What We've Had so Far

"Gathering Threat"

"Axis of Evil"

"Slam Dunk"

"Shock and Awe"

"Mission Accomplished"

"Last Throes"

"Adapt to Win"

"Stay the Course"

"New Way Forward"

"The Surge"

"The Pause"

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I thought I'd post this as a found poem, but it's also a list. These are the catch-phrases that the Bush administration has used to describe the situation in Iraq, in the order of their appearance. "The Pause" is the most recent strategy being promoted.

“Motivated by a force that is vocalized but not wholly comprehensible, the lyric insists on being heard in spite of the fact that it cannot make itself fit conventional codes of meaning. To whatever extent it employs everyday discourse—and even the more esoteric discourses of politics or religion—its aim is to point outside any accountable meaning, to provoke the reception of an excess of meaning. ‘Lyric’ does not suggest an inattention to the material aspects of language or to the possibility of double voicing by which works of art can critique their own formulations.” From Elizabeth Willis's essay "The Arena in the Garden: Some Thoughts on the Late Lyric” in Telling it Slant: Avant-Garde Poetics of the 1990s. Ed. Mark Wallace and Steven Marks. University of Alabama Press, 2002.

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I've always liked this quote. Some of the more interesting contemporary lyric poetry "cannot make itself fit conventional codes of meaning" but also plays off the readers expectations of what these codes might mean. Diaristic, or personal narrative poetry, that isn't critical of first person, or self-referential in some occasional ironic way, has always been problematic for me, or else just boring.

Louise Glück comes to mind as a poet that falls into this "hugely boring" category. Helen Vendler notes that Glück’s poems invite the reader’s participation by asking us to “fill out the story, substitute ourselves for the fictive personages, invent a scenario from which the speaker can solve the allegory. . .” But it's this kind of pseudo-psychological agreement with the audience that convinces me that those who gravitate to this kind of poetry should really be reading a novel. "Inventing a scenario" is not similar to the "willing suspension of disbelief" required of reading poetry that presents a challenge to the imagination. It's just a sign of banal writing.

The List Poem

In the list poem the poet, or writer, in a very Duchampian way drags the reader into making certain associations based on the context provided by the list.

Marcel Duchamp, by placing a hat rack on a string and hanging it from the ceiling took an object and rechristened it as something else entirely, an activity at which he excelled. It’s easy to see when looking up that the wooden hat rack, suspended, has taken on a life of its own. Duchamp was the source of so many artistic currents it’s difficult to keep track, but that would make a good list. His 1936 “Coeurs Volants,” for example prefigured Op Art by decades.

List poems hang from a contextual ceiling of sorts and, taken together as a group, these disparate items sometimes have an unpretentiousness to them that’s really unique because they exist minus all the aesthetic baggage of the typical poem. The only rules are that there are no “rules” to writing a good list. I guess the structure should exist as a numbered, vertical series versus a list separated by punctuation written as a paragraph only because that could be misconstrued as a catalog. Rhyme can sometimes hold a list together, or not, and it sometimes helps for the list to either ascend or descend into a culmination of some topic or else to devolve into near chaos, so that it’s understood why the ultimate item belongs there and nowhere else on the list. The pressure to provide some gradation as the list progresses can lead to either laughs or a rejection of the list, because it’s nearly impossible to read an effective list without judging the list against a mental tally of what the reader supposes is the “real” or more authentic order, based on his or her own experiences and preferences. Examples include James Tate's "The List of Famous Hats" and Ted Berrigan's "Ten Things I do Every Day." Christopher Smart’s “Jubilate Agno” was written between 1758 and 1763, largely while Smart bided his time in a madhouse. “Jubilate Agno” is only a list in the sense that nearly all the lines begin with “For” or “Let.” And where else could we find one of the best lines of poetry in existence?

Tho' toad I am the object of man's hate.
Yet better am I than a reprobate, who has the worst of prospects.

Other examples include James Tate's "The List of Famous Hats" and Ted Berrigan's "Ten Things I Do Every Day." Listverse.com is a good source of lists, but not necessarily list poems, serious or otherwise. Send me a list poem as a comment and I’ll put it up.

Here’s one from Listverse.com

Top Ten Books that Changed America
10. Leaves of Grass
9. The Clansman
8. The Grapes of Wrath
7. The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
6. Silent Spring
5. Native Son
4. A Vindication of the Rights of Women
3. The Jungle
2. Uncle Tom’s Cabin
1. Common Sense

This top top ten all-time rock performances is complete with You Tube clips, which is a nice touch, although The Ramones playing “Commando” on any given night at CBGBs in the late 70s should be included, or Bob Dylan playing “Maggie’s Farm” at Newport. My top ten rock/jazz/reggae moments?

10. Lou Reed, Chicago, IL (Navy Pier)
9. Brainiac, Dayton, OH (Canal Street Tavern)
8. Samla Mammas Manna, Chicago, IL (Schubas)
7. Kiss, Dayton, OH (Hara Arena)
6. Beenie Man, Negril, Jamaica (Bourbon Beach)
5. Elvis Costello, Chicago, IL (Grant Park)
4. Pharoah Sanders, Chicago, IL (Jazz Showcase)
3. English Beat, Chicago, IL (Abbey Pub)
2. Sonic Youth, Cincinnati, OH (Bogart’s)
1. Arthur Lee/Love, Chicago, IL (Park West)

Tuesday Morning Top Ten (after Todd Colby)

10. Bill Clinton is "lost in a political funhouse"?
9. tapas
8. warm Chicago weather
7. more coffee
6. getting lost in Jewel
5. the Final Four
4. f#*%@cking gas prices
3. rereading David Meltzer
2. Facebook
1. birds

Daniel Borzutzky, Patrick Durgin, Tim Yu, and Simon DeDeo after Patrick and Tim's reading last night at Myopic. It was a huge weekend of readings. Kristy Odelius read collaborative poems with Tim, too. Chicago = ground zero for much exciting writing recently.

I'll be reading some of my poetry this Friday for Cracked Slab Books as part of Small Press Poetry Month at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago Ballroom at 6:30.






Small Press Showcase
[sponsored by the Poetry Center of Chicago]
Friday, March 28, 6:30
SAIC Ballroom
112 S. Michigan Ave.
Chicago

L’Albatross

Here is my homophonic or blind translation of Baudelaire's poem L'Albatross followed by the original.

*

Souvenir for the amused, home for equipment,
pennant deaf, I’ll bat Os, vast as axes, these marred
solvents, indolent companions, the voyage
navigable and glistening. Surface of gilded Americans

a penny haunts the dispossessed, plantains
aren’t ok, big and blue, there are malleable honchos
lazy pity parties, grand and blanching. My
communiqué trains aviators, coats and ducks.

Ill voyager, commune with gauchos playing violas.
Naugahyde bro, quit Comcasting and lay.
Lunar grape minus vex, a billiard ghoul
auctions mimes, and buoyant we confirm violets!

Poet, you resemble a prince at a new desk,
but quit haunting tapas and write about archers.
Your exile is a solitary and million wheeze.
What ailment gallops ‘cross the peach of March?

*

Souvent, pour s'amuser, les hommes d'équipage
Prennent des albatros, vastes oiseaux des mers,
Qui suivent, indolents compagnons de voyage,
Le navire glissant sur les gouffres amers.

À peine les ont-ils déposés sur les planches,
Que ces rois de l'azur, maladroits et honteux,
Laissent piteusement leurs grandes ailes blanches
Comme des avirons traîner à côté d'eux.

Ce voyageur ailé, comme il est gauche et veule!
Lui, naguère si beau, qu'il est comique et laid!
L'un agace son bec avec un brûle-gueule,
L'autre mime, en boitant, l'infirme qui volait!

Le Poète est semblable au prince des nuées
Qui hante la tempête et se rit de l'archer;
Exilé sur le sol au milieu des huées,
Ses ailes de géant l'empêchent de marcher.

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Homophonic translation: Take a poem in a foreign language that you can pronounce but not necessarily understand and translate the sound of the poem into English (e.g., French "blanc" to blank or "toute" to toot). Some examples: Louis and Celia Zukofsky's Catullus., David Melnick's Homer, now available via Eclipse: Men in Aida -- part one and part two. The preceding is a description of homophonic translation from Charles Bernstein's Web page, but this "form" has had many various practitioners since Bernadette Mayer created her famous list of writing experiments. It's a great way to break out and create some fresh word associations from old poems.

Signing up for Google Analytics allows me to check in occasionally to see who’s reading milkmag.org. Visitors to the site come mainly from these ten countries: United States, Hong Kong, United Kingdom, Canada, France, Malaysia, South Africa, China, Brazil, and Japan.

I have a specific memory of seeing “2001: A Space Odyssey” with my parents at the movie theater. I had fallen asleep about midway through the film and woke up during the time-travel sequence. From watching “Electric Company” and “The Flintstones” to that was quite a huge leap—I’d never seen anything like that in a movie. Arthur C. Clarke, a man who envisioned the idea of telecommunications satellites in the 1940s, has died. It goes without saying that minus the satellites circling earth, our world would be a much different place.

Stanley Kubrick turned “2001” into a huge visual metaphor that still has the power to amaze. Let’s hope Hal never comes true. On an semi-unrelated note, if you haven’t seen “Colour Me Kubrick” with John Malkovich, it’s worth a look.

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

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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.