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 My visual poetry work is still unpublished, but it is a frontier of mine, an edge I want to push.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,