The Contrite Fallibilist

2011-12-15T14:21:00.000-08:00

A Thinking Thing

2011-12-15T09:06:00.000-08:00

But what

is a thinking

thing?

It is a thing

that doubtsunder-

standsconceives

affirmsdenieswills

refuses---

that imagines also

and knows.

-Descartes, Meditations

Two Saliences

2011-12-05T20:44:00.001-08:00

Thin Puddle

2011-12-05T19:48:00.001-08:00

one fingertip’s fraction

deep spilt across polished

concrete glassy

continent pristine

save one single

inland sea / a yellow

fish-shaped

leaf

2011-12-03T11:16:00.000-08:00

Metonymy as an Approach to a Real World

2011-11-08T15:29:00.000-08:00

Whether what we sense of this world
is the what of this world only, or the what
of which of several possible worlds
--which what?--something of what we sense
may be true, may be the world, what it is, what we sense.
For the rest, a truce is possible, the tolerance
of travelers, eating foreign foods, trying words
that twist the tongue, to feel that time and place,
not thinking that this is the real world.

Conceded, that all the clocks tell local time;
conceded, that "here" is anywhere we bound
and fill a space; conceded, we make a world:
is something caught there, contained there,
something real, something which we can sense?
Once in a city blocked and filled, I saw
the light lie in the deep chasm of a street,
palpable and blue, as though it had drifted in
from say, the sea, a purity of space.

- William Bronk (1964)

Ozu Stills

2011-11-08T15:28:00.000-08:00

Shook Ones

2011-11-02T08:19:00.000-07:00

At issue were blankets
of sediment, uplifted---

(our ledger
broke lucky: schist)

In what spirit and to what end

that precisionist fathom, "purged
of anecdotal details"---set off,

we ring out, upend each vendor's
angle, keeping time

...
Strait-laced, we saw you lovies
opt for gray-scale prating

Instead, to have say
to make known or do
To cast together feathery-
delicate valves-n-portals

like,
"the spur.....the spar.....the slur

purls, mutedly"

Dusk Poem

2011-07-23T07:43:00.000-07:00

10 useless résumé words – and 10 eye-catching ones

2011-07-23T07:34:00.000-07:00

1. Outstanding

2. Effective

3. Strong

4. Exceptional

5. Good

6. Excellent

7. Driven

8. Motivated

9. Seasoned

10. Energetic

1. Created

2. Increased

3. Reduced

4. Improved

5. Developed

6. Researched

7. Accomplished

8. Won

9. On time

10. Under budget

Three Found Poems

2011-07-23T07:19:00.000-07:00

2011-07-23T07:17:00.000-07:00

2011-07-12T19:21:00.000-07:00

Escapist Iconoclasm

2011-05-07T08:12:00.000-07:00

Welsh Fact

2011-04-29T21:49:00.000-07:00

Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch

means

"Saint Mary’s Church in the hollow
of the white hazel near the rapid whirlpool
and the Church of Saint Tysilio
of the red cave"

Fleshy Occlusion-Abstractions

2011-04-09T09:05:00.000-07:00

Your Diagnosis:

2011-04-09T08:54:00.000-07:00

"You have a poetic sensibility and an ability to see beyond the day to day. You often seem to be living in a higher realm, or to be not-of-this-earth. Occasionally you imagine interior lives for friends and associates that are near-complete fabrications based on your fears or hopes for the future. You are often not aware of your own feelings. You have a strong sense of right and wrong, and because of this are often disappointed. Despite what can sometimes be a destructive inward-turning anger, you are very gentle. You are sometimes a bit out of touch with the ebb and flow of modern life. If your behavior is out of synch with your moral values, a severe psychic disturbance can result. Because connectivity is so important to you, you can become quiet and sulky if you feel that others around do not understand your point of view."

-from: http://www.hypnoid.com/psytest2.html

Light Work

2011-04-08T07:14:00.000-07:00

Exerting up to 20 pounds of force occasionally and/or up to 10 pounds of force frequently, and/or a negligible amount of force constantly to move objects. Even though weight lifted may be negligible, it may be rated light work if frequent walking and/or standing is required.

Stills

2011-02-28T14:52:00.000-08:00

Stray Notes Re. American Pugilism

2011-02-28T13:23:00.000-08:00

1.
Two months before
I came into the world
Larry Holmes weathered
Ken Norton's blows
and thus beat him.

2.
When I was about one
month old Muhammed Ali
persevered and scrapped
to overcome skinny-looking
Leon Spinks, who had won
their first contest.

3.
Remember Charles Bronson's
busted hands in "Kid
Galahad," where the King

breaks into a quivering
song about home before

knocking out Sugar Boy
Romero and getting the girl?

Micro-Tectonics Diagram

2011-02-21T13:50:00.000-08:00

Tiny Glacier Lesson

2011-02-21T13:44:00.000-08:00

Allegory of Collaborative Passivity

2011-02-20T13:54:00.000-08:00

2011-02-19T18:36:00.000-08:00

There are 58 people with the name John Harkey in the United States

Find John Harkey on WhitePages. There are 58 people named John Harkey through regions like Flagstaff, AZ, Dallas, TX, Fort Worth, TX, Georgetown, TX, ...
names.whitepages.com › Name Popularity - Cached

Three Moons

2011-02-17T08:29:00.000-08:00

Healthy Iconoclasm

2011-02-15T14:23:00.000-08:00

2011-02-06T14:15:00.000-08:00

That we revel in
trappings of seeming

constraint, ebb-drawn,
wants hem-strung

ordinance: expect
oration minims and

bit-tongue reserve---
brushes lightly

against, wants hem
heave hush

2011-01-14T12:34:00.000-08:00

The radio talk this morning
was of obliterating
the world

I notice fruit flies rise
from the rind
of the recommended
melon

- Lorine Niedecker

Three Texts

2010-12-16T12:50:00.000-08:00

2010-12-14T07:53:00.000-08:00

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

- Lorine Niedecker

Auspix & Omen

2010-12-09T08:08:00.000-08:00

Night Depository

2010-12-09T07:42:00.000-08:00

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

2010-11-21T14:13:00.000-08:00

Typos (Tropos)

2010-11-20T11:25:00.000-08:00

S O D D Y
I N F E R
STRUCTR

2010-11-18T08:53:00.000-08:00

Holiday Throw Sale!

2010-11-18T08:02:00.000-08:00

["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]

2010-11-16T17:29:00.000-08:00

2010-11-12T17:39:00.001-08:00

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 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

Diptych w/ Pink Accents

2010-11-09T10:49:00.000-08:00

2010-11-09T09:39:00.000-08:00

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.

2010-11-08T08:24:00.000-08:00

2010-11-08T08:17:00.000-08:00

2010-11-05T11:02:00.000-07:00

Wash those
greens more

vigorously, they
can take it
...

(We might go
by new names

or travel under
them)

Scenery

2010-11-03T17:55:00.000-07:00

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

2010-11-03T17:19:00.000-07:00

Gray City

2010-11-03T17:12:00.000-07:00

Well / Now

2010-11-03T16:38:00.000-07:00

"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...)

Two Ensigns of Poignancy from 1918

2010-10-31T12:41:00.001-07:00

- 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

2010-10-28T19:31:00.000-07:00

Veiled Morning-light

2010-10-17T15:22:00.000-07:00

Lightform Cut By Rusted-Out Metal Wall

2010-10-17T15:19:00.000-07:00

Small Tower of Light Lozenges

2010-10-17T15:15:00.000-07:00

2010-10-16T12:26:00.000-07:00

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.

Sin Sobre

2010-10-14T11:00:00.000-07:00

NO ENVELOPE

2010-09-24T09:57:00.001-07:00

Today, I mistyped
candid
as
candied.

Shadow-Play

2010-09-23T10:47:00.000-07:00

Scrutability

2010-09-21T16:07:00.000-07:00

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.)

2010-09-17T11:56:00.000-07:00

2010-09-12T17:52:00.000-07:00

N=A=T=U=R=E

Re: The Moon

2010-09-10T08:28:00.000-07:00

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!

Domestic Abstraction

2010-09-05T10:54:00.000-07:00

2010-09-05T07:38:00.000-07:00

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.

Truth 'n' Advertising

2010-09-04T07:21:00.000-07:00

Signature Extras

2010-09-03T08:52:00.000-07:00

"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"

2010-09-02T09:23:00.002-07:00

2010-09-02T09:23:00.001-07:00

("Limber fingers" makes an exquisite trochaic two-step.)

2010-09-02T09:17:00.000-07:00

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.

2010-08-31T12:54:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-30T12:08:00.000-07:00

2010-08-23T12:21:00.000-07:00

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.

Charles Burchfield, 'The Insect Chorus' (1917)

2010-08-17T10:44:00.000-07:00

Rhythms

2010-08-16T12:37:00.000-07:00

2010-08-15T17:40:00.000-07:00

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).

Domestic Abstraction

2010-08-13T11:11:00.000-07:00

Coronal Mass Ejection

2010-08-13T09:17:00.000-07:00

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.

Reading Test With White Letterforms on Black Grounds

2010-08-12T09:33:00.000-07:00

Stills

2010-08-12T09:30:00.000-07:00

Some Peirce

2010-08-10T11:34:00.000-07:00

"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)

Exquisite Corpse

2010-08-07T06:55:00.000-07:00

This Morning's Notices

2010-08-06T06:56:00.000-07:00

- 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

Indoor/Outdoor

2010-08-05T07:32:00.000-07:00

Three

2010-08-05T07:30:00.000-07:00

List of All Book Titles Within View as a Composite Clue to One Creature's Umwelt

2010-08-02T06:44:00.001-07:00

On the Anarchy of Poetry and Philosophy
Semiotics in the United States
The Truth of Poetry
A New Theory for American Poetry
Introducing Semiotics
Figuring the Word
Language and the Distortion of Meaning
Broken English
Modernisms
Regeneration Through Violence
Disjunctive Poetics
The Subject of Semiotics
Connoisseurs of Chaos
The Principles of Art
Radiant Textuality
The Shape of Time
Philosophy in a New Key
Black Riders
Toy Medium
A Natural History of Pragmatism
The American Poetry Wax Museum
Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers
The Poetics of the Common Knowledge
Thinking Poetics
The Practice of Everyday Life
The Visible Word
The Gift of Death
The Poetics of Space
The Language of Inquiry
Pragmatism
The Varieties of Religious Experience
Vigilance
Radical Vernacular
Microscripts
The Labyrinth of Language
How to Do Things With Words
The Medium is the Massage
The Body in Pain
Some Forms of Availability
Line Break
The Life of Poetry
Iconology
The Object Stares Back
The Pursuit of Signs
Orality and Literacy
The Resistance to Poetry
Prepositions
The Postmodern Condition
Limited Inc
The Message in the Bottle
Powers of Horror
Economy of the Unlost
Process and Reality
Violence in America
Illuminations
Reflections
The Disheveled Dictionary
Mythologies
The Pleasure of the Text
Poetry, Language, Thought
This Republic of Suffering
Alone With America
Ferocious Alphabets
Blues People
Shorthand
Language and Myth
Concerning the Spiritual in Art
Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling
On Beauty and Being Just
Poetics of Music
The Gift
Reason, Faith, and Revolution
Mimesis
Making Your Own Days
Syncopations
Minima Moralia
Signposts in a Strange Land
American Oblique
The Shape of a Pocket
Structures, Or Why Things Don't Fall Down
Changes in the Land
History of Shit
Hotel Theory
Scrapmetal
The Rustle of Language
Conquest of the Useless

'Dinner and a Movie' / Blue-Text Diptych

2010-07-23T12:35:00.000-07:00

Principles of Art, Index: V Section

2010-07-23T11:26:00.000-07:00

values, see tactile values.
Van Gogh, V., 53n.
verse, 296.
Vico, Giambattista, 80, 138.
violence, literature of, 87.
violin, 143.
'visual art,' painting not a, 144.
'vulgar, speaking with the,' 131, 174.

2010-07-10T09:07:00.000-07:00

Materials

2010-07-09T12:01:00.000-07:00

A small tight coil
of wire gone
to rust
thus dressed
in terra cotta
orange but not spoiled,
usable &
sections of pipe caked
with scabrous concrete.

Some Trees

2010-07-09T07:52:00.000-07:00

2010-07-09T07:48:00.001-07:00

The artist cannot afford passively to acept, to "reflect" or to celebrate what everybody likes. The artist who subscribes to the commercial slogan that the customer is always right will soon be deserted by everybody. The customer has now been trained to think that the artist is always right. Thus we have a new situation in which the artist feels himself obligated to function as a prophet or magician. He sees that he has to be disconcerting, even offensive. Who will ever read him or buy him unless he occasionally insults the customer and all he believes in? That is precisely what the customer wants. He has delegated to the artist the task of non-conforming on his behalf---the task of not conforming with "ordinary decent people." Where does the artist go from there? In desperation he paints a meticulously accurate portrait of a beer can. (T.Merton, 1966)

Legs & An Arm

2010-07-09T07:41:00.000-07:00

A Blues

2010-07-07T08:52:00.001-07:00

What horror to awake at night

and in the dimness see the light.

..................Time is white

..................mosquitoes bite

I’ve spent my life on nothing.

The thought that stings. How are you, Nothing,

sitting around with Something’s wife.

..................Buzz and burn

..................is all I learn

I’ve spent my life on nothing.

I’m pillowed and padded, pale and puffing

lifting household stuffing—

..................carpets, dishes

..................benches, fishes

I’ve spent my life on nothing.

- Lorine Niedecker

Ars Poetica

2010-06-24T10:33:00.000-07:00

Tiny Syllabus

2010-06-24T08:00:00.000-07:00

Shakespeare, Sculpture, Small Business Help

Baggage

2010-06-24T07:01:00.000-07:00

Fraction Anthem

2010-06-23T09:27:00.000-07:00

We demur at 'alarmist'---
forlorn but fun-loving
alertist, rather.

Take down
this message,
please:
PERFORATE FIRST
EMBROIDER LATER

('Imminent danger' is redundant;
you're either in it or you're not,
there's no approach.)

.....................
- More and more, at every turn, I find myself given away.
- I am saddled, in part, with the fate of being thought adorable.
- I would like to wear, for a time, a phosphorescent medal.
.....................

On occasion, the meet-most
chintz ('we lift up our hearts') finds
purchase

a parsec afoul of wilting
morale, lapsed cogency:

so our group fairweathers, admitting
a welter of concessions and ennui.

What thistle-down DIY, what
throws and pillows---

('we lift up our hearts')
such sovereignty, the crises practically
penciled-in.

....................

(I plucked the newest, palest leaf from the youngest tree on the block, placed it on a table for viewing, but it curled up as it died, like its kin-creatures, the spider and the storybook.)

'Tiene dolor? Cuidese, cuidese.'
('With gladness and singleness.')
....................
Go on now,
shovelful by shovelful
gets it done.

Just see you
mark the slick condition
of this pitch.

...................
(Now must be the flush
moment for Haitian yellow
mangoes. All the street
vendors have 'em in spades.)
....................

A difference between Torts
and Acts-of-God.

That fellow has winsome energy,
I skip to it.

Appeals for succor, nifty skews:
wincing in pleasure.

Not a stop, a stop-over, an organ
stop, i.e., a tongue.

Giddy, nigh, leavened
with gravitas.

Conjunctions of the Illegible & the Figural

2010-06-21T12:31:00.000-07:00

Susanne Langer Holds the Line Against the Annihilating Positivist Blob

2010-06-21T11:12:00.000-07:00

There is a widespread and familiar fallacy, known as the "genetic fallacy," which arises from the historical method in philosophy and criticism: the error of confusing the origin of a thing with its import, of tracing the thing to its most primitive form and then calling it "merely" this archaic phenomenon. In a philosophy of symbolism this mistake is particularly fatal, since all elementary symbolic forms have their origin in something else than symbolistic interest. Significance is always an adventitious value. Words were probably ritualistic sounds before they were communicative devices; that does not mean that language is now not "really" a means of communication, but is "really" a mere residue of tribal excitement. (Philosophy in a New Key, 248)

Ibex

2010-05-24T18:45:00.000-07:00

Leaping
Contending

Fraction Anthem

2010-05-23T14:22:00.000-07:00

(When pressed
I side with the ardent
over the adamant)

---Paul Klee's Hand Puppets
---Alexander Calder's Tiny Circus
---Emerging Problems in Particle Phenomenology
---Emily Wilson's Micrographia
---Robert Walser's Microscripts
---Laundry Loads: Lights, Coloreds, Darks, Delicates, Permanent Press

(Then snap, some
guns' reports
spun loose from
the shimmery
backdrop):

"Anzio Annie & The Popcorn Man"
...

When we say stillness we
really mean the earth
's spinning and hurtling
's so near-perfect that
we can't acknowledge
as much verbally because
we don't feel it. Still, it's
not an illusion; it's virtual.
The bright wire nail you
stand upside-down on
its head really will stay
that way for a long, long
time.

(We Were Looking At
Flowers In The Flower
District)
...

This morning the news
reported that a man had
been arrested for burning
his small daughter with
hot water. The man said
he did this because the girl
kept interrupting him
while he was playing video
games.

(I just wrote 'tine'
instead of 'time')

Living Arrangements

2010-05-22T12:18:00.000-07:00