chris murray's *Texfiles*

"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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ManY PoETiKaL HaTs LisT:

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:


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
Henry Gould's AlephoeBooks
Julie Choffel's Understory
Tom Murphy's former one
Jean Vengua's New Okir
Roger Pao's Asian-American Poetry
Tom Lisk: Oilcloth and Linoleum
Kevin Doran
Reb Livingston's Cackling Jackal Blog
Janet Holmes: Humanophone
Lorna Dee Cervantes
Mark Young's gamma ways
Brian Campbell: Out of the Woodwork
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
Marie Mutsuki Mockett
Feral Scholar: Stan Goff
worderos: Tom Beckett
In Galatea's Purse
Japundit
Quiet Desperation: Jim Ryal
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?
Joe Massey: Rooted Fool
Kate Greenstreet: every other day
heuriskein: Tom Orange
Chiaroscuro Metropoli: Tom Beckett
Behrle's latest spout!
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
Notes on the Revival: Jeremy Hawkins
PurPur: Petrus Pokus
Snapper Missives: Scott Pierce
A Sad Day for Sad Birds II: Gina Meyers
Great Works: Peter Philpot
zafusy: experimental poetry journal
Writeboard: a collaborative writing tool
John Latta: Rue Hazard
KP Harris: Croissant Factory
Stephanie Young's New Site
Stephen Vincent's New Site
Portable Press@Yo~Yo Labs
Square America
Amy King's blog
Robert: Peyoetry Hut
Muisti Kirja: Karri Kokko
Karri Kokko's Blonde on Blonde
Yummeee Blog (recipes)
Nice Guy Syndrome: Tim Botta
Left Hook
Del Ray Cross: anachronizms
Juan Cole: Informed Comment
BuzzFlash - Daily Headlines, Breaking News, Links
Aaron McCollough
Chris Lott's Cosmopoetica
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Little Emerson
Fever, Light--by Sawako Nakayasu
Second Wish
Nomadics
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Radical Druid
Ron is Ron: the Ron Silliman Cartoon by Jim Behrle
Dagzine: Positions, Poetics, Populations: Gary Norris
Shadows within Shadows: Tom Beckett
Self Similar Writing: Jukka Pekka Kervinen
The Little Workshop: Cassie Lewis
Sky Bright: Jay Rosevear
Poesy Galore: Emily Lloyd
Lisa Jarnot's Blog
Poetry Hut: Jilly Dybka (has moved here)
Pornfeld: Michael Hoerman
Seven Apples: Justin Ulmer
Hi Spirits: Andrew Burke
Bacon Bargain!: Joe Massey
Ivy is here: Ivy Alvarez
Whimsy Speaks: Jeff Bahr
Umbrella: Jeff Wietor
Chicanas! (Susana L. Gallardo)
Masters of Photography
Blog of Disquiet: Gary Norris' Teaching Blog
Suzanna Gig Jig
Bad with Titles: Jay Thomas
Spaceship Tumblers! Tony Tost
Desert City: Ken Rumble
E-Po
Zotz!
Optative Mood: Tim Morris
ecritures bleues: Laura Carter
The Ingredient: Alli Warren
Skanky Possum Pouch
Slight Publications
Jewishy-Irishy: Laurel Snyder
Sea-Camel: Alberto Romero Bermo
Growing Nations: Jordan Stempleman
Tom Raworth
Entropy and Me: Hal Johnson
Scott Pierce: Snapper's Junk
Chicano Poet: Reyes Cardenas
Semio-Karl M&M
Stephen Vincent
Hoa Nguyen/Teacher's & Writers
a New Word Placements
Narcissus Works: Anny Ballardini
Richard Lopez
Tributary: Allen Bramhall
The_Delay: Chris Vitiello
Jukka Pekka Kervinen: Nonlinear Poetry
Lanny Quarles: Phaneronoemikon
Clifford Duffy: Fictions of Deleuze & Guattari
DagZine
Carrboro Poetry Festival
Steve Evans: Third Factory
DEBORAH PATILLO
SKANKY POSSUM PRESS
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WOOD'S LOT
Geof Huth: DBQP
Ann Marie Eldon
Jim Behrle: The Jim Side
Ray Bianchi:Postmodern Collage Poetry
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New Broom
Flingdump Scattershot
Tony Tost: Unquiet Grave
Grapez
SB POET
Mark Young's Pelican Dreaming
|||AS/IS2|||
Li's A Private Studio
Anny Ballardini's Poet's Corner
Tom Beckett: Vanishing Points
Dumbfoundry
BadGurrrlNest
Jean Vengua's Okir
Hear-it dot org: info on hearing problems
Tim Yu's Tympan
James Yeager's Modern Lives
Tony Robinson: Geneva Convention
Daniel Nestor's Unpleasant Event
Ex-Lion Tamer
Carlos Arribas: Scriptorium
David Nemeth
Ela's Incertain Plume
Mairead Byrne's Heaven
Catherine Daly
Black Spring
Br.Tom's Finish Yr Phrase
Shin Yu Pai: makura-no-soshi
Harry K. Stammer: Downtown LA
Corina's Fledgling Wordsmith
Jilly Dybka's Poetry Hut
Ben Basan's Luminations
Katey: Chewing on Pencils
YaY!! Eileen Tabios: Chatelaine Poetics !
Jill Jones: Ruby Street
Geoffrey Gatza's BlazeVox
Bill Allegrezza's P-Ramblings
Gary Sullivan's Elsewhere
GoldenRuleJones
Poetry_Heat
Bookslut
Chickee's SuperDeluxeGoodPoems
As-Is !
John Latta's Hotel Point
Sawako Nakayasu's Ongoing Show
Shanna Compton's Brand New Insects
Crag Hill
kari edwards: transdada
Fluss
Michael Helsem's Gray Wyvern
Word Placement
Bogue's Blog
Jordan Davis: Equanimity
Robert Flach's Unadulterated Text
Michelle Bautista
Ironic Cinema
Mike Snider
Farewell Tonio!
In Through the Out Door
The Blonde Brunette
Awake at Dawn on Someone's Couch is Toast
Jukka-Pekka Kervinen:Non-Linear
Xpress(ed) !
Chris Lott's Ruminate
Venepoetics
Laura: Yellowslip
Stick Poet Super Hero
Mighty Jens!
Radio UTA: Toni's Thursday Poetry Show
Tim Morris: Lection
Gabe Gudding
Constant Critic
Sappho's Breathing
Waves of Reading
Jhananin's Insite
Fanaticus
AdvExpo
Stephen Vincent
Stephanie Young: New Well Nourished Moon
Kasey Silem Mohammad's Newest Limetree
Lanny Quarles: (solipsis)//:phaneronoemikon
States Writes
Rebecca's Pocket
Simulacro
Braincase Links
Sentence
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73 Urban Bus Journeys
Poeta Empirica
poetry for the people: canwehaveourballback?
Ernesto Priego's Never Neutral
Nick Piombino's Fait Accompli
Weekly Incite blogresearch
Jim Behrle's first monkey
Jim Behrle's Monkey's Gone to Heaven
David Kirschenbaum's Boog City
Not Nick Moudry
Laurable
David Hess Heathens in Heat
Jack Kimball's Pantaloons
Li Bloom's Abolone
Ron Silliman
Chris Sullivan's Bloggchaff
Chris Sullivan's Slight Publications
Chris Sullivan's Department of Culture
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



Monday, January 31, 2005

 

from kari edwards, Texfiles Poet of the Week :

--poetry & photos by kari, India Journey, dec 04--



from section 2 of the manuscript Bharat jiva :


*

whose mind
thinks thinking body
tongue speaking
whose tongue
whose eyes
whose ear of ear
thinks body
life's tongue
speaking speech
eye of eye
of that that
cannot be
of whose mind
thinks
can only be seen
spoken of
by the tongues
breathless breath
unheard from dawn
in the fire wind
lightening
truth beyond motion
in the mind


*


two trembling minds
face each other
through a mass of hallucination
held together by speech thoughts
held together
by a series of obligations
beyond the 16 part
universe
beyond the nothing left undone
the thief
is no longer the thief
murder
no longer murder
in a blank hour
past a mood
that stood by
speaking sense
as two
organs
trembling
in their own hands


*


beyond this and that and everything
beyond

acts and relationships
an ever changeless
web of spiders
beyond a blank
attempting to speak
to a victim’s
own mythological motif

a place where fat is melted
beyond
this and that and everything
burns a formula
born imperishable
blazing two mind
on a bed of flowers
a crown of thorns
trembling indecipherable
beyond the all pervading torment



~~~~~~~~~~~~~~copyright of kari edwards~~~~~~~ o~o/ ~~~


chris at 11:25 AM |

 

Happy to have updated my links to the typepad space at Laura's (er, finally udated it, that is...). She's posted the entirety of Marianne Moore's "The Mind is an Enchanting Thing", a fave here, as is "The Steeple Jack"--a good poem for Arlington, TX, and lots of other places, I guess. & oh, gee, please take it easy with the Dali--he once painted his sister in a huge hat shaped like a high heel and a window in her back--though (per Steeple Jack) even a seemingly tame Durer might cause dream-semiosis--thinking of all that obsessively gross attention to detail in Durer's work--my god!--he must have been wonderfully interesting.

& hey, many thanks for the nice mention over there, Laura!


chris at 10:26 AM |

 

from Terrence Des Pres: "My subject is survival, the capacity of men and women to live beneath the pressure of protracted crisis, to sustain terrible damage in mind and body and yet be there, sane, alive, still human."--Survivor


chris at 7:31 AM |

 

aw shucks & oops: now i see what i couldn't exactly recall the other day when posting on brTom Murphy's fyp first line index. 03 chapbook. another abecedarium poem i'd seen and heard/read talk of wz here at Ken Rumble's Desert City, one of Standard Shafer's poems read for Ken's series a few weeks ago!--gosh i wish i'd been able to hear it--lovely to see it here, tho--thanks for this post, Ken!--and, gosh! extra thanks for including me on your wish list!--i'm honored--what a nice surprise : ) oh, and hey, if ya make it around Halloween i'll come dressed as a blog template...


chris at 4:14 AM |

 



Oh, yeah--If it ever seems I might be losing
my sense of humor,
just do this:
call the Texas Teamstress Union of
MULTI-TASK-ACK!!!
YAKs, okay?--they know what to say to me!

(like, mooooo!, or Ack!! or something strong like that)


chris at 2:38 AM |

Sunday, January 30, 2005

 

--mass--deadly--pastels--sonnets--propulse--ions--lipstick--bullets--more-- ammo--less--fetish--&


enter "propulsive" event(ually) get mauser munitions...



"The notion of the sonnet was ‘propulsive’ in that I wanted to make visible the arbitrary, generative violence of any imposed formal constraint...

... The planet is sick. Our mass culture has made a deadly fetish of its stupidity. I don’t know what the use is of art, or if it’s the uselessness of art that is a bearer of hope, or what. I certainly cannot see the efficacy, aesthetic or political, of prescribing or proscribing certain poetic modes in advance of the poems themselves. Regardless, an exclusively literary response to the multifaceted madness of being in this world will never be sufficient in and of itself."--Ben Lerner,
interview with Kent Johnson, Jacket 26
(Jacket's one of my favorite reads, Y'all...)


Do check out this interview by Kent Johnson, of Ben Lerner,
Jacket 26 - October 2004 -
"No: Ben Lerner in conversation with Kent Johnson."

Ben Lerner is founder and editor, with Deb Klowdon, of
No: a journal of the arts.

Wow!--what a provocative read:
Thanks, Kent, for sending me the hullo on this one : )


chris at 10:06 PM |

 

Finally had a few minutes to catch up on reading blogs and found so many fine things I didn't yet know about.

I've been sick this weekend but feeling better now (many thanks for sending your good wishes on getting well, Steve Vincent--it means a lot to me--& gosh I must say, your blog is looking very, very, fine indeed!).

Though feeling better, I'm still overextended work-wise, and then sad, too: I've lost my wonderful assistant here at the UTA Writing Center, Cyndi Dumas, also a wonderful student/writer, who some of you know because she was the fine person who helped me coordinate the Poetry_Heat readings here last summer and fall. My deepest sympathy and condolences go to Cyndi and her family--her mother passed away suddenly on Dec. 26--and so Cyndi has had to quit her studies for now and move from Texas to Tucson to be with her family. Cyndi--my best thoughts are with you--be well!--please stay in touch!

So, then, on cruising around bloggyland, in addition to the wonderful surprises at Jacket 26 (see above: Kent Johnson interviewing Ben Lerner) and Steve Vincent's blog (he's experimenting in excellent ways with images and text), here are two more fine things I happened on:

Adding Jay Thomas' Bad with Titles blog to the links list--welcome, Jay, and thanks for reading Tex! I'm especially captivated by Jay's work with such... keep on!

And last but not least--this at Tom Beckett's new blog,
e-x-c-h-a-n-g-e-v-a-l-u-e-s: a new, fascinating, in depth interview by Tom Beckett with Thomas Fink Lotta hard thinkin' goin' on outsida Tex, y'all... : )

keep on!


chris at 10:53 AM |

 


Dear Jukka--wow--this one's kinetic, all colors jumpin' & dancin'--great new work!


chris at 7:07 AM |

 

from kari edwards, Texfiles Poet of the Week :


photo by kari edwards, India Journey, dec 04 Posted by Hello


from Part 2 of Bharat jiva

*

some shed their skin
others repeat a layer
one feels the limits of
the fashion of fashion
one feels the limits of fire
some a deep solemn smile
gratitude for the mundane
some are fed on fear
some from the river
some shed the skin
when the fire begins
someone is burning
in fear
burning in their skin
someone is free of fear
someone drowns
in a rock hard world
taught by parents
motor desire
restless towards a suitable
blood drinking
fringe of a holocaust

some dance in a river
a limitless stream
one hundred trees
deep in the gratitude of marvelous
some sit in their
flesh and turn to ash

some without craving
reveal a thousand units of joy
all the oceans
of all the fires of the universe

someone without knowing
reveals a universal cry
some mistook the cry for
an atom
others for a thing
with a name
others dance in the river
of limitless time



*


put some salt in water wait till morning
wait in the mind
that waits in words
that arrives in the wait

put some salt in the mind
taste the morning waters
in the will
that puts salt in the mind

concentrate on nothing
before the salty waters
in the swelling hordes
taste the salts of the suffering
reflect on the reverence of seeing
and tasting
the salts of suffering
and the joy of seeing
the infinite joy
of knowing
there is nothing but
the infinite in the finite
nothing but instantaneous rest
in the continuum
of verbs, nouns, and adjectives
after the point and comma

listen to the sound of the waves
that takes the breath away
from the morning heat
swelling
in the suffering wound
in the salts of the mind
pronounce the self
a watery everything
within the body
covered in the salts
of the earth
suffering
in a being body
against
a dwelling empty
reflected on a bed spread
of indestructible matter
in a place unkempt by anyone
buried beneath the feet
in the breath
of the golden sun
that enters the body
swelling the reflection
that reflects back


*

without a second
deep within a vast separate
nothing absorption
river rising
consumed by flames
a body instant
before
and the instant expires
something and
a witness
surrender and sweetness
nothing further
through fire
to perceived another other
as the self
rubbed in syllables
like oil
like butter
like water
like a photo
freed of its image



photo by kari edwards, India Journey, dec 04 Posted by Hello


chris at 6:45 AM |

 

new interview up at Lance Phillips' blog, Here Comes Everybody: Rae Armentrout


chris at 3:02 AM |

 

lots of qwertyuiop[]\s history


chris at 12:45 AM |

Saturday, January 29, 2005

 

Been reading in the vibrant poetry at EOAGH: a Journal of the Arts, edited by Tim Peterson and hosted by Charles Alexander's excellent Chax Press--check it out, Y'all...


chris at 10:52 PM |

 

Update from Sentence: a Journal of Prose Poetics

An announcement from editor Brian Clements about Sentence # 1 poet/poem, Jamey Dunham's "Urban Myth" being selected for inclusion in BAP 2005; the imminent Sentence # 3; the call for subs to Sentence 4; & the release of Denise Duhamel's new book from Firewheel Editions:


Dear Sentence Subscribers, Readers, and Supporters:

I'm delighted to announce that Jamey Dunham's prose poem "Urban Myth" from Sentence 1 has been selected by Paul Muldoon to appear in Best American Poetry 2005. This is, of course, the first prose poem from Sentence to receive this honor. Congratulations to Jamey, and much thanks to Jamey, to David Lehman, and to Paul Muldoon!

The third issue is almost complete and will include excellent work by Radu Andriescu, Carol Bardoff, Edward Bartók-Baratta, Reva Blau, Joe Bonomo, Susan Briante, John Briggs, Christopher Buckley, Paul Colinet, Robin Cunningham, Robin Dare, Cortney Davis, kari edwards, Elisabeth Frost, Dennis Gonzalez, Noah Eli Gordon, Jeff Harrison, Michael Helsem, George Kalamaras, Janet Kaplan, Charles Kesler, Milton Kessler, Juliana Leslie, Rachel Levitsky, John Olson, Marjorie Manwaring, Michael Martone, Derek McKown, Chris Murray, Daniel Nester, Papa Osmubal, Shin Yu Pai, Rochelle Ratner, Andrew Michael Roberts, Leonard Schwartz, Alan Sondheim, Adam Sorkin, Hugh Steinberg, Charles Harper Webb, Stephanie Woolley, and others. It also contains essays by Gerry LaFemina, Maxine Chernoff, and others, and a fabulous Feature on The Prose Poem in Great Britain, guest edited and introduced by Nikki Santilli, with work by Andy Brown, John Burnside, Vahni Capildeo, B. Catling, Patricia Debney, Roy Fisher, Alan Halsey, Cecil Helman, Rolf Hughes, Norman Jope, Rupert Loydell, Rod Mengham, Christopher Middleton, David Miller, Geraldine Monk, Brian Louis Pearce, Peter Reading, Peter Redgrove, Peter Riley,Gavin Selerie, Andrew Shelley, Ken Smith, and Aaron Williamson.

As you may know, Peter Johnson is guest-editing our fourth issue, due in the fall. Please continue to send submissions to our usual address for that issue, Box 7, Western Connecticut State University, 181 White St., Danbury, CT 06810.

Finally, I would like to announce that we (Firewheel Editions) couldn’t be happier to be publishing Denise Duhamel’s beautiful (both in content and design) Mille et un sentiments, and it should arrive from the printer next week. The book retails for $12—order a copy now before it sells out!

All best wishes for a fruitful and happy year,

Brian



chris at 10:45 PM |

 

down with flu here in the last day or so. i see there are a number of comments--apologies for not yet responding. will be doing so shortly.--cm


chris at 10:38 PM |

 

If you haven't already seen the provocative Bookforum article which is linked at EPC, then do hop over and have a good read--Charles Bernstein discussing Jackson Mac Low.


chris at 10:17 PM |

 

from Texfiles Poet of the Week, kari edwards :


photo by kari edwards, India Journey, dec 04 Posted by Hello


chris at 11:53 AM |

 


photo by kari edwards, India Journey, dec 04 Posted by Hello



the bells never stop in varanasi



everyone's dying
everyone’s dying to die
everyone's in my way
on my way to die
it's too hot and dusty to die
I am eating the ashes of the dead
I am eating the exhaust of cars
I am dying to die
I am an image sacrifice
I am looking for a boat to take me to heaven
namaste
your boat has bad karma
out of the way
I am burning inside of shame
I am at the seat of the ash
of time
of guatama
of a boat to nowhere
burning inside
I am the end of time
shiva orange
rat queen
goddess of money
sleeping in time to die at the hands of doms
sunrise to sunrise from the beginning of time
alone at the end of time
rowing nowhere to wash my soul
lost in serpentine alleys and back ways
amongst the amputees and water buffalos
amongst entrepreneurs that will cut your throat
and amongst the dust breathing souls
looking in the eyes of the ones
looking back
for anything
not burning



*


there is not that and both and more
more and nothing
here, there is no more
never or not and more

here Allah is Allah
the clay child rides the rat
in the city of clay pots

everything is everything
has a purpose
gets used and reused
Krishna is Shiva
is both Krishna
Shiva Vishnu
and both
get reused


this and that and nothing
or that and both
the ganges
flips its views
depending on location
call it time
call it harmony
call it a petite kingdom
with limited access
a plastic Jesus
a ballistic buddha
piles of ashes
monkeys scream
black death
millions of chanting souls
a mass display of
here is there and nothing and both




~~~~~~~~~~copyright of kari edwards~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ o~o/ ~~~


chris at 11:46 AM |

Friday, January 28, 2005

 


photo by kari edwards, India Journey, dec 04 Posted by Hello


chris at 3:51 AM |

Thursday, January 27, 2005

 

You Can Always Imagine a Life Lit from the Inside: Tom Murphy's fyp chapbook

Received:

YaY!! Just today was able to get over to my home-mail (it's located several buildings away and when the weather's not good or when I'm stacked with work at UTA, I don't get to check on it everyday, but gosh I am so glad I went over there, because there I found Br.Tom Murphy's wonderful chapbook, finish.your.phrase. first line index. 03 (Mundelein, IL: cat press, 2005--cat press being tom's own imprint).--full size, 8 1/2 x 11, staplebound, medium weight cotton cover of a cool pale yellow (so very like the thinnest slice of lemon i found looking like a wheel in the tall clear glass of home-made lemonade i was served last evening at the lovely Asian restaurant, Red Bowl, just up the road here!--that cut of pale and cool yellow); 18 pages distinctly, innovatively numbered thus: lllll lllll lllll lll (tho in straight lines, which the closest to on this keyboard is the letter l).

This book is fascinating and full of the innovative trends and appealing personality to be found in the daily poems on Tom's site, which is also a great resource for teachers (check out all the links and such). This chapbook (I like it so well that I keep thinking there must be a better term for this than just plain ol 'chapbook' ya kno?) collects all the first lines of Tom's Y'03 poems from the fyp page of his blog/website, thus remaking/restructuring them into an entirely new, book-long poem. The effect for me is choral: many voices speaking (singing) in harmony, even though of course they are not always speaking of harmonized life, but of real life and its difficulties, its range of senses and sensitivities, reason and sense. And all this is done with no little gentle self-&-other-referentiality in that a number appears at the end of each line, a crumb, as it were, so to help the reader refer back to the original day and complete context in the week of the year it was written (2003 over at Tom's website). Here is one section:

rain intensifies pushing down7
rain said ... open up a door... make a way 6
reaching the cat... and finally coffee cold 26
really no good.. you know.. desperate willies juggling copper 42
red-wing... in a big stone... 25
remaindered... shattered under a deadline... 15
remember to think in sentences... people like sentences 18
remote... i sent a picture to myself... and shocked myself... 23
rooms of kids... as we call them... 1
running turned out to be... less helpful than standing 10

(lllll lllll lll)

But reforming or restructuring innovatively is not the only subtle working of the impulse of indexing (thanks for this term, Suzanne) and citation, archive, layers of ordering that comprise any book but moreso, I think, when it becomes its own subject, as in becoming the primary rhetorical emphasis: Tom's done another interesting thing with this chapbook. He's arranged all the lines in alpha order from a-z (bolding in the beginning line for each letter). Thus it is an abecedarium of sorts--hailing from a long and intriguing tradition dating in English at least to Chaucer if not earlier, and which also seems to me a compliment/tribute both to tradition and to contemporary poetics. Recent examples that come immediately to my mind are Carolyn Forche's latest book, Blue Hour (Harper/Collins, 2003) which contains a long poem that is an abecedarium, and avant classics of contemporary poetry that are structured around, toy with, and so, radicalize the idea of an alphabet, such as those of some poet-bloggers (sorry can't recall who was recently toying with this in bloggieland), tho of course, first among them would be Ron Silliman--whose own recent book, Under Albany (Salt, 2004) elaborately develops out of the idea of an alphabet, and a special one: it's a reworking/furthering of his classic, The Alphabet. Well, I just want to say how very Borgesian (and indeed, one of Tom's fyp entries does mention Borges) of y'all!

Also, many thanks, Br. Tom, for sending along this wonderful work. I'm enjoying it immensely. And for the rest of you po-folks out there: better get in touch with Tom at this link on his site... and see about obtaining a copy of this fyp chap so you can join in the readerly pale-lemon-wheel-feel, or the very ivory tones of delight and its many wisdoms, including this from Q:

quarantine under the stairs has us dreaming of small flowers... 46

which altogether I find remarkably resonant, so 'lit from the inside'.



~~~~~~~~~~~~poems copyright Tom Murphy~~~~~~~ o~o/


chris at 11:36 PM |

 

Announcing a new Texfiles Poet of the Week feature:

It is my great pleasure to bring you the profoundly beautiful and spiritually evocative poetry and photography of kari edwards, of transdada blog. kari recently returned from a journey to India. The work presented for the feature here is from hir manuscript of work, Bharat jiva and photos taken during that journey. Sending a warm texfiles welcome to kari !


photo by kari edwards, India Journey, dec 04 Posted by Hello


BIOGRAPHY

kari edwards is a poet, artist and gender activist, winner of New
Langton Art’s Bay Area Award in literature (2002), author of iduna, O
Books (2003), a day in the life of p. , subpress collective (2002), a
diary of lies - Belladonna #27 by Belladonna Books (2002), and
post/(pink) Scarlet Press (2000). sie is also the poetry editor
I.F.G.E’s Transgender - Tapestry: a International Publication on
Transgender issues. hir work has been exhibited throughout the united
states, including denver art museum, new orleans contemporary art
museum, university of california-san diego, and university of
massachusetts - amherst. edwards’ work can also be found in Scribner’s
The Best American Poetry 2004 (2004), Civil Disobediences: Poetics and
Politics in Action, Coffee House Press, 2004, Biting the Error:
writers explore narrative, Coach House, Toronto, (fall) 2004,
Bisexuality and Transgenderism: InterSEXions of the Others, Hawoth
Presss, Inc. (2004), Experimental Theology, Public Text 0.2., Seattle
Research Institute (2003), Blood and Tears: Poems for Matthew Shepard,
Painted Leaf Press (2000), Aufgabe, Tinfish, Mirage/Period(ical), Van
Gogh’s Ear, Amerikan Hotel, Boog City, 88: A Journal of Contemporary
American Poetry, Narrativity, Fulcrum: an annual of poetry and
aesthetics, Pom2, Shearsman, and Submodern Fiction. kari can always be
contacted at: terra1@sonic.net


*


vellum wipers for a better room



28 hours packed in
the usual comical bardos
unable to prepare for
layers of privilege
shed tears
wiped away
on the edge of
a smog filled capacity

18 million
breathing souls,
assassin motorcycles,
tyranny transports,
suicidal proxies,
assorted verticals
dating to the stone age
lumbering alongside
naked madness

privilege becomes
part of the situation
becomes the situation
that becomes the highlight
submerged in
clouds of exhaust
shards of eyes
arranged
in abandoned
surroundings
crumbling egos
snapped
empty
engulfed
in a religious
wall of pesticides

vanished to an asylum
for the criminally insane
labeled iron residue
struggling to extinguish itself

this is not sympathy
it’s a plaster faces
against a wonder
to-be-alive
hand-to-mouth
indecipherable
“undesirable”
tapping;
“it’s not the system
it’s the contrast
boxes of fate,
an address sisyphus”

it is the insane
marching with the insane
pulling back
sheets of room service
to reveal
a constant sea of surface


*

1.

left amongst crumbling and abandoned dogs
sacred cows, o’henry and shakespeare
amongst tagore something and fashion magazines
left amongst being unpacked, redistributed
and subdivided

there in the lightness of
street cracks
packed in
something and everywhere
one time is not another
it’s all the time
it’s a job
it’s everyone’s job
backing into a makeshift universe
complete with infinity
and sunlight

a shifting centrifuge
crumbing in straightjacket ease

a blue modeled shiva
dark illuminating
holy cows, goats, and beggars
millions doing everything
everything has a job
shiva has a job
a beacon
a plaster order
come to order
above a something
for everyone
doing a job



2.

that was then
now
a newer
more of the same
only more
with each step
an increase
stuff in the cracks
something order
called to order
called to prayer
chaos bodies
beyond physics
proving something
in semi-real time
not recognizable
other world
walls of bodies
a street of bodies
a street of everything
bits and pieces
form a universe of things
no holes
just parts
and pieces of parts
unconnected ghost heads
and matter
all enter the heart
Allah enters the heart
human stars
remnants of millions
chanting
nothing but god and Allah
for the birds in distress
and the one-legged beggar
harm nothing
do nothing
come to prayer
a proposal for modest tourist



1. see only monuments to dead things, colonial memorials, and airport duty free shops.

2. with time off from a guided tour, watch only cnn and bbc.

3. everywhere there’s a macdonalds stop and eat, no matter what.

4. never learn the language.

5. go on a travel binge, eat only at your hotel next to the airport.




~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~copyright of kari edwards~~~~~~~ o~o/ ~~~~



chris at 7:26 PM |

 

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, HOA NGUYEN--
MANY GOOD WISHES & TEXFILES YaYs!!




chris at 11:19 AM |

 

Still working on some computer issues, afterall (frustratingly--such that the images are now cool, but there are also some text issues)--so, will be posting work and information on the terrific new Texfiles Poet of the Week tomorrow. thanks y'all for hangin' in...


chris at 10:56 AM |

 

Okay--finally have (some of) the computer stuff transferred and figured out so that I can once again be fully with this page, as it were. (i love that phrase, and i have fetishy feelings for other abstract terms as well--i confess, y'all! such as, foremost among them, *indeed* (b/c it is a connector, and connects real life with rhetorical stuff, as in action: 'in' + 'deed'--hell yeah--we know we're in it now.). But this phrasing that means nothing and the complex or highly (pro)verbial past, *As it Were*--how very intriguing of Englishy Folk to have stowed so much into that little bureau chest, eh?



chris at 7:49 AM |

 


photo by kari edwards--India, dec 04 Posted by Hello

Thanks to kari, who kindly shared with me an entire album of exquisite photos taken on the recent India trip.


chris at 3:45 AM |

Wednesday, January 26, 2005

 

some days i just only want to be something like the person in the flash image below, the one who gets to lift that line up and down, over and over. so calm, the way that line does what it does. uncomplicated. whereas i am *um*complicated, eh? i'll let y'all kno when i hear back from them on my application to be that one...
: )

ZaZen, Y'all


chris at 10:51 PM |

 

yeah, check out Anny's post on Venus in retrograde...




chris at 6:53 PM |

 

coming up later today: a new Texfiles Poet of the Week feature: so, stay tuned, Y'all.


chris at 6:24 PM |

 

Lance has a new poet interview going: Lee Upton. wow!

Go Lance!


chris at 7:53 AM |

 

New Digs!--Blessed by a Fantastic




Hah! Tex is back in action, Yo! Definitely got rid of the ACK!computer/tech problems and tedious slow downs & translating necessary to work between pcs and macs, that frustrating effect of continually crossing multiple venues, made up mah mind and got all done with that todayI went fishin' and found an angel. I've got way too much to do right now to let this tech stuff slow me up. I also got into those neat, very sweet little saviours (items for storing data): the Lexar Jump Drives--Wow!! 512 MB fits on your key chain--well worth the 60-80 dollars spent (I bought 2, one at Best Buy for 80 the other day when desperate to be sure all my stuff was immediately backed up and available between both pcs and macs, and then I found them for 60 at Office Depot so got another to back up that first one (stowing it in my cookie jar so I always know I have it...). But yeah, what got me done with all this hassel of the last several days?--this brand new (feels like a brand new Schwinn!--pedalling!) Toshiba/satellite with big memes and hi-speed-stuff. Toshiba-baby!--it purrs! Right now I do love UTA, Y'all, on that count alone.

So, hey, do be lookin'out here b/c tex is fixin' to run another fantastic Texfiles Poet of the Week feature (Tex is once again blessed to have a terrific and fun poet you'll all know and love, and who has some knock-out, brand-new work, another very unique offering), tonight (if I can keep the ol' eyes open to work this new T-baby well enuff to get the job done) or at latest, tomorrow. Please stay tuned, all you wonderful, beautiful folks!


chris at 6:59 AM |

Tuesday, January 25, 2005

 

blogger's acting weird again--or maybe it's this computer--anyway, unusual script is showing up in my editing screens, eg., the Winterson post with the pic in it went bahzoooey just now... added a bunch of little squares and then deleted a lot of regular text. i wonder if moving between venues has it confused. anyway, i hope i can get some tech help today. stay tuned.


chris at 7:14 PM |

 

from Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body *


At last the letter-box flipped open and a note slid out. It said, GO AWAY. I found a pen and wrote on the backside. IT'S MY FLAT. As I feared there was no reponse. For the second time that day I found myself at Louise's.

'We're going to sleep in a different bed tonight,' she said as she filled the bathroom with clouds of steam and incense oils. 'I'm going to warm the room and you're going to lie in the tub and drink this cocoa.' ...

In the park in the rain I had recognised one thing at least; that Louise was the woman I wanted even if I couldn't have her. Jacqueline I had to admit had never been wanted, simply she had had roughly the right shape to fit for a while.

Molecular docking is a serious challenge for bio-chemists. There are many ways to fit molecules together but only a few juxtapositions that bring them close enough to bond. On a molecular level, success may mean discovering what synthetic structure, what chemical, will form a union with, say, the protein shape on a tumour cell. If you make this high-risk jigsaw work you may have found a cure for carcinoma. But molecules and the human beings they are a part of exist in a universe of possibility. We touch one another, bond and break, drift away on force-fields we don't understand. Docking here inside Louise may heal a damaged heart, on the other hand it may be an expensively ruinous experiment.

(61-62)

...

HEARING AND THE EAR: THE AURICLE IS THE EXPANDED PORTION WHICH PROJECTS FROM THE SIDE OF THE HEAD. IT IS COMPOSED OF FIBRO-ELASTIC CARTILAGE COVERED WITH SKIN AND FINE HAIRS. IT IS DEEPLY GROOVED AND RIDGED. THE PROMINENT OUTER RIDGE IS KNOWN AS THE HELIX. THE LOBULE IS THE SOFT PLIABLE PART AT THE LOWER EXTREMITY.

Sound waves travel at about 335 metres a second. That's about a fifth of a mile away. If I shout now, she'll hear me in seventeen minutes or so. If have to leave a margin of error for the unexpected. She may be swimming under water.

I call Louise from the doorstep because I know she can't hear me. I keen in the fields to the moon. Animals in the zoo do the same, hoping that another of their kind will call back. The zoo at night is the saddest place. Behind the bars, at rest from vivisecting eyes, the animals cry out, species separated from one another, knowing instinctively the map of belonging. They would choose predator and prey against this outlandish safety. Their ears, more powerful than those of their keepers, pick up sounds cars and last-hour take-aways. They hear all the human noises of distress. What they don't hear is the hum of the undergrowth or crack of fire. The noises of kill. The river-roar booming against brief screams. They prick their ears till their ears are sharp points but the noises they seek are too far away.

I wish I could hear your voice again.

(135)


* Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body. New York: Random House/Vintage, 1994.


chris at 1:33 AM |

Monday, January 24, 2005

 

Check this out: Dale's posted a new poem of Clayton Eshleman's, "Chauvet, Left Wall of End Chamber."


chris at 7:07 AM |

Sunday, January 23, 2005

 



Tlunka-Tlunka (extended--elastic?--poem, "Anonymous," follows)


I do love that sound made by bamboo windchimes. Yesterday it was really windy here as a cold front moved through, and my standard-issue metal pipe chimes were sounding far more like frantic pleas for warmth than music. My neighbor's bamboo chime, however, sounded low and restful, even in the increasing howl of gusts whooping it up coming around the edge of the building (my apartment's in an upstairs corner, or end of the apartment building next to an adjacent similar building, so there is this corridor that the wind makes a lot out of on days like that).

But, really, back to it here: i've been feeling like it's somewhat ironic (since this is a poetry blog...) that I haven't posted any of my poetry lately (gosh i think it's been over a month since i posted more than a poem-in-passing)? Tho of course it's been a great pleasure to feature poetry from many others, most recently that of Chris Vitiello--but in the rush of getting the semester up and running here I haven't had much time for writing poetry (even tho for some time now i had usually written poetry of some kind everyday...). Or, maybe i just found one of those funky places folks get into sometimes, when the writing dries up for a while (or everything one tries to write just sounds all dry, mechanical in the worst ways--altogether lacking innovation, eh?). I think these fallow periods are good--they are times when things seem to be reorganizing, switching parts, or just plain resting.

Anyway, here's a little fantasia I started last year and saved on the desktop of this mac, forgetting it was there, but which I then saw and opened to toy with yesterday while frustrated by the pc-computer problem, tho that problem is not an explicit presence in the poem--which, I am adding hours later, keeps wanting me to add stuff--i'm feeling very compelled, and so going for it (i may delete it all later)--

nor, btw, is this Budapest-Hungarian statue of Anonymus (but i thought it kinda cute in a January-grim-reaperish way... : )


--via C.Towse, Scripps Coll/Budapest pics



Anonymous


... against the numberless paralyses that rose from events, over the voice of the ocean of mediocrities, whose gigantic size was suddenly once more unmasked vertiginously.--Henri Michaux


1.
being's pinkish carnival of names--
the word dragon
exacting its page of flesh

& being or bloody too handsome
clown of thorns (Mel,
Mel!--must
being be so very Melicon:
icon & incremental
zero sum

of revisionism
& evolutionary actuarial self
drama Poe-ish red rose
pollen sprinkle of winter
shivers--where's the love?

xenophobic?

generalizing now,
a book will have leaves & sunny

(the) finer points of punctuation

have arrived
late here, but--
Do you know where your entirety
are tonight?

What brick & mortar, mortar, self

of profittable medicine replicating progress,
& building?

my cubicle, my jelly
jar I give you my immersible

sponge bod

i=m=a=g=i=n=a=t=i=o=n

is a window vase & self
satisfaction
of tlunka-tlunka bamboo wind
chimes
a bell curve of expectant
prepositions
versions

& several
virgins of place

imag
i
nation predicted by evening
& Jarrell

temp of 21 degrees
below
mere
assumptions

2.
& ideology in any other's green woolen
scarf of night
slides into a drift
of first person replications
a ladle of Magritte

with a blizzard of anonymous neurons firing
fists of light
quotations
pounding

the pavement toward an unconscionable Wall
Street position

when no matter which side of the structure
you feed your herd on everyone
knows it's located on an island
form of the verb to be

professional & if blue sky
or soothe-say

then less
of nemesis & flesh

of college accounting lesions
or lessons for plankton
in anonymous food chain stores

the barnacles all acting
in accordance with international law

mercury poisoning has its rhetoric of shrill
delight for concrete
chucking out

of all past

touch the October of was
& come now, jog with me along weary at Erie
flip open
a cell

(just Call 1-800-L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E
as in hey Joan, tell us,
How's my driving?--
hell, how's my insurance rate?)

it's so
degrading being
a (little neck)
warmer more than your average
Houston
pier where the privileged ones live on in ultima Greeky memoria
& two storey
stilts

so, anonymous, were you ever
telling

an old story
of Madonna's thousand yellow
canoes stove-in
upside-down, slipping
off a mudbank to be a therefore, a cigar
smoking?

3.
i did not say gun. it's also been
proven that the fingertip
whorles of Brad Pitt are being
sued for diva
cliches in Troy

assassination or abortion--he was creation
ism swallowing in self
petri

during blush hour traffic
having dark anonymous thoughts

of venial silk tent mothers
& the Mr. of Mr. They--

say we
warm
5 degrees every millennium
having nothing
to do with hugs
but our effluent

our flowing out of signage & motif
catastrophies

or canasta & no
thy/self

or you who imagine
Achilles a wave

file, heavy, heavy of ivory tusk,
clever shield, prophylactic
buckle or bronze
mask

are printing the future in rushes
from mouths of trapped snowy North America
mink (their tiny feet, chocolate-eyes)

or robins' beaks plucking sodden
ground for the heavenly
Baud-
elaire
you pine, you ply
wood, you-you!--
of it all--

4.
"anonymous shadows have changed the channel
on me," oh yeah, sure, their silver one body

of cloud or water: these are "moon holes" luxurious jade floats

gliding after the anxiously swimming
in Sarte, or a Nazified later idea
of unavoidable liasons, reason reading
Heidegger with faux neutrality

she said: you sorry
fucking excuse for a self
and we believed it over and over

acting like mouths
opening/closing

cloning bivalves or seas of ancient
exotic paragraphs

of need
for what can & cannot be
spent naming







~~~~~~~~~~~~~~poem copyright of chris murray~~~~ o~o/~~~~

hey, & check out this --dunno if its got any good stuff but i'm gonna have a look.











chris at 10:34 PM |

 

Ack!! Computer troubles again!

It looks like the pc laptop i prefer to use is out of commission for a while--til i can get ahold of one of the tech people at the Writing Center here to have a thorough look into what's bugging it (literally). Seems like it is so easy to pick up buggy stuff anymore--somehow my pc caught a nasty new kind of pop-up that just won't go away no matter what i do, with and without the latest stuff from Ad-aware. it replicates and reinstalls itself at an alarming rate. I've run norton anti virus and it comes up clean that way, but the damned annoyance keeps replanting itself somewhere on the computer in a hidden version, i guess. it's certainly been an adventure trying to locate it and clean up whatever i could find, i'll say. i've done everything--deleted every possible place i can think of, and went to using only mozilla, and it seems to have out-foxed foxfire (tho i'm merely proficient with these things, not any kind of expert, so i'll have the tech people in my lab look things over). in the meantime, i'm only using the pc for word processing docs. for online stuff i'm back to a mac, a nice G4 power book, but elegant as it is, i find it a frustrating piece of machinery, slow and difficult to navigate for someone used to a quick little pc. but hey, i'm pretty lucky to be able to use any of these things, too, so i'm not really complaining, just missing the good aspects of the pc.

i'll be trying to post some poetry in a while here, so please stay tuned...

o~o/


chris at 12:36 AM |

Saturday, January 22, 2005

 



Chris' poem 7, below, put me in mind of all kinds of leaf-blower issues. Chris' line, "He leaf-blows in church clothes," is terrific, for one thing, and so I did a little looking around and found this nice-lady-image, she's just so contentedly, um... blowing away, right?

and this nice article from Metro Newsabout how people have actually complained about things like what the nice lady is contentedly doing.

and this very nice, practical minded fellow:


and a nice No Blow! gif image with this nice research project about Non-Occupational Hearing Loss, something the nice lady and the nice fellow should probably read, post haste...


chris at 1:22 AM |

Friday, January 21, 2005

 

from Chris Vitiello, Texfiles Poet of the Week :

the 7th of 7 poems from the manuscript, Irresponsibility :

Late November into early December 2004
Shenandoah, VA
Harrisonburg, VA
Springfield, VA
Washington, DC
Durham, NC


Grackles bathe where the drainage
terminates // Typical pull // Pulling so into
      // Between
the low Winter Sun and me
Before the low Winter Sun, their splashes illuminate

He leaf-blows in church clothes

There really are grackles

Grackles splash a fray
in the drain divot pool behind
which the Sun sets // Position makes this
appearance // Giving
up is never correct
The whitespace goes negative // Choice of negation
Event-specific sets of by what
The oak leaves appear brassy
Undoing aperçu

The grate has sunken askew // Here’s why // Gerunds
      are now
That school addition is unornamented and, in backlit
      shadow,
flat

Shuttle

Iris and Gracie console imaginary horses
A storm threatens // They argue
beneath a lopsided oak
Win it word by word is problematic
Carriage returns

Cadiot: I will do something to someone
The school building rear
looks like a factory contains
also is a factory // Is
Not an implication but a container
His behavior appears portioned and metaphorical
to me as
if he thinks he is being read
A container contained by what it contains
What’s in Firdos Square now?
Argument is the game
It
Grackles bathe and drink in
a drainage pool
Winter Sun setting linear behind
These 2 things, but 1 thing

Making an argument is a surface

Exploitation instructs

This coat does nothing

I know that the dogwood is completely red though I cannot see
      it from here

Arafat’s dead // So’s Michelle

“What’s different now?”
versus “Can it be unwritten?”
Only the parts of his body move that
he needs to // He does 1 thing
Miles Davis: “Paraphernalia”

The grackles, the water, their splashing, the sunlight
through the splashing
I’m in the plenum too
Iris and Gracie try the swings again
is experience-determined duration
This book is set in 12-point type
I wonder if I’m still alive

The container, the surface, the contents, the
whitespace, the characteristics, the durations attached to these
Hocquard: Does writing allow someone to see better?
And the words, obviously
Pursuit is pushing and we have
those 2 words // Little gravelly hill
is one way of saying
little gravelly hill
Thank you Hocquard
Once demarcated, how different should/could the items be?
He makes shit and carbon-dioxide

The saturated soil sank so unintentional berm

(As I write this) Iris tells Theresa to say “No, no it isn’t”
      // Theresa says it
Geometric equipment and what isn’t?
Cobra is a system not a composition
Albiach: would their word be transmitted

That lopsided oak likely lost its crown in ice storms
Vicki and I married and Rabin was assassinated
Iris guesses pronunciation at vowels
A signal is a sub-signal This with this
      or this without this

Returning to the grackles is
different from returning to Firdos Square // One symmetry
displaces another
Royet-Journoud: eye pursues its prey / shelters behind
      another phrase
The Fallujah offensive is replay and slow-motion
at here // Bettis’s subtlety
Is it information or does it contain information?
Evie’s rectangle

The coverage of the taxi explosion
shows the exploded taxi


Until she gets it right


Nothing elapses at now


Vicki calls from earlier in time


The cartoons did their jobs and were declared heroes


The magical rain brings the tree to life


Neither vacuum nor plenum is a negation

I’m getting tough // Poetry is invisible

The red dogwood leaves hang directly at the ground
in angled clusters around the base of the
nude depleted buds

The Periodic Table lapses into abominations
One name is as good as another
Amber’s detachment
Minimal and essential, snakes
The projector completely blocks the light source
      between each frame
Nothing’s haphazard and I don’t expect
the dots to be connected // Iris says
“The pinks almost rhyme”

Snakes do
not elaborate
Sunset is a lie

By naming the suspension of judgment you
are missing the point
There were no single grackles // The understood it
Grackles is singular

Each dogwood leaf is mottled with blacks, browns,
      and reds // Veins
are yellowish implies the green they were in Spring
White, dried blotch perimeters
Lack of end-punctuation is a characteristic //
      Characteristic has of
I agree they’re red

They were probably starlings
It turns out
The noun is a process

I can see three flags from here
Her remote control trees all on the same frequency
Devendra Banhart: “Nice People…”
One thing is not any thing

Vicki moved and everything moved // Vicki moved everything


chris at 11:31 PM |

 

Yes, Virginia, the Aliens are in DC,
at this very moment!


Alivianate El CocoReyes!--you are really crankin' out the good stuff.
Go read these poems, y'all...


chris at 11:21 PM |

Thursday, January 20, 2005

 

British poet Peter Philpot has created a vast poetry resource site full of links from all over. (He also says some very nice things about Texfiles--thanks for the good words, Peter!)

& here's a link to Peter Philpott's home page & works

& here's a link to the website's main page, "Great Works: innovative writing: modernist / postmodernist / archaic"


chris at 7:48 PM |

 

Some Train's Always Firin'Up@Pantaloons-Po-Express, Y'all...



pic via Pierce-Haviland Rail .com, yeah, girl, you make tha train go...

& Hell-yeah!--keepin' them pantaloons short & sweet, Y'all!--what a good read this is. *

Oh, hey: we'd all do well to put our keen or keening poetry knees or just our eyes to browse, on
these essays, cooly raging against every type of poetic stasis, too--my favorites are "Bronk the Alien," "Work Types," and "Plain Luxe" and tomorrow I'll find others for faves, that's how good these are: clear, challenging, engaging--tho all are written in just plain sinew and wiley-coyote. Full of visionary idea-mock of monumentalist white-ish-wash or bushbags & the Billy.C.Bullpatties it thinks nourishing for all po-folk. Thus, these essays are razory where called for, and generous in where earned, so, in all, they're optimum critiques of the RRtracks with the VW tires on low: loads of fun rolling along on sheer gravity. * *

And now I have to confess: I admit to not having done my homework well enuff, or it seems even at all-- last semester: here's a fine resource for all students of poetry (which means Y'all poets, eh?!): "American Poetry for Students of English Worldwide." this is a fine page full of links and full of expository care about poetry. So, Hey, Y'all--do look into catching up with this one.

The online presence, Jack Kimball, is as full of "Luxe" and surprise as the exceptional subjects attended by all these links to the site--but what really took me away from every conceivable assumption about anything having to do with image and text, was this one: Wow!!--
@ the Scenarios link: hey, no kiddin', this initially inconspicuous page is full of Pow Wow: dang, what a lot of rock it packs!--click anywhere and see what ya get: surprise is energy, eh?! Wonderful!

Keep yr Chaucerian eyeen and yr other eyen on Jack K's site and and links, eh?--you'll be coming close to po if y'all do so...

* I first got onto this Jack Kimball, Pantaloons, post not from mongreling around like I usually do, but from a fine take-off-post over at Allen Bramhall's site, Tributary--so, my thanks to Allen--& hey, Y'all might look into what Allen has to to say in response to this, as in,"Don't Learn Poetry, Write It!"

** My friends and lovers and I used to, at the high point of South Rim Plateau, which is about two or three feet from the rim of Grand Canyon, AZ--before they turned the RR tracks into one more touristy thang--well, we'd take our humble little hippie VW bugs (i owned two while living there--absolutely the best SUV on leetle engine and less gas) and we'd put 'em up on the RR tracks (only took two able bodied teen or twenties-aged folk), then let out the air in the tires (we also kept a little air pump w/us, or we calculated/knew which ranch on down the way would have a pump or a vehicle working), and, listening to Hendrix or Janis, or the best ass-kick blue grass we could find, well, we'd coast on down to near Valle, AZ (junction of HWYs 64 and 180, an area then pretty bare and barren, but now being heavily seeded with potential commercial development funds)--it's the junction, you may recognize if you've been around there at all, as the place of the Flinstone's Theme Park--a strange place, indeed. It's best feature is miles of high prairie in sunset, tufts of timothy grass frozen to pink in winter, and a better greenish gold than wheat in spring/summer/fall. Well, I liked it, anyway. Some very fine goofs & laughs that way...



~~~~~~Allart@PantaloonsLinks=Jack Kimball/copyright~~~ o~o/ ~~~~

(other silliness is, as usual--just plain ol copyright de me!)







chris at 7:34 AM |

 

An open oven full of fried chicken!



About My Course this Semester:


The students in my new course on the history and development of the American short story as it evolves and hybridizes into many other things, from micro fic to the widespread variations on prose poems, are a very enthusiastic bunch. Several are from the fine arts--photography, film studies--which i welcome in the mix because they always bring unique perspectives and some interest/knowledge of contemporary aesthetics (whereas most of the students are from other disciplines, and this semester several are from nursing, also interesting perspectives, tho without a lot of emphasis or background in aesthetics and history of ideas). We're reading a fine (and inexpensive) volume of unabridged EA Poe first (Gramercy/Random House, 1985), from cover to cover (several students mentioned yesterday how much they like this book and will be keeping it after the course--I like that idea!), so that should be interesting--a gothic spin to the (eventual) turn to pomofic and prose poems, eh? We'll see where that takes us.

We're also going to read (much later in the semester), in addition to Dale Smith's The Flood and the Garden (mentioned in the post below), Lucia Berlin's Phantom Pain (Tombouctou, 1984), and Linh Dinh's Blood and Soap (Seven Stories Press, 2004) [and i see from some mail that came while i wz gone that Chax Press (Hi Charles!) is looking for sponsors for several fine works, including Linh's latest, American Tatts--a book, which, given Linh's edgy and fun perspectives, Ron Silliman notes, amounts to a work from "the clearest eyes imaginable, a walking example of the role of the real at the heart of the surreal" * --and I couldn't agree more]. Here's something tasty! from Linh Dinh's American Tatts:

Eating Fried Chicken


I hate to admit this, brother, but there are times
When I'm eating fried chicken
When I think about nothing else but eating fried chicken,
When I utterly forget about my family, honor and country,
The various blood debts you owe me,
My past humiliations and my future crimes--
Everything, in short, but the crispy skin on my fried chicken.

But I'm not altogether evil, there are also times
When I will refuse to lick or swallow anything
That's not generally available to mankind.

(Which is, when you think about it, absolutely nothing at all.)

And no doubt that's why apples can cause riots,
And meat brings humiliation,
And each gasp of air
Will fill ones lungs with gun powder and smoke. *


In addition, we've many other fine works to read in this course. I'm really looking forward to it, since it's just different, even quirky enough, to perhaps make something new out of the underpinnings of prose poetics and the usual literary-structuralist takes on the genre(s).

And I haven't yet decided whether to have a group blog for this one--because, first of all, there are just so many students--twice as many in this course as in last semester's seminar (this one is not a semimar, but a literary survey course, so the cap is higher in terms of number of students allowed to enroll in it, thus, of course, implicitly more work involved teaching it--which is fine, since teachers have latitude in how to approach things and can vary their approach according to such elements as number of papers to grade & etc.). To have a blog in this situation might be counterproductive since we'd spend a lot of time just getting everyone up to speed on how and where to contribute to it. But then, it is a very good learning tool for any writing class, or any class where dialogue is essential to learning (most classes, in my estimation, but i guess some would find reason to argue that). So I'll decide on that in the next few days and if a course blog works out, then i'll let Y'all know the url.


* courtesy of Chax Press materials.



~~~~~~~~~~poem copyright of Linh Dinh~~~~~~~~ o~o/ ~~~


chris at 4:44 AM |

Wednesday, January 19, 2005

 

Hey, have a good read and then scroll down to check out Marcus' cool pics and report on the NC LuciPo folks, their activities this weekend past--Standard Schaefer read for their Desert City Series. I have to agree, tho, that my fave foto is the "new author photo" (I'm quoting Ken Rumble from the Lucipo list) of Carrboro Poet Laureate, Patrick Herron (Patrick, Hi!)...

And Tony Tost at Unquiet Grave is making lots of lively noise in posting a wonderfully reflective piece on the reading, too, dovetailing it with several other interesting things. In that, it occurs to me that Mr. Essay hisself, Montaigne, would enjoy this--& I mean it truly: it's a great read. And don't miss Tony's new series: his own Best Am Poetry list, bloggy-wise: where first up are some cool things by several poets including Standard, and that so-kool-of-SkankyPoss's-hisself, Dale Smith--whose The Flood & the Garden (publ. by First Intensity, 2002), my students are reading this semester--Yeah!

So, Hey, Y'all, keep on!


chris at 5:45 AM |

 

a great interview of Deborah Meadows is up at Lance Phillips' Here Comes Everybody blog..


chris at 5:43 AM |

 

. . . . . .



from Chris Vitiello, Texfiles Poet of the Week:

from Irresponsibility

6

Run run run run run

At


She said a particular tree was irrelevant // She said
            a specific tree was irrelevant
A joke so inappropriate I didn’t say it
She mutters // Under her breath // She’s a mutterer
We have a word for that

The duration is measured in the item // Mensuration is and
is outside of experience // To say
“ghosts” your voice stops entirely

Ken still finds joy and Brent’s prose
is getting really good and the top third
of the dogwood is red and Iris quoted an ad
and I’ve fallen back on the Cadiot three times this
            week reflexively
and the St. Augustine

Shaking down the dualities
Alexia wrote Do not erase over the axes



~~~~~~~~~copyright of Chris Vitiello~~~~~~~~~~ o~o/~~~~~





chris at 3:04 AM |

Tuesday, January 18, 2005

 

still having some tech trouble, so I'll have to wait till tomorrow to make the special post. stay tuned!


chris at 11:26 AM |

 

They begin to fall from me, the fathers... (fr. Photos 1 & 2)--some fine poetic-prose writing going on over at Steve's...


chris at 8:36 AM |

 

And, oh hey: that little loopy episode spoken of just below is not the surprise I promised earlier: that's still in the works, involves images, but some guest images that are far more cool--actually, they are especially profound--than any of my other silliness yesterday or today. : )

So, it's all in the works and I hope to have some of it going in the next hour or so--do stay tuned!

Love,
chris


chris at 6:05 AM |

 

Well, talk about narcissistic--i just spent several hours with Blogger's connex to Picasa and Hello, the image posting applications, just trying to get this one little pic of little ol me posted here. Picasa wouldn't respond for some reason, and then Hello got stuck on some loop I couldn't fathom. Finally I had to delete all the old versions of these from my computer and reinstall. That was a good idea, I want to let y'all kno, because the latest versions of these image-managers are far better than the ones from just a few months ago--if nothing else, they are organized better so you can easily see what to do in a progressive sequencing rather than running all over yer screen frantically looking for the 'send' buttons, like i had to do--since reading poorly written directions is so frustrating that i'd rather just play it by ear, as it were, and so: Voila!--here is that lil ol pic of me that i thought so important to post if only because, well there just aren't many pics of me around, and this one made me feel sufficiently narcissistic to tinker with (as a rule, i really don't like pictures of myself, or i don't like how they turn out, or i get uncomfortable with them--take from that what you will, i'm too set in me li'l ways to change ...). So once and for all, here is a pic of chris murray that even chris murray likes...). Hey, keep on...

ZaZen, Y'all

o~o/


chris at 5:54 AM |

 



Chris Murray,
Bandaras Bay, Mexico, 24 Dec 04

(Oh hey, Hi, Y'all!--it was a lovely night on the bay)


chris at 5:05 AM |

 

Finishing up my syllabus--classes start here tomorrow--and dashing around running errands, but when I get some calm moments here later this evening, I have an extra special treat for Y'all! Not to be missed--so do stay tuned...


chris at 12:04 AM |

 

New readings up at Tony Tost's Spaceship Tumblers--do check it out!


chris at 12:02 AM |

Monday, January 17, 2005

 

Listening: Neil Young, After the Gold Rush:
Oh

(instrumental &)

all in a dream
...
there was a band playin in mah head
...
I wz thinkin what a friend had said
I wz hopin it wz a lie
Lookit Mother Nature
on the run

in the nineteen seventies
...

Flyin Mother Nature's silver seed to a new home in the sun
...
But only love can break your heart
Try to be sure right from the start
...
I have a friend I've never seen
...
& hey: I've thought of everything from A to Z
...

or just go ["my little one--the special morning brings another morning
...shadow on the things you know and show you the way to go
... it's over")

& yeah: ZaZenY'all...

o~o/


chris at 10:21 AM |

 

from kari edwards' Transdada, among many significant articles, this call from Transgendered Voices dot org (TGVoices) :


Transgendered Voices in 55 Words or Less - 2005


Transgendered Voices, Inc...a Wyoming, USA not-for-profit corporation...has organized a spoken works competition for Transgendered people of all types and nationalities..

The final date for receiving the entries is June 1, 2005 and submissions may be sent to Transgendered Voices starting on February 1, 2005.

There will be prizes of 500 USA dollars...currently the equivalent of 22,000 Indian rupees...for the best spoken work and the most innovative spoken work...and the total number of prizes will not be limited to two prizes.

An eBook of the text of the submissions and a CD of the spoken works will be published and sold for the benefit of Renaissance Transgender Association of Pennsylvania, USA...one of the oldest and most successful transgender organizations in America..

Each year TGVoices will choose another organization from a different country to support through the sales of the eBooks and CDs of that year's competition..

Please review our website at www.TGVoices.org to learn the full details of the competition and to download the entry application..

Please forward this email notification of the competition to all friends, organizations and members of the organization that you feel may have interest in such a competition..

Thank You..

Elizabeth D. Jeffords - Executive Director
Transgendered Voices, Inc.
3333 East Bayaud Street - Suite 111
Denver, Colorado 80209
United States of America

303-320-6630 - Telephone

MyOnePenny@aol.com
www.TGVoices.org


chris at 4:00 AM |

 


"3 Spoon Bicolor" *



from Chris Vitiello, Texfiles Poet of the Week,

from Irresponsibility

5

Not even the end
The birdhouses are rotting // They rot // They are rotten
Randall’s calmness

On Wednesday at four-fifteen pm Eastern
literally blind with anger

Evie’s poem is a location and torture is its border

The wainscoting is warping there

Iris used strategy

Now we either talk about the election or we don’t
How to take care of people
I wrote myself a reminder to apologize
This is a poem
The poem happens outside the poem // Poems happen outside poems
// Poems aren’t
poems

Happens is the operator





"3 Birdhouse" *


~~~~~~~~~~~~poem copyright of Chris Vitiello~~~~~~~~~~~~ o~o/ ~~~~~~

* Gourd images courtesy of
Donald N. Maynard and Brian J. Sidoti, Ornamental and Utilitarian Gourd Evaluation Fall 2002




chris at 1:01 AM |

Sunday, January 16, 2005

 

Hi Spirits!


chris at 2:00 AM |

Saturday, January 15, 2005

 

"Little Silhouettes of Men or Houses that Pervade Statistics": *About* Adorno on the Matter of Image(s):



from Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on Damaged Life, " 'Picture Book without Pictures' " [Adorno's title is an ironic quoting of a title from Hans Christian Anderson]: *

Amid the network of now wholly abstract relations of people to each other and to things, the power of abstraction is vanishing. The estrangement of schemata and classifications from the data subsumed beneath them, indeed the sheer quantity of the material processed, which has become quite incommensurable with the horizons of individual experience, ceaselessly enforces an archaic retranslation into sensuous signs. The little silhouettes of men or houses that pervade statistics like hieroglyphics may appear in each particular case accidental, mere auxilliary means. But it is not by chance that they have such a resemblance to countless advertisements, newspaper stereotypes, toys. In them representation triumphs over what is represented. Their outsize, simplistic and therefore false comprehensibility corroborates the incomprehensibility of the intellectual processes themselves, form which their falseness--their blind, unthinking subsumption--is inseparable. The omnipresent images are none, because they present the wholly general, the average, the standard model, as something unique or special, so deride it. The abolition of the particular is turned insidiously into something particular. The desire for particularity has silted up while still at the stage of a need, and is reproduced on all sides by mass-culture, on the pattern of the comic strip. What was once called intellect is superceded by illustrations. It is not only that people are not able to imagine what is not shown and drilled into them in abbreviated form. Even the joke, in which once the freedom of the mind collided with the facts and exploded them, has gone over to illustration. ... [All of which] is implicit in the universal triumph of subjective reason.


Abstraction--the power to imagine and hypothesize, to invent systems of explanation for material phenomena, isn't "vanishing," but the power of it--the power to perceive and value, to understand, to know its import and impact--has diminished and is continually being rearranged and undermined. Though this diminishment of the power of imagining had been happening long before 1951 when Adorno's book Minima Moralia was published (note that this unusually structured book, a gathering of intentional fragments written from the perspective of "subjective experience" on all sorts of topoi-as-cultural-phenomenon was written as a 50th year birthday present to Adorno's good friend, Max Horkeimer. And the diminishment of useful abstraction has continued since, so that it seems even more important now to have another look at these relations via Adorno's perceptions, analysis and response. In this Adorno passage are several interesting and subtly layered points to be considered. Here is a preliminary overview of them, with some discussion added. Of interest to me first are the assumptions built into it, namely, that it generalizes the use and reproduction of all images under the overarching rhetorical authority of western late capital culture--the examples to be imagined here would be from advertising in magazines, and then one early television, which brings up another point that Adorno could not have avoided--his own moment as it informed his own "implicit" tendencies in "subjective reason." This, in turn, brings up another problem, the basic one inherent in western logos, generally, and as Adorno's contemporaries were at the time of this writing, busily sorting out: I am refering to Derrida's critiques of western reasoning and textuality's latent harboring of the paradox of being, which is that one can never completely step outside ones subjectivity, thus, the assumption of objectivity that is so prized in western logic--from Aristotle to Cicero and onward--is the biggest myth and problem for any kind of critique of writing that seeks to persuade via reason (logic).

The problem of assuming a general western cultural perspective here is that it excludes some other highly meaningful cultural uses of images: I refer to so-called primitive cultures, where the image is the dominant semiotic currency of community in not only everyday rhetoric or pictorial designs and what westerners lump together by calling it art (more accurately these are iconically related to cultural currencies and relations of myth/symbol/ritual), but the very basis of cognition in such cultures. What this is and how this works is something western thinkers can hardly imagine (though they can start to get a grip by reading Walter Burkert and Mircea Eliade), so saturated are they (I include myself) with their own very different cultural orientations and perspectives.

That, in part, comes back to Adorno's point, then, about 'subjective reason'. It goes unremarked that our western 'reason' is subjective, yes. But that is not only due to the problems of advertising and ideology. It is also due to the problem of an uncriticized hegemony of logos--the inescapable monument of letter/word as authoritative, as a linear progression, a hierarchical form of absolute logic. This is the problem with overeliance on 'The Facts' or, as Adorno puts it in his inimitable way, those "little silhouettes of men or houses that pervade statistics"--which is to say, the statistics will always be imperfect since inescapably human.

The image is as dangerous and as useful as all the thinkers have said it to be, not because it is so easily loaded with ideological use, nor because it is reproducible in late capitalist or post modern or globalist culture, but more simply because it is a form of cognition dependent on evoking pleasure or connection with community, not on reason. And reason, will, intention, are less easily learned and retained than is the pleasure response, which is connected more to instinct (this is verging on Freud/Lacan/Kristeva & etc). And community--groups of people getting along together--depends on reason more than pleasure (though none of these things are completely mutually exclusive categories). So, given this, Adorno is warning of the problem of reason being coupled with pleasure and thereby being severely undermined by representations of subjectivity, even though he knows that there can be no absolutely objective human reason without some kind of subjectivity. He is reminding us, about our "toys"--in the literal and the figurative, general sense: artifacts of pleasure--tending to overgrow, to "outsize" our capacity to reason (even though it is already limited). Think of how an item like the gun is a toy in the general and the more particular ways: a dangerous toy (early in raising my children I was horrified to find the toy store ailes divided by gender, and then to see what toys were offered for each supposed gender: boys got guns--I did not want my son to have that *Toy*.)

Adorno additionally posits an awareness of the dangers of relying too much on the 'about' at the expense of the real--even while doing so in a mode of 'about' And ironically there is this imagistic parallel: recall the online spam and browser hijacking trick of 'About dot com'--how it operates to overtake all else. Adorno's is a very useful insight because it is also the problem of rhetoric and of philosophical emphases: spending more time talking about something rather than doing it or making it. The difference between theory and practice, between being a critic of poetry or writing poetry. To notice where and when "representation triumphs over what it represented" --to notice that subtle switch whereby cognition (ones own and/or others) stops concerning itself with the thing itself, and is deluded into a concern more for thinking or talking or discussing only what it is about. The over concern with finding meaning, then, rather than living and making, creating, being in art.


* Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. Trans. E.F.N. Jephcott. London: Gresham Press, 1974. pp. 140-141.


~~~~~~~commentary copyright of chris murray~~~~~~~~ o~o/~~~~




chris at 11:02 PM |

 

What Happens When We Mix Light?

More Googlies:

"Green," entry # 7.



Via (copyright of) a very cool site:
The Wyvern's Lair

And here's entry # 2:


from a science lab at ASU, "Submod 3: Obj 2: *What Happens When We Mix Light?"



ZaZen, Y'all!






chris at 4:46 AM |

 

from Texfiles Poet of the Week, Chris Vitiello:

from Irresponsibility


4

Cadiot lets nothing get away

A syrup cork

A frame

The hardware store is still there
on 18th Street
When I’m not entirely present
Vicki isn’t sure about me

Simple commands

Laying it out there to see
if it resonates with anyone

The plastic bullet entered an eye // The plastic bullet entered the eye // The plastic bullet entered her eye

To see the wind I look at the tree



~~~~~~~~~~copyright of Chris Vitiello~~~~~~~~~~ o~o/ ~~~~


chris at 12:55 AM |

 

from
A New Broom blog, "What do you call that noise?: A Tragicomedy in One Fit" Check it out--some good sweeps goin' on over there...


chris at 12:04 AM |

Friday, January 14, 2005

 

from Francis Ponge, "The Sun as a Spinning Top" *


It is perfectly natural for the sun to shine initially in the upper lefthand corner of the first page of this book.

Brilliant Sun! At first, an exclamation of joy and in response the acclamation of the world (even through tears, but it makes them shine).

There is every reason to believe (curious expression) that we are inside of the sun; or at least inside of the system of its power and its love.

The day is the pulp of a fruit, the sun is the pit. And we, drowned in this pulp like its imperfections, its spots, its defects. We are symmetrical in relationship to its center. Its rays envelop us, run past us, and then go on to play far ahead.

Night is the spectacle, the consideration; but the day is a prison, the forced labor of the sky.
This star is pride itself. The only instance where pride is justified.
Satisfied by what? Satisfied with itself, dominating everything.
Everything created is lit by it, warmed by it, recreated by it.

"The sun dispels the clouds, recreates them, and then goes through the rider, without even using all its strength..." (La Fontaine, Phoenix and Boreas).

Brusquely, the flashes of light and heat together blanch the outside of the sails.
But in the long run, cold currents of water in the bath always win out.

The animates a world which it had first damned to extinction: it is then only a feverish or agonizing animation.

In the last stages of its rule, it creates human beings capable of contemplating it; then they die, altogether, and yet they remain as spectators (or escorts).

The sun, animating, lighting what contemplates it, plays a psycho-
complicated game with it, flirts with it.

At times, its nozzle inundates us, at times, only the roof or a large window.

In the great barrel of the sky, it is the radiant bung, often enveloped in a rag of dull clouds, but always humid, so powerful is the interior pressure of the fluid, so impregnating its nature.
At the moment of his death, Goethe saw the bung give way and the fluid (pure and dangerous) spurt out, and he said, "More light." That may indeed be death.

Dazzling sea-urchin. Clew. Dented wheel. A blow of the fist. Tomahawk. Bludgeon.

Here, the first and last are all mixed up.
Drums and drumbeat.
Every object finds its place between two rolls of the drum.

(222-223)


* in Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness. Ed., Carolyn Forche. Trans. Serge Gavronsky. Norton, 1993.





chris at 10:18 PM |

 

from Chris Vitiello, Texfiles Poet of the Week,
an exquisite audioblog:

this is an audio post - click to play


* * * *

--begin cm interlinear---

& how should i admit i
find useful this consonantal ash
exquisite--

how it reminds me of inquisitive
agents of ex-urban
malls

glossy price tags

i detest

& highways frantically painted
in sparkly extravagant lines of Emily
Dickinson dashes (ooo la)

& my answering la:
of satin white-lane reminders
to stay or risk the on-coming
other blinking traffic
something like drama
or only some apparent girl
satin & rules
& then!
such sparkling spinarets
of pollen-yellow

(life gives on to its best)
slashes!
:
--end cm interlinear--

* * * *


Hey, Y'all:
Chris V's audioblog reading is from his "sentences for use"--
the appendix to the (imho) extremely wrought, immaculate manuscript,
Irresponsibility, the subject of this texfiles feature.

Chris sends along these words by way of intro to the audioblog:

Use these sentences to re-reticulate others’ processing scales for written information. Through the reading of these sentences their potential as a system ratchets against the contextual understanding system of a particular individual. This realigns the reticles between these systems---visualize a slide rule. Obviously, the level of detail and specificity will increase with the more “Sentences for use” that come into play.

Any information can be contained in, and any passage of writing converted into, sentences like these. Use them as you see fit. This book’s copyright does not cover them, so they can be disseminated freely without credit or compensation.


So, hey, do let yr ol' doggy ears out for a velvet po-turnstile treat, Y'all...
Give a good Listen Up
& as always here at tex:

Many Thanks for (literally) *Listenin'* plus
oh Yeah--
ZaZen, Y'all

Love,
c

o~o/


chris at 6:10 AM |

 

from Chris Vitiello, Texfiles Poet of the Week :

from Irresponsibility

3

Iris read like // Brent raved about the sleeptalker
We plotted tasks on a field quartered by
axes
Incapable/capable and despised/enjoyable

Brent’s paraphrasing of Barthes
I can never remember his precise words

Evie’s poem is a rectangle
the first and last lines of which are the word
"torture" which also begins and ends every line in between
In Rikugien Gardens the woman said:
"That tree is irrelevant"



~~~~~~~~~~~copyright of Chris Vitiello~~~~~~~ o~o/ ~~~~~~


chris at 4:00 AM |

 

Official LuciPo Phone Booth * :




LuciPo Poets emerging from phone booth:




* cross reference
the comments in this Texfiles post... : )

o~o/



chris at 3:09 AM |

 

from Philippe Soupault * :


Poems from Saint Pelagia Prison

I.
Wednesday on a barge
and you Saturday like a flag
the days have crowns
like kings and dead men
lissome as a kiss my hand
rests on chained foreheads
A child cries for her doll
and we'll have to start over again
Monday and Tuesday cold-blooded
four Thursdays off from work

II.
a thread unravels
a shadow falls
a butterfly exploded
chrysalis or glow worm

III
Who mounts
the storm
a balloon
honey or silver moon
Four by four
Let's look for the children
the parents of children
the children of children
the bells of springtime
the beginnings of summer
the regrets of autumn
the silence of winter
an elephant in his bathtub
and the three sleeping children
singular singular tale
tale of the setting sun

(208-209)




*in Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness. Ed., Carolyn Forche. Trans., Paulette Schmidt. Norton, 1993.







chris at 12:59 AM |

Thursday, January 13, 2005

 

Dept of the Syllabus Celestial :


--
via Levity dot com:

Ginsberg's Celestial Homework

Oh, I love this! it's the photo of a page (actually, you can view all three pages of the document at the website linked above, Levity dot com), from Alan Ginsberg's spring 1977 literary history course at Naropa happily titled, Celestial Homework. I can't decide if I like the readings better or the title--well, okay, yes: the readings. But what an, um... *heavenly* little title!

Many thanks, for this wonder of a find, going out to Tim Botta. The Levity dot com link is in the December 26 post on his very cool blog, Nice Guy Syndrome!

Hey, ZaZen, Y'all!


chris at 5:26 AM |

 

"... but hey, this is the Bush Administration, after all: no good idea goes unperverted." Tim Morris, from Optative Mood,


chris at 1:45 AM |

 

Anyone seen
this Swiss film by Mattias Caduff on Paul Celan's short story, "Conversation in the Mountains"?--which is about a failed rondevous between Celan and Theodor Adorno over that famous line of Adorno's regarding how "poetry cannot be written after Auschwitz."


chris at 1:27 AM |

Wednesday, January 12, 2005

 


The Smoking Car, via OZBACK Trains, AU ...


from Texfiles Poet of the Week, Chris Vitiello (who is also hard at work today creating world peace)




from Chris' most recent manuscript, Irresponsibility :


2

Those crows have a bigger vocabulary
Perpetually postpone than

I don’t understand crows but I know I could
in the parking lot

The car is smoking

I knew
The car smokes
All you have to do is pay attention and it’s not that simple

The fault in forgetting

There’s a



~~~~~~~~~~poem copyright of Chris Vitiello~~~~ o~o/ ~~~~~



chris at 10:46 PM |

 

Ken Rumble emailed me to say that the LuciPo poets had "grown a little as a group" since last June. I had mentioned them and listed the members names from their journal, The Displayer in my post of yesterday, announcing Chris Vitiello as Texfiles Poet of the Week. So, I want to correct the list of yesterday with this new one sent in by Ken. I'll also grin and add that of course I had to invite myself to become a member of Lucipo, too...

Laura Carter
Brent Cunningham
Aaron McCollough
Andrea Selch
Amy Carroll
Alyssa Wolf
Adam Good
Brian Howe
Clayton Couch
C. S. Giscombe
Chris V.
Christopher Davis
Debbie McGill
Erica Stevens
Eden Osucha
Randall Williams
Gabe Gudding
Heather Nagami
Andy Beckmann
Jonathan Fisher
Joe Donahue
Jon Minton
Jon Thompson
Kathryn Salisbury
Leigh Plunkett
Lance Phillips
Maura High
Marcos Canteli
Laura Sandvik
Micah Weinberg
Mike Gubser
Nihad Farouq
Tanya Olson
Scott Pierce
Daniel Feinberg
Patrick Herron
Paul Jones
Marcus Slease
Richard Allen
Rebecca Walsh
Reb Livingston
yours totally (Himself the Elf, Ken Rumble)
Brandon Shimoda
Evie Shockley
Standard Schaefer
Susan Ray
Tim Botta
Tessa Joseph
Tony Tost
Todd Sandvik
E. V. Noechel
Will May
& beyond tex, my other moi!-- o~o/






chris at 10:42 PM |

 

Oh yeah, Amy's definitely *Got Voice*--Amy, Hi!--so nice to see your blog--hey, Y'all, check out the NYTimes link she's put up...


chris at 10:16 PM |

 

And while I wz checking around bloggy land to see whazzzup, I found this treasure from checking out all the signature links in Lance Phillips' email about his new interview poet, the fascinating Ameri-Somoan Poet, Dan Taulapapa McMullin :

Lance's exquisite new poetry up at Nth Position--all about innovating the body poetic--I *really* like this work...


chris at 7:54 AM |

 

Just checked out E-X-C-H-A-N-G-E-V-A-L-U-E-S, Tom Beckett's new blog, a site for dialogue-form-interviewing, and no little Tom foolery, or so I imagine... :) Hey, it's all very well worth looking into--the first interview is with Crag Hill, so, I want to add these good wishes:
do Keep On, Y'all!--it's really lookin' good over there!


chris at 7:05 AM |

Tuesday, January 11, 2005

 

Announcing a New Texfiles Poet of the Week: Chris Vitiello!




I'm sending out a very warm welcome to one of contemporary avant poetry's most incisive writers and theory-thinkers, super-po-person, Chris Vitiello, whose blog is The Delay, where you can always find something to stretch your wandering octopi-mind out, ink and all, and to fill your poetic engines from essential, non-fossil-fuel-tanks... For myself, I'm very happy to say I had the great pleasure of meeting and chatting with Chris last summer at the Carrboro Poetry Festival--take my word for it: he and his work are not to be missed--check out the recording of his reading there. And look for an audio recording here during this feature week. For now, here's a short bio for those who don't already know of Chris' many writerly accomplishments :

* Chris Vitiello lives in Durham, NC and is part of the Lucifer Poetics Group. While getting an MFA in Writing and Poetics at the Naropa Institute he co-founded the journal Proliferation. His book *Nouns Swarm A Verb* came out in 1999 on Xurban Books. Recently Chris has been writing performance texts and plays, as well as making super-8 films with his 5-year-old daughter Iris. His latest poetry manuscript (which these poems are from), Irresponsibility, is nearly complete. *

The Lucifer Poetics Group (aka Lucipo) spoken of above is based in North Carolina and consists of a fine-feathered, peacocky-motley crew, some of whom have also been TexPOWs (Texfiles Poets of the Week) * and several more I hope in future to con into becoming TexPOW's--if they'll let me :)

The members are: Tim Botta, Amy Sara Carroll, Joe Donahue (Hi Joe!), Patrick Herron * (YaY!!), Maura High, Brian Howe, Tessa Joseph, Aaron McCullough, Eden Osucha, Ken Rumble (Ken, Hey!), Evie Shockley, Marcus Slease * (Marcus, Hi!), Jon Thompson, and the ultrapoetryperson, Tony Tost (who rocks literarlly, and figuratively--especially with the new audio po-site he's recently been putting together!), John Lowther, Jonathan Minton, Lance Phillips (Hi Lance!), Kathryn Salisbury, Todd Sandvik, Rob Sikorski. What a WOW bunch of po-folk, eh?

To start off Chris Vitiello's TexPOW feature, I want to do two things. The main thing is I'll be posting one poem per day (seven altogether) from his new manuscript, Irresponsibility, so look along below for poem # 1. But, secondarily and because it is interesting in terms of what goes into the development of a manuscript, and by way of introducing the work--basically, in order to give a sense of how provocative yet continuously open-ended is Chris's work, thought, and oulipo'd historical materialist subject-matter in this collection (as it was being developed)--I'm going to post here two sections of it (5 & 12) that were first published in Volume One of The Displayer, Lucipo's and Desert City Press' chap-journal, which was created for the Carrboro Poetry Festival (June 2004).

If you have not yet seen this humble-looking no less powerful chapbook (it's beige card stock, with a big old black goat prancing at center on the cover, and only a humble 20 pages of folks' poems, tho of course, each of 'em's full of fuel), then you should look into it--every poem by the Lucipo folk has its day.

(And for the following, please note this: the numbers of the sections of the following poems by Chris Vitiello have since been revised and renumbered--viz: a new version of 5 will appear here in five days.)

From Irresponsibility (June 04 version)


5
Less windy today but still
pretty windy

The is greater than the
artiface of breaking the line
on 'still'

Could have written 'and still pretty windy'
Seen from above, penguins in open water
look like they're flying

This is a poem

Differentiate diametric opposition from simple extremes

Bluntness is a characteristic


12
The legal system is set up to determine
a conviction or an acquittal
I have lost a sense
of where to break the line
I guess I will try my way back into it

Practicing on a sentence from the paper.

Tank fire destroyed the
mosque's 50-foot-tall minaret,
from which the insurgents were
attacking

Iris played with toy guns for the first time today

*


and, from Irresponsibility (Oct 04 - Jan 05 version) here is # 1:




23 October 2004
Durham, NC
home

1

Forty-five minutes // A negotiation
Half sunlight and half condensation
without the rhyme

All week I never got used to holding back

The difference between directions and the map
Forget how to read this

*


Stay tuned, good folk, for more of this provocative work over the next week.



~~~~~~~~~~~poems copyright of Chris Vitiello~~~~~~~ o~o/ ~~~~~~


chris at 10:27 PM |

 

Dunno Kisses



kisses i dunno. i wz not kissing, i wz doin a little semiotic. it wz research. on kisses on other signs. the usual stuff showed up: images. lips and people. baby kisses or two dogs. a parrot kissing a man. then, a bunch of lips in various hues, red, pink, gold (tho no purple, green, or blue), & many candy kisses. there wz a recipe for those, following a card listing all their vital statistics: sodium content, fat (in two kinds) sugar, calories, the row of zeroes for vitamin categories. But I let my head wander. a little, to a shore. I inquired of whale kisses and thinking. just how sweet that would be. to see. so here is my therefore. a whale being. well-hugged by rescue-humans. or i got a dolphin kissing a forlorn human. And then I got this toy, no tellin' why. dunno.


chris at 10:19 AM |

 

Now that my email's cleared of spam and I've had a chance to read some of the wonderful messages full of good will, some fine poetry, and interesting activist news that Y'all have been sending these last few weeks (well... awwww, shucks! Y'all been makin' me feel all cool an' stuff with these fine messages, & that's one really good thing about coming back after a long gap like this one: the good mail is all piled together so that one gets all this good vibe all at once, rather than a little at a time--so cool!)

I'll be able to post about some interesting doings and works that people have been getting into, over the next few days. So, do look forward to that, in addition to the upcoming week of poetry from the mysterioso new Texfiles Poet of the Week, who I will shortly announce. Stay tuned, Y'all.

Love,
o~o/ Chris


chris at 8:17 AM |

 

Coming up this evening: announcement of a new Texfiles Poet of the Week, one I am sure Y'all will be very happy to see here... so stay tuned! I've got errands to run here shortly, and my walk to take (it's really warm here--something like eighty degrees, which makes me a little leary since that also means in winter that it will either storm soon, or the temp will take a sudden dive by fify or so degrees, so I'm outta here to walk before the temp goes wonky...), but then I'll be back to introduce the latest Texfiles feature. Adios for now...


chris at 2:20 AM |

 

from Carolyn Forche, "Early Night" * :


I wrap myself in sheep leather,
kick heavy snow over its own tough skin.
Snow, daylight, ghosts in my mouth.

Here my round slovak face feels like
whale meat on soapstone, I cannot
touch myself without screaming.
With a fist of Slovak I toss
old forgotten language to birds
asleep in flight, in snarling ice they stuff
their faces in their wings.

Hold to the wooden arms of bare oak.

I walk like this alone, old country
boots munching the field.
This snow is the snow of Urals
swarming upward, ashes, birds
frozen solid into stars.

(12)


* Carolyn Forche, Gathering the Tribes. Yale UP, 1976.


chris at 1:04 AM |

Monday, January 10, 2005

 

Spam Is Very Bad for all the Nice Humans





I am just so delighted that Spam Inc. has chosen me to be their January electronic Queen. In that, I am happy to report that I have now finished several hours of sorting and deleting over 2,000 spams from only one of my email boxes, my university account.

Soon I might actually be able to read some of my legitimate email, some of which dates to Dec 17, none of which is, I hope, not too urgent because, if so, then I have no way of knowing since it is all mixed in so subtly by title, alongside my favorite spam from intriguing people and places all over the world, such as: Personal Greetings from Near-Alike Names of Any of My Friends *and* Any Notable Person in the World; or, Enhancing Body Part Pictures and Products alongside the Latest in electronic Snake Oils; and of course, all told, just plain old Short-Time Remedies for all of Life's Moments. I think I will become a spam person. Just have a personality and vocabulary made completely of spam. And AI SuperSpam Being. Ask me any question and I will answer it with intriguing spam titles and come-ons...

But my non AI, alter ego persona, chris murray, is working on answering my legitimate email. So, if you have sent me a message, please accept my apologies for the delay in answering. I'll be attempting to catch up all of this for the next day or so. Unless some blast of incoming spam totally overtakes my email.

: ) Thanks, Y'all.


chris at 1:16 PM |

 




YaY!! I'm finally back here (though as y'all know, Texas is not my favorite place, so I can't really say YaY!! about being "home," since I don't think of TX as home but it is nice to be back where my things and computer cable is!). I'm not yet totally unpacked, but working on it. I just spent the last day or so since arriving by plane Friday night, with daughter Heather over at her downtown loft in Dallas. Cool beans, for sure, and I met some wonderful friends of hers--Kristen and Ryan. Got to hang out with them at the O-Bar (Elm St, Big D), the other night (I'm not much of a club person but I have to say it was a great adventure to hang out with these folks--a real privilege), and to eat some fantastic Italian food at a real landmark in Big D, Campisi's. The cook there always gives daughter Heather a go-box of exquisitely homemade meatballs & Italian gravy for her golden retriever, Eliot (she called me up one night right after she got the pup last spring, asking me what might be a good name for a dawg. And, ya kno?--of course I said T.S. Eliot--for, what a scrambled up old dawg, he was, eh?).

I had a great trip in many ways--Mexico on the Pacific coast--I spent Christmas eve on a balmy coastal pontoon boat ride with some of the nicest folks one could ever get to know--was fantastico (biggest highlight for me?--a bullfight!--yes! I loved it. But almost everyone I say that to recoils in distaste. Ah well. I'm not PC on it, I guess. Anyway, I hope to say more about all this over the next few days), but that was only one week.

The other two weeks I spent holed up in a fine little out-of-the-way place in a central Arizona valley, writing (editing) a long essay, walking, watching rain and snow, and just forgetting all about whatever stressed out stuff I had been doing for the last several years. So perhaps I will be able to say more on that part of my hiatus, soon, too.

Right now, I just want to say how glad I am that I took the hiatus from online things (even tho I have [no lie:] 3,000 emails--mostly spam, of course--to go through because of being offline so long), and I am even glad to have had a hiatus from blogging because it gives me a nice feeling of renewal, a fresh gathering of perspectives to bring to TEX now, although I also really, really, missed Y'all! So, this was a good thing for me to do, but I hope it also brings some good things and new perspectives via TEX, for Y'all... .

Now, for this coming week, I have some major prep work to get done for the course I'm teaching in spring semester (history of the American Short Story, from Poe to contemporary prose poems), which starts next week (Jan 18th). And I have two nice surprise pieces, as well, and some overdue (sorry!) short reviews of some fine poetry books. So--lots to get going on.

Not to overlook this, too:
two major readings in my Poetry_Heat series here at UTA are coming up this semester: Brian Clements is reading in February, and Eileen Tabios in March. I also hear that our favorite friend of Alexandra Papaditsos, Kent Johnson, might be traveling around TEX this spring--so will stay tuned on that situation, too. And as always, it does feel like way more than one can hope to get done with, but somehow most of it does get done, and reasonably well.

Many thanks to everyone for the continued reading of Texfiles--I'm humbly happy to see that so many readers check in here regularly. : )


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ o~o/ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


chris at 8:27 AM |

 

If you haven't checked this out, do so (since I've been gone for over three weeks now, I understand that although this is news to me it may not be to many of you, but I want to note here that I like what's changed over at the former Falluja In Pictures blog. It's now a dot org, has been more generically (re)titled: Crisis Pictures--and also attempting to remain politically neutral. Admirable work going on in all of that.


chris at 7:59 AM |

Wednesday, January 05, 2005

 

Hi Y'all--Happy New Year--it's been raining and snowing around here, flooding all the rivers and creeks. Much needed water, tho. also, way colder than Texas, for sure. Right now I'm sitting in my friend Pam's front room, drinking green tea. the wood stove is fired up, burning cedar slow. The walls are full of Darryl's collection of masks from all over the world, found mostly in secondhand stores (Darryl is Pam's husband). There must be a hundred of these mysterious masks, all shapes and sizes. My favorite is a very scary one hanging from a plant hook jutting from the ceiling on a string. It would fit over a head, so is really more than a mask, with a life size face, red with balck and white lines around eyes, ears, mouth, huge teeth at least an inch square, each one, and there are about ten of them, then two fangs protruding out of the lower back jaw. Huge nostrils on the nose, huge eye hold, egg shaped. Huge ears. real hair: black with five long feathers hanging on the ends at the back. I haven't asked Darryl yet what story he has for this one but it must be a good one. Maybe I'll try it on. No, I better wait to see what it might signify, eh? Maybe I'll just write a poem based on it, yeah, that seems right...

Well, more soon... I'll be back to Tex this weekend.

My very best to you all!


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ chris m ~~~~~~~~~~~~ o~o/ ~~~~


 

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