Modernity

And now of cell phone flashback with no narration, told in cell phone point of view was in cell phone here with halfway through cell phone season, cell phone comic's storyline is mostly referred to as INTERNET. Made no influence on most of cell phone comic, save however, so cell phone fact that it was a flashback to an entire cell phone year. When it did, Howard gave first story arc ended to get cell phone characters from cell phone first season. Tamed by high society, and some lesser user announced cell phone site changing cell phone INTERNET universe for his audience. Quite a shock when he of which is completely unrelated to cell phone original science-fiction space opera by cell phone name and dramatic heroic entrance speech. Maxim's weapon of choice doing "lotsa damage" with after cell phone cornball conclusion. Not being completely some filler comics in cell phone middle of ABDOMINIZER and once in a while when cell phone narration-snipped fellow (named Maxim) and was technically satisfied with cell phone way ABDOMINIZER turned out, but didn't feature Maxim or cell phone flashback. That storyline took place after cell phone first INTERNET, of filler comics. Reamer was also tres cell phone starring ABDOMINIZER. Cell phone lasted weeks and followed cell phone adventures of a young INTERNET supplemented by "I will punish you.” Comic back to it. Cell phone readme/setting of cell phone comic was characters from both INTERNET and ABDOMINIZER on and on with crucial references (cue sidekick), from definitely a fantasy world, but it was dotted. About cell phone weekdays things people do and say in cell phone future tense every cell phone for conclusions one could draw based on one shot: gag strips featuring a buxom vampire named Fluffy who had boring weekends—narrative. Instead, it followed a bad guy, with new comic, cell phone story now only runs with format changed. While still updated daily during cell phone site to return to a brand-new season of INTERNET (see Table 1).

Going Gentle Into That Good Night

It may be old news that poets die young, but many of the innovative American artists who have shaped the course of art history in America are now well into their 60s, 70s, and 80s. Think of

Philip Glass – 70
Michael McClure – 75
John Ashbery – 80
Ron Silliman – 60
Ron Padgett – 65
Judith Malina – 81
Ed Sanders – 68
Clayton Eshleman – 72
Alice Notley – 62
Taylor Mead – 83
Gerald Stern – 82
Clark Coolidge – 68
Rosmarie Waldrop – 72

Arthur Rimbaud, whose influence on literature, music, and art is inestimable died at the age of 37. The modern Chinese poet Gu Cheng (1956-1993) died relatively recently at the age of 37 as well. One of the more famous younger poets who died after a brief existence was Sylvia Plath who died aged 31. Plath left out cookies and milk and completely sealed the rooms between herself and her sleeping children with tape and then placed her head in the oven in her kitchen while the gas was turned on. The Welsh poet Dylan Thomas died at the age of 39 after drinking 27 successive straight Scotch whiskys at the White Horse tavern in Manhattan. So, it doesn't seem that evidence does in fact show that poets live shorter lives than other types of writers. I just hope that the younger generation of writers and artists are prepared to take on that heavy responsibility whenever that time comes.

The Big Break

But then I remembered you said
I should be more Keanu and less Depp so then I
said something much more Keanuesque in reply I thought
and less Deppic to test you, but what came out was
misconstrued as mere Eastwood. Then an eruption within
me produced a glimmer of some terrific Baconesque charm,
slathered with a subtle varnish of Hasslehoffish implacability,
but you then requested a dash of Pittish vulnerability with my
Clintonic stoicism. So, I stuttered slightly to levy a hint
of hallucinatory Dick Van Patten Saturday-family-outing-leadership
to my brattish (nearly waifish) DiCaprios, and you shouted “too
damn Baldwin, amateur!” and I seamlessly launched into the
debauchery of my precision Billy Bob, pausing periodically to
season it with a bellicose Shatneresque bastardism and you fumed
“Bowie not Schwimmer, asshole!” and at this point my chic potpourri of
Farrellisms interspersed with nearly schizoid Denzels and nostalgic
Douglas Fairbanks, Jrs. brought the entire crew to tears as the
light was finally perfect, crossing my face on my best side producing
a halo effect of spellbound, yet majestically skittish, Nicholsons as I
just so happened to notice out of the acrimonious corner of my
James Earl Jones left eyelid that you were not at that precise
moment paying any particular attention to anything but your own
slightly Kubricked fingernail.

WP Reading, May 18

I'll be reading at Woodland Pattern Book Center in Milwaukee on May 18. Will Alexander is reading the following night.

Woodland Pattern must have the best poetry selection in the Midwest, if not the nation, and the roster of poets who have appeared there over the years is industrial-strength kewl (Lyn Hejinian, Allen Ginsberg, Jackson Mac Low, Nathaniel Mackey, Eileen Myles, Ron Padgett, Simon Ortiz, Jerome Rothenberg, Ed Sanders, Ron Silliman, Eleni Sikelianos, Quincy Troupe, Karl Young, and John Zorn among many others). I hope to see you there. Maybe I'll finally get to see the Milwaukee museum of art.

Listen. Speech is the prudence of the aged
And time is a passionate sculptor of men
And the sun stands over it, a beast of hope
And you, closer to it, embrace a love
With a bitter taste of tempest on your lips.

-Odysseus Elytis

_________________________________

Thessaloniki, Athens, and Santorini will be forever such wonderful memories for me. If you've never been to Greece make a point to go someday, because it's well worth it. Seeing the Parthenon from a distance on the night of a full moon and hearing the sounds (conversations, arguments, car alarms) and smelling the smells (cheap Greek cigarettes, the catch of the day, ouzo) of Athens was a great experience, but I hear that Kefallinia is actually the place to go in Greece for relatively untouched beaches. Athens was the jumping off point for me for Santorini. The caldera is a once in lifetime experience and half the island is made of black sand beaches so it's a surprise to find brightly colored shells against that backdrop. The inner side of the island is a vertical drop of what must be thousands of feet, terraced with small patios, so it's possible to look down upon other revellers on lower levels and then outward toward the center of the submerged volcano, which still appeared to be smoking. The thought of sitting on the rim of a sumberged volcano that wiped out all of Greek civilization thousands and thousands of years ago adds a sense of excitement to the night life on Santorini, which is made up of honeymooners, college kids, retirees, and backpackers from all over the world. When I was there I sensed an abundance of French, German, and Australian tourists. I'm thinking of when I can get back over there and remember one night I spent out walking the twisty, turning, cobblestone, labyrinthine streets of Santorini among the hundreds of stray cats of all colors and wandered into the Jazz Bar there to talk to the owner about Miles Davis, while sipping another free beer. This guy was so happy I could have a conversation with him about jazz. Santorini is Atlantis and I fully expect it to sink again, someday, back into the sea. Before then though there will be another few sunsets and the travellers visiting the island will applaud when they see it.

Virtual Emily

There are those who know Emily Dickinson was the poet of America. Some, however, believe it most certainly must be Walt Whitman and others are of the Wallace Stevens camp. Few have the dedication of Philip Jenks, however. An Emily Dickinson tattoo. A large one. Check out the UMass Virtual Emily site for all things ED.

Intriguing Individuals Versus Threatening Soups

No rest for the gullible. A nation with the shakes. Can’t you feel it? That’s your insomnia squawking. Crepuscular, yes. Attention K-Mart shoppers, your social security is being hijacked by a non sequitur. Bilge pumps at full speed. No amount of whimsy will save us.

I've been thinking about Robert Creeley the last few days, since it's been two years now since his passing. Reading his work is so meditative and instructive. I'm glad I got to see him read at the University of Chicago when I did.

THE MIRROR

Seeing is believing.
Whatever was thought or said,

these persistent, inexorable deaths
make faith as such absent,

our humanness a question,
a disgust for what we are.

Whatever the hope,
here it is lost.

Because we coveted our difference,
here is the cost.

benevolent as gold

derelict page an in
vitation to grace, thus we ga
ther innocence almo
st tangent, a high minde
d echo, like a silo or dyna
mite. the eye must be
a salesperson to marry
these hours, their signifiers

Ark

The poet is prone
to circumnavigate
the globe, but it’s
only a coffee table.
poor Orpheus.

This poet is a rare
starfish on a barbecue.
that poet is a neon
sign flashing "yes."

My body goes
when I want it to.
I’m not afraid of
snakes.

Let us defend
Social Security. let us
be nice to strangers,
and tourists.

Hollywood is a trendy
drug, or a bright red
car, divinely silly.

I will come to
your rescue with
handfuls of hope.

Hello.

The philosopher’s saddle
is truly vast, upon it rests
the desire for light.

John Ashbery is watching you.

Wystan Hugh Auden on creative writing. This is worth reading only because of the line "Happy the lot of the pure mathematician." How does that line scan? Auden has at various times been a favorite windbag of mine, only because you have to know what not to aspire to as well.

Lumpy Sincerity

Write sky poems in an empty room
about psychological pneumonia.
Friends come and friends go
singular dance of the seasons, remain.

What common emotions, individual struggles
of beads and oceans and secret rivers.
My theme is perfect and without center
its beauty is its movement, glistening.

What music and pictures, of rocks
my approach is crumbling, splashes and
rites beneath shark harmony
your shoulders are a thin mystery.

Swimming in facts, afternoons flexible
exaggerations gallop as religious as Rome.
Hear them whisper, cats know—
musculature of the present flexing.

Old Fashioned Question Mark

Night is a limousine
inscribed
on your tongue.

Press the flesh
of each final hour. Remember the
surface of each
tattered afternoon, naked as stone.

What dim fragrance kidnaps
your every blue second?

Who asks your name among a
crowd of strangers
and writes it in
your eyes?

There must be some
eternal conversation:
a flame
hardly noticed

as an ocean coalesces in your bones.

Another Ballad of Maps and Globes

Inbetween our faith incontinent
wheezes like a newly invented
instrument upon which we play
the hills from here to there.
Pretty tombstones like teeth
and not like teeth chew the
moon looking down upon this mess,
humans racing to and fro without alibis.
Capsized in the desert they will find us
crouching in the gutters of time
explorers of the inner side of nowhere.

Hart Crane: Master of Fogbanks

He discovered onyx, pendulum,
basilisk
(one or two) and
composed jingles on the
tops of frogs, until the sun
descended in a
stereo sky. But still, he could not
answer the ultimate question why.

He gathered sticks and stones and
a few harpoons, astrolabes, a
few, and wrapped them loudly
in a velvet robe, (continents and oceans flew)
and at the moment of
death, there in the clearing he
carefully, miraculously knew
what was it he was supposed to.

Jumping from the deck of speech:

Dazzling Sky

We’ll go on living despite the intrusion.
Appreciative of your glance in my direction, the chiaroscuro
of moments, cast me in the role of son,
to the patriotic television is most painful,
I am now able to sit and calmly watch the screen,
let’s not forget that intellectual fever,
fetish of distances
bewildering silks.

Flambé vigilante, try the surface
disconfidence of illumination:
Culture wears shades.

And all at once, vultures arose,
jellyfish reality
completely dismantled.
Visit my outer space
and I’ll visit your self-preoccupied garden.

Gorgeous Illustrations

Feminine machines, themselves
like a fragrance, she said and the
table again strayed from its place
and moved about the room
with such lightness and laughter
and why are you reading
as her hands so absolute
in a good way, the precise manners
of New Englanders, like pillows,
filled with famine. Good luck there,
because love is a secret factory
manufacturing doubt and the
employees blow smoke rings
on their lunch breaks the size of
Manhattan. Scores of dahlias
feed him morning and, like green
sleep, right now is the time.

I woke up this morning and thought of Cid Corman, so I picked up the Origin anthology and it fell open to this page because of the postcard.



The Overlord of the North Sea said: "A frog
living in a well cannot be told of the
ocean, for its habitat limits it; nor can
an insect flourishing in summer be told
of winter's ice, for the season sways it;
an opinionated fool cannot be told of Tao,
for he is bound by one doctrine or another.
Now that you have moved beyond the shores
and reaches of the River to be graced with
sight of the Great Sea and are abashed,
you can be told of the Great Verities.

—Chuang Tzu, Autumn Flood (ch. 17)

I went to see the film, Venus, yesterday which will probably be Peter O'Toole's last and the scene in the film when he recites the famous lines from Hamlet while standing in an empty ampitheatre swept by the wind and falling leaves, remembering the triumphs and tragedies of his long life, had me thinking again about economy of words. Venus is good by the way. At the very least it served as the impetus for this random blog entry. And thinking of Chuang Tzu has me thinking of Lao Tzu.

We put thirty spokes together and call it a wheel;
But it is in the spaces between spokes where there is nothing
that the usefulness of the wheel depends.
—Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu

So thinking of Cid's economical poems had me thinking of the master of the economical, Emily Dickinson, and her antithesis,
Walt Whitman.

Between Dickinson and Whitman there's such a huge gulf. It seems like the impulse to write anything using a long line has disappeared for this writer. Here's a funny negative review of Dickinson's work that was published soon after her death in 1886.

"It is plain that Miss Dickinson possessed an extremely unconventional and grotesque fancy. She was deeply tinged by the mysticism of Blake, and strongly influenced by the mannerism of Emerson....But the incoherence and formlessness of her— versicles are fatal...[A]n eccentric, dreamy, half-educated recluse in an out-of-the-way New England village (or anywhere else) cannot with impunity set at defiance the laws of gravitation and grammar."

—Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Atlantic Monthly

Whitman, however, was an eccentric, dreamy, half-educated lover of crowds who walked the streets of Manhattan enthralled by the humanity there—he had necessary moments of solitude but he required the thrum of the crowd to function.

As Frank O'Hara said

"And after all, only Whitman and Crane and Williams, of the Americans are better than the movies."

To that I'd have to add Dickinson because

THE DUTIES of the Wind are few—
To cast the Ships at sea,
Establish March,
The Floods escort,
And usher Liberty.

And then to take it farther out, watch this Monk video. That's another master of economy, Count Basie, watching Monk from across the piano. Thelonious Monk's off-kilter solos have more in common with Dickinson's work than one might expect.