Oh boy, once you (I) post something here, I have to post some more, right away. The push it down the page syndrome.

What feels a little queasy is self-interrogating even now - like a self-cleaning oven - I came home after picking up copies of a er my new book Picture Palace from SPD and wanted to blog, blog until I puked. But I also came home after months of considering the dead object and wanted to blog, blog until I puked, and never did. For all that time. I come home every day and - consider the dead object. Maybe I’ll puke it up, fall asleep and be done. “Design’s not dialogue” said the poem, about relation with dead objects. I keep thinking, who do I want to tell this book about or tell about this book? Apparently tonight the internet, and in a hopeful moment I think that may have something to do with this book’s sometime or a lot of the time trying to address these conditions. The a-href I’m writing in right now.

Or maybe just - hello.

Interesting and lovely conversation with Laura Moriarty and Joshua Clover at SPD, lovely in its being so immediately struck up, fallen into, in the middle of such heat (ridiculously and ‘unseasonably’ hot in berkeley today but I was still sweating way more than usual, sweating more than the weather even, I probably stunk! I stink right now!) and me sweating and zoning out in excitement/anxiety, we sat in front of the fan momentarily and talked about poets who live or live a version of their writing, of writing, especially those who do so without a safety net (money) - who risk falling through the net - and what would that look like in one’s own case - and -

Sorry because this is/will be a total over-simplification, but part of what came up in this conversation were kids, real-life kids, parenting, but also various comparisons of writing and parenting - poetry as progeny? The metaphor wasn’t exact but it came close, or it is multiplicitous, if that is a word - maybe it was more like, the life one lives, as one’s progeny? Of course it’s an old and totally useful comparison (Fanny Howe’s Pinnochian Ideal!) (Tag to add: “I have a problem with exclamation points”) and I am pushing or turning it here to talk about how I was thinking about the feeling of having a kid, which I haven’t had, but watching friends, poets around me go through the process of having kids, and the helpless interesting and special attachment to kids born at the same time as one’s own kids, and so one of the best parts about today was of course seeing KEVIN KILLIAN’S BOOK! Action Kylie, and John Sakkis giving me a copy of his fantastic new Cy Gist chapbook Gary Gygax (replete with stickers - two of them - both both) and also a copy of Chris Vitiello’s Irresponsibility - apparently 7 copies of Chris’s book arrived from the printer with their insides printed upside down (rendering the back cover the front cover if one orients the book to the direction of its insides, and in this case it’s a doozy, a girl in gold slippers holding a pastry in front of a glass case of pastries…) and I received one of these 7 misprinted copies, these homeopathic fuck-ups which in their own way I am sure must have guaranteed the clean and safe printing of the rest of the print run, what a gift, and then reading Brent’s really great blurb for Chris’s book and then reading some of Chris’s book and being very excited to read more, here is poem 11 from the section titled “Blowing Rock, NC”, and I will quote this only if I can simultaneously make clear how incomplete this section is without reading the poems and pages that precede and follow it, its nest:

The legal system is set
up to determine conviction or acquittal
The forest is visited by me
I have lost a sense of where to break lines
and will try my way back into it

Practice on a sentence from the paper:
Tank fire destroyed the
mosque’s 50-foot-tall minaret,
from which the insurgents were
attacking

Iris played with toy guns for the first time today

**

Also thinking about Maggie Zurawski’s THE BRUISE coming out so recently and can’t waiting to get a copy - that great thing Maggie blogged about, the sheer unbelievability of her book being in the world, and how glad I am, that THE BRUISE is - also how generous and very Maggie that blog post is, how much I have been having some grateful internal laughter over the book as a bruised cousin. The fantastic spiralling outwards sentences of that blog post. You want to read a book written by this person right? Hi Maggie we miss and love you and congratulations!

August 27, 2008 * 8:29 am

I mean, seriously, as if one could get ‘away’.

Although also

August 26, 2008 * 8:36 pm

I am sitting here drinking a glass of Goats Do Roam which seems a totally appropriate pairing with the blog post I keep thinking of and then casting aside as too stupid, truly, an idea, to blog. Which is roughly: “what I did on my summer vacation” although with a million addendums because it wasn’t a vacation, but then it was, too, as the summer months involved, along with work, weeks in arizona, oregon and parts of california that are not the bay. That is: I bought and used many gallons of gasoline.

Also, Goats Do Roam seems the perfect pairing b.c. it sat in the trunk of my car in 100+ degrees being not-drunk during a trip to the hot springs (in all their sleazy summer glory) and I have been wondering, is that Goats Do Roam wine OK after spending so much time in the hot trunk? And/or especially given that today I discovered an awful confluence of what appears to be laundry detergent, fabric softener, the box the fabric softener sheets came in, and perhaps the remains of some ice that melted back there during the same trip when the Goats Do Roam wine languished in the heat, anyways these ingredients have gotten together and produced a TOXIC SNUGGLE. Toxic snuggle is a wet purple awfulness spot in the trunk of my car. It is also a band. Or it is that classically awful punchline, a good name for such.

More to the point I have been thinking of another post about how this blog is a DEAD OBJECT and then what constitutes a dead object? And what relation is the right relation to a dead object? All energies around this question have since been directed towards poetry.

Alas.

The good news is that Goats Do Roam seems to be completely OK- it is shutting down this blog post - even now - I report - there are videos and pictures and narrative re-enactments to come, maybe, including C. diving into the CRATER LAKE which DID ME IN. As did, as does, as is doing, the Goats Do Roam.

And yet, the post. Of so much more to say! It’s been so long! It was good to be away!

August 26, 2008 * 8:26 pm

Belladodie!

!!!

August 7, 2008 * 12:56 pm

Get your copy here!

*

The poems came mostly by email. I printed them out, trimmed the excess paper around one and taped it to the wall in the bathroom next to the mirror. And then there was white space. “Hello (behavior) how (behavior) are (behavior) you (behavior)”. The lake in the poem was my lake, the wounds in the neighborhood where I lived, lived with it, I was a myrmidon, I was hot for the nectar too. I attended the past in the present, scattered across the sea. It was windy there. I was drunk with the poem morning and night, just like Baudelaire commands. At noon, I was usually at work.

Another poem came in the mail, written out by hand. I put it on the refrigerator door with a magnet, next to a bill of lading and above the carbon copy of a hotel sign-in card which asked its guests who they were ‘representing’. Possibly this question had to do with musicians and their managers staying at the hotel frequently. On the card, from a weekend trip with my best friend, I’d answered: ourselves. I thought this answer dumb and funny and unsure of itself and cavalier and elegant and true. Impossible. But represent we did, by the pool, reading and writing, hanging a dress on the closet door and taking its picture, eating at a restaurant, driving in a car, etc.

So here we are, Goodnight Voice, “where the arm can be slid in and out like a sleeve.” The voice, recombinant, in love and discord with the grammars, metrics and recombinant voices (bodies) that come before, alongside, of course the self on this surface (surface social, surface formal) is a construction. It’s Faberge, it’s cream. It’s possible to slide the arm in and out like a sleeve, but also scary and ridiculous, “crude & fragile like sewing a thumb on a marshmallow hammer”. The sleeve is still part of the body (individual, collective) and if not done with great care, the maneuver is going to hurt. Sometimes even then.

It turns out I can’t speak that clearly about these poems I lived with, what’s inscribed inside me now. I watched the poem on the door. I watched the poem on the wall. “Agency, relic of durable love”. I have to admit I quoted this back and forth to myself and others. I have to admit I cried. The tears had nothing to do with the poem but sometimes while crying I would think of this relic, agency. And the no possible crusade imaginable to retrieve it. So I injected its past possibility into the only future I can sometimes imagine: reading. Writing as reading. Later I heard (along with Robert Duncan, Louis Zukofsky, Alice Notley, Jay-Z and others) Carolee Schneeman in the poems, too: “everything that room could want, every room, even Dante. / Yes, her.”

Claudia Rankine writes, in Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: “..Paul Celan said that the poem was no different than a handshake. I cannot see any basic difference between a handshake and a poem–is how Rosmarie Waldrop translated his German. The handshake is our decided ritual of both asserting (I am here) and handing over (here) a self to another. Hence the poem is that–Here. I am here.”

In this here there are others, others in the voice that asserts itself, not without dismay, that asks how much we can see and feel another, in the selves that are handed over, others in the troubled care called out for. In the face which is everywhere (“my neck, my back, my neck & my back.”) Goodnight Voice.

July 19, 2008 * 8:47 am

Something the internet can do is make a person feel cynical and out of touch like everything else, faster. I don’t know what to do with myself or my hands here in the internet of June 2008. If by the internet I mean you. More and more I just hang out with bad information on food and fuel and flooding. And fires, and studies on death by pollution. Sometimes there is a lot of YouTube video I wake up and don’t know how I got there, Angelina Jolie. That is all. And then in the middle of the information I will get a longing or a pang for my own private internet of 2003, which felt small and private. There were like 7 of you I thought of when I was here. And the same is true now. But now, in addition, I can’t feel my limbs. I feel like … a polar bear… a worm … a cotton ball. Spreading. Detached. Before, I was hiding in a very specific sort of place and after a while I ran out into the street to say hello. I (thought I) knew roughly where I was. Hiding and who I wanted to encounter.

Now I feel like a glob.

Maybe it’s good for me? (in the sense of valuing confusion/bewilderment)

1. Ironman last weekend. The hero as ipod, or the most awesome PDA ever. Dream of total containment. Dream of absolute freedom of movement.

2. Third installment of the Berlin Alexanderplatz tonight. I missed last week, which meant renting episodes 4-7 and catching up at home. Moment where I was sure it would be unavailable at the video room on piedmont ave. because everyone else in the bay area must be obsessively following along, too. Then had a really difficult time stopping myself at episode 7, but managed. Somewhere in the environs and links around the conversation going on at Open Space, someone mentioned the 1931, 88 minute version as in “why watch all 15 hours when you can…” (I could be wrong about this, I can’t remember who said it or where.) I point towards what I can’t find to say how struck I was during episodes 4-7 by the necessity of seriality and length to Fassbinder’s project. The serial and sheer size fits (performs, in a dreadful, perfect way) Biberkopf’s dogged cycle of beginning over again and again. Also the religious/moral tone of those re-beginnings - he is, again, a ‘new man’ (or a bird, or…) and then he is himself, and then it is another episode. (binge, retreat, beginning, violent encounter.) My inordinate (and mildly distressing) affection for Franz only increased while watching these episodes, but I feel a little let off the hook by Brecht Andersch’s great post - perhaps it’s the actor I’m fond of, not the character. It is often difficult for me to extricate actors from their roles. Everything onscreen makes me so nervous. I was a real wreck during Ironman. I can’t believe this is only the halfway mark of Alexanderplatz. Or a little beyond halfway. Feels like we’ve lived a long time already in the beerhall alone.

The scene where he has a conversation with his three beers and one schnapps!

Seriously!

June 19, 2008 * 3:44 pm

Hi!

Hi.

Chris Chen, Cynthia Sailers and I have posted some notes in response to the SPT aggression conference. They’re over on the conference blog.

Also I have a Summer Cold, with a fever and everything.

Andrew Kenower has started posting audio from the conference over at A Voice Box: Bay Area Recordings of the Recent Past. I have been wanting to point to A Voice Box for a long while! It is a really terrific and growing archive.

You know what else I’ve been meaning to point to for a long time is this, “Send us your vertical answers”, a project Amber DiPietra is putting together on the Kelsey Street Blog, of poets who have responded and will hopefully respond to the questions (titles) in Bhanu’s book The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers.

Also and, we’re planning a public post-conference session for the weekend of June 21/22, time and location to be announced soon as possible. Check back here and/or at the conference blog for more info soon.

June 11, 2008 * 7:53 pm

A little late, but in the spirit of, let’s say, er, the content - let’s say you live in the bay area but won’t be able for whatever reason to attend any of the panels this coming saturday as part of the AGGRESSION conference, or let’s say you live on the east coast of the united states, or let’s say you live in oxford, or let’s say you live in buenos aires, or let’s say you do plan on attending the conference but the Q&A is always a hard space to speak into, and let’s say you’ve read some of the materials that Jasper Bernes, csperez and Erika Staiti will be talking about at saturday’s panel on the internet, and then let’s go further and say there is a question you might want to ask the panelists from wherever you are? If any of the above is the case, may I present the comment box? Please send such questions along if you have them, and I will ask these questions of our panelists on Saturday morning.

May 29, 2008 * 11:56 pm

“Through the hush of debts / and the roar of engines / we’ll struggle to recall / this is how it ended / this is how it ends”

(Christine Fellows, “Vertebrae)

May 26, 2008 * 1:58 pm

It always feels wrong, why is that, lots of reasons, to post something here when there are so many emails and lists to write, but I am out of town and mostly away from the away of here, and so but while I am, didn’t want to wait another day to say:

I hope you many will be in town and able to attend some or all of the upcoming SPT conference (next weekend! May 30/31) on aggression: political antagonism and contemporary poetics. I think there will be a lot to think and talk about.

Check the conference blog (link above) for advanced reading, exhibits, the full schedule, panel descriptions, etc.

May 22, 2008 * 10:21 am

and, again, department of:

anniversaries, death, birth, colorado, sleep deprivation.

watching the death toll(s) rise.

May 22, 2008 * 10:04 am

Then suddenly I *love* facebook, unfolder of information such as fallen fruit which I’d never heard of before receiving a facebook invite to this week’s nocturnal fruit forage in LA. It seems like local chapters are encouraged, though? Yes? Bay area anyone?

This won’t come mid-narrative for some of you, dear some of you all who deserve my sincerest apologies for talking about nothing else for a month now, that is, the RATS and the OPOSSUMS. Some kinds of rats really love avocados. A nocturnal fruit forage seems like a good step in my rat and opossum self-directed training. Isn’t that what the rats and opossums do? Nocturnal public fruit foraging?

This post is a public update that the opossum catcher came to the house yesterday and set some traps (the catch and release kind). The bait is STRAWBERRY NEWTONS. Most cats I guess don’t like strawberry newtons. 24 hours later there’s nothing in the traps yet. But when the opossum catcher showed up yesterday, he did have an opossum in the back of his truck, trapped at another location. A grown-up, cat-sized one. And so, my first.. sighting? viewing? (Suzanne and I googled “possum” a few weeks ago at my obsessive urging, and wow when that first picture came up it really did us in. Different, but related, I think, to what may or may not be living in the ceiling. I still have a lot to learn obviously.) This story is going backwards or something but I should say somewhere very clearly that I have not been having the easiest time ever with the sounds in my walls and ceiling, my ceiling and walls and ceiling and especially not with the sounds in the wall right behind my bed. At first I thought there were some overactive cats upstairs who only played at night. With many, many rolling balls. Then, when one of these denial-cats fell down into the wall one early morning, I employed, somewhat shakily, a fantasy concerning a glossy disney character who simply wanted the opportunity to make soup at a fancy restaurant. So I have been of course! It goes without saying! Googling opossum, oh, several times a day, ever since it was introduced as a marsupial alternative maker of THE SOUNDS. Opossum + loud noise + wall + babies + mating season + geography. I’m getting there. (to a search string a little wider than myself)

And moving ever closer to an embodied opossum: last week Samantha told me about seeing one at Sulphur Creek and I’m hoping to visit with her and Jonas in May. Yesterday’s opossum was understandably depressed, laying on a bunch of crushed strawberry fig newtons, in full daylight, tired and wishing for a dark corner to nap in. Mary my upstairs neighbor saw him first, unexpectedly, through the tailgate of the truck, and screamed. I forced myself to look but all I could see was the dinosaur-esque tail, so big! and coiled! And viewed through a crack. I almost looked away but didn’t. And then, the opossum ears, so intricate. The tired eyes. And hands.

I learned yesterday that rats and opossums can cohabitate in the same space, raccoons are more aggressive, and the interior wall sounds I’m hearing sound, to the opossum catcher, more like rodents than opossums. I know, information from an opossum catcher could be considered suspect, or something, but this one repeated several times that we must call immediately if we spot an opossum in the trap, as the traps are placed in full sunlight, and sunlight really stresses them out and it’s dangerous if they aren’t retrieved in a few hours. What I didn’t find out yesterday: the release location. So I have no idea where yesterday’s was relocated to. And he or she has not left my mind since, her or his face, so tired, with such big eyes, and a really weird mouth. Also, what happens after relocation? What’s the opossum’s relation to the group? Was it a he or a she? Did it have any babies?

April 27, 2008 * 5:19 pm