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.