, the instant of creation "instanter," a radical present-tense.

Read the rest here.

Reviewpoint

2008-12-21T13:59:00.003-05:00

Steve Fama recently posted on Naturalistless and Aaron Tieger's Collected Typos. Very interesting stuff. Check it out here.

Reviewery

2008-12-20T11:40:00.002-05:00

Lars Palm has written a quite interesting review of Playing the Amplitudes, up now at Galatea Resurrects.

New Blog

2008-12-14T19:53:00.003-05:00

In case you missed it, Dave Rich has a new blog. Interesting reviews of work by Clayton Eshleman, Edward Dahlberg, Geoff Olsen, Cat Meng, David Gitin, etc. Check it out here.

Quickie

2008-11-10T11:37:00.002-05:00

A few poems are newly up at P.F.S Post, edited by Adam Fieled. One's for Joe, another for Jess, and the third's for everybody.

All's here for feeling

2008-10-29T17:49:00.004-04:00

Voice: Where does instinct or intuition fit in there?

Olson: I'm trying to avoid those words. By the way, i would knock'em right down by using Jung's four functions. i think that nobody has improved on Jung's declaration of functions. These are the functions. The four functions are intuition, sensation, thinking and feeling--which I notice that Jung in that article slips and makes "emotion" instead of feeling, which is a terrible error. "All is there for feeling," for example, to take Whitehead's--that enormous statement of Whitehead's about the character of creation. "All is there for feeling." That's not emotion, emotions are strictly a personal business and hung-up stuff, which disappear the moment that you touch the real....

(from "Under the Mushroom," 1963)

This is certainly an interesting distinction that Olson makes between "emotion" and "feeling," although the speculative character of "there" in Whitehead's proposition, as Olson recounts it, goes uninvestigated, which is a concern if we're questioning the problematic of the real vis-a-vis emotion.

It seems to me that feeling, taken in its fullest sense, is implicated in the evental context of now, to which, as Duncan claims, the poet is responsible in terms of one's attentions. In other words, the now's here, not there, the moment through which the past and the future rush into and pass through one another, at least to use Olson's own understanding of history as a presence through which one functionally exists. Presence, in this use, is functionary and doesn't pander to a predicated "metaphysics" in some philosophico-mystical way. I suppose I can put it another way: Here = feeling = being = event = now, etc. Equal, that is, to the real itself.

Adieu.

Playing the Amplitudes

2008-09-25T15:52:00.004-04:00

Now out on BlazeVOX. Free. This one collects a wide range of work, including The Breaks, the sonnet sequence "Zone," and a rather dated but fitting little ekphratic collocation called Draw. Epigraphs by William James, Gerrit Lansing, Ralph Ellison, Willem de Kooning, Charles Olson, Albert Einstein, Chuck Stein, Jean Dubuffet, and the US Anti-Narcotics Campaign, with cameo appearances by Jack Kerouac, Jack Spicer, et al. Much thanks to Poetry Saint Gatza for making this collection happen. Adieu.

File Under Elitism

2008-09-20T21:36:00.003-04:00

I excerpted the following from an article by Sam Harris on Sarah Palin and the question of elitism in American politics, entitled "When Atheists Attack." Although Harris' criticisms of Palin are arguably fair, he is at his sharpest and, paradoxically, his bluntest when he turns to the matter of so-called elitism:

"Ask yourself: how has 'elitism' become a bad word in American politics? There is simply no other walk of life in which extraordinary talent and rigorous training are denigrated. We want elite pilots to fly our planes, elite troops to undertake our most critical missions, elite athletes to represent us in competition and elite scientists to devote the most productive years of their lives to curing our diseases. And yet, when it comes time to vest people with even greater responsibilities, we consider it a virtue to shun any and all standards of excellence. When it comes to choosing the people whose thoughts and actions will decide the fates of millions, then we suddenly want someone just like us, someone fit to have a beer with, someone down-to-earth—in fact, almost anyone, provided that he or she doesn't seem too intelligent or well educated."

Point taken. You can read the rest of the article here.

Have Such Scams Ever Worked?

2008-09-19T18:52:00.004-04:00

Hello,

Pardon this unsolicited mail by which I am introducing a matter worthy of your consideration and, ultimately, your involvement.

l am Mr. Gary Hsiao (a Branch Manager with Bangkok Bank PCL, Taiwan). I am seeking your collaboration in re-profiling and appropriating a substantial sum of money belonging to a client of my bank who died suddenly without naming a next-of-kin nor leaving a will. This opportunity will be of mutual benefit to the two of us.

I propose presenting you as the next-of-kin of the deceased and benefactor of his financial estate with all the necessary documents I shall provide to substantiate this assertion. If you are interested, kindly get back to me with as much personal contact information as you can comfortably avail me to commence the necessary legal paper work at huang20gary@kimo.com

Upon your response, l will avail you with the modalities we shall use to actualize my proposition. Please treat this proposition as private, discrete and confidential by virtue of my active service and position in the bank; if not interested you can delete this mail.

Regards,

Mr. Gary Hsiao, Branch Manager
Bangkok Bank PCL, Taipei Branch
121, Sung Chiang Road
Taipei 10429, Taiwan

Necessary Margin

2008-08-30T02:32:00.003-04:00

Issue 1. Sous Rature. READ before it is erased.

Post-post

2008-08-18T15:52:00.003-04:00

Take a break and have a little fun with Bulhak's Postmodernism Engine. Or should I say, a Postdiscursive neo-Dada Inter-(con)texual/textural Abstract Machine that decenters phallo-Dad(a)-author-centricity?

I generated an essay on Burroughs and Feminism. Fascinating.

Suppose That You Were Supposed To

2008-08-07T13:54:00.007-04:00

Lars Palm has started up an ebook (ad)venture in writing called Ungovernable Press. I'm happy to report that Supposed to Sound is available for reading and download via the UP blog, as well as two works by Lars himself. From what I understand, there is much more to come.

The ebooks use a reader called Scribd, no download for which is necessary. I'd suggest checking out the reader, even if you're not all that interested in reading poems. I'm enthusiastic (can't you tell?) about the po(e)tentials for textual dissemination via weblogs with the Scribd platform.

Adieu.

Another Day Word

2008-07-17T15:34:00.003-04:00

The following definition comes from Ambrose Bierce:

Politics, n. Strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.

Psyche

2008-07-16T16:20:00.007-04:00

The following bit is from an interesting little article that popped up on Wired. Frank O'Hara once joked that there was "nothing metaphysical about tight pants," echoing W.C. Williams' sentiments regarding metaphysics that he was more than wont to voice. Descartes roll over, but I don't see how the psychic function of the individual subject does not cognitively process information in a singularly material way and, moreover, I don't see how the processing of language-information radically differs from that of image-information:

"One way around all this may be to figure out 'how human beings recognize objects in the real world and duplicate that functionality in a series of algorithms.' But here's the catch: 'Recent research has indicated that humans use not one algorithm, but multiple algorithms for the task of object recognition - depending on the object being recognized and the situation at hand."

"Sometimes, people use 'template based algorithms' -- like matching an object to a database. Sometimes, they look for particular features. In other situations, they watch for geometric icons, or geons. 'These three algorithms are used in conjunction with a fourth algorithm, a contextual cueing algorithm, which limits the overall search space. Finally, human spatial memory is able to mentally rotate objects in order to match the object to different representations'."

Once upon a time, there were a select group of workers called computers. They did computations for a living, and they used algorithms to do so. Machines replaced their primary function of computation, but computers are still tools or instruments with which we interface. I'm using algorithms right now to process how to italicize this present sentence. The buttons on the screen (or the hot-keys, as it were) merely serve as extensions of this processing. Perhaps I'll write more on this in the future, but in the meantime, check out a book called The Universal Computer, or, better yet, a book by Berlinski: The Advent of the Algorithm.

Adieu.

Gist In Case

2008-06-30T15:09:00.003-04:00

Or, rather, just in case you missed it, Jerome Rothenberg's blog.

Grenier

2008-06-26T21:51:00.001-04:00

LATE

for John Dowland

you will not
save things or
make them perfect

music is power
yo
lustrous ox

lightly the
transfigured leaves
ok on that

Dodo Way

2008-06-17T14:20:00.006-04:00

Mars lander discovers white material? Scientists hope for ice:

"Here's a closer look at the white material in the trench now called 'Dodo-Goldilocks' that was uncovered by the robotic arm aboard the Phoenix. The white material was first noticed on June 3 but more has been exposed as the robotic arm has dug deeper. Since the white material is only on one end of the trench, NASA scientists theorize that they could have hit the edge of a slab of ice." (Read more here.)

Where there is ice, there once was life? Are they hoping to find traces of life to simply find such traces? To what end is all this? One skeptical suggestion that seems implausible to me, but that piques my interest nevertheless: Where once there was life, there is oil.

The ostensibly humanist project of digging into martian terrain has never struck me as innocent. The very naming of the trench "dodo" suggests the death-drive of Western culture. Here today, dodo tomorrow, and crude the next. The phrase "traces of life" is suspiciously morbid.

As for the so-called curiosity of "Goldilocks," doesn't the moral of that tale instruct one to not meddle?

Do Go

2008-05-31T15:56:00.003-04:00

Saturday June 14 8 PM

NICOLE PEYRAFITTE - VOICE
& MIKE BISIO – DOUBLE BASS

Café 5C - 68 Avenue C at 5th street. New York City

(delicious light fares + teas, coffee, beer & wine available)
$8 COVER+ $5 MINIMUM

A multilingual performance by singer, painter & cook Nicole Peyrafitte, accompanied by bass player Mike Bisio. Tonight they will offer a selection of Peyrafitte’s originals, contemporary poetry/texts by Pierre Joris, Henri Michaux, Frida Kahlo, Occitan songs and their signature song…or is it a dish?

Natural + Listless

2008-05-31T14:59:00.004-04:00

A few years ago, I took a trip to Ithaca with Jess Mynes. At the time, Aaron Tieger was living in Ithaca, writing great poems and, among other things, working as part of the Soon collective that hosted a reading with me and Jess. Just as a good friend will do, Aaron played the part of tour guide, showing us around the area, and it was then that I found a slice of shale with a seashell imprint. Two things made one integral thing: the shale was no longer simply shale, which is itself formed by compaction, and the seashell was no longer, yet had made its print, what Olson called "typos" or the imprint, the actuality of creation. You could say that it was impressive. (And, as I type this, I also think of Gerrit Lansing's "Honey From the Rock": "rock of what imprints us in the shakes of being where we are.") When I sat down to write "about" the trip in my notebook, "Naturalistless" was the result: Two things as one integral thing, formed in couplets that themselves are wholes. I literally wrote the impressions of the topos or topology of the place in compressed rhythmical "slices" or parts.

There is more to the story, even for such a modest sequence of poems. Suffice it to say that, somewhere along the way, I sent the poems off to Carl, and wow did he do a magnificent job with this little chapbook. Carl on the project:

"A few years back my wife and I were hanging with Chris Rizzo at this bar called Charlie's Kitchen over in Harvard Square. After a few beers he pushed over this packet of poems called 'Spare Parts' and says 'let me know what you think'. I remember going home and reading it and saying 'i wish i could write this good'. I didn't write a poem for five months. 'Naturalistless' is the ultimate compendium of his spare parts. These poems are whole sentences chopped down to two words, joined. It is both a refreshing poetic statement and a future bookshelf mainstay. Also, Christopher Rizzo is the man behind the unparalleled Anchorite Press."

If you're interested in procuring a copy, here's a link to The Greying Ghost Press. $5 ppd. Needless to say, I'm thrilled to see these poems out in the world. Thank you, Carl.

Say Hello to Piaget

2008-05-15T01:34:00.002-04:00

Where?

2008-05-08T02:44:00.003-04:00

If you happen to know Brooklyn and wouldn't mind showing a poor Bostonite/Albanian around, please do give a shout.

Adieu.

Good Goose

2008-05-08T02:35:00.002-04:00

The Burning Chair Readings
present...

Goose Up!
Poetry!
at East Coast Aliens

Saturday, May 17th, 3-8pmDoors 2:30 pm, $6

Ana Božičević
John Coletti
Kate Greenstreet
Sarah Gridley
Katy Henriksen
Shannon Jonas
Jennifer Kronovet
Mark Lamoureux
Timothy Liu
Chris Martin
Jess Mynes
Cate Peebles
Christopher Rizzo
Matthew Rohrer
Frank Sherlock
Joanna Sondheim
Shanxing Wang
Rebecca Wolff

& music from
The Hadacol

Hosted by Cannibal, Saltgrass, Harp & Altar, & Tight

East Coast Aliens
216 Franklin St
btwn. Green & Huron
Greenpoint, Brooklyn
G to Greenpoint Ave (exit at India St)
B61/B43/B42

Necessetics

2008-05-07T20:23:00.004-04:00

Striking. Striking through. A new online journal is looking for new work, and you should get involved:

~~SOUS RATURE~~

Level

2008-05-01T20:18:00.002-04:00

Just finishing up quite a bit of research on Pound, and I came across this bit in Pavannes & Divigations: "There is sort of a spirit-level in the ear, giving us a sense of balance."

This is interesting to me in a number of ways, especially in terms of Olson's "the soul is proprioceptive." And, of course, in the the sign itself: level. It pivots on that "v" and spells itself backwards.

Adieu.

God Particle

2008-04-10T22:17:00.003-04:00

Or Logos Particle? The pre-Socratics would probably call it something else entirely, but leave it to the media to logocentrically inflect Higgs' research, dubbing the theoretical Higgs boson "the God particle." Here are the opening paragraphs from Robert Evans' Reuters article, the entirety of which you can read here:

GENEVA (Reuters) - British physicist Peter Higgs said on Monday it should soon be possible to prove the existence of a force which gives mass to the universe and makes life possible -- as he first argued 40 years ago.

Higgs said he believes a particle named the "Higgs boson", which originates from the force, will be found when a vast particle collider at the CERN research centre on the Franco-Swiss border begins operating fully early next year.

"The likelihood is that the particle will show up pretty quickly ... I'm more than 90 percent certain that it will," Higgs told journalists.

The 78-year-old's original efforts in the early 1960s to explain why the force, dubbed the Higgs field, must exist were dismissed at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.
Today, the existence of the invisible field is widely accepted by scientists, who believe it came into being milliseconds after the Big Bang created the universe some 15 billion years ago.

See that my grave is kept clean

2008-04-07T18:32:00.001-04:00

Bob Dylan wins a Pulitzer.

Typographing

2008-03-30T15:31:00.003-04:00

Sonneteering

2008-03-22T21:40:00.002-04:00

In Ross Feld’s Philip Guston, we find the following story elaborated by Guston himself:

“I came into the loft one day and I tacked up a canvas on the wall…a very old loft full of dirty skylights and a lot of crap around, [and] I thought, I’ll just paint what I see, don’t think. So I painted the whole loft, like one of those Matisses—easel, broken chairs, electrical wire hanging down, all the way right up to my hand below painting it. I worked steadily for eight hours without stopping. I ran across the street, got my wife. Look at that, I can paint. It’s as good as a Bonnard. I was really upset. This denied everything I was doing….I had a hard time sleeping that night. I was very upset; where do I go; is this a new career, or what?...I came in the next morning and there was nothing there—literally nothing there. There was a representation of all this, but it seemed like a fake, faked up, because it didn’t seem real. It didn’t seem concrete. It didn’t seem to have any life of its own. All it did was represent something, and depended on all this recognition, like you have to be briefed on it, like, oh, yes, a chair, a torn cloth, oh, yeah, a broken mirror. It was composed nicely; it flowed and moved through one part into the other, all around your eye moved nicely, absolutely satisfying as a painting. Well, then, naturally, I proceeded to destroy it."

Guston rejected the bona fide conditions and virtues of the classical tradition, perhaps most usefully reduced to the name “Bonnard.” He had achieved what we know as “good painting,” i.e., that which fit snugly into a preformed aesthetic niche. “Composed nicely” meant nothing less than the “absolutely satisfying,” which relied upon a given or standard set of assumptions held by both painter and viewer alike. The painting behaved in formally predictable ways.

In this small passage, Guston’s way of speaking about painting evidences a curious outlook. The representative image—the image in crisis—“seemed like a fake, faked up,” “didn’t seem real,” “didn’t seem concrete,” and, most importantly, “didn’t seem to have any life of its own.” What do we make of a representative image that no longer holds the authority of concretion?

Once powered by the classical tradition, the image could no longer stand for the real in any critical or vital way. In terms of language, the historical antagonism between verba and res, between word and thing, itself stood on shaky ground. For Guston, the representation or image announced itself as such: a mere representation rather than an object in its own right, without any “life of its own,” as both Zaller and Rexroth have written about abstraction in the early postwar era, well before Western culture took its so-called linguistic turn. As it turned out, an object in its own right that had a “life of its own” was both concrete and abstract at once. The maker was the same kind of thing as the made, the latter an extension of the former. Radically underwritten by the problem of representation, discursivity always already produced “a fake, faked up.”

I return to Guston often. Last night, I sat down to write a sonnet, and I mean a traditional sonnet, which I hadn’t attempted in many years. I believe it was Sidney who likened a solid metric to good horsemanship—or chops, as it were—and I was curious as to how I’d measure up. I won’t post the results here, but it took only two uninterrupted hours to produce the poem, at which I retrospectively nitpicked with little to show for such efforts. My ultimate response: “I can paint,” but I wasn’t as upset as Guston at his “Bonnard,” which probably speaks to my early lack of success in the arena of traditional verse. Juggling the elements of a sonnet proved, in the early going, impossible. At the moment, frankly, I feel more uncomfortable with a self-comparison to Guston than I do with the formally traditional constraints of any poem.

Entering a Story

2008-03-22T16:44:00.003-04:00

"I told you not to concern yourself over the outcome of the conflict. There will be no outcome. the procedure will maintain itself until it is replaced by another less familiar and more complicated. The prime nature of the question is a repetition that, through saturation and standing wave duration, eventually results in statement. Next to the list was tacked a manuscript casting a fictional light on the origin of the square in a fictional light."

Coolidge, Mine: The One That Enters the Stories

Now that I've entered this paragraph, as if mere information entered into "the square" typing screen of Blogger, I wonder what one makes of the title. The one "that" enters, or the one "who" enters? The "who" becomes "that," an object among objects in space, "in a fictional light," one certainly gathers.

Open Says Me

2008-03-15T22:26:00.004-04:00

"There is not a phase of our experience that is meaningless, not a phrase of our communication that is meaningless. We do not make things meaningful, but in our making we work towards an awareness of meaning; poetry reveals itself to us as we obey the orders that appear in our work. In writing I do not organize words but follow my consciousness of--but it is also a desire that goes towards--orders in the play of forms and meanings toward poetic form. This play is like the play of actors upon a stage. Becoming conscious, becoming aware of the order of what is happening is the full responsibility of the poet. The poem that always seems to us such a highly organized event is in its very individuality ("idiocy" the classical Greek would have said), in its uniqueness, crude indeed compared with the subtlety of organization which in the range of contemporary linguistic analysis the study of syntax, morphology, etymology, psychology reveals in the language at large from which the poem is derived. The materials of the poem--the vowels and consonants--are already structured in their resonance, we have only to listen and to cooperate with the music we hear."

Duncan, "Towards an Open Universe"

Now That's Alchemy

2008-03-13T21:32:00.002-04:00

Nicole Peyrafitte's blog! Collectages.

Wreading

2008-03-06T23:00:00.010-05:00

It would be fantastic to see you in Boston, this Saturday, 8 March:

Pierre Joris

& Christopher Rizzo

The Union Square Poetry Series

P.A.s Lounge, 6pm

345 Somerville Ave, Somerville MA

On Fenollosa

2008-02-25T21:18:00.000-05:00

"You speak to an animal with a few simple noises and gestures."

Pound, ABC of Reading

Origin Aside

2008-02-17T18:27:00.002-05:00

The thought for the day, as per computer scientist Howard Aiken:

"Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats."

Adieu.

Objects

2008-02-05T11:46:00.000-05:00

"The future of the internet is an internet of connected objects," says Jean-Francios Kitten in this short BBC article on Radio Frequency ID tags. The technology is brilliantly terrifying: tagged objects connected to the internet, in much the same way a computer or phone is connected, which makes brick-and-mortar objects (objects of the real) digitally interactive in real-time. If such can be achieved with, say, a book, then it is only a matter of time before such tags are used with animate objects: humans. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to hear of the technology employed currently. I wonder at the potentials for the development of a wi-fi poetics.

Spice

2008-01-30T18:37:00.000-05:00

Joe Massey sent out a reminder of Spicer's birthday today.

Thanks, Joe.

A Poem Without a Single Bird in It

What can I say to you, darling,
When you ask me for help?
I do not know the future
Or even what poetry
We are going to write.
Commit suicide. Go mad. Better people
Than either of us have tried it.
I loved you once but
I do not know the future.
I only know that I love strength in my friends
And greatness
And hate the way their bodies crack when they die
And are eaten by images.
The fun's over. The picnic's over.
Go mad. Commit suicide.
There will be nothing left
After you die or go mad,
But the calmness of poetry.

--Jack Spicer

You Live Here

2008-01-26T19:59:00.000-05:00

AP reports that a "large" US spy satellite "has lost power and propulsion and could hit the Earth in late February or March, government officials said Saturday." Add this to the list of governmental war-game incompetence. It should go without saying that the satellite "no longer can be controlled" and that, morever, it "could contain hazardous materials." And even more alarming is the thought that "it is unknown where on the planet it might come down." If several flaming tons of technological wizardry doesn't fall on you, then those unspecified and nebulously qualified "hazardous materials" ("could contain"? one hopes--naively--that said government officials should have such information available) might ultimately cook you.

"Officials" should at some point realize that this planet is our oikos, a fundamental fact that has been taken far too lightly by those with claims to power. Tons of hazardous debris never "fall harmlessly" on our house.

Late February or March? I'll mark my calendar.

More EP

2008-01-19T03:42:00.000-05:00

"France shd. be commemorated in Elias Lowe's story of the Parisian biologist who had written on crocodiles all his life. After the monumental and definitive work on the subject he visited Africa to look at a crocodile. One advanced toward him. He climbed a tree. The crocodile then reared up and proceeded to follow him. 'Mais non! Mais NON!' ejaculated the scientist, 'Les crocodiles ne montent PAS les arbres'."

Guide to Kulchur, "Education or Information"

An amusing tale, in line with the ABC ("LOOK at the FISH," etc.), although Pound himself doesn't see that to perceive sense-objects is to process information. One supposes that his faithful attempts to intuit the atemporal gists of things blinded him to this.

Adieu.

EP

2008-01-17T16:58:00.000-05:00

"America was found full of nomads."

Pound, "Patria Mia"

Performances

2008-01-12T16:27:00.000-05:00

This just in from Nicole Peyrafitte:

Monday January 14th 2008 at 7:30 pm
Pierre Joris
Eugene Ostashevsky
Michael Loughran
11th Street Bar
510 E. 11th Street
(Between Avenues A & B)
Manhattan, NYC.
Free.

Sunday January 27th at 6pm
Nicole Peyrafitte
Belle Gironda
at the Zinc Bar ( great caipirinhas!)
90 West Houston St. in Manhattan (below Zamir Furs)
$5 donation

Other reading at the Zinc this month:
January 13 -- Jeremy Thompson & Joe Elliot
January 20 -- Alan Davies & Jill Magi
January 27 -- Nicole Peyrafitte & Belle Gironda

So They Say

2008-01-12T16:20:00.000-05:00

This just in:

Quale Press is very happy to announce the publication of They Say by Joseph Torra.

They Say is a novel about a working-class, first-generation Italian family living in the Boston area in the first half of the 20th century, centering on the family’s struggles over oldest brother Louie, whose early artistic genius and political passions deteriorate into delusion and severe mental illness. Narrated by various siblings in this sprawling family, their stories have the intimacy and drama of a conversation told around the kitchen table—and like any living, breathing family tale, the brothers’ and sisters’ stories intersect, run parallel, contradict each other, fill in each other’s gaps. Theirs are stories of love and luck, as well as poverty, death, illness and domestic abuse.

For more, check out the Quale Press site here.

Byrne-ing Down the Music Industry?

2008-01-10T02:18:00.000-05:00

In a fantastic Wired article "Survival Strategies for Emerging Artists -- and Megastars," David Byrne discusses the state of the music industry and speculates about the directions it may take in the future, which includes a number of hybrid DIY approaches to production and distribution. Interesting indeed. Do give it a read in full, but here's a sample: "What is called the music business today, however, is not the business of producing music. At some point it became the business of selling CDs in plastic cases, and that business will soon be over. But that's not bad news for music, and it's certainly not bad news for musicians. Indeed, with all the ways to reach an audience, there have never been more opportunities for artists." Of course, I'm considering the similarities to lit publishing as I type this.

Adieu.

Twombly

2007-12-28T22:08:00.000-05:00

In Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates identifies Apollo as "the purifier, and the washer, and the absolver of all impurities." Keeping in mind that the articulation of division and naming was fundamental to Plato's dialectic, and that dialectic purified (katharmos) the soul through refuation of false knowledge, then what do we make of the graphical mark of Apollo here?

What's more is that there is even more

2007-12-04T15:27:00.001-05:00

This just in...

Dear Yes Dear:

Please allow me to say hello to you with my voice! I am EDITOR NATE PRITTS writing with a special proposition only for someone with your name because of how it was uncovered in a secret document. About money! Yes, please read on.

I would like to transfer to you, at no charge and for all of your own use, the new issue of H_NGM_N. Please respond to me by clicking this link here in the next word – http://www.h-ngm-n.com - & you will be transported immediately to the secret trove of literature that was left to you by your dearly beloved dead relative you do not know.

What’s more is that there is even more! If you were to considering sending me the sum of $6 US, I would surely then find myself putting in the mail to you a copy of the last will and testament of your dearly beloved dead relative you do not know.

The title of this tome is WHO COULD FORGET THE SENSATIONAL FIRST EVENING OF THE NIGHT by Julia Cohen and she is even not dead as I write this! And it is not even a will but really a chapbook of really terrific & ultimately edifying poems!

You could do worse than this and I’m not only kidding about that but also I am telling a quiet kind of truth that makes you want to spend money on things. Things like this! Even if they are free.

http://www.h-ngm-n.com

Please act now before the government of England claims all of this money & prize. Please exercise your right and use the finger on your hand to manipulate the computer clicking device and bring yourself to the new issue of H_NGM_N that you need.

Yours most sincerely,
Nate Pritts, Editor in Chief.

Event News

2007-12-03T17:36:00.000-05:00

BookThug BOOK PARTY

Featuring authors Cara Benson, Greg Betts, Evan Kennedy, Camille Martin, Gregory Pardlo, publisher Jay Millar, others!

December 29 2-4pm
Bowery Poetry Club 308
Bowery @ Bleecker, right across from CBGB's
F train to Second Ave 6 train to Bleecker 212-614-0505

BookThug is an Independent publisher of chapbooks and trade books of poetry and poetically minded literature. Sold through Apollinaire's Bookshoppe, specializing in 20th century literature. Emphasis is given to poetry, smallpress, the experimental and the ephemeral. Apollinaire's is also responsible for the distribution of BookThug, a small press that publishes contemporary innovative poetry. It’s true that the books on our shelves are not for just anyone -- but we'd certainly like to encourage you to become someone today.

Asterisque

2007-11-28T23:39:00.000-05:00

Asterisk 3 is now available from F&F. It features poems from Michael Carr, Andrew Mister, and yours truly. Such company's my privilege.

Mr. Mynes also reports that Asterisk 1-3 can be had for a mere $9. A set, a steal.

Bobby D

2007-11-25T00:20:00.000-05:00

"In the true poem, it is a poetic or creational passion that presides. The heart, the brain, the nervous system—that tree of immediate, intricately branching, correlations thruout the body—the visceral, deep inward, tonal condition, are united in one governance in that passion from which all the projected field of "content" and "affect", of "message" and of "invention", arises as the living body or form, the very poem of that always particular, always urgent, always unique demand that a poetry come into existence. Is it into the lungs that this whole intelligence comes into the pre-literate?"

(Duncan, from Notes on the Structure of Rime)

What Is Good For A Must Be Good For B

2007-11-17T15:55:00.000-05:00

THE IMMORAL PROPOSITION

If you never do anything for anyone else
you are spared the tragedy of human relation-

ships. If quietly and like another time
there is the passage of an unexpected thing:

to look at it is more
than it was. God knows

nothing is competent nothing is
all there is. The unsure

egoist is not
good for himself.

Creeley

2007-11-14T17:50:00.000-05:00

So, in the middle of a chaotic week, I took about an hour today to watch the Lannan Foundation film on Bob Creeley. I'd seen snippets before, but the entire interview/reading was a wonderful break from what's turning out to prove a tough month. I took notes, out of which an interesting constellation of articulations emerged: the "duration necessary for defining structure" (Creeley asks "What's the imagination of time?"), the situation of writing (wherein "you need the action"), rhythmical patterning of emotional states, and Duncan's "the body again becomes phenomenal." Creeley once told me to use Williams as measure. Those days are, for better or worse, gone. Watching this film I fully realized that Creeley, not Williams, has been the touchstone for quite some years now. The trick is: you ain't got to sound "like" him to learn from him.

Anyway, one Creeley joke: "I'm not depressed, but simply paranoid." Aren't we all?

Lineated Rodney

2007-10-03T16:35:00.000-04:00

My psychiatrist told me
I was crazy and I said
I want a second opinion.

He said okay,
you're ugly too.

Statement, 1954

2007-10-02T22:30:00.001-04:00

If you're unfamiliar with Paul Blackburn's "Statement," available online at Jacket 12, then do yourself a favor and give it a read.

If You're Lonely You Can Talk To Me

2007-10-01T17:08:00.001-04:00

Never a good day when 2--count them, 2--Beatles albums go missing. Revolver and the soundtrack to Yellow Submarine have apparently left the proverbial building under their own power. No "T'morrow Never Knows" for me. Likewise "Hey Bulldog" (for the chorus of which see this post title) which I began humming shortly after waking today...

Ah, well.

Adieu.

Gravity's Rainbow Revisited

2007-09-03T13:55:00.000-04:00

I've been considering the following two passages from Pynchon's novel:

1.

Now there grows among all the rooms, replacing the night's old smoke, alcohol and sweat, the fragile, musaceous odor of Breakfast: flowery, permeating, surprising, more than the color of winter sunlight, taking over not so much through any brute pungency or volume as by the high intricacy to the weaving of its molecules, sharing the conjuror's secret by which--though it is not often Death is told so clearly to fuck off--the living genetic chains prove even labyrinthine enough to preserve some human face down ten or twenty generations...so the same assertion-through-structure allows this war morning's banana fragrance to meander, repossess, prevail. Is there any reason not to open every window, and let the kind scent blanket all Chelsea? As a spell, against falling objects... (p.10)

2.

"Fuck you," whispers Slothrop. It's the only spell he knows, and a pretty good all-purpose one at that. (p.203)

Obviously, the sense of "spell" can articulate these moments. What's striking, really, is that not only are words and scents (a pun on sense?) considered spells, but, as such, they are also functionally the same kinds of things. The continually weaving molecular fabric of being-in-flux is the physical "assertion-through-structure" of life. Matter, energy, and information--in some shifting ratio or relation--are the indissociable elements of conjuration. Foucault roll over, but the power of fragrance and the power of words are here understood as no different.

Now, through this lens, rather than through that of semiotics, consider the Olson passage I'd posted below. Interesting.

2007-09-01T19:14:00.000-04:00

Genius

2007-08-29T01:38:00.000-04:00

Einstein quote of the day:

"Once you can accept the universe as matter expanding into nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid comes easy."

Silver, Shiny, Sticky

2007-08-22T01:37:00.000-04:00

In response to hearing that I owned a copy of the oversized edition of Olson's Maximus, a critic-to-be-named-later spoke derogatorily of the edition, pointing out in a rather pragmatic yet snippy way that the cover tends to fall off. I didn't have an answer for him.

Tonight, as my cover finally fell off, I thought that, if indeed there was such a thing as the universe, then it wouldn't be held together by logos, but by duct tape.

Problem solved.

This was my most profound act of the evening, of course.

Adieu.

2007-08-10T04:39:00.000-04:00

but love, what is love but
that only those who obey
are fragrant?

(Olson, a bit from "Of Mathilde")

Zero Degree Thinking

2007-08-06T01:46:00.000-04:00

How can mathematicians consider a conflation of the infinite and zero?

The only way to do it, I think, is to consider both indeterminate, because both can be made to equal any number.

If this weren't possible, then:

If you subtract one from the infinite, then you still have the infinite.
If you subtract one from zero, then you have negative one.

Am I wrong about this? Puzzling.

Adieu

Simpsonized Sox

2007-07-26T18:33:00.000-04:00

Well, the idea of http://www.simpsonizeme.com/ is interesting, but the results are sort of lackluster. I have to admit, though, that you can definitely find Sideshow Manny in the bunch.

Summer

2007-07-26T17:50:00.001-04:00

Since my last post, I've not only returned to Albany after a brief stay with family in Florida, but I've also become aquainted with Mack's Kabuki. Are you familiar? If you've ever been interested in comics, and if you've any sort of infatuation with multimedia design, then I highly suggest you check this out. Powerful work.

As for the rest, so to speak...

I'm currently working on one long poem and two prose pieces, the first of which is on Olson and the second of which is on Ceravolo. Hopefully, I'll finally finish with both critical pieces by my deadline, this Monday. Then, continued reading (more James, Merleau-Ponty, and Whitehead), setting up a prose piece on Pynchon (need to read a book by Stearns, American Cool, first), and continuing on with the long poem. Well, make that "poem."

Adieu.

Out, Up, Over, etc.

2007-07-09T15:18:00.000-04:00

Just got word that there's new work at past simple, now on issue #3. Check it out. There are also a couple of poems by yours truly up at Unpleasant Event Schedule. And, before I forget to say this yet again, check out some interesting "text-jams" by Deborah Poe that utilize language from The Breaks. D-Poe's blog is over here.

Adieu.

No, Really?

2007-07-09T15:12:00.000-04:00

"Bush has adopted a legal doctrine known as executive privilege that has been occasionally invoked with mixed success throughout U.S. history to shield presidents and their aides from having to answer questions or turn over information to Congress or grand juries."

More on the latest Bush Administration shenanigans here.

Light Reading

2007-07-04T15:28:00.000-04:00

“[I]f, in a word, we accept reality naively as it is given to us all at once, that able-to-be-sensed reality on which our vital interests depend and to which all our actions relate—well, that able-to-be-sensed reality and the sensation we have of it are, at the moment when the sensation is produced, absolutely identical to each other. Reality is apperception itself.” —W. James

1950

2007-07-02T21:51:00.000-04:00

“It is no accident that Pound and Williams both were involved variously in a movement which got called ‘objectivism’. But that word was then used in some sort of a necessary quarrel, I take it, with ‘subjectivism’. It is now too late to be bothered with the latter. It has excellently done itself to death, even though we are all caught in its dying. What seems to me a more valid formulation for present use is ‘objectism’, a word to be taken to stand for the kind of relation of man to experience which a poet might state as the necessity of a line or a work to be as wood is, to be as clean as wood is as it issues from the hand of nature, to be as shaped as wood can be when a man has had his hand to it. Objectism is the getting rid of the lyrical interference of the individual as ego, of the ‘subject’ and his soul, that peculiar presumption by which western man has interposed himself between what he is as a creature of nature…and those other creations of nature which we may, with no derogations, call objects.” --Olson

Attention

2007-07-01T21:01:00.000-04:00

Although I'm on vacation, I'm still at work. I've recently been editing a piece on Olson, a process that has proven extremely instructive thus far. I first discovered Olson's work nearly fifteen years ago, and I doubt that I've ever understood his project more thoroughly than I do today. Hopefully, I'll be able to say the same t'morrow.

I'm at work on other projects as well and, although I won't disclose either who wrote the following or where the text comes from, I will at least share this:

" 'Attention' -- permit me to quote here a phrase by Malebranche, via Walter Benjamin’s essay on Kafka 'Attention is the natural prayer of the soul'."

Also, in mention of Kafka, noted as an epigraph in American Ones: "I am on the hunt for constructions."

I take such a "hunt" as meaning research, not in the academic sense but rather in the post-literary or non-literary writing sense, perhaps as Olson may have taken the word. Such a "hunt" or writing/(re)search is, to my ear, the epitome of "attention." The natural or vernacular prayer of the object of soul is the (re)search both of and for "constructions." And, you know, I'm not considering "soul" as an epistemic consequence here, perhaps not thoroughly at odds with Benjamin's own considerations.

Adieu.

On the Road

2007-06-19T16:12:00.000-04:00

Are you itinerant? Well, here's a new set of rules. A code on the road, so to speak. The implicit question "What would Jesus do if he drove a BMW?" isn't exactly plausible, but one needs to keep in mind that rationalism is usually a fundamental component to any institutional construct.
What would Jack do? Or, more to the point: What would you do?

Synchronicity

2007-06-14T23:34:00.000-04:00

After my last post, I decided to do a little reading. I opened a book to a random page, and I found the following:

"Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense."

Gertrude, once again, is not only cogent, but relevant. Useful knowledge indeed, tho, if I can hazard some sarcasm, "Reflection on the Atomic Bomb" is not quite as serious as Silliman's reflection upon anthologies of poetry.

On A More Serious Note

2007-06-14T23:19:00.000-04:00

Pierre Joris responds to Ron Silliman's comments on M2:

"There is clearly something more here than meets the eye, yet one is really at a loss to figure what it is. But the reader of Silliman and of Silliman’s blog should be aware that much of what gets written there appears with a startling disregard for fact and at the service of whatever phantom demons he may have in mind. If that’s the case in this instance, one can only suspect that it’s the case in other instances as well."

Do yourself a favor and read the rest here.

Adieu.

Wrighting the Day

2007-06-13T16:33:00.000-04:00

"All those who believe in psychokinesis raise my hand."

"Someone sent me a postcard picture of the earth.
On the back it said, 'Wish you were here'."

"I have two very rare photographs.
One is a picture of Houdini locking his keys in his car.
The other is a rare photograph of Norman Rockwell beating up a child."

Steven Wright

2007-06-12T22:15:00.000-04:00

Came across this today and nearly spit out my soup:

"Exhiliration is that feeling you get just after a great idea hits you, and just before you realize what's wrong with it."

Disaster

2007-06-12T15:32:00.000-04:00

No Andrews! No Bernstein! The horror! Langpo given short shrift by an anthology?! Stop the presses! Call the police! Do something!

Should we say that this critique-like rebuke is just "Ron being Ron"?

2007-06-04T01:09:00.000-04:00

Calvin: People think it must be fun to be a super genius, but they don’t realize how hard it is to put up with all the idiots in the world.

Hobbes: Isn’t the zipper on your pants supposed to be in the front?

Hotel Bill

2007-06-01T20:46:00.000-04:00

Three people check into a hotel. They pay $30 to the manager and go to their room. The manager finds out that the room rate is $25 and gives $5 to the bellboy to return. On the way to the room the bellboy reasons that $5 would be difficult to share among three people so he pockets $2 and gives $1 to each person. Now each person paid $10 and got back $1. So they paid $9 each, totalling $27. The bellboy has $2, totalling $29.

Where is the remaining dollar?

and 1 and 2 and 3 and...

2007-05-20T20:06:00.000-04:00

By the way, I've counted on planet Zero before: numbers and words turned out to be the same kinds of things. And reliably so.

Outer Space

2007-05-20T20:00:00.000-04:00

Fewer & Further Press is pleased to announce the publication of Clark Coolidge's Counting On Planet Zero. Counting On Planet Zero is printed on laid paper in an edition of 500 copies, 50 of which are special editions. Copies can be purchased for $8, postpaid.

Please visit the Fewer & Further Press site for an excerpt and cover image. Payments can be made through the site with Paypal.

Special editions are hand-sewn and signed by the author, for $15. If you would like to purchase a special edition, please contact the editor for availability.