working on working

on a project w/ mIEKAL and camillE (she has adopted his orthographic ways and means i guess).
and on something called unvarnished? no, "unwithered jaguar," a Spanish project commemorating a Spanish woman poet
and on a paper on NYSchool/Flarf genealogy/continuum
and on a paper on "use-value of the avant-garde" whatever that means
and then think forward to something on...micropoetries for Dee Morris's "poetries" issue of Iowa Review of Cultural Studies or some such...her description in the MLA call for papers validates my attempts –not alone, to be sure, but sometimes it feels that way –to open up poetry studies to THE SOCIAL, decades after some have already proclaimed the death of cultural studies...
i feel responsible for this blog now, to maintain it, cultivate it (and spring is coming, and my garden's going to need a shitload of attention, yes, shitload in the form of nourishment; compost, manure, etc.) and how can all this be done. and i feel i haven't sufficiently nourished the blog, haven't shared the best language, the best thoughts, the best logic, the best emotion, the best eloquence that writing can offer, writing to the social void, or rather to the anonymity of the social since folks do seem to be looking over my shoulder at what the latest is, though they don't comment. How can this world of infinite criss-crossings and interfacings be managed? Who has time to look at all these different poetics blogs to compare and figure out what's useful and what's not? Esp granted the provisional, contingent, half-baked quality of most blog entries, why invest time? It's a matter of feeling one's way along...

whine you dine you valentine you

nada nada nada nada nada
niente niente niente niente niente
rien rien rien rien rien
bubkis bubkis bubkis bubkis bubkis
zilch zilch zilch zilch zilch
zippo zippo zippo zippo zippo
nought nought nought nought nought
nutt'n nutt'n nutt'n nutt'n nutt'n

but springtime
and
...

more thrift

blind
bush, leaf
rut and wet

grain-
meat, meal
oat, tef, rye

drink
heat-soak
ale and rye

gaily
moth-rose
fly, bug, fly!

gusty
wind-whim
tip its hat

's Real
keep holy
cap and gun

tipsy
trip your
not-dry nut.

snore
snow-bear
ice-den nap...

urban
lust-orgy
hit and run

a lot of these are either imperatives or mini-narratives.

collaborrythms

collaborythms
collaborrhythms
collaborithms
labia clacking together irigaray style, or is that irie reggae stylus.
when writing is such sweet sorrow, so is writhing, that is

collabowrithing or is that
collabowriting or coulibriting
the chirp of the honeybee
and the syrup of the hummingbird
a gelatinous mewling of sexoid flabberghasting
that isn't very pretty is it

let's get back to the ecriture femilyrique...
et familiarique à l'Amerique...

collaborythm
i knew all about it once
i got down with the pancreative juices
or joices, or joists
and i'll enter more thrifts next time
there has to be some juice to
credit me with the "poetries"
deedle deedle debit card
you owe me and i owe a
deedle deedle dumping ground
and that's what there is to say.

windchimes

on a cue from the windchimes the snow moves upward toward the sun anticipating swarms of winged springtime mites. Is there a relationship between confetti and confession, as there is between "book" and "birch"? it seems poetry has ebbed away down thru the fissures of the rocks in my brain as i tend to innumerable stupid workthings and misunderstandings. each one is an opportunity to practice mindfulness and compassion and also its language slips between me and the disinterested contemplation from which independent words emerge. A half-smile on a stone's face is still too tightly framed to set me free. There's a lot of charming reactive hijinx going on on the flarf list, funny and sardonic words are busting out all over, including nada gordon's "Why God, Why?" and a new chick on the block, baroness von flarfinghoven, who's knocked out a rambunctious toon or two. Magee and Sullivan, Gardner and Davis going hogwild in the most endearingly dickwagging way imaginable, tearing it up and burning rubber in an orgy of sticky-fingered creative derivations. But this isn't the way i want this blog to go; commentary upon commentary on flarf. there's plenty of that elsewhere.
corny or not, i do look on this space as a writing space, for my cabin-feverish mind (MN in midwinter) to wander in that meadow to which i can't return often enough. i've got a review of Rachel Blau DuPlessis's newest Drafts coming out in How2, here's a head's up on that. Rachel seems to like it which is always gratifying but also raises questions for me about my motives and the future of my writing. Do i do it to please? for praise? to make "important interventions into the production of poetic knowledge"? to exercise my faculties at large? to ratify, a la descartes, human existence? because one can't do otherwise? b/c if one didn't do it there would be personal suffering for lack of it? writing is what happens in the world, nothing can stop it. the five-letter, four-letter and three-letter words rain down on the downy eaves of the blue house w/ the yellow door, curling upward again toward the sun "half-hid" behind the fabric of the nation, is the rain "excellent" rain. are the words "excellent" words. are they corporate messengers. are they free angels. there they go, horizontally drifting past the window, snowing on the city as it cries in my heart, what is this languor that overtakes the weather with icicle featherlings and thorns of glass?

zoundzzz

just dug Douglas Ewart and Mankwe Ndosi at Jeff Hansen's Sundays at Blake School series. AFternoon of sun and cold briskitude outside, inside a pulsing resonant didjeridoo sound enveloping a large room w/ fireplace (and fire w/in) of mostly teenage prep school students who are stunned and embarrassed by the new sound, but getting drawn in in the course of the afternoon. A parade of gaudy gorgeous instruments, all handmade by Ewart himself, rainsticks, a drum made of a bicycle wheel w/ beaded spokes, winds, percussives, ah and Ndosi's masterful vocalizations. got lost later in posh Mpls district, mansions on one side of the road and huge leaning trees on the other, barren and magnificent, forlorn and grand against the stark snow. as silent and static as Ewart was resonant, vibrational. now it's getting noticeably lighter out, it's 4:55 and still sunshine!!! amazing that it happens every year. noodling away at this "use value of the avant-garde" essay, i have no idea anything about a-g, just want to showcase my fabulous textemes culled from books of poetry, the internet, and archives...less and less compelled to "make sense of it all..." no reviews, no nothing here, just a stream of teenish diarism...

riding and riffing

Reading K Stewart's A Space by the Side of the Road and it's reminding me how much i still like the "new ethnographic" writing; just in the first chapter i find a certain methodology, if you can call it that, valued: eschewing totalizing analysis for a kind of parallel construction of a text or object thru thick description, riffing, parasitism, and mimesis; i find that i fall into this "method" when writing about certain subjects, notable Jewish ones or writing about writing. I question the rigor of this style, which i do see as a style rather than a method, but it is a lot of fun to feel swept up in an engagement with a dialogic, porous object like Alan Sondheim's or Adeena Karasick's work. Or Flarf. At the same time i also find myself, with certain other "assignments," gravitating more toward a plodding attempt at systematic analysis; i'm not esp good at it, but there is a kind of humility in "getting over oneself" that i appreciate and find worth cultivating. but i do like writing an essay on the model of riding a bucking horse, hanging on and describing in breathless adjectival prose that veers into the standstill stoptime of the "poetic" breakneck otherzone whatever one can eke out of a kaleidoscopic textual envelopement, text as chaotic womb, a churning universe of activity and pulsations to be documented by one w/o proper language...blah blah blah. so, where's my writing going? round and round in dusty orbit to create an experience, a spectacle, the bucking bronco whupping my ass every time.

the word of the day is aristotle, who climbed the tower of babel, and married a model, and did they cuddle or what, and bought her baubles, and went full-throttle in the space shuttle. th-th-that's all folks. i can't go on i'll go on and on ... til the break of ...etc