bussing it

who's willing to share future dreams in this field? the system - the institutional role of the writer - is tied up in publishing, and in teaching. so the professor on one hand, the writer on book tour on the other. neither one of these seem foregrounded in a community of desire (kinship?) where the writer actually chooses who s/he lives among. they can be, but they are pretty lonely, alienated models themselves - and these are for the writers who "make it". we go where the jobs are. some writers have the good sense to choose to enter into only such a professional situation where they feel comfortable/challenged, and hence can brew up (or walk into) a certain degree of intimacy among peers. others go where the opportunity or $ is, and its hard to argue with that given the alternative. but it makes for an awful lot of loners out there, lonely folk who know most others through professional, not intimate, relationships. and i would count the two years at naropa as negating that distinction between professional and intimate community - Naropa seems one out, where this fundamental division (or alienation) of work and life is not accepted. and even there the staff was rife with politics and tension, not sure how the intimacy (kinship) of going back 20-40 years helped or hindered this.

does that make any sense? here in SF we have a fragile but existent community of writers - several overlapping, largely independant ones really, and i am on the edge of one of those, with my amigos. perhaps i am crazy, but this community - and the internet helps, but i would never desire it to be the main/only tool - provides a bed or ground for my work, my writing, however tenuous (largely due to my (and others) holding back from this community). provides a social context.

that seems important. the way a conversation takes an inherently and consistently different direction than a monologue.

i brought all this up because - it is a dream of mine to have a semester length program (in either fall or spring or summer- maybe one in a diff. season each year) for college students aboard a bus - a travelling community of scholars and artists and students.

it would be for credit, associated with some school, both for admin support, credit, and possible practical assitance... maybe it could exist without this. but it should be for credit, so the students can use it to graduate. it would CERTAINLY be educational.

in my head of heads i always imagined there would be an ecologist, a historian, a poet, a phototgrapher, a mechanic, a cook, etc. could easily be a native american scholar, a critical theorist, a novelist, etc., the idea being a travelling caravan, moving across a specific and varied terrain (say the American SW, the Great Plains, the Pacific States, Mexico), w/ pre-arranged and of course spontaneous stops (buses do break down), w/ a slew of classes offfered on site, on site studies, a study of place in one sense.

a friend of mine took such a class in ecology at Geoge Washington in the 90s. they hiked and bused across the SW studying the land. My sense is that it would be four classes, and that it would be multi-disciplinary - ideally aimed though at writing, at writing this experience, these meetings.

its so hopelessly idealistic its delicious. i always have imagined doing this with friends. a community making venture. i value others often out of this radical sense of being alone. my body feels foreign today, mind too. i have the bends - 30 feet tall and billowing oddly in the wind. almost transparent, birds and heating ducts pass through me. what substance does my jelly hold?

seems another trap. lets rent buses, hjack some kids, make it happen. before gas prices render this an impossibility, oh, perhaps it already is.

(but just imagine getting PAID for this!) i would love to hear some of your writerly/teacherly/publisherly dreams. or your thoughts on mine.

Why not delicately probe the schizoid Q of a committed readership for friend's blogs.

Its Memorial Day. What are we memorializing? I don't actually know, but isn't it related to all our wars and struggles "as a nation"? Paired with Veterans Day for the soldiers, this is that holiday? I don't know; its a day off. There's a sadness in the very emptiness of the exercise, but practically, there is so much attention to jobs and careers that the feeling of gratefulness to have a day-off is immense. As is the selfishness, the vacation-minded mentality - no? Something very American about the festivities revolving round couple, family, friends, individual pursuits, not the community. But then Melissa went down to Carneval yesterday, so she could give us the skinny on how this weekend becomes a knotty and naughty social experience. So a bow to those killed and fucked-over from Manifest Destiny, the Eisenhower Freeway System, the transcontinental railroad, Iraqi Freedom, and the Brits who tried to get us to pay our taxes without representation, rebels both North and South (and West), and the anarchists who marched through Chicago in the 1880s, the IWW organizing the Colorado miners and the Massie seamstresses, the Communist rallies in Manhattan in the 30s, the American Indian occupation of Alcatraz, Cesar Chavez making my Grandaddy pay fair wages to his Mexicano fieldhands (sez he did all long), all the artists fleeing to Europe, Stonewall, the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Spain, and all others who raised their voice to oppose a vision of empire that leaves no room for creativity, possibility, difference, and dissent. And to all the conflicted souls, from George Washington and Thomas Jefferson on down, who wrought freedom with one hand, and tyranny with another. Our freedom, and our lack of it, has been born out of the blood of millions... in every corner of every life. History. Learn it, muthafuckas.

And, if you're like me, don't drink too many Lynchbrug Lemonades in the afternoon sun, it'll wipe you the fuck out and you'll end up going to bed at 9:30.

Another comment I've come across was a friend's feeling put-upon by all these blogs out there, having so many to read, feeling obligated. I think this is a vital practice for us, so here is my disclaimer: come here when you want to, as you want to. Its a public space, a 24/hr meeting spot. AND if you are a friend of mine, if we know each other well, let me know what you think of it. I am ever curious, and sometimes bored (and obvious). Plus I sleep a good 7-9 hours a night (more when I crash at 9:30). I feel the same pressure to visit regularly, faithfully. But I am not a faithful person, nor a regular one in most things. I'm a fairly good friend, but a miserable farmer. Actually, my tomatoes aren't bad. Come, go, be good cyber nomads, if you're around, stop in, there's always food.

Now how homey is that? It could be the Hank Williams, it could: "i'm the same ol trouble that you always been through / so why don't you love me like you used to do?" Hank ended up a morphine addict, how many of you cowpoets knew that?

- criticism, see also honesty, communal. sharp. feedback.

I got some very astute feedback this morning on a manuscript I’m working on: “unreadable”. So here’s some thoughts on bumping up against the formidable other: unreadable how? how is the difficulty, the impenetrable quality encountered? what happens when we refuse to enter the thicket? is the text conscious of its unreadability, or does it show signs of strain, struggle, duplicity? i.e., is this a faultline or secret of the text? if its difficulty is embodied consciously, towards what end does it point? i think the consciousness thing might be a red herring, but as artists, reading our own work, our friends work, writing out of and back into a community of desire, what else can we nurture in each other? that is a serious q for me. one more: if we know the author of this text, or identify with them, how do we experience (what comes up emotionally, intellectually) that failure or repulsion or difficulty – the experience of unreadability in a loved one? And how do we word it – to each other, ourselves, them? Hit me with yr best shots/ Fire a-wayyyyy!

on neurobureaucratism (tough times, tough blogs)

if you’ve read the last week of blog entries, you’ve noticed the shift from a more essayistic, classically “public” blog style to a denser, rougher investigative one. the later arises out of a sense of struggle, a commitment to blogging bouncing up against my confusion, and that makes for a sense of “a lack of things to say” and i was writing out of that. its an interesting space, no? that i-want-to-write-i-have-to-write-i-ought-to-write matrix spinning round, and then, the drive is so intense alongside an often overloaded, hectic, uneven in its own right stretch of life, that, honestly (or even deceptively) what do we write? what can we? i always have somewhere in my head that writing is libratory, that it frees up, but it also enslaves – or can. the dark, tortured loner loser geek arrogant soul is as much a part of this path as is the bright, grounded, bounding, smiling giver-of-life bit.

i can sense many drives in my writing, in my desire to write, and in my mental monologues around writing (yes, they are the same schizoid dialogues which are really monologues cuz we play all the parts you have, simply with complete different particularities). the two i want to bring out now is the domineering, hectoring drill sergeant, who is ever commanding me to drop and give him 100 lines. that guy really beats me up. he has a film critic type on his right, who is always looking over his shoulder, whispering asides about the faults of the work, its pathetic and bathetic ambitions and follicles, a whole double whammy when i give these two schizoid-bits the stage.

ironically, the more control they exert – the more i feel pushed to write from this place of discipline, resolve, determination, macho grit – a place of law and order and a hard, paternal morality (where failure always looms), the less work i do, and the more whiny, cornered, sniveling, and snotty it is. and completely, overwhelmingly, narrowly self-involved, fighting out its resistance and surrender to this paired paternal bully/critic drive.

the passion, dexterity, freedom, possibility and desire, just basic, joyous/mourning/responsive desire to work and play with words, that barely ever raises its head above the weight of suffering and infighting that marks the “paired paternal” mode. this work, although sometimes marked by a very sentimental, excessive softness ( i am thinking of amoebas and slime molds here, entities fine in their own right, but whose lack of boundaries in a non-watery environment guarantee extinction) allows a confidence, politics, sexuality, expressiveness and attention to language the other mode is constantly censoring/ignoring.

the trick is to (there’s no trick) wake up in either spot – cornered, tired, and alone, or surrounded by friends, flowers, whiskey, and a good flick. man, i am pounding this into the ground. please help me not be overwhelmingly dualistic about this (above) distinction.

Heavy, with blue jets. Crinkling, EZ. All this lack of argument: how not to build up a center, just to have a congested urban area to call home. One way of hiking is to stake claims to the land as it passes : investment. Other strategies call for kissing. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to call this the plane on the tarmac, ready for refueling, unless its the hose in the technician's hands, hard w/ oil.

What I wake up to as tight loosens with repeated exertions in that direction, or about it, a form of greeting, or acknowledgment - and also a curiosity. It would be easier if the pictures were painted pretty, then you could take yourpill and go for a sweet swim. Deep bronze skin when thinking - or from - blue. Throwing off the ants, a fine way to ruin a picnic. Where the underbelly of leisure is some desperate escape. Uncritical, therefore fallen. Or fall-guy.

If I had anything else, some other pouring out of fingers, heading down this grid of pipes, I would let it come through. Unrecognizable. But today, in this, sewer, these rats. A rank and fertile damp, the cinematic drip, shadows, shadows, dark. This is the background hiss of the OS, hardware in motion, and wet. Fog has arrived, stealing our warmth. Poncey ponce, saute, evening news, the weatherman's blank screen. Somehow they now where to point (me too). Know
ing
lee.

ving/vining : constellate (so as to frame a relative space - not gold gilt, not doublesided tape : keeps it from falling of the wall)

a relative frame, a bend in the rhodes

( stayin A live. )

notebooky / postcarded and particular

Hands up if you don't understand JWG's fantasy baseball team.

The Icthyosaurs were subtler than I expected, time and geologic pressure acts in much the same way a Clark Coolidge poem does, it severs and reassembles, bends and compresses until the very substance is completely unrecognizable - is that a vertebrea? an eye socket? The fact that a ranger just happened by and offered us a tour made it all the more pleasurable (otherwise the fossil house had locked doors - locked doors in the Nevada woods - if "woods" is too Black Forest strong (those trees are short and well-spaced) try pinyon-juniper foothills.) Dinosaurs are difficult, that's the news, they are not Billy Collins poems.

I have added a new link to Georg Huth's dbqp : visualizing poetics blog. For those inclined toward seeing, towards text and letter as a visual media, this blog is a delight, and a springboard into another marginal community of absolutely underrecognized freak-genuises. My visual poetry work is still unpublished, but it is a frontier of mine, an edge I want to push. I credit Melissa Benham's work @ Naropa with jogging in me anew the possibility of seeing work as well as (left-right) reading it. dbqp has some excellent visual work up for inspection, the usual shitload of links, and some intriguing and ad-hoc poetics: its worth grabbing a hot bev and spending an hr or two surfing off of.

I would also like to let y'all know that Ronald Johnson's Radi Os has returned to print. If you follow this link and scroll down you'll also see why it might be a good idea to cross the road and look down/away if you see Jennifer Moxley heading your way. Ronald, for some reason, is not as well known as he should be. Radi Os is a fascinating and elusive book, and has been out of print as long as I have been looking for it. Anselm Hollo mentioned it several times in his Postmodern American Poetry class, and both he and Silliman agree that it is a not-to-be-missed work, an excising of Paradise Lost in a way not too dissimiliar (at least methodologically) to Steely Dan. And when was the last time you got all cozy w/ Milton?

For those of you invested in the matter, work continues on the Subday website. John Sullivan has it in his capable tecnho-hands, and we are hooking up IPs like nobodaddy's bizness.

On a more personal note, its Jack Bessey's, Sara Larsen's Jack, 31st birthday Thursday. Sara's blog might be a good place to visit and say hi. Jack will be turning 31 tomorrow, and will be, on the same day, winding up his 4th semester studying graphic design @ CCSF. Its things like this (and hearing it in a Supermarket in Tonopah) that keep "Touch of Gray" running through my head like some advertisement for hair care.

"And that's all I have to say"

Viva,

carless, difficult, endearing. fucker

if i logically edit to excise mistakes, as that is what editing is, a clarifying of intention, then we may reap the boredom of the intended. this five minute rule will work well for another crowded day in the dense downtown buzz of urban somewheres, not sure if there is any need or advantage to any greater sense of place. in the hub. the intended itself may be a narrow slot canyon, a blind alley wish is liable to flash floods - a beautiful hike sometimes, but not if you want yonder wide field. the possibilities are to take another step forward, or turn around and exit. if one has the right shoes, they can attempt to climb up the sheer rhetorical walls of the narrative, line after blinkered line. break bread, pour a beer at an incline into an inclined glass, the two bend towards eachother, delaying the arrival - no, the intensity - of the foam. transferrance without disturbance. but assholes deserve the bubbles in their beer. i erased those last words. keeping the tidyness of lawns, the line at the car wash, which one needs washing? which child is a dirty one, which one will be made shy by the being told so. john giorno, no brion gysin: the work of the poet is to break the chains holding words together (down). a freedom. part of the plan, or all of the plan, or wait, there's a plan?

5 minutes

when i say ungrounded i think what i imply is that a single experience can upset a worldview. so, the "ungrounded" are "caught off guard" by Pearl Harbors and 9/11s on a daily basis - boyfriends cheat, glasses drop, a wasp gets caught in the car. and, in upseting a worldview, a self is also upset - upset geologically, as in tilted, warped, and buckled. even erased. obviously this is what melissa benham once characterized as my "carefully carless" writing, where i don't know where it goes, yet it goes.

which is not to say "mistake" or "ignorant" but explorative. there is a type of upset around, say, the entrance of a wasp into a car, and then there is the magnification and exaggeration, the rupture of a previously acknowledged and held to norm by this entrance to such a degree that, a moment later, the person won't remember participating in the waving of the arms, the swearing and the fear - that it came over them. possession. so, perhaps i am talking about the sense that

i am not talking. i am

5 minutes are up

future seebald of norte america (western division)

Today, in this stretch of the world, it is a classic spring day in San Fran, in the low 70s and sunny, although the strong winds in from the ocean are up and kicking, meaning that I am in for another hell of a bike ride home. at times, the wind grows so stiff that I fear the bike will just stand still on its side and fall over. I have not researched the actual physics of this.

Today, in Yosemite Valley, heavy snowmelt has caused flooding, shutting down the access roads, and damaging buildings, campsites, roadways, and parking lots.

A dozen miles north of Yosemite, these photos were taken by the plowing teams digging through the 15 or so feet of snow over the Sierra passes. Not far from their, Belding Ground Squirrels, true hibernators (hence waking on internal calendar clocks) are coming out of their holes, a little stunned by the extreme whiteness of their world.

Down the Sierra spine 120 or so miles, it’s topping out at a mere 115 degrees today in Death Valley.

And, in the Great Basin Desert, its wildflower season. “Exceptional”, the local rangers say.

California is, I could say, a geographers invention, a mass fallacy our administration foists on generations of school-kids, as if that shading on the map meant anything beyond politics.

But, at a recently minted 30, I figure its high-time to explore a stretch of this invention, and Sarah and I are setting off tomorrow on a road-trip through the Great Basin and (if weather permits) the northern Mojave Deserts. We’re off for hiking the Toiyabe foothills and Canyons north of Tonopah (NV), dipping into as many swimming holes and hot springs as we can find (so far several), making cheap jokes about Mark Twain (we have both read his Roughing It, covering his 1860s exploits in the same area, as well as in Frisco and Hawaii (the Hawaiian section is fascinating as it captures the full upheaval of the 19th century/progress/imperialism on a then "isolated" (but less and less so) outpost of Polynesian culture & includes an impressive reference to surfing – and to Twain’s own failures as a surfer – while many potted histories of surfing discuss how surfing “died out” in the 19th century since the missionaries frowned upon it (Hawaiians surfed nude, en masse: did Twain? I really, sincerely hope so)).

We are also hoping to disturb pristine nesting bird sanctuaries in the Carson Sink, marvel at Icthyosaur fossils in Berlin, kick up ghost town dust in Ione, eat Danish bread in Bishop, and drop in on the Eureka Sand Dunes.

There are no bombings, no mass riots, no retracted headlines, no shootings of innocent civilians, and no marches of the landless to accuse the government of dragging its feet with land reform in this stretch of the world today. While I am thankful for that, I realize I will be spending a night in the Overland Hotel in Fallon, a few miles away from the air force base that Top Gun was shot at, and that when we wind through the desert pass in the White Mtns, we will be under an hour away from the Nevada Test Site, where dozens – if not hundreds – probably hundreds – you can see the impacts on satellite maps – of nuclear bombs were exploded over a 30 year period. And San Francisco, in 1847 a sleepy Mexican frontier settlement, was, by 1849, the booming and stinking center of the capitalist take-over of the whole Far West. Many of the scheming and conniving businessmen who ruthlessly exploited every one who crossed their paths with murderous interest rates and outrageous fine print and brutal labor conditions now have streets, skyscrapers, and successful companies (not to mention statues, wings of the Opera House and Art and Science Museums etc (some of them even financed exhibits to dig up Icthyosaurs in the same way they would gold or cobalt) named after them. In so doing building the very city I inhabit and work in.

Wish us luck, and no flat tires.

Just maybe I will have a chance to drop a line tomorrow, otherwise, this site will be quiet except for your prying eyes until next Monday, when, just maybe I will have something to say about the scourge of poetry, or why I am not a photographer. And I’ll have the pictures to back it up.

nine midnig pommes

name the devil

if joy is inarticulate
how to shift the code

a bend in the highway
makes love w/ its sign

(whoopie)

=

i worry about this
bend bout it
licking wounds

a minute – a forgetting –
i’m biting

salt, salt from the wound
and

all these words

fill a cheap glass vessel
or oil tanker
spills onto the floor

holds up the sliced
off head

=

this reinvention

a longing
where all longings are for

a bending
a tongue licks –
the tongue
a miracle
on my moist (skin)
or eyed

these words even
what is forgotten
rousing –

BYOB. bring yr friends

=

absolutely positively 110% alone

i’m not fucking her
thinking

thoughts: shaft, slick
what firmness is,
claiming this
holding, a holding
a hole, a lining
this and this incline
rising. have risen
re
lease?

who built the pyramids, tell me
tell me the desire

=

fiction speeds
thru the bldg

santa claus trav
els magic round
the world

fiberoptii

absolutely
nothing is off
that grid,
abso-fucking-
lutely

and nothing
else at all

=

music
in that next room
and this ear

first thought best thought
meaning: now i know yr secret

lying to those poor little lies

and such a heavy bag.
jetlagged even. its fucked w/ yr
brain, all these airports
flying to land to fly

a fly. imaginery. the brain
is scrubbed clean, hung to

practiced

the beads – linkage – thin string – hand
led ex
amine every chain

“dissolution”

a greyhound bus
a backlit sky :
twilight, airbrushing
indigo,
and those sighs, those dreams
those impossible, LOOK AWAY
clouds

=

and then you will know me.
we will be like sisters,
your knee will bend, relaxed-
how you’ll lean back yr head
on the wall. brothers,
an un
fuckable bond. i will
pick your scabs

your million scabs
like clouds,
like irritating inlets
or islands

scratching. i want to talk of currents between
where even talk can swim

=

romantic, its not
a tragic story
the incidental revolt
holds just one frame

when we rise
no looking back on the bed

the US Postal Service
delivers the (privatized) mail
every single multiple day

indivisable, w/
junk mail for all

like that. w/ a prayer for the trees
for the mills, for the trees

=

edit me silly
oh
“already have”

who is this person i’ve heard so much about
meet them on others faces
shaping – do i recognize their voice
riding?rising?
raisin?

time to get off that horse now, kyle.
(saw)

=

words trail after – implies time – words
word they constantcy constantly consonants,
adverbial relations, nouns. whiteness
permits every one, a framing
where. intimacy is to be held –
the release is procreative
to carry on
a hardness for working
a softness for loves

pivot
the relation

where learn to tango
is too easy (burn & dodge)
is one root (how else to take the
photo?)

and what is the constant dance?
untemporal, ill-tempered
@ intersection
bling – bling – king lite

proceeds,
w/ caution

=

i so desperately want an answer
written, rolling in my mouth
and the orgasm is death
we knibble a little just a smidge

fat-free
the fridge is in a perpetual
state of disrepair

a corner. and jaws
gaping

oh does my job suck just then

Alongside my attempts to network sits my eternal loneliness. There is 10 o'clock, drinking, and there is 4:45 am.
The Byrds wrote a song off this, or someone said, its the Bible. Appropriately in motel rooms - the darkened channel surfing of the soul. Afix the label - now hold still. There is a point @ which no one is listening - and this starts w/ the speaker themself. Radiates outwards, the dimming of the sun, the lightbulb, the stranger sharing the elevator for 13 seconds.

And then Diane from marketing walks in...

awk
werden

to become bird
like "cluck"

turns click. a
new channel,
said softly -
i mean the tongue
presses the cheek deliberately
and without violence

-three times in a row:
the cat comes, the catacombs

the pope on the rope -
his robe has a new neck
@ its nape

this has wandered in a direction
like all the rest "different
than i desired" though

on that field tilted
out "above" - if you
cared to look - the
twitters darted (sharp!
as to violence - who
sez) &
there was no
such
ting

Thoughts on the Possibilities and Attractions and Revulsions of a Life Writing

Brent works @ SPD, and has for several years. He confirmed to me exactly how small the poetry scene is – at least the call-it-what you like crowd I run w/. Investigative, notational, experimental, difficult, troubling, yes yes, in part. Let’s face it, and revel in it, we’re an underground, made w/ sweat, we get to know each other’s faces. Harper, Bantam, Penguin, they can wait, you’ll make more, yes, but the whole thing will be a smaller, student-indie version of Brittany and J-lo anyway. Might as well do a student-indie version of a world that isn’t – can’t be – Brittany and J-Lo, nor even Susan Sontag and Margaret Atwood and the New York Review of Books. We went to the wrong schools, anyway.

Brent and I’ve been hanging out, and i think the best single thing we stumbled upon was this – Brent’s job pay him several times a year (I think) to go to book publishing trade shows, in every respect like the one’s my wife Sarah goes to for children’s clothes. The literary world – SPD, Coffee House, New Directions, sit in one row in a far corner of a room “you can barely see across on your tip-toes” (and Brent is a tall man). In fact, the whole shindig is so large, there are only a handful of indoor venues capable of accommodating it. That’s in the whole USofA, maties.

What is America buying (and just maybe reading?) Cook-books, bedtime stories, mysteries, Danielle Steel, pro- and anti- Bush books, how to learn Unix, how to build a deck, the Holy Bible, poems by a kid w/ a rare blood disorder who is 8, books on wine and postcards and Lonely Planet Baghdad (special section on beaches and underground clubs).

in other words – if you don’t – if we – sit down and set down an alternative version – our version – of this reality, it will not exist. NO ONE ELSE IS DOING IT. Our voice – of difference, at times rendered as – rightly – dissent, is – if we are committed, if we care about this – important, vital, a treasure to develop – a work-practice, the activity (on-going) of wisdom and compassion. If we think the late capital narrative waist is too tight, or the American Male gendered hem too high, taint nothing else to do about it than to write and publish that writing as exactly and attentively as you can. Not even for someone else – poetry doesn’t sell – but to pass round to friends. And to make new friends. To build the community Anne Waldman is always building, that Allen was/is building, that a handful of teachers and writers and thinkers and lovers are working out, a community not built on commodities (not even built on that ur-fetish the book) but on… what? you tell me.

And even this small pool of poetry is – on Brent’s end – “all bizness”. Small Presses are desperate for the dead presidents, all these aging hippy gangsters writing threatening letters to distributors and book stores for $14.92, $123.86, shipping included. And the successful ones get successful by hopping ship, reprinting the classics or going soft on grants w/ too many strings attached. And, equally likely, dropping dead of exhaustion.

Yet, this very real liberation from an audience, which we all experience w/ the attendant rejection letters and Emily Dickensonia, is exactly what frees one to write w/o the concerns, cares and fetters of an audience, that constant power of communicability, the demand to make it accessible, make it a fucking Ikea or Lego block of words. This freedom is exactly what allows one to write up close and personal – not private, personal – like Emily D. Sara Larsen is studying her in Diane’s class and perhaps will be kicking us some gospel vis a vis Amherst’s finest some time soon.

So the curse is a blessing, is our chance to bring in vast joys and incomprehensible sorrows, minute and ephemeral notations, puzzling and obtuse ideas that distract yet compel, all the charged magnetic musings our cyborged hands can transmit. In other words, we can put the writing and the writer first – an intimacy. We can write at a high level, and allow others to meet us or no. We can all vow a poverty of writing, no attachments, and make our money somewhere else. I desperately want a teaching post, but I also desperately want to be a worthy teacher for my students time, not some middle-aged white guy w/ a steady income, a sort of genteel and non-descript (i.e. sanctioned) poetry cop (of one of several persuasions (flavors) now available) “nothing to see here, move along move along…like this”. I would like my classes to be an experience in what it means to come alive in words. My classes that don’t exist, my wandering from topic to topic,
excited and destroyed. Utter. ly. ish.

The poetry cop: its occurred to me that a large part of what is called “official verse culture” is really the investment of the large cultural institutions (w/ their tight links to the large economic and political ones) in demonstrating, publicly, for those few who come to see, the magic trick of non-threatening art. that there is really nothing to see here, that the manufactured reality persists here, is fed back, nothing to see, you already know this but, here, its pretty and its moving, its already known – see – like we said, so it is. here, here’s this big nothing, here it is like it is, like we want it to be, just like we want. the work is not chosen much for value, but because it continues the general cultural distraction of the subject from themselves. its not valued so much as art as it is as a spell to keep its audience asleep, dreaming the designated dream. Once an avant-garde dies, then they can be brought in, once the revolution is canned, it can be distributed. But first let the fish flop out its last gasps. Then gut it, textbook, syllabus, core curriculum. As all the taught writers were once revolutionaries (maybe not sir Philip Spencer but who knows? God I hated the Faerie Queen) but, having fallen silent, support the ‘natural’ edifice of the state.

The evident anguish and obvious irony of the way Stephen Malkmus cries “Ca-reer! Ca-reer!" in "Cut Yr Hair", going on to have – what else – just that. So how best to use our dirty hands? (“I realized that trouble was inevitable and the question was the best way to be in it” – Judith Butler, memory misquote (?), Gender Trouble, pg.1)

The rant does get in the way of making a subtle comment. Energy is horse-like – I have trouble riding it. This is a passionate release of frustration – a magic, but the spell does not transform compleat (a universe is made of such leftover ash).

To the extent I have a point above, one question might be, to what extent is techno-capitalism having trouble riding its horse? That trouble, around velocity and control (directionality), may be the best revolutionary aspect of our culture – its very systemic madness is what undermines and limns those exponents who would maintain and buttress its dominance. Maybe force the beast faster, push it to slobbery wide-eyed abandon, and then watch it drop. In the confusion, a good moment to slice off the rider’s (hello) head.

Hello. So a shout out to Brent Cunningham and to taking poetry wholeheartheadly: writing, publishing, editing, reading, recording, broadsiding, theorizing, conversing, listening. That list just might read better in reverse. Onto, into, across, of, thru.

Your Questions Answered With Ease

or

Your Questions Answered With Ease and Style:


-the one that got away was taken on the way home from Stacy & Melissa’s old apartment in Gunbarrel, on the Diagonal Hwy., Rt. 119. I nearly crashed – repeatedly – getting the series of action shots of my sweetie as they took her off – where, finally, I don’t know, the truck got off @ Valmont, the road out to the dump, by Boulder’s strangest landform, that lonely and bizarrely steep butte that i was sure had been minded when we first arrived. It i yours for any project you might wish it for, you can also find it on the catalog page of some of the 2003 subdays.

-Jim deleted his own post, he apologizes for this. Evidently it was pesky even to him, and galled. In it, he was insistent upon the import of publishing – and urged me on like a racehorse or cheap whore. I am not as adverse to this type of thing as you might think. Everyone wants a website up, but no one is building it – or are they – I hope to hear the word from provisional tech-angel John Sullivan soon.

-The anonymous i wrote of a couple days ago is peach friedman. She may be housesitting for us (no biting, Thomas). I hear she has - or had - a blog, and if we all ask nicely we just might get to visit. What i mean to say - no links for Peach.

of, or near, the person

Ola amigos. Its been a while since i hollered at ya. When i open the microwave door, and the water’s boiled, all the oils and flavors of the last dozen meals greet my nose, and its as if the water’s gone off. Salt Wells is the site of a now defunct brothel in Nevada. I just emailed Juliana Spahr and Lyn Hejinian. At some point, at each point (deferred), if we see the Buddha, we need to kill the Buddha. If you wear a head on top of your head, you’ll hurt your neck. If he wears a face over his face, the cancer has an invitation. Endless filler between commercial breaks. The variousness of consciousness, presented variously. Each machine as an externalized extension of our body (Brakhage).

-

Yester i took the day off to be w/ Sarah (mi amore dolce e acido). Twas my 30th bday. We took a leisurely sunshining urban hike up Twin Peaks, the central hill of SF, and ate a blood orange while watching tankers and flitting tweetie birds. Then dropped down into West Portal and explored the hood there, Sarah reports that while food merchants (incl. restaurants) are doing well, other types of business on the high street there are in a state of dormancy and decline. My thought was that it was lucky that the school crossing guard spoke good English, and that Moussaka can be far more delicious than Whole Foods sells it as. No one warned us that Kunafa was basically a hot ball of almost pizza-topping consistency cheese garnished w/ ground pistachios in a sweet syrup. Chewy cheese deserts, no thank you please. Melissa and Brent came over for dinner at the swinging local sushi joint, and a beer at our fave Ethiopian pub, Club Waziema. Club Waziema could kick the shit out of the now-tastelessly named Tsunami Sushi and Sake Bar any night of the week, but sometimes you just need some sashimi. and they do fry their tofu well - rare in this country.

Before bed I finished off the day w/ a bath, and managed to drop Joanne Kyger’s Some Life (Post-Apollo Press, 2000) in the suds. It mended nicely over night, and looks better than the bong-water stained Selected that Joanne signed, laughing. So Ms. Kyger, what exactly is it about your books that makes them so accident-prone? “Awareness of existence and mortality [are] at the center of Some Life…” Evidently so.

For my birthday, Sarah’s parents sent $ for books. And SPD had an open-house sale. I bought a bunch of books while cruising their warehouse and not listening to Andrei Codrescu (it felt devilish and deserved – what poet forces Pirooz – Pirooz of all people – to wander the aisles to score him some speed – I don’t even think the NPR fucker was going to pay me, but just speed up his sonorous skittle/skiffle). Here’s the take (all this was given to me @ 50% off, meaning the cheapest of these cost 1.25(!) and the most expensive was still under 10 – that’s economy for you):

-Continuous Flame: A Tribute to Philip Whalen (Fish Drum, 2004)
-A GEOMETRY, Anne-Marie Albiach (burning deck, 2000)
-SOME LIFE, Joanne Kyger (Sean – have you seen this series – they’re tiny, like Green Integer – Brent sez its not a bad scheme, a lot get stolen from bookstores, but the stores still have to pay the press…)
-It’s go in quiet illumined grass land, Leslie Scalapino, Post-Apollo, 2002.

Always stay in
the quiet illumined grass
land – but I can’t

-pg 12

-9:45, Kit Robinson, “””, 2003 (this will be my first book by him – once when i thought i had a handle on Language writing, someone handed me a poem of his and it all went to hell)
-A Picture-Feeling, Renee Gladman, from ever-intelligent Roof Press, 2005.

that the ‘feeling attached
to ideas’ rushed in
after
speech and
made the sudden flood
of sensation foreboding
(it blared
as if lit from every corner)
does not mean
it captured anything

-pg.27

-Chain 5, different languages, w/ a healthy smattering of vizpo and its children and hangers-on. i’m always on the layout alert, although i am a fitful dresser.
-that they were at the beach, Leslie Scalapino (1985 i think) quite simply my heart is w/ this (frustrating - neccesarily) one
-Selected Poems, Larry Eigner, 1971 (!) (this cost the 1.25)
-The Heat Bird, Mei Mei Bersenbrugge (1984 ish)
-Plum Stones, Michael McClure, a poet i used to make fun of until i saw his broadsides @ the Poetry & its Arts exhibit.
-Another Language, Rosemarie Waldrop’s lt 90s selected.
-At Egypt by the exhausting Clark Coolidge
-I My Feet, Gerhard Ruhm (Burning Deck, Rosemarie’s transl., some concrete work and a general anarchic air – I bet Anselm knows him)
-Watching how or why, this beautiful 1977 Larry Eigner book w/ rough edges paper “printed in Italy”, a slim sage hardcover w/ a cardboard-colored undyed slipcover. just the prettiest lil treasure ever, and it must have been there 28 years waiting for me to take it home. (‘waiting’?)

these last ones were Melissa & Brent’s gift to me last night:

-Bedhangings II, another beautiful little hardcover, smaller than a MacInnes, Susan Howe
-A Test of Solitude, Emmanuel Hocquard – i picked this one up but put it back – did someone see? Spare yourselves, readers, Emmanuel H. is not a woman, so don’t make that gaffe – also, try not to spill soy sauce on yr wife. It’s a very trendy restaurant, in its way.
-Zoo, or Letters Not About Love, Viktor Shklovsky. Brent says “this book could change your life” but refused to say into what.
-My Method – Writings & Interviews, Robert Rossellini. We established that I have never seen a Rossellini, but that reading this might “help me become a man” or some such suspect thought mumbled into beer and that Open City might be a good place to start.
-My Futurist Years, Roman Jakobson. essay, letters, memoirs, poems. a great photo of the young Roman in his little Tsarist sailor’s outfit. Holding a shovel. Very, very cute. I am relieved to know that darling little buttons dressed in “mommy’s bestests” can eventually outgrow this decorative phase and become live subjects. The Whalen photos in Continuous further this belief. If you know Sarah, you’ll know why I am re-assured by this. When we do have a child, it will be one non-stop pre-school fashion runway. Send your emails protesting Sarah’s decision that if it’s a boy he can’t wear pink to: sarahandthomas@earthlink.net. [Actually Sarah disputes this and claims I am a poor listener who conflated "not dressing up our child in little girl's clothes for which he will be made fun of" for "not wearing pink". Sodeska. I stand corrected, w/ thousands of other poor listeners-who-are-loved-(tryingly)-by-those who-are-not.]

So a big thank you to the person who came up w/ birthdays, and presents, and to Sarah’s parents. You guys rock.

SPD survives in part w/ our generous support. If you have any $, consider becoming a member – it cost me $45 and i get 10% off all their books for a year, and a tote bag. Not sure out-of-the-area types get the tote, but it’s a winsome #. SPD is open, during weekdays, for your browsing pleasure, and their warehouse is a poet’s joy to wander.

So there’s a glimpse at my summer reading, though I picked up a copy of Pico Iyer’s Sun After Dark @ Stacey’s, and plan to read that one too, unless the prose is too flowery. Something I add just because this guy sells, and I’m always a little suspicious of that. I tend to stay below 92 on the radio, unless I’m out of the city, then I’ll take what I can get (norteno and C&W, mostly).

Well that was exhausting.

@ work and yet...

here is a sneak peak of el pobre @ wrk. today we are compiling lists of who we want to send free copies of the zine to. except that i forgot i was doing this, and actually had a rare busy day in the office.

so now, i find, instead of an hour to type my manuscript, i ought to puzzle my head w/ names and addresses.

here's my list as it stands: juliana spahr, norma cole, leslie scalapino, laird hunt & eleni sikelianos (they can share a copy this time), anne waldman, the poetry project, ron silliman, lisa jarnot, and bhanu kapil.

this list is not inspiring me. its one of those moments when i feel out on a limb in this poetry scene, all alone. and now this moment is an e-moment. lovely. i will pick this up w/ brent cunningham tonight, brent works @ SPD, and appears well-connected in the worlds of poetry. you'll have to ask melissa if he connects well in other areas.

so send in yr suggestions : who merits a free copy of our zine? they might a) have a blog or zine/journal review capability, they may b) live in the bay area, and/or c) just be so very talented that we want them to join in our little community.

i'll let you know of anyone off your list who gets "elected". we welcome your help, even if you write pesky comments like JWG did this morning from Korea.

a new one

welcome Teresa Sparks. all blog hail. if you haven't visited her new - and newly linked in - blog, please steer that queer mouse (or mosque, bob, if you're being social) over here.

This blog thing is addictive. I have the feeling of creating a world here, and then sharing it... not so much blogger be like God unless we can see God as the virtual sparrows chirping on the telephone wire this morning. Actually, in this neighborhood, one block from the 1927 invention of television (commemorated w/ a plaque for the "Genius of Green Street"), its just as likely to be green parrots that, as Juliana Spahr notes, someone released, someone released.

Lisa Jarnot's blog is now linked in here. Check out her May 4th entry in case you've missed that news.

an august may morn, juvenal

here is a fascinating indication of how surreal the narrative of Iraq has become, from this morning's NYTimes:

In the capital, the National Assembly approved six new cabinet ministers on Sunday, including the unwilling candidate, Hashim al-Shibli, who had been named human rights minister. But on a day when Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari had hoped to complete his cabinet and end the contentious political battles that delayed his government, the rejection was another embarrassment.
One day earlier, Dr. Jaafari had declared at an afternoon news conference that all six nominees had already been approved by President Jalal Talabani and his two vice presidents. But Mr. Shibli, in an
interview, said he did not formally learn that he had been picked until just before the confirmation vote on Sunday, leading him to believe that his selection was more symbolism than substance.
"I heard about it watching TV," he said. "No one talked to me or asked me about it before. This morning they called me and tried to congratulate me on my 'new job,' but I said no. I refused this because this is sectarianism, and I don't believe in sectarianism. I believe in democracy."

now this is a story (in what blogger calls "block quotes"), and i am cautious towards its verificity - this comes froma war zone. i don't know if Shibli's act is brave or heroic, but it brings those words up for me. he might well have been a target of assassination if he chose to accept this post. there is all that. and there is the fact that he learned of his "high-ranking" appointment - he claims - from television. the words that spring here is incompetent, farcical, gaffe, simulacra. it seems like diveristy in the Iraqi cabinet has all the grand promise and shallow reality of diversity in a Random House poetry anthology; "panem et circenses". But white bread, pre-sliced, American cheese. Its a patriotic act, really, hence the university positions, the easy flow of grants. A hard-working, industrious people (blogging at the day job).

Oh the heart hardens, too much mayo, lard-ass. Redemption (a miracle being that part of gravity we do not expect, or understand) can take the form of a question.

an old one:

"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?"

My choices: Pierre Joris, Ammiel Alcalay, Anne Waldman. A nation needs a party, not the party? No caps? Wishful thinking (short-lived paradise of anarchist Barcelona cut 1939). I don't know. Have a wonderful morning, friends.

snails go gnash traileds

after thinking over the story of el pobre Mouse (R.I.P.), a few words for the New Age.

i routinely do a quick visual sweep of the garden and if i find snails or slugs, i pluck them, give them a quick gatha ( intention being key to what follows) and then make a quick stomp and pull combo, very little is left to the imagination. but only on certain "death days" - other times i just look at them - beautiful if invasive animals, like us, also transplants from Europa on some comic misadventure, not that they see it that way - snails are so lovely, their delicate eyes, how you can see the pupil, the pupil, alive and tender probing, on, on, on. as relentless as scalapino's defoe. (patrick, i think, stole that book)

so that is the flip side for you, noting here my defense of a claim, a claim to tomatoes, nasturiums, mint and thyme. the gatha is my friend, what can i do - we are in the ever belly of murder. better luck next time, and down comes the boot.

dear reader i would do the same to you...


the smile lets me off the hook right? ginger pills and thoughts on the Henry Ford-ness of both emmerson and the pragmatics will take me out. who wants to read about the classical stoics? look them up yourselves! epictetus, esp.:

Epictetus (55–c.135) was a Greek Stoic philosopher. He was probably born at Hierapolis, Phrygia, lived most of his life in Rome until his exile to Nicopolis in northwestern Greece, where he died. The name given by his parents, if one was given, is not known - the word epiktetos in Greek simply means "acquired."
Epictetus spent his youth as a slave in Rome to Epaphroditos, a very wealthy freedman of Nero. Even as a slave, Epictetus used his time productively, studying Stoic Philosophy under Musonius Rufus. He was eventually freed and lived a relatively hard life in ill health in Rome. It is known that he became crippled, most likely from extreme rheumatism. He was exiled along with other philosophers by the emperor Domitian in 89.
It was Epictetus' exile by Domitian that began what would later come to be the most celebrated part of his life. After his exile, Epictetus traveled to Nicopolis, Greece, where he founded a famed philosophical school. This school was even visited by Hadrian, and its most famous student, Arrian, became a great historian in his own right.
True to Stoic form, Epictetus lived a life of great simplicity, marked by teaching and intellectual pursuits. He is known to have married once, late in life, to help raise a child who would have otherwise been left to die.
Epictetus' main work is the Enchiridion --or "Handbook", while his longer works are known as The Discourses. It is not believed that Epictetus wrote these, himself, but that they were penned by his pupil, Arrian. Like the early Stoics, Epictetus focused on ethics and on being masters of our own lives. The role of the Stoic teacher, according to Epictetus, was to encourage his students to live the philosophic life, whose end was eudaimonia (‘happiness’ or ‘flourishing’), to be secured by living the life of reason, which meant living virtuously and living ‘according to the will of nature’.

So master your own life, master of your own life (and nothing else, my chumps, nothing else). Now if only Chain's "Dialogue" issue (hands up if you've been rejected by Chain) had our man Epictetus in conversation w/ Deleuze... even w/ Billy Collins, I am a flexible man. Tried to read that issue in the bathtub today, it was one big distraction. Luckily, I figure the likes of Bruce Andrews encourages me to be distract. Why Chain is brilliantly distracting, consciously invokes it, but then so does a gnere novel, so does Danielle Steel, but Bruce lets you in on it. Partners? So they say. Edwin Torres is a being of pure light, at least if pure light is a little like ecstacy and meth on a 120W spanglish rampage through the NY Public Library.

compost makes for bedding, immersive

So who would be interested in an el pobre Mouse around the theme of work/play? Is anyone writing about work, is writing work, what is all this work and if its play, are we just minor league versions of major league basketball stars - inspirations for working stiffs w/ rotten sex lives? Or is play work (and is work serious?) - maybe we could even call it sweat : el pobre Mouse, the Sweat issue. We could trouble this distinction w/ so many type of tickles that I will promise never to bring it up again and we'll all be enlightened beings with wonderful sex lives.

Its in the air out here folks, I once had a fine mind, now its finely fecund, fiercely (needs to be fined).

-

For the past couple weeks I have been talking poetics with an SF poet who just may wish to remain - or become - anonymous here. So here are the greatest hits and misses of my end of our correspondence: because if poetry doesn't matter, we're all in deep shit. And if it does matter... the sublime is some excellent... shit? Fuck. This language thing is hard, esp. when you have the hairbrain notion of actually reading "intelligent". I offer this up as a learning again to write poetics. Anonymous has been kicking my butt whenever the assumptions get too out of hand... now its yr turn.

-

so who are you reading? and where are you reading? i am wading into
> charles bernstein's "a poetics" which is really invigorating.
>
> OHH and if you haven't already, consider checking out the amazing and
> cheap "poetry and its arts" exhibit at mission (nr 3rd) : it closes
> tomorrow, and there's a closing party. a couple of us are going back.
> its astounding. 12-4:30. did you see it? what did youthink?
>
> duration, yeah. i occasionally can read or write a short piece in a
> way so that it does have that complexity and lift-off, but that
> usually involves a multiple re-reading, to note all the microscopic
> turns and fragments suggesting worlds. but in a long piece, you can
> sit back and let it come in, immerse yourself in it - challenging in a
> different way. and a good place for me right now, to work w/ that
> build-up, all the plateaus intersecting, getting more and more steam
> up around language, particular phrases and words and bodies
> (particular particulars really) repeating. mutating. getting whacked.
>
> but this doesn't do it justice. feel free to send work my way when
> you wish, i always/usually enjoy a poem in the mail, (usually when i
> am really grumpy)

-

> maybe will have a chance to read yr poems tonight. can i tell you how
> much i love hearing your comments on my work? i am laughing now, its
> silly. but true. i am so pleased you enjoy them. i am really working on
> coming out of the closet (desert?) again as a poet who hibernated in a way after
> grad school. the whole community is temporary, nomadic, and then camp
> breaks, we spread in the 10 directions, and god forbid, you're ALONE
> again.

-

> just read sunday2, if you take, eat candy, eclipse 2. then got
> sidetracked in answering email and now fear my response is diluted.
>
> i get the strong sense of you working through different patternings
> here, digging into what yr own poetic field is/might be (what can we
> get our hands on, right?), and putting it through the paces, pushing
> velocity in one piece, dropping into a more contemplative circling in
> another, moving up close to language - to words and wording and the
> foreignness of that microscopic world, and back again to the relative
> solididty of "complete thoughts" (eat candy - complete, moving, but
> not "progresing" - nice ). that seems awesome, and perfect. its
> invigorating to read into these rough, lively, wild places, feel you
> literally on the trail, exploring, remembering, digging...
>
> i like this concentration on writing into the unknown - which is
> always a turning over of the supposedly known - it is a site for
> discovery. i think this is the type of work that can change a writer's
> relation to the world, not just their style in presenting it up for an
> audience. a (r)evolutionary poetics. libratory.
>
> instead of "voice" i sense voices: there's a sense of vulnerability, a
> sensuous play (the language-fucking sits nicely besides the stated
> erotics here, esp. given the openess of "you" - lover as reader,
> reading as a being inside (interiority) of you (where you are text,
> the physical book, mind, this sense of "author" ; this is maybe my
> favorite vein, a literature of desire, including formal, and
> intellectual desires - what else to base the act of writing on? ) , a
> strength and resilience (carried on w/ each new page). at times i
> sense blocks - or words/rhetorics that grab my attention as sites for
> future explorations, mysteries in their own right... and i also enjoy
> the work you are doing right now (well, several months back), a work
> of noticing, a noticing grounded in the body (but what are bodies?),
> in breath, in a language which describes, which alludes to
> description, and which threatens to cancel that: like touch and go
> with the world outside, the world within, whatever these might be...
>
> too nebulous, that thought, but somewhere in that direction.
>
> i enjoy the experimental sense, and i feel this work is more about
> process than product - at its strongest, there is a blending of these
> two that is very fulfilling. details, ripples, eddies, re-occurences
> - i am wondering what its like to study w/ leslie right now... i
> imagine she might be a perfect teacher for you...
>
> look forward to what's next.

-

> i re-read what i wrote to see if I was insane ( i thought i had been)
> and it was actually a delight to see I could read that email w/o
> wincing. As to the process/product freak out you had, I like what i
> said at the end of the email:
>
> i enjoy the experimental sense, and i feel this work is more about
>> process than product - at its strongest, there is a blending of these
>> two that is very fulfilling.
>
> meaning i read these poems more as kinetic - as a moving - like you
> said, mental tracery - than as product, where product is a
> foregrounding of a packageable, recognizable artifact. this
> distinction is necessarily wobbly, but i dont like poems that come all
> wrapped up and with instructions - and if they come that way, i like
> the wrapping to ba alittle odd, and the instructions to make me pause
> and reconsider what the hell is going on here, not to hury me about
> the business of reading and understanding this poem.
>
> does that answer it? i like the exploratory form, a poetics of
> investigation (of reality, incl. (always already)language's reality).
>
> and yet i see your anxiety. on one side, culturally, we are trained as
> little americans to worship product (that which will make us happy and
> free us from bondage) and i mean that literally. worship, ie to center
> our life around its redeeming value. whereas process - ie us right now
> in motion - is not static, not easily digestible and convertible into
> "finished" product w/o an act of murder (stasis - we literally are
> still -as bodies - only in death: the stillness of meditation is a
> type of death (and of murder, but its okay to murder the mental root
> of ourself, we spring right back (unlike w/ bodily murder) - you can
> not pin down a butterfly w/o killing it, boxing it lighting it on a
> wall in a butterfly museum.
>
> on the other side, isnt process boring? isnt it somehow deficient,
> just an exercise for some future -no doubt greater and more final -
> product? this is like the if i live my life well i will go to heaven
> type of argument. i sit zen, and in that tradition, that logic just
> doesnt cut it. a process-centered writing simply has to reinvent its
> sense of worth, alongisde every other aspect of its relation to the
> world, not just of letters, but to the world. author, text, sign,
> audience, language, rhetorics, referrants, narratives. all up for
> grabs.
>
> which is why its so easy to misunderstand the aims and methods of this
> work - we are trained not to see it, and if we do see it, our instinct
> is to somehow kill it and make it other ("useful") to itself.
>
> evidently i'm in a mood and on some sort of roll today - but i think
> you are doing great work - i just want to encourage you to take it
> further, to further devote yourself to writing-as-process, to keep
> negotiaiting exactly what you are negotiating, and to open up and
> overturn whole new worlds of being and becomin along the way. process
> itself becomes the product, so that we ground ourselves in the yin
> (motion - the extending line) and, when nec., emerge and stake a
> claim, a point, a "fixed" perspective (yang).
>
> i worry all the time about the worth of my work but its never helped
> anything except to get in the way and make me crazy. lets not go that
> route. the first and main worth must come in the writing of it. its
> life as a text for others (even you, later) is all gratis, an
> extension yes, but also distinct, a then, a future later, not the
> writing-now. as far as reassurance, once i got over my own
> product-versus-process bit, i got excited by your work, got into it,
> and enjyed its unfolding. i certainy dont think there's anything
> "wrong" w/ it that you need to go "fix". i hate that side of
> workshopping.

-

i truly believe that there is an offer of intimacy in your work which
is greater, more telling, and more rich to encounter than any
confession in a more conventional spoken style... than any accessible
work could offer by very virtue of its trying to be accessible (like
say,a lecture - another faux spoken event which is anything but
intimate and surprising by the norm). or chatter at parties. its when
we drop the hand me down forms that we really meet each other as
strangers - which isnt so strange - which brings us together -w hich is
what we want (no?). silliman says the accessible poets dont want
intimacy, they are deadly afraid of it. spot on i think. not intimacy
w/ each other, w/us, w/ the page and the act of writing. they want
distance, perspective, porper shadings, staged snapshots. SMILE.

-

PS: whats important crew? this is total request live. i like the sense that we can drop a line or two on each others nagging questions. and does sean macinnes have the actual temerity to insist that i call him to find out whats up? like being homeless is such a burden, if couchsurfing counts as a genteel/ne'er-do-well relatve of homelessness...

sean, we love you. let us know.

the one that got away...

el pobre Mouse

el pobre Mouse is the name of the zine I put out with Sara Larsen. Her blog link is to yr right. You can email us if you would like a copy ($5-10 sliding scale). They come with beautiful handmade covers, though not the kind of beauty people are usually telling you about. Maybe. Made with love. email: sarahandkyle@earthlink.net

You'll need that for the post below.

Subday Press is the press I co-run with Summer Rodman. I like to co-run stuff with people, esp. if their names begin w/ "S". Subday has 7 titles out to date. All are poetry or poetry-hybrids. Here's what we've done:

(...), Matt Langley
(who will soon be on an all-expenses paid trip to Korea, where he'll meet up w/ Jim Goar, whose blog inspired me to get into this in the first place. Him and Ron Silliman).
Critical Series, Sean MacInnes (Sean has a secret he may or may not tell you. Also his house burned down).
codeswitching, Melissa Benham
(her link is kinda to the right- her beau has taken her to a cozy seaside resort for her 30th bday this weekend, and last nite we got drunk and danced about it all-Jim, we had Makers- it was like you were there.)
a train came by and slowed, Summer Rodman
(yay Summer! Summer also runs a company that makes rubber hose and teaches visual journaling at a (for now) library)
a string of noun, Teresa Sparks
(who tried to ruin my life by hooking me up with Gay Sunshine Press - but Teresa - you've been foiled! Teresa's immense mind - in which one may wander, occasionally, w/ proper clearances -grows straight out of her heart, its a medical miracle with some disturbing complications.)
A Room of Trees, Sean MacInnes
(Sean still uses caps. Thats what we like about him.)
the Steely Dan project, yours truly.
(I was and am a bit ambivalent about publishing my own work but wasn't up for the other options. I too use caps, on occasion. (Take that MacInnes, Rodman, et al))

and we are going to be doing more books soon, and putting a website up so you can visit us and water us with yr paypal-ing, paypals. Poetry is a lovely, fierce and radiant word-being and those of you who don't read it should be ashamed of yourselves. Poetry is ever of the one that got away, but if you email me I will make sure these titles don't get away from you.

Now you will need that info for a later post, and I am going to take my too-cheeky self into the shower.

tera patrick / the way of the superior man, evidently paranoiac watching

Allright. Why is the blog "create post" title bar somehow linked to my google ( guessing here) search bar memory thing - you know, you type in a letter and it gives you all these possible choices of words/searches you've typed before that start w/... say "t". And why are they so goddamn embarrassing. is google like confession? Does blogspot want me to write about these things? A detective digging up old dirt?

September 19th, 2004. Dear google, I am lonely today. I want to have wondrous erotic encounters but with whom? Sarah’s not around and no one else is either. Please help me find photos of streaming video images of Tera Patrick giving blowjobs, getting fucked in every position the Kama Sutra can think of and still get a camera in there, to help me with the miserable realities of my life. Oh google, also, can you look up this whack-sounding book my therapist recommended, and oh, blogspot, can you remind me of these two wonderful moments in my life a half-dozen months later? (found the pictures, not the book - Tera Patrick is a sometimes very beautiful woman, although I can't say I’ve fully psyched my relation to porn - I think I would like it better if it was a) more process (eros) and less product (display). and b) if it was more a social adjunct than an asocial one and c) the stuff wasn’t as addictive and mind-deranging to the susceptible as crack cocaine. still, not a bad place to explore once and awhile, learn something new (look at that).Google, just one thing, make that shit free, I ain't paying.

Jim Goar asked me about censoring myself and, well, there's a passage I would normally censor. But these silencings create ugly echoes and ripples...Another thing I would normally censor is that I just looked down and saw the tiny mouse that is in our flat today and told him in a boyish voice (speak small to the small?): "little mouse, can't you go home [looking to the side to see if the cat’s round looking to the side to see if the cat's around][mouse sniffing foot and unhurriedly scurrying a few feet off – under the futon couch] you don't live here...and it's not safe". Actually I'm amazed any mouse could live in this cat dense area. Go little mice! Go poets and writers not afraid to speak the unspoken! Down with us being subalterns, those nasty little half-castes that get the stick from the boss and are expected to pass it on to the truly abject ( a little mouse, a cat, a homeless person or the guy at work no one will talk to, all the plants we call weeds, boulders w/ lizards sunning on them where a freeway should be [boom!] the millions without enough food to eat, living on a dollar a day or less when the SF Muni costs $1.25.

It hit me: I just met el pobre Mouse. Then…

I had several paragraphs more here, I was very happy with them, one of those moments when you just finish typing and it’s a great feeling, satisfying, I was excited to share the post, and then the spell-check wouldn’t open (popup blocker) and then something horrible happened – I lost 50, 60% of this post. So I am typing it in Word now, vowing never again to trust typing on-line, where there is no text to save, too virtual, too fragile. MWord will at least store its lost data.

So anger and loss. And then okay. It told an amazing little story that unfolded here as I was typing – how I heard my punk rock neighbors discover a mouse – maybe in the mouth of their cat – and how the guy – a big Henry Rollins with a shaved head type – put the mouse in a bag – took it downstairs into our shared courtyard, the girl whined after him "John, nooo.... John, noooo" not to kill it – he said “its just a little mouse” and I knew he was going to kill it and then heard him whack the shit out of the bag with some blunt object – saw him: grim-set frown, saw him throw the bag in the garbage – girl abandoned the mouse after those few weak (totally weak) words – I wanted to say something but was paralyzed – felt stupid – it happened, I made myself into a subaltern, failed to speak and insert myself into that text, he went back upstairs and I got angry. At everyone, mostly me (el pobre Mouse : cowardice begins at home). Then I got up and went outside to check on the mouse. He was in the garbage, in his brown bag. I roughly/gingerly – a little afraid –as always-of death – shook him loose and onto the ground, a few inches – he was dead – half-curled, still warm and soft – a visible cut or two – eyes closed – stoned non-expression – little claws and long limp tail. I put my hands together and said (no, chanted) a dedication gatha for him, low and a little trembly first word:

All Buddhas throughout space and time
All Bodhisattvas, Mahasattvas
Maha Prajna Paramita

The great wisdom of the far shore, of the other, of the western paradise, Shambala, nirvana, land of Amida Buddha, right here. Worried the neighbors would hear me. Bowed, picked up his tail – still dead – walked him over to – a few feet away – our garden plot, kneeled and w/fingers dug a shallow grave, a couple handfuls of dirt, placed him in, under the calla lilies, sprinkled the dirt on him, patted him down, his tail still out, buried that too, forgot to bow, bow.

I was very proud – truth be said, of, after writing this, the following line, which came to quite sweetly, out of the blue:

And so I would bury you, dear reader, when your time came.

-

So, tender, and this is all history now, all recap, I talked a little more, slightly embarrassed perhaps, with sincerity, always embarrassed of being sincere – Where’s that ironic armor so I don’t get hurt out there, ma? Where’s my carefully worded not sayings, or said so you won’t notice, or said just so you’ll hear it right, and I’ll come out okay (unscathed). Dear readers – do you want to tear me apart? I can tell you I get scared – but the neighbors might hear, will need to hear from me if we aren’t going to go around and disturb all the peace w/ our mice killing and our federal prisons and arsenic skies and M1 Abrams tanks and F-18 Hornets and that woman wanting me to sign a petition to make all teacher pay based solely on merit – and I told her the very words (merit decided by whom?) made me nauseous, (“okay, then you don’t have to sign”- but she was wobbly - wasn’t sure if I meant nauseous with a headache or nauseous at the idea – I told her I had a headache – and I realized the answer was both).

Disturbing the peace. that was el pobre Mouse’s crime, that is always his crime: but whose peace? peace as a maintained order, patrolled, guarded, a box rimmed with wire. barbed.

-

Started off with porn. There’s this weird moment I can enjoy when you look at the image and the man becomes a woman, the woman a man, and its never said, but its there, this slippage – and I see, say, Tera Patrick’s face as one of the guys on Mount Rushmore: I read woman as hardworking, stoic, steely determination, an act of great endurance and will achieved through strength. And the little guys pumping away for some little girl dream of himself, all sugar and spice with more leg hair. And those moments when the other gig is up – and someone – or everyone – looks bored. I wish porn wasn’t built only around the wankery of male fantasies – some give and take, some social eroticism, some porn-on-the-street, in the marketplace (not at it’ edge in some peep booth, or veiled through the wink wink of advertising) in the carnival, mixed up, uncapitalized (or done with capital as an accessory, not sole motive) porn given some good vibrations treatment – that would be something worth seeing. Engaging with. I know there are people who do positive porn, the same way I know its cold up in the Artic. I have no real experience of this stuff, but I do think the erotic could come more into a public and playful (not that horrible protestant hard-work porn) space, pleasure is a lovely thing. A friend of mine tells me of how they kiss in the streets in Brazil – full kisses, w/ tongue. It means: I like you. Let’s do this Just this. Not necessarily always leading to (tiresome) that. A lightness in that this.

So here’s to those who celebrate the erotic, with all its possibilities, charms, and (always possible) traps: to Robert Duncan, to Paul Blackburn, to the songs of Leonard Cohen, and mi pobre Sara Larsen. To the troubadours who got thrown out the window of late, and to those writers, and I will stubbornly count Juliana Spahr among them, who are bringing the body, the sexual body politic, back, center, lovers, lovers, loves.

romantic after drinking also (makes) alone and artful

My head hurts. Today I went out to lunch with people known as "co-workers" and we plied ourselves w/ free beer and whiled away an easy couple hours, til W. Got paranoid and began whining about what his boss might do to him when he got back but by then the second pitcher was empty, so...

...Once we were outside I was immediately far drunker than in the restaraunt, a phenomena that continued as we entered the office, where I found even the hum of my trusty hard drive sounded uneven and malevolent.

The above story is copyrighted and intended for educational use only.

Trungpa (Chogyam) wrote about alcohol as a unique drug, one that simultaneously elevates and depresses - from the easy cameradie of one Tom Waits song to the head-in-toilet moan of the next. In the brewpub, I tended toward elevation - now - by a simple transition of physical space/a few minutes of digestive time, if there is anything "simple" about that - I find myself far more towards the depressed side. Slow and low. Sunglasses would be the order of the day, if I had a pair.

The best part of the lunch was watching these two moods nip each other's heels, giving birth to and cannibalizing their "opposite". How exuberant became sullen, how thoughtful turned giddy, its a carnival - and a carnival is its own cycle of dependent co-origination, its own web of constant shift. Like these philosophic turns...

But, friends, how much of what we write do we share: and how do we select those bits? The ones we can easily share, or the parts we are desperate not to share, the parts we have built extensive closets and sub-basements for, neatly boxed and presumably forgotten... but my work is totally honest - all this makes me sad. Sad-in-the-writing of it.

And I also know each one of us is writing towards and into a freedom (although some call it "power") we desire and are terrified of. Its the terrified of part that I am coming to experience more of right now - how it manifests in a censoring, a clipping away of that which doesn't fit with what I want to show (and has such good reasons for doing so, devious fucker) ... and how what I want to show becomes lesser, limited, more polite (in the sense of 'mannered' - that is, politically tailored), in so doing. I suspect its not just me waking up into consciousness of this, but I really don't know. Surely every writer has desires they acknowledge and bask in, and others they try to hide - desires both textual and more broadly lived. Studying at Naropa it was fascinating and often disturbing to see how writers - often quite celebrated ones - were inevitably "dirty snowballs" of consistency and contradiction - and how many of them seemed to be holding (tightly to various degrees) this very perverse (in a non-glamorous sense, perverse as in torturous) admixture together, goading it on, at all costs. As if there response to Plato's cave and the Buddha's journey was I have come so far and no farther. Ego-centric in the most basic, geometric sense: as if we needed to hold the planets in orbit about the sun like a steering wheel on the road.

And yet, writing this, I think back too on - when they were in their court (i.e. workshops) esp. - how much openness and flexibility and consideration they gave both to their own role and to us. The generalities are here - because a) I'm still feeling the beer and b) why name names? Impressions vary. For many years I was a completely idealistic sop, and it in many ways saved my life (it ruined it in the remainder). (Ego-centric)

I'm reading Julianna Spahr's thisconnectionofeveryonewithlungs which has this decided ability to engage these sticky places, these contradictions. Pico Iyer quotes Leonard Cohen as saying that life is rooted in perplexity, that we bend around these perplexities like trees into the light. Juliana certainly is doing just that as, once again, she caps off an utterly distinctive "voice" with an utterly compelling subject. Turning over the relentless interconnection we rationally know binds all objects and subjects in the world is nothing new yet in doing so with such ruthless attention Spahr can never escape the rough limits of this logic: the unfinished business of alienation, private property, our equally relentless closures and turning-aways from all the "yous" before us. And that she does so simply, lyrically, both fully enmeshed in particulars and able to write richly on "love" and "war". This book is a dialectical rollercoaster, an omnivorous beastie that will break into your pantry and clean you right out. For which you will be very thankful. Having worked and re-worked my own responses to the war, having been horrified and dismayed and out-gunned by the political establishments of this country, the economic establishments, and the military establishments ("the three-legged stool") I still came to this book unconscious of how deeply and persistently scaring this war, this administration, this environmental policy, this habit of not looking each other in the eye on the bus, has been for me. It never stops. A poem, a book, a night of fucking, these can be acts of resistance - as tender and impotent as they may seem: and, in a world of hegemonically assigned meanings, they do seem so (unless say, portrayed in a film, where they seem heroic). This book dives into that turning, each line a new shade - a new particular, the situation evolving at the very edge of our ability to articulate it, always threatening to be beyond us, out of our control. I don't know another writer who so plumbs the perceived limits of our autonomy, or how the damned world of media reference incessantly bumps into, pours upon the intimate world of parrots outside the window, a lover next to you in bed. And how that second, piped-in world claims dominance, claims objective hegemony, claims to be the (not a) real (deal), and my world, your world, our worlds, slip into the unsaid corners, leftovers, detritus, nada. But isn't the media distant, manufactured, bogus and endlessly distractive/murderous/exploitative? Don't we have a voice in it except to gobble it willingly down? Spahr writes, with tense and eloquent dignity, from here, this ripped open seam out of which I bleed daily.

I read this book for half an hour in the bathtub last night and it was easily the highpoint of my day, even though the bluelights we've strung up in there are barely enough to distinguish soap from toothpaste, let alone letters of type. But the calm, even lines - which I am reading as a lyric prose, essentially hybird (and endlessly fluid in possibility - hence "omnivorous"), her praising, decrying - and even naming - of unlikely things (anaphoras and litanies of attesting, of witness), her investigation of distance as a sort of spiritual balm, all strikes me as something marvelous. Wrought, but not a fraud.

Which makes me feel all the funnier for my inability to go up an talk to Juliana when I see her about the city - she teaches a town away, across the bridge at Mills, and I've ran into her three times now. Baseball aside, 4 will be the number that I step up to the plate.

Trailing slimy seaweed word-strands, and having just been handed 401k info, I bid yous goodnight.

fresh blood in the base of the neck

The title has already changed. So much to learn here - photos, layout, links. It's happening - and its happening at work - so this is a paid adventure. I am the lucky recipient of my employer's unknowing grant. And, amazingly, this happens while I do my job, for they allot me far more hours than they do work. Fellow folk of this century, I hear this is how it used to be. Once upon a time there were many such jobs allowing a latitude of freedom at work, and now I think they are whittled away with each cycle of merger/layoff.

The title changes since w er d um fi e ld was a bit more obscure than I could stand by as a blog title, though it has this lovely, where is that place feel to it. But, unless you speak German, so will this. The original title meant to conflate werden with word hum, into its own little neologism, so a word-hummed field of becoming. This computer hums - whines, creaks - I am obsessed by it. That drone I return to in dozens of notations and pieces - an originary noise for computer people, even the expensive models sound, they are just designed to sound silent. But like Mr. Cage said, silence is but further noise once you listen to it.

All our lovely others seem rather like fictive characters in an often cheap plot. Masking exactly what use of words and worlds? In the Bay Area, less than 5% of the native ecosystem is intact - the entire region has been thoroughly remade - intentionally and otherwise - by humans : ship ballast discharging Polynesian crustaceans into the harbor waters, gulls and pigeons and sparrows to feed on our waste, salt marshes dyked and farmed for salt, and then, in turn, filled for condos and computer companies. Hills stripped of trees and brush for firewood and cow feed, than paved over for homes w/ a view. Lagoons filled in and creeks made into sewage tunnels (the area of 16th and Valencia was once a lake fed by now hidden watercourses off Twin Peaks and Buena Vista - you can see it on very early San Francisco maps) South African ice plant and Australian eucalyptus to "reign in" dunes and manufacture forested glens, snails to feed the discriminating French migrants, concrete, steel, aluminum, a thousand forms of plastic and several forests worth of wood to carpet, cover, retro-fit and thoroughly resurface the earth here, and to link up each new habitation into the non-virtual net of infrastructure in which this glorified electronic city is but a small, nearly invisible parasite. Or, perhaps more a fattening cow along for the ride.

So there's my paragraph of eco-doom. As long as our fuel resources keep shrinking and our fuel prices keep rising though, this level of consumption will become unsustainably, prohibitively expensive though, and our technology will either wither or turn green (even going nuclear would - if you look into it - not only take forever and be exceptionally risky, but be prohibitively expensive in this coming crunch). And its been said before but the earth itself will recover, even if caribou, sequoias, the monkeys of Madagascar and the monkeys of homo sapiens, along w/ most other large mammals, fish, reptiles, amphibians, etc. Are wiped off. Its happened several times before, and the raccoons, crows, ants and company will flourish where we fell.

So there's my second, more cheerful paragraph of eco-doom. I really would love to see the ruins of our civilization someday. It would be so refreshing - either in another incarnation, or as a time-traveling tourist. I write this forgetting all the possible pain heading our way as we live through this probable contraction of of techno-splendour upon which we all so depend.

But for now I'll content myself with noting that a) this has nothing to do with what I stated was the site's aim yester and b) i am letting go of what i said yester. As for the aim and direction of this site, it is as new as the name, and the blog itself - I don't know exactly yet what will happen here. I'll be exploring and hopefully get into a groove or twelve. Poetry and writing and consciousness are never more than a ranting paragraph of eco-doom away. But when working for a firm that is full of architects building (well CAD-ing) new structures, when working for an institution that build institutions for other institutions is your daily workday domicile, the call of a couple paragraphs of prophetic eco-doom is all too sweet to pass up.

AND if anyone is curious where this particular eco-doom came from, there is a recent article worth checking out (and perhaps fact-checking : I haven't) in Rolling Stone of all places. It's called "The Long Emergency" - check it out here.

Focus. Focus. Obsessed with focus. A desire for control, a controlling fucking desire. But for now, further chaos, out of which what might come... Its where the wild things are.

Gof4 thought for the day: please send me evenings and weekends.
please send me evenings and weekends.

It's Melissa Benham's 30th birthday on Friday. Shame on yourselves if you didn't know that.

Artist and writer friends: when can we quit our day jobs? Another 40-50 yrs is just too long to toil for another's $. I don't want to be building these buildings (Federal Prisions, Hospitals, Police Stations, Luxury Condo High-Rises). Stay tuned for the saga of the Rawk Papier Sizz-o-s Collective's struggle to overthrow our oppressive conditionings, conditions, and conditioners. And just maybe the saga of how I am or am not saving the ass of a near-dead Gay Sunshine Press.

"Beloveds, your skin is a boundary separating yous from the rest of yous"

-this connection of everyone with lungs, Juliana Spahr,OUT NOW.

If you're reading it, let me know, we can talk. Its a big world, so its nice to share a book (even electronically).

a first stab is further wounding

Welcome to w e r d u m, my first venture into the blog. Inspired by my friends young blogs and Ron Silliman's comparatively ancient one. I'm wading in. This seemed like such a wonderful idea and a natural outgrowth of my work until I actually started typing. Now it feels rough and uncertain, not an unfamiliar place to begin (first lines of the Inferno, anyone?).

w e r d u m f i e l d is a site I will return to - the vow being once a day, M-F, to venture my thoughts on topics of the hour, as they fleet foot it by. I'm looking for - primarily - an outlet to practice the prose sentence as it manifests in the essay, essay used here loosely, in the old French sense of essai, a trail. So a venturing into issues and subjects to reclaim more land for my writing. As a poet, I can at times keenly feel the limits of my rhetorical range, and I have long wanted to add "poet & essayist" but I can't find any essays I've developed farther than a rough draft rant buried in the hard drive.
I'm also looking for an investigations of writing, poetics, and consciousness. This is not a blog chalking up the details of my private life, but it very much aims to be a blog which incorporates the full panoply of my personal experience. I realize that the distinction between private and personal is just that - an often quickly made and roughly run fence - but what I am implying is that I hope this site will be rewarding even if you have never met me face to face. So I am aiming to set up a public space with this blog, a public space that is not itself selling anything - though if you would like to buy a book or two of my press subday, or even a book or twelve of my own steely dan, i think we can hammer out an arrangement.

Much, most, and perhaps all of this work will be done - at least for now - on my computer here at work, during odd or even lengthy stretches of calm. So that is another constraint, as long as we're talking methods and aims here:

-the prose sentence
-at work
-investigating poetics

How strange to "begin." Strange and artificial - that is to say man-made - as this work is a continuation, in a new space, of an age-old practice and often schizological distraction/obsession of mine, largely around the intertwined Qs: what is a poem, what exactly happens (and can happen) when reading/writing, and who/how am i? I wobble endlessly - both as an open participant and overwhelmed neurotic - in my continual investigations of these koan questions. And through this, they have become increasingly and wonderfully alive and full of power to me, dynamic, fragile, massive bodies within which to explore and dwell. So the rough map of this blog's territory is always already drawn, and yet the process is continual, the drawing itself is what this site will bear witness to, not some final and definite map by which to pilot down waterways or across interstate. Hopefully, US-Mexico borders will be kept to a healthy minimum here, with their entrenched, static positions requiring ever-further defenses, at ever-higher costs (to all parties). Even our former Hollywood action hero Governor has stumbled across this minefield with his comments praising - unironically - the "Militiamen" (or vigilantes, as you like it) who have been abetting the official border patrols in their "police actions" against the illegals who seek to work the minimum wage jobs the rest of us would rather die than perform.

If I have any luck, this blog, like SIlliman's will spawn its own barking comment box full of pesky dogs. Avast, fuckers!

I was going to talk about the Gang of Four lyrics cycling endlessly through my head after Monday nite's mind-blowing show ("concert" : when - a teen - I'd say "show" my Midwestern mother always used to reply: "but you didn't go to see a movie"). But, instead, if you haven't paid much or any attention to Gang of Four, check out an excellent essay by Greil Marcus on the Gof4 here (its the second essay) and take it from there. No one else quite brings (round) ass and (sharp) head together so cathartically. Certainly not the Chili Peppers.

So I am writing this to further the cause of an aware poetics, of a close attention to language, and a continual wrestling w/ the questions that animate my mind (and career). I think I might even be writing this to be a better citizen, to sort through the madness of our times, our meth-head culture, our puppeteer politics, our byzantine social rituals of commodified alienation and passivity (I want to talk to strangers on the bus) and enact a democratic space where I and the we around me share the work of making our world, and the equally essential work of listening to and witnessing the world already-being-made (and this will all be done fast, on the fly, w/ duct tape and a residual paranoia that my boss is coming).

I have never heard it more succinctly put than in the Stephen Mitchell translation of the Tao te Ching: Know the yang, but stick to the yin. w e r d u m f i e l d will be a site to explore this dynamic, to locate a workable basis for a discriminating poethics. And hopefully to discover a source of humor too, amid all this contemplation: sticky, light, all over our fingers. Tasting neither of chicken nor chocolate. And, as Joanne Kyger puts it, avoiding the success/failure game.

The change will do you good.