Maybe we should ask the Most Trusted Man in America .

Have you tried the Word Cloud Generator ?

Bill O'Reilly, back to school? Great idea.

More on the strange world of Francis Bacon .


BlazeVOX books needs help.

Bill Knott is still pissed.

Theories and explanations about the much debated [sic] .

Scientists say we can "see" sound and "hear" light.

Are you an apple or a pear ?

Feel the love: Celebrities and John McCain .

Once again milkmag.org will participate in the Poetry Foundation's Printers' Ball at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art. Thanks to Fred Sasaki for making this happen.

Amy Winehouse and fake authenticity pay a visit to my other blog ... Environs. [pictured: "Jazz" by Karel Appel.]

"Art is a secret script that you can only read with your instinct."
Karel Appel, 1962

Spliced Suddenly to a Closeup

What happens in poems
trains graze upon the prairie,
hours fall from the sky,

which is unlike anything except
horses speaking in autumn voices.

Beheaded table littered with night
into the mirror swim.

Our Meanwhile

If I were missing a hooray, saying
wake up and car it, you’d gaze a map of
moments and explore the thick foliage of
sleep. Who sent a laugh wrapped in morning?
Under the cypress trees a compass dreams.
Plot caught us deadpanning about the
after and grackles upon pine needles cackle.
But we are thoroughly neither where the
pointing shadows undress themselves and
sway. Our meanwhile, which made one so
Copenhagen, dealt us a pocket of knives.
Have you seen the horizon, without its
Lacan, giving birth to light? Wretched and
magical we return to conquer happy.

“I was astonished at the closeness of his speech with its hesitancies word by word the forms of his writing. It seemed that, in his specialized – i.e. personal, unique, home-made, close to the nose, close to the grain, actual – world of writing and speech, the forms he wrote were precise notations of the way his mind thoughts occurred to him, as he noticed them, and the way they’d be uttered out loud. ... The main principle seemed to be that his mind moved syllable by syllable – as if his basic unit of thought was the syllable – as if thought-forms could be broken down further than picture image, further than thought-breath or whatever larger unit Kerouac or Olson or Duncan or Williams or others have used, could be broken down below words themselves even, to syllables, one by one moving forward in time, one by one at a time left on the page to tell what change mind went thru in the head at the desk or with pen in hand on the lap on a ship or a plane or in bed, slow as a live clock, monosyllable by monosyllable ... here Creeley was exhibiting his own personal objective yoga as it were of speech-mindfulness, a completely unique universe uncovered by awareness of the syllable as basic atom or brick of poetic mind. What was rare to experience was how much the entire set of mind, the set up, represented in the beginning of the poem, was modified by each new single-breath’d syllable. So each one word syllable modified by hindsight all the previous words. Of course that’s universal in speech, but to hear speech so bare that the modifications of mind syllable by syllable were apparent, were the theme and play of the poem, was like raw mind discovery to me anew, like rediscovering Cezanne’s method of creating space, or Poussin’s arrangement of planes or Pound’s quantity of vowels.” (‘On Creeley’s Ear Mind’, 414)

—Allen Ginsberg

___________________________________________________

Hearing Robert Creeley read at the University of Chicago years ago is one of the high points of my time spent as an audience member at poetry readings. It was only after hearing Creeley read that I began to fully understand the pacing and musicality of his poetry. I understood the importance of the parts to whole as never before. Because of his relatively simple diction my previous tendency was to read the poems quickly and then to reread them as quickly. After hearing them presented by Creeley himself, I slowed myself down and thought of their timing as I hadn't before. Creeley seemed more attuned to this than most other poets I've heard——famous or otherwise. After hearing the intonation of Creeley's poems I realized that many of them are brief enactments of a human drama, re-lived in the telling. They seemed to be less of a language experiment and more of a lyrical document of a psychological gesture. As Ginsberg hints above, Creeley was the master of set up.

His asides also provided such monumental context that I literally forgot where I was while listening.

Russian author Alexander Solzhenitsyn has died.

Along with Elie Wiesel's book Night, Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch showed the horrors of Hitler's and Stalin's regimes to the world. After criticizing Stalin in a letter in 1945, Solzhenitsyn spent 8 years in a Russian gulag as punishment. He was a literary celebrity after publishing One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch but then found himself out of favor again and by 1974 he was stripped of citizenship and expelled from Russia. His death yesterday was heralded as a huge loss for literature worldwide.

And here’s the TIME magazine story and the The New York Times obit.

I just found out that my letters to Cid Corman are now archived at Indiana University , which reminds me of my usual rant about the advent of e-mail and how it has contributed to what probably amounts to the loss of a large portion of the recent historical record of poets in correspondence. Cid’s responses were brief of course but filled with such incredible insight; I can’t imagine that we would’ve labored over e-mail the way we obviously gave thought to writing letters. I’m glad the letters exist now somewhere for safe keeping. In an extreme example, I used to get letters from Charles Henri Ford painted on rice paper. Painting letters on paper made of rice made opening them an occasion that can’t be compared to receiving e-mail. Convenience has cost us something and this is another instance when it seems that technology has trumped posterity. It's interesting to see who else Cid was in correspondence with and when.

drive—he sd

Aram Saroyan's memory of a conversation with Robert Creeley about his poem "I Know a Man" casts the poem in an entirely new light (and shows us the importance of punctuation).


I Know a Man

As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking,—John, I

sd, which was not his
name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, what

can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,

drive, he sd, for
christ’s sake, look
out where yr going.



—Robert Creeley

Cathedral

—after Nichita Stãnescu


There is magic in the wolf

who stares up at the flooding moon.

Whose light is a sling for stones,

a worm's pocket filled with eyes?


My heart is elastic, waits for

the gondola bearing god.

We are entranced by every Vesuvius.

The idea of it gnaws the mind.


And look, your frail teeth

put the moves on a cabbage.

What fugitive cathedral

exhales its pious cargo?


Only the grass can know

the rabbit’s mathematics.

It’s interesting to find out that former Jane’s Addiction frontman and Lollapalooza creator Perry Farrell is still going strong. The first two Jane’s Addiction albums made up part of the soundtrack of my senior year of high school and I have a distinct memory of listening to their first album and thinking “I like this but why does everyone keep talking about some band called Guns n Roses?” As a poet, I’m sometimes mistaken for an important person, so I got e-invited to the Lollapalooza After-Hours Party at Golan Studios Saturday night. Perry Farrell, my high school memories thank you.

iv.


cloud capsule

sleeping forest of why

stone
boat


through summer’s sieve
float across
a high-wired silence.






v.


one who sighs
this is for you



the oatmeal oars
mowing the sea of yes.

I'm looking forward to the David Meltzer/Michael Rothenberg reading at Myopic on October 12. Thanks to the Poetry Center of Chicago and Francesco Levato for co-sponsoring (scroll down). This comes at the end of a weekend-long symposium at Columbia College on the Beats with readings by Diane DiPrima and Joanne Kyger.

What: David Meltzer/Michael Rothenberg poetry reading
When: October 12, 7 pm
Where: Myopic Books, 1564 N. Milwaukee, Chicago

This is a fascinating page about Thomas Merton's Red Diary. It's interesting to see what Merton was reading at the time and the quotes he held dear--I'm still amazed by the possibilities of the Internet. I love stumbling across pages like this.

For example, I otherwise would not have found this quote, of which Dostoyevsky wrote "All the essence of Christianity is contained in this prayer."




"O Lord and Master of my life, give me
not a spirit of sloth, of despondency, of lust or
of vain talking; but bestow on me thy
servant a spirit of chastity, of humility,
of patience and love. You, O Lord and
King, grant to me to see my own errors
& not to judge my brother, for blessed
art thou unto ages of ages."


St. Ephrem

I'll bet you didn't know that Henry David Thoreau has a blog. He must be pretty old by now, but he still makes a lot of sense. (Pictured: Woods near Walden Pond)
____________________

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”

“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”

“In what concerns you much, do not think that you have companions: know that you are alone in the world.”

“Men are born to succeed, not fail.”

“If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. But do not care to convince him. Men will believe what they see. Let them see.”

“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.”

To bolster his standing in the polls and to appear ready to tackle the world’s toughest issues, John McCain in a bold move meant to grab the headlines made his first visit to the Internet today. His sweeping tour of the region will find him visiting sites such as Amazon.com, Slate, Wired, Google, and perhaps even Facebook, although McCain’s top advisors admit that a visit to Facebook may be too much for the aging McCain to tackle in one afternoon. Joking with blushing Cindy that he may have to IM her later, a term she was seemingly unfamiliar with, McCain appeared relaxed and self-assured as he emerged to face the cameras outside his home before beginning his historic tête-à-tête with “the Google.”

--Me Tronome News, 7-21

To them in the observatory

That mind and I survive
together and I lust harmlessly the
cross of schedules.

With a heart full of groceries

I wander appetite roads
wearing an enormous blue
mustache like a dessert.

Perhaps you have seen her
indeterminate No
from where she reigns
atop the mosque of sleep?

I’ll continue to prism
the vast outer centuries
until the gavel comes down
upon my conscience.

Who's purring genius,
so thoroughly sidewalk,
climbing what's rafters.

Tomorrow @ Brown Rice

@ Brown Rice
Come out tomorrow night to hear my collaboration with musician Dan Godston.

Monday, July 21, 8 p.m.

1st set
Larry Sawyer — poetry
Dan Godston — trumpet, small instruments

2nd set
Laura Emelianoff — open harp
Eric Leonardson — springboard

B r o w n R i c e !!!
4432 N Kedzie Ave
Chicago IL 60625

Doors open 30 minutes before the show begins. Brown Rice is a half block north of the Montrose / Kedzie intersection, close to the Kedzie station on the CTA brown line. The entrance is below a sign that reads "Perfect".

New poetry up at milkmag.org: Steve Timm and Jessica Baron.


Plus some greatest hits:Clayton Eshleman, Dana Ward, Sheila Murphy, Bill Berkson, Amy King, and Laura Sims.

Michelle Malkin on Obama's "Delusion"

“In this struggle, scholarships will be far more important than smart bombs.”

—John McCain


“We must also engage, however, in the more difficult task of understanding the sources of such madness. The essence of this tragedy, it seems to me, derives from a fundamental absence of empathy on the part of the attackers: an inability to imagine, or connect with, the humanity and suffering of others. Such a failure of empathy, such numbness to the pain of a child or the desperation of a parent, is not innate; nor, history tells us, is it unique to a particular culture, religion, or ethnicity. It may find expression in a particular brand of violence, and may be channeled by particular demagogues or fanatics. Most often, though, it grows out of a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair.”

—Barack Obama

An argument devoid of logic or coherence usually begins with an ad hominem attack. Neo-conservative commentator Michelle Malkin who has made a name for herself by appearing on Fox News, is adept at that type of attack, which is probably rewarded at media conglomerates like Fox, who pad every broadcast with a virulent array of every type of logical fallacy. The sad fact of the matter is that using logical fallacy does in fact work on voters. Appealing to history, appealing to popular opinion, the red herring, ad hominem attacks, and use of straw man tactics and overgeneralizations are the foundation of each and every Fox news broadcast. Malkin’s latest flimsy whinefest attacks Barack Obama (not his platform, or his arguments) as well as John McCain (somewhat indirectly).

Her mention of “Kumbaya Liberalism” further distorts the facts involved and also turns a blind eye to the gravity of our situation. It’s easy for me to remember that the promoters of the Iraq War reminded the American people that the effort would involve “shock and awe” but also the “winning of hearts and minds.” Any educated person realizes that the yoke of tyranny breaks most easily when the common citizenry have changed their minds about a situation involving repression and decide for themselves to take action against their oppressors. There is no more effective weapon, if this process can even be called a weapon. In its plainest terms it is a war of propaganda. It’s apparent that Malkin not only is incapable of remembering her American history, but that she’s also engaging in a war of propaganda against a large segment of the American population who does in fact now agree that the war in Iraq should be reaching its conclusion and that it wasn’t so much a war of winning hearts in minds, but a war to protect our economic interests in the region. Weapons of mass destruction were never found. Malkin doesn’t allow herself the foresight necessary to realize that the weapon that must be used against future enemies of the United States must be the “war” involving diplomacy. The United States doesn’t have the necessary resources to wage a worldwide battle on multiple fronts indefinitely, so Obama, and to a certain extent John McCain, understand that speaking softly and carrying a big stick only serves us up to a point. Both candidates have weighed in on this topic and stated that military muscle needs the support of a progressive diplomatic effort. The real tragedy is that understanding is not fashionable and many are mired in their selfish interests. Fox News has helped to quash the idea that understanding our enemies is worthwhile. The act of understanding or evaluating does not mean that the idea of the use of force has been taken off the table.

Malkin’s selfish interests probably involve working her way up the ladder at Fox News, but in the meantime she is spreading the kind of misinformation that worsens our situation. Both Obama and McCain are correct in their realization that we need to think of a way to stop the self-perpetuating cycle of hatred that is the cause of these horrific acts of violence. The jihadists who committed the terrible deeds she mentions are too far gone for rehabilitation but our only way out of the costly efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan is to use all methods at our disposal—military might as well as diplomacy. We have proven that we have the muscle but attempts to add some brains to the equation are routinely demonized by fanatics like Malkin. Her knee-jerk response is the type of absurdity that got us into a situation where we are spending trillions of dollars rebuilding another country at the expense of the economic health of our own.