I just had it on my list for days. It means write my last post. I did it. Anything I write from this word on is gravy. I’ve enjoyed the battles, Harriet, I’m grateful. I’ve even enjoyed my own forays down into the thread to do some serious barking. I’d especially like to thank the organizers of this blog. Merci. Friends. I’ve truly enjoyed the immediate opportunity to comment on the world of poetry, or
I was in Maine last summer and Jennifer Moxley asked me why I didn’t get involved with the language poets since I was that age. I don’t even know how to answer that question simply. I actually get asked this a lot. Like there’s the boat going by. From another generation you might think it was a class.
The following is the first of two parts of a keynote I gave at the Advancing Feminist Poetics Conference at CUNY last week…
I have a bunch of things I’ve been reflecting on lately and I wonder what kind of keynote they’ll make. Generally I’m happiest with the off the cuff remarks which are so often planned. I have a number of things and I’ll jot them on an index card which seems a blank postcard to myself perfect little luggage with several of these I sit down and then the utter formality of the poetry world always feeds me. I feel like a predator.
Just read Maggie Nelson’s Bluets which will soon be in a bookstore near you. It’s an uncategorizable piece of writing composed of numbered philosophical statements which consider the color blue, and so much else but in the aftermath of reading Maggie’s “bluets” the fascinating word Pharmikon remains in my mind.
It means drug though “the word in Greek famously refused to designate whether poison or cure.” It’s also variously described as “a recipe, a charm, a substance, a spell, artificial color and paint.” She knocks about trying to link it to love, to fucking. But it doesn’t stick. She brings up the possibility that instead like beauty, Pharmikon radiates. It does not stay still. And finally the written word is called Pharmikon.
Let’s face it; it’s an altered state. I started getting sick in San Diego – I felt shivers as I headed to dinner after the reading and I lay in bed at Roddey’s thinking what if I just fly home without even reading in LA. But I got up and felt a little better and did read and sat shaking lightly in a restaurant afterwards with my friends. Now it was just a question of how heavily it would
I toured with Jim Carroll in 1990. It was sort of an honor.
He was the exact same age as me but when I came to town in the poetry world he already had everything – a book from a big press with a Larry Rivers cover called Living at the Movies and parts of his Basketball Diaries had been published in Paris Review while he was still a teenager. He came to the Poetry Project when he was in high school to meet the older poets – Ted Berrigan, Anne Waldman who themselves were in their 20s then. It was unimaginable to me, Jim’s kind of youth. And that he was famous from then on.
Just to say quickly my man is Frankenstein, the creation of a pretty young woman dating an older poet, Percy Shelley. She, Mary, took a dare on a rainy weekend with the older guys in the mountains for a few days (Who can write the best ghost
I’m trying to cure myself of the blogging late in the month syndrome PARTICULARLY because this month is my last month of blogging. To get to the quick of it I think well why am I not blogging now. Well because I have a new book and I’m

Manhattan is one of the great places in the world to ride a bicycle and for instance tonight it was Myra’s birthday so she and Chana, her girlfriend, and I rode to Film Forum and then to the East Village for bubble tea. It was very social and just beautiful out tonight. But sometimes a bicycle is an interruption and you ride it somewhere to meet someone

I was having an exchange online with a friend about a book of essays I just published and in response to him saying he was enjoying reading it I gave a short essay in reply about my suffering. How utterly hard this book was . . . not so much to write but to put together. It was a monster. Every time I read publicly from this book I make similar allusions to the martyrdom of
Anselm Berrigan
Abigail Deutsch
Tonya Foster
Melissa Friedling
John S. O'Connor
Barbara Jane Reyes
Amber Tamblyn
Edwin Torres
Cathy Halley
Michael Marcinkowski
Travis Nichols
Fred Sasaki
Don Share
So long and thanks for all the fish + a question... (8)
Vladimir, Ron, and Gregori (4)
dubious poetry: the palin comparison (3)
To Vaya in the Viva of Time (2)
Indie Publishing: Two Questions, Many More... (5)
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