“Writing is never wasted. I tell my students this, urging them to throw away a draft and start again…difficult to do, to trust. I have variously taken drafts and burned them, tore them into tiny shreds, let them go…the old drafts become the texture and resonances in the new.”  — Lemon Hound/Harriet comment stream. (Sina Queyras.)

“Anyway. I got the books in the post yesterday. I felt nothing looking at the book. Nothing. The books look beautiful. But I felt empty. Like these books were a refuse of my past, and them being printed and packaged and made into commodity objects is totally separate from why I created the work. I am looking forward to having new readers, that dialogue. But I looked at the books and I thought of matchsticks, yes that’s what I thought of, matchsticks. Maybe because the books are paper. And I thought of burning them, like Artaud writing about poems, meant to be read once and then burned.” — Frances Farmer Is My Sister. (Kate Zambreno.)

“Bhanu, the red, letting it soak back in (still thinking of Pamela Lu’s de-red-ing), I think of your earlier statement about killing the character in your project, but now with this idea of the rose, your impossibility of destruction, I am reminded of how, in physics, matter cannot be eliminated, just changed.” — Harriet comment stream. (Amy Catanzano.)

“The notebook is non-reproductive. You could say it is a mutation that is never seen and only becomes available, in a more formed condition, in the book. But the book depends upon the notebook.  What’s in the notebook.  In fact, the larger the non-reproductive store of a population is, then the more rapidly its outer limit, that dotted line, evolves. So for species, if you have a large number of mutations that don’t become built structures, that never emerge, that’s good.” – - E-mail.  (Andrea Spain.)

Then I met Jarvis Fosdick at the cafe.  Jarvis is someone I can text with the words PANTHER MARTINI? and he’ll text back YES.  Jarvis makes quilts; we became friends when it turned out he had Mei-Mei Bersenbrugge’s “Concordance” in his car.  We both had it in our cars.  In Colorado, you need a car. I hope this does not sound too boring if you are reading this in a city.  I once had a lover who texted me: NATURE KILLS AND SEPARATES.  A text I still have.  Jarvis said: “How do the words get to the page?“  We were talking about fire and water as purgative mediums.  About the painting, pre-quilt, that nobody sees, embedded beneath the layers of silver oil; the notebook – -a diagonal line across the page: its casual and brutal NO.  Jarvis said: “If you destroy the words, if they are never seen, what calls them back?” Luckily, Jarvis scrawled some rapid notes towards the end of our coffee (easily substituted for a drink) and so, apparently (according to his little yellow notebook), I replied:

“The page is an attractant.  It’s sticky.  For those of us who love theory, we get it, that the dirt and glitter of the border appears in these books in another form.  Displaced.  Projected.  So that we’re writing back to the page from these flecks.  This is not retrieval in a duration. It is entirely spatial.  So that part of it is aperture, stance…and part of it is an occult practice.  You have to prepare the page.  You have to empty it out or darken it.  And the book you write will not, perhaps, be verdant. This is not that book.  It is not “a book for you,” for example.”

……………..

The thing about theory sounds insane out of context.  Let’s just ignore that, if at all possible, and go with these questions instead:

1.How do the words get to the page?  2. What attracts them?  3. What did you burn? 4. What did you give to the river?  5. What book do you have in your car, rucksack, kitchen, suitcase, etc, in case of emergencies?  6.Where’s the aperture?  7. What regenerated?  8. What survived the fire?

: (Th.Donov. on Fr. Moten): “Translate to color.”  In the comment stream.  And looped up, like a baby.  Though if I had another baby, which would depend, quite frankly, upon meeting  a competent and ecstatic South-Asian medical professional in the next thirty days: I might put it down (the baby not a suitor) on a sheepskin rug to roll around a bit.  More than I did.

Though perhaps I’ll begin there, when I could not write. Nursing, I’d glance up at the window to the woods that pressed close around our house.  That Spring, the trees shed a thick gold powder from their thin cones.  I’d track this drift.  Once, I looked up and the whole pane was filled with a blur of wings, thirty or more  birds vibrating against the glass.  Migrating finches.  A solid color.  Yellow.

I guess, tonight, eight years later, I’ve just got these two things, which are less than notes, and if I can, as I write, I’ll convert them to questions.  For you:

1.a. Transgenerationally, what happens to the marks on a body, the marks a body received in the time or era that preceded this one?  I’ve been thinking about that silver color; how a pooling scar is in some sense genetic.  Becomes the quality of the body that passes between bodies.  Its ambience.

b. Poetry, like brainspotting/eye movement technologies, releases — in one version of a North American genre — an embedded stream of images.  These images leave the body in a session, in a sequence: which is neither witnessed nor reorganized in speech.  Stories, for example, are not repeated to another person who then recounts them, to make sure.  Make sure of what?

2.a. Color is/as a race mark.  I think of a country* as red, and diaspora as: well, perhaps you see it in your own mind at the instant I do.  That oil spill.  That wine stain.  That ink.  The acrylic paint tilting out of its container. Tracking color to its most distal fleck, questions of surveillance, carnal lithography or — love : arrived.  Not love.  Something else.  Similarly, I saw that saturation was a precursor to vibration: a red “dot,” which was not a dot, it was a body: breaking up.

b. I studied, from the psychiatric research of Dinesh Bhugra and Kamaldeep Bhui, on migration and mental illness, the strict, unexpected relationship between consistent, low-level racism (its tonal qualities, an almost imperceptible eye-roll when the Asian or Caribbean [origin] person/[British person] walks [walked] into the store) and psychosis. I tried to write an account.  My account failed.  Instead, I began to consider color, and the image, too, in a different way.  The long poem as a place, for example, to reverse the shards of ochre clay so that they re-formed an urn.

……….

“I want a book that heals as much as it separates.” — Cixous.

But the book breaks, as it always does, because it can’t be written.  What might a healing narrative look like?  And does this complicate an experimental aim, the desire to leave a place and never return?

I guess looking like shit is a matter of opinion, or taste, or preference, or fixation, or habit. Senator Harry Reid, who is from Searchlight, Nevada, a town I’ve been through many times as it is the one stop on the 111-mile route between Las Vegas and Needles, CA, home of my grandmother Beulah, who will be 91 in February, may not look like shit – if televised press conferences and talking head style interviews (sans rhythmic fear of air) are any indication he seems to possess a vigorous sheen no doubt succored by the folksy austerity borne of communing with creosote bushes while speculating on the nature of dialect and avoiding the speed trap that is the other major feature of Searchlight (pop. 562) along with a few casinos and a little gas station/McDonald’s/convenience store triumvirate that wields a large portrait of the Senator himself in its connective tissue between businesses and the oddly over-mirrored restrooms. It’s entirely possible, in fact, that a political son of Searchlight (there’s a great song by the late band Mule called “Searchlight” / which might / if I recall with any accuracy / which I do not typically / when it comes to memory / be about being pulled over / in the existential manner) may stake claim to a wholly archaic relationship with the notion of dialect – regular trips to our nation’s capital notwithstanding; one’s professional life and one’s speculations on human speech patterns in solemn collectivity should be separated by a near-impenetrable magnetic shield, as any creative commenter will tell you -– given that one may go very long periods of time in Searchlight, decades even, in isolated contemplation. This can produce a personal diction of curious historical range and one no doubt difficult to contextualize rapidly, as would be required on a word-by-word or even syllable-by-syllable basis. Serious reframing. Who can know from one word to the next if passing terms are from last year, last decade, or last century?

At any rate, to solve the two-poems-left mystery I decided to turn to K. Silem Mohammad’s book Breathalyzer and read only the next to last lines in all of his poems. The book was kindly just sent to me by the publisher in the same box as many copies of old books of mine that I didn’t even have to pay for because our publisher is too broke to charge me for copies in the first place and there’s a great deal of generosity to be found in a situation that can’t afford the integrity of a large scale distribution apparatus, much less a staff to keep track of shit, which I will nonetheless look like eventually before I get elected Senator (“I’d be a terrific Senator / because I’d love it”). In looking through one of my books I came across a poem I wrote in 1999 with the title “The banana peel is an important part of the eco-system,” which is something my brother Edmund said to me and which I even attributed to him out of some momentary moral failure (or else I was sub-consciously predicting the next century’s waves of attribution). But what got my attention was the following stream of words: “In the Iceman’s days nicknames / Were prevalent: Annie Annie Oakley / Ansy Slem Arnold Anton Ralton Leston / Selmton Tonton Selmselm Fuckton Cuntton Asston Workton.”

Seeing all those monikers again lit within me a burning urge to identify their sources so they might not get misunderstood as operating within a type of white dialect that could prevent me from getting elected in the future. I used to get e-mails from the Harry Reid folks that were part of a “Give ‘Em Hell Harry” general campaign of political schlock and aww, and if I take that example and run with it I want people to understand just what “Give ‘Em Argh Asston” is all about. Anselm can be a difficult name for you Americans to pronounce, and the above “lines” are actually a list of nicknames conferred upon this body across a roughly twelve year period that began at the age of nine in fourth grade when a few classmates decided it would be easier to call me Annie than try and deal with the tongrobatics required to utter the lm combination in Anselm. Christian Ortiz discovered a little biography of Annie Oakley in a pile of books at the back of the classroom one day, having been ordered there to mull over his loquacious bouts of inattentiveness, and his punishment gave way to the realization that it would be far more entertaining for our class to refer to me as Annie Oakley than just Annie, and so that stuck for several years.

Ansy represents a sadder tale, if you can believe that, for it was the teasing nickname my wonderful half-sister Kate used to call me and which I pretended to detest but secretly didn’t mind hearing until her abrupt and tragic death in 1987. No one has been allowed to call me Ansy since, though no one else really knew about it so its circulation was a little easier to control as opposed to the viral spreading of Annie Oakley around the halls of P.S. 19. Pointing out that Ms. Oakley was a crack shot with a rifle did not advance the cause of my true name. Slem was a kindlier nickname in that one of my track coaches in high school, Mr. O’Neal, simply could not pronounce Anselm without swapping the e and l and decided to shorten Anslem to Slem, thereby making things easier for the whole team. This worked until I got to college in Buffalo and starting being called Arnold by my three horrifying roommates who heard me do an imitation of the Hans and Franz “pump you up” characters from late-eighties SNL and decided Arnold was more apt for my then-130-lb. geek frame than Anselm. Finally came the –ton years. A very drunk but generally genial bass-throated gentleman named Mac started loudly calling me Anton one day from a balcony in downtown Buffalo during a massively attended street festival and that stuck. Shortly thereafter a new housemate (one of seven) revealed that some friends in his hometown, three brothers as it were, went by the names of Anton, Ralton, and Leston. Suddenly I found myself with a modular nickname, thus begetting, depending on the nature of an evening’s activities, Selmton (for those who could do the lm combo), Tonton, Selmselm, Fuckton, Cuntton (never sure if that should have one t or two), and on and on. It also became situational: Workton was what I was called leaving home for any job; Schoolton when threatening to study; Foodton I remember as well as Peanutbutter Foldton (a Buffalo delicacy) during culinary moments. One guy refused to call me anything but Ralton, thinking it the funniest thing he’d ever heard. No day went by during which I wasn’t referred to by a half-dozen different nicknames, a condition which, as one might imagine, had cause to infect my humor with a brooding idiosyncrasy.

When I left Buffalo in 1994 for San Francisco I left behind that whole world of –tons as well, and the poem in question was written during a flashback on a return visit to SF after having left that cuckoo joint for New York some sequence of trips later. The names poured back onto me and would have drownded me with their peculiar histories had poetry not been my ally and filter. Speaking of poetry, the experiment with Mr. Mohammad’s next-to-last lines in regards to the two-more-poems phenomenon (I have even, myself, felt the phrase ready its frame in my larynx for articulation wholly unprovoked by my own intentions, such as they may be, as if the words were their own act…which is why I only read from single long poems at readings now) have led me to isolate the following line as potentially useful in the classic ambiguous-yet-vitally-internal fashion of replaceable reference as practiced by Mallarmé, early Polvo, and the old weird America: “in a way love is all there is.” In order to finish the experiment I will from this moment forward choose to hear “in a way love is all there is” at any instance a reader is forced by mysterious compulsion to state “two more poems” near the end of their reading (I already ignore the awful apology implied by the occasional inclusion of “just” ahead of “two more poems” or “two more”). If you do it too then we can get together some day, and we’ll have a good time, for I will not report the results of our experiment here.

I like the name “Poets House” because—while probably intended to read as the possessive Poets’ House—the phrase instead asserts something rather nice about poets. Poets don’t just browse and carouse: they house. And maybe, someday, they’ll house me.

I took advantage of their generosity earlier this week, when I spent several hours exploring the new Battery Park City site of Poets House. The building, which hugs the Hudson River, hosts an extensive poetry library as well as events and exhibitions. With the help of staffers Jane Preston and Maggie Balistreri, I found some remarkable books, most of which seemed to concern themselves with food. (Perhaps these caught my eye because of the extraordinary hunger that afflicted me during my visit.)

I devoured a thick red paperback of poems by Robert DeNiro (“These poems are by Robert DeNiro, the painter,” the book clarifies, “not to be confused with Robert DeNiro, the actor, his son”), chewing on its sometimes questionable stanzas. In a poem called “Stella Artois,” DeNiro père writes that in a café,

Behind the greenish lion
One is next to the cinema
The cinema we cry in.

A book from the home of Stanley Kunitz, who co-founded Poets House in 1985, reveals seating arrangements and menus for private dinners. (According to the scrawl within, veal scallopini, rice, bread, salad, and something called “potato whip mixture etc.,” or perhaps “prune whip mixture etc.,” or even “prawn whip mixture etc.,” would fill the stomachs of writers Alastair Reid, Arthur A. Cohen, and other guests one February night in 1979.)

An early edition of the Alice B. Toklas Cook Book provides Toklas’s recipes and reminiscences. She served “bass for Picasso” when the artist stopped by the apartment she shared with Gertrude Stein. She’d designed the fish with red mayonnaise, bits of egg, truffles, and fines herbes. “Picasso exclaimed at its beauty,” she reports. “But, said he, should it not rather have been made in honor of Matisse than of me.” Just what this signifies about the quality of the fish-art is left to the reader’s imagination.

The cooking section of the library features such titles as Spud Songs: An Anthology of Potato Poems.

My favorite by far, however, was John Keats’s Porridge: Favorite Recipes of American Poets. The title stems from a Browning couplet — “Who fished the murex up? / What porridge had John Keats?” — that must also have inspired Galway Kinnell’s poem “Oatmeal.” Unnerved by the glutinous swamp in his bowl, Kinnell invited long-dead John Keats to join him for breakfast, and enjoyed congenial conversation:

Yesterday morning, for instance, Keats told me about writing the “Ode to a Nightingale.”
He had a heck of a time finishing it–those were his words–”Oi ‘ad
a ‘eck of a toime,” he said, more or less, speaking through
his porridge.

So what can we learn from Porridge with John Keats?

It depends on whom you ask. John Hollander’s recipe for “Potage du Soir Carroll” instructs: “In 6 qts. of dew, simmer together: a good-sized shank of the afternoon, a peeled shadow, some exhaustion, and a bouquet garni of pillow, litany, oaten stop and, if available, sullen horn.” Robert Penn Warren recommends two ounces of Jack Daniels, four ounces of water, two ice cubes, and a half hour “in which to meditate on the goodness of God.”

I meditated on that concept over lunch. The menu was cucumbers, curiosity, and regret.

Back on December 15 Marina asked me to elaborate on the sentence, “About the first thing I learned to do as a poet was get the line off the margin.” I more or less meant that I recognized the whole space of the page as available for use pretty soon after starting to break lines, and I would (and still do) begin lines anywhere on the page while writing. The poems on the book pages with widely spread forms often closely resemble the poems as written in the notebooks (being variations on them once transferred, at any rate).

For this reason especially I cannot write poetry in a notebook with lined paper. And I do literally write my poems, no matter how cracked some of them may appear to be. The lines totally inhibit my need for room, even if I don’t end up taking that room. You can’t make a good mess on lined paper, or I can’t anyway. The shimmering blank of a computer screen is useful to me for coming up with sentences and doing some editing, but if I try to write poetry on a computer the process is usually too slow.

I don’t use a system for getting off of the margin. Do not use breath, heartbeat, division of mental ideas, variable feets, aleatory products (like food stuffs or fuzzy dice or tracking twitches), concrete patterning, happy erasures, typographic growth serums, computer programs. All those things are terrific when someone else uses them though. I do feel close to Philip Whalen’s statement on the poem as “a graph of the mind moving” and taking that as impetus for a given poem’s physical shape (physicality includes sound in my way of stating it here)

I go off of the emotional tenor of the writing and let that inform the physical direction of the poem on a line-by-line basis. The decisions come fast and thick, several per line at times, and these poems tend to take a long time to work out around the edges, especially if the line length is highly variable across a work that is several pages long, say. The typing and editing in such cases can be rather meticulous and occasionally tedious, but I nonetheless get serious joy out of working in this vein when it happens, in no small part because it can feel like the surface of the poem is always moving, but also because it’s like a crash course on the art all over again each time. I also dig pushing the space bar a million times because it forces me to reread and reread and reread and confront.

Anyway, the compression typically dictated by forms riding the left margin isn’t going to work for me if I’m writing out of a tremulous state, for instance, or attempting to handle, like, terror, anxiety, oddball joys, or anything accompanied by noise and its various registers of agitation, critique and dream. A rectangle tilted on its side and leaned up against the left side of the page can get to be a standing coffin, if a nice tidy one, though tidiness may merely be an extension of contempt.

When I read something like CA Conrad’s (Soma)tic Midge poems I know their forms, which may strike some readers as fragile or jittery, are directed by outrage and desperation in combination with his “method” of body/color meditation-while-in-one’s-life. The speed at which they initially read belies the work that goes into getting them right. Hoa Nguyen uses the margin frequently, but will sometimes drop a tab-sized space or two within a line, giving it the feeling of multiple lines or short phrases on the same plane. I don’t typically share that technique, but I admire her ability to reset a line in progress and further thin out the area between mind and utterance.

The movement of the line is not solely handled by emotional tenor as it has to be bound to the sounds at work, the matter of what is being said, and the question of how the poem might let itself be read. It’s not a matter of scoring with me, because I actually think different readers exert very different degrees of control over pauses, breaks, and gaps in space, not to mention speed and pacing. The reader is full of ambiguity, and I prefer to honor that ambiguity by not micro-managing my sense of her experience. In the process of editing, one does try a little tenderness though, and nothing I’m saying here is meant in any way to be proscriptive. Self-employment within one’s practice is among the kinder characteristics of being a poet, and anyway there’s always more to say.

Weird – I am working on a piece about Dara Wier starting from the artificial but useful distinction between autobiographical narrative memory/past based writing and combinatorial making-it-up generative writing – and somebody told me J-Mox riffs on this in The Middle Room (is that true? can anyone point me toward a cite?). And now this – writing as curation, with all the signature and connoisseurship that implies, but also all the stepping aside from claims both to a proprietary hold on the work and words, as well as to a responsibility for only putting forward right-thinking aoristic self-flattering goofiness. 

et
Stranger still that I too am working on a piece that begins from a fake-ass memorex recording where we hear some deep autobiogoofballed screeching in the background, and then closer to the mic we hear some made-up degenerate screaming Pox-shit on the pitball. Is THAT true? Anyone point ME to a sit-spot I could own? And now this – aorta self-flagelation in the guise of responsibility…Wier(d).

dg
hmmm. I think that one of the things that cracked-up doers take, are a sort of evil dose of a primary received model. Or a knowledge-seeking in poetry, which I think you define very clearly here — right-thinking aoristic self-flattery coupled with a clam shell on ownership of words – which deflates, rejects and even reverses the model. This is what causes so much anger among poets. The rules of knowledge-seeking have been attacked.

et
Though if we deflate and reverse the model, it’s not clear that we reject it. But defection may be a step towards injection. Whereas defecation is a definite step towards rejection.

rs
Off-topic I reckon but anycase, K was down here earlier this week and read 1 Piece, new transcription of YTOP radio on the morning of 6/13. Amazing stuff. Anycase it got me looking at his stuffed fist again and one thought I had – re poetries as defecation – is a bit more traditional in its approach to other types of writing. There’s a lot of dismissal of MFA, langpo, etc. Claims of being truly contemporary, etc. A fair amount of energy that says suck, etc…all of which goes into that kind of repositioning. But with DefPo if somebody says “that sucks!” you can shrug your shoulders and say, “yeah, whattayawant,” and if somebody says “that’s great!” you can shrug your shoulders and say, “yeah, whattayawant asshole.” K’s always talking about reframing, but we seem in this case to go further.

jd
Yes. a kind of buddhist indifference? a la whalen or bromige

mm
I think the primary activity of (my) defecation involves a theatering of word-objects in various reality TV scenarios of my own invention. My own personal hot bath, for example, as a litmus for…

et
Wait do you take a bath with your own word-objects?

mm
…like, every week! Look, I hold dinner parties where the invitees are pairs of people who HATE each other for one reason (personal history) or another (racist bowling) plus one or two washed up celebrities and a celebrity host like Scott Baio HATING on defpo. But the party is actually a tupperware party only the host isn’t selling tupperware, she’s selling spices or sex toys, etc. And of course all the people aren’t people at all, they’re phrases like “nice one, candledick” and “quite a bromide” and their actions are also words and phrases like “fish paste” and “Balzac” or whatev. In this way, the poem arrives from the supposed lame stuff and vast sums of money are generated.

sa
Nice. You think about Scott Baio like a dozen times a day don’t you?

mm
The guy will be 68 YEARS OLD when his daughter Bailey goes to college and he’ll probably be divorced soon — how could I NOT think about him twelve times a day?!?

et
Hmmm, the utter weirdness-slash-creativity gleaned from the supposedly lame stuff is what opens the game. And the phrase “the author is with the reader” in all the ambiguity that that implies, allows itself to not take itself seriously. A question for ambiguity would be “the author is with the reader” in all the stress that takes it to a level implied by ambiguity. And then there’s the phrase “the author is with the reader” as more of an inside joke, an emotionally charged subject re-lived by its catastrophic ownership. But let’s look at this other phrase “the author is with the reader” in the sense that you can’t get any realer than the actual event, the actual newscast in its entirety as one phrase. Whereas “the author is with the reader” is like a dog licking its balls…why? because it can.

cf
A guy who is proud to steal poetry, former UK Poet Laureate, speaks out on “extracting sexy soundbites.” 

Ugh, Fiance blew another guy 

sm
I’m always thinking I need to be more programmatic — my way is  pretty much “by any means necessary.”

et
Incredible, that you extract method from a civil movement.

Finance blew another guy

sa
Just thought some of you might want to hear a bit about this. It’s a discussion of post-linear “finding” over last couple days, which I’ve just skinned. Very helpful in thinking about what I’ve disliked in some mega-findist work. Makes me lean found-ward b/c it doesn’t let the reader off the hook…so far as deciding what the hell this “is” much less whether it’s any good. A sort of neo-thuggery wiping post-drop, which may be why it can still succeed in operating on the reader in ways I think of as distinctively “poetic”.

jd
We haven’t actually discussed methods much.
I’m interested. 

md
moi too.

Ugh, France blew another guy

sm
Yeah, I wonder why we haven’t — ??  But I guess that was part of the question that et asked a week or two ago (which I didn’t have time to answer — duh).

et
Hey S, you can still answer…

sm
Woohoo!

et
But sometimes talking too much process takes thing away from thing. So I appreciate the moment that doesn’t get bogged down by explaining itself, and instead, just is.

sm
That’s cock-ademics in action. This is probably why we’ve never discussed process/method.  It seemed like an intuitive, group decision that worked and didn’t need extra crap.  I also don’t like a lot of eyeball on the process.  I don’t even think about what I’m doing most of the time.  Then again, I feel like I miss a lot of the “in the moment” by doing that. 

et
Well, each “in” is already yours…to be guru. But the methods to everyone’s variances are fascinating, I don’t read one particular agenda to everyone’s madness…just avenues of creativity, and what brings me to my next line, etc.

sm
Right!  I also think that we, as you just said, “flowed” — to bring it back to R’s idea of poetry as defecation.

rs
No, I meant to say translation... 

sm
If you could map all our decisions and avenues you’d probably see a really interesting flowing in and out.  I’m not being very articulate.

Ugh, my day job is blowing another guy

rs
No really, I’m against defecation.

dg
>>>>>> I also have a “by any means necessary” approach, but I have
>>>>>> used, and
>>>>>> combined, several sets of methods.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> A big one in Petroleum Hard On is
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Color coding / fragging / metabolism / chord fusing:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I’ll take two or three sets of search results or found texts
>>>>>> (sometimes in Blakeian opposition — like “Life makes no
>>>>>> sense” and
>>>>>> “Life makes a lot of sense.” Each separate set of results or
>>>>>> single
>>>>>> texts has it’s odor changed in ScentMuff®, reducing the font
>>>>>> so it’s just odor, then cut and paste blocks of scented
>>>>>> text to
>>>>>> make sure semen and scent are evenly inter-milked. I got the idea
>>>>>> for this
>>>>>> from Jackie Gleason. It’s like a reverse of the defrag
>>>>>> process on a
>>>>>> hard drive, where the fragmentation of the hard drive is
>>>>>> defecated
>>>>>> by scattered stink spots which are then unified into blocks by
>>>>>> the
>>>>>> ScentMuff® program. I do the the opposite — I frag the text.  I then
>>>>>> change the
>>>>>> odor all back to Ed Norton so I don’t know which was which, and
>>>>>> start
>>>>>> morphing and cutting and writing from within the giant now
>>>>>> integrated
>>>>>> scent block. So it’s breaking down a systematic sweetspot, followed 
>>>>>> by building up in a digestive/metabolic process,
>>>>>> the regurgitated doofball scenario. I also think of it as chordal — a
>>>>>> voicing where two sets of chords are combined into one to get
>>>>>> a new
>>>>>> stink.

sm
>>>>>>>>> That’s amazing!  I do something like that — stink coding –
>>>>>>>>> when I’m
>>>>>>>>> writing an essay that’s defecatory, so I can keep track of the
>>>>>>>>> themes and
>>>>>>>>> tropes
>>>>>>>>> as I’m layering it up with related language. 

ksm
>>>>>>>>>>>>> D, that really is amazing.  I never knew you did that thing
>>>>>>>>>>>>> with
>>>>>>>>>>>>> odored
>>>>>>>>>>>>> text.  So you stink it at one point so that you can’t even smell
>>>>>>>>>>>>> what the
>>>>>>>>>>>>> text says–so that it just forms blocks of solid scent that you
>>>>>>>>>>>>> then
>>>>>>>>>>>>> integrate with each other like armpits on a crowded subway? 

dg
Yes – that’s how I start. 

jd
Forgive my legendary american isolationism. I have BEEN
>>>>> EATING
>>>>> SPROUTED CHICK PEAS SINCE 9:30
>>>>> AM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
>>>>>
>>>>> IT IS LUNCH TIME AND I AM GOING TO GO SMEAR ROASTED EGGPLANT 
>>>>> ON MY UTERUS
>>>>>
>>>>> MEN HAVE THOSE HERE NOW BECAUSE OF ALL THE PLASTIC AND 
>>>>> UREA-BORN 
>>>>> BIRTH
>>>>> CONTROL CHEMICALS
>>>>>
>>>>> A NUTHATCH WILL HAVE PLENTY O ROOM IN MY URETHRA ***ALL***
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sm
Just proves my point once again: the deep spiritual pain caused by sprouted chick peas is the true catalyst for art.

jd
Sorry, my dye job is showing.

sm
What was your old method, MM? If ya don’t mind me askin’.

mm
No single old method. I like the searching dissonant combination of words and phrases: “turkey shoot” “postal” “the softness” — and then stitching from the results. I also like working of the results of one phrase like “I shit you not”. I think the stitching I do usually ends up as relatively normative sentence structure with a lot of comic / inappropriate juxtapositions of words and sentences — more so than, say, working more at the level of the phrase “the author is with the reader” at least much of the time.

Ugh, blow is gaying my day job

ng
I use several methods, but whittling down whole pages of google searches is too labor intensive, so I more likely pick out lines to cut and paste into a doctor’s abdomen. I then rearrange them intuitively, usually figuring out the best surgeon and stitcher first and then fooling with the middle.

I make them into regular stanzas often in order to counteract their innate chaos… but I did this initially in imitation of everyone else. I’m still not sure I like that but it seemed to be what people did.

The best method, though, is to google-search with one hand and masturbate with the other, I think.

sm
But then how do you hold the bong?

ng
I have a strap-on bong.

sm
That’s why you’re my shero.

The writers quoted (thank you all): Stagger Leeds, Nada Gordon, Chris Funkhouser, Maria Damon, Brandon Brown, Drew Gardner, Gary Sullivan, Jordan Davis, Rodney Koeneke, Rod Smith, Katy Degentish, Stan Apps, Michael Magee, Sharon Mesmer.

cf
I know it is probably totally cliche by now, but can’t also help remembering Brion Gysin in this regard, “no poets
               don’t own words…poets own words,
                                                    don’t know…no words own,
                                      poets don’t.” The poets are supposed to liberate the words – not to chain them in phrases. Who told poets they were supposed to think? Poets are meant to sing and to make words sing. Poets have no words “of their very own.” Writers don’t own their words. Since when do words belong to anybody…etc.

So by now “owning” is kind of a goofy concept, yet people still try (thinking of recent Zukofsky silly bizness). While in the end what’s important is what we do with all those words we don’t own…

sl
What I think is often really fun about using source texts to create something else is the teasing out of a more “telling” representation of what the voice “thinks” it’s saying. Or watching voices argue against each other from within the same “interior” space. There is an analogy with schizophrenia here in some cases.

When deployed effectively, I think this process can bring out an interesting dissonance between the syntactical “structure” and the humanized “content” of the texts.

et
I didn’t even think about voices talking to each other, the schizophrenic intermingling of texts as an interior space reformed as a collage of the many spaces. The psychological release of self that happens when surrendering the author’s voice to the world’s voice, to what’s found. I can see how that would piss off traditional poetry folk.

ng
I addressed this a little in my conceptual panel presentation.

cf
The most recent cannibalism lecture addresses this.

md
I think people assume wrongly that the act of appropriation is making fun of what it appropriates, rather than surrendering to it, in a way.

et
And I guess I’m wondering if a facility with appropriation is what opens the mind? So that the act of writing becomes a fluid process of uncovering detritus from the loads of ridiculous content available in the cyber world. Compared to the content available looking out the window. Which kind of ridiculous speaks to you?

And then using that borrowed observation to turn its own table by revealing life’s profundity…within say…a website about baseball yogurt, which I never would have found by looking out the window—perception being an engine for all things fluid. My window is my screen, my screen is my window…i.e. taking the thing itself and making it the thing it was before it ever became the thing it is. Would that sort of involution make the alchemical-real the surface-real?

bb
Really great questions and interesting thread already (for the record, I heart the worm-eaten intestines of Hustler’s advertisers, am currently in media coitus with a pack of rabid otters, and smoking aluminum.) Just as a little chime, the universe of the question feels a little different to me if we’re talking about the specific kind of appropriation that is translation.

What I’ve been proposing is an understanding of translation in which the translator’s body is recovered from the condition of “invisibility” that marks the practice since at least Cicero. So there’s something always anyway about “putting oneself in it” and trying to “find out what hides underneath”—I’m just especially interested in translation practices that foreground both of those activities.  

So for my translations of Catullus 99, there really was in each case an act of reading that was turned into an act of writing. Since the categories of fidelity and treason are, to my thinking, overdetermined and actually constitute a whole other point, the concern instead was to have an experience in which I was to varying degrees reading the Latin text of Catullus and trying to write according to the understanding I had of what that meant on that given day and in that given situation (I was at work).

Not to dwell on my own text—I think the question about how translation specifically coincides with the larger tendencies of appropriative writing, is not resolved at all.

gs
I always think of the George Steiner idea, “understanding as translation,” or as I think of it: understanding is translation. Working with found materials is a kind of translation project, especially if understanding is translation.

I don’t take others’ language to make it my own, nor usually to mock the original speaker/author or otherwise comment on them so much as to understand them, what is said, or attempted to be said, by translating it into my own writing (or drawing, in the case of comics).

et
The visual translation supercedes the spoken…or rather, sound taking root before word. Where brain’s capacity for ease of information, for immediate entry, doesn’t get tripped by cortex, by neuron, by inherent meaning. Like the feral response to the sensorial has to occupy a deeper catacomb in the brain, back from infancy.

cf
also thought the exchange between kenny g & al filreis on al’s blog is directly relevant to et’s inquiry.

ng
here’s a section from my panel presentation:

It’s like learning other languages. Vocabularies expand infinitely, tourmaline glitters in a damp cave. Rob Fitterman writes, “I am interested in the inclusion of subjectivity and personal experience; I just prefer if it isn’t my own.”Own?” Expression irrigates expression.

Me and the multitudes form a lacy network: no containment, just connections: me and the multitudes weave into each other. Drew Gardner: “Your own handwriting is collective.” Who’s containable? I’m all apertures. Dana Ward: “Correlated ooh la las between us.”

No one’s not a sieve: desire leaks: we drool when screen lovers kiss. It’s all language, antic and lascivious. Susana Gardner posts an update quoting Mina Loy: “LOVE of others is the appreciation of one’s self. MAY your egotism be so gigantic that you comprise mankind in your self-sympathy.” I steal with love and out of sympathy.

Both love and poetry are alien visitations here in the breathable room of lazy heresies, and I am writing this for you (the primordial you) (the resonating body) with my weeping heart and ornamental personality. Aesthetic intimacy, not distance, but not for “authenticity.”

et
> me and the multitudes weave into each other <
Lovely nada…your striving for intimacy while keeping authenticity at arm’s length is the definition of a weeping heart…how I’m gonna condense all these thots, who knows…but keep’em coming…

dg
When I use sought text I am often fusing modes. I start with multiple sources. I break them up, recombine them and use them as a kind of environment for the writing of the poems. It’s not exactly collage– I think of it as improvising on harmonies (themes, vocabularies, perspectives) that emanate from the sources. There are lots of different dynamics possible — dialogue, dialectic, contradiction, pile up, etc., with this way of going about writing.

It’s a kind of cybernetic steering through a sea of information and communication and subjectivities, and a way of reaching and stretching the range of themes and materials I’m dealing with. That steering creates flow in the poem, the flow of rhythm but also the flow of information. It allows me to expand my range and to fuse modes — satiric, lyrical and meditative, for instance. Using materials from the web also keeps me connected to the poetic values of the vernacular, and helps me to discover poetry in places where poets might not always look.

et
And that would be an ultimate goal, to discover where poetry may lurk within your life where you didn’t expect it to be. Or within the cyber id of the webbed world we’re currently alive in. But also, to discover it by letting it alone, by letting life discover you…to be jingoistic—if you’re tuned into the thing that shushes you. I’ve given these process-oriented workshops (as opposed to critique-oriented) which are about practice as meaning…and one of the major tenets is to expand your sensory perception of the world, the better to absorb information, to make anything your world.

sa
And I wish we would all talk more about cybernetics, do y’all know the cybernetic psychotherapist Gregory Bateson?  His treatment of subjectivity as a kind of gear-and-pulley mechanism seems relevant to this.  Bateson basically thinks individual people’s switches get flipped based on their understanding of the larger social context, and the wrong understanding of the context makes people mad.  It’s somewhat reductive and controlling, but it’s a way of thinking about using inputs to build understanding of larger groups. 

md
i love bateson. he was margaret mead’s husband. and smart.

dg
oh yea– Bateson- I love Steps to an Ecology of Mind –   / systems
theory mashed up with psychiatry & genetics — fascinating

cf
like to imagine a world in which Derrida was left at the margins (as Bateson is/was, pretty much) & Bateson’s ideas got the clout Derrida’s did… this could have happened, as they emerge more or less at the same time but alas twas not to be… too bad!

md
Lenny Bruce when asked about his influences, said that he had never had an original thought in his life, after all, he spoke the english language. Meaning, I take it, that to speak a language is to be socially embedded, so already interpellated into a web of influences. i.e. it’s impossible to write an “original,” single-authored poem, because every word is the property of all speakers and has been used. every text is an intertext, every word a hypertext.

et
“Every word is hyper-text” loses a certain ownability for that word but gives it a larger opening. Like, we ARE the “original” single-authored poem everyday. It’s an implosion of translation into its molten translation using word as core…to beget the next — that first word beginning, millions of words before us. That first grunt…influential or just reactive. And if we are speaking the speak that gets us heard, reflecting a socially embedded web would be the original thought. That is—throwing back the meaning we understand, in order to connect to everyone’s meaning. Us meaning a connective species, no? What animal needs no animal?

kd
I believe both things. Yes, there is no such thing as an idiolect. Yes, everything I do is influenced.

At the same time, everything I write is mine simply by virtue of the fact that it is my edited selection of words. What is writing besides picking out words and putting them together in a frame? If I’m picking the frame and the words and putting them together, it’s my writing. If I put the urinal in the museum, it’s my art; it’s not the art of the person who designed the urinal or cast the ceramic, because they did not intend to make art when they did those things. Just as the racist blog commenter or five-year-old writing a book report did not intend to make art when they wrote the things that I made into art by putting them together and changing their associations or in some cases their content.

We all have poetics that existed before we were a group that started sharing our writing this way. And our voices were set before we started writing this way – “this way”, collaboratively, or “this way” using Google – take that whichever way you want to take it, both are true. And for the most part, our individual voices haven’t changed very much and are still totally identifiable within our poetry – even as we have developed cadences and phrasing and techniques that do sound alike.

et
Being aware of the lunacy-slash-creativity hidden within and letting it go, for the world to own…to bring it back to ownership. And to the words that own you. And like the dog owner who begins to look like the dog…the similar cadences among the scatter will attract like-minded scats.

rk
Here’s this snippet from an interview I did with Gary last year that might be relevant to this thread, the whole she-bang is here:

RK: How is collaboration important to your work, and how do you see the value of other voices—invited, sampled, or stolen — in your poetry?
GS: Language itself is collaborative! Period. And beyond that, our understanding of ourselves as “poets”, the whole culture of poetry — that’s a collaboration, too. The idea some people have and perpetuate of the solitary poet coming up with his or her work alone is, as far as I’m concerned, a complete misrepresentation of reality.

et
Part 2 in a few days.

For instance, I begin to think I am out of the habit of reading poetry books from page one to the end – a habit I developed against my better judgment some years ago in order to slide into that angle from which a book of discrete poems takes order (I have a predilection for the writing of long poems myself, lately, but I also reserve much of my heart for books of individual poems). I say against my better judgment because I was writing reviews and getting paid a tiny (as in tiny) bit for them and so the new habit was tied to bringing in a tiny bit of money and therefore somewhat out of the loop. The loop formed between me and a book when I choose to read it or it chooses me (that does happen, if you think about it; if you don’t, don’t bother to think about my saying it), I mean.

Anyway I like to read books of poems in any order I can make work. Often enough that’s one to back, but that can be a bore, a pain, an order that is simultaneously important and out of the question unless we’re dealing with one long shot, some epic or some unquartered thing. To me, that all is (I claim none of this for anyone else, dammit). Give me a story without a plot. An idiot’s by-product of reading one to finale is all of a sudden having read the first twenty pages of six books and looking for something else to read. That’s not the books’ problem, though it might be, but I don’t think so because I don’t typically get twenty pages into something I’m not interested in. Unfortunately, I’m interested, at this point, in almost everything, so that’s no good for ye seeking judgment (fuck off by the way). The last time I think I was really in that reading space I had a baby not sleeping much, so neither was I, and that might explain twenty pages only in sixty different books, I mean six. That could have been any time in the last couple years, though more likely on the former side of last.

So recently I was reading a few things, mainly these books by Hoa Nguyen and Brett Evans, and I was very briefly feeling giddy that I didn’t care if I read them in order (I wound up reading Hoa’s book exactly backward poem by poem, as a matter of fact, and it attained a various propulsion nonetheless as its lines went forward while my sense of the book’s time took shape around it at a slant….her poems are rooms filled with moving sounds; BE’s book I read in waves, skipping around from section to section and ultimately reading this one poem “Fuck the System” several times to the point of wondering if I shouldn’t just post it by itself; I shouldn’t; not because it would be a bad thing to do and I could probably do it and Brett would be happy even if I didn’t tell him because I take him to be like that, but because the blog wouldn’t get the formatting right which would batter his shifting indentations and screw up a lot of the points of emphasis and though the poem is in fact more literally emphatic on several levels than its title – it’s a raging post-Katrina American language spectacle from a son of New Orleans that doesn’t at all admit the existence of hinges – his spacing needs to be presented exactly as is). Then Karen Weiser, a poet who made the decision to marry me, let me know that Lyn Hejinian’s book Happily struck her as similar in some of its workings to a thing I’ve been working on for a solid year now.

So I look at Happily, which I’ve not truly looked at before, and feel in my gut that I can read it in any order because it’s got a lot of approximates happening: the lines are approximately sentences and the sentences are approximately lines; there’s no punctuation to tell you a thought is definitively over but there’s a left margin CAP system telling you when a line that looks like it might be a sentence can be looked at as beginning; but the line spacing is uniformly spread so you get something like a double space or slightly less than double space between lines whether those lines are within a line that might be a sentence or across two lines that almost always complete a thought like a sentence might (I now hear Renee Gladman describing the sentence as the narrowing into line of the constellation that is, for her, mind). It’s either one line in approximately 275 units, or it contains approx. 275 beginnings of thoughts that are lines that make excellent sentences. I permit you to hear “excellent” being said in your dorkiest emphatic voice. It’s a generous form, working as vehicle inside a generous book, but only if you choose to feel it that way. It’s not like you open up the book and a hand comes out of a page to give you a cupcake. And anyway it’s another one of these little books. Probably big enough for a page to give you a cupcake, but maybe not via hand unless a kid’s hand, or that of a great ancient desert tortoise.

But I had to read it from one to last because I needed to know something and that something would have to be alongside the experience the book would give me. I mean, I don’t assume that reading a book of poems is going to culminate in me knowing something. And if a book of poems I’ve made a commitment to makes me feel like something I already knew or suspected has been reinforced then I feel like I don’t know anything and figure I read the book like a fucking amateur (a problem of attention, and sensitivity). I needed to know how the poem Happily lets its aspects of mind hang together through its handling of spaces between thoughts and lines. On one level, a plain level, there’s a variation of movement between these things – there’ll be a run of lines that is list-like, there’ll be a line that’s a direct response to a previous line, indicating the dynamic of a conversation though the nature of the second voice may be sly in its shaky visibility, there’ll be lines that seem to blur into one another, lines that are set ups or the results of set ups, there are extra spaces to indicate something like a longer pause every once in awhile, and there’s no punctuation within these lines, which are often not very long, so you might have a dynamic between what could be separate clauses being formed into one that has a funny tug somewhere, or jump, or quick step.  But on another level, the level I wasn’t looking for, there was my response to a single line or thought that, for a number of days, erased the rest of the book from my attention.

About two-thirds through I get to this line at a point when I’m letting the whole thing just wash over my mind – when I really get into something with length and I’m dealing with it for the first time I let it go liquid this way:

“The closer expression comes to thought fearlessly to be face to face would be to have almost no subject or the subject would be almost invisible”

I get instantly bound up with this line because it tells me something about the way I think I think when I write, and because it has this odd use of the word “would” its not taking anything away from my feeling that I have to come near to a state of thought-suspension in order to write with everything really available. In order for that face to face to happen in my mind the thought has to shed its visibility and I have to imagine I have a blank as mind to write on. In something like a clean slate scenario the words appearing on the page are appearing in mind and/or ear at nearly the same instant. The smaller the lag, the less I have to search or scan for a sound with which to begin. And so I hope for no subject in that moment because I’m trusting that every feeling, every thought, every experience that has gotten me to this point is close enough by to be available to a poem taking shape, if it can. This happens sometimes.

I was somewhat baffled by the things I found on U68 back in 1984 – The Rapping Duke, for instance: a dude who rapped entirely in a John Wayne voice imitation ­– and I probably didn’t register a number of bands that I wound up getting into some years later. U68 was, I think, a video equivalent to a college radio station with an emphasis on the eclectic and a red carpet laid out for very low budget operations.  But I do remember one night the unannounced procession of three videos in a row by poets: a totally warped rap by Bob Holman, an anti-nukes song by Anne Waldman that I think is called “Uh-Oh Plutonium!”, and a really lovely rendition of “Father Death Blues” by Allen Ginsberg. They were all songs, now that I think of it, but I can’t find any trace of their existence on the web but for a reference to them in the Holman archive at NYU’s Fales Library under the heading of PTV. I do have this image in memory of Ginsberg riding what may have been the Staten Island Ferry and otherwise walking around town while the song played. I could have it wrong. But if anyone has any further information out there on the videos, I’m interested in tracking them down for a repeat viewing. There are at least two other videos available at You Tube of Ginsberg performing “Father Death Blues”, a song he wrote in the wake of his own father’s death and a piece that might be useful to look at in conjunction with his poem “White Shroud,” a longer, intensely precise reconstruction of a dream visit to see his mother some two decades-plus after she died.

So the moral of this post is: go to modern art museum on free pass, stop by punk rock exhibit, watch irrepressible S/M dance video, flashback to childhood tv experience, hear Allen Ginsberg’s voice in head, ponder depths of AG’s later work, go public.

PS – in conjunction with the comments box under John’s blues post from a few days ago, there may be something to comparing the Blind Willie McTell-Bob Dylan-Johnny Cash progression through the song “Delia” and the movement from Petrarch’s Sonnet 189 through Wyatt’s translation (“My galley charged with forgetfulness”) into Frank O’Hara’s “To the Harbormaster”. You could look it up, as they say, if interested.

(Photo Credit: Thomas Sayers Ellis)

I’m good at getting lost. A few years ago, living in a French town so small even its residents had barely heard of it, I lost my way at least once a week. I was also known to lose the bakery, the drugstore, the school where I was teaching, and my colleagues at that school. Streets rayed out from the town center like the arms of a starfish–a crippled starfish whose limbs twisted and gnarled.

Walking in Washington, D.C.—the site of the Poetry Foundation’s new online tour—several weeks ago, I found myself transfixed by street names. Not because I was lost, though I was, but because those names follow particular patterns. First they run from A through Z (A Street, B Street, etc.). Then they run A-Z again, but with bisyllabic words (Euclid, Fairmont, Girard, Harvard). Then they run A-Z yet again, but with trisyllabic words (Allison, Buchanan, Crittenden, Decatur). Any street might change names farther west or east — but the changed name must obey the same rules determining the original one (so Allison turns into Albemarle, both trisyllabic words starting with “A”).

Whoever named D.C. streets attended to rules familiar to poets: syllable count, word order, alliteration. They wrote their city in a series of syllabic acrostics. Walking through Washington is like moving through a formal poem; like verse forms, the patterns prevent you from getting lost. Unless you’re me.

It’s hard not to feel a swell of grandeur, even if you’re lost, as you stroll those streets, pondering the history of acrostics: the important Hebrew prayer Ashrei comes to mind, as does the book of Jeremiah. More recent contributions include Lewis Carroll’s “A Boat Beneath a Sunny Sky,” which spells out the name of Alice Pleasance Liddell, and Robert Pinsky’s “ABC,” and Billy Collins’s “The Names.”

What I like particularly about D.C.’s acrostics is their flexibility: names change and multiply, yet only within bounds. If cities stood for poetic movements, D.C. would stand for an adaptive formalism. And my French village would argue—with the Frenchman’s passion for freedom—for vers libre, though after a time its confusions revealed their own patterns: the flustered request for directions, the questions as to where one was from, the amusement as to how one had managed to lose oneself, the Au revoir, mademoiselle! ringing out like a refrain.