Listen to a Story

Because accidental, the boys know the girls.

Of course, both boys and girls need to work also unusual hobbies,
but the circle of life is not the same.

There are too many girls who are always male,
efforts that boys, girls, smiled politely declined.

Then, the wave.

After some time, the boys know the girls single, to further her pursuit of one more.

When the boys return from overseas assignments,
such as honey to see the girls smile.

Boys know, the long wait for a long time, or can not wait.

Tell It to My Spell-Checker

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070921/od_nm/britain_hyphen1_dc;_ylt=Am36EnTwxfZWtVtcEU2jDO6s0NUE

I Am Thesaurus

Burning Man 2007

Working for The Man

I just returned from the annual art festival held in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada known as Burning Man (perhaps you've heard of it). A city of 40,000 + people springs up for a week of incomprehensible heat, cruel dust storms, and unbearably loud techno music booming through the night--in other words, the perfect summer vacation! There is also the most unbelievable art, beautiful, ingenious people, and a very palpable sense of community (I know it sounds cliché, but it's true I tell you). This was my 3rd BM in a row and, for me, the best yet.

It was Tutu Tuesday... I don't make the rules

I had the quintessential Burning Man day (or perhaps that is an oxymoron) on Saturday. I intend to write more about it later (in verse?) but it began with a beautiful woman grabbing my hand and guiding me quietly up behind a man in a short kilt where she bent down, looked under said kilt and then whispered to me in the most lovely, thick Scotch accent, "he's not really Scottish." She then slipped her hand from mine and disappeared into the dust. And that was just the beginning of my day...

Since I'm still recovering and still playing catch up, I won't even try to explain the experience now. As I may have mentioned, I will be writing more later (I am oh-so inspired) but for the moment here's a Burning Man Haiku I wrote and a few more pictures...

Searing Sun Beats Down
Saline Dripping From My Nose
A Guy Without Pants

Those trucks are real

Off to the Purple Rain party on Wednesday



All we are...

I won't even try to explain this


The night of "The Burn"


This is an art car--with ears that wiggled

Two burns for the price of one--the oil derrick explodes after an impressive fireworks display


Yawn... if you've seen one 30' tall sculpture with a beautiful, nearly-naked girl climbing it, you've seen 'em all...

The temple burns on Sunday--perhaps the most impressive fire of all

Robert Grenier and Clark Coolidge

Just because Kasey mentioned zombies the other day I'm reposting this--an essay from an earlier, more innocent time...

What is this?

Journal # 8 – Robert Grenier and Clark Coolidge

We have spent a lot of time discussing language in this class. Well you have anyway, while the rest of us stare unblinking at you as if we were extras in a remake of a George A. Romero film. Remember the movie “Dawn of the Dead” when the zombies longed for the brains of the living but were relentlessly gunned down in a shopping mall by the well-meaning “heroes” (I mean, come on, even if zombies don’t have “feelings” like the rest of us they were somebody’s loved ones—I just feel that blasting them in half with a shotgun or decapitating them with a machete is overkill considering that most of the time they could be taken out quite effectively with a sharp blow to the head with a baseball bat)? If not, I’m sure that you remember Barbara Guest and Jackson Mac Low from last week. They were the poets who, among others, talked a lot about language. If Guest’s An Emphasis Falls on Reality was about the birth of language and Mac Low’s “Dance” poems were about the usage of language, as I have previously claimed (see Journal # 7), then Robert Grenier’s poems are about the tools of language.

Even if Grenier’s poems were total gibberish (which they aren’t) they would “seem” to have substance because of the tool he uses—namely the IBM Selectric typewriter. When I was a kid, my parent’s ancient manual typewriter fascinated me. I would spend hours hammering away on it, not to create my literary masterpiece or even to write impassioned letters to the editor—no, I just wanted to see how many keys I could jam together at one time. Then along came the Selectric with its electric pseudo-efficiency—what a machine! Without those cumbersome keys my hyperactive imagination was freed to zip, efficiently, across the page at 70+ WPM! Since I no longer saw a future in key-jamming on a Smith-Corona (my boyhood dreams crushed like the face of the undead with a Louisville Slugger), I decided to learn how to write instead—something I’ve been doing, on and off, ever since. Grenier’s poems remind me of that simpler time—that time back in the 1970s when the costumes in zombie movies consisted of little more than gray makeup and thrift store clothing—and when I first discovered my love of writing.

Clark Coolidge’s manifesto Words had me reeling like a guy with a twelve gauge surrounded by flesh-eating corpses. Perhaps you were hoping that the zombie analogy would have died with Grenier, but it has, instead, crawled from the grave even stronger and smarter than before—in fact, it now bears more of a resemblance to the creatures in the film “28 Days Later” than anything Romero ever dreamed up. Coolidge’s words, like our weapon-toting heroes, are living, breathing entities—oh, sure they can dance like Michael Jackson in the Thriller video, but they can do so much more.

If I would have read Words only six weeks ago, I would have, embarrassingly (because I’m imagining myself in class doing this), scratched my head and said, “huh?” But my brain is so much bigger now (uh oh, I can only hope that no undead T.A.s—and I know they’re out there—are going to be reading this because, well, you know, bigger brain…)! Words makes sense to me in a way that I would never have expected. I am enjoying the feeling of “getting it”—that beautiful precursor to the magical ability to lavish elitist snobbery on others (a dream I’ve had ever since I first got the ‘F’, ‘G’, ‘H’, and ‘J’ keys successfully locked together like a Mississippi chain gang). Coolidge’s manifesto and his poems have opened my mind (insert your own zombie joke here) and inspired me to experiment with my own poetry. And, since I haven’t quite been able to beat the zombie thing to death yet (for God’s sake, toss me that lead pipe!), I’ll just add that, for me, Coolidge is definitely the hero of this journal. But does that, necessarily, make Grenier a zombie? I think Grenier might have a problem with that, so let’s let him be a hero too—but he doesn’t get the shotgun—no, if I have to use this cheapo plastic Microsoft keyboard, the least he can do is fend off those rotting spawn of Satan with his weighty Selectric.

An Emphasis Falls on Reality by Barbara Guest and poems by Jackson Mac Low

What is this?

Journal # 7 – “An Emphasis Falls on Reality” by Barbara Guest and poems by Jackson Mac Low

I have discovered one of my new favorite poems in Barbara Guest’s An Emphasis Falls on Reality. I thoroughly enjoy the way “An Emphasis Falls on Reality” skates across the tongue before announcing itself to the world when spoken—and that’s just the title! People (as in “those people”), when talking about poetry, have a tendency to devote a lot of energy to things like “structure” and “flow,” but I want to avoid them almost entirely when discussing this poem. Hmmm, no flow and no structure—well, I guess that leaves me without anything to say so I’ll just move on to Jackson Mac Low. Oh wait—I forgot about “language”! An Emphasis Falls on Reality is all about language.

Guest’s brilliant use of language allows us to tiptoe psychoanalytically between the Chora (Lacan’s “Real”), a time before our introduction into language, and The Mirror Stage (our first entry into language)—the place between subject and object, a place philosopher and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva terms The Abject. Where do we stop experiencing “the pure materiality of existence” and start experiencing our lives through the “reality” of language? Why, right there in the first line of An Emphasis Falls on Reality when the “Cloud fields change into furniture” (1). I imagine myself as a child, wrapped in my favorite blankie, staring up at the “natural” cloud fields (representing the Chora) before they morph into the “reality through language” that is represented by furniture and then, just as quickly, they change into fields. This back and forth between the surreal and the real creates a startling landscape. She deftly uses language with and against itself to take us back to a time before its existence. She evokes feelings by using the cloud fields, snow, silhouettes, and illuminations to represent that primal state. She even talks of “‘being’ and ‘nothingness’” (13) to bring us ever closer to that earliest stage of life when “silence is pictorial/ when silence is real” (18-19). By interspersing jarring, tangible words into this ethereal world—words like furniture, “fountains” (11), “motors” (16), and “walls” (24)—she is unleashing the revolt inherent in the Abject. These words somehow don’t belong, but they are there nonetheless. She goes even one further by speaking directly to the language, using words like, well, “words” (which “stretch severely” 5), “vowel”(22), “metaphors” (25), and “font” (32), and lines like “that letter composed of calligraphy” (21). We somehow know that “willows are not real trees” (28), but simply a word that represents the objects that “entangle us in looseness” (29) as “the natural world spins in green” (30). By looking at the poem in this way I appreciate the small miracle that Guest has performed. Language, inevitably and irrevocably, really does create “darkened copies of all trees” (45).

Jackson Mac Low speaks to language as well but much more directly than Guest does. He’s not taking us on a journey to a world of pre-language, but simply showing us the “dance” that language can do. I suppose if you’re going to have to use language, you might as well know how it works. He gives us a pretty big clue to what he’s doing right in the title of the collection from which the first three poems in the reading are drawn—The Pronouns. Sure enough, there He is, 1^ST DANCE. announcing himself in line one of Mac Low’s He can do all sorts of things. He starts by doing pretty mundane stuff like “[making] himself comfortable/ & [matching] parcels” (1-2), but we pretty quickly realize that this isn’t your grandmother’s He. He starts by “[making] glass boil” (3) and I’m OK with that—I can accept that He is capable of this. But Mac Low isn’t satisfied to leave it there—our hero, He, can do even more. He somehow is “presently paining by going or having waves” (11). Wow! I had no idea He could do that! I in 6^TH DANCE becomes the first-person alter-ego of He from 1^ST DANCE (kind of like when John Travolta steals Nicolas Cage’s face in the film Face/Off)*. I is doing what He did, only now in his own words and from a slightly different perspective. He boiled glass but I “boil[s] some delicate things” (3). I “discuss[es] something brown (the bottle that’s not white perhaps) and “keep[s] to the news” (16) all while “quietly chalk[ing] a strange tall bottle” (9). You thought the person pronouns were impressive; wait till you see what This in 12^TH DANCE can do. Detached, This really gives us a fly’s-eye-view of the happenings and sees things in a whole other perspective making “meat before heat” (20) and getting “leather by language” (22).

I’m going to speed over Trope Market and 59^TH Light Poem (both which I liked very much) to get to the only poem of the reading that I initially had trouble with—Antic Quatrains. At first Antic Quatrains assaulted me with its structure and archaic language, but then I realized that Mac Low was playing a joke with language. The words in Antic Quatrains are so over-the-top, so ridiculous in their extravagance that it is impossible to take the poem seriously. Plus, as a bonus, when I began Googling the mostly unfamiliar words I found out the poem was pretty pornographic—and I know this because while I was looking up the definitions on the Internet I actually came across real pornography and was able to successfully compare the two. Unfortunately, all this time surfing porn precluded me from becoming too familiar with Mac Low’s final two poems, Twenties 26 and Twenties 27—on first glance, I guess I’ll just say that I kind of liked them…

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* I never actually saw this movie.

Alan Watts: Life and Music