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"A note to Pound in heaven: Only one mistake, Ezra! You should have talked to women"
--George Oppen, _Twenty Six Fragments_
Archives:
xoxo Hey, E-Mail Me! xoxo
ManY PoETiKaL HaTs LisT:
Michael Helsem's Gray Wyvern NOLA Fedora.
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poetry. hks' smelly head baseball cap.
Samuel Beckett's Lucky's
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giving his oration
on what's questionable in mankind,
in *Waiting for 'God-ot'*.
my friend John Phillips's 1969
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ultimate: Stephanie Young's First Well Nourished Moon
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Eileen Tabios: Corpsepoetics [see Chatelaine above]
YaY! Liz's Thirdwish
Ultra Linking
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Tuesday, January 13, 2004
The Constant Critic is out--
a very nice piece by Jordan Davis
:: check this out, too :: *)*
on Lorenzo Thomas's Chances are Few.
chris at
10:33 PM
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from Joseph Brodsky's "Eclogue IV: Winter" * :
VII
Dreams in the frozen season are longer, keener.
The patchwork quilt and the parquet deal,
on their mutual squares, in chessboard warriors.
The hoarser the blizzard rules the chimney,
the hotter the quest for a pure ideal
of naked flesh in a cotton vortex,
and you dream of nasturtium's stubborn odor,
a tuft of cobwebs shading a corner nightly,
in a narrow ravine torrid Terek's splashes,
a feast of fingertips caught in shoulder
straps. And then all goes quiet. Idly
an ember smolders in dawn's gray ashes.
(291)
*Joseph Brodsky, "Eclogue IV: Winter," in Collected Poems in English. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000
chris at
12:21 PM
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About Texfiles Poet of the Week, Mark Weiss :
Although I have linked to excellent source sites (Wild Honey Press) with biographical information about Mark Weiss, I have not yet posted some here. I will now, just below, but perhaps even more significant than the listing form of biographical statement is an autobiographical essay, which Mark has kindly written to be included during this feature. It's a fascinating self-reflective essay concerned with montage--how the poems were formed for his Chax Press publication, Figures (2001; and see below, 10 Jan 04 postings, for two of the poems from this chapbook, both also read aloud in mp3 audblog to accompany that post). Without added verbiage from me, then, here they are:
1. Biographical Information on Mark Weiss:
Mark Weiss, a New Yorker by birth and inclination, has taught writing and literature at Columbia University, Hunter College, Pima College, the University of Arizona, and the University of California--San Diego. He was for many years a film maker and a psychotherapist. He has published three chapbooks, A Letter to Maxine (Heron Press, 1974), A Block-Print by Kuniyoshi (Four Zoas/Nighthouse Press, 1994), and Figures (Chax Press, 2001); two collections of poetry, Intimate Wilderness (New Rivers Press, 1976) and Fieldnotes (Junction Press, 1995); and the anthology Across the Line / Al otro lado (Junction Press, 2002), which he coedited with Harry Polkinhorn. Forthcoming are a bilingual anthology of Cuban poetry since 1944 and and the bilingual collections Stet: Selected Poems of José Kozer, Selected Poems of Gastón Baquero, and Selected Poems of Raúl Hernández Novás. From 1973 to 1975 he edited and published the journal Broadway Boogie. He currently lives in San Diego, where he publishes Junction Press and buys and sells fine art.
2. Mark's autobiographical essay concerned with technical aspects of the writing of his chapbook, Figures :
by Mark Weiss: A TECHNICAL NOTE ON FIGURES: 32 POEMS
For six or seven years in my late teens and early twenties I was involved, as director, editor, camera man and sound man, and sometimes in more than one capacity, in the making of a dozen short films. Most fell into the amorphous category of documentary, which in my case meant anything from the highly abstract to promotional films. I was pretty good at it; a number of the films were shown at various festivals, and one that I directed, shot and edited was among three shorts chosen for the first New York film festival.
Even now when I’m doing visual work the perceived tends to transform itself, the natural world seeming to be composed of letter forms when I’m designing a book, for instance. I was more suggestible as an adolescent, or at least less in control of my suggestibility. I remember a particular moment in it must have been the Fall of 1962 at around 2 p.m. on a day radiant with enormous white clouds floating in deep blue when, walking north on the east side of Broadway in Manhattan perhaps a hundred feet above 106th Street (my back to the bank, barbershop and luncheonette that were there then) I glanced westward and it occurred to me that every shot one took or imagined (and the world across the street was insistently composing itself into shots) was somehow removed from reality, no longer there, survived only in the camera, that the perceived field had closed itself like water rushing to fill the place from which water had been withdrawn, so that neither scar nor seam indicated the empty place where the stolen image had been, and that if one weren’t careful one could stumble into the void left behind and never escape. It was as if within that luminous afternoon were folded endless unknowable and dangerous secrets.
I was of course obviously right that the captured moments no longer existed apart from their captured versions–time no longer passed for those images. The shot remained; the place had moved on.
It’s probably not necessary to add that in those days I spent a great deal of time pursuing hallucinations (I can’t praise enough the educational value of hallucinogens for those lucky enough to survive them), and the notion that I had that the pieces of time locked in the camera could be reproduced, and not just as prints on celluloid, or even projected back into the spaces from which they’d been removed, creating bizarre temporal discordances, may have been a side-effect of that pursuit. Regardless, behind the pursuit was the the same sense that there were other possibilities hidden within the known.
Editing was my passion. It seemed to me that a film could be made of nothing but blank leader, because something of interest, the pattern of mind, would inhere in the the juxtaposition of durations.
Film, like writing, music or dance, is temporally dynamic–it proceeds through time. Film proceeds by means of different forms of movement: the frame can move, as in tracking or panning shots; objects or characters can move within the frame; and the shot can be edited into a sequence of shots. Editing is by its nature abstract, as Kuleshov demonstrated in the teens of the last century in what has become known as the Kuleshov Experiment. He salvaged a closeup of the actor Mozhukhin and intercut it with shots of a plate of food, a dead woman in a coffin, and a little girl playing with a teddy bear. “The public raved about the acting...,” Pudovkin, who assisted Kuleshov, tells us. “They pointed out the heavy pensiveness of his mood over the forgotten soup, were touched and moved by the deep sorrow with which he looked on the dead woman, and admired the light, happy smile with which he surveyed the girl at play. But we knew in all three cases the face was exactly the same.” The Kuleshov Experiment, and all montage, depends upon the human habit of creating meaningful connections between unlike things that happen to be next to each other. Associative memory systems are based on this, and so are narrative and the sciences.
My first film was a series of six sequences, each of a different cemetery, separated by five equally morbid sequences of a ruined house, a slum clearance that looked exactly like the ruins of war, vehicles overgrown by plants, a half-sunken tug boat, and some discarded furniture (I was 16, which is excuse enough). Only a half dozen shots had any camera movement, and there were no people or animals, hence no movement within shots. There was also no plan beyond the thematic: shots of cemetery a, shots of demolition site b. There was no preconceived narrative to determine the order or duration of the individual shots.
One could say that each shot had been found.
It took me three years and two versions to edit what became a 12 ½ minute film. I had improvised an editing tree out of a couple of pieces of lath, some wire brads and a waste-basket. Each shot hung from a brad until discarded or glued into sequence. Establishing sequence was the problem. I shuffled those shots endlessly, until it seemed to me that I knew every variation in grain or shadow. Gradually they assumed an order that seemed inevitable.
Probably one could extract from the existing order a structural principle or set of principles binding one shot to another: similarity or contrast in structure, light and shadow, camera angle, the like, or continuity or discontinuity of evocation. But that would explain why the sequence works, not why it’s preferable to the other possible sequences that might also have “worked.” In practice, it was a question of what felt right
Editing is the creation of association. It’s also the arrangement and manipulation of time. Duration was an issue. Some shots or sequences of shots passed quickly, creating the illusion of action, but the film itself was about stasis, and most of the shots were excruciatingly long–I remember counting the number of seconds that seemed tolerable and then adding a few more. The idea was to create a tension something like a dancer’s extending the line until it appears inevitable that there’s going to be a catastrophic loss of balance before he or she resolves it in the next gesture. Like the dancer I was calling the viewer’s, and my own, attention to the transition between gestures and to the imagined space between.
This process seems to me now incredibly obsessive, but also incredibly disciplined, for an adolescent. Inherent in the making of any art (or for that matter any structure) is, I think, the necessity for a set of refusals, hopefully evolving from the materials at hand; the alternative would be an undifferentiated ocean of phenomena.
For several years in my twenties I imposed the crudest form of refusal on my poetry, writing almost nothing but sonnets, an occasional villanelle and a couple of pieces of blank verse. God knows why–maybe it had to do with enduring a first, horrific marriage. I was very bad at it. No sooner had the marriage ended, in any event, than I began to write free verse and to fall under the spell of what Don Allen codified as the new American poetry. I learned to never be without a notebook in my back pocket, because that simple preparation was at once an act of faith that something might be found and a declaration of metier, and I learned to write only what came to me in language and never to write for the sake of writing. Looking back at my own poetry of that period I can already see the movement towards assemblage, but it was another 17 or 18 years, in the wake of writing the introduction for Mac Wellman’s Satires (St. Paul, MinnesotaNew Rivers Press, 1985), and under the influence of medication that rendered continuity of focus almost impossible, before I gave myself full permission to abandon the formalities of narrative continuity, to approach, in other words, what I had already known as a teenage film maker.
Figures: 32 Poems is a sequence of detachable pieces best read, I think, as a serial poem. Most of the numbered parts are composed of discrete units of a line or a few lines, few containing both noun and verb, separated by blank space indicating silence that seem to me to ring with meaning. An improvisation yoking the comic to the tragic. Snapshots, my notebook a camera, the captured image (whether of an internal state or an external or imagined object or event) viewed unsentimentally, and without hierarchy. Then pasted together, torn apart, and pasted together again until it feels right.
There are no adequate words for the process in English. Disjunction implies the separation of joined things, which is usually in my practice the opposite of what I’m doing, although there are disjunctive moments. The various terms imported from French lose in translation their native grittiness and become academic jargon, a way of elevating the seriousness of an argument: bricolage and collage have lost in English the sense of make-shift and craft (a bricoleur is a handyman, a tinkerer, a do-it-yourselfer, collage means “gluing” or “wallpaper hanging”) that they never lose in French, and that tied the artist to anyone who puts things together. Assemblage will have to do, or another French term from which the grime has fallen in its journey to English, montage.
Montage focuses on the connections between things but also on the spaces between. Silence in poetry, as in music, is as important as sound, and it contains meaning. The nature of that meaning (because not all silences are the same) is influenced by the words that surround it and the impetus of the piece at large, but it’s probably too slippery to define, and the undefined nature of that meaning creates a tension, a shifting commentary on the voiced moments around it. The world of the poem becomes something like the world across Broadway in that moment in1963: immanent with unknowable dangers, possibilities, and temptations, a place to lose one’s way.
chris at
10:01 AM
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Mama Davis's son
for Ced May
was feelin' blue all day
all night feelin' it goin' on,
blue slides soughing around him
through his eyes, his belly, his thighs
his thinking & it was catching
in the throat
***
so he wrote it
all into a smooth curving bundle of silver threads,
looping over and around one another:
this is what it means
to embrace
***
wide wooden buttons, summer creme nylon lingering
at the curb, a striped creme, almost an elbow sleeve
down to and through his long fine
***
fingers & loaded up his art with lungs, cheek, lip, tongue
with that blue pushing uphill & down so he
had to turn that blue to blew
turned it up into clear early
morning sky--
***
blew all that old blue out both sides
his mouth all
around & out
a brass amphi,
a brass amphi full blue,
for long ways, blue of hundreds
of thousands
trumpet miles,
& so he was.
***
Listening: Miles Davis: Kind of Blue
cm
chris at
8:29 AM
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Hah ! Best hat from Google, resulting in a Texfiles hit:
Crocheted Hat with Flames
Yeah.
chris at
7:04 AM
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Dunno. This part of this one just got to me.
Doesn't, or shouldn't have to matter why, no ?--cm
"... We know wolves
and the cold.
Save us
from men in boats"--Malcolm Davidson, Tramspark Blog
chris at
5:32 AM
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Monday, January 12, 2004
About Those Irrepressible Frogs :
Aristophanes, Fate, Family...
chris at
12:15 PM
|
 audio post powered by audblog
from Mark Weiss, Texfiles Poet of the Week :
Two poems from * Figures * (Chax Press, 2001) :
XXI
Eat the baby
spit out the bones
filling the hollow space with life.
Long carpus and metacarpals the last
joint of her left
thumb, for instance, when her hand
shields the near side of her face
in shyness
*
The pleasure of watching an obvious strategy.
*
Each day each night I
thrust and parry
carry the voice and the
the bag of and
that breathless language.
*
A beauty that her mother never had.
*
Potted plants old flowers
coffee grounds
punctuation depiction
narrative.
The nature of the fluid calligraphy of light
through the slits of the blinds
onto gauze curtains
shimmering
in every breeze
from every viewpoint.
*
The defense of modesty is the maker’s
scant integrity.
*
Because you couldn’t
be other than you are.
*
As through gauze curtains
the dance of impatience
**
*
(20-21)
XXVIII
A last drink with the boatman
and the water lapping. Lost
in blue froth
at the edge
of the wave at the end
of night.
Layers of froth, and inland
the sound of dawn-bird and the last revelers.
Wind blows the white pages.
Last blue of night
first blue of morning.
*
The dangerous conflict
of the non-human.
*
Into the darkest place
the light penetrates.
Sculpting with light.
The ghost of a brush stroke
the ghost of a thought
the ghost of an imprint.
The shore of the sun
the powder of light
and at night
here on the edge of it
here where it breaks or drifts
this vulgar place
density of event
dots in a matrix.
The sail the sun
the horizon.
*
Sky interpenetrates the tree
as an act of passion.
*
Sky-theater.
*
The bend of a thumb
the bend of a nipple.
*
The thrilling rain.
*
Someone has died in this thrilling rain.
the terrible wind in
whatever kind of trees.
*
I have made this voyage
before,
and before
and before
and before.
***
*
(27-28)
(((((((((((((. .Figures. .))))))) * ) * ((((((((((((((((((((((c. Mark Weiss)))))))))))))))))
chris at
8:20 AM
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Sunday, January 11, 2004
Added later (actually moved to this entry due to space problems elsewhere), regarding Sunday: I have heard today from my good friend, young enlistee soldier-Pvt. Mark Shtreyzman, who is now a guest of Uncle Sam's somewhere in Iraq, I believe. He sends well composed fotos, much as his poems are well composed, but full of everything imaginable: in one foto, he is smiling along an uphill, cobbled street, near a tall stone building, strangers passing. Looking the brave he's been taught to look. Also looking like a high school student. That open. Mark S: be careful!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~cm*poem~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Mimeo Lessons
Schooled between covers
in scent of mimeo-bleed cut
of paper aroma desire purpling
alphabetic on white sheet approval
to more stamp word
saturate
postal lettering
gazing inchbands on market T-bone
carts of fat ink blue purple across the flesh veil
completely edible me supposedly
harmless as book
print
super shopping dye
pour the waxed
circles of floor
in the endless singing
radio punishments
over head.
Think ratios:
faith/fate
lb/$
supermarkets
will never be over
your widest eye.
How unnecessary is construal
immortalized usables
pointy paper golden
Good Housekeeping's
Family Circle anxiety
for dessert recipes
so never to talk
of home & dirty
wars
here:
more mimeo lessons
to straight imprints
& sex stamp of approval in blue ink
thigh cut I am blue ink from birth
certificate & body after mimeo under
state control--over
as in driver
license, college degrees, all the personal
checks
at banks the teller
asking more names
in my face
over the curve of blue
ink (is)
noise
coin, mimeo over
& over.
~~~chris~~~~murray~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~(* ? *)~~~~~~~
chris at
1:12 PM
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Courtesy of Never Nuetral :
Ernesto, claro que si!--muchas gracias para esta prudencia " 'Al contrario de la nausea sartreana, hija del tedio, la melancholia es el hambre ontologica del ser consciente.* ...' "--Julio Hubard
* Which I translate as: "Contrary to Sartrean disgust (or nausea if one prefers the stronger descriptor, or less literally, the catchphrase in English, derived from the 1950s-60s philosophical thought of Jean Sartres, "Existential angst"), daughter of boredom, melancholy is the ontological hunger to be conscious... ."
I find Hubard's a refreshing response both to the depressingly dead ends of Sartrean thought (existance has neither a priori nor ultimate noetic meaning), and to oversimplified, or the pop-culturally-wandering, elasticity of definition regarding what is now called depression--of which melancholia is both root term and named as a symptom of form.
If *being* (the ontological condition) is prone to stray away from its moment and thus also its momentum, simply because it is part and parcel of consciousness and imagination which have no set forms, then excess straying or straying too far from the moment would create a condition of hunger/want/need/desire "to be conscious," yes: to be in the moment, not elsewhere. The distinction is not really even subtle. Hubard is saying that conscious *being* (the condition) is not necessarily a complete dead end as in Sartrean thought; it's merely a matter of form and placement while in the paces of momentum, the flux of "being."
Thanks again, Ernesto.
chris at
9:49 AM
|
On the rewrite of Camus:
... that life is worth living(o)loving ...
[in one sense, then, this can be a matter of substituting an "O" for the "I"... ]
note: if clicking this link after Jan 11, scroll to Jan 10
chris at
12:01 AM
|
Saturday, January 10, 2004
Jumpin' Smileys!
Thanks to Mark Young, who posted a poem at As-Is in response to one of Mark Weiss' Australia poems (and do check out my very flash response in the comment box, too...)
chris at
1:59 PM
|
((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((c.m.))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))
from Mark Weiss, Texfiles Poet of the Week--
a poem from his new manuscript, * Australia * :
Ormiston Gorge
Up a long incline and around a hill, into a canyon, then opens
onto the Pound, wide floodplain, a lake once--one can see
along the mountains the mark of old beaches--reduced, as now, to a series of deep, cold,
shadowy pools in an expanse of rock and sand. The Finke river,
salvation of seabirds, and once
a songline. There are fish, a sort of bream, that grow a foot long and die
when the pool dries but always reappear
with rain.
Ants everywhere, red sand
for soil, a ready-made pigment.
A cut through the mountains at a bend of the dry bed. At the outer edge a
cliff
undercut by a still crescent of water, and on what would be the slow side,
the eddies, pink sandstone broken into square terraces. Emerging, the
largest pool,
in places cut beneath the hill, but on the other side a wide beach, and on it
some kids from America and some aborigines, also kids--teenagers
from a mission school, volunteers and their charges,
down from Darwin to show their land to the natives
and to bring them a god. Such
perfect innocence, innocent of the temptation
of irony and of all temptations.
I want to tell them, “whatever you do
you’ll never do again.” Despite joy
or sorrow.
((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((copyright:::Mark Weiss)))))))))))))))))))))))))))
chris at
1:29 PM
|
Get your word on: if you haven't found this yet, check out Poetology
& Jahipster tells some reality behind working with producers in *Afrodite life* : www dot jahipster dot com
chris at
12:20 PM
|
Yay!! Shin Yu Pai, currently a Boston-area Poet & Photographer,
who has published work in one of our fav online journals,
can we have our ball back?
(# 16, an issue that also includes a poem by moi !)
whose most recent book is * Equivalence * (La Alameda Press, 2003)
( here is Joyelle McSweeney's review of it in * The Constant Critic *)
will be coming to Dallas in February to do a program with a school through the Dallas Writer's Garret.
And also, I'm hoping, we can do something here in Arlington, or maybe a combined reading with DFW area poets? I'm going to be looking into venues for a fun poetry reading that weekend. Perhaps at UTA, but hey, if anyone has a better idea-- maybe something a little less, um, *education/all*?--let me know.
And definitely, if you want to read yr stuff,
give me your info:
CMURRAY@UTA.EDU
or
CMURRAY88@YAHOO.COM
& Tex is over here smokin' roll-yr-owns & falling down drunk & loud, singin' & tossing Gary Cooper's Ten Gallon Stetson off the balcony:
Yo-Yip-Yip-Yippee-I-YaY-Aay mah leettle doeggies:
Oh mah students iz goenta luv this, a poettreee--hooo-weeee...
& I'm sayin' to Tex:
Okay now Tex, You are Not Willie Nelson.
You are not even Boxcar Willie: you know this behavior is just perpetuating the bad stereotype of the decent working cow-man, will you
just settle yrslf down about this poetry party now 'til we know for sure, hey?
chris at
7:27 AM
|
from John Ashbery* :
"Paradoxes and Oxymorons"
This poem is concerned with language on a very plain level.
Look at it talking to you. You look out a window
Or pretend to fidget. You have it but you don't have it.
You miss it or it misses you. You miss each other.
The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot.
What a plain level? It is that and other things,
Bringing a system of them into play. Play?
Well, actually, yes, but I consider play to be
A deeper outside thing, a dreamed role-pattern,
As in the division of grace these long August days
Without proof. Open-ended. And before you know
It gets lost in the steam and chatter of typewriters.
It has been played once more. I think you exist only
to tease me into doing it, on your level, and then you aren't there
Or have adopted a different attitude. And the poem
Has set me softly down beside you. The poem is you.
(181)
from "The Picture of Little J. A. in a Prospect of Flowers"
III.
Yet I cannot escape the picture
Of my small self in that bank of flowers:
My head among the blazoning phlox
Seemed a pale and gigantic fungus.
I had a hard stare, accepting
Everything, taking nothing,
As though the rolled-up future might stink
As loud as stood the sick moment
The shutter clicked. Though I was wrong,
Still, as the loveliest feelings
Must soon find words, and these, yes,
Displace them, so I am not wrong
In calling this comic version of myself
The true one. For as change is horror,
Virtue is really stubbornness
And only in the light of lost words
Can we imagine our rewards.
(167)
*John Ashbery, "Paradoxes and Oxymorons," and "The Picture of Little J. A. in a Prospect of Flowers," in Postmodern American Poetry. Paul Hoover, Ed. New York: Norton, 1994.
chris at
6:58 AM
|
Contemporary Poetry Review's out: Special Issue on Lowell, including an interesting-looking article on the sonnets, by Christopher Bakken.
chris at
2:57 AM
|
Friday, January 09, 2004
Half Sonnet, Will Ski *
A sonnet a day will keep thee just right
On rockin, Mike ! YaY !! You're back to bloggin'
Across that slippery Sonnetarium slope,
I see, and with Ol' Ovid's drama'd poles.
But darn it all, I'll never lose this clippity
Clop--tho hey!--wax that iamb-ski,
& etc, Good-Mike-Snider: do Keep On : )
* Sorry but I'm only allowed half a sonnet per day,
and as you can see from this half sonnet
(a/b/c/c/d/d/b--in near rhyme only)
it belongs somewhere between Mother Goose,
tap dancing, typing, cartwheels,
and Cheerleading Camp : (
alas...
but Mike Snider,
now ** he really writes a sonnet--check it out.**
chris at
9:23 AM
|
doyouknowwhereyourpersonaearetonight?doyouknowwhereyourpersonaeare
Dept of Text Speaking for Itself:
Yasusada "Alias, I said, I quote you..."
--followed by a brief comment from this (Un)Tex Blogger--
from Araki Yasusada, * in Doubled Flowering ** :
"Sentences for Jack Spicer Renga" ***
Walking, we insisted the Manyoshu was a blur, and why we said it on
that path is also a blur.
( seven beats, rapidly, ko-tsuzumi )
The tile has a pattern and a dancer walking there.
(rrrr went a bell, and the dancer went rrrr)
The lover was like a rose, beneath the light of the bar, leaning.
Going out and into the shadows that are massed against the sound
of a bell.
( one strike, densho )
You wouldn't believe what the others said:
( five seconds, random, shakuhachi)
They said things like "Death," "Yukio Mishima," or "Have a nice day."
( five seconds, random, hickirichi)
The lover lay down on the stone and I pulled off my shirt or vice-versa.
( ten seconds, random, da-daiko, uckinarashi, mokug-yo)
There were flowers, flattened, in the closed book.
Alias, I said, I quote you.
(one strike, densho)
Alias, the book is near your ear, in the photograph that is about you.
(one strike, densho)
(His seems to be a "heady" sort of writing, in love with the trace of thought itself)
So the writing is barely legible on the ancient screen.
(seven beats, rapidly, ko-tsuzumi)
So I call back his arm, drifting into the massed shadows of the rose.
(one strike, densho)
Now the dancer is tracing a pattern over the pattern, feet clicking
against the tile.
*** [By Yasusada and Akutagawa Fusei*.]
[Ink-brushed notes added below in Fusei's calligraphy]
No messages, no intention to share emotion. No lyrical intensity--percussive soundings within patterns of harmonic or dissonant chords; utterance as autonomous fact and its saturation in context ( this tension). Gaps as intrinsic to such grammar--less as caesura than as sign. Spicer's ghost as a concave form I glimpsed, hovering, a few feet above poem.
[ Yasusada's cursive note added in pencil] Ask Mr. Davidson _1_ : What does he think that word truly means--"lyrical." And ask him, also, what is the meaning of those broom-like forms attached to the front of his skirt?
[ _1_. From material in the notebooks we know that Mr. Davidson was a teaching colleague of Mr. Rogers, and, like the latter, a native of Scotland. From this and other notes in the notebooks, it appears that these individuals sometimes wore their native costumes while teaching.]
(82-83)
** Araki Yasusada, "April 9, 1968 Sentences for Jack Spicer Renga," in Doubled Flowering. New York: Roof Books, 1997. [Copyright of Kent Johnson.]
* Note & Comment on text from Chris Murray: If it matters to some to know the following information, then I will say this much: "Araki Yasusada" is the name of an authorial persona (a "doubled flowering" which is a figural representation of authorial presence and absence, a doubling of authorial effect, both a split & a combining, through poetic text, ya kno?)--a character performing text as if intentional. "Akutagawa Fusei" is similarly employed here, though as a character whose role is editor, thus one with even more performative intention within this text.
In the end it does not matter who constructed these personae--which is to say, a name for that function, the cultural performer(s), otherwise lumped & called an author, does not matter. Author carries import as though a godly person had special powers with language including ways to grant some manufactured & unalterable truth to the issued text and the personae created in the text. The text will always play and will do so outside self-reassuring controls and fictions such as the author-function. Authors do not matter.
What matters is what is said, how it is said, in what historical presence, conditions & context, and with what intertextual discourse contributing in and as community. Then, who reads, what they do--what actions are commited with people influenced by all that intertext. For textuality is made of layerings of aliases performing actions; it is therefore prepositional, and dynamic in space and time: between, to, and with, others as community, not as or by godly author decree (and the interests of captitalism conflict nicely, or irresolvably, with this, no?) ... "Alias, the book is near your ear, in the photograph that is about you" ... cm
whereisyouraliaswhereisyouraliaswhereisyouraliaswhereareyouryour'syours?
chris at
4:21 AM
|
Thursday, January 08, 2004
I did not forget. I thought about ya, I just forgot to enter this post during that day, Tuesday, 06 Jan :
* Happy Birthday, Danny O'Connell *
chris at
3:09 PM
|
"Ernesto Cardenal releases the third and final volume
of his autobiography..."--Thanks for this news, Guillermo (post of Tuesday 06 Jan)
chris at
2:50 PM
|
* Love Your sNOBuddHA * Lanny !
(scroll to Tuesday, Jan. 06)
chris at
2:16 PM
|
YaY!! From the Chatelaine: Check it out: *PINOYPOETICS & "The Impending INVASIAN" *
chris at
2:08 PM
|
from Mark Weiss, Texfiles Poet of the Week :
3 additional poems from his new manuscript, Australia
Kings Canyon
Mannerly trees.
Discrete plants inhabit their places
each within its patio of sand.
What significance, if any,
to the ragged black cloth
draped on a fallen bough?
Ghost gum, white pine
exploit the cracks.
Desert grass tree.
No two places no two moments alike
each a cinder
lit and extinguished.
The endless holocaust that will have its end
at the end of everything
in entropic distance.
Cycads fernlike palmlike survivors.
Not quite in any sense the goat I was,
nonetheless I save myself when I trip
and slide
onto the scree. Only a little cost
to weathered tendons.
My own shadow trapped
amid the odd linear shadows of desert plants.
A frenzy of wind.
Toward the end of his life my father asked me “why
do you always have to do things
your own way?” and I laughed, not aware
there had been a choice.
Poetry first and foremost
a tool for knowing.
No time to note
everything. One makes perhaps
the wrong choices,
but so it is.
I was thinking for instance, when I tripped,
of the Irish kid
behind the breakfast counter. From Kerry,
she said, and I’d forgot to tell her
about my time in Skibbereen, all of it,
the car broken, waiting at roadside
for the rental company. Hard to know what’s not
significant. A dirty edge of town,
an oily ditch by the road,
horse-drawn wagons hauling scrap.
And here I am at the base of a canyon,
pancakes of sandstone,
in the dead center of Australia,
wind whipping
strange trees. If I’m very careful
I can parse their sounds.
Olive-green, yellow grasses--
millet, I think--sprays of flowers,
orange, yellow, occasional blue,
and stumps of charcoal from the last burn
in the overwhelmingly red landscape.
To the West MacDonalds
Twenty-six wild camels. I walk among them
and they amble off, small groans from those
forced to rise.
Ur of the Chaldees.
Like me, the first of them transported
from Arabia might have thought
“not so bad, a lot like home.”
Sky ahead red with blowing sand.
All morning the wind whipping. Through every dry watercourse
a flood of red sand, and the sky to the south and east
something between pink and purple.
450 K to my next campsite,
another night under the stars, unless the wind
prevent it. Though certainly a tent would be useless
in such a gale.
All manner of leaf and twig blowing.
Tricky to drive, but a lovely wind
to stand in.
Helen Gorge
Due south a great starless blackness,
like Poe’s negative where black was white and the savage god
inhabited an ultimate warmth within the frozen antipodes.
I sit here waiting for the dingo I have been told is in the habit
of coursing the sand, unlikely as it seems
that such a hunted beast
would pass before its hunters.
All over Australia poison baits are offered
for its eradication. It’s not really native, one hears
repeatedly, probably came with the aborigines, no more than
50,000 years, and maybe less, as little as 3
millennia. So then, authenticity becomes a matter
of choosing the moment and killing all
that follow. By that logic, why not poison
the aborigines, why not the europeans, leave the land clean
of all but birds, and reptiles, and marsupials?
If a wallaby hops in a canyon and nobody sees it
is it really there?
High-pitched electric squeak of a bat.
Alpha Centauri and its mate still above the cliffs, but the cross
lost from sight. South, however,
exactly where it was.
In this desert drought’s
the only news, flocks trimmed
by two-thirds, and a good lamb
goes for 150 that last year would have fetched
a third of that.
The line articulated
so as to express volume.
High up a plane deadheads for Canberra. Down here
the rumble of engines. What can the creatures
make of it?
The wind’s died
to a downy breeze, enough to keep
the flies away.
Cliff. Absence of stars
is how you know it’s there.
La Chingada and La Llorona stalk
the dreams of Mexicans,
cause and effect
to the very edge
of the fiesta.
Glen Helen at dawn
a pair of black birds--
cormorants--loonlike
on the water.
Silver fish--bream--
leap for their breakfast.
Clucking and trilling on the cliffs, the gallah
arrive. They sing for the
insistent moments of mating.
13 grebe and one chick.
Through the cloud the light silver
then gold in the clearing.
chris at
11:29 AM
|
Hurry: go to kari edwards' Transdada and take the quiz: "What art form are you?"
chris at
12:22 AM
|
Wednesday, January 07, 2004
Hey! Big Congratulations to Nada Gordon and Gary Sullivan on their betrothal. Bliss is Best!
chris at
2:24 PM
|
Wow, Jilly! Sounds like a really full exciting week. Rock on!
chris at
1:58 PM
|
from Mark Weiss, Texfiles Poet of the Week :
Five poems from his new manuscript, recently completed after his travels in August, 2003 : Australia
San Diego
Away from home, and other teeth will eat my tomatoes.
Faithless, anyone’s tomatoes.
Butterfly almost the color of the blossom
it lands on. Slightly greener, but wings folded
become invisible. Something here,
must be eats
butterflies.
Scant rain
big drops
with space between
nonetheless
a hammer-blow
to a hummingbird
A second generation of flowers on my night blooming cereus
waits for dark, and in the valley between its ridges
tiny snails search for nutriments.
Cock-eye the sailor man
a port in every girl.
Just have to learn the sandbars.
Sydney, Coogie Bay
Like home? Two cockatoos perched on a phone line.
And a walk, still dazed with travel,
along cliffs and beaches, Coogie to Bondi. Coogie
an arch of sand between promontories.
Cemetary Cliff terraced above surf. A wheel
to steer by, three spokes intact.
“He sees his pilot face to face
Now he has crossed the bar”
Captain George Nyholm. 11th December 1907
Aged 55
Lorikeets
Magpies, but larger than ours, and perch in trees.
Blue-lit public bathrooms.
Junkies can’t see their veins. One would think
they’d miss.
Or skin pop. Or even
mark a vein before entering.
Katoomba, Blue Mountains
Like a white rag
cockatoo flutters down the canyon.
Silently the white cockatoo
like a leaf
floats
to canyon bottom
the merest lint
in the shape of a bird
on the green mat of eucalyptus.
60 years to get here
skating all the way
and how many left
for the rest.
The unfamiliarity of the southern sky.
“Sailors take warning.”
In the morning
In the morning al amanecer at the becoming
day the light,
understood as progress,
not mandate, declares
it will happen
in the face of all logic.
Fell, like a handkerchief
with wings.
Coogie Bay
Concrete pools filled by the tides.
“Beautiful”--alright, then.
The niceties of daily life.
Society a loose bond of friendships.
The sand drained from beneath her feet she enters
pushing the waves before her, become liquid,
dissolved, resolved
as vector.
Cliff to cliff,
and back again. Then dries her hair,
arms raised, neck bent to the towel,
a straight leg, and a bent,
torsion at waist.
The half-life of life.
A discontinuous life experienced as discontinuous.
A gull flies low across the beach
its shadow before it
broken by the surface it seems
to paint.
Sydney
Jewfish.
First time I’ve seen one on a menu,
and I order it
as if compelled, my head
thrust forward, reptilian,
checking the room for danger.
Danger without, and within. The fish
named for the way it rubs its pectorals,
for all the world a moneylender
rubbing his hands,
anticipating the ruin
of another Christian. Shylock
the Jewfish. Rationale
for the deaths of millions.
What would I call it,
swallowed insult? Eucharist
of humiliation? Delicious and tender,
with an avocado chutney.
Here as elsewhere,
the scourge of Christianity.
A short black/ a tall
black it’s only coffee,
only here.
chris at
12:30 PM
|
New Orleans is not all that far from here--if you're going to be there this weekend:
check out this poetry reading on Sunday
by
Gerald Schwartz:
Sunday afternoon, Jan. 11, 2004, @ 3:00 p.m.
The Maple Leaf Bar
8316 Oak Street
New Orleans, La 70118
Free!
chris at
10:44 AM
|
Ben Basan, at Luminations,
is interviewing me this week! Thanks for the showcasing, Ben! I'm glad to be there at Luminations, and honored.
I think this interview idea of Ben's is wonderful. It's good to be able to read at length about the blogger behind the blog, ya kno?--I was intrigued reading last week about Bill Marsh's life, ideas, and SDPG.
And now I can't wait to see which blogger and blog are next!
chris at
10:08 AM
|
Coming up here shortly: New Work from
** Mark Weiss, Texfiles Poet of the Week **
chris at
5:01 AM
|
that score below is meant as a way of saying i've been sick since yesterday, flu--yuck!--but it exacerbates the ear problem. so, the ear won that one but only by a point, no?
chris at
4:59 AM
|
Last Night's and Today's Final Score:
Airport Runways & Impossibly Small Zen Monks with Tiny Bells : 100
Chris Murray : 99
chris at
2:29 AM
|
Tuesday, January 06, 2004
Dale Smith Weighs-in: about that Unbelievable Believer article...
"It doesn't matter if Yasusada is 'real'; his existence in language is vitally active within the imagination of many people. There's a thin line between existence and nonexistence anyway, and both stream through us and language is the thread in it all." --Dale Smith, "Believer Beware," 02 Jan 04
The best kind of disciplined response to what lacks credence, as surely this Believer article does?--keepin' it short and sweet, as you do so well here, Dale. Very nice work: responsible...
Chris Murray
chris at
12:33 AM
|
Monday, January 05, 2004
^ ) ^ --Yo!!--Skanky Possum 9 & 10 came in Saturday's mail :
scroll down here to Sunday, 04 Jan 04's 5:30 a.m. post for tex-sized bits of some great poetry, including Timothy Liu's version of Sappho # 1 ( L&P) !
While yr at it, also scroll to check out poetry on Sunday night from the latest
Texfiles Poet of the Week, Mark Weiss !
and the round-up post for Michael Helsem's poetry feature from the last week (give or take a few days, ya kno?)
chris at
3:12 PM
|
Walking is Horizontal and Vertical: "a pleasure fulfilled..."
chris at
12:41 PM
|
yeah, right, Jeff: you're just jealous because you don't have impossibly tiny zen monks with bells hanging out in your left ear... I kno how it is...
chris at
11:54 AM
|
Tabasco: chipotle
A lesson from daughter Holly's bro, Jeff Brimager's excelante friend, Nick Choate. About Tabasco: "Do not put Tabasco in your blogg. Keep it in your pocket. Um, always. Or always keep it in your car. Su transportation devicee. Thank you, Ma'm. Love is Good. Good Night now."
:) cm
chris at
11:12 AM
|
** Announcing
another newly featured Texfiles Poet of the Week! **
It gives me great pleasure here to introduce the poetry of the highly esteemed poet of intuition, sensuality, & erudition, as well as the exacting & most accomplished publisher of Junction Press. Last but not least, of course, is this poet's renown as translator. A warm welcome, then, to
** Mark Weiss ** :
(the above link is courtesy of Wild Honey Press)
PARTS OF A SUNSET
Williamsburg, Mass.
At sundown
gold on the birches.
One mountain sets behind the other
on the earth's curve.
On her side
purple water lavender stones.
In the valley
different birds.
.
A deep-voiced bird.
an orange persian attacks a sparrow in the tall grass. Some kind of tree behind her.
The cut hay lies flat
in the field by my old house. In blue twilight
a pert blond in cutoffs is painting it white.
A man hoes a rectangular garden on the slope where the survey map's contour
runs between the house and the pond. The eastern sky
has turned pale ochre, and
begins to be pink or orange. To the west
the red shirt on the line with the sun under it.
The life the other side of the windshield a miniature life.
.
Man tying baled hay to his truck. I remember it
carted by horses
in such a sunlight
eight years ago.
..
.
BRAHMS AND MARVELL
Brahms, we know, haunted bordellos, loved sopranos
and lady pianists, bathed
in post-coital sadness. Ich grolle nicht
wrote Schumann raving
while Brahms and Clara rolled in the next room. Marvell,
the scholars tell us, on the other hand,
died virginal his women
figures of speech. His verses
argue otherwise
his mourning nymph not marble
but flesh
quivering in the shock of loss a sexual loss. Or portraying his king as rapist. Always
the awareness of pressure in his own groin
the garden itself
an orgy.
Two paradises 'twere in one
To live in paradise alone,
the passionate man's renunciation of passion for his self's sake. Brahms
is more explicit about his motives he writes to Clara
he shall never marry, his art requires it. Love
so comforting you lose yourself in it the self-absorption that the act requires constantly
intruded upon by domestic necessity. Society
is all but rude
To this delicious solitude.
I keep hoping
for my own solution that
the love of life and its passing
can live together in my body with longing,
and with beauty,
who enters alone
like the moist girl from behind the curtains of my mind's castle the constant
adulteress. I have seen her,
her feet approaching over the bare stones
hidden within me. How
to conduct my life
with such a secret?
..
.
In the vest-pocket park I sit near the waterfall
and read. When I look up there are clusters of
yellow mums vibrating
like the Matisse at the museum. A woman
appears to be dipping her brush.
The paving-stones are paintings.
Women women with eyes and hair.
Her startled eyes.
The planes
of bodies and faces.
..
.
On the subway
radiant blond hair
frightened eyes.
I look again. A girl
on the verge of tears. When I look again it's to wonder
which of the newcomers wore rose-water so lavishly
that it filled the car
and I imagined myself in a garden.
..
.
RUSTY TRACKS
1
Abandoned tracks. Between the ties
heads and guts of chickens. I recoil,
move on. Later,
among the wreckage,
a bed of weeds,
a toad.
2
Across the cinders
red and white cloth snaps in the wind.
3
Through the overcast,
an ochre sunlight,
patches of blue. One goes about
one's business.
..
.
The women circle, the men
cut in, she dances
with many men. And I think
of the mating of bees, all those eggs in
their bursting sack,
to be fertilized by the chosen partner.
..
.
After a feast,
distended,
I sit among starving Africans, their naked
flesh hanging like rotted cloth, that
flaccid. I give them,
smiling,
an almost empty bucket from which
they will not eat. Even in sleep. Even in company.
..
.
THE BLUE CUP, after Joseph de Camp
In the painting she holds
a translucent cup to the light. She wears
a fluffy apron, and her sleeves are bunched
above her elbows. A young housewife,
cleaning, caught smiling, and in the light shining
on her upturned face she is translucent
as well. Enchanted, I leave the museum
and find her again in a woman
walking into sunlight.
..
.
chris at
9:21 AM
|
Listening: Gate Krasher--special gift from Jeff Brimager, daughter Holly's good and wise friend, so like a brother. I'm grateful.
I love this mix you made, Jeff. So good, keep on!
chris at
9:16 AM
|
And some say I only know enough to be!
really dangerous!
yeah: coming [nod to Cixous, yes, you read that right, y'all]
(are people from New York or Arizona allowed to say Y'all?--I mean I know no one else is allowed this privilege, at least not in the disciplinary halls of my children's high school, but I never did get the rules on that quite right otherwise here in good ol' top-down Texas)
up on the Magic Hour around here: getting ready to announce another Texfiles Poet of the Week. I like this moment a lot. I'm really not a big control freak at all--really--just ask anyone who has met me or knows me in person: I'm very *oh, hey, do what you like, and I'll do what I like and somewhere along the way we will have anemone waves or some granny cookies, really!* Except of course with students: Y'all: beware, be scared. Grades are everything in my book of books. You know this. Do not underestimate my grave concern & etc, hey, Ted, duende dude, I like all that crow you keep talkin ... & etc ...
New Poetry here on the blog slate. Always feels so festive to me. I like it, yes, I like that a lot!
chris at
8:51 AM
|
Actually, ya kno what music sounds better?--with the ear thing
going on, I mean (cf post below, "ear problems")? Joni Mitchell's Court and Spark. It's way-far-overboard conventional bougey Malibu aquanet spray on my blonde shoulder strap-ons (!ooooo) (it was just a smokey mirror PR B-job when it came out: Mitchell says as much in the live double done a few years later with the LA Express), and needs more, um, salty court, peppery spark? Heck, how about some habanero or just a nice cold lover's plum?--wasn't happ'n w/the promoters who were helpn on the money end of who you are, honey, ya kno? Identi-T-straight ironed blonde hair sings nice har har.
But yeah, the impossibly tiny zen monks with bells certainly make for a much better (he he he) *helpme! ima parking lot blonde! im yer best shoulder pad...*
Well, anyway, one of the lists I belong to just had a very interesting riff on Janis Joplin--definitely a rock enigma skidding across all helpmes, that my little zen fellows could not ever improve upon (she woulda picked 'em up and hugged 'em straight outta life, ya kno?). The question begins with O. The answer is Original.
So, I have some poems done over her somewhere around here, I think, archives about 3 months ago?--mentioned in passing to the spectacular Sawako Nakayasu! [that one's a link to Sawako's first blog, Texture Notes, where you can find my favorite Sawako poem, the dream about hamburger--Ouch!]--
(hi, Sawako!)--and that one is a link is to the second blog, The On Going Show--Sawako's slate for performance pieces--over email during the week she and her fantastically gummy-surreal poems were featured on Texfiles Poet of the Week (check archives for early October).
Well anyway, my working title for that grouping of poems, re: Janis Joplin, is *Evolving Janis Objects*. I'm such a synechdochal fool sometimes: I just love the title: I think I love the title more than whatever the poems might be now or might become. That may be a bad sign, as in: Janis!--Born Under a Bad Sign (Again!). Will keep working on getting a far, far, better attitude here. I promise. [Praying, right now, to the impossibly tiny zen men with bells, yes! as we speak.]
* "Well some are gonna try to break you, too, O Trouble Child, breakin like the waves at Malibu... "--yeah, right. Janis would never have put up w/that sh_t, no?--more like: break that effiing bottle on my back, Suuhkkuhh, and see what it gets ya, baby summmmmmmertimerimeitiloveitdon'teverstop....
but then she did. damn!
ta ta fn xoxoxo
chris at
7:46 AM
|
Kindly Reminders Received * :
from harry k. stammer * : new caps for the ManY PoETikal HaTs LisT:
NY Yankees cap & every kind of captain ("cap'n") cap !
which then got my sleepy memory jogged enough to recall seeing, just this afternoon, another new beauty for the list:
On the cover of Skanky Poss # 10, where Ma Poss is wearing a Nighttime Cap while she is rocking and knitting by the woodburining stove (?--i believe it is a heating stove, it may be some other kind besides wood, tho; will have to check on this detail; and indeed, it may also be a stand-up radio--not sure!). YaY!!
* Special thanks to harry k. stammer (who also has a kick-ass piece of foto art--"Wittgenstein Wipes, 1/1/04"--up on his blog right now! ) for not letting the ManY PoETiKal HaTs LisT be inadvertently neglected by yours truly :)
chris at
7:11 AM
|
Going walking! In the wind. Wearing a scarf I made, and a hooded sweatshirt: don't want any wind bothering the impossibly small zen monks with bells asleep in my left ear...
chris at
4:00 AM
|
ear problems
all day yesterday but receding today. not vertigo this time, but likened to the effect of having a host of small jets landing inside my left eardrum over and over with little bells being rung by impossibly small zen monks. if you've ever experienced it, you know what i mean. if not, then don't get in line for this one... so strange. there may be some correlation, they say, to work done earlier in life as an airline ramp agent: loading baggage into the cargo holds of DC 9s, directly under idling jet engines--it can cause ear damage. well yesterday, at least, there were no train whistles tho, which is nice (no, I never worked on a train...)--those get very alarming and make all of that noise very hard to ignore. teeth, sinus, inner ear, who knows. there were also echo effects for everything yesterday: didn't bother me much when i was listening to Dirty Vegas, since there is a sound zoo operating all the time in their music anyway. but generally it makes music listening an experience either very annoying or very unintentionally new. and people get very irritated when asked to repeat themselves--that's always fun. all this strange humid overwarm for January weather. the sounds make sleep nearly impossible. being unable to hear on one side really messes up the sense of awareness of self-in-sound-space--difficult to orient oneself on that perceptional level. doctors know nothing. all their tests are dumb and unreliable as far as I am concerned. colder, drier weather today. things improving--smaller, less frequent fliers making special trips in the alien spaces of the inner ear? let us not even begin to talk of brains and nerves
cm
chris at
3:42 AM
|
from Michael Helsem,the Gray Wyvern, current Texfiles Poet of the Week :
Here are two more immaculate poems of Michael's to round out this Texfiles feature:
"The Trick"
it was just a casual trick
at the end of the Seventies
that old man with jetblack hair
& his winning smile
one more Late Seventies folly
& a shudder in the loins of America
engendered there
these cratered streets & playground Uzis
cooking fires under the overpasses
libraries selling off their books
& my friends dying without health care
America caught it
way back when but only now does it begin to show
that fatal nihilistic germ
or social virus
now the denial ends
& we will be wiser at last
in the dreary decline before
America has to die
of its social AIDS
4 23 94
*
"Planarian Child"
And will i only one day say,
"we would have loved"?
A lunar chore, to count unsaved;
dry maria.
Yet somehow still i must believe
this waste of blood
was not our need,
but genuine choosing not to love...
Why have it so?
--But that a bitter anguish sleeps
where other lovers store their hopes,
as proud,
as free.
4 21 94
^*******^)^*************poetry^ by ^ michael helsem****^)^****^
Many thanks to Michael Helsem for letting us all have these glimpses into his wide ranging, sharp and immaculately polished work. Happy & Prosperous 2004, Michael!
cm
chris at
2:50 AM
|
Some Big Doin's on Tex's To Do slate for today :
--post work that rounds out the feature of Michael Helsem, current Texfiles Poet of the Week
--announce and post work (this evening) from another new, featured poet for Texfiles Poet of the Week
--complete the in-process introduction to Skanky Possum issues 9 & 10, started this morning (see post just below this).
--post *A Little Crimson Faced Expo on The Typo* : how it is that "trailer" is really "trialer," and vice versa.
--post some poetry!
lookin' forward--let's make more YaY!!
chris at
12:03 AM
|
Sunday, January 04, 2004
Skanky Possum 9 & 10 * : Just Say Yes -- and Gitcher Bestest Skank On, Now!
Those fuzzy white gray longtailed rat lookin loveable big cone noses are hangin out upside down all over the place here lately: in trees, in security-tight sheds and garages, & they're sayin' stuff with their fortune tellin' little onyx eyes, like, "Well what the heck do you want with my one and only garage-beam-perch, anyway?--darn humans are dumber than a box of locks"-- I swear!
Well even if we can sure love the skanky, no? True to its implied promise of representing the bureau of Skanky research (one single woolly belly full of words in the farce, no I mean the face, of the rest of the world full of so many other bellies full of words!--ooo la la), and of expressing "The Opossum Revolution" of which we of human dignity are all a major pat no I mean part, darn it all!--these exceptional issues, #s 9 & 10, include work from such devoted possumites as Eileen Myles (love this, in 10's--had to be!--opening poem) :
"I am a post
modern ..."--Eileen Myles, "Mr. Fixit" (1) # 10 **
yes!--working with line can mean everything to the concrete
post, no?!
But think on this, too, from # 9:
"...
I wonder whatever happened
to the families of those who died
when we shot the Iranian airbus
out of the Persian Gulf blue sky.
... "--Daniel Bouchard, "The Fourth" (20) #9 @
And here is modus slant, ever opening up more linguistic playing fields, true to form:
Chris Stroffolino:
"We tear each other whim from whim
and blame love. ..." (31) # 10 ***
& ah, more masters of the fold unfold these:
"...
Here's none I walk away with --
the whiteprint of her spine.
Word breaks its word
with truth breaking its fast
back from interminable hunger..."--Nathaniel Tarn, "Tention! Her Cadences" (11) # 9 @@
Three from Jerome Rothenberg's A Book of Concealments--this from "Larger than Life" :
"...
The rain fades over Europe.
Men & angels
dance before the sun,
a dead snake
dangles
from a tree,
the babe
with glaring eyes
stamps on a half chewed
apple. Happy days!
..." (17) # 10 ****
Yet how, when at last availed, can we not speak of fond allusions to our most venerable Sappho?
And here is that very thing, made from the poem opening we know so well, Sappho 1 :
"Porcelain-throned Aphrodite--
don't leave me sitting here
on a public john with no one
..."--Timothy Liu, "Disgrace" (1), # 9 @@@
This is only a mere freckle on the belly of the 9th Skanky Possum: here are some of the 9th's much beloved sister and brother contributors: Eleni Sikelianos & Jack Collom, Joe Safdie, Joanne Kyger, Caryl Thayler, Tom Clark, Gloria Frym.
And more in SkPoss 10, including Richard Owens, Thomas Fink, Peggy Kelley, Duncan McNaughton, Chris Tysh, Linh Dinh, Diane di Prima. Then also, excerpted highlights from The Possum Pouch.
But please, do not make me keep going on here!--get the SKPoss
in it's luxurious-belly-entirety, soon! & see how wonderful the work in these issues really is. Above all: do enjoy!
*Skanky Possum: Bureau de Recherches Skanky, La Revolucion Opossum. Hoa Nguyen and Dale Smith, Eds. Austin, Texas: 2003/2004, Vols. 9 & 10.
** Eileen Myles, "Mr Fixit," Skanky Possum Vol. 10, p 1.
@ Daniel Bouchard, "The Fourth," SkPoss Vol. 9, p. 20.
*** Chris Stroffolino, "Entre Nous," Skanky Possum
Vol. 10, p. 31.
@@ Nathaniel Tarn, "Tention! Her Cadences," SkPoss Vol. 9, p. 11.
**** Jerome Rothenberg, "Larger than Life," A Book of Concealments, Skanky Possum Vol. 10, p. 17.
@@@ Timothy Liu, "Disgrace," SkPoss Vol. 9, p. 1.
cmurray 04jan04
chris at
2:03 PM
|
Received in Saturday's mail:
Skanky Possum 9 (Pa 'Poss)
(YaY!! & YaY again : )
Skanky Possum 10 (Ma 'Poss)
And, purchased in addition for reviewing later this week:
The Believer V.1 # 9
chris at
12:36 PM
|
Saturday, January 03, 2004
from (this is one of my all time favorite poems)
Frank O'Hara * : Poem
Lana Turner has collapsed !
I was trotting along and suddenly
it started raining and snowing
and you said it was hailing
but hailing hits you on the head
hard so it was really snowing and
raining and I was in such a hurry
to meet you but the traffic
was acting exactly like the sky
and suddenly I see a headline
LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED !
there is not snow in Hollywood
there is no rain in California
I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up
(129)
* Postmodern American Poetry. New York: Norton, 1994.
chris at
2:31 PM
|
from (me!) :
lOvErsTOp HoT CoLd MOuNTaiN CoupLets
sTOp, lOvEr, I cannot
Be your Keanu shell
Girl up the streaming butterfly feel
Good flick fuck today no sTOp
Sorry two other Pine Ridge bus sTOp
Kiosks collect real civil war bones or Great
Rain of blood Great Civil Divide before oil kill no I’m kissing a Wall
Street interest today sorry sTOp holding
Me Me Me Britney & you Fortune
500 tomorrow sTOp all Nicole you biotch you've ruined my download
rayon padding fiduciary
Wearing cheery Piute pop-up killer sTOp
Insurance & ancestor is my anemone
Name & taffeta laugh sTOp I lift
The past joyful capitol
Toll booth marm sTOp
Instructing on myopic credit
Guilt limits sTOp lipstickn numerical
Phone shattering statements for capital one L
Love her leave her aquanet mother bridge sTOp
Xray of cup cracks: once the cup is broken fade to gray
Inside psyche sTOp... yeah whatever Valentino drop kick opportunity
Poutmouth girl percentage rate sTOp just sign here
Sign me here at pigskin TeX I wannanew 6 fords for my driveway yes
Over the river & through the babies'
Gun blue mascara woodsTOp more oil gimme
&&&&xoxoxox&&poetry & more O YaY!! by chris m&&&&&&&&&&&xoox&&&
chris at
11:03 AM
|
mmmm, btw, i do so much like bobas, yes!
chris at
3:03 AM
|
no winter here?--smoggy & *really* obscenely warm weather here today. so strange, can't figure whether to think of it as a blessing or some other chicken little kind of thing having to do with environmental-global warming trends. surreal, yes, that says it too. going off now in my summer clothes--sleeveless blue linen shirt, summer's bright yellow flip-flops, for heaven's sake! but that is the only comfortable way when the temp is near eighty, but yes, going out for boba tea--black tea latte with almond & honey has become a recent favorite, tho I can do without the honey just as well: it can make things way too sweet, kno what i mean? : )
more poetry coming up soon, some of mine, I think
ta ta fn
chris at
2:52 AM
|
Friday, January 02, 2004
More Great New Hellos!
SF Bay Area's YaY!! Julia Serano, Renaissance Woman !
via introduction from kari edwards, Transdada
kari, thanks for this link--
Julia, i love yr website--it really highlights well all your good works !
chris at
11:49 PM
|
from Michael Helsem, the Gray Wyvern,
Texfiles Poet of the Week :
"CARILLON TOWERS"
Oil-strewn coral,
slow carol trine.
Rat loin escrow,
allot iron screw;
nor will coaster
allow nicer sort.
Scowl in art lore.
Let iron scar low.
Worn solacer lit,
we scroll-ration;
crawl into roles.
O winter collars!
Sorrow, lilac net
no car lilt worse...
raw silent color.
Worst cell: no air.
Tell Orion's craw
creator ill now;
slow iron cartel.
Rote lion scrawl.
Clean-lit sorrow
lest narrow coil...
Twill scone roar.
Oil-strewn coral.
4/8/94
chris at
2:34 PM
|
2 beauties selected from Kent Johnson's and Stephen M. Ashby's wonderful anthology, Third Wave: the New Russian Poetry * :
Tatiana Shcherbina's "The Mermaid" [translated by J. Kates] :
I make my way as a mermaid,
as they wrap themselves in raincoats and plunge into
the shower,
I always go out in my golden scales on the shore.
They will say: here's the moonlit sea splash-flashing
under my tail
The thousand-eyed will see its likeness in me.
City, city, you are old and you barely fill the eye
how the air congeals, like a bird and a lion
and how it strips scales from off my scaly skin,
how brave and tender I stand in the light
of the world.
And the scales float onto a merchant vessel
from Thebes.
The wind is long and comely, slow in its flight.
They drift like snowflakes, like tea leaves--
my stiff attire.
They will say: Look, the sea sparkles and gulls hang
in the air.
(19-20)
Vladimir Aristov, "From The Dolphinarium" [translated by Gerald J. Janecek]
(A Poem in Fourteen Statements)
Dedicated to the Armory Baths
Dolphin--a sea mammal from the
subclass of toothed whales,
serves as an object of trade;
its fat is used to produce lard,
its skin provides durable leather,
its fins and tail provide glue.
--Dictionary of Foreign Words, 1954
Let us go then, you and I...
--The Love Song of
J. Alfred Prufrock
I.
Well, let's go then,
You and I ...
And in the sidestreet
Beyond the watery smoothness of the air
We will part
Here beside a wrought iron fence,
Around a graveyard of autumn airplanes--
Of maple tinplate disfigured accidentally.
You concealed yourself in the last archway,
And I circled the inside of my lips with my tongue,
And my tongue lay motionless,
Its tip come to rest on my teeth.
You flitted by like a dolphin with a raging face,
The fire of a cigarette
Going off into the Moscow night.
And my tongue sparkled
And sank into my depths,
Making its way through my blood
Holding the lantern of speech.
Come up to the surface, dolphin;
This body of yours has emerged in the dark
Of still early damp sidestreets,
And from your and my
Moist depths
Came a marine voice.
A dolphin chattered in the fountain
With a splashing brass mouthpiece in its beak,
Bestilled before the entrance
Near curtained portholes of eyes.
(186-187)
* Third Wave: the New Russian Poetry. Kent Johnson and Stephen M. Ashby, Eds. Ann Arbor: U Mich Press, 1992.
chris at
2:00 PM
|
Had a pleasant note from Jilly Dybka, of Poetry Hut, wishing me happiness in the new year, and letting me know she had linked to Texfiles. Thanks, Jilly, and Happy & Prosperous 2004 to you, too!
cm
chris at
1:56 PM
|
from Claude B. Levenson, *** Symbols of Tibetan Buddhism *
Chapter 17 : "Mudras: Signs for the Expression of Indescribable Forces" :
The word [ mudras ] itself means "seal" or "sign,"
revealing the intention to both seal and to demonstrate,
in other words to "translate" words by different means.
In short, a species of visual alphabet that serves to attain
the essential beyond speech. Here, also, the heritage is Hindu,
but the interpretation varies... These sacred gestures
flourished with greater exuberance in the schools
of the Great Vehicle, while those of the Small Vehicle
generally restricted themselves to the distinctive seals
characterizing the rigorously precise and codified
"moments" in the life of the Enlightened One.
...the attainment of Enlightenment ... integrates
object with subject... the privileged moment when
opposites are transcended and the road
to omniscient wisdom opens...
(69)
* Claude B. Levenson, Symbols of Tibetan Buddhism. Photographs by Laziz Hamani ** . Foreward by the Dalai Lama. Singapore: Assouline Publishing/Barnes and Nobel, 2003.
** French photographer, Hamani (b. 1959, Paris), has published several collections of his photographs, among them, Panama: a Legendary Hat [note to self: include in Texfiles hat list via both Bob Dylan and this photographer.
*** Claude Levenson is a Parisian journalist for Le Monde and other periodicals. A polyglot, she has also translated work of the Dalai Lama and Russian writers such as Mandelstam, Zamyatin, and Eliad.
chris at
10:42 AM
|
just as I head for the door
something says no, check this out
first--technorati, forgot to look at
earlier today, so i decide yes,
will look at this before going walking--
and so glad, too, for, lo!
what's found? a most happy surprise, yes:
YaY!!--Jill Jones via "Ruby Street: JJ taking poetry for a walk!" is bloggin--so, a Warm Best Wishes for 2004, Jill, and so nice to see you here: welcome to bloggieland
chris at
5:01 AM
|
goin walkin. then to eat. then to post more poetry!
ta ta fn
chris at
4:44 AM
|
Lotta blithering gone on around here last night. Sucks to be Sting at Texfiles, I guess. And, awful typist that I am, I did let a really wild post slip in between the two DiPalma poems I put up (love those two poems!), but didn't proofread it, I guess, because some of those things in there were not even words! Yeah, yeah. LaLaLa. I have to laugh at myself so I forget how dumb my tuppence is sometimes. So that section had to be edited, completely out, is gone now, since I don't know what words might have corresponded to what the furiously typing fingers of this bad typist put in there. Talk about deep *language poetry* one letter at a time--hmmmm.
But anyway, am glad NewYear's and Sting are both done-for now. It's always such a strange night for me--the transitional aspect, I suppose. Freaked me out to put the TV on while jsut looking for something decent or simple and then to land on Sting's face with Oprah. Just very bad, that. Should have known better than to put the TV on, I guess. Best lesson.
Somewhere in my many online travels last night I encountered a list of words coined in 2003--I think it was from a news article, but am not sure and didn't bookmark it or note it. I hate when that happens, because I can't be sure in all the semiotic flow & flew, where it came from. O happy sieve-brain of mine: i love you but i also live you. Anyway: most of the terms were already well known to me but one term intrigued me about its contextual use or probable use?--dunno, cuz haven't heard or read it being used. The word is "metrosexual." Anyone know anything about this term, its referents, referrees, and contexts? Thanks.
chris at
2:26 AM
|
I just found this blog tho it's been going for a while, I guess, and it's local, here in Dallas. It's lookin' good. Check out Katey!
chris at
12:37 AM
|
Thursday, January 01, 2004
I think a big HAPPY NEW YEAR
got layered in,
down there
'mongst all the rubble
somewhere, dunno,
but I do mean it every time I say it!
Once more, then: Here's wishing the most excellent new year prosperity and happiness will be shared among the good and the heretofore not so good, y'all! Go make some YaY!!
(Well, I guess you can see why I am never elected to make the toast... )
smiles,
cm
chris at
4:15 PM
|
from Michael Helsem, Texfiles Poet of the Week :
The Peacock Cult
Heat o' the sun, vertigo
in an untemperate month.
Cinnamon latte makes mirth
out of my glum indigo
& vermilion limbo. Filch
rubies. Far from my lover
watch light slide on the silver
inkpen that is all to touch.
Acolytes of the big sky
would relish this bleak shindig.
Car in the shop, O stormgod
of little mishaps a flung paean
into; Lord Wart Hog.
chris at
3:48 PM
|
Welcoming the YaY !! New Year:
from---I love these!---Ray DiPalma * :
[Rumor's Rooster]
Rumor's rooster
halloos the distorted
strata of analogies
my A is a vegetable A
my A is a vegetable Z
profligate and tangential
is the balance
commercial and run by
the transmission of
the undeclared
or the strange low
coherences of the ear
when and where there
is no such thing
the thought walked
(429)
And then to think about this fine piece of work:
Each Moment is Surrounded
Each moment is surrounded
by the correct torrent
Each moment is
surrounded by
the correct torment
The sphere's endless erasures
and a longer calm protect the song
A full moon
makes a litigant of the tides
Their issue
they'd have you know
is the province of apprehension
where the joke clatters through eloquence
and its busy simplicity to postpone the marvelous
Embracing yet another version
of the sham paragon you heave majestically
in the thickening denials
There is much to be answered for
based on a play by one so big
his name need not be mentioned
And how much longer
can you continue to spit in the face
of the baggy scholar gentry
for they are many and their sincerities
come like the loaves and fishes
(1988)
(429-30)
* Ray Di Palma, "Rumor's Rooster," & "[Each moment is surrounded]," in Postmodern American Poetry, Paul Hoover, Ed. New York, Norton, 1994.
chris at
2:56 PM
|
Whew. Somebody got a little riled over Sting, below. Dang.
It's the way it is.
chris at
1:48 PM
|
Sting: Do Not Give Me Crap Crackers in your Saturday Safe-Way, Baby:
Sting is still tryin to get a life-lie in a velvet Un,
a consumerist buying life-lie:
I cannot believe how
here in my living room unbidden
he is still usurping
so a no-muscle no-work scarecrow man
with his supposed guitar
angst, life-is-academic-
& hard-for-this-man-Sting,
on Oprah (what naive is her excuse?--must be about money's fast gimme must).
what a definite gauge on the flesh
of poetry
in its velvet
Un.
As they say so well with the pointy > pah & pah-
leeze.
Just because you purchased yr due copies
of Chaucer,
and called yrself oh-hurt-me-
Sting,
with some big boy degree
that you also have a purchase on music-art-poetry-today.
Anyone can tap their western excess
forceps tear you up man
faucet the foregone gimme
(it's always all about) product,
but few can deal with
means:
Sting,
slam a hair-gello-knock-off,
you do'n know
what "means"
means, man--
to a now, a little Amen
is in order
not least because of :
love & diamonds
on beaches & South Africa
arriving for
unwitting engagement
rings,
slow as blood
you so many centuries full of
west-girl-not-knowing.
Sting, make yr memorable: You
Suck, Man.
cm
chris at
10:43 AM
|
In case I miss the exact moment while offline:
To All You Wonderful Folks who read Texfiles,
HAPPY NEW YEAR 2004 ! !
& as many xoxoxoxox 's as you need, always,
cm
chris at
8:33 AM
|
Coming onto New Year around these parts. Will be back to post some poetry after calling Dad & Jo.
chris at
8:17 AM
|
Going for Pho Ha-- Be Back Soon
with more poetry from
Michael Helsem, Texfiles Poet of the Week!
chris at
3:53 AM
|
All's good now with the Blogger view screen. YaY!!
Almost time for Happy New Year 2004...
chris at
1:17 AM
|
OOooo Guillermo! You have changed your attire. I like this
House Made of Dawn--one of my all time favorite titles (and texts, too, of course).
chris at
12:39 AM
|
I wonder if the blog problem is the UTA server--it was down because they've been making changes. They may not be done yet. I've just signed on with aol instead to check from there and everything with Blogger is working fine via aol. hmmmmm. Or maybe none of these speculations have anything to do with one another. hmmmm. will keep checking.
chris at
12:08 AM
|
Wednesday, December 31, 2003
Just had an email from one of the loveliest people I have ever known: Pradeep Varadaraju, who was a former network administrator in the Writing Center I direct at UTA.
Pradeep graduated with his master's degree last spring and is now home in India, happy with a new job. He wrote to send happy new year greetings and hugs, so
Pradeep!--we miss you--Happy New Year, Best Wishes Always!
chris at
11:56 PM
|
My UTA email is back on, but now
somethin's up with Blogger:
i'm unable to open the View Blog screen.
when i click on it, i end up back at the Blogger
sign-in screen. Anyone else having similar problems?
chris at
11:48 PM
|
A Very Happy New Year's Eve to All!
chris at
1:58 PM
|
from Michael Helsem, Texfiles Poet of the Week
Bonds of collusion, Ubbo-Sathla;
gilvous shards of dried pear.
Crimson drinking fountain in the darkness
for what small solace is afforded by understanding.
Zlohtuhb to Algol.
Gamesters call it flirting with perdition.
My hyperbaric filibuster ended
in an imaginary burial at sea.
And so we go amid foetor of Ilwax
not even requited for the Hitlerectomy
nor more 10 than not.
O waniand fain of settingstede,
sphragistic Chosferatu.
12 21 94
chris at
4:44 AM
|
Check this out! Continuing Revelation
chris at
3:29 AM
|
Tuesday, December 30, 2003
About my email address: for those who may not already know,
my UTA email is down.
please use one of the following addresses, instead:
cmrry88@aol.com
cmurray88@yahoo.com
thanks!
chris at
11:36 AM
|
audio post powered by audblog
Michael Helsem, Texfiles Poet of the Week, reading his poem,
"Burden of the Global Chancre" :
who knows this endless red sky
knows my heart
a veil across the firmament
& mirror of a burg's despairs
who knows this awful glowering red
from dusk to dawn has all the news
anyone needs to have
of what befell the stars
chris at
4:52 AM
|
i'm outta here for a while--a spaghetti dinner while! yum. adios my friends!
i'll be checking back in shortly: expectin that there may be a special audblog
post coming in... (yes! see above) ^)^
lookin forward.
YaY!!
chris at
3:37 AM
|
well, did ya see that? the lost post showed up, half an hour after i posted it! so then i had 2 of 'em.
sheesh, Blogger!--what're ya doin?
anyway, i just deleted the first one.
: )
chris at
3:34 AM
|
hmmm. well, somehow i just lost a post with links to
kari edwards's new rockin' poetic works, over at transdada
and at As/Is--do check out these new very tough (i mean "tough" as highest praise as ways of 'telling it like it is') poetic forms of "Is."
chris at
3:12 AM
|
Scroll down some here at this link for an interesting reader-round-up on good ol' odd ED.
chris at
2:11 AM
|
from Emily Dickinson, #136 * :
Too cold is this
To warm with Sun--
Too stiff to bended
be,
To joint this Agate
were a work--feat--
Outstanding Masonry--
Defying--Appalling--Abashing
Beyond machinery--
How went the Agile
Kernel out
Contusion of the Husk
Nor Rip, nor wrinkle
indicate
But just an Asterisk.
(162)
*Emily Dickinson, "136," in 'The Incidents of Love,' Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson. Ashfield, MA: Paris Press, 1998
chris at
1:38 AM
|
Monday, December 29, 2003
UTA email's not working for me, so if yr tryin to email me, please do so at one of these 2 addresses:
cmrry88@aol.com
or
cmurray88@yahoo.com
thx : )
chris at
2:01 PM
|
from Michael Helsem, distinguished scholar, & Texfiles Poet of the Week :
"Transinfinite Redress"
My flesh turned to ribbons & lace
by the googol-hooked cat,
this wedding dress
you wove of spider's silk.
What do i want with
recovery
from you or your fountain of radiance?
To polish the chrome fingers
of your vast suborned tenderness again...
12 24 92
*
"Orison of the Salamanders"
Albino wolves drowse
tonight, albino wolves.
succeeding waves
on a beach of black glass
whose pauses extend
from the start of my life
to its end.
Albino wolves drowse;
rabbits dig.
Madness is the promised land
sometimes & when it digs
all the way thru
to here,
i sit & cannot say a thing
amidst thousands
of blind hands,
albino wolves.
11 4 90
*
"La Tombo de Veronika"
HH'NKHA HKN
HH'NKA-NKH-NKH-NKHA
HKN
NKH-NKH-NKHA HKN
HH'HH'NKHA HKN
HKN
8 7 89
~.~.~^^higherpoetry~&~loveaboveall^)^copyright^)^michael*helsem~.~.~
chris at
1:33 PM
|
Someone wrote me an email asking:
What the heck kind of b_ll sh_t
is this? Why Emily Dickinson & why _imitation_ stuff?
Fair enough, question, I suppose.
Here is my answer:
I spent a day at Emily Dickinson's house not long ago, gratefully in the presence of a fine ED scholar, Tim Morris.* * The experience made me think very hard about the life of this poet and what tangible things went into the making of the ideas that bloomed to what we call poetry.
Her garden (I actually have chrysanthemum seeds from a blossom from her garden--I stowed it away in my*checkbook*--how's that for a little mad money when ya need it? my Granny woulda been proud...) is still exquisite (oh, sorry: such an overused word--will try harder--hug a mountain or something to make it all better, ya kno?!) . And I fell in textual space/time love with ED even beyond the poetry. I mean, what a crush! So, crushwise, I also bought the book, *Open Me Carefully,* as well as, no lie: I also bought a tee shirt:
it quotes an ED poem:
"Fame is but a bee--
I love poetry--
so don't fuck w/me--
I mean it!" *
: )
*awwwww, hey it doesn't really say that! Emily had her ways of sayin, sure, but she wouldn't have said it that way, nuh-uh--
The tee-shirt really says:
"Fame is a bee.
It has a song
it has a sting--
Ah, too, it has a wing."
the same "wing," I venture,
we all rhetorically, and who knows else?--
we all inherit with the import we cast on the rhetorical--
which is a very well known Emily quip.
One of my favs, tho argument being the favored yet divisive and then the forgivable, O whore, that it is,
what else can i say, love, about that?
Except O words, let us make something more better like peanut butter, thanks. whaa laaa.
cm
**Becoming Canonical in American Poetry: U of Illinois Press, 1995.
deity bless us all no matter
what and so we be extremely
_ucked_ but _ucking O: lucky--cmurray
chris at
9:18 AM
|
(this is from some things in manuscript I'm workin on.
Send yr best feedback, please, I mean if ya want to, and with many thanks here!) :
Letters for Life: Emily Dickinson to Susan Dickinson:
Two-Day!-Sister!-Letters
"The Frost of
Death was on the
Pane,
'Secure your Flower'
said he.
Like Sailors
fighting with a Leak
We fought
Mortality. ..." --Emily Dickinson, # 138, _Open Me Carefully_ *
1.
Dear Sue, on my walk
today the garden
frozen stiff to balking--
my heel scuffs--
I had to bend to it,
even removing my glove,
touch it, risk belief
in the ends
of cold--
crystal lack--
there is Northampton’s old
brown brick, coarse
incorrigible captain, some things barren--
even to God’s wide mind
whisked back again, sweet
I came warm
to my secret--
windowed little conservatory
where I said--
to some addressee,
some “you”--
“love, aloud--
to see
whatever would would it do?--
it did tickle
out a fog in comely petal
shape on one
pane near two
fully aroused snow
crysanthemums--
O Susie!
I will send you--
one
soon
only for you.
*
2.
Vinnie and I are cooking
a great stew and baking
dressed of course in our double
layers of apron--
the flour flying about
recasting our laboring
selves to unrecognizable
(though widely famous)
actors, the stage
a Japan Island
Opera, mixing
spoon swords singing
their exact fell Lear
and swoops, all the best
bowls--
the heads of too many
lovers and fond soldiers
leaving--
into the great murky sink
of political life and leaving--
really she is doing more
and I am letting her--
I am so caught up
outside of flour dust, gingerbread
with thoughts of you today--
how are you? How was your trip
in the snow? Did you wear
your soft blue
scarf I--
O--I want to say
most gently--
knitted just
for you?
*Emily Dickinson, "The Frost Of...," # 138, *The Incidents of Love,* in Open Me Carefully. Eds., Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith.
Ashfield, MA: Paris Press, 1998. p. 163.
~~above & beyond~~copyright: chris murray: try baby~~O~~Okay~
chris at
8:11 AM
|
Stephen Vincent! Hurry and get over the Saturnalia! We miss yr beautifully written walkings and wonderful descriptions of awakenings ...
chris at
2:35 AM
|
So good to hear from Kriti Kanthi, with holiday greetings.
Kriti is home now in India and planning her marriage! YaY!!
Hi Kriti! Hugz & Hi to your Dad and wonderful Mom, and to groom AJ, too...
xoxo,
c
chris at
1:53 AM
|
makin turkey noodle soup, got the onions, carrots, celery, some garlic, some black pepper, sage, wide noodles, broth goin on. mostly it's better as a simple thing rather than a kitchen sink kind of stew (that comes later, after a few days). but a secret is: a pinch of cinnamon & nutmeg. really makes it just right.
chris at
1:05 AM
|
There might somewhere be a better female vocalist than Emmylou Harris, handy with all string instruments, lyrics, arrangements, stage presence, and just genuinely also a kind, good hearted person. I have not yet heard of one though, and have been listening for a little while now.
: )
"She," "Pancho & Lefty," and that supremely infectious harmonic song of good will: "Hello Stranger," all beautifully done on "Luxury Liner," an old one now (maybe what, 25 years?--sheesh!), but what do I know about that?!
please do keep on rockin', Emmylou!
chris at
12:53 AM
|
Sunday, December 28, 2003
New! a Dept of ManY PoETiKal HaTs
and accompanying, ongoing LisT
(see my hokey inept silverstream trailer park triple-wide on wheels list started just above the links list to the left ) .
I began this after reading a Million Poem of Jordan Davis's, # 956 ("... maybe in a fedora...").
Now, new to the list:
1. "LAPD hat" (see below), from a harry k. stammer poem, "San Pedro and 11th," 12/27/03, also at As/Is blog)
2. "silver aluminum baseball cap"--on looking into more of harry's superb poems--scrolling across the blog--that reflect, mitigate, & document the flux of life in one place: downtown L.A., (hats, for example, are one commonplace signifier in this project) there is also the "silver aluminum baseball cap" from "Main at 6th (for the Eastside Sinfionetta)" (12/6/03).
chris at
9:56 AM
|
Listening:
Patti Smith, "Dream of Life"; Peter Gabriel, "Shaking the Tree"; Fugees, "The Score"; Continuous Peasant, "Exile in Babyville"; Cesaria Evora, "Voz d' Amor"--looks like I'm gonna be up for a while, yeah!
chris at
9:23 AM
|
Hah!-- cracks me up and scares me near to a PBS swoon, all at once: some kinda
Super Bad Zombie-ism Ugly's
got hold of my good friend, PoLLY TiX...
(well, okay: she does get stupid enough as it is, ya kno?--so she didn't need any more help alienating folks) (requires flash)
HearYe, HearYe, then,
all ye Good American Souls of Reading
& Polly Tix today: with this smashing
Trickster's Master-trick, Patrick Herron
is henceforth declared
* Texfiles Magician of the Grotesque Mistress PollyTix *
keep on, my friend.
chris at
7:30 AM
|
( blush
& more blush...
...........* smiles to you * Chatelaine Eileen! )
chris at
2:44 AM
|
from Texfiles Poet of the Week, Michael Helsem, (** see below, an editorial note of apology added 29 Dec)
who sends along this bio-info:
michael helsem was born in Dallas in 1958.
shortly afterwards, fish fell from the sky.
he used to edit a local poetry zine called AMOEBA in the mid-Eighties.
for the inveterately curious, his 2nd book of Lojban
poems (with translation) can be found at:
Michael Helsem's 3 Books in Lojban Story
And here is some of Michael Helsem's poetry, written from 1979 to 1989 :
"A Collage-Bible"
'And imperial and gracious apparel'*
is subtle edgewort,
tiny black ants all over a newdropt breadcrust
since last (my rosary of changes) or what
it does matter in this same hour's manyweather
garb, umbrella or no, love the like sort of decision
rightly taken; & i recognize in myself
such considerations-without-an-object
like daylight though no visible source
has risen while you watch a pale gray vault in vain
for edge, definite ray, & blinding-golden.
6 27 89
( * first line from Mclean's Poliphilus)
*
"Yes Soft Poison" **
Yes soft poison
poison yes soft
soft poison yes
yes poison soft
soft yes poison
poison soft yes
1979
*
"MANTIS RELIGIOSA
'Nothing is lonelier than the belly...' --Tchicaya U Tam'si
There.
That must be it.
The site of all my manysided sorrow: the Belly.
--belly wants food to repletion
--belly wants fire of adrenaline
--belly wants belly to rub against
--belly wants...
--belly wants...
...i dont know? not to be belly? insideout belly?
(let us remain within this metaphor)
--belly wants...
..........................................................................................
belly wants light
1 18 85
*
"Roche Joust
Double Acrostic Quadratic Dictionary Poem (13)
Minatory Swar m,
A ileron Elid ed,
Es charotic Sun
Of T heir Is land.
Down Aisle Hour
New Fl es h Augur
To Go Ec lipsing
A Vert ex Hurdle.
Or Sl ay Th e Ruby
For Hylic S leep...
In crust Thi s Ax
L ivid Cloud let,
Most Wry Rhyth m.
7 15 85
**Editorial apologies, note added 29 Dec 03 @ 4:14 a.m. : the poem, "Yes, Soft Poison," was retitled "Zeitlichkeit" for the collection, D'neecht.
((((((.)(((mh)(((.)))))(&))))))(:)poetry above copyright michael helsem)))(.))
chris at
12:55 AM
|
Saturday, December 27, 2003
Sfumato Unwind
1.
adore kind of a street light unraveling
in dawn a bleary
too eye
early
a.m. bus
through L. A. looking
all sidewalk ready
peppermint business
& barber swirl towney crowded stations
two mother
cliches
spiraling open on rubber corrugate mat
upsteps
& desire predicates: doubles
of yellow road grit
painted partners
crying babies so full of morning I can
almost love
not knowing
how
so it is
so new
& capitalizing on trend of bergamot
drink cup scents mild
adverts about hunger being
only your someone else's not
tea
my lapside V a desire all
dozing below unsure warm
sip is all
or never to be
lines crossed
for too-new moving matter
6 cow towns and 50 mile unSatin ribbons
of waving land lapse to window nap
& who is also what?--
“Be there?” --
& thinking it
shivers
utter
as body matter
for please
or for “Sorry”--
so why not
extravagate
love
these selves selved to the full wha
or "Yah" or so they say
online as if aloud
& it matters.
2.
Sure: mark this, love, how orange waves
fan ashore casting long girl of suppose
eyes loosening shells ancient or novel
characters to humidify this loud
faint bus window smudge--
someone tried to leave their lips
here: right here!--
yeah, always choose the exit
seat, says one of the mothers in my
My knit of personals
3.
will always say finding
Hollywood’s sign this particular morning full of antic
blinds every chipped havoc ocean heroic movie
viewer block
tunneling
through more & more walls: Oh Dream Center:
do center Oh What Easy E-Woman & civil
O Man you make
or make them
old selves
continually erase
hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
replenish
I think number 4
comes next?
I was
thinking mmmmm-huh
this is nice
kind
of a kind:
a sweet loitering
Sfumato
relay
kiss
cm
****************Sfumato Unwind--chris murray--2003******
chris at
12:40 PM
|
** Announcing another Texfiles Poet of the Week ! **
drum roll, 3 little bells, trumpets, accordian, cowbell, triangle, red/gold buddhist hats and robes, incense, incense burners, dragon masks, 10 kazoos and their fervent players & yes, of course!--Flames !!! (provided by Google, no less : )
A very warm welcome via Texfiles to the erudite & full of ancient episteme drenched in thickening brocades of muthos, yet no less given to pointing out the exact contemporary antic in bushiebaby mongery mange of PoLiTiKies, it's YaY!!
** Michael Helsem, the Gray Wyvern ! **
And, Enjoy!--here is only a sampling-swath from Michael's ongoing poetic brocades :
ODE: A Crime Against the Moone
1.
The music of the years, too dear for me
a candle drowned in its own wax
slavery has returned to the world
where urge & the Story dovetail
we trade mutable masks, i & the dead
one of us has lost the code
false phosphorus, indigo on black
a skinhead reads me my cards
you're paying too much for entropy
i know where you can get much cheaper
entropy--lore
of the dispossessed
enters my body
wordlessly, like the chill
of a great cathedral.
2.
Fathomless answer, the city
had assumed its golds & even the undersides
of the overpasses
were lit. Down the narrow alley stairway
four detours on the way there
wonder underway, marooned near doom
ineluctable return. Railey
wept.
Silvered by slug trails of joy
the hundred-foot statue of Stalin
visible from across the Trinity River.
The Story
into thirteen swans divides;
the colors of a bruise are not the sunset's.
In napalm i have burned
cold orb & bright
impoverished kiss, forage
five old wolves
tarrying at the shadowless duration.
3.
Crashsound returns as ingots
wasp tattoo of the bronze mortgage
graves laid upon graves
the weeping statue, righted
i keep hearing singing in the walls
jarring the gyro
through the Hunger Wall
an experiment in mixing musics
MC 900-foot Earthworm
in this former empire
without the stained glass
House of the Black Mother of God
the moment, overly edged
salvo of ornaments gargoyle scree
can't argue with the cold
alone in the Police Museum
fenced pit of rubble
the basement walls bared to the sky
return to a dubious parking place
mayor of the besieged town
distant birdsong
in this bright abyss of air
curiously intimate.
4.
Or say my Evil Eye had flowered
Under a rain of stones
on the beach of the lifeless sea
from watching fires elapse
then flick an ant away
reasons
the counterclockwise clock
conspirators' passageway
opened in the tarry afternoon
stone forest chess game
by a saffron quaver
following the wires
vegetarians carrying candles of animal fat
divvy the gleaming implements
ridged to my thumb.
5.
Possessing you, why does my time compare
captioned victim ore into slag
rose vowel interval wall of starfish
last night of the Winter King
open door, molten road, shoe in the moonlight
pointing
pointing the ninth candle
& these details are things i want to know
& what i want to know i have to find
orange sparkspray
the length of an eyeblink
car-tossed cigarette at night
the Shrine has vermin.
(from KING BRAINWORM, 1993)
Burden of the Global Chancre
who knows this endless red sky
knows my heart
a veil across the firmament
& mirror of a burg's despairs
who knows this awful glowering red
from dusk to dawn has all the news
anyone needs to have
of what befell the stars
(from PRELUDE TO GRANDWICK, 1995)
chris at
6:02 AM
|
Many thanks to Patrick Herron for the excellent, provocative poetry. Thanks, too, Patrick, for your patience with Tex, whose typing and proofreading at times leave a bit to be desired (new glasses !--Tex is going next week for new glasses, I promise) !
chris at
4:28 AM
|
& now, as the curtain of evening world closes most darkly here in downtown Arlington where no doubt a cold winter flood is on the way--
& now to out-dramatize Mr. Poetic Drama hisself--ole bearded and berobed Hizzoner John Milton--
here is a fine piece of work from *YaY* !!--the One and Only Most Ginsu-Wit,
Patrick Herron (& do check out Patrick's website--proximate dot org--for lots more fun!) Texfiles Poet of the Week,
(in the week's last but never the final posting) :
death letter
(three plus one revisited)
"last train to Demonville right on time"
-- Barry MacSweeney
I
around 11 this morning read the letter the end
learned the girl i loved my word is dead
I caught the first plane and flew home
to face my new life completely alone
the devil came down in furious swarming hoard
and our dog dragged her off her cooling board
I did not know you loved me until you were underground
it takes your disposal to see that I am bound
the devil came down in furious swarming hoard
and our dog dragged her off her cooling board
I caught the first plane and flew home
to face my new life completely alone
around 11 this morning read the letter zed
learned the girl i loved my word is dead
II
red letter zed in morning
her word dead
caught first plane flew home
face life alone
devil down furious swarming hoard
dragged off cooling board
did not know love until ground
destruction see bound
dragged off cooling board
devil down furious swarming hoard
face life alone
caught first plane flew home
her word dead
red letter zed in morning
III
red letter zed word dead
flew alone
devil hoard dragged off board
know love until ground bound
dragged off board devil hoard
alone flown
word dead red letter zed
IV
the: red: letter: of: the: dead:
a: hoard: that: flew: and: its: streaming: pyre:
the: devil: read: it:
love: bound: and: turbines: screaming:
the: word:
hovers: overhead:
i'm: choking:
chris at
1:45 AM
|
O Is for This One: "perfect dropping marmalade testify aspire a... "
storing this O away just in case humans wonder ever what can machines wonder ever will generate wonder from what mere humans i wonder ever say when thinking aloud after a long read in a difficult poetry wonder sending the mere ever human everywhich way in consciousness and feeling wonder for words as much for a turkey dinner full of succulent bird roast sweet meat cranberry steam sweet potato green bean jam bacon jalapeno fry pumkin pie might come close to what a stomach labors to do for the human's wonder well being even if the human continues to fob ever more stuff into its body otherwise known as wonder body belly belly of the body belly jelly wonder jelly belly jelly roll well that is where wonder wanted wanted wanted desired to be ever ever ever anyway now back to my usual attempts to be linear nonmotime biz & sometimes i blither ** thanks so much, jukka ! ** of wonder tho ever you keep us all well stocked in wonder words and all their bellying forth combinatories to wonder on ever
chris at
12:12 AM
|
two poinsettia plants about to topple off the piles of books directly in front of me. am reaching to adjust the balance. there. now i can see out the sliding glass door to the parking lot. cloudy out there. daughter Holly listening (loud) to White Stripes. I like their sound.
chris at
12:01 AM
|
Friday, December 26, 2003
Soon: more poetry and mp3s from Patrick Herron, currently featured Texfiles Poet of the Week.
Later this evening?--announcing another Texfiles Poet of the Week !
chris at
11:44 PM
|
Happy Holidays from The Chatelaine: she's featuring a poet for the Holiday: Sean Finney! Very nice work--Thanks, Sean, and Eileen !
chris at
2:47 AM
|
Squatter and Cracky Christmas Update
They are watching The Nutcracker Suite on PBS, with rapt attention. Something about the sparkling, walking, talking/singing, dancing Nutcracker and Clara, must be terribly appealing to them. Fascinating and terrible. For, they keep lifting up two claws to cover their eyes on the scariest parts. Two other claws trying to cover their ears at the same time. And two more to cover their mouths (where ever their mouths are--I have still not figured that out, and likely won't: won't examine them [ugh: who wants ever to be "examined," clinically, instructionally, or otherwise?--this goes way beyond "test anxiety" or even "text anxiety"; it must be something innate about not wanting to be opened without consent or permission; something about authority & power relations, no?]; won't send bow-wow Google out there to fetch a sketch of hermit crab anatomy. As for my own education in the field of biology: I think we dissected worms, sheep's eyes, and frogs back then--yes, we did, memory confirms (with another ugh & distinct gag: formaldehyde ). But not hermit crabs. Some things one just does not need to know. Ever.
Squatter and Cracky have uncovered their eyes and perked up some. Clara is wearing a blue bow. Actually, two: one for each braid-swirled around, above her ears. And now she's gone to bed with her happy little nutcracker doll. Enter Sugar Plum Fairy--briefly in this production. I have the sound turned off so am not sure to which point the symphonics have progressed so far--maybe I'll turn it on. But if so, then I'll have to turn off Alison Krauss + Union Station, which is kinda nice right at the moment, so, I dunno. Squatter and Cracky seem too caught up in the visuals to care much what the sounds might be. And for all they know, The Nutcracker Suite is Alison Krause + Union Station. So be it. Next up?--Buena Vista Social Club, a Christmas listening must, around me. Looking for blue bows for Squatter and Cracky. They'll share.
Meanwhile, The Turkey of the day bastes itself (whatever the heck does "self basting" mean?). Not nearly as scarily as those well lighted deer everyone in burbie land has on their ever-green lawns. Grassy lawns are still being cut around here though not as frequently as in July. I guess they have to lift the well lit deer off the lawn before they can mow; maybe like how my mother used to lift those overstuffed chairs up by their corners in order to vacuum beneath? I dunno, I do as little of any of that stuff as possible, but don't have any big chairs to lift, or extra lawns around to mow, basically.
Well they're up on all claws now, trying to twirl. This is a real Disney-moment. Gee I should have bought a camera--they just look so cute. And really, exposing them to the Nutcracker Suite, if only in visuals, will certainly help them later. They will soak it all up, just like they do the water out of their sponge--even if I can't tell from what part of anatomy they do so.
chris at
12:22 AM
|
Thursday, December 25, 2003
Merry Christmas!
chris at
9:55 PM
|
fixin turkey with cornbread dressing, sweet potatoes, green beans with bacon, cranberries, pumpkin pie, for daughter Holly, Jeff, some of their friends, and me. lookin forward.
chris at
9:50 PM
|
hmmmm. Blogger's spell checker wants to replace "Texfiles" with "decibals"--
um, okay... but only once in a while on the holidays... ?
chris at
12:57 PM
|
from [o soulful, so lovely] E. E. Cummings * :
[O sweet spontaneous]
O sweet spontaneous
earth how often have
the
doting
fingers of
prurient philosophers pinched
and
poked
thee
,has the naughty thumb
of science prodded
thy
beauty .how
often have religions taken
thee upon their scraggy knees
squeezing and
buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive
gods
(but
true
to the incomparable
couch of death thy
rhythmic
lover
thou answerest
them only with
spring)
(550-551)
*e. e. cummings, "[O sweet spontaneous]," in The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. Richard Ellman and Robert O'Clair, Eds. New York: Norton, 1988.
chris at
11:41 AM
|
Christmas Day I:
1. You are happily asleep, I hope.
If not, let me happily wake you...
2. I love this June Jordan poem, which speaks intimately to matters of need for goodwill as a community issue. I have committed it to memory for the god forbid times when I might need to recite it over and over.
3. June Jordan's poem:
You Came With Shells
You came with shells. And left them:
shells.
They lay beautiful on the table.
Now they lie on my desk
peculiar
extraordinary under 60 watts.
This morning I disturb I destroy the window
(and its light) by moving my feet
in the water. There.
It's gone.
Last night the moon ranged from the left
to the right side
of the windshield. Only white lines
on a road strike me as
reasonable but
nevertheless and too often
we slow down for the fog.
I was going to say a natural environment
means this or
I was going to say we remain out of our
element or
sometimes you can get away completely
but the shells
will tell about the howling
and the loss
(1468-1469)
*June Jordan, "You Came with Shells," Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. Richard Ellman and Robert O'Clair, Eds. New York: Norton, 1988
???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????
Christmas Day II: (in progress...)
On Holiday Messages: Right Now Is the Day
to Say "Merry Christmas" --
& In the Interest of a Most Goodly Wished
Holiday to All & Every Human,
Whence & Wherewithal (as if told, well, somewhat, by such as an Anne Bradstreet) :
I must take the message in this christian holiday reductively, for I am heartily sKeptikal of religion as an institutionalized influence prone to the most useless of dogmatic exclusionary rhetorics.
1. Un-Uber-Clothed-Implics
But to reduce this one to only its bareness (perhaps a good thing?), its un-uber-clothed implics, there is something warm like a body of good will, as similarly, the urging about sharing, that exists in many other religio-cultural practices and influences. This is one of the fundamental bases for all community as far as we now know: shared goodwill.
2. Who Would *Own* Goodwill?
Despite what its advocates like to claim, christianity does not own goodwill or the history of its influence on human community. Indeed when disseminated by christianity, as by other prominent yet strident religions in *the world* (whatever that means), the concept of good will takes on an ominous, spreading arm of co-optation for other means and purposes, easily an appropriation, a colonization, an "interpellation," as Althusser famously points out--it puts its subjects in a position of feeling convinced (believing) that they have been especially called on by a certain power who owns the decisive say that defines the religion's essence and import, and its teachings.
3. Result of Good Will
This contradictory problem will always haunt the notion of good will. But who can do without some fundamental basis in good will? Thank goodness it cannot be *owned.* It is given, shared, or revoked, for good reason, if necessary. But if revoked by whim or mere self interest, then the thing shared is not made of good will. Enterprise, perhaps, but not good will, which requires extreme mutuality between those who would otherwise be strangers. Many have written on this: Heinlein, Bradbury, Delaney, Borges, Sappho: legion is the result of the thematic of goodwill.
4. Basic Need of Goodwill
We would all be subject to the worst paranoiac havoc, it there were no sense of some basic trust in good will. Humans think too much, use their consciousness too extravagantly and wonderfully, to have it any other way. All of literature is made of this problem, no matter the time or intention.
5. Beneficence: Conscience: There are no Rings to Kiss
I take the best of the message in the christian tendency, then, to be beneficent: that 'tis to cultivate good will, share it, and share how to do both those things--that which will create, sustain, and expand community in ways that all will benefit from freely and in good conscience.
6. Yeah, an idealist. So be it. Write more. Tell me about it!
Keep On, and Happy Holiday--
of the most sincere Good Will,
from Texfiles.
more quandaries
in stranger shapes,
soon...
:)
ab&cm
chris at
9:17 AM
|
Sor Juana Libreria (de *Vianett,* que dice, "Tambien te deseo una Feliz Navidad." :
"I wish you a Merry Christmas, too."
Muy bueno!
Good will, the
finest cloth
in all of
talk--no?
chris at
8:07 AM
|
Dept of Holiday Ponderables
this one, from Jeanette Winterson * :
"I don't know if other worlds exist in space or time. Perhaps this is the only one and the rest is rich imaginings. Either way it doesn't matter. We have to protect both possibilities. They seem to be interdependent."
(146)
*Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry. New York: Vintage, 1991.
chris at
3:08 AM
|
Wednesday, December 24, 2003
Leyendo * :
La Jornada sin Fronteras, porque es un link al blog exelente, Libreria Sor Juana. (Actualmente, el primero link es por el periodico, La Jornada, y se va al otro link.)
Y encuentro las articulistas de una de mis favoritas escritoras, Elena Poniatowska. (articulistas [on culture and arts, film, novels, etc] de 2003, en el verano)
Y, este es el version largo, en Ingles (arrgghh! Yo escrito el Espanol un poco y es muy pobre !): I was reading over at Sor Juana Libreria
and through a link & comment hopped over to La Jornada for some news. There I found the related periodical, La Jornada Sin Fronteras, and I got to looking around there. I found that there are several series of articles by notable theorists and writers of international reputation. One series is by and also about the writer, Elena Poniatowska, who I heard speak eleven or so years ago at Rochester, NY, (University of Rochester, Spanish Dept. Presentation), and had the honor of meeting and speaking with briefly. The talk there was about her work on the literature of testimony in Central and South America. She, and her work are simply fantastic. In, this series of article-links in La Jornada Sin Fronteras, there is one about celebrating Poniatowska's 50th year as a writer (13 de junio 2003), and also about the status today of literary "Testimonio," the literature of testimony (which, Poniatowska reminds us, is necessarily "always political") (3 de julio 2003). I was heartened to find this and to read in Spanish. However halting (out of practice!) my speech or writing of it may be, I enjoy reading in Spanish and can do so very well in consultation with my uberspirit for everything: a decent dictionary :)
I wanted to note this find, and send this message of gratitude:
Gracias a Sor Juana--
y Feliz Navidad !
* please forgive my awkwardly written Spanish. thanks.
chris at
11:18 PM
|
from Patrick Herron, Texfiles Poet of the Week :
"Mutation 12" & "Mutation 18" with mp3 links:
(text first published in Muse Apprentice Guild, Issue: Spring 2003)
Mutation 12
My place is in a collection of
landscape sounds, bent windows,
piles of junk, and godawful people
contained by the storefront.
Random shelves group on the harsh curb
to implicate capricious lines
& invisible sounds.
I am generalized to write this
with anonymous faces, reflections,
and an arbitrary rotting fish
named "Miserable."
*
Mutation 18
Push fish peels into five locks for landscape extraction procedures.
Bend window panels, eat crust pinches, make piles of hammers. Look, the godawful
oxidant clouds (I saw those people extruded through no reason). Storefront.
Not one I generalizes you, not if written with bending anonymous arms
or with axed rotting memories misnamed "Forgotten". (Inquire without).
Extant random selections shelve narrow groups. Down on some ideas lulled
into curbing repeated implicating mutters? Ask about whatever happened
to our capricious invisible aphasias, the ones we never had.
chris at
11:14 AM
|
I am enjoying (went back twice today!) reading this continuation of Nada Gordon's "Song of My Own Self"--thanks, Nada, and big congrats on the blog's first year anniversary!
chris at
10:39 AM
|
Footnote (!) to the Hat List
generated here (scroll down a bit) last evening from reading
over at Jordan Davis' Million Poems :
Via suggestions from Jordan, add :
Moose Antler Hat
Propellor Beenie Copter Hat
Knitted (!) face mask
Doo Rag
and then I realized I had forgotten to list one other that comes to mind for me:
(who can forget that special hat Salvador Dali painted?)
the Ladies (Non-Sensible Black Heeled) Shoe Hat
chris at
1:24 AM
|
Tuesday, December 23, 2003
from Clayton Eshleman ** :
[excerpt from "Notes on a Visit to Le Tuc d'Audoubert"]
the cave floats,
in a sense, in several senses,
all at once,
it rests on the river, is penetrated
by it, was originally made
by rushing water--
the cave
is the skeleton of flood
images on its walls
participate, thus, as torsion,
in an earlier torsion--
Here one might synthesize:
1) abstract signs
initiate movement
brought to rest in
3) naturalistic figures
(bisons, horses etc)
In between, the friction, are
2) grotesque hybrids
(useful--but irrelevant to systematize forces that must have been felt as flux, as unplanned, spontaneous, as were the spots/areas in caves chosen for images--because shadowing or wall contour evoked an animal? Any plan a coincidence--we have no right to systematize an area of experience of which we have only shattered iceberg tips--yet it does seem that "image" occurs at the point that a "naturalistic" horse is gouged in rock across an "abstract" vulva already gouged there, so that the rudiments of poetry are present at approximately 30,000 BC--
image is crossbreeding,
or the refusal to respect
the single, individuated body,
image is that point
where sight crosses sight--
to be alive as a poet is to be
in conversation with ones eyes) ...
(310-311)
*
The Lich Gate
Waiting, I rest in the waiting gate.
Does it want to pass my death on,
or to let my dying pass into the poem?
Here I watch the windshield redden
the red of my mother's red Penney coat,
the eve of Wallace Berman's 50th birthday drunk
truck driver smashed Toyota,
a roaring red hole, a rose in whirlpool
placed on the ledge of a bell-less shrine.
My cement sits propped against the post. To live
is to block the way and
to move over at the same time, to hang
from the bell-less hook, a tapeworm in the packed
organ air, the air resonant with fifes, with morners
filing by the bier
resting in my hands, my memory coffer
in which an acquaintance is found.
Memory is acquaintance. Memory is not a friend.
The closer I come to what happened,
the less I know it, the more I love
what I see beyond the portable
frame in which I stand--I, clapper, never free,
will bang, if the bell rope is pulled.
Pull me, Gladys and Wallace say to my bell, and you
will pass through, the you of I, your
pendulum motion, what weights
you, the hornet-nest shaped
gourd of your death, your scrotal
lavender, your red glass crackling
with fire-embedded mirror. In vermillion and black
the clergyman arrives. At last
something can be done about this
weighted box. It is the dead who come forth to
pull it on. I do nothing here.
When I think I do, it is the you-hordes
leaning over my sleep with needle-shaped
fingers without pause they pat
my still sillhouette which shyly moves.
The lich gate looks like it might collapse.
Without a frame in which to wait,
my ghoul would spread. Bier in lich,
Hades' shape, his sonnet prism reflecting
the nearby churchyard, the outer hominid limit,
a field of rippling meat. I have come here
to bleed this gate, to make my language fray
into the invisibility teeming against
The Mayan Ballcourt of the Dead, where
I see myself struggling intently,
flux of impact, the hard
rubber ball bouncing against the stone hoop.
(308)
** Clayton Eshleman, "The Lich Gate," and " "Notes on a Visit to Le Tuc d'Audoubert," in Postmodern American Poetry. Paul Hoover, Ed. New York: Norton, 1994.
chris at
11:42 PM
|
This evening: more poetry & mp3 from Patrick Herron, Texfiles Poet of the Week
chris at
10:11 PM
|
fromJordan Davis : from The Million Poems movin' on down the (poetic) line(s) :
# 969
"I list my debts
And forgive them.
It's Christmas
And the bakery's on fire!
"It is so difficult
To be a grown-up..."
***
purely a conjectural, idiosyncratic response on my part:
a big Amen, I say,
Amen...
***
But keep on reading till you have traveled to this, # 956 :
"... I have that
Get up and be there feeling myself,
And as long as I can remember it's
Sent me out to the arcade, unmoored,
Maybe in a fedora, who knows. Just
Leave me alone means come home
And love me, I thought everyone knew."
***
OOoo, a fedora!--
or a Yankees cap
or a Stetson
or a navy knit
or a beanie
or a long tailed ski cap
or a sombrero
or a strawmade field hat
or a hand crocheted pull over
or a buddhist prayer hat, gold/red
or a golf cap
or a santa hat
or a veil
or an audrey hepburn polka dotted veiled hat
or a there so many hats!
and if someone,
who for the sake of great
love, says "come home":
then i want to say aloud
that is *exactly*
what one version of
*it*
*is*
all kinds of nice stuff all over there, Jordan! Thanks much.
chris at
12:25 PM
|
Live Action Museums: my Fetish Life is at ACE
Still trying to get to those errands--actually they are at the hardware store, which is one of my all time favorite places to go. Fact: it gives me shivers to think about wandering the ailes: all those shiny gadgets--and only a few people really know what they are for! And other things: even industrial strength hand lotion, the kind pharmacists don't even have, but that every truck driver knows about. I just love that. And lamps: all kinds of lamps for every reason of light.
Yes, I know. I am twisted, and not just about that: car washeterias are second ultimates: the little convenience stores attached have all these fetish items for cars--furry things!: scented things!--whole universities (!) devoted only and lovingly to modes of movement. And in these places the universities are so practical: everything that could ever be professed about such as home plumbing or vehicle cosmetics.
Of course, I basically think we should all be on trains. Doing without cars by now! And certainly will have to before too long, for what should be obvious environmental and human-cost reasons, but it does not keep me from being enamored of these live-action museums of the O-so-cared-for-everyday, ya kno?
chris at
3:57 AM
|
Errands to run. On return I think I will audblog some of my poems.
In fact, if anyone is interested in audblogging some poetry over the next few days, just email me:
cmurray@uta.edu
if I don't get right back to ya it's because UTA email might be down
so try this address
cmrry88@aol.com
--looking forward!--
chris at
2:43 AM
|
Geoffrey Gatza sends along this notice:
"HouseCat Kung Fu is Back!!!
After long last HouseCat Kung Fu is back and better than ever! http://www.blazevox.org/zoo/ An interactive poetic journey through the Buffalo zoo.
HouseCat Kung Fu by Geoffrey Gatza. A Poetry happening enclosed within a buffalo zoo. Kent Johnson says, "Hey, this is pretty good" and Dana Gioia calls it "a work of trash from the made-for-TV crowd, definitely fit for animals." Companion to the Award winning CD. A must have for any collector :-)
It's Not Too Late! Choose UPS NEXT DAY to receive by December 24.
get your copy NOW
HouseCat Kung Fu
by Geoffrey Gatza (Paperback)
Product Number: 9080308
$10.00 | Graphic Poetry
HouseCat Kung Fu
HouseCat Kung Fu Audio CD
by Geoffrey Gatza (Audio CD)
Product Number: 6573046
$10.00 | Trance Verse | Hear Samples, too
to order at CafeShops
to see at BlazeVox Zoo
HouseCat Kung Fu is not associated with the Buffalo Zoo or any of it’s animals
We returned the tiger so please drop the charges :-)
Thanks!
Geoffrey Gatza
editor@blazevox.org
chris at
1:37 AM
|
And lately I have been fascinated reading Bill Allegrezza's blog, P-Ramblings...
fascinated, as well, by Ben Basan's Luminations, where last week he reviewed
Factorial !--
Sawako Nakayasu's publication-in-partnership (Hi Sawako!--how's everything?)
And things are lookin' good over here, too, at Sawako's other blog, The Ongoing Show.
Enjoy!
chris at
1:31 AM
|
Monday, December 22, 2003
Happy Solstice, Everyone ! !
I have received some lovely Solstice greetings from folks. Thanks, all, so much!
I think that human expressions, in the formal ways of greetings shared, tend to spread good will, a very necessary element for human interaction: "hello" is not only "hello I am here to speak with you," but also "hello: I mean you well and hope we share that meaning."
So let me end this with a big Hello!
Y, la luz continua...
chris at
11:50 PM
|
from Patrick Herron, Texfiles Poet of the Week :
Day of the Dead
for Aaron and Andrew,
and Ramon Fernandez too
I read in a bar last night, on a wall in a
piss-stained stall in the bathroom. It read:
One day you will be dead.
And with the sound of splatter on the floor
(I missed the bowl I had come in earnest to fill)
came the words of one bleak bitch Siren.
She sang, not so sweetly, but shrill, as if out of the plumbing,
the shadows of the fragments of a dark and weightless tune:
Your time will come; you will be cast into
that endless deep black lonely sea. Forget the piss.
As you sit upon your high overt rocky cliff
and wave your arms over this huddled city, over this
the ignorant mass below yearning without hope to be
wonderful if not free, you should not forget: your arms
have no magic. You too is standing right here in the pee.
The wind will blow and blow and the wind will bellow
as above, so below, as above, so below, as above, so below:
remember the piss. You too will drown, the same as me.
This ghost of the pisser,
I did not miss her.
She made me quake
in my boots and so I
remembered to flush but
I forgot to shake,
Patrick
Here's some recent publishing and bio-info on Patrick Herron:
Of Patrick's book-length manuscript of poems, Be Somebody, which is written in the ventriloquising-voice of Lester, a sock-puppet, Ron Silliman wrote in a keen review, "My Sock Puppet, Myself," (blogpost, 24 Nov. 03), that there are "Steinien levels of of play ... in Lester's intimate striptease of the self." The poems deal with problems of pronouns in both usage and representation/subjectivity, demonstrating the basic paradox of pronouns either as reliable markers of grammatical navigation or as representatives of an actual person. This kind of poetic revelation illuminates problems of far reaching consequence, even though in the poems this is ostensibly all only in fun--puppet-play. Thus, another layer of paradox--rhetorical & poetic beyond the "me" and the grammatical as fit for a page or one more line of words strung together for logic and communication to sort out--is nicely revealed through the poems.
By way of a bio, Patrick writes:
"The sum total of Patrick Herron's poetry is worth approximately $147.22;
that's approximately $0.10 a poem. He has recently completed work on
his third and fourth books, "Black Iris" and "The American Godwar
Complex." The fact that none of them are published gives you some clue.
Approximately four score of Patrick's poems and essays been published in
the last three years in journals such as Jacket, Canary River, VeRT, and
Fulcrum; two of his poems appeared as part of Project Hope at the Tokyo
Metropolitan Art Museum in 2002. Zzzzzz. He is currently a graduate
student at UNC-Chapel Hill and a research assistant at Ibiblio.org
(http://www.ibiblio.org). Just because it happened to him doesn't make
it interesting. When Patrick has free time he likes to compose record
and perform laptop music or work on his ongoing web art project,
Proximate.org (http://www.proximate.org). Give me a break. He
currently resides in Carrboro, North Carolina, where he is Poet
Laureate. He wants you to know that he is, by definition, not Lester.
Yeah, sure, don't try selling me wooden nickels, pal.
And Patrick's book, Lester"
Thanks, Patrick!
chris at
1:29 PM
|
going to the store to get some yarn for presents--scarves!
when i return, I plan to post more work
from Texfiles Poet of the Week, Patrick Herron
chris at
5:35 AM
|
from Joseph Brodsky, "Lithuanian Nocturn" * :
XVII
Muse of dots lost in space! Muse of things one makes out
through a telescope only! Muse of subtraction
but with remainders! Of zeros, in short.
You who order the throat
to avoid lamentation,
not to go overboard,
that is, higher than "la"!
Muse, accept this effect's
little aria sung to the gentle
cause's sensitive ear,
and regard it and its do-re-mi-ing tercets
in your rarified rental
from the viewpoint
of air,
of pure air! Air indeed is the epilogue
for one's retina: nobody stands to inhabit
air! It is our "homeward"! That town
which all syllables long
to return to. No matter how often you grab it,
light or darkness soon darn with their rapid
needles air's eiderdown.
(223)
*Joseph Brodsky, Collected Poems in English. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2000.
chris at
4:39 AM
|
*****......Cricket Time Poetry........********
I am posting this poem because I had a lovely, encouraging note, requesting some poetry (of mine!). I hope y'all like it.--cm
13 ways of listening to a cricket
all day drizzle flecked
air sweating brown lawn
across asphalt ground
in a veil of Texas
crude & yellow leaf salting air
through the alphabet of infant
tears naming a first noon
or day breaking its noun porthole
of two ampersand rigs
in almond reverb light
& neighbor’s asparagus fern spreading
oak breeze ting-ting wind
chime, your bare lips slowed to a word
cm 10:00 pm, 8 Oct. 03
888888888888888888888888888888888888poetry by chris murray8888
chris at
12:36 AM
|
Sunday, December 21, 2003
So, I guess the game is really up now.
It was not enough just to quit the real cigarettes...
Now I'll definitely have to quit my "Psychic Cigarette," too ... *
* To Slight Publications: thanks for this!
chris at
12:06 PM
|
Dept. of a "Rocking Disco Santa" Response
As he usually does, my father, James T. Murray, who lives in the area of Rochester, New York, sent a holiday card with a Santa Claus on it. Well, that's understandable--he was Santa for a long time for six little people (Chris, Joanne, Nancy, Jayne, Jimmy, Patrick) and then to a large degree, also Santa for their children, too, over the last twenty-some years.
On picking up the mail, I recognize the handwriting immediately in the pile, and eagerly open the envelope to see what Dad has thought up this year by way of a card--it's an art for him, sending offbeat cards or sending ordinary ones and tweaking them to make something offbeat, noticeable, different, a kind of signature-Jim-Murray. But there's somethin' more than a little off about this year's card-image of Santa: he has a very bright face: a very bright green face. And the red suit looks a little frayed, ill-fit, worn out. The hands look gray-green though not so green as the face. And then there is all that dishevelled (this is a word that always reminds me of the word, "devil," because of its sound) hair: long white-ash-looking hair falling any which way from the head, long beard, falling same, scraggly. This Santa's hat, too, is ill-fitting, kind of deflated, the way a wind sock looks when a gust suddenly vacates it.
I walk away to think about this odd card--there is no doubt that it has a joke built-in to it. My father has a wonderful sense of humor--something is always funny to him, and he passes it on to others easily. So, I don't trust this card to be something straightforwardly sentimental, as such cards usually are. And it's certainly nothing out the ribald genre. This is my father here, afterall.
Opening the card, it has this message: "Christmas: it takes its toll on everybody." Okay. True enough. But something's still not sinking in here, I just know it. So shutting it and turning it over, I see that it is made by an outfit called "Actual Pictures from Holidays Past."
So I return to the card's front side, looking more closely at the green face of this Santa. Jeeze: it's my father's face, I finally notice. Dressed up or foto-funned-up to be Santa, sure, but also the Grinch!--so how did I miss all that the first time around?!
Many Thanks to you Dad, for all your generous Christmas-ing. Also, not least for your good humor--in honor of which I send out this Christmas song ** for you:
Rocking Disco Santa !
**courtesy of information about American Song Poem Music Archives and its links, found 20 dec 03, at Slight Publications blogspot--with thanks!
chris at
8:11 AM
|
"... fingers made of rain /wanting breath or branches /computerless Ahhhhh... "--Guillermo J. Parra
keep rockin, Guillermo!
chris at
12:39 AM
|
UTA email is down. If trying to reach me, please use one of these addresses:
cmrry88@aol.com
cmurray88@yahoo.com
chris at
12:23 AM
|
Saturday, December 20, 2003
Books Within Reach (books currently on the writing desk):
--Simon Ortiz, Woven Stone (U of AZ, 1991)
--Joe Ahearn, sin.thet.ik (Firewheel Editions, 2002)
--Carolyn Forche, Blue Hour (Harper Collins, 2003)
--Beverly Dahlen, A Reading, 1-7 (Momo's Press, 1985)
--Anne Carson, Sappho: If Not, Winter (Vintage, 2003)
(Sappho Transl)
--Nathaniel Mackey, Four for Glenn (Chax Press, 2002)
--Cesar Vallejo, The Complete Posthumous Poetry (UCal Press, 1980PB)
(transl. Clayton Eshleman & Jose Rubia Barcia)
--Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales (Modern Lib, 1994
--William Carlos Williams, Collected Poems, Vol. 1 (New Directions, 1991PB)
--Columbia Poetry Review, no. 16 (Columbia Coll, Chicago, 2003)
chris at
10:14 PM
|
Going out to walk. Then to get some Vietnamese Pho--lately a favorite since discovering a new cafe 5 or so miles away over by the Hong Kong Asian Foods Big Supermarket that Fei and I go to. But closer to home here the other day I did find some good Thai food just up the street, neat little drive through cafe (huh?--drive through cafe?--that must be an oxymoron, no?). Daughter Holly says the place is not that good, but what does she kno?--she's not me!
More soon. Maybe more poetry soon.
chris at
3:11 AM
|
Check out this Gender-Fender-Bender
from Texfiles Poet of the Week, Patrick Herron :
Smashing Girls and Boys
"Girls are what they wear,
and boys are who they hit."
Shit not worth one dead hair.
This prescribed bloodstained valance,
It's a bullshit visaged balance,
panache-ridden parlance, barren farm passed
as palace and panacea. See here, is this
dissimilarity or peaceful parity:
this is a cock here in my panties.
Smashing girls and boys.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!Smashing Poetry!!!!!!by !!!!!!Patrick Herron!!!!!!!!!
chris at
1:30 AM
|
Friday, December 19, 2003
&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
UTA sent a msg around saying email will be off this weekend. If trying to reach me from midnight tonight to 8 a.m. Monday, use one of these:
cmrry88@aol.com
cmurray88@yahoo.com
thanks.
&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
chris at
6:39 PM
|
from daughter Holly, a little seasonal fun:
Get Yr Mouse Ready for Snowglobe!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
some things are just so twisted, so wucking fazey, you know?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
chris at
1:22 PM
|
Some New Linx & Things
A. "Andrew I found this thing for you... "
B. "Babel-17: ... Rimbaud was knocked off ... "
W. "What did Beckett say? ..."
Squatter & Cracky are heavin the sponge around like it wz a little volleyball, sayin' : Linx & things are lookin' good !
chris at
12:23 PM
|
********************************************************
Announcing a new Texfiles Poet of the Week Feature:
** Patrick Herron ! **
A warm welcome, then, to you, Patrick.
You Rock!! Especially when Politicians are lyin (that's always... )
But hey, here is some of Patrick's Best Bad-Boy
Oh-So-Ginsu Wit (including his mp3 reading aloud) :
Patrick Herron's "What Basho Wrote"
What Basho wrote me about the dust of Gautama
Dear Patrick,
Empty your mind and your hat will follow. So please begin by transcribing the following seventeen hats, and do hold onto your own hat for the duration. Only the hat will remain. I'll explain later.
The Ten Hats of Buddhism
A Zen Buddhist is not a Zen Buddhist
but a person faking paradox
and a person faking paradox
is a fake Zen Buddhist paradox and
"A Zen Buddhist is not a Zen Buddhist"
is an attempt by a fake Zen Buddhist
to fake a fake Zen Buddhist paradox
and the fake attempt of a fake person
who is of course a person and yet empty,
not a person or even a Zen Buddhist at all.
The Four Noble Hats of Buddhism
Which is to say Zen Buddhism is fake
so to be a real Zen Buddhist (Listen up! Kneel, slave! Thwack!) you must be fake at faking the forsaking of Zen Buddhism
and be a fake paradox or even a fake fake fake.
The Two Hats of Buddhism
Perhaps paradoxically, three fakes
do not negate each other when they do.
Buddha, The Enlightened Hat
They merely give nothing a cover.
Love,
Basho
PS My final and perhaps only coherent recommendation is that you always wear a hat. It will help one of you to appear as if you are flying above the dust in the wind, above the hatless masses. I'm giving up on the cold austerity shtick altogether and am heading to someplace warmer. Look for me there, where it's warm. I'm the one in the hat.
************* Pottery Hats by Patrick Herron****crak-crak-crak****
chris at
9:53 AM
|
India/US Hellos: Gurudev Bhat!
I have had a very nice email from Gurudev Sirsi Bhat who is from India, and is a former computer lab tech/admin here at UTA, in the Writing Center I direct. After graduation, Gurudev wanted to remain here in the US to work, which is a very competetive job market for international students. But he was able to secure what many students consider a dream job in computer engineering here in the US. I am happy for Gurudev--having seen his achievements here. And now he sends good wishes for the holidays, so nice to hear! I am very grateful for Gurudev's good will whenever he writes.
Five months ago he sent the most elaborate wedding invitation!--beautiful. Of course I could not make it to India for the celebration, sorry to say. I know I would have loved it. But now, 5 months into the beautiful marriage he writes that he and his wife send happy holiday wishes. And
"If you're coming down to California, please do come and stay in our little
place whenever you pass by San Jose or San Francisco.
Wish you a Very Happy Christmas to you and your family."--Gurudev Bhat
Gurudev, that is so sweet!--I would love to! Thanks so much. I will be coming to California before too long and I will not fail to be in touch so we can all say warm hellos! I hope you and your new wife are happy and that all goes well for you during these holidays, and always.
Best Regards, Best Wishes, and Hugz to You Both!
Chris
chris at
9:16 AM
|
getting ready to post a Texfiles Poet of the Week feature here shortly.
"shortly"? ever thought much about that word? it's a little strange: we don't ever say "longly" or "middlely"--so why do we say shortly? Must look this up, um ... shortly. Will send little Fido. BRB. arf
chris at
6:46 AM
|
Listening (on recall, livin that one of a kind, plush, serial, trailer park life--diapers hangin on the line for years--you think I am joking...):
Well, i sent the puppy dog into the prefab mini-storage to dig way back (well not *that* far!) in the *likelies* pile (rather than the other music stacks--for we love books, music, and fotos here more than anything and have lots of both--which music stacks contain the*neveragainnotfornothins,* the *neveragainbutnottradineithers,* the *maybies*, the *onceinawhiles* or the *bankonits*). **
And the puppy dog came back up with
Maria Muldaur !
long time, yes.
But for that stupid Oasis juke-song, mostly her music and especially that quivery-quavery voice of hers I like--and then, her back-up bluegrass folks really rock. No matter that none of that can possibly still sound so resilient now yet it does. Still rocks like violins in sandstone canyons: sculpted, random with delight, lots of curved side spaces full of breeze and birdseyeviews to fill if ya want to.... okay.
**love these asterisks this evenin'--but the reason for this one is that these categories are useful (soundin a little Marianne Moore for a minute there) for organizing all kinds of paper clips, fake nails, or just plain old phenomena--but never friends: they always belong in one category mixed up all together so much better to jam.
chris at
6:11 AM
|
I will be announcing a new featured Texfiles Poet of the Week this evening.
chris at
3:44 AM
|
VVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVV
from Hannah Craig, of Awake at Dawn on Someone's Couch, the last post of poetry for the present feature as Texfiles Poet of the Week: "Perceptioning" (this is post # two, parts I and II of the poem; parts III and IV are posted just below) :
Perceptioning
I.
Orioles fall like dark seeds, the pica-pica-picaro
of sky tossed down. Near ground, they accelerate,
flare up. In the garden of the self,
the days stretch barley stem, cottonwood. The days
eke water. Lambs saltate in their spring wool,
blimpish pulses split open, sponge rainwater.
Call her, Demeter,
from the mouth of home. The high house
windowed and grave. Call, but the well
will answer gurgle with gurgle. She’s awander
in her lavender skirts, playing witch-in-the-holler
with the seaman’s daughters. They clutch one another,
stare the bored stares of nascent nymphs.
You cannot figure them out, let alone call them home.
II.
Cabala cabala, the creek breathes. Cabala, salaamoselah.
Halt there.
Where you go, willow? Where you sleep,
narcissus? Beloved, I am the wild-plum, busty with leaves. Or the straw-man,
leaning on a pitchfork. I am clean fun, a run
through the summer bracken. The gitchy-gitchy-one,
itching through a case of acne bad enough to hurt.
Boombox hoisted on one shoulder,
I lead a Hamlin march through the small towns,
past the grain silos.
Oh the hollow
of your back, darling,
it moves me to tears.
Your mother turns the tea-cup over. She sees a dark man in the mirror.
She sees he knows how to use his tongue. And then you're minde,
little hussy-fuzz, little bee-bush with your hair oak-spoor,
mushroom. You pose lakeside, in the act of thrusting
shoulders back, carry your new self
distributed evenly over the old self. Woman,
in the half-light of girlhood, swallowing, swallowing...
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~poetry by Hannah Craig~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
chris at
3:25 AM
|
Thursday, December 18, 2003
Many thanks to Hanna Craig, Texfiles Poet of the Week. I have one more of her beautiful poems to post, and since it is a long poem I will post part of it now and part later this afternoon.
Here is part one (the poem's III & IV, for linear order on the blog) of a two part post of "Perceptioning" :
III.
Like a gong, she beats
her way through pumpkin farms, grouse-hunts.
Crests the red-roads, past the Methodist galilee
and old Mag's country grill. The tumbrel-growl
of autumn hangs in the ear, trundling between death
and the doorstop. The girl's gone
heavy in her brassy days, dullness settles like a cake-bell.
Rain. Hey, play that song again.
Rain. He lays down with her
but he doesn't feel nothing good. She just holds
herself in the doorway, sighs in front of the TV.
After third-shift in the belly of a red-hot machine---the ghosts
play tricks with his eyes. First a marshmallow-moon,
then this river of lava. Sticks she pins into the shape of a man.
Honey, did you meet the one I love? Her laughter, the cold
whip-snap of a branch under ice. Oh, but there's the water.
He ruined her, now she's his to keep.
The wheat-fields gone to bronze,
the whickering of nanny-mares, the apples
hanging rotten on their branch.
And the girl
in her heyday, now hung from a sackcloth of fever,
bare feet atremble. She sees the meadow
and the meadow is all she can see.
IV.
You send the skin-and-bone hounds on a run, white
raucous in the dead hills. The only sounds
in the house are water, and its relevant search for air,
the insistence of this dying cicada,
his coldfrock hoary with frost, his buzzing almost
sickening, constant as it is. You shut the window.
You go to the door and remember, this is what for.
This is it. You turn the lock, click of tongues connecting,
walk up three flights to stars you cannot see.
Daughter, if you want to, you can take apart the night-glass,
the jar from which smoke gathered. From which panther awoke.
You can brush the lamp low, touch the sloe-tongued memory,
its mulish observance every year the same. I’ve put aside
the gabion of day. I’ve dyed these heretical signs
in gray. Who chooses me?
Seed-heart, the broom of me,
gloom-song of me, lying
head across bed, lying so still
the heat moving absent, heat moving
gone, gone, gone.
Tell me snowheart, icicle yin-yang,
where does this end? Who chooses me?
I walk away on my own two feet.
chris at
9:16 PM
|
I will be announcing another Texfiles featured Poet of the Week later today--probably not till early evening.
chris at
9:04 PM
|
"Ghost Ships"
--a critical-creative work by Lanny Quarles--
chris at
11:33 AM
|
from Joseph Ceravolo's (exquisite!)
_Ho Ho Ho Caribou_ *
V
Where is that bug going?
Why are your hips
rounded as the sand?
What is jewelry?
Baby sleeps. Sleeping on
the cliff is dangerous.
The television of all voice is
way far behind.
Do we flow nothing?
Where did you follow that bug
to?
See quick ....... is flying.
VI
Caribou, what have I
done? See how her
heart moves like a little
bug....... under my thumb.
Throw me deeply.
I am the floes.
Ho ho ho caribou,
light brown and wetness
caribou. I stink and
I know it.
"Screw you! ....you're right."
IX
No one should be mean.
Making affection and all the green
winters wide awake.
Blubber is desert. Out on
the firm lake, o firm
and aboriginal kiss.
To dance, to hunt, to sing,
no one should be mean.
Not needing these things.
X
Like a flower, little light, you open
and we make believe
we die. We die all around
you like a snake in a
well and we come up out
of the warm well and
are born again out of dry
mammas, nourishing mammas, always
holding you as I
love you and am
received inside you, but
die in you and am
never born again in
the same place; never
stop!
(292-294)
*Joseph Ceravolo, "Ho Ho Ho Caribou," in Post Modern American Poetry.
Paul Hoover, ed. New York: Norton, 1994.
chris at
3:28 AM
|
Happy holiday trip to Mexico, Danny O'Connell!
hugz + xoxo
chris at
2:39 AM
|
Wednesday, December 17, 2003
Listening:
a DJ mix from Jeff Brimager (daughter Holly's friend),
electronic sound poems--what a treat!--Thanks.
These are so percussionally and culturally collage: very nice, Jeff.
This cut right now is sounding a lot like
Issac Hayes partially outrunning
then jump-turning-back on the eighties
Blade Runner standing in concrete
beach visuals & dialogue
fade to sand background a wallpaper
of po-po vice-voices
satellite triangle-beamings definitely not yet Jodie
in the muchos Canned Heat sound quotes
layering samba or Havana with the Hayes
perpetual water reverb canyon genera--
light metal contraptions--Fly Wright Bros Now
Be Everywhere in 2003 & something traveling
tourist: very leaf-blower fumes
over whisper choruses:
"quickest way to change things" --
kissing is
the verb to be
felt hat zen yellow
bell to revamp mosses of early
monks of seventies canyon flooring
coolest when laying up
cm
chris at
11:34 PM
|
Not Madonna--Martin Amis vs Catherine MacKinnon: Yellow Hypothetical Porn Dog, Doggone It All
a reader (Hannah Craig, Texfiles Poet of the Week) responds* to and insightfully analyzes Amis's Yellow Dog
*to which this other reader (me!) says thanks! i enjoyed reading this: it kept me thinking
chris at
11:21 PM
|
"Elves Have Left the Building" !
--Malcolm Davidson at Eeksy Peeksy
chris at
2:57 PM
|
Combo for amazement and gratitude: Josef Sudek!
Special thanks to Jean Vengua at Blue Kangaroo (hey, so good of you to dig out and to put up the link! thanks--I love Sudek: some very lived-in, small, thick spaces, cooling soups of black and white, foto-ing: gee, Ansel, yr too much in landscapes!--move inside, or move on down the line, yeah). Jean I also really like that piece on mail art.
For some semiotic reason unexplainable, it brought to mind SFO's own Journal of Public Domain, too (tho anyone interested may first want to email the publisher (nice to see the Gram Parsons Project mention over there...), at Slight Publications, regarding that excellent collection, the JPD.
& hey! --Great Happy Thanks, as well, to Mark Woods of Wood's Lot (for one fine unit of recall in the history of visual texture: your post on Sudek). Oh, that 1896 Kodak camera! So cool... & I saw that 1974 retrospective in Roch at Eastman House--I used to live right around the corner from that house and its fabulous grounds and gardens; it was a favorite haunt of mine evenings after work, or weekends, to see the collection, once upon a time--
wow--so nice to see this, Mark!
& p.s. for those who have read some of my poetry that levels complaint against Kodak the corporation--for dumping toxic waste in the region: George Eastman started Kodak, which grew to be an environmentally irresponsible company/corporation. But he also laid some basic technological groundwork for photography to go a long ways toward that art, one we are grateful to have today. It seems few things that delve in or even that deliberate with power are ever either all sacred or all profane (Hurry: must consult Milton and Eliade, immediately!--be right back. I promise... )
pps. I showed daughter Holly all this very fine Sudek en-blog-material. She was too small to remember George's house (and certainly not even an eye-twinkle in 1974!). We do favor best that one foto of the egg & bowl, best--for the wood grain, the lived-on table, aching window frame.
o. & o, la. & more la.
chris at
9:56 AM
|
from ** Hannah Craig (YaY!!) Texfiles Poet of the Week ** :
(I love all Hannah's poems, but this one is extra special in my book! Hannah: thanks for writing it so very well... )
La Violins, this Spring
La Violins
Le Blizzard
La Flautist Dans le matin
Lads, in the morning, I am weary. Home from war,
I say, la violins is playing out its
part. [Enter Horn]
Have thee desired
So shall I give to thee
Have thee a soap in hand
So lather the windows
of they soul-they know, they soul
is quickly risen, given easy
Roll them drums! Away lads, and fast
away. There snaps the miserly mouth of the goat.
The clitter of his hooves.
His Hornedness, His Clovenness.
Roll them drums!
Where was this war?
Not so much war. I hung black cloth in the windows.
And the dying cried out. There was a little smoke
from the guttered candles, from wet apple wood.
A nosebleed, darlings, from the cold.
Amok, amok,
here the lady on her kite, her violins
so kind, so kind. She said leave them
all behind, the wife, the young.
Here the lady with her white bassoon,
her long swan screaming, the singing
passing over us.
Der Kinder Kiln, Der Flame, Der Matchstick.
La Violins calls to the Horn. Wake now, my gray sons,
and ride the pattern of the world. I am weary, wife,
weary-cold. Hold me. Here come the cellos.
Keep me warm. The bittern speaks, the nut, nut
chickadee outside. His tap-tap-tap. I wants
my life back. Flee, you harridan, you tongue-cleaved
glut, and take your silver sleeves.
I stand in the frost-door and breathing.
I stand on the threshold and glitter.
**** O poems. ***O beauties.*******By Hannah Craig** (who rocks)**
O poems.*****&*******O beauties.********endlessly & rocking*****
: )
chris at
2:41 AM
|
Tuesday, December 16, 2003
Mucho Happy Grats!--to Sarah Gambito--
winner of the Alice James Poetry Competition!
Check out Sarah's poem,
"The Glitter Lamb,"
posted where the ooooo always meets the aahhhhh :
Chatelaine Poetics
very nice, eileen!--rock on
chris at
10:23 AM
|
audio post powered by audblog
YaY!! an Audblog from Hannah Craig, Texfiles Poet of the Week
For M.
Wight, I have seen you. Two stars
on your chest. A fig in the left star
on your chest. In the center of the fig,
a stone.
The thin sheet
on the summer bed trembles. Lo, the cat
under the sheet, shaking himself.
Hurry. Your daughter on the telephone,
and you can only manage to say
the place where the lilac once bloomed
is torn, missing. The cat comes through
the door with a dove in his mouth, held out
like a gift. Yes. We suffer all at once,
forever.
You hang your stars on this hook. The beach-house rug
with its muted yarns, its pulled-loose
blue. Fish on the wall. A bowl of glass and shell.
How quickly all the nights
become day, and quicker then
to bed, to bed.
Your husband pulls you from the floor.
Go to sleep, the turnkeys whistle,
sibyl sleep now sleep now. White
on the frame of black. You hang the words back.
Nailed there. Fig. Star.
It spreads, and they say
there’s no stopping.
************************************poetry by Hannah Craig**********
chris at
2:32 AM
|
from Texfiles Poet of the Week, Hannah Craig :
Here's a bit of bio on Hannah Craig, for those who do not yet know her and the fine poetry she writes, as well as the blog she keeps, Awake at Dawn on Someone's Couch (linked above on Hannah's name). She currently resides in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, grew up in Indiana, is a graduate of the University of Chicago with 2 degrees in Anthropology, and is presently having a love-hate relationship with Pittsburgh, PA. Among other notables, she has recently published in the journal, Stirring.
So then, here are two more of Hannah's evocatively textured and sensuous poems:
The Story In Translation
Over the killed trees (or dead, sleeping, miserly)
a flock of herons, their long legs
dangle in fly-by. This is the season
for ghost (white, churlish) stories,
the boy who swallowed a watermelon seed,
the vines that grew from his ears. Or the sacrum
mistaken for a ?? (bowl, candle, lamp). The woman
stands at the window. The black dog stands
at the window. Toward dawn, she lifts her hand
and squashes a moth, febrile, (weak, pulsing)
fluttering blue. [Word obscured by ink]
comes through the bamboo, the sheaf of his poetry
under-arm. In the last regime he had
his own syndicated column on the beautiful
countryside. Twice a week, weeping trees
on their knees, willows bent down,
songbirds flitter-skit (fast and skipping, jaunty,
full of motion) through the seed-grass.
Now he comes through the walls, his sick cough
straddling the swamp air [Consider allusion to Isis carrying Horus
through the Delta reeds]. Tonight is the witch (misread: wish)
tale, the boy who never returns to his bed. Grandfather (Uncle, Mother),
sit here beside me on the bed and say
[paper torn, line missing]
[paper torn, line missing]
which is all I can ask.
*
Arcs sur Argens
Snow, shell, snake. Roseline, the white hem
and the eye. Third miracle, the body
which will not decompose. First, roses from your skirt.
Second verse, same as the first. Snow, shell, snake.
Angels cut cake, pass the plates. The nuns return
for tea and find you. Trance, product of faith. Divide by crazy,
subtract 5. Pocket-calculator, mutter-mutter,
die Mutter, der Inbegriff.
Now you’re black---shriven, shrunk. The moisture of your claw-hands
hooked to heart. Intercessor, you protect the grapes. You perform
this-is-my-body for the crickets. Or you watch over the fountain,
cracked and full of cold, clean.
Cannot aid a traveler, a spark
of light-love-left,
or heal or tend the spirit. Cannot even rain
your roses down at will.
Still here on the prie-dieu of the road, sunk
on sandals. Heel-toe-blister-toe. Tired and dust. A photograph
of my back, turned away, walking. Hassock of fine white
flowers, little lithium bells. I ask for whatever you can give.
*
********************poetry by Hannah Craig*********************
chris at
2:06 AM
|
Monday, December 15, 2003
Corina from Fledgling Wordsmith--I would very much like to thank you!--please email me...
cmurray@uta.edu
chris at
10:59 PM
|
mmmm. blueberry yogurt. gala apple slices. oxygen. jasmine green tea.
chris at
10:13 PM
|
Will be posting some more fine work from Hannah Craig, Texfiles Poet of the Week, later today toward evening.
chris at
9:58 PM
|
Just had a very nice email from Clayton Eshleman.
I am looking into bringing him here to speak at UTA.
So nice.
In honor of his fine work, I want to post this poem:
Un Poco Loco
Bud Powell's story is never complete.
The image of a man playing blues
who earlier that day
sipped lunch on all fours
is rudimentary turning, crawling
chorus after chorus, lifting I Covers,
to view simmering Waterfront splinters,
he is visiting fist shacks,
the sipped milk becomes dug root,
he bites into the horizon
wearing keyboard braces, he winds within
the steel cord all
who have pulled through mother recall
as the bastard spirit beyond her strength.
(56-57)
Amen. For Goodness in Life. For Grace. For Bud Powell. For us all.
Thank you Clayton Eshleman.
* Clayton Eshleman, "Un Poco Loco," in The Jazz Poetry Anthology. Sascha Feinstein and Yusef Komunyakaa. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991
chris at
9:29 AM
|
Dept of R$ceipt
looking at a find from today's walk:
leaf, deep red, mahagony deep red, laced with leathery gold veins, stem innocent as an apple's.
home and took off my old felt gloves to absentmindedly reach back into my jacket pocket to clean it out.
Pocket I thought contained merely some old paper receipts from the grocery store: milk dollar sign tax bread dollar sign tax tomato dollar sign tax & etc.
But what I thought was only paper felt, to touch, sooo very cold: damp dead skin? Yikes!
I wondered what had gotten into that paper?--the six-foot-under-earth? Shock, a little. Funny how the discovery of illogic is so shocking.
Loving logic. Loving to rely on it. Boom. The not-happening-logic. Too cold.
but of course it was logical, just not yet accounted for in perception: the leaf, still cold from the damp, near-frozen sidewalk I had scooped it off to then stow in my pocket, to now retrieve absentmindedly. sheesh.
and then this one unaccountable image of action pops quickly to mind (but why?): swaddling--and seems like a nightmare pop up.
so significant for this particular season, the term, swaddling, when one is raised christian: various (whichever church could help the most over the specific family crisis at the time since heaven apparently forbade any kind of spiritual unity of ecclectic interests): catholic and protestant blends (especially ironic when i discovered at 13 or so how the word, "catholic" means "universal"?!).
i'd been walking past growing numbers of examples of the christian birth scene: jewel-lit , soap-opera-dramatically: 45 minutes of, three burbi streets of, various examples of,
creche scenes, twinkling lights and twinkling deer skeletals nodding head back and forthe via batteries (not to be mistaken for those deer used in target practice or seasonal sport elsewhere and often by the same folks who put such on display at christmas in the front yard... ?), even christian carols emanating from doorways--this is the same electronic mock-voice that makes brooohaahaahaa rise like an almost harmless jolt from (the same) doorways on Halloween to entertain children so they will come up and get more candy!--Sugar is so good! Haa. Haa. Haa.
red leaf. swaddling. cover. covering. damp. red. leaf.
Why did I pick up that leaf? It all seems so surreal to me now.
chris at
8:12 AM
|
In Praise of Good Works: Jaime Saenz, translated by Kent Johnson and Forrest Gander, the Work of "Immanent Visitor"
I selected some translated readings to comment on a little bit today, but mostly to share the beauty of the work and of the act that brought the work to readers of English. I think of translation as a difficult act, and one of sustained wonder, a kind of commitment to no little awe and sweat and cultural Good Works that although indispensible for literary art, is never praised enough, can never be praised enough.
The care involved in translation sustains one of the most important of human interactions and forms of bonding between differing people via literacy. Translators have to be delicate, deliberate, sensitive yet secular lovers of their chosen subjects, cultures, and texts. A very beautiful and noble act is translating, one that works well only in tandem with a great amount of ethos. Without this work of textual love and ethos, literacy would be stunted, a reality of Babelesque squanderings, an act of futility. Translators of poetry, to my mind, are heroes who cannot be praised enough. (for more on this view, please read my article-interview with Chris Daniels in the Spring 03 issue of the University of Texas at Arlington, English Department's online literary journal, Znine.
I am thus very pleased to post this small excerpt of poetry translation by Kent Johnson and Forrest Gander.
It is from Jaime Saenz, Immanent Visitor * and in some meta ways can be said to speak not only of the tradition of the secular beloved--the poem's work--but also the good work of any act of love, even a textual act of love, even or perhaps in this context, especially that of translation itself. I suggest, too, perhaps as a shoring up of that which is fragmented, chaotic, disorderly and disconnected :
I
The floating world is lost, and the whole of life catches in the spring light of your looking,
--and while you repeat yourself in the echo, horizon bound in smoke, I regard your departure,
clear substance and hope dehiscing into distance:
you live on that sweetness when beauty, sorrowing, glances your way,
and you emerge in half-profile
to the iron ringing of nighttime instruments, golden and blue, a music shining and
throbbing and taking wing
in the hollow of my heart.
I don't dare look at you lest I not be inside you, and I don't praise you lest joy steal away
--I'm content just to watch you, and you know this and pretend not to look at me
and you bounce around, exaggerating everything with divine insight,
as if you were riding a horse or a motorcycle...
I yearn for you the moment I hear you,
a sepulchral music vanishes and my death steps out of you,
beloved images become visible to the musicians
when it's you who is listening
--always, the musicians exult in silence
when it's you who is listening.
II
Your crossing the streets separates you from me, as the day and the streets are
separate
--the whole city is a spider that hoards you from me,
and the light cuts you off; it isolates you and makes me see how well it cocoons
you
--resplendent, your happiness on the street corners,
at grief's hour I ask myself if I will find that sublime, deep blue of your
garments ...
the air of your voice when evening falls
--and I ask myself why I would joyously surrender to the joy you kindle in me.
Your likeness to me is not to be met in you, in me, nor in my likeness to you
but in a line randomly traced and made unforgettable by forgetfulness
--and in the scent rising from certain drawings that make us weep
and which at the same time enliven us,
because your stunning vision is a disquiet to the flavor of memories,
that gentle testimony left by youth of its leaving:
hidden image...
(5-6)
Jaime Saenz, Immanent Visitor. trans., Kent Johnson and Forrest Gander. Berkeley: U Calif Press, 2002.
chris at
1:24 AM
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Sunday, December 14, 2003
Jean, yes!--tis lookin good with the scanner up.
Decided to choose one to like a lot--the Josef Sudek egg bowl for its "banal object" focus, but moreso for me those achingly lived-on wood grains, & that pocked table surface. So much life happened right there, kept happening.
Then just below that, catching up on reading: I like the Sondheim stuff you've posted, too. thanks!
I hope your headache recedes soon.
chris at
1:23 PM
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Daughter Holly Listening * : Sade--who (still--what is this?--third generation of listeners?--amazing) sounds soooooo sexy--that incurable affection for body. Rhythms infinity. Nice. I love it. Music. Poetry. Music. Poetry. How the 'Smooth Operator' goes on and on in these modes. Music. Music. Poetry. Music...
[Post-edit, a little later:] Now Daughter Holly's onto Boy Hits Car : I love them. "Animal" and "Man without Skin" rock as music and as poetry. conscious effort to be poetry in there, too, I believe.
* Daughter Holly is listening in her room (sanctuary) and it is **cranked up**--
Strange parent that I am, I do not mind the volume unless under a lot of stress pressure & etc. In fact: I often just borrow off thru the walls, their listening; or when I do play stuff out here in the living room, they sometimes have to tell me to turn mine down. Sorry to say: someone (me! *grin*) didn't follow the usual growing up patterns (missed some of those patterns completely?). But yeah: role reversals: bless every one of 'em, I say. It's one way to begin to learn dialogue.
chris at
8:23 AM
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To Corina: Muchas Gracias ! Sending a very warm Thank You to Corina, student at Oberlin * !!
What a fine honor para mi y mi blog, chris murray's Texfiles :
Corina has put together a blog --Fledgling Wordsmith-- specifically to research, contextualize, and respond to what blogging does for writers in terms of community. (alas: unfortunately, there is no contact info for Corina at her blog--if there were, I would send her an email of thanks!--so I hope she sees this post, and if so, that she will send me an email to say hello.)
This is Corina's second research paper on the topic (the first paper is also posted at Fledgling Wordsmith, but you have to scroll down to the first few posts for it). She investigates, describes, and defines a series of blogs based on several kinds of appeal. Literary appeal is a top priority, and eclectic samplings from contemporary writing and writers.
This is an honor for Texfiles because Corina made it a centerpiece for her paper, which explores two other blogs in depth, then concluding that the kind of blog Texfiles is expands the genre and the feel of blogging. Gosh! I blush, feeling humble, but am so very pleased to hear this!
Corina writes,
"Murray posts his [sic] own poetry as well as works by poets like Stephen Vincent, Jack Myers (the Poet Laureate of Texas), and Diane di Prima. The blog also includes book reviews and news about Texas poetry and literary events. In true blogger fashion, Tex Files has a lengthy list of links: the personal blogs of other poets and writers as well as online literary journals (some of these journals such as Skanky Possum and Bookslut also have their own blogs). This is an online community but it is distinct from the type of community that Megnut is a part of. Blogs give Tex Files a venue to create a literary (primarily Texan) community that links poets and readers together by their love of literature.
"Blogger.com calls itself 'Push-button Publishing For the People' (Blogger). This diction is significant. Most people would not think of having a blog as being published. But blogs are a tool to get your ideas or work out and noticed and maybe even commented on or blogged. And Blogger is 'for the people.' Anyone can get 'published.' Anyone anywhere can say nearly anything online and someone can read it. And comment. And then the person who posted it could respond to the comment. Blogs are a new way to share ideas and artistic work and are being utilized especially by many individuals and groups interested in literature. Weblogs are portals to poetry."
Corina also mentions that the blogger advertising sucks (it is stated far more eloquently by Corina). And I guess my name can evoke some gender assumptions--that is interesting and not the first time an online correspondent refered to me via male pronouns, but it is not as interesting as the rest of what is mentioned about blogging and community. That's really where it's at!
Thanks very much once again, Corina: and let me say that if you are in Dallas and want to talk poetry or anything literary just get in touch with me:
cmurray@uta.edu
YaY!! Poetry and poetry blogs: For the people--24/7
*On the sitemeter, I did notice a repeating pattern of visits daily over the span of a week or so, from an Oberlin url recently, and I wondered about it. But of course you cannot really identify anything about such from sitemetering and I am not always in favor of following its siren call--it's a waste of time, mostly, except to give you a rough idea of some demographics and peak reading hours by which to project an idea of audience, but sitemeter certainly cannot and should not be used to try to identify who is reading--!--there is a question of sanctity in the relation between readers and PR or marketing dictums: readers should be able to retain their sense of privacy, I think. So that is where I differ over the question of value in sitemeter. Thus in this situation of noticing the Oberlin url, I figured it to be another one of those little mysteries in life that will never be solved, until I found the technorati links the other day, and am very pleasantly surprised to conclude that the Oberlin url visits were probably Corine and to find this paper she wrote (and wanted it to be found: if she will contact me and give permission, I will post the entire paper here, if she so desires. )
chris at
1:54 AM
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On Caracas: an update on recent political events: Venepoetics--thanks, Guillermo.
chris at
1:20 AM
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from Susan Howe, My Emily Dickinson* :
My Life had stood--a Loaded Gun
In Corners--till a Day
The Owner passed--identified--
And carried Me away--
My and me. In this unsettling New England lexical landscape nothing is sure. In a shorter space (woman's quick voice) Dickinson went further than Browning, coding and erasing--deciphering the idea of herself, dissimulation in revelation. Really alone at a real frontier, dwelling in Possibility was what she had brilliantly learned to do.
POSSIBILITIES:
My Life: A Soul finding God.
My Life: A Soul finding herself.
My Life: A poet's admiring heart born into voice by idealizing a precursor poet's song.
My Life: Dickinson herself, waiting in corners of neglect for Higginson to recognize her ability and help her to join the ranks of other published American poets.
My Life: The American continent and its westward moving frontier. Two centuries of pioneer literature and myth had insistently compared thre land to a virgin woman (bride and queen). Exploration and settlement were pictured in terms of masculine erotic discovery and domination of alluring / threatening feminine territory.
My Life: The savage source of American myth.
My Life: The United States in the grip of violence that threatened to break apart its original Union.
My Life: A white woman taken captive by Indians.
My Life: A slave.
My Life: An unmarried woman (Emily Bronte's Catherine Earnshaw) waiting to be chosen (identified) by her Lover-husband-Owner (Edgar Linton).
My Life: A frontiersman's gun.
The emblematical
chris at
12:53 AM
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some days all one can do is recognize iterations and, well, just iterate, ya kno?
chris at
12:44 AM
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from Samuel Beckett's The Unnameable* :
"… These notions of forbears, of houses where lamps are lit at night, and other such, where do they come to me from? And all these questions I ask myself. It is not in a spirit of curiosity. I cannot be silent. About myself I need know nothing. Here all is clear. No, all is not clear. But the discourse must go on. So one invents obscurities. Rhetoric. These lights for instance, which I do not require to mean anything, what is there so strange about them, so wrong?"
(7)
* Beckett, Samuel, The Unnameable. New York: Grove Press, 1958.
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