epic

too lazy to do anything else today, sad that work begins tomorrow, but cheered up by this epic. click on the epic link & watch for an exploding piano!

More on the Evergreen front

We're about halfway through the second issue of Wholphin; it features an unaired sitcom pilot directed by Bob Odenkirk in which the love (sex) interest is an Evergreen Graduate who didn't know the Holocaust had happened and is outraged by her garbled facts. The episode was funny, but, at the same time, it didn't feel so good when someone else was making fun of us. Wish I could say I learned my lesson, but. I probably didn't.

the vacation at its end, i relax

here are the books i bought while in NH:

Zukofsky's A (been thinking about buying it for a long time then came across it...)

Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury (to replace the copy stolen by my mother, hardback & still brilliant)

Steinbeck's Travels with Charley

& a little chapbook, seemingly self-published by Alex Crangle entitled Emotion is a Robotic Piano Playing the Twelve Tones of You. i found this little book at the Plymouth book exchange in a small college town for three dollars. i assume alex crangle is a student there. i like it alright. he, after all, writes such poems as: "An Epic Space Poem: Part 1 or; From Your Seat in the Dirigible, A Million Miles Up" and "Long Legged Anthropods Probably Crawl On Me In My Sleep" and "The Centipedes Are Getting Downright Arrogant". Here is an example of Crangle's skillz:

The Guardsman 40,000 Is

The Guardsman 40,000 is now
a bald tire in the dirt surrounded
by last year's brown leaves and the cracked
vacuum chambers of old street lights
now fallen, their filaments hanging out like
thin mercury tongues in a broken bed of glass
and dust. I have to be careful, my shoes
are somehwere in Vermont and the twine keeping
the paperback books on my feet is unwinding
quietly, cut by rocks and giant emerging pythons
of deep, established roots. The black-
market book merchant sells Thomas Mann and Jean
Genet from suspended trenchcoat wings, promoting
the modern thought I use to wander this new rhodo-
dendron forest. But I fear
these fraying thoughts
will only hold for so
long. I'll never

see the rubber
walls of this
prison.


anyways, in some of the poems there is a randomness that entrances me, tho also, sadly, at least for me, an admiration for bukowski...

just getting into Matt Hart's Who's Who Vivid & enjoying it. it is fun, easy going stuff, & heartfelt. i particularly like the first poem, the poem that appears in alice blue 1. a lot of it relies on the juxtaposition of images, as though the connecting lines have been cut free, & perhaps a little surrealism, but tamed.

still thinking about Jim Goar's Whole Milk, from Effing Press. I like it more & more.

evergreen alumni compilation 2006!

just recieved the alumni news letter & rather than the pleas for money i've come to expect, i found a compilation cd containing, perhaps, the best dance song ever recorded. track 7, coraxio's "consumer sex". it is also the most terrible dance song i've ever heard. it is brilliant. check your mailbox greener grads, before it's too late.

Schuyler, Beckman, & What to Expect When You're Expecting

Introduce Joshua Beckman with a Schuyler poem? Sure. Why not? Even more fortuitous since right before the reading I had been looking that Diary of James Schuyler (which looks quite interesting and I may go back for)...and his collected works. Oh James! How I love thee...

And Beckman read and we laughed at such wonderful lines as "Bad raccoon in a good world..." But I yawned a lot. And sat next to two books by authors "Staples," and "Starbuck" and felt like I might be watching a commercial for how to sell a poet.

And then I bought World Jelly and Whole Milk, and may go back for Plots...since it came so highly recommended. And the diary of James Schuyler. Hold off on his collected works (at the criminal price of 32 bucks) until I can afford to spend 32 bucks on one book...

Open Books was welcoming as always...but I find the audiences at these readings always a little disappointing. For some reason, 19 year old hipster kids with limp mohawks seems too easy.

Wish you were here.

sitting in phoenix airport

w/ many books in my bag, the stars of which are Mulligan Stew, Lunar Follies, & Who's Who Vivid (Matt Hart, the first poem of which appeared in alice blue one. nice to see the name in print as tho it were a real thing (& indeed it is a real thing). Lunar Follies, another Sorrentino book is pretty tight, very short fictional art reviews, calling to mind some of Millicent's art history stories tho more compact. Mulligan Stew continues to impress w/ lines such as this one: "The sky has a flawless blue, a faultless blue, that blue that has about it somewhere a touch yellow, or perhaps pristine white, a subtlety that seems mixed with the pale azure that makes it, perhaps, even paler." or this paragraph: "He fought against the tenderness that welled up in him. Can love exist here? Love? Ha! Ha! He spilled his drink, and thought, bitterly, I spill my life as I spill this drink. Fool! Yet he couldn't bring himself to walk over to her."

anyways, leaving soon. laters yo.

interesting stuff

write poems via the erasure method at wave books or visit bear parade & read matthew rohrer.

also, i found alice notley's disobedience at half price books in scottsdale. otherwise, their poetry was nothing to shake a stick at...

new poetry online!

a l i c e    b l u e   has trampled out into the middle of spring, & i'm sure this has distracted most readers of poetry & prose... but, if you have the wherewithall to keep reading, tarpaulin sky has dynamite new issue. & so does ACTION YES w/ new work from Catherine Wagner (some of those "everyone in the room is a representive of the world at large" poems she read at Open Books) & Zachary Schomburg (check out Scary, or No Scary) & for further reading, check out Typo 8 & the poem entitled Scary, No Scary.

nba playoffs

been watching the playoffs from a distance & w/o the sonics in, i've watched a little of the old footage on youtube, & in doing so, came across this funny shawn kemp dunk video. any guess as to what language the music is in...german? (this may only be funny to me).

alice blue three

stark & w/o bells at www.alicebluereview.org

this should have been the winter issue

sarah & i were talking

about poetry this morning and it brought up this entry from limetree (where, by the way, a somewhat interesting discussion about flarf continues [it started, I think on minor american] in regards to a poem that can be found here).

all of that aside, this earlier post comparing a Billy Collins lyric poem & Jennifer Moxley lyric poem is still quite interesting, & seeing the poems side by side, both using similar strategies etc... just curious what you fellow dimlabbers think of the analysis etc...

check out this lesbian poem generator!

Fans of Cort Day...

Joshua Corey says check out Geoffrey Nutter, and then talks about some other stuff.

check this out

Gilbert Sorrentino 1927-2006

a little here

&

here

...

box to private     my armed instant
pushed sabotage wound     acquires braggarts
buttresses gigantic turrets
oh great     w/o the pair i
protect trailer blue
exempt behind ballads &
wired killing jelly     i adapt!
w/ sheep that inflate empty lands
despot animals & charisma
the decided alarms of eyes
my cough capture factory reopens
& men that never shake
remain unseen     the war vigorous
w/ boorish death     spitfire
events we simulate     the record
in my kill-drink-tunnel
grass & platings     neglect & shepherds
airplanes attacking tundra
dissimulated canaries     my
yellow satellite
& an army of well-dressed galas
on zero summer cruise
generate wars & sea recovery
for considered men who restrict
positronic boy repair or
scandal     my voice that drags     screens
w/ intrusive benevolent red
we prefer regulation
for my iridium rope opera
& men who peel risks     hands
the school vampire paradigm
don't disembark     my behavior is
a skull wire intern
w/o lamentation     one random pledge
removed     my circumspect malady

hmm...

sarah & i wrote the following poem sometime ago. the idea was that we could only use words with the vowel "a" or the vowel "e". no word could use both, & extra points were given to high quantities of words w/ two or more "e"s or "a"s, such as "adamant," "peerless," or "veneers." this, of course, is not nearly as restrictive as anything millicent would write but...it was a fun exercise.

Bereft bank teller, my blatant armada
that preempts chaps & braggarts &
halts tall, peerless & pell-mell. Eschew
these exempt ballads, vagrant laggards,
heedless canards that span the spartan
phalanx. Adapt! sheep that swell vacant
lands & canvass adamant sleepers, eye
alarms, & men that never see war. Stal-
wart heresy cheers these events. We
cheer grass & dented veneers. Slapdash
ramparts & reddened shepherds. Carnal
reverends & secret vassals. Pretend egret
& canary. Scan level fresh and well-
dressed—demented army between thwart
& gala. Engender effete wars & esteemed
men. Repress scandal, my drawl, canvas
sheets. We prefer men of settlement. Men
that carry green bananas & sandals. Men
that peel hazards & hands when they land
garb temples. The fracas settles banal
regret. A ballast, haphazard, repelled,
seedy warrant, my malady a leery vertex.



i just finished reading "Lyric Poetry After Auschwitz" by Kent Johnson, "Red Juice" by Hoa Nguyen (amber i'll be sending you a copy), & "World Jelly" by Tony Tost, all from Effing Press. all enjoyable reads.

i also just finished "Letters to Wendy's" by Joe Wenderoth (this i took on my secret manager trip to seattle & read on the airplane). also a terrific book, analyzing human life, as it does, in all its joys & traumas, in relation to fast food & pornography, but in a good way...

laters

R.I.P. Maren Katelena de Vries May 6th, 2006

she jumped from the
Aurora Bridge
to end her suffering because
she could not except failure in herself
I have not seen her in years
Elementary School was so long ago
she was one of my best friends then
it hurts me now as if she was still my best friend.
It's over for her now,
but memories of her will still live on.
I will always remember.

About a Friend

About A Friend

She throws herself back into her past
Her bruises show that people don't change,
Her head is bruised from the stairs

Her daddy killed her baby

Her period, a month late
He kicked her stomach to the point
of an unexpected period: heavy and disturbing, bleeding,

Her daddy killed her baby

She fought back - she made him bleed
but her body is still bruised
Her emotions are still broken

Her daddy killed her baby

Why did she go back?
How could her foster parents let her?
She has no answers

Her daddy killed her baby

He used to rape her everyday
until she was 15
Yet she went back

Her daddy killed her baby
Her daddy killed her baby
Her daddy killed her baby

lyric spaceship or "human drones follow each other in a stiff motion" for biz

& i become myself
i bring the laughter
the average natal pod of unknown methods
in the company of people who change the research
& share like occasional motels
or starships that earn great returns of squares
& break the ball of unperfect chaos
the model     radically reduced
by belltowers or bumblebees of human misery
that bring closer a population of dye
my starship of tact of coast
starship that lobs belltowers
of satisfied burdens     my starship     now legal
w/ perceptible dad costume
when donned does not function
only negotiates for square operations
& swims the worlds you carry w/ meow
or town table of tragedy do
i of the prose pawn
of the yawl of the knack ploy
the hayrack natal of toys
of the halo crate
of the of i
of the prototype of simple ones
of the toy of the lull of the ploy of already
of the sofa of the unperfect
of stiff people of movement of human hating
which cuts it
you do not laugh or square
& the bumblebees realize
& relocate again
their pictures of tiles arranged
so i cut her song charms
in the enterprise of it
to become the pursuit
& station-wagons or starships have my unperfect ball
not technicolor or square     not me

random poem

Mirrored tile images arrange and
disarranged in fashions unknown,
Society becomes the target - the mimicked fortune.
Tiles twist & break to form an unperfect sphere-
marbled pattern chaos that satisfies as a community.
Human drones follow each other in a stiff motion.
In order to feel accepted they have disowned individuality.
They've traded themselves for copy-cat picture perfection.
People realize and yet the drones march on.