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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:
Holly's Pirate-girl Hat,
chrismurray in a straw hat,
Michael Helsem's Gray Wyvern NOLA Fedora.
Duchamp's Rrose Selavy's flirting hat.
Max Ernst's Hats of The Hat Makes the Man.
Jordan Davis' The Hat!
poetry. hks' smelly head baseball cap.
Samuel Beckett's Lucky's
Black bowler hat,
giving his oration
on what's questionable in mankind,
in *Waiting for 'God-ot'*.
my friend John Phillips's 1969
dove gray fedora w/ wild feather.
Bob Dylan's mystery lover's Panama Hat.
Bob Creeley's Black Mountain Felt Boater Hat.
Duke Ellington's Satin
Top Hat. Acorn Hats of Tree.
Freud's 1950 City Fedora.
Joseph Brodsky's Sailor Cap.
Harry K Stammer's Copper Hat
Hell. Lewis LaCook's bowler hat(s).
Tom Beckett's Bad Hair Day
Furry Pimp Hat. Daughter Holly's black beret.
harry k stammer's fez. Cat
in the Hat's Hat & best
hat, Googling Texfiles:
crocheted hat with flames.
Harry K Stammer's tinseled berets.
Tex's 10 gallon Gary Cooper felt Stetson cowboy hat.
Jordan Davis's fedora.
Dali's High-heel Shoe Hat. Harry K Stammer's en-blog LAPD Hat
& aluminum baseball cap. cap'n caps. NY-Yankees caps. the HKS-in-person-caps
are blue or green no logos nor captions.
Ma Skanky Possum 10's nighttime cap.
moose antler hat. propeller beenie hat.
doo rag. knit face mask hat. Bob Dylan's & photographer Laziz
Hamani's panama hats. Mark Weiss's Publisher's Hat.
Rebecca Loudon's Seattle-TX-Hats'n'boots.
Ever-Evolving Links:
Silliman's Links
Dominic Rivron
Unidentified
Br Tom @ One & Plainer
Dan Waber: ars poetica anthology
Dan Waber: altered books anthology
chris daniels: Notes to a Fellow Traveller
Chris Daniels: Toward an Anti-Capitalist Poetry
David Daniels: The Gates Of Paradise
subterranean poets: Beijing Poetry Group
Charles Alexander/Chax Press: Chaxblog
Headlines Poetry: the latest weblog entries
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Shanna's DIY Publishing Blog
Galatea Resurrects: a Poetry Review
Tom Beckett
John Sakkis: BOTH BOTH
New Francois Luong:Voices in Utter Dark, KaBlow!sm is...
Old Francois Luong: Voices in Utter Dark
Margin Walker: Andrew Lundwall
Free Space Comix: the latest BK Stefans blog
Adam Lockhart, Experimentalist Composer
Antic View: Alan Bramhall & Jeff Harrison
lookouchblog: Jessica Smith
MiPOradio
Web Log -- Charles Bernstein
Google Poem Generator: Leevi Lehto
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Feral Scholar: Stan Goff
worderos: Tom Beckett
In Galatea's Purse
Japundit
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Luca Antara: Martin Edmond
Brief Epigrams: Ryan Alexander MacDonald
Radio My Vocabulary: 4 pm Sunday Poetry Streams
Mark Lamoreaux: [[[0{:}0]]]
Hot Whiskey Blog
louder
Nick Bruno: They Shoot Poets Don't They?
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Kate Greenstreet: every other day
heuriskein: Tom Orange
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Fluffy Dollars: Michelle Detorie
Jane Dark's Sugar High!
The Katherine Anne Porter Literary Center
(Charles) Olson Now: Michael Kellaher & Ammiel Alcalay
kari edwards' TranssubMUTATION
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PurPur: Petrus Pokus
Snapper Missives: Scott Pierce
A Sad Day for Sad Birds II: Gina Meyers
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zafusy: experimental poetry journal
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Portable Press@Yo~Yo Labs
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a New Word Placements
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Grapez
SB POET
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|||AS/IS2|||
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Hear-it dot org: info on hearing problems
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Shin Yu Pai: makura-no-soshi
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YaY!! Eileen Tabios: Chatelaine Poetics !
Jill Jones: Ruby Street
Geoffrey Gatza's BlazeVox
Bill Allegrezza's P-Ramblings
Gary Sullivan's Elsewhere
GoldenRuleJones
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Bookslut
Chickee's SuperDeluxeGoodPoems
As-Is !
John Latta's Hotel Point
Sawako Nakayasu's Ongoing Show
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kari edwards: transdada
Fluss
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poetry for the people: canwehaveourballback?
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Kasey S. Mohammad's Old-New Limetree
Kasey's Old Limetree
James Meetze: Brutal Kittens
Cassie Lewis: The Jetty
Joseph Mosconi's Harlequin Knights
Nada Gordon's Ululate
ultimate: Stephanie Young's First Well Nourished Moon
Steve Evans: Third Factory
Noah Eli Gordon's Human Verb
Jean Vengua's Blue Kangaroo
Sawako Nakayasu: Texture Notes
Free Space Comix: BK Stefans
Crosfader
Malcolm Davidson's eeksy peeksy
Marsh Hawk Press group
Catherine Meng's Porthole Redux
Josh Corey's Cahiers de Corey
Very Nice! Shampoopoetry
UTA's Lit Mag: ZNine
Wild Honey Press
Jacket
JFK's Poetinresidence
Malcolm Davidson's Tram Spark poems
HYepez: RealiTi
HYpez: Mexperimental
Aimee Nez's Gila Monster
BestMaX: Jim Behrle's jismblog
Cori Copp's Littleshirleybean
Jordan Davis: Million Poems
Eileen Tabios: Corpsepoetics [see Chatelaine above]
YaY! Liz's Thirdwish
Ultra Linking
Henry Gould's HG Poetics
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Saturday, January 10, 2004
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
3:01 PM
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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
4:59 AM
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((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((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
4:29 AM
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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
3:20 AM
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Friday, January 09, 2004
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
10:27 PM
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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
9:58 PM
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Contemporary Poetry Review's out: Special Issue on Lowell, including an interesting-looking article on the sonnets, by Christopher Bakken.
chris at
5:57 PM
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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
12:23 AM
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Thursday, January 08, 2004
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
7:21 PM
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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
6:09 AM
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"Ernesto Cardenal releases the third and final volume
of his autobiography..."--Thanks for this news, Guillermo (post of Tuesday 06 Jan)
chris at
5:50 AM
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* Love Your sNOBuddHA * Lanny !
(scroll to Tuesday, Jan. 06)
chris at
5:16 AM
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YaY!! From the Chatelaine: Check it out: *PINOYPOETICS & "The Impending INVASIAN" *
chris at
5:08 AM
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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
2:29 AM
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Wednesday, January 07, 2004
Hurry: go to kari edwards' Transdada and take the quiz: "What art form are you?"
chris at
3:22 PM
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Hey! Big Congratulations to Nada Gordon and Gary Sullivan on their betrothal. Bliss is Best!
chris at
5:24 AM
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Wow, Jilly! Sounds like a really full exciting week. Rock on!
chris at
4:58 AM
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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
3:30 AM
|
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
1:44 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
1:08 AM
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Tuesday, January 06, 2004
Coming up here shortly: New Work from
** Mark Weiss, Texfiles Poet of the Week **
chris at
8:01 PM
|
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
7:59 PM
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Last Night's and Today's Final Score:
Airport Runways & Impossibly Small Zen Monks with Tiny Bells : 100
Chris Murray : 99
chris at
5:29 PM
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Monday, January 05, 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
3:33 PM
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^ ) ^ --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
6:12 AM
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Walking is Horizontal and Vertical: "a pleasure fulfilled..."
chris at
3:41 AM
|
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
2:54 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
2:12 AM
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** 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
12:21 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
12:16 AM
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Sunday, January 04, 2004
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
11:51 PM
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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
10:46 PM
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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
10:11 PM
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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
7:00 PM
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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
6:42 PM
|
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
5:50 PM
|
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
3:03 PM
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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
5:03 AM
|
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
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