Nomad Ink

just like i pictured it...

2010-02-06T11:18:00.000-08:00

New York has been a wild ride and a real tonic. Sabbatical Heaven, that is, etymologically, seventh heaven. I'm working feverishly on a wonderfully fun project with Adeena Karasick. My normally sluggish intellectual metabolism has been boosted by her intense wordplay mind, and i find myself putting together warped etymologies, mid-20th C. Euro- Jewish intellectual history, and textilic rhapsodies nonpareil. Also went to a class Alan Sondheim's teaching at the School for Visual Arts, we watched a movie on free jazz which was v inspiring. I learned that John Tchicai is half-Danish. It's nice to share something with such a creative soul. It was great listening to him talk in the movie, he sounded like my mother and all that side of the family when they venture into English. Then celebrated Alan's b-day w/ a feast made by Azure, and met Joanna and Eugene Lim, daughter and son-in-law. Also spent previous wkend w/ the Funkhouser-Hufnagel family unit in rural New Jersey, writing collabs way into the night which i then posted on Wrytings. They made pizza for the kids and for the grownups so i got my NY pizza fix in NJ. Now i'm plumping up around the middle, so must go back on walking regime. More to tell later, and fun night at Jean Franco's writing goofy groupoid poems at a party in honor of Nicanor Parra's daughter, the artist Catalina Parra. I took the opportunity to share the work of my host Walter Lew; everyone was most touched and impressed and asked where they cd get the books. Yay. More more more to tell tell tell, later later later.

time to catch up

2010-01-24T09:06:00.000-08:00

Dear me, it's been almost a year? I keep forgetting my password and I just figured out how to get a new one. Duh.
I'm being a culture vulture in NYC interspersed with days of loneliness, traditional (i'm told) beginning-sabbatical depression (the transition to unstructured time), and lovely long walks throughout the Queens neighborhoods of Sunnyside, Astoria, Woodside, and so forth. I bared my brains under the El for a few hours the other day and traversed miles of pigeon-shit bespeckled sidewalk, smelling the fabulous smells of burning sugar and frying meat all along roosevelt avenue and digging the splashes of color from the sidewalk displays of the grocery and 99¢-&-up stores.

Went to the Tuli Kupferberg benefit at St. Anne's Warehouse on Friday eve, with Eddie and couple of his friends, Ardele and Liss. The benefit was my kind of thing, homey and warm, with raw edges (lots of time between the sets to switch equipment, etc) and a high level of artistry. Kind of like when I went to the Vision Festival in the 1990s, it was all these world-class musicians performing at ear-splitting volume in a church basement that still had a shred of tinsel from the Christmas pageant draped over the curtain cable overhead, even though it was Memorial Day weekend. Anyway, the highlights were the Fugs, Peter Stampfel (of the late great Holy Modal Rounders, whom I remember listening to at night as a teen on Boston's "underground" radio station, WBCN and chuckling over "Boobs a Lot." He sang "Dook of the Beats," and I was chuckling along. Flutterbox was new to me, and great. Jolie Holland was uneven: first song powerful, second incomprehensible. John Hall, whom i'd just seen at the PoProj benefit marathon, was great but a bit over-amped. Laurie Anderson/John Zorn/Lou Reed were good but went on too long. Trance music. Melodic at times but mostly not. I liked it when they all played the same note at the same time. Gary Lucas powerful. Sonic Youth, again, first song great, second okay but not great. Who really cares. It was a benefit for the guy "who jumped off Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown..." or something like that. He didn't really walk away. He spend months in a body cast. So don't try this at home. There was a lot of love there, and I picked up a copy of Tuli's Teach Yourself Fucking and a commemorative t-shirt, since all the proceeds go to him. Shame on our health care system (and can i tell you how mortified I am on behalf of my home-state Massachusetts?), that the assembled efforts of the evening probably covered one minor "procedure" or one day of care, but it gave us an excuse to get together and experience art .

Eddie was getting uncomfortable (cramped seats) and the luminaries were fading, so we left but it was a wonderful evening just the way i like it: homey, unpretentious and full of uneven bursts of brilliance and talent.

Last night went to see Foofwa, Alan Sondheim and Azure Carter at New Dance Amsterdam, yet another overlapping but sufficiently-unfamiliar world. Again, homy feel of folks who know each other, combined with superamazing artistry. I know Alan as an internet theorist and poet, so it was exhilerating to see yet another side of his polymathic creativity: he played a range of unusual (except for one guitar) string instruments (strong instruments) while Foofwa danced and Azure sang. I'm not a dance person so i have no vocabulary for describing what I saw except to say it stimulated my brain and body; Foofwa is like the Iggy Pop of dance (intensity, channeling intense masculine energy) which from me is a high compliment. I loved his quote from John Cage: "I decided to not make choices but to ask questions." Too bad I left my I Ching in Minnesota. The audience was super-responsive and loved the show. As far as I cd tell.

I went earlier in the week to a screening of Howl, Rob Epstein and Jeff Friedman's encomium to everybody's hero Allen G. James Franco was really excellent; not since his James Dean do I think he's had a role so worthy of his talents. (Not that i've seen all his films.) He caught Allen's vocal inflections and gestures, at least from when he was older. I don't know if he did that pedagogical thing with his finger as a younger man, but it resonated with the Allen I knew.

The night before, I went to Nada Gordon's bday party. That was really lovely. Nada looked like a glamorous cream puff. It was fun to see folks, again, a nice homy (that's "homey," not "horny") group of sharp folks it's a balm to be around.
Also nice to see so much of Walter Lew, my in-and-out host here in Queens, and walk around the nabe with him yakkety-yakking.
Ok i'm exhausted. Good to be back, y'all.

text textile exile...

2009-04-07T12:13:00.000-07:00

EM, for Emma Bernstein and Her Family: Charles, Susan, Felix
Phrases taken from Charles's and Felix's remarks at the funeral
click on image for closer detail.

Terra Divisa/Terra Divina: for Iain Biggs

my tribute to ron asheton, the late stooge

2009-01-15T11:25:00.001-08:00

I first encountered Ron's presence and voice in the pages of Please Kill
Me, the wonderful oral history of US-based punk rock. His anecdotes were
vivid, wryly hilarious, insightful. He made me want to learn more.
Believe it or not, I had never listened to the Stooges before, though
i'd heard about them a bit, especially Iggy Pop. I instantly became an
iggiologist and Stooge freak at an advanced age, and it revolutionized
my life. I feel happier on a daily basis, I have more energy, I'm not
afraid to be more sassy and humorous and performative. The Stooges, one
could say, gave me my groove back. Ron's hypnotic guitar playing brings
me deep into myself and out into the world simultaneously. He plays
those riffs and it seems as if they have been in the world forever, but
they haven't. That, to me is the sign of genius: when something is
initiated into the world, like a three-chord riff, it suddenly seems so
obvious and right–natural even, as if ordained by the logic of natural
processes–but it never had existed before. That is the Stooge genius: it
sounds simple, but it is a whole concept, a unity, a total experience.
It's Life. And Ron Asheton, who gave so much to so many in not all that
many years, has made this enormous contribution to humanity.
My thoughts are with his friends and loved ones and colleagues as they
learn to fully internalize and pass on what he gave them.
deepest sympathies and warmest wishes.

Ron Asheton RIP

2009-01-11T18:55:00.000-08:00

I feel sad; Ron Asheton, visionary guitarist and raconteur extraordinaire, died this past week. I haven't been able to get into my blog for almost a year, and then mIEKAL showed me how to set up an account...and reset password, etc.
And a couple of weeks ago Emma Bernstein died.
Now these are two people I never met but i feel as if they have touched my life: Emma through her father Charles, a wonderful, generous poet and colleague; Ron through reading his words in Please Kill Me and through being an Iggy Pop fan. In the last year i've become something of an Iggologist, and now this. Yes, I feel sad.
May all beings be at peace
May all beings be happy
May all beings be free from fear.
A lot has happened in the past year; i went to latvia; i got promoted to full prof with the help of my outstanding chairperson, i made some stuff, i wrote some stuff...
i feel better and better about being in the world, and now people are leaving the world, at least people as they've been.

expansion?

2008-01-12T16:24:00.000-08:00

what's expanding is my girth, as i recover from 10 days on the east coast 5 of which were spent sick in bed in the home of my childhood in newton centre MA.
what i'm hoping will expand is vision, creativity, energy, productivity, imagination, generosity, compassion, mindfulness.
the phone rings and i know it's long distance but i'm glued to the screen here...stymied by the fretfulness of available activities, i can always turn to this sort of reassuring diaristic writing, which soothes me.
i don't feel like evaluating dissertation projects, though they're asking me to log on to show i exist...
i don't feel like proofing mIEKAL's novel (i mean right this moment i don't feel like it; what i've read is actually great)
i shd go to the gym but i don't have time b4 i head off to leslie's bat mitzvah party (gorgeous happy-making time at the shul this morning, had a deep experience of my people, though i had no idea what the f*** anyone was saying, except i caught words like "moses" and "egypt" here and there...and the food was great, hence expanding girth etc)
i shd clean my room...
i shd cut 22,000 words from my ms
i shd write another letter of rec
i shd send a condolence card to my mother's friend Pia
i shd...uh, nominate someone for something
argh.
all i feel like doing is...writing in this little space, my comfort zone, and reading yet another bio of iggy, who is also a taurus.
what-evah!
all of these things will get done except the cleaning of the room. who really cares?
so, i feel better, energized, already, having written my banal little confession, sweetly packaged in bloggy pyjamas and sent off to bed in cyberspace.

fin de semestre blues...

2007-12-16T11:39:00.000-08:00

sleeping, sleeping, reading silly rock and roll bios, latest was Tearing Down the Wall of Sound, about Phil Spector, who is interesting as a demented diasporoid, and about whom i did a bit of work in a paper on Adeena Karasick...but lots has been going on. First, Renee Gladman and Carla Harryman came to give a reading under the auspices of VG:Voices from the Gaps and the UMN's Institute for Advanced Study. They were terrific; Renee read 2 pieces, one about a woman dying from being hit by a car, losing blood and observing the activity swirling around her in response to the accident, the other a brilliant piece about orientation, disorientation, trying to get from one place to another in a city without using the handdrawn map in her back pocket, just asking strangers and trying to reconcile all the crazy and familiar things people say in response to being asked directions. Carla gave a spirited and equally brilliant reading of 3 of her Adorno's Noise hybrid essays; the first a breakneck speed Acker-esque (in theme if not in style) piece about being fucked/bullied by the President; the second a long piece that ranged over the galaxy system ("McBasin") to a meditation on a fiber-sculpture woman corpse by a woman artist that resonated strongly with Renee's first piece, then...anyway it went all over the place to v impressive effect. The last piece, which was somewhat blurred by a lot of folks needing to leave, was a speedy word-salad pirouette through...can't remember as well. Anyway the house was packed, it was good, and Adam Schrag manned our new camcorder ably. Then the next day Dhana-Marie Branton interviewed Renee really well in the VG basement office and we took her to the VG class where, though she felt it was a bit awkward (she thought she'd be reading from her work), she answered student questions about The Activist, a book that I teach a lot and that Maddy Chakraborty had put on her syllabus at my suggestion (thanks, Maddy). Then we had Ethiopian food and I took her to the Ashbery bridge by the walker art center.
THEN the following night we had our Samuel Beckett 101 Celebration in the English Dept (we missed the centennary and thought 101 sounded better anyway. It was amazing, 23 languages being read (including English), excerpts from Godot, The Unnameable and other yummy Beckett snippets. Here's the playlist:

1. Bulgarian: Stoyan Tchaprazov

2-3. Chinese/Japanese: Leo Chen, Leo's friend Toshi

4. Danish: Ole Gram

5. Dutch: Jenneke Oosterhoff and friends

6. English: Richard Rose
Philip Bratnober
David Bernstein
Kevin Riordan
Richard Rose

7. Finnish: Susan Larsen

8. French: Christophe Wall-Romana, April Knutson and Maria Brewer Pascale Crépon, Amy Kamel, Mira Reinberg

9-10. French/Latin: Robert St Clair, Steve Jackson

11. German: Rembert Heuser

12. Greek: Tom Lewis

13. Hungarian: Maria Bales

14-15. Irish/Korean: Annmarie Lawless, Eunjoo Kim, Jewon Woo

16. Mongolian: Lisa Fink

17. Russian: Masha Zavialova, Sasha Zavialova and Kesh Zavialov

18. Spanish: Rosemary Valero-O’Connell, Joanna O’Connell

19-20. Swedish/Norwegian: Susan Larsen

21. New Guinea Tokpisin: Steve Winduo

22. Turkish: Ayca Ulken

23. Urdu: Bali Sahota

Ryo Yamaguchi made t-shirts saying "I can't go on, I'll go on," which sold out in minutes (i was wearing mine and sliced it up a bit punkish, and had a great time mc-ing) and we had a cake with the same line, plus a huge thing of Jameson's, a six-pack of Guinness, lots of dried fruit, wine, cheese, challah, nuts, chips, salmon, etc., a really great hospitable spread that kept everyone happy, thanks to our generous dept chair Paula Rabinowitz, whose husband David Bernstein did a mean Krapp, bottle-uncorking sound effects and all. The eerie thing was, when he was doing his Krapp, the video From Silence to Silence, which was playing (silently, of course) on the other side of the room showed a famous Beckettian actor also doing Krapp. The synchrony was fabulous. It was really well-organized thanks to our genius loci, our low-key inhouse genius, terri sutton. It was a really high-energy evening, capped off by a mass reading of the last 2 pages of The Unnameable loud enough to rouse the dead. We were, in fact, honoring our spiritual/literary ancestors, and I think it must have made Sam (if I may) happy. it was, as i told folks in an email later, Beckettastic. There were about 75 people there (Paula counted). It's becoming a tradition (last year it was Howl@50 that started everything). Who will we "do" next year? Dickinson? Stein? Sappho? I'm rooting for a chick, but we'll see what the weather brings.

That was last Friday night. Saturday was a party for the MCBA "winter book," which this year was Vispoeology, an anthology of visual poetry concocted, i mean compiled by Scott Helmes, Tom Cassidy and John Bennett, stalwarts on the scene. mIEKAL and Camille came into town to celebrate and for mIEKAL to perform his masterpiece of spam-generated playwrighting, Neologism Hospital Theatre. I got to play Dr. Grace Butts, and the next day or so got the best pseudo-doctor spam name in history in my in-box: Dr. Whalen Bump. Anyway it was a lot of fun getting to be part of the festivities and then partying at the after-party and going for a big sushi meal beforehand.
Then a few days' lull and then the grand finale, dinner with my graduate seminar chez moi, i cooked all day sunday and monday and tuesday, that was really fun: cream of leak and potato soup with CSA leeks and potatoes, squash soup w/ coconut milk and ground pumpkin seeds, cilantro humus, mesclun salad w/ pears, red onion and feta, good cheeses, 2 kinds of bread pudding with whipped cream and ice cream, coffee, roast free-range chicken: they brought: really good cheese and bread, brownies, walnut cranberry pie, cherry pie, cookies, rotisserie and southern fried deli chicken, wine, and other delicious things. They talked about their final papers and read some sample paragraphs. It was exciting and fun and afterwards I've barely been able to move, sleeping and reading silly rock bios, and continuing to look at iggy pop videos online and draw inspiration from his manic creativity and smart id.

live down/noodling around

2007-12-03T06:58:00.000-08:00

an offering based on a line of spam from mIEKAL aND

Do wispy clouds give you a different feeling from thick cumulus clouds?

Your tear-stained harp, your cotton robe
the feathered strings that knit you up
do whispers make a different and less cumbersome cloth?

Does the texture get all up in your heart?
What makes an instrument corded or smooth?
How do you work under water?
The amniosis you crave, the gnosis you endure.

How can you play with those ice-manacles on
How is your heart spread out like an orphaned glottule
What do you do when the red line appears under your word, at your feet
What is this impetuous flight into the volcano’s molt

Your thin shift aflutter
Your torn-string heart
Your feathered feet
Your dying voice

Your silver chains
Your bereft throb
Your bleeding mask
Your fallow melt
Your gallows smile
Your hollow cloud

rock star

2007-11-29T10:13:00.000-08:00

Earth is my rock/star, melting fire and stone. When Chris Funkhouser remarked that Thich Nhat Hanh was a "rock star," i felt like, oh no he isn't, he's the exact opposite. But of course Chris is right; Thay gets up in front of thousands of people, gets his ego out of the way (if he has any left after all these years of discipline) and channels pure compassionate, life-giving energy. When I watch powerful music performances, something is also being channeled, something more human: creativity, sexuality, spiritual yearning embodied in a variety of modes: anger, lust, passion, joy, cynicism, etc. A good performance is a condensed version of what it is to be human. Watching Iggy's "Passenger" on youtube brought this home to me in an anguished and joyful way; you see the gamut of emotion and exhaustion, duty, disciplined performance, seduction, sweetness, despair, maskedness, etc., in a compressed time/space that is exceptionally powerful. What do Iggy and Thay have in common. It seems a bit absurd to even ask the question, but the way life and death interpenetrate, and the desire to calm desire...iggy my rock of gutterality, thay my star of aspiration: iggy my star incandescent, thay my rock of stability.

ah, sunny but brisk

2007-08-21T07:28:00.001-07:00

wind is up today, but in a little-ripply way rather than a big-waves way. the treetwigs are stirring vigorously. i burned my kale for the 3rd time last night, i just can't seem to get it right. what will i try today? cukes and red pepper salad, can't go wrong w/ that, nothing to cook on an unfamiliar electric stove. what is the etymology of "stove" anyway. i'll have to check but am afraid to leave my post here in blogland to check lest i lose this little passage, humble as it is. the cape is so mobbed in august, i miss the beautiful desolation (angelic, even) of the winter months, but it's paradise anyway. i wonder how much i'll have to weed my garden when i get back, after a month of dereliction...esp the polygonum and the stuff that comes up between the paving bricks on the walkways, oh and the garlic chives that take over everything...well i will have plenty of occupational therapy in the weeding mode when i get back, and i've got something already on the loom, plenty to do. xo for now! md

"your training is to enjoy every moment of your life!"

2007-08-20T14:10:00.000-07:00

that is what thich nhat hanh said to the kids during a dharma talk at the retreat i just got back from. I will be taking it to heart, so stay tuned. today i got up early and ate my breakfast looking at the still still sea. so amazingly beautiful, with imaginative cloud formations constellating and reconstellating as they moved with fat purpose across the sky in a counter-intuitive direction. it was alternately cloudy and sunny throughout the day, now pretty cloudy but fairly still and heavy-leaved air, in fact entirely overcast so one can't speak properly of individual clouds but a white-gray wash across the whole of the sky. A few twigs laden with green twitch with anticipation of the next big thing, the raindrop or little wind gust headed its way. all aflutter with excitement, contained in serenity. Life is quite beautiful. I got my ms in the mail today, wow, i haven't quite taken that in, better not to, i guess. nothin' i can do now, it's just past 5:00 and the mail's gone out. love to all, md

caped weather

2007-08-08T08:48:00.000-07:00

overcast but so mild and windy, humid, the paper in the printer gets all wavy after just half an hour's exposure to the cape air. lush lush lush, with fat unripe green concord grapes growing wild everywhere. proofread 400pp ms again, and again found plenty of errors, wish that were plenty of eros. mairead byrne will come up sometime in the next few days for lunch and chat abt poetry etc... that'll be nice. i'm so close to providence but rarely get down there, time slips by here...picked up a pound of mussels for dinner last night, they were -bummer! -kinda boring. wonder why. i've never had boring mussels before. the kale, on the other hand, just sauteed w/ a bit of onion, garlic, olive oil and water, was divine. and the mushy peach was redeemed by a few drops of honey and some of the real-but-fake-ish light-cream whipped-cream-from-a-spray-can left by the previous visitors. ah, mushy peach were paradise enow! the night before, dinner w/ celia and jerry brown's son and friends from london, jeffrey/kit baked a divine pasta dish w/ red peppers, organic ground lamb from mike brown's farm, and a bechamel/parmesan crust that was to die for. i had 2 helpings, and was reassured to learn from my sister that the leading diet experts recommend one meal a week reprieve. well that was it, as i also had a slice of mango-raspberry pie with aforementioned fake-ish whipped cream for dessert. that's it for now, folks. i can't go on i'll go on...xo, md

foggy woods hole day

2007-08-07T14:08:00.001-07:00

spent the morning with joanne moore, the grand-niece of Yiddish poet Manileib Brahinsky, mother of Anna Malmude, and grandmother of James Davis. she regaled me with tales of her Yiddish New York bohemian childhood, her saintly grandmother and her audition, at age 8, with Balanchine to go to his ballet school after her Isadora Duncan training with the daughter of one of Manileib's mistresses. Her dad picked up Balanchine in his cab and asked where his daughter (joanne) shd go to ballet classes and B said when she turns 8 (she was 6 and already knew she needed some technique) send her to me. so he did and she went to balanchine's ballet school for 9 years. now she lives in woods hole and served me fabulous bagel-bottoms from H&R with butter, cream cheese and lox!!! v decadent. we walked from her charming cottage into woods hole so shd cd buy cigarettes and then looked in the liberty house for nice clothes, then went to the aquarium to visit the seals, but they were summering in new bedford so the seal-pool was drained. it was a great walk in sleepy, muggy weather, with great coffee at her house with real light cream (as opposed to the fat-free halfnhalf i found in the fridge when i arrived...
what a nice day, and tomorrow the poet mairead byrne arrives...summer's great!

hello my invisible and unknown dears

2007-08-04T14:59:00.001-07:00

killing my wrists in wifi land, but loving it, here i am at the Coffee Obsession in Falmouth MA, wearing my favorite summer dress and answering email. v touched by everyone's concern abt the Mpls bridge disaster. i was on a plane to boston when disaster struck, and learned about it the next morning when my mother showed me the front page of the Boston Globe. Wow. a Dramatic Rendition in drawing, not photography. It's right by school, so i was a bit beside myself not knowing about my colleagues and friends. Now it turns out just about everyone's ok. I mean, as far as i know, the folks i know are doing all right. but what a wake-up call, in many ways. It's remarkable how distant i feel from it, though, once i learned that no one i know was affected, and that there were in fact so few fatalities. Is that screwed up?
The cape is lush, i'm not usually here in august. everything jungly and overgrown, it looks healthy, not dried-out like mpls. the water's warm, i've been in twice and there's no body-gasp when the water gets mid-midriff as there usually is. It's strange to transition into a rhythm of sloth and slowness; i spent most of today proofreading my ms for missing em-dashes and other typos. it'll take a while to get it out the door, i have to bring myself to revisit the introduction after having reread it and seen the overall lay of the land. ok, i'm just chilling. happy vacationing. a bit isolated but x funkhouser will be down here for a day, and then i've got a few poet friends around...gotta scare them up. over and out...

ah, againagain

2007-07-25T13:49:00.000-07:00

what a wonderful feeling to be back in blogland. after various kinds of frustration i finally, thanks to my beneficent workplace, have an uptodate laptop and here i am at my cafe, working and taking a break from working by blogging, looking out at the 95 degree weather (i rode my bike over here, what folly but it beats sitting in a sauna-fied car) from the imaginary cafe with the real airconditioning in it...how wonderful to feel i can actually write something without having my wrists stick to the keyboard from humidity internal and ext.
i have suddenly gotten shy about loggin my blog, who knows who is checking in to read it, and i'm so overprotective that it's having this undesired effect, i feel that someone's looking over my shoulder and i can't be spontaneous. gotta shake that inhibition or this will be just as stultifying as any other obligatory activity.

frustration

2007-06-28T20:27:00.000-07:00

Dear God, let me see if i can post an entry without losing it this time. last time was an exercise in frustration and sent me into a bit of a tailspin; it feels like a major defeat to spend time writing and have it disappear despite my best efforts to post. makes me want to not share any writing at all. are those gunshots or firecrackers in the near dark distance? the neighborhood's going downhill again, my middle-aged gay male couple neighbors are moving out b/c they can't take in anymore. i'm worried abt who might move in. cars idling in the alley, then speeding off; unfamiliar teenagers with ravaged looks sauntering down the alley; crazed-looking women ringing my doorbell and asking for $16 to "call a locksmith cuz i locked my keys in the car..." let's see if this'll post. my lilies are out, beautiful, and roses too, and some things i don't know the names of... first meal of the summer w/ sonja and andy, my CSA share-mates; it was dreamy, the grilled zucchini like candy, the sugar snap peas like candy...green candy nonstop in the languorous back yard...

just checking in

2007-05-05T05:57:00.000-07:00

at last! after weeks of struggle with password, username confusion, it seems i've stumbled into the proper combination after several visits to the "forgot your password?" site and so forth. it's spring in full swing now. magnolias come and gone, lilacs out, other people's fruit-tree blossoms going crazy. it is one of my favorite things to drive through a slightly run-down neighborhood and be amazed by the cherry-blossoming trees lining the streets with glory and dark pinkness. yesterday, the first rainy day in some time, gave me the opportunity to make a savory bread pudding while reading someone's ms on queer poetries and napping (is there a relationship? well yes.) the ms is smart but turgid and it's taken way too long to read. joseph lease was just in town for a very successful set of events; two readings, one at Magers and Quinn bookstore and one at the U, and a lunch w/ grad students that was incredibly helpful to many of them, plus to me. this past week has been a series of dinners with friends/colleagues i haven't gotten together with all year, and belated birthday treats. i am pretty burnt out, and next week to nyc for a panel at the bowery poetry club, which i'm excited about b/c i've never been there, believe it or not. happy cinco de mayo!
walter lew was here, latasha diggs, other folks...it's been quite the year, i've had such a great year!

rainy day women

2007-03-31T14:01:00.000-07:00

well at least one woman, myself, and a soggy three-day rain extravaganza here. green things are coming up and i've no chance to pull them out of the ground, the squilla, dandelions, grass, in places i don't want them, and then other exciting things: tulip leaves, iris leaf-spears, fat fuzzy buds on the magnolias, and of course the yellow willow greening with leaf-buds. did home repair type stuff: a new bedroom shade cut a little too narrow; new batteries for the kitchen clocks and the thermostat, new black ink cartridge and pens from Office Max where a nice official looking boy approaches me in the soggy parking lot. I think i'm parked wrong, in a handicapped spot maybe, but he says, "Hi, I represent Jesus Christ and I wonder if you know the story and would like to learn about it." I told him I was Jewish, let's just split the difference. "Live and let live," I said, shaking his hand and wishing him a good day. Then off to drop lots of $$ on a black ink cartridge. And a few $$ at the dollar store, on sardines. mmm. a nice high protein, high calcium snack, high calorie too tho.
kamau brathwaite and anne waldman both visited here last weekend. Kamau read at the Loft as part of our Art as Knowing conf., sponsored by the English Dept (thanks to my chair, paula rabinowitz, who has supported all my efforts to bring groovy folks to campus); Anne as part of the Bob Dylan conference. Kamau did his shadda thing, amazing life/poetics story that always blows everybody away. He seemed to b energized by his performance and the audience response. See Aldon Nielsen's Heatstrings blog for some nice photos; Aldon was in town for the Dylan conf and had the sense to come a day early to catch Kamau. It was wonderful; immediately after the standing ovation initiated by JOtis Powell!, Douglas Ewart and I think John Wright and Bill Cottman, Kamau was surrounded by young folks –the few Jamaican students at the U, other postcolonial folks all animatedly telling him how much he was telling their stories. Then he signed books standing at the podium for about an hour. The daughter of family friends, Rachel Mordecai, one of our doctoral students who was in town to defend her wonderful dissertation on Jamaica in the 1970s, was there; they had never met but they got to meet in mpls of all places, and he read a poem he'd originally written for/dedicated to her mother, the poet Pamela Mordecai, and rededicated to Rachel for the evening. It was a marvelous event; Kamau was introduced by my lovely colleague Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley in black and white high heeled sandals and a brilliant outfit to match, both selected by her consort Kale Fajardo. She looked smashing and gave an intro that identified Prof Brathwaite as a "master drummer" in service of the "master of the drum," whose daughter she also identified herself as. After the intro Kamau nodded and murmured, "Good." After all of that KB, Omi, Kale and I went to Peninsula, a Malaysian restaurant on Nicollet –of course i got turned around and so KB and i got there late –and we had fish with a strange shrimp paste and lovely sweet mango tofu. It was a nice mellow time and i got home at midnight. The Art as Knowing conf itself was excellent; the next morning Douglas Ewart woke us all up with a dazzling multi-instrumental and multi-media musical tour-de-force. The previous day, Alan Read from England had given a highly suggestive and evocative paper and Ricardo Dominguez entertained us with his amazing virtual Zapatista nano-tech "actions" narratives. Sunday Anne Waldman read some of her Bob Dylan shaman poetry from the Rolling Thunder Revue inspired by Dylan's looking like a kachina doll in whiteface (though i think the intended effect was commedia dell'arte, but whatever), and gave an encyclopedic if somewhat nervous (though charmingly so) paper on Dylan and the Beats, which everyone was v happy with. Her performances are always masterful, as are Kamau's (at least the ones i've seen; i've seen anne far more often), though it was endearing to see her a bit insecure abt her academic creds. Greil Marcus (is it "grail" or "greel"?) also gave a good talk abt hibbing high school. I hung a bit w/ Aldon and his grad school pal Richard Flynn, but spent most of my time w/ Joanna, my pal and ex-across-the-hall neighbor, and her friend Leslie who was up from Louisiana for the conf. Later J, L and J's sweet daughter Rosemary (whom i've known since conception and thus feel a bond with) had dinner at Quang. It was really very nice; Rosemary read a book about Faerieland while J, L and I yakked and scarfed down deepfried shrimp and sweet potato balls, and sea bass soup, their sunday special. mmm.
well that's it for now; enough procrastination. i've finally started in on a prayer shawl for Eli, the youngest son of college friends in Western Mass.: he specified purple, black and silver in addition to the raw silk i get from Henry's Attic. MMMMM. i love working with silk.

snoweventfestival

2007-02-24T14:57:00.000-08:00

We're having a snow event, as they euphemistically refer to this three-day, three-wave, three-pronged attack of the frosty precipitate. Snow's blowing sideways, heavily, "heavy snow, blowing snow" tonight, "we've had freezing drizzle ..." "late tonight and tomorrow..." "regional snow tonight"..."3-8 inches by tomorrow" and here comes Prairie Home Companion on NPR. This wd be a good time to go to the gym, just as GK starts up his opening song about the old piano down the avenue. Its tones are muffled tonight. Tonight? It's only just 5:00 in the afternoon, a Saturday afternoon, and i've been noodling with some school service stuff and skimming the batch of papers i got from my ugrad class. Mostly look pretty good, pretty imaginative. Started a new weaving thing, before i get into Eli's tallis, that's Dorothy's son (Dorothy my old Hampshire College friend); i ordered the silk today from Henry's Attic and bought a cone of silver metallic. I've got the black and purple so that'll cut down on my "out of pocket" so to speak. Last night lovely meal at Barbette's w/ Joanna: we split baby turnips, a beet-apple salad w/ horseradish cream and little sprinkly fried onions like toasted coconut on top, and then a lemongrass basil steak that was truly yummo-licious. and then, of course, a creme brulée. Some v nice things happening: Poetix Collaborative funded, perhaps a personal work related good-thing i'm not at liberty to disclose yet, and an IAS fellowship for next spring. Ahhh, a little breathing space to think that what i do *does* show up on the map occasionally. Ok off to the gym before the GK narrative draws me in.

morning again, nothing needs to be done...

2007-02-18T07:05:00.000-08:00

that's a line from peter orlovsky. but it's not quite true. i've got a number of "tasks," some oppressively impossible, some pleasant except while i'm contemplating doing them i'm invaded by anxious thoughts about the oppressively impossible ones, and writing this is bringing me no relief so i'll change the subjext, the substance, the introject, the retroject, the gesture, the jester (can i change the jester?), the hexxer. can i? i feel hexxed by my own mind. maybe if i did some of those pleasant tasks rather than simply contemplating them i'd get some traction, make some headway, get someplace.
it's gray, warmer than it's been, car finally functioning again, and of course while it makes life easier, it doesn't lift the heavy melancholy of february and understimulation. trying to find meaning in color, started a bright scarf for mIEKAL, and making nice "headway" on my x-stitch "text, textile, exile" but while it's soothing to do it also means i'm not doing the other things...writing this !@#$#@! introduction to this book, the same introduction i've been trying to write for 10 years, here let me introduce you to my book, it's shy but rewarding to spend time with, its name is Bagel Shop Jazz: Poetics for a Post-Literary "America" and it's been leading a reclusive, elusive existence for about 10 years, making occasional appearances piecemeal in this journal or that, possibly you've seen part of it in this edited anthology or that, like i say in its totality its a shy beastie. well this intro will get done, you all out there in cyberspace are my witnesses. it's like, what to wear for an important occasion? just throw something on. just to get out the door.

momentus

2007-02-13T17:06:00.000-08:00

A moment. Making a nest of time. Here in the night office, fluorescent light reflected in the shadeless windowpane, colliding with the rounded planes of a steel sculpture outdoors. a few mornings ago i heard a terrific breakingcracking noise somewhere in the house, but haven't been able to identify a broken pipe anywhere...afraid of what'll happen during the spring thaw...don't know how to turn my water off. Barrett Watten came to give a talk and a reading last weekend, it was v stimulating and fun, lots of different people coming across my radar, in the department, at home, going to the Weisman to the Dylan exhibit, going to the Walker, making a turkey, setting up the room for a digital screening of some of BW's poems, hanging a sheet for projection, arranging the chairs, all kinds of material domestic arrangements that are not part of my everyday life...have my classes been suffering from my slight seasonal depression and exhaustion? v possibly...i'm in a room an office with four sides, how unimaginative is that, and yet does that force a level of interiority on me, an onus to create an imaginative world that moves and vibrates in a way my spatial-exterior world does not? in my grad class we just finished talking (sort of) about Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge's Endocrinology. Body as book book as body, as building, as map. Book as world. As outside so inside. but is it abject.

more belower than below

2007-02-05T14:28:00.000-08:00

The ultimate mn frustration: my car won't start, even w/ a jumpstart from kelly next door and a visit from triple-AAA with strong jumper cables. Something's wrong. Again. With this car I got because my mother knew this mechanic who bought this car at an auction and so on. Never a quarter-year without trouble. Anyway i'm here, at home, now going to get it towed to Sayid my nice mechanic. It's bright sunshine but well below zero, and with a wind-chill to boot, in the -20s. I canceled my class, that was the responsible thing to do, many of them take buses or ride bikes year-round, it's not safe, it's a night class. you can get frostbite waiting for a bus in this weather, they say exposed flesh can freeze after 10 minutes at -30. Anyway i'm trying to keep my spirits up by having carol meet me at sayid's and then we'll have dinner at the longfellow grill, where i've never eaten but it looks nice-ish. not super-nice, but nice-ish. i made some cornbread, a Cooking Light recipe i've made before, and friday night i'll marinate the turkey in bourbon and etc. Barrett Watten's coming for a talk and a reading and i'm hosting a potluck chez moi b4 the reading... so gearing up to make the turkey, etc. i just need my car to work!!!

below below below below below

2007-02-03T19:23:00.000-08:00

it's 30 below 0 with the windchill. dangerous to go out, not to get the mail etc, but to go for a walk, etc. for more than 10 minutes or so. so i stayed in, did laundry, read some of Rachel Blau DuPlessis's Blue Studio and went to the gym (yes, my car started). Last night went to the "preview party" of the bob dylan exhibit at the Weisman Art Museum, it was really fun people-watching and looking at all the weird artifacts. you could push a button and hear marlene dietrich's cover of "Blowin' in the Wind," and watch great outtakes from Eat the Document etc. It was noisy and crowded so it was hard to hear stuff, for example a tape of bob zimmerman age 15 playing music in his livingroom w/ friend john bucklen. but what you cd hear was unmistakably the future bob dylan. his english teacher was there, we chatted, his favorite poet is wordsworth, his favorite poet to teach is loren eisley! they served mini-hamburgers, awful-looking pale french fries, and beer or bottled water. i think they were thinking "Hibbing MN" for the food, but it only underscored why Bob Dylan left Hibbing. However, they had commissioned a chocolatier to design special chocolates for the event and those were really good. i listened to spider john koerner and tony glover playing and singing old American folk music. Now how the heck do i PUBLISH this post?????

back at last thank god a'mighty...

2007-02-02T15:11:00.000-08:00

ah, finally switched to the google thing on my office computer. it wont work at home but now i'm home free. nice talks this afternoon by colleagues katherine scheil, michael hancher and jani scandura, in increasing levels of complexity and narrative tension they made a fine sequence, tho' i overate on the chocolates, cookies etc provided by the department. they talked about archives, which i presented as arch-hives, based on a paper on Adeena Karasick i'd done in which i talk about bees, the letter B (beit) and the archive as beehive ("Beehive yourself, maria!" exclaimed Adeena delightfully when we did a joint presentation back in October). i got in the erotical aspects of archive fever, the throbbing of activity and desire for the goldmine motherlode, etc. it was fun, having Adeena in my back burner as it were as i introduced these speakers. now off to the gym and then to the opening of the bob-dylan's-early-years gallery opening at the weisman...looking fwd...to seeing spider john koerner and tony glover. it's around zero degrees, far less w/ wind-chill, but i feel all femmy in my flouncy floral skirt and pink sweater, the bldgs are overheated here at school (unlike my underheated home) what will we do to contribute to the slowing of global warming? how can we, living as we do in mpls, the minne-apple or little siberia???

so much hassle on the blog...

2007-01-22T14:27:00.000-08:00

they're trying to get me to switch to something they're calling "your new BLOGGER account," that involves "cookies," google, and java. coffee and treats? i doubt it. but it hampers my ability to log in when i've got a few peaceful snowy moments at home and restricts me to my office computer here at work. i've got genet on the brain, immersed in Miracle of the Rose over the weekend and throughout the previous week, having assigned in for a class...wonder how they'll respond, i'm curious. and watched "Un Chant D'Amour" on ubuweb (thank you Kenny Goldsmith!!!), which is beautiful, beautiful but sometimes laughably melodramatic or romantic; the two men frolicking in the verdant woods together, the one chasing the other...it moves me the way adolescent excess, especially my own, moves me. today i got some great clothes from my sister and from Lisa Arrastia, and i feel like a million buckeroonies getting ready to teach my 2nd class. life floats by dreamlike, veering strangely between feelings of overwhelming business and melancholic or happy torpor...sometimes within moments of each other. The sky looks like wallpaper scrolling by framed by my office window, identical thin-shaved clouds, as if big fat cumuli were sliced on a mandoline and placed like tiles across the sky, which, fortunately, is blue and gold after a few days of snowy blankness. These moments of self/nature reflection are supposed to be anathema to what they call "post-modern" poets, but i can't deny the feeling of peace that a few moments of objective correlating and breathing do a lot to ground me. ok that's it; i can't go on i'll go on. that sentence will be on the cake for our next year's Samuel Beckett 101 celebration...

finally and new year...

2007-01-12T19:53:00.000-08:00

finally a real minnesota winter's daynight, with windchills in the negative digits and 30 below up north. i like to cook on days like today, to create a little extra heat in the house and stimulate my senses with smells and textures. I made a greek leek/spinach/feta pie, very lowfat except for the cheese, with only a dusting of cornmeal for the upper and lower "crusts." there's a lot of poetry in the world right now, streaming through the air like radio frequencies, sometimes you can catch it, especially when the cold air makes everything so super-crisp. Eric and Kelly, the Raintaxi folks, live kitty-corner across the back alley from me, and as i got out of my car after a nice session at the gym i heard their windchimes in the dark...an exquisite sound, it sounded like angels we have heard on high, or the music of the spheres; highpitched but sweet, piercing but blending harmoniously with all the other chimes... I've been living here for 2 and a half years or so and i never even noticed that sound. That's poetry for you. It reminds me of the month i spent in dathun at Karme Choling in Vermont, and walking the half-mile or so from the dormitory to the meditation hall in the early morning before dark, and hearing the telephone poles singing furiously in the cold silence. My practice is deepening...i never even understood what people meant when they said that, i would listen with envy and slight impatience, a bit of shame at my lack of diligence ... but that's the past. Now, for the last several weeks, I've had wonderful rushes of feeling/insight/trains of thought while sitting, and though i know better than to make a superbig deal out of each instance, i can't deny that it's rewarding and feels special during and after it happens. I've been having delightful workouts at the gym as well, this january break, a real gift to do these daily trips unworried and unhurried about time and pressing obligations. Last night enjoyed Uzbeki pizza in North Mpls with Mark Nowak and Lisa Arrastia, we laughed and yakked. We were just about the first folks in there at six, and they were inverting the chairs on the tables when we left. The guy who took our orders and served us was, i think the son of the owners, an Afghan and his Minnesotan wife, and he was reading Rumi. Very sweet. That's it for now. I've been blogging for a year now, off and on, mostly off, but it's been a soothing space where i can recommit to the expansion of spirit that writing accomplishes for me, unambitious writing in its way, ambitious in its other way as well.

tabnabbed!

2007-01-03T13:58:00.000-08:00

so, like, i've been "tagged" by Rodney Koeneke so i will list 5 little-known facts about myself. What does "little-known" mean? What is "myself?" I will try to do this in a way that still makes me "viable" in case potential employers cruise my blog; i have heard that this happens. Fortunately I like my job right now.
1. my father went to boston latin school w/ leonard bernstein.
2. my mother rode her bike to school w/ asger jorn.
3. i never met a dairy product i didn't like.
4. i used to be but now i am.
5. for my high school graduation present, my folks paid for the printing of a self-published ms of poetry called "Waiting: A View from the Earth;" it was a green spiral-bound booklet done by a commercial printer my mother used; several copies were at Grolier's Poetry Bookshop for years until i bought them back in a blush of self-consciousness. And I never let my folks read it.

blear

2006-12-11T11:41:00.000-08:00

no weather.
flex akimbo.
so there,
black coated
super
trudge
skimpering
scarlet
managerial
no labor
half-windows
in the moon
bowls bounce by
on heads
no ice
manacles
shambolix
meet me
no phrasing

melancholia trifle

2006-12-05T17:34:00.000-08:00

something like a letdown after the big public events of the last few weeks: first HOWL@50, then t-giving, then the Translating Translation event, where Masha Z and Christophe Wall-R knocked my socks off with their wit, erudition, and thoughtfulness; these events are charmed in their own way, suspended in a glow of aliveness, and give me an energy boost, though they take a great deal of energy to prepare for as well. So i spoze it's "only natural" to feel a dip in the daily mood barometer afterwards...went to the café but couldn't concentrate, then got a haircut to have someone fuss over me for half an hour. it was very nice, he was a nice, non-irritating person, not fatuous or intrusive. and i really did need to get a haircut, first wrote hair cult, which my family actually was; my older sister has never cut her hair, which is down to her knees, quite thin now, with age i guess. So's mine. But i cut mine. my mother too, her hair is long, she cut it once, in her twenties, and says she felt "like a circus horse." She's 90 and still wears her hair up in a bun. i must be writing about hair to not write about the exhaustion and slight emptiness of end-of-semester weeks...one more week of classes, a bunch of prelims and dissertation defenses, and meetings...

recovery

2006-12-04T13:17:00.000-08:00

here i see "recover post" two days later...it's not on my laptop at home, just here at school. halfmmmmooncalf torn lightning across itself, withering into a mist of ice. it's cold out today and the fantasy of fireplace, friends and languor entices. leisure at tunnel's end...and hurling myself at it.

crushingly unfair!

2006-12-02T18:12:00.000-08:00

i just composed a long, long post and lost it. it was about Translating Translation, a beautiful event we held yday featuring Masha Zavialova and Christophe Wall-Romana. I can't stand that i lost it having labored over it for some time and described a lot of stuff in detail, with loving adjectives and naming lots of names, and full of content about the content of the talks which were spectacular. this is so unfair. well perhaps it was meant to be.

2006-12-02T18:11:00.000-08:00

planetary

2006-11-29T11:14:00.000-08:00

swathes ice-brick
paler back of
stripes darker and black
alternatives
cigar-topped
holder
shape of
ledge of
pale shelf
bowing muscle
shadow alped
man-shadow
mountain image
held down blue
tight sky tarp

post t giving

2006-11-26T18:32:00.000-08:00

the problem w/ hosting your own tgiving party is that you can't just walk away from the feast; you're left with leftovers and so, in spite of all the little leftover parties you host throughout the weekend you end up eating a lot of it yourself and thus it is that you gain all this weight that then takes a year to lose...right in time for the following t-giving. i've been living on turkey, stuffing and rod ferguson's red velvet cake for a few days, well, since thursday and it's sunday now. and though i try to only eat tiny bits at a time, it doesn't always seem to work out that way. Last night went to cheng heng cambodian restaurant w/ shevy leslie and alex lubet and his family, then to alex's house to watch bob dylan movies. we settled on renaldo and clara, mostly on my insistence b/c i didn't know if i'd ever get another chance to see it. we watched abt an hour of it; whenever dylan was onscreen it was interesting; whenever he wasn't, it wasn't. it was a real challenge to watch, what with all the murky mumbling and dark colors and cramped spaces. anyway i had curry fish at the restaurant, which was none too smart for the diet, it was way too much fish drenched in oil and virtually no greens. then today i walked around the lake with my friends carol and joanna, then they came over for a leftover festival. that helped me consolidate things in the refrigerator so the pies aren't leaning over about to topple off the tin foil covering the turkey, and the pumpkin soup and gravy have been transferred to smaller receptacles. tomorrow miekal and camille arrive and they will really help me put a dent in things b/c they like the turkey and stuffing, though they are not fans of red velvet cake, but i'm sure they will make short work of the pecan pie that never made it out of the freezer, and the ice cream of which there is still a copious amount. i hope they will go for the saffron mashed potatoes (with a stick of butter) b/c i've got an ungodly amount about a gallon that i can't possibly finish myself. carol likes it but she's about the only taker so far. well enough about food. were you expecting poetry?

howling on the radio

2006-11-22T08:10:00.000-08:00

yday i was on the radio, along w/ bill morgan by phone from vermont, talking about HOWL. it was fun. it's on a station i always listen to, Minn. Public Radio, not b/c it's such a great station but b/c i crave the sound of the human voice in conversation. i had often fantasized about being on this particular show b/c i get irritated with the host; she can ask such stupid questions. but i enjoyed it and i even heard from a few friends and colleagues later in the day that they'd heard it and enjoyed it. i'm enjoying these minor moments in the sun; they do a lot to counteract the daily blues of november in minnesota and the seemingly ceaseless round of letters of recommendation, meetings, dissertations, ugrad papers to grade, etc. that is the most gratifying thing abt writing this blog; it soothes me, the way writing in my journal soothes me, reminds me that i'm here, words are my best friends, like my cat, i can caress them and touch them and let them go and they wander about the room and come back; they have a physical comfort in them, the fact that they exist, that i can use them that i can never use them up, that they are always here for me: when i walk from the parking ramp to my office; when i get in my wonderful bed with a book or a crossword puzzle or a magazine; when i turn on the radio, when i talk to my friends, when i talk to myself.

quietude at school

2006-11-20T08:27:00.000-08:00

It's so quiet in the halls at school today, and only one student comes to my office hours to drop off a paper b/c he can't be in class. I feel like Bernardo Soares, turning my institutional humdrum hell into an imagintive heaven on an hourly basis. The HOWL reading accomplished that in a loud and vibrant, public way; daily my blog and whatever little writing i do about the slice of sun across the top of the brick buildings accomplishes this on the inside, quietly but life-sustainingly. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell can be a subtle thing, not the clash of agon only. It's so quiet at school today, because it's Thanksgiving week and lots of the students are already out of here, though it's only Monday; it's also so quiet because Friday night's HOWL was so raucous. As Susan Hamerski wrote to me in an email, "What a sound; what a music." It's so quiet in the halls at school today because this is the hum of daily existence, the hum of the computer and the fluorescent (flowering?) lights, like at home the hum of the refrigerator and occasionally the dehumidifier in the basement can be heard even upstairs...and the labored breathing of the cat. It's so quiet and in a minute or so i've got to go teach, finish up Kaddish and Ginsberg and then on to Bernadette Mayer before Thanksgiving Day. So much to be grateful for: for words, for language, for the relationship between the fingers that type and the intellect that composes, for everything that has to work correctly in the neurological kingdom and every other kingdom as well.

all a-howling tingle now

2006-11-19T18:07:00.000-08:00

I'm still all atingle from Friday night's HOWL event. We read en masse, the whole thing including the "footnote to howl;" david bernstein from the Theatre Dept (and my chair Paula Rabinowitz's husband) conducted, along with three Arts Quarter pixies, Eliot Durko Lynch the blue-haired impresario, Crystal with or without beret, and a cute girl whose name i forget in countercultural gamine fashion. There were about 150-200 folks in attendance, including my old Naropa connection Gregg Rutter and his wife Beth and their friends Robert Ferguson and wife (with a K- or C-name); about 12 of our fabulous graduate students, many of whom read self-translated passages of HOWL in their own languages. That was the highlight for me. We had a lot of tech difficulties that meant that some of the special effects we had planned we were unable to execute until later in the evening when they had become somewhat irrelevant. Still, we opened with the sound of howling wolves, to put the Minnesota imprimatur on the evening. A jazz trio consisting of Paula and David's son's best friend, Javier Santiago and his father Mack (hence a "generational" event; the evening was very much about generations) and a bass player who accompanied the mass reading, which was gloriously chaotic. People were sitting at different round tables around the Campus Club (spectacular view of downtown's skylight reminiscent of the cover of the HOWL album where a young and wild-eyed Allen Ginsberg is gesticulating in front of an infernal Moloch city-scape), each table had a few xeroxed copies of HOWL on it. As the Theatre Dept Arts Quarter folks and I wandered through the room shouting the gospel of Ginsberg, it was so cool to see all these people, many of whom i knew from my daily institutional life, hunched over the texts in intense concentration, intoning with their fellow-readers. People I'd known, though not well, for eighteen years. Finally I was reclaiming a space which had for so many years been abusive. One colleague referred to it as a "ritual of cleansing" so the department can achieve a different vision. It was an exorcism in a way, and when we were done we were all glowing from the oxygenation of reading aloud such a longline poem and having to breathe! Reading in different languages were:
Albanian, Julia Musha boy was that amazing to hear
Amharic, Solomon Deressa who intoned Kaddus Kaddus Kaddus...
Bulgarian, Stoyan Tchaprazov straight from the City of Wisdom
Chinese, Wang Ping who brought kids and friend
Danish, Ole Gram-wild to hear HOWL in my mothertongue!!!
French, Robert St Clair who read a fabulously gutteral Moloch passage
German, Tom Pepper who read from America and recited Jimmy Schuyler
Haitian Patwa, Valerie Deus from Brooklyn
Hebrew, Renana Schneller it sounded so beautiful
Italian, Siobhan Craig who took on the polysyllabic academy
Japanese, Christine Marran (with intensely cute baby in stroller)
Latin, Steve Jackson ? he appeared out of the blue, it was a true gift from heaven
Oromo, Solomon Deressa again
Russian, Masha Zavialova the professional translator doing Moloch
Spanish, Rosangelica who also appeared spontaneously and translated on *-of-moment
Yiddish, Leslie Morris and Margie Newman, she-wolves of the shtetl

and Alexander Truskinovsky, whom i'd known since he was an undergraduate physiology major and now is a doctor at the Med School, recited a gorgeous Mayakovsky poem in Russian and followed it with his own translation --riveting! Ryan Cox, Becky Weaver and Gregg Murray, students in the English Dept, read their own work, as did u-grad Jacob Duelman later on. Gregg Rutter read too, a poem he'd written the day before about having hoped a poem like HOWL could really save or change the world.

There was a sheetcake saying "HOLY HOLY HOLY" i had three pieces with lots of frosting, during the last few minutes of wind-down. The wonderful Terri Sutton, the dept's events manager, calmly did everything from order the food to run the video camera. It is hard to capture in blogtalk the intensity and excitement of the event; it was thrilling. Many folks said: "We should do this more often." A few others used the term "thrilling" also. Most of my ugrad class was there, i was proud of them for showing up, though it was assigned. And folks i didn't recognize at all. Two former colleagues, now retired, were there; one is a friend, the other is someone who tried to get me fired. It was sort of a kick to see him perseverating earnestly over the text and to think that the context was capacious and forgiving enough to hold both of us in the space. It was v meaningful and fun for those of us who have labored under the yoke of an oppressively prejudicial and conformist department, we were creating new possibilities, just as the poem itself created new possibilities when it was first intoned at the Six Gallery in San Francisco 1955 and then published to scandal and notoriety in 1956.
I spent the weekend taking it easy, and today made pumpkin soup for Thursday's feast. I still have lots of pumpkins and squash left! And I've been shopping like a crazy person for all kinds of "luxury" goods, well they're not but i never buy them: fruit spreads, which i use in bread puddings, crystalized ginger (they have a new, cheap kind at the co-op), nuts and dried fruit, eggs for pies and so on. Made a butternut squash pie yesterday, with one egg and two egg whites –it rose really high and looked beautiful, then sank and still looks all creamy yellow and brownish on one side where it got more heat, like a golden marshmallow held just the right proximity to the flame.

heteroglossic howlings from minnesota

2006-11-17T09:26:00.000-08:00

tonight is the umn's HOWL celebration. we will open with a soundtrack of wolves howling (putting the Minnesota imprimatur on the evening) and then go on to a group reading of the celestial rant, followed by open-mike testimonials and a reading of HOWL in about 15 different languages, from Albanian to Yiddish. Two Ethiopian languages (Amharic and Oromo), Chinese and Japanese, Bulgarian and Roman, Haitian Patwa, Danish, German, French, Italian, Russian, Spanish, Hebrew, and maybe Farsi. If everybody shows up. Sheetcake saying "holy holy holy" and live jazz by three generations of Latino musicians, the Santiago family. Amazing. David Bernstein is the secret hero of the event, having gone above and beyond in his planning and visioning. Terri Sutton is the other secret hero, the publicist for the department and organizer supreme. I am fretting about what to wear and what to do first, play the wolves howling or show Allen reading. Anyway, it's overcast and gray, still, not a single stirring of wind, and i shd go to the gym before it's too late. that'll put me in a good mood for the rest of the day, so i can deal with the technical difficulties that are bound to crop up. Wish me luck (mockingbird.). And unpoetic as i feel right now, it will be a poetry orgy. lovely words and lovely energy.

slow-mo sunday

2006-11-12T16:33:00.000-08:00

my skillet of leeks and barbequed turkey is cooking away downstairs, all bubbly-bubbly, making the house smell good, but it'll smell funny tomorrow when i come home from work and step inside. the phone's been ringing a lot. got more fun stuff lined up for the HOWL event; three generations of jazz musicians. bongoes, drum and keyboard, to riff behind the mass reading. and what else, what else and what else. wrote a review of a good book in record time. didn't get to my real task of the day, haven't gotten to it in two weeks, in three months...had a blissfully lowkey weekend, did nothing except, well, wrote that review, met w/ david bernstein to plan the howl thing, shopped at a consignment store, emailed back and forth with a student who wants help on a paper...meditated, ate, had divine sleep, walked just a little, had squash pie with Eric and Kelly of Rain Taxi fame (it was fabulous, with real whipped cream) and got the recipe from Kelly, it was actually made w/ a butternut squash from my CSA, one of the twenty or so i brought back. so these squash and pumpkins are finding happy homes with appreciative people who love to eat.

veteran's day

2006-11-11T15:58:00.000-08:00

Veteran of grief, loss, writing, teaching, dieting, used clothing store and yard sale shopping, hair growth and hair loss, the 60s, the 70s, New England girls' school, and that's it for now. i haven't earned any medals for any of it, i don't do any of it best of all the people who do it, or the most of everyone who does or experiences these things, i'm just a footsoldier in the wars of experience. bush laid a wreath at the grave of the "unknowns." a chilling phrase. the loneliness of dying on a battlefield –or anywhere –and not having an identity that can be traced to a mother, a child, a relative or friend...i remember seeing the monument to the unknown soldier at Arlington Cemetery as a child when my family took a trip to New York and DC, and my father told me that the flame burned eternally there. I was touched and haunted by that image, and the awe and respect in his voice (one didn't hear that often) but had no idea what that kind of loneliness was until now that i'm older and can fathom such a thing. I remember walking down some creepy commercial part of San Francisco with Ed Cohen in grad school, after seeing a bad movie (an inferior French knock-off of "My Life as a Dog") and passing a homeless man on the street; he was sitting on an overturned box; didn't look that old actually, had longish hair that was still discernibly blond, but his face was ravaged. "I'm dead," he said. "I've been a dead man for years." That was what, over 20 years ago now. It comes back periodically. He's an unknown soldier in the wars of experience, my memory of him is the light that will never burn out, now that i've written this and maybe someone will see it hurtling alone and bereft thru cyberspace, jostling all the other messages and ephemera that rise and fade by the millions every day.
My father was a veteran tho' he never saw action. So i think of him and the things about me that are him-ish. Voice, facial structure, values, grayblue eyes, broad hips. Ah, maybe he knows i am writing about him. Finally got to read Persepolis last night what a treat. I am happy that such talent and intelligence exists in the world, and such powerful witnessing.

friday crash

2006-11-10T17:50:00.000-08:00

ahh, i've skidded to the end of the week and slammed right into friday night. here i sit at my screen and keyboard, imagining the world outside full of plans and energy, and i just want to hunker down with reading material. or writing material. when feelings of loneliness came up this week i thought maybe i needed more socializing, but on closer inspection it turned out that i socialized nonstop last weekend and it was one of the reasons for my sense of depletion and thus loneliness. So this weekend i'll use the alternate strategy: lay as low as possible. I have to meet w/ someone about our HOWL event a week from today, that's tomorrow at noon, but otherwise i have an (ah, bliss) unscheduled weekend. Let's hope i can get some work done on my book w/ Ira Livingston.
xo, md

respite despot

2006-11-08T16:46:00.000-08:00

just a few minutes in the expansion of today: it's 70 degrees out in minnesota today!!! fabulous. a 12-mile bikeride, can you believe it. in a few minutes i'm off to meditate and really sink into the day in the most luxurious manner, but in the meantime i need a transition from the gogogoness of life in late fall semester. i sipped my wonderful cup of coffee out in the backyard under my backdoor light, sitting on the steps in sandals and a summer skirt, looking at the withered leaves hanging from the wisteria-draped structure-thing. Imagine. Life is open when it's like this. Every day a new gift falling from the clouds into our laps as we're seated at our computers or in our easy chairs. We talked abt Frank O'Hara in my ugrad class and i passed around a bunch of books including the Joe Brainard Retrospective catalogue, from which i'd xeroxed his essay on "art." afterwards a student wanted to borrow it. Just for a couple of days. "It's pretty cool," he said. I couldn't disagree. I'm such a sucker for their enthusiasm, i let him have it, just made sure my name was in it. Another student wanted to borrow my Amiri Baraka video but wasn't in class today. It's pretty lovely. But when do i get to do my "own" work? Am I supposed to forget that word "own"? Thây would say yes. Here is my own work, dear blog. You're it right now. My lovely expressivity-vortex, my generous blank friend, my enabler. As long as i don't try to posture as a poetry-know-itry person, you are a relaxing reflection to spend time with.

ahhhh-ish

2006-11-06T08:34:00.000-08:00

Sinking into writing, a profound luxury of the mind. The white sky matches the white screen, the white page; in each case, a redeeming graininess mitigates the sterility associated with whiteness, turning it into the promise of change, of no-longer-whiteness, of whiteness-in-relation. Inscription is the promise, the change, the no-longer, the relation. Inscription is embrace, entwiniture, enlacement, embellishment of Being. The wooden windowframe of my sterile office fixes a sterile landscape of brick, concrete, chimney, sweetly hokey faux-gaslamp streetlight, and at the same time there is permission to revel inwardly and transform this bleak blank into a plenitude of texture and imagination. It is unstoppable.

mine eyes glazeth over...

2006-11-01T10:48:00.000-08:00

windowcloud
suncold
iceframe
yellow missile chimney
bricked angle
youth vertigo halo

sax colossus

2006-10-31T20:22:00.000-08:00

sonny rollins was inspiring...these folks, like Kamau Brathwaite, Bob Dylan, Sonny Rollins, a couple or so decades older than I and still going strong, i realize there are few limits to what one can do if one is passionate about creating art, if one can't help but do it... Rollins's gait was a bit stiff as he moved across the stage, but his playing was fantastic. Powerful lungs, strong musical vision. The trombonist didn't have a very clear sound; it seemed muted and a bit fuzzy, nice complementary tone to the sax but not at all what one might consider virtuoso tone...interesting. the place was packed, the ted mann hall at the u of mn. people were very attentive and respectful, they really knew what they were seeing. i sat way up on the second tier where all the kids and less pecunious folk but diehard fans were; next to me were a tiny, smelly, ugly but magnetic old couple who spoke to each other in english but with strong accents, possibly german or swiss; that wouldn't have been my first guess, but i noticed later that the man's hat looked tyrolean...turns out she is a musician, a pianist, and knew quite a bit about jazz...she remarked in her thick accent to her date (or husband, or brother, cousin or friend) that "all the musicians" had turned out for the concert. i wonder who she is.

Today also finally the tree man from Matt's Tree Service (a gay or gay-friendly treework co) came and took away the parts of the willow and mulberry and that one i don't know what it's called, with the green-and-white leaves, that were touching the house...part of the anti-squirrel campaign. He remarked that since he works outside, he doesn't mind indoor type recreation. Like what? Book signings, he said. He liked to go to book signings. He'd just been to one by someone who'd written about Iraq, Paul Rykoff?? and Al Franken, and he'd wanted to go to Barak Obama's recent one but it had been during the day. A charming conversation. Minnesota's good at that. Gay, politically progressive tree people.

rollins and tootsie rolls

2006-10-31T17:07:00.000-08:00

forgot to get halloween candy then ran out and bought $18 worth of tootsie rolls, reese's pieces and mini-hershey bars. only got 2 groups of kids and now must rush off to a sonny rollins concert, i'm thrilled b/c this'll be the first time i get to see him...Jamaican/Canadian poet Pam Mordecai was just here at the U for a reading hosted by VG: Voices from the Gaps it was a great occasion, she's a very warm and lively person i admired her stamina b/c we kept her going all day long w/o a break and she was exceptionally gracious about it.

ok just got a bunch more trickrtreaters...they've pretty much cleaned me out. The adults always want candy, too. Only one dad in the whole crew said no. ok overnout.

happy backness

2006-10-27T17:10:00.000-07:00

it does feel nice to be back, to have the space and leisure to jot a bit of interiority into the electrons. now waiting for a few folks to come for dinner, some of my colleagues who also meditate at the same place i go to, andreas and fernando, and andreas's partner lisa disch, a great person. it will be a slightly weird dinner as i made a pumpkin soup w/ veg broth and a salad, but then some organic lake trout sugar-cured, cold, for the meat dish (lisa's a vegetarian), and then bread pudding for dessert, plus a cheese platter that a and l are bringing. when i had dinner at lisa's once she made exquisite food, a melon and avocado salad and stir-fried jumbo shrimp w/ black mustard seeds and all kinds of fancy stuff, and this is gonna be pretty plain. but it's all abt the people, hey, na? the doorbell shd ring at any minute. they're also bringing wine. fernando is a lusophone culture expert (just got a guggenheim whoo-hoo) and he's bringing portuguese wine.
last night saw marjane satrapi at a local church that's for sale (!). she was great. lots of high school students there, very touching, a real minnesota crowd, tall, blond and earnest, wearing home-made hats and sweaters and clapping when she made even the mildest anti-Bush observations, which most of them were. mild. sat with mark nowak and lisa arrastia, two of the best people, but why say that the world is full of excitingly fabulous people and i am glad i know some of them. some are my students, my sweet undergrads who spend $$ on poetry books!!! that are not even required!!! ok, time to go fret abt being a hostesse.

idiocy

2006-10-26T08:58:00.000-07:00

oh i am such an idiot, i see i already posted my ramblings on pierre and nicole's, so that makes me wonder about my mind. but now i recall i actually wrote about making kabocha squash soup, with oolong tea and ground pumpkin seeds for body. that's what it was, well that's what i'll be consuming for the foreseeable future, as i've made vast quantities from the enormous squashes i picked up at the harvest festival for my CSA; about 10 huge butternut, kabochas and pumpkins, that'll hold me for months, and possibly give me carotene poisoning, the yellow-tinged skin of a compulsive carrot-eater. ok, over n out.

reconstruction blues

2006-10-26T07:26:00.000-07:00

I posted a lovely passage (yeah, i admit it) right before flying to tulsa, then lost the whole thing. I'll try to reconstruct the highlights...
Here's a collaboration i sort of imposed on Audacia Dangereyes, the alias creature of overheardness:

FEUILLETON

you said humbly
all a-mumble

both read books
shaves of glass

vanishing and easily
fired from within

outdistanced by time
crumbly pure powdered

I got to the scene
between the leaves

panting all ancient history
painting through parchment

I like the way it turned out. I remember going to albany for a conference convened by Chris Funkhouser back in the 1990s, and i stayed w/ Pierre Joris and Nicole Peyrafitte in their Madison Street mansion; i was ravenously hungry and ate most of the chicken and cornbread she'd prepared for dinner; she's an amazingly efficient and good cook and hostess, in addition to being –to me, at the time –intimidatingly hip, having grown up in an inn-keeping family in the pyrenees. I stayed in Joe's room and read a pirate book to Miles, the younger son. "Le Pirate BADABOUM," and drank my coffee on their couch looking out a tree, with their cat Pillule snuggled up against me. At least so i remember; anyway it was lots of fun saying "pillule" and "badaboum." That conference is the first place i met sandy baldwin, ben friedlander, chris stroffolino, doug rothschild, and of course pierre and nicole. and chuck stein, whose presentation blew me away. the only woman i remember other than nicole is belle gironda, though i know betsy burns, now my mpls homey, was there as well, as i remember her daughter Cici in Pierre and Nicole's livingroom.
It's an overcast day here and i'm sick, at home, having bowed out of the presentation on Dylan and the Beats i was going to give in Colleen Sheehy's class on Dylan at the Weisman art museum, in preparation for the big Dylan exhibit that's coming in the Spring. There is a conference in late March associated with the exhibit, so all you groovoids get your paper proposals in! ok, over and out. it's kabocha squash soup all day every day around here, an antidote to the extra avoirdupoid accumulated in Tulsa.

tulsa tussle

2006-10-23T10:49:00.000-07:00

just back from MSA8 where i had a lovely time seeing Barrett Watten, Ben Friedlander, George Hartley (who read a KICKASS paper on Pound's ideograms, Fascism, and Bush's doublepeak), Steve McCaffery, Michael Davidson and Dee Morris (though i didn't really get to connect with the latter three), my very first doctoral student, Mike Bibby, now a full prof at Shippensburg U) and my own UMN colleagues Paula Rabinowitz and Lois Cucullu; and meeting new groovoids like Sarah Ruddy, Joel Nickel, Amy Hume and Matt Hart. The Tulsa Doubletree Hotel had terribly stale air in the guestrooms and freezing conference rooms,and i felt super-alienated until i connected with my panel-mates and the panel actually took place. "New Directions in Poetics." BW framed it in usual trenchantly theorized style and then we were off to the races. I spoke first, about WEB DuBois and Walter Benjamin, and what we can learn from them about new directions for current poetics. I prefaced it by saying how hard it was to speak on new poetic in the current planetary cacophony in which sustained thinking is pulverized by global war conditions, and referred to poetics going missing, "non habeas corpus." It was a good warm-up act for George Hartley's amazing polemic mentioned above. I had also mentioned the death of Du Bois's infant son as an impetus for the Souls of Black Folk, and then George referenced the "death of my sons," to whom his paper was dedicated. It was an incredible moment as I had not known about the tragic events in George's recent life, and learned more about them later, at dinner. Sarah gave a paper on Ben F's Simulcast, referring to the "savage adolescent" impulse to take on one's seniors in the poetry-heavy scene, while Ben was sitting right there in the audience, a sweetly quizzical half-smile on his lips. It was great. Then a marvelous couple of dinners right in a row, with many of the above-named groovsters in the town where steak was king and they do meat right. eventually made it to the fascinating Gilcrease Museum of Western-themed art and was quite impressed. With Barrett and Sarah. We had a magnificent sunday brunch there overlooking the "grounds," with a series of goofy and/or majestically beautiful women serving us and asking us how we were doing, how we liked the food and if we were ready to have our plates taken away or our drinks refilled. what a life!! it's hard to get back into the groove here in my office in mpls, but i am glad to be back in control of my diet and the air quality of my sleeping quarters. Reading Ashbery's Flow Chart for an independent study w/ a Creative Writing MFA student; it's sheer delight, much to my amazement.

winterish interstices

2006-10-18T18:53:00.000-07:00

i've got a moment or two before i go meditate at Common Ground; i may actually have finished my conference paper, amazingly enough. i looked at Paula Rabinowitz's ASA paper where she also talks about Mark Nowak's work (as i will at MSA8) and hers is fairly tightly wrought; mine is pretty general with some forays into density, but hers is dense throughout. Sometimes the mind is on, sometimes it's just off. Fabulous "tea-scented" kabocha squash soup, with ground pumpkin seeds in it to give it some body, and half a cup of strongly brewed oolong tea. it's delicious!!! using the chicken stock from these natural chicken carcasses i can buy near my house, at the new Midtown Global Market, one of the Cities' few multicultural sites...the stock came out so velvety and rich i can taste it through the intense squash flavor. I picked up about 10 huge kabochas, eight butternuts and 2 pumpkins (among other things such as cilantro, sage, two napa cabbages, beets, zucchinis, leeks and kale; most blanched and in the freezer by now) at my CSA's harvest festival; that should keep me in orange vegetables through thanksgiving at least. time to start planning that baccanale...but first, the HOWL festival, november 17, all poets welcome. it's overcast and wooly-sky'd all day and yesterday, even some "snow showers" today while i was teaching. i had gone to the CSA harvest festival with Sonja Kuftinec and Andy Arsham, with whom i split a share of vegetables this summer and with whom i thus have many fond food memories from their backyard. Summer is a wonderful time for an academic; we can work at our own pace and enjoy life. I'm rambling, sort of, but having such a lovely time doing it, just checking in with myself in public like this. Life is full of unobtrusive pleasures like this.

breathless gush of i'm-back-ness!

2006-10-17T08:45:00.000-07:00

dear invisible listeners! (this is how walter benjamin began one of his radio broadcast book-reviews, so endearing)
i've been away for so long. I was overcome w/ bashfulness, like, who was i to claim blog-space, it seemed at once abject and grandiose, esp as i did not aspire to poetry pundit-dom but rather to cyber-connectedness regardless of content; it turned out i enjoyed writing about food preparation and the weather, as in, the view from my writing window(s), always a source of inspiration, from Literature Nation to whthrrhthms. I can't really enjoy a cup of coffee unless i can look out the window at a tree; i remember explaining this to Pierre Joris and Nicole Peyrafitte when they hosted me at their gorgeous Albany mansion at some conference long ago, organized by Chris Funkhouser among others. That was a lovely visit; i met their cat, Pillule, and their sons Joe and Miles, and read a book, Le Pirate Badaboum, to Miles. Right now i'm procrastinating working on a paper for the Modernist Studies Association, on New Directions in Poetics, a panel operated by, flown by, no, chaired and organized by, Barrett Watten, so the theoretical, polemical and intellectual stakes are h-h-h-high (oy v-v-v-vey iz mir); there's so much to say and it's hard to stay calm and rational on such a topic, so i'm taking refuge in the past; writing quite sketchily on Du Bois and Benjamin as forerunners of a poetry and cultural studies as well as an embodied poetics in their inspired styles, both heavily imbued with Enlightenment dialectics and breaking away therefrom. hmm, i'm enjoying paraphrasing my as-yet unformed paper more than i'm enjoying writing it...
Last wkend had a great time w/ Adeena Karasick, doing a "simultaneous jewissance" presentation of mutual scholarly/creative influence, to a grad student conference, Articulations, at the Theatre Dept here at the UMN. Her energy is so intense it carries me along with it and makes it easy to play with words in a heightened way; the eroto-linguistics of performance...
And what else...my garden is...tiny nascent white raspberries re-forming on wild stalks, of course it'll frost over and plunge into winter b4 these little gems have a chance to actualize themselves in my mouth...and the jasmine has turned to spindly pinwheel seedpods across the vacant ex-dog-run area...and the buckeye tree in back has shed all its geriatric leaves while the willow tree in front hasn't even yellowed yet, still deep green...
and here Marjorie Welish made me promise i wouldn't turn into a "let me tell you about my garden" writer...
anyway, this is my letter to the world, which sometimes even does write back. but how do i get those stupid ads out of my comment box? and people have tried to tell me how to link to others' blogs so i can do the network thing and give back to those who are giving to me but my eyes glaze over when i read their instructions...sorry tim, sorry nick. i'll try. xo, md

cape ditties

2006-04-12T08:32:00.000-07:00

here are some blips from the cape;i thought i'd posted them already but now i don't see them anywhere in the "archives..."

smeared goodbye ocean
gold-rumpled, can i bear
a thuddening unrelented-
nessless
is it heart to say
is heard
harm
senselessness loss
12/20/05 /0/0/0/0 and all these days...
every day not here wasted...

low ebb rubble
explosure excess
saltstrewn, tide-tranced
wavulets clampt up

blasted
yearnt
broke-off --

6/29/04

blind mica
embolded motley
sky for eyes
sun malimbo
moulting clouds
dizziac
persephonic
gold
cumulata

6/28/04

monocrag jumpup
rockassault a brute
grav stoniness end-
lessly rocking
wavestones inna
bawdgarden ocean

6/28/04

emerald
vibrato in
fuschia field
tummel-tot
hummingbird
bolt and
friend's de-
lightly tremble

6/27/04

a first!
red deer in the
backyard
sniffs at the ocean
gingerly
a tentative
elegance
bless/\ing.

6/26/04

variable whites
flatlining sur-
face
sleeping rocks
dogs shaggy w/
seaweed
barnacle-harsh

6/26/04

some thumb
agin th'
'orizon
blurrrs
skysea
smudge
a slay-
grieve
dress
line down
'side me

june 25 2004

dark n
acquama-
ria quaintance
emanations
foaming they-
selves under-
sea'n
small
roars
the real
behind the
real behind
the::::::

june 25, 2004

blind screen sea
surface for fonts of
birthdeath scrimmed &
scrolled
wavelings' glimmer
making
melting
writing

6/24/04

lightsea
wordcrosstown
good to me
gorge on flowermeat
flowsand
sunflux
loca(l) sola(ce)
splurge
saltflats
cross't crowmeat
gruntgrass
decay burnt godnight
6/23/04

th-th-that's all folks, i can't go on i'll go on and on...

&Now&Then

2006-04-04T14:44:00.000-07:00

off to &Now festival right from school in about 20 minutes. cash prizes worth hundreds of dollars worth of Women's Studies Awards available. Helen Hawthorne Hartung Award, Valata Dakota Fletcher Award, etc etc. gotta go, not too punditty now or ever!

back in the skidaddle

2006-04-03T14:16:00.000-07:00

So i get some nice posts from friends. that is a big incentive. i didn't see the cool dress at the oscars but i will try to google it. i've started a new xstitch it's going to be a big SOS to indicate how swamped i feel...a big O in the middle with s's dancing around it in different fonts. haven't cooked anything memorable lately except a bread pudding with a jar of black raspberry "spreadable fruit" jam and some of the cranberries i got from dreamtime village, and honey. i've got way too much honey, people give it as gifts etc. i gave a half-finished "pure minnesota honey" plastic bear to gabrielle civil and still have tupelo honey, chestnut honey and one other kind in big jars to work my way thru. i'm maxxed out w/ this collaborative arts search committee work at school it's fun and stimulating but exhausting over the weekend i cry b/c depleted... a puppeteer, michael sommers, gave a fun presentation his work looks sort of wierd, art brut-ish but he does cool community stuff and the art and theatre dept adore him...

punditry: yes or no

2006-03-08T11:22:00.000-08:00

now that i have this little space for thinking, i realize how much dedication it requires from others to maintain the discourse, what a commitment to the poetic project to log all one's most developed thoughts on poetry and poetics. but what if one really does want to be a teen diarist and not a pundit?

working on working

2006-02-26T14:31:00.000-08:00

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

2006-02-14T14:44:00.001-08:00

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

2006-02-13T13:37:00.000-08:00

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

2006-02-12T15:42:00.000-08:00

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

2006-02-10T07:31:00.000-08:00

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

2006-02-05T14:48:00.000-08:00

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

2006-02-01T07:47:00.000-08:00

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

vimineous

2006-01-29T13:27:00.000-08:00

Not vituperative, not vermininininfested, not hideous.
Not vitriolic, not virile, not virtuous.
Not venomous, not toxic, not magic.

A slather of blind wicker pointers exhibits a frame for thinking. A fat drift of weather over water. White streaked on white, and heavy dropsy informs my posts of late, n'est-ce pas? Not much to quibble about, when the snow falls like rain.

another day slept-crept away

2006-01-23T15:55:00.000-08:00

suddenly stymied, i forget how to spell "crept." is that right? i'll let it stand but am mildly horrified at the predations of aging on my so-prized "language arts" abilities. the all-white recipe (rice, rice cakes, chicken, slivered almonds, daikon and mushrooms) was one heak of a lot of word, but i pulled it off over 2 days...marinating chicken in dry vermouth (i used a few drops of grand marnier, the only booze in the house; i used napa cabbage instead of daikon, too), egg white and cornstarch, etc etc. was it worth it? well it's pretty good, esp the ("lite") coconut milk you add in at the end) but quite bland considering all the work. i guess that's the point of white food. it's a whole issue of food n wine. i find it soothing to cook instead of work, did i already say that? and the bourbon balls and chickpea hummus are resting comfortably in the refrigerator waiting for thurs pm when the "Art as Knowing" Research Collaborative comes over to eat and talk about our future plans as a group. A nap punctuates a rereading of Raymond Williams's Marxism and Literature, now *why* am i making a graduate class in creative writing and cultural studies read this? it seemed like a good idea at the time. It is easy to have respect and affection for people like RW who cared so much about what they did that they were happily cranking books out late in life to sum up the insights gleaned in a lifetime of being a Marxist Literary Critic, or, as my students have been known to say, the insights "gleamed." I'm a gleamer myself, though the trash-cruising in my new neighborhood is a thin shadow of what it used to be like in my posh old neighborhood, Uptown Mpls, full of restaurants, bookstores, clothing stores and fancy expensive houses whose yard sales were heaven. No poems today. Next i'll figure out, courtesy of Nick Piombino, how to link to other sites where "my" "work" can be "appreciated." xo, my lovies all... just read Juliana S's Every one With Lungs and want to call everyone "Beloveds," i guess i'll make my grad class read that too, as she's coming here next sept (yippee!)

a post-creative world

2006-01-22T15:36:00.000-08:00

one of the formulations in this website is "post-create.g?" which seems pregant with meaning for a world in which Romantic authorship sort of wants to die and sort of doesn't. we're not comfortably past the mind-set which Barthes described and Foucault historicized for the purpose of hastening its supersession. i must admit that all notions of authorship *and* their proposed alternatives hold competing sway in my "imaging-nation" when "i" "sit down to write," making this blog a field of experimentation in consciousness-in-public, a practice of self-making that loosely takes poetic activity –the internal end of its wide-ranging continuum –as its organizing "theme." One of these days i'll learn how to link to other stuff, to make the collective aspect of this blog (as imagined by moi, a non-collective individual, but internally multiple nonetheless) a bit more defensible. here, just for the sake of experimentation with exposure, are some little ditties i wrote to keep myself alive (nothing dramatic, just brain-alive) on cape cod a few years ago:

(actually this one just a few weeks ago on trying to digest the news that my mother wants to sell the house and has a buyer...):
smeared goodbye ocean
gold-rumpled, can i bear
a thuddening unrelented-
nessless
is it heart to say
is heard
harm
senselessness loss
12/20/05 /0/0/0/0 and all these days...
every day not here wasted...

lightsea
wordcrosstown
good to me
gorge on flowermeat
flowsand
sunflux
loca(l) sola(ce)
splurge
saltflats
cross't crowmeat
gruntgrass
decay burnt g'dnight
6/23/04

blind screen sea
surface for fonts of
birthdeath scrimmed &
scrolled
wavelings' glimmer
making
melting
writing
6/24/04

etc etc
i'm already feeling that these are corny...but my intentions are good, officer...i can't go on i'll go on and on good goon that i am...

like who has time for this...

2006-01-22T10:04:00.000-08:00

ah, "morning again, nothing needs to be done..." except it's not quite true. I'm supposed to write a paper on "The New York School Poets and their World" and i've chosen to write about NYSchool and Flarf, a genealogy of sorts and styles. A few flarfer-nutters sent me their thoughts and impressions and i know there was a whole flurry of pop-theorizing about flarf about a year or two ago but when will i have time to comb through the archives and dredge it up? i'd rather cook. yesterday i started a recipe from food and wine, a white-rice and chicken dish in which all the ingredients are white (the picture in the glossy mag looked really good) and i got abt 1/2 way thru and i had to go out for pizza w/ a coupla dear colleagues and so i left everything (having already burnt the slivered almonds) and now, today, after a pizza dinner and a late-night walk around Lake Calhoun (3.1 miles) the thought of cooking doesn't appeal. But it appeals more than working on this paper, reading application files for the Creative Writing Program (i don't have access to the room they keep the files in anyway, so there goes that weekend plan), or most other obligations. I am supposed to read Marxism and LIterature and Notebook of a Return to the Native Land for classes this week; i guess i can do that in bed with coffee, so that looks like the best option for now. over and out. i can't go on i'll go on and on...

thrift

2006-01-21T11:33:00.000-08:00

so i've been formally misled, exposed my faulty poems, these pseudo-haynaku, no wonder they feel so constrained, but i found them fun to play with. The series is called Thrift. A six-letter word meaning austere economy. And there are more; i may as well memorialize them here with tom and ray magliozzi manically conducting their automotive hi-jinx in the next room.

rooms
bare, full
pen and ink.

cloth
loom-root
oak and elf

tread
warp, woof
god and dog

glyph
mark, etch
the ink pen

RIFLE
KILL MORE
ETC AND ETC

haunt
dirt-wolf
get him off...

books
edit self
ems and ens

comic
page joke
gut nor gun

had enough??? tough. i can't go on i'll go on and on...

write
more epic
ode and pun

great
life trip
and how now!

blues
hand, palm
eye and ear

brief
idea-clue --
now it's not!

oozes
life from
arm and leg

music
when tree
has its day

ok so these mini-narratives have a kind of compulsivity to them; as i read them aloud-to-myself in the transcription process. in daily speech and writing i find myself counting the letters of the words i use in search of usable thrift-ku lines to file away for later. Thirst, that's five letters, how about that. like robert lowell cranking out several sonnets a day in his lizzie and harriet phase, but not as "accomplished;" clumsy (a word i love, find endearing), approximate, searching, like northrop frye (i first wrote norbert wiener) on doggerel: a not-fully actualized reaching for mature verse, poetry slightly refined from its block-of-marble phase.

whew. i figured it out

2006-01-20T13:03:00.000-08:00

ok, so now i'm back in the saddle after a few days of not knowing how to access my own blog; an auspicious beginning. i am much heartened by all the wonderful encouragements i got to my first post. accordingly, i'll post some of the poems mIEKAL showed me about, namely a form initiated by sheila murphy of 1 five-letter word/two four-letter words/three three-letter words.

crack
open muse
now now now

marks
onto lace:
pin her ear

maybe
lost into
dew-eye day

never
fear your
rub, arm-boy

habit
less
ness:
it's not bad

trace
rose lips
our mad joy (that's the keatsian one...)

River
move over
one new hut

and the soap opera digest:
anger
over love
put her off

parse
more arse
fat ass rut

Think
true much,
you li'l imp!

and after after emmett:
glass
blow blue
row sea oar...

light
over moon
dye the sky

Split
star born
yes her sin

Tzara:
dada-word
fun for you!

money
isn't many
hey you rat!

idiot,
cool fool:
die for art!

I can't go on I'll go on and on and on...

and yet there's more...

2006-01-20T11:13:00.000-08:00

from upstairs here, i can smell the chickpeas cooking; i'm making cilantro hummus (just use cilantro instead of tahini, it comes out really good) and looking out hte window at a snow-covered garage roof of my gay-couple neighbors. my other neighbors are a somali family w/ six beautiful kids who plaster themselves against my chain link fence and call out "meow!" to my cat when she's outside. but it's winter now and i don't see the kids so much. i just finished a shawl for rain taxi's next-year ebay silent auction; it's lilac, light blue, dark blue and another color i forget; kelly everding picked out the colors for the weft, blue and two shades of brown. i washed it, blocked and steamed it, it's drying on the diningroom table, it's pretty trippy.
thanks for the shout-out tim p but i fear there will be scant litcrit here as i'm pretty brain-dead these days. i'm having some difficulties w/ my graduate class, creative writing and cultural studies, not sure why, i was avid to teach it last semester, couldn't wait, and then when it came time to prepare for the first class of the semester i felt muffled, mediated, at a great distance from the material and the materiality of being in the classroom. i hereby make a commitment to spend a little time thinking more seriously about the issues and the format before next wednesday. more three-liners later, when i get back from (yet) another school-related meeting...

initiation

2006-01-15T12:06:00.000-08:00

Whose fatuous musings riddle these unreal pages? (I hope we will do quite well together, a big fish and a small one in a babbling aquarium on the second floor of a rural post office here in the heartland. ) An adventure in public writing, with a shrieking parrot in the soundscape, this blog is launched with an inspiration of walking, writing and syllabic composition at Dreamtime Village, West Lima Wisconsin. Or was that syllabic competition? Elva, Ezra, Ervin and Ephraim are the names of the Amish guys on the farm next door, a festival of "Old Testament" E-nomenclothing.
By the time the words are formulated they're old hat. Whom can i count on to read me?
Go, little blog, envoid into it, make your mark on the formless ether of ideas.