Old News

age of the forklift

2012-02-11T11:46:00.004-05:00

it’s me, tom, talk
as fog not cheap & dead
that tree was a phone
cracked as winter’s up
a little girl’s eyes
          zooming
after fade of motor
cycle              makes you
wonder, says her mother
have good days, says the
baker, faded            have
good days           out the
door, down the street
i’m lost as that, good
as fog not eyes & bodies
yawn a school—
it’s me, tom, school
as fog not eyes & bodies
after fade of motor
again i get
beat up & move school
to school thru race
riot as if body were
speech—it is, & that was
the 90s, in shadow, much
as body’s a path from a bruise
like a trumpet—it’s been    it’s been
          this afterlife
we got hung up on
& sat outside to see
& couldn’t          you yawned
the hallway groaned the strings
are eyes shot out a trumpet
like care could
happen in a house that
counts for you—look at all these kids—
i give myself what they
gave me over & over—the institutions,
i mean & the kicks to the head
                  there’s my name
                  it’s a black hole
                  i shovel things in
an if notes       a blues in a crumb
clip       the money where your
home was            cement where
the mouth is          our violent need
to shovel out description
                              for the hum
                              under the ash

ANYWAY

2012-01-08T19:28:00.041-05:00

I’d go to Spain just for that. The whole image (from this website) gives me all that’s great in the world at the moment, in a moment. “In the world.” Funny it’s hard to feel “in the world” sometimes. Can you get chased out?

“The history of our time calls to mind those Walt Disney characters who rush madly over the edge of a cliff without seeing it: the power of their imagination keeps them suspended in mid-air, but as soon as they look down and see where they are, they fall.

“Contemporary thought . . . can no longer rest on its own delusions. What used to hold it up, today brings it down. It rushes full tilt in front of the reality that will crush it: the reality that is lived every day.”

That’s from The Revolution of Everyday Life by Raoul Vaneigem, written about 50 years ago, in French. On some scales, not long ago. Situationist.

Last April the poet Kit Robinson came to Philly, and I got to read with him at Fergie’s. We both happened to read poems titled “The Station.” His, from a book called The Crave, goes like this:

As you were
stuck in one place
the 70s

You thought to write
perchance to cut
a stencil

Against the time
a steady state
rhyming

With a groove
“Call Me”
the sounds of cars at night

Insubstantial
against the space
of an empty lot

Shot full of holes
the smoke
sign of the placeholder

You were just waiting
outside a factory
in-plant maintenance

Surrenders its secrets
on the off chance
guards the rails

Too many untouched to remember

Reading the poem, I can’t help but think of New Jersey. It’s the 5th stanza mostly: “Insubstantial/against the space/of an empty lot”. NJ: that steady, stationary state of dull, cloned highways and parking lots that are empty even when full. The emptiness of a reality that is lived every day in many states. Jobs, jobs, jobs. The poem runs on a concern with creating the steady state of, say, a song that would resist that reality. That last lone line gets me—untouched rails, untouched people. Train after train, call not going thru, trace of the broken down. I return to the ambiguity of “in-plant maintenance” a few lines prior, of what all’s in that—its possible subjectivity.

Here, let’s consider the following quotations as a pair of rails:

“Poetry is language on a holiday. Free to go where it will. But it is not jobless. The job of poetry is to continue, despite everything that is pitted against it.” – Kit Robinson, from poetics statement on Elective Affinities

“The Occupy movement is a holiday. There is nothing frivolous about that. Holidays are not escapes; at their best, they deepen our experiences of things. Consider the rituals of this holiday . . .” – Jeff Sharlet, from “By the Mob’s Early Light: The Ritual Significance of Occupy Wall Street” (Bookforum, Jan/Dec 2012)

Some holiday in Chicago:

Some holiday in Philadelphia:

Mic Check at Philadelphia City Council

Lately holidays like these in cities the world over—disruptions that got us thinking about the possibility of an actual public and the imagination and collaboration that would require of so many people. In the examples above, the ritual of the people’s mic (aka ‘the human mic’) stands out—an aggressive, sometimes affective tactic which, in other contexts, such as a general assembly, can create profound empathy and cooperation that fosters a culture of listening. On one hand it can be used to shut down dialogue (a good thing only when what’s being shut down is the false, ceaseless political discourse controlled by the rich); and on the other hand it can intensify communication within a group.

As Sharlet points out, at GAs “you find yourself repeating things you don’t agree with. And you watch the inevitable cranks and complainers who are forced to repeat the crowd’s pleas for them to let the meeting proceed. You become intimately aware of language, parceled out in short phrases; you reconsider which of your own words are really necessary.” The slowness and tedium of the people’s mic are elements of its strength, if only because it can help us see just how conditioned we are by convenience culture, by capitalism.

The poet Janaka Stucky took a screen shot of that image and it spread quickly over the internet via facebook. Another wonderful disruption, it struck me as so utterly perfect when I first saw it, an experience similar to first seeing the image of the giant bird on wall in Spain (above). But I also thought immediately of friends and enemies who’ve scoffed at or dismissed the occupy movement, and I laughed.

A friend re-posted the image on facebook right after me and right away someone responded defensively, idiotically, along the lines of: Are you suggesting there is some great corporate CONSPIRACY against us? This doesn’t PROVE anything . . .

You are the conspiracy, fucko, and the proof.

I didn’t say that. Actually, I didn’t reply at all because, at the time, a Tom Waits song was playing in the juke box in my head, sadly merrily, and I was enjoying it all too much, the ironies, the associations.

TIME TIME TIME TIME

“The fight for Eros is the political fight,” I’ve kept reminding myself since hearing Angela Davis speak in October. I wish there were a recording of her entire talk that night at Irvine Auditorium at Penn (a beautiful auditorium, by the way—it was my first time) so that I could revisit the whole inspiring thing. Anyway, she closed by quoting Herbert Marcuse, her former teacher: “The fight for Eros is the political fight.” And later she marched down to Occupy Philly and spoke again, for a much shorter time, and quoted, again, the poet Audre Lorde, as she has many times in many places—to sustain the holiday:

"Differences must not be merely tolerated but seen as a fund of polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic" (from Lorde’s essay “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House”).

The full gist:

Let’s say this movement, in the U.S. at least, is about education (or learning—that might be a better word), and that all concerns are tied to it. This would include ways to talk and hear (ways of being), but also seeing how systems—especially education systems—teach us to chase ourselves out of the world. And so the movement would need to continually disrupt those systems, in new ways, with an eye always toward replacing (not just “reforming”) them. Invention is absolutely necessary here (consider Slavoj Žižek’s words at OWS, for example, and here).

Ted Greenwald’s memoir, CLEARVIEW/LIE, has me reflecting on what a city public education does to you, how it shapes your mind. School was where I learned to not learn, to not create, to shut down, be afraid, give up, hate people. Greenwald doesn’t rip into it, but he shows, in playful ways, the subtle and profound impact a public education can have (for him, it was Queens in the 50s) as his story bounces back and forth in time. Note how he squeezes in Paris 68, which reappears throughout the book:

Since the beginning of time there are Four Seasons. Our four is The School Year.

School, school yard hang out with friends, listen to radio stories, dinner, homework, bed. It’s a week night and school’s tomorrow. Halloween, Christmas, pea shooters, yoyos. Then, it’s summer.

The Filipino yoyo experts at Lamston’s did great yoyo tricks. But my favorite thing, they carve small native village scenes in the sides of the deluxe models, with rhinestones imbedded.

The diurnal course, more, courses accompany me to college, where in my second year, taking a leave of absence, go to the Meadows on a Tuesday night. Dumbfounded. What are all these people doing here, it’s a school night.

The ghostly patterns burn into my screen.

In 1968 in Paris, at the beginning of May feel a vaguish undefinable uneasiness. Finally, figure out, paper and final time. The School Year afterburn.

Summers are great, too short. Plant stuff, play war, build tree forts, drink many-colored sodas, smoke, fish, swim. Too short.

And later in the book:

Like it or not, maybe it’s all those war movies, the war seeps into my mind . . .

At any rate, lookit

In public school, it’s very great to be in the cockpit of the American Dream. Right there the mist-enveloped pop culture crossroads crucible, in there with a devil.

Sign on the dotted line

Anyway

The dewy self is revealed, not some decorated or value-added form, call it entertainment, once complete, personality and all, drains and makes void, something repeatable and infinitely reproducible.

Think about it, with a calendar advent of entertainment, if one definition of insanity is doing the same thing expecting a different outcome, entertainment is insanity’s perfect vehicle.

Get your ass in said ve-hicle.

The faint and built up fear, the same thing wants to be fresh never, is. Even if its song is an infinity cover.

Writ from inside out.

Being always outta here, stronger and stronger. School and its directions, to my lights, start to complement what attracts my attention outside of school.

The talking to myself, underbreath cursing, is a lifelong soundtrack accompanies myself working doing something requires you gotta concentrate. Driving, after I get my license in high school, talk to the road, other cars, other drivers, the radio.

If watching TV (now and then) talk to shows, the plot, the characters the dialogue.

Same in movies, I’m not the only one with the running commentary.

Working, similar, to keep going often let my eye run over some page of something I’m reading, stop where it will use the words (however) to move on with.

Greenwald's creative adaptability is fascinating and remarkable to me—the method he found to respond to (talk from, create out of) the insanity of the “infinitely reproducible,” the monotony of pop culture/school. The tic, or habit (ritual?) in the interest of sanity leads to new forms. (It’s interesting how this sheds light on his poetry, which maybe I’ll write about elsewhere.) What I identify with here is the restlessness, from which the book’s refrain of “anyway” was likely born.

I use “anyway” constantly in conversation—as a way to move on, to keep going or to get to a point; also to level off something I just said, to reduce or dismiss its significance; or to abandon a point altogether. For me, “anyway” is often a sigh, a sign of resignation: only so much can be communicated, I give up, not worth it. You can hear it when I talk. Now where’d I learn that? Those dim hallways of those dim, dull buildings I spent all those years in?

What of my words come out that hallway of my throat?

Anyway, I’ll finish up here with a pair of animated histories to think about.

business reply mail

2011-12-09T13:29:00.014-05:00

my own skin til the nietzche
wears off      breakfast alone
                   reflected in bottle
of bordeaux snagged a night
before undrunk out of a reading
w/ friends           in background
a worry of rowhomes the body
aches out of        paean to place
lives in the mouth           gets me
out of the house             today’s pages
are milk        over coffee    down
the street      october        the wind
makes me weak     i blow away
                            like a leaf
suicidal thing to say always
it’ll be like this          the money
to make it so            squatting
all around me—         am i tired
of carrying out a prescribed social
function               for a world i don’t
believe in              is it time to bull
doze a tent           i mean what all
are you if more than mind and taxes
a state like texas                 a little
united states w/ a chimney, general
assembly, general assembly—
it’s hard to make a bedroom too
empty              yet hard to fill
oneself w/ the absence of a public
while one is that absence
a number          the other day
in a notebook: easy to love all
the whackjobs from a distance
       your mother
       your father
       your brother
       your body
                       more foreign than
i think       & outta sorts push
the thought     a whole feeling
of what threads      form a bus
thru a life                 bus that hangs
from the noisy people i march
with     a thread coming home
to a holler not pissed on      a bus
the thing         inside         out there
         DEMANDS NOTHING
no pit bull, for example, hung
dead on the door to the moneyed
white bar squatting
in a poor black pocket
of the city itself

GlitterPony #13

2011-12-07T16:15:00.003-05:00

Three poems--the first from Valu-Plus, the other two from Common Sense--are in issue #13 of GlitterPony Magazine, which includes work by Sampson Starkweather, Cynthia Arrieu-King, Travis Macdonald and other good writers. Thanks to Natalie Lyalin & Jon Link, the editors.

scaffolding

2011-11-15T12:39:00.002-05:00

a popgun’s a popgun
little mussolini landlord
on his cell phone
for his yuppies puppied
up on the deck built
just for the rising
rent some mexicans
put windows into
from the scaffolds
you wanna be better
than the years winding
round a clock & dropping
off the wall as bottle
caps into a trash can
of a white kid who
says why drink & drive
when you can smoke
& fly
from his bike
now there’s a poem
finally
it’s been all day
this thought of finally
throwing eggs at the rise
& fall of the dull
talk of watered plants
& puppies of those
across the street you’ll
never know & now
don’t have to
in the shot breeze
you might live for
round a clock & dropping
just for the rising
of a white kid who says
a popgun’s a popgun
that’s from emerson
when you can smoke & fly
from the scaffolds
you’ll never know
a poem finally
of the dull talk
of watered years
winding up the thought
of throwing plants & puppies
from the scaffolds

primitive information

2011-11-02T19:31:00.003-04:00

David Hadbawnik just interviewed me about Old News. You can read the interview here.

Nov 4th: Reading in Brooklyn

2011-10-28T12:01:00.005-04:00

Looking forward to reading w/ Anne Boyer and David Blair
at Pete's Candy Store, 709 Lorimer St, Brooklyn, NY
Friday, 11/4 at 7pm - as part of the Multifarious Array

the book

2011-09-22T13:56:00.004-04:00

My book Old News has been published by Furniture Press. You can get it here--not for free, but for cheaper than the internet. It'll be available soon from SPD, too, and a few independent bookstores in Philly and elsewhere.

Book party is October 5th, 8pm at L'Etage (6th & Bainbridge) w/ music by Site Recites.

Thank you to Christophe Casamassima, the editor.

Fact-Simile - Autumn 2011

2011-09-20T12:07:00.004-04:00

The new issue of Fact-Simile, an excellent magazine now published out of Philly, is available--online and in print, for free. In it you'll find about 20 poems, including one I wrote last year, and an interview with Fran Herndon. Thanks to JenMarie Davis and Travis Macdonald, the editors.

Erasing 9/11

2011-09-09T17:34:00.002-04:00

(a play on a poem by Edson)

     A father with a huge eraser erases his 9/11. When he finishes there's only a red smudge on the wall.
     His wife says, where is 9/11?
     She's a mistake, I erased her.
     What about all her lovely things? asks his wife.
     I'll erase them too.
     All her pretty clothes? . . .
     I'll erase her closet, her dresser--shut up about 9/11! Bring your head over here and I'll erase 9/11 out of it.
     The husband rubs his eraser on his wife's forehead, and as she begins to forget she says, hummm, I wonder whatever happened to 9/11 . . .
     Never heard of her, says her husband.
     And you, she says, who are you? You're not 9/11, are you? I don't remember your being 9/11. Are you my 9/11, whom I don't remember anymore? . . .
     Of course not, 9/11 was a girl. Do I look like a girl?
      . . . I don't know, I don't know what anything looks
like anymore. . .

snaptrap

2011-08-17T21:49:00.008-04:00

one approach was the christ
route like a clothespin you
squeezed the legs to split
the head into wings—the oldies
wore thorns to keep the birds
off and that’s why they’ll never
leave the juke box for cleaner
bars—will i ever fall in love
w/ a poor girl? a paper snow
flake off the smokeeter with
a sticker—ignorance is censor
ship—hangs like an eye that
won’t see a future stripped
to dusk and tapped, a stick
figure dancing away like a
spider w/ its keys as thought—
wknd shifts a must, beer
knwldge a plus. that’s me
getting away. i’m all right at
letting myself be used. you?
i get it from the statue we’re
meant to be when we grow
up THAT ALL TRAVELERS HERE
MAY REMEMBER THOSE OF
THE PA RAILROAD WHO DID
NOT RETURN from the war
to hang your coat on, for
example. halfthoughts make
bank on the doubletake
but i’m in it for meaning, so
no, i can’t love everyone.
it’s 3:15 east
            east
            one
            hand
            exactly
            a train
            a you
takes the river’s pulse back
to city hall, takes its dog on
to a self, to think of dad sick
and get sad imagining talking
to h about it who i can’t spell
out, even here each step a letter
from the hush hush of the hole
the dog sees out of, a window
in a face flown up like a kite
from the throat, inarticulate,
mine maybe and the many
reasons i’m not a cop, not a
body stiffening into red rope
no clock red rope no clock forty-
one to forty-five and the rich
laughing at all the fire, all the
playgrounds to name after

interview

2011-08-05T11:52:00.001-04:00

Debrah Morkun interviewed me recently for her new project called Starlight, Philadelphia, which focuses on the practices and poetics of Philadelphia poets. We talked about entropy, having the last word, and repeating yourself, among other things.

sluice

2011-07-03T14:27:00.001-04:00

sunday again but
the dog counts
i’m no statue
i have to lick up
its yaps, be pulled the
parkway thru city
hall like a kite
downward
to the delaware
for a girl. sewers
gape at all crapjoints
franklin, yaps slashed
thru for water and
air—a bag lady into
a recorder: blue jays
against the rook, tying
knots. i choke up,
nothing american,
something older—
just make contact
keep your eye on
the dog, it isn’t yours
and what is? i muster
south, and passyunk’s
our little parkway,
a diagonal lined
w/ plates of an indian
face every few steps
the kids are getting
tattooed on them.
to be worn and walked
on, native as a board
in a window. to lower
your voice so as
not to come off
as a show off, be
the father father.
here’s what i’ve learned
so far: crossed out,
you cut thru, find
a note in the mail
slot: dear ryan
i have a norman
rockwell painting
you may have it
if you want—it is the one
of the doctor listening
to the heart beat
of a little doll. love,
grandmom
we shall outlive
our minds. love,
the sand in your
heart—the heart’s
a metaphor, remember,
i said to my students
whose lost eyes i fall
thru to apology. love,
the sand in our hands.
i’m sorry little kid
on susquehanna
who taught me to play
chess—i forget your
name and the game
remains to me a SEPTA
that never was, small
dabs of train run thru
us as we stare at one
another, mothers
we’ll need to be
to ourselves.

pegged

2011-06-14T19:13:00.001-04:00

i don’t know what
i’m gonna do
when the oil runs
out—
make room
save up
seeds
joke about
the place
like a stick
figure
doodle
about academic
             dishonesty
             policy
learn to hum
and brandish
         weapons
         pencils
hammer the metal
sharpener
         back on
to my grandfather
who’s dead
             that wall over
             there
brandish the creaks
in memory
of the floor
of that old
house under
             foot
brandish
hiss my last
name in the dark
                 the word “glass”
                 turned over
like a stone flat
            thrown
            at a box
spraypainted
on the wall
in red
for stickball—that one game
at all
i played
for real
in my life
til i was good
                and envied
by other kids
their sticks
           stones
           ways to lose
           boo santa claus
           throw batteries
at the loud mouth
             prima donna
             professionals
who played for the
             day’s weather
             anyway
and the pretty flag
their grandfathers
all saluted too
             anyway
where do you come from
where do you come from
who do you think you are
             booing me

no more mister softee

2011-06-07T12:00:00.003-04:00

you are a donkey, mister softee
you are all lyrics     forming worms
that never end        mister donkey

you are the creamiest, dreamiest
ding-a-ling down the street
you are a softee, mister ding-a-ling

down the street        say it in spanish
first            rico sauve, señor asshole
do you wanna start a band?

it’s the song of summer, mister soft-serve
picture the amazingness of my
concession        i am a milkshake, mister

sundae            listen for my store
on wheels        my worms of exception
i’m like      it’s better than yours

you are a highlight, mister dee-light
but i am the method man
of the creamiest ding-a-ling down

the street      come on, mister softee
come on

after frank furness

2011-05-10T16:12:00.033-04:00

plain brick comes off honest
frank furness holding on
to his medal of honor
and asking for another
from a nonexistent
country while trussing
his turrets together and
offering them to us—here, flowers
from the machine
that raised us—trust
them, the civil war
        his underbite
and then he just saunters
out the old post
office i stand in
for god knows how long
with my letter
        this geezer
in front of me:
        they should privatize it!
        they should privatize it!
his little public
        spittle
        skin
        speech
        of day
the crying
        baby
up front
        the constant
        customer we tickle
        our nickels for
                circles
                thrift—

                        buzzards.

                        crickets.

                        crickets cricket.

                        the president smiles out of the wall.

                        we’re getting there.

****

on al-jazeera cornel west imagines martin luther king
would say to barack obama:

                get out of that golden cage

tweet tweet tweet tweet tweet tweet tweet tweet tweet tweet

        a bunch of angry people just roared out of mcdonald’s again.

tweet tweet tweet tweet tweet tweet tweet tweet tweet tweet

        when my wife started calling the house “my baby” that’s when i knew i had to get out.

tweet tweet tweet tweet tweet tweet tweet tweet tweet tweet

        here’s my dream:

        some dudes chase me around town trying to stab me, and they finally do.
        a hot dog at mcglinchey’s remains 75 cents. i wake up and write a letter:

                to my bitches:

                in the united states “cooperative” means “obedient.”
                for an american, that’s a bitch, if an american is nobody’s
                bitch. america is everybody’s bitch—which makes us
                all what? what should we call ourselves?

                        yours,
                        the first nobody

*****

i stand in line for a stamp
and frank furness
builds a building
w/ wind and flowers:

it’s philadelphia, and we try to demolish it.

the quaker rowhome of all-
indians-no-chiefs makes a lie
inside my chest, a convulsion, a debt
to abolish thru convulsion after convulsion after convulsion

        rains it pours
        the people off
        your brows arched
        gothic—headache
        raised and razed
        by taste (so called)
        the deep
        shadowed
        entrance to your
        city, mind we walked
        thru w/out much
        of a bother

all the organs of your body
are sound, said the doctors,
self-control alone is lacking.

reading the introduction of furness’ biography i get bit by a spider, twice, and within two days i’m limping, venom spreading down my leg, purple, pink and painful. pain in the ass.

tweet tweet tweet tweet tweet tweet tweet tweet tweet tweet

tired of waiting
i walk and walk
and run into debrah—happy
national train
day, she says
and we talk time
off, and it starts
to rain, and i go
to a party

it’s the kentucky derby, too, and i bet, as always, on the fifty-to-one horse:

                watch me go, it’s called this year

tweet tweet tweet tweet tweet tweet tweet tweet tweet tweet

outside last drop in
the drizzle moms
grope for their minivans
and get wet anyway—
rains it pours
the main line dribbles
down the dog’s leg—
        we’re all gentlemen.

who flipped your car
and set it on fire?

frank furness of
churches, banks
and stations, one
once on the schuylkill
described as an insane
short story of a castle—

        demolition built
        to last out
        of our lungs was
        the genius

a hundred years after his death
i’m a breath of what, falling out
of fashion w/ septa tokens dropping
thru holes in my pockets. i grasp
for some religion, any obsession
to make my soul into a house. how
ugly, this aborted subway system.

        dear emerson, i’m stuck
        in the seasonal aisle
        of cvs and the poets
        are calling each other
        brave—what should i do?

        hold no fact sacred?

        unsettle all things?

furness once said to his protégé, louis sullivan,
that “his great ambition in life was to get his
clients into the academy of music so that he
could come out on stage and tell them all
to go to hell.”

for furness, the inferno made the difference.

that some pretend there’s no such thing, no civil war,
that their plain brick pretension lines the city, owing
the world how it is.

that some wait on snyder ave for the sugar express and say hey, it’s a free ride.

                 buzzards.

                 crickets.

                 crickets cricket.

                 the mayor smiles out of the wall

and so do i, betting on
his self-destruction as
i bet on the letter
i'll score into the days
i lay waste to—stones
                           trees
                           clouds
                           history, which outgrows

our cheapness.

i drop out
        of it
looking like septa
for the laughs
i drop by
to see how you’re doin
for the laughs
that echo up 22nd
as breezes rock
the feathers
back to earth
i drop in
a cloud aches
a prayer by
paid off nobodies
like septa
who walk the ghost
town up and down
how many dead loves
how many times
manly in brittleness
and broken want
anyone might say
to you: i want to
hold your face
and cry into it
until i disappear
like you did

the bottle

2011-04-17T12:16:00.000-04:00

I’m in the middle of Super Mario Brothers and she wants me to make a bottle? I’m not makin a bottle. I’m like, it’s not my kid! Money’s my mommy, too, right, so don’t talk to me. I’m not SEPTA. Do I look like SEPTA?

the scrubbing

2011-04-17T12:15:00.002-04:00

Dear RYAN,

Don't think about it. Don't even let it cross your mind. The horror stories of germ infestation and the rampant spread of bacteria and viruses can make anyone queasy.

So instead of thinking about it, just take a simple action: Wash your hands.

It's that simple. Washing your hands frequently is one of the best ways to have it all. Here, let’s have it all: try one of my tacos. Yeah, with the sauce. Mmmmm. Good, isn’t it? The pork’s so good here. Pork’s so good because pigs don’t sweat, you know. So says the sweaty nose. So says your soapy sniffles. You want a piece of my sniffles? Yeah, have a sniff sniff. Mmmmm, yeah. How’s your hot sweaty? Yeah? How’s your little scrubbing? Mmmmm. You wanna learn more about my little scrubbing?

Mmmm just log onto www.ibxpress.com and mmmmm just click on the mmmmmm yeah Cold and Flu Assessment to find out if you have something.

Doesn’t that sound good? It's nice when life is simple. It’s nice when life is easy.

Your partner in health,
Independence Blue Cross

the intransitive

2011-04-17T12:14:00.000-04:00

You know a neighborhood is gentrifying when it gets a Doggie Style. You know a gentrifier is neighborhooding when he gets Doggie-Styled.

the bhagavad-cvs

2011-03-27T13:25:00.002-04:00

chris, to protect men of virtue and destroy men who do evil,
to set the standard of sacred duty,

crush boxes in back room.
this is the ancient discipline i have taught you today.

bring down more bounty and stack in aisle 15.
you are my devotee and my friend, and this is the deepest mystery.

take down risers and posts in aisle 16.
your birth followed the birth of the sun.

move all extra care price cut signs to front half of store.
many forms of sacrifice expand toward the infinite spirit.

chris, let me know if you can come in sunday.
actions do not bind a man in possession of himself.

spring

2011-03-21T00:01:00.004-04:00

If anything of moment results--so much the better. And so much the more likely will it be that no one will want to see it . . . . WCW

new news

2011-03-06T21:01:00.001-05:00

Old News, the book, will be published later this year by Furniture Press. Big thanks to the editors.

song

2011-03-03T15:59:00.005-05:00

revision

2011-03-01T00:16:00.002-05:00

confucius said gentlemen
surround a question
w/ blankets to quiet
the bias
       your lost twin
the bed
on which you sit
to grow dust—
we got brushed
year of the sheep
top of the drake, 1929
the building affords us
the world. can you hear
me piss in the blue
toilet?           here
the poem falls
apart, in the blue
come to.        what
used to be's a you,
national geographics
stacked up, say,
from back when, for
what. you
can't just say that
about life. you
can't just dig a sorry
park, not sorry, for
the starved grip. i
curl out of the you
to try to find you,
               and my face breaks.
the books: reptiles
descend from birds
and the real estate
boy flies. if money's
the mommy to loot
all heart, keep just
moving, please, moving
into what you say so

          (for my brother)

that torn sound: some poetics

2011-02-22T22:07:00.004-05:00

I made a braid of quotation from Cecilia Vicuña, Nate Mackey, and Lewis Warsh--three people whose poetry keeps moving through me--and posted it on PhillySound, February 19th, along with a few notes about Vicuña and her beautiful film Kon Kon.

verdict

2011-02-05T23:46:00.008-05:00

past a point, all the old radio jingles. everybody who knows / goes /
to melrose. elbows, everything’s a rebound, reaching over her to
smack the SNOOZE. i mean all of you, as i lean on the counter, walk
down the street, and do dishes. i mean on the counter, mean down
the street, and mean dishes. mashed potatoes. all the movements
of my body, another sip of coffee, and you all in that. my lips closed
plans in the snow, fell from a tree. i let the place be the place, keep
being the thing. this can’t have been the place, my skin tells against
the trill cry of a kid that circles my walk, cinching the houses, hoodies
on the corner. the corner’s had enough, mind split as light by window
pane in opposite directions—retreat and research. in the pane, long
nightmare of self. i am too. i am not enough. and in passing, my own
mother, would you look at that, who i’ve run from all this time, as
prescribed, and the splintered minutes of presence the skin recalls
and means. i let my kid sip beer out of the caps, too, and flick them
across the kitchen, which i will paint blue with him.

what are you swinging at

2011-01-19T15:23:00.005-05:00

on my way to fergie’s i actually pass
fergie, the owner, tying a balloon to
a lamppost on 10th street: it’s a boy
it says, bobbing in the wind and then
oh shit—a student—brian, i think—
hey mister x, he says and i wave and
think good kid like i’m old and can
say, and the walk goes on as weeds
in the fall it is, cracks caught in a
mirror’s parked car, illegally it feels.
it all goes, it all goes. i know no one
who works for the parking authority
and that makes me less of a person
which is fine—i appear closer than i
actually am and wake up the yellow
floor in a bookstore only two-fifty
for a friend to be named, a no-hitter
off dolph’s kitchen radio still wringing
thru me. a text from dan: wiffleball?
the weather’s dumpstered a curve in
the dirt, meaning my mind’s gone
behind acme, aims for the police station, where
we’d play. what if we grew up in a state
of walls which were all the streets of
this city, mapped in our brains, and
now we know how to get anywhere
there’s to go, so we get bored, bored,
bored, sad, sad, sad and write down
something like grid like a crib to contain
the unpredictable and watch the back
of a trash truck eat two big sofas. one
solid meal after another is how we
live this country, we being whatever
it is. i order a burger at fergie’s and
there’s fergie—the man is everywhere
and hoa nguyen’s at the microphone
telling us about chinaberry trees in
austin texas, how they grew on her.
she grows on us. poetry on poets,
drinking this drink. then some of us
fight about how to live in a fucked
world and i lean back against the wall—
i don’t know how to live, i whisper
to hoa who laughs in half the question
and i’m here for a minute.

ice cream by jim jarmusch

2011-01-12T15:50:00.010-05:00

Look at what a poem this scene from Down by Law is--as a work of fiction but also as a kind of event that happens in real life among real people. A half-hearted tinkering--the card game, Waits' and Lurie's taunts and Benigni's persistent attempts to communicate--this tinkering against hopelessness and misunderstanding erupts, improbably, into song, which is momentary understanding and freedom. The song spreads, a ripple effect through the prison. A mini-riot. You know it's a good poem if some guard tells you to quiet down, even if the guard is just a voice in your head.

utilities

2011-01-05T21:18:00.002-05:00

in passing, passyunk, once a footpath, coughs a card: brick of
squabs. soul that squabbles, flaps, flop. the run-over pigeons
make me the streets. i live it the fuck up. tuesday: who it is,
from birth, ignitions. coffee, coffee, christ, the future—women
and their worry, and my worry. in what town does what is
got a shot against should? i wanna go there—baby take me
please. if bliss, then bills—turn the faucet either way nickels
for everybody, though any love’s a skiff in her loss i latched
onto, long ago. i make myself useful, not because i like to.
i like to fuck until total exhaustion. til eyes've left. owls of
dirt, the stared at dusk. an opening for breakfast: a you, a
wind, a waiting to blow those robins out of the tree.

hold on or hold up

2010-12-17T00:01:00.000-05:00

a man turns into a hand
and we’re striped
by traffic, hello pulled
yellow—the outer sky
don’t block the box
bitches. taxis flit by
itches, home back
in the hole of bare
brown trees, as far
as i can see. cops
look at me when i look
around. the mall is
cowards but jefferson
clouds in larry rivers
hush of gas
from airtime airbrush,
as if. my friends walk
on the suns of the un
built, back into a man
of food court.
michael jordan is
the saddest thing
in the whole world.
so’s tweety bird. so’s
me when i stocked
ladies underwear for
strawbridge’s. its old
entrance now four
glass panels shut
blue. where to begin
i remember thinking,
my whole life fired
SKY BLUE ahead
in red letters arched
like sundown, UP to
50% OFF. what is
the past? all these
trash cans which are
cops that look like
robots. feed their
eyes your soda
under the canned
classical, sniff the
coffee stains off
the chinese ever
greens. to sniff’s
to work the floor
i believe, as water
quarters you in dark
ness. the 23 bus
misses us for
christmas, puddles
that we go be

reading passyunk lost

2010-12-11T10:51:00.002-05:00

Some notes I wrote on Kevin Varrone's passyunk lost can be read on PhillySound, December 10th.

the state of new jersey

2010-12-03T20:44:00.000-05:00

You seemed more working class the last time I saw you. Maybe it’s that you’re talking different, yeah, when you introduce people, or it’s just your clothes this time, I don’t know. Anyway, did you get my email with poems? I would still really like to read in your series. I know I said I’m going to sue one of your best friends, but I think if you judged me solely based on the merit of my work, that would only be fair. You’ve got a great series here, and I mean that, I do, but people who are less fortunate need to know about this. The disenfranchised, there’s a lot of disenfranchised people out there, like me. Forgive me, I know I’m annoying and I don’t really care about anyone else in this room, but I am going to die soon, and that’s real. People need to know that there isn’t gonna be a movie about me. People need to know about it. They need to know about the state of New Jersey.

the test

2010-12-03T20:43:00.000-05:00

They like you until they find out you’re into them. They’re all grown-up cave girls. Not that we’re different. Not that this business of “I’ve suffered more than you.” Ever will take off. The running theme is what is human greed’s relation to motion, or how long can you look into another person’s eyes. I bet the old New York School poets I love, I bet they know the exact pains. I peek at their papers, the trace of car caroming off, shhh, and take off. Shhh. I grow with nothing.

the deal

2010-12-03T20:42:00.001-05:00

The people who are cool are not in a position to hire you, eckes. Write that down on your napkin there. Fold it up and mail it to yourself. Mail yourself. When your doorbell rings it’s either valu-plus or jehova’s witness. Take your chances. Wipe your mouth.

no libs

2010-11-29T00:06:00.001-05:00

south broad’s valu-plus is closing. everything must go
til day’s reflection is night’s, your passing face barters
for itself against the blackness pulling thru us. threads:
kids from south philly high walk by, their shithole of a
school on their shoulders, not anyone’s. let the asians
and blacks have at each other, say the old whites, shrug-
ging themselves off to the young whites in their patient
bossworship that builds and builds a box to be gutted
between dollar tree and footlocker. kids are actually
small, smelly goats, terry eagleton, the british critic,
reminds us americans. i look out of my box: no parade
of marxist profs. i would like to be open. hey, if northern
liberties on the other side of town burns to the ground
i’m fine with that, so long as we plant a giant sign in
the middle of all the smoking rubble: AMERICA’S FIRST
SUBURB. sure, crumb cake from kaplan’s and coffee
walking around the ortlieb brewery ruins and the jazz
that came from a corner of it—i’ll sell you the postcards—
i’m selling them right now, in fact, for nothing. but that
giant sign i’ll especially sell you, dirt cheap, and we’ll
make it pretty.

song

2010-11-25T13:17:00.001-05:00

art as experience

2010-11-08T20:59:00.004-05:00

in passing john calls john dewey j-dew, which makes everything infinitely
more watchable. go phillies like a bus, half hours, half flowers, to valu-
plus for flip-flops and a new notebook—marble, like my stoop. i stand
on the book, its title, valu-plus, arrived home on a sticker, yellow, with
a price: a buck, a holler. after that we’re free to have our hazards. love
ages me, but not that two people were murdered a half block from me
this week. the barista lays down a napkin and spoon even when you’re
just getting it to go. front-to-back three years ago a night this november
i tore thru splay anthem while this place was called something else, and
i thought i felt the whole world sail thru a map in my chest, knocked on
wood a lesson: bare hands, bare hands, no lie: you’ll never understand
yourself in isolation. a hair on your selfish city’s chest, you will mistake
selfishness for independence again. again, you will catch yourself being
a republican to yourself. if i’m beaten, who can tell. not me, anymore.
not me, anymore.

the money

2010-11-06T13:52:00.002-04:00

He said if you don’t give him the money, he’s gonna break your neck, which means he’s gonna break your thumbs, not your neck. And he will, believe me, I’ve seen him do it before. Yeah, I’m wearing a sweat suit and I’m Italian, on 11^th St., in the rain, on a cell phone, and it’s not the movies. The guy who just passed me on his way to work is probably an adjunct professor at Community College or Temple, who cares. Just get him the money, all right, or you’re fucked, I swear to god.

the man

2010-11-06T13:51:00.000-04:00

Well, the first time I hooked up with her was orientation, and I got to third. But then I didn’t talk to her for a while. I had her in my phone as “Asian Chick,” so she like got deleted pretty fast. Then I just saw her at AXP on Friday and . . . I doinked her. Man, I just had to, you know. I had to make a citizen’s arrest to protect my idea of a home, which wakes me up crying in the middle of the night sometimes. Man, I know I gotta be a man about it, I gotta be a man. It’s tough.

the area

2010-11-06T13:50:00.000-04:00

Excuse me, do you know the area well? Can you tell me where I can find a soup kitchen? I’m trying to get something in my belly tonight, you know. No, not for the movies, bro, I’m for real. Everyone already has a boyfriend. I don’t know what I’ll show up as. I’m for real, bro. I’m for real.

the station

2010-11-06T13:48:00.001-04:00

Pattison Station is now AT&T Station. New name, same underground coverage. Only from AT&T. Rethink possible. While I fuck your mother. I am fucking your mother. I am still fucking your mother, while your father watches, jerking off. And now he’s licking my semen off the wall as I smash your mother’s face with a hammer.

mouthed off

2010-10-14T19:02:00.001-04:00

from ground up always
big pieces of sorry
gonna pay you in pennies
the city run on
without you. if i’m
a city, that’s a stretch, a
leap from scratch this
one penny stands for
this one penny sings this
one penny & the 1977
on it’s a year that heals
itself like water’s face
after another
inheritance. thank
you. sloppy joes
for you and you and you
says the lunchlady, and
i’m friends enough
with the assembly line
drop of her talk, true
fall of the jaw a sort of
season you wouldn’t
argue with. you wouldn’t
argue with that union
boss who looks like a
bulldog. i let the drear
drench me, the so
what of october a leap
from scratch that spreads
the mind like a poem—
woolworth’s, hatched.
it had a smell you won’t
ever be again. wawa
customers take note: suck
it up now: free ATMs!
to have a bank account!
to count the styrofoam
peanuts! cupped, you
can’t afford to inhabit
only your emotional
landscape, which does
not trickle down, as some
bitches on the left
suggest. the little prince
pees herself, and it
smells. yes, the planet
is lonely. yes, there is
blood on your hands—you’re american.
that’s what you mean
every time you say
“get over it.”
every time you say
“never forget”
you mean the pee
in your pants has
dried and you are
thirsty. is there sweetness
in the laughter of all
the stars that are bells? no,
those are Os from oprah,
hula hoops for the bored,
obama, a vagina, maybe.
nothing real born of this
world save block and day
upkept, lottery winded.
you keep a promise or you
don’t but no christianity
              no islam
              no judaism
              no tongue-bored
pavement where life be, no
nothing that’s not oak
in breath and rush out
the door, fall forever
and nobody worried
about “about”—
we closed the place,
i say, kicked out.

song

2010-09-10T10:21:00.001-04:00

Dear Thomas Paine,

2010-08-26T19:10:00.004-04:00

There’s a plaza named after you here in Philadelphia, just north of City Hall. On the front steps, in front of the Municipal Building, a giant Frank Rizzo statue is frozen, tyrannically, in mid-wave to traffic. Over his right shoulder a statue of the Philly Phanatic like some harmless little alien of a vice-president, about a third of the size of the actual mascot, tries to welcome us. And over Rizzo’s left shoulder is a sculpture of a game piece from the board game Sorry!

Big pieces of Sorry!, chess, checkers, Monopoly and dominos are scattered throughout Thomas Paine Plaza. The installation is called “Your Move”. You can climb on the big replicas and write your name on them. That’s what the kids do. The older, more permanent piece of public art here is the Jacques Lipchitz sculpture “Government of the People”: chunky human bodies squished tightly together, many feet and hands, holding each other up and some nebulous object at the top that’s hard to make sense of. A dedication on a plaque interprets it for us:

“Symbolizing family life, the wellspring of society, the hope of the future and the concept of government being of, by and for the people. This sculpture is dedicated to the people of Philadelphia.”

What’s at the top of the sculpture must be a big piece of shit then, my brother suggests. He’s a bike messenger. People I know always see him fly by and then tell me they saw him, so it’s like he’s everywhere. As far as jobs go, he likes it. He likes the freedom of riding his bike all day, which he does anyway when he’s not working. The bodies in the Lipchitz sculpture do not look free; they look uncomfortable and ridiculous—and looking at the top, at the ultimate production, it doesn’t seem that what they’re doing is worth it. Maybe they should all take a break and climb down from there and each get on a bicycle and go for a ride.

No family life for the bike messenger, who achieves freedom horizontally, not vertically. He goes home and makes music with his friends, and that is a kind of family, and that is his wellspring. Or he goes home and thinks about himself and the world that presses him, another wellspring. His ambitions are concentrated and few since he does not think vertically either. If there’s a heaven above, who cares?

I’m sorry, Tom, that there is no bicycle named after you. There’s only this plaza which is an ugly, painful emblem of the limits of freedom we impose on each other and ourselves, and of the shit we collectively produce. It gets worse: inside the Municipal Building is the Streets Department, which this year initiated the Unlitter Us campaign. The ads are all over the subway and on TV. The print ones show a person speaking a poem about the virtues of throwing away your trash. The words appear (littered, you could say) on the speaker’s profile. All but one of the poets I’ve seen so far are dark-skinned. Here’s one of the poems:

          Outside looking in
          All they see is trash
          If you’re a product
          Of your community
          What does that make you?
          Reconsider your litter
          The kids watch what you do
          So c’mon
          We can end this cycle
          Reconsider your litter
          The brush is in your hands
          Paint a pretty picture.

While the rhyme of “litter” and “picture” is charming, I wonder who the “they” is looking in. Tourists? White people? People with money who don’t litter? Maybe just the kids that arrive in the middle of the poem? Let’s see—the brush in my hands would have to be more of an eraser, and the pretty picture what exactly? A city that doesn’t look poor? If there’s such a thing as “big government”, this must be it—an implicitly racist campaign of bad poems that isn’t going to make the city cleaner or anyone in it more responsible. The program itself is a total waste.

I propose a Litter Us campaign instead. It’d go something like this: we all go around town knocking over trash cans in a fury, perhaps imagining each can as someone who’s done us wrong, and then we all get drunk somewhere. When we wake up the next morning, hungover, we write about the emptied contents—what we saw and felt—and then mail what we wrote to our mothers, fathers, sons or daughters, lovers or ex-lovers. Or we draw a picture or write a song or make some kind of thing and send it to them. I figure if we do it on a grand scale, this repressed culture of ours will begin to see what art is for, value it and evolve.

Oh, as for the trash—the mayor, city council and their families could clean it all up.

Yours,
RE

christ on a bike

2010-08-26T19:07:00.001-04:00

i’m just following
the man’s plan
with a corner
that opens out its
fingers like planks
that sigh small businesses
moms and pops
to bounce from
to buy gum from
to chew the plan
to shake hands
with all the bands
play a show
make a demo
quit your job
be a slob
be a slob
take a bath
a bird bath
a nothing people
a sadness like
standing water
in my chest
so there’s nowhere
to go but do
what the kids do
for real: schoolbook
old nostalgias
into fists to toss
in the schuylkill
as pennyboats water home
in the weathered know-how—
my love will be here
when i wake up
as an old man
city on top
of me
til i tell it
what to do
tell it to stop stealing
my gas

for Brandon Eckes

edgewise

2010-08-12T15:12:00.002-04:00

so when i’m buddhist
finally and gin pints
at frank’s become
trains into trees
in a distance
liberty then water
thru bench slats
all the presidents
wet dogs at gunpoint
in the open-faced
park you once lived
in to tell people
about—hey, i was a kid
once and now last so
in your thought clouds
as stamped pieces of
comic strip dialog
that’ll drift around
for a borrow and
yellow—
all you can get
is the drift
a pigeon
this morning flew
into my place
panicked and calmed
into an owl and
perched, so i opened
the window, my mouth
and it flew out, a ghost
and i miss it, i miss it
i miss it

for Brandon Holmquest

wised up

2010-08-12T15:11:00.000-04:00

worn stupid
i hear you
in myself
when i talk
to people
in the scrapped air
worn the corner
of 10th & oregon
plain as day
you can see
the highway
as a beam
thru the ballgame
cars passing thru
the crowd
in calm swift lines
that make my eyes
things to do here:
sit or sleep or go
down there all
lazy in the papers
of hunch scraps
founded on
hunch scraps
airplane or thunder
i don’t cross
the crossing guard
i don’t tie forth
boredom
for nothing
i don’t change my
password
for the standings
of quacks
to grow a science
broker than a duck
of self

more than i could

2010-08-12T15:10:00.000-04:00

a bunch of the bar
starts really getting
into sinatra’s “my way”
peter sellers looks up
from his magnifying glass
and fixates on this one
guy who’s singing it
into his girlfriend’s half-
averted half-embarrassed
face as she texts a friend—
half here, i think, a licked
sadness and that half
the whole bar up in its
own business, as always,
as if any of the world
that’s not this bar
could give two shits
and so what if it did
anyway—would it be
what it needed to be
would it eat up doubt
and spit it out
like the street outside
going by as taxis
as people looking
for money or ass
and a thing to reassure
them they’re wrong
a thing to reassure
them they deserve
to be punished
forever and ever?

flat water

2010-07-19T16:16:00.001-04:00

penny slinger        another
broker     for speech boats
home into a tree made
of the dead named all
washington          watered

          city of plants
          to be heard

          is a kind of
          consumption

          of self
          no end

          of articulation
          eats the world

          the wall
          of resolve

wrought wrong or not
attends public school
for food, for sex
for what music
and how        it wasn’t
a well-made bell, rung
the ranger as faces
ticker-taped out his
mouth             flashing
themselves            yes
i remember i remember
the hippie who swung
his hammer at the bell
yes it’s true       he said
           GOD LIVES
a bunch of times
about ten years ago
right here
then went to jail
from nebraska

                          for CA Conrad

If you're in New York . . .

2010-07-10T12:27:00.002-04:00

I'll be reading there with Brandon Holmquest
Thursday, July 15th at 7pm
@ The Four-Faced Liar
165 West 4th St., at 6th Ave.
Free poetry.

The Joe Milford Poetry Show

2010-07-06T21:15:00.002-04:00

A few weeks ago, Joe Milford hosted eight Phillysound poets on his internet radio show, The Joe Milford Poetry Show. We read our poems into a telephone at Pattie and Kevin's house. It was a good time.

You can listen to it here.

We each read for about 5 minutes, in this order:

CA Conrad
Ryan Eckes
Ish Klein
Pattie McCarthy
Chris McCreary
Jenn McCreary
Frank Sherlock
Kevin Varrone

on the make

2010-07-01T11:51:00.007-04:00

if man makes to deny
death he’s a continent
governed by an island
and all that water
and then what—
jimmy rollins goes yard
in chicago
as if to say for us all
i miss you like crazy
to whatever dies in us
every morning
the walk-off replayed forever
i can’t get over
how cool to flip
the bat like that—
it’s time to leave
the bar for the sake
of my hands
which, opened, smell
of tacos & potsmoke
as what to make suddenly’s
the question of walking
home in the heat that
eats you        little bits
of family in a voice
spat toward the future
from trees of teeball
practice          those
sycamores across
the street making me
count the many weeks
since a coffee w/ you
that died in me
across a little round table
an eye broken like
a halfdollar as you
listened for what
it’s worth against
the tottering situation
of things      the world
going by      embarrassing
like haiku     flew off
the sill         are you seeing
any one       my dumb
prayer of to-do list
groceries crossed out
on back of a poem
in shirt pocket
the dog on my heart
knowing i know
it is god
cares less and less
the city is quiet
which means we lost
its talk growing slowly
as nice strangers
in no real direction
       no telling
       no telling how it all
turns out               even after
all those good times
all those good times gone
down the sink
you don’t clean
any more
the fight is the dream
says lauren
in a poem that ends
it’s summer   it’s summer
       wrapped up
       wrapped up
i'm happy and tough
and sad so easy
      sad so easy

Dear Tom Paine,

2010-07-01T11:45:00.002-04:00

My ex-wife just dropped by to pick up the key to her house, the one we used to live in together. I’ve got frozen mixed vegetables on the stove and I’m microwaving a burrito and drinking a cold beer, and I feel good. My key chain’s as lean as it was when I was a kid. I shed and shed and wonder where the deep trusts run. I do pushups. I know I’ll feel down later. That’s why I’m writing you now. My friend Brandon once looked in my fridge, laughed and said he’s never seen a fridge’s contents so reflect “ambivalent bachelorhood.” He told me to man up and get some bacon. Ha!

Tom, what about telling someone you love her? Shouldn’t people stop doing that to each other? At least so long as expectations in our culture around that expression remain poorly developed beyond establishing a sense of “stability”? Or so long as a “failed marriage” typically means one that ends before one of the couple dies, while a “successful marriage” means one that has not yet ended or was ended by death? The standards here seem a little low. It gets me down to think how people get burned all the time by the conditioning we have to endure through language.

When I think about love I almost always remember the last line of a poem by Dean Young called “Sources of the Delaware”: I love you I say meaning lend me twenty bucks.

What a great line. I love that poem. But I hardly read Dean Young anymore. All his poems seem the same. I think once he got comfortable with his success, he stopped pushing himself. When I read him now, I think “low-rent John Ashbery.” When I read the cute surrealism of so many of my contemporaries, I think “low-rent Russell Edson.” But I should work on myself. Am I a low-rent Ted Greenwald? I’m aiming to be a not-so-cheap Ted Greenwald – which is to say I’d like to verge on something like myself.

I believe in voice. I believe in individualism. Last week I was reading The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, a collection of essays about poetry, several of which write off “voice” and “individualism” as manipulative, capitalist constructs. For the most part, the book was painfully boring, uninspiring, and full of nonsense – if you ever want to scare yourself away from poetry forever, I recommend this book. Anyway, in it there’s a short piece by Ted Greenwald about writing that I found interesting. He writes:

“The sound in my poems comes from the sounds I hear in my head of almost myself talking to some person. I choose to have as my limitation spoken speech, as you and I are sitting here talking. That’s what I test the poem’s shape against.

. . .

“What I’m interested in and always have been is not what ideas people have in their heads, but what’s in the air. The most invisible part of ‘trends’. What is it two people in the whole world or maybe twenty all of a sudden out of the middle of nowhere start to think about. What’s in the air is the shape of things to come—it’s palpable—right under your very nose. I hear what’s in the air, that’s my way of thinking with my ear. You’re not working with the idea of something, you’re projecting the idea of something. You’re not working with models, you’re projecting models.

“It’s a romantic notion (where classical means coming from someplace), going someplace, sort of operating more out of imagination and less from received forms. In a specific sense, what it is is the interior mind projecting itself into the phenomenological world, telling you where it’s going . . .

“Poetry is about a time that hasn’t occurred yet, and if it’s very good it’s about a time you’ll never know about.”

Ted’s idea of “projecting models” calls to mind your ideas about individualism and self-governance, Tom. It’s utopian and, in a sense, American, since there are models behind it. Greenwald’s thoughts echo calls for independence (cultural, collective and individual) found in the writing of William Carlos Williams, Mina Loy and others. But while you, like many poets, articulated what was in the air, Ted’s been after a music that stays ahead of solid meaning—it’s about raised consciousness.

I think I know where Ted’s coming from, and it’s a serious place, the desire within him to make a poem like that. But what if the place he wants to go is actually the place he’s coming from? That is: the desire is the place calling him forth. This is just a hunch. Since Ted (like anybody) is made up of a past, which he’s trying to reconfigure into something new, maybe what he’s doing is trying to, say, realize himself. What if he wants to be the poem, this music that’s not quite born (in that meaning is at most a sense of something) that is made out of scraps of what we’ve already said to each other? I imagine being in a state of near-constant music, where your mind’s always in this kind of motion that an ideal poem has when you’re reading it out loud, perpetually shedding meaning in order to make it. I daydream about that—it would sort of be love itself, invincible, a way of rolling with the punches.

Well, anyway, Ted’s idea about having hardly any idea sounds nice, and I’d like to believe it’s true, that it’s possible to do and not just another sorry-ass attempt to find permanence within impermanence, but there’s a small block of ice at the center of my heart, my burrito’s getting cold and my beer’s empty.

Talk to you soon,
RE

thomas paine on the jack of spades

2010-06-15T00:21:00.003-04:00

i am too big to fail
the cops are babies
in the rain
cried out
posters ripped
off telephone poles
on the way to cvs
or acme or rita’s—
you had your whiz
now get your
water ice

the new york shuffle
will always be older
than new york
an unmarked club
is throwing a boss
out the window
like a party
their yankees
a graveyard
cut from a stem

neighbors complain
of hands
there’s nobody
to clock
til jack makes jokes
about vietnam
is he allowed
is he the boss
of vietnam
who be my own boss
who be my own police

who spraypaints a middle
finger on the wall
and who smooths it
roughly into a peace
sign before the giant
frank rizzo mural
is repainted over it
by a giant club
of jackass

playing card

2010-06-15T00:14:00.006-04:00

a gift from Debrah Morkun

not the time

2010-06-15T00:11:00.002-04:00

if you call peter porcupine
“peter skunk”
that’s nothing
you’ve got nothing
on him
the land he owns
is owned
by a king
and the country
is comfortable
this is not a time
that tries men’s souls
this is a time
that doesn’t try
because its soul
is a deck of banks
that trade names
every few years
so we forget
what to call
our stadiums
that we piss all over
happily
as free agents

Dear Tom Paine,

2010-06-09T11:05:00.001-04:00

The Flyers are in the Stanley Cup Finals, and they're huge underdogs. The last time they won it all was 35 years ago, in our country's 199th year. Nicknamed the Broad Street Bullies, that 70s team is remembered for its gritty, aggressive, balls-deep approach to the game. Philly prides itself on those kinds of teams, which supposedly reflect the city's character. We like to imagine ourselves as perpetual underdogs by celebrating ourselves as working class, as the foundation of all that is great in this world, as the very roots of an attitude that makes America America--indeed, we see ourselves as the embodiment of freedom.

I watched Game 2 in Big Charlie's with my friends. They (we) lost, 2-1. But I don't care about hockey. I think it's boring. Sure I want to see them win it all so that the whole city fills the streets again and I can highfive strangers for a few hours and watch people flip over cars and dance around fires and generally assert their masculinity as if it were the cause of freedom worldwide. Sports is the only thing that ever unites this city. But hockey?

The last Flyers game I went to was in 2001. It was preseason, an exhibition game. My friend Rudy had gotten us box seats, so premium beer was brought to us in these comfortable chairs and everything was nice. We watch a little hockey, we talk, we make jokes, we drink beer. During the first intermission, George W. Bush is broadcast on the big screen. He is making a speech. Everyone goes wild, then pays attention as if a goal were being replayed. Suddenly it's time for the second period to begin, so the speech is shut off as the players skate back onto the ice. Everybody boos. Everybody continues booing. So Bush comes back on. Everybody goes wild. We listen to his speech: America, the underdog, will rise from the ashes by bombing the shit out of Afghanistan, a poor, war-ravaged country that nobody cares about. We will smoke the terrorists out of their holes. We will show the cowards who's boss. Ravenous applause. The speech concludes to ravenous applause, ravenous applause, ravenous applause. U-S-A, U-S-A, U-S-A etc. And then . . . the game is called. The game is called . . . . for patriotism.

Really. That actually happened. The game. was called. for patriotism. The players, who were of course mostly Canadian and Russian, skated off the ice after 20 minutes of play followed by this absurd speech, and the chanting, invigorated masses funneled out of the arena, which was then called the F.U. Center (after First Union bank)--officially the FUN Center, but nobody called it that. Angry and therefore afraid, I was careful not to make eye contact with anyone on the way out. I mumbled a few quiet complaints to Rudy, who couldn't care less, against the tide of U-S-A, U-S-A, U-S-A.

Games are called for bad weather. Is there any comfort in thinking of patriotism as just a form of precipitation, as something that comes and goes? Recalling that event, specifically how alone I felt in the middle of that crowd, makes me feel sick. Can bad weather make you sick? It's actually bacteria, right? It's living things. Which our bodies, as true underdogs, as hosts at gunpoint, will try to resist without question, without meaning.

I don't hope that we lose. No. I hope the series goes 7 games and that Game 7 goes on and on and on in an endless tie until everybody gets so fucking bored they go home and shut off their TVs while the players skate back and forth, back and forth for days, unable to score in the big empty silent arena, and the game is finally called for boredom.

Yours,
RE

a pair of epithalamia

2010-06-01T20:47:00.006-04:00

On May 22nd my friends Steve Dolph and Mary Hoeffel married each other. Laura Jaramillo and I each wrote a poem for the wedding.

Below is the broadside, which I awkwardly scanned into my computer.

poem

2010-05-10T11:54:00.007-04:00

(after reading “of being numerous” w/ friends on top of a parking garage)

we want to say
“common sense”
and cannot
the door torn off
the mouth
hanging
out a car parked
& booted a bankrupt
shopkeeper the very
tongue he preaches
parched & barking
the accident
the poem in me
i believe
til i see it
& then want myself
which is someplace
else        thomas paine
recanted nothing
on his deathbed
in a house later
demolished
which today
is a piano bar
called marie's crisis
on grove street
marked w/ a plaque:
citizen of the world
you don't know what
you see
so you love
then break
reaching like a bridge
that cannot be finished
that is not invented
god – this place
doesn’t exist
my friend said of paris
the big empty talk
of museumed people
fifteen-dollar beer
behind red-roped
sidewalk & michael
jackson died the next
day from passing cars
billy jean is not my lover
all day & all night
the mosquitoes eating us up
for the words to say
the buildings
so we could be them
and walk thru our lives
traveling is not
vacationing
in my book
one does not vacate
in my book
opened flat
my father lying
on the floor
counting the churchbells
every hour to the wall
that won’t let him up
as if the final words
we live by were not
already vacating us
fuck the job it’s perfect
you’ll find another one
i’ll write w/ this pen
w/ your name on it
til the ink runs out
then throw it away
& rise to make a toast:

you can have a seat

you can have a drink

you can have a woman

you can have a job

you can have this whole
society that does not
want to move
this cult of final word
this thing that grew
into my heart & died
i get up & walk around it
punt it down the street
then mug somebody for it
eat her flowers, wipe my
ass, flush & close the lid
is that closure?
no, but i’m retired
i’ll be retired my whole life
from you stupid assholes
who believe in jobs
you don’t know what work is
til you wake up
on the ceiling
as shadows of leaves
clawing for tree stumps
lumped in the throat
you thought was yours
it’s a forest for a tongue
from bedrooms i used
to wake up in
it’s a forest for a tongue
to pave a life
up & down
as chewed gum gets
tarred into it here &
there     final words
flattened
as they should be
so the wind can be revolution
which is all it is
a street made
of people railed
w/ eyes emptied
of windows, opened
& closed     so inside one
i dust the pollen off
my tv w/ an old che
guevara tee shirt
though i have no channels
& almost never watch
movies i can look up
& see myself
on the screen
in black & white
writing this poem
to somebody
& swear i hear
my neighbor’s tv
downstairs tonight
though it can’t be
b/c she’s out of town
i have this note
says i’ll be away
til next friday
fyi (if you see the light)
i have a light
on a timer

Dear Tom Paine,

2010-05-10T11:51:00.002-04:00

I admit I’m impressed that your chapbook sold hundreds of thousands of copies. I wonder at how your writing appealed to so many people across the social class spectrum. The success of Common Sense is credited to the force of its imagery, which, situated within simple, direct language that was buffered with biblical allusion, sucked readers into your corner while rendering any other corner so wrong and wretched a place anyone would be a fool to be caught dead in it.

Your corner is furnished with questions such as this one: “How impious is the title of sacred majesty applied to a worm, who in the midst of his splendor is crumbling to dust?”

And declarations such as this one: “Now is the seed time of continental union, faith and honor. The least fracture now will be like a name engraved with the point of a pin on the tender rind of a young oak; the wound will enlarge with the tree, and posterity read it in full grown characters.”

Even your enemies had pretty nice things to say about you. John Adams, for example, who hated your guts, believed that your “utopian conviction” and “brilliant pen” made you the “most dangerous man in America.” Who’s the most dangerous man in America today? Hard to say, but I doubt it’s a writer, whoever it is. Today there is no one like you who wields the same influence, and I think that is why many people say that poetry can’t matter. This letter is about poetry. And the future of our country.

It’s not that more people would want to read poetry if more poets used imagery like yours or used simple, direct language. Plenty already do. Besides, your own writing has been described (by a prominent Paine scholar) as “disjointed, even rambling, amounting to a stream of observations on political events or statements by others . . . which [you] interpreted to [your] own advantage, often disregarding the original speaker’s intentions.” Hmmm. I often find myself doing the same in poetry. But I try to resist interpreting solely to my own advantage—otherwise I learn nothing, and then what’s the point, except for convincing myself that I’m right?

I know that being right is important to you, Tom. That makes you more of a politician than a poet. Maybe you’d disagree, but look: you convinced people of democracy without using the word “democracy” even once in Common Sense—not because you mastered the show-don’t-tell principle of the creative writing workshop, but because “democracy” was a dirty word back then, sort of like “socialism” today—no one would buy it. And, let’s face it, you didn’t believe in any of that Christian nonsense you were spewing. You were pandering. You compromised on truth.

You also used to brag that you didn’t read very much. How true can that be? I mean, come on. Maybe a little John Locke? Or Crèvecœur? Your thinking began somewhere. Your sound came from somewhere. And you believed in dialogue, in the social. You preached it. Yet you wanted to be heard more than you wanted to hear. In that, you may be essentially American. 300 million people now live in the United States, so I doubt what I can say accurately about a country of this size. We are too many to be one, too many for nationalism of any kind to make sense. I’ll say that I live in a society in which people are dying to be heard. Sometimes I wonder who is dying to listen. I write in order to be heard, in order to matter. We 300 million are a society that aches for society, perhaps without truly seeking it. At best, the U.S. consists of various almost-societies; at worst, a collection of crumbling worms seeking to crown themselves.

Would my time be better spent trying further to trace how we have come to be so, or shutting up for hours and hours, days and days and, before saying another word, letting myself become full of sounds and sounds until, finally, singing it all back and seeing what I’m made of?

Sincerely,

recording from 4/30, mostly books

2010-05-05T13:52:00.002-04:00

Here is a link to a recording of my reading last Friday at Mostly Books.

(Thanks, again, to the tireless Greg Bem, who, I suspect, is constructing a non-academic counterpart to PennSound. Greg is threatening to leave Philly for Seattle soon. It's time to bombard him with letters threatening him to remain here.)

upcoming readings

2010-04-26T13:40:00.005-04:00

I will read poetry aloud on

Friday, April 30th at Mostly Books, 529 Bainbridge St, at 9pm
w/ Rick Snyder and Sean Fitts

Sunday, May 9th at Molly's Bookstore, 1010 S. 9th St, at 7pm
w/Jeffrey Stockbridge and Liz Moore

Sunday, May 16th at Robin's Bookstore, 108 S. 13th St (2nd Fl), at NOON (not 3) w/ Samantha Barrow, hassen, Heather Saker and more

Thursday, July 1st at UPenn Bookstore, 36th & Walnut, at 6pm
w/ Greg Bem, Mecca Jamilah Sullivan and others

flash mob

2010-04-20T11:09:00.001-04:00

you get a message says come down
so you come down
so which way to the river, a boy asks
and i point my finger
east into the empty TLA video store
            AVAILABLE
            AVAILABLE
            AVAILABLE
the pink papered up windowfront
fronts nervous moms
with obvious answers
lock their restaurants
whose lookouts keep it coming
whose windowlight turns night
into a story that goes on
the streets which talk of water
til our hearts nod and know
what home is           home is
a rival high school as segregated
as your own room     it's tired
of listening to you collect
yourself into buckets from
the ceiling that edits you
down to a status update

can you watch my bag?
sure          there's a love
that's nothing in another
place you can't find
there's a love       it sleeps
and wakes your days
beyond letters     stamped,
i clock in            the time
is ripe for endless
foolishness       a flash mob
mops up the jizz of april
my jacket       the weather
counts the people
an arm of the river meets
the mouth of a sea
if more people live here
kill the people!
or turn the page and continue
along an arm of the mouth
the house fronts painted
shut a shade too for the
mobbed heart         so goes
the leak of jackets    so go
flutter yourself somewhere
a knock at the door dumbs
down your freedom pamphlet
you can be in love in a target
parking lot and sleep for days
under the country's front page
a bus just blew right past me
robbed of lightness
i walk and walk and walk
and walk down the street
to be open like a door
open like a door

hating me won't make you pretty

2010-04-20T11:01:00.000-04:00

a tee shirt said that
on a worn-out woman
w/ a bicycle riding
the el to frankford
for easter
me and my brother
to meet our mother
who’ll make dinner for us
who used to make clothes for us
when we were kids who
wanted tee shirts
that said things—
my mother refused
to put words on our shirts
clothes shouldn’t talk, she said
people talk—you’re gonna
speak for yourself

today i said if sorrow’s really
old joy, toss me an absolute
to suck on           christ is risen
we hop to & fro     the rhythm
opens a small business     a prayer
we patronize     we are patrons
patriots             pick up a pound
of ham from greenman’s
on your way        worn pieces of
routines               the sense and
nonsense              pieces of clothes
in the common weather we’ve
worn      pieces of my mother
in pieces because my father’s
left her for good
and all the money from her business
gone for good
that hurts to say               for good
it’s not for good
it’s for the fucking worst
you might as well shoot the motherfucker

you’re not supposed to do that
you’re not supposed to               take your bike on the el
you’re not supposed to               park against the direction of traffic
you’re not supposed to               turn on red when there’s a sign and nothing’s coming

Scythe, Volume II

2010-04-08T13:15:00.003-04:00

Two poems from my Old News mss. are in volume 2 of the online journal Scythe.

Wendell Berry on restraints in art and life

2010-04-04T01:30:00.005-04:00

A few nights ago I was re-reading Wendell Berry's essay "Faustian Economics" (Harpers, May 08), which I've assigned my composition students the last few semesters, and it reminded me of why you should never apologize for being a poet. My feeling was reinforced the next day after reading an absurd email from Temple's provost (to the entire university) claiming that an adjunct union isn't necessary. I've come to live my life in opposition to the thinking that characterized that email, a way of thinking that rests on the assumption that what's best for the privileged is best for everybody else, and that freedom is something granted to an individual for working hard and remaining loyal to people with more money. Wendell Berry, a farmer and poet, argues for a better definition of freedom than the traditional American one that foregrounds the individual's inherent license to do business at whatever cost to land, resources and other people:

"In our limitless selfishness, we have tried to define 'freedom,' for example, as an escape from all restraint. But, as my friend Bert Hornback has explained in his book The Wisdom in Words, 'free' is etymologically related to 'friend.' These words come from the same Indo-European root, which carries the sense of 'dear' or 'beloved.' We set our friends free by our love for them, with the implied restraints of faithfulness or loyalty. And this suggests that our 'identity' is located not in the impulse of selfhood but in deliberately maintained connections."

It's the thought of faithfulness and loyalty as restraints that caught me this time. I'd never really thought of them as restraints. That is, I've never felt restrained by being faithful or loyal to someone. That's always come natural to me. But I think I'm understanding Berry's point more deeply now. When you're free, you aren't aware of restraints. When you're free you're creating, and you do so hardly knowing. You don't experience restraint as restraint.

Maybe I'm somewhat free in regard to friendship and community then. Certainly I'm not free in other ways. Anyway, Berry believes these restraints are the root of a potential paradigm shift. What about the more obvious restraints--say the restraint of that which does not believe in you--the world that worships efficiency and fashion, that will suck the boss to be the boss? Berry suggests that those restraints are broken by bypassing them for truer restraints, by subscribing to another model and living it.

What's hard, for me, is locating the right restraints, ones that are "not confinements but rather inducements to formal elaboration and elegance, to fullness of relationship and meaning." This has to be case by case. It can't be as simple as be a good neighbor or love is all you need. For example, what about my wariness of people (and institutions) that want from me without intent to give back? What about my broken heart? Those too are restraints you have to work within. There are competing restraints on an individual level that seem to make progress impossible. Berry suggests the answers to our problems, individual and collective, are in our cultural heritage, in the products of real freedom; there's nowhere else to go. So back to books and trying to be like Jesus and buying fair trade coffee, I guess.

Out of loyalty to Berry, who's the kind of writer I tend to trust (because he's been around), here are more of his words:

"It is the artists, not the scientists, who have dealt unremittingly with the problem of limits. A painting, however large, must finally be bounded by a frame or a wall. A composer or playwright must reckon, at a minimum, with the capacity of an audience to sit still and pay attention. A story, once begun, must end somewhere within the limits of the writer’s and the reader’s memory. And of course the arts characteristically impose limits that are artificial: the five acts of a play, or the fourteen lines of a sonnet. Within these limits artists achieve elaborations of pattern, of sustaining relationships of parts with one another and with the whole, that may be astonishingly complex. And probably most of us can name a painting, a piece of music, a poem or play or story that still grows in meaning and remains fresh after many years of familiarity.

"We know by now that a natural ecosystem survives by the same sort of formal intricacy, ever-changing, inexhaustible, and no doubt finally unknowable. We know further that if we want to make our economic landscapes sustainably and abundantly productive, we must do so by maintaining in them a living formal complexity something like that of natural ecosystems. We can do this only by raising to the highest level our mastery of the arts of agriculture, animal husbandry, forestry, and, ultimately, the art of living."

old poem after old war

2010-03-24T20:11:00.002-04:00

Here's a poem I forgot I wrote. This was in October 2001, and I didn't know what else to say.

I forgot about that website, too.

(Haven't forgotten about the wars, though.)

dumb dog

2010-03-12T13:25:00.003-05:00

dumb dog barks the bottle
caps       what are their lives
made of across the street
i wish was a river
mountain’s a one way
split in opposite directions
by 10th        which pulls me
by the back of the pants
south         of snow and
garbage (i hope)     nothing
to park but a park
at oregon ave     i walk myself
around marconi plaza
around a statue of columbus
he’s italian     he’s graffitied
on by his kids here
their squirrels
at my feet
for food gone back up
tree whose long shadow
makes a path i follow
to a bench     for a long
foolish time i thought
i’d succeeded
in failing to follow
in my father’s footsteps
but look there’s nothing
to do but respect that
man til the day i die
while we grow stranger
and stranger
toward one another
i know enough to know
he never knew
where he was
i know the scattered
uselessness
grown into heart
i can watch it here
in front of me
on broad street which
passes itself up
what wife what good
it says
i keep my walls blank too
every day the page
so i’m something
to say
by just stepping in a room
churchbell in throat
makes me noon
today
there is nothing
there is nothing
but a weak ‘come back
to me love you are
the realest thing
i ever found in this city
that bore me’
a wash    spat up    sitting
now numbly indignant
if not dead in
the laundromat
holmquest calls to say
he’s back in town
indefinitely
a rope
to catch hold of
friend
we need these
depressions
like quarters for pool
at a bar
tonight i’ll call you
when i get outta
this place

hard of hearing

2010-03-12T13:11:00.000-05:00

the basic formula, to quote
my friend quoting her friend
quoting a friend, etc:
hurt people hurt people.

--for Darcy Sebright

Elective Affinities

2010-03-09T16:29:00.006-05:00

A few of my poems, as well as a poetics statement are now part of Elective Affinities: a Cooperative Anthology of Contemporary U.S. Poetry, edited by Carlos Soto Román. The contributors also become editors. The idea is to "chart our own literary map where affinites, differences, and unexpected connections coexist in an ongoing, collective construction." I've followed this anthology - which is a blog website - with interest, and one reason is I'm curious who other poets name as their affinities, as those choices will determine the directions in which the anthology spirals outward.

What does "affinity" mean? After Carlos asked me to send work, including a list of five affinities, I made this long list of influences and then struggled to whittle it down. He let me have 11. I decided that an affinity would be not only a living poet whose work has influenced me deeply, but a poet I've met and conversed with, someone whose ideas about poetry often ring in my head. Of all the writing that's influenced my own, the work of those eleven is most directly in dialogue with mine.

The nature of the anthology foregrounds dialogue, community, even localism as the project expands to various places. Its unpredictability might help it avoid the pitfalls of typical anthologies, which have to draw stricter boundaries and are bound to be criticized for their shortsightedness, exclusivity or editorial judgment. At this point, the only criticism of Elective Affinities I can anticipate would be what Jacob Russell calls "The Lost Gatekeeper Lament" - which is ideologically opposed to "affinities" of artists and is willfully blind to the vibrant literary communities that exist right now (that you can find in Philadelphia, for example). I recommend Russell's recent post about this - he picks apart one such lament from The Chronicle of Higher Education.

My affinities turned out to be mostly Philadelphia-based writers. But perhaps another concern: they were also mostly white men from a similar class background. How bout that. It's interesting to me how the project might illustrate lines of class, race, gender and age in poetry circles. But especially class, since the work of all of those eleven poets addresses on some level class conflict or economic disparity and its social effects, and this topic - which seems to me very politically urgent - is by and large ignored in much of the American media I encounter, including poetry - and that ignorance is destructive. (It also happens that this concern is usually absent from the Gatekeeper Laments.)

In a letter Gil Ott wrote me once (in 2002) he lamented the fact that the United States has become so stratified that it is not only possible but likely that when one travels through this country one does so without leaving one's own social class. Gil's writing has taught me a few things about traveling, inner landscapes and texts included. One is that traveling is not vacationing.

Elective Affinites is ongoing, and I like that, too - and that it's happening in 14 other countries. I'm curious to see where it goes.

passyunk lost

2010-02-25T21:02:00.004-05:00

2.25

the rain is wider
than the skyline,
than the eye
of a mind
of winter.

no snow but a hole-punch
disaster flurried
white circles
in an arc about your desk

& anamorphosis from a 3rd story window
let me walk fingers across the rooftops
to the liberties some 12 pop songs away

-- Kevin Varrone, from "middlefebruary" in g-point almanac: passyunk lost - which is the book I am reading tonight and recommending to you all forever.

Kevin will read at Chapterhouse this Saturday night w/ Sarah Dowling and Joanna Fuhrman.

Sunday, 2/21 at L'Etage, 8pm

2010-02-14T10:20:00.004-05:00

Join us for a night of performance, cocktails, info and prizes to benefit the Haitian Mission of Doctors Without Borders. $5 donation suggested. All moneys collected will go to help the people of Haiti via an impactful organization who was in the country before the tragic earthquake, remained there, and will still be there for the rebuilding process.

Hosted by Jaime Anne Earnest, MPH and Frank Sherlock

Musical guests:
Site Recites and special guests

Poems by:
Ryan Eckes and Frank Sherlock and more

Commentary by: Jaime Anne Earnest, MPH, Dr. Elisa von Joeden-Forgey and Maria Raha

L'Etage is at 6th and Bainbridge (above Beau Monde), Phila, PA

a pair of recordings

2010-02-09T23:07:00.002-05:00

On January 11th I read w/ Brandon Holmquest at Molly's Bookstore (it's open again, and they're selling records and dvds, too). You can listen to the recording here. Pictures and a summary here.

On January 7th I read at Blend. You can listen to the recording here.

Thanks to Greg Bem for all of this.

common sense is not super glue

2010-01-30T14:18:00.008-05:00

toast: if you lose my bones
after i croak           no sweat
                            my neighbor’s
name was jimmy stewart
before i knew of the actor
                            in my backyard
i told him he wasn’t the center
of the universe

yes i am he screamed
no you’re not i said
yes i am he cried

and threw dirt on me
it’s a wonderful life
of graves or jokes
for angels
i tie my ass to a tree
and walk for three days
a debt collector
in the poorest city
of a country w/ wings
made in china
a sense of balance
         takes
a sense of balance
so self reliance eats
the lie of itself
what am i worth
to what i have loved
remains a question
for the birds
to pick at
the train’s a whistle
that hurts
you can float whispers
into its phone’s heart’s
bathroom door its
locked song withstands
any attempt to smoke
it out
some aching poem
in there          sleeping
off its debts

expect large streams
of paul revere
a gaping sense of wounded
cats          the huff and puff
the house that holds a name
that gropes
i smash old crow bottles
in my kitchen
chris dances in the ruins
brandon tackles him
paper bag over my head
counting down the sidewalk
riverbottum passed out
against stoop
pass the glass says the love
to no one
it’s a wonderful life
sweep it up

on foot

2010-01-30T14:15:00.002-05:00

balance is loss on foot
i can’t care for that plant
to hold my world up
any more than
get on the floor
and pray
to the men who built
this building
petals horribly
brittle
a single
earthquake
in philly my folks
recall from the 60s
knocked them out
of bed they bounced
back up like coins

on one side’s your
fear - flip it and
there’s what you
worship—

what is it?

comfort—
intelligence—
money—
praise—
love—

after the love we turned
on the lights all shaky
and stupid, history
a cemetery on one end
of the line. you can’t get
through. how come if
reporters can tell me
an old lady crawls
in the dirt for her pills
while an old man lies
motionless as rats pick
at his overflowing diaper
in port-au-prince
they can’t tell me what
they did or did not do
to help them? it’s hard
to make the news when
you’re alive. ants emit
urges and nobody bids.
the signs all point to
a fucking ending
the presidents all say
SEND CASH

mr. president, may a cluster
of flies swarm the open
fracture of your skull
may the flies carry
the gossip which leaks
from the fracture to
the dead poor
that they may shake
the earth forever out
of our righteous sleep
that they may enter
the living that the living
enter the story and be
it

Dear Tom Paine,

2010-01-30T14:14:00.002-05:00

During the recent SEPTA strike, I had to take a cab. The driver, from India, asked me about American women. What is wrong with them, he said. Why had they spurned him. Why are the customers so mean. I wanted badly to say the reason you came to this country is the same reason the women here want nothing to do with you. Two birds with one stone. Efficiency. Common Sense. But I kept the stone in my pocket and shrugged. I tipped him two bucks on a nine-dollar ride, which I thought was reasonable, but he didn’t say bye back. We both felt indignant. Two birds, one stone. We love that stone. Love to save it up for the right birds.

My friend Brandon says the only thing he loves about New York City is that intimacy is possible through anonymity. There are so many people that sometimes a person’s gotta spill his guts, say the words, the desperately important words, allowing for a real, meaningful exchange. Something’s born, a story, say, out of and in spite of an overwhelming nothing, and the story has a chance to live on for awhile before it is washed away. This Big Nothing might make us honest, but it also cheapens the risk. Tell me about risk, Tom. Why is that important to me? Is it simply that I want a greater return on my investment? Is it just that I want more?

What can I call the distance between birth and my writing this very word, so that it’s holy? Time won’t do. Life won’t do. Gertrude Stein wrote in “Poetry and Grammar”: “As I say a noun is a name of a thing, and therefore slowly if you feel what is inside that thing you do not call it by the name by which it is known. Everybody knows that by the way they do when they are in love and a writer should always have that intensity of emotion about whatever is the object about which he writes. And therefore and I say it again more and more one does not use nouns.”

That we have to name and name and name again and again and again is a real motherfucker, Tom. But that’s how we stay young. It’s the only way. And that means you have to be a poet. There was a poet I loved very deeply who called me “love,” and I called her “love,” which is both a noun and a verb but more so a verb. Once I asked her how we had come to call each other that, and she said “because we’re lovers.” I’m one who loves. You’re one who loves. And we had come to be lovers by spilling our guts to each other again and again (and by fucking, a kind of gutspilling). So the action of naming the respective distances between our respective births and the present moments of naming, you might say, the little speeches we offered to one another, brought us closer and closer, til finally we named each other “love.”

Now this type of thing is swell, right, but what if you think of yourself as a noun rather than a verb, and someone’s calling you a word you feel strongly as a verb, such as “love”? It can be a lot of pressure to realize you’re a verb, that you’re in motion all the time, and that you are headed, ultimately, for an unknown intimacy, and you have only dead intimacies to go on, to guide you. What kills me over and over is the paradox that inside the urge to name is the urge to make permanent, and in naming we achieve the opposite, as our little speeches change us, taking us further and further toward some abyss that could be heaven or hell or anything, really. So you can’t know how much it’s worth, the intimacy. Name any price it’s totally arbitrary. Which means it is probably not something to bank on.

So what is? God is. And god is not love.

I’m speechless right now, Tom, and I don’t know what I am, so I’ll close with Stein’s thoughts on verbs: “ In the first place they have one very nice quality and that is that they can be so mistaken. It is wonderful the number of mistakes a verb can make and that is equally true of its adverb . . . Besides being able to be mistaken and to make mistakes verbs can change to look like themselves or to look like something else, they are, so to speak on the move and adverbs move with them and each of them find themselves not at all annoying but very often very much mistaken. That is the reason any one can like what verbs can do . . . Verbs and adverbs and articles and conjunctions and prepositions are lively because they all do something and as long as anything does something it keeps alive.”

Anon.

love song

2010-01-30T14:12:00.002-05:00

i was not a depression
in the park’s heart i was

not a tree in south philly
what i was was a glass

coke bottle strung from
a power line i looked up

out of the bottle, the sky
was a dime and it

blew into me and dried
up the death and i

fell into sleep fifty feet
deep and woke up as air

w/ you: no title, nothing
had begun nothing had

ended, the world spun
so the river was patient

we hurled stones at the
water, and they skipped

across

for the record

2010-01-30T14:03:00.004-05:00

sorry marcel duchamp but
you are not a household
name where most people
come from           nothing
personal              the urinal
changes my life every time
i relieve myself
a classist rolls his eyes
like stones down the steps
of the poorly attended
funeral that invented him
underground there’s no
wallet open to mouth
signals to the operator
no traffic spilling its guts
to anyone           i’d like
to say i was born in the subway
and then invented love
but that’s as readymade
as american cities are
for spoiled artists
to win honors
from the social class
that invented them
i have been told
i have a one-track mind
an ambulance insists
on going down passyunk avenue
i don't know why
its blood won’t flow faster
again and again i arrive
at the point where
the question of what god
could be crosses my desire
to eat or fuck or tell a story
and that’s where i get off
and try to figure out
where the hell i am
since place and identity
have melted into
the same glue
cecil b moore used to be
columbia ave or columbia
became cecil b moore
temple university once belonged
to the neighborhood
i was going to bother
to say i rely on public
transportation
for the record
for the record
at tasker-morris
this morning
on the platform right in my
face stopped a big dick
drawn by finger
on the fogged up window
of the subway car
i got on and rode in silence
among the other passengers
surrounded by other drawings
of dicks on windows and
advertisements w/ mustaches
and thought bubbles and
as i tried to keep from bursting
out laughing i got pretty
confident that the spirit
behind those drawings
would live forever and ever
and i would continue to believe
and believe in this world

a pair of thoughts on responsibility

2010-01-15T14:20:00.002-05:00

********************************************

To take responsibility for your life is a middle class concept. It's like wearing a neck brace to hide your scars. It means that you're taking a vow to walk the straight & narrow. The words mean more than you say, a meal ticket to instant happiness. To articulate the idea of responsibility indicates an irregular heartbeat. The label is pinned to your shirt collar, but your true identity has been erased.

--Lewis Warsh, from "Premonition"

Collaboration w/ Brandon Holmquest

2010-01-10T14:40:00.003-05:00

Last year Brandon Holmquest and I wrote a bunch of poems together. Below are a few of them. Tomorrow night - Monday, the 11th - at 8pm, we're gonna read them and some other things at Molly's in the Italian Market. It will be a party. You're invited.

Cowboys Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Mamas

When I die I will ask who, who robbed the register. My first question will go unanswered. My second question, a refrain I hope rots the core of another prayer, the moment I learned that one could, if one wanted, laugh a priest into shame, that opened it all up . . . and then it passes. Another chapter in the Universal Bible of Human Misery. It sold thousands of copies the first year. Brilliant reviews, but almost nobody read it. You can find it in any used bookstore. $2.95. Mass-market paperback. Heavily underlined. Marginalia.

No Frontsies, No Backsies

I am Walter Mercado's tailor and my ass is made of gold. Come sniff at its horizon! At the top of the hour! At the bottom as well! Spank me with a hammer! My ass is a bell! The parishioners come a-running, clad in trash bags. The poor bastards worship the grandeur of my work. The poor bastards worship the poop on my stoop. What do I charge? What do I charge to let you scoop up my poop? I charge nothing because you may not scoop it. You may not. I will. I will use my solid gold shovel, and you will watch and, by watching, pay for it.

Does Marcellus Wallace look like a bitch?

However, we come quite to the precipice, quite the messy mess. Victorian. Where in the milk's the milky loquaciousness I bet my mother's milk on? That shit is gone. My sole inheritance this advice: Beware black rats and white mice. Beware brownstones with bay windows: traps. Carnivorous plants. Asps and asspacks full of candy. Rush on the radio huddling masses, fingers the hungers I can't let you go.

Correspondence

I type poet in an email and google tries to sell me poet lessons. They are taking all my letters. And they read them. Spool them round some headquarters. Parking meters, I wrote my uncle last, are a product of your generation. Parking meters, he wrote back, what are those? He wrote those words on paper. Sent them through the mail. My next letter began: Dear Uncle Luddite, okay I have thought about it and I will join your paper airplane factory under one condition: no contracts. And you can't fire me. Dear Spacebook, it is 2:50pm. I own the shirt on my back. Dear Myface, fucked til seven and I've got 1800 friends so why are my hands shaking. I should know better.

I'm reading Thurs, Jan 7th at 7:30

2010-01-02T11:02:00.003-05:00

Come to BLEND @ BLUE BANANAS CAFE, 223 South St. on January 7th.

I'll be reading w/ Dan "the man" Schall and Jonathan Todd.
An open mic will follow. $5 cover.

Details here.

Aaron Lowinger's "Bills Fan"

2009-12-23T19:44:00.001-05:00

So the Eagles are in the playoffs again, and that makes me tired. But after hearing Aaron Lowinger's poem "Bills Fan" - which I nominate as the greatest poem ever about football - I figure, okay, okay, I'll go to the bar and watch the goddamn game.

Here's Aaron reading "Bills Fan":

Back in September Aaron gave an incredible reading of dense, rolling poems here in Philly at the Chapterhouse . He read from his chapbook guide to weeds, which he made with his wife, Becky Moda, who did the illustrations for each weed (they also sang a folk song together). We've got a recording of it and will have it up on the Chapterhouse site soon.

For more of Aaron Lowinger's poems, go here and here.

Ted Greenwald's Common Sense

2009-12-18T14:52:00.010-05:00

Back in March one early morning during the cold, cold week Temple University calls Spring Break my doorbell rang for, I think, the first time since I’d moved in four months before. We just call each other now, right? “Yo, I’m here, come let me in.” Anyway, it was a delivery. Ted Greenwald’s Common Sense (1978), which I’d ordered from Small Press Distribution after listening to some of his poems on PennSound (esp. “Whiff” from 1979) and reading a selection on EPC. I opened the package and opened the book and read for maybe an hour. Stayed up, starting writing a poem, then returned to the book and read some more. The poems kept me up. I didn’t go back to bed when all else was telling me nothing’s worth getting up for. I was hibernating, depressed. It’s hard to believe I got up in the first place.

HUMAN EVENTS

I
picked up
a shovel

and started
digging

pretty soon
I was
in china

and started
walking

I’ve been reading this book all year. I’ll read parts of it several times a week and try to carry its rhythms with me throughout the day. In a letter I wrote Greenwald recently (he doesn’t have email; maybe he listens for the doorbell), I tried to articulate what I like about Common Sense: it’s how the poems unfold from line to line (as if the poem were folded up in the beginning, in the title) and the depiction of a world of fluid objects. That’s what I told him. There’s always a transformation of object or image that pushes the poem, that makes the rhythm. One word leads to another, and the words themselves seem like live objects. (I think some people call that “materiality.”) That’s the sense of the poetry, perhaps. Sometimes the transformation happens through repetition, sometimes rhyme or word association, sometimes narrative. (The book is actually a selection of Greenwald’s first 10 books, I think, which explains the variation in style and its length [195 pages]). Here’s a few:

THE PIANO SHIVERS

the piano shivers
someone’s singing through
the radio through
shrugged shoulders
his tongue rolling over black keys
each note like a bone
added one by one to a skeleton
the sky, flesh, brings
the beast back to life
it walks upright
snacking on hedges
low-hanging twigs
low flying planes
the song lands at three points

SATURDAY NIGHT

Martha wears a mu-mu
and Ellen has a boo-boo
Bill has a beautiful b-b
and Morris has everything

Turk has a cigarette
and Michael has Ellen
Zeke has a bandanna
and Martha loves it

Louise has a thought
and Martha’s in it
Zeke has Louise handy
and Bill plays blues

Martha Ellen Bill Morris Turk
Zeke Michael and Louise

FOOD CYCLE

clean glass
dark park and buildings
part night
lights clear
and then I look in
to find my weariness
I wear my work and its dust
over my body
passing into a wonderful darkness
on the other side
morning wakes
it is not late it is just right
I wash and shave
smoke a cigarette
have some coffee
my body wakes up
that was a long time ago
my body wakes up
tired
frazzled
snow
snow turning to rain

In many of the poems the human body is fused with other objects in the cityscape. There’s often an expression of odd, slightly surprised detachment from the self, who is found again and again situated in or linked to a part of the world just now observed. I come away with a sense of human clumsiness, which contrasts with the fluidity. I’m made aware of my own objecthood, physicality and fragility, while my focus on the movement around me is heightened. Neither the thing nor the word right in front of me is overlooked or ignored; rather, it determines what follows, and the effect is a kind of motion I’ve always been after in my own writing. The tone of these poems alternates between a “seamless fatigue”, a phrase I take from the following poem, and a “wonderful darkness” that leaves me feeling “the world wide and awake around me.”

RESTLESS

scanning the outer world
with my senses the inner world
bumps against a tree in a park
filled with strollers after rain after hot morning
with a large dog pissing against the bark
a wind so it seems
hot from all the activity
is arriving in a car circling the block’s blood
for the millionth time (it happens so fast)
looking to park and does across from a store
crowded with shoppers entering and leaving
the revolving door revolving charges
plates and kids clutched in the hand in the pocket in the bag
my ear (left) is bumping into a radio
that moves rapidly past in the hand of a stroller
while the other ear barges through two couples
dressed up and looking down the street discussing where to eat
my feet ache from a long walk in the rain and are wet
sogging my legs as my heart coughs through its hangover
a little faster than the cigarette I puff
windows
windows
street-crossers
sidewalk movers-over
a slowing down, all,
to catch up with the hotter parts of nerves
a seamless fatigue
tailored to the city like a flush
a seeing of brain upon the gates
doors and windows open and close to exits and entrances
light travels
shade cools
sound carries
animal vegetable mineral
here and there are heroes and villains

In longer poems small narratives evaporate while the trace of them—their sound (the exhaust, you might say) form the next part of the music. This is most evident in the 26-page poem “The Life.” Below are the first five stanzas and then a few more stanzas that appear a few pages further into the poem.

a boring moment
I pick up a book of poems written by boring poets
the poems aren’t good they aren’t bad

they get jobs
they get wives and children raise families
they write poems
they live interesting lives

I’m getting pissed off
pissed off
I pick up a pen and start to write
I take a break
burn most of my old poems
throw out letters
dump boxes of papers
I get back to work
there are poems and poems

there are limits to what I can put up with
there are those make me want to puke over my shoulder

night steals into afternoon
and mugs one
formal like a dress, the coming of winter
what trees there are
lose leaves and gain edge
while I get my winter nerves
something weird’s going on in my left shoulder
like a crazy parakeet
banging against bars of muscles and bone
whims drive cars into the garage of the blood
there are rush-hours and images of sadness
making the nose flute
there are beer senses searching for a rug to be snug in
the hand turns to winter
and raises a landscape to the nose
and the nose knows

. . . .

isn’t it strange how ambition
takes on a high and bright language
almost rushing into a play with murders
as it crosses the mind like a roach crossing the wall
it’s something I have
like
an
apartment
and something I admire in others even if
I feel misdirected the energy is terrific
and soothes and rubs like a towel after someone’s bathed
it’s the difference between indifference
loosening furry bonds chomping on the brain
as someone, pressed, says
I’ve lost my train why can’t you be more realistic
and that’s what I am
only I’m making everything up from scratch
and can hear even the tiniest feet strolling along white flat

bundling noises enter my ear
and release a catch to many synapses
something is starting to take place,
I want to tell you, don’t you think you should ask
I’m running out the door
running out of things to say
“stay awhile” I thought and did
and want to say to you “stay awhile”
does this sound like a complaint
vaulting out of the imploring hand over
the bar of the heart
ear of the cup of woes

morning dreams
afternoon dreams
evening dreams
night comes in sits down and dreams
the ashtray dreams the cigarette its smoke
the hand bracing my head dreams of writing down dreams
upstream, a dream starts to take root in the river
as a sliver of light dreams a shiver in my spine
the back waves bye-bye to the brain
a hand writing the dreamy words
“this is them”

smooth and bumpy wonder meet in a tongue
licks the lip of the day
something special (instantly forgotten) brings this on
forms a landscape
adds a little motion makes a scene

[NOTE: Previous posts on this blog labeled "common sense" do not feature Greenwald's poems. "Common Sense" is the working title of a series of poems and letters I have been writing, inspired both by Greenwald's book and Thomas Paine's pamphlet of the same title.]

Symposium on Organizing Reading Series

2009-12-10T11:56:00.003-05:00

This Sunday, December 13th at 2pm at 4226 Spruce St., I'll be participating in a symposium called "Venues: Aesthetics, People, Politics, Readings and Performance", hosted by the Poetic Arts Performance Project. A few us will be answering questions about the how and what and why of running a reading/performance series.

some common sense

2009-12-03T22:30:00.002-05:00

made man

each week i watch pigs
pulled off the trailer
flopped over shoulders
gutted into the deli
esposito’s pork & beef
each week slit perfectly
the spine of a bus stained
under closed eyelids
nothing out of the woodwork
but “what” questions
hung up to dry
what’s the point
says that one
give it up
i am the point i say
i leave holes all over
in trying to make myself
punch a past in world
series disappointment
what i meant peels itself
out of a bus that doesn’t
stop like water
follows the path of least
resistance you flow by
the mural that tells you so
that peels you out
of the woodwork a chill
sent down the spine
of the bus you caught
open the fare and say
ahh where to

Dear Tom Paine,

Looking back, it’s the thing that keeps everybody down I’ve always written about. The thing I’ve always been infected by. Just when I believe it’s cleared my system there it is again some afternoon. I think that thing is common sense.

Hear me out.

First, common sense is something we tend to direct at people. Thus, its sense is hardly common, hardly shared. Consider the rhetorical contexts in which the term “common sense” is used usually. We use it to disparage. In order to buffer a weak argument, we use it to imply that those opposed to us lack common sense, i.e., are too stupid to understand us: “We must change such and such – it’s just common sense.” If the proposition were actually common sense, there’d be no need to say so. We also use the term to reprimand. I imagine a father yelling at his son, smacking him on the back of his head: “Use your common sense next time!”

Tom, your pamphlet both disparages and reprimands. Beautifully. In choosing “common sense” as a title for your pamphlet, no doubt you had in mind a second definition of “common”: ill-bred, low class, disgusting (a much more common definition back then). You sought to inspire righteous indignation in the American masses, who would then direct their rage at the English aristocracy: “Damn right we’re common. And proud of it!”

Perhaps this is why our conservatives today try to co-opt you—not for your libertarianism so much as your rhetorical savvy. But I can’t give them that much credit. Instead I’ll say what’s more likely, and what no politician would dare say: our country is rife with idiots. Rife with commonness. George W. Bush would never have become president otherwise. Such is democracy, eh, Tom?

Borges once argued that arguments convince no one. I believe him. I am forever unconvinced. What’s most convincing to me about your pamphlet is the music. The orchestration. As Isaac Kramnick has written: “It was not Tom Paine’s common sense but his rage that turned hundreds of thousands of Americans to thoughts of independence in the winter of 1776.” Well, I am one of them. Long dead, flesh rotted to bone. Common.

Why was there almost nobody at your funeral, Tom?

Sincerely,
Ryan Eckes

the chase (poem written by stan in a dream)

the whole hour
works

it’s out
to
lunch

it’s
ow

after the
day

its
tail

we're robots

2009-11-10T22:35:00.004-05:00

Hailey Higdon and I have made a chapbook that consists of 3 of my poems and 3 of Hailey's. It's called we're robots. Want one? Let me know or go to the website.

happy survival

2009-10-25T11:14:00.001-04:00

Eddie Okwedy, "Happy Survival"

Cheers to the genius who thought to synchronize this song with this cartoon.

poemas

2009-09-29T13:34:00.002-04:00

Earlier this year, Carlos Soto Román translated a few of my poems into Spanish, and now the translations have been published in the journal 60 Watts, along with Carlos's translations of poems by Debrah Morkun. You can read them here.

Here you can listen to Carlos read his poems in the Wooden Shoe in Philly last summer.

looking for an apartment

2009-08-20T10:40:00.001-04:00

carbon monoxide is colorless

and odorless

but joe loves the phone

so it rings

hello, he says

we walk around his mouth

it feels like philadelphia

in august or august

in philadelphia

the fan cuts a hot circle

out of us

a dumpster slams

in the alley out

back

it’s a brand new fridge

says joe

open it and take a look

Common Sense: 8/18 at 8pm

2009-08-13T15:51:00.012-04:00

Tuesday, Aug 18th at 8pm
at Wine-O Bar, 447 Poplar St.
Phila, PA

Donald Deeley will be reading fiction
Brandon Eckes & Chris DiOrio will be playing music
and I will be reading poetry & letters inspired by
Thomas Paine's Common Sense and
Ted Greenwald's Common Sense.

$2 cans of Yuengling & Pabst; $3 glasses of house red or white wine.
Hosted by Abbi Dion.

DiOrio & Eckes, the musicians, pictured above.

notes on innovation

2009-08-07T02:30:00.005-04:00

Since reading Magdalena Zurawski's response to the negative review of The Bruise and the recent conversation between Dale Smith and Kenny Goldsmith in Jacket, I've been thinking a lot about this concept of innovative literature. I know the word "innovative" is used to distinguish between conventional, traditional modes of writing and more experimental work, but I wonder to what extent "innovation" is now a primary concern for writers who identify themselves as avant-garde or post-avant, and what the consequences of that might be. When I hear the word "innovation," I think of technology, mass production and one-upmanship, impatient American culture of consumption and disposability. I think of my new "energy-saving" refrigerator.

Most people, I'd bet, would say they value originality - that word seems to have nothing but positive connotations. But I don't think we all share the same definition of originality. I don't see originality as at odds with acknowledging influence; nor do I see it as at odds with dialogue with other people (alive or dead). I mean, if you really produced something completely original, or innovative, nobody'd know what it was, right? The product wouldn't communicate. I think much of what's tagged "innovative" in literature actually sacrifices communication, and I'm not sure what for. To fool people into believing one is "ahead of one's time"? It's hard for me to buy some imaginary historic timeline of art, some Structure of Poetic Revolutions. Do publishers ask for "innovative" work because they see poetry as a science on which the progress of civilization depends? Are we rapidly approaching a glorious point in time, an apotheosis, when nothing could possibly be any newer? Are we going to heaven or something?

In the Jacket conversation, Goldsmith states explicitly that he is interested only in making an impact within the history of art - so as not to be ignored - and that he has made a career of it by showing "the art world that poetry was as up to date as anything they were showing in the museum." And he suggests, as many avant-garde or "post-avant" writers have, that "adventurous" poetry has been "marginalized." By who, though? How is it that avant-garde writers (and not artists - somehow the other arts are different, according to Goldsmith) have less power than writers who aren't avant-garde? This argument always fails to account for social class. The truth is that the poetry is "marginal" because it's written for a privileged sliver of the American population. A more accurate term than "marginal" would be "special interest."

A writer's sense of audience is important. You might write alone in a room, but that room is in the world, right? If one's chief aim in writing poetry is to be innovative, then--given the historical exclusivity of art, the still limited access to higher education, not to mention widening class divisions--can one's sense of audience be anything other than an insular group of people who mostly come from the same privileged social class? And whose poetry, therefore, will not be innovative but apolitical, regardless of claims made on its behalf?

The desire to be read and be recognized is essentially the desire for human exchange, i.e., communication. Perhaps the purest form of trade. One thing I've liked about living this poetry life is that it often maintains elements of folk culture (readers as writers and vice-versa; opportunities to interact with other writers), unlike arts that are more firmly situated within entertainment/pop culture (marked by sharper divisions between artist and audience; a more passive, less participatory situation). If one's sense of audience is grounded more deeply in the entertainment model, that is, in the absence of genuine human exchange, then the desire to be recognized may become the whole point of writing--and then we've got ourselves a delusional poet, one whose values seem oddly similar to those espoused by Reality TV shows. I see this delusion in the pettiness, the wastes of breath I find in, say, negative reviews in lit journals, in the petty criticisms on blogs.

Writing to communicate is inextricable from valuing community. In Dale Smith's impressive defense of poetry's "communicative potential," there's an assumption that one has (or should have) an obligation to participate politically in the society in which one lives, and that that obligation is not separate from the work that one chooses to do/make. This happens to be a characteristic I've admired about many poets who live in my city--I draw inspiration from them, from the commitments that are evident both in their writing and in the work they do outside/around their writing (often their jobs).

It's important for me also to distinguish here between "community" and "network." Sometimes people conflate these terms. It's the difference between talking to/about somebody to know the person and talking to/about somebody to use the person. When a writer starts meeting innovation quotas, as I once caught myself doing in grad school (by, say, incorporating types of parataxis, disjunction, fragmentation into my writing), at the expense of saying what needs to be said, that writer is networking, not writing.

Taking chances, breaking habits, questioning norms - especially one's own - becoming conscious - yes, I understand the importance of that, in writing, in living. I have a hunch that originality derives from being relentlessly true to oneself (as cliche as that may sound), and that can be impossible to measure, impossible to quantify, and hopelessly subjective, which might nag the more scientifically-minded among us. But innovation for the sake of innovation is something to question. For real.

respect

2009-07-24T16:59:00.003-04:00

The mighty Kim Gek Lin Short has a blog, and on it she has written about the voices in my chapbook.

And Steven Allen May, a few months ago, w/ some kind words.

And several months ago, Stan Mir on Old News.

Thanks, folks.

text messages

2009-07-15T17:10:00.002-04:00

my inbox: a year in review

Working the handlebar tonight with some chick. Come by get a load on. Start this holiday off right.

Republicans are on my television chanting “drill baby drill.”

Muaaa! besitos muchos besitos monis. i am so lucky you are the best.

Jesus was born in a Wawa.

Or you could just let him know that there are anatomy lessons available next door at the Dive.

The swelling is going down.

Im workin at the handlebar with my lovely cousin Lauren tonight. Be there, cause every time you drink an angel gets its wings.

Skylar born @ 7300 am! All are well. :-)

Just an fyi – keith and i are not dating . . . You had a strange look on your face that looked as if you thought he was serious. Hope you’re having fun at the Locust.

Kids melted in rain. Stuck. Diner. Doubtful.

Allo, gubnor! Sup witchu? How’s the adjuncting? How’s life? How’s my Eckes?

theres a beef n beeR to help pay for my hit n run @ out of wack jacks on Saturday. Tickets are $25.

I am @ Claudia’s place. i want u to know that i will miss u a lot. love MM

Do you think it’s weird to have a dog in the shower with you – while you’re naked and taking a shower?

Broke gonna have to skip.

read remains again today. holy shit.

Everythings coming up ryan.

What are you up to this evening, cupcake?

Balls out no bull old fart prof. Was a good one. Lots of remembering to do tho.

You got cash?

Tell jack im sorry i missed him!

No really thank you.

overheard

2009-07-08T13:31:00.002-04:00

At 4th & South:

"I'm the only Duck driver brave enough to say it: Punk Rock Girl."

-- driver of a Ride the Ducks bus/boat to tourists on board, pointing out the store that used to be Zipperhead, "immortalized" by The Dead Milkmen in their song "Punk Rock Girl."

All last summer, in one of the apartment windows on South Street, there was a sign that said FUCK THE DUCKS.