the world a letter

2010-05-06T02:50:00.001-04:00

This song makes me want to cry with happiness. (can't embed, disabled on Youtube. You'll have to click through!)

2010-03-14T11:56:00.001-04:00

2009-12-09T01:02:00.003-05:00

What a beautiful video.

2009-12-04T00:53:00.001-05:00

Woodworker Ch'ing carved a piece of wood and made a bell stand, and when
it was finished, everyone who saw it marveled, for it seemed to be the
work of gods or spirits.  When the Marquis of Lu saw it, he asked, "What
art is it you have?" Ch'ing replied, "I am only a craftsman--how would I
have any art?  There is one thing, however.  When I am going to make a
bell stand, I never let it wear out my energy.  I always fast in order to
still my mind.  When I have fasted for three days, I no longer have any
thought of congratulations or rewards, of titles or stipends.  When I have
fasted for five days, I no longer have any thought of praise or blame, of
skill or clumsiness.  And when I have fasted seven days, I am so still
that I forget I have four limbs and a form and body. By that time, the
ruler and his court no longer exist for me.  My skill is concentrated and
all outside distractions fade away.  After that, I go into the mountain
forest and examine the Heavenly nature of the trees.  If I find one of
superlative form, and I can see a bell stand there, I put my hand to the
job of carving; if not, I let it go.  This way I am simply matching up
'Heaven' with 'Heaven.'  That's probably the reason that people wonder if
the results were not made by spirits."


(From the translation of Zhuangzi by Burton Watson)

2009-11-05T14:06:00.002-05:00

Sometimes I wish I wrote differently than I do. Reading this poem, one of those times.

2009-11-03T20:57:00.001-05:00

There is no feeling quite like having new poems.

2009-11-02T00:19:00.002-05:00

A couple of three more things.

First, Suzanne Frischkorn has another book, Girl On A Bridge, coming out next year. If it's as good as her first, it'll be very good.

Second & third, here's two online interviews entirely worth listening to, one with the aforementioned Kate Greenstreet and one with Jeffrey Ethan Lee, two poets entirely dedicated to their art and its practice.

2009-10-12T23:40:00.002-04:00

I know I don't post much anymore, but I wanted to put mention to two things: One, Matthew Thorburn's "Disappears in the Rain" is really a wonderful little chapbook, and my suggestion would be to get it while there's still what to get.

Two, a good friend, Andrea Hornick, has an exhibit up in a gallery in Chelsea through October 27th. I've been seeing slides/hearing about these paintings for over a decade now, and they really are wonderful. If you get a chance, you should go look.

Three things, I wanted to mention three things. Kate Greenstreet's new book is out, and she is really getting somewhere with her writing. Not that she wasn't somewhere, but she's really got an energy she's working out. Not, I imagine, that you need to hear it from me--go hear her read.

Four things! (they keep popping up) Ana Bozicevic-Bowling's book from Tarpaulin Sky Press. Not out yet, but looks great as well.

All four wonderful artists, all entirely, in my opinion, worth your time.

2009-07-22T09:51:00.001-04:00

Nice.

2009-05-26T14:47:00.001-04:00

Craig.

URGENT

2009-04-30T01:46:00.003-04:00

{NB: I just received a note about this and wanted to pass it along; yes, this is real, and it is serious, so if you think there's anything you could do to help, please do}:

(note that you can go to findcraigarnold.blogspot.com for the most up-to-date information.)

Craig Arnold, whom some of you know, has gone missing on a small volcanic island in Japan while on a creative exchange fellowship. Craig, an experienced explorer of volcanoes, never returned to his inn after leaving alone to research the island’s active volcano for the afternoon. The authorities are on the third day of searching for Craig, and are scouring the small island (of only 160 inhabitants) with dogs and helicopters. If he is not found by the end of the day, the authorities will call off the search.

We need your help to insure that the search will continue. The island and areas surrounding the volcano are small enough that an extended search will surely lead to Craig’s discovery.WE NEED PEOPLE TO CONTACT THEIR LOCAL CONGRESSPEOPLE AND SENATORS TO PRESSURE THE JAPANESE STATE DEPARTMENT TO CONTINUE THE SEARCH. WE ALSO NEED HELP SPARKING MEDIA ATTENTION FOR THIS STORY, WHICH WE ALSO HOPE MIGHT INCREASE PRESSURE ON JAPANESE AUTHORITIES TO FIND CRAIG. A document with background information about Craig is available, as well as information about the details leading up to his disappearance as well as about the island itself.

If any of you have ideas or know people who might be able to help, please take a minute to contact your senator and congressperson via telephone or even email to explain this problem and insist on their help.

We are so hoping to find Craig today, God-willing not seriously injured. If so, this will not be an issue, but we must ensure that if this isn’t resolved today, Craig doesn’t end up an unsolved mystery. He is too important to too many people, not to mention to arts and letter generally, for this to happen.”

The University of Wyoming (where Craig teaches) is taking an active interest in the search and Wyoming Senators are apparently in contact with the Japanese consulate. But: help is STILL needed and appreciated.

Also: There is a "Find Craig Arnold" Facebook page. Please join for updates and news.

Craig Arnold, Ph.D., is the author of two award-winning volumes of poetry: Shells, chosen by W.S. Merwin for the Yale Series of Young Poets in 1999, and of Made Flesh (Ausable, 2008). His poetry has been anthologized in several volumes of the Best American Poetry Series, and his poems, articles, and translations from the Spanish have appeared in such publications as The New Republic, Paris Review, Poetry Magazine, Yale Review, and many more. He is the recipient of numerous prestigious awards and honors, including a Fulbright Fellowship, the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Alfred Hodder Fellowship in Humanities from Princeton University, an Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Dr. Arnold did his B.A. at Yale University and received his Ph.D. from the University of Utah. He is presently an Assistant Professor at the University of Wyoming. Craig is currently in Japan with the U.S.-Japan Friendship Commission's U.S.-Japan Creative Artists Exchange Fellowship and has been missing since April 26th (evening Monday April 27th Japanese time).

THE DETAILS:

Monday April 27th (Japanese time) he arrived with the 2:50 pm municipal ferry from Yakusima on the island of Kuchino-erabu and checked in to the local "Watanabe" inn, the only one on the island. He was with 2 Japanese tourists who had reservations. He did not have one. (They must have helped him check in.) He had traveled to the island to visit the volcano, as he has been working on a book on the subject of volcanoes for some time.

His plan was to stay only one night and leave the next day. (Craig has visited many volcanoes around the world in recent years as is very experienced with visiting them.)

He immediately left his 3 bags at the inn and departed around 3 pm on foot to the next village, taking only his walking sticks. He was wearing black or dark colors: long pants, a dark hat, a nylon jacket. His Japanese iPhone was on his person but has not been reachable due to inconsistent reception on the island. The exclusive provider of IPhone service, Softbank, has been contacted by the police in an attempt to utilize the built-in GPS capabilities of the phone.

At the village, someone with a car drove him to the entrance to the path leading up the mountain to the volcano. There are 4 paths to the volcano which are obvious and in good condition. He was taken to the entrance of a path next to a dam where evidence collected by the police suggests he ascended. His footprints have been found. The police have not found evidence of a return trip along that path. The area is densely forested until reaching the summit area, caldera, of the volcano where there is little vegetation.

The police stated that the path to that area is clear but that finding the path on the descent could pose problems so it is likely that he may not have found his way back to the path he entered by.

When Craig did not return to the inn by 8 pm, the inn staff searched for him by car, driving to the village. Unsuccessful, they returned to the inn and called the local fire brigade at 9 pm who responded immediately and searched until midnight.

Day 2 (Tues, April 28 JT) 5 police officers (under the direction of Mr. Kazuhara) arrived from Yakusima that morning with new assets: cars, search dogs, police persons, a helicopter. 40 total persons now working on this: 30 local fire reserve persons and 10 police persons and officials. They searched the trail he took but did not complete an exhaustive search of all 4 trails. One individual climbed all the way to the top. The area was circled several times by the helicopter and they also flew around the coastline. I contacted them directly at the end of the 2nd search day: 6:30pm. (5:30 am this morning, Wed April 29th U.S. time). They were debriefing and planning for day 3, with a plan to concentrate on the possible alternative paths down from the volcano that he may have taken by mistake and the surrounding area.

Day 3, the official required last day of the search, begins tonight. They are only required by law to search for 3 days. Extension procedures must be arranged with Mr. Kawahigashi and may require payment. Other than the helicopter, no higher level assets have been deployed at this time. Since the focus is on a "boots-on-the-ground" search and rescue (the forest makes visibility from the air limited) more people should be deployed immediately to assist.

ENVIRONMENTAL BACKGROUND:

Kuchino-erabusima (various transliterations possible shima, jima):

Volcanic island 14.5 square km. Spring weather conditions, temp drops at night but not to freezing. Has not rained since Craig went missing. Fresh water available.

reachable by municipal ferry from Yakushima

Police based in Yakushima

Hospital on Yakushima

Airport on Yakushima connects to Kagoshima, major city.

Map:

http://homepage2.nifty.com/erabu/sight.htm

PEOPLE IMMEDIATELY INVOLVED:

The following people only speak Japanese with a thick regional accent:

The search and rescue operation is being led by

Town Officer: Mr. Kawahigashi

cel: 81-(0)90-7162-8404 / office tel: 81-(0)997-49-2100

(last spoke with him 7:05 am NYC time) They were preparing to debrief from

Day 2 of the search and prepare their plan for Day 3.

Day 3 begins tonight, Wednesday April 29. (= morning Thurs, April 30 Japanese time)

The Yakusima police officer on the case: Officer Kuzuhara: 81-(0)997-462110

he is on the neighboring island Yakusima, not the island where Craig is lost.

THEY ARE ONLY REQUIRED BY LAW TO SEARCH FOR 3 DAYS. THERE IS A NATIONAL HOLIDAY HAPPENING RIGHT NOW. WE MUST APPLY ALL AVAILABLE PRESSURE TO MAKE THEM CONTINUE THE SEARCH AND TO CONVINCE THE U.S. CONSULATE TO ACTIVATE THE AVAILABLE AMERICAN ASSETS (OKINAWA) TO ASSIST WITH THE SEARCH AND RESCUE OPERATION ON THE GROUND.

The process is currently stalled at the Fukuoka Consulate level with

Mark Baron (cel: 81-90-30143802) working under Margot Carrington

(Fukuoka Consulate office tel: 81-92-751-9331)

The Tokyo Embassy # is 81-(0)3-3224-5000 and the interim Charge d’Affairs is James P. Zumwalt

Local U.S.-Japan Friendship Commission Contact TOKYO:

Christopher Blasdel

Cel: 81-90-9362-9914

Home: 81-3-3309-0403

Executive Director of U.S.-Japan Friendship Commission:

From: Eric Gangloff

Dr. Eric J. Gangloff

Executive Director

Japan-US Friendship Commission

1201 15th Street NW, Suite 330

Washington, DC 20005

(202) 653-9800

(202) 653-9802 fax

www.jusfc.gov

LOCAL AMERICAN ASSETS:

http://www.okinawa.usmc.mil/DoD%20on%20Okinawa/DoD%20on%20Okinawa%20Page.html

Kadena Air Force Base, Okinawa under the command of Pacific Air Force (PACAF)

http://www.kadena.af.mil/

NAVY: Commander Fleet Activities Okinawa:

https://www.cnic.navy.mil/Okinawa/index.htm

Naval hospital: http://www.med.navy.mil/sites/nhoki/Pages/default.aspx

2009-04-25T12:27:00.002-04:00

lol poets

2009-04-19T18:20:00.006-04:00

Video of me reading at the Stain of Poetry Reading Series last month:

All the people I read with that night were wonderful, if you have the time I'd suggest checking them out (here's a page with all the readers from that night, and readings previous as well). Ana and Amy run a great series, much thanks to them for having me to read, I enjoyed it immensely.

2009-04-12T00:33:00.003-04:00

Go.

(h/t Goblin Mercantile Exchange)

2009-03-24T01:21:00.002-04:00

I'm reading this Friday in Brooklyn, in the Stain of Poetry reading series. Link here. Come see, if you're around!

2009-02-11T11:44:00.002-05:00

Another rough rough draft, this one what I'm maybe doing with the fragment I posted a few days ago. I'll delete this one in a day or so. It is very likely to change somewhere between somewhat and a fair bit even by then.
-snip-

2009-02-07T00:48:00.001-05:00

I have a fragment. Now I need to use it. I think I know what I'm going to do, but not set yet.

. . . it’s like a wave with a stone
not knowing what to do with it
and not knowing what to do with it
and not knowing what to do with it
over and over again
through its momentous variations
until there is no stone to not
know what to do with
and still it keeps rolling . . .

2009-02-03T18:18:00.001-05:00

Ok, this is funny--dry absurd too-wonky political funny, but funny.

And speaking of funny, here's where I got my most-recent blog tagline (above). If you aren't familiar with the game Half-Life, it'll still be funny, just not as.

2009-01-30T02:41:00.006-05:00

Ok, I'm going to post a draft and then, in a day or two, delete it. It is likely to change dramatically before it is un-drafty anyway, this is maybe the first section of sections? Not that I expect ^you^ to read it, but I'll read it differently here, I'll read it ^as if^ you are reading it, and maybe see something I hadn't before.

(p.s. If I owe you an email/letter, I will get to it soon! The crush of things-to-do along with my spastic memory means it goes slowly (and there's even two which are months overdue, I'm sorry), but I'm moving on it.)
-snip-

2009-01-21T17:09:00.002-05:00

Elizabeth Arnold's poem? A little flat, sorry to say. I think it showed a certain envy of Maya Angelou's, strange as such a thing might seem (even using the word 'pulse' in a similar way, if I remember correctly); not for the poetic qualities Angelou brought but for the personality she filled the stage with. Arnold's poem felt cowed by the spotlight it was formulated for.

I feel churlish comparing it to a poem I think better, and want to preface the comparison by saying that I think Arnold did a fine and professorial, if not completely artful, job. That said, Frank Bidart's poem on Slate this week not only does the job very well, it begs the question as to how any American poet could ever hope to write a public, democratic poem without invoking Whitman.

2009-01-19T01:34:00.002-05:00

Two links:

Now I wish I'd made plans to be there. Especially to have brought the kids. I remember very vividly my mom taking my brother and I to the ERA march in D.C. in -- was it 1981, or 1982? I think 1981. Anyway, I wish we'd made arrangements to be in D.C. to see the inauguration this long weekend. That would've been good. Whatever the future holds, I've become too cynical the last four years especially and I'd like to feel that melt into possibility a little.

Nothing to be done about this, unfortunately I think the guy being reviewed may be largely right, and an institution I've had so much hate and love and desire for will be changed to a memory I may or may not perpetuate among those students who attend in its wake.

2008-12-22T01:02:00.000-05:00

It's me, this week, at No Tell.

2008-12-15T10:51:00.002-05:00

Ummm . . . wow. Really?

I was sort of willing to be with it until the guy at the end. I mean . . . uhh, what's there to say?

2008-12-12T09:34:00.002-05:00

Amazing.

2008-12-07T01:29:00.002-05:00

I read criticism of Rostropovich’s playing of the cello suite’s prelude (in this thread on youtube) as accelerated, and feel very strongly that they are missing the point. Bach in general and that piece in particular is not meant to evoke tears or certainties of emotion—it can, and does, but that is as a side-effect of the music’s central motion, which is creation. That’s why I think so much more highly of Rostropovich’s performance than I do of Minsky’s, with his gently specific romantic coloring, striving hard to make the music something different than its wholeness is.

Listening to Rostropovich play the piece is very much like the thrill of having an honest and profound thought – then another – then another – in a continuous chain of perception which you would want to write down but for the fear that the process would cause you to lose all but maybe one partial shadow of the ideas themselves, let alone their relationship to one another. This is why Rostropovich’s rendition is so true, it has the velocity of creative thought as its tempo. You have an idea, and you’re in its harmony, then it takes itself in an unexpected relational direction, and you astonish yourself to have housed this inspiration; then it expands again, and suddenly its expansion is its theme, it keeps changing more into itself and intensifying until it doesn’t know if it’s breaking apart or fully realizing itself (that part which first shadows at ~ 1:30 and then flowers around 12 seconds later), then it gets to stop in a satisfied sudden fullness. The Minsky, beautiful as it is, is just a little too much like letting Cordelia live on to marry Edgar for my taste. His ending does have a gorgeous gentle pleading to it, and I love hearing that too, but to my ear it misses the point I need most from the piece.

That said, what do I know, right? I don’t even know what that final motion is called. But I’m speaking from a personal need. Listening to these I’m beginning to form a sense of how my poems can move musically. By musically I don’t mean just the sonics of syllables but the proportion and structure of a poem’s progression as a whole, how it can support itself as it rediscovers what has never been covered up by anything other than its own initial misconceptions (you can tell I’m pretty far from Bach right now, but that’s probably because I’m pretty far from Bach); how the composition of the poem can lead the reader to feel as if they’re having their own realizations, or have them, as if there’s a difference. I suppose it’s hard to describe right now, it’s more a feeling in my chest, but I don’t often have this sort of re-evaluative moment in regards to my poetry, this may be the first time in, I don’t know, 12 years? So hard as it is to describe, I imagine I’ll be doing so, in my poems and in my coming to terms with what I want from them, for some time.

Just for fullness, here’s a link to Casals playing (music starts ~ 50 seconds in). The piece really is a document of astonishing changes and of opposites harmoniously reconciled, negative capability speaking sonically for itself.

And I want to say, I don't mean to belittle the incredible beauty of any of these renditions by comparing them--they really are all extraordinary--I'm trying to make a point important to me as an artist myself, and from that place I'm very comfortable saying what I have.

2008-11-18T11:15:00.003-05:00

What a great poem on Verse Daily today.

And just for the hell of it, the one on Poetry Daily: not bad, but I couldn't help but here this in my ear as I read it, and what I heard sounded so much more authentic, and to my taste (apologies to the poet), than what I read. Derivative or coincidental? I don't know.

2008-11-14T02:04:00.007-05:00

So I was driving my daughter to the supermarket yesterday, and I ask her, already knowing the answer, if she wants to listen to Mr. Ray or Yo Yo Ma. Listening to Mr. Ray (a children's singer, I'm not sure how well-known he is or isn't outside of central Jersey) we drive and talk, mostly about what I don't really remember. I'm driving to a farther-away supermarket because really I want her to fall asleep, but she isn't, we're almost there and she says "I hate Yo Yo Ma!" She's three, and she hates/loves a lot of things very passionately and very quickly. I laugh and say, "Is he boring? Aren't you glad we're listening to Mr. Ray?" and she says "I love Casals!"

I like to listen to different cellists play Bach's Cello Suites. We recently got the Ma version; I don't like it as much as the Casals, while Dara likes it more. Jonah had asked my why I like one and Dara likes the other, I thought about it and explained that in one sense there's two approaches to art on display here. Casals is playing what he knows by heart, but he sounds like he's surprising himself as he moves through the music, and reacting to that surprise by moving into it--it sounds rough because he really doesn't know exactly how it is going to go, or at least makes it sound that way; it is very passionate and romantic. Yo Yo Ma, on the other hand, has studied the music intently and practiced it to perfection, and you can hear his mastery in that sense in every measured note. Which isn't to say, I explain, that I always like the first kind of art, but that that is the quality of the Casals I find so attractive. The first thing is to like what your ear likes, and then you can figure out why, following that. All this on the way to Best Buy, a few days before.

I had no idea Halcyon was listening to that conversation, but I guess she was. It was just really really funny to hear my 3-year-old daughter say "I love Casals!" Anyway, then she fell asleep, so I got to turn around and go home and take a nap too.

yay

2008-11-05T00:53:00.004-05:00

I've been meaning to post, but the velocity of my days precludes too much thought, so my ideas pass. I really really mean to again, at least semi-regularly, and hopefully the few of you with rss feeds waiting will still be reading?

Anyway, tonight, wow. Just wanted to say, I'm probably not the only one who feels this way:

Now I can stop reading fivethirtyeight.com obsessively. I'd like to even stop paying attention to politics very much. I know that's not what this should be about, but the whole public-face thing isn't really something I found interesting before the horror-show that came along--well, first with Reagan, so it's been there my whole life. I remember his ketchup-as-vegetable thing, that was the same year I read Animal Farm and I don't think I connected them two thematically then, though I did by the time NWO was popular (remember that video?), and I was reading stories of 100,000 iraqi soldiers dying in the tanks they'd been chained within. I'm sure that was a glorious war and all, but by then I think I was aware that there was no such thing, and the spectacle was revolting. I was resolved to move to another country, but then having kids and being near their grandparents took priority, and besides Clinton was in the white house, it felt different, bad as some of his decisions were.

But that's all backstory to what happened in 2000, when the freakshow came to the Florida recount. So I've been watching the whole thing since then almost obsessively. It's nice to see someone I respect in the white house. Let's hope for some sanity in the years to come.

2008-09-29T08:54:00.005-04:00

I'm no economist but everything I've learned from watching politics the past 10 years tells me this is right: why in the hell is shoveling banks buckets of money a good idea? I honestly don't understand why the Democrats don't, at the very least, want to minimize the amount given NOW, so that they can have much more control over the process of drafting the HOW in a few months time, when a Democrat (likely) is president. And why hundreds of billions to help the banks but nothing to help the people defaulting on mortgage payments for their only home? I mean, wouldn't it make sense for there to be an agency created (or an existing one expanded and tasked) whose job would be to try and renegotiate some of these userous variable-rate mortgages into more reasonable fixed-rate mortgages? That would cost money (because the fixed-rate mortgages require good credit and a bunch of the defaulters are not of the highest credit rating), but take some of that $700 billion and establish a fund which insure the risk for the banks and allow those who need it a lower interest rate which would let them keep their homes and pay the banks the money they need so desperately. Or even just outright subsidize some people in their struggle to keep up mortgage payments so they don't just walk away from their investment. That way, the banks still get the money, AND it helps people too.

(EDIT: That said, I keep hearing that something has to happen, anything almost, or lots of people will hurt, and I'm willing to believe that this is true--I'm commenting more generally on the shape of the bailout, not whether or not to vote for this one. Both topics I'm really unqualified for to pose as an authority.)

But what do I know, I'm a poet not an economist. I'd like to hope there's a reason of higher order than the reason which led so many democrats to embrace Iraq. Wall of text over, back to poetry.

2008-09-07T01:47:00.008-04:00

So, I'm starting to reread certain books which were important to me ten, twenty years ago. Right now, for example, I'm reading Walter Pater. His sentences used to excite me, and don't get me wrong, they still are wonderful (like this, from "The Child in the House"; "So he yielded himself to these things, to be played upon by them like a musical instrument, and began to note with deepening watchfulness, but always with some puzzled, unutterable longing in his enjoyment, the phases of the seasons and of the growing or wandering day, down even to the shadowy changes wrought on bare wall or ceiling--the light cast up from the snow, bringing out their darkest angles; the brown light in the cloud, which meant rain; that almost too austere clearness, in the protracted light of the lengthening day, before warm weather began, as if it lingered but to make a severer workday, with the school-books opened earlier and later; all the humming, the freshness, the perfume of the garden seemed to lie upon it--and coming in one afternoon on September, along the red gravel walk, to look for a basket of yellow crab-apples left in the cool, old parlour, he remembered it the more, and how the colours had struck him, because a wasp on one bitten apple stung him, and he felt the passion of sudden, severe pain." How lovely is that 'note' in the third clause! And then the context for the specific scene of the sentence, that which lies around that specific moment (of the wasp sting) is inside the sentence, is the sentence's grammatic kernel. And how all that general context, the things playing notes on (in?) him, are full of sensual contradiction, just as the notes played from him are puzzled but deepening. And it all sits on that specific moment of pain--it's almost funny (but not also), like he's mocking his seriousness with great seriousness.) but what used to feel like an admirable, if extreme, circumspection and attention (as if he had written like Cezanne painted), now feels squeezed a little too tight, not necessarily fussy but not permeable enough to a broader range of sensation than he felt comfortable writing out.

Of course, the sentences are the same as they were a decade ago, it is me getting older and my tastes changing, which is welcome; but it is also me getting older and more mundane, my ear cottoning from age and responsibility. After Pater, I intend to find some new grammar to get excited about; one of the responsibilities of aging, I think I'm just learning, is keeping my ear, through its changing, supple.

begin again

2008-09-04T11:37:00.005-04:00

I'm going to begin again, but what is there to say? I want to be able to say, like Lily Briscoe, "I have had my vision," but neither has it had me, and the most optimistic is to add 'yet' to that 'neither has it had me;' and starting again is adding that yet, so I do.

2007-04-24T00:16:00.000-04:00

Ok, I still have little to add, I'm just going to use this space to note what someone might find of interest regarding me as a poet (which is to say, my poems). Not that things happen at a great velocity in my life, but I may as well collect them here, make it a home page of sorts.

If you'd like to find some work of mine, find in the left-hand column the header "Where my mouth is," the links under there will take you to some.

Items of interest added as they appear:

6/13/07: "All Architecture," an e-chapbook, from End & Shelf Press, run by the inestimable Josh Hanson, now available: click here.

2006-05-03T12:41:00.000-04:00

I'm taking a hiatus from blogging. I think I've said whatever I wanted to. I'll leave the site as is for if/when I feel like taking it up again. Good luck to everyone.

Gone fishing.

2006-04-30T10:52:00.000-04:00

Good, interesting, basic post on the physical basis of our economy--and, really, our world.

2006-04-28T21:43:00.000-04:00

Funniest post ever.

Help. Cannot stop laughing, I've bruised my forehead against my desk edge and choked on my own spit. And I'm not even sure why.

2006-04-27T23:30:00.000-04:00

The crony fairy!

"I guess it's impossible to select qualified people to run FEMA; if you try, the Crony Fairy will spirit them away and replace them with Michael Brown."

2006-04-27T00:00:00.000-04:00

Now it's my turn. I'm all "Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita" today . . . biblical-numerically, that is, not spiritually. At least, I don't think.

(By which I mean I'm 35, and fairly happy.)

2006-04-26T12:00:00.000-04:00

A very well-mannered article on the art of the poetic insult through the ages.

2006-04-26T11:41:00.000-04:00

My appetite for fluff has crossed over to movies--watched Gladiator last night, kind of disappointing. What could have been some thrilling fight scenes became, under the spastically intrusive hand of Ridley Scott's fussily self-congratulatory directing, a string of scenes in the spirit of hundreds of football replays (or maybe even the frustrated desire to see those not-so-exciting replays in fast-forward). Clue to directors: if a person is stabbing another person to death in an arena, or in some Belgian forest somewhere, it is already exciting--trust the line, so to speak, don't color it out of existence or overembroider it. Oh, well. Still not so bad, I didn't even mind the overacting pulled out of J. Phoenix (he overacted well enough, I guess you could say, and he did do an impressively convincing borderline psychotic). &: I'm probably alone in this, but I found the ending very moving. Curious modern/classical crossover & imdb fact: did you know that Roman gladiators actually wore product placements into the ring? [update: to be fair, the final battle was pretty gripping, not at all prey to the directorial egotism I described above.]

Also watched the first Conan movie a few nights ago; now that movie is both terrible, and one of the best. The pacing can seem so slow, but once you get into the rhythm, and the score, you (well, I) realize it moves like an opera, only without any songs. Everything is very strongly what it feels, very purely that. I don't think there's one moment of ambiguous characterization in the whole movie. Very satisfying, by the end: perfect, in its own way. And talk about a fight scene--the one where the three thieves break into Thulsa Doom's bizarre revels to rescue the princess is perfect. And though Arnold looks just right, he doesn't move as gracefully as a Conan should; but that just adds to the excitement, he looks like he really could get whacked.

Whacked . . . tonight, we watch this week's episode of the Sopranos, taped for us by my cable-receiving brother-in-law. On deck for the weekend? Maybe Circle of Iron.

2006-04-23T22:18:00.000-04:00

All day it's been nagging me . . . it's somebody's birthday. Who is it? Who is it? I've been mildly uneasy. Is it N--'s, an old friend from college? No, that was last week. And then I remembered . . . (see post below, i.e. previous post)

2006-04-23T22:17:00.000-04:00

The memorial in Westminster Abbey. The scroll his left hand points to reads:

"The Cloud capt Tow'rs, The Gorgeous Palaces, The Solemn Temples,
The Great Globe itself, Yea all which it Inherit, Shall Dissolve;
And like the baseless Fabrick of a Vision, Leave not a wreck behind. "

2006-04-20T17:26:00.000-04:00

Dream: I was talking to a (nonblogger) poet about a blogger (poet), explaining "He lets his terms dictate the sense of his argument--it's like watching marbles roll around on a table."

2006-04-20T17:19:00.000-04:00

Pear trees.

2006-04-20T17:17:00.001-04:00

Pear trees.

2006-04-20T17:17:00.000-04:00

I just can't stop! It's the sunhat made me do it.

2006-04-20T16:59:00.000-04:00

"Bein' the president is hard work . . . "

If anyone has any of the unreported juicy details related to this debacle, please backchannel; I'm dying of curiosity.

2006-04-20T10:12:00.000-04:00

I think you can see how similar (yet different) she is to her brother. There are days where she looks just like he did as a baby. This photo is from when he was ten months (Miami Beach).

2006-04-20T10:06:00.000-04:00

Eight months old. She has two teeth, so you can't let her gnaw indiscriminately on your finger anymore--her brother calls her "the little piranha."

2006-04-19T16:12:00.000-04:00

Cogent post from Jordan Davis.

2006-04-19T00:35:00.000-04:00

J- & I've been watching "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" every day for around a week now, after I showed him the "Black Knight" clip from youtube (you can watch it yourself at the bottom of this post, if you don't have it embedded on permaplay in some deep recess of your cranium already). He loves it, and there's nothing like a 6-yr. old telling you that your mother was a hamster etc etc over and over to get your teeth grinding under your smile. I thought it was pretty precocious of him, and all, and I'm running over what I can and can't show him (most of Meaning of Life is out for a few years, except for Mr. Creosote and I suppose the tiger skit; but Life of Brian should be ok). Then over the weekend he was at his friend's house, and her mother calls and asks "is it ok if J- watches "The Holy Grail"?" "Sure," I say, thinking J- suggested it, "should I drop it by?" "Oh no, we have it. I just wanted to check if there're any scenes you wanted fast-forwarded." "Nah," I said, "the Castle Anthrax scene more or less goes over his head. Are you going to fast-forward it for Minnow?" "Oh, we do, but I guess we won't this time." "Minnow likes it? Did Jonah tell her about it?" "Nah, she was at Gretta's and watched it with her around a week ago, and since then, that's all she'll watch." I was flabbergasted, but I guess a bunch of parents who got turned on to Monty Python in their early awkward teens now have companions of the apparently-appropriate age to watch it with, so we are. And now there's a band of little people tromping around during recess across town yelling "Blue . . . no, yellow. Aaaaggghhhhh!" How strange.

(Aside: I found 9th grade english so minddeadly I spent the year in the back row with a friend reciting entire Python movies line for line back and forth. This was because I disliked my 8th grade english teacher so much, and she was going to be my 9th grade english teacher as well, so I opted out of honors english to avoid her. She used to give letter grades on our stories and poems, accompanied by personally judgemental and belittling comments . . . I have had the chance to get to know her as an adult, oddly enough, and she is a perfectly nice person from this side of the power divide.)

Anyway, watching this movie is a better critique of the Bush Administration than any else I've seen. And, along those lines, probably a better and more honest appraisal of how most history gets made than most more serious attempts at the subject. Coconuts and self-deceptive logic underpins it all, urges of ego, myth, self-representation, all smoke-and-mirrors (not that there's smoke and mirrors in the movie, I'm just using a cliche). Just imagine Rumsfeld's or Cheney's face under that black helmet . . . unfortunately, the Democrats aren't Graham Chapman, they're Brave Sir Robin. Also unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any paddywagon at the end of the movie.

Umm, the embedded html isn't working, so the link is here.

.

2006-04-18T16:12:00.000-04:00

Good lord. David Byrne has a blog. And it's a good one.

2006-04-17T11:46:00.000-04:00

My "My Lead Hat" is this week's poem in/at Realpoetik.

(I wrote this poem before there was a book called "Petroleum Hat," or a chapbook called "Sex Hat." Hats just must've been in the air, some time of mutual genesis (sic).)

2006-04-16T19:56:00.000-04:00

I think it's very important when writing poetry to write about those things people get enthusiastic about without giving into/relying on simple enthusiasm, to maintain a position of . . . sobriety maybe, but a sobriety Rimbaud or Keats would know perhaps by its antonym. It's taken me this long to see that's what Yeats meant when he said he wanted to write "one poem maybe as cold/and passionate as the dawn." Or Ashbery "accepting everything, taking nothing." Think for example of Dante in his "Vita Nova," that mixture of ardor and clinical observation of everything, including the experience of observing said ardor; an ardor for that experience which feeds on its own submission/unsubmission to itself.

Sidewise relevant (because finding it brought to mind unexpectedly Yeats, and then the above sequence of thought), the translation of verse 71 in my last post was on a piece of paper in my paper mountain, I think it was from ~ a year ago. On the back was this poem:

Craft

One rose, darker and redder than any,
from whose base night comes,
I break my minds
I cradle you by your hips,
your head hangs as if one questioning,
one hundred years has past.
Soil you need, I will be your soil,
you will be your soil.
Bloom from my chest.

I didn't know when I wrote it I had Yeats' rosicrucian poems in mind. Funny how that works. Anyway, that's the sort of poem I think, even as I'm writing it, no-one beyond my self would be interested in (not that it necessarily keeps to the qualities I advocated in the beginning of the post). I keep them around anyway.

2006-04-15T12:44:00.000-04:00

Trying to sort out Lao Tzu can be tricky, even in Chinese I understand. So I look at different translations (this place helps, though it is kind of overwhelming) and have an edition which gives a word-by word (ideogram-by-ideogram) breakdown of possible translations. And of course my meditation invests my sense of meaning strongly.

So here's how I suss out verse 71:

Knowing unknowing is health, while
not knowing unknowing is sickness.

Sicken your sickness, and you will grow well;
Wisdom is to live healthy, cultivating no sickness, and therefore enduring none.

Here's that website's 29. I took the above path through this passage because it follows what I understand of the Daoist view of health: that sickness only arrives when one is depleted of good qi, and the maintenance of good qi is most surely dependent on that basic good meditation of mindlessness which allows good qi to flow. That an unhealthy mind inevitably eventually results in unhealthy qi flow lets all the levels of metaphysical understanding the various translations I linked to above work fine. And is the sense, I think, behind what is, in my try, the fourth line of the verse.

2006-04-11T20:36:00.000-04:00

Ok, a caveat before the link: I'm not linking because I think the scenario described is likely, or even anything other than barely plausible . But Billmon (the writer) has, in his past writings, shown himself to have an uncomfortable (for him, I imagine, that is) intimacy with the way those in power think. So I link to it as something worth reading for what it is, and not as a "sky is falling!" exclamation. Besides, the guy writes so infrequently now, it's kind of an event itself.

link

Anyway, yeesh. I haven't thought about things like "roentgens" in a while, not even in this post-shoebomber world, not since I was a kid and used to be so freaked out about the possibility of nuclear war that every nighttime backfire had me thinking it was The End. Remember that?

Another anyway: here's something from Gabriel Gudding worth reading, probably more worth reading, since it involves something you can control, and understand, yourself: link.

2006-04-11T15:15:00.000-04:00

Check out this great poem by Paul Hoover from the new issue of the Laurel Review.

River

Writing's an aid to memory,
memory's an aid to thinking,
and thinking is near the soul,

where the grassy riverbank
makes the water look green,
and the "scent" of one haiku

drifts toward the next one,
a meditation on rushing water
that makes distance fearless,

distance which gives us names
like Euphoria and Wisdom,
names that travel the length of a sentence

before they find the falls.
Knee-deep at its source,
we set the river dreaming

toward its final destination
where the wind from three heavens
smells like princess chicken,

the good kind, from Yang's.
As it awaits the cooking pot,
a fish stares at the ceiling

with its eye of milk and tinsel.
Soon it will sing a song
as rich as Chinese silk.

Once it was part of the river,
river that comes from the distance
and returns there also.

While the rest of us carry on
the great labor of thinking,
children do all the cooking,

their voices in the fire.
It's all connected somehow,
like a net that's full of holes.

How thick the water's green--
double green, the glassy river
and its mind-tossed banks.

(After Chinese Yueh-Fu ballads)

Maxine Chernoff's and Josh Kryah's are especially good too. I have one in there too, one I feel very humble about just now.

2006-04-10T13:39:00.000-04:00

I really feel odd. I haven't written this little in, I don't know, ever? Over the past months or so just reading lots of old cheesy sf/s&s/fantasy novels. I can't abide much serious literature--I've been picking up novels--'Oliver Twist', say, or 'The Life of Michael K.' by Coetzee--and setting them down at the point I feel the manipulation the author is offering is just overwhelming, bordering on abusive (for the Dickens, for example, just when Oliver runs out to pay the bookman his 30-odd pounds.) And poetry, after a few lines, I lose interest, though not always for the same reasons as the fiction. History seems to offer me solace.

The only poet I've enjoyed reading for any length of time in this frame of mind has been Ashbery, (he feels so clean and straightforward in a way no one else bothers to be, is how it seems to me now, go figure), and the only prose writer whose books I've finished has been Naipaul, the only one who hasn't given me that awful manipulation feeling. An artist's medium should be his words, in collaboration with the (attentive) reader, and not the reader's assumed and fatuous submission to the writer's construction. Naipaul, clear-eyed, seems not to forget that.

As far as genre-fiction goes, I'm just sucking 'em down. There's one I wanted to discuss a little: I was recommended the "His Dark Materials" trilogy by Philip Pullman. Umm, Jonah just woke up (home sick with a stomach bug), I'll finish the Pullman pan later.

Later:

Much seems to be made by Pullman of reversing the usual order of things: in the first book, the protagonist runs from the gentility of her mother, who heads a governmental group which kidnaps and psychically mutilates children in the name of religion, into the safety of righteous gypsies, with whom she sets out to rescue said children. For example. Eventually the whole multiverse becomes embroiled in a followup to the original rebellion of the Angels (see Milton), everything falling out on nice gnostic lines (i.e. the entity called "god" or, in case you missed Pullman's point, "The Authority" is not the creator but instead the first created to gain self-consciousness, and Lucifer et al. are the good guys, fighting to free all souls from the deadening dungeon of . . . ). But for all that Pullman says, following Blake's famous pronouncement on Milton, he is "of Satan's party and knows it," he ain't. This guy (or, at least, to be fair, this series) wouldn't know (perceptual) free will if it bit his toes off. There's more of Milton's majesty and poetry in one (nearly ^any^ one) of say C.S. Lewis's Narnia pages than in the best of the "His Dark Materials" series. A deadening approach to self-revelation is all it adds up to. Vague spirituality; consider the way Lewis represents the approach of a certain spiritual clarity towards the end of "Dawn Treader," when the sea becomes clear all the way to the bottom, fathoms deep, and the water tastes sweet, and the sun becomes intensely bright, as do the travelers' faces. As a child I read that and was wholly, completely taken by the physical description, in a physical way and not ideational. Now I read it and know what sort of metaphysic he's at, and they address, add to each other. One is the other. There's absolutely none of that in Pullman that isn't obnoxiously ham-handed; and almost always at odds with its surface 'message' is the undertone of a consciousness which believes power defines its own morality. Freedom seems to come down to the right to happily gather some metaphysical particles suspiciously like the 'mitichloridans' (sic) from (ye gods, am I really referencing?) "The Phantom Menace."

If you're still reading let me say I found this series, by the end, psychically revolting. I at least half-read such genre-fiction books now to tell the stories to Jonah, he loves hearing me relay them even more than having them read to him at this point. These three I won't bother with. Too bad.

2006-04-07T15:12:00.000-04:00

I bought some offal from the local organic farm I buy meat from--some lamb kidneys, heart, and liver. I am marinating the heart now, sliced into strips. I can honestly say I have never seen anything so beautiful. The usual conflict of emotions, of course, behind my eyes, but the thing itself there is humblingly beautiful in its composed and familiar perfection. Humbling because it's familiar.

The kidneys were astounding too, but too intense. They smelt like wet sheep in a barn full of peed-on hay during a wet spring rain, even after the soaking in water-and-vinegar. When I ate my one bite, they were like chopped liver in taste (a taste I've always liked) and texture, but behind the taste was a smell--as if I were smelling with my tongue-back, and my throat--as described above. I just couldn't eat it. "A fine tang of faintly-scented urine" indeed! Nothing faint about it. But Lexie the dog gobbled it up. This was two days ago, and she hasn't taken her pleading-for-more eyes off me since.

2006-04-06T12:56:00.000-04:00

Ceremony

What could explain
but the obvious
my words
the obvious obviates
not explained things

but the explanation
shines it thinks
in its own daily arc
the shadows too are a sort of heliotrope though
hope for less

2006-04-03T11:39:00.000-04:00

Sentiments like "Approaching this work, possibly any work, with an air of judgment ultimately will tell you so very little about what is going on when there is so much more to be gained by not doing so, by reading through that old nagging sense, getting beyond it to see what the poet was sensing, was after," where Silliman betrays his conscious reactive programmatics for the true and personal thoughtfulness which makes him such a good, and interesting, reader, make me happy. (The manner in which the 'programmatics' are a result of his goodly reading (or how I surmise the connection) is interesting and probably worth a blogpost, but not today.)

And this "In contrast, I think, to how a previous generation [saw the war in Vietnam], we often want to see the war in Iraq as somehow continuous with a long history of conquest and not, as would be equally possible, an interruption of a peaceful democratic project," from Rhubarb is Susan, is astute, and seems accurate to me.

2006-03-31T15:21:00.000-05:00

Ok, so I'm late. YouTube is cool.

Does anybody enjoy being himself as much as David Byrne?

2006-03-29T14:12:00.000-05:00

I know nothing.

2006-03-21T19:57:00.000-05:00

"While it's difficult to predict an outcome, observers believe Ruth Bader Ginsburg will use her three-fifths of a vote to oppose."

2006-03-18T13:13:00.001-05:00

2006-03-18T13:13:00.000-05:00

2006-03-18T13:12:00.000-05:00

here she is (a month or so ago, i've only just figured how to transfer the pictures I took then).

2006-03-16T23:56:00.000-05:00

Jordan Davis asks "What is it with poets and terms of 19th century sociology? What vets books and poems titled with terms from Marx, Althusser-chic?" I've titled a few in those lines, so here goes:

With me, it's that my dad's a sociology prof. who studied at the New School in the late 60's/early 70's, with a bunch of folks who were, from what I understand, the inheritors of the heavy-duty high-thinking-exceptional strain of German sociology. This was (and is) a very important part of his personality. Him talking about Marx, and Weber, and Freud (and me reading them, a little later but still in the preadolescent ages), strangely enough, form a significant portion of my childhood experience, the concepts I apprehended or half-apprehended as much as the sensation of having absolutely no understanding of what I was being told/read. So I probably use it for different reasons than most poets. The shit's in my bones, and is more of an emotion/sensation for me than it is an intellectual experience. Not that the explicit use of those terms is a major strain of my poetry (though I think the undercurrent abovementioned is), but I do use it. So for example, that's why, in my chapbook, I put the poem "Means of Production . . ." near the Van Gogh/father poem--I don't think a reader would see the connection so straight, and I didn't intend it to be so, but they run nicely together, I thought, for the reasons discussed above. Now I know there’s probably a lot of ore in that rift to mine for a poetry which references both public and private in a powerful and personal way, but I’m not there yet; securitized debt’ll have to wait, I’m confident it’ll be there waiting whether I like it or not.

I can't represent for anyone but myself, but there it is.

2006-03-15T16:11:00.000-05:00

"Take those things you believe, and don't," another gem from The Daily Show.

(warning: video, largish bandwidth needed)

2006-03-12T00:09:00.000-05:00

This is funny, on so many levels. I don't know which is more absurd, the bizarre small-time manner in which Hussein 'ran' his country, or the fact that up until the very actual invasion, Hussein thought the U.S. would never *actually* invade because of how stupid that would be to actually do, or that even in the face of the invasion he was more concerned with the dangers of Shi'ite unrest. Though I think my favorite bit of absurdity is that one of Hussein's generals, having found out that there were, actually, no chemical or biological weapons to rely on for defense (Hussein only told his generals this in December of 2002!), was so "impressed" by Colin Powell's UN presentation, and the insistence of the Bush administration, that he began to suspect that maybe Hussein DID have wmds after all . . .

This farce is history, watch it happen; it's always been this way. Poor Iraq.

(I don't mean funny like haha funny, btw, I mean like crying.)

2006-03-02T22:55:00.000-05:00

Again, I'm linking to Slate . . . check out this photo-essay/essay about the craft of costume design (& the Oscars, but that's not so interesting). Solid points, all. But the thing that impelled me to comment here was the frame of Travolta from Saturday Night Fever, that I wanted to point out that the costume works too well. By that I mean that it doesn't just subtly (beyond the fact that there's nothing subtle about that suit, I mean) clue us in to his social class, aspirations, etc--it gets us to participate. That is, it takes a real act of will on my part to see past the coolness of the suit (let alone the shoes), to see it as signifying Travolta's "oversized sense of himself"; my perception of the intended characterization regarding the other movies' costumes came quickly, seemed obvious without needing the essay's description to clue me in. The SNF frame, though, is too dynamic to leave the spectator truly a spectator. So close, can't see it. Too successful. That's good art.

(It's not just the suit, it's that whole subway-thing. Is there a space in the world like a subway for letting a person feel like they are being, in the eyes of a casual public, exactly who they want to be?)

2006-03-02T18:06:00.000-05:00

I've been too bashful-shy to say anything before, but I've been meaning to thank those who've mentioned What Remains on their blogs (Josh, Jenni, Eduardo, Peter, Suzanne, Matthew, are those I've seen), long or short. Being read is nice; and being mentioned is nice, too. Thanks, all.

(And I also noticed, today, that the robot likes me. That's cool.)

2006-02-25T23:04:00.000-05:00

Also wanted to say, I'll be giving a reading at SUNY-Purchase (in Westchester) Monday night, 7 I think.

And that this reading is worth mentioning, worth going to (info from here):

Brenda Shaughnessy, Craig Morgan Teicher, Thomas Hummell

Sunday 2/26 7:30 PM

The Fall Cafe
Smith Street near the corner of Union
Carroll Gardens
Take F or G trains to Carroll Street
Exit at the back of the train (if coming from manhattan)
take a left out the exit, walk half a block, cross street and there you are.

Tom Hummell worked with me on the chapbook at the PSA, and he is a great poet as well (no small part of the happiness I feel regarding the PSA is that it is populated with talented poets, no surprise I suppose but there it is.) Not to mention his reading-mates here, of course. I'd go to the reading, but I have to prepare myself for Monday, so can but suggest it to you instead, and suggest it I will.

2006-02-25T22:44:00.000-05:00

I've been absent, I know, from here. I've been so . . . busy. With nothing. Well, almost nothing. A tired man's consolation. Lazy consolation.

I've been meaning to write up my thoughts on a bunch of chapbooks, I will soon, in serial. I'll start now with a quick mention of how truly good Tony Tost's World Jelly is; you may have heard it elsewhere, and it's true. Pick it up and read it; I don't care if you have a hard time understanding difficult poetries (let alone if you'd classify this chapbook as difficult); however you conceive of the this/that thing in our country--it doesn't matter where you stand. Pick it up and read it, and then go read almost anything else (but spare yourself the disappointment of reading your own, unless you really want to take yourself to school), it will be slack; you'll see. Talent, and dedication, integrity (poetic, that is), all show in his poetry to great effect. I still maintain something I posted around a year (?) ago regarding Invisible Bride, that TT gets away with a startling amount of --sentimentality?-- that emotion is a strong base for what he does, not intellect (though intellect of the first order, and they play off each other so well--that might be one sort of talent, one I like very much). And it proves a broad enough base to support a number of motifs -- of influence, of creation, of chaos, of desire -- in good proportion to each other (and themselves).

I know I'm making little sense here, all I mean to say is that I don't have the necessary superlatives at hand (if challenged, I may find them, or at least a more precise analysis), except to suggest you read it.

2006-02-24T13:57:00.000-05:00

Whose Flow

Later on, just as sleep finds out
words, and words for words, and narrates
me out of consciousness with whatever words
my waking will be the not-remembering of
I’ll remember nothing but with my body, all tension
will loosen, leap earthward—oh world,
if these large words whose arc my eyes grow dark to
could remember to be silent
in their motion, gracious enough to be
articulate beyond one random spasm
through my leg, a flutter like kicking off the deep end—
what do I hope to save, dividing myself thus
and jumping back and forth—
a drowning man each time? What is the story
I tell both ways, what are these fluent words
I always interrupt [hear], never remember,
which divide me, inundate me,
am I anything other than two
different kinds of sleep?

2006-02-22T19:33:00.000-05:00

But if Marley's fans are cheesy and annoying, at least in this country, so are Pablo Neruda's, and no one holds that against him.

2006-02-17T01:00:00.000-05:00

I've been meaning to mention: have you read "The Age of Bronze" (the Iliad rendered as an archeologically-accurate series of 7 graphic novels)? I just finished the first one, "A Thousand Ships" on the recommendation of a friend and found it wildly effective. The artist makes a few decisions I felt a little leery of, such as abandoning the familiar in medias res opening of Achilles & Agamemnon arguing and instead setting it all chronological--so the first scene is Paris farming (or was it hunting?) with his adoptive (though he doesn't know it yet) dad. But after the first twenty pages or so, I found myself really getting drawn in.

Maybe it's because I'm *so* familiar with the characters and the story, but I found seeing the various actions portrayed graphically emotionally gripping. For example, the scene where Odysseus is sowing salt so Agamemnon doesn't draft him off to war. Just seeing Odysseus rendered as a living person, with an expression on his face: thrilling, I was drawn in. It helps that the artist is very able to bring scenes to life, and makes everyone look real, with singular physical characteristics; and while there's an individual personality for each character, there is also a shared personality which exists throughout the line (I suppose one could call that culture if one wanted, or expressive of 'the arranger', the term Joyceans use for the unifying narrative principles of "Ulysses").

When you think about it, these people (Achilles etc) are kind of the earliest recorded (outside of Lascaux, I mean) superheroes; where better to locate them and their dramas than in a comic book? Very well proportioned to the medium; I couldn't recommend it highly enough.

2006-02-16T00:06:00.000-05:00

I wasn't feeling well, but now I'm feeling better. Better's better.

& check this out. New Blakes turn up, and they go . . . up for sale! The funny thing is, if you read the article, they disappeared because the publisher who commisioned Blake to make them was "impressed by Blake's watercolors, [but] he felt that the artist's style of engraving was not commercial enough."

2006-02-15T19:51:00.000-05:00

Nice space, visual and verbal, in this post from Kate Greenstreet, no?

Her chapbook, btw, has a similarly attractive interest in proportion and elision, relationship and distance, and is very excellent. I highly recommend it. (& hope to say more when I find the time.)

2006-02-10T00:42:00.000-05:00

I write things down half-asleep. At their worst they sound Dedalean-deadly (Stephen, that is). But I still like them. Here's some more:

All an ocean, self-consciousness a region long-traveling swells pass through—perception the region of shallowing limnality, the breakers what we call words. Called words. Those swells, what we choose to fill our consciousness, when choice is an element, which it always is. Which is where my metaphor breaks down; but for that, we are what swells pass through, on their way to words, which wash back through, under and into, away.

* * * * * *

Of Clouds

Apprehension is more important than verbalization. Poetry is verbalization as close to apprehension as can be (or the trying for). That is, it is apprehension acceding to verbalization (grudging) or apprehension transfigured by verbalization (triumphant).

What I mean is, your soul is always whole, but if you for one reason or another think it is not, all things dependent on it (your world) will conform to, will act as if it is, the way you think it is, the way your thought massages it to be; if you like me feel you have an ache in your soul, your body and mind and acquaintances and prayers will all conform. So will your language, and so will your perception. This is what is meant by ‘free will.’

Though all these things which grow strange will tend back to the natural path, of which wholeness whole apprehension is the apprehension of. Poetry, insofar as it is visionary (aperceptive), is this tending back. It also affords for the reader participation, insofar as it is given free reign beyond the social madedness which may serve as scaffold; participation, in that individuals who share society share concerns, concerns on their one face misperceptions, on their other the working out of. The deeper the one, the deeper the other. This is what is meant by ‘group consciousness.' Without context.

(Alternately, that last sentence could read "By which I mean poetry is that without context." My handwriting can be hard to discern, so play it like mad-libs, as you like.)

2006-02-07T11:21:00.000-05:00

Greg Perry sums up with remarkable accuracy how I feel about David Wagoner's poetry in his review of today's daily verse offerings, even coherently stating how the satisfactions of reading his poetry interact with the frustrations.

&: In the next week or two, I'm going to offer little reviews of the chapbooks I've been reading the last few weeks. (As time permits, of course.)(Or not so little.)

2006-02-02T23:50:00.000-05:00

Jose Edmundo Reyes, who some may remember as a blogger from ~ a year ago, is part of a new anthology, one which, I think, seems named (in that it is named after the writing group which it represents) in honest proportion to what it is. Jodie writes

" . . . my writing group,
the Powow River Poets, has just come out with an
anthology of members' work. The Powow River Anthology,
edited by Alfred Nicol and with an introduction by
X.J. Kennedy, is now available from Ocean Publishing
(www.ocean-publishing.com). Here are the details:

The Powow River Anthology

ISBN 0-9767291-5-6

Ocean Publishing
P.O. Box 1080
Flagler Beach, FL 32136-1080

Office Hours Monday thru Friday 9am - 5 pm (Eastern)
(386) 517-1600 Phone
(386) 517-2564 Fax

Our members include Rhina Espaillat, Len Krisak,
Alfred Nicol, A. M. Juster (all of whom have won the
Richard Wilbur award and had books published by U. of
Evansville Press), Deborah Warren, Bill Coyle
(together both have won two of the past three New
Criterion Poetry Prizes), Richard Wollman (Gulf Coast
Prize in Poetry), and others."

2006-02-02T12:03:00.000-05:00

James Joyce, b. today.

2006-02-01T19:29:00.000-05:00

One more curious excerpt from the Heather book, this time on writing for publication:

"Compared with the clarity and matter-of-factness of, say, Caesar, his [his being Sidonious, the 5th century stylist under discussion] love of showing off seemed the height of decadence. Writing at the end of the Victorian era, Sir Samuel Dill passed this judgement:

"' . . . There is little doubt that he valued his own compositions not for their substance, but for those characteristics of style which we now think most worthless or even repulsive in them . . . the torture applied to language so as to give an air of interest and distinction to the trivial commonplace of a colorless and monotonous existence . . . '

"Even in translation, Sidonious can drive you crazy with his inability to call a spade a spade, and there's no doubt he spent a lot of time trying to say things in as complicated a way as possible. One of his later letters contains a nicely illuminating comment, delivered at a moment when he thought that the literary audience he had been educated to address had gone for ever: 'I am putting together the rest of my letters in more everyday language; it is not worth embellishing phrases which may never be published.' But it is not fair to judge fifth-century style by first-century standards, and more recent commentators on late Roman Latin . . . have been less quick to condemn the stylistic complexities that were the height of artistic chic in the fourth and fifth centuries. An age that can see chain-sawed cows in preservative as art is by definition unlikely to judge other artistic endeavours by rigid universal standards." (page 376)

A startling level of self-honesty from Sidonious, no?

Moving on, I'm now reading Caesar's commentaries, one of many books I know I should have read yet haven't. What's startling is the seamlessness of the Roman Empire's end with its beginning; I left off with Roman territories being settled by migratory warbands of barbarians who had grown overly powerful along the borders of the Rhine, the Danube, and the Alps, and I open Caesar to find him preoccupied with stopping this precise thing from happening: the Helvetii want to leave their small territory north of the Alps and conquer a richer and larger one in Gaul; Caesar, for reasons of Roman border security, want no such thing to happen (among other problems he foresaw, was that if they left their territory, more warlike and fierce, and thus less-desirable-as-neighbors Germanic tribes would move into the gap). The continuity makes it more apparent that Rome fell as it rose than anything else I've read.

In any case, I'm enjoying the Caesar immensely. I bet I'd enjoy it in Latin even more. I really wish I had even some tiny natural talent for languages: it is my largest intellectual deficiency, I've never been able to pick up any language, though not for lack of trying: even Hebrew school did little for nothing; four years of French, nothing; living in Israel for five months, barely able to buy a bus ticket. My brain is just not made for more than one language, I suppose, though I find the specific words and the ways they mean, in other languages, fascinating.

That said, Jonathan Mayhew has been writing some super posts on translation recently. The idea of being able to translate is no less fantastic to me than science fiction; maybe that's why I like reading about it so much.

What I'd do to be able to read Dante in Italian.

2006-01-29T21:32:00.000-05:00

I'm really not much for doing politics here--there are many places better, I just watch--but I have to ask: remember all that powder the Democratic Senators kept saying they were saving? Where is it?

What a bunch of losers.

2006-01-27T22:24:00.000-05:00

I've been reading a lot of poetry I've been really enjoying, but when I close my eyes, all I hear is "I said get ready,/ cause this ain't funny;/ my name is Mike D./ and I'm about to get money." This has been going on for days. Is that fair?

Inevitably, thinking about the Beastie Boys . . . I was lucky to be old (or young) enough (in high school, then college) to hear them as primarily farce. But look where they went. They kind of remind me of the Beatles; they began derivative, so virtuoistic in their idiom as to be parodic; and then took direction from their virtue (so to speak) and not their idiom. The psychedelic overlap is gratuitous, though it supports what I'm saying.

Why am I thinking about these things? Something must have suggested to my brain I'm still in college. Cue heavy smoke drifting through the room . . .

2006-01-27T12:24:00.000-05:00

Just wanted to note that the motion through these lines (which end a poem by Joanne Kyger quoted by Ron Silliman today),

When he dropped us off in the city
He took just one very shapely branch
& left us on the sidewalk

with this huge mound
of drooping greenery and blossoms
and drove away into the night

, especially the weight and pause of and around the fourth here quoted, is wholly admirable.

2006-01-25T16:25:00.001-05:00

If you would like to buy a copy of my chapbook "What Remains," you can do so either at the Poetry Society's website (scroll down to the "2005 PSA Chapbook Fellowship Winners"), where it is part of a set, or from me, where it is signed.

[update] Alternately, you can click the paypal button I've added to the sidebar, just to the left.

2006-01-25T10:53:00.000-05:00

I'm starting a new history book, Peter Heather's "The Fall of the Roman Empire." Basically an overview with an eye to arguing that the classic view of the Empire's fall being based on internal contradictions (of economy and morals gathering to weakness in the face of the vitality of the barbarians) is no more than a good story; rather, that the border state German tribes, adopting enough of the Roman economy over the centuries (specifically agriculture technologies which allowed a large population increase along with the usual concentrations of wealth and disparaties attendant on such things), were strengthened and capable of what they did despite continued Roman military and cultural vitality. I'm only 1/4 of the way in, we'll see how it goes.

Here's a relevant little passage (relevant not so much to the summary I gave above as to our country, our time--their military difficulties not even so far away from ours, geographically speaking):

"What did divine favour mean, if not security against defeat at the hands of those lacking that divine favour? The supreme imperial virtue -- again often represented pictorially on coinage as a diety awarding a crown of laurel leaves as this suggests, was one of victory. And any failure to deliver it could be taken as a sign that the current incumbent of the purple was not the right man for the job.

"Imperial spokesmen faced the task, therefore, of angling their accounts of events on the frontier to maintain the required image of imperial invincibility. In early 363, for instance, the emperor Julian took a huge military gamble, leading his army 500 kilometres on to Persian soil right up to the outskirts of the capital, Ctesiphon. The Persian King of Kings, Chosroes, had let him advance, then sprung a trap. The Romans were forced into a fighting retreat all the way back to home territory. By the end of June, when Julian was killed in a skirmish, the situation was hopeless. The Roman army still had 250 kilometres to go, had more or less run out of supplies, and was managing to retreat only about five kilometres a day because of Persian harassment. Julian's successor Jovian -- elected on the campaign -- had no choice but to negotiate a humiliating peace. The Roman army was allowed to depart, but surrendered to the Persians two major cities, Nisibis and Sangara, a host of strongpoints and five border provinces (map 3). But so pressing was the expectation of victory, especially at the start of a reign when the seal of divine approval needed to be particularly evident, that Jovian could not afford to acknowledge defeat. His coinage proclaimed the Persian peace a victory and Themistius [an orator] was trundled out to reinforce the point. The spin-doctor's discomfort is only too evident. The best he could come up with was this: 'The Persians showed that they were voting for [Jovian as emperor] no less than the Romans by throwing aside their weapons as soon as they became aware of the proclamation, and shortly after were wary of the same men of whom before they had no fear.' He followed up with the quip, based on a famous story about the election of the Achaemenid King of Kings Darius in 522 BC, that the -- obviously irrational -- Persians chose their rulers according to the neighing of horses.

" Not a bad effort at a brave front, perhaps, but this was one spin that no one was buying." and so on. [pages 70-71]

This book reads very much like a survey course; a very good one, but it doesn't have the depth of --style? personality? spirit? -- that the Diarmaid MacCulloch did. This one I've had for a day and I'm a hundred pages in, digesting it as I go-- the MacCulloch, usually I could only read 15, or even 5-6, pages, before I had what to digest and ruminate on; had to before I could continue, even for days. His style allowed for more complex association throughout the text. Not that either man is the less apparently learned, and it may be the nature of each discipline--the Romanist I suppose has to reconstruct a whole culture and world out of scattered documents and stories, is more an archaeologist in his/her analysis and less an in-depth commentator than the Renaissance scholar, who shares languages, social structures, Religions, national borders (largely), etc, with her/his subject -- the latter's subject is, more immediately, familiar, so more can be understood as a matter of personality. That said, I think the MacCulloch probably is a rare book in the depth its author managed to achieve an a casual, sentence-by-sentence basis. He also managed to seem very warm and humane, almost familial, which in retrospect is no mean quality for a historian, or at least for them to bring to their text. Comfortably and staggeringly erudite, the very fantasy of what an Oxford prof. would be.

2006-01-13T20:25:00.000-05:00

So, more random thoughts, of use to . . . whom? So busy, not so much time to collect the fragments into anything more coherent this week, so here's what I've got:

All an ocean, self-consciousness a region long-traveling swells pass through—perception the region of shallowing limnality, the breakers what we call words. Called words. (and then, looking back, I added:) Those swells, what we choose to fill our consciousness, when choice is an element, which it always is. Which is where the metaphor breaks down; but for that, we are what swells pass through on their way to words, which wash back through, under and into us, away.

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

I wrote this line, not sure what to do with it:

To kiss you hopeful in the cool breeze of Spring

and then the weather got lovely for a few days--I think it hit 58 degrees on Thursday, here. So maybe it did something on its own (. . . the unacknowledged legislators of the weather?).

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

before the warm weather kissed us:

A Picture

of emptiness outside the house
satisfied the cold
it was lonely;
the more there was the surer it grew
and as the picture did not change,
it concentrated, diminished:
the icicles dripped
less; the moon hung
static; the river,
so fast,
would trip you at the ankles could you
move yourself to walk there,
down to the park
past branches grown black candelabras . . .
the porchlights and streetlights casting
downward through—as if the stars in repose
were reflection, were a dark
uncomposed, a negative lonely for vision,
an unsecond shuttered . . .

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

Not too satisfied with my words these days--like racing on stilts for balance, hard to change direction. But my daughter is lovely, and my son astounding, and Dara no less happy than I am; 'sweat of your brow' is right! We are happy.

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

Rereading Keats' letters, painful to remember the last time I was, because the last time I was was just before Jonah was born. I was mad to write every second I had left to do so whenever I wanted. Recalling what that was like, as a matter of somatic sensation, and feeling the dull exhaustion of now, the not-so-nice part is as the feeling of poetic immersion passes back into tiredness and responsibility. Once passed back again, I'll sleep.

2006-01-06T15:04:00.000-05:00

"It's almost like wiping out Carnegie Hall," said the comic Jackie Mason, whose $10,000 reward for the capture of Abe Lebewohl's killer remains unclaimed. "A sandwich to a Jew is just as important as a country to a Gentile."

2006-01-03T19:55:00.000-05:00

As an essentially private person, as this blog has felt less like a private space, and more like a public one, I've been finding it harder to negotiate what to say here, and how to say it. It's almost like the impulse is towards blogging more intimate details of myself/my life, to balance what feels like an increasingly public quality to blogging, i.e. more bloggers, being around longer, people occasionally googling me now because of, I suppose, the chapbook. Nothing so great, but more than one or two ears turned my way can make me self-conscious, I suppose.

Just thought I'd say.

Anyway, reading this story made me remember one particularly stupid string of days in Israel . . .

I was seventeen, and a friend convinced me that spending a month basically homeless in Israel would be a fun thing to do over the summer. So I signed up to go, and then he couldn't for medical reasons, so I went alone. There, I made friends with a few college guys who were trying to tour for as long as they could for as little as they could. The episode which first came to mind on reading Farris's story was alone from them, wandering the Old City of Jerusalem, getting lost in the souk, and finding myself by the Damascus gate, marveling at everything for who-knows-how-long, eventually finding my way back, having this great 'experience,' and then hearing about a German tourist couple getting stabbed there two weeks later, it ostensibly being the 'wrong' place to be.

But then I remembered the days after that . . . the two-day episode now in mind begins at a deserted city (Haifa?) bus stop at around 10 at night, where three scary people had Justin and I backed against a waiting platform wall. There was a sudden sick feeling of imminent violence, where the concrete all around, which normally is barely noticed, at the edge of consciousness, suddenly becomes--concrete--and an awareness of how prevalent concrete is, and how hard it is, and given to angles and unpleasant surfaces. Justin didn't want to give them our wallets, and then a bus out of nowhere neatly fit against the platform, and on we jumped. It was only a handful of seconds, I remember each one. (I should say that I have never experienced physical violence at the hand of another human in my life, the one exception being Q--, three grades older, who in fourth grade taunted me to 'pull down my pants' as I was walking home with a friend, and I turned and charged him with my head like a ram, and got clocked in the jaw and fell to the ground, and he left. There was no time to be scared, or hurt, there, I don't think it did either. The sensation on the bus stop in Israel, and later that night, was very different.)

We arrived at the equally deserted Tel Aviv central bus terminal around 11:30 pm. At this point I wanted to take a taxi to where we were going (I think we had a youth hostel in mind, though maybe we were just going to try find and sleep on a beach). But Justin said walking is free, so we walked. And got lost. The neighborhoods were getting uncomfortably scary, and I think at one point it became obvious at least one person was following us, so when we actually saw an open hotel, we went in and, though it was obviously nowhere near luxe, paid the $45 American for a room and called it a night.

Each floor shared a bathroom. Our floor (the second) had a bathtub full of (literally) shit and a toilet bowl overflowing. Our room had a window that wouldn't close which looked over a low roof, and the bed was equally (and abundantly) covered with dried blood and dried semen. We could hear a man and a woman arguing and, eventually, her getting beaten, soft dull and repeatedly hit. What could we do? We did nothing, I still feel ashamed. I don't think either of us slept an hour, and when morning came, we made our way to the beach and I fell asleep on my back in the sun. When I awoke, I felt delirious and had little white bumps on my chest, sun poisoning. I staggered into the nearest hotel and spent $15 (remember, these are 1987 dollars, and I was 17) on a pastrami sandwich (flown in regularly from Ratner's), and then $150 on a hotel room, where I slept feverishly. Justin crashed on the floor, but wouldn't chip in. So much for my experiment with budget travel.

So that was my stupid seventeen-year-old story. How much of it was true danger, and how much a timid middle-class American foreigner's imagination? Probably a fair bit of both. Nothing like Farris's adventure, for sure. One common conclusion though: fortune favors the oblivious.

So, if anyone wants to dig out their own embarrassingly stupid travel misadventures? I'd like to hear yours.

&: I know mine is super tame. That's part of the charm, or at least the intended charm.

2006-01-03T19:49:00.000-05:00

"Like High School, 1975's Death Race 2000 seems to have been willed into existence by the disturbed daydreams of bored teenagers . . . "

2005-12-23T13:40:00.000-05:00

A bunch of disparate thoughts. I'll write the (short) one I have in mind and add as the rest reoccur.

1) Lynn Emanuel has some very good poems in the new "Ploughshares." Especially especially the first one. My fingers ache (from rocking Halcyon to sleep for what turned out to be nearly an hour), which makes typing difficult now! so am not typing it in, but it shouldn't be too hard to find, if you want.

2) A poem is better off a window, than a mirror.

3) Thought tends to reify and promulgate itself (I know, no shocker. Just where my head is at.).

2005-12-22T11:53:00.000-05:00

Uh huh.

2005-12-18T13:23:00.000-05:00

I really need to be posting more . . . I'm trying! (or will be.)

Here's a photo of Halcyon a friend took. She is a very wonderful baby. She does ^not^ like her mommy to leave her for very long. Other than that, super peaceful.

I was staring at a first draft last night, all the possibilities I write in--usually where the poem has an uncertainty, I'll write and write possibilities, and look and weigh--I think I'm actually trying to find simultaneously a finality for that part and a phrasing/imagining which preserves the uncertainty. Anyway, my drafts can get really messy and I have to be careful to rewrite or to type them up occasionally because it has happened that I become unable to figure out what I had in mind. Actually, that can happen just from my handwriting, my 'a's, 'e's, 'o's, 'r's and 's's become frustratingly indistinguishable.

Anyway, I scanned the draft, you can see it below the Halcyon picture--it should be legible if you click on it, to enlarge it. I can't say as to the quality of the ^writing^, I haven't read it since I jotted it down last night before going to bed.

2005-12-18T13:22:00.000-05:00

Halcyon

2005-12-18T13:19:00.000-05:00

what a draft looks like

2005-12-12T19:55:00.000-05:00

This is really fun--Jonah's been spending lots of time just playing with it. It's kind of mesmerizing.

You can click through to all sorts of other simulators, too.

2005-12-04T11:56:00.000-05:00

Wow that was fun. Thank you, everyone, for listening.

I feel like a grinning idiot who just keeps saying 'thank you' to whoever'll listen. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Beyond that, I don't have much to say. It was wonderful to read for so many people. And with such talented writers--for each reader, I had the distinct feeling that that person's poetry was the poetry I was there to hear. Wonderful. And everyone so nice, and generous. And Halcyon, who'd been teething all day and kvetchier than ever, slept the whole time, until she woke up around 11ish to let us know we really had to get home. What a good baby.

So now I have the chapbooks. Well, only one, mine--I'll have more copies soon. If interested, you can buy here, at the PSA store (or should be able to very soon), or if you want a scrawly signature from yours truly, from me. I think they're $10, though again, I'll know when I get them. If you've sent me for trade, I'll reciprocate soon, as soon as I can.

When I said generous before, I meant it, btw. As part of the whole thing, I get also to spend a month at the Millay Colony (which I thought I was going to have to say no to, but Dara said say yes, so I did), as well as give a reading & a one-time class at SUNY-Purchase. The people at the Poetry Society--all of them--are phenomenal, warm, and dreamily generous. I can't thank them enough.

Continuing, regarding the near future: I'm also going to begin teaching for the Rutgers Writing Extension program (poetry & fiction, I think, so two classes). And I'm giving a lecture at some point in the Spring at Middlesex County College on something literary. And in a few weeks Dara goes back to work, which means I'll be taking over for Halcyon a good bit of the day. All to say, I'm gonna blog when I can, but I could say the same thing for brushing my teeth. I'd been preparing myself, mentally, to move the blog way back towards the involved-reading-of-a-text-and-contemplating-it-in-keystrokes mode (i.e. Moby-Dick, Stanley Fish, Spicer), and I will when I can. Really. Though I'll probably often only have time to post pictures of Halcyon being cute. Well, maybe not only, but at least.

2005-11-24T23:16:00.000-05:00

Thanksgiving

They were the only one who thought they were right, who were right.

The loss spread quickly, and we were left standing, edifices along the cliff over the sea.