A Blues

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

Tiny Syllabus

Shakespeare, Sculpture, Small Business Help

Baggage

Fraction Anthem

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

Susanne Langer Holds the Line Against the Annihilating Positivist Blob

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

Leaping
Contending

Fraction Anthem

(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

Attempted Speech-Act

The necessary things reverse lead the near necessary things and shows that how its impact to their life.

Excerpts from L. Hejinian's Intro to Best American Poetry, 2004

What is best in American poetry is, finally, all of it, in all its modes and moods and themes and divagations. It is written and published against the logics dominating the times, and it flourishes---
...............................

The evaluations entailed, however, are variously motivated and variously contextualized...a history, but one that is heuristic in character, self-reflexive, arbitrarily completed annually, and always ongoing...(The necessity of querying and opposing one's "tastes")...

Powerful and engaged counters to the doleful state of the year...
Aggressive and/or overtly defiant works...
Fantasies (though not escapist ones) of alternatives...
Dislogical poems and dialogical ones...
Poems in which quixotic pathos is revolutionized into play...
Strange cosmological positives produced at unexpected points of encounter...

Art is all about living...
[poetry's] sources of energy
(it's virtues) are not frozen in
perfection but flow through
time as consciousness
and question.

It is precisely that kind of "bestness'---the common good of being lively---that I hope...
..............................

...a picaresque adventure...across innumerable sites and through diverse situations...This is a good story...it is rich in experiences and full of reality, full of world...

Reality, of course, always
exceeds even the best poems; there
is always more world than a writer
can create, or represent, or speak
of, or, even, reject.

...poetry is often fascinated by the unknown, which is often full of meaning. // Encounters with meaning (and with it, the sense of meaningfulness) bring with them the emotion of making sense, i.e., of discovering sense or, sometimes and with a stronger emotion, of having created sense.

...an inventive and activist role rather than a passive and consumerist one...

What interests
the artist is the working---
the interested living, not the dis-
interested spectatorship.

The desire that propels poetry propels us away from our "possessions" and forth into the world, replete with reality...

Stevensian Collage

Fraction Anthem

Bestow commotion, reclamatory leer, bravado currency---

*
The half-rubbed-off
bit of gold leaf on my
plastic watchface tells
me what time it is,,,

*
When I step close
to the rotting thing, a
dozen flies explode up
and out into a dozen
respective fugue-spirals,,,

*
Cotton sheets and pillow-
cases can get hot enough
in a commercial dryer
to burn your fingertips,,,

*
The gingko trees on
our block have fruited
into full green now
they wave and shimmy
they know we're moving
they're cutting us
no kind of slack,,,

*
Little use
that that
shirk was
due in no
small part:

err
aux
str-
undrtne
wandr
concrtd
t'pke
errnd

Robert Walser: Microscripts (Out Soon)

Serene, recalcitrant figuration

















Nest, shell, ship





















Amphibious repose, & out-look

Dear Fugitive Caesura:

As for values,
PROMISCUITY vs. PERSPICUITY, go.
[sigh]
Still another bungled come-uppance,
huh?

Osmotically Yours,
Ward-of-the-state

Antiphon:

res amissa recitals, redounding aplomb!

stupefaction, baffled & lithe:

dichten assumes a shudder, toddlers:

censorious cursor, whole saga of lyric contortions
contracts, at last, to one flinch:

sugary go-forth, uh, you chagrins us.

That guy knows
from leggy gorges,
goes stutter- or side-
stepping, votes "care
& dear concern." He'd
lend me a quantum
of fervor---love, love,
love---leaving me, tho',
fumbling sullen half-
assed angelisms.

Pressure trans-
ducers & triggered
spark-gaps are used
in nuclear weapons
& also in treat-
ment of kidney
stones.

You owe me a
cynosure, better
still a bell-
weather.

('There's a layer of ASH
in this fucking cheese!')

Just yonder, 18
silver stars, of
several specific
gravities, lazily
twist & drift, a
glint per second
per dangle added:
PRECIOUS PROPS

A cleavage makes a space, sure, but creates also points and planes of possible contact where formerly there were none to be found.


Annul
froward
continence,
moribund.


"Slowly every one in continuous repeating, to their
minutest variation, comes to be clearly realized...
every kind of one comes into ordered recognition.
More and more then it is wonderful in living
the subtle variations coming clear into ordered recognition..."
(Stein).

How some writers commute in and around Language City.

Californian Outer-Space

Verbs for Signal Phrases

Author is neutral: describes, explains, illustrates, notes, observes, points out, thinks.

Author infers or suggests: asks, assesses, concludes, finds, proposes, shows, supposes, suggests.

Author argues: claims, contends, defends, holds, insists, maintains.

Author agrees: admits, agrees, concedes, concurs, grants.

Author is uneasy or disparaging: belittles, bemoans, complains, condemns, deplores, deprecates, derides, laments, warns.

Dispatch from a Windowless Room in San Diego

In front of me now are a foam cradle and two lead snakes. Next to those is archival box 34 (folders 1-17) of the George Oppen papers, the only materials in the holdings that can be accessed materially, physically, instead of through microfilm.

Although the scanned, grainy, backlit black-and-white pages as they slide across on the microfilm screen have their own magic, their own special illumination of the phenomenology of writing (I am not one who categorically harbors contempt for the mediations of technology), this form and mode is not a surrogate for engaging original documents. Microfilm stands apart, boasts its own values. Rendering manuscripts as coils of tiny-then-magnified translucent images deceptively converts often wildly heterogeneous papers into a sort of dream-book---a glowing, whirring, clicking scroll before which one sits bewitched, but also in control, fiddling with knobs and buttons: forward or backward at variable speeds, up, down, rotate, focus, print.

Such enchantment and such pleasures of control are fine, I say, as far as they go, but one wants and needs also (not necessarily only) to hold the leaves, sheets, slips, fascicles; to see how the different inks and colors and markings play off each other; to determine or at least have better guesses about what words a scribbled phrase really consists in; and withal to find oneself in the place of, or as, the writer, physically oriented to some given page or pages just as the handler-inscriber of said materials might have been.

Kettle-Moraine Day-Dream