Vanishing Point

The particular yous
that witness some conscience
remember the light.
In the pool of metaphor
there floats drifting and blowing
the shape of a skyline.

These details that bark
attest to the discovery of thought,
and the snow remembers
your eyes’ invitations.

I've uploaded an e-chapbook to milkmag.org. It's Unusual Woods by Gene Tanta. And here's the cover of the editor's favorite Beefheart album. But Doc at the Radar Station is pretty cool, too.

Witness the spectacle of the resurrection of the Exquisite Corpse. Codrescu and Co. live to edit another day. In other news, I'm going to hit the west coast for a week of much-needed sun in LA.

Upcoming Poetry @ Myopic Books, 7pm

Sunday, March 23 - Andrew Lundwall & Daniela Olszewska

Sunday, March 30 -Tim Yu & Patrick Durgin

Sunday, April 20 - Kathleen Rooney, Elisa Gabbert, & Simone Muench

Sunday, April 27 - Nikki Wallschlaeger & Kelly Lydick

Sunday, May 18 - Bill Berkson

Sunday, October 19 - Brenda Iijima

______________________________________________

Location:
1564 N. Milwaukee Ave
Chicago, IL 60622

Contact:
773.862.4882

The Five Obstructions

Jørgen Leth assumes a Sisyphean task, as assigned by Lars Von Trier, and descends into a creative hell of his own choosing. Leth’s assignment: Remake his own short film “The Perfect Human” numerous times using various constraints dictated by filmmaker Lars Von Trier. Leth accepts the challenge and I had to wonder how two American filmmakers would handle a similar duel. It would be interesting to see Christopher Nolan go up against Tim Burton, for example. The sparring could most easily be compared to a game of chess, were it not that Leth seems nearly gleeful in some existential way in his knowledge that accepting the challenge means he is already the loser. Or do I mean winner? Somehow this acceptance riles Von Trier all the more as he realizes that Leth’s centeredness makes him nearly impenetrable and not the target that Von Trier hoped he would be. The final obstruction finds Von Trier in an attempt to “become” Leth, as he commands that the latter pronounce dialogue written for the “perfect human,” which we now realize is Leth (according to Von Trier, anyway.) If any, or all that, is confusing it won’t be after you watch the film. Interspersed throughout, Leth’s original 1967 short film, “The Perfect Human” perfectly underscores “The Five Obstructions,” which is the best documentary I’ve seen recently.

Direct any calls to Waveland Bowl this weekend. I'll be hitting the '08 Lebowski Fest and rolling a few games. We'll be working in shifts.

{from} Life Cannons

We thaw to change and break the anger of its days,
when beaches stretch to the vision of some Goofy, who

plates a table for a last supper had by cartoon seagulls.

As when Buster Keaton stands and the framehouse falls around him,
or the singing of "La Marseillaise" in "Casablanca."

Else Snow White kissing Bashful and Dopey on the head in "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs."

Like Jimmy Stewart in "Vertigo," approaching Kim Novak across the room, realizing she embodies all of his obsessions—better than he knows.

And John Wayne putting the reins in his mouth in "True Grit" and galloping across the mountain meadow, six-shooters in both hands.

Remember Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta discussing what they call Quarter Pounders in France, in "Pulp Fiction"?

The Man in the Moon getting a cannon shell in his eye, in the Georges Melies film "A Voyage to the Moon"?

(Urgent, ringing telephone.)

Nearly identical to the way Zero Mostel throws a cup of cold coffee at the hysterical Gene Wilder in Mel Brooks' "The Producers," and Wilder screaming: "I'm still hysterical! Plus, now I'm wet!"

Marlon Brando is still screaming "Stella!" in "A Streetcar Named Desire."

Jack Nicholson is still trying to order a chicken salad sandwich in "Five Easy Pieces."

However, the ambiguous pair of lips in "Citizen Kane" no longer pronounces "Rosebud."

How about the haunted eyes of Antoine Doinel, Truffaut's autobiographical hero, in the freeze frame that ends "The 400 Blows"?

What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate, Cool Hand Luke.

Anne Frank said "In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart."

We need Jean-Paul Belmondo to flip a cigarette into his mouth in Godard's "Breathless" and Moses to part the Red Sea in "The Ten Commandments."

We need to find an old dead man in a child's swing, his mission completed, at the end of Kurosawa's "Ikiru."

We need to hear the word “plastics” in the “The Graduate.”

We need "There's a spider in your bathroom the size of a Buick!" from Woody Allen in "Annie Hall."

We’re running down that hill with Indiana Jones being chased by 100 Pacific islanders with bows and arrows as he leaps into a plane with “Snakes!”

You are the knight who plays chess with Death, in Bergman's "The Seventh Seal."

And “We ain't got no badges. We don't need no badges. I don't have to show you any stinkin' badges!" according to Alfonso Bedoya in "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre."

We need "I want to live again. I want to live again. Please God, let me live again."

We need "Forget about it, Jake. It’s Chinatown."

Literago

Las Vegans at the edge of sleep
desire and satiate that desire by
accessorizing to where
she bites off a piece of wind
and blows it upward into birds.

The loaded hell of your mouth
yawns big as Wednesday
cusps each evening with a stiletto that
sidewalks as earth’s icing at the
ledge of oligarchy.

Mystique, in league with
captives of perspective,
like a swarm of advertisements
perambulates along the avenues.

According to Robert Samuelson at Newsweek, Barack Obama has already failed.

Florida schools are now permitted to use the term "evolution" in their curricula. Just as soon as they familiarize themselves with other recent events, they'll be ready to join us in the 20th, I mean 21st, Century.

Bush's approval rating is the lowest in the history of surveys.

China has banned foreign cartoons. Spongebob and Patrick, those weisenheimers, will have to take their subversive underwater shtick elsewhere.

Danny Ocean is the UN's messenger of peace? I voted for Elliot Gould. C'mon. Don't you remember "Capt. John Francis Xavier 'Trapper John' McIntyre"?

Night by the Encyclopedia

I loved you then, mostly for your tacos. They were like
small victories in the second Boer War (or Tweede Vryheidsoorlog).
I read The New York Times for the typos and
occasionally would run,
like a fool I know,
to the feed store to get more tangerines. And nothing could
quench our thirst for history

as explanations drifted through the streets like two discarded newspapers.

My path of snow that runs through night
could it be said that we were in love
she announced to the room as if asking for more salsa

as the television removed its clothes.

And what voices were so busy polishing our eyes
for another day of symmetry where the mountain sleeps?

Canadian poet Rob Mclennan is relentless...his online posts are voluminous and he’s a publishing monster. Swimming around in the world of Ottawa poetry is nearly making me forget this marathon Chicago winter. If it’s this cold here, the folks even farther north must be solid.

My collaboration with Joe Kimball has finally been published in the new issue of Mome. Here's one of my shlocky storyboards alongside a panel from the finished piece.

Ticket to What

This isn’t nature’s duel weakness,
truth comes early in the throat
a blanched monkey, stout as birth.
Hellborn and helpless these months
ache like inconspicuous stems.
Criminal grapes fill with echoes.
My pleated lives really feel,
cycloptic beasts who, greenish, need
and we’re brained and dying among false
trembling flowers. Early or die
just for the taking. What they do to you
come a month. We’re empty,
good. Might live, expect something more
than dimes for food.

The happy confusion of Amy King-- one of my favorite poets.

Orbiting Planet You

Tell the forest leaves to quit their labor
my heart is a candelabra of dice.
Here in your studio of dreams
among autumn clocks I quince.
If I could ice your anesthetic,
echo an ocean twelve years.
But your shimmering voices
the quality of your amber.

The General panics
earlier brandishing gentians.



Itself cognition,
rhetoric reveals its sores.


What jazzing hands
Take your grievances to the particulars?


Life pancakes as
The faraway uncertainties.



You are coconuts -
Mount Fuji in drag.




What shrine to realism
burns in moonlight.

Because I write poetry, I often get into conversations with nonpoets about writing and writing poetry in particular. When recently asked about poetry by a person whom I know who holds many advanced degrees but doesn’t often read poetry except as a mental exercise or dessert to his main dish of academic or sociological regular reading, I found myself recommending poets whose work I don’t even read. It crossed my mind that living in this country and continuously consuming the goods and services offered here in the U.S. often leads to a practical view of art (for the nonspecialist). Time won’t be invested (even fifteen minutes) if there won’t be some kind of return on that investment, i.e., what’s in it for me? Art is intrinsically not a practical endeavor but leads the viewer or creator toward an aesthetic experience, i.e., art isn’t typically utilitarian, architecture notwithstanding. So, I ended up finding myself talking about Gary Snyder’s poetry because of its relative accessibility. Snyder used plain language to explore concepts and philosophical questions related to his own quest for understanding and he has lived his life on many continents as a proponent of eco-awareness and green-consciousness before those terms had really even entered the popular vernacular. So, why wouldn’t I recommend to a non-writer of poetry the poetry that I admire and read? I guess the self-editing involved as I size-up the asker of such a question leads me to make certain assumptions based on the asker’s appearance and the context of the question as related to the tone of the conversation that preceded it has a lot to do with my response, too. I’m going to make a conscious effort to not self-edit in the future though when asked this kind of question, because it would be better for anyone interested in reading poetry to dive right in to the best poetry written versus to read selections that are *accessible.*

The more genuine answer would be to say that it would be a good idea to dig up a copy of The Desert Music by William Carlos Williams, Harmonium by Wallace Stevens, The Tennis Court Oath, by John Ashbery, Lunch Poems by Frank O’Hara, or even more recent titles like A Fiddle Pulled from the Throat of a Sparrow, by Noah Eli Gordon, or Do Not Awaken Them With Hammers by Lidija Dimkovska. Picking up great anthologies like Bay Poetics or The City Visible is a good way to gauge what’s going on in poetry right now, too. No more will I recommend poets I don’t even read, although the writing itself may be worthwhile. I shouldn’t do any more corrective steering. I’m not even driving the car.

Another City Visible review... This one by Tom Hibbard.

I'm going to finally make it over to
Intuit Gallery today to see the Henry Darger exhibit. Darger lived out his reclusive life in his one-room Lincoln Park, Chicago apartment working as a janitor by day, but at night working on his 15,000 page novel, complete with illustrations about the angelic Vivian Girls, who lead a rebellion against godless, child-enslaving men. Darger attended church daily and rarely spoke, so when his work was discovered by his landlady months before his death it started a landslide of interest in the man who some consider the most amazing of the "outsider" artists. The documentary In the Realms of the Unreal by Jessica Yu that PBS ran a few years ago is interesting to say the least. Darger was certainly the most prolific of all outsider artists. At the time of his death in 1973 he was working on the 3,000 page sequel to his voluminous first novel. His landlady eventually became executor of his estate, which comprises thousands of original illustrations meticulously drawn by Darger himself, in addition to the handwritten pages to what may be the longest and most bizarre novel ever written.

Bill Berkson gave me advance warning that the MoMA edition of In Memory of My Feelings that he edited has been remaindered, so I picked up a copy on Amazon for twenty bucks. It's an incredible bargain and wonderful book. I'd scramble over to Amazon.com and see if there are any still available. And here's a photo of Lana Turner (nearly) collapsing.