Thursday, December 16, 2010

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Popcorn-can cover
screwed to the wall
over a hole
.........so the cold
can't mouse in

- Lorine Niedecker

Thursday, December 9, 2010

Auspix & Omen


Night Depository

The reenactment
showed the citizens

were sitting ducks, done-in

by the pyroclastic flows

In the blink of a cowering
eye, fallout of a drastic

miscue, one of many
ways to go


///

Came lymphing down
the home-stretch,

She put us through paces,
Shaker woodwork
and shape-note singing
or call-and-response
endurance anthems:

Troubleshot with
dyspnea, waived and
wavering in cold, star-
less blue curtains

A ways to go

The Quickening
not yet arrived

"There are [still] many
species of biting flies"

And the night hedges
maybe after every
seeming yes or no

Sunday, November 21, 2010

Saturday, November 20, 2010

Thursday, November 18, 2010

Holiday Throw Sale!

["Laminated Holy
Cards" & rebar wrapped
in tinsel]

There we were
talking the talk

A pre-fab funicular
version, then re-

tooled effort-
lessnesses: the-who-

&-the-what tidings
["wound"]---Blown glass
& iron ingots

had MARKED THE
SPACE, traversing
the brain-blood barrier

Tagging the toxic
plaques, we talk---So what

If it all merely hangs
together:

[Memos, displaced
but deputized

The Marked Space
Blues]

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Friday, November 12, 2010

THE MOON IS THE NUMBER 18, by Charles Olson

is a monstrance,
the blue dogs bay,
and the son sits,
grieving

is a grinning god, is
the mouth of, is
the dripping moon

while in the tower the cat
preens
and all motion
is a crab

and there is nothing he can do but what they do, watch
the face of waters, and fire

The blue dogs paw,
lick the droppings, dew
or blood, whatever
results are. And night,
the crab, rays round
attentive as the cat to catch
human sound

The blue dogs rue,
as he does, as he would howl, confronting
the wind which rocks what was her, while prayers
striate the snow, words blow
as questions cross fast, fast
as flames, as flames form, melt
along any darkness

Birth is an instance as is host, namely, death

The moon has no air

In the red tower
in that tower where she also sat
in that particular tower where watching & moving
are,
there,
there where what triumph there is, is: there
is all substance, all creature
all there is against the dirty moon, against
number, image, sortilege---

alone with cat & crab,
and sound is, is, his
conjecture

Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Diptych w/ Pink Accents


















A vacation

is a movement---
fevered or forlorn

lunge---to do

away with & evacuate
the premises, that

is, the clotted

tiresome assump-
tions one's days have

come to consist

of, not some place
or other.

Friday, November 5, 2010

Wash those
greens more

vigorously, they
can take it
...

(We might go
by
new names

or travel under
them)


Wednesday, November 3, 2010

Scenery

I always eagerly search
the index of a new book
to find a name I cherish,
and then I go to the last
page on which that name
is mentioned to see what
memorable thing might
have happened at that
vanishing point.
...

A woman's body, cropped at the shins and seen in profile, leans to the left,
that is, forward. She may or may not be falling, and her slack face suggests
either sleepiness or the thrall of some sedative. A man stands right of her.
He is dressed in a tailored-looking suit. His arm is extended out toward the
woman, almost touching the small of her back, though if she is falling, it does
not seem likely that he will have any real chance of catching her. The woman
appears to be wearing the man's beige rain-coat. It is oddly draped, hiding
her body. The still-frame fades smoothly in and out, according to a precise,
automated sine-wave pulse: the image surfaces from the darkness, slides
across, on a temporal curve, an apex-point of brightness, and then immed-
iately becomes subject to a steady dousing. Correspondingly, the screen is
only caught in total blackness for an incalculable moment before the illumi-
nated forms emerge again. The moment fades in and out like that, for hours.
...

(In any event
if an object sees action
it under-
goes
some portion of
said event.)

Blue City




















Gray City




















Well / Now

"So much

has
happened

if you
really
think

about
it,
love

and yet

there's
also so
much

that's
yet

to
happen"

(these

yellow
leaves
don't
rhyme

with
those
pinkish-
gray

clouds,

and
yet...)

Sunday, October 31, 2010

Two Ensigns of Poignancy from 1918



















- Kurt Schwitters


The Great Lament Of My Obscurity Three

where we live the flowers of the clocks catch fire and the plumes encircle the brightness in the distant sulphur morning the cows lick the salt lilies
my son
my son
let us always shuffle through the colour of the world
which looks bluer than the subway and astronomy
we are too thin
we have no mouth
our legs are stiff and knock together
our faces are formeless like the stars
crystal points without strength burned basilica
mad : the zigzags crack
telephone
bite the rigging liquefy
the arc
climb
astral
memory
towards the north through its double fruit
like raw flesh
hunger fire blood

- Tristan Tzara

Thursday, October 28, 2010

Saturday, October 16, 2010

I hear a saxophone, through a portable stereo, playing a sleepy, sweet version of Edelweiss

I hear a rotary saw cutting plywood, plus more distant hammer shots

I hear semi-rhythmic thawnks of a tennis ball and

I hear the happy slow swirls of jet-roar tracking overhead.

Thursday, October 14, 2010

Friday, September 24, 2010

Today, I mistyped
candid

as
candied.

Thursday, September 23, 2010

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Scrutability

When and in how many ways does your voice crack?

Offfen enufff, and these ways:
in self-same concentric or spiraling patterns,
in wounded-knee creases,
in glottalized guttural graphemes,
in M-dashes, chopped 'n' screwed,
in "Voice of the Nature" is my ringtone,
in as-is so-and-so,
in a cold, dry smattering,
in newly illumined minus-signage.
.................

(An italicized hyphen hissed,
revolted, forsook its place

& ligature duties---
it lung'd out at me.


Now, we've a little glare
lodged snugly against

the underside of our upper-
left cranial plate.)

Friday, September 17, 2010

Sunday, September 12, 2010

Friday, September 10, 2010

Re: The Moon

Joseph Conte on ROBERT DUNCAN:
"The moon does not become a fixed symbol with limited relations but as a sign enters a limitless network of associations...The moon moves bodies of water, it moves the bodies of the lovers in their nocturnal embraces, and it moves 'the body of the poem, aroused' (Duncan, BB 19)."

MINA LOY
"Lunar Baedeker"

A silver Lucifer
serves
cocaine in cornucopia

To some somnambulists
of adolescent thighs
draped
in satirical draperies

...
A flock of dreams
browse on Necropolis

From the shores
of oval oceans
in the oxidized Orient

Onyx-eyed Odalisques
and ornithologists
observe
the flight
of Eros obsolete

And “Immortality”
mildews ...
in the museums of the moon

“Nocturnal cyclops”
“Crystal concubine”

Pocked with personification
the fossil virgin of the skies
waxes and wanes

LAURA RIDING:
"If, for instance, I say 'the sun which multiplied' or 'the moon which singled,' as I do in one poem, I am endeavoring to indicate actualities of physical circumstance in which our inner crucialities of human circumstance are set. My moon may look like an old tired poetical symbol, and I like an old tired romanticist, but I truly meant that the moon's being what it is where it is intervenes in our outer circumstances as a negator of the sun's fostering excessivenss in our regard, both lush and destructive---as a tempering counter-agency, relatively little but near. However foolishly mystical this may seem, nothing so far learned by scientists or experienced by astronauts disproves this."

WALLACE STEVENS:
from "The Man in the Dump"

Everything is shed; and the moon comes up as the moon
(All its images are in the dump) and you see
As a man (not like an image of a man),
You see the moon rise in the empty sky.


JACK SPICER:

Moon,
...........cantilever of sylabbles
If it were spelled "mune" it would not cause madness.
...

"I would like the moon in my poems to be a real moon, one which could be suddently covered with a cloud that has nothing to do with the poem---a moon utterly independent of images. The imagination pictures the real. I would like to point to the real, disclose it, to make a poem that has no sound in it but the pointing of a finger."


RAE ARMANTROUT:
"View"

Not the city lights. We want

-the moon-

.....................The Moon
None of our own doing!

Sunday, September 5, 2010

Domestic Abstraction

SOIE-disant:

to speak oneself into silken, tissue-paper existence---

manifold, flowy, translucent,
creased and/or crushed,
fragile, resilient
---

by means of a language, a poetics,
for which the same modifiers obtain.

Friday, September 3, 2010

Signature Extras

"Every Piece Was His Favorite"
(Whetted drapes, no song, an empire waist.)

"Lost Sea Adventure"
(The ramifications of a radically indeterminate
universe, a materialism of noncoincidence.)

"Anecdotal Evidence of Homesick Mankind"
("...an angel hovers above
her pubic bone, and an eye stares out
from one shoulder---")

"In a Gilded World, Theirs Is But to Quip and Sigh"
(Incorrigible, inexorable, incurable: what delicious words.
I find them fatally true, of me and much.)
...

I'm a nervy angler, an abortive
pugilist: dull-barbed,
hamfisted; a dusty drone
with elan, devious, dervishy; swollen-
tongued communicant,
formalist makeshifter.

I'ma nnvh:
hvvy brvvng
.

"Enchantment in a Race Against the Clock"

Thursday, September 2, 2010

("Limber fingers" makes an exquisite trochaic two-step.)
On any relatively flat surface
a four-legged stool will always
wobble, if only the tiniest bit, but
a three-legged stool will be
perfectly, unimpeachably stable.

Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Man's great affliction, which begins in infancy and accompanies him till death, is that looking and eating are two different operations. Eternal beatitude is a state where to look is to eat.
...
The vulnerability of precious things is beautiful because vulnerability is a mark of existence.

- Simone Weil

Monday, August 30, 2010

Monday, August 23, 2010

Every threshold was cool-grimed
marble---our light green

stunt, our light
blue balooning. There stooped---

whereupon, wrenched---

a cornered tree. If surnames'd
been found pinned

to that that that.

Thus glossy green
resounds off blue marble leavings.

Sunday, August 15, 2010

John Harkey is the CEO of Consolidated Restaurant Companies. He served with Arthur Simon on the Special Committee to negotiate the deal with MHR.

John Harkey is an avid outdoor adventurer who enjoys physical challenges. His exploits started in 1997 when he scaled Washington state's Mount Rainier, which is considered the most extreme endurance ice climb in the United States. That same year, he competed in the auto racing World Challenge series at Sears Point in Sonoma, Calif.

John Harkey is an aspiring free lance sports journalist specializing in football-related news and events.

"I've worked closely with John Cracken and John Harkey, and I've come to trust their judgment in evaluating companies. They are very thorough in the conduct of due diligence and creative in structuring a win-win transaction for all involved."

From teen to man, restauranteur John Harkey has channeled the energy of an entrepreneur.
...
STEPHENSON, Augustus A. "Gus" (killed by John Harkey).
HARKEY, John A. (killed by "Gus" Augustus Stephenson).

Friday, August 13, 2010

Domestic Abstraction

Coronal Mass Ejection

There was a "viscous, colloidal fog" that temporarily
took the form of a garden.
There were 30 seconds of weightlessness.
There was a burst of light and wind; later, all that remained was
"a mountain of disjointed facts that strain credulity."
(The austral summer is 5 months of no nighttime.)
Someone said "shame will save humanity."

..........
Each was coming from and headed towards something.

The question 'where are we?' is deferred, withheld, for several days.

Each, together, is reading & manipulating signs & objects, always in the shadow of a heaving, menacing thing: force or being.

Each cuts a certain figure socially, appears to be a certain type of person; the signs they present and produce are read according to the nearest familiar type connoted, and then further experiences (additional signs) modify this initial reading---overturn it, refine it, complicate it, and/or cement it.

Each must relive the event via the intensely subjective memory of catastrophe that is lodged like shrapnel in the mind.

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Some Peirce

"A sign, or representamen, is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity. It addresses somebody, that is, creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign. That sign which it creates I call the interpretant of the first sign. The sign stands for something, its object. It stands for that object, not in all respects, but in reference to a sort of idea, which I have sometimes called the ground of the representamen. (A Fragment, CP 2.228, c. 1897)

"It is important to understand what I mean by semiosis. All dynamical action, or action of brute force, physical or psychical, either takes place between two subjects (whether they react equally upon each other, or one is agent and the other patient, entirely or partially) or at any rate is a resultant of such actions between pairs. But by "semiosis" I mean, on the contrary, an action, or influence, which is, or involves, a coöperation of three subjects, such as a sign, its object, and its interpretant, this tri-relative influence not being in any way resolvable into actions between pairs." ('Pragmatism', EP 2:411, 1907)

Friday, August 6, 2010

This Morning's Notices

- Back to School Rug Sale: Save 55% with Coupon at Rugs USA
- Teaching Opportunities at Graceville Corrections Facility
- NY Times: 'Russia, Crippled By Drought, Bans Grain Exports'
- A-Word-A-Day: 'vainglorious'
- Borders: 25% Off Your Purchase, Plus Glitter Ball Giveaway & Silly Bandz Swap!
- FYI: Folger Institute Paleography Skills Course