»SOUS LES PAVÉS« Fall/Winter 2011

Number 5/6

sous les pavés, la plage »beneath the paving stones, the beach« IN THIS SPECIAL DOUBLE ISSUE Jay James May Amiri Baraka Mairéad Byrne Joe Luna Linh Dinh Kenneth Reveiz Min Jung Oh Dan Hoy j/j hastain Teresa K. Miller Rodrigo Toscano Rob Halpern

Thomas Meyer Debrah Morkun Posie Rider Croatoan Sean Bonney Susan Howe Farid Matuk Jared Schickling Brenda Iijima Hoa Nguyen Craig Santos Perez

Kent Johnson Edgar Garcia Dale Smith Warren Craghead nick-e melville Patrick James Dunagan Aimee Herman Jessica Smith Gene Tanta Austin Smith Robert Archambeau Immeritô

SOUS LES PAVÉS is a bi-monthly newsletter of poetry & ideation distributed by mailing list only and funded by the generous donations of its readers. To join the mailing list or to donate, visit the SOUS LES PAVÉS tab at www.interbirthbooks.com

 

SOUS LES PAVÉS invites responses to the contributions within these pages & will strive to make such responses available in print. Send mss. & correspondence to Micah Robbins | 3515 Fairview Ave. | Dallas, TX 75223 or email [email protected]

 

!!! ATTN!!!

Public Disordered Statement There are no stories in the riots, only the ghost of other stories —Handsworth Songs (1986) With permission, I would like to make a statement. Journalistic form has failed us. Next form: montage—present moments and present moments. The impoverished are out to get you. This, they say, is completely unacceptable. Are you in shock? No, then you condone the rioting? The perceptual field is the choice between horror and advocacy. Which side are you on, boy? “Listen to the black youth”, he said from behind the police tape as the Mayor of London faded. Listen to the “old West Indian negro” who will not be broadcast. Speak at length to the police commander. Cut off blood supply to youth. Black silhouette against a burning sky stopped. You’re too late, they say—the lapdog hops onto the back seat. LG 42LV450U 42” FULL HD LED. Trade police brutality for instant justice. Change the title and slant the eye. The boys in blue run into the boys on bikes and kick the shit out of them. Slant the eye: brutality for justice. Rights without responsibility. Responsibility without a stake. No stake in society. No such thing as society. Claim that looting is a result of rampant consumerism and not the corollary of a riot: Reserve and Collect without the reservation. Remember Handsworth. Poor wage, hard labour/Only Babylon prospers/And humble suffer. Pretend that the good life was built on dust and vapours. Pretend that capitalism works. Play dead. The moral fabric, they say, has disintegrated. Class and race are old news: the whites have become black and are worse for it. ConDem one culture from behind the ramparts of another built on the intolerance of what it is not, the refusal of the prefabricated hermeneutic, mass-produced. White scrubs dark from bloodied road, from charred wall. Feel sick for days. Foam at the mouth. Demand curfews. Demand rubber bullets. Demand water cannon. The BBC bulges from stuffed army britches. Whet the public appetite. No, prepare the public appetite, then whet it. No, create and establish the public appetite, and demand the public act on its appetites. Eat the poor. COMPAQ Presario CQ56-206SA. Get to the bottom of this. Restore order. Support the victims of this terrible violence. Be more effective. Submit your photographs or videos of the recent disorder in Greater Manchester. Lambast social media—the wrong kind of enterprise. Sanction the armoured state phallus—behind its face-mask order you—remove yours. Set fire to Tottenham. Bring the war up. Tally up the cost. Evict looters from their homes. epetition name: Convicted London rioters should lose all benefits/Signatures: 219,060/Closing: 09/02/12. Only benefit claiming feral scum would do this. Jerk your knee. Feel sick to the stomach. Our Big Broken Society. The gangs, they say, are territorial, hierarchical and incredibly violent. The video response with the highest number of views . . . will receive a £500 donation . . . of morality vouchers. Mirror: mirror. EDL, enter stage right. We will track you down, we will find you, we will charge you, we will punish you. Hardcourt High. Attitude Vulcanized. Two runners-up will each receive six months. Foot Locker is constantly at work, to make sure you stay ahead of your game. Wait for Cameron’s swamping speech. Wait for another war. Our partnerships with the top players in the business mean we can offer you sneakers and apparel that you won’t be able to find anywhere else. Keep Calm and Carry On.

Remember the story your dad told you about smashing high streets up for fun all in aid of the claret and blue? Remember the game your dad told you about called “beat the paki”? Good old fashioned white violence. Guess what mister, I’ve got no voice, no future, no leadership—the emphatic hand hovers before the camera, the voice that proclaims silence makes the case. I shrink, my stake lessens. A Sneaker Way of Life. Force 1 Low. This is people saying they’ve had enough, he says: the politics of cutting your nose off to spite your face. This is the 1688 state. Discipline and Punish. Six months for intention to steal. Four years each for inciting a riot. Community service, a curfew and banned from social media for telling a joke. Laughing all the way to the young offenders. Six months for stealing a £3.50 case of bottled water, bottled at the source. Natural refreshment for you means new water pumps for Africa. That’s because 100% of our profit helps to fund clean water projects. In fact, every time you buy one of our products, you’ll be doing something good for someone else, somewhere else. Global Ethics LTD. Get married, go to school, hate crime, love your country. 18 months in young offenders institute for bin theft. Don’t be a dope. We got a lot of people out here. That’s why there’s more crime on the road. There’s nothing to do. There’s gonna be a riot— it’ll be riots: riots. Austerity cuts have closed youth community centres and lines of communication between communities and those who police them. The coalition denies any suggestion that cuts have anything to do with disorder. Hist’ry at Oxbridge ain’t what it used to be. Information Appeal Line—0800 092 0410. Tuned 1. Tennis Mid. SHOP A LOOTER WE NEED YOUR INFORMATION TO MAKE THEM PAY FOR THEIR CRIMES. But then, you can’t take from those who have nothing. Mark Duggan, shot dead by police, 4 August 2011. Dale Burns, dead after police taser attack, 16 August 2011. Jacob Michaels, dead after police pepper-spray attack, 22 August 2011. Philip Hulme, tasered by police while he bled to death from self-inflicted stab wounds, 23 August 2011. While the fading embers of unrest smouldered, the state’s poet lamented those “brave, bright, brothers”. The police kept on murdering. 333 deaths in police custody in 11 years—0 police officers prosecuted in connection. The gangs, they say, are territorial, hierarchical and incredibly violent. Shop a copper. Give the police more power. Continue to monitor the situation. Ban public assembly. Do you have selflimiting thoughts and behaviours? The advanced neuroVector audio technology will eliminate the self-defeating mental and emotional states to which you have become compulsively and physiologically dependent on. What exactly is the Independent Police Complaints Commission “independent” of? Collect 10 points for every one pound. Wear your “I love LDN” or “London Unite” TShirt with pride and show the looters, the rioters and the rest of the world what an amazing community we have here in the World's Greatest City! London. Stand up. Unite. LG 50PV350T. To really immerse yourself in your favourite films, why not try a home cinema system? Powerful speakers fill your room with surround sound and many systems are iPod or MP3 compatible in addition to having built-in DVD players. Offer of the week. And a year away from the Olympics, we need to show them the Britain that doesn’t destroy, but that builds; that doesn’t give up but stands up; that doesn’t look back, but always forwards. Everything must go. It was my choice, it was my decision. That night, it was like you was invincible. TM

—JAY JAMES MAY

 

» WHAT WAS ALL THIS FINALLY « What was all this finally? Did this happen or was it still happening? Or was it long ago in my mind a science fiction negro comics? Though it was not strictly negroes. In fact there was a long questioning going on between somebody and them on whether this tall dude was, in fact, a negro. Or as they said in the liberal drags. Whether he was, in fact, negro. Are you negro or a Negro? Well, strictly speaking, Bof. How my city am changed. When you bees in it, watching and not watching. Feeling Somebody stealing. And the gremlins from the anti kremlin limiting the space you save to be yrself when you can, after all. They said you said I thought. Hmmp. Like this one guy I’m staring at in my mind, was a murderer. Is a murderer. He do murders. From the tip of his shrunk eye, acid shoots on you from the hate peepas. They supplies it. He was a hunk of ugly. He was ugly and he wanted ugly and he looked ugly too. He had an ugly son who looked like him but pitifuler. You never expect the son to be as ugly as the father. He shd be farther away from that ugly. But there him were, ugly naw ugly as, to say yr expectations was spat out with the rest of the coming. I was metaphoring about the coming of the Occupation. When the dead sent a light skinned negro who had been Presidenk of the Oxford University Jewish Student Organization. Don’t say, what?, like that. It’s true. How does him qualify with that? Aw, well you know the script. Like they have in the holy wood. The grove of trees where they gives degrees. Stanford. Yale Law. Cecil B Rhodes collar. So youse can woof down the goodies, almost, with the rest of the pesses. Who else can play like they didn’t kill Jesus just turned him in? But then you wanna accuse the neo colons and the neo cons with being the same as . . . No, not the same as, part of the same instrumentation. They don’t beat the drum but they plays one of them little horns, a flute, a meat whistle or something. So you could be standing in the street and the streets moved. They, like, closed. Narrowed, thinned . . . You cd see people disappear, you could remember how they last looked, how they were, you could see them talking and they were gone. Hundreds now. More than that. Disappearing every day. People you knew well. And not altogether suddenly, there is, by replacement, a weaseling skirmish line of noticeable vermin. Not just that, that’s the worst. But not even that ugly, by strangers with degrees, bylines, cover stories, titles, ignorant quotes or not so ignorant, but strange. Some like they hadn’t witnessed the last 50 years. And well they hadn’t, they just got here twenty thirty years so they mind’s “beards” is just coming. But then we cd be facing the talk of these phantoms of material life. Squawking opposite justifications, reporting phenomena you didn’t know or knew as something else. Could you sit like the deity of judgement without arguing or getting fucking angry? Ha Ha, you just another slightly out of shape humanoid.

»« Cd we skip the years from the overthrow of the 1st coming and hit on Yeats’ second coming and break that down with this. Cd we go right to the spooky house drama. The story that claims narrative underwear to cover its tale. So it is not Jesus and his disciples of whom you re-fur . . . nay they is in they grave naked still. No these is negroes and they grayish brownish pinkish retainers by whom they is retained as well, as ladders to good fortune. Are these fortune hunters to which you give reefers to? No they is mentally arrested, they is cool with the low. But you must give us some tale for our story. Some real life clothed in singing words, that tell the tale all right. And who it was, and what they did, and what you thought. And what it all bought of the years, the laughter the tears. How, for instance, you went from this street, that night, with the street light slanted like it is in paintings and interesting movies. Not with them, but perhaps a paralleling forward to here, colors, lights, sounds, conversations, acts of any kind, just to be where we are now listening, to you and ourselves. That like a play we had finished this act and the curtain came down, the blackening tissue that covers the space that is the space till the next scene. The next seen. The next Act, perhaps. And where wd we be then? It had all been folded in symbolic parables. (You dig, parables don’t you, Jesus!) So then we thought, as if it had only been understood by a few who turned pages in the north where it was cold and they had little else to do. So we sought then to make it a telling narrative of sorts. To give it more flesh like covering, a cover story. Since at base it is a sermon looking up at the mount. And thus have it understood by those, with us, on the ground. (Abbey made us cry, telling us what it was like “here on the ground”!)

  »« And so begin again. After years of the earlier noted negroes had practiced such isms and plasms and spasms of their intensifying backwardness. The more you do the more its you. (An old saying) Which was local, for all that. Home rule, by fool. After a few decades, it growing more used to by us, there came another kind of negro, not from here. From near hear but not actually with us. We had actually been warning yall of this. There is a whole philosophy of Negrossity which I didn’t uncover but repulled the covers off. “Here they is,” I warned as the little snaggle brain (or “brain-ded” as Bloods like to say, still wounded by their antiquity). They was here, these ossitys in all the epochs. From way back way over. (Dig, “The Africans Dug Negrossity”) But then you always got some name to drop on em that make them other. And they is other, to a certain extent. But then, understand, Man, they is yoself. That thing you bring with you that aint you exactly, but a reflection of your weakness that you carry so there is a dialectic to your existence like everything else. No Up without Down, no Left without Right. So the Negrossity is the grossest part of you, the dumbest, the slave that walks behind you, along side you, in front of you, dissing you with the worst features of yourself. I meant our self. OK, like for every WEB there’s a Roy W or a Walter W to hobble your steps with ignorant savagery pretending to be sophistication. So finally, the Sisyphus syndrome is not just the result of the wild white savages plummeting down the side of the mountain to jam you & turn you around. No, there is spread under your feet like the silent excretion of some hideous beast, the slippery scum of negrossity, with it’s savage odor functioning like words turning the surface of the mountain shiny slick dangerous, while all the time battering your senses with ignorant submissive words. Like Tom Ass Clarence saying how he would rush down into his basement when the real world got too much and listen to the soothing words of General McArthur. Or with the blanket wrapped around him to weaken the blast of people “wanting.” “Why do they think they should have rights? The way they want to live (like me and my masters) is ‘luxury’. The little children lined up to do the flag salute, a crucifix in each classroom, this is what makes me gloatish with delight.”

»« So after war and war and struggle (always) our ease turns into a doorway for foulness from another place. “These are not white peepas,” you say. “Why don’t you tell your father to stop calling me ‘a Trojan horse’?” Yet him, them, is. As sure as. And after a few ticks, real “Greeks” crawl out of their insides with contracts from Lehman Brothers. Do you know you live in “The Money Jungle”? Imagine you were in a city where a constant shower of dollar bills fell out of the sky and covered everything, but you couldn’t touch any of it. This is what Duke told Max and Mingus. Feel that, he was saying. Hearing the giant animal feets stomping toward us. Disguised as press releases. Articles in the Enemy Chronicles. (I met the editor, he just didn’t want you to call him names or berate evil.) Mere photographs hurt. Sound bites really bit. Innocence was jive. Radios crawled toward you. Satan film company began to produce quality flicks. You was in it or talked about or pointed to. You was some kind of “Before” that made dressed up people itch. What it was is that they were stealing your shit. They were digging a grave for your everything. Who was this, them … and so forth. Who was they these? In size places, alphabetical order. We did say what we thought and felt the wind or when and tried to say. But saying sometimes is a fragile insistence. Like this one poet type, a few years ago a university sent me his book to review, to find out whether they shd publish it or not. And being sprinkled with negro patriotism, I sez, “Yeh, publish the boy.” The shit wasn’t that interesting. In fact it wasn’t interesting at all. But I put my left foot over my heart and sez right on. Then a few years later this negro is being cleaned and sprayed so they cd give him something and as proof he was the new breed he goes out of his way to tell them what they want. “Yeh, that spook is too political. None of us Spaded spades needs all that huffin and puffin when we got a flower we can admire.” And Bingo! He gets the Pulled Negro prize, which is worth money, Jim! (Is that the guy with the name them Arabs give him in that Sembene movie which Senghor banned? Yeh, but Senghor told me if he hadn’t banned that movie, them Muslims would’a killed yo boy.) But that’s just stuff passing by or growing up around you like them pods in the BS. Here this thing, then another thing, then you look there’s, like they say, several things. A bunch “appear” later when the smell already came ,like the washrags of nasty asses, wafting. You know how stuff wafts? Yeh but it sposed to mean the assholes “clean.” Like people that didn’t do nothing but be taught by Flash Gordon and them while you was getting yr head beat. Dudes that don’t know nothing except some fake shit somebody you know don’t know shit told them. “Oh, Hello” (Its that guy who doesn’t want to speak to you, but something made his lips move, so he tried to

  outprovise.) Did he say hello? I guess that’s what that was. Well, why doesn’t he want to speak to you? Ain’t you a celebrity? No, somebody the Negro who was head of the Oxford University Jewish Students Organization don’t like after he got the 6.5 from your girlfriend. You gotta watch people who lie when they tell you they name. Nothing is Free. So they tryin to take the city away from us like it was clothes they cd rip off. They cd train a nigloo at Stanford. After he arrived from a little gated joint in Jersey with 20 nigloo families. Whose parents were heroes since they integrated American Express. Wow. See, that was the bit, that they cd claim heroism by being the first niglos while the peepa getting stomped and beat is crisscrossed or locked up Mumia Geronimo style as vermin by the real vermin. And D niglos can get sent to Stanford to learn advanced backwardness. Then to Yale Low school to learn lowness. Which they did. Then qualify as Roads scholars meaning they had rid colored folks all the way up ding dong hill. “Abeast, Abeast” they say. In the same ritual as that which saw them bind us and take us down to the sea’s edge to sell us to the Ghost. And we say the same thing as they arrive setting up the chopping block with they evangelical negro crackerized mentality, A Beast, A Beast! Whip! Whip! Whip! They ideas. Whip! Whip! Whip! They policy. You got them whelps. Old black 3-D tattoos. And savages scream from the woods “how nice, how nice, they cd put you (what he call us) Zulus, on ice.” They don’t understand what we wanted. They think what they want, which the now-ghost told them, is what everybody need, is co wreck, Slavery under chocolate drop’s version of white supremacy. (One drop make you an asshole.) What Douglass thought when he could look at the foul thing, Andrew Johnson, was telling him how much he had cared for negras, now they want to vote and shit. Of course not. Ahem (which mean, “get the fuck out!” in recently poor white boy talk) “You all thought you was better than us standing behind that hip fence at the plantation, didn’t you. You despised we poor whites.” “Not I,” sez Fred, his fist balled up inside his head. “Why you dumb motherfuck,” Fred thunk, “that’s how I learned to read, poor white boys taught me in exchange for scraps from the master’s table.” Johnson goes on, “you want poor whites to suffer by giving you the vote” Johnson was raving. What is the coincidence of after Kennedy’s assassination and Lincoln’s assassination the real rulers stuck they Johnsons in. See the Moriarity of this story is that now you got jigaboos who is trained to be stand ins, surrogates for the Head’s child. So you can get a bullet head negro in to put down reform, change the direction of the rock we pushing up the hill. Don’t you understand, Integration Was A Success! And it is not just the persons in some such whatnots, it is the very minds of us, of them, of we, of certain obvious motherfuckers. So it cd be, ”Hi,” at the disenthralled public house who now have a more prosperous pup to sup, the winking eye sez, don’t dis guy know that’s the police chief over there chuckling and him the loud mouthed n-woid that sd that the PC was either Cholley or Joe McCarthy or a mixture of both. What wd that be, A fascist dummy? You cd walk in familiar joints and certain rotund rats lately here to feed cd acknowledge with their strained disattention that they were signaling to the peanut head negro who was signaling to Murdoch that a favorite enemy was within slander distance They wd always look like they had some kind of makeup on, or make down. They wd have a grey shine to their ribaldic knots. They wd be disguised as colored guys. Prosperous colored guys, But they wd look like spies Michaux had thought up. But that’s what it was, what it is. Fanon again, some of the oppressed don’t want to kill their enemies, they want to be them. (Huh, that already happened in Europe and sho’nuff, the “middle east,” chum.) There you go again. ( to quote Da Reag!) So that the wormiest ideas could be transferred to the whipped. By the whip crackers. Even screams for mercy could be soaked with false consciousness. “I cdda freed more slaves if more of them knew they was slaves,” my old aunt Harriet used to say. What wd Boris Karloff have looked like if you painted him brown, modernized him, cause if he wasn’t modernized he’d look like one of them zombies in a Republic pictures Voodoo movie. He’d have to be modernized. Sent to school. All the way. Send the heebie jebbie to Yale or someshit. He cd go to Hampton. Wait a minute, Jethro, you skipped Howard. OK he cd go to Howard too. Damn, somebody always wanna get my shit in it! Maybe I have said these things many times, even when I didn’t know exactly what I was saying. But now, see the shadow on the wall. Remember the history of anything. The dead! The dead! And what they knew. Likewise today, we seem to be alone. Though that is not true. They are everywhere the voices you knew. Flitting through the shadow of everything. So we must, nevertheless, put some conscious narrative to this. To sum up. Walking on the late quiet street unknown yet to anybody plunging out of somewhere. The recognition of

  yourself as somebody in your family. So information is not enough. What can be done with it? The whippers could make whippers out of the whipped. But we want to know. We want to feel our lives. The quality of living, livingness. Yet tinted, shoved, in whatever direction, yet still underneath inside it the breath the desire. I mean if we wanted to look at the world as something to be changed. We at the very bottom. Our hands feet minds eyes bloody from this continuing wrestle. Some of them Angels was evil! What wd that mean in the big brittle echoing antagonism of what the world is? You mean how wd we end up? Exactly. That How, That End, That Up? Where do they come from, what do they mean? Where we wd be “someplace else.” And could you be loved, Bob Marley asked, peeping that metaphysical contradiction. But bullets is stronger than holy shit. But we must find some way to end Negrossity, divert it, at least, before it kills us as it grows to replicate the fiend in its most elaborate and extravagant ugliness. Who has the capacity to render the simple heathen more than he was, at the expense of those more than he was. But it’s not about anybody or thing other than we who are most belittled and surrendered by this evil masquerade. This body snatcher actuality on our persons. This dripping history, those screams and beatings. Not just that but, the Doctor said, “but none of them was real estate.” And Wanted or Un, there is nothing to do but move on. Forget the little creepy negroes scattered all over the place like unpaid bills. Look into the faces of the many who are not them.

»«

The haven of each advance gives these flakes of our developing, prominent yet necessarily expendable existence. So they can cavort as something our struggle has given them (yea, it has) & the world, without acknowledging or even knowing it. Even despising it. Like the ugly negro sitting across from Cesaire in the trolley car, that challenged his negritude. But challenged it is not a “tude” but a gross “ity,” the magnification of pettiness, that comes confusing the light through a crack in the slave cabin with something grander than oneself. And yearning for that rather than the self growing of health and wisdom. Whatta you mean? That having been raised to recognize part of reality they reject the whole of it to slither in the sliver they feel is sweetest, less us like. So then, as well, that is, what is more. I left off thinking about all that, all this, & turned where I was to go on, walk on, to the place I thought I wanted to go, & at the signal, the Pomegranate, actually an old politician, one who had betrayed us fifty years ago, and who still breakfasted each Saturday AM with old dudes like him, stopped me in the street. Like he stepped out of the shadows, it seemed maybe he was a shadow, like the suddenly animated humanoid newspaper blowing down the street in The Red Shoes, came alive and was blown up against me by some invisible gust. Did he have on a hat? No. But his hand was up to his ear like a greeting or a salute. What was this? I had finished the drawn out mental soliloquy – no, it was a dialogue, a narrative, there were many many other voices driving the grimacing images. But it had ended or so I thought. There had been a clear break, where the pictures and voices had stopped. The parables and narratives and inquiring verses had stopped and so I found myself in the middle of the street, in my own town, with the darkness stretched around me like a circle of hard rubber words and approaching and retreating, nearby and distant sounds. Music. Talking things. And the humans zigzagging around the animals. “What’s happening?,” so that is literally what I said. “What’s happening?” Again and he said nothing. He was fatter, older. He looked like he might die any minute. So I hoped that my suspicion that he had chosen to die in front of me, was casual paranoia. But he merely stood there like something meant to hold stuff, hats or umbrellas, his hand up to his ear. Saying nothing. I was anyway trying to insist on him saying something. “How you been? Haven’t seen you in a minute.” But then I realized he was actually pointing, pointing just behind me. So I turned. At that moment a green and white car slid into place with some heavy white woman driving. She was waving at me as Pomegranate walked around to get in. I said something, “Seeya later” and began to dial my phone for a cab, still, I guess, distracted. What stopped me was this little group of integrated sentinels. Standing just behind me to face me when I turned. They looked, yes, they were those people I met before, who wanted to take me around town. “We were supposed to show you how everything has changed. That what you remember doesn’t exist and that there is not even the memory of you anywhere around here.” This was coming from inside the group somewhere. Maybe 5 or 6 negroes, a couple whites, men and women. Michaux’ spy peeked around from the back of the Negronut. Maybe their mouths

  were moving, but they were not in sync with the words. What was I supposed to say. “Whatta you stupid assholes want now?” popped into my head, but all I said was, “Yeh, OK.” “You don’t even know where you are,” the crowd voice wheedled. “No? Do you?” “We changed the name.” It was not laughter the little circle’s voice projected. But some kind of blank sick not thought that is. It could be a song if you had never heard a real one. “We changed the name. We even changed what everything is.” The whole circle waved their arms. Like “goodbye, goodbye.” Maybe they or it sounded drunk. As if you could understand twisted gibberish. “Oh, Jesus,” I had dialed for the cab. “Hello , Ark cabs … ?” “But that’s it, it not old or new Ark any more, we changed the name to Negronia.” (And in unison it seemed) “All stripes, no stars.” They waved their arms again. “Goodbye!” But that was just propaganda. The cab didn’t come but I walked and walked and walking seemed to make things familiar, with maybe a few added headaches that one had to sit and figure out how to act, like my grandmother told me. “Boy, you need to find out How to Act!” And I walked until I arrived at the place we once had called Dar es Salaam. And yes, it was still our house, actually, just recently repainted with a new roof and new lawn. We even had a car sitting in the driveway. And inside my wife (Shirley Graham DuBois bless her), the boys, one a high school Principal, one a truant officer, one a trying to be writer, the other out somewhere, a basket ball coach and the teenage granddaughter, just about to go away to, where else, HU. And some more recent more teeny ones thumping around. There was rap on one floor, jazz on another, and two little grands on one computer, putting different clothes on different figures, and laughing at their mutual complaints. And all of them much smarter than me. No, we are still here. And gonna be. You’ll need an encyclopedia of ignorant motherfuckers to find out who were our enemies.

—AMIRI BARAKA

from LAUGHING AT RICH PEOPLE (a work in progress) RICH PEOPLE HIDE EVERYTHING Rich people hide everything. They even hide themselves. I can’t find a single one in my neighborhood. They hide in gated communities maybe. Then they hide the gated communities. They have homing devices in their jets. Seriously do rich people really exist? Yes, they own, like, all the wealth. Rich people love hiding things. They invented safes. They hide their money and their jewels and their assets. They travel incognito. They hide their names. Poor people have to show ID but rich people? They choose to be anonymous. Now what are they afraid of? The littlest poor kid can walk the streets. Rich people hide themselves in every tiny thing. They gotta be around here somewhere. Some day I’m gonna set out walking and I’m gonna walk and walk and walk until I come to the gates of their gated community. I’m gonna holler at the gates + rattle the bars until a suave gent in a pressed uniform and aviators

comes down + asks me to show ID. And if I got it, I’m not getting in.

RICH PEOPLE DON’T YELL Rich people don’t yell. Murmurs fall from their relaxed lips like waffles or snowflakes melting into deep pile beneath their calfskin thonged pedicured feet. They mouth but sounds don’t come out. A syllable wafts like a wafer, hovers, and is blown aside by a sigh. If the rich shout it is strictly within the family circle or among their intimates or servants or attendants or masseuses or manicurists or doctors or colorists or rhinoplasticians or dieticians or yoga instructors or personal trainers or couturiers or stylists or chefs or chauffeurs or chauffeuses or consultants of multitudinous kinds. The rich never yell in public. They don’t harangue across the street at some-

  one in the doorway of a bar (pray God not a child) and they don’t shout You look nice as you cross the street at the intersection of Chalkstone and Smith and Candace and Orms.

himself or herself up against it. But heck, if government is a bunch of people that’s not playing the game. It’s sorta subverting the rules. The whole point is that rich people would be a better government than the government. Pretty soon we’ll bleed the government dry and rich people will be their own little governments dispensing education and employment and aid. They’ll have their own kingdoms and we’ll call them kings.

RICH PEOPLE ARE CONSIDERATE They will never ask you to their house because that might embarrass you. They won’t tell you stories about the places they have been or their conquests. Rich people would hate for you to feel bad so they meet you at coffee shops where they drink bad coffee stoically and look around magnanimously and maybe even let you pick up the tab.

RICH PEOPLE GET THE NOBEL PRIZE IN ADVANCE Yes they do. Then they step up the war in Afghanistan. Or run raids in Pakistan. Is it Obama or Osama? Osama? Obama? There is righteousness and righteousness. Hey they were both rich but only one got the prize.

RICH PEOPLE HAVE NARROW EXPERIENCE THE RICH ARE IN THE DETAILS Rich people can do what they like. They can eat at the Core Club. They can ski. They can wobble round in Jimmy Choos. They can take five vacations a year. They can delude themselves they have broad experience, broad access. The fact is, if they are rich, i.e., part of the 20% that own 84% of the wealth or the 1% who own almost half—or the one hundredth of 1% who receive 6% of all income—then they just don’t share human experience of life on earth as it is generally and universally known. Think about it. What is the classic human experience? Worrying about money. In Mumbai people are worrying about money. In Beijing people are worrying about money. In New York and Moscow and Tehran and Istanbul and London and Rio and Lagos and Paris and Jakarta and Karachi and Osaka and Kolkata and Cairo and Buenos Aires and Tokyo and Dhaka and Seoul and Rome and Baghdad and Delhi and Guangzhou and Sao Paolo and Manila and Shanghai and Casablanca and Capetown and Boston and LA and Mexico City people are worrying about money. And probably in Tristan da Cunha and Easter Island and Cape York and Ittoqqortoormiit and Nunavit too. And I don’t mean worrying in an active sense like money was your partner or your responsibility. I mean more being worried by—like being rattled and shaken like a toy in the mouth of a very big dog whose saliva is pure acid. That’s the human experience man. The one rich people know nothing about.

The poor are all like okay it’ll do. That’s good enough. Will it hold? We can cover it. No-one will notice. Look it’s fine. What the heck. The rich are all like it has to be perfect, it has to be superfine. The thing. The job. The trip. The home. It’s like the rich expend their whole taste on the tip of the iceberg, the infinitesimal point of contact between themselves and the labor of everyone else.

RICH PEOPLE CRAMP THEIR KIDS’ STYLE Yes they do. My kids know they can do better than me. They know they can do it! They want to do better than me! They want to show me! Rich people cramp their kids’ style. I mean how can their kids beat them? Rich people make it worse by giving their kids every advantage. EXCEPT DOING BETTER THAN THE OLD MAN. My kids have had fewer advantages in many ways than I had: single parent family, emigration, sustained poverty as a result of capitalistinduced recessions. They have every opportunity. I’m proud of that.

RICH PEOPLE CAN’T DO ANYTHING RICH PEOPLE WANT TO BE THE GOVERNMENT Rich people want to be the government and sometimes they are. They can be mayors of cities. Of course they can be presidents. They can own an army. They can be so close to government that they would be it except as we know rich people like to hide so you don’t always know who owns everything, like the government and armies and newspapers and prisons and schools and wars and . . . everything. Rich people want to be the government but rich people don’t like government mainly because government tends to be a bunch of people not just one. If government were a person, just one person, a rich person would definitely want to know it and measure

They can’t caulk. Yes I didn’t know how tricky the silicone caulk would be. That it would go all bubbly like that. But I’m better than a rich person—rich people can’t caulk! Rich people can’t cut molding! Okay how long did it take me to figure out You cut the top side long for a join in an inside corner and You cut the bottom side long for a join on an outside corner? So it took me a long time! Rich people can’t cut molding. Hey yesterday I couldn’t and now I can! I can even write a poem about it: top long within / bottom long without. Rich people can’t write poems! I don’t care what you say no-one in their right mind would listen to a rich person’s poem. Except other rich people. Except maybe the rich person’s

  MOTHER! I’m never gonna call a rich person a poet. That’s never gonna happen. Rich people can’t do ANYTHING. That’s the whole point of being rich. You don’t work. You play. You make money. You’re not able to make anything else and let’s face it money makes itself. And when you get really bored and fed up and disgusted with yourself you become a philanthropist and meet other bored and fed up rich people who are disgusted with themselves in gatherings laced and spiked with just the right amount of poor people to keep life real.

RICH PEOPLE LIKE ART And it looks amazing in their clean houses. Rich people have great windows, even special galleries with controlled lighting. But it’s dead dead dead dead dead dead I was going to say but of course it’s not. The art on the walls of rich people is living money—what would be the sense of buying it if that were not the case? The talent of the artist is absolute of course—that is the leaf furled over the grub, the money, beneath—the leaf already detached from the tree, the leaf already being eaten by the grub which is after all the living thing, the thing that will propagate. That is what art is to rich people: money. The blazing thing on the wall is the fallen leaf. The living part of it all is money, the grub beneath. Impossible to believe that these clean walls are diseased. That something so cool could be corrupt.

YOU CAN’T BLAME THE RICH You can’t blame the rich. Everything’s become more conceptual: conceptual art, conceptual poetry, conceptual finance, why not? One reason why not maybe is that money is not art. When an artist takes a job running an art school and says, This is my art form now, beware. Their heart is not in art—of any kind—any more. Stockhausen described 9/11 as "the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos." Tisa Bryant says “When planes fly into the World Trade Center that’s not art, I’m sorry, but that’s not art.” Tisa Bryant is right. Because art, that most unnatural of all creatures, is human. That most sublime of all creatures is built for the human heart. Unlike the cosmos—and the greed of rich people—art thrives on limits. Of course, like the Nazis, the rich may lead blameless domestic lives.

WE NEED THE RICH We need the rich of course. We need to look after the rich. The richer the rich get the better things are for us, right? Anytime these bozos start talking about taking down the rich or taxing them I get so mad. The rich make jobs. The rich spend money. The rich employ people. You hurt the rich you hurt yourself right? Most of all we need the rich to dream.

—MAIRÉAD BYRNE

BRIGHTON POEM Think of stupid people – what the fuck? Some men there are love not a gaping pig But stuck it; last night my friend was pissed On. But blind are able to see anything in The world, whenever they want to see it In the future, a total bean to cup experience Lifts me from the trauma at the station, – A kiosk is a violent thing, hurling coffee At the other one that simply shouts a Thousand times at rush-hour. They are Absolutely trying to kill us and I am Wholly entrained into the gorgeous And imperial magnanimity of the Escalator entering my face, O speck Of truth you everywhere, a kiosk of Pure light, expanding in the world sung Diegetically. Your destiny, if you choose To flake it, is for your children To be born inside bad jokes about the Frappuccino and to be pissed on by the Sea, whose steely resolve is < 1% Of the total empire of harm that wants To kill you, where you will drown in The massive fight off Ship Street, you Will drown as the cops pull out, slowly You will raise your joke about the mocha To the level of a social critique so damning You will not even become punched, and You will punch yourself in the eye to make Clear that you are never going to die In the latencied disservice of a latte shitstorm Surrounded by your friends off Ship Street Beaming with the thrill of live violence Equal to the size of you ... #London’s home Less invade our streets; I wish wholeheartedly The homeless were an army and this were true.

—JOE LUNA

 

“I’m 65 years old!” she said to the cops as they chased her away. —LINH DINH

 

AND WHAT CLEAR STREAM

shit on my warm tender heart & make me vomit looking for love forever besmirch beat down to death in all the right places and drop curving up to stomach no dick in any angle acute and the skin around it with heat’s lack insensitive sparkling faces growth gluttony shitted babies & massive population extermination the hard flush’s favor and wet cheek drop falling yellowy tear apart to touch nothing flower urine tongue nothing crude acne ugh nothing 2 run from cum run from cum never touch one another only take issue hazel eyes smoke in vomit in each vast meadow riot in the pesticide worm heart weathervane tinkles on glorious porch sunlit punch memorize German vocabulary & Fahrt & shit

difficult the dream to kiss from difficult this distance from afar no word ‘kiss’ Fuck. flowing stream wiping cream weeping to make the daily moping art clean to love and dance and fuck à la mode bike tracks in the snow it seems that he creates a building declining & lip plump 2 eliminate dissident elements around my road kill & smell my rotting architecture delicious melt and if i am to survive my pulsating heart mortar from afar burst body to form new wholes en masse which is exactly to bomb the wheel to push down the existing landscape to make room for the job that is being down up blow i find what this druggingly recreational not high but cynical estimates 2 never preserve low civilization r yum the or the but yes the or the no but and so no but the bird that’s flown into the room yellow-breasted shut dictionary slut up cut and electrocuted til charred and unsinging

& y r u so beautiful? kissable your profile pictures tiny heart i gaping need your Fuck. Shove to mind read & Schwulsein ist nur eine andere Art zu lieben unvisible pantingly hungry don’t you kept-inside notice aside step Fuck. und Liebe ist die schönste Art, fuck glücklich zu sein & is the heart a grave invisible digital blow job at the atomic level intense proliferation of quotidian desire eyes my closed and to onto your face cum and shit I love you

  & why resist at all ‘open-shirtedly happy-trailedly possible’ is as equally valid as ‘fair game’ and the time between now and now is as unalterably simple as ‘the time after now’ when why protest at all is simply alterable: “Okay. Use the thing,” she said. & b 4 i can continue shitting in the most great sadness & everyone barebacks and gets and AIDS & and they all die and and you are alive allowed for and by the culture and the & the institutions and that and and cater to and you & sometimes the air is so marvelous overwhelmingly shit that you shoot your accustomed dove —Shove.

—KENNETH REVEIZ

» NOTES TOWARD LOVE « Post-Castration “The body as home, but only if it is understood that bodies are never singular, but rather haunted, strengthened, underscored by countless other bodies.” (Clare 11)

1. and suddenly / they set out running / after a face (Rossi 41) It is my twelfth birthday. We get in the car, as we do every year for my birthday, and drive out of our neighborhood—our white neighborhood where I am called “Twinkie.” “Twinkies” are yellow on the outside and white on the inside. I like the nickname because nobody else qualifies: it’s only mine. We drive out of town. I am going to Boston’s Chinatown where I can eat all the pepero, ojinguh, and kongnamul I want. There, within the smell of garlic, fish, fruity perfume, and exhaust from battered cars, I stare at pastel signs advertising the pertly flat noses and doll-like smiles of Asian girls. I am happy to be one of those girls, to be that pretty. The white boys back home are happy about it too. I can’t keep still in my seat. It is my twelfth birthday. For once both of my parents’ traditions, one Jewish and one Korean, are in agreement: I am a grown-up now. When my husband turned twelve, he became a grown-up too. He boarded a plane in Seoul, South Korea to attend a good American school, get a good career, and take good care of his parents. When I turn twelve, I am somewhere between Harrison Avenue and Oxford Place, beside a window display of codfish heads hung on blood-stained dowels which glitter with sticky silver scales. My skin pales as its mass expands and fattens with a bloat I attribute to white people.

What I am trying to say, and always fail to say completely, is that under the gaze of “pure” Asians, I am white. I am fat and ugly: their faces say so. I walk to the white section of the city. I am awkward and yellow: their faces say so.

2. To depart / is always to split apart. (Rossi 103) It is my twelfth birthday: I am a grown-up now, which is to say I know myself to be what I have always been—a couple broken vases of different colors scattered across a cheap linoleum floor. My husband and I have one thing, and only one thing, in common: we both turned twelve and looked around our bodies, our incoherence. We built cylinders around the broken pieces of us to somehow keep ourselves together. An unwanted and unexpected side-effect of this is that cylinders also prevent contact with others. We justify our building with the knowledge that there is no possibility of touch between a broken shard of glass and the softness of another’s skin anyway—unless you’re willing to see a little blood too. We’ve seen enough blood. But I still want. This: “the ghost that loss brings out into the open.” (Rossi xxvii)

3. so I might live with it / companion friend (Rossi 101) Today: “unstable and seems subject to echoes from the past, to synaesthesia as sight gives way to sound or smell and as one sense interweaves with another, to a combination of defensiveness against the harsh present and the protection of some particularly cherished fragment of the past.” (Said 52) Today: “unstable”: I paint my nails red, the stereotypical color of Asian women, and leave my apartment strung with Bob

  Marley posters, pictures of my Haitian-Korean-American family, and mandalas I paint as part of therapy for PTSD. I go to the bar for a whiskey on the rocks—the drink of American writers or so my fellow writers, who are much more American than I, tell me—with a friend named Tomas Rodriguez. Like a pair of disposable wooden chopsticks in a plastic bag with take-out lo mein, I feel especially “Asian” when I am with him even though the very fact of our friendship is decidedly not Asian. He is Puerto Rican and male. Today: “unstable”: my husband tells me that adjusting to a Korean return would be faster and easier than the adjustment to his arrival here. He conjectures, he imagines. It is safe to do so because there will never be an opportunity to prove otherwise. When he comes home after his last trip to Korea before the U.S. citizenship process would prevent another visit for at least four years, he tells me he wants to talk to a white girl who doesn’t make him feel different. I don’t tell him, as I do every other time, that I am not white. I let him tell me how much fun he had with his friends, how different their jobs and relations are from his own. I let him tell me how he misses having friends. His co-workers are too different to have over for a few beers. He doesn’t understand how I can be friends with people named Tomas. Eleven years later it turns out that I didn’t become a grown-up on my twelfth birthday after all. Neither did my husband. His flight across the Atlantic and my walk past a codfish display are not important. What is important happens today when he calls me in tears and I am here, writing to you and speaking with him. Today, in getting closer to here, closer to you, we become. Today: “unstable”: I write to you.

I finger: I stare: blur of threads, each woven into continual shift between disappearance to latency underneath and appearance to the overt surface. Like Cairo’s layers of history described by Said, each deteriorates at its own unique rate even as this duration is extended by its interconnection and proximity with the others. I follow the threads, its “promises of arrival” mirroring the streets of Cairo and Chinatown, “deferring the distant trajectory and supplying you with momentary relief.” (Said 342) What I am trying to say, and always fail to say completely: Even if demolished, my cylinder will never entirely disappear. Ash and dust remain, haunting, transforming to threads which will—I must believe this!—someday weave themselves to a cloth touched and touching. I imagine a cloth travelled like the stupa I climbed in Crestone, Colorado. Its spiraling ramp gradually moves the body forward without a sense of destination: there are no steps to count, instead a singular ramp whose shifting spirals obliterate the possibility of a final arrival for you never see the end. There is only the desert’s expanse. I repeat: There is no destination. There is no belonging. There is only “the indefinitely postponed drama of return,” (Said 179), the desire which is “our revenge . . . in spite of everything / in spite of circumstances without where when how.” (Rossi 55)

—MIN JUNG OH Notes:

4. So that the memory might overflow / like a full pitcher (Rossi 107) I have questions I cannot answer—can you? Do you know how to break a hand through the cylinder prison of difference, how to touch? How to be brave enough to let the fragments scatter where, perhaps, they could still themselves between your toes? How to live in a page like Said’s Cairo, “a city of innumerable adjustments and accommodations made over time; despite an equal number of provocations and challenges that might have pulled it apart, it seems to me as coherent as ever”? (339) Help me: I want to fold the tattered remnants of my rainbow striped hanbok into the pile of yoga pants and mini-skirts strewn across my bedroom floor. I want to walk among the “squatters and disorderly human traffic coursing through them.” (Said 339) I have given up on mummifying the ghosts of my body to silence, rather I want what is harder to visualize: for them to be “displaced without commemorative plaques, or allowed to crumble slowly, or left to co-exist with other competing histories.” (Said 341) There is too much arriving and leaving all at once for me to figure this out. I want to live in Said’s Cairo where the drops of memory “overflow” and seep into whichever crack of the dusty floor they happen to fall. Will you bring me there?

Clare, E. Exile and Pride. Cambridge: South End Press, 2009. Print. Rossi, Cristina Peri. State of Exile. Trans. Marilyn Buck. San Francisco: City Lights Press, 2008. Print. Said, Edward W. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000. Print.

RED ROCK

It’s like this place exists for people to prove their cameras exist. I’m listening to stage direction against a backdrop of awe. Two birds do an audible fly-by. I open my eyes and everything is black and white. I’m caked in iron oxide. There’s a shaman on a ledge in the distance and one or two crumpled forms at its feet. A tour guide has led some arthritic and broken types up here to bathe in the healing heights of the

5. and dream about return / — like Ulysses — / without ever returning. (Rossi 109) Today: “unstable”: I finger a pink silk scarf that my aunt mailed to me from her favorite department store in Pusan, South Korea.

vortex. I have more blood than I can imagine. I have zero respect for the highest level concept of the world.

—DAN HOY

 

—j/j hastain

 

» MERIDIANS « for and after Stephen Ratcliffe “And eventually I was writing poems that were not appropriated but sounded as if they were.” – Mairéad Byrne

37°49'N.122°19'W

vertical lines of beige and brown eucalyptus trunks to the right, vast expanse of green plane opposite, visible through corridor between grey-blue buildings boys in black eyeliner and tight dark jeans against green and magenta background of bougainvillea over cracked pavement and cigarette butts girl approaching, recalling other boys in black eyeliner against backdrop of warehouses in SoHo claimed by developers, recalling tight dark jeans in a climate void of eucalyptus trees white wisps in otherwise clear sky, sky-blue, sun not visible from corridor between buildings, long diamond leaves making overlapping oval shadows on cracked pavement

(What doesn’t it create, this lack of exchange, girl noticing other human activity in the courtyard onto which the corridor—smelling of eucalyptus—opens, recalling New York City and the boys there who are like the boys in Northern California but even more conscious of the way their clothes hang, yes, it is possible, noticing but not speaking, walking into the grey-blue building, up to your office, not yet knowing the heft of the stack of papers she would create, copies of copies of new versions with the slightest of revisions, a time before learning that everyone in the East Bay writes at least one poem about the fragrant trees, a repetition creating more than déjà vu, uncoordinated collaboration, collective construction of regional cliché?)

»«

40°47'N.73°58'W

reflection in the bodega windows, empty morning bus stop mirrored in front of grey clouds punctuated by white clouds punctuated by small grey-blue sky patches, mangy orange cat barely visible on other side of glass girl exiting adjacent apartment building, noting dry cold air and wet cold sludge collected in basin of handicap ramp from sidewalk to street, the M60’s turn onto Amsterdam

  musician in Oakland penning lyrics about cheating girlfriend, subtle literary critical analysis of Middlemarch interspersed Morningside landscape, melting snow encasing melting garbage, light entering vertical through airshafts framing sky/brownstone, cloud piece and patch

(How do you separate yourself from the result, the need for a result, images accreting out of concern for the preservation of images, language languishing on the surface of images, language separating from the physical out of concern for language, language returning to narrative out of concern for audience reception, audience returning to the page out of concern for dialogue, for direction of construction, for quality control of result, to enforce the existence of result?)

»«

41°53'N.87°38'W nearly straight, nearly horizontal arc of horizon, deep blue with palette knife of black, half-knife of green, Lake Michigan arching against sunset, seductively orange-magenta smog evening, girl sitting on side-facing bench, noting traffic on Lakeshore Drive, recalling deeper briny blue of Elliott Bay, Spring Hill unfolding in winding streets to meet kelp-catching rocks mother of one, widow of one facing recalled bay, inventorying list of requirements, contrasting with list of everything Central Time Zone has--and lacks, cf saltwater smooth concrete curve off drive, bare deciduous branches breaking orange from orangemagenta from yellow stripes and encroaching horizontal grey

(Of late nothing but writing letters to the dead, I have a collection of dead, you know this, but for the last letters and letters the one dead, and he writes back but in pennies—found coins, dimes, a few nickels, two quarters, and once when I planned to give up, a wheat penny— these are not overheard utterances but urgent correspondence, what is the right way to live, Please Respond.)

»«

39°87'N.75°24'W rain-snow mix visible against brown vertical windows dividing long, low grey-white buildings east from west, triangular with truncated corner expanse perpendicular to divided rectangular prisms, beige weather-beaten grass with black sediment patches

  man reading One Hundred Years of Solitude on R1 toward Suburban Station, stopping and noticing the difference between the silver Adidas logo and silver luggage rack overhead girl waking tangled in sheets not her own but alone, noticing trail of sweat in groove between shoulder and neck, and the dream, a bed at 87°38'W covered in clean laundry to pack slice of greencharcoal river along road to Manayunk, diffused grey light of overcast sky revealing orange-rust gutters over brown-red brick row houses, backdrop for black sediment on plowed snow (Forget integration, how else to find the incisive predawn sensation, the brief sinking into the is of the was, nausea indicating the lack of language and image obscuring the this; how else but to speak from one part to another—I have given up hope of integration—but to speak, to exchange, except to appropriate the learned language appropriated at each juncture? Why are we speaking if not to provoke speech in return—is this the right way?—is there a speaker genuinely wanting to speak alone? There I was facing rows of desks in the urban landscape and the dwellers of that landscape, who maybe in other circumstances collected eucalyptus seed pods for their children, with or without fathers still present, but in this one threw paper airplanes and insults, hushed me for the sake of in-class cellphone calls, and I climbed on a desk and yelled into the yelling and thought I could create silence, shrilled I’m not doing this for my health to a roomful old enough to have begotten me—can you imagine? And for what?)

»«

47°39'N.122°18'W

Duwamish River curving north, east, south, east, west, clear blue sky illuminating green banks, tall grass and Oregon grape, blackberry, rufous-sided towhee calling on overhanging branch two sets of two bikes taking turns passing and being passed, one rider repeating to himself inexplicably I Corinthians 13, “For now we see through a glass, darkly” Ford Thunderbird careening down West Marginal, seventeen-year-old driver not finishing the phrase, breaking through barrier, ricocheting off low concrete wall wisp of cloud in clear sky, blackberry vines filling open space between barrier bars, morning glory in cyclone fence, mockingbird calling as white-crowned sparrow (What is it like to be a father and still be a father, and father a new generation with a generation that is yours and then a newer generation with a generation that is not yours? What was the distance from side to side, barrier to fence where the blackberry vines have now been killed off, Agent Orange, so I am told I have not visited the site although the time approaches rapidly—what is the angular distance from his circle to my plane of reference, to yours, the range of exposures within which we might produce a print of satisfactory quality, my freedom of action, his, his taker’s? Ever yours, )

—TERESA K. MILLER

 

From DECK OF DEEDS

El Sirviente It’s been a busy week for the public servant. On Monday, he planned for the Three Gorges presidential tour of China in the spring. On Tuesday, he lowered the black curtains on the International Labor Organization’s “Respiratory Diseases” yearly report and let Canada’s visiting Tar Sands rep take an impromptu whizz in the Oval Office. On Wednesday, he fired an “over sensitive” staffer after a department meeting. On Thursday, he hired a staffer he met at a Lithium Industries mixer. On Friday – in the morning, he agreed to lowering minimum standard requirements for Hazardous Waste cleanup while visiting Mexico; later that day, he fired an “over inquisitive” staffer – in an elevator – before a meeting; in the evening, he promoted the Lithium Industries staffer – by e-mail. On Saturday, he promised to limit labor union “influence” at the Commerce Club in Boston; he then flew back to DC, laid a little turd in behind a lavish wall curtain in the West Wing, and then walked over to the East Wing to direct his staff to wring out as much “working language” as can be had from the word freedom; finally, he ended up at the Dominican Republic’s embassy, fighting for a Free Trade Zone late into the night. Busy week for the public servant.

La Palabrita Your gut feeling was right. The word, Liberty, didn’t actually go visit an old friend from the French Revolution last month. It’s having a fling – with two silver-haired MP’s from the Netherlands. It met them on a train during its trip through Europe last year. They got really drunk on ready-made anti-immigrant rhetoric, and stumbled into Frankfurt station in Germany. The three went monopoly media hopping, and ended up amnesiating (or, amnesiacking) out – in a booming techno club. The three woke up tangled in each other’s lexical matrices in a toilet bowl. And now, here’s Liberty, in another toilet bowl, in Manhattan, about to announce its candidate’s candidacy while its candidate clamps its candidacy in its candidate’s candidacy.

El Diablito “Diablito,” they affectionately call him at Family of Labor reunions. He doesn’t look like a diablito at all really; he looks more

like a sleek young barracuda. However you cut it, he’s 100% primate. Over the last six months, he’s developed a strong attraction to scrawny, even slightly decomposed legislation, legislation “clearly” below his “game.” It happened at a corny Marti Gras event in his medium-sized jobdepressed town – everyone was in masks. Sum of it is, at around 3:00 a.m., he found himself gagging on a Wall Street-Labor Cooperation bill that stretched his mouth in all directions, seriously challenging his gag reflex. He – enjoyed it. “Diablito” – likes’em fully earmarked now.

El Alumno “Worker behavior-based accident.” That’s the phrase his intriguing new older friend likes him to rhapsodize on. And that’s just what this very serious young corporate industrial hygienist gives him. And lot’s of it. He met him six months ago at an airport bar during a layover on the way back from an Abba comeback concert tour in Orange, California. Never in a million years could he have imagined getting entangled into a toxic chemical reaction chain with another alumni from MIT. It happens mainly on the mesas of Ciudad Juarez, in half kilometer-wide lithium sulfur tubs. The young hygienist enjoys the challenge of allegorizing the letting loose of a whole day’s worth of run-off into the neighborhoods in the valley below, and his intriguing new friend is relieved by the re-directed torrent of guilt, shame, and depression that engulfs somebody else’s every sensation. The only other alumni who know about these lucrative enterprises are his intriguing new friend’s two other friends (brothers) who’ve got a thing for Tea Bags dunked in brackish waters. Party party party.

La Meditadora The heart rate spiking, the extremities of her fingers and toes electrified, the eyes popping wide open…nothing makes her feel more alive than having the phrase “Core American Values” toss her around, having “its way” with her, the whole of her being as a plaything for its mad desire. The blue star-studded envelope containing the phrase appeared in her mailbox at work. She slipped it into her red-wavy-lines-onwhite purse for later viewing in the Boeing 737 restroom. Now, with jittery hands, she slowly opens it. Her breathing halts for a moment. It’s the first time she’s felt herself in that compressed, eternal-seeming moment.

  Suddenly, as if commanded by a ghost, she goes down on all fours in the cramped stall and raises her lowermost spine up high while arcing her uppermost spine backwards as far it can go. In that position, she tunes out everything in her mind except for “Core American Values” and her hard breathing muffled by the Boeing 737’s twin jet engines at cruising speed.

genie bottle.” Also, they’ve since switched from twill & graph paper pattern wear to modest platinum leopard pants and chunky-monkey muscle tees at headquarters. They’re not “casualties,” they’re casualty makers and shakers.

Ten minutes go by, and as the feeling of fainting increases to a fevered pitch, she slams her face into the stall door ten times to bring herself around. With lingering pain in her supmorbital foramen and zygomatic skull bones, she relaxes for the rest of the flight until landing in Lansing, MI, where she’ll resume her life as a porous and permeable life form who works in a synchronized manner alongside identically porous and permeable life forms across the globe.

Los Entusiastas This has gone pretty far, and it’s likely to go further. Quite literally nothing else does it for them anymore - they have to feel fully airborne and free falling to the ground – to feel anything at all. How did this deep-seated understanding of body mass vs. gravity evolve? When their Corporate Assets Chief finally let them control the main console a few nights at the Federal Aviation Center’s Jet Lander Simulator last year, these barristers were absolutely smitten with aerospace near-miss disasters. They suddenly felt internally chaotically frisky, suddenly more the captains of their primal instincts. They wore mostly twill and tight button-down long sleeves as they depressed & released literally hundreds of buttons per session. One night, unbeknownst to them as to why, they decided to wear fireman pants, but sheared-off, in the form of a kilt, cut just above the knees. As they pre-sequenced what seemed like just another routine flight from La Guardia to Ronald Reagan International, they suddenly sensed an intense heavy gaze fall onto their faces from across the hangar. No sooner than they looked up to see who it was, than they sensed a huge stream of piss dropping onto their “pants.” They immediately (electro-mechanically) deployed a towel from under the consoles and began to frantically wipe themselves off. As the wiping came to a close, they raised their heads only to find the man with the deep-set eyes and oddly angular Hollywood plastic-looking dark hair carving out their skulls with his gaze. They felt an additional drops sprinkle onto their mixed up attire. The rest is history. They’ve grown to love the combination of charred, “preferred guest” lawyerly aroma coupled with the light, sprizzy scent of liquid nitrogen foam and polyethylene anti-incendiary tarps. They all play hard at “trap the union health & safety department into a

El Financiero This much needed break from visiting his new boss’s extended family over the holidays has taught him some important things: Small amounts of his own vocabulary (even though there’s no such thing) on the tips of several strangers’ tongues can be rather “attractive.” Being “pregnant” with “the reality” of “current conditions” means you can’t get “pregnant” again (he knew this before, of course, but not like this). Stepping into a high-end, after-trading hours aggro-male bar wearing a black bow tie and spaghetti-thin suspenders during a financial meltdown at two in the morning at the beginning of a new quarterly earning period gets you a limited amount of attention. Booking an extended stay at a five-star hotel in Dubai in advance of a congressional inquiry using a moneygram from Aruba – is nearly impossible to trace.

La Observadora Feeling the initial jolts of an explosive, subterranean social transformation is something that she lives for, especially when the jolts are perceived to erupt from nearly frozen bystanders’ warm, pulsating bodies. First, their emotions brighten to a maximum luminosity, spectacular accidents in thought causing intention to splinter into multiple paths of action; next, their ideals deflate and tuck hard against actual lived conditions; after that, their sense of public vanity dissipates, a scattering plume of smoke to nowhere; finally, their dogged dedication to reason clamps its straining claws into a rapidly unfolding speculative science of a just-around-corner “reality.” The jolts come in a series of flickering dream images, sending waves of recovered historical memory into her sense of The Now. She adores this new “little demon” friend more than anything else in the world. The feeling is mutual.

—RODRIGO TOSCANO

 

» MEMORANDA « from MUSIC FOR PORN

• Boarding a bus to tour the devastation, a spontaneous surge of meaning irrupts inside the grid. A blackening corpuscle, an indecipherable glyph, ruin lurks deep in the bowels, my poem’s stupid plan, a wasting syndrome, this place without history. Yr body without my mouth, it’s mere environment, but with my tongue it becomes territory. Fingers rim whose feint like tears. A stain without limit, his dead weight adds a lot of drag to our lateral glide. Moving in this halo of shame, the love of a militiaman, democracy’s soul, a thing that fails to happen, suspended in this mindless blow, incalculable interval where we almost make contact with the present. Singing in the fault of our temporal divide, who will have been here to hear this. Mon petit soldat, mon semblable yr touch makes me other than the meat I am. Yrs can be the soft part, a loaf’s spongy middle, a place we have no name for. With this in mind, after removing blindfolds and cuffs, I push the bodies into a canal before joining other members of the unit waiting in nearby trucks, ready to return to the post. The fact that they don't have access to the river nor the authority to dig their own wells hasn’t been explicitly mentioned, and while conspicuous signs do trickle thru the wire mesh, it’s not enough to derail the program. Remains erase the ones whose names we’ll never sing. This decay of sound, the way capital wiggles, a worm in my stool. Thick description replaces the self with rumors of a clean interior. Wire and cranes, rebar and concrete, it’s all been gathered after the war for repackaging. Just watch me disinfect in creepy mist. Patches of heather here and there, thistle, columbine, and rose, such dreams of beauty blanket space. Reducing appetite to forced withdrawal, we marvel at the thing’s capacity, sublime, this magnitude of failing grip. Please, touch me here again. Consider these pared down phrases, how they fail to register the erosion of system-wide reference, while the recrudescence of all that remains identical with itself binds me in thrall to so many small conspiring forces, like steel, like corn. No doubt, you can compose an image of the damage by extrapolating freely from the glossy surface of my private’s pretty face. That’s when his rectum opens, my cavernous abode, proverbial wound, inaudible diphthong in a dead Afghani’s impossible name.

• Consonant with the rules of self-regulation, I keep turning over the same old ground. Just miswrote “police speech situation,” thinking about our language experiments, how they succeed inside all the current contracts. There goes that stump again. Belongs to a man of action, a real mensche who’d cut the throat of a terrorist with box-cutters. The feel of his balls in my mouth is pretty hot, and his theory of agrarian development in the South is even hotter. Price packaging beefs up the social force of time. But one can hardly call this political literature, at least not in the real sense of the word political. At best, my lines draw on a few baked ideas and plot their paths sort of radial-like, tracing the movement of sugar and corn, raw cane imported from Hawaii, beets from the peninsula, recycled steel from China for

  ships, massive ships, big battle ships, hugest facility on the whole Pacific Rim. And while the good life would negate the conditions that make my poems possible, I get off on high-performance synthetics, the body being this imaginary whole, like the space of property and money. From gantry cranes to scaffolding, just assault the system with hokum, coming on junk investments, dreaming of dressage. The way they burn the bodies, on certain days, when there’s a gentle breeze coming from the north, what sweet odors move me. If y’re quiet, you might hear the war moving thru every sound I make. Like his cremains, unidentifiable chips of bone ground to a fine powder for making the paste. It doesn’t matter what you believe, this being the thing’s one great achievement. There’s a strong signal coming from a water hole just west of the great pacific garbage patch where the effluent of our consumption, draining with my humours deep in hollowed seascape, feeds back into fat. No common eye, the plastic gyre itself, so Archimedean, and from whose withdrawn point there emanates everything we can’t perceive, the void in which it all hangs. Being is a value-slope, a residue of aura hardening inside refurbished Gulf War mat obstruction, now used for detecting low flying drug smuggling planes and immigrant bodies crossing in the East, the way this memo moves, from foreskin to forethought, overstimulation falling prey to easy recognition.

• Failing to arouse what can’t be apprehended, wandering narrow corridors in search of better aid, my fantasies revolve around soldiers and migrant workers, whose terminus defines all movement in advance. Patches of heather here and there, thistle, columbine, and rag. Fondling these pared-down phrases, this report registers a breakdown in systemwide reference, another turn in the spiral of error, what these memoranda perpetuate. Slipping spirit into bone, a counterfeit resolve, the poem marks a starless place where nothing collides, my own body having become the scene of off-gassing and expelled energy as the grid bears down on every sound I’ll never make. Singing thru a soldier’s arms, I find myself mysteriously altered, unwilling to kill the gesture that might exceed what histories penetrate my form. After all the banks go down what hardened shapes, what starry eyes I lose the power to distinguish myself from those whom I referred to only a moment before as indifferent to the generic malfeasance. Again, I ask, who can remain the context of one’s own ecstasy. The writing betrays every effort, a severed limb, or rump. Returning thus transfigured to that scene, I induce alternate visions, eating trace particles, whatever precipitates in powders and gels along the wooded edge, barnacle encrusted borderland, where the vehicle stalls for an unknown period during which we wait to be subsumed by local controls, absorbed by the fluctuating value of timber and steel. Just crush the debris into a mealy paste until you become clear, yr body numinous, a phantom abandoned in a lifeless flow. Upon noticing fine spores colonizing the glass still moist with yr breath, I reach for baggie and tweezers and gather a specimen as if to contain the thing’s triumphant reach, or capture my own capitulation. An otherwise smothered voice calls me thru the broken valves. Between equal rights, force decides. What surplus shatters every frame, it’s even more devastating when feeling very far away, as this feeling of no feeling fails to correspond to any of the cataloged registers or moods. Afraid of this paralysis, I flee the purity of my own spasm, incorporated blank dissolve, pushing these figures of a self thru 63-grade ore, exquisite nonsite of my polis.

—ROB HALPERN

 

NOVEMBER RAIN

Syntax thaws. Ices back up. This is Paris. I think it must be a cloud although usually sun doesn’t strike

I knew it was no dream. The pull. The edge. Slope

outside my window until early afternoon a patch of hemlock hedge glows.

of flat gray roof somewhere in Ramallah

There is no beholder. Whoever stands before the canvas doesn’t exist.

when I woke.

Nothing sits upon this table. So much depends upon. Though there’s probably something under it.

Closure. Isn’t. Nothing ends. Everything begins. Spills, leaks, seeps, overflows uncontained. And there you are. Where my shadow cast itself it looked black. And glistened. Like as not a passage from Milton. No. Dante. Vinyl. Or ice. A lifetime almost everyday romance washed away. An ordinary splendor remains. In the middle if it wasn’t raining I could explain. A biblically green valley leads us to a cave somewhere in limestone country along a stream bed dry now or whose waters run underground. Great things are done not by jostling in the street. But when men and mountains meet. Give this story to the future. Pronouns abandon.

Awake hours before dawn. Wanting what’s in mind gone. Now. Who are you? Have to learn all over again. But can’t. Or won’t. Or wait. Anticipation no more than an event horizon. The edge of what is comes from. This dream not mine: He held out a hand. A band on his index finger: “Years from now you’ll know the meaning of this.” There is the morning and there is the evening and the day in between. Every moment that’s never been happens then with you. See myself in the bathroom mirror. Weeping inconsolably. Love: if not lost then risked. Romance disjunct. I am fifteen. I heard myself say: I think I can handle this thing with Sean.

  It wasn’t. Then it was. Then not. Forget time and space.

Didn’t know where I was. Hardly mattered.

Remember your cat. I hear myself say:

All solids melt into air. All holy made profane.

Pattern and color remain. Dream is all the time.

To sit in the room alone and silent. And bear this.

My aching heart, speak or break. Don’t prevent my going

This is the darkness that surrounds us and we must learn to encompass.

or talk behind my back. When the feather is set on the scales

This is the wealth that fills my hands and slips through my fingers

be fair, be light. Weigh no more nor less than

and falls to the ground. Sparrows flock. Point a winter text.

my walking into green fields. By noon this morning’s melted snow: rhinestones uncovered by the wind in the leaves. This isn’t I love you nor I hate you but what the eye tells the heart

Milky light. A bit of winter sky. Bare branches. Evergreens. Is it Prospero I’m thinking of? Who puts away his books. Or breaks his wand?

on the road through the woods. Yesterday. As far away as this morning. You. Sooner than the road in this wood.

Here it is almost November. Excruciatingly green. (Primavera.) Cataracts? Or a brain tumor?

How to taste this? And listen. Each cluster’s upmost petal. The pale dash of green. Vibrant. Delicate. The native rhododendron blooms about a month after the purple. Without William Carlos Williams

Here am I. This place. See. It’s beauty impossible to recall in absence. Somehow its presence dies down or goes out like an unattended flame when unfaced. It’s a sea now. No more one thing after another. They float. My heart. What’s dear. A wave.

this poem wouldn’t. Objective correlative. Negative capability. Empedocles hurls himself into Etna off a flight Christmas Eve to Los Angeles. It begins to rain. Spent the whole day reading. Occasionally looked up.

And ear. As in “annunciation.” As in “enunciation.” What arrives there on its way elsewhere. Should I even say so? This was a couple months ago.

  Early that morning. Before dawn. A blessing received.

from HERA

CALF SET CLAY FOG

A gift bestowed. A secret held. Wordlessly. In the dark. Though you are gone, they aren’t. Snow falls. Rain. Sunlight. Then melts. Around the bend in the dark a car doesn’t come. But moonlight. My father left an algebra when he died. A room

i could go to the highway & buy some roses & leave them on the doorsteps of that woman who checked digital time engaged with the Forensics Eddie gleaned from the Sony Walkman he rewound & he was Cold, Not a Survivor, from the malaise of this island where he gave me a loaf of bread & said only Middle America can chalk the roadway

never gone into again. Who comes there * to wait? Among the x’s & y’s? A’s & b’s? Something said during the day. “I want to die.” Thinking out loud. A sonnet? Can’t recall the color these chairs were. Celadon? Now pale mustard. An old man throws his ceramic pillow at a rat. It cracks opens. (Pillow not rat.) Out falls a note. Lines about plum blossoms. Here are these lines I wrote in love with you.

Deconstruct body the heart market a bleached test-bed check verifications squandered bank statements the boy pulls his tired trophy up the hill & the girl meanders, a Stockholm Syndrome, her glory in those things non-deterministic today everything is paradoxical a home-made economy, i’ve lifted you over the bonfire so you can feel the economy exponentially, this glittery economy burning

*

It’s not that I’m out of love with you.

molecular someone else lurks sex, otherness, Viral Judgment our lives wrestled over resentment i grabbed his hand & headed for the laboratory where there was an imaginary line between the area of lyric & my subtle disposition to continue biological law

It’s that you aren’t there. Where are the edges? Were they only illusion? Allusions. No more than the horizon’s curve.

—THOMAS MEYER

—DEBRAH MORKUN

 

FINDLATER where y live is a ruin w/ a perplexed edge – pinch – no a gale can't unlash its tethered corners or howl pull away from the scent these days, it's mainly the first born that gets gelded dense as a hall wielding a border stench a retina soaking in a general ocean share an ageless whisky & apologise for yr hunk of agency / yr pieced up legacy a speculum for tastlessness & waste made picturesque by parliament of rat – to build a team mass fat & take infertility for a tonic, for ceremony mark on concave wombs collapsed into tapestry – we love to hear wd love to hear from yr experience letters to hir holiness sieve yr lips / mask yr painted sistren up cragged & castled shores white by nesting or wave circled by patience – left alone w/ a bow fiddle leaning & o the o the wind & o that's not the fortress that's its garage that's where it parks its horsepower where bone comes home to groom & grow thro ground a new graffiti laid waste by thems great-men-o-history say-o th rain & th detached wing curtaining your daughter w/ bow shaft as her gender is unaddressing laced by privation – sell a cell till y are yr own enemy shot thro w/ 'u kn wht i thnk i'm my own othr??!!?' y kn it bubbled up as a shove & a skylark & now

i can only think & say th dreadful riddles! – wisely impounded, unleashed & sunk deep in the unclear sea – rain like a cymbal, a repeatedsingalong round friendly fires as sensible as a ball bouncing above a ballad (another line spread about by southerners) – travel by chest plate used as a season pass for wind / rain / chafing yr libertys

—POSIE RIDER

PUTTING THE PO BACK IN POETRY

What follows is a gonzo account of my first visit to the newly constructed $20,000,000.00 headquarters of the Poetry Foundation in Chicago. This is also the first dispatch of the Ellipsis Group; the stoned dirtbag children of Hakim Bey, CADA, the MC5, and the Diggers. Our aim is to blur the lines between poetics, journalism, and direct action, to actually explore and dance on the threshold of art and life. Until that night at the Poetry Foundation, the Ellipsis Group (which is in all likelihood a fake name) was nothing more than half-asleep conversations between lovers, stammering lucid declamations at looming kudzu covered tree giants from the roaring bed of a freight train, and a few bizarre artifacts left in the lobbies of the Trump Tower and on the steps of the Chicago Stock Exchange. The events of September 8th, which resulted in the Poetry Foundation demanding the arrest of our comrade, proved to be a catalyst that has coagulated our group. Ellipsis (a.k.a. Croatoan) is imaginary. It is a work of fiction, which spore-radically erupts into the Real. There was no plan when I arrived at the Poetry Foundation headquarters, which I guess most readers haven’t seen yet. You can get a pretty good idea from the photo on the web page: it pretty much looks like an apple store with some shrubbery. “The home of poetry” . . . ipoetry . . . clean . . . different. I dunno. It’s a really sterilized and rather anxiety-inducing space—which is funny, because this monstrosity was funded by a $100,000,000.00 grant from Lilly Pharmaceuticals, manufacturers of the emotion deadening drug known as Prozac—but it’s perfect for poets that love to rub crotches with each other while giving knowing glances. It’s a glass building with sight lines of all points from any point (except for the corporate offices, to which access is blocked by beefcake security goons wearing secret service-style garb—no earpieces though— probably no need due to the panoptic architecture) which is really

  from Iowa said is funny or cleaver or interesting while you look over his shoulder to see if you can make eye contact with a more important poet or board member across the courtyard in the other room, hoping you’ll have the opportunity to sniff their crotch and they yrs. It’s really good for that. Plus so much free shit! You wldn’t believe it. One girl was carrying a giant platter of grapes that made her hunch over so much she had to share the weight with another worker (who was also probably some eager creative writing undergrad)—a truly Romanesque scene. They were giving away buttons that said words like “boredom” on them. You cld stand in line to get yr cards read in case you wanted to get in touch with yr inner spiritualist. Best of all though, of course, was the free wine. But you cld only drink their kool-aide—no outside beverages and no smoking anywhere on the premises. Anyhow, as I mentioned earlier, I showed up without any real plan thinking that I’d be there solo, just taking notes for future activities; drink as much wine as possible, case the joint, and sew the seeds of chaos on a person-to-person basis. However, I soon noticed Stephanie Dunn, my friend and main partner in trouble making, rabble rousing, and being on the scout. We met, as a matter of fact, at this bougie art gallery in Wicker Park which was showing Ginsberg’s photos and Burroughs’s paintings, and Stephanie threw up a tag on the pristine white wall that read: “’Lets Play Wilm Tell’/ Blood and Invisible Apple on Whitewashed Drywall/ by: William Burroughs/ 23232323 pesos” next to an already existent wine stain on the wall. I didn’t play it cool enough afterward and ended up taking the fall for that one. But funilly enough, the botoxed tanningbed-dwelling gallery owner was actually cooler than the friendly folks at the Poetry Foundation. The gallery owner only threatened to call the cops. The Poetry Foundation went the whole nine yards and finally figured out how to put the po back in poetry. Stephanie and I were the main organizers of a Mayday night parade this year, which also resulted in her arrest. The two of us have a slightly complicated romantic history and hadn’t talked in a while, so I was really happy to see her there as we had dreamed up plans for the Poetry Foundation involving a bunch of pigeons. When I saw her, she was wearing a plastic pig nose and stomping on one of the plastic wine glasses. I walked up and gave the glass another good stomp and said, “Hello.” We both started laughing because we knew there was gonna be trouble. Almost immediately, there was a tap at my elbow. A woman—probably not much older than me, but dressed in the traditional shawl and expensive-looking dress of her people (i.e., middle-aged bougie waspie ladies)—did that stern whisper thing, but she’s still smiling in this weird way and adding these inflections like she’s asking questions at intermittent points in her sentencecs . . . dig what I’m saying? . . . and she says in this voice: “I just wanted to let you know(?) that we spent $300,000.00 on this floor(?) and that you guys should maybe be a little bit more respectful of that(?) . . . soooooo . . .” At first I was silent because I was about to have an aneurism in response to the litany of things I wanted to say, but thankfully the lady chimes back in like she’s trying to smooth things over or something, like “Okay, now that you know how baller the Poetry Foundation is, we can be friends!” and so she says, “You two know about the Greek wedding tradition, right? Like with stomping on the glass? You know? like My Big Fat Greek Wedding? Have you guys seen that?” Steph replies, “Fuck Marriage!” and I reply, “Oh, that’s interesting, I always knew that as a Jewish custom . . . but that's interesting too—perhaps even more interesting— because Ezra Pound played such a huge role in the founding of this organization and (I leaned in to do the smiling whisper thing) we all know abt pound’s anti-Semetic streak. (I know, low blow, but I cldn’t help myself. My head was on fire.) Maybe that wld explain why y’all are being such facists about the floor.” The next thing I know, the lady was gone. Stephanie had disappeared, and I found

myself spinning in a circle shouting in my best vaudmar voice (vaudeville-weimar): "Yr attention please! Yr attention please! Ahhhem . . . I have been informed that the floor we are standing on at the moment cost $300,000.000! This is a thrice six-figure floor! I wld like everyone to try to imagine $30,000.00—or anything, for that matter, but preferably American currency, and multiply that thought by ten!” The Poetry Foundation has really great acoustics. I felt another tap on the shoulder. “Thank you,” and then to the lady again, “Yes? Can I help you?” Apparently, my announcement was a bit tacky. “If you don’t stop this, I’m afraid we are going to have to ask you to leave.” “And if I were to decline yr invitation?” “Don't make me make you leave.” “Don’t make me play Joker to yr Batman.” She didn't laugh. She took a breath like she was going to say something, but just walked away instead. I went to get more free wine, hoping that they weren’t spiking my drinks with some experimental brainwashing pharmaceutical that would cause me to blankly recite Billy Collins poems and pathologically schmooze. I was snapped out of my paranoia when I ran into Jenifer Karmen, a friend of mine and a really committed leftist poet from Chi. She runs the Red Rover reading series, teaches ESL poetics workshops on the southside, and works with a free education collective similar to the one my friends and I run on the westside. “Hello Brooks! I'm surprised to see you here . . . though I can’t say that I’m surprised you’re the one who was making the racket in the other room. Good for you. Isn’t this place insulting? It’s really funny that they decided to build this thing on Superior Street of all places. I can’t wait to read this O’Hara poem. It has a koros of frogs and I think there are some lines of the poem that will make these people feel a bit foolish.” “Right on Jen, I can’t wait. Hopefully they’ll let me stick around long enough to hear it.” “Here take this. You can be a part of the koros of frogs! . . . and feel free to make any additions or alterations you wish.” “Thanks Jen. This’ll be really fun.” There is a photograph taken by some greyhair who was wearing a fashion kefia of Jen and I posing with the fist and middle finger. I got another glass of wine and walked back towards the room where the reading and hummus and grapes were being held. My progress was blocked by one of the aforementioned beefcake security guys who had just been talking to the aforementioned lady that I offended. The beefcake said that they weren’t letting anybody else in so as not to disturb the reading. I told him that that was cute but, as it so happened, I was supposed to participate in one of the readings and it would probably be more disturbing if one of the performers was absent. I showed him the piece of paper that Jen had given me, and he begrudgingly let me through. As soon as I got through the door, to my delight, one of the readers was about to recite “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island.” This is one of my favorite poems, and I think most readers are aware of the controversy surrounding this poem (see Sous Les Pavés no. 1) involving Kent Johnson, Richard Owens, and the strange conspiracy bent on keeping the true authorship of the poem a secret. When the reader announced that he would be reading this poem by Frank O’Hara, I piped up and said, “I recently heard that this poem may have been written by Kenneth Koch.” The guy scoffed, “Actually, its an O’Hara poem. At least that’s what it says in this collected O’Hara that I’m holding.” “Oh . . . it was published posthumously, right?” “Uhm . . . yeah . . . I think so.” “And it was first read at O’Hara’s wake by Koch, whom practically no one had heard from since he disappeared after taking O’Hara’s typewriter and all his poems after he was killed by that dunebuggy.” A murmur set in as we heckled back and forth for a bit before he began the poem, which was, by the way, a very good reading of it. Then it was Jen’s turn to read. There was another guy reading the poem with her, and another lady who held up cards when it was time for the different koros parts. It came my turn to read, and I did (I wish I had the lines in front of me) and then said, “And

  since extemporization was encouraged, I’d like to add, in case anyone missed the earlier announcement, that the floor beneath our feet cost $300,000.00; wouldn’t it have been a poetic gesture if we found ourselves standing on a dirt floor because the $300,000.00 had been used to start literacy and poetics programs in the Chicago ghettos.” A few awkward chuckles echoed through the room, but my suggestion was mostly met with silence. The expensive air, as it were, had been sucked out of the room. Jen rocked a little solidarity fist, and the other fellow reading with her said, “that's actually a really good point.” There were a couple other thumbs up, etc., but for the most part people were giving me the death stare. Jen finished the poem, and I decided that it was time to go. I went to say tootaloo to Stephanie, who was talking to some middle-aged dude with a patchwork ethnic-looking jacket and rocking a beret. “I’m talking to this guy because he’s been on the prowl all night and looks like he’s trying to look like something, and I like that. I’m going to get him to try and do something embarrassing. But yr going so soon? I’m just getting started. Nice speech by the way.” With that she just pounced on me, and we started making out rather raunchily. We just sort of went with it until one of the goons came up and gave the shoulder tap and informed us that “PDAs” are not allowed in the Poetry Foundation. Stephanie told him how funny she thought it was that there is no kissing allowed in Poetry’s house. At this point we had no choice but to escalate the situation. We started rolling around on the opulent floor (which does feel very luxurious on the skin, I must admit), articles of clothing were removed, the pig nose became involved at one point—I don't really know what happened. At one point, we were surrounded by the security guards. They really wanted us to leave. We both agreed that “we wld prefer not to,” but I think the reference was lost on the goons. Once we felt we’d

had our fun, we got up to leave. As much as they wanted us to get out of there, the goons were now insisting that we stay, saying that the police were on the way and trying to get us to follow them into a back room. I told them that I’d fallen for that one before and that I’d prefer to leave through the front door, like all the other guests. One of the goons put his hand on my shoulder and said, “I haven't had to do this since Iraq.” I’m not really sure what he meant, but it sounded threatening. After this point, things got kinda chaotic, and Stephanie and I were doing a kind of levelheaded demonstrator/crazy demonstrator thing. We got out the door, but the goons were trying to detain us. I slipped past them and went around the corner to smoke a cig in case I didn’t get to have another one that evening. I hoped that Stephanie cld give them the slip as well. Next thing I knew, the pigs arrived and they had Stephanie in handcuffs. I tried to persuade one of the cops (who oddly enough wrote me a ticket earlier that week for having a beer by the lake) to get his partners to let her go. He pretended like he was going to try, but didn’t. I talked to Stephanie early the next morning after she got out of the pricinct. She has a court date for “disturbing the peace” (which is a charge used to indicate that someone was having a really good time) and had to spend a really shitty night in jail. She told me that the pigs were watching porn at top volume while she was handcuffed to the wall and making really creepy comments towards her. So that was that. Rumble in the Po Foundation round one: institutionalized bourgeois cultural organizations and the repressive state apparatus working together as a team. Until next time . . .

—CROATOAN

—SEAN BONNEY

 

TRANSCRIPT OF CONVERSATIONS TAKING PLACE IN THE MINUTES IMMEDIATELY PRIOR TO THE PROTEST AT THE POETRY FOUNDATION

Woman wearing a lemur-fur scarf: “Oh isn't it just lovely how they activated this space?” Her husband, hands-in-pockets, sort of turning and gazing: “The indoor deciduous trees are a nice touch . . .” Their daughter, her eyebrows extended to her ears by streaks of mascara: “I think it's cruel, papa. Do they not deserve to feel the rain, to photosynthesize . . .” Her mother: “Nonsense. I think them perfectly lovely. Now wipe that mascara off your face, you look like a debutant.” The husband, in undertones: “Oh look, my darlings, it's Davidson. I believe he's on the Board. Watch me regale him with a little Eliot . . .” Shouting across the space, startling the other minglers: “There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: ‘Davidson! You who were with me in the ships at Mylae! That corpse you planted last year in your garden, has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?’” Laughs hysterically, clasping an embarrassed Davidson on the arm, causing him to spill a little red wine on his shirtsleeve. Woman in lemur scarf: “Now look what you've gone and done: you've caused our Davidson to spill his wine.” Her husband: “Then I say, ‘Out, damned spot, out I say!’” Davidson: “George are you very deep in your cups already?” Lemur woman: “Of course he is, John, you've hit it on the head. We've been here since 5:30.” Then, obviously proud: “John Barr invited us early.” Davidson: “Ah yes, yes, I was invited to that little gathering, myself. But, well, would you believe it, I was waiting for this suit to be dry-cleaned!” All (except the daughter): Laughter and back-slapping, the drunk husband laughing so hard he appears, to passers-by gazing in through the glass, to be crying. Lemur woman: “Well, I had the most delightful conversation with Christian . . .” Davidson: “Oh thank God for Christian . . .” The drunk husband: “Where would American poetry be without his guidance . . .” The daughter, sarcastically: “In the ditch with Lorca . . .” Davidson: “You've a smart daughter . . .” Lemur woman: “Oh she's smart alright . . . smart in the mouth . . .” play-slapping her, then continuing: “Truth is, I wake in the night with a shudder when I think where all this would've gone to if he hadn't . . . bless New Formalism . . .” Making a gesture towards the ceiling, “In this age of terror and uncertainty, it's so comforting to know that there's still respect for the poetic line . . .” Davidson: “I absolutely agree, my dear . . .” Lemur woman: “And this space . . . to think it only cost $21.5 million . . .” Her husband: “LEED certified, they say . . .” Davidson: “Why, our pal Sidel could've paid for it with the change from his morning espresso! . . .” Though this joke makes no sense, they laugh uproariously . . .

  Lemur woman: “Oh if only Jimmy Merrill were still alive to see this . . .” Davidson: “Yes, but we must be very vigilant to keep the homeless out. They'll piss on everything . . .” Drunk husband: “We were told a private security company was hired to keep the rabble out . . .” Lemur woman: “It's simply too nice a space . . .” Davidson: “They have their ‘hip-hop.’ I don't think we have anything to fear.” Lemur woman: “George, please go easy on the cheese. I'm the one has to sleep with you tonight. I swear it's like sleeping next to Ol' Faithful . . .” Her husband: “Yes, well, it does give me gas! Hmm . . . but I can't resist it! It's organic gruyere, from Wisconsin . . .” Davidson: “Yes, I hear there are still farms up there . . . how nice . . .” The crowd: mass consternation: a group has entered and begun shouting . . . Lemur woman: “What? . . . What's happening? . . . George? . . .” Davidson: “They look like terrorists . . . Is that a bomb that hairy one's holding? . . . Quick, everyone, get down!” Lemur woman, from the floor: “Thank God, it's only a book of Vallejo's poems, but . . . what an absolute travesty this is. Do something, George . . . you tepid idiot . . .” Her husband: “It's alright, I think. The police have been called. Someone's called the police. Yes, here they come . . .” Davidson: “I blame the rioters in the UK: I see they're influence in this . . .” Drunk husband: “Come, dears, let us take a stroll under the trees . . .”

—SUSAN HOWE

PANTER TANTER Start feelin’ so crazy out on the lanai so sexy tonight Florida’s got the flame on hot take the kitchen knife set up shop where the Nightstalker gets taught “oh girls, he’s a man” make it up from who you got tough broad constellation palm trees look different under that we thought about womanface, pastels, Buick vinyl, clip-ons clip-ons, substitute teaching, full nose, womanface, clip-ons, substitute teaching say your other name, moon is gonna go that salt and deer scat sweet the room know the contour of the hill our womanface go low three turkeys hump down the valley all of us men buzzing together eating prosciutto is like eating a cousin you love California scrub brush stink of its own fire

—FARID MATUK

 

PROSPECTUS FOR A STAGE ZERO’S BLOOMING EXCURSION WESTWARD A DESERT MOTHER HENS

But about what you say… If the fool believes he knows how to fix something, and nothing else believes it too? Is that enough to constitute the physical reality? “What was that? No” “No, we’d fix it, precisely because there is no cure.”

“In conclusion, then, there is no God but a profound nothing. And this nothingness appears to us like a god—as if we were gods. There could be no death but then, it would follow, no birth— humans fear this—what we’ve been exploring here—we pretend we don’t see it ahead, compounding our problem here—legend has it that if you meet your doppleganger, syntactically, you must be dead. Therefore, and this is the point I wish to make, as this nothingness must nurture you—because its future cannot exist otherwise—language, coupled with reflection, should guide our total thinking. We’ve seen tonight how we are charged with our own care. Therefore to be blessed would be a choice. There is nothing fixed or essential in adopting this premise, the fear of which is no different than fearing eternity—this is merely an obstacle. Thank you.” A wrinkled, dark man—a bald sheen in subdued, academic light— collects a few sheets of paper. He wears glasses strapped to his head, like goggles in late fall, yet his ashy stumps bear no shoes, his bony arms slosh freely, the robes clasped in knots at his left shoulder. After cattle prods, sixty years ago, a detail from life described in his book, his smile gapes like a newborn baby. A man, who would drive him to the airport, announced a reception.

  Onramp; they passed under the green go arrow of a green light, turning left. He reclines upholstered seats, hair and crumbs, sighing gentle sighs. They successfully cross into the bleak motionless dusk of the zone. Squared blocks of inhabited or vacant (static) ducts, the intestinal rooftops’ (backward) straw exhaust, stairwells as few of them ever reach this gravel refracted like dust in atmospheres lighting the craggy peaks groaning this time, this inflamed egg’s shadow in the valley of drought. Silhouetted; a motion passed over the teeth. A skyline that remembers.

—JARED SCHICKLING

Mark and Dad and their three thoughts do not hang around. They pass down a series of doubled doors far apart, beating the crowd, on their own despite the stairs, when they enter a cavernous flatland. They continue in haste through the central nave of what’s essentially four gaudy basilicas. A black-marble colonnade appears to erect, on either side of them, a creamier stone clerestory where arched, shallow windows shed dusty light on tapestries meant to indicate themed periods of time. Each source of light is the opposite wall of course, meeting at the midpoint like crossfire, why there is no electricity needed here—nature’s chandelier. There’s a unicorn in the woods, the lute and women watching, near a pond, a lonely knight, oriental paisleys and a horse and battle (picnics and such), dazzling hedgerows that would have been terrific once. Blanket, cream pearl and the lutes. At the base of every third pillar free of dust in glass cubes a knickknack of purportedly precious material gets erected. Here there is no order; no conflated languages. It comes out of the ground, and looks like it. The floor in tiles is a lifetime of men—an exquisite though odd mosaic. With a low, steady twinkle, the cloud of dust must have reached them, raising invisible bootprints. The bottoms of the sky. They notice each affronting façade, quickly—symmetry and nonexistent commotion—with significantly more breathing room a silent hum now mingled with the general din bounces round the rock-cut dome while not until the train ride and two walks are over, when both are more comfortably fastened in the seat, obtrusive and fuel efficient: “What they’re trying to say,” Mark continues, “take us for example. We’re not delewwsional, ok?” To which Dad replied, “You are old enough to fancy that. You can think like that at your age. As for me I should crack the window.

—BRENDA IIJIMA

 

SO OBVIOUS

AGENT ORANGE POEM

“I must probe being’s depth before I try to change its surface” —Alice Notley

So obvious feathers on a heart pen or beneath violet insides Open center when your heart is a small baby born Horn cup held inside and you wear a gown with dark torn a dark train and starry yellow flags for me maybe also summer cicadas I mix these pieces seeing inside & outside and cutting cutting the cutting of two the woman cut into two to make the earth and the stars two worlds that is one world Maybe have to become that bird one dropped-wing injury refuse all duties the blue black like I think she’s things out of us

TREE POEM Train horn directly and green warm Who me who me It’s me and a rare ear turned Green that flees twice the size and warms Buckthorn it is a gift from you World Call it common jujube Mend the tiny tear Able to see finally Ladder in the red moon year

After Emily Dickinson

What justice foreigns for a sovereign We doom in nation rooms Recommend & lend Chinaberry spring

resembling fragrant

Here we have high flowers a lilac in the nose “the zeroes— taught us— phosphorus” and so stripped the leaves to none

—HOA NGUYEN  

WHERE AMERICA’S DAY BEGINS Guam is truly where ‘America’s Day Begins.’ Yes, Guam is a part of the United States; located 2500 miles west of the international date line, Guam is hours ahead of Hawaii and is 1 day ahead of the US. At sunrise, we hear army personnel singing in the English sections while children on Guam wave Old Glory, shout ‘U-S-A’ and sing patriotic American songs. But Guam is also where injustice, waste, and abuse begin. A bumper sticker I hate so much bears that deadly slogan ‘Guam: Where America’s Day Begins.’ Guam is the westernmost frontier of the United States and 15 hours ahead of the Eastern Seaboard Time Zone. Yep, Guam is, geographically, where America’s Dream ends. Guam is literally the first American community to greet each new day; a privilege manifest in one nonvoting congressman and the idea that we ‘Practice Democracy in Paradise.’ Guam’s tourist bureau promotes the Pacific island as ‘where America’s day begins,’ a big draw for Japanese tourists (1 million annually), which helps preserve our culture. I’m from Guam and we are a day ahead of the mainland, so we actually got our PS3s while ya’ll were still sleeping or something. Guam is truly ‘Where America’s Products begin.’ Language is not a problem— everyone speaks English, mostly with an American accent of sorts. Too many people still think of Guam only as a bleak outpost for the U.S. military. Just in case you are confused, Guam is where America’s day begins. We are 15 hours ahead of New York! But if the house of your culture was burning down, then you have to look beyond the whole ‘Where America’s Day Begins’ bullshit (which is basically the historical). That’s why they say: ‘Here today, Guam tomorrow.’ So, me and the rest of the Chamorros are ahead of y’all. Sorry if I threw everybody’s timing off.

—CRAIG SANTOS PEREZ  

 

------- Forwarded Message Follows ------From: "Ossama Husein" Organization: Sudan State University To: [email protected] Date: Fri, 28 Aug 1998 13:52:55 -0500 Subject: (Fwd): Khartoum Translation Conference

Dear Mr. David Bromige: It is to our delightful attention that the poetry of Sudan is now discussed in the poetry of America with such suddenness. Thank you for being a section of this and for making a vision of a poet of Sudan. In ways I believe you do not suspect, you have entered the Arab nation's literature. It is my principle, nevertheless, that you must be delighted by this. Please excuse my English, but I am writing to invite you, as a poet first of Canada and now, secondarily, of America, to what I now wish to present. I am speaking concerning a conference (International) devotional to translation in all the sense of this word. We are interested, with specificness, in the doubled (tripled!) voices passed through many mediators of history and cultural ignorance. Irony, as I feel you must conceptualize, is big here. Irony, in its bigness, becomes something other. It is like, for an example, you, a Sudanese poet speaking through an English tongue of brokenness. Or it is like many, many things: For an example, if I may twice say so: It is like two boys kissing in the shadows of a pharmaceutical plant. (They are like black and deep wells. Their lives inside are very, very rich.) The sun will come up over this dusty land and an ancient hatredness shall fill them. I do not know if I put myself well. So may I directly ask. Will you come to Khartoum? Please close your heavy eyes and dream of my branching hand opened out to you. We passion to invite another poet of America, Mr. Kent, who also is credenced in your two countries, and perhaps others, to be a racist. (In his reply to our Central Council, he spoke: "I am honestly not sure.") Still we are opened, and we have most little, but our flowing tents which appear (to all purposes and meanings) to be sailboats in the desert, are yours. Our young are fresh and eager, and they shall press into your soft mouth goat cheese with a hurt and surprised look in their eyes. Also, dark-skinned soldiers with golden and musical watches adorn every minareted corner. Yes, you will find Khartoum strange and hospitality-filled, except, as you realize, inside certain surprising circumstances. But lightning on a human is more likely, so really not to worry. Ethnography, of course, is also interesting to every one of us and to all peoples. Our flowing tents, if I may say it repeatedly (for I, in an addition, am a poet), appear to be sailboats in the desert. Thus, after the morning session, we will convene in Building 242 for tea, the prayers of all religions, and the making of bombs. No one is to be insulted, not even if they do not know how. Then we will reconvene, as I have said, and talk concerning Ethnography, including the customs of Christian animists to the south, the abandonment of the people of Darfur by the West, the poignancy of American magazines like Look and Cross Cultural Poetics, and the rituals of Buffalo List of Poets. Well, I am sorry. The situation is very complicated. But here, as the saying goes, we are. Here also, please, is a poem by a youth named Leonel Rugama whom we have invited too, except sadly he was beheaded long ago, at 20 years, by Green Beret students in the country of Nicaragua:

THE EARTH IS A SATELLITE OF THE MOON Apollo 2 cost more than Apollo 1 Apollo 1 cost plenty. Apollo 3 cost more than Apollo 2 Apollo 2 cost more than Apollo 1 Apollo 1 cost plenty. Apollo 4 cost more than Apollo 3 Apollo 3 cost more than Apollo 2 Apollo 2 cost more than Apollo 1 Apollo 1 cost plenty. Apollo 8 cost a whole shit-load of money, but no one cared because the astronauts were Protestant they read the Bible from the moon astounding and delighting every Christian and on their return Pope Paul VI gave them his blessing. Apollo 9 cost more than all of these put together including Apollo 1 which cost plenty. The great-grandparents of the people of Acahualinca were less hungry than the grandparents. The great-grandparents died of hunger. The grandparents of the people of Acahualinca were less hungry than the parents. The grandparents died of hunger.

  The parents of the people of Acahualinca were less hungry than the children of the people there. The parents died of hunger. The people of Acahualinca are less hungry than the children of the people there. The children of the people of Acahualinca, because of hunger, are not born, but they hunger to be born, even just to die of hunger. Blessed are the poor for they shall inherit the moon.

Well, in realness, I do not know why I give this poem, except that I know you very much like poems. Don't you agree it was translated, without doubtfulness, by someone most self-congratulatory, so angry at his own country, yet blind as Oedipus to the terrorisms of non-white peoples? (Forgive me. I am smoking opium from Afghanistan. It betters my English, which you can tell is getting better as this letter, like a martyr, spills.) Of course, Mr. David, the trip (including camels) is long, like torture, apparently, in its likeness, and you shall be compelled to gift-forth your own plane-fare. In these days, that can be a dangerous incident. I understand, of course. But we sure hope you will say yes. Will you say yes? The people of Sudan and the Darfur await you. Headphones are to be distributed. You are forever one of us. Sincerely, (although it is not my true name) Osama Hussein

—KENT JOHNSON

song is precious is of wealth but cannot be accounted for the selling lies —Theodore Enslin

1.

Quietly take from itself Nothing or withhold on nothing That raises the cream Of man’s pain but Keep it to yourself

BIN-LADEN IS DEAD, LONG LIVE DEATH What if must you accept He who presumes to wage War with a god, a dream What follows, Except if you

Not to live long nor in disgrace That drives us to nothing.

2.

Until it is a deep amber, Boil it on high: Strip him under The sun. The earth Cannot sustain ideology Like an auto-immunodeficiency Its strength is disability.

Awakening find you are Still in a dream, with the heat Of exhaust behind you, He sacrificed His respiratory system To make a hymn, to hold Heat like gasoline, to wage War within the earth, he Of the footprint Whose beard was

The bald obsidian bared its tooth In speckles of rain on white.

3. Like an almond-tree or the whiteBill of a sea-cut boat which Cut the sea and gave Back nothing Except if you

SACRIFICE

TORTURE Is there the energy to penetrate The rose? To fly forward To rooted dimension? To speak out?

  4.

INSIDE JOB Who wailing disgrace As a song does not fly with the blessing of birds? Attenuated although they not Live long, or worse: That in disgrace the self-hate beneath song Makes them hate the wail And disgrace it, makes them hate Even that which deserves their love? What’s this? Nothing, Tower 7.

—EDGAR GARCIA

COLLAPSING AMERICA All governments lie, kill and misuse public funds, but these calculated habits are amplified manifold during wars. We’re in two now, aiming for a third. Japan, whose land we’re still occupying 65 years after Hiroshima, has just announced sanctions against Iran beyond what the U.N. mandated. South Korea swiftly followed suit. It’s surprising to see these two countries so in sync, until one remembers that they have become American cheerleaders for decades. Rah, rah, bomb Tehran! A murderous chorus is rising, yet again. Countries that aren’t our client states can be counted with two hands, even those missing fingers from an exploding grenade. Universal outrage has been drummed up over the case of an Iranian woman about to be stoned to death for adultery. She’s also implicated in the murder of her husband, for which she may be hanged. This second, more serious crime has been left out of many news stories. America also executes, but it doesn’t stone, especially for a bit of ticklish fun on the side. We inject, electrocute, gas, hang and shoot our condemned. We’re more humane that way. Forever bureaucratic, we pay attention to procedural niceties. Our objection, then, is not to capital punishment, but to certain methods. Stoning is barbaric. We don’t stone, period, except during one of our serial wars, where we will stone entire communities back to the Stone Age. But that’s war, buddy. We also use phosphorous and cluster bombs, plant landmines that will last generations. To rectify and avenge the stoning of one woman, someone we don’t really care about, whose name we can’t even pronounce, we’ll flatten Iran, maybe by Thanksgiving. The United States is concerned about women worldwide. It is touched and outraged by one Afghan woman, Aisha, whose nose was sliced off by her Taliban husband. To defend her honor, it has killed hundreds of thousands of her brothers and sisters. To protect her, it has destroyed her country. It’s the principle that matters. We care about the individual, at least those who are useful to our agendas. It’s the masses we don’t give a flying whoopee about. How can we not raise our voices, for example, when an impris-

oned prostitute—hardly a criminal, really, even less so than an adulterer—is left in a cage, to be baked to death for at least four hours in 107-degree heat? Her captors ignored her pleas for water. They wouldn’t even allow her to use the bathroom, so she soiled herself before passing out. She was still alive, however, when finally taken to the hospital, where doctors allowed her to die. Incredibly, no charges have been filed. Such barbarity and judicial callousness deserve our fullest condemnations, except that hardly anyone has heard of Marcia Powell, 48, who died in an Arizona prison in May of 2009. The mainstream media ignore her, because her abject death cannot be exploited for political purposes. We’re not trying to bomb Arizona. Needing to kill, a government will lie before, during and after splattering blood. Eschewing subtlety, it prefers to speak in slogans and clipped, cartoonish sentences. They hate us for who we are. We must fight them over there, so we don’t have to fight them over here. We’re trying to root out the bad guys. Adopting this lingo, many Americans are dubbing the community center and mosque near Ground Zero a “jihad mosque” or a “victory mosque.” In Lower Manhattan last week, I saw a man carrying a sign, “EVERYTHING I EVER NEEDED TO KNOW ABOUT ISLAM I LEARNED ON 9/11.” Another displayed a caricature of “IMAM OBAMA.” There was an effigy of a tied up Palestinian, complete with keffiyeh, with this placard, “OBAMA: With a name like HUSSAIN we understand. Bloomberg: what the f@&k is your excuse?” Totalitarianism always breeds idiocy. Lies that go unchallenged lead to more preposterous lies. Idiocy is also the manure from which totalitarianism rises. On September 11, 2001, the entire world saw America symbolically imploded, but our actual collapse is ongoing. It is relatively gradual, unlike the three, yes, three, World Trade Center buildings that tumbled onto their own foot prints. For the last nine years, we have endured an unending stream of lies and idiocy, none more grotesque than the official explanation to what happened that tragic day. Despite being lied to repeatedly, almost daily, Americans are strangely gullible to incoherent, even ridiculous narratives dished up by their government. Brainwashed by the bromide that their nation is always a force for good, anywhere, worldwide, Americans can’t imagine that Washington could be complicit in the murder of its own citizens. Ignored is the fact that it has done so many times before, and since, 9/11. Using false pretexts to invade Iraq, our government has caused the death of over four thousand Americans, more than the number who perished on 9/11. I don’t know what happened that day, but it makes no sense to me that World Trade Center #7 fell down without being hit by anything. It makes no sense to me that it collapsed exactly the same way as the twin towers, as if imploding. It makes no sense that the passport of Satam al Suqami, one of the alleged hijackers, could be found on the ground, when entire skyscrapers were being pulverized. I also don’t understand how no military jets could intercept any of the three planes that hit their targets that day. The first tower was struck at 8:46AM, the Pentagon at 9:40AM, nearly an hour later, with no effective response from our vaunted military. I used to take buses to and from the Pentagon Transit Center. I knew the building wasn’t very tall, so it struck me as weird how an airliner could hit it from the side. Why fly parallel to the ground, nearly shaving it, to strike such a low target? Why not just dive into it? There are red flags all over this incident, yet many sane, reasonable people will become completely unhinged at the slightest suggestion that the official version doesn’t add up. Our government

  lies all the time, but when it comes to this one incident, we shouldn’t question anything? Even National Review, of all places, pointed out visa irregularities among the alleged hijackers, how they could enter the U.S. without the proper paperwork. After Martin Luther King was killed in 1968, his family refused to believe the official explanation. They fought and fought until an assassination conspiracy trial was scheduled in 1999. Presented with extensive evidences, a jury concluded that, yes, the federal, state and local governments all had a hand in Dr. King’s murder, and that James Earl Ray was not the shooter. The King family did what any sane, loving family would do. Coretta Scott King explained, “We had to get involved because the system did not work. Those who are responsible for the assassination were not held to account for their involvement […] It has been a difficult and painful experience to revisit this tragedy, but we felt we had an obligation to do everything in our power to seek the truth.” On September 11, 2001, someone stabbed America. She’s being murdered right now. As Americans, we need to get to the heart of this, because this madness and deceit are perpetuating themselves. If we don’t have the courage and clarity to confront this evil, we won’t regain our sanity or move forward. We might as well be dead. We’re dying. As with the King murder and so much else, you cannot expect the system to convict itself. It will lie and lie until the truth hardly matters.

—LINH DINH

As if the whole arc of a lifetime of fucking cohered in precise narratives As if the man and the woman or the woman and a woman or a man fucked a man and fucked the woman and each other some more As if a thesis on the ice shelves of the Antarctic As if a thousand years or a million As if the crowning head of an infant As if the raw chunks of birth As if a peasant of Lampsacus As if sacrificing an ass to the horny god As if the smell of the raw meat of the village clung to the air and my linen As if a penis the size of watermelon As if age doesn’t matter As if the great corridors of existence led to little cafes or places where children read Peter Rabbit and Squirrel Nutkin As if nursed on rhyme from within infernal howling As if carpet-bombed in France As if making a story of semen and vaginal secretions and blood As if a universal grammar tethered a nation As if bombs in Basra and Kirkuk and Delhi As if a girl didn’t lose all her water and die in her family’s arms

AS IF PRIAPUS

As if Sade had never written the progress of the modern world As if incantation and ritual produced uncertain results As if a god never raped the weak—the virgins and children of any land

As if a plane cruising the sky

As if the market were suddenly disturbed

As if we could hear into the body of black caterpillars

As if sitting by a river in a park drinking beer in October

As if persimmons’ sweetness mourned

As if fucking toward enchantment

As if the crash of certainty blanched your dreams

As if an answer were imminent

As if the indefinite measured up to fact

As if stroking all the way to relief

As if a boy in black pajamas resisted the tethering of memory

As if in the market before the hesitant jihad of the suicide bomber

As if a bat a ball a glove As if I had all I wanted and the resounding rush of it wound through me

As if a mouth on a mouth and the energy of embrace As if laughing drunk in the toxic spurt of eternal youth

As if the drones compelled assent

As if time’s pace varied in the holy ignorance of our bodies

As if oceans conversed on topics of the watery abyss

As if the god’s dick like a metronome

As if words separated from words

As if filtered by the unknown

As if every breath secured the potholes of memory

As if masturbating in the blank no time of now

As if going to the drive-in

As if children playing ball

As if code warmed the great halls of history

As if childhood begins or ends

As if the program loaded the mystery

As if the middle of the narrative cohered into form

As if it were you

As if the god’s pleasure secured our peace

As if talking on a nice day and a cool breeze blew

As if fidelity to those we love

As if afternoons in the sun

As if frog tears embalmed the heart

As if the patrols changed routine

As if you were here in the sun far away

As if fucking in cold sheets As if they were young

—DALE SMITH

 

—WARREN CRAGHEAD

 

THE BIG

1

LIBERAL united society. To do that, we can build a stronger society a fragile society marked by inequality, spreading wealth through society, into a building society. a society where everyone has the opportunity to get the cornerstone of a fair society, fair society, opening up a free and democratic society. the mark of a fair society. Older people have worked hard and contributed to society In a fair society, everyone should have the right to an important part of a fair society fair society is one where people can afford to work and live in the countryside society is strengthened by communities coming together Creating a freer society

LABOUR strengthening society our economy, our society and our politics will renew our society an ageing society renew our society strengthen our society to an ageing society advance towards the good society society and politics we believe in, society, by protecting the things people value Our society is not broken, it is strong society is a smaller state to be inflicted on our society the society in which they are based. Creating a shareholding society would make our society more unequal and unjust. across our society. our society and economy, providing breakthrough treatments, an ageing society, change our society’s attitudes to mental illness the bedrock of our society Our society is ageing Retired people bring great strengths to our society – we need to adjust to an ageing society – the huge contribution older people make to society

  Marriage is fundamental to our society, in our society we need to go further. our families, communities and wider society. society is not just a marketplace. the contribution that people of faith make to our communities and society a society where economic prosperity and quality of Our society rightly demands respect from young people. society should respect young people’s views our society faces, Parliaments and civil society.

CONSERVATIVE Mend our broken society. Change society the Big Society the role of the state is to direct society to strengthen society from big government to Big Society We believe there is such a thing as society, it is built on a strong society. Society that trusts in the people broken society will be a central aim in building the Big Society, Society, to build a political integration into British society.

Change society CHANGE SOCIETY | INTRODUCTION Mend our broken society Our society is broken, we can build the Big Society a problem that affects our society the Big Society, not big government. repair the torn fabric of society. the actions we take but on society’s response.

CHANGE SOCIETY | BUILD THE BIG SOCIETY Build the Big Society big government is the Big Society a society with much higher levels of personal, professional, civic and corporate responsibility; a society where people come together a society where the leading force for progress is social responsibility The Big Society runs our broken society,

 

Society agenda. These plans involvere distributing power from the state to society; building the Big Society; Society is not just a question of the state stepping back We must use the state to help remake society. creating a Big Society Bank.

CHANGE SOCIETY | BUILD THE BIG SOCIETY : the ‘little platoons’ of civil society – and the institutional building blocks of the Big Society in the rebuilding of civic society. an annual Big Society Day funding from the Big Society Bank

CHANGE SOCIETY | BUILD THE BIG SOCIETY Society means encouraging the concept of Strong families are the bedrock of a strong society. the relationships they foster are the foundation on which society is built. older people play in families and in society,

CHANGE SOCIETY | MAKE BRITAIN THE MOST FAMILY-FRIENDLY COUNTRY IN EUROPE CHANGE SOCIETY | BACK THE NHS CHANGE SOCIETY | BACK THE CHANGE SOCIETY | BACK some of the most vulnerable people in society,

CHANGE SOCIETY | BACK CHANGE SOCIETY | RAISE STANDARDS IN SCHOOLS CHANGE SOCIETY | RAISE STANDARDS CHANGE SOCIETY | RAISE STANDARDS CHANGE SOCIETY | FIGHT BACK AGAINST CRIME our broken society – by cracking down on drink- and drug-fuelled violence,

CHANGE SOCIETY | FIGHT BACK CHANGE SOCIETY | FIGHT BACK AGAINST CHANGE SOCIETY | FIGHT BACK Whitehall has damaged society by eroding trust a zero-waste society. society. Households need new incentives to the violent overthrow of our society

—nick-e melville   1

all societies from the conservative, labour and liberal democrat manifestos 2010

 

 

» STATEMENT OF POETICS «

confuse memory with medicine scream down spine. paper cuts. signature steam permanence.

elastic minus the girdle There is no need for synthetics like Victoria’s whispered, overpriced secret. Allow space for binding, packing, a push down or spackle. to write to fill the lines where splinters exhale off benches

—AIMEE HERMAN

THE AESTHETIC IMPLICATIONS OF “JULIA’S WILD”

This body of text practices trilingualism and contraction. Theories include gender confiscation and syntax dissection. Calls herself alone with pen ink plastic cap between lips, kissing language of stain and blots. There is no need for love when paper exists and never interrupts or walks away. to remove the veins attached to initials orientations There may be a carve out. A distinction between childhood trauma and mother carnage. need to declare a bra size sharp accent to disconnect the unwanted I know I have long hair but sometimes I am boy. When I talk about my dick I need you to believe that I have one [sometimes]. write in scars and exit signs stain of conformity and academic line structure There is no need for paper distinctions, map assurances, stick-on-peel-off labels. The location of this text-body may be found in Whitman songs and Bukowski contradictions. Reveal the gesticulation of body’s remorse: call it dirty piece of nothingness or ghostly or passed around or workshopped. How can one edit the typos found in scar tissue. Poem.

bruises like brooklyn sidewalks the stick stickiness

Scars are a language learned only by breathing.

stitches stitching

Just as Louis Zukofsky places himself within a tradition of poetic virtuosity that includes Homer and Shakespeare in Bottom, he places himself within a tradition of poetics in which poetry is closer to music than art in A (Cf. A-12) Indeed, we see this aesthetic at work in his poems. The final section of A and a large portion of Bottom consist of Zukofsky’s poems set to Celia Thaew Zukofsky’s music. A begins with a tribute to Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion; Bottom quotes from a plethora of philosophers, composers and librettos. By fitting himself along these multiple historical strands, Zukofsky argues that the poet stands within a three-fold tradition. He is a philosopher (albeit with limited knowledge of the truth and limited ability to convey it); he is a poet (in the “man speaking to men” or “unacknowledged legislator of the world” tradition of the Romantics; in the seer tradition of Homer); and he is a composer. A’s proximity to music is clear to the reader who has been trained in reading 20th century poetry, which uses line breaks and the positioning of words on the page to “score” the poetry so that the reader can recreate the sound the author heard in his mind. Because much of Bottom quotes prose passages, it often seems less like music and more like a philosophical treatise, which is perhaps why Celia Thaew Zukofsky must redeem it with a long musical setting. However, many subtle qualities make Bottom musical. These include Zukofsky’s careful use of quotation and his occasional burst into musical poetry. He edits the quotations he finds to reveal particular truths (which are not necessarily the ones originally indicated by the passages quoted) and to highlight sonic qualities. Although he often quotes long sections of prose in order to prove a point, he just as often quotes from Homer’s and Shakespeare’s melodious poetry or from librettos written as poetryapproaching-music. Juxtaposed with philosophical treatises, the lyrical poem highlights the lyricism of philosophical language. Everything engaged in Bottom becomes Zukofsky’s poem; and, per his aesthetics, Zukofsky’s Bottom constantly approaches the sonority of music. In “Julia’s Wild,” Zukofsky breaks into a fugue. The fugue’s subject is a line from The Two Gentleman of Verona, “Come, shadow, come, and take this shadow up.” The poem “rings a change” on the line.

  The poem’s words work like the letters in an anagram, and the meaning shifts with the shifts of the parts. Similar to Zukofsky’s other fugues like “Hear her clear mirror” and the poems of 80 Flowers, the fugue of “Julia’s Wild” plays with a delicate balance. On the one hand, the poem’s alteration of the single original theme shows the crucial importance of syntax to meaning. The content of each line rests on the positioning of the words in that line; thus each of the “Hear her clear mirror” poems seems to say something different, and that which “comes” and “takes up” shifts in “Julia’s Wild.” On the other hand, this poem—like the other fugues— constantly stands at the edge of nonsense. It approaches music in a way that few poems do, by reducing words to almost meaningless materials and arranging them like notes. If we look at the fugue poems without valuing music over poetry, however, we find that these poems comment on the nature of music as much as Zukofsky wants music to comment on the nature of poetry. We come to recognize two important aspects of music that correspond to the balancing of meaning and nonsense mentioned above. First, as in “Julia’s Wild,” music (like meaning) relies on difference and syntax. Music is often conceived of as a flow of sounds over time. It has long been classified as a “successive” art because it seems that it is perceived only in time—as time passes, so musical themes unfold. However, a perception of musical themes as simple as “melody” or “here the music begins and here it ends” relies on syntax. Syntax is the ability to perceive one element (of music, speech, etc.) as before or after another. This perception of temporal proximity in turn relies on the spatialization of memory. Memory places one object, sound, or word before or after another and so perceives that one has taken another’s place. If this spatial memory were not engaged while listening to music, one note would so erase another that one could not perceive “music” or “melody” or any organization of sounds. The second point extends from the first. If we use a memory to record in a sort of virtual space, the order of sounds in a piece of music, then music is as material as it is temporal. “Julia’s Wild” (and Zukofsky’s other fugue poems) thus calls attention to the spatiality of music by showing the relation between the supposedly “more” material medium of words on a page, and the supposedly less material (more temporal) medium of music. In order to differentiate this kind of poetry, which “rings a change” from a specific set of initial material, from other subgenres of poetry, I will call this kind the “code poem.” Code poems are a subgenre of the genre I call “Plastic poems.” Plastic poems straddle the aesthetically separate categories of visual art and music by calling attention to the concomitance of space and time (simultaneity and succession). Code poems are distinct from other subgenres of Plastic poetry, which all work on the reader’s mind differently. Code poems mimic DNA in their recombinant structure; they force the reader to decode their patterns; and they bring to light the mnemonic encoding operative in the reader’s understanding of syntax. The code poem recombines a limited amount of poetic material to offer multiple messages. Poems with this recombinant quality have been described as “fugues” by Louis Zukofsky (as above), “crystals” by Christian Bök, “anagrams” by Michael Lentz, and many others, and “gathas” by Jackson Mac Low. Although these names range from the static-corporeal (crystal) to the dynamic-incorporeal (fugues); from the logical (anagrams) to the spiritual (gathas), all of the poems produced under these titles conform to a single syntactical theorem: spatial memory allows for the perception of temporal

differences. These poems are utterly reliant on difference for their content, as well as for the pleasure of their aural and visual arrangement. They thereby rely on the reader’s ability to remember what came before, in order to establish a difference with what comes next. The content is as much in this interplay of slight changes, as in the normal seat of content (the meaning of the words). At the most basic level, memory is an inscription of information into the mind—even the basic distinction that this is different than that requires a mnemonic tracing. Thus, code poems require spatial encoding. Concomitant with this spatiality, however, is temporality. One makes spatial traces in time; and it is indeed only the passage of time and emergence of new spaces that reveals difference. Thus, code poems happen within a temporal schema of past-future which must be able to be retraced (future-past) in order to establish the difference between what is being read now, and what was read before. The ability to recognize these temporally situated differences is inherent to all reading, speech, music, etc.; but the code poem highlights this condition of perception by experimenting with it with simple gestures. The code poem, like musical canons, twists/generates new cadences from one set of original materials. This requires two things, one of which is essentially spatial, and the other of which is essentially spatio-temporal: material and memory. Whether sound or pigment, the materials used for art are material. In all art, as in all perception and language, memory figures both spatially and temporally: it organizes space in time and time in space with the barest syntax. In being like music, the code poem points to the materiality of music, and challenges the historical aesthetics that would place the written or material word lower in a hierarchy with respect to the transcendence of temporally flowing music.

—JESSICA SMITH

COURAGE AND LANGUAGE IN THE IRONY AGE The best flarf is virtuosic. The best conceptualism is failure. —Vanessa Place

At the ACLA session on Conceptual Writing in New Orleans, Craig Dworkin asked the following question: “Why does the signature matter so much to “uncreative” writing?” For a national conference on Creoles, Diasporas, and Cosmopolitanism in New Orleans that seemed unaware that socio-political relations had anything to do with the Katrina disaster, this question struck me as remarkably relevant. Mr. Dworkin’s incisive question inspired me to ask my own question: “why does the biography matter so much to “uncreative” writing?” When I posed the latter question during the Q&A of the “Flarf and Conceptual Writing” panel at AWP in Denver, Vanessa Place said she was not sure that biography did matter to “uncreative” writing and she spoke of a project wherein she directed a Warholesque factory of text producers. But does such a Fordist

  vision of textual production get outside of the allegory or narrative of the biography of “Vanessa Place”? Biography is a sort of catch all for felt and unfelt, seen and unseen influences and traces of intention. It is hard to fail. Represent! How can we describe what we see and hear on the screen or in books without writing ABOUT it? That is, how can our writing be the object made (the thing in itself), not the object made ABOUT the object? How can we write AT the movies or AT the documents of history or AT being (verb or noun), not ABOUT the movies or not ABOUT documents or not ABOUT what we are (verb and noun)? To the question of bio mattering or not mattering to “uncreative” writing, Christian Bök offered a specific example referring to a work by Kenneth Goldsmith, suggesting that one way that “uncreative” writing may fail successfully to (re)present the biography is through multiplicity. In “The Poem as a Field of Action” (1948) W.C. Williams had the same idea when he called for many, messy works . . . a bolus of influences from which future Eliots may draw sustenance. Allow me to cherry-pick my sources: Stop a minute to emphasize our own position: It is not that of Mr. Eliot. We are making a modern bolus: That is our somewhat undistinguished burden; profusion, as, we must add in all fairness, against his distinction. … There are summative geniuses like that—they shine. We must value them—the extractors of genius—for what they do: extract. But they are there; we are here. It is not possible for us to imitate them. We are in a different phase—a new language—we are making the mass in which some other later Eliot will dig. We must see our opportunity and increase the hoard others will find to use. We must find our pride in that. We must have the pride, the humility and the thrill in the making. So, what are the differences between “signature” and “biography”? Most obviously, one difference is that “signature” and “biography” are words that come from two very different fields of specialization. “Signature” connotes the hygiene of structural analysis; while “biography” suggests the messiness of unknowable cultural crosspollination. For example, consider the welcoming words of Kenneth Goldsmith in framing Kent Johnson’s re-casting of Goldsmith’s book, Day: As he once asked, at the blog of the Poetry Foundation (though with what seems in retrospect a disingenuous banality), “Nearly one hundred years after Duchamp, why hasn’t appropriation become a valid, sustained[,] or even tested literary practice?” Here now, Kent Johnson wagers the query with a vengeance, brazenly upping the ante of Uncreative dialectic by throwing down before us a readymade gesture that is nothing but dizzying in the synthesis of its conception: a flagrant appropriation of a Conceptual work’s Authorship and Copyright, … His Day emerges hot and bright from the dead-dark of an innocent pre-dawn, a sort of authentic Afterlife that rises from the “original” simulacral body in which it had lain (latent and expectant). As in the best of Sherrie Levine, but more radically still, it summons us, now, that we might think harder in its sudden light. Indeed, Kent Johnson’s Day stands as the first Conceptual gesture of its kind in the history of American poetry: An open, literal theft of an entire “book,” exhibited without shame, as a new and strange Work of Art in our Museum of Modern Poetry. I can only tip my hat.

I want to pick up my claim that failing is hard to do and ask why. Why is it hard to fail? Wouldn’t failure be the most luxurious thing in the world? Is not everyone an expert at failure? No! In fact, the tacit assumption girding conceptual work is not Kantian ethics, nor extra-narrative allegory (as Place asserts), but the persistent humanist dream of progress. Failing better (failure to fit into the social and aesthetic status quo) is a kind of innovation. Now, the alternative to established hierarchies is nothingness. When we wink at the void, the void winks back. Sincerity and irony, like virtuosity and appropriation, are dialectical: each needs the other in order to claim the new object under the sun. CNN news flash, we would die without the sun: the sun would not die without humans. We need the myopia of humanism to create value hierarchies between classes, races, genders, individuals, etc. Even so, it would seem difference itself is both good and bad with respect to how we make meaning in and of the world. But given even this radical ambiguity, must cultural and attention hierarchies rule our lives and the way we talk and think about poetry? May be, but what makes man's destiny: his (always already forgotten) origins or his power to choose? What does the irony age mean to us? Does irony mean cynicism or skepticism? It is a relevant question if we find that we do live in the irony age. In other words, if man's destiny is to be inhuman to man, then (latest) capitalism will continue until the final man profits off of the final other man. What do we mean without the daily reproduction of the American way of life? (Women's bodies sold separately.) What about man’s inhumanity to bird? A picture is worth a thousand gallons of oil. IRONY is to SARCASM as SKEPTICISM is to CYNICISM What's the alternative to shopping for freedom? What does it mean to be expressionless or “non-expressive” (to quote an explication Robert Fitterman offers for his list poem, “Directory,” which consists of found text (names of mall stores))? Can things really still be found (colonized by the trenchant scope and point of our attention spans)? In what ways might finding text at a mall exact its price on our way of being in that muzak and perfumed corporate air? Spending time at the mall is like reading Wittgenstein: the experience changes how you see yourself in the world. Can one shop ironically? Can one stand under a great weight ironically? Can a capitalist be sincere? I think there is at least one difference between irony and cynicism. The irony age still has its heroes, while the cynical age has lost all sense of need. Cynicism is a cold and hollow bastion of want. Look, when freedom comes to mean only counting our own dead in war, the gild has chipped off of our age showing the loverof-death beneath the glitz. The Lefts do equal irony and the Rights do equal cynicism to the extent to which The Lefts acknowledge individuals as principally social animals and The Rights see individuals mainly as productive animals. How can a hero exist after the devastating critiques made to the hero-function by both the multicultural-being-together-ofmodernity and by postcolonial thinkers? Yet, without a hero or without an agent or subject, how can aesthetic or social change occur? I would suggest living and acting between hero-functions, shifting biographical identities and aesthetic forms. Not a corporatist globalization but a learning motion. INDIVIDUAL TALENT is to TRADITION as CONSPIRACY THEORY is to PROPAGANDA

  There is a moral and aesthetic cowardice required to maintain the binary between identity politics (with their various appeals to authority) and craft and marketability (with their various appeals to status quo structures and use-value ethics). In other words, how do we talk about the gap between being immigrants ('the other') and being modern ('making it new')? For instance, I agree that how fiction gets discussed seems more immersive (even more pluralistic) than poetry. Is fiction more oceanic and womblike than poetry with its hard-line breaks? Is the killing of the humanist author (ritualized in various ways and to various degrees by Flarf and Conceptual art) the best way to bring immersive interiority into poetry? Or should I ask, how might poetry bring immersive exteriority into readers?   Who benefits when dialogue between form and content is stifled? Who gets lost in the multitude, when formal innovation and biographical concerns each pretend the other does not exist? Why

can’t both style and meaning make equally legitimate claims to the span of reality? Why can't we think about how to innovate with language, oil paints, and code while at the same time consider who has access to books, canvas, and the internets? To sum up, contemporary man (that educated moral relativist who has heard the rumor that the God industry has gone bankrupt) cannot split personal attack from scientific inquiry. However, I hope contemporary man can have skeptical dialogue rather than cynical maneuvering. I hope we can debate with open minds the differences between ad hominem attacks and the scientific method. It is the only chance the human virus has to survive. I invite poetry’s indirect action to imagine why and how to survive.

—GENE TANTA

Notes: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704912004575252223568314054.html; http://bostonreview.net/BR34.3/burt.php; http://www.blazevox.org/catalog.htm; http://www.lesfigues.com/lfp/50/about; http://www.blazevox.org/index.php/Shop/superstars/day-by-kent-johnson-78/ http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=237060; http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/poetics-essay.html?id=237854&page=3 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBTPXbIVbTk; http://www.awpwriter.org/conference/2010ConfArchive/2010schedFri.php; http://www.acla.org/acla2010/?p=476

CANTO XIII

Kenny Goldsmith walked by the dynastic temple and into the cedar grove, and then out by the lower river, And with him Marjorie Perloff and Vanessa Place the low speaking And “we are unknown,” said Kenny, “You will take up charioteering? “Then you will become known, “Or perhaps I should take up Nascar, or football? “Or the practice of conceptual poetry?” And the poet Dworkin said, “I would put the writing programs in order,” and Vanessa said, “If I were chair of a writing program “I would put it in better order than this is.” And Kenny said, “I would prefer a small mountain temple, “With order in the observances, with a suitable performance of the ritual. They should put me in charge at Naropa.” And Dworkin said, with his hand on the strings of his lute The low sounds continuing after his hand left the strings,

  And the sound went up like smoke, under the leaves, And he looked after the sound: “The old swimming hole, “And the grad students flopping off the planks, “Or sitting in the underbrush playing mandolins.” And Perloff smiled upon them all equally.

—ROBERT ARCHAMBEAU

THE FIGHT FOR THE KINGDOM OF ABECADARIUM

Anselm was the first to fall, hit while out scouting between the lines. Berrigan, his father, saw him go down, and ordered Creeley to set matches to the fuses of his canons on Black Mountain, wounding Dickey, who survived by drinking water out of Eliot's leaky helmet, who had no need for it anymore. Franz, whose father was a general, died while trying to switch sides with Ginsberg, a nurse who couldn't decide whom to help and so, with Hamill, spent the battle praying for peace in a grove of trees planted by Ignatow, who owned the land the battle was fought on and cried with his arm around Justice, who hadn't wanted it all to come to this, and wished that his friend Kees would show up, who had gone missing the night before near the bridge, along with Lanier, whom no one had ever heard of anyway but whose beard would've helped somehow. Merwin was riding a white horse back and forth and no one could seem to hit him. Niedecker came out of a house with her hands up, saying don't shoot, I'm just a librarian. O'Hara got the New York guys together, his buddies Koch and Ashbery and Padgett, and they split off from the other East Coast guys, taking with them Quasimodo, whom they only wanted because his name began with the letter Q. Ransom, seeing this, said, We Southerners can do you one better, and started his own army, while Silliman started a blog to document it all and the whole nation split up and took sides. Tranströmer was recruited heavily but just sat fixing Bly's translations. Urizen showed up but everybody said, Hey, you're not a poet, get out of here, and then Vallejo stood up and said, This is ridiculous, we're all fighting for the same...but someone shot him. Weldon came up from the river, and everyone applauded but then started fighting over him, X.J. muttering under his breath, Where's Lanier, we need his beard? as Yusef yelled, Stop, I'm trying to write about how sad and pointless all this is, and they did, but then Zukofsky showed up and everything really went to shit.

—AUSTIN SMITH

   

Poetry Personals WANTED Conceptual poem in search of author. Must be careerist and capable of name-dropping central figures of Frankfurt School, articulating key differences between Lacanian/ Derridian/Foucauldian theory of the subject, and arriving at the conclusion that it!s all about math. If we could only get together, we are sure to piss someone off, preferably an ethnic minority or an assault victim. Then we could laugh and decide together that it!s not our fault. Former Flarf poem wishes to return to its rightful owner(s). It was fun being at the Whitney, but now, frankly, we are a little embarrassed. If there is a way back through the search engine we would like to return to being a dashed-off comment on a bass fishing blog, please. MISSED CONNECTIONS ME: The warped and out-sized egos of several-dozen middle-aged, white male would-be avant-garde poets. YOU: The comments from Silliman!s blog. We were once so close. We miss you. We are giving up hope that you are somewhere locked in cyberspace, like one of Ron!s back-handed compliments to a young poet that ultimately furthers his agenda of justifying the legacy of his actual poetry. Please, just let us know you!re OK. ME: A slow poem broiling in the Texas sun like the shell of a dead armadillo by the side of the road. YOU: A fast poem hot on your way to the Claudius App and confused encomium from

Charles Bernstein. WE: could make beautiful music together, if only you!d let me insert my throbbing distich between your slick stanzas. Please get in touch. ME: The word "ghost.! YOU: Any of a thousand about-to-be “dictated” poems by first-time readers of Jack Spicer in MFA programs. I am waiting here, hovering, ready to come out in a poorly conceived simile, a verb, or some other seemingly clever construction. Don!t settle for poor substitutes like "spook! or "spirit.! If I were an actual ghost, I would fucking kill you. But I!m not, so you!re safe. ME: The lyric “I.” YOU: Vague, lazy polemic by avant-garde poet explaining why his type of poetry is better than everyone else!s. Bruce Andrews first introduced us, at a party at Michael Palmer!s house in Noe Valley sometime in the 1980s. There was a lot of coke. We barely got to know each other and I was whisked away to The Objectivist Nexus… to an interview about Flarf… Well, I am dying to be controversial again, so please, give me a call? ME: A beatup copy machine in the basement of a library at Cambridge. YOU: A hastily written poem by an undergraduate. Accolades await. ME: A meticulous and exhaustive guidebook-language description of a bird, its mating habits, Latin name, migration pattern, etc. YOU: A Pushcart Prize nomination. SERVICES Poems composed in any form, for any occasion: [email protected].

The Pleasure Thermometer Philip Levine was recently appointed U.S. Poet Laureate, replacing W.S. Merwin. What do you think? Well, jeez—it’s about time they figured out a way to honor an old, mainstream, white male poet. —Brock Letang, Poet-at-Large Erkle, flurfle, yaaaaaaakledooun. Die zeistrugllllle neufreundin, ixnay rickle mxxxclclflix! —Jonas X, Sound Poet So at this rate, we’ve only got, what, about 50 years till we can toast Joe Massey, Poet Laureate? — Emily Courtright, MFA, Iowa

The Back Page

edited by Immeritô “Uncouthe, unkiste, unkent”

The Poet’s Weather Almanac

Ah! where must needy poet seek for aid, When dust and rain at once his coat invade?

Fall Angels of rain and lightning From a solid atmosphere Black rain and fire and hail will burst A deep, autumnal tone, Sweet though in sadness.

West The hot wind coming down from Santa Ana Driving the hills crazy, A fast wind with a bit of dust in it Bruising everything and making the seed sweet.

South Drought Has left its ravage on the field. The season’s wreckage lies about, Late autumn fruit is rotted now.

North Winds gather in the north and blow Bleak clouds across the heavy sky, And frost is marrow-cold, and soon Winds bring a fine and bitter snow.

East A coming shower your shooting corns presage, Old aches throb, your hollow tooth will rage. A sable cloud athwart the welkin flings, That swilled more liquor than it could contain, And, like a drunkard, gives it up again.

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