I love blues music — singing the blues, listening to the blues. That’s why I was so excited to get a call from my friend Pierre Lacocque, a wicked blues harp player and the band leader of Mississippi Heat. Pierre asked me to work on lyrics for the band’s new album — and I couldn’t pass up the chance.

I had a blast working with Pierre on lyrics for the band’s last disc, Hattiesburg Blues. Part of what made the experience so much fun was the blues form — that insistent echo of repeating lines. Here’s an excerpt from Gone So Long:

I can hear the train
running down the track.
I can hear the train
running down the track.
Working any harder
Would give me a heart attack.

I also loved the story the songs tell (the unabashed narrative drive behind the songs). Here’s a glimpse from Forgot You Had a Home:

I tried to change you, but
You paid me no mind
You choose your job
Over family time
You forgot you had a home.
All you’ve got is a one track mind.

The title pretty much gives the story away in this one, but I like how this lyric updates the blues convention of a wandering man: here his eyes look only to work, not to another woman.

When Pierre writes music he has specific singers in mind. It’s cool — and challenging — to write from the perspective of other characters (in this case as a wronged woman), and even other singers (some singers like room at the end of phrases so they can create vocal “fills”; others like a cleaner line).

The new album is not yet titled, but the tracks have all been laid down. The CD should be ready in January.

Embedded mid-level to centurion’s height, one pupil, ever-seeing…nay the seers. Worming through rush hour. People…what a heave! Says the underground spray-maker while stenciling a baseball logo on a subway map. How much, son? Fifteen, pops…but this one’s got pinstripes in neon, like that gat on the moon. Snap, yo excuse me. Cell phone camera…graphic coloratura…perfect reproduction on a screen the size of twee. That’s nice, get one with ma man here. Grabs his new customer…like long-lost buds. Here ya go bro, two crazy enwhyceers. Click. Thanks man, later. Returns to biz-role. Now where was we. This one or this one. That one. Below the rumble, flickety rickster teems in survival mode. Seen many, I tell him, but this…one of a kind, beautiful. Thanks son. Thought you were, and I was. That’s right, pops. Not much younger though. Don’t tell. Later friend. Peace. Folded map in my pocket, dream catcher…stenciled in torrents (dies festus).

But I’ve got too many fires burning at one time. I’m not alone in my desire to do something old. Said pupil, levitating the anterior fontanel. When will you tell me, o Head Shrink Booty Dip? And I am scattered in the introduction of fire to hose, sir…replacing soak for light. How did you get that nit, son? Status burn, sir. Pegasus layered in entrails. Daylight on a camouflage shoe. Hoofed male-thing grunts and wants an answer. Neigh, fruity. Or to the now-release—the leave of power that finds the living animal (the truly alive) in the frame of its new. I am now venturing into the identity screw—the plug-up done in by erasure.

To sprecht-baum in the echo of a previous post…who goes fishing without a line once tethered by the catch? Tranny Schinkel (how’d ya do!). To become the coming prey aligned with quasar, serve meal for master while scrubbing hands fervently. Don’t off this, dare send incomplete surrento, del oso!  And yo, how was you gonna pay before leaving, sir. And what’s that you doing for the people, sir. And how many instants give you time, sir. And why can’t you sit with me when I’m riding on the same truck, sir. And how come the first car won’t open on my platform, sir. And when did all that grey make you safe, sir.

And who are you in the glow of the screen. Said pupil, hiding from can’t-get-a-handle-on-diamond-shaped-a-hole. No sleep, pops? Kinetic imperfections arouse inferior reflections. Lookit me, trying to get sommadat hope-closure on a brimstone. Or some ancient evenings sold below the living room, with the kitchen under the loft-bed and a curtain separating dinner from sleep. Comes the blond jet, jingo pucker. Said pupil telegrams occipital…love here, gaseous facsimile of Juno. How about one last taunt, bud? Okay. Serious? I’m sayin’...and grunt-maker bellows limbless fate. Gone, in a star’s shot. Mime bops on b-box d-lite. Irreparable witness…to base quote on litmus.

What now seems especially useful out of that experience was catching that the range of subjects in those chronicles was fairly wide, and the types of detail that Ashbery honed in on and thereby felt capable of articulating (that may sound like a simple statement, but I’ve found in my own attempts at review writing that the things one notices and the things one can get at effectively in the writing don’t always meet) were typically placed in terms of an experience of the work as opposed to an assessment. There also appeared to be a very fluid dynamic of juxtaposition running across the writing and seeing simultaneously. All of this was helpful in giving me a sense of a mind at work, one that had an especially porous barrier between diction and perception, and I took that into my reading of the poetry and found I could sustain a deeper level of attention to the choices being made syllable by syllable.

This past summer I had the good fortune of being present for an informal talk by the writer Renee Gladman that in part covered her own process of getting from the constellation that is mind into the linear progression that is a sentence. At one point she posed a question that I took to be usable in a number of internal and external conversations: “what are the conditions that make this writer relate to language in this particular way?” It’s a fabulous question, as I see it anyway, in no small part because it’s meant to allow for a gradual recognition of a mind at work without trampling on the sensibilities of writer or reader. The question also allows for open speculation as to what those “conditions” might be, which means, I think, that another body of knowledge does not have to be necessary to begin formulating an answer. The idea is to get back into the writing and re-center one’s attention on the dynamic present between mind and language.

It’s also an easier question to ask of somebody else’s work, as opposed to your own, though I suspect any kind of answer you’d get out of placing yourself under that microscope would be useful so long as you had your story right (if that’s possible). One real difficulty might be having to account for your own idiosyncrasies that are not part of some moment of programming, if you’re even aware of them (or your programming, for that matter).  Some writers have a way with upending questions meant to be searching and “fair”. I remember hearing the poet and translator Vyt Bakaitis respond to a question at a q-and-a as to whether he dreamed in English or Lithuanian by pausing for a moment, then saying, “I don’t know that I dream or think in language.” He was very serious, and I’ve been “in love” with that sentence even since.

The mass of suits and perfume crammed through corridors burrowed beneath concrete reminders, swimming the juice-pulse through the city’s membrane. Underneath all that motion, the subway vibrating all those spirits up through rock and metal. Creeley’s “Chasing the Bird”: ‘The sun sets unevenly and the people / go to bed. / The night has a thousand eyes. / The clouds are low, overhead. / Every night it is a little bit / more difficult, a little / harder. My mind / to me a mangle is.‘ My daily commute from the green of the Hudson Valley to the grey of Manhattan skyscrapers, accented during harvest time.

Our garden which began with such promise this Spring gradually suffered neglect over the summer. My wife and I, still getting our ‘green’ on after moving up here from the city, are learning a solar definition of time…at odds with the city definition I grew up with. After so many years walking to work, from the East Village to Soho, my separation anxiety from the city has settled into a complex groove, a sort of misplaced territory that has become the travel itself. The hope of permanence beyond the change…highlighted by the prospect of land, soil, earth in my fingernails. We have this huge fenced-in garden, inherited from the previous owners, which had a variety of veggies planted in the Spring, doing okay…until the exhaustion of weeding (clever tricksters how they assume shapes of neighboring plants, the easier to pass right over them) and watering proved overwhelming. And there was Tim, the lawn guy, with his giant machine mowing down the overgrown rupture for us. And there we were yesterday, looking at this dried-out wound, resolved to its conclusion, remembering that potatoes had been planted in the center. A spark of hope. Sun came out, as if saying, ‘go for it.’ The three of us, digging through the potato patch, unearthing spud after spud. Russian Fingerlings, Yukon Golds, Red Pontiacs, 80 potatoes in total…fantastic! What farmers we were…below the surface anyway. And then the crows.

Hundreds of them, a murder of crows. They’ve been gathering over the last month, in the trees and land in front of the house, just a few here and there. Until yesterday, before the potato episode, I looked out front in the morning and was shocked to see hundreds of them. A gang, I thought, before murder. I immediately recalled Ted Hughes’ book, Crow, and its alchemical allegories. One of the first books of poetry in my lunch bag thanks to Steve Cannon, who ran The Stoop workshops with Bob Holman before the Friday Night Slams at the Nuyorican…those workshops were my salve, a guiding light from stage to page. I’d forgotten about the poems in that book, how phantasmic the protaganist seemed. Battling the sun back ‘when  crow was white’ emerging defeated and black, yet managing ‘up there, where white is black and black is white, I won.’ A chilling declaration of will over being.

I worried that our home had attracted such a large number, investigated online to make sure their myth aligned with mine. One of, if not the smartest of all birds, deemed the Trickster in folk tales, signifying change. The keeper of sacred laws, able to bend the laws of the physical universe, asking you to “shapeshift” your current reality into one of your dreams. Heady stuff. So I guess they weren’t so bad, but the Hitchcock reality got me spooked. I went outside and flapped my arms a bit, just to scare them away. The intelligence of a six-foot scarecrow in a red hoodie, chasing the bird, doing my job to protect family, up here during harvest time.

Fall is here, which means ponderous Hollywood movies, funky potpourri, [W]ild [T]urkey, and of course, new bloggers on Harriet!

Today, we say our goodbyes to Joel Brouwer, Rebecca Wolff, and Eileen Myles.  They’ve done a wonderful job here on the blog, and we hope they’ll come back from time to time to share a thought or two.  From everyone here, let me offer a hearty thanks for your dedication and service.  Huzzah!

I know.  It is sad.  But all is not lost!  We still have Barbara Jane Reyes, Abigail Deutsch, and Tonya Foster to help transition us to this new season.  And!  We have five new great bloggers starting, well, right now, today:

Anselm Berrigan’s poetry collections include Zero Star Hotel,  Some Notes on My Programming (Edge Books 2002, 2006) and the most recent Free Cell (City Lights, 2009). The poetry editor of The Brooklyn Rail, co-editor with Alice Notley and Edmund Berrigan of The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (California, 2005), and former director of St. Mark’s Poetry Project, Berrigan teaches at the Pratt Institute and Wesleyan, and directs the summer writing program at the Milton Avery Graduate School.

Amber Tamblyn, born and raised in Venice California,  has been a writer and actress since the age of 9.  In 2005, she published her debut poetry book, Free Stallion (Simon&Schuster).   She is the executive producer of  “The Drums Inside Your Chest”, an annual poetry concert event in Los Angeles   She is the co-founder of the non-profit, Write Now Poetry Society, which works to identify, inspire, record, and publish great poets, support poetry communities, produce poetry shows, increase poetry audiences and strengthen poetry organizations.  Her second book of poetry and prose, Bang Ditto (Manic D. Press) was released this Fall.  She currently lives in New York City.

Edwin Torres is the author of several books and chapbooks, including The PoPedology Of An Ambient Language, The All Union Day of the Shock Worker, Fractured Humorous, Lung Poetry and forthcoming from Nightboat Books, In The Function Of External Circumstances. He started creating text and performance work in 1988 under the banner “I.E. Interactive Eclecticism,” an invented ‘movement’ whose purposefully broad term gave his one-man variety shows a forum. In 1990, he discovered poetry at The Nuyorican Poets Cafe and The St. Marks Poetry Project. He has since collaborated with a wide range of artists, creating performances that mingle poetry with vocal/physical improvisation, visual theater, music and sound. His CD, Holy Kid (which ’straddles a position somewhere between Finnegans Wake and I Love Lucy’-Kenneth Goldsmith) was part of The Whitney Museum’s exhibition, The American Century Pt. II. He’s received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, The Foundation For Contemporary Performance Art, The Poets Fund and The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. His current invention, “Noricua” (mid-wifed with the Bronx-based artist collective Spanic Attack), is a noh-boricua inspired non-movement seeped in non-ideology.

Melissa Friedling is a film and video maker.  Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in festivals, galleries, and museums.   She is the recipient of a Fulbright Award and artist’s grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) and the New York State Council for the Arts (NYSCA).   Her writing on film, art, and culture has also appeared in various publications, most recently as a regular reviews contributor to Flash Art International.  She currently teaches at The New School University and lives in Brooklyn, NY.

John S. O’Connor is an instructor at New Trier Township High School in Winnetka, Illinois.  He is the author of Wordplaygrounds: Reading, Writing and Performing Poetry and Room Full of Chairs, a book of haiku.  He has worked with the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, Penn State University, Holy Cross School in Brooklyn, and was director of the Hyde Park adult literacy program, Blue Gargoyle.

Howdy, folks.  Welcome to Harriet!

Harriet’s the second blog I’ve posted on. The last one was about art which could include poetry and I did it for a year.

It seemed to me that a blog is an extension of an earlier journalistic idea, the column, and in my own writing history, the column was a follow-up on my presidential campaign, circa 1991-92. The campaign was over but I still needed to talk. I mean publickly. The presidential campaign was a follow-up on improvisational performance art and the performance art was a follow up both on a life of writing and reading poetry aloud and also getting sober which encourages a person to talk a lot or learn to talk without a drink in their hand. I think language is a big drink. When I think about doing my first poetry readings there was a danger of being too loaded when I got up there so I tried to keep it to a few beers and I could get really blasted after. Once I stopped drinking it’d be diet coke or water. I think all the time about the phenomenon of watching the poet drink water, that silent pause in which the poet offers her throat to the room to keep the pipes wet and moving the words along. It’s sort of glorious to post here on poetry because it’s putting the beginning and the end of language together. Poetry being the beginning of language and the post representing now which is not an end at all but a kind of boundary. People get upset about how irresponsible the blogosphere is and it reminds me a little bit about the raging a few years back in the mainstream press about memoirs by people who had hardly had their lives yet. I remember one pundit calling these memoirs by people who weren’t yet tipping over into the grave “half lives” and coincidentally so many of these people were female authors and young. People not officially entitled to speak about their own existence yet. What do they know. In its heyday of the memoir definitely aired some hot topics. Incest was big, alcoholism still is, and if you can separate it from incest and we must the memoirist might even write about her family. Something the memoirist had survived – a mountain climb or a disease would also be a good subject.

At 13 posts to go after this I’m needing a little consideration of the form. And what about all its attachments, the thread. I sometimes write a post and don’t read the comments for days but they do come into my email, my home so to speak. Eventually I go. There’s something sweaty and heated about going down into that hall where all the talk is going on that just makes my blood pound. I just called someone (or a class of someone’s) ‘bozos’ which constitutes the worst name-calling I’ve indulged in so far though maybe homophobe, sexist and I forget what else are slightly worse. Bozo seems personal to me, verging on gross whereas the others seem like appraisals of someone’s thoughts and work. I know that these terms aren’t as easily used as they were even ten years ago because identity politics are supposed to be over but that seems so convenient for the people who don’t call themselves anything, just thinking men and the women who think just like them. I think all of us are complexes of stuff: gender and class and level of income and class affiliation and occupation and sexual persuasion and race and aesthetic, very important, and geographical location, age and ethnicity. You know what I mean. I kind of enjoy being down there in the thread once in a while where a lot less women go. Do women have better things to do, or just don’t read or write in blogs as much or would prefer to watch. I like to get down there and swing. As a little girl I liked to fight too. I love the experience of doing a blog and getting paid to do it (which I think is kind of tacky to mention but it’s out there, so…) justifies it to me in a way because though I do a lot of things for free including poetry which includes blurbs and recommendations, and talks and so much else I do have to make a living. And what a blog feels most like to me is talking. And getting paid to do it which is the best. I’ll talk about money for a while or slightly because I think my greatest crime in a recent post was contemplating the perceived wealth of another writer. Is that so bad. Yes. It makes people go crazy. And I honestly don’t know why except that someone has something to protect. What that something is: you tell me. But the blog is a synthesized version of all those things above – the column, the campaign and so on. And even one of those crazy teevee talk shows. Where people seemingly would say anything just to be on teevee. I don’t watch those but I really love it all. It makes me think about the life of a city street and New York where I currently have just come home to from a traveling summer and I remember reading a nineteenth century account of New York and how if a horse fell down in the street and a crowd gathered and someone would stick a handbill (selling something) on the felled horse. And things are essentially the same now. This ad, this already not so new tool is in my experience is a people’s art. Or a peoples’ practice. The public sort. If people sneer at how uncontrollable a thing a blog is that’s because really any bozo can stick an ad on a dying horse (our empire) and plenty of bozos write them. Some of those bozos are saving us from the mainstream news world which doesn’t tell us anything, and bozo world also frees us from the world of mainstream publishing which does publish some wonderful poets and other writers but mostly it underlines poetry’s weird and wonderful dilemma which is that no one’s really knows what a poem is – though lately I think of it as speech searching for itself in all directions. The innate unmanageability of poetry makes mainstream publishers either make conservative choices or be obedient to someone’s list or ideas but often it just seems like manners to me. We (and that’s an appropriated we) publish poets we’d like to have dinner with. It’s like the academy. We hire people who feel good in the room. And there is a room. Poetry is many rooms. How do we represent that. Poetry doesn’t mind so much if you don’t have dinner with it, though poetry needs to get heard and be read and that only eventually. At some point the message needs to arrive. There needs to be some hope of that. In the work or in the world. So poetry stays a little thin because not everyone can invite poetry to dinner in all its versions but it always finds a home and a blog is increasingly what is giving it that. It speeds things along, making connections which is the thing that gets obstructed most by our institutions and in our big (and failing) media. I hope it remains irresponsible. A spiky and oddly comforting place. After 32 years of living in New York I now have an air-conditioner in my apartment and I will soon write about that. I look forward to a flood of no comments. It’s cool in here in the now time of the fires and the floods and the big melt coming down. No more ice on the planet by 2013. We need to talk a lot, right

I’ve been reveling in the freaky cold August, watching my tomato plants suffer the potato famine, all manner of sun-loving hot-weather organisms turn their faces resignedly down. Gnats reveling, orbiting. My husband with his usual sagacity suggested that it might be interesting for me to blog about literary finances, meaning in this case: How has or hasn’t the economic downturn affected small press publishing, in light of its being kind of mostly outside of the usual stream of finances? In that most literary presses are run as nonprofit orgs and/or financed by an individual of means.

Well, honey, I guess you could say–and I think this is what he wanted me to get at–it’s kind of an interesting time to be a small press publisher, in light of the above. It’s kind of like being a homeopathic doctor when Americans “suddenly realize” (the Brits have a great word for this: it’s one word: what is it: anyone who writes in with the right answer gets a free subscription to . . . Fence) that homeopathic medicine really works, just as at the same time the health care system is reformed such that preventative care is supported thus rendering most druggedy-drug medication unnecessary.

It’s fun to see the crappedy-crap-crap fall away. I hope to have good news for you shortly.

she has some kind of viral cataracts in her eyes

Here let this image of my new gray kitten, Myshka (”little mouse”) stand eternally (and here let the internet stand for eternity) in for my realization that I am not suited for blogging. I’ve realized this before, on my own blog over at Fence. I started that blog more than a year ago, and thought it would be so great to have a space in which to relate all the things I thought about on my long drive to my office. Now, I thought, now I see what this blogging thing is all about. It’s about speaking TO THE WORLD! A whole other kind of engagement, never before possible. But my blog has really slogged–it’s there, we use it more as an announcement board type thing–as it seemed to turn out that really I’d rather keep my random thoughts to myself. My speech has a lot more reverb, it turns out, when it’s bouncing around in my skull-cage.There is a big difference between speaking to an imagined audience, as I do when I write poetry–and when I prepare speeches in my car–and one who might actually respond. Speaking out loud one’s random thoughts to an audience that might actually respond turns one willy nilly into a Public Figure. The dialogic nature of this blog, for example, has me running scared from being heard, and it’s easy to notice that I don’t accept challenges (like Jordan’s provocation, here, to blow it up), or even less tentative invitations to “step it up, yo”, and I don’t seem to have much endurance, either, for exploration. If I did, I guess I might try my hand at criticism. Instead, I throw out a word like “Puritan” or “transparency” or “kitten” and then I pivot on my platform, go inside the cuckoo clock, and shut the door behind me. This is the kind of provocateur I am: a non-dialogic provocateur. Now that is a fun word to spell. And I mean that.

Here’s someone who likes to blog, and for free (we on Harriet are Paid to Blog): Zachary German. And here’s some of his poetry. I’ve been noticing, amongst Fence submissions and out in the world, this new flat style of confession. I call it confession because it seems to me to take Robert Lowell entirely at his word. It’s irony free (or so saturated with irony as to be involute), it’s shame free (except when it outrightly proclaims a shame reaction to something, ie, “I picked my nose and was embarrassed when someone saw me”). It’s really different from the New Quiescence that an older generation of still younger-than-I-am poets are engaging in, which Steve Burt has alerted us to, in the BBR. Here’s another, more nuanced practitioner of it, Jon Leon, or rather a piece about what poet/publisher Dan Hoy calls The Now Wave which includes Jon Leon. I like it! It’s incredibly easy to read. I’m going to start writing like it. But I’m just going to write letters to my friends on paper in this style and mail them to them and you’ll never see them.

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