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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:
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Max Ernst's Hats of The Hat Makes the Man.
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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
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Bob Dylan's mystery lover's Panama Hat.
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Hell. Lewis LaCook's bowler hat(s).
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& aluminum baseball cap. cap'n caps. NY-Yankees caps. the HKS-in-person-caps
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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.
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|||AS/IS2|||
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ultimate: Stephanie Young's First Well Nourished Moon
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UTA's Lit Mag: ZNine
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Malcolm Davidson's Tram Spark poems
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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 17, 2004
Hey! Thanks, Tonio! What a great way to do top ten lists--
very nicely done. Many thanks for including this little bloggie, too. (scroll to Tonio's Thursday, 15 Jan 04, posts)
chris at
2:38 PM
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Dept. of In Process
In the Rolling Effusive Tyranny of Good
Seaweed: the World is
so much a Floating Infusion of Good,
a mass, wandering oceanic surfaces,
just looking for necessary. Good words
more. Accept all wantering good words
that come like frigate birds over your brow,
your oar, your SUV, your real estate
deals, always. No--more than that, relish
purse seine tuna for good. No--revel in shark
steaks for good, bathe in lobster good * :
make like tiger mussel shell words. No--get
down. Get down in sand & mud at water's
edge & drink your shots, drink words
for good, just be better seaweed. Roll around,
scratch that wet discarded good & dirty
world with all your only most feathery,
your feelings & all your uphill wants
for good, your yelping sandy sock
full of good words. Bring out all your bird
seed & slugs. Roll at the ancient
bird wet edge of your creaturely revel
in sand, in air, this good world--roll in it.
Never let a good deed or a good word go
without excess or go by unrevelled in,
unanswered. Love every one, all the time.
If in this world we must have tyranny
then let it be Words or Words-
worthian goods: words without tables and chairs!
Good & full of English grammar, more, & more oceans.
cm
* gee: Don't it Just Make
Ya Wanna Be Bad?
(all good words
gladly accepted here!)
(((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((* ) *)))))))))))))))))))))cm))))))))))))))))))))))
chris at
1:17 PM
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FYI & WhazzzUp on texfiles posts :
1. The Newest Texfiles Poet of the Week: Clayton Couch
2. Special Poem: "Of You," a beauty from Lanny Quarles
3. Thank You to Mark Weiss & some new poems
4. Scroll down to my Friday poem, "Slip Now," in response to Lanny Q's
.+so then, ZaZen Y'all+
chris at
5:55 AM
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Announcing Another New Texfiles Poet of the Week :
Sending out a very warm welcome and much appreciation for the poetry, to
** Clayton Couch ! **
Clayton lives in South Carolina & blogs at Word Placements, and, with Andrew Lundwall, is one of the innovators behind
that prolific group poetry blog, As/Is. Also, here, at this fabulous zine, Siderreality, Clayton is the highly esteemed editor.
Here are two of Clayton's poems that I think rock!
Human Resources
Channel subtle nervous chatter and feeling. Trapped,
the shoes don't fit, or the meetings warp what is out-
side, unopened. Whether you glare too soft or slow,
where itch courses and retraces, old divides organs.
Down middle, being young disadvantages severe
dress rehearsal. Winding downstairs as if hampered,
you prod and stab at fatalism, unable to clear away
the plaque. Fellowship is impossible; no limits to share
float brackets on behavioral sleepiness. Impersonal zoo,
social extremity zooms, and flood competes for prayer.
Silence. No one knows what sets her off. Tired drivel
up front, no one complains about weekends sold.
Difficult…no inner cruising speed and it's no good
to see you for now, and yes, the accusation falls
flattered. Tough questions fed up, or burnt of mind.
Its Discontents
Paradise is in trouble again. I said it.
Don't wait for the effigy fed with fork
and spoon to turn against you one night,
when it has had enough of TV dinners, boy.
Medieval doctors, walking putrid cobblestones,
lean noses on humourous odours and diagnose
the wicked, birdlike and beaky, joking it up.
You're not kidding. Civilization's sister
is a rat or cockroach; you believe in good
behaviour. I was, as you said from the bottom
of your holey heart, indisposed. Would you
have it any other way? Believe me, when barter
breaks down, everything abstract in market-
place clowns around awhile, ripping that torn
and besotted tax umbrella out of your hands.
%%%%%%#####@@@@@(..poetry c. of Clayton Couch..)&&&&&&&&
chris at
5:15 AM
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Friday, January 16, 2004
(& please note: do scroll down here to my post of Fri. 16 jan 04, 5:33 a.m., my poem written in response to the following beautiful poem) from One of my Favorite Poet-artists
--YaY!!--Lanny Quarles !
(I just Love this poem!) :
Of You *
of the innumerable tiers above me i weep
of that inverted babylon that atrium where i am
looking at the work of your hands where the fountain
of inner tiers flows of the garden in which the hands
of your work are the coral of your tears
tiers in which the garden of your work commands me
i must look i see you in the work in which i stand
i weep looking up into the work of your hands
into the innumerable tears above me i stand in the
tiers i see your work in the hands of the working
your work is you standing in the tiers in the tiers
of working they are drawing and writing with such
exquisite precision i see your work i saw your working
hands i weep before the work of your hands and the
tiers reach up like the tower of hanging gardens babylon
atrium of tear reaching ever inward ever more baroque
spiral of spirits and angels and texts and failures
and explosions and processing the flow of light in the
work of your hands and cascades of darkness from above
and the luminous animals leaking from the skin of your
marriage somewhere in these tiers i saw your work and
the work of your hands led me weeping into the atrium
of the great work by the spirit of the hands and the dark
divine word of actuation and the spirit of your tiers
and the message of your weeping was the drawing and the
singing and stunted trees and the towering globule of
electric motion and the tiers of texts where i am lost
in the coral of your handiwork in the majesty of your
weeping tiers how i found the strength to look for you
to see your work how across the great distances i saw you
saw you there snowflake little equation little occaison
and the storm was a flesh over tiers of bones lost in
the workings of the storm of your hands i saw you in your
work in the great machinery of the angels of your hands
you fold so queerly over the head of a needle through the
eye of a camel they came so gently like reflections between
the planes and the pains of the yawning maw of the chasm
of the black and perilous chasm which is the tiered atrium
how ever upward and downward how lost among the tiers
lost among the tribes i weep standing lost within your
work by the wondrous work of your hands your beloved hands
which had breathed coral into the city of tears where
lost in your work i saw your hands lost in their work in the
garden of the working of the great work of your hands
the skin of your knowledge is turning in the great metamorphosis
of the hulk of the tier in the great inner spiral hulk of the
tiered garden of weeping hands stands me lost in the work
in the working of you and you are somewhere up above me
up above your own work and the work is the work of tiers
tiers upon tiers of the garden atrium chasm well of hell
which ripples in the gravity mirror which leads me always
to you seeing you in your work i am seeing you in the chasm
of the mirror in the shrine of the hand i am weeping
* Lanny Quarles, "Of You," (solipsis) //: phaneronoemikon web-blog, post of Thursday, 15 Jan 04, 9:28 a.m.
(((((((.)((((((((oooo)(((((((((.))))))(c.Lanny Quarles 2004))))))))))
chris at
11:48 PM
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Many Thanks to Mark Weiss!
Last summer, Mark kindly let me have a look at and choose from poems in a manuscript he had been working on. I chose many, since so much of Marks poetry is expertly accomplished and especially moving. These are some of my favorites of that work, indeed of all his work, so I'm very pleased to be able to publish them online, here, at Texfiles. I am grateful to Mark for being a Texfiles Poet of the Week, which does require some patience (I'm not much of a person for calendars or a regular, by-the-clock doin's : ) But more than that I want to thank him for writing poetry and for translating and editing it, with such care, with the finesse and precision that otherwise might only be found in the work of a rigorously well studied symphonic composer. The pianist turned conductor-composer. This is a poet who lives what can only be called a love for the work of art, yes--but even more than that, this poet has a great devotion to the art of the work. An enthusiasm for every minute detail of the work. To sustain that devotion is a most difficult task in the distractions of daily-ness, and the long range fracas that is the conceptual climate of aesthetics, the conflicts and challenges that most cannot take on and survive in for very long as artists. Mark has been there, a stablizing presence, for a number of years. He has been amazing that way, as many will certainly attest. But I'd humbly like to add one more thing: how grateful I am to Mark for his friendship. Many Thanks, Mark!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
New Work from Mark Weiss, Texfiles Poet of the Week :
SEIZURES
1
The angel in baroque splendor
on the church cornice, horn
to lips as if in celebration--about to exhale a polyphony
that will be the end of everything. His feet step forwards as lightly
as if joining the dance in air
that is an angel's preoccupation.
2
A focus on words, a phrase
out of context, spoken, heard, read,
that makes poetry dangerous
whether alone or in company. For a moment
overcome, like vomiting
with grief and then
a focus that could burn holes in the words, except that
it changes them in pursuit of a quest for the phrase that could save me
but is never found, so that I'm left with word-salad
and a few minutes' remnant aphasia.
A half hour later my words
are entirely back, an hour more
my full energy, as if I had in fact
vomited forth some disabling glut. This
or a depressant that does
accomplish its task and may reduce
the onset of seizures. Through this
all words, in speech, in class
in writing or daydream become threatening. And I try
regardless to live my daily
demanding and self-demanding life.
3
There was a woman this morning exhorting angrily the empty street she walked down in a language
I could not at that moment identify, if it was one
at all, her heavy calves
bare to the morning's bluster. It was perhaps that
she spoke to. I was tempted
to follow her to discover
an object of wrath I could join with, and would have
if my day's obligations had permitted. For a moment
the adolescent's thought that this now lost, this irretrievable experience
took precedence. Before the mask of experience dropped over me again.
4
The rain so fine it
does not even puncture the surface
of standing water.
**
*
I love
the body
of the child.
And the married woman
who looks away
will remember this.
**
*
THE CONQUEST
The sunken barge in the dead waters of the Gowanus Canal summons,
at evening at the end of springtime from the subway's overpass, the work-
life of waterways, the Erie, the Royal,
and before that, middens
on the banks of rivers and seashore, mounds
and fairy-rings and the rocks
that Finn himself had flung from a high place, and mostly
the small ship
that coasted the shore of Campeche Bay, at long
intervals a figure
or a crowd of figures in white cotton, dark-
skinned, flowing hair against jungle greenery,
a various welcome. The landing
where a white stone temple stood empty on the shore and they found
a nightmare beyond comprehension, remains
of sacrifice the parts of bodies, bodies
with hearts torn from them, and they
equally mysterious
equally horrible, communicating
by the most meager translation, often,
and by the translator's decision, faulty, but in context
hopeless of understanding. Lost
except for the shreds of myths, as if a collision of anticultures in which
one had had to eradicate the other,
and the remnants of a way of being to be expunged in a lifetime, the cities
that Diaz said appeared to float before him above the lake's surface, a marvel
his mind faltered at the awareness of, a vision,
he thought. Not even remembered
by the people who made them. And on my
island the villages and their builders buried
without trace, and I
constantly mourning the narrowing
of the richness of the place I walk, my mourning
in itself an acknowledgement. Call it
inner space, as if it mimicked that reality, or were mimicked by it.
**
*
WAKING
Timid with distance, I think
of the ooze of femaleness in the false dawn
that a forest morning always is, that the forest
outside my window is, in the real dawn-time this morning.
Body to body.
There are doves
calling, and birds
whose voices I don't know the names of
and a cardinal suddenly in the sole domestic pine of the deciduous wilderness,
black face and orange beak. It flies off, not even
acknowledging my presence, a cackle following
its red path through the forest. I awaken
again, dim as I am this morning, awakening
from a long sleep, and everything,
everybody, filled with surprising grace, as they say,
abounding, and a man
can at least save himself for a time and become
in all innocence a child, a child
with a man looking over his shoulder. Outside
there is another thing
and another, and the day
broods through its heat into cold again in the brooding mind
always twilight, twilight of morning or evening.
**
*
FOR LAURIE
You have become in my dream
an operative for the Department
of Internal Affairs, you tell me, explaining
the IA button you wear
above the left breast of your summer dress. And your eyes
are suddenly a hiding-place. You are in charge of my heart
and will know my subversions
as you once catalogued my interest in the bodies of other women at a party
no matter how I tensed my neck to control my glances. I suppose
I am writing about love and mystery
in my own and in your eyes, of the persons lurking there
that neither of us know but whose movements we monitor,
suspicious not only of intent, but action. In my craziness they erupt
from me, and I seek
a monitor I call caring, but,
being one of those corner loungers, expect pursuit
when I run, your gaze
still following me. What is it
you want, I ask
myself, that you cannot have this morning? Oh,
love, as it never was,
that says,
rest now, you have done enough.
**
*
ROMANCE
Whenever I travel in time I arrive at a crisis
she said sometimes a war in which my pain or valor strike even me
as admirable or in a past body
wildly desirable, legs in the air and the greatest men
of my time between them. Sometimes I wish I could travel in time
to a simple place, to a cottage
on the edge of a forest with no large beasts
no stories, and a dull average man
or no man at all. Maybe a cat
for company and a fire
and blankets for the long
silent winter. I would sew quilts
and stir the pot, and sleep at sunset
and that would be history.
**
*
Cat sits on the shed roof
watches the shadow of the clothesline back
and forth, towards and away, the rectangular shadows of pants
and sheets,
hopes for a bird-shadow. It's warm
on the roof
and sunny. After a while
he shakes
himself, and leaves.
**
*
FLOATING THROUGH BROOKLYN
Fulsome blossoms of the cherry and the streets
of this dingy city filled with romance. I am the wind
itself, gliding downhill on my bicycle, singing
any risk,
any risk is worth it.
I had been thinking
for thirty years I have written poems and will write
for forty more and it seemed
a hopeless burden to float
that lightly.
**
*
FLOATING THROUGH BROOKLYN, AGAIN
A dog barks by the cemetery three blocks away, barks interminably in the brittle darkness
his presence known
to whatever walks there. In my high bed with its books
and its amber lamp and its shelves
with more books
the great splintered night in the silent branches across the glass at my head and the sad light
of the street-lamps on the paint-and-chrome bodies of cars. I have a geode
so large that I sleep there, so large
it becomes the street, so large with
its trees and stones, its stones glowing,
it seemed, from within.
A property of marble
or of white.
I have a bonnet made of blue
made of clouds
made of darkness. All night long
I float.
**
*
MIMI'S TURTLE
My friend has owned the same turtle for 18 years. She dips it
in medicinal baths. It eats
its brethren when she introduces them, and it seems pleased
when it pokes its eye. "It may
outlive us all," she says, and imagines plans
for that contingency, weighing the qualities
of different zoos. She says, "of course
it knows me;
I give it food."
**
*
chris at
9:29 PM
|
Getting ready to announce another Texfiles Poet of the Week. First, though, I'll be posting some more of Mark Weiss's fine work (in a little while here).
chris at
9:07 PM
|
Listening:
Janis !
A long 2 CD set.
Amazing Grace
chris at
8:05 PM
|
Listening:
* I
don't know
just
what
to do
with myself... *
White Stripes
YaY !! (provided by daughter Holly's good taste!--thanks, sweetie!)
:)
chris at
4:18 PM
|
Slip Now *
for snowflake
for mountain
for the higher path
slip now
for red lava gravel’s
coldest subtrahend
in melt
in scar, in growing run-off
in the one & only
scent that is ice--
slip now
for strands of timothy curled
below studded tongues of frost
melt,
slip now
past winter’s wheeze of rose
hips, their fractions
of thorn & dessicated rant brittling,
slip now
dripping
in the first geometry
the delicate warm
threading light touch of dawning,
slip now
for embracing root
& aspen
grays & embodied
stacks of unseeing eyes
slip now
for each mottle
each speckle cubed of reddish ponderosa
trunk knuckling its bursts of needle
shine against sky
each will heel
to time,
will lay down
slip now
past the knarled ears
of oak grannies scarved
in snowflakes & half lives
the remainders of oak time
slip to mind now
cmcmcmcmcmcmcmcmcmcmcmcmcmcmcmcmcmcmcmcmcmcmcmcmcmcm
* written in response to "Of You," a poem written by Lanny Quarles of (solipsis) ://phaneronoemikon web-blog, and posted there on Thurs. 15 Jan 04, 9:28 a.m. Lanny's "Of You" is also posted here (above), on Friday, 16 Jan. 04, 11:32 p.m.
chris at
5:33 AM
|
In Praise of * Anticipation * YaY !!
Now that's what I been thinkin'--this is exactly what a sonnet should be for and/or about. Yeah!
That, or in praise of growing, and/or cooking, good things: sonnet to lentil soup, anyone? Ha ha. Seriously, tho, I think I will have to settle here for a sonnet to the sweetpotato. It's a perfect food. Like lemons are perfect. And apricots. Walnuts, pecans, almonds. Cranberries. Oranges.
And oh lord, yes: Mango-mango, mango mango mango, Baby!
chris at
1:43 AM
|
Why, in commodity-centered, quantifiable worlds, books can get really sad. Thanks, Eileen, for this very practical outlook. & Hey, Y'All, Buy More Books !
chris at
12:12 AM
|
Thursday, January 15, 2004
I'm cookin' a turkey. Really. With sweet potatoes. Smells good in here. Rainy-drizzle outside, nice inside. : )
chris at
9:41 PM
|
Wow. Got a really wild accusatory email from some guy on the Buffalo Poetics listserv after I posted a note agreeing with a post by Rodrigo Toscano that some of the discussion there had gotten strangely assumptive about so called normalcy, as in that rightist agendas are just doing what's *normal.* There appear to be some very misinformed contributors there, and often they make claims full of faulty warrants and unexamined assumptions about homogeneity in culture--you kno: the usual crap. Rodrigo wrote very clearly, and objected to this tendency. I commended him.
Next thing I know I get this email from a Steven Balaban (?), who I do not know, and have never heard of, jumping all over me and Rodrigo for supposedly creating an environment of exclusion there! Yeah: I stay awake at night cooking up new ways to interject my censoriousness on the entire Boogalo List, and my plans always work & etc. He said we were the reason he only lurks on the list--doesn't want to have to listen to people like us. Like I spend a lot of time there, anyway (I post maybe 4 times a month, tops). Then some other guy got on there and made some slur about blogs and bloggers. Wow. Must be some real negativity running around somewhere in there. Well, on Steven the emailer, I deleted him with no response, of course. And have no reason to take up any talk with the one who doesn't like bloggers/blogs--they are entitled to their opinions--but it always worries me when people start getting high pitched about stuff like this: they're just so hateful sounding about it. Geeezzzz.
Rodrigo answered the emailer in a kind but no-nonsense way. And sent me a nice hello email. Thanks, Rodrigo!
chris at
9:12 PM
|
Countdown on Nine, # 6
is up at As/Is
chris at
11:51 AM
|
[This is not a review:]
Would Ya Like a Few Slices of Limeony Wit with this Morning's Crispy Qwertyuiop Flakes?
Well, I'm fresh out of limeonies and flakes, especially since i had to use all mine up when I found myself inextricably tangled up in blue links Wednesday (wrong, not typed in right! all over the place!!--it sucked!). But anyway, don't worry--I did find this very delightful web-take, first, on the tradition of REVIEWING, which we all do, and must do, and must do well, but which can get a little stagnant from time to time. So here's a fresh take on it and something of a remedy :
“[Reviewing:] ... it depends on your objective: trying to compete with other grad students to see who can better please the most feared and apparently omnipotent department curmudgeon at some expensive so-called research university?
or [& this's the part I like best:] trying to get something out of literature and writing in this short life, something other than a good grade for tracing previous expert readings?”--Steve Tills, Editor, Black Spring: The Republic of California
That's in a piece under the links (ah, no not that word!), titled, Reviews. And then the piece is in one font, titled "My Reviews," & subtitled, "Review Aims." Okay, I thought, now we're getting somewhere. A map, a lesson, a taxonomy, a monumental paradigm. So it wasn't until I read all the way through it and got to the next piece, different font, & titled, "Review 1: Review of 'Review Aims' " that I just could not stop giggling. I should say laughing, I suppose, and make this dignified, no? But really it was the act of giggling in process, on-going. Over that one little bit of cleverness. Well I'll be back to read more, definitely!
But here, in my non-review, I won't stop with that, nosirree, cuz the editorial statement for Black Spring also rocks for bottom line revelatory truths in a age of blowhard bushie revelatory truths:
"NOTE: Although the editor(s) will often solicit work from friends and frequently showcase poetries by *established poets,* Black Spring especially seeks to encourage submissions from "dissenting" and isolated poets, particularly [& here's what won me over in this one:] those presently, chronically, or geopolitically unblessed by Bush Era economic prosperity and American egoism."--Steve Tills, Editor, Black Spring
So, how’s that for an editorial statement?
Yeah, poetry for the people, definitely.
The first issue of Black Spring came out in December 03, and includes work from
Stephen Ellis, kari edwards, Jim McCrary, and Steve Tills.
Not to harp at ya or anything, but
What are you waiting for?--please go
read this new journal, they've got it goin' on!
Thanks, Steve, and Rock On!
chris at
4:26 AM
|
Sooooo Lovely :
"... answering your enigmas
with an ache in its bones."--Esdras Parra,
from the poem, "Este suelo secreto,"
(translated by Guillermo Parra.
Hey, rock on, Guillermo! ),
posted to Venepoetics.
Yeah!--check these out...
chris at
1:45 AM
|
Wednesday, January 14, 2004
Darn it all ! Having great trouble with links of every kind today!
For those looking for correct links to Znine, just go to the
Znine main page where you can then check the index.
Thanks for your patience.
cm
chris at
6:42 PM
|
About Antonio Jose Ponte :
I see I messed up last night (early morn, really) and didn't get the linking right below on Cuban poet, Antonio Jose Ponte, the posted translation by Mark Weiss, below. I've got it working in there now. And here are some others:
Antonio Jose Ponte :
here's a link from *Aperture*
& another from *City Lights*--an interview with Cola Franzen and Dick Cluster
& a site still under construction from *Cuba,* on Marti, a history of poetry there, & with a mention of Ponte at the end.
as well as one from Habana Elegante, "Ecos y Murmullos," explaining Ponte in context with the art work from other Cubans, in a Cubano-promotional ethos. (this one is mixed Spanish and English).
chris at
3:42 PM
|
# 7 of "Countdown on Nine" is up at As/Is
chris at
2:09 PM
|
UTA's online lit journal * Znine * is Up :
Check out the dialogue-interview I did for Znine with the very generous spirited,
poetics-minded
Annie Finch
[here's poetry & info from
Poetry Magazine, Sept. 01],
who is a scholar-poet at Miami University of Ohio [and here's Annie's home page at Miami University of Ohio]--
so have a look at this latest issue of UTA's online lit journal, Znine.
But don't forget to look around in there for more good stuff :
this issue of Znine also includes work by
Clayton Couch, of Word Placements
Stephen Vincent, & check out (Steve's blog)
and more new work from Texfiles Poet of the Week,
Mark Weiss,
as well as poetry from Kristi Wilson, Terri Vaughn, Leslie Wortman, and many others!
Enjoy...
chris at
4:48 AM
|
from Mark Weiss, Texfiles Poet of the Week :
a translation from Spanish to English of the poem "So Near" by Cuban poet,
Antonio Jose Ponte (b 1964) * :
So Near
A few doors from you lives your love,
and she sits at the next table, but you don't know it.
It's as if you inhabited different cities,
different time-zones.
In the distance, very near,
she seems a creature from another world.
The look, the kiss, the certainty
that they will entwine together delayed.
A few doors from you lives your love,
and she sits at the next table, but you don't know it.
She has made of your steps
the dust they raise,
the silence of telephones,
a taste unsavored.
Child of the city, she begins to be
she whom the clouds the leaves
and summer evenings seek.
Inevitably, they will meet.
It was destined, that accidental encounter, that meeting
that afterwards, lying together in the dark, they will remember,
and wonder how it could have happened,
the tables that close,
the path that easy,
how they could have breathed apart so long.
Translated by Mark Weiss
(140)
Antonio Jose Ponte, "So Near," originally in Asiento en las ruinas. This translation by Mark Weiss, in Poetry International, Issue VI. San Diego: San Diego State University Press, 2002.
chris at
4:19 AM
|
Tuesday, January 13, 2004
from Adrienne Rich, "Ghazals: Homage to Ghalib" * :
8/4/68
-- for Aijaz Ahmad
If these are letters, they will have to be misread.
If scribblings on a wall, they must tangle with all the others.
Fuck reds Black Power Angel loves Rosita
--and a transistor radio answers in Spanish: Night must fall.
Prisoners, soldiers, crouching as always, writing,
explaining the unforgivable to a wife, a mother, a lover.
Those faces are blurred and some have turned away
to which I used to address myself so hotly.
How is it, Ghalib, that your grief, resurrected in pieces,
has found its way to this room from your dark house in Delhi?
When they read this poem of mine, they are translators.
Every existance speaks a language of its own.
8/8/68: i
From here on, all of us will be living
like Gallileo turning his first tube at the stars.
Obey the little laws and break the great ones
is the preamble to their constitution.
Even to hope is to leap into the unknown,
under the mocking eyes of the way things are.
There's a war on earth, and in the skull, and in the glassy spaces,
between the existing and the non-existing.
I need to live each day through, have them and know them all,
though I can see from hre where I'll be standing in the end.
* Adrienne Rich, "Ghazals: Homage to Ghalib," in Poems: Selected and New, 1950-1974. New York: Norton, 1975.
chris at
9:43 PM
|
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
1:33 PM
|
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
3:21 AM
|
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
1:01 AM
|
Monday, January 12, 2004
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
11:29 PM
|
Hah ! Best hat from Google, resulting in a Texfiles hit:
Crocheted Hat with Flames
Yeah.
chris at
10:04 PM
|
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
8:32 PM
|
About Those Irrepressible Frogs :
Aristophanes, Fate, Family...
chris at
3:15 AM
|
Sunday, January 11, 2004
 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
11:20 PM
|
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
4:12 AM
|
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.
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