CorpsePoetics (formerly WinePoetics)

2003-12-12T06:37:00.000-08:00

GALATEA WILLINGLY STEPS DOWN FROM THE PEDESTAL TO SPEAK

And the Winged Corpse descends into H(e)aven. This Blog shall now rest in peace.

Please feel free to follow the jasmine perfume into moi new blog

THE CHATELAINE'S POETICS

at

http://chatelaine-poet.blogspot.com

where she continues to pare herself down to become ever closer to Poetry...

O ye Negative Energy! You shall be stopped at the Gate!

2003-12-07T20:26:00.000-08:00

BACK BRIEFLY FOR SUCH IS THE POWER OF ADOBO!

ROWWRR! ACK!

And nine million and one peeps jump back from their computer screens. Astonished, they watch brief vertical slits appear on their screens, then disappear....fade into a beaming radiance before said screens revert back into the familiar image of the Long-Lashed One....but this time with two cats, one perched on each lovely shoulder.

Sorry, did Artemis's paw startle you? The Corpse beams. My cats aren't de-clawed, but they are very sweet and playful! Anyway, here's grey Artemis who had pawed at your screen....and here's Scarlet the diva. Aren't they precious? And peeps watch for a few minutes while the Angel croons at each feline. Blue wings flare in background....

Blink.

Then Corpse gives back attention to peeps long-starved for her attention. Don't pout. I know you've all missed me. (Thanks for e-mails and recent mentions on blogs despite moi absence; I just flew a quick blog roundabout.) I do promise to come back....and I do promise A VERY SPECIAL TREAT for my RETURN!!! Just check in every now and then as MOI SHALL RETURN!!

But for now, I'm back just because I promised to participate in blogland's first ever

ADOBO BLOG PARTY!!!!

Here's an adobo poem from my forthcoming book, Menage a Trois With the 21st Century! This is part of the Gabriela Silang poems -- hey, what's a Filipino poetic series without an adobo poem?!

Grandmother’s Fable
As Gabriela Pines for Chicken Adobo

I feel I should savor
my childhood measure of a house

where grandmother
gave birth with abundant abandon

where grandmother died
more radiant than a sun’s implosion--

Seashells adorned the sills
for so many windows--

I could feel grandmother’s
disbelief in walls--

Capiz shells introduced
Corot’s “The Origin of the World”

with mica flakes peeling away
as slowly as a vintner’s “bad year”--

A modest interior
refuted jagged angles--

Clouds of cushions
recycled chicken feathers

softening every piece of narra furniture--
Against hand-stitched covers

white lace and silver sequins
collaged together angels

as if they could never fall:
as if a harpsichord could last an eternity--

From this one visit
to grandmother’s house

I choose to immortalize
another woman’s lost history

aided by translucence
and another poet’s “transposition

of birds into daughters”--
Grandmother stewed chickens

with soy, vinegar, salt and pepper--
I always ate more than one helping

foregoing milk for rice wine
as I prefer my tongue

sodden, thus, fulgent--
I feel I should savor

memory as proof:
Someone shall remember you and me

2003-12-01T20:22:00.000-08:00

HERMIT POETICS (#2)

Two of my new three babies arrive this week, followed by the third baby in a few weeks. The elves are grinning and prepared.

Then I noticed that the sky is ripped today, with its edges having dissipated into grey. So I have to fly up there and do some repairs, which will necessitate transferring some of the color from my lovely blue wings. Sky should always be blue.

This is all to say: I will be off blogland for probably a while. Probably won't be reading many blogs, either, so if you wish to tell me something, send a backchannel e-mail. Meanwhile, do feel free to backchannel me if you have an answer to:

Why must writing a poem require the poet to be grief-stricken?

2003-11-28T07:43:00.000-08:00

TREVA

So my family came up from L.A. to join us for turkey-day. While waiting for them to arrive, I was in the studio working on my novel. Now, as you might glean from reading this blog, when I develop a work, I often find it useful to inhabit the personas of said work (e.g. angels). So, there I was in the studio (I first wrote, novel), behaving in one of the ways that facilitates the writing -- in this case, I was crooning to a Barbie doll with long, black hair (guess who that is) seated in front of a tiny pink computer (you press the keyboard and the screen shows a pink heart).

By the way, this is a "Pinay Barbie" which is different from the usual Barbie. I view a Pinay Barbie as a postcolonial subversion of the Barbie doll for an entirely too complicated reason for me to go into now -- but I mention this as I know certain of youse otherwise would get on moi case for having a Barbie. Anyway...

...there I was crooning to "Marites," the Pinay Barbie and my family arrives. I didn't notice them arrive, which is why my niece Treva apparently was standing, wide-eyed, in the doorway to my studio for a minute watching me interact with Marites....

Later that evening, amicably drying pots and pans (amicably since moi belly was pleasantly full), the conversation gets around to what I sometimes do as a poet, in terms of researching some of my projects. Out of the blue, Treva approaches me and pats me on my left shoulder. She whispers, "It's okay. Everything will be okay."

Treva is 12 years old.

2003-11-27T00:13:00.000-08:00

MOI IS NOW THE MOTHER OF THREE!!!

Okay. As Rhett mischievously recalls, I was interviewed by Sophie the cat at the St. Helena Animal Shelter to see if she'd consent to be my owner. I did attend the interview. In fact, I liked her. Two to three-year-old black cat. Light jade eyes. Soft purring as I stroked her.

Afterwards, Tom said she's just like me. I replied, "What do you mean?"

"A loner. Likes to do her own thing. But very appreciative of receiving attention when she wants it."

Okay....we won't go there further. But there's also one significant issue affecting our cat adoption. As of December 20, our household is due to receive a German Shepherd puppy. So whichever cat we adopt, it would have to be prepared to deal with said puppy.

Sophie apparently wasn't -- something about peeing on counters. That was devastating. The hubby, forthwith, took me to another animal shelter in Sonoma. Shadow. Lovely grey cat. But other issues. Telephoned St. Helena Animal Shelter again. They asked us to come over and be interviewed by Maria.

We went and were interviewed. The thing is, there are hundreds of cats at these animal shelters. So the animal shelter cat people choose which cat shall interview you, based on what you say you are looking for over the phone.

What we need to realize is that cats choose you, not the other way around. While we were making Maria's acquaintance, we were chosen by two other cats: Scarlet and "Ruth." To make a long story short, we decided to be adopted by Scarlet and "Ruth" and will pick them up next Friday. Scarlet has a multicolored -- brown, orange, black, red -- fur that Tom likened to an abstract painting; just gorgeous. "Ruth" is half Siamese, grey, delicate....a clear lady.

We don't know much about Scarlet's background but "Ruth" was dropped off in a litter box with 9 new kittens! "Ruth" is just over one year old but she's already dropped 9 babies -- but that clearly took a toll as nursing turned her into almost skin and bones.

Anyway, the reason I keep putting "Ruth" in quotes is that I've renamed her "Artemis," the virgin goddess of the chase. I don't know -- I sense that the animal shelter people called her a Biblical name to reflect her grace and sacrifices. Well, I wanted to give her a new life (and fatten her up) -- and referred to virginity as, surely, nine babies is enough!

I read a few days back that Catherine changed the name of her cat Winnie to Jude. Then I read Nils say "cat: you can't just change your cat's name...you'll set a sequence of events so vile and reprehensible into motion, irrevocably i might add, that the cosmos just may never recover"

Nils sorta spooked me...but I spoke to the shelter peeps and they said it won't matter for Artemis, The Cat Who Used To Be Ruth, because they'd only had her for two months and so the name they gave her might not have connected yet....and as she's just over a year old, she's still adaptable enough to receive a new name...

Plus, sometimes, the shelter people called her "Ruthie" and I figger if rhyme makes a diff I can always call her "Artie" (and I'll still be happy that Artie is short for Artemis) and, ANYWAY: isn't Artemis a better kitty name than Ruth?

Anyway.

So, today, we spent hours and don't ask how much mula at Petco and Walmart buying FOR TWO CATS AND ONE DOG: beds, blankets, carriers, toys (I confess I went overboard with the catnip toys), Xmas stockings (of course), food (dry food, wet food, and "treats"), litter boxes and litter, leashes (the cat ones have bells on them), dog and cat tags, scratching posts, puppy shampoos, cat bathmat (it's that thing that humans devised and cats probably won't use but which I nonetheless acquired that you place right outside the litter box so the kitties presumably would wipe their paws off on them before returning to rest of house), water and food bowls, fur brushes, and a partridge in a pear tree.....it's enough to make one dizzy and I did get dizzy. The fact that I got moiself bath beads and new socks while shopping for them aminals didn't alleviate what it took to fill up five shopping baskets....

So, that's the scoop (from the litter box; I have been advised to use clumping litter) on SCARLET and ARTEMIS. Moi new cats!

And now: the story of the dog!

I am blissed to announce Scarlet and Artemis shall have a brother:

ACHILLES

He comes with a Bio!

Achilles is a black and tan Brezel German Shepherd
Born October 21, 2003

Dam (Mother): Dam: V Nube vom Magisterdamm, Sch. III (Grand Sire: VA Max della Loggia dei Marcanti)

Sire (Father): VA Neptun von Bad-Boll, Sch. III (Grand Sire: VA Jeck von Noricum)

I don't have photos of Achilles through the internet, but you can see his parents at http://www.hausbrezel.com/german-shepherd-puppies/puppies.html; they're the second couple in the middle of the page.

Aren't the parents gorgeous? So you can just imagine how their puppy looks; extrapolate from photos here. Perhaps something like the two in the third photo down after the header "MORE HAUS BREZEL PUPS."

======

Then, because Moi lives on a mountain, I'm now having deer fencing built to create a paddock for them where they'll be separated from the coyotes, big deer, a mountain lion, rattlesnakes, wild turkeys, porcupines, skunks, looooooong-eared wabbits and other wild animals.

Aaaaahhhh yes. Hermit Poetics in the making.....The Angel is preparing her h(e)aven .... stocking where her ark landed with animals (a second German Shepherd is a real possibility) .... a place where gods shall never betray -- what poems might come from such a place?

2003-11-26T23:00:00.000-08:00

OH WOW

Thanks for the attention Nick and Tom.

Tom, I am -- hard to believe -- almost speechless over your paragraphs; so stunned I can't even preen. Let me just say they mean much to me as I know you are a painter as well as a poet, di ba? Salamat.

2003-11-26T20:12:00.000-08:00

OH NO: NOT ADOBO ON ULO NANG ASO

Yum Yum. The adobo party continues its crescendo towards December 8. Today: Jodie Reyes!! With his Italian version and my French appropriation, we've got European representation! (Tho I've lost track: did someone say spam adobo? And I do mean SPAM, not spam!)

And Barbara of the former Had Nothing To Say Blog (yeah, right) continues salivating over adobo (why do I sense seduction poetics lurking here, sweetie?)

But fer crissakes Tatang! Cat fucking adobo? There is indeed a story re Sophie -- or rather non-Sophie -- coming up in a brewing post. But it's not because I ate the cat -- cat pulutan? That's just plain obscene. Worse than that -- I've been meaning to chime in on earlier pinoy posts: ULO NANG ASO!!!???? (although, cackle: I do lub dat inside flip joke y'all!).

***

Okay. For kicks -- here's an offer: The first non-Filipino to e-mail moi that s/he knows what we Filipino bloggers have been tsismising about as regards ULO NANG ASO will get a bundle of fabulous poetry books as a prize.

2003-11-26T09:57:00.000-08:00

THE LAST SAMURAI -- NOT!

Well. Now that "great sex" is over, Moi returns online in time to field this letter from moi boy and super-dooper poet Paolo Javier. Paolo writes Mama (that's Moi to youse):

Dear Superfriendz:

I know a lot of the critics have been praising this film (for the most part), but don't be deceived--"The Last Samurai" is an offensive, orientalist nightmare. While most levelheaded people already took this for granted (Tom Cruise clad in samurai armor? & it's NOT a comedy??), I actually thought I'd give the film the benefit of the doubt, esp since the free screening I attended was offered by ACV. Well, I'm not here to state the obvious, but rather to discourage you all from supporting this film. Spend your hard-earned money on something else this Thanksgiving weekend! Just read the following CASTING CALL for the film:

"Casting beautiful Asian women for Warner Bros.' The Last Samurai PremiereAfter-party to be held in Westwood on Dec 1st.. Women will be dressed as village women from the film's wardrobe department and mingle 'in character'through the party, helping to create the ambience of ancient Japan, circa 1870's. There is no pay, but a chance to be part of this year's biggest Hollywood premiere with a guest list including Tom Cruise and the rest of The Last Samurai's fantastic cast!!

If interested please forward a picture and information ASAP to:

Cheryl Rave
Entertainment Producer
Warner Bros. Special Events
(818)954-3549 phone
(818)954-3011 fax
Cheryl.Rave@Warnerbros.com"

(taken from the blog: http://www.livejournal.com/~slanderous/)

Now I don't wanna spoil "TLS" for everyone (it does a good job on its own doing that, believe me), so for those of you who are planning to see it, STOP READING HERE. For those curious to receive the gist of the plot, please read on! & get a sense of why I think the film's title ought to be changed to "AMERICA'S FIRST ASIAN FETISHIST".

paxxo,
P.

--

PAOLOVERVIEW:

1) WHITE MAN (Cruise, playing a general) slaughters a village of innocent "redmen", then, feeling guilty about his actions, looks to atone for his sins in a foreign land,

2) namely Japan. Taken captive by the samurai, he learns the Way of the Warrior, & decides he wants to be one of them. Then,

3) WM gets to live in the house of the family of the samurai leader he'd killed in battle prior to his captivity, but for some magical reason the children of the slain man take a quick liking to him. Not only that,

4) but the slain man's widow finds herself attracted to WM. To add insult to the husband's memory, the widow asks WM to wear her hubby's armor in the final climactic battle between the samurai & the emperor's army. Then,

5) WM is not only able to regain his honor on the field of battle, but also gets to enjoy the spectacle of the emperor's army falling tearfully on their knees in reverence of his heroic actions (actual scene, y'all). Oh, & in case I forget--WM is the ONLY survivor on the samurai side. Then,

6) he is able to sway the emperor away from his most trusted advisor, & to assist in the emperor's decision over the future of the land. Then, looking forward to a life of peace in the country, WM retires

7) to the village of the (now obliterated) samurai army, where he finally gets to shack up with the widow, who is overcome with joy at his return.

=========================

Now. The Angel's span is so expansive she can even be ... pragmatic. As we say in poetics: cultural capital is not agreement; it's attention. That is, I'm aware that press, even bad press, might actually increase attendance for a movie -- but Moi figures that if you are aware of the concerns in Paolo's letter, it at least may affect your reception of the movie as something that's not just entertainment...

Peace, y'all.

2003-11-26T08:54:00.000-08:00

OFF THE CUFF RUMINATIONS

Thanks to Guillermo for sharing Stephen Spender this morning. Seems timely to so many issues being discussed nowadays, like when Spender says:

"If poets are associated with madness it is because some poets have inhabited a world of their own metaphors, taking them quite literally."

***

From more than one blog pops up the issue of the reality of words (or lack thereof). This is a different issue, of course, from implications of appropriation...although related. But the notion of whether words have meaning is different from how speakers colonize others...

***

When one writes a poem from hate, it's not surprising when it's a bad poem (which is not to say a good poem is possible....of course "bad" vs "good" are terms I'ma using here simply for curatorial convenience as...uh, this is a post off-the-cuff...)

***

The advantage -- and disadvantage -- of opposition poetics is that the author doesn't have to think, merely react.

***

Common sense is that the appropriator proclaims "freedom of speech" while those being appropriated protest. What's (often) not common sense is for the former to act all aggrieved when faced with said protest -- unless one is so super-needy for attention that one no longer discriminates among various types of attention.

***

To love is to appropriate. But that's not the only kind of love.

***

I often wonder whether peeps who confuse words with physical acts aren't getting enough sex. Or enough great sex.

***

I should get offline as I don't get great sex online.

2003-11-25T14:23:00.000-08:00

TOOT STILETTO TOOT

I love moi horn. It's got a fat velvet ribbon tied up in a bow with its ends dangling off .... my new toy. TOOT.

Gads...what I do to amuse moiself...

2003-11-25T14:09:00.000-08:00

P.S. DON'T LEMME FORGET TO TOOT THE LOVELY STATIC

I forgot to note in this photo of Barry surrounded by a bevy of beauties that there's a book in front of him (gifted by poet-publisher James Meetze):

THE FREQUENCIES by Noah Eli Gordon

I highly recommend it, too! These poetry books -- along with Barry's own OPERA -- make lovely Holiday gifts, y'all!!!

And she raises her latest toy, the brass horn...

2003-11-25T14:06:00.000-08:00

ON MOI LATEST TITLE

Was it we who sparked the problem,
seeing rainbows in other folks' oil spills?
--from #32 by Rodney Koeneke

Nine million and one peeps click onto Corpsepoetics and promptly fall off their chairs from the unexpected -- and loud -- sound of a trumpet BLARING STILETTOS INTO THEIR EARS! Once said peeps crawl back onto said chairs again and cautiously and helplessly stare back onto their computer screens, they see the Long-Lashed Angel guiltily looking at them as she tries to hide the brass trumpet within the folds of her voluminous velvet skirts.

Sorry, the Angel whispers. I didn't know the trumpet would blare so loudly...

Then she perks up, eyes glittering. OH, BUT GUESS WHY I WAS TOOTING MOI OWN HORN!!!!????

Peeps sigh and shake their heads. But one besotted peep asks WHY and one is enough for the Angelic Corpse to keep tooting!

Because Rodney Koeneke just proclaimed me -- that's MOI to you! --

MAYOR OF ROUGE STATE

!!!!

She raises the trumpet again but as she sees the peeps duck, she promptly lowers her hand.

Okay, okay....no more tooting. But do let me read from Rodney's proclamation! And she whips out a parchment to read his e-mail, uh, florid scrawls on antique paper as to why he designated her Mayor:

Lesley thought the Methodist minister comment was right on-target! It's funny b/c I was raised Lutheran, and the sermon was always my favorite part of the otherwise soul-dulling service--a place where the spoken word was taken seriously and revered like nowhere else in the bland suburban sprawl.

Angel looks up. Isn't that interesting? Recovering the sermonic sensibility! Rodney ain't post-avante! He's avant garde! Then she continues to share his reply to her earlier thoughts on Rouge State:

I'm happy about Tom's comment too; I think a lot about how 'non-poets' (though we're all poets there on the inside somewhere, aren't we?) will respond to my work, and to the work of other writers I admire. On that score, you can't do much better than winning a comparison to the Magic Flute, can you? And from the 'professional' poet, Ms. Wine Poetics herself, what a boost to be compared to John Yau! You'll have no trouble imagining me preening as I read it.

Hmmm, Angel thinks. Wonder what Rodney looks like when he preens...Then she blows a kiss at her peeps and sez, "I do want to share something I told Rodney -- which is that I think we're all born poets and it's the living that often leaches away that aspect of ourselves from, um, ourselves. Anyway, such leaching has certain implications about how we live our Poetry, no?"

She raises her trumpet again just to amuse herself by seeing certain peeps flinch. Okay, okay, she soothes. No more teasing. Here is a poem from the state of which I am the newly-proclaimed MAYOR!!!!

This is just one of the poems that caused Rodney Koeneke's ROUGE STATE (Pavement Saw Press) to win the 2002 Transcontinental Poetry Award!

#32
Space, then, is time made visible by things
so that when the empire strikes back
it's at air, and hits the mustachioed subalterns
               of the preceding century
with a force that splinters our bleacher seats
in history's cramped stockade.

Just as the phallus devolves into a crocus
or a tower in which the old woman's grandchildren
might live, so does the stodgy mulatto
at last learn to swivel in the captain's chair
and insists on your presence tonight at dinner
near the bosprit, towards the wake.

Was it we who sparked the problem,
seeing rainbows in others folks' oil spills?
Or us who deserve credit
for getting the flywheel to purposefully oscillate?
Whose physics hipped the groundlings
to the city's architecture:
ships anchored snugly in the estuaries,
guns poking up at the quays?

Probably April will change us, after years
of gamma rays. The cannonades may be
less terrible; hot couples without much scruple
will tamely saunter the explanades.
It will be Sunday and people will get boozy
behind the modular barriers surrounding the Civinc Center.
We were only making literature:
               Space, then, is time made visible
                               by things.
My greatest achievement that summer
was keeping skinny, while the boulevards
were filling up with words.

2003-11-25T08:47:00.000-08:00

ADOBO POETICS

Meditations on adobo, as Sunny wily-ly points out, is not just about chicken! "Adobo -- eating it, cooking it, talking about it, thinking about it -- is also about memory, colonialism, cultural contact, consumption, family, cuisine, the senses, identity... and it's good to eat too!"

Like, Barbara writes a hay(na)ku:

most tender

when
simmered in
a pressure cooker.

But one can say Barbara here just encapsulated "Adobo Poetics", to wit: the poet who insists in floating in a pressure cooker is often the most tender to criticism. Or, from fire leaps up the poem. Or, from compressed coal leaks out the diamond....yadda whatever -- it's early in the morning, ya know....so Barbara is gleefully chattering on her blog (I guess she's really inspired by eating) but, Dear, whilst I love moi San Miguel beer (the more kayumangi, the better) -- I also can drink wine with adobo. I'm WinePoetics -- I drink wine with anything since Poetry is about everything....(I sound like I'm about to sermon like a Methodist minister, but that's the story of the next post).

Speaking of simmering, did I read that right? Tatang Rhett wants to cook the Corpse? Honey, y'all don't need spices to find Moi .... uh, spicy.

Oh, and then Tatang write: "Yes, we want titillation and ecstacy, but we also want to know if you are pulling our legs and winging it." When it comes to poetry, no one can more ecstatically wing it than the Corpse! Spicy preen.

Then Jean (of course you have to become a cook! If I can do cheese and crackers, anyone can cook!) wonders whether Corinne is committing sacrilege with turkey adobo. Naaaah....in an age of constructs; Corinne, at least, is putting her pot where her pen is!

Still, Moi is the Mistress of Desecration. No one does French Adobo better. Hah? Well (sheepish cough), that's coq au vin -- I just appropriated it into Filipino....

Anyway. But, to *get real*, we are backchanneling behind the scenes for moi old idea of an ADOBO COOK-OFF!!! We, here being Leny, Sunny and moi (anytime after Dec. 16 daw -- maybe in January after the holidays?). But, okay you Bay Area Flips -- let's chatter.

But until then, check out the first Adobo Hay(na)ku over at Leny's.

And (and this means you, too, Aimee, Michelle, Jodie, Joey, Ian, Erna of maArte and others) don't forget that on blogland (and you don't have to be Pinoy to participate) --

December 8 is Adobo Blog Party!!!!!

If you don't have a blog, you can e-mail Sunny or even Moi and we can post your offering so you can party on with the Adobo Poets!

2003-11-24T20:11:00.000-08:00

AT BARRY'S BOOK PARTY!!

Thanks to Michelle for photos of the West Coast launch for Barry Schwabsky's OPERA -- like this one with Barry and Michelle!

Then there's this one of Barry surrounded by a bevy of beauties -- oh, wait. I had to say that since I'm in this photo, too!! Preeen. I'm the one caught hiding behind Barry's back as I tried to hide my wings.

What a hoot. I love the Bay Area -- its poets gave such a warm welcome to Barry and his words. Smooches to you all!

2003-11-24T09:26:00.000-08:00

"A WORK OF BURNING WORDS"!!!

Moi is humming above the clouds....and now 9,000,001 peeps see her begin to scoop from the sky as she starts to paint her wings a lovely sunlit blue....

She pauses to look at her peeps -- I'm sure you all want to know why I'm purrrrring this morning! Diplomatically, her peeps stifle their sighs and ask: OKAY. WHY?

Flutter long lashes as she preeeeeeens.

BECAUSE LOOKIT AT THE CURRENT ISSUE OF BOOKFORUM! IT CONTAINS JOE DONAHUE'S REVIEW OF BARRY SCHWABSKY'S OPERA!!!!

From BOOKFORUM:

OPERA: POEMS 1981-2002
BY BARRY SCHWABSKY
SAN FRANCISCO:MERITAGE PRESS.
104 PAGES. $14.

Dazzling modulations of phrase and tone mark the twenty-plus years of poetry gathered in this collection of work by art critic and frequent Bookforum contributor Barry Schwabsky. In lines immediate, musical, and moving, Schwabsky's offhand, elliptical precision amounts to a kind of intimate postmodern speech. These are poems lavish with perception, often forming whole poems within poems: "Our pleasure is an imitation / of two people kissing / in the park. And in that dark hemisphere / it's never too late to fool yourself." Opera find spectacles of desire in the quietest corners of our lives. In "Songs for a Light Sleeper," Schwabsky speaks with a lyricism so quietly incantatory that one can imagine his words catching the ear of a precursor, Hart Crane, somewhere in Elysium:

Fictions of wind
the uncreated shadow
down this street

all eyes rimmed
with darkness
which is no possession

requires eloquence
another burnished summer
brush on my cheek

But no cadence can dissolve death, even in a book called Opera. And as Schwabsky cautions, "once you start writing elegies you'll never see the end of them." Still, the closing poems are resonant with a depth that belies their casual air. Despite their discretion they confirm: This collection is a work of burning words.
--Joseph Donahue

2003-11-23T23:48:00.000-08:00

COUCH SWEETIE

Peep awake on couch has some helpful (Nov. 21) posts on my earlier muttering about how silence might be political or poetically-social. Interesting and stimulating thoughts in the various passages you kindly took the care and time to cite. Thanks for sharing.

2003-11-23T17:47:00.000-08:00

ADOBO PARTY-TIME!!!

Adobo is of the hand-made life
The sticky juice of pungent cloves
Clings for days
Clings to your hair and collar
To your pillow and sheets
Carries over into your dreams
Of Home.
--from "The Power of Adobo" by Leny M. Strobel

Sunny invites y'all to an ADOBO PARTY!!!!

December 8 daw ang deadline, y'all.

Sunny and I have a dream of someday doing an Adobo tasting party here in the Bay Area. Someday -- cause sooner or later, we gotta get real and *colonize* naman yun fictional constructions, di ba? I mean, I can't think of a more useless poem than a food poem -- let alone adobo poem -- if you don't end up wrapping physically as well as literally your lips around that succulent meat, licking, biting, chewing....swallowing! If you have never gotten your chin greasy on adobo, don't even expect that poem to resonate!

Sage and poet Al Robles once told me, the best way to get poets to unite is to eat together.

Hmmmm....Manong Al, of course, would be the first to say eating together would go a long ways to solving mucho differences, whether or not we're talking pinoys and/or poetry. So: _______ and _______ (and as many ________s as wanna join), anytime y'all want to eat together, I'll cook (or not cook, whatever).

And where's the San Miguel....?! I'ma ready to toast MABUHAY!

2003-11-23T13:33:00.000-08:00

LYRICAL MYTILI AND RODNEY AS MOZART

Delighted to see Kasey's report on the Mytili Jagannathan and Rodney Koeneke. This was an enjoyable introduction (for me) to Mytili's work -- I don't have much to add to what Kasey said, except that I particularly adored her poem referencing the movie "Kama Sutra." I remember seeing that experience and just floating about on a silken river of colors, colors, colors! Every so often, I also felt myself floating on pleasure, listening to Mytili.

I also was purring during Rodney's reading of poems from his wonderful first book Rouge State. I am glad he wore a white shirt and a pair of black pants as it fit his non-bombastic style of reading which -- though it may not have been what he intended -- reminded me of my childhood Methodist minister sermoning at church. What is a hoot, of course, is how the presentation style contrasted with the narrative nonsense of Rodney's poems. I use "nonsense" only to stress what I thought were poems made of pure music.

I want to digress to share a rare reaction by the hubby -- a rare reaction for Tom rarely goes to poetry readings (for a long reason, partly related to some, um, rather egregious readings I used to drag him to when I was a neophyte poet trying to explore what this poetry world is about). Anyway, to Rodney and Mytili's reading, he -- as is his wont with poetry readings -- surreptitiously brought a book to read in case he got bored. He didn't open it at all. In fact, Tom had this to say about Rodney:

"Reminded me of Mozart and The Magic Flute ... yes, not straight narrative but still accessible because he made it fun ... a real pro ... unexpected, not the usual blah blah..."

Good enough for me! Here's a sample of Rodney's "not the usual blah blah" poems:

I have collected brown envelopes from P.O. boxes,
Taught square dance at the local Sunday school
I have built a chocolate ziggurat of oafter dinner mints
And snacked my way to its dark, funereral bowels.

I have entertained a taste for Nembutal
And find it weaker stimulant than sound Welsh tea.
I have indulged a secret lust for tummy tucks
Then banged up my body like an unclaimed airport bag.

My foyer is dark with pink and womb-like silks.
Beneath this heavy sweater, I can't breathe.
I resolve to make an ending. I politely decline to begin.
Double yet sterile; beginning, I end.

*****

An unexpected bonus to the experience of hearing and seeing Rodney read was to hearken back to the memory I identify as my turning point from being a fiction writer to poet. This was when I stumbled across John Yau's poem "Conversation at Midnight" in the American Poetry Review (long before I met John). I read John's poem -- how it subverted meaning but only to make the words seem more pure through other qualities like sound and rhythm. Rodney's poems offered me a similar experience -- pure music...thus musical integrity.

2003-11-23T11:52:00.000-08:00

ON DEFENSIVE POETICS

It's all so (sadly) predictable -- poetics, human nature. When one is feeling defensive, it's difficult to listen.

And when one wants to be on the defensive -- particularly when feeling embattled is to relish the receipt of much attention -- it's difficult to listen.

And the tactics, too, are predictable. This whole Whatever problems you have, I have problems, too. So predictable I just need to do a reprise from a recent post:

From my Nov. 19 post: "I am reminded of Japanese American poet David Mura's point that when he talks about the racism he has encountered as an Asian American or Japanese American male, a respondent would say something like, "Oh, I know exactly what you mean and can relate to how awful you must feel! For example, when I ______ [fill in the blank here on some sort of abuse [now I would add anguish] said respondent may have experienced]" -- a strategy that, without dismissing whatever abuse or anguish that respondent experienced, allows for not addressing directly Mura's raised issue on Japanese-Americans' problematic history in the U.S."

============

What blissful relief to see this and this. Enforced parts of my history: the use of "Filipina" in a Greek dictionary to define "maid"; the use of "monkey" to describe a half-Filipino/half-African American boy; the use of "Filipino" to define "pedophile..." it can go on...and these are examples from people who weren't necessarily *intending* anything awful, but nonetheless....

============

A time for everything. A time, indeed, to be silent? Be silenced? Can you just shut up and listen?

============

Are you strong enough to shut up? Are you a good enough poet to know when form must equal content and, thus, be silent?

============

When someone mentions an issue, there is an issue here to be addressed and that issue may not just be a means for you to talk about yourself.

============

The paradox is that when an issue is raised that affects one's poetry practice, it's difficult for people to listen and not just dig in to defend their style of poetry....when, if anything indeed should be fluid, it should be Poetry.

============

Sometimes, when one is mired in opposition poetics, a poet ironically ends up exacerbating his/her victimhood by wallowing in such. To be informed by opposition is not the same as to be formed by opposition.

============

To be informed by opposition is not the same as to be formed by opposition. This, for example, is why I -- as someone interested in the effects of colonialism -- write ekphrastically, Love Poems, food poems, beauty of sunset poems.

============

From my background of engagement in the Asian American literary movement, I am aware of the tension between autobiography and aesthetics, particularly when the former is of the type that lends itself to easy(ier) consummation via what's considered exotic or politically correct, etc. My eye, therefore, often goes dubious when I see certain Asian American poets make a big deal about their family backgrounds in their poems and bios. This, though, is difficult to straddle as I must also try to be aware of when my skepticism might prevent me from listening to those stories.

============

Shall we look at things from the standpoint of energy-generation? One can burn oil to create electricity. To create electricity is a good result, but unless one includes pollution-control mechanisms in the oil-burning equipment, one also ends up polluting the air. It's okay to rely on imagination for making poems, poems being the good result. But if the poet doesn't care about responsibility (not at all the same thing as censorship, mind you), the poet often ends up also creating pollution.

============

Pollution only ends up being subjective -- i.e. one person's pollution is another person's work of art -- if one believes Poetry is mere words.

2003-11-23T00:39:00.000-08:00

LIFE IS ALSO GOOD

Saturday dinner. Coq au vin for 17 people, including stellar young artists Stella Lai and Chris Oliveria. With the latter's help, the former installed DO NOT TOUCH ME on my walls; the installation is comprised of those words spelled out by teeeeeeny Che-Che masks. That's the kind of graffiti I liked. Afterwards, dinner. The wines -- yes, yes you grumpy oenophiles who think I've been ignoring you, this post is for youse:

1996 Chartron et Trebachet Chevalier Montrachet Clos des Chevaliers
1996 Bacio Divino (Napa Valley Super Tuscan blend of cabernet, sangiovese, petite syrah, merlot and cabernet franc)
1995 Henschke Mont Adelstone Shiraz
1991 Barca Vehla (Portuguese)
1994 Zind Humbrecht Clos Windsbuhl Pinot Gris Vendage Tardive
1976 Adolf Rhinehardt Ockfener Bockstein

Afterwards, 1985 Grahams port with cigars. Life is good. Did I even mention I cooked the coq?

2003-11-22T12:06:00.000-08:00

ECONOMICALLY SPEAKING

Jodie Reyes offers an interesting examination of poetry, using economics. In particular, what caught this former economist's eye (oh, yah: I've done that, too -- I don't just write Whitman-like; I live Whitman-like) is this excerpt:

The thing is, different languages have different demand curves. The demand curve for, say, French or German poetry is much higher than the demand curve for, say, Filipino or Tibetan poetry.

Jodie's discussion focused on translations. I'm thinking, now, not on translations but more generally as regards Poetry. The "demand curve" concept is a great metaphor for moi point -- which more poet peeps should understand -- that poetry is not about competition (no fixed supply and demand). If anything, the more wonderful poems are written, the more demand there is for poems, or the demand curve rises.

Until I read Jodie's post, I hadn't thought of the demand curve aspect to Poetry -- which seems to me just another way of proving the karmic nature of Poetry. For instance, the more you draw attention to other people's wonderful work, the more attention inevitably will return to your own poems....because the demand curve rises.

So, for positive energy for Poetry -- lift that demand curve! -- here's Moi praising *another* poet (though all I really want to do is pat my own lovely shoulders), Jodie's reflections on Jose Garcia Villa:

Check out Jodie Reyes' fabulous "VILLA,NELLE" inspired by Jose Garcia Villa, as well as his very useful essay about how he came to write the poem -- specifically the incorporation of Villa's two conventions for which he had become (at one point) famous: the reversed consonance and the comma. (And, teachers: Jodie's presentation, too, may be helpful for students.)

2003-11-21T17:34:00.000-08:00

CHATTER

Has Moi been overly talkative today?

But you've been riveted, right?

Well, it's partly to distract myself from having been unnerved by two forays into pet stores today. I thought I'd shop for those thingies -- you know, those trays that cats pee in -- in anticipation of, hopefully, passing the interview with Sophie tomorrow (Sophie's the kitty at the animal shelter who's going to interview moi to see if she wants to go home with my wings). But, geeeeeeez, all those accouterments -- I don't recall any of those rhinestoned collars or polka-dotted mouse toys or catnip-stuffed abstract stuffed animals et al ever existing 30 years ago when I had a cat! I got dizzy...then started being chased by the store owner's blind 16-year-old dog who wanted to hump my leg or something. I unfurled and flew out of the store! Well, I'll try again tomorrow...

But whilst I'm on, may I just say to you pinoy poets posting your hay(na)ku -- you do know that I ain't fluent in Tagalog, right? I'ma just saying....having said that, I have Faith! Leny that your Tagalog hay(na)ku is absolutely brilliant!

But, hey: a new Hay(na)ku poet!! Corinne Domingo and check out hers entitled "what he said"! Good (and pungent) one, Sweetie!

Okay, I got Mail Order Brides and Two Poets to attend to....have a good evening.

P.S.
Oh behalf of Barry and Moi, thank you for your support, Chris!

2003-11-21T16:14:00.000-08:00

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2003-11-21T15:51:00.000-08:00

COMPLEXION POETICS

Oh
Moi God!
Do you mean

Moi
cheeks could
have been sugar-sanded!?

Moi
Lovely Face
"Raggedy and Raw"!?

Aimee! Ay, naku!! I mean, Hay(na)ku! Unnerved wingtips pats at her cheeks until, feeling their unchanged softness, the wings are soothed...

2003-11-21T12:14:00.000-08:00

THE *EFFORT* CONTINUES...

Like, how can silence be political? Or, when we're talking about Poetry, how can silence be social? (I am not positing anything; I am sincerely questioning because I don't know the answers.)

Thus, I liked seeing this helpful post on GENDER today from kari edwards.

I also am looking forward to hearing this evening during:

Koeneke & Jagannathan @ SPT

RODNEY KOENEKE & MYTILI JAGANNATHAN
FRIDAY, NOV. 21st, 7:30 p.m.
Timken Lecture Hall, CCA (formerly California College of Arts and Crafts)
1111 Eighth Street, San Francisco (just off the intersection of 16th and Wisconsin)
$5–$10 sliding scale, free to SPT members
See www.sptraffic.org for more details.

MYTILI JAGANNATHAN was selected for a Pew Fellowship in 2002; her work has appeared in Xcp: Cross Cultural Poetics, Combo, Interlope, and Mirage; and is forthcoming in the anthology Cities of Chance: An Anthology of New Poetry from the United States and Brazil. She joins us from Philadelphia in celebration of the publication of her new chapbook ACTS by David Hadbawnik's habenicht press.

RODNEY KOENEKE was born in Omaha in 1968 and grew up in Tucson and Los Angeles. He’s lived in or about San Francisco since 1986. He has published a book of history, Empires of the Mind: I.A. Richards and Basic English in China, 1929–1979 (Stanford UP, 2003); Rouge State is his first full-length poetry collection.

2003-11-21T11:49:00.000-08:00

HOLY WATER, BATMAN! ... I MEAN, HOLY WATER, MANONG!

Young Gun Poet and children's book author Tony Robles saw something at St. Patricks that amused him. So he wrote a poem about it. Then he sent the poem to Moi. Then Moi posts it below because, yah, it's a tickle!

Huh. Subtext -- so when some of moi peeps think of desecration, they think of me....why is that?

Regardless, the poem is a hoot -- and there certainly are a heck of a lot more subtexts in this poem than moi attempt just now to make the history of colonialism, immigrant and diasporic suffering, homelessness, religious hypocrisy, poverty and so on all about me (lovely -- preeen -- though Moi may be):

Holy Water
by Tony Robles

The church has
stood for nearly
a century

Its bricks have
withstood
earthquakes,
gentrification

Bricks held together
by a mixture of
straw, bone and
marrow

The elderly attend
mass
there

Business folks, working
class folks drop in
during the course
of the day

Walking by one afternoon,
i witnessed the
unthinkable

utter blasphemy
of the
worst kind

A manong
with a baseball
cap pushing
a shopping basket

with grace and
absolutely
no shame

walked up
to the front of
the church

unzipped his
pants and urinated
on the wall

People
walked by

some looked,
some pretended not
to notice

The manong
was oblivious

The sun was
out and a homeless
man nearby sat on
the ground next to

an empty
cup of
change

I walked
away

feeling
blessed

2003-11-21T09:06:00.000-08:00

GOOD MORNING FROM THE HEADQUARTERS OF THE NPA*!

Tatang Rhett is doing wonderful things ala dialogue with the hay(na)ku form, while its fever still simmers on As-Is!

Rhett, for your innovative work, I hereby designate you the December featured poet at Meritage Press's "Babaylan Speaks" column! We'll talk!

Meanwhile, as I adore kari edwards and I adore Michelle Bautista, I adore seeing Michelle guest on kari's transdada blog! Here's an excerpt from Michelle's essay on "Gender and Pronouns in the Philippines," referencing the Filipino martial arts form of kali:

The kali itself stresses that all people contain male and female energy and that we must really be both regardless of physical named gender. It's the understanding of how these energies blend, integrate and work together that make it so powerful an art.

All these Pin@y good vibes helps alleviate one of my residual discomforts from last night. I was at a posh dinner. Sat next to an 80-year-old woman. It was clear she had some problems "socializing" with me, though she acted nice. Finally, she JUST HAD TO TELL ME: her maid is Filipina.

Well, so of course off I went on a discourse on economic development issues in the Philippines that has resulted partly in the "brain drain" as well as the growth of the overseas domestic worker industry .... when what I really wanted to share -- but couldn't because it's a secret -- is how Filipinos have a grand master plan to take over the universe and the domestic workers are the front-line of that army....

---------
*"NPA," of course, means "New Poets Army...." what did youse (and you know who youse are) think I mean?

2003-11-20T23:24:00.000-08:00

GEMS: "WE ARE THE MAKERS OF MANNERS"

"Basil King's art has taken a different path since his student days," writes poet-art critic Vincent Katz. While his first love was abstract expressionism, he has forged a rugged independent surrealism. "King makes use of a free reference to human physiognomy ... allowing the emotional and formal valences to take precedence," Katz writes.
--from a Marsh Hawk Press press release

What a bounty in today's mail! I LOVE LOVE LOVE receiving poems! First, three books from Stephen Vincent :

WALKING by Stephen Vincent (Junction Press, 1983)
BY LINGUAL WHOLES by Victor Hernandez Cruz (Momo's Press, 1982)
THE POETRY READING: A CONTEMPORARY COMPENDIUM ON LANGUAGE & PERFORMANCE edited by Stephen Vincent & Ellen Zweig (Momo's Press, 1981)

Thanks Stephen! I'll have more to say on these wonderful works later.

Basil King also sent me his latest publication, MIRAGE: A POEM IN 22 SECTIONS -- a seminal work as it completes his "MIRAGE project" which previously was reflected in three other books: THE COMPLETE MINIATURES (Stop Press, 1997), DEVOTIONS (Stop Press, 1997) and WARP SPASM (Spuyten Duyvil, 2001).

As with the books Stephen sent, I'll write more on MIRAGE later as Ms. Winepoetics is exhausted, having just returned from a five-course wine-tasting dinner where the wines didn't really knit (ugh!). But, for now, here is a sample from MIRAGE , a collection of poems and memoir...this makes me weepy:

XV

Frank O'Hara, 1926-1966

Dear Frank,
The last time I saw you you'd come to my studio in the Anderson Theater and we'd crossed the street to my apartment at 57 Second Avenue. You, Martha and I had dinner, and afterwards, sitting in a chair with a drink, hyou said you were going to Fire Island for a few days. That when you returned -- you gave me a date -- I was to be sure to phone you at the museum. You said what I was doing in the studio was going to take a long time. That I shouldn't have to worry about Martha and the girls. It was my job to devote myself to the work -- and that it was time to find monies for me. That I wasn't to worry.

I walked into the lobby of 57 Second and coming out of the elevator were Joe LeSueur, Frank Lima and Sheila -- all crying. They saw me and one of them said, "Frank is dead."

Frank, we moved to Brooklyn just before Thanksgiving, 1969. Martha and I still live in the same house. Except for a teaching stint in Michigan lasting two years and one summer, we have never been away from New York for more than a month. You were right. It took a long time. Since 1985, I've also been writing Poems called ":A Painter's Bestiary." Poems about other painters' work. I think you'd appreciate them. Martha and I were in Manhattan last night to see our daughter Hetty dance. Some things do feel concrete. Some things are. On this big table are ten sketches in preparation for a self-portrait, drawings of Jacks for the card series, and many small paintings for the "Mirage."

Frank, some things haven't changed. They've gone backwards. Roi's photograph was in the New York Times the other day. He was on the steps of Newark's City Hall demanding a civilian review board because of police shootings of teenagers.

We saw Esteban and Harriet Vicente last month. Esteban is painting -- painting his way to heaven. Oh Frank, I think of Henvy V telling his Catherine, "We are the makers of manners." Of manners -- you, Frank,...

2003-11-20T10:29:00.000-08:00

FEELING LIKE A BLOG SOCIALITE THIS MORNING: COMPLEXION POETICS; A POEM IS A PATE SO WHY MEET THE DUCK; THE DIASPORIC AVANTE TAKE ON MARCOS/AQUINO; AND A LAUNCH FOR A BOOK IN THE DIASPORA!

Sweetie Aimee suggests through the As/Is Blog that I scrub moi lovely face with tangerines!

Complexion tips on poetry blogland!

Poetry! What a wonderfully expansive expanse you offer!

==============

And, yes, Li -- I love the duck/pate analogy for meeting writers in person. Here's another hoot of an excerpt from Margaret Atwood's NEGOTIATING WITH THE DEAD: A WRITER ON WRITING (Anchor Books):

"A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures," says Lord Henry Wotton in The Picture of Dorian Gray, puncturing the early-Romantic great-poet idea by taking it to its logical conclusion -- the logical conclusion being that if poetry is self-expression and a great poet puts the good stuff in himself into his work, there's not much of him left over for his life. "The mere fact of having published a second-rate book of sonnets makes a man quite irrestible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize."

Of course, as someone who lives greatly as well as writes greatly, I don't necessarily agree with the above. But Moi do plan to remember this excerpt whenever I inexplicably lapse in the future and write an egregious poem. Flutter long lashes...

==============

Flutter long lashes again! Rhett! I am so honored! Check out his new Hay(na)ku blog, please. Naturally, a poem blog can only be uplifted by poems dedicated to or about Moi:

The Fallen Angel
by Rhett Pascual

Marcos:............................Aquino:

See
what did
I tell you
................................................that
................................................she's the
................................................fallen angel savant

not
angel savant
a great avant

................................................hmmm,
................................................feels like
................................................a post avant

just
go with
me on this

................................................then
................................................you are
.................................................the people's hero

==============

Speaking of "pin@ys," Barbara Jane Reyes points you to a New York book launch for NOT HOME, BUT HERE: WRITING FROM THE FILIPINO DIASPORA, ed. Luisa Igloria (Anvil, 2003). One of my WinePoetics essays is in this anthology, though I won't be at the launch. I hope this book doesn't end up being one of those publications that publish me but don't send me a contributor's copy. (Barbara, do you have your copy yet and how'd ya get it?).

2003-11-20T09:52:00.000-08:00

AWWWW

Red Eyes. I'm blubbering this morning.

Why? Nine million and one peeps ask. Coz lookit what Sweetie Michelle Bautista wrote about Sweetie Barry Schwabsky's OPERA over at the Gura Blog! Thanks Michelle -- when a poem inspires another poem, that's Poetry continuing to work its magic....!

Here's an excerpt of Michelle's lovely poem:

ride. ride. read. ride.
resist. read. rose. rose.
red. rose. read. red. reread.
Hold on.

pleasure is the new pain. clenched. water, sugar, tea,
rose petals fall. Like holding your breath. like poems
never written. like wishes that come true. like lungs
boiling black tea. like secrets of birth. you asked me
to stay.

2003-11-20T00:01:00.000-08:00

A HOOT OF A BOOK

There's an epigram tacked to my office bulletin board, pinched from a magazine -- "Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pate."
--Margaret Atwood

I relished almost every word in Margaret Atwood's NEGOTIATING WITH THE DEAD: A WRITER ON WRITING (Anchor Books).

Here's an excerpt:

Back in 1972, I did a one-person poetry-reading tour the length of the Ottawa River Valley. This was then a somewhat remote area and not thickly strewn with bookstores; I went by bus, carted my own books with me to sell -- I was good at making change, having once worked at a sports-equipment fair -- and at one stage I hauled these books around behind me on a toboggan, due to a flash blizzard. In the four small towns I visited, I was the first poet to appear within living memory, or possibly ever. The readings were packed, not because people loved either poetry or me, but because they'd already seen that week's movie. The two best questions I got asked were, "Is your hair really like that or do you get it done?" and "How much money do you make?" Neither of these were hostile questions. Both were pertinent.

2003-11-19T20:58:00.000-08:00

OBSERVATIONS FROM BEYOND THE MARGIN....DISTILLED

How to address the very basic tension between

--those who believe in the fluidity (or impurity) of language (and identity)

versus

--the fact that words must contain (specific or mutually-agreed-upon) meanings for "Others" -- and especially the previously ignored, dispossessed, silenced and abused -- in order for said Others to obviate their silencing -- to, indeed, *Talk Story*?

Culture is abstract but also specific. Problems are specific. I am reminded of Japanese American poet David Mura's point that when he talks about the racism he has encountered as an Asian American or Japanese American male, a respondent would say something like, "Oh, I know exactly what you mean and can relate to how awful you must feel! For example, when I ______ [fill in the blank here on some sort of abuse said said respondent may have experienced]" -- a strategy that, without dismissing whatever abuse that respondent experienced, allows for not addressing directly Mura's raised issue on Japanese-Americans' problematic history in the U.S.

***

This issue is linked, too, to the inherent narcissism (notwithstanding its other merits) in appropriation poetics.

2003-11-19T08:34:00.000-08:00

MOI DECOLONIALISM SCHOLARSHIP: WHY I PREEN

Garlic, lots of garlic
Will scare off the aswang
Who would spin a curse
On a newborn
On a young virgin
On the other woman
But such nonsense
Mother said, is only for fools.
--from "The Power of Adobo" by Leny M. Strobel

Clap, clap....black wingtips clap! She pauses her morning blog jog to applaud: Rhett: you go you hay(na)ku master!

Then, she continues jogging and pauses before another blog to note: Decolonialism scholar and poet (yes you are!) Leny M. Strobel (whose adobo poem is fast becoming a classic among foodies) writes,

I realize I still don't like tooting my own horn. Maybe it's because "ang Pilipino hindi nagbibilang" (Filipinos don't always want/need to keep track of who is doing what for whom; we just do without thinking of being recompensed for it), according to MC Canlas.

In doing so, Dr. Strobel reveals one of the subtexts to why I continually preeeen on moi blog.

So I preen not just because I'm vain (though enchantingly so, don't you think?). I preen because I am a decolonized Filipino!

Gads. I'ma so deep.

Black wings cross across her chest so that wingtips can pat both shoulders....even as the angels overhead snort....whilst one angel can be heard whispering to the others, "Maybe she should stop writing posts before her first cup of coffee...."

2003-11-19T00:01:00.000-08:00

A CAT FOR ANGELS

A soul drenched in the milk of marble
goes through the floor of an evening
that rides lost on a naked virgin
It gains power over the dull man:
It is a soul sucked by lepers

What liquid hour shall river
its song on my cat
with the neck of all space?
--from "Plumage of Recognition" by Philip Lamantia

I interview Sophie -- uh, excuse me, Sophie interviews me -- this Saturday to see if she'll want to come home with me. Sophie is a one-and-a-half-year-old cat. I haven't had a pet in about 30 years. But now that I live on a mountain, I figure....and so made an appointment at the local animal shelter.

I'm actually sort of nervous. All I can think of at the moment on this furry topic is a story I recently read somewhere....something about the difference between dogs' and cats' tongues. To wit:

A dog licks you if said dog likes you.

A cat licks you if you taste good.

Then, what with my wings, don't you think a cat will think me a gigantic bird? Forget the licking -- maybe a cat would consider me a perpetual Thanksgiving turkey dinner and just want to chew on me year-round? My delicate skin scars easily, you know....and my concern is obviously shared by the other angels, some of whom are now hissing, thereby showing fearsomely sharp-tipped teeth, at me ....

She licks a wingtip. Pretty yummy, she thinks. But is that good as regards Sophie the Cat?

2003-11-18T20:45:00.000-08:00

PARKING TICKET POETICS & PLEASE SUPPORT THE CAC

I
am lovely.
Most writers aren't.
--"Self-promotional Hay(na)ku" by Tom Beckett

As-Is! And Mark Young, Joseph Garver, Sweetie Aimee Nezhukumatathil, and Tom Beckett continue the hay(na)ku fever! All that's enough to uplift me despite Parking Ticket Poetics! (Particularly since I find myself rather sucky at this hay(na)ku form, notwithstanding having concocted it with Richard Brautigan's and Jack Kerouac's help -- Thanks for the shout-out, Tatang Rhett, but the form wasn't cooked from just from the Flips Listserve...and, hey, the involvement of these American poets -- seems apt since it's a Filipino but "diasporic" form.)

Anyway. What? "Parking Ticket Poetics", youse ask? Well, Moi explains: I, quite aggravated and itchy, had to mail $35 today to the Department of Motor Vehicles Etcetera Department. Coz I apparently parked my car last week at a street in San Francisco when said street was due for its regular street cleaning.

Now, the signs on each street specify street cleaning times so that peeps won't park during those times. Obviously, I misread that sign. But I know why I misread that sign! Because rather than seeing that sign's words, I was seeing the text of a poem-in-progress dangling before my mind's eyes!

Damned poem!

This happens to other poets, right? Like -- you're in the thrall of a poem and it sorta takes over until you finally vomit it out resolved (or not resolved) on paper?

Huh. Although. $35 is pretty cheap for the price this particular poem cost me. You should see the other costs I've had to _______ well, never mind: a story for another post someday! Must go offline to, you got it, scrutinize moi wine cellar for the next bottle....!

===============

Oh, but wait. One more thing: Chad wants to know if we've met before. Sweetie (and if you read this blog, you risk being called "Sweetie"), if you've met me, you would remember as I am drop-dead ("corpse", get it?) gorgeous. Just ask -- uh, lessee: who should I pick, she thinks, fluttering her lashes -- Guillermo and he'll tell you just how lovely I am!

Okay, on that note, I can go.... oh wait again. Just as I was going to post-and-leave, poet and oenophile Rena Rosenwasser e-mails the following below. If only as a Kelsey Street Board Member, I certainly must repeat it below (I've mentioned this in a prior post but it's worth repeating!):

On behalf of Kelsey St. Press and the entire Board:

We urge all residents of California who support maintaining the California Arts Council to please consider purchasing an Arts License Plate.

You can sign up on-line at http://www.cac.ca.gov/feature/arts_plate.cfm

Right now due to slashes in the state arts budget, some of the only revenues going towards the arts are from the purchases of Arts License Plates. For $30* you can have a Wayne Thibaud designed plate for your car. You will also be actively supporting the state's commitment to literature, dance, music and the visual arts. Without the CAC's presence small presses like ourselves would cease to exist. This is a critical time for all of us to show our support of the arts.

Please forward this message to reach as wide an audience as possible.

* Dang. To think my parking ticket would have more than covered Wayne Thiebaud!

2003-11-18T10:29:00.000-08:00

THEY AIN'T HEAVY. THEY'RE MY WI...I...INGS, SHE CROONS (AKA, A CONJURATION)

Yesterday: physical therapy on my back. At one point, burning stones heaped against my shoulder blades. The very air on fire....

Nobody ever talks about the debilitating toll taken by wings -- heavy muscled wings -- when borne by human shoulders. To be a fallen angel, of course, is to be transrace: neither angel or human but a combination of both.

Transcreature, trance-creature, trance-ndence....

Of course: when I say I fly, I mean, I am writing poems.

So, I am one chapter away from completing the book for which the "100" poems at Gasps had provided footnotes. Its latest working title:

THE DEFINITIVE HISTORY OF FALLEN ANGELS:
A MEMOIR AS A NOVEL AND A POEM

Yes, a critic would label it "mixed genre." I call it all --all of it! -- a "poem."

Okay. Interested publishers, line up on the left. A long line, no doubt, for this *experimental work*. Yeah, right: long line: wingtip smacks air! Okay, I'ma gonna brew up a publisher from moi cauldron! O come to me...

Flap, flap! And off she goes with a hum under her breath for her poems conjure ... and a mending wing carefully cradled against her lovely breasts....

2003-11-18T08:09:00.000-08:00

EXCREMENTAL HAY(NA)KU (LAUGH)

There's a strain of hay(na)ku fever running through that "crazy place" As-Is! Latest are Michael Bogue and my latest link Harry Stammer! Preeeeeeen: moi form is catching! Don't ever let anyone tell you moi never, uh, extended poetic legacy! (Wingtip smack: you are so full of ....)

But Michael, Sweetie, this ain't one:

Most
Writer's write
Doo-doo

A hay(na)ku is comprised of

Oneword
Two words
Three (3) words

Here's my excremental hay(na)ku -- a sequence:

Boy--
learn how
to count shit!

By
the way
Michael and Harry

Did
you know
birds have penises?

Okay. So, believe it or not, I just realized that birds have penises so I thought....I'd share that with y'all nine million peeps!

Ugh. Late night. Methinks I need a cup of coffee...

2003-11-17T08:40:00.000-08:00

HUH

penis on a bird

2003-11-15T23:26:00.000-08:00

HERMIT POETICS: A PUBLIC BEGINNING (#1)
(AN ARTICULATION FACILITATED BY ANDREW JORON)

Here is the seed of all resistance. Here is its ratio:

O, the grieving vowel
________________________

zero, the mouth of astonishment

[...]
In a word, the uncanny reflection of an unfinished world.
--from "The Emergency" by Andrew Joron

Reading -- and highly recommend -- Andrew Joron's new book, FATHOM (Black Square Editions, 2003). Andrew's tour de force opens with a poetics statement....and said structure reminds me that I need to write such a poetics statement, too, for my next book to come out from Marsh Hawk Press. My book's title will be I TAKE THEE, ENGLISH, FOR MY BELOVED. The poetics statement I am reminded to write will explain why the biggest mistake I have ever made as a person and as a poet is to have "married" Poetry.

=============

While I was recently in New York, a poet called me a "Muse." (Specifically a Muse "deus ex machina.") I detest any truth in this characterization. I loathe this role whose nature makes me betray myself.

=============

The title poem is like many in Andrew's latest collection for being wonderfully cerebral and evocative -- offering a night music like the sound of glass shattering in some distance, and yet generating a sort of trembling whose strands include a deliciousness in shivering. Here is an excerpt from "Fathom":

"The face of the Other who refuses to wake
Resembles a clock.

That entry was lost, that was the entrance
To this Time of writing--

where the eyes of effacement were hoarded."

=============

I negate this post for it negates me. But I won’t delete it. I retain it to remind myself…

2003-11-14T16:44:00.000-08:00

HEY HEY IT'S THE HAY(NA)KU!!!

Sweetie
peeps of
the world unite!
--"Hay(na)ku Manifesto for Eileen Tabios" by Tom Beckett

OH MOI GOD!!!! I mean, AY NAKU!!!

Thomas Fink and Tom Beckett are posting hay(na)ku on As/Is!!!!

Long lashes dampen as she sniffles. Such sweeties y'all are.

Salamat! I feel so honored I don't even mind that seeing your hay(na)ku on the screen startled me offa my chair and I'm now rubbing my sore ass from falling to the floor!

After that! Moi? Grumpy?

HAVE A GREAT WEEKEND!

2003-11-14T16:28:00.000-08:00

FRIDAY TODAY AND NEXT WEEK

Durian is a fruit: a big, green thorny fruit. But wait, it is not just another exotic and expensive fruit from South East Asia. In fact, it is considered "King of the Fruit" throughout the region. Personally, I think that is an understatement of the millenium since we Asian are humble people. In fact, the actual status of Durian is "THE GOD OF ALL FRUIT!". No kidding! Yeah, yeah, I know, some (unadventurous) people would rather die than to smell the STINK of a durian.
--from Durian Online (DOL)

The world's greatest musician happens to live in the Philippines: Jose "Joey" Ayala. His fans call him "Joey Ayala" but I like calling him "Jose" as it's more grown-up and -- though don't trust moi memory on this -- I believe he and I once had a conversation where we mutually agreed we should both grow up. Uh, I hope he's doing better than I am on this goal...

Anyway, Jose -- the only poet I know to poeticize stinky-smelling but sweet-tasting durian (okay: who's got the dirty minds?) -- just began a blog and I'm mentioned in today's post!!! Da problema is he visited one of my Philippine publishers, specifically the one who's putting out my erotica any month now. Hope Jose doesn't give me a string of pinoy puns based on moi content.

Meanwhile, Leny's post on Mail Order Brides reminds me that Lizabeth Oliveria Gallery is opening an exhibition by performance/visual installation artists "Mail Order Brides" comprised of Eliza "Neneng" Barrios, Reanne "Immaculata" Estrada, and Jenifer "Baby" Wofford. The three perform as a group but also work individually. I'm not yet familiar the others but I consider Reanne Estrada to be among the most promising artists of her generation. Check them out!

I'm cutnpasting below information about M.O.B.'s exhibition opening next Friday; I hope to go there and then go hear Rodney Koenecke (just got Rouge State -- thanks Rodney!) with Mytili Jaganathan at Small Press Traffic. Scroll down also for information on their reading. Come spend next Friday eve with moi!

Mail Order Brides/M.O.B.
Lizabeth Oliveria Gallery is pleased to present "Honeymoon Suite Nothings" an exhibition of work by the Mail Order Brides/M.O.B. (Eliza "Neneng" Barrios, Reanne "Immaculata" Estrada, and Jenifer "Baby" Wofford). The exhibition will run from November 21st through December 20th. An artists' reception will be held on Friday, December 21st from 6-8pm.

"Honeymoon Suite Nothings" features digital prints inspired by a place that, according to Umberto Eco in Travels in Hyperreality, "the poor words with which natural human speech is provided cannot suffice to describe." Born of the uncompromising vision of former beauty queen and avid accordion player Phyllis Madonna, the Madonna Inn is a pilgrimage for the imagination, a mental Mecca for California artists and retirees alike. It has the most uncanny ability to be at once wholesome, opulent, and debauched. Much like the Dolphin Hotel of Haruki Murakami's "A Wild Sheep Chase" and "Dansu Dansu Dansu," the Madonna Inn suggests that our immediate realities are tentative, at best. Between the walls of each compartmentalized theme room, fantasy and reality reconcile and cease to exist as contradictory states. One suspects that the profusion of mirrors in each of the suites IS in fact a network of portals to other worlds, darker dimensions?

It is in this sovereign visual universe of Rococo cherubs and rock waterfall showers, in the spirit of double meanings and hidden realities, that the Mail Order Brides/M.O.B. hold their annual strategic planning meetings. All of the Madonna Inn tableaux were shot on 35 mm print film during one such retreat and printed as large-format digital files during an artist residency at the McColl Center for Visual Art in Charlotte, North Carolina.

The Mail Order Brides/M.O.B. are a trio of california based Filipina-American artists engaged in (wedded to) a collaborative process of cultural investigation. Eliza "Neneng" Barrios, Reanne "Immaculata" Estrada and Jenifer "Baby' Wofford have worked together since 1994, in diverse creative endeavors such as photographic psychodramas, public service posters, karaoke videos, and museum make-overs. They have exhibited at the McColl Center for Visual Art in Charlotte, North Carolina, and New Image Art in Los Angeles and in the Bay Area at the De Young Museum, the Triton Museum, the Luggage Store Gallery, Galeria de la Raza, San Francisco State University, and the San Francisco Art Commission Chinatown Gallery. They have completed public art projects for the San Francisco Art Commission's Market Street Art in Transit Program and a mobile video projection throughout the city of Charlotte. The Mail Order Brides/M.O.B. have also screened at various film and video festivals throughout the U.S. such as the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival, the San Francisco Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, New York's Mix Festival and Chicks With Flicks, and Detroit's Museum of New Art.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
lizabeth oliveria gallery
49 geary street, suite 411
san francisco, ca 94108
415*229*1138 (t)
415*229*1139 (f)
www.lizabetholiveria.com
web@lizabetholiveria.com

RODNEY KOENEKE & MYTILI JAGANNATHAN
FRIDAY, NOV. 21st, 7:30 p.m.
Timken Lecture Hall, CCA (formerly California College of Arts and
Crafts)
1111 Eighth Street, San Francisco (just off the intersection of 16th and
Wisconsin)
$5-$10 sliding scale, free to SPT members
See www.spttraffic.org for more details

MYTILI JAGANNATHAN was selected for a Pew Fellowship in 2002; her work has appeared in Xcp: Cross Cultural Poetics, Combo, Interlope, and Mirage; and is forthcoming in the anthology "Cities of Chance: An Anthology of New Poetry from thw United States and Brazil." She joins us from Philadelphia in celebration of the publication of her new chapbook ACTS by David Hadbawnik's habenicht press.

RODNEY KOENEKE was born in Omaha in 1968 and grew up in Tucson and Los Angeles. He's lived in or about San Francisco since 1986. He has published a book of history, "Empires of the Mind: I.A. Richards and Basic English in China, 1929-1979" (Stanford UP, 2003); "Rouge State" is his first full-length poetry collection.

And here are some advance words on Rodney's book!

"In Rouge State, Rodney Koeneke puts the blush back on the demotic. His idiomatic montage is a careening screed dictated from a state of alert, all puns intended to turn the hose back on a culture run literally amuck, and whose marquee reads: Raw, Red, Rouge, Incarnadine. Welcome to these states!"
--Michael Gizzi

"Cannily an(a)esthet(ic)izing the misogynist and orientalist phantasms that are projected onto the digital plateaux of its own prosodic bravado, this is how Naked Lunch might have turned out if it had been written by Robert Browning having a sex change operation. There can be but one sordid bordello of this magnitude, and Koeneke has erected it squarely at the fissure where the simulacrul Middle America of Pop Warner and bubble top vans collides with a paracolonial hallucination of Eastern inscrutability inhabited by five-dollar houris and hack oud players. These elegant verses have teeth, and be warned: behind each incisor lurks a Dunciad."
--K. Silem Mohammad

2003-11-14T07:28:00.000-08:00

ON MERRIAM-WEBSTER'S "WORD A DAY" PROGRAM

Restive
(--after “On God (En Garde),” an essay by Archie Rand)

The farmers are monitoring the sky. Rain dilutes sweetness in the grapes. Knuckles knot into themselves, mimic the knees of hundred-year-old grapevines. The cabernet hang like purple testicles. I am always fingering a bunch. Sometimes I pinch off a globe, split its skin before my lips and suck at its membrane. The farmers measure brix mathematically. I want my body to determine truth like Cezanne painted rocks instead of images. When I see the winged shadow glide over the fruit-laden fields of September’s wine country, I know better than to question how my body doubles over. How my mouth gasps. I feel blood flowing out of a creature, somewhere, felled on its path. Its last vision will be a vulture’s open beak. Sweetness, let the harvest begin under the most livid sun. “Sweetness”—perhaps I mean You, dear “God.” Lord, I am praying for life and living—I am making poems.

======

The above poem was first published in xStream (thanks to poet-editor Jukka!). The poem is also featured in "Definitions," a section in my latest poetry manuscript ENGLISH FLIRTS that's comprised of one-paragraph prose poems all written out a la "first draft, last draft." The poems were written in response to the "word of the day" sent to me by Merriam-Webster. For a while, I subscribed to this program so that I would use their e-mailed words as titles for new poems; the process allowed me to write poems that transcended intention or the limits of my imagination as regards the birth of new poems. Of course, in the process, I also expanded my vocabulary which is why I remain a subscriber to MW's program (though I no longer use it to generate poems) -- perhaps this is a program to recommend to your students?

2003-11-13T09:24:00.000-08:00

Q & A WITH A PEEP AND DUTCH HENRY BRINGS IN THE HOLIDAYS!

A Sweetie writes in with question: "you're just making up the angels and elves, right?"

Moi answer: "This is a Poetry Space, Sweetie. Nothing is fictionalized. It's all true. It's all real."

And allow moi to add: it's such a hoot watching my angels chase after the scampering elves! Oh! And there goes an angel ascending now with an elf clutching her white ankle! Watta hoot!

Holidays always arrive early for Mis. WinePoetics...and the official start this year was last night at La Table Restaurant where Dutch Henry sponsored a wine tasting dinner. The wines just keep getting better and better at this winery -- kudos to winemaker Scott Chafen -- which also presents some of the best deals in California for fine wine! Recommended from Dutch Henry as all were yummy from last night:

Chardonnay, Los Carneros, 2000
Argos Meritage, Napa Valley, 2000
Cabernet Sauvignon, Napa Valley, 1999
Zinfandel, Napa Valley, 2000

Make these part of your Holiday drinking! Poetry in the glass!

2003-11-12T09:32:00.000-08:00

A NECESSARY TURNING POINT

Blue was wings.
--from "Red" by Ted Hughes

Just finished Diane Middlebrook's biography of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath: Diane Middlebrook, Her Husband: Hughes and Plath (Viking, 2003). Made the morning turbulent.

So many ... emotions, conflicting emotions, resulting from this book.

Among them: as soon as I read the last page, I was immediately compelled to take down Ted Hughes' Birthday Letters, which, of course, are his poems about his life with Sylvia Plath. Middlebrook's work makes me read these poems with fresh eyes -- more empathetic eyes.

This morning -- and as someone who loves to tinker with the concept of color as narrative -- I'm particularly moved by the last poem in Birthday Letters, "Red." Here's an excerpt:

When you had your way finally
Our room was red. A judgement chamber.
Shut casket for gems. The carpet of blood
Patterned with darkenings, congealments.
The curtains -- ruby corduroy blood.
Sheer blood-falls from ceiling to floor.
The cushions the same. The same
Raw carmine along the window-seat.
A throbbing cell. Aztec altar -- temple.

Only the bookshelves escaped into whiteness.

Yep, I read "the bookshelves escaped into whiteness" as alluding to (poetry) books on the shelves containing redemption by offering poems alchemized from troubled experiences. But I also don't believe the poem is a rationale for making certain decisions in life. This is a conclusion I am still in the middle of making true. Which is to say, up until literally this point of writing this, as a poet I have been incredibly stupid. No need to go into details -- and certainly, this is not to say I won't be stupid in the future. But, even stupidity should be something a poet should try to make new....

"Red" ends with Hughes' meditation over what happens to be my favorite color, blue:

Everything you painted you painted white
Then splashed it with roses, defeated it,
Leaned over it, dripping roses,
Weeping roses, and more roses.
Then sometimes, among them, a little blue
bird.

Blue was better for you. Blue was wings.
Kingfisher blue silks from San Francisco
Folded your pregnancy
In crucible caresses.
Blue was your kindly spirit -- not a ghoul
But electrified, a guardian, thoughful.

In the pit of red
You hid from the bone-clinic whiteness.

But the jewel you lost was blue.

Synchronicity: there must be a reason, of course, why blue is my favorite color. Anyway, no, Mike, I haven't found my lost poem (thanks for the kind words). But it's okay. It was just another poem from a series that I think I've been whittling for far too long; I see the bone appear as white as the empty page. Time to move on....the sky today over St. Helena is seamless, sunlit blue. Time for poems where my wings shall become the only dark clouds against it....until, someday, my black wings, too, shall learn and finally lighten into

BLUE

2003-11-12T07:59:00.000-08:00

edwards AND NEALON THIS SUNDAY!

And since I've just written on Chris Nealon and admire kari edwards, it seems appropriate to pass this on:

The New Brutalism Reading Series Presents:

kari edwards
&
Chris Nealon

Sunday, November 16th
7-9 PM
at 21 Grand
449 B 23rd St. Oakland
$4 cover for your thirsty maws

http://www.21grand.org

Please come see two fabulous Bay Area writers!

Chris Nealon’s poetry raises the lyric to an ironic ecstacy, but is no less sincere for it: “I'm misprision / I'm direct address / Apostrophe a condom / And my stomach hurts Calendula: You Flower / O Chronicle / My Emperor” (from Ecstasy Shield). Nealon was born in Long Island, New York and lived in Boston and Seattle before coming to SF to teach at UC Berkeley in 1996. He has a 2001 chapbook from Black Square Editions, Ecstasy Shield, and a 2001 book from Duke University Press called Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion before Stonewall. Black Square is also bringing out a book of poems, The Joyous Age, next year. He owns tons of flags and haven't illegally downloaded anything.

kari edward’s poetry plays with the fluidity of a gendered subject, creating a text where poetry, prose and hyperreality merge: “I am the night mother in the nubian eight, I am the night buoy asking to sink in the mother. I am the buoy asking to sink in the night mother” (from “a napkin ring for my silent butter”). edwards is a poet, artist and gender activist, winner of New Langton Art’s Bay Area Award in literature (2002), author of iduna, O Books (2003), a day in the life of p. , subpress collective (2002), a diary of lies - Belladonna #27 by Belladonna Books (2002), obLiqUE paRt(itON): colLABorationS, xPress(ed) (2002), and post/(pink) Scarlet Press (2000). She is also the poetry editor of I.F.G.E’s Transgender -Tapestry: a International Publication on Transgender issues. Her work has been exhibited throughout the united states, including denver art museum, new orleans contemporary art museum, university of california-san diego, and university of massachusetts - amherst. edwards’ work can also be found in Experimental Theology, Public Text 0.2., Seattle Research Institute (2003), Blood and Tears: Poems for Matthew Shepard, Painted leaf Press (2000), Aufgabe, Fracture, Bombay Gin, Mirage/Period(ical), Van Gogh’s Ear, Fulcrum: an annual of poetry and aesthetics, Pom2, 88: A Journal of Contemporary American Poetry, Narrativity,Bathhouse, The Journal of Bisexuality, Milk Magizine, Moria, Boog City, and The International Journal of Sexuality and Gender Studies.

2003-11-11T22:17:00.000-08:00

CHRIS NEALON'S "PEPPERMINT STICK"

"Look," I whispered, as the black-eyed angels blotted out a V of sky -- but even then, the melody they leave behind, isn't it a scrap of other melodies, given a new setting, and distracting us from getting back to wherever it was we heard it the first time? I can't tell if I should fight for the original, or just let go and float on new arrangements: is anyone going to be annoyed, or notice? It hurts right here, below the navel ..."
--from "The Joyous Age" by Chris Nealon

And I also enjoyed hanging out with Meritage Press author Garrett Caples during the Small Press Traffic Soiree, partly as he gave me his latest release from his Ferocious Rhino Press: an absolutely nifty limited edition chapbook featuring the title poem of Chris Nealon's forthcoming collection The Joyous Age (Black Square Editions, Spring 2004). YaY! for Chris, an extremely talented poet (with whom I enjoyed sharing "exuberant and witty" repartee). Here's another excerpt from the title poem which makes me breathless in anticipation for Chris's book (just BREATHLESS!):

"I guess you could say you have to crack things open to get at the utopia inside; so that there's a rhythm to their separateness from us, whether or not we're able to step to it, and its echoes off the wall of our minute preoccupations trace the independence we so cherish in them. I'm not sure. Either way there's a whole terrain the analogy doesn't cover, where it actually owes a debt to what it can't accomplish, like a sophisticated chaos of horns purchased at the price of a childlike bass line, or the mingled senses of terror and release you get watching a flogging. Trying to describe it makes me unlike myself, but I can't stop--when you've had what I have, a deeply, demonically permissive master, there's really no option but to keep going, even if what you get from that innocence, that endless submission to the words, feels like being fucked with a peppermint stick, it hurts and makes you giggle then it hurts again...."

2003-11-11T19:17:00.000-08:00

JENNIFER MOXLEY: ANTIDOTE TO MY GRUMPINESS

I suppose that I have half-imagined
my remembrances to be fissures
through which this place makes known
the continuance of my absent friends,
as stars sometime were thought the holes
through which angelic light came shining.
--from "The Sense Record" by Jennifer Moxley

For whatever reason, I so loathed today that I took a three hour afternoon nap just to be unconscious through three hours of it.

I was so cranky that several times, I even had the thought: when I read poetics statements, I just wanna tell some poets: Oh, grow up.

(I've had that thought, too, about my own poetics statements....)

How much of this can be attributed to the fact that I'm in the middle of a new biography by Diane Middlebrook, Her Husband: Hughes and Plath -- A Marriage?

Anyway, I looked for medicine and picked up Jennifer Moxley's The Sense Record and other poems. I've heard of her but haven't read much of her poems (though she was on my very loooooong to-follow-up-on-list). I picked up my copy of her book during this weekend's Small Press Traffic soiree.

Well, okay. So I've read Jennifer Moxley and I am so so so so so so pleased that I'm back in a chirpy cheerful moooood! I am always gladdened when I read great poems by a newly-discovered poet. And these poems are beautiful for being worldly, easily fitting into their spaces, gently yet oh so keeeeeenly insightful, balanced, joyously displaying the sheer wonder of wonder... quicksilver but lip-sticked a gay red, poems with small but enchanting noses (which is to say, there isn't a single word/phrase that sticks out from the body of the poem more than it should), fraying edges of a white silk scarf, the architecture of pure white marble etching the seamless blue of a sunlit sky...Ach: you have seen clearly the ancient Helen's face...

Quite obviously, I am so positively struck by Jennifer Moxley's poems that I've gone and done become inarticulate....That's okay. I'm also healed now of today's grumpiness. Thank you, you ...

... you, whoever you are; I know nothing of Jennifer Moxley -- I didn't even know she was Steve Evans' "partner" until I read her bio in the book stating so. Well, dang, Steve: pour only the best bottles for her!

P.S. This postscript to serve primarily as Notes to Moiself, though take from it what you will: reading through The Sense Record also evoked, for me, the lucidity of Molly McQuade's (in)sight(s), the liveliness in spirit of fictionist Amanda Davis, and Barry Schwabsky's post OPERA poems. As regards the latter, granted those poems are not yet in wide circulation, forcing you all to take my word for it for now but, someday, you'll see. Okay: enough blogging; I'm off to play with the elves! The wee ones are scampering all over the place helping me prepare the home for the holidays! I love the holidays!

2003-11-11T11:46:00.000-08:00

ANTI-BOREDOM POETICS

Once one has identified a source for opposition poetics -- and, yah, opposition is a great means for sourcing energy, nu? -- and created work revolving around such opposition, how to get past that? So as not to inadvertently become victimized by that which one has sought to battle?

Not really a complicated question. It's something more fundamental: most basic. How to avoid getting stuck in a style.

*****

I admire most the artists who never cease the attempt to get beyond style. The effort requires vision, courage....and, what can be the most difficult: stamina.

*****

Bathos is defined as witnessing an artist with much stamina and not much else.

*****

Shit. This post contains negative energy. But I won't delete it. Today: I am EXTREMELY GRUMPY.

Hairtips trembling....black feathers falling to gesture dimensions from previously non-layered air....

2003-11-11T08:45:00.000-08:00

KELSEY STREET PRESS ON CAROL MIRAKOVE AND THE CALIFORNIA ARTS COUNCIL

The reason I reluctantly missed the Carl Rakoski celebration this weekend is because I was attending a Board meeting for Kelsey Street Press. From said Board meeting, two items worth sharing:

First, congratulations to Carol Mirakove of Brooklyn who will be the third recipient of our Frances Jaffer First Book award. Her book was nominated by Juliana Spahr and chosen by this year's judge, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. In 2004, we will release Carol's book entitled OCCUPIED which is a book of witness on the Afghan / Iran / Iraq wars.

Carol is the third winner. Prior recipients of the Frances Jaffer award were CUSP by Jocelyn Saidenberg, chosen by Barbara Guest; and Unknowne Land by Elena Rivera, nominated by Myung Mi Kim and chosen by Kathleen Fraser.

Secondly, as I'm sure we all know, the Arts are under severe financial pressure. We think it worthwhile to remind that people can throw support in a fun way to the California Arts Council by purchasing the personalized "Arts License Plate."

To my buddy, Art! And she raises her mug of coffee in toast....

2003-11-10T08:53:00.000-08:00

NEED-A-BREAK POETICS

Hmmm. I seem to have lost the only copy of the one poem I've written since finishing my project, "Footnotes to the History of Fallen Angels." But that reminds me of one of moi favorite stories as regards poetry:

A poet's house caught on fire. Said poet is standing on sidewalk watching firemen try to put out the blaze. It looks like the whole house and its contents will turn to cinders, though. A neighbor approaches to express sympathy, specifically asking, "Did you get your writings out of the house?"

Poet sez: "Nah. All my copies of all my work were in there."

Neighbor expresses more sounds of sympathy.

Poet sez: "It's okay. The true poet will always have new poems to write...."

I don't know if that's true, but it's a favorite story of mine. Anyway:

Six deer sighted through fog whilst on morning java. Yelled at the two by my newly-denuded rose bushes. Crooned at the other four. Crooooooooooooon....lovely brown eyes they had.

2003-11-09T08:17:00.000-08:00

SMALL PRESS TRAFFIC SOIREE NO SMALL TIME!

"Recognize me in sunshine"
--Barbara Guest

A great time at Small Press Traffic last night, enlivened by Kevin Killian in so many ways, not the least of which was his appearance as Anna Nicole Smith (great legs, Kevin! Look forward to seeing you in a mini again!) Congratulations to SPT's Awardees:

Barbara Guest: Lifetime Achievement Award (she read three poems and made air palpable).

BOOK AWARDS:
Anselm Berrigan for Zero Star Hotel (great to see Anselm in SF; he signed his book partly by noting Nov. 8 was his "mom's birthday"! Well, HAPPY BIRTHDAY to we-all-know-who!)

David Bromige for As In T As In Tether (also showed up to receive his award by delivering an affecting recitation of a poem)

Louis Cabris for The Mood Embosser

Rob Fitterman for Metropolis

Jennifer Moxley for The Sense Record

Lorine Niedecker for New Goose

Meanwhile, from SPT's auction, I am the oh-so-pleased owner of a Rosmarie Waldrop broadside, "Song" that begins:

began gold
in the eyes
wind lifting
sheets

So go read these titles that garnered the raves of the SPT Board! Go, indeed, and begin gold in your eyes....!

2003-11-08T09:01:00.000-08:00

TODAY!!!!

Nine Lives--Small Press Traffic's 9th Annual Literary Soiree & Auction
Saturday, November 8, 2003, from 3-8 p.m.
California College of Arts (CCA)
1111 Eighth Street, San Francisco (just off the intersection of 16th &
Wisconsin)
email: smallpress@ccac-art.edu
415-551-9278

Over the past years our auctions have been enlivened by the appearance of all kinds of extraordinary one of a kind items. Zadie Smith, the UK author of WHITE TEETH, autographed a tube of toothpaste for us. Gore Vidal sent us his proof copy of his New Yorker article on Monica Lewinsky, while Don DeLillo sent a manuscript page from MAO II. Anonymous art activists raided Michael Ondaatje's waste paper basket, and we sold his trash--an action that got us dubious press in the New York Times. Last year reclusive wunderkind JT Leroy let us auction off his corrected version of METEORS,--and on and on. This year, Pulitzer Prize winning writer Michael Cunningham pried the face off a travel alarm, and signed it with THE HOURS, while Irish novelist Jamie O'Neill (AT SWIM, TWO BOYS) made a St Patrick's Day T-shirt that will bring tears to your eyes--all to help us raise money for San Francisco's premier avant-garde poetry showcase.

$10 admission for a full day of

SURVIVING, THRIVING and JIVING at NINE LIVES

It's our ninth annual soiree event and what better trope to employ in the copy than the nine lives of the cat? We're an organization that lives like a cat, on kindness, dexterity and dumb luck, but we reward you with so much affection!

Food * Music * Cash Bar--featuring the Meow Mix cocktail! * Celebrity Appearances * Raffle for Fabulous Prizes * Poet's Theater * Presentation of SPT's 2nd annual Book Awards, the best books of poetry published all of last year . . . and our 2003 Lifetime Achievement Award goes to Barbara Guest

OUR BIG ANNUAL AUCTION OF LITERARY MANUSCRIPTS, MEMENTOS, AUTOGRAPHS, SIGNED BROADSIDES, LETTERS, PHOTOS, ARTWORK AND EPHEMERA
You'll claw your way to the front. Highlights of this year's CAT-alogue include:

* Michael Cunningham, alarm clock, yes, alarm clock signed by the author of THE HOURS for our auction

*Gertrude Stein HOW TO WRITE, Allen Ginsberg's copy annotated by him

*1963 San Francisco Poetry Festival broadsides MINT (Helen Adam, Blaser, Duncan, Lew Welch, Ferlinghetti, LaVigne, Jess, and many more) thanks to Donald Allen's generosity

*Early US modernists Lola Ridge, Waldo Frank, Marianne Moore, the whole Cary Nelson crowd!

*Robert Creeley, unpublished poem

*Barbara Walters ALS to Ann Landers

*Rare double display manuscripts by Karl Shapiro AND David Shapiro

*Manuscript material, signed books et cetera, graphic works by--Anne Rice, Anne Carson, Ted Berrigan, Josephine Miles, Barbara Guest, Terry Eagleton, Andre Maurois, William Plomer, Jamaica Kincaid, Ian McEwan, Jamie O'Neill, William Meredith, Isabel Allende, Christopher Fry, Leslie Scalapino, Philip Whalen, Rosmarie Waldrop, too many in fact to mention! Come and gawk, come and bid, it's all for a good cause.

WORLD PREMIERE OF "THE SMITH FAMILY,"
A NEW PLAY BY CRAIG GOODMAN AND KEVIN KILLIAN
A tornado's heading toward Fort Smith, Arkansas, where the Smith family is hosting their annual reunion. Barometer's falling, pressure's mounting, Jack Smith is up on the roof filming "Flaming Creatures," Wayne Smith torn between his devotion to his wife Liz Smith and her sister, former Angel Jaclyn Smith. Patti Smith conducts a secret Romeo and Juliet affair with one of the Jones family (Tommy Lee), while Anna Nicole Smith struggles with demons of her own. Kiki Smith has made a 500-ton vagina for the Venice Biennale, while Will Smith ponders his floundering career. Meanwhile an interloper's moving on in, and the ghost of tall, elegant Alexis Smith prowls the plantation with her spectral dog. Susan Smith looks at her two kids in the back seat and then looks at the lake and then--As Morrissey (from the Smiths) croons in the background, Heaven knows we're miserable now. When you've got a big family, who's to blame for all the problems of the world? With Taylor Brady, Anne Collier, Gerald Corbin, Margaret Crane, Kota Ezawa, Tanya Hollis, Kevin Killian, John Koch, Karla Milosevich, Yedda Morrison, Rex Ray, Laurie Reid, Jocelyn Saidenberg and Wayne Smith (as himself).

Soiree opens 3:00 p.m.
Auction Preview 3:30--5:30 p.m.
Presentation of Book Awards 5:00 p.m.
Auction 5:30 p.m.
Raffle drawing 7:00 p.m.
Play 7:00 p.m.
Continuous food, drink, entertainment and stupid pet tricks, it's the 9 Lives of the Cat at Small Press Traffic!

2003-11-08T08:36:00.000-08:00

GARBAGE IN, GARBAGE OUT

''They are occupying the world,'' said Shazad Ahmed, one of the residents. ''What do you expect the people to do? Kiss them?''
--from Morning News

Start with a stupid policy formed from ye olde assumption military strength will overcome ignorance of history. "Garbage in, garbage out."

No flowers. No parade. No beribonned banners. No easy ending in sight.

More assuredly, more coverups and propaganda to come.

2003-11-07T18:10:00.000-08:00

TWO MASTERS => EKPHRASIS

There are two reasons for reading the current (November) issue of Art in America.

The first is an illuminating article by Tan Lin on the drawings of Mark Lombardi who "used pen, pencil and paper to elegantly map hidden networks of politics and finance."

The second reason is to specifically check out Archie Rand, one of the eight painters highlighted as among a group of painters "enliven(ing) their medium in distinctive ways." (And I'm not just praising Archie Rand because he's a Meritage Press artist.)

In Lombardi and Rand, you see masterful coherence displayed by two artists whose technical mastery of their forms is placed to great use to explore the content -- nay, the meaning -- of their subjects.

Lombardi basically graphs the relationships among some of the greatest scandals of our times -- like Whitewater and remember BCCI? In doing so, he creates drawings as pleasingly abstract as other artists who deliberately explore amorphous shapes. Lombari shows how the argument of politics vs aesthetics is tedious, is unnecessary.

Rand, meanwhile, is simply a genius. To even see the reproductions in the magazine of his paintings is to see a result that I often feel many (more hip) painters are striving to attain, but are too *undeveloped* to achieve; in part, this relates to Rand's integration of high and low, e.g. comics with the very formal aspects of, say, color. His most recent series is brilliant -- trying to present Jews "as if they were Canadians," which is to say, not from a perspective of victimhood or nostalgia. (Those interested in diasporic issues should also check out Rand in this issue -- Hi Leny!)

Okay, nuff said on that. I could wax for pages on this but I have to go to dinner and to know moi is to know that I have my priorities straight as regards food vs poetics.

Yum. But do yourself a favor and check out the works of these gentlemen: Mark Lombardi and Archie Rand. In fact, I suspect some poets might pick up something from these two for use in their....poetry.

2003-11-07T15:03:00.000-08:00

MEANWHILE, BACK IN THE COUNTRY
--a post for Kasey for writing Deer Head Nation

Left the mountain for two weeks. Returned today to discover that deer had jumped the fence to eat my lovely roses. Sudden eyes of lightning and lips of thunder: venison is yummy with stewed berries!

Wingtips fling open windows. Long lashes cast shadows down the mountain.

YAH HEAR ME DEEEEEER?!!!!!!!!

I'MA GONNA SLICE ME SOME STRIPS OF VENISON WITH MAH WINE TONIGHT!!!!

P. FUCKIN' S.

WHAT IS MISSY WINEPOETICS' MIDDLE NAME?

TWITCH YOUR ANTLERS -- THAT'S RIGHT!

WHAT IS MISSY WINEPOETICS' MIDDLE NAME?

YOU GOT IT: IT IS ROSE. ROSE. ROSE.

YOU WANNA EAT MOI? I'MA GONNA START AN EXPORT BUSINESS EXPORTING CHANDELIERS MADE FROM YOUR ANTLERS, YOU ROSE-CHEWING DEER!

EAT MOI ROSES AGAIN AND I'MA GONNA BAPTIZE YOU ALL WITH THE SAME MIDDLE NAME CALLED:

BUCKSHOT!!!!!

Wingtips reach for windows and slam them shut. Sshhhhh.....sshhhhhhh.....sshhhhhh. Inhale/Exhale .... and .... the tips of her uncut hair .... slowly .... cease .... trembling....

2003-11-07T07:21:00.000-08:00

PETTYCOAT RELAXER JOHN OLSON

What nice company in Pettycoat Relaxer, Two!

Thanks to co-editors Carl Annarummo and Michael Chiumiento for including two of my poems. If I recall correctly, I'd written the second one about Gabriela Silang falling in love with John Olson by riffing off the Table of Contents of Olson's book ECHO REGIME (Black Square Editions). I love John Olson's poetry. Like this excerpt from his "Xylophone":

the naked thirst of color

wiggling in the dark like a tongue

of silver hit with a hammer

Gives more of an oooooomphh! to my morning than any cuppa java!

2003-11-06T21:03:00.000-08:00

DEAR POET,

What is it we give each other -- gold, shark's fin --
other than a renewed sense of the miraculous?
--from "Earthshine" by Arthur Sze

He imposes orders as he thinks of them,
As the fox and snake do. It is a brave affair.
Next he builds capitols and in their corridors,

Whiter than wax, sonorous, fame as it is,
He establishes statues of reasonable men,
Who surpassed the most literate owl, the most erudite

Of elephants. But to impose is not
To discover. To discover an order as of
A season, to discover summer and know it,

To discover winter and know it well, to find,
Not to impose, not to have reasoned at all,
Out of nothing to have come on major weather,

It is possible, possible, possible. It must
Be possible. It must be that in time
The real will from its crude compoundings come,

Seeming, at first, a beast disgorged, unlike,
Warmed by a desperate milk. To find the real,
To be stripped of every fiction except one,

The fiction of an absolute--Angel,
Be silent in your luminous cloud and hear
The luminous melody of proper sound.

--from "It Must Give Pleasure" by Wallace Stevens

2003-11-06T07:47:00.000-08:00

from "ADVENTURES OF A WIFE"
DON'T GET IN THE WAY OF MOI CHOCOLATES!

Tom the hubby pokes his lovely emerald eyes into her studio. It was her humming, he sez, that caused him to interrupt his flow and go to her. Now he asks, "Why so cheerful?"

She flutters long lashes, thus revealing the bits of chocolates dripping from her eyes.

"I thought you'd finished with Halloween," hubby sez.

She raises a chocolate-stained wingtip to pop another, uh, chocolate between her luscious lips. "I have a few more -- they're breakfast!"

Looks at her. A sunlit ocean shimmering within his eyes. Then dispels the mood by noting, "Aren't you scared you'll get fat?"

Looks at him. Hears the Dark-Winged Ones beneath her ceiling begin to cackle. Leashes her instinct to pout and, instead, sez at Emerald Eyes with much aplomb:

"I'm married. What do I care what I look like?"

2003-11-06T07:35:00.000-08:00

NEW YORK NOTES

"Mistake. Mistake. Mistake. Mistake. Fail. Blunder. You have to write so badly you then can transcend it."
--Arthur Sze on writing poems

"Each book is like a marriage and each poem is an act of lovemaking."
--Timothy Liu

"The work gets harder, even as you know more about it....particularly when you are seeking the edge."
--Mei-mei Berssenbrugge on the effect of experience

I had a kick-ass panel this weekend during the AAWW national conference on Asian American Poetry. It kicked since my panelists were Arthur Sze, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Timothy Liu. Gads: the energy in that room! Wise words and an enthusiastic audience made for a panel that could have gone on much longer! Afterwards, Arthur and Mei-mei both looked at me and said they normally hated panels but this one really worked! Kewl. Here are some notes that make sense to share outside of the conference's context, with the caveat that I can't guarantee the accuracy of direct quotes given my awful handwriting (that caused more than one nun to slap rulers at my poor wingtips masquerading as fingers when I was in elementary school):

On Making A Poetry Book:
ARTHUR: Spent 7 years writing the poems that would come to make up his book Archipelago. He began working on the structure of the book in the 5th year. "Certain poems don't fit in [a book's] field of energy." Said he hates the attitude of some poets who are the type to feel along the lines of: I've been writing for four years and it's time to put out a book. Still types out individual poems on an IBM typewriter; he begins retyping poems into the computer when he's forming a book. During that typing-into-the-computer, he then can sense if he's being repetitious, in terms of themes or text, for purpose of a poetry collection.

TIMOTHY: Agree with Arthur that the book is organic. But he's more prolific; he writes a lot of poems and then he sifts through them to form books. He considers his process to be an accretion because "I am writing ONE BIG BOOK." Nonetheless, he does want each book to be different, likening a book to an art exhibit; if the show is always the same, the audience is going to be disappointed. [Then Timothy mentioned the example of a very prominent poet (but whose identity I won't reveal here) who claims to work very hard at ensuring each of her books is "different" from each other; but, as Timothy points out, her books are actually quite similar....a point which I very much appreciated since -- in both poetry and art -- I notice that many peeps get to a style and then never grow further from that style, particularly if said style receives audience affirmation....]

On Titles:
ARTHUR and TIMOTHY: the poem's title usually comes after the writing of the poem

TIMOTHY: the provisional working title is like an itinerary; the final title is when you've reached your destination

Length of final versus working drafts:
ALL say they've never written a poem that's been shorter than their first drafts.

ARTHUR: He can take as much as seven months to complete one of his multi-sectioned poems.

On Visual Arts and Language:
MEI-MEI: The visual arts is way ahead of language in terms of (avant garde) ideas (e.g. feminism). In poetry, for example, they're still questioning abstraction.

ARTHUR: Mother was a painter and so was looking at paintings long before began writing poems and that has been an influence on his work.

On Process:
MEI-MEI: It's possible for an artist to create a body of work and it's society that edits.

TIMOTHY: Sometimes, I think of the process as writers going unh, unh, unh and then out finally comes this little brown thing -- and you ask: Is that it?

MEI-MEI: The margin can be the most fertile place -- where one most can grow.....Diffused mind....Gayatri Spivak's Outside In The Teaching Machine....go into a space called "hysteria"....born in China and came to U.S. The immigrant experience facilitates notions of relativity: nothing is one thing or another.....and the music of language is outside of denotation.

*********

Here's two sections of Arthur's 7-part poem -- entitled "Earthshine" -- that was discussed during my panel. I feel that Arthur is arguably the most adept poet of radiance alive today. O, RADIANCE!!!!!:

6.
Sipping mint tea in the ebbing heat of the day,
I recollect how we stumbled onto a raccoon
squashed between boards leaning against a fence,
saw tadpoles wriggling at the edge of a pond.
On the living room table, thirty-six peonies
in a vase dry and become crepe-paper light
to touch. Yesterday you watered blue chamisa
along the country road, while I watered desert grass
under the willow. I recollect I opened a brown,
humid box and, stunned, lifted a handful
of morels, inhaling the black aroma of earth.
What is it we give each other -- gold, shark's fin --
other than a renewed sense of the miraculous?
Nanao watched a blip on the radar screen; later,
when he saw the flash, he thought Mt. Fuji
had erupted in a burst of light. Sipping mint tea
on the longest day of the year, I sense how
the balance of a life sways, and a petal may tip it.

7.
A steady evening with a first-quarter moon;
numerous craters along the terminator are razor sharp;

I observe the ghostly bluish glow of earthshine
and feel how the moon has no permanent dark side.

A horse neighs by the barbed wire fence;
we trudge into a wet field, carrying, from under the portal,

a bee's nest in a basket, place it in a nook
of a silver poplar. Will any bees hatch in spring?

I notice thorns on the bare branches of Russian olives;
you spot coyote scat before the v-shaped gate.

We walk to where the Pojoaque and Nambe flow together --
I am amazed at how we blossom into each other.

I hear the occasional drone of cars on highway 285,
hear how the living expire into smoke

and the dead inflame the minds of the living.
When I exhale against a cold window, I see

the ever-shifting line along the terminator;
and, as the shadow cast by the rim of Theophilus

slips across the crater's floor, I feel light
surge into a honeycomb gold -- it all goes and comes at once.

2003-11-05T15:21:00.000-08:00

WHAT ONE MUST DO FOR POETRY (AKA TASSEL POETICS)

Here's a self-explanatory excerpt from an e-mail I just sent Guillermo who had kindly asked how my Monday reading in NY went:

"The Monday reading went well....but it's so telling about poetry that they scheduled us ahead of a burlesque performance, clearly hoping that some of the burlesque aficionados might be moved to attend early for the literary reading (they do that a lot apparently at that particular venue -- what a hoot!). I stayed for the first act of the burlesque show -- a shadow play, but boy did that woman manage to swing tassles well from her nipples!"

Bless you, Galapagos Arts Space of Brooklyn! You swing! Uh, I mean, you rock!

2003-11-05T11:04:00.000-08:00

HOW TO GROUP-THINK?

Must clarify my thinking on group versus individual blogging. I am uncertain, for instance, why I posted my reaction to Jordan Davis' Constant Critic review of Mary Ruefle over there at As/Is, not here...

2003-11-05T01:25:00.000-08:00

MOI IS BACK AND CATCHIN' UP

Perhaps what draws me to hula is the poetry in these chants, and the act of dancing brings the poetry to life. Words become movement. I become poetry....

I have many fire stories. I've even been learning a dance about the goddess of fire, Pele. The dance is fast and bombastic. In one part, the dancer becomes lava, surging and puffing, devouring everything in its path.
--from Corinne Domingo's blog: "'Aiha'a: Reflections on dancing, writing, and staying grounded"

Received (thanks) and eager to read:
Poetrycam by Jordan Davis
Equivalence by Shin Yu Pai
NEDGE (various issues) from Henry Gould
INVOLUNTARY VISION: after Akira Kurosawa's Dreams, ed. Michael Cross (I've done one pass-through already and this is a great read!!! Thanks, James!)

ASIAN AMERICA
I'll post more later on AAWW's Intimacy & Geography poetry conference. But, meanwhile, check out the web site for probably my last Asian American anthology project as an editor: SCREAMING MONKEYS. Going out with a bang thanks to the good works of managing editor M. Evelina Galang. So youse out there -- and you know who you are -- you next generation of Asian American cultural activists, take a look at what's up with AA literature....and continue the activism. Yes to more AA anthologies, but, yah: make it new. More important, make it more interesting than just round-ups, or focused on one-note themes like "age 40 or younger"....Okay? Okay!

Observation from plane reading:
There are interesting commonalities between kari edwards' iduna and Mei-mei Berssenbruge's latest, NEST.

Other plane reading:
Going Home To a Landscape, edited by Marianne Villanueva and Virginia Cerenio (the anthology launched Monday)
Seeing Out Loud, Jerry Saltz's Village Voice art columns 1998-2003
Love Life, a novel by Zeruya Shalev
The Hours by Michael Cunningham (it's belated but I have as high a stack of to-read-books as anyone)

Blogland
Oh yah, honey. As/Is is rockin' and rollin'! (And ya knows what I mean, Andrew!) What blog fatigue? That line-up is getting to be a mini-snapshot of poetry blogland. Why? And what will make the difference between posting there as opposed to on one's own blog? 'Twill be interesting to follow...

Welcome kari edwards, Leny M. Strobel, and sweetie Corinne Domingo to blogland! Actually, ain't it interesting how so many peeps I often discuss on this blog end up doing their own blog: Michelle, Guillermo, Jukka, Barbara Jane.....This point is most interesting to Moi because it's been a while (2 days at least) since I complimented moiself over something for which I deserve no credit. Oh yah. Moi is Back.

But before Moi became back, Moi went. I need to post to just say: this was my best Halloween ever from spending the eve on a plane traversing the North American continent...while American Airlines' flight attendants were all DRESSED IN COSTUME and passing out Halloween candies!!!!!!! I really had to sit on my hands as there was one stewardess I wanted to mug for her hat: a black witch pointy hat with a huge black spider dangling from one end!

Speaking of Halloween, I stayed in NY with a family which included loveable seven-year-old Philip. Consequently, there was a huge bowl of Halloween candy loot available in the dining room. Consequently (cough), over the past 48 hours, I ate (and, unfortunately, I do not exagerrate):

10 Tootsie Rolls
15 Snickers Fun Size
10 Peanut Chews
10 The New Butterfinger
1 M&Ms (huh: don't ask me why only one)
25 million milk chocolate eggs covered in orange foil
25 mini Hershey bars
5 Starburst
1 Laffy Taffy

Actually, it's a good thing my parents didn't let me go trick or treating as a kid; I'da probably have ended up being a 500-pound teenager....

But enough about moi...Instead: GO TO THIS!!!!

Nine Lives--Small Press Traffic's 9th Annual Literary Soiree & Auction
Saturday, November 8, 2003, from 3-8 p.m.
California College of Arts (CCA)
1111 Eighth Street, San Francisco (just off the intersection of 16th &
Wisconsin)
email: smallpress@ccac-art.edu
415-551-9278

Over the past years our auctions have been enlivened by the appearance of all kinds of extraordinary one of a kind items. Zadie Smith, the UK author of WHITE TEETH, autographed a tube of toothpaste for us. Gore Vidal sent us his proof copy of his New Yorker article on Monica Lewinsky, while Don DeLillo sent a manuscript page from MAO II. Anonymous art activists raided Michael Ondaatje's waste paper basket, and we sold his trash--an action that got us dubious press in the New York Times. Last year reclusive wunderkind JT Leroy let us auction off his corrected version of METEORS,--and on and on. This year, Pulitzer Prize winning writer Michael Cunningham pried the face off a travel alarm, and signed it with THE HOURS, while Irish novelist Jamie O'Neill (AT SWIM, TWO BOYS) made a St Patrick's Day T-shirt that will bring tears to your eyes--all to help us raise money for San Francisco's premier avant-garde poetry showcase.

$10 admission for a full day of

SURVIVING, THRIVING and JIVING at NINE LIVES

It's our ninth annual soiree event and what better trope to employ in the copy than the nine lives of the cat? We're an organization that lives like a cat, on kindness, dexterity and dumb luck, but we reward you with so much affection!

Food * Music * Cash Bar--featuring the Meow Mix cocktail! * Celebrity Appearances * Raffle for Fabulous Prizes * Poet's Theater * Presentation of SPT's 2nd annual Book Awards, the best books of poetry published all of last year . . . and our 2003 Lifetime Achievement Award goes to Barbara Guest

OUR BIG ANNUAL AUCTION OF LITERARY MANUSCRIPTS, MEMENTOS, AUTOGRAPHS, SIGNED BROADSIDES, LETTERS, PHOTOS, ARTWORK AND EPHEMERA
You'll claw your way to the front. Highlights of this year's CAT-alogue include:

* Michael Cunningham, alarm clock, yes, alarm clock signed by the author of THE HOURS for our auction

*Gertrude Stein HOW TO WRITE, Allen Ginsberg's copy annotated by him

*1963 San Francisco Poetry Festival broadsides MINT (Helen Adam, Blaser, Duncan, Lew Welch, Ferlinghetti, LaVigne, Jess, and many more) thanks to Donald Allen's generosity

*Early US modernists Lola Ridge, Waldo Frank, Marianne Moore, the whole Cary Nelson crowd!

*Robert Creeley, unpublished poem

*Barbara Walters ALS to Ann Landers

*Rare double display manuscripts by Karl Shapiro AND David Shapiro

*Manuscript material, signed books et cetera, graphic works by--Anne Rice, Anne Carson, Ted Berrigan, Josephine Miles, Barbara Guest, Terry Eagleton, Andre Maurois, William Plomer, Jamaica Kincaid, Ian McEwan, Jamie O'Neill, William Meredith, Isabel Allende, Christopher Fry, Leslie Scalapino, Philip Whalen, Rosmarie Waldrop, too many in fact to mention! Come and gawk, come and bid, it's all for a good cause.

WORLD PREMIERE OF "THE SMITH FAMILY,"
A NEW PLAY BY CRAIG GOODMAN AND KEVIN KILLIAN
A tornado's heading toward Fort Smith, Arkansas, where the Smith family is hosting their annual reunion. Barometer's falling, pressure's mounting, Jack Smith is up on the roof filming "Flaming Creatures," Wayne Smith torn between his devotion to his wife Liz Smith and her sister, former Angel Jaclyn Smith. Patti Smith conducts a secret Romeo and Juliet affair with one of the Jones family (Tommy Lee), while Anna Nicole Smith struggles with demons of her own. Kiki Smith has made a 500-ton vagina for the Venice Biennale, while Will Smith ponders his floundering career. Meanwhile an interloper's moving on in, and the ghost of tall, elegant Alexis Smith prowls the plantation with her spectral dog. Susan Smith looks at her two kids in the back seat and then looks at the lake and then--As Morrissey (from the Smiths) croons in the background, Heaven knows we're miserable now. When you've got a big family, who's to blame for all the problems of the world? With Taylor Brady, Anne Collier, Gerald Corbin, Margaret Crane, Kota Ezawa, Tanya Hollis, Kevin Killian, John Koch, Karla Milosevich, Yedda Morrison, Rex Ray, Laurie Reid, Jocelyn Saidenberg and Wayne Smith (as himself).

Soiree opens 3:00 p.m.
Auction Preview 3:30--5:30 p.m.
Presentation of Book Awards 5:00 p.m.
Auction 5:30 p.m.
Raffle drawing 7:00 p.m.
Play 7:00 p.m.
Continuous food, drink, entertainment and stupid pet tricks, it's the 9 Lives of the Cat at Small Press Traffic!

2003-11-03T10:18:00.000-08:00

A POST (AKA, AN INJECTION FOR MAH PEEPS IN WITHDRAWAL

I'm still in NY; one more reading tonight at Galapagos Arts Space in Brooklyn, 7 p.m. (scroll down for more info). But I thought I'd post because I sense many of mah nine million peeps going through CorpsePoetics withdrawal (wink).

A very special thank you to Guillermo and his girlfriend Claudia for driving in from Boston just to see my event during the AAWW conference; I'm very touched -- I was crazed during the conference and was sorry not to have spent more time, but I now can verify to the internet: Guillermo is as handsomely charismatic in person as he is on his special blog, Venepoetics!

Guillermo's discussion today, by the way, on the relationships between postmodernism, (post)colonialism and the (lost) potentials for revolution remain ever timely for me. I have noticed, as an example, certain writers who -- perhaps unbeknownst consciously to them -- rely much on participating in the Western canon as partly a way to transcend the vicissitudes of political decadence in the Philippines (which, in turn, affects the reception of the arts). This is a tricky terrain to navigate because certainly my assessment (as I've just posited in the prior sentence) could be totally wrong as applied to certain artists and what may be happening is simply a writer believing that to be true to his/her art, s/he must not get bogged down in politics of corruption. Aaaarggghhh! Why do I even raise this when I don't have time to address it? Well, I'll just throw it out there....a shard of frustration.

Incidentally, I recommend one of the books from my plane reading -- and recommend it specifically for poets: YOUTH, a novel by J.M. Coetzee. Synchronistically, it ends up touching on one of the topics addressed by my panelists at AAWW. 'Twas something I also discussed over lunch with Arthur Sze and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge when I asked them about the effect of time and experience on their poem-writing processes. I'll post more later but, to sum it up: "IT GETS HARDER." I note this really because I think so much about how much Poetry is about Faith. Relatedly, what was interesting to me about YOUTH was how the protagonist aborted his progress as a poet due to, indeed, a lack of Faith. The poet's life in this story becomes (for me) a metaphor for how bravely we all choose to live...

Twitch. Suddenly, the Corpse's ears twitch. She looks up. She sees her mischievous Fallen Angels stifle their cackling to begin singing, "O Come All Ye Faithful...." Corpse swears at them: *&^@_)(*+$_)(@(^)(. Not here, will you!! We're in an internet cafe!!! She reaches for her bag to throw at them, notices people around her looking at her oddly, clears her throat, and settles back down to continue typing her post, trying as hard as she can to ignore the black-winged angels....

Anyway, I leave tomorrow eve to return to California, which means I'll miss this event but I'll post it below because I recommend it to you New Yorkers:

Kundiman & Verlaine - a Visual Poetry Exhibit

Poems by:

Paolo Javier
Joseph O. Legaspi
Tan Lin
Sanjana Nair
Prageeta Sharma
and more....

Opening Reception
Tuesday, November 4, 2003

Open Bar 6 - 7 pm
Sponsored by
Stoli
Happy Hour until 10 pm

Verlaine
110 Rivington Street
(Between Essex & Ludlow)
F Train to Second Ave
212.614.2494

2003-10-31T08:56:00.000-08:00

HALLOWEEN & PHILLY COVERAGE OF BARRY SCHWABSKY

Spending an hour with Schwabsky's poems is like spending an hour in a postmodern art gallery. You come away confused and provoked by the coded musings--with their mystifying private and public references and words that scan like machine-gun fire. The book's most intriguing feature is the poetic voice that coos and argues, wheedles and slaps, slipping from turgid stream-of-consciousness to breezy colloquialisms.
--Roberta Fallon

I'm having Halloween candy -- chocolates! -- for breakfast! YaY! I'm about 5 hours away from hopping on a plane to New York but, basically, will be flirting with the moon whilst Halloween escapades unfold across North America tonight.

Actually -- and this is a HUGE WOUND -- I've never experienced "Trick or Treating." When I came to this country, my brothers of course were allowed to go out in the neighborhood (coz they're guys) while Moi, the only girl, had to stay at home (safely) with my parents. This also meant that I doled out the tricks as the Trick or Treaters went by....can you imagine the trauma everytime I saw a dressed up girl with her full bag pass by the front door.....

....if my parents had my way, I'd be cocoooned forever within a box lined with soft blue velvet. Yah: doesn't that sound like a coffin?

Corpse thinks...It's so difficult to parent or be parented....

Huh: Anyway, when Barry was in town and I was talking about blogs and whether that was publishing or not, he said it seemed to him that one HUGE difference between a blog or a journal is that the latter has an editor that would ask at appropos moments: ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO SAY THAT?

But those lapses, of course, are what generate so much of the charm in blogland! Well, and other things besides charm but....munch: much of which can be addressed by chocolate?

Blather. But really, now, what I really came online to post is FABULOUS NEWS! Lookit this review from Roberta Fallon of the Philadelphia Weekly (Oct. 22, 2003) on Barry Schwabsky's recent visit there:

POETRY IN NOTION
I'm not a fan of art that appropriates poetry for its raison d'etre, like the work of Lesley Dill, for example, which uses the poems of Emily Dickinson as its base. But when I heard about poet, art critic and curator Barry Schwabsky's poem-and-art collaborations with artists Jessica Stockholder and Luisa Rabbia, I was intrigued. Maybe when art and poems are produced in collaboration, the result is a stronger product.

Schwabsky, a New Jersey-born, London-based author widely known for his books and magazine pieces on art, is in town for two events. Tonight (Wed., Oct. 22) he'll lecture at the Institute of Contemporary Art about the video art of Gillian Wearing, and tomorrow he'll read from his new book of poems Opera: Poems 1981-2002 at the Penn Bookstore. You may remember Schwabsky from a show he curated at Locks Gallery earlier this year, "Post Flat: New Art from London."

Spending an hour with Schwabsky's poems is like spending an hour in a postmodern art gallery. You come away confused and provoked by the coded musings--with their mystifying private and public references and words that scan like machine-gun fire. The book's most intriguing feature is the poetic voice that coos and argues, wheedles and slaps, slipping from turgid stream-of-consciousness to breezy colloquialisms.

As for the art-collaboration poems, it's not fair to judge them without the art (not included in this volume). But like the other poems in Opera, they are earnestly romantic--which, come to think of it, is something you can also find in art galleries these days.

=========

Now, I like the above article for many reasons. The first is that this is a reviewer who wasn't predisposed to say anything positive (in fact, do I sense a bit of caution in terms of preconception?) .... and yet found a means to engage with Barry's poems. Now, I imagine that the way Ms. Fallon phrases it (e.g. the excerpt with which I begin this post) doesn't necessarily make the poems attractive to some for pursuit. But if you see some of the prior coverage of Barry's poems (many of which are in prior posts), I suggest that what you see is the wide-ranging nature of the response to his poems. I think there is something positive in the diversity with which people react to Barry's writings. These are clearly not one-note poems.

By the way, I've seen Barry's collaboration with Luisa Rabbia. It is gorgeous -- prints using my favorite type of blue; you can sense the beauty from the images here. I'm glad to have their collaboration in my library.

(And, for the record, I disagree with Ms. Fallon: I think Lesley Dill makes some beautiful works. It's so tough to see works without bringing preconceptions to art, isn't it? I mean, why should the strategy itself -- in this case using poems as a base -- be an almost paradigmatic constraint to how one sees the results of the strategy?)

Both the poems Barry wrote with Luisa Rabbia and Jessica Stockholder are in OPERA. I'ma tellin' you: get this book for something unexpected in contemporary poetry!

2003-10-30T18:10:00.000-08:00

HOPE TO SEE YOU IN NEW YORK

I'm flying (pun intended) to New York for two events over the next few days. The first is AAWW's Intimacy & Geography, a national conference on Asian American poetry, in which I participate on Saturday, Nov. 1, 2003; click on the link for full conference schedule while here are my panels:

11:30AM - 1PM / $7 / @ CUNY
Lightning Strikes
In this panel, poets trace the editing process for one of their poems, from first draft to published version. Eileen Tabios (moderator), editor of Black Lightning: Poetry in Progress. Participants include Mei-mei Bersenbrugge, Arthur Sze. and Timothy Liu.

2 - 3PM / $7 / @ AAWW
Poet Squared (a conversation): Arthur Sze & Eileen Tabios

Asian American Writers' Workshop (AAWW)
16 West 32nd Street, between 5th and 6th Avenues
10th floor
New York, New York 10001

CUNY Graduate Center (CUNY)
East 34th Street, at 5th Avenue
New York, New York 10001

=============

My second event is on Monday evening, Nov. 3, 2003:

Bold Girls: authors from the great new Filipina anthology, GOING HOME TO A LANDSCAPE
in an Evening of Poetry, Prose and Music
Monday, November 3, 2003
7:00PM to 9:00 PM
$2 Admission

Location:
Galapagos Art Space
70 North 6th St.
Brooklyn
Info: bookings@galapagosartspace.com

Authors Reading and Signing their work on Nov. 3:
Melissa Aranzamendez
Luisa Igloria
Isabelita Reyes
Elda Rotor
Eileen Tabios
Marianne Villanueva

Musical Accompaniment
Michael Dadap—Classical Guitar (check out his website: http://dadap.com)

For those taking the subway, take the "L" train to Bedford, exit towards the rear of the train. You should find yourself on North 7th and Bedford. Turn left, walk one block to North 6th. Turn right on North 6th, walk two or three blocks (towards Manhattan). Galapagos should be on your left-hand side; there is a reflecting pool in front of the building.

2003-10-30T18:03:00.000-08:00

HMMMM

back again
the form of persuasion based on emotion
extremely important in the effectiveness of a speech
the appeal most likely to get the audience to do something
not inherently wrong
based on character

not limited only to cellular tissue changes as it also includes the pathogen

like a sports car while you are more like a dodge mini van or a yugo
the part of an argument that appeals to the reader's emotions
a testament to that

is in the first place of all of us
a series of works which i will be pursuing all of my life
ruled over by a giant sentient tree
from gothenburg

a greek word that derives from pathein
meaning "suffering" and becomes a major movement in later hellenistic styles

the rise of aggressive dilettantism in philosophical matters

a group of extremely talented musicians from tucson

is zeal

is always thoughtfully beaten down with the cugel of slapstick

not a bad thing

2003-10-30T11:24:00.000-08:00

PROVOCATIVE READING: ART AND FEMINISM

it might make sense to speak to how a growing hunger for spiritual fulfillment in a spiritually degraded society is leading people to feminist art (or, I could add, any other idealistic art practice).
--Dan Cameron

I appreciated reading this today from Artforum which presents its IN PRINT section with:

HOW MIGHT WE ASSESS FEMINISM'S INITIAL IMPACTS ON ART, ITS SUBSEQUENT HISTORICIZATION, AND ITS CONTINUING INFLUENCE? ARTFORUM ASKED LINDA NOCHLIN, ANDREA FRASER, AMELIA JONES, DAN CAMERON, COLLIER SCHORR, JAN AVGIKOS, CATHERINE DE ZEGHER, ADRIAN PIPER, AND PEGGY PHELAN TO CONSIDER THIS QUESTION IN AN ONLINE ROUNDTABLE ASSEMBLED IN AUGUST. THEIR RESPONSES—REFINED BY THE PARTICIPANTS AND PRESENTED IN THE FOLLOWING PAGES—SUGGEST THAT FEMINISM AND FEMINIST DISCOURSES AS THEY HAVE FOUND EXPRESSION IN CONTEMPORARY ART ARE AMBIVALENT ("IN THE FULLEST SENSE OF THAT TERM," AS PHELAN PUTS IT), MULTIFACETED, AND EVER EVOLVING.
*****

So I posted the link above but it seems you may not be able to access it unless you're an Artforum subscriber. But since I'd already typed out the excerpts below, I'll post it anyway and you can pick up Artforum directly if enough intrigues you to do so and you don't necessarily read it (okay, I'm a subscriber but I don't necessarily read it either; I like looking at the pictures). There are bio notes about the contributors at the end of post:

LINDA NOCHLIN: Today, it seems to me that the fundamental differences within feminism exist between those artists and critics who think of "woman" as a fixed category and those who think of it as something more fluid, constructed, and variable. There is also a difference between those who think of feminist art and art history as critical practices and those who think that pure, "positive" images of woman are possible—that there is some essence of femininity out there to be captured. Perhaps '70s feminism, powerful and necessary though it was, is now outmoded; feminism has transformed and is itself transformed in contemporary practice. Feminist politics today is far more multivalent and self-aware; the battle lines are less clearly drawn. The binaries—oppressor/victim, good woman/bad man, pure/impure, beautiful/ugly, active/passive—are not the point of feminist art anymore. Ambiguity, androgyny, and self-consciousness, both formal and psychic, are de rigueur in challenging thought and practice.

ANDREA FRASER: my conception of institutional critique as an ethical rather than a political practice—a practice, that is, concerned not with the condition of being dominated so much as the condition of being dominant—also seemed to lead me away from explicitly feminist engagements. While that notion of an ethical practice was also deeply rooted in feminism—particularly in feminist critiques of expertise and mastery—it led me away from work through which I might engage my own experiences of gender-based domination or even determination. So while I continued to consider myself a feminist, it become more difficult for me to consider my work feminist. // Recently, however, that began to change .... Returning to performance also meant returning to my own body as a primary site, to my own subjectivity, and also, reflexively, to my own (institutionally constituted) fantasies as objects of critique.

AMELIA JONES: Today, I think feminisms need to address and theorize gendered identity so as to accommodate the intersectionality (per Kimberlé Crenshaw's valuable theorization in her essay on the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill hearings) of how we position ourselves in the world and how we are understood by others. Women, if there is such a discrete category—Sandy Stone and others might argue otherwise—are never perceived simply or exclusively as women: Our feminine identity is always already imbricated in other aspects of our perceived and experienced identity. Every woman of color and every queer woman knows this because she has to. She has no choice. // I see the most interesting artists instinctively or explicitly working through intersectional identifications, producing work that navigates the complexities of identity in the contemporary world of highly technologized global capitalism. All we have to do is think about the difference between how "American" (as an identity category) was understood on September 10, 2001, and how it is now understood today (after 9/11, in the midst of the Bush presidency) to understand why conceptions of gendered identity from the '70s, '80s, and even '90s (with its "Bad Girls" shows) must be rethought. A woman wearing a veil on a Manhattan subway reads very differently today from how she would have read before 9/11 (and before the current US administration suddenly noticed the misogyny of the Taliban). Given this situation, I find myself admiring and learning from Shirin Neshat, Mona Hatoum, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Kara Walker, Renée Cox, Susan Smith-Pinelo, and Laura Aguilar—artists whose work presses a feminist critique into, and along with, a critique of racial and ethnic identity, as these inflect sexual identifications of all kinds—and from artists such as Susan Silton, Mira Schor, and Catherine Opie who explore gendered experience through aspects of pleasure and sexual orientation or self-identified sexual positionalities.

DAN CAMERON: In discussing feminism within the art world today, I have to confess to feeling somewhat estranged by a discourse that often seems distant from my experience of contemporary art and theory. Perhaps that is compounded by the fact that I am writing this from Turkey, where so many issues associated with the "heroic" phase of '70s feminism are at the forefront of current popular debate—precisely because the women's movement of the past is very much a phenomenon of the present here and in other less-industrialized countries. (My research over the past several years has taken me to countries like Brazil, South Africa, Thailand, and Turkey, where achievements that we take for granted—birth control, antirape laws, no-fault divorce—are sometimes a matter of women's life and death.) The women's movement has triggered broad cultural changes with extraordinary social and political repercussions, and therefore I believe that addressing contemporary feminism from a global perspective is of particular importance. Granted, no feminist has yet been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize or offered a retrospective by MoMA, but I would rather focus on the movement's ongoing accomplishments than on its underrecognition (or underestimation) within mainstream culture. I have always believed that it is semidelusional to seek reward from the very system you have set out to reform.

COLLIER SCHORR: As excited as I was by late-'80s and early-'90s postfeminism and French theory, as applied to the work of Barbara Kruger and Laurie Simmons and others, these arguments were situated in a dialogue with men. At that point, you began to see a schism between the goals of a more homogeneous feminism and the ideologies of queer theory. In fact, queer theory, which includes the possibility of changing one's gender through grammar (i.e., a woman sees herself as a man, so she calls herself a man, a "he"), could hardly be seen as celebratory of femininity when it offers a clear desire for masculine privilege. In that sense, contemporary queer theory actually almost becomes reactive conservatism: The same woman—who may sleep with other women—adopts a different gender and simultaneously opts out of homosexuality. The advent of this nonsurgical sex change has all the uncomfortable baggage of racial "passing" and creates, in its most political sense, an erasure of early feminism. But then we must ask: Is feminism a celebration of the "feminine" or of freedom and optimal choice? Clearly, the two are not always the same.

JAN AVGIKOS: I'm thinking about a lecture I gave last year on Roni Horn's work during her exhibition at Dia. Looking at a wide range of her art, from the first trip to Iceland to the clowns, and working directly with her drawings, photographs, sculptures, and book works, I explored many subjectivities in her art—personal, psychological, sexual, and, I posited, lesbian. Several of her collectors attended the lecture, and one called the artist the next day, joking that she didn't know she was a collector of "lesbian art." (Yuk, yuk.) The connotation was that any such content in Horn's work was put there by (my own) whimsy and could easily be erased, as one would remove dust from the surface of a sculpture. Meanwhile, Horn's market is well established and can easily tolerate such "aberrant" readings of the art. No one loses, and everybody has a nice day. Feminism in art is something that interests scholars and artists but that dealers, museums, and most other people often politely tolerate or assiduously avoid.

CATHERINE DE ZEGHER: I am hopeful that it will be possible to "degender" and "deracialize" difference and to think of it in positive, nonreifying terms. If modernism's radical and inventive strategies were dependent on alienation, separation, negativity, violence, and de(con)struction, the twenty-first century may well develop an aesthetics of relation and reciprocity defined by reconstruction, inclusion, connectivity, binding impulses, and even by healing attitudes.

ADRIAN PIPER: After reading all of this stimulating talk I find I have nothing to contribute after all.

PEGGY PHELAN: The zigzagging successes and failures of feminism throughout the world today—women are routinely prime ministers in some places, and routinely maimed or killed for alleged sexual infidelity in those and other places—are symptoms of the ambivalence that still haunts feminism as an intellectual revolution. Yet that ambivalent zigzag is one of the most radical consequences of feminism as thought practice and, I believe, anticipates the likely trajectory of the next great intellectual revolution, the biogenetic one. Uneven distribution, economic access, and the larger forces of what we might call medical capital will similarly compromise it.

CONTRIBUTORS

Linda Nochlin is Lila Acheson Wallace Professor of Modern Art at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts.

Andrea Fraser's midcareer retrospective is on view at the Hamburger Kunstverein through November 9.

Amelia Jones is Pilkington Chair and Professor in the History of Art at the University of Manchester, England.

Dan Cameron is senior curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, and curator of the 2003 Istanbul Biennial, which remains on view through November 16.

Collier Schorr will have simultaneous shows of new work at 303 Gallery, New York, and Modern Art, London, in January 2004.

Jan Avgikos is a contributing editor of Artforum.

Catherine de Zegher is director of the Drawing Center, New York.

"Adrian Piper Since 1965: Meta-art and Art Criticism" travels this month to the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona.

Peggy Phelan is Ann O'Day Maples Professor in the Arts at Stanford University.

2003-10-30T09:45:00.000-08:00

UNNERVED

When I quote someone, I do it as an act of homage. (Who was it who said he'd love it if people used or even stole lines from his poems as he'd view that as a huge compliment?)

So, this morning, I'm trying to recover from someone whom I'd sometimes quoted as claiming I am quoting "to compete" -- i.e., that by quoting said quote within my own work I am attempting to "improve" the quoted text.

I care about this person. Equally significant, this person cares about me. I think the paranoia underlying this person's statement implies something about his experiences -- and I am saddened to think about how this person must have been so hurt in the past to have become sufficiently cynical to make this charge.

Wounds can make for great poets -- but I'm tired of that poetics program. I long for its post-________ that is not stuck at compassion.

P.S. I don't know that I know what I'm saying here; mostly, I'm unnerved.

2003-10-29T18:32:00.000-08:00

AS/IS

Per blog moderator Andrew Lundwall's gracious invitation, I joined the As/Is Group Blog. I just go on, ya know...

Which reminds me to speculate, I'm not sure "blogger fatigue" reflects the constraints of the (blog) form, as some have posited. I wonder whether the fatigue mostly reflects the blogging individuals (whether it's time constraints or something deeper within their psyche about the particulars of their blogging experiences to date) versus reflecting something about the form itself. As regards form, it's not like mere *pen on paper* hasn't produced enough volumes to decimate rain forests, ya know what I mean? I'm sure the (potential) interactivity of the medium -- as well as the immediacy of such -- may surface a source of tension; but I mean, isn't that more linked to the individual than the blog form?

Please note that I'ma just chewing the cud generally here as opposed to having any particular ex-blogger or potential ex-blogger in mind.

Anyway, I joined As/Is because kewl poet-peeps are on it and because I like the idea of it being a space for spontaneity: that firstness in the gasp. I just posted my first post there! As you might glean, I don't necessarily agree with the (temporally *hip*) assessment by Ennio Flaiano that "the verses of a poet in love don't count."

I love Love.

2003-10-29T12:12:00.000-08:00

THE ARMOR OF INNOCENCE

Someone recently called me "innocent." It occurs to me: said innocence is my only defense against the fact that Poetry consistently betrays.

2003-10-29T07:46:00.000-08:00

BEHIND THE BLUE CANVAS

I LOVE MOMMY GLO.

So let me tell ya of my Mommy Glo. She is Gloria Rodriguez, recipient of a "Life-time Achievement Award" from the Philippines's Manila Critics Circle for her work as a publisher. For years, she directed New Day Publishers, a leading publisher in the Philippines. When she "retired," she began Giraffe Books. Since 1993, Giraffe Books -- named after her own unique distillation of her name into that long-legged animal -- has published over 160 titles. But it's a one-person operation; as Mommy Glo puts it, "Giraffe has four employees--me, myself and I, and Gloria Rodriguez!"

Now, Mommy Glo probably would be the first to admit she's not the most technically-savvy person about. When I sent her my manuscripts, I could have e-mailed them to her. But she wants them in hard copy, and she typesets them individually -- which, I believe, facilitates her own reading and editing of the manuscripts. She also finances Giraffe Books out of what I've always imagined to be her household budget. The results are decidedly low-tech: e.g., books with a giraffe on the cover with the cook cover design being basically what she puts together (no separate book designer here, peeps).

But what also results is a perversely charming outcome. It is so easy nowadays to come out with glossy production given advances in technology that the more homespun quality of Giraffe Books -- which Mommy Glo operates out of her living room -- just leave me....enchanted.

And Mommy Glo is on my mind as I just received the page proofs for the third book she will publish for me -- and my first short story collection -- BEHIND THE BLUE CANVAS. The book cover will be in pale blue, and there will be a small rectangle of darker blue in the middle of the front cover. Title above, and author's name below, said dark blue rectangle. Then the ubiquitous giraffe beneath the author's name. Low tech, but more than does the job. Thank you, Mommy Glo.

=========

All of the stories in BEHIND THE BLUE CANVAS are related to the visual arts world -- the characters are artists, collectors, art dealers and so on. Thanks to poet-scholar Jean Vengua for the Introduction; here's an excerpt from her essay:

"My immediate reaction to the 'aesthetic affairs' in this book is both attraction and repulsion. This is not negative criticism. Both exist, and are crucial to any work of art. And I find here a certain repulsion to the world inhabited by these artists. That is, one is attracted by the promise of eros, but to see artists as they exist within the economy and spin of the art world, and to read this as a narrative of sexual desire, is also to be repulsed. For sex itself, and sexual desire is narrative. To paint, to construct, sculpt, conceive (as in conceptual art, as in artistic creation) is, after all, to make oneself, or the extensions of oneself, interesting and desirable. In one sense, it is to love. Even that which appears repulsive wants to please someone.

"At the same time, there is the lie. That is, the nostalgic and very western vision we have of the artist's seemingly autonomous, or at least democratically independent, purity of vision. But the valorization of independence and autonomy obscures the relations of economy beneath the surface. We have here a counter-narrative that runs against the grain of the romantic notion of the artist, the genius in his garret, or in her expensive loft studio, working on some 'pure' or original vision or concept. The New York City art world in these stories is itself stripped and exposed. You, the reader, are a voyeur into its intricate social and material network, not unlike that in the mansion from the Story of O by Dominique Aury (using the pseudonym Pauline Reage). The galleries of New York City provide the context. They are the mansion, the community, and city. But none of them, no matter how tasteful or avant garde, transcend the marketplace."

*****

BEHIND THE BLUE CANVAS will be out by year's end, or shortly thereafter. Though published in the Philippines, the book will be available internationally (e.g. through Amazon).

This project is dedicated to Dominique Aury. Her lover Jean Paulhan had made the chauvinistic remark that no female was capable of writing an erotic novel. To prove him wrong, she wrote the graphic Histoire d'O (The Story of O) under the pseudonym “Pauline Reage.” For the longest time, no one suspected that a woman -- let alone the demure, intellectual and almost prudish Dominique Aury -- authored the book.

Flap in wings.....the Mischievous One looks at her nine million peeps. Surely you all know that, despite my hair and lashes, I'm actually....prudish? She bats her lashes and a wingtip flicks her uncut hair tips into a mini ebony wave briefly painting air...

2003-10-28T20:57:00.000-08:00

TIRED OF MYSELF THAT IS NOT MYSELF

From "it's that thing again" by kari edwards in her newest book, iduna (O Books, 2003):

that stonewalled wreck keeping out the bits -
those fly-by night landings on the street -
worse could be saying something out of or -
maybe the big one or the little one -
yelling fire in a mirror -
where did it say I could say what I say -
and what does it mean I mean maybe -
maybe it was wrong -
words without a body -
maybe I don't know which way back from where I came from -

*****

Tonight, I'm living out one of the two epigraphs to the poem I'd read Sunday at kari's home:

Vivo sin vivir en mi
“I live without inhabiting myself”
--St. John of the Cross

2003-10-28T09:19:00.000-08:00

PARALLEL PARKING HAD BETTER BE DAMN GOOD FOR THE SOUL!

In chauffering Barry Schwabsky about town, I've back-ended parallel-parked perhaps nearly 10 times in the past 48 hours. That is more times than I've back-ended parallel-parked in the past two decades. But it's tough to find parking in San Francisco and would have been difficult to explain to Mr. Schwabsky why I should keep driving miles away from any one particular destination because Moi here tries to avoid parallel parking unless there is enough room to do front-entry parallel parking. It would have been even more difficult to explain to same Mr. Schwabsky that I hear a flock of fallen angels pontificating their irritating dos centavos about my driving skills -- specifically, lack thereof -- whenever I conduct 12-point turns into a parking space. Certainly, it would have been most convenient for Moi if I'da just strapped Mr. Schwabsky on my back and then flown him across the city -- but that would have even been more difficult to explain. Still, the trials have been good for my soul, no doubt. Soul -- can you hear moi?

========

In case you didn't have the stamina to read to the end of my prior post, here's a heads-up: Barry Schwabsky and I will read at Halcyon in Brooklyn on February 8, 2004 -- a 1 p.m. reading that Sunday afternoon. I am mostly relieved that said event won't involve me driving him around New York City. In 20 years of living in NYC, I'd successfully avoided driving within its cityscape. Wings have such an advantage....

2003-10-28T07:55:00.000-08:00

OPERA REPORTAGE

Since Meritage Press published Barry Schwabsky's OPERA, which is my first project as a publisher that involves a book-length poetry collection, y'all are just going to have to deal with moi maternal side as I lovingly gather the reports on Sunday night into a neat packet here for Barry's reading pleasure when he gets back to his London home and, thus, online. I mostly want to record the Barry-related coverage but I'll have to include references to moi-self to faciliate articulating the whole of the experience for him.... though, I do include said references to moi-self unrepentingly since I was there not being a potted plant and because said references to moi are complimentary and...what is this blog but not an OPERA ABOUT MOI-SELF?!

Sip. Morning coffee that is desperately needed....

So, first, Michelle Bautista wrote:

Monday, October 27, 2003
A night at the Opera

Capped off a wonderful weekend with, but of course, a night at the Opera. No, no, not at Davies Symphony Hall, but at the abode of Kari Edwards and Fran in a live/work space that was an old Sears building 30 years ago.

Good to see the Well-Nourished Moon, Stephanie Young again. We only seem to run into each other when Eileen is around. Stephanie flipped through the pages of Kari's new book "iduna" just out from O Books. Can I tell you? It's a feast for the eyes with an aspect of mystery novel to boot. The text literally bounces around the page forcing you to flip and turn the pages up, down, upside down and around. There is text literally everywhere as if she's hidden messages and clues throughout the book.

Soon the crowd settled down as Kari took the podium and introduced Eileen who did a 15 minute piece, which was breathtaking, both for her and for us about entering one's skin. The speed and repetitiveness felt like a rollercoaster ride on the downslope. It left everyone dizzy, in that good, let's ride it again way. Or maybe it was the wine. It caused one attendee, a painter from Atlanta who was with one of the Chris' (I obviously painstakingly can't recall her name), to say, "Eileen's writing is like ballet, we fall in line accordingly."

Next up, debuting his new book from Meritage Press was Barry Schwabsky. Rhett would comment later it was like getting hit by cannon fire, til he realized he should just sit back and relax to let the words enter him.

Afterwards we chatted a bit more over the ube bread (which you can get at Valerio's bakery in Union City, Vallejo, and Daly City) and the heavenly brie, while Barry signed his wonderful collection.

We drove home still humming its melodic arias.
posted by Gura on 10:36 AM
*****

Thanks Michelle (and the Sweetie "kari edwards" doesn't capitalize her name). That poem I read was 167 tercets and the longest I'd ever read -- I learned, for one, that if I'ma gonna do that kind of long poem reading, I shouldn't imbibe a glass, let alone three glasses, of wine beforehand. Anyway, I had some folo-up backchannels with Gura Michelle about Rhett's "canon fire" reference and, yes, apparently Rhett felt "like there were so many images and emotions that it came like canon fire, [but] then he just let it wash over him."

Isn't that sweet? The Long-Lashed One Sniffles....

Then Stephanie Young followed up with:

October 27, 2003
Michelle reports on last night's reading, also where to get that delicious bread.

Eileen's reading ended with a breathtaking repetition of vowels, what became a trancelike call and response of I I I O O O U U U.
Posted by Stephanie at 01:44 PM

James teased me for uttering several sighs during Barry Schwabsky's reading last night. I immediately reprimanded myself with Invective Verse ("Let us heave no more sighs unless we are falling in love") until I realized that duh, I was heaving exactly the sort of sighs Moxley's writing urges us toward. I'm guessing that I was falling in love with Barry Schwabsky, or his poetry, or something. Schwabsky is a love poet. I don't have my little red notebook with me at work, but I'll tell you one thing I remember: he read from a new series of poems titled something very much like The verses written by a poet in love don't count. I have it on record that James himself sighed quite heavily upon hearing this title, clearly the kind of sigh one heaves when falling in love with something they wish to have written themselves, and isn't that the whole problem of desire? Do we really want the object of our wish craft, or would we like to *be* them? Landing - or sleeping, in their skin, territory covered / shared by both Tabios and Schwabsky last night.
Posted by Stephanie at 01:55 PM
*****

Ah, indeed. James and Stephanie are referring to the epigraph to Barry's post-OPERA poem (or poetic series) entitled "For Despair." The epigraph is as follows:

I versi del poeta innamorato non contano.
--Ennio Flaiano

which does translate to "The verses of a poet in love do not count."

Barry does have a knack for choosing epigraphs well. (Recall that Kevin Killian once marveled in a post to the Poetics List that he'd never seen a poem boast an epigraph by A.A. Fair until one of Barry's poems in OPERA.)

Rhett himself would end up posting about last night:

Monday, October 27, 2003

Sunday night was a book launch for Barry Schwabsky's OPERA. Barry's reading was like a series of cannonballs being fired into your face. Boom! Boom! Boom! Wait! I need a rest, damn it! Now that I have the book in my hands, it is absolutely a pleasure to read his words with my spacings/timing.

Eileen Tabios is the publisher for Meritage Press and Eileen graced us with a reading of her "20 minute" poem. The title escapes me at the moment, but I bring up the poem because once again, Eileen managed to teach me something.

The poem is inspired/derived from various poems that Eileen wrote. The repeating theme is about "you falling into my skin." The amazing part of the reading is that the poem was essentially a representation of making love. Now, how Eileen accomplished to describe/show/discuss lovemaking without making it seem like porn (from a Republican Moral Majority point of view) is amazing. The poem will be coming out in her next book which will be published by a Finnish publishing company.
posted by TatangRetong at 6:49 PM
*****

Thank you Tatang Rhett. Yes, that poem will be published in Menage A Trois With The 21st Century and, cough, you got it -- there is a reason why moi blurber Kevin Killian calls it a "half diary of dildo desire" (such a good blurber you are, Senor Killian.) But, shoot, there should be enough romance to even soften a Republican, I hope.

Then Michelle posts again, to my relief as she helps address my lax in forgetting the "Atlanta painter"'s name with whom I had a very enjoyable conversation (Welcome to the Bay Area, Miriam! I look forward to seeing you at Chris's concerts someday!):

Tuesday, October 28, 2003
Ay, pala! The Atlanta Painter Revealed!

So the painter from the Opera book launching has revealed herself to be Miriam Jacobson, who will soon be a SF Bay Area convert. She's here scoping out the place to find a place to move to in a few months. Take it from Stephanie and me, the east side of the bay is better! But then again, we're rather smitten over Oakland.

The multi-talented Miriam is not only a painter but also a singer and song writer and hopes to pen some operatic tones to Barry's Opera. Can't wait to hear it!

She leaves the email with a P.S., inspired words from Barry's poems:

Your words are like a sword
That call us to a horde.

posted by Gura on 12:00 AM
*****

WELL. So doesn't all that make you all salivate to hear more? Fortunately for you East Coasters, Barry Schwabsky and I will be reading in your territory. Watch for us coming your way to Halcyon in Brooklyn on February 8, 2004 -- a 1 p.m. reading that Sunday afternoon reading for eros that should, uh, ... uplift your Sunday evening?

And off the Mischievous One goes cackling to play with the rest of the day!

2003-10-27T23:02:00.000-08:00

THREE EVENTS IN NEW YORK

I'm flying to New York this Friday for two events. The first is AAWW's Intimacy & Geography, a national conference on Asian American poetry, in which I'm participating Saturday, Nov. 1.

I'm posting more information about this second event as my prior post on it apparently contained incorrect travel instructions. This is the correct information:

Bold Girls: authors from the great new Filipina anthology, GOING HOME TO A LANDSCAPE
in an Evening of Poetry, Prose and Music
Monday, November 3, 2003
7:00PM to 9:00 PM
$2 Admission

Location:
Galapagos Art Space
70 North 6th St.
Brooklyn
Info: bookings@galapagosartspace.com

Authors Reading and Signing their work on Nov. 3:
Melissa Aranzamendez
Luisa Igloria
Isabelita Reyes
Elda Rotor
Eileen Tabios
Marianne Villanueva

Musical Accompaniment
Michael Dadap—Classical Guitar (check out his website: www.dadap.com)

For those taking the subway, take the "L" train to Bedford, exit towards the rear of the train. You should find yourself on North 7th and Bedford. Turn left, walk one block to North 6th. Turn right on North 6th, walk two or three blocks (towards Manhattan). Galapagos should be on your left-hand side; there is a reflecting pool in front of the building.

=========

An event I'll miss as I'll be in transit back from NY to CA is the following, which is an event I wish I wouldn't have to miss -- from Kundiman organizer Joseph O. Legaspi:

Kundiman is co-sponsoring a visual poetry exhibit at Verlaine, a funky bar in the lower east side, serving excellent drinks. (lychee martini, anyone?) poems are blown-up and hung on the walls: a visual rather than oral representation, you dig.

this event is FREE and includes 1 hour of OPEN BAR.
what's not to love?

Kundiman & Verlaine - a Visual Poetry Exhibit

Poems by:

Paolo Javier
Joseph O. Legaspi
Tan Lin
Sanjana Nair
Prageeta Sharma
and more....

Opening Reception
Tuesday, November 4, 2003

Open Bar 6 - 7 pm
Sponsored by
Stoli
Happy Hour until 10 pm

Verlaine
110 Rivington Street
(Between Essex & Ludlow)
F Train to Second Ave
212.614.2494

2003-10-27T09:23:00.000-08:00

THANK YOU, BAY AREA!

Thank you poets, artists and friends for your warm welcome last night to Barry Schwabsky -- to both the Bay Area as well as back into the *poetry world.* I couldn't have imagined a nicer group to shepherd him back to the Way as those attending his launch for OPERA, courtesy of the HOUSE READING SERIES put together by cheese expert kari edwards, Stephanie Young and Taylor Brady. Attendees included said sponsors, as well as co-host (and wonderful colorist) Fran, Chris Stroffolino, Chris Nealon, James Meetze (thanks, too, for the INVOLUNTARY VISION: after Akira Kurosawa's Dreams!), Sean Finney, Joseph Lease, Donna de la Perriere, David Larsen, Rodney Koeneke (I do appreciate the thought-flower! thanx Rodney), Michelle Bautista (whose ube-filled pastries were a clear hit with the crowd!), Rhett Pascual, Liz Oliveria, Chris Oliveria, Stella Lai, Laura Y. and others whose names I am stupidly forgetting here. But, HEART'S GRATITUDE to you all. Namaste.

For those who want more of Barry, he is delivering a lecture this Tuesday evening, as noted in this CCA notice:

CALIFORNIA COLLEGE OF THE ARTS, SAN FRANCISCO
Graduate Studies/Wattis Institute Public Lecture Series
7 PM, Timken Lecture Hall, San Francisco campus
Info: 415.551.9251

Coeditor of the international review section of Artforum, Barry Schwabsky is the author of The Widening Circle: Consequences of Modernism in Contemporary Art (Cambridge University Press, 1997) and Opera: Poems 1981–2002 (Meritage Press, 2003). Schwabsky also wrote the main text for Vitamin P: New Perspectives in Painting (Phaidon Press, 2002). Schwabsky has taught at Goldsmiths College, Yale University, and New York University; he currently resides in London.

2003-10-26T09:06:00.000-08:00

ACH SYLVIA -- HOW YOU KEEP BEING SERVED UP!

Recently saw the movie "Sylvia" and read the novel about Sylvia Plath, Wintering by Kate Moses. Neither the good acting and lighting in the former or the attractive language in the latter can hide how both projects lack any urgency for their beings.

2003-10-26T09:05:00.000-08:00

GAIL SCOTT'S PARIS

Oh! So, yah: I guessed it right! kari edwards had been the one who wrote the e-mail that began the prior post. I can seeeeee youuuuuuuuu.

Anyway, so I heard kari read Friday at Small Press Traffic with Gail Scott. Together, both made me so so pleased to have flown down from moi mountain. Gail Scott was first introduced -- and lovingly so -- by Robert Gluck who noted that Gail's novel MY PARIS had been cited as one of the top ten novels of the year in Canada when it was first released (sorry, can't recall the organization that cited it as such). Gail read then to celebrate the novel's re-release from Dalkey Archive. My notes offer a "word cloud" below, which may give a sense of the evocative and refreshing approach taken by MY PARIS; the book refers to Paris in the 1990s, with the war in Bosnia raging in the background (again, a caveat that my note-taking is not ... scientific):

".....mint in the margins ..... not a real history, rather a vast collection of 19th century anecdotes ..... languor ultimately not resisting capitalistic market ..... "a person could wander here for months" .... my reflection in concave mirrors [...] still, looking pretty good ..... (as regards Collette) an old hedonist knowing how to take the pleasures of the body without ruining her skin ..... you are among the old fossilized remnants of the old regime ..... I open my knees so he can ssee the spot -- Why? ..... my women of the Left Bank; raining in Sarajevo ..... ennui covering a tear in the surface ....."

Gail had an enjoyable reading style, at times seeming to read the whole as if it were a single paragraph. Gail Scott's Paris is clearly worth exploring.

2003-10-26T07:20:00.000-08:00

REVOLUTIONARY LIVING, REVOLUTIONARY LANGUAGE

revolutionary living is an act of living in a rolling thunder of questions; poetic language can be an act of revolution; there is no act but acting that is repetitive and preformatted, a repeatable act is a conmodification of the body; there is a living revolution in poetic language that is a continuum...their is a question that questions the question and folds in on itself... there is veggie dogs and a bun for 2.98 at Sam dogs at 28th and Broadway....

p. or both,

So someone sent me the above missive in response to my post on "There's More Than One Way [in Poetry]" (Oct. 23). Was that you, kari?

Or maybe kari edwards is much on my mind, not just because kari is kindly hosting my reading with Barry Schwabsky tonight (maraming salamat!) but because I saw hir read with Gail Scott Friday night at Small Press Traffic. (I'll post later on Gail Scott's reading.) kari was reading partly to celebrate the launch of hir new book, iduna (O Books, 2003). I AM AWED, EXCITED, FLABBERGASTED AND SO SO SO SO PLEASED TO SEE iduna CREATED THAT I'M EVEN TEARY WITH EXCITEMENT AND INSPIRATION!!!

So many wonderful poetry books have come out of late and iduna is just the latest testament to the supremely healthy state of poetry (those who bemoan what's coming out of "new poets" clearly are not looking in the right places....or simply not looking).

Kevin Killian introduced kari and here are some of my notes from his introduction (my notes are scattered and my handwriting bathetic so assume such caveats):

...iduna extends kari's range -- of gender confusion....gut-splittingly funny when it wants to be; mystical when it wants to be....[challenges preconceived] ideas on heroism, kindness and lucidity...

I don't have much notes from kari's reading, but I think Kevin's notion of how kari's work challenges preconceived ideas on heroism, kindness and lucidity is as fabulous a summation as said summation can be.

And the reason I don't have much notes is that I got lost, at one point, into the rhythm of hir words (kari is also a great reader), my eyes noting (with much appreciation) the occasional rolling of her shoulders as hir words affected hir body....and in that voluntary loss to rhythm, I mentally returned to one of my own poems and ended up rewriting -- and improving -- its ending. For me, the most elemental proof of another writer inspiring me is when hir work moves me back to my own words with fresh eyes.

I allowed myself the brief distraction from kari's reading because in the 15 or so minutes of sitting there at the SPT auditorium waiting for the event to start, I'd already inhaled (so effortlessly!) iduna which I'd just bought. It is not just a revolutionary poetic text but a revolutionary way of presenting the book.

When I first saw Kevin that evening, he joked with much affection, "Have you read iduna? I can't even see it; it makes me dizzy."

The book is indeed dizzying...but with a center of calm so that one ends up, as a result of reading it, more learned -- which is to say, more lucid. How many authors can lead you into their works and release you as a much less blinded being?

In iduna, each page transforms itself before your eyes into skin -- specifically, tattooed flesh. The verses were presented, but each page was no longer a one-dimensional field. It became a layered space through a backdrop of other text printed in lighter tones; the result strips out layers to create depth from what is usually the flat page.

But the space is not "white space" -- it is the mussed up space of flesh that's shown a lot of living: wrinkles, scars, bruises, love marks, orgasmic stains, lost teeth, calluses and so on. Visually dizzy, such that as one continues entering this *book* it was absolutely LOGICAL that the verses sometimes would be presented on their sides or upside down, rather than top to bottom. That, too, is a smart strategy -- by compelling the reader to manipulate the book (to reverse it or turn it sideways), the book provides a reason for physical engagement (as with touching flesh) instead of just reading words.

But the visual is not privileged -- read the damn words and they are still masterful in ways that text is (conventionally) judged. Not only do several of her poems out-Flarf Flarf but, like, how's this for upending, while paying homage to, lyricism:

the hand that commits the most

I sit in those that would swim past a nobody morse code

there is harm dropping against the wall and blue screams
surround arithmetic beforehands

it is worth noting (not in any order): turquoise manners, deafen glass, and those tiny humming condolence(s) regulate tropical pastels between stilled yellows and mechanical joy

it's vowel time now and my opponents arrive -- we form exploding tongue ruts
               a contortionist shifts red, the light backs up, an engine glares --
               the sea crumbles dawn --
               hard known tips labor in consequence --

I notice a tumbling down, a tumbling down -- at half mast, as when one is indecisive in the advances of lawn care.

upon approaching the sea I think carefully and then as before --

off-color sights arrive in their appointed side lock feelings,
the margin sits and I sit in the margin.

we envelop blank falls, out of an amassing cache of unassigned sins, sodomy lights my cathode-ray tube, the jury sweeps by in a cause and effect maneuver --

"what we have . . . is . . . . . form . . ."

                                             *****

I knew I was witnessing something special and unique when I read kari's prior book, a day in the life of p. (subpress collective, 2002). iduna exceeded my expectations....and makes me salivate with eagerness to see where next this poet will go. (Oooops: sorry -- and the Wet But Long-Lashed One reaches forth a wingtip into nine million screens to wipe saliva of the readership's grimacing cheeks.)

The revolution. What I also appreciate about kari is how hir activities as a gender activist becomes integrated into her words. This writing may or may not be fiction. But it is truth because, first, something was lived before it showed up in the telling. I am not up to speed on kari's activities as a gender activist so won't go into that much here. Let me just say that kari signed hir books partly by crossing out the title to replace it with the phrase "No Gender." (I think the interview in Rain Taxi, though, helps shed some light on kari's thinking here.)

As one who aspires to be a poet, I am inspired to see and read and feel iduna. As a practitioner, I saw the horizon of my imagination recede, which is to say, the field has become ever more wide in which I can play with Poetry. Thank you, kari -- you have birthed nothing less than a gift!

Here's one more from kari, a poem whose fabulous title is from Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. Enjoy!:

have you ever retired a human

take a deep breath

turn the sky into a bite sized ball

swallow

imagine all the filth of time

the screams from war

blood shed particles

lost memories of genocide

exhaust, fumes, vapors and particles
from every motor, coal furnace, and nuclear reactor

the bones that have been crushed in machines by machines or become machines

all the hate and violence caused by fear times 1 million and fifty-five

isolation and madness in the upper atmostphere

each and every cry from the last of a kind each and every ten billion

greed and the road paved with good intentions

take a deep breath

swallow

2003-10-25T15:41:00.000-07:00

AUGHT IS AN OUGHT-READ

Thanks to Ron Henry for having been most supportive of my series "Epilogue Poems." His wonderful journal AUGHT has printed a generous selection. Thus, I dedicate the last poem in this 21-poem series to Ron:

EPILOGUE POEM (EPILOGUE)

________________And_________________

And ________________________________

And ________________________________

________________________________And
--from “White, Throbbing”

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2003-10-24T08:43:00.000-07:00

HAPPY BIRTHDAY

to Ms. Positive Energy Herself: Chris Murray!

2003-10-24T08:39:00.000-07:00

INVITATION (HOPE TO SEE YOU THIS WEEKEND!)

Thank you Taylor Brady, Stephanie Young, and kari edwards for:

HOUSE READING SERIES ANNOUNCES

> Reading by:
> Barry Schwabsky
> &
> Eileen Tabios
>
> Sunday, Oct. 26 7:00 p.m.
> 3435 Cesar Chavez
> #327
> San Francisco, CA
>
Barry Schwabsky was born in Paterson, New Jersey, and now lives in London. He is a curator, an editor for several leading art magazines including Artforum, an art/literary critic who writes regularly for the London Review of Books, and lecturer at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is the author of several monographs on contemporary artists, The Widening Circle: Consequences of Modernism in Contemporary Art (Cambridge University Press), and the critically-praised Introduction to Vitamin P: New Perspectives in Painting_ (Phaidon). Information about his book OPERA: Poems 1981-2002 is available at http://meritagepress.com/opera.htm.

Eileen Tabios is ... MOI.
>
********************************************************
>
> DIRECTIONS: to 3435 Cesar Chavez #327
>
> between Valencia and Mission, on the South side of Cesar Chavez is a parking lot entrance; which when you first enter from Cesar Chavez will be (some) guest parking. Parking in the area (on the street) is not to bad. Once you have entered the parking lot go to your left past a small printing company and directly behind that (to the west) will be double glass doors. @ left of the Doors is a "buzzer system" press the number 043. Someone will pick up the phone and buzz you in.

> Mass transit.
>
> Bart - get off at 24th go south on Mission, (the numbers will get higher) walk 3 blocks, cross Cesar Chavez (there will be a stop light) go right 3/4 of a block, turn left in to parking lot.
>
> MUNI- get off @ 27th walk north (the opposite direction the muni would be going from down town) walk one block turn right on Cesar chavez, Cross Delores, Guerrero and then cross valencia, turn right into first parking lot.
>
> Buses- on Mission take (going southish)- 14. 14L, 49 (get off at 26th - 1/2 block from cesar chavez - walk south - cross Cesar Chavez turn right; Valencia - 26 get off just past Cesar Chavez, cross Valencia on Cesar Chavez, turn right into parking lot..
>
____________________________________________________
>
> This is another home reading brought to you by Taylor Brady, Stephanie Young, and kari edwards.
>

2003-10-23T22:06:00.000-07:00

DANIEL HOFFMAN AND "IRONIC CINEMA"

It is as though the thought of angels fell
Ejaculating from a cloud
--from "Snow"

I can tell from reading Daniel Hoffman's poems that he got to a certain space my favorite poets attain. Here's a timely poem:

The Way It Is

They were waiting here to say
This is the way it is

This is the way

I came bawling into their domain
Of harsher light
Remembering a place
Of purer light and messages
Passed across a darkened transom
From that place
Remembering

They said this is the way it is
In this light this dust
This scuffle for the scraps, bad blood
Between unequals............You'll get wise
You can break
your heart against stones here
Remembering

Counsellors, betake your
Covenants of convenience
To a place of stones,

I
Must lift the shadow of each shadow
To find the dooryard
To that place.

=============

The "space" I refer to above is one where, among other things, irony is transcended. I mention "irony" again because I don't wish anything I said in a prior post to be (mis)construed as a diss against the wonderful blog -- and my newest link -- called "Ironic Cinema." (Thanks for the note, Lisa.) I actually am in deep empathy with Ironic Cinema's approaches -- akin, I think, to (my) annotating others' texts in an attempt to chisel out the hidden song from a boulder of prose... And, after all, how can one not drool over such lines from Ironic Cinema as this (ironically lyrical and) supremely evocative "found poem #29":

A red sofa in the living room
David eats raisins reading
science fiction.
Ghostly gazing towards April
afraid.

2003-10-23T10:09:00.000-07:00

THERE'S MORE THAN ONE WAY

Poetry can be affected by anything and everything. How one chooses to live one's life very much can affect what is written. The action affecting the word and, in turn, the word affecting the action.

There is also more than one way to approach how a poet may change his/her approach to the Poetry practice. The approach of de-emphasizing "action" is unnecessary. I know several poets who are "cultural activists" -- dare I say their activism *improved* the literary merits of their poems? There's no automatic causal relationship of course -- Poetry doesn't work that way.

To write Poetry is an act.

For me, the writing is secondary to the primacy of living Poetry. I don't think I'm the only one who believes this way, either -- it's just that when one takes this approach, one inevitably is more likely not to be encapsulated by a canon-making framework that relies primarily on...words.

*****

The above words skirt a more basic issue, though: there are no canons within Poetry.

2003-10-22T20:37:00.000-07:00

BOREDOM POETICS

Opposition without content.

2003-10-22T20:16:00.000-07:00

ADVICE TO A YOUNG POET (REPRISE)

Advice to a Young Poet: "do not believe your own press"

"Let the Master/ of Fine Arts require building/ of roads or houses"
--Indran Amirthanayagam

I know I said earlier I'd post the advice to young poets given by Luis Cabalquinto, Jessica Hagedorn, Marilyn Chin, Garrett Hongo, David Mura and John Yau through my book Black Lightning. I changed my mind (get the book yourself; you won't be sorry). Instead, I'm moved by certain developments to post an excerpt from the article on poet-diplomat Indran Amirthanayagam (who, I believe, is currently representing the U.S. in Belgium). The article began with an epigraph quoting Pablo Neruda:

I want poems stained
by hands and everydayness...

I long for eatable sonnets,
poems of honey and flour,...

Brother poets from here
and there, from earth and sky,
from Medellin, from Veracruz,
Abyssinia, Antofagasta,
do you know the recipe for honeycombs?
--from "Sweetness, always" by Pablo Neruda

For the Sri Lankan-born poet Indran Amirthanayagam, 1993 should have been a good year. It was the year Hanging Loose Press published his first book, Elephants of Reckoning. But in May 1993, a young man, bombs strapped to his chest, crashed his bicycle into then President Ranasinghe Premadasa. The explosion killed both bomber and president mere days after a leader of the opposition, Lalith Athulathmudalli, was gunned down during a campaign rally. Even in a country that had become accustomed to high levels of violence in recent years, the two assassinations were extraordinarily shocking and brutal.

Thus, in May 1993 when Amirthanayagam should have been happily celebrating his book's publication, his attention was focused on calling for an end to the violence in his birthland. In the same month his book was officially released, The New York Times published an Op-Ed piece by Amirthanayagam bemoaning "the latest public violations by villains, bogeymen, crazed boys, rogue elephants. Violations. Rape. Murder."

[...]"It was a bittersweet time. Why did this paradise become bloody? I was in pain. Part of my goal as a poet was to tell the Sri Lankan conflict to the world. When I lived there, it was called Ceylon and it was multi-ethnic and multi-cultural. What was this Sri Lankan conflict? Did I support it? Can I support it? Does it matter if I support it? Who am I?" Amirthanayagam says, recalling some of the questions he faced. "I didn't have a gun in hand, but I did have a pen. Though I had the frustration of not being able to fight physically for either the independent Eelam, or Sri Lanka directly, as I have avoided both choices, I had an emotional anger that I channeled through my poems."

[...]As Amirthanayagam watched the violence escalate in his birthland, other factors exacerbated the tumultous emotions he was feeling in 1993. Earlier that year he received an acceptance into the American Foreign Service and, thus, knew his days in New York City -- just when he felt he had achieved a certain literary success in what he considered a leading center of American poetry -- were numbered. But before leaving for Washington D.C. and the rest of the world, he had one last poetry reading scheduled at St. Marks Poetry Project to mark the release of Elephants of Reckoning.

Thus, Amirthanayagam wrote the poem, "WORDS FOR THE ENTERPRISE," both to introduce his book during the reading and to reflect on the events then affecting his life. "When I say in the poem that 'Spain is New York', I was trying to evoke the sense of idelaism that inspired the world's artists to fight against Franco in the Spanish Civil War. Franco won. Fascism took over. But it was a noble fight and Federico Garcia Lorca was one of its victims," he says. "Though it was 1993 and not 1935, I was trying to evoke that sense of bravado. That, as we look towards the Millenium, we should gather ourselves and assume the heroics and idelaism that infused earlier generations.

"Because I wrote the poem as an introduction to my book, I was acting as a cheerleader to the audience," he continues. "I wanted to rouse the audience to get the elephants out. Elephants are a symbol for many things in my book, including the best of ourselves -- the best of human potential. That, too, is the role of the poet: to enter the hearts and minds of people and ask them to realize their own potentials."

Tellingly, Amirthanayagam adds that he concocted the poem's title partly in reference to the popular television and movie series, "Star Trek." He explains, "I was actually thinking of the U.S.S. Enterprise because that starship had all of the world's races represented as they went out there to boldly go where no man has gone before."

Finally, Amirthanayagam says, he considered "WORDS FOR THE ENTERPRISE" a response to what he found disappointing in contemporary poetry.

[...]"I wanted to say to the M.F.A.-ers to go out there and build roads and houses," he recalls. Or, as the poem states: '...let the Master/ of Fine Arts require building/ of roads or houses, breaking/ eggs for sweet cakes and meats,/ watching eggs break/ and chicks blind-hungry/ jump for worms, fly oceans."

For Amirthanayagam, part of the "ENTERPRISE" is what he calls "the literary tradition of being political and social, wher ehte social is equal to caring" -- a tradition practiced by such admired poets as Garcia Lorca and Pablo Neruda. For him, it translated into a new career: diplomacy....

"It was a tortured decision. I was comfortable in New York, but felt I needed a new challenge to grow further as a poet...I had this romantic idea that through diplomacy I could do this (social role) on a planetary scale, as Neruda did in Mexico when he squired away David Siqueiros who had been accused of trying to kill Trotsky."

*end of excerpt*

======================

For more on Amirthanayagam and his poem "WORDS FOR THE ENTERPRISE," you got it: get Black Lightning. Meanwhile, the issue I'm considering is -- there is a point when irony becomes an escape. Don't get me wrong: I'm not dissing anyone here (after all, I'm a Romantic and romanticism also can be escapist). But perhaps it's time to see irony (and romanticism) as it's become in this very problematic age: a poetic period of adolescence that's time to outgrow. [UPDATE AFTER A NIGHT'S SLEEP: BUT PERHAPS NOT....]

2003-10-22T18:41:00.000-07:00

WHY PAYING A COMPLIMENT IS AN ART FORM

Poets should learn to compliment other poets without, in the process, dismissing other poets. Poetry is not a fixed closed pie, contrary to peeps getting masturbatory pleasure and/or financial compensation from forming (de facto) canons.

It's more insidious than you think, too. These judgments can form cracks through which less benign factors like racism, objectification, sexism, and other biases can poke their ugly weenie heads.

2003-10-22T10:25:00.000-07:00

UNTITLED

I miss David Hess. So I pressed my soft cheek against the soft t-shirt he gave me, the one with the fading words "I Lack Lacan"....and had an epiphany.

ABSENCE IS NOT PRESENCE

So many idiots who've been spouting that and why have I been an idiot believing said idiots?

Sip. Morning coffee.

Anyway, interesting reading this morning from two new additions to my links, except I don't know who's experiencing behind dawn over couch(?).

http://someonescouch.typepad.com/

Amy Bernier

2003-10-22T00:44:00.000-07:00

ADVICE TO A YOUNG POET

So I've been leafing through my first book BLACK LIGHTNING in preparation for my "Lightning Strikes" panel during the upcoming AAWW national conference on Asian American poetry.

I'd forgotten the pretty nifty (if I do say so moiself) feature I'd incorporated -- I'd asked the 15 subject poets to end each of their "Bios" by answering the question:

What advice would you give to a young poet?

Here are some of the answers:

Arthur Sze: Read the chapter "Reflections and Aphorisms" contained in The Art of Rosanjin by Sidney Cardozo and Msaaki Hirano (Kodansha, Tokyo, Japan, 1987).

Kimiko Hahn: Take risks. Leave the map at home.

Timothy Liu: Read all the poets (living and dead) you can so that you can then get in on the great conversation that poetry is, a conversation that exists both in time and in eternity. And during times when you're not reading or writing, fill your life with as much beauty as you can afford: great food, great art, great music, great sex. To apprehend what is great is to fill oneself with awe and gratitude as armor agains thte vile and the ugly and the small which is also life, a life that seeks to negotiate the abyss between what is imagined and what is real.

Li-Young Lee: The writing of poetry is a sacred endeavor and to never forget that. So that even if the world doesn't find it marketable or translatable into coarse values, keep in mind that the writing of poetry creates soulful values, subtle values. And remember, never lose heart; realize how important your work is. It occurs to me that everything valuable is invisible, like love. The creation of art is invisible and subtle.

Mei-mei Berssenbruge: Advice: finding or creating a peer group; wide experience; wide reading.

Indran Amirthanayagam wrote a long poem entitled "Advice to Young Poets." Here are excerpts: Read The Republic, if only to make yourself angry....[F]ollow all advice offered by Allen Ginsberg except the hallucinogenics....As I've said to the mirror, do not believe your own press....Finally, first, last, at least on paper, at least in life, love-make....And if you prefer holy orders, let them batter / your heart like Donne's three-personed god.

Meena Alexander: Whatever you do, do not lose heart. Remember that the lines you work with, work through, need the quietness that only you can give so that the act of composition might fulfill itself. Once I heard Joseph Brodsky speaking. It was at Columbia University just after he got the Nobel Prize. And this is what I recall him saying: "I'm a poet. I send something out and it comes back to me. I send it out again and again. There is no certitude here." To which I would like to add, this is the palimpsest of time through which we make ourselves as poets. Going the long road. There are no shortcuts. Remember that the poem on the page is only the tip of the iceberg. Most of what endures, turning into the soil of the poem, is carried within, unseen, even worldless. An act of meditation without cease. Poetry is a small scale art, an art of exquisite detail and this is its power. It can be recited, shared, sung. It need not be bought and sold.

Sesshu Foster: In a corollary of the dictum, "Pessimism of the intelligence, optimism of the will," patiently endure your frustrations and try to write as much as you can; save as much time as you can for writing -- give readings whenever asked: they're instant, free workshops. A lot of people are looking for happiness in life, but why bother to do that in poetry? Go for revenge. It has to taste sweeter when you're young.

I'll post the rest later; coming up are advice from Luis Cabalquinto, Jessica Hagedorn, Marilyn Chin, Garrett Hongo, David Mura and John Yau.

This feature is just one of the many reasons why I've always considered Black Lightning a *poet's poetry book* (though it's also been helpful to many laypeople, according to feedback I've received). Do please check this out (and support my nonprofit publisher AAWW), if you haven't already! Among other things, you can witness moi fumble since I began this project just three months after I started paying attention to poetry (in this particular lifetime).

2003-10-21T19:45:00.000-07:00

Barry Schwabsky Reminders: Philadelphia, New York and San Francisco

-- to celebrate the release of his book OPERA: Poems 1981-2002

PHILADELPHIA
Penn Bookstore
3601 Walnut Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104
215-898-7595
Thursday, October 23
Noon-1 PM

NEW YORK
Friday, October 24
6-7:30 PM
303 Gallery
525 West 22nd Street
New York, NY 10011

SAN FRANCISCO
Poetry Readings by Barry Schwabsky and Eileen Tabios
HOUSE READING SERIES
at the residence of kari edwards at
3435 Cesar Chavez, #327
San Francisco, CA
7 p.m., Sunday, October 26, 2003

I should note for you art lovers that Barry -- also a highly respected art critic -- is also doing visual arts-related lectures in Philadelphia and San Francisco:

INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART, PHILADELPHIA
Wednesday, October 22, 2003
7:00pm - 9:00pm
Whenever Wednesday: Lecture
Lecture: Barry Schwabsky

Schwabsky will discuss Gillian Wearing’s work in its art historical context. He is the author of The Widening Circle: Consequences of Modernism in Contemporary Art, coeditor of international reviews for Artforum, and a professor at Goldsmiths College, University of London. ICA Tuttleman Auditorium

CALIFORNIA COLLEGE OF THE ARTS, SAN FRANCISCO
Graduate Studies/Wattis Institute Public Lecture Series
7 PM, Timken Lecture Hall, San Francisco campus
Info: 415.551.9251

Coeditor of the international review section of Artforum, Barry Schwabsky is the author of The Widening Circle: Consequences of Modernism in Contemporary Art (Cambridge University Press, 1997) and Opera: Poems 1981–2002 (Meritage Press, 2003). Schwabsky also wrote the main text for Vitamin P: New Perspectives in Painting (Phaidon Press, 2002). Schwabsky has taught at Goldsmiths College, Yale University, and New York University; he currently resides in London.

AS REGARDS BARRY'S FIRST POETRY COLLECTION, OPERA:

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY:
Putting 20 years of work into one intensely wrought luminously gripping book, Artforum critic Barry Schwabsky here stages his Opera: Poems 1981-2002. His approach to the eponymous form -- colloquial, lived-in, forking the vulgar tongue, mixing in trailer park trash talk, throwing out references to Wittgenstein, Larbaud and Traherne -- rises to the other-worldly.
Meritage Press, Small Press Distribution, 104 pages, ISBN 0970917929.

ADVANCE WORDS:
The word "song" resonates over and over and the poems here will often suddenly burst into an intricate, complicated melody.
--Juliana Spahr

His poetry is exactly as strange as the familiar may permit. His work, born of a strange encounter between American poetry and European masters such as Celan and Novalis, always surprises me by its exploratory investigations. He writes one of the most loving poetries today, filled with a sexual myth as strong as anyone's.
--David Shapiro

These might be choruses and arias from some lost Venetian music drama of the early 1600s--an allegory of the nature of light and of desire, set on one of those abandoned islands where every imaginable encounter becomes possible--transmuted over the intervening centuries of silence into a software program for a new species of lyrical electronica.
--Geoffrey O'Brien

Imagine poems written by Sir Walter Raleigh after he has read Wittgenstein and Lorine Neidecker, listened to bands whose names weren't in the air but whose one song was on the airwaves, and learned more about contemporary art than anyone thought possible, and you might get a sense of the compactness of these poems, an airy abstract density unlike anyone else's.
--John Yau

2003-10-21T17:14:00.000-07:00

CONUNDRUM DU JOUR

I'm dying to comment on one of the hot issues currently floating about on poetry blogland but it would only serve up more "cultural capital" fodder for a certain peep and it's not like anything I would say would change said peep's mind. Cultural capital, I keep reminding myself, is not necessarily based on agreement. It's based on attention.

Too bad, too, as my comment would have been brilliant.

2003-10-21T08:22:00.000-07:00

BIRD LESSON DU JOUR

I love the animals on the mountain. Just now, I heard a tapping against the window. When I went over to investigate, a huge -- must have been nearly three feet high -- crow was on the windowsill, flapping its wings against the glass. As I neared the window, it languidly spread its huge wings to fly away. Beautiful. BLUE-BLACK WINGS. Such glossy feathers -- such sheen! And I could hear the bird's message: This is how you must fly -- with grace, no effort showing, expansively....

Good lesson -- I'm still a newbie with my wings...

2003-10-21T07:58:00.000-07:00

LENY'S GIFT

Scholar and newly-out-of-the-closet-poet Leny Strobel had given me this gift, a charming piece of bamboo etched with decorative patterns. I'd been using it as a bookmark. For some reason, I didn't think until this morning to read the description of it that was on its packaging. Said description states:

This precisely formed and decorated item of buho bamboo is a louse pick. T'boli tribeswomen of South Cotabato, Mindanao, find it a socially rewarding time for exchange of local news whiile assisting one another in the search and destruction of such vermin from each other's scalps.

Uh. Okay. Girlfriends -- if any of youse ever want to sit around in a circle swapping gossip and picking lice of each other's heads, I got a louse pick. Please, uh, bring your own...

More seriously, check out this beautiful site for more information on the T'Boli:

"Women must continue to weave, to make jewelry, baskets,to sing and tell stories," she stated. Her daughter brought out her tribal clothing: necklaces, bracelets, earrings, the 13-pound brass belt adorned with T'Boli bells and carved metal, an embroidered shirt, eight thick brass anklets and six wrist bracelets, the beaded wooden hairpiece and a pair of earrings which extended from the earlobe and wrapped around the neck like a collar. He put them on with the daughter's help. Transforming herself into a veritable temple, she became a visible map of her ancestors, her culture, and nature. She smiled proudly. Then she lifted her skirt and showed her tattooed calves, which would make her recognizable at death to the ancestors in the other world."

2003-10-20T21:02:00.000-07:00

ON DEPICTIONS OF WHITE AND THE GAZE

One of the most interesting (and pleasure-inducing) painters today of "white-on-white" works is Eve Aschheim. Eve just alerted me to a group show, "White," now ongoing through November 15 at Bill Maynes Gallery in Chelsea, New York. I plan to see it later this month, and would have seen it just for Eve's works which I've admired for years. But other artists in the show are respectable and probably worth seeing: Noriko Ambe, Lois Dodd, Chie Fueki, Walter Martin and Paloma Munoz, Suzanne McClelland, William Pope L., Dorothea Rockburne, and Gil Shani.

Before my trip to New York, though, I'll be seeing the Diane Arbus exhibit at SFMoma which opens this Saturday. I am thinking of writing on this exhibit, though not from a pure review standpoint. If you edit a literary/arts journal and are interested in an essay about this show, e-mail me and I'll give more details about the perspective I'm considering.

2003-10-20T20:47:00.000-07:00

MY MARTHA STEWART MOMENT

So, some posts back, I spoke about reintroducing moiself to the art of gardening. After nearly two decades in New York City and thoughlessly plonking plants atop radiators, I'd had this assumption I had a Brown Thumb. But now that I live "in the (wine) country" of Napa, I figured I'd try again since I had this mud patch in front of the house. So I hoisted my lovely ass on over to Walmart's and got plants for said mud patch. Well, now, they are presenting a veritable riot of supremely lovely colors. It's not Giverny but it's something.

So, this weekend, very self-consciously but also quite quite cheerfully, I took my lovely ass on over to my former mud patch whilst my right hand brandished a brand new pair of gardening clippers. I have this lovely white rose bush just spilling forth flowers -- and what better way to enjoy fresh roses than to have them actually come from your garden!! The crystal vase was waiting in the kitchen! With much graceful swinging of moi biceps, I clipped and clipped and took into the kitchen a huge gathering of fresh white roses.

So I'ma trimming them here and there and plunking them into the waiting crystal vase. Every so often, I'd feel a nip on moi fingers but assumed they came from a stray thorn....until Tom enters the kitchen, looks at humming me, and observes:

OH MY GAWD YOU'VE BROUGHT IN BUGS!!!

I looked more closely at the pile of branches before me. They were CRAWLING with huge brown bugs, some of which were feasting on my fingers! We had to throw out all the branches and roses...and now Tom won't stop talking about how I've infested the house!

Well, crap. That just about made me miss my former view on Amsterdam Avenue -- staring at the backside of a brick building.

Slap! Excuuuse me! Had to get a bug that was hiding over there in the corner.

It drove me to drink, I tell you (1999 Noon Winery Reserve Cabernet from Southern Australia).

Martha Stewart never mentioned this! I'd sue her but ... isn't it already a long line?

Here I am with a glorious flower garden and I'm still skulking about Safeway for their specials on Guatemalan-bred roses.

Ah well. Anything to help out the Guatemalan economy -- after all, I am internationalist in thinking....

2003-10-20T00:13:00.000-07:00

SOIREE (A NOUN TURNED VERB) WITH SMALL PRESS TRAFFIC!

As I have just joined the Board of Small Press Traffic, do allow moi to do Board duty by suggesting: save the date for the following event spotlighted in an open message from SPT Director Elizabeth Treadwell Jackson:

Nine Lives--Small Press Traffic's 9th Annual Literary Soiree & Auction
Saturday, November 8, 2003, from 3-8 p.m.
California College of Arts (CCA)
1111 Eighth Street, San Francisco (just off the intersection of 16th &
Wisconsin)
email: smallpress@ccac-art.edu
415-551-9278

Over the past years our auctions have been enlivened by the appearance of all kinds of extraordinary one of a kind items. Zadie Smith, the UK author of WHITE TEETH, autographed a tube of toothpaste for us. Gore Vidal sent us his proof copy of his New Yorker article on Monica Lewinsky, while Don DeLillo sent a manuscript page from MAO II. Anonymous art activists raided Michael Ondaatje's waste paper basket, and we sold his trash--an action that got us dubious press in the New York Times. Last year reclusive wunderkind JT Leroy let us auction off his corrected version of METEORS,--and on and on. This year, Pulitzer Prize winning writer Michael Cunningham pried the face off a travel alarm, and signed it with THE HOURS, while Irish novelist Jamie O'Neill (AT SWIM, TWO BOYS) made a St Patrick's Day T-shirt that will bring tears to your eyes--all to help us raise money for San Francisco's premier avant-garde poetry showcase.

$10 admission for a full day of

SURVIVING, THRIVING and JIVING at NINE LIVES

It's our ninth annual soiree event and what better trope to employ in the copy than the nine lives of the cat? We're an organization that lives like a cat, on kindness, dexterity and dumb luck, but we reward you with so much affection!

Food * Music * Cash Bar--featuring the Meow Mix cocktail! * Celebrity Appearances * Raffle for Fabulous Prizes * Poet's Theater * Presentation of SPT's 2nd annual Book Awards, the best books of poetry published all of last year . . . and our 2003 Lifetime Achievement Award goes to Barbara Guest

OUR BIG ANNUAL AUCTION OF LITERARY MANUSCRIPTS, MEMENTOS, AUTOGRAPHS, SIGNED BROADSIDES, LETTERS, PHOTOS, ARTWORK AND EPHEMERA
You'll claw your way to the front. Highlights of this year's CAT-alogue include:

* Michael Cunningham, alarm clock, yes, alarm clock signed by the author of THE HOURS for our auction

*Gertrude Stein HOW TO WRITE, Allen Ginsberg's copy annotated by him

*1963 San Francisco Poetry Festival broadsides MINT (Helen Adam, Blaser, Duncan, Lew Welch, Ferlinghetti, LaVigne, Jess, and many more) thanks to Donald Allen's generosity

*Early US modernists Lola Ridge, Waldo Frank, Marianne Moore, the whole Cary Nelson crowd!

*Robert Creeley, unpublished poem

*Barbara Walters ALS to Ann Landers

*Rare double display manuscripts by Karl Shapiro AND David Shapiro

*Manuscript material, signed books et cetera, graphic works by--Anne Rice, Anne Carson, Ted Berrigan, Josephine Miles, Barbara Guest, Terry Eagleton, Andre Maurois, William Plomer, Jamaica Kincaid, Ian McEwan, Jamie O'Neill, William Meredith, Isabel Allende, Christopher Fry, Leslie Scalapino, Philip Whalen, Rosmarie Waldrop, too many in fact to mention! Come and gawk, come and bid, it's all for a good cause.

WORLD PREMIERE OF "THE SMITH FAMILY,"
A NEW PLAY BY CRAIG GOODMAN AND KEVIN KILLIAN
A tornado's heading toward Fort Smith, Arkansas, where the Smith family is hosting their annual reunion. Barometer's falling, pressure's mounting, Jack Smith is up on the roof filming "Flaming Creatures," Wayne Smith torn between his devotion to his wife Liz Smith and her sister, former Angel Jaclyn Smith. Patti Smith conducts a secret Romeo and Juliet affair with one of the Jones family (Tommy Lee), while Anna Nicole Smith struggles with demons of her own. Kiki Smith has made a 500-ton vagina for the Venice Biennale, while Will Smith ponders his floundering career. Meanwhile an interloper's moving on in, and the ghost of tall, elegant Alexis Smith prowls the plantation with her spectral dog. Susan Smith looks at her two kids in the back seat and then looks at the lake and then--As Morrissey (from the Smiths) croons in the background, Heaven knows we're miserable now. When you've got a big family, who's to blame for all the problems of the world? With Taylor Brady, Anne Collier, Gerald Corbin, Margaret Crane, Kota Ezawa, Tanya Hollis, Kevin Killian, John Koch, Karla Milosevich, Yedda Morrison, Rex Ray, Laurie Reid, Jocelyn Saidenberg and Wayne Smith (as himself).

Soiree opens 3:00 p.m.
Auction Preview 3:30--5:30 p.m.
Presentation of Book Awards 5:00 p.m.
Auction 5:30 p.m.
Raffle drawing 7:00 p.m.
Play 7:00 p.m.
Continuous food, drink, entertainment and stupid pet tricks, it's the 9 Lives of the Cat at Small Press Traffic!

Small Press Traffic Literary Arts Center promotes and supports writers from all over the globe--particularly those who push the limits of how we speak and think about the world. Since 1974 SPT has been at the heart of the San Francisco Bay Area innovative writing scenes, bringing together independent readers, writers, and presses through publications, conferences, and our influential reading series.

For more information about Small Press Traffic, check out our website at: http://www.sptraffic.org

2003-10-19T22:55:00.000-07:00

"THEY KNOW NOT WHAT THEY DO"

It's boring to see poets scramble with such a lack of subtlety for public recognition and validation. But let's talk about me. I once thought said scrambling to be interesting. Now: yawn. This afternoon, I saw three pretty bluebirds flash blue wings as they soared past the windshield. Their color allowed them to mate with the blue sky. A lovely fusion because color did not privilege.

2003-10-19T16:30:00.000-07:00

"CHOKEPO"!!

I sent a chokin' prose poem over to Timothy Yu. He sez:

Thanks--for revealing the as yet unexplored lyricism of choking...duly posted.

You're welcome! Check me -- and other poets -- choking over at Timothy's Tympan Blog!

2003-10-19T01:08:00.000-07:00

SO SNAILMAIL COMES TO THE MOUNTAIN WHERE I, NOT MOHAMMED, AWAIT

There is a god that separates mother and child.
--W.B. Keckler

Since I'm hanging out in wine country, I usually get my snailmail once a week as said mail is usually delivered to my San Francisco address (which is how I prefer it as, in the country, I have one of those country road post office boxes with zero security).

Among the voluminous pile were the twin (east coast and west coast) issues of ambit (thank you west coast editor kari edwards for including me). I haven't finished reading through the issues but I am savoring a new discovery for me: W.B. Keckler. From his poem "For Sonia Balassanian":

Substance pours into resemblance.

The world awakens inside a murderer
dividing and replicating
like a god, an amoeba.

And later:

"You may stumble onto the sleepless universe,"
she whispered to the guard
as he stepped on the bus home.

But of course she wasn't there.

Neither was he.

The god is that which divides

time from place
or soul from face.

This often happens in basements.
Under the earth. Windowless.

It is a mythic place that stops.

That stops energy like the color black
or a blackhole bending light

hence time.

So compelling. Thank you W.B. Keckler, whoever you are, for writing and writing....

==============

Also among the pile was a shimmering gem: Nick Piombino's Theoretical Objects. It warrants more than what I can offer right now. But I already know from my first pass-through that I am impressed by both this collection's underlying concept (which I reduce into saying: theory turned tangible) and the way it is manifested with a marvelous sensibility of lightness even as it retains complexity -- not easy to pull of and which speaks to the deftness of this poet: Here's an excerpt from Nick's "Missing":

I've known what you looked like and have followed you without having certainty, without an image. Your tracks were felt with my feet, your face a visage without signs, your name a way of holding, your thoughts a strumming instrument. Please don't let precision take away the in-between. Don't let them classify the kind of jokes that stumbled in front of us, as we heard them passing on the street. Even this is closer than that. Even this protects the surface from too much grazing.

"Your name a way of holding" -- beautiful. Thank you Nick -- and, yes, I am blinking in the shadows...trying not to become addicted to ... blinking in the shadows because, after all, the sun awaits.

==============

Also among the voluminous pile from this week was an order for Barry Schwabsky's OPERA through a Publisher's Discount of 25% off of the $14 retail price and free shipping (the latter at least a $3 value). Since OPERA probably won't be available through Amazon for at least two more weeks, I'm extending the Publisher's Special (which expired on Oct. 15) through to the rest of the month (e-mail me if you wish info). Thus, for $10.20, you can get a copy of Barry's book -- probably the lowest price you can get it for now. Barry's book is also available through Small Press Distribution.

2003-10-18T12:18:00.000-07:00

BULLSHIT

As a Filipino-American, I resent the double blow of seeing my hard-earned U.S. tax dollars go over to support a Philippine president who uses the terrorism issue to mask her incompetence with other domestic policies.